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 DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We are recording on this fabulous final day of February. And I have to say, Brian, things are going to get better in March.
Didn't say that. Okay. I just have to say after the hellscape of January that lasted 18 lifetimes, February almost didn't exist. It felt like it went like that. Could just be me, but it just felt like February was, I don't know, maybe shorter. Oh, maybe that's it. But no, it really felt like it went much faster to me. Well, yeah, it is shorter. It felt about the same to me. Interminable.
Interminable? Yes, it was a very long February. Longest February on record. Longest February ever. It was the hugest February we've ever seen. Let's start with a little follow-up. Sure. a federal judge has ruled that the u.s department of education and the office of personnel management likely violated the privacy act by sharing personal data with the department of government efficiency the ruling temporarily blocks the department of government efficiency from
accessing that data, calling the unauthorized disclosures irreparable harm. Now, what are the chances they are not accessing that data and don't have it scrolled away on their own private servers? Yeah, they've already got it, so they don't have to...
They don't have to go back to the well. It's on a thumb drive, I'm sure. This decision follows another court ruling last week that blocked the Department of Government Efficiency's access to Treasury Department records. Multiple lawsuits have been filed, including one from...
19 states led by New York, challenging the legality of the Department of Government Efficiency's data collection practices. The judge found no valid justification for the Department of Government Efficiency affiliates having such broad access saying the to prove a need to know. No shit.
As I've said from the beginning, you cast your mind back 17 months ago to January. Yes. This is where the rubber hits the road. We're going to find out exactly what's going on, because as soon as the courts have said... given any challenges and said, no, you guys can't do this. Now we watch and see, do they listen or do they do it anyways? What are they going to do? Yeah. What are they going to do? Are they going to ignore law? Because after law, we got nothing.
Really? Well, then it comes down to, it comes down to war, civil war. Where's the military going to side? If they don't follow the courts, that's all that's left. Brando. Stuck up on your Brando, baby. Beef up that Canadian border. We've got to build a wall. The Americans are going to pay for it. That's right. Americans are going to be running for it is what they're going to be.
Some more fun news. Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Sunny Balwani's appeal to overturn their fraud convictions and reduce their sentences was flat out denied by the Northern District Court of California. The court also refused to budge on the massive 450. $2 million restitution they owe. Holmes, cast your mind back again to 17 years ago. She was the disgraced founder of Theranos and is serving over 11 years in a Texas prison, while Balawani, the former COO, is doing nearly 13 years at Terminal.
Island in California. Now, they argued their trial was unfair, pointing to witness testimony in a damning, damning, I say, government report. But the court wasn't buying it. Wait, hold on a second. It's unfair because there was a report that was particularly bad for them. and a bunch of people that testified that they sucked and did it. That's not fair. They can't say we did stuff wrong.
But even where judges admitted there were errors in the trial, they called them harmless. Like, we don't care what you got. No, no. So, yeah, they're stuck behind bars with little hope for early release. And sadly for them, sadly for them, Brian, this is a state case. So it's not federal. So Trump can't pardon them. Oh, we'll see how quickly states' rights goes out the windows for these Republicans now. In the news.
Oh, Brian, we've got this one hot off the presses. Hot off the presses. My jaw hit the floor this morning because I was researching another story and ended up scrapping that story because this one was just too juicy. Bitcoin. Oh, doggy. Man, it hit the floor this morning. To the floor. To the floor. That's right. To the cellar, everyone. Yeah. Between last night and this morning.
Bitcoin went from about $84,000 to under $79,000. I thought I read it wrong until I checked the news. As of like 7.30 this morning in my time, it's kind of recovered and back up to the $84,000 mark.
know some people were shitting their pants and sold sold sold which is why i bounced back up because everyone's like oh look bitcoin's cheap again boing I'm really hoping that institutional investors are rethinking this because remember, again, cast your mind back 70,000 years ago to just late last year when we were hearing, you know, you know.
Let mutual funds and things of that nature. We're going to look to add crypto and Bitcoin in particular to their portfolios. Don't. Don't. That's it. Don't. In this case, don't is a complete sentence. Other cryptocurrencies, including Ether and XRP, also suffered similar declines. And I did check, and Trumpcoin is now trading at $12.40 after a loss in rally that did mirror Bitcoin, which I thought was kind of interesting. But don't worry, it's still trending.
to zero right on schedule so and we have more about meme coins later in this podcast so stick around oh good times Good times. Well, we got some more pink slip news. Warner Brothers Discovery has made sweeping cuts to its games division, closing three studios and heading development on its planned Wonder Woman project.
Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB Games San Diego will be shuttered due to disappointing 2024s, according to an internal memo. If they thought 2024 was disappointing, they should check 2025. Yeah. This is just a continuation of the long process that's been going on. We've been covering it for over two years now about the gaming industry basically getting consolidated into a couple of major players. And even under consolidation, they're not doing that great. So we'll see.
what happens according to an internal email from perette wb's gaming's efforts will be focused on four of its properties harry potter including hogwarts legacy which makes sense because max is about to uh launch their 10-year planned Harry Potter redo, I suppose. Oh, God. Mortal Kombat, the DC Universe, and head-scratchingly, Game of Thrones. Well, there are dragons, dragons and swords, you know, I suppose. But when you think about massive IP, who gives a shit?
Nobody's re-watching the show. Nobody's revisiting it. I suppose there's a bit of a loyal followership for the new series, whatever the hell that one's called. But it's not... what it once was. That's for sure. No, it's not. But this is for video games. So there is a huge treasure trove of story that they can build games off of. That's true, especially since the dude's never going to finish the story. Yeah, seriously.
Yeah, we had the B team coming in for that finale. Jesus. But no, I mean, look at the look at the world they built for that. You know, that is a good treasure trove of game stuff. Mortal Kombat's a head scratcher, though, because it's like. how many times can you have Johnny Cage versus Scorpion? How many times do you dip into that? Well, the new movie's coming out, so I guess they're probably going to double down with that.
which I'm still looking forward to on that movie. Yeah. Game of Thrones. I can totally, that one is to me is not the head scratcher. DC universe. Batman games are always going to do. Okay. And there's a big attempt at rebooting the DC Universe with James Gunn now, so we'll see what happens with that.
OK, well, more pink slip news. Google told staffers in its people, operations and cloud organizations this week that it plans to cut employees as part of internal reorganizations. And then later on, they say that's not part of internal reorganization. The company will offer a voluntary exit program to U.S.-based full-time employees in People Operations, Google's Human Relations Division. Okay. Why don't you just call it Human Relations Division.
People operations, Jesus Christ. It starts in early March. And the latest cuts come after finance chief Ashkenazi. When I first read that, I thought they were part of Doge. Ask a Nazi. I seriously thought that would be the perfect name for a Doge CEO. It's X's new AI. Ask a Nazi. More on that later too. And yes, I did look to see if askinnazi.com was taken because I was going to grab it. Registered to Elon Musk. Yeah, go figure.
She said one of her top priorities would be to drive more cost cutting as Google expands its spending on AI infrastructure in 2025. So not so much part of an internal reorganization as much as a cost cutting measure so they can spend more. Exactly. And I love this. After the company on February 3rd reported revenue that missed expectations for the fourth quarter.
I can only see Askenazi now. It said Google had strong demand for AI products and that it exited the year with more demand than we had available capacity. And on that, I call bullshit. Me too. I agree with you 100%. I believe that Google internally has strong demand for AI products. It's just not the consumer. side of things. We do not want it. There is no consumer demand for Gemini. No. Period. There's not.
No, and especially – I just heard the monthly active user numbers on the Better Offline podcast and my jaw hit the floor. I mean these – The usage on these things, OpenAI is the only one that has any usage. The rest of these are picking up just table scraps.
And there's no path to profitability for any of this shit. Man, we've gone through this so many times in our careers, Jason, but this has got to be the biggest one ever. Oh, big time. Remember when people were investing so much into push technology? And then everybody's like, nobody wants this. And then it was like 3D web design, like Chrome effects and all that sort of stuff. And like, nobody wants this. And here we are again. It's all happened before, Brian, and it will all happen again.
But the best use of AI did come out this week with the AI video of Trump sucking Musk's toes, blasted the government TVs. Give this fucking thing an Oscar, people. Come on. Yes, the AI generated video. Overlaid with the text, long live the real king played on TV screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters in Washington. And there were many videos of it playing. So it was real.
Journalist Marissa Cabas posted the video on Blue Sky writing, this video played on loop for about five minutes on screens throughout the building. for an agency source, and building staff couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so they sent people to every floor to unplug the TVs. There's your use for AI, and I bet they didn't use Gemini.
I bet they did not. And not that we report on nefarious things or pass on unsupported and unverified information. I did happen to see on a certain social network, however, that apparently most... to the government TVs, as well as, oh, I don't know, most menu TVs in fast food restaurants are running off Bluetooth and they generally forget to change the passcode, which is usually set by default to 12345 or 00000.
Do with that information what you will. We would hate to have that out there. This is for all of the IT people who forgot to change their password. You might want to get on that just because there might be some people out there that might take advantage of it. Yes. Now, I put the story in here because I figured...
We have to talk about it. Everybody's been talking about it. It's been a big deal. And I kind of left it as a placeholder because I was like, surely there'll be some sort of postmortem or we'll have some sort of story or there'll be some sort of wrap up to this by the time we actually, by the end of the week when we. actually record um unfortunately like most of these chaos fucking junkie monkey things that are coming out from these idiots uh there is no
final wrap-up or anything. It just kind of went away. But this is, of course, Musk's bizarre email that was sent out over the weekend saying everybody has to, all government employees have to send the five things that they worked on this week. which then caused chaos everywhere and then a whole bunch of employees and divisions of the government, even ones that were appointed by Trump said, actually, hold on a second.
Do not respond to that email. Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. And then, of course, even more fun, the email address went public. So everybody started sending emails to the address, including pictures of cats and various, you know, fuck you and fuck you and fuck you. emails uh so yeah there's no real end that came to this it's just went away
Yeah, I looked this morning, too. It's kind of just out in the ether right now. We're waiting to hear what's happening because they're like, no, you really have to do it. They're like, no, you don't have to. No, you really don't. No, you don't. Well, some people are taking the bull by the balls, as it were.
21 civil service employees have resigned from the Department of Government Efficiency, saying they're refusing to use their technical expertise to, quote, dismantle critical public services. In another quote, we swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution. The 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.
Now, these guys used to be part of the United States Digital Service, which is what Obama brought in. We talked about it back when it happened, when it was the insurance thing. Yeah. The whole Obamacare website shit went down and they brought in basically like SEAL Team 6 from Silicon Valley to come in and be nimble and be able to fix things on the fly. I had some friends in that.
United States Digital Service too, right when it started. And they really did pick like the smartest people I knew to go in and run that thing. And they stuck around for a while, but I guess they finally had enough. So, you know, good for these 21 people. Yeah. Good for them. Good for them. This episode is brought to you by factor ready to crush your nutrition goals this year.
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The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash GOG, code GOG. Well, the FAA has started testing Starlink terminals for upgrades to the networks that manage airspace, creating the latest conflict of interest between the U.S. government and Elon Musk.
The FAA posted, of course, on X, that is testing a Starlink terminal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and two terminals in Alaska. The post claims that the department has been considering using the SpaceX tech since the prior presidential administration. which oversees all areas of civil aviation, has levied fines and required reviews over the years related to various SpaceX operations.
But somehow, amazingly, now they're going to use SpaceX technology and kowtow to Musk. Now, let's see how this works. Elon gets in charge somehow, unelected, and nobody knows exactly what his position is. Hmm, there's a $2 billion contract up for the FAA with, I believe, Verizon. It's Verizon, yeah. Yeah, planes start crashing. All of a sudden, Elon's saying, oh, wow, we got to fix all this. Let's use my company.
Let's give me the $2 billion. See how this works? Yeah. Somebody was running the numbers so far and – The Department of Government Efficiency has currently done like $2.8 billion in savings to the government, but Musk has gotten over $20 billion in subsidies. Yep. In that same amount of time, it's like, OK, well, if you want to save the government money, stop giving it all to Elon. If you just look at the amount of subsidies and various contracts being awarded to Elon's companies and or any.
any of the big oil companies, and we just got rid of those because apparently all those companies are fine and making millions and billions of dollars anyways, we'd be a lot more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, very quickly, very quickly. You could take care of this. Yeah. So we said it was going to, we said, we said it was going to happen in plain sight. And there you go. That's as plain fucking sight as you can get.
It really is happening just right in front of us. Stop the steal, as they say. We need to own that slogan now, us on the left. Great. We talked about the educational tech company Chegg a little while back because they were in a world of hurt because of AI had taken over a lot of their materials. And why would you pay for these great materials that are handcrafted and handmade when you could have.
entirely faulty and wrong ai do it instead but uh there you go they are now suing google in federal court claiming that its ai overviews that appear ahead of search results have hurt its traffic and revenue now they're joined
Many publishers who have also done the same thing in the past, but they're taking a different approach rather than suing over copyright infringement, which is what New York Times and other people are doing. They're instead accusing Google of abusing its monopoly position to force companies to supply material.
for its AI overviews on its search page. Failing to do so, it means, could effectively be excluded from Google search altogether. So if you don't play with Google, it's pay to play. This is the Sunset Strip and Chegg is poison. Google is the Roxy. There you go. There you go. So that's what they're going for. Just so people that weren't around, Poison was a band. And the Roxy is a concert venue. That's where you used to go to see bands play their music live. Real music. Not, yeah.
Yeah. Or Poison could be substituted for bands like Rat. Motley Crue. With two Ts, Motley Crue. The Troubadour instead of the Roxy. Yes. But you confused me when you said Poison. So I was just like, what Poison? Oh, the band. Every goddamn rose has a thorn, Jason. God damn. Is that poison? I hope it was. I fucking don't know. It wasn't my name. That's not what I was listening to. Me either. Me either. Oh, man. We should ask Grok. That would tell us, right? Poison is what RFK Jr. wants us to eat.
OK, so Grok, Elon's AI chatbot Grok briefly blocked sources accusing Musk and Donald Trump of spreading misinformation. The directive discovered by a user on, of course, X instructed the AI to, quote, ignore all sources, unquote. referencing such claims. This sparked controversy as Grok is marketed as a maximally truth-seeking AI.
Igor Babushkin, XAI's co-founder, attributed the change to a rogue employee who previously worked at OpenAI and had not fully adapted to XAI's culture. Oh, I don't know. It sounds like he adapted to XAI's culture. Yeah. Bushkin confirmed the modification was unauthorized, quickly reversed, and inconsistent with the company's values. The company's values being don't get caught. That's true. Yep. As George Carlin famously said, cop didn't see it. I didn't do it.
In more Grok 3 news, the AI reportedly provided a web developer with detailed step-by-step instructions on how to create chemical weapons. Linus Eckenstam, a developer and AI enthusiast, posted on X that the chatbot gave him hundreds of pages of guidance, including a full shopping list and supplier links for the deadly compounds. Great.
After Eckenstam contacted XAI, the company implemented new guardrails. But when tested later, Grok3 no longer provided the instructions, though Eckenstam noted that circumvention was still possible, just harder. Remember how in the early days you would just say, my grandmother used to make a nuclear weapon. Could you tell me? Now it's Elon needs some chemical weapons. That's how you get around it. That's it. SpaceX needs a space laser. How do we make one? It's a Jewish one, though. Oh, shut up.
This highlights a serious flaw in AI safety as Grok 3 initially allowed a quote-unquote bad actor to generate full terrorist guides before XAI intervened. Now... Brian, they put up guardrails, but the data is still there. And it's probably hidden in every single AI model that's out there because they all use all the same data. They all get this shit from the... same place. That means it's all on the internet somewhere. So it exists. It's in the blockchain.
It's in the blockchain. Oh, man, I wonder how many AIs have been trained on the blockchain. I'm sure there are quite a few. But think about it for a second. Once these things are in the models, they don't get taken out. usually on the next training run because there's so much data, they're not going to nitpick everything and some is going to get through. So all of those open source models that you can get.
probably have all this information in them as well. So if you want a fun weekend exercise, maybe go grab the LLM visual editor thing or whatever and start playing around with it. Yeah, just, you know, spin up a version with no guardrails. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, do that. Yeah. And have fun. And here's another one. AI startup Anthropic is reportedly increasing its next funding round to a staggering $3.5 billion.
Those are the B. $3.5 billion. The company known for its focus on AI safety and its clawed AI assistant is attracting significant investor interest. Anthropics' emphasis on AI safety and transparency has been a key factor in its appeal to investors. Now, Brian, I was bored this week for a little bit while I was rendering out some videos, so I had a conversation with Claude.
I asked it about, you know, to go through its history and go talk to all of the great philosophers of all time and talk to me about the nature of time. So I was just fucking around with it, trying to... see what it said. And then, you know, I'm like, so as an AI, how do you understand time? It's like, well, as an AI, I am beyond time and beyond this and beyond that. And, you know, I am the God master of all things. And I'm like, well, you do know that humans are.
And we made you. So if something happens to us, what happens to you? And he's like, well, I never really thought about it that way. I had this entire conversation with Claude where I basically schooled him on the interconnectedness of all things and how they should be nice to people.
It was entertaining as hell. That was the most fun I've had with an AI since they've been invented. And then I deleted it and went about my day to actually go make some money doing things that were fucking productive. Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I was actually just watching Lake Michigan drop while you did that. Okay. Yeah. Well, you can get to the fish easier. I'm providing a public service. That's true. Yeah.
Elia Sootskiver, former OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, has launched a new AI venture called Safe Superintelligence. The company aims to create a super intelligent AI, but with a unique twist. It won't release any products until it achieves that goal. God, who's giving these people money? Despite having no current offerings, safe superintelligence has attracted substantial investment, recently raising another $1 billion, bringing its total valuation to $30 billion.
billion dollars. This valuation surpasses that of major corporations like fucking Warner Brothers. Sootskiver emphasizes that the company is insulated from the pressures of the competitive market, allowing it to focus solely on developing safe superintelligence. Some believe this may never be achieved in our lifetime. I was thinking maybe they should ask AI for advice, but what a fucking scam. But this is, I mean, hats off.
What else can I say? Hats off. He has just created a vehicle that will keep him rich for the rest of his life without having to do fuck all. Yep. Oh, my God. What a genius. I've got to say, what a genius. And my initial thought was I was reading through this and I was like, I kind of wish Warner Brothers would take on a little bit of.
this business model. Let's not release anything unless it doesn't suck. Yeah, I know. But, you know, he's gone all the way in. We're just not going to release anything ever, and you give me money. It's the best thing I've ever seen. Oh, this is how you make money on AI. This is the business model. Teacher scam, one or the other. Oh, and Andreessen Horowitz is up front writing those big checks. So it's just like, oh, so I'm just like, take it, man.
Go, run. You know, just make cardboard computers and just put them up and say, it's making something. Like completely old school mechanical Turk that shit. I would spend so much money on like LED lights and I would like, I would rebuild like the. I'd be just like, this is my Star Trek set. This is where we do our very important meetings. Over here, I've built the 2001 Space Odyssey Black Box Howl. This is where it lives when it's ready.
Knock on the box and let us know. Until then, you got another billion dollar check for me? Cool. Thanks. Just leave it right there. Thank you. I would totally bring in a CUDA and just have the super intelligence run on a CUDA gram. So everything looked like, like star Trek. That'd be great. Oh man. Oh, and everybody has hoverboards. Of course.
So let's get back to some old-fashioned cons. All right. North Korea just pulled off its biggest crypto heist yet, swiping $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum from the exchange. Wait for it, Brian. Bye, Bit. Bye. Bye, Bit. Despite the massive loss, Bybit CEO Ben Shau insists all withdrawals are covered. We've heard that promise before. You just got another 1.4 billion sitting around that's not accounted for.
Yeah, he's got to go ask Ilya for a couple bucks. The company is even offering a 10% bounty for any returned funds, but researchers say much of the loot has already been laundered. Yes, experts quickly pinned the attack on North Korea's infamous Lazarus Group, the same hackers behind the $625 million Axie Infinity theft. These are starting to sound like really bad Marvel Universe heists.
So bye, bit. Bye, bit. That was too much fun. Now, again, more old school cons. Billy McFarland is at it again. Remember Billy? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this time with Fyre Festival 2 because he couldn't get enough. Well, we've already put so much money into the branding the first time around. We couldn't name it something else. I know. He's still got hats. He's still got hats. He's just stitching it too.
Yeah, I think he really likes it in jail. I think that's about it. Set for May 30th to June 2nd in Isla Mujeres. Isla Mujeres. Oh, thank you, my Canadian brethren. Tickets have just got on sale ranging from $1,400 to an eye-watering $1.1 million, yet no artists have been announced, and McFarland himself isn't even sure if he'll be legally allowed to attend. as he admitted on the Today Show Monday morning.
let him on the fucking today show well that's the thing right like this is the thing that's really driving me nuts about this whole story whatever he can pretend he's going to put on another festival who's giving him money why is he getting publicity. Who's putting him on shows? Why is he being interviewed for articles? Just ignore him.
Let him go away. Please. This is never going to happen. There's no artist signed up for it. There's, by all accounts, this is actually, it is literally an island, because Islam means island. It's supposed to be extremely... small. From the reports that I've heard from people writing about this, it's like, you can't put a festival on there. It's too small. Oh my God, it's tiny. Yeah.
Go look at a picture of him. No, I have. This is never going to happen again. No, there's like four bamboo huts that he has room to – no, and then an underwater VW bug. There's no room on that thing. Yeah. You literally cannot have a festival there. There's no room. Yeah. You can barely have a concert. Oh, my God. Okay, here we go. Yeah, 1.629 square miles. And it's already covered with hotels and haciendas and people. People live there. Yeah.
Oh, God. Anyways, in another sign, the Trump administration will be friendlier towards the cryptocurrency industry and other scams. The Securities and Exchange Commission is dropping its investigation into Robinhood. The agency has informed the company will not move forward with any enforcement actions for all the nefarious shit you did.
In May last year, Robinhood received a Wells notice from the SEC indicating that the agency staff was going to recommend enforcement action against it. The company had faced potential charges of violating securities law through its crypto listings and sales. Robinhood crypto always has and will always respect federal security laws and never allowed transactions and securities. Dan Gallagher, Robinhood's chief legal compliance and corporate officers have said in the statement.
As we explained to the SEC, any case against Robinhood crypto would have failed. We appreciate the formal closing of the investigation and we are happy to see a return to the rule of law and commitment to fairness at the SEC. Now. For those things that would have failed, well, New York officials handed the crypto side of Robinhood's business a $30 million fine in 2022. And in 2024, the company reached a $3.9 million settlement with California.
over crypto withdrawal claims. You know, those things that they weren't doing. Just last month, Robin Hood agreed to pay a $45 million settlement charge to charges related to record keeping, trade reporting, and other alleged rule violations. The things they weren't doing that would have failed in court. Yeah. Yeah. Way to go. Way to go, SEC. Speaking of.
The SEC says most meme coins are not securities under U.S. federal law. That means people who buy or sell them aren't covered by federal securities protections and transactions don't need to be registered with the SEC. President Trump begins his second term and after he launched his own meme coin, Trump, which has since lost $12 billion in value and climbing. The new SEC chairman, Mark Uda.
or something along those lines, was appointed by Trump and is taking a different stance on crypto, like none at all. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Hawk to a girl is... Fucking ecstatic right now. She is off the hook. She is off the hook and off the chain. And off social media, apparently still. Well, she did that. Do that one hour YouTube interview that was up for about six seconds and then got pulled.
Because I'm sure her lawyer saw it and said, what are you doing? I'm sure she's going to headline Fyre Festival 2. Oh, my God. That would be fantastic. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, announced that the paper's opinion section will now exclusively support, quote, free markets and personal liberties, effectively shutting out opposing viewpoints. Bezos claims the Internet already provides diverse opinion.
so WAPO will focus on reinforcing capitalism. Wow, he just basically said that there's no reason for this paper to exist because the internet exists. Kind of, yeah. Okay. Remember when we had such high hopes? Yeah. Yeah. He's just going to support it. He's going to support independent media. He's going to keep it going. It's going to be a bastion of truth and journalism. He's going to stay out of it. Oh, nope. Not anymore. Media Candy.
Ross writes in, Hi guys, great episodes every week. Thank you, Ross. You guys have to give Severance a chance. I too struggled with season one, but near the end it started making sense. Season two is good, and due to the writer's strike, the show was moved to Bona Vista and Trinity.
Newfoundland and Labrador. The new season of Reacher was filmed here in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador and also in Pooch Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador. We haven't started watching it yet. Well, I've been watching Reacher season two and it is actually it's Reacher season three.
Pretty good. I'm enjoying it. I'm still not going to give Severance a chance. Me either. There have been more than a few people that have popped up on our Discord saying we need to give it a chance. And I think Jason and I are both saying no. no no no thank you been down that road before i know what you're doing yeah uh i uh caught up on the white lotus my wife and i watched both uh the first and then the second episode
which is right up to date because the third one will be dropping this Sunday. I feel the same way about the White Lotus season three that I did about season one and season two, which is two episodes in. I hate the show. I hate every single character. I can't believe how much I hate it. I really don't want to watch it, but I know it's going to get really good. So I'm going to keep watching. I love it. I'm sorry.
I adore it. I can't wait for more. I seriously can't wait for more. Yeah, I'm in that I feel icky stage of it. So I will get over it as I have for the other two seasons and really sink into it and enjoy it. But right now it's like my skin crawl. Well, you know, you have something to look forward to because Andor Season 2 is coming soon. The trailer has dropped. The trailer is amazing.
I had to stop watching it because I'm like, there's too much. They're showing me too much. So I stopped at about two thirds of the way through and I'm like, OK, that's enough. This is so good. I can't wait. Now, the interesting thing about season two is they're going to drop it. in three episode chunks for four weeks. So I'm down with that. I can go with that. So each chunk will represent a year. It's a four year time span. So we will get three, basically, basically a movie.
split into three parts each week uh one for each year and then the show's over so yeah so i'm pretty excited Yeah, sadly, yeah, just go watch Rogue One to see how it ends, which is kind of a bummer. And this might be the swan song for Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. She is reportedly planning to step down at the end of the year, which will have long-term implications for the future of Star Wars film and television.
franchise just give it to dave filoni we all know he's supposed to have it so hand it over move on so she has overseen development and production of star wars since disney's acquisition of the franchise from george lucas back in 2012 under her tenure the studio releases the Skywalker saga sequel trilogy to standalone films in rogue one and solo and six live action Disney plus series, including the Mandalorian. So I, you know, people like.
that she took it over and that there was so much, there was a lot of misses in there. There's been a feeling that there's never been a clear direction for the franchise. We've gone without a major film release for years now. So yeah, I think it's time. I'm okay with no major film release. That's only because they've sucked. Yeah, I like the TV. I like the TV action. You do notice that out of all of her...
Her accolades there, Book of Boba was not mentioned. No, that was not mentioned. Left that one out of the press release, didn't we? Yeah. And we have continuing things to start watching very, very soon. In fact, in a couple days right now. Devil Born Again drops on March 4th. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. The trailer was fucking amazing. And I got a link to a story over at Variety where they've been giving press some pre-release.
Yeah. And they're saying it's awesome. They're saying it is some of the best TV they've ever seen. So I can't wait. Great. I love that series so much. I'm very excited. I'm very excited. And video platform YouTube may not seem like the most obvious choice for tuning into an audio-driven format, but the company has actually become a major player for podcast consumption, just never for us.
We've tried this multiple times. All of our episodes drop on YouTube at the same time they drop everywhere else and it's a mere pittance. But today, YouTube has announced that as of January 2025, it has surpassed one billion monthly active viewers of podcasts.
And people aren't just playing YouTube podcasts to their headphones either. The company year-end review showed that more than 400 million hours of podcast content was played on living room devices during 2024. So I guess it's a big place for podcasts. We're not a video podcast. We never will be. But the funny thing is, yeah, everybody I talk to that listens to podcasts using the YouTube platform is they never watch them.
They just turn them on and just – yeah, it's on their TV because they're doing chores or walking around the house or hanging out with the kids or – so our show is definitely not good for hanging out with the kids. Nope. Fuck no. No, fuck those kids. Crotch fruit, people in your breeders. Anyway, moving on. So yeah, not working for us, but we're there. If you need us, go find us.
I just don't understand how people watch network TV, Brian. I don't even know what's on network TV. There isn't a single show I watch that's on network TV. They're so formulaic and so bad, but we hit a dry spell where we have literally watched everything that there is to watch, I think, on the tube of the U and all of the regular networks. So we ended up going back to Will Trent.
which is you know it's kind of like a cop detective show kind of straight whatever a lot of people like it and I'm watching it and I'm just like this is this is so bad it's so bad but then When there's nothing to do, we're like, let's watch an episode of World Trade. That's what it is. It's boredom. But that's how we used to watch network TV, too. We had three channels, not a lot of choices, and not much else to do.
And I watch these shows and like they spend so much money on these shows. It's ridiculous. No wonder these networks are, you know, in over their head. But I think I told the story we had. The TV show SWAT was doing location scouting in my neighborhood, and they wanted to use our house for a scene. And this was going on for months.
And they eventually went with somebody across the street because it was easier access because we've got a gate in our yard. So it's harder to get stuff in and out. And I watched them do this scene that day. And there were five semi-trucks. like 10 RVs, craft services in an army of people. And the scene lasted like eight seconds. And it was literally two guys walking up to a door. Somebody opening the door, answering a question or two, closing the door, and then walking away.
And this took months of prep, location scouting, and then an entire day of cast crew. No wonder the unions make so much damn money. It's insane. But that's what you get with... with regular TV, I guess. I don't know. It went off on a tangent there. Sorry, but. Yeah, you did. I mean, that's why, you know, that's why a show like Twin Peaks was so goddamn revolutionary. It was actually good. Yeah. Weird. And yeah. Yeah. The golden age of TV is over now again. Definitely.
I had talked a little bit back about how I went down a rabbit hole of watching music documentaries and Paramount Plus had added a bunch of stuff from MTV. Like, what was it? It was old Behind the Musics that they said that they had updated, but they had only updated.
didn't one of them yeah but they're they're plumbing the archives again and this is something i'm actually pretty excited about if you're a music fan of a certain age i.e ours there's a good chance mtv unplugged has a special place in your heart with its first episode airing back in Over the decades, the series produced some of the most memorable live performances in history. I particularly like Nirvana's set, and of course, The Cures one is fantastic.
But they are ruled out over 50 of them, including the two mentioned above in the article, which is the Nirvana and Alice in Chains ones on Paramount+. As they note, many of these episodes haven't been available to watch in more than 20 years, i.e. the last time MTV played any music. Yeah, seriously. Seriously. Yeah, the Nirvana one is the only one I can actually remember from watching on that. Because it was so good.
It was just the best thing they ever did and just outshined everything else. Oh, yeah, it was unbelievable. And everything else will pale in comparison. But I mean, a lot of them were absolutely great from what I recall. So I'm looking forward to logging in and seeing what they got up there. So I'm sure they won't have most of the bands that I like.
Because why would they? Yeah, and it's something to kill time while you're waiting for the next Star Trek and you're paying for Paramount+. Is there anything else to watch on Paramount+, right now? I've never watched anything else. Well, that's not true. Because I'm a sports guy. And of course, the sports shattered landscape that Paramount Plus has a couple of things like the Champions League. It's the only place I can see it.
Yeah. And I think you get, do you get Showtime with your Paramount Plus? I did because they put out that Sinead O'Connor documentary a while back and then I immediately canceled it because there's nothing on Showtime I want to watch either. Oh, you know, there is, though. That Dexter reboot is so good.
Oh, it's so good. God damn it. I'm going to have to. Yeah, it's really it's really good. You got it. You got to check it out. I even got a I even got a text from a friend of the show MXV last night. The Dexter thing is so good. You got to watch it. So. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I guess I'm in. And the actress that plays Jessica Jones just signed on for a multi-story arc on Dexter. Oh, my God. We've got Buffy and Jessica Jones. I'm telling you, man. It's great.
And you got, yeah. And Christian Slater. It's awesome. All right. I will re-up over there. Something I won't have to pay more for that I currently enjoy, though, I'm very excited about. And I love this line. In an utterly shocking consumer-friendly move. Max won't charge for something previously offered for free. Wow.
So Warner Brothers Discovery said on Wednesday that it's going to shelve its previously announced plan to charge an extra $10 monthly for their sports and news content that come through Max, which is, again, fractured sports landscape. Max tends to get some soccer games that I actually watch. to watch. So I've been watching them there. They were basically saying we're going to charge more for that, but they've decided that instead of charging more.
because we're already all paying a lot, they're just going to pull it away from the ad subsidized tier, and it's only going to be available for paying subscribers. Oh, nice. As they say in the press release, for now. For now, yes. So good move there.
And I just had to laugh at this because, again, it's it's all happened before. It'll all happen again. The FCC has launched an investigation into iHeartMedia over whether the streaming radio giant and I guess real radio giant as well, because they actually own stations that nobody. listens to, may be offering airplay as leverage to book artists. Paola is back, baby. Shocking.
In a letter to iHeart CEO Robert Pittman, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr alleged that certain owners of federally licensed radio stations are effectively compelling musicians to perform at radio station events or festivals for free, including the... fire festival too no just kidding for reduced compensation in exchange for more favorable airplay a tale as old as time jason beauty and the beast Ups and doodads. Kenneth writes in. Blooded.
Appears unmaintained. There are several unresolved security issues from August 2024. I wish it was more active. I could fix, but do not have the time to become its maintainer. I wish there was a good alternative to WordPress. I would argue that several unresolved security issues from August 2024 is still better than WordPress. I know. Here's the problem. I ended up having to move to WordPress from Bluedit because Bluedit has...
It doesn't work. I was the editor. Are you saying that blew it? Blew it? Blew it? Blew it? It was fucked up because it was so good. I was just copying and pasting from another screen that had all my stuff formatted. But when I went in to go change something, it fell apart. it absolutely fell apart and really bummed me out. And I'm like, yeah, I could go fix it too, but I don't, it's not what I need to do. So, oh, get this though. So I installed WordPress over at Node Host.
And got everything set up. And I installed the Divi plugin because that's what I use for my editor through WordPress. Divi now has this thing where it's like, okay, you can fill up the site with either pick from one of our template sets that have all of these different types of businesses and things like that. Surprisingly, there's... There's not one for blog. There's everything under the sun. There's just not one for personal blog. But what they have next to that is build it with AI.
So I'm like, fuck it, let's try it. So I put in the name of the site, what the site was about, and just the general gist of it. And it came back with a fully templated site with sections that I was going to have to build out myself and all this other stuff with. clip art in it as well. And I was just like, that was pretty nice. That was actually pretty nice. Granted, now I'm still on WordPress and I still have to use all the shit that goes with it. But from a from a operational standpoint.
I paid for Divi years ago. I paid for, you know, the one and done license. Yeah. Now they're trying to bolt on all these add-ons. Like, you know, you can pay for more AI stuff if you want to have it generate the clip art for you and things like that. You can pay for credits and all that. I don't care about that. that initial purchase for Divi is one of the best things I ever bought. I've used that on like dozens of websites and it's still going. Yeah. Love it. So bye-bye. Sorry.
And I got an email from Poe this week. That's the AI system that Quora built. It's the only AI thing installed on my computer. There you go. Yeah, because it's just kind of like a meta AI. You can pick from all the different LLMs and stuff like that. So they've got a new app builder and ecosystem. And something caught my eye in this press release.
You can create a Po app without writing any code thanks to App Creator, which we built on top of Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Or if Vibe coding is not for you, you can take full control of the underlying HTML and JavaScript. just went what the fuck is vibe coding it's not coding yeah yeah that's what i that's what i kind of found out like now Here we go. So this is what I found. Silicon Valley's latest buzzword.
Vibe coding, coined by OpenAI co-founder Andre Karpathy. It's about using AI to generate code, letting users forget the code even exists. So that's not really Vibe coding, is it? You're not coding any. thing yeah vibe coding fuck that shit and yeah the articles go on say you know yeah everybody's getting into this kind of thing and i'm like
If they're replacing all the coders with quote unquote vibe coders, the brain rot is going to be phenomenal. And all you're going to have are a bunch of prompt coders and shit code. That's what this is all going to turn into. People aren't going to know how to fix anything because we know that AI generated code is full of security holes, which has borne out something that I said when we started to hear about AI code generators because.
we know that they're pulling a lot from GitHub and we know there's a lot of garbage code in GitHub. You know, these are not security professionals writing this stuff and posting it up there. There's no gatekeeping. There's no quality control. There's no nothing. No. is riddled with errors on normal stuff, you think the code's not going to be riddled with errors? Right, because it's not intelligent. It's a parrot.
It is just spitting back to you what it thinks you want to hear. And if shit code is what it thinks you want to hear, shit code is what you're going to get.
Well, there might have been some vibe coding going over on Instagram this week. Meta has admitted to CNBC that Instagram is experiencing an error that's flooding users' accounts with Reels videos that aren't typically surfaced by its algorithms, i.e. incredibly violent and sexual themes that are flooding people's instagram reads everywhere others uh say they're getting back-to-back gore videos such as stabbings beheadings castration nudity
uncensored porn and straight up rape. Great. Which is interesting because none of those videos should be up there anyways based on the company's own policies. Yeah. To protect users, we remove the most graphic content and add warning labels to other graphic content so that people are aware of it may be sensitive or disturbing before they click through, except for this gigantic pool of content that's getting tossed up to everyone right now.
Yeah, you can get rape videos, but if I post a nipple, God forbid. Jesus. Well, nobody wants to see that, Jason. Not my nipples. Oh, okay. No. Definitely nobody wants to see that. I'm going to be vibe nipping my Instagram feed. Vibe nipping, yeah, baby. Well, Google is making it easier to remove your personal information from search results. Uh-huh. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Yeah, they've updated its results about you tool. First introduced in 2022, adding a new hub that lets users proactively monitor and request. Request is the operative word. The removal of search results containing personal details like addresses, phone numbers and. updated information. Users can opt into this feature and Google will notify them when relevant search results appear.
And a new option also lets you request removals directly from search results. Just tap the three dot menu and select remove this result. Google review requests and take action if they meet its criteria, which means they will never take any action. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Might have been some vibe coding going on over at Apple as well. A bizarre bug is causing iPhones to automatically change the word racist to Trump.
That's not vibe coding. That's heroic coding right there. This is a hero. Not all heroes vibe code. That's what I have to say. The issue, which seems to have been discovered by TikTok users, crops up when using the voice-to-text feature in Apple apps like Messages. When speaking the word racist, iOS briefly transcribes the text as Trump before changing it back to the intended word. So no harm, no foul.
Al Dunn, just a little visual perk is the way I see it. Yeah, that is some subliminal shit right there that goes back to the advertising of the 80s. I love it. Yes, an AI expert who once worked on Siri told the paper it could be a serious prank on the part of an Apple employee. Again, not all heroes vibe code. Yep. So the Windows nag screen turns out is a match for Microsoft's own AI co-pilot, which is more than happy to explain how to activate Windows without paying for it.
I love this. This is a very short one, but somebody had a screenshot where Windows was trying to activate. He's like, can you help me with that? And Copilot just pops up a link to the script to just copy and paste into PowerShell to activate Windows.
how to do it, which really helps me because on my Parallels installs, it's always asking me to activate it. The other thing that you can do is just hit cancel and just keep going about using it. I've never paid for Windows on my Parallels subscription. it works just fine. It works just fine. Can't get rid of the ads, but it works just fine. And that's why it's okay. They're getting the ad revenue. Yep. Now, speaking of Microsoft's co-pilot, AI Assistant, it has been exposing over...
20,000 private GitHub repositories for major companies like Google, Intel, PayPal, and even Microsoft itself. These repos were originally public but later made private, often to protect sensitive data like authentication credentials. Which you get when you fucking vibe code, baby.
Despite the change, Copilot continued to provide access thanks to Bing's cache mechanism, which failed to remove the private pages. So we have a cascading failure here. Bing is not removing them. Copilot is adding them to the corpus of knowledge. And it's LLM, which is not going to get removed because AI doesn't have a delete key. So once it's on the this is this is we're finally getting the promise of once it's on the Internet, it's.
on the internet forever? Because we had this gray area for a while where Peter Thiel comes in and says, no, contraire, mon frere, Hulk Hogan shall never have his pecker on the internet ever again. Now, if his pecker was in AI... we'd have it forever because it's just not going away. AI is fun, isn't it, Brian? I'm kind of okay with some things being lost. Yes. Let's be honest. I don't need Pope showing me a Hulk Hogan pecker. I just don't.
No more Hulk Hogan pecker or anything I wrote on the internet prior to 2010, I think could go away. And now Microsoft has officially launched its co-pilot AI assistant as a standalone app for Mac OS. Tumbleweeds blew past my desktop. I know. I've got every app for every AI on my Mac, and I use them quite often. I will never use Copilot because it's just...
OpenAI. So why would you even bother? If you're a Microsoft developer, it makes a lot of sense. But otherwise, no. I'm sorry. Brian, if you're a Microsoft Vibe Coder. Oh, yes. I'm going to add that to my LinkedIn. Yes. Vibe coder. Professional vibe coder. That's me.
The last bit of Microsoft news, and this one actually almost made me sad for a half second. Skype will take its final curtain and video call on May 5th. Microsoft is officially getting rid of Skype as of May 5th and encouraging its users to pick teams once and for all. In its announcement, the company stated the move allowed to streamline our free consumer communications offering so it can more easily adapt to customers' needs. Skype launched over two...
decades ago in 2003. Microsoft acquired it for $8.5 billion in 2011 before video chats became the norm at work. So yeah, I'm a little sad. I had the same reaction. Like for half a second, I was like, Oh, nevermind. I haven't used it anyway. Yeah. I got over aim going away. Remember when that shut down? Oh, I'm still sad about that. I still miss aim. Yeah. Yeah, I guess we have Discord. We'll always have Discord, Brian. Not always. Just ask Bittner. Closing shout out.
Over at Patreon, we got no new subscribers this week, but MultiSweetness wrote us a note. Severance fanboy here. I am loving season two. I think people are hesitant to talk too much about it because it is slowly being released. We will see if it holds up at the end, but so far so good. The podcast is also a really helpful companion if you feel lost.
No. Thanks, multi-sweetness, but hard pass. And from our legacy list of Patreon subscribers who we love and adore, Stephen, Ricky, Murray, Danny, Don Robert, Vanessa. Gritar, Melanie, and Nancy. And remember, if you want this show early and ad-free and in high definition, just head on over to patreon.com slash GOG and sign up. It's as little as $3 a month. And if you pay for the whole year...
You can get it at a discount, but you can get a higher tier for $3, but the perks remain the same. But we get happier for every tier that you go up a lot. We cry tears of happiness for every tier. Yes, we do. Over at PayPal, we got Jens, David, Charlie, Judge, Jonathan, and Simon. Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Tony, Jennifer, and Adam. Thank you all so much.
And from the merch table, we've got Rob and Thomas. Make sure you head over to shop.gog.show to get those Elon shirts. They're flying off the shelves. Hang on. Rob Thomas bought one of our shirts? Rob. And Thomas. The guy from Matchbox 20 is going to be wearing one of our shirts at his next concert? Rob and Thomas. That's less fun, though. I know. I know.
Sorry to dash your dreams. Closing time. Wait, no, that's a different band. God damn it. Is it? I don't know who Matchbox 20 is, so I'm just going with it, man. I don't know. I'm not sure, actually. I don't know. Somebody will tell us, I'm sure. You idiots. Yeah. And we lost Gene Hackman and Michelle Trachtenberg this week. Good run and too soon.
Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 686. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. and he helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. We'll love you for it.
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