692: Confabulation and Frivolity

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet... Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, I'm so excited. My bags are packed. We are less than, or actually a little bit over a month away from Fire 2 Festival. Oh man, can I come too? Sure. Why not? We might be the only people there.

Oh, that would be great. I'll bring the cheese if you bring the bread. If you, of course, recall the initial Fyre Festival, which was a total disaster, and they went to jail for it, and he's out of jail, and of course immediately announced a second one. which initially had a location placed solidly in the ocean. Yes, that was fun. Yeah, that was fun. And then we found out it was going to be some island, and the island, of course, had never heard of him or anything.

And then he claimed that he had, of course, talked to the city officials on that island and was going to sort it out. The island probably holds 50 people, so not happening. Okay. Now he says that actually it's going to be in Playa del Carmen, which is a larger city on the actual...

On Mexico itself, not an island. On the mainland. On the mainland, as it were. Okay. But, of course, the city wrote in Playa del Carmen, there will be no event called Fire 2. There is no registration nor planning. This government prioritizes order, safety, and truth.

which is mexico so i don't know about that yeah i don't know about that but uh you know history be repeating itself quickly in that they have no uh concept whatsoever and have not spoken to them or at least they're saying that Two days after that, McFarlane posted a statement on Instagram with alleged documentation showing that he was working with the city for the festival.

Trump Sharpie there to create that. The documents do show approval for an event with a maximum of 12 hours of music over three days for 250 people. which is not quite what the Fire 2 Festival has been promoted as. Nope. He also did say earlier that an entertainment lineup would drop in March, it being now April 11th. Yeah. No entertainment lineup yet.

Rep claims that performers will be revealed next week. This is from an article that was written two weeks ago. The only person who's publicly said they're booked is a former NFL player, Antonio Brown, who I'm sure drops the sick beats. Okay. But you can still get tickets. The cheapest one is $1,400 with ticket options as high as $1,100,000. Well, now, do you have to buy an NFT to get in or is there a meme coin that's attached to this that I need to know about?

Some DeFi thing. Don't think he was able to get any of that together, but you never know. I'm sure he will sell them if he can. All right. That's fun times. I can't wait to go, Brian. I know. I just won't be able to get back in the country. So it might be, you know, the festival to end them all. So I had a little follow up last week about the IRS data sharing that I was talking about. Yeah. And that has come to pass. The IRS has made a deal with ICE to, uh...

to share data on immigration, immigration data. So. Yeah, that's going so well that Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Melanie Krause said, fuck you, I'm out of here. Yeah. I would like to say that at least there's somebody left in government with a spine, but she left government. So no, those spines are. Leaving quickly, and I would just like to point out that undocumented immigrants in the United States paid a total of $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, and in 2023 paid $89.8 billion.

So that money is just going straight out the window because nobody's going to be paying those taxes anymore because they're going to be sharing data with ICE. Either way, they're going to either be kicked out of the country or they're going to be too scared to pony up the money. Way to go. Also probably worth pointing out that the undocumented immigrants tax bills are considerably higher than, oh, I don't know, say Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Amazon, Microsoft. Everybody.

And here's, here's the real shitty part. They don't even get to take, you know, take part in any of the programs that they're paying into. They're never going to be able to collect on social security that they're paying into all of the other things they're paying into. Yeah. Master plan. Best possible people in charge. So have you ever heard of Mustafa Suleiman? Yes.

He was the DeepMind guy, right? And now he's over at Microsoft. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. Well, he came out this week and kind of confirmed what I was saying last time, which was I'm like, Microsoft is going to sit back and let OpenAI. do what OpenAI is going to do, spend all the money, create all the stuff, and then pick them up at a fire sale. So I was kind of right because he says he's just going to let OpenAI burn cash and then build on their success.

So, you know, kind of the same thing. They're just going to let them run, let them run, do all the foundational models, do all the crazy stuff they're going to do. And then we're just going to kick back and get all the benefits because, you know, we did put in several billion dollars of investment. We just want our slice. Yeah, a lot of that money they're burning through is our money, but we'll just pick it up when they're done.

Exactly. Exactly. Let the kid play with their toys and then swoop on in. Yep. And speaking of toys, ChatGPT just came out with a new feature yesterday. And now ChatGPT has access to all of the previous chats you've ever done. So it's now it's got like this big deep mind, not to be confused with deep mind from Google, with all of the data that you've ever done. So it's learning about you.

right? It's such a great new feature, Brian. It's so awesome that you're already opted in. You can opt out, but of course they opted you into this great new feature that they've given you. Isn't that great? I'm taken to not signing in. Like I just use it, not signed in now. Oh, when I use it, I use it in giant bursts. So I actually pay the 20 bucks a month because I, the times that I need to use it, I can't be rate limited. So, so, and the thing is, it's like.

I have to look like a complete schizophrenic to that thing because I'm pasting in news articles and having it do all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah, I'm all over the map. So I went and opted out this morning. I'll talk about it at Media Candy a little bit later because I'm telling you.

You can't have some fun with it, but if you think that if that's going to use what I did last night as a basis for my personality, that might actually match. But everything else, no, it's going to turn me into a crazy person. But speaking of money, though. You're talking about how Microsoft gave all the money to them. You know, I was thinking of money this morning and watching the stock market burn and everybody else burn and all the people that are.

you know, out of work and dying in other countries because of what's going on. And I'm like, you know what? If this guy is just there for all of the money. Why don't we just start a Go Trump Me fund? get a couple billion, go buy him Greenland and just let him sit there. So I think, I think that's what, I think we should, we should have a go Trump be fund. That's the only, it's the only rational thing that I could come up with this morning as I'm going through the news going.

At the moment, as far as I can tell, the stock market is the Go Trump Me fund. I've never seen such blatant... manipulation, but you know, I don't, I'd like to get through the border next time I fly in. So I'll just stop there. Yeah. Yeah. Just leave it, leave it, leave it with me. I won't be able to come back from fire fest, but I am fine in Cali. I am fine in Iowa where I'm at right now. I'm in Iowa, outside of Des Moines.

I'm a big fan of finding the headline in which you don't actually need to read the article and then the answer is kind of right there. So here we go over from Gizmodo. Microsoft hooked the government on its products with freebies. Could Elon Musk's Starlink be doing the same thing? Yep, absolutely. Okay, moving on.

Yep, that's easy. I wish they were all that easy. That's great. Me too. I've got some Doge news, of course. The social security website has crashed and is being blamed on Doge software updates because, you know, best and brightest. using their vibe coding. Elon Musk's war on fraud and abuse has impacted the Social Security Administration's ability to distribute payments, according to a new report.

Frequent outages of the agency's website in recent weeks have been linked to its expansion of fraud checks earlier in the claims process from the Washington Post. The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers' identities. So it sounds like they're having an integration issue.

The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the check. but the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Ah, the X playbook.

Great. So yeah, they have managed to crash the social security website and the social security applications and everything like that, which is rather important for quite a few people. Yep. Like you said, best and brightest. Best and brightest. We're vibing it up, baby. Doge is also dipping their toe into AI, and this one I'm kind of floored by. Some managers at the Environmental Protection Agency have reportedly been told that Doge is employing AI.

to monitor communication apps and software such as the widely used Microsoft Teams for anti-Musk or anti-Trump sentiment. So yes, they're using AI to hook into all the various communication methods that government employees are using. And they're searching for anybody saying anything bad about them because they're pussy.

What about Signal? Are they scouring Signal for anti-Musk sentiment? No, as it says here. Meanwhile, it's said that Doge staffers are using Signal to communicate with each other and make sure nobody sees what they're saying.

All right. Here's a note to the EPA. Anybody that's left there, go get a Signal account. Ah, but using Signal is a violation of federal record-keeping rules given the ability to automatically delete messages after a certain period of time, Jason, and government employees are not allowed to use it. Unless you're Doge. Doge! So that's great. That's what you want people doing. So yeah, of course, Witch Hunt are on. Yep. And a new report from the New York Times reveals that...

Doge has quietly gained access to an unprecedented amount of personal data on millions of Americans. But not so quietly, I would argue. No, Doge has tapped into data systems from agencies like the Departments of Education, Labor, Health, and the Treasury. Data includes everything from social security numbers to bank account info to medical employment and even psychological records, raising major privacy concerns. No shit, Sherlock. Have you seen the list?

Yep. I highly recommend everybody go look at the list of all of the stuff that they've got now. They've got everything. And I'm sure it is being pumped directly into XAI right now. Of course it is. 110 percent. Yeah. Well, Brian, we do have a knight in shining armor that's coming to the rescue, and that is the Government Accountability Office, or the GAO. You know why they're coming to the rescue? They're trying to find some accountability. Because they're under the legislative brand.

So they are not subject to the whims of Mad King Donnie and can actually go in and look for what the hell Elon is doing. So yeah, the GAO is an independent agency. So they have launched an audit into how Elon's Doge is going through all of the sensitive data across the multiple departments. And we can expect a report. Sometime. But it will be a public report. We'll see. Yeah, by the end of spring, if there's a government left.

That's what I'm saying. Hopefully, it's hopeful. It's hopeful that at least there's somebody left that is not subject to the whims of the executive orders that can actually go in and tell us what the hell's going on. Right. If they comply. We'll see. If they comply. Because that's a big story right now. Are they going to comply? The poop emoji has been returned multiple times already. True. So we'll see what happens.

Well, that's some concerning use of AI up there in what we've just been talking about. But the UK went and said, hold my beer, or I guess because it's the UK, hold my cider or hold my warm lager. They're going full minority report. They hired Tom Cruise? No Tom Cruise, but The Guardian has reported that the UK's Ministry of Justice has been developing an algorithm designed to identify people who could become killers.

Oh, what could possibly go wrong with that? Yes. Initially dubbed the Homicide Prediction Project, this tool uses data from UK police forces, possibly including victims and witnesses, as well as suspects. Obviously, Civil Liberty Watchdog State Watch discovered the program through the Freedom of Information Act request and went, hang on a second, what the fuck are you doing?

Based on the data acquired by the group, State Watch claimed that the program developed its prediction tool based on police data between about 100,000 and 500,000 people. Different categories of information shared with the Ministry of Justice appeared to also cover sensitive topics such as mental health, addiction, suicide, and disability. See, this is what happens when you start to get all the datas. Things need to be siloed here, people.

Time and time again, research shows that algorithmic systems for predicting crime are inherently flawed. This latest model, which uses data from our... Institutionally racist police in the home office will reinforce it. I mean, maybe you don't come out that strong if you, you know, try to go down the middle line here, people. But no. So they're saying, of course, this is research purposes only, which means we want to see if this works or not.

Great. Great. I find it fascinating that they do have Freedom of Information Act requests over in the UK. So that's good. It's good when they work. Yeah, it really is. Well, going back to the AI here, MIT study finds that AI doesn't, in fact, have values. Hmm. Shocking. Why would it have values? It's a fucking computer program. It's a computer program. It's a word prediction engine.

A new MIT study is pushing back on the idea that artificial intelligence systems develop values like humans do. The research, which looked at leading models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others, found that AI doesn't hold consistent beliefs or preferences. Instead, it imitates human responses and often fabricates or hallucinates answers.

Well, now it's going to have a much larger memory, at least on chat GPT. So that'll be interesting how that plays out. But it's still going to imitate human responses because that's all it knows. That's all it is. It's a parrot. Going back to the class I took with a learned professor who is at the apex of these studies.

That the hallucinations and all of that sort of stuff, that is a feature, not a bug. And you have to understand what it is appropriate to use AI for and what it isn't. And here we are again, shoving everything in that we aren't supposed to be doing with these tools. MIT's Stephen Kasper, a lead author, says claims that AI forms stable opinions are misleading. His team found that depending on how questions were phrased, AI systems would flip between conflicting views.

like individualism versus collectivism, showing no real internal logic. Yes, because it's not self-aware. Quote, for me, my biggest takeaway from doing all this research is now have an understanding of models as not really being systems that have some sort of stable coherent set of beliefs and preferences. Instead, they are imitators deep down who do all sorts of confabulation and say all sorts of frivolous things.

Confabulation and frivolity, Brian. Confabulation and frivolity. That's what AI is good for. It sounds like Monty Python. And it's funny, too, because yesterday I was working on a project. And it was like I'm trying to do the same thing over and over every week on a set of. podcast transcripts. So I had a really nice set of chat GPT prompts that got, it was perfect.

on the first transcript. On the second transcript, completely different types of results, formatted completely differently, all over the place. And it comes back to, if you can't use this thing as a consistent tool for what it should be used for... then what the fuck is it good for? Again, learned professor from whom I took a class.

States very specifically that you cannot expect any of these models to return the exact same results every single time. And again, feature, not a bug. Understand how to use the tool. Confabulation and frivolity, Brian. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online in a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

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Oh, and here's another fun one from Elon. Elon is trying to get Tesla. to buy xai which just bought twitter i think at this point xai needs to buy tesla tesla is crashing He's just trying to consolidate. This is just the shell game now. This is the full-on three-card Monty meets shell game meets... I just don't know where to stuff all this shit to hide it anymore. He's like, he's got too many bodies under the bed. The arms are starting to fall out. He's trying to shove them underneath.

Saying there's no murders to see here. Everybody's fine. Let's just go about our business. You know, he originally wanted Tesla to invest $5 billion into XAI, which I think the shareholders said, excuse me? And that has to do with our cars how? Yeah, well, he's trying to say it's because of these fully self-driving projects.

Who wants confabulation and frivolity when you're trying to get on the i5 at 70 miles an hour? I was about to say, I don't need confabulation and frivolity attached to the cameras and not the LiDAR that you're using in your cars, which are going to tell me what to do and drive me straight into a cliff. Exactly, because all it's doing from the... When it sees a photo of the road in front of you,

It is trying to figure out what that means. When you have LiDAR, it knows how far away things are. And what have we just established about AI? It will not return the same results every single time. Bingo. Sometimes we'll move out of the way. Sometimes we'll speed up and go into it.

Sometimes that's a semi in front of you. Sometimes it's a wily coyote wall. We just don't know because we made it up from frame to frame to frame. And I don't know if you've noticed, it takes quite a while for these systems to actually interpret. the images that come through. So if you're trying to do that a couple hundred times per second, hmm, see how that works.

But speaking of Tesla, here's another one of your headlines, Brian, that just has the whole story baked into one. Tesla is so cooked that it's now refusing to accept Cybertrucks as trade-ins. First smart decision he's made in a while. I think so. I think so. Nobody wants those piles of shit.

Nope. I tell you what, though, people who handle the Lemon Law legal cases are just, they got a windfall, total windfall. I actually know somebody who handles those kinds of things. And they're like, cyber trucks are the best thing for my business. Farfik Nugent or whatever the Volkswagen thing was.

He's having a blast. I think he's getting a new home in Greenland soon. And speaking of good news for people profiting off of the bullshit that's going on in the world, Molly White now has a job for the next 10 years because... The Justice Department says it will pull back on prosecuting crypto fraud. That's right. It is all now legal. Do what you want because nobody's watching you. Nobody cares. That's it. It's over. Done. Done skis.

That's just great. Isn't it fucking awesome? Isn't it wonderful? I feel almost bad for the handful of crypto guys that are sitting in jail right now. Oh, I know. Poor Sam Bankman Freed's just got to be apoplectic that he can't get out. He's like, I got to deal with fucking Puffy over here. I got Luigi over here. Can I just get the hell out of here so I can go play some video games and wear my damn Birkenstocks again?

Yeah, well, if I were Molly White, I'd be I'd be a little bit worried. I'm not entirely sure she's got a job for the next 10 years because right now they're just not paying any attention to it and they'll pull back on prosecuting crypto fraud. But the way things seem to be going, if you say anything negative about crypto fraud in the near future, you might be going to jail. Well, you just get disappeared to El Salvador. So I hope she's got her paperwork in order. And I hope her OPSEC is good.

Don't go to Mexico. Don't go to the fire festival, Molly. Don't go to the fire festival, Molly. For the love of God, we need you. We need you. What we don't need is Shopify CEO, Toby Lutke. Have you seen the kerfuffle about this guy this week? Well, of course. I'm here in Canada. Shopify is a Canadian company. I figured as much. I figured as much. Well. Now, if you work at Shopify, it is your duty, it is your mandate that you must use AI as part of your job.

Every day, it must be part of your workflow. The first thing you must do is bow to the altar of AI and ask it what to do next. You know what I don't want in my storefront that I set up? I don't want confabulation and frivolity. I don't either. Well, I would like some frivolity because some of our shirts are kind of fun. Well, I want it to come from me, not from the plugins I'm using to sell you shit.

That's true. When I plug in my credit card data, I do not want you to confabulate what my order is. I laugh myself all the way not to the bank because... I don't know, but he's saying in a company-wide memo, which we've all seen now... that effective AI use is now a fundamental expectation across all roles from engineers to executives.

And he's calling it reflexive AI use. Okay. AI has its place. You know, these tools have their place. They're good for drafting. They're good for brainstorming. They're good for prototyping. They're not good for implementation. Why are you telling your employees that the first thing that they should be doing is using AI? What is... Like you just said, it's specific on a case-by-case, roll-by-roll basis. Yeah. I don't want the people at the cafeteria putting glue on my pizza, you know?

Because they had to go find a recipe this week at the commissary. Yeah, we brainstormed lunch. It's just fucking dumb. It's just fucking dumb. I can't state it any more plainly. Just fucking dumb. Yeah. Now, in this next story, I can't decide if this guy's a hero or not. I almost feel like he is. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted Albert Sangier for defrauding investors with misleading statements about his NAIT financial technology platform.

It was founded in 2018, and Nate claimed it could offer shoppers a universal checkout app thanks to artificial intelligence. Now, how do you get those investors? He raised more than $40 million from investors for the app. You've had to basically say that you're using AI because that's what investors open up their checkbooks for. So he said that.

However, the indictment states that the so-called AI-powered transactions in NAIT were actually completed by human contractors in the Philippines and Romania, or by some bots. I love this guy. Yeah, he's using mechanical turks. He told his investors, yeah, sure, we got AI in there. And then he used actual humans to do the work. We always said AI is people. It is. One form or another. And this guy did it. But of course.

While crypto may not be regulated, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can't defraud your investors. And he's still so he's in trouble. Okay, okay. Another, I don't know, this guy's a hero or a villain too. In a bizarre courtroom moment, AI entrepreneur Jerome DeWald tried to use an AI-generated avatar to represent himself in a legal case.

But the judge was just not having it. DeWald, the founder of a startup called ProSayPro, is suing MassMutual in an employment dispute. Due to long-term health issues from throat cancer, he requested to submit a video statement instead of speaking live. The court approved the request, but DeWald didn't appear in the video. Instead, a polished, generic-looking man began speaking. The judge stopped at cold and asked who it was. Who dat? Who dat?

DeWald admitted it wasn't a real person. It was an AI avatar named Jim created with a free trial from a company called Tavis. I could just see the watermark floating around on the video. It's like 15 second like clips all stitched together. We've all been there. We've all done it. We've all done it. The judge was furious and accused DeWald of misleading the court and trying to use the hearing to promote his business.

DeWalt ended up presenting his argument himself and later admitted he should have warned the court about the AI. His startup, ironically focused on using AI and legal self-representation, hasn't been operational for a year. So he was basically trying to just get on Shark Tank to promote his product. I mean, again, like... half hero, half villain? I'm not sure which. I know, I know. You got to give the guy some cojone points, you know. Hey, you know, he believed in his own product.

That's true. He was dogfooding his own product for sure. Yeah, I got a story here about TikTok and Trump and Chinese tariffs, but that just seems pedestrian at this point because. Who the hell knows? Also, it could all change by, oh, I don't know, now. Lunch. And now. And now. And now. And now. And now. And now. Yeah. Tariffs on, TikTok's on. Both are off. Nope. Tariffs on, TikTok's off. TikTok's on, tariffs are off. Oh, Jesus. My head's spinning. My head's spinning. What else you got, Brian?

Well, we've talked a little bit in the past about getting smartphones out of school, which I think is out the window here. We're not even going to have schools. Given the whole thing about schools, given the people that are running our Department of Education right now. Do you have that story later on or is that? I took that story out because it was. Where she basically referred to it as steak sauce rather than AI. Yeah. May 1? This was Linda McMahon talking at a conference, and she said,

She was saying that AI was A1. But here's the interesting thing about that. Right before the clip that everybody pulled out and said, oh, my God, she doesn't know what she's talking about. She clearly referred to AI as AI. That it's one of those things where it's slightly ambiguous because she was talking about a one teaching and there is a one. That is an actual term in education. So...

That, you know, this is one of those things where I didn't even want to get too far deep into the weeds on it. But I watched the video, not just the clip that people put out. And before she starts talking about A1 classes. She blatantly says, AI. I think this just might be, you know, the liberal media, fake news, fake news. Well, here's the thing. She's horrible and unqualified in so many ways that we don't need to pick on that particular thing. That's what I'm saying.

I don't want to give her ammo to fight back and say, oh, see what they did to me? No, I was clearly talking about this track in education. I'm like, no, you're still a shitbird human because I know everything that you did at the WWE. So I didn't want to give her. Well, anyway, I guess the point being, will there be an education system in the U.S. when somebody who used to run a wrestling federation is now in charge of it?

Who knows? But they're certainly starting to take some steps in France, which I like. According to this article, the last decade or so has seen schools and governments alike working on a substantial question. To what degree should students be allowed access to their phones? We know it's probably a bad idea in school. I mean, hell, if I have to go see Coldplay and I have to stick my phone in a fucking bag, I think kids going to school should do the same.

France is now leading the charge, requiring smartphones to be turned off during school hours since 2018. Now they're taking things a step further, insisting that students leave their phones in lockers or pouches, according to The Guardian. This decision follows two key events, a pilot program reported on by multiple sources and published expert recommendations. The former involved 180 middle schools comprised of over 50,000 students.

Over the last six months, they have done a digital pause, putting their phones in a locker or pouch that is unlocked when they finish their day. And the trial was successful in improving schools' atmospheres, according to the people that are there in the know. There was also a 2024 report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron issuing recommendations, including no smartphone use for children under 13 years of age and no conventional social media access until they reach 18.

Those are going to be hard to enforce, but I do think this whole no phones in school thing is a really good thing. So keep at it. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think there should be no cell phones at work. I think there should be no cell phones after eight o'clock at night. Yeah. I mean, I remember when I was going into the office for a bit and, you know, it was kind of COVID.

scattershot who actually else would show up besides me but uh when people did show up it's like okay five minutes or 10 minutes on your phone five minutes or 15 minutes on your phone okay what are we doing here people We've got some good science news today, Brian. I want to end on, at least end this segment with a little bit of something good. Something frivolous. Yes, this is not confabulatory or frivolous.

Researchers have unveiled the most detailed map of a mammalian brain ever created, focusing on a tiny fragment of a mouse's neocortex. This groundbreaking project took nine years, involved over 150 scientists from 22 institutions, and mapped 84,000 neurons with half a billion synapses and 5.4 kilometers of neural wiring. all within a grain-sized piece of tissue. Holy shit.

Using, here's the part that gets me, using AI, scientists tracked every neuronal wire and analyzed how these connections functioned as the mouse processed visual stimuli, even watching clips from the Matrix. Because somebody's got a sense of humor. Nerds.

Come on, it's 150 scientists. Somebody over there at least has a good sense of humor. The study combines structure and function for the first time, offering insights into brain diseases like dementia and advancing neuroscience towards mapping the human brain. One grain of rice at a time. Did you take, did you check out the photos that they, they generated from the connections? Absolutely amazing. And the one thing that that made me immediately think of is how like.

Neuralink is just a bunch of butchers. Yeah, absolutely. Like they have no fucking clue what they're doing. None whatsoever. They're like, let's drill a hole in this guy and zap him a couple of times and see what works. Look, he can play a video game. Oh, great. Well, Jason, we had the White Lotus season finale. Yes, we did. People are already speculating about the next season.

Spoiler alert time, I guess. Back up if you don't want any spoilers. I'll wrap up the season finale in one quote. I killed my father. Prepare to die. Yeah, that was weak. I thought this was the weakest of the three seasons. It was fine. Like, I don't watch it for plot. I watch it to watch people be miserable in beautiful surroundings with stunning cinematography. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, horrible people, beautiful pictures. Yeah, that was about it delivered like it always does. But yeah, it felt it felt rushed. It felt like there was no payoff on any of the storylines, really. The one that did pay off with the dead people, I mean, you saw the twist coming. You saw Signs Guy walking in with the twist. Oh, yeah. Episode two. I saw that in episode two. So we all knew.

No payoff with the rat lifts at all. You have no clue what's actually going to happen with them once all those pennies drop. The Belinda storyline was great. It was great to see Money completely corrupt her and her do the exact same thing.

uh, to pour, uh, porn chai that was done to her. So. Yeah. And the fucked up thing about it too, is if you, if you follow the trail from the end, as soon as she gets the money, she sends her son off to go get his, his, you know, wellness retreat. And she's like. This is the whole thing that gets me. She says, I've got money. I paid for this. You're going to go do it.

So, you know, what's his name comes up and tries to try to get his time with her so he can not go kill his dad. But the money that she's already spent makes her son. get the retreat. So she gets, you know, boots him out of the way. So then he sees the guy goes, kills her. So it's all a direct lead from Belinda getting the money.

to the murders happening and everybody dying. It is a direct straight line. That's Mike White's thing, right? It's money corrupts and he tells those stories. It even happened to Guy Talk. Yeah, everybody. So it's just, it is what it is. Fine. That's great. But I just think we need more of a payoff in the stories and we need to see what happens. So something to keep in mind for season four, Mike.

Yeah. Yeah. The whole guy talk thing. It's like, yeah, Mr. Buddhist. So he shoots an unarmed man in the back who's walking away. Yeah. Real nice. Yeah. But now he gets the hot chick in the job. Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, what's his name? Malfoy was he was wearing a fake dick. He didn't even have the didn't even have the cojones to wear his wear his own schlong to work that day. The studio, though. What are you thinking about the studio? Are you caught up? I have abandoned it.

You have. I have. I got three episodes in and I realized I don't like this show. It's not cutting. It's two slaps. It's frivolous. It's almost as if AI wrote it. This confabulation and frivolity, Jason. uh the show can't decide what it's going to be and ultimately it leaned on its strength which is a star and i can't stand his humor anymore i i just i can't stand seth rogan stoner humor and that's where the show is stuck

Oh, I liked it. I liked the Ron Howard thing was great. I thought it was fun. The Ron Howard thing was fine, but the whole like... If you're going to do slapstick, then do it well. Don't just fall into a couple drink carts every now and then. Are you clumsy or not? What the fuck is happening here? It just feels poorly written to me. I'm not into it.

Okay. I'm going to stick with it. I kind of enjoy it. I think it's lighthearted. Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Except for Severance. Go check out Severance. I hear it's a great show. Yeah, I'm going to stick with it. I'll let you know how it goes. All right, let me know. I'm not 100% against it. It's just there's so much to watch.

Yeah, that is a problem right now. So it's kind of fallen off. It's just I'm not enjoying it enough. And I was like, oh, well, you know, I could watch the studio, but I'm already behind on Daredevil and I got to finish that up. Daredevil's going well. Daredevil's good, yeah. Yeah, I did. I did have a break in the storm this week and I checked out the Devil May Cry anime series on Netflix. It's an eight part.

I played the game. I played all the games. I love the games. The anime had a slight connection to the games, but... It was OK. It was decent, you know, for an eight episode anime show that I was watching at 10 o'clock at night trying to go to bed. Right. Yeah, it was good. I give it a like a, you know, solid B. I'll probably watch the next season if it comes out.

Last night, we did have Black Mirror Season 7, which kind of feels like just reading the news every day. I saw a headline that said, it's nice to escape the shitty world by going into Black Mirror. Which is really fucked up. Which is really fucked up. Yeah. I caught the first two episodes last night. You're not going to watch it, right?

We'll see. Maybe after we get past all the new stuff that's coming out. So we'll see. Okay. The first two episodes, the first one was just a, it just came out and hit you right in the gut. Right. It was really, really well done. Really well done. It went a little long. They could have cut about 10 minutes out of it. But otherwise, I thought it was so spot on. Brian, you'll get a kick out of it. All right. I mean, I'm definitely going to watch whenever the Star Trek ripoff.

sequel one airs. I'm going to watch that. It's already out. They're all out already. You can go watch it. Yeah, that's the last one. That's a 90-minuter. I'm going to go back and before I watch that one, I want to go watch the original again just to get caught up. But yeah, they're all six episodes dropped yesterday.

Okay. So the second one I kind of saw coming pretty early on. It was a good concept. It was an easy concept. It was pretty fun. Did not see the ending coming. It's a nice, good switcheroo at the end. It was good. It was good. So, so far. Yeah, I had nightmares all night. So it's perfect. It is doing what it's meant to do. It's taking me out of the nightmares of...

of the real waking world and putting me right into the fake nightmares are so much better than the real ones, right? Dude, they are because I wake up and I go, Oh God, at least that didn't happen. I hear there's a whole episode about terrorists. Great. Yay. But some things that made me really feel like I was in an alternate universe. There was a new episode of Ask a Ninja out this week. What is this, 1994? I lost it. I was just like, holy shit. I know that guy.

I need to send some texts and congratulate those guys. I actually don't know who's doing it. Well, I know the ninja. I'm friends with the ninja. I don't know if the other guy that was part of it got back into it. It was solid as usual. Ask a Ninja never, never really fails you.

At least for me. I'm just such a diehard old school Ask a Ninja fan. If you guys don't know what Ask a Ninja is, you young kids, it was one of the very first tentpole web series out there. It was like Strong Bad. It was up there. Yeah, that and Tiki Bar TV. I think we need a new episode of Tiki Bar TV. I want to know what she's doing nowadays.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like 10 minutes, but well worth the watch. Made me happy. All right. I am watching a new show on Max. It's called The Pit. And this came from, obviously, my wife. She loves these types of shows. It is the end result of the years that we've had of network television and cable television merging. We have an emergency room doctor procedural program. instead of being on NBC or ABC where all the rest of them are.

So they get to show a bit more gore. They get to drop F-bombs and all that sort of stuff. It's actually quite engaging, and I've enjoyed the show so far. It's a lot more edgy than you could ever be with Grey's Anatomy or ER or anything like that, but it's the exact same kind of show. The conceit with this is each hour of TV is occurring in real time. It's a it's a, you know, like a 12 hour shift in the emergency room. So 12 episodes, each one's an hour of their shift.

Um, it's good. It's, it's pretty good. You know, it's not, I wouldn't be watching it if it were up to me, I'd be watching black mirror and all the other things that I'm not watching because my wife is now into the show. And, uh, we drain out an hour a night watching, trying to catch up on it. But if you're into the kind of emergency room kind of, you know, doctor TV show stuff, it's right up there. It's very well written.

We got the trailer for Tron Ares, the first trailer that brings us to a whole new grid. We got Greta Lee. Unfortunately, Jared Leto, I can't stand him, but I guess I can look past it. Jeff Bridges, Jillian Anderson is in this. No Olivia Wilde. Anyways, out October 10th. Music is by Trent Reznor, of course. I can't wait. Yeah, the trailer does look really good. So we'll see. We'll see. October 10th for that.

We also got the first real trailer for Murderbot, which comes on my birthday, May 16th on Apple TV+. And I thought the trailer was pretty good. The trailer – that show is going in a direction that I did not read the books for. That is not – that has very little resemblance to the books I read. No, they are going for some confabulation and frivolity.

Whole shit buckets of frivolity. They're making it a comedy. 100% a comedy. That was not a comedy series that I read by any stretch of the imagination. But, I mean, I have to say, like, every beat was from the books. They're not doing a foundation on it.

No, no. Yeah. Everything is in there, but it's just way more tongue in cheek. I guess I read the books wrong. No, I just, it's an adaptation. You know what I mean? You didn't read the books wrong. The books were not funny. There was funny stuff in it, but it was brutal. Yeah, it was. I'm in. I love Skarsgård. I think he's a fantastic actor. Even though it's not a woman.

Yeah, that's the real kicker. But I liked him since True Blood, so I'm in for that. Yeah, his brother is the crow can go suck a bag of dicks, but I'll watch Murderbot for sure. We get the final Mission Impossible this summer, May 23rd. Yeah, sure we do.

Just like Kiss's final tour. Stone's his final tour. Everybody's final tour. Yeah, if you watch the trailer, you don't need to watch the movie because everything's in it. Like every other Mission Impossible trailer. I'll probably watch it because I've seen all the movies. I don't expect it will be very good because none of the movie – the first movie I thought was – I liked the first one. Yeah. The first, the first movie was epically good. I worked on the second movie, the John Woo, which.

On a rewatch a couple of years after seeing it in the theater, I'm like, oh, now I get it because then I just kind of knew the John Woo style, which is it baked into that movie. None of these movies make any sense when you go back and watch it. It's kind of like Fast and Furious. I think it's just like, let's watch some action and some spy shit that doesn't really translate well onto the screen and watch Tom Cruise do some crazy shit. That's about it.

This is about as popcorn as you can get. But yeah, I'll check it out. I'm in. I'm in. All right. Transitioning over to music, sort of, starting with Brian Eno. More than 30 years ago, Microsoft commissioned Brian Eno to create the now iconic Windows 95 reboot chime. Now, the sound is among this year's selection of 25 culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant pieces of recorded music archived into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.

I love this. And in 1996 interview with San Francisco Gate, you know, spoke about composing it. The thing from the agency said, we want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah, blah, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional, this whole list of adjectives. And at the bottom, it said, and it must be three and one fourth seconds long. That's fucking awesome. And he did it. He did it. He absolutely did it. A lot.

Imagine if he got residuals on that. Oh, my God. He might be richer than Elon. He would have been Lars Ulriching. There's all these pirated versions of Windows out there. I want my 50 cents. Oh, no doubt. We got some new music out, a new garbage single. As you know, I love anything Shirley Manson. So there's a new single called There's No Future and Optimism from the new album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, which is set to arrive on May 30th. The new single is pretty good. I enjoyed it.

And we have some Lush-based shoegaze resurgence news. The Mickey Burrini trio, which she was one of the singers of Lush. Just to go through the timeline, there was Lush. The drummer committed suicide and the band split up. She left the music industry. There was the Lush reunion. Then there was another Lush implosion because the two singer-songwriters do not get along at all. Then she writes a memoir and then she forms a band to play songs and book signings of readings.

That band became Purushka, which released two albums that weren't very shoegazy, but were pretty good. Then they split up because most of the members were in other bands and it just wasn't working out. And then she formed the Mickey Burrini Trio, which is just her and her.

I believe, husband. I don't know if they're married or not, but they have kids together and this other guy. And they have just released an album called Tripla, which is phenomenal. It's lush with a little electronica in it. So it sounds great. I don't know if it's wise to start a band with your husband considering how your track record is with other bandmates. Listening to that timeline, I'm like, it doesn't sound like she gets along with anybody. So maybe having – maybe –

She's trying to angle for a divorce, maybe? I think they've been together a very long time, and he's from some 90s band as well. And hey, you know what? If they split up, that means she's single. I'm okay with that. Oh, there you go. The other singer-songwriter from Lush is Emma Anderson. So she also briefly formed another band called Sing Sing, then dropped out of the music industry again and now has come back as a solo artist.

She has an album out called Pearlies, which is pretty good. I've always been more of a Mickey fan than an Emma fan, but I still enjoyed it. And then tangentially, there is Steve Kuralt, who is the drummer from Ride, another excellent shoegaze band from the 90s who is putting out his first solo album. Meanwhile, Ride is still releasing albums and they've all been very good as well.

But he's got a solo album with the first single called Lonely Town that Emma Anderson sings on. And that is probably the most shoegazy of the bunch of all of them. And it's just a fucking lovely track. I really like it. So there you go. Bunch of lush news. All right. I was playing around last night with the old chat GPT because...

For some reason, I came across an old song called Morrissey Rides a Cock Horse by the Warlock Pinchers. Fantastic song. Talked about it on the show before. Link will be in the show notes. Go check it out. And I found a story where the guy, one of the two singers from Warlock Pinchers actually did a song a couple of years ago called Donald Trump Rides a Cock Horse.

He's a bit of a one cock pony. He is a one cock pony. Yes. And as far as one one trick websites go, you can go to Donald Trump ride the cock horse dot com and see the video. Perfect. Still up there. But I'm like. I grabbed the lyrics for Morrissey Ride the Cock Horse and said, make me a song about Elon Musk. to this tune. So it gave me back, it wrote a decent version of it.

That crybaby son of a bitch. No clue Twitter wrecker. Tunnel digging man child flamethrower fundraiser. Stock pumping clown show. VR bro with no class. Making billions off of hype and burning through his staff. It's okay. You know. It's decent. But then it kept going. It's like, would you like me to do this? Would you like me to do that? ChatGPT just kept going and said, would you like me to write an entire EP about all the other tech bros out there? I'm like...

Well, sure. Yes, yes, I would. So it wrote me an entire album in the track list as Elon ride a cock horse, Zuck build a cage and peed in it. Daddy Bezos in space boots. AI is going to eat your job and lie about it. VC blood ritual. We work sucks forever. PayPal mafia reunion show in hell and NFTs killed punk rock again. And the lyrics are these. They're not great, but they're not half bad.

Like, NFTs killed punk rock. They sold a JPEG for half a mil while your local band can't pay the bill. Blockchain bros and vintage tees LARPing revolution on Web3. I see no hallucinations. That was pretty good. Okay, Chad GPT, you got some skills. And then it's like, would you like some show art? I'm like, sure.

So as you can see, I put the show art in our show notes here, Brian. That's not half bad. That is not half bad. All it really needs to do is say, would you like me to connect you directly to Spotify and put this up there? It gave me, here's the thing, it gave me musical notation.

for the entire album on how to sing it, in which keys and which refrains and the tune to put it to. All it couldn't do was actually make the music. Well, look, Jason, I think you just take next week off from some TV and you go pop over to Sora and you write some music. Yeah. And you're done. Wait, Sora is the video one. What's the studio?

I can't remember the name of the audio one. Yeah, the audio one. But yeah, I just go spend some time in there and I just put out the whole album. And the funny thing is when it created the show art, the first time it did Elon Rides a Cock Horse, it gave me a flyer.

And it was a perfect Elon Musk, even though it says over and over and over again, I can't do pictures of Elon Musk, which we know is bullshit because it keeps doing really good pictures of Elon Musk, right? So I actually tried to have it use the same. bit of artwork or use that devil art i just posted it you can see in the in the show notes here the the picture of elon with the devil horns it's very youtube when he did his memfisto character except elon yeah yeah yeah so

But it is pretty good. And now I'm just worried that, okay, now all of this is in my chat GPT memory. Every time I try and get a summary or do some actual work, it's going to tell me that Elon ride the cock horse. There's going to be a lot of cock horses showing up in our notes. Just get used to it. Cock horse is all the way down. Apps and doodads! Brian, I kind of tripped out a little bit this week. I kind of followed the herd and drank the Kool-Aid because...

Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. Apple going to start charging a lot more. I pulled the trigger on a MacBook Air 15 inch. You are not the only one. Oh, I know. I know. I too decided that, uh, My wife and I kind of sat down and went, this tariff stuff is insane to begin with. And it almost doesn't even matter if there are tariffs at this point because business supply chains have been disrupted and everything is going to be more expensive.

or harder to get for the next couple of years. End of story, flat out. So we kind of did a whole house. We looked around at everything. Obviously, it doesn't matter with our kid because he's going to... He's going to grow and he's going to need new shit all the time. But we went, you know, all right, well, let's get new sneakers for both of us because those will last a couple of years. But we need to get them now because they're going to be way more expensive.

And I did the same thing with my laptop. I'd like lined up a buyer here for my old one. And then I went, you know what? I got to get this now because this one is not going to last another three years, but a new one will last me through the end of this insanity if it ever ends. Yeah, that's the exact same thinking because I'm looking at my MacBook Pro.

And looking at the date, I'm like, okay, that's a 2021. It's 2025, four years old, still in beautiful shape, except I put all these slip drives on it that are stuck to it. So I had to go get a Scotty peeler. If you've never used one of those, it's like a little $9 sticker remover scraper thing. Everybody should have a couple of these in their house. They're fucking phenomenal. Even just taking stickers or anything off of anything or just goo.

Get a Scotty Peeler. They're awesome. So I got one of those to take it off and I'm scraping that off and I'm just like, okay, this thing is going back. So I got to use a trade-in for my MacBook Pro because I... I suck at selling things online. I'm just never good at it. So I got a good, I got a good deal on it. So, and I just put the payments over time on my Apple card and it works out to like 130 bucks a month. And I got, I don't know what you got. I got the 15 inch. I got the lowest.

model, but I jacked it up to 32 gig of RAM and a two terabyte drive. And that should be well, well enough. The only thing that I'm going to miss from my MacBook Pro is the GPU and the port. I got the higher-end one just straight out of the box, the 24-gigabyte memory 512 SSD. Okay. Yeah, I need way more space because I'm working in video and audio all day. I don't think I'll be doing much video on that. I don't know. You've got a full album's worth of videos to make now.

Tell me about it, man. Tell me about it. It's going to be great. I'm going to be a rock star, Brian. I'm going to go into music and then you can rep me and I'll have you do my social media and book my shows. So I'll go around and hit play on my laptop, on my new MacBook Air. I'll go around the country and play it for people. It'd be great. Well, luckily, if I'm doing your social media, the year is 2025 and Instagram is reportedly finally working on an iPad app. I'll believe it when I see it.

We haven't heard anything about this since 2022 when Instagram head Adam Masari said there simply weren't enough iPad users to merit developing a native app, said everybody that had an iPad that loads Instagram on it when they're trying to do other things because we can't.

focus on anything anymore so yeah this year they're finally actually thinking about it but we'll see and this is mostly probably because you know we've got tiktok we've got all these competitors out there all of them work on an ipad except for Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. I'm hoping for a new Blue Sky iPad app, too. Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, there was one that they actually bought. I think it was called Dark Cloud.

something like that. That was a really nice iPad app, but you had to pay for it. Wait, wasn't that the weather? Oh, dark cloud. Yeah, it might've been the gray sky, gray sky. That's what it was. Gray sky, dark cloud, gray sky. Whatever. One of the two. So I had that for a while, but they bought the company that made that. Blue Sky bought them, so hopefully they're working on a decent iPad app. I did buy a piece of software this week called Nova by Panic, which is a code editor.

It's the successor to Coda 2, which I used for years back in the day. So they deprecated Coda 2 and created Nova. And I did this because... I have a business idea, Jason. Oh, bring it. Bring it, Brian. Bring it. Business idea. We're going to make a code editor called Lebowski. It's going to be for editing vibe code. Oh, yes! i'm in i'm in and the tagline is that code really brings the room together

Oh man, you're on fire today. Yeah. Can't wait. Let's do it this weekend. Cause it should only take a few minutes to vibe code it up. That's right. Yep. I was listening to something from Derek Sivers last week. I think he was on the Mark Manson podcast. And I remembered he did a thing about tech independence. So I went to his website, found it, and he had a whole like how-to on how to get spun up on his VPS.

service and all that stuff. And I just did it because I was stuck in a really boring AA meeting on Zoom. I'm like, I need something to do. And here's the other thing. It's been three years since I had a stroke. When I first had the stroke, For the first two years, I could not read code. If I viewed source on anything, it was a wall of nothing. And in the past like six months...

I've started to be able to read code again. It's crazy. Like all the things that were gone are starting to come back. And I really had a hankering to be able to get back in there and do some stuff. I don't know why. I really hate writing code. Conveniently, just in time that most code is, again, a wall of nothing because it's all been vibe coded. Exactly. I want to go old school and go back to the things that I used to write because I used to enjoy writing code.

and being able to make things. So I spun up a VPS and got my Nova set up and everything's all, I got my IDs done, my SSH keys. I remembered so much. And here's the thing, I opened up Vim. I don't know what it's like been dormant somewhere stuck in a little crevice of my brain and it all just came fucking flooding back. And I'm like, this is cool. This is cool. It's like, like, like discovering a new superpower that I thought was long gone. So I'm kind of happy about that.

But to get into some doodads, Brian, I saw these and... This is one of those things that I fucking forbid anybody who listens to this show to buy. I will hunt you down. I will beat you to death with them. They are called Kabata, the world's first AI-powered dumbbells. You've got to be a dumbbell to buy AI-powered dumbbells, especially when you hear the price, Brian. It ain't cheap. No, you can get them for the early bird special of $1,199, which is on sale from $1,999.

Yeah, I mean, this is all a complete load of shit. It's dumb, all the AI stuff, the rep counting, because you can't count your own reps, the real-time form correction, my ass, that's not going to work, AI-powered coaching, bullshit. That's just going to be a bunch of packaged fucking workouts in there. Doesn't matter. Stupid. The thing that I have a problem with is actually as a weight set, it's horrible. It's stupid because, and I'll tell you why, it's only five pound increment.

Now, I own a set of different, you know, the same kind of deal where you can just select the different weights and pull it up. Yeah, there's tons of them out there. And the thing is, for the lower weight. You can't just skip up five pounds. That's going to kill you every time. It needs to be.

There's a reason that these weight sets usually go from like five to seven and a half to 10 to 12 and a half to 15. Because when you're working those smaller muscle groups, you cannot handle that big of an increase every single time. Yeah, definitely. It's only bigger muscle groups. So they fucked up even the weight portion of it. There's no two and a half pound increments. It's only five pound increments. Garbage. Garbage, I say. Total garbage. Don't get that. Nope.

And there's something that you may want, but you may not be getting. The Nintendo is now delaying their Switch 2 US pre-orders following Trump's tariffs. Nintendo officially announced the Switch 2 on April 2nd, but hours later, the Trump administration said it would impose a sweeping set of new tariffs targeted against a broad swath of countries, including Japan, China, and Vietnam.

Products from the latter two of those countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54% and 46% respectively. So God knows what these things are going to cost. They're not taking pre-orders while they're trying to figure this out. They're now delayed indefinitely. And it's unclear what could happen following Nintendo's assessment of the situation. But one possibility is that the company could just allocate less stock for the U.S.

Because they will sell them everywhere else without these insane tariffs. Yeah, and the tariffs have changed since you started that sentence. Yes, of course they have. They've totally changed. Yeah. So I'm glad you got your switch when you did. So you're good. My kid is already like, there's a new one coming. I'm going to get that. Right. I'm like, no, you're not. Go get a sticker that just says two and put it on. I'm just going to put a two sticker.

Then you can go by the Scotty peeler and scrape it off when the Switch 3 comes out and you're good to go. That's right. I saw a gadget this week called the Busy Bar. This is from the people that make the Flipper Zero. The Busy Bar is a productivity multi-tool device with an LED pixel display, focus timer with distraction blocking feature on your phone and PC, fully customizable, open source and smart home ready. It is $249. which is pricey. But if I lived, if I worked in an office,

I would so be buying this thing because it is so fucking cool. It makes so many assumptions and it's so fucking passive aggressive rude. Well, when I worked in an office, we used to have the green card, red card system. Because, you know, when you're in cubicles and you need to be left the fuck alone, you put up your red card and people would know to leave you alone. And you put up a green card when you can talk. So this is just a really geeky way.

That cost you $249 to just basically have a green card and a red card. Yeah, the cards are a lot cheaper, I would start off with. Also, I did love reading some of the comments which are, or companies would allow you to work from home so you can maintain your work-life balance. Or maybe you get cubicles back instead of being in an open fucking farm at your office.

Yeah, well, it's still cool as hell. I want one, but I just bought a MacBook, so I can't get this. This is a lot less than the MacBook, I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah. But I work in an office by myself, so I'd have a sign that my dogs can't read. Great. Perfect. I know I'm busy. Leave me alone. You need a wolf bar. Now, Brian, while the busy bar or the wolf bar might be $249. I don't know. Have you checked out Amazon Hall yet?

Amazon Hall is basically Amazon trying to Timu all of their garbage and sell you just shit. It's literally just a marketplace of crap. Okay. There's a link in the show notes. Check it out. There's like, I mean, there's nothing in there that you would actually ever want to buy. So slouch socks for women, nose hair trimmers. It's like Amazon basics gone even worse.

What's this one? A silicone cover for your Roku that has a paw on it for your dogs, I guess? I don't know, which kind of makes your remote control look like a chew toy. Yeah, it's stuff that most people would normally never buy. I think that's what it is. It's made for stoners at four in the morning. I think that's about it. We talked about the game mob control on the show before. Yes. And I, my addiction to it was, was epic.

And unfortunately, last week, I put it back on my iPad for what I thought was going to be a quick check-in to see where things were. And four days later, I finally deleted it again. That game is weaponized addiction. It is absolutely weaponized addiction. It's horrible. It's one of my least favorites. We have mostly weaned my son off iPad, bought the Nintendo Switch. Obviously, that helped.

His cousin still plays Mob Patrol, so he wants to play every now and then. And it is the worst thing in the world. He loses his mind when we tell him to stop, when he doesn't do perfect with it. It is so addictive. over anything else he has ever touched that game is it causes the most problems i've had to delete it off the ipads completely yeah yeah basically what they do is layered timed quest

Which means there's always something to do. Always. It's an infinite loop of shit to do. Yeah. It's horrible. So, yeah, I would recommend that nobody ever install this game. Stay away from it. It's just, it's like TikTok. You don't want it on a device because it will suck you in no matter how strong you are, how smart you think you are. It will get you one way or another. Yep.

And I do have a nice one use website that I wanted to put in today. Well, it's not nice. It's actually quite dystopian and terrifying. It's called the United States Disappeared Tracker. Yeah, it's basically tracking all the people that were taken into ICE custody. with no warrants or anything and have been disappeared. So... You know, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it's kind of scary, especially when you go look at the number.

which is way higher than I thought it was going to be. I thought, you know, we're like in the tens or something. No, 1,216 people have been disappeared by this government so far. That's fucking terrifying. That's not supposed to happen. The dark side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes all things cyber on the Cyber Wire every day. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on Caveat.

Breaks down industrial cybersecurity on Control Loop and even brings the laughs on only malware in the building. How are you hanging in there, Dave? I am hanging in there. Thank you. You know, it's a process, as everybody knows, just the whole grief thing. I would say the best description of me this week is kind of, I've been in a bit of a numb fog. I'm getting things done. I'm doing all the things I need to do. I'm doing my work without any trouble.

I'm kind of in that mode where somebody says, Hey, Dave, you want to do such and such? And I'm like, if it's any consolation Dave I think almost everybody in the known universe is feeling that way at the moment Right, that's true. You know, that's the general feeling that's out there, even without all the extra stuff that brought you there. Yeah, it doesn't help. It certainly doesn't help. There are days I wish I could not look at the news, but...

My job is looking at the news. It really sucks, doesn't it? I've wanted to be off the internet for about 10 years, Dave. Yeah. I feel like some days I'm like, hi, I'm Dave Bittner and here's your bad news. Well, what do we call it back when we first started doing this? Breach fatigue. We all got breach fatigue. It's like, what got broken into this week? Okay. Now it's just like, okay, what horrible thing has happened in the government today? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, I'm...

I'm trying to keep my spirits up and do one day at a time, step by step. So that's the best I can do. And sometimes I need to take a nap and I'll take a nap. Sometimes I need to step away and I'll step away. And so trying to remember to have self-care through all of it. My impulse, for better or for worse, is to kind of take care of other people and try to make sure everybody else is happy. And, you know, I'm not always successful at that. And certainly sometimes I fail miserably at it.

But when in a situation like this, it makes it harder for me to remind myself that, you know, I If I want to do all those other things, first I have to make sure that I'm functional. Yes. It's easy to forget. Well, you can always book a trip to Disneyland. That seems to rejuvenate the fires within. I know. My wife and I were actually looking at each other the other day because we were there a few weeks ago.

And I was like, you know, she was like, I know. And I said, you know, and she said, I know. My wife and I had the same conversation because we were like, you know, we can't spoil our kid. Like he can't. I grew up thinking that going to Disneyland every single time we go and visit Anaheim is normal. I know. Look how you turned out. Exactly. I mean, case study number one, like you don't want that.

But then, you know, we were so we were adamant like this summer, we're not going to we're not going to Disneyland. We're going to do other stuff. We're definitely not going to go to Disneyland. And then as just, you know, life and. I'm just kind of gesturing with my hands and everything. So, you know, so all of a sudden last week, I was like, okay, we got to find a deal. If we find a deal, we're going to go.

Well, here's the deal, Brian. I don't know if you guys got this, but since I subscribe to Disney Plus with Hulu, I just got an email yesterday about all the deals I get as a perk. for being a Disney Plus member for tickets off going to the parks. So did you guys get that? Oh, yes. I got that email as well. So we're looking at them. And there's also a Canadian deal. There's all kinds of stuff. So there will be Disney. Well, so not to one up you guys, but as I was.

Going through my father's safe deposit box, I found a handful. The golden ticket. Well, kind of. I found a handful of multi-day park hopper tickets. That were my father's and my mother's that still had. days left on them. Oh, jackpot. Right? So again, I'm looking at my wife. So Dave will not be joining us next week as he will be. She's looking at me. We're going, is this a sign? Is this a sign? So we'll see.

We'll see. When we were younger, before we had kids, we regularly made long weekend trips down there. And maybe that's in our future. I don't know. I think you need it and deserve it. So by all means. We'll see. So following up a couple weeks ago, we were talking about how much we all were enjoying Gravity Falls. Yes. And I'm midway through my family's second trip through it together.

We just got to the season one finale, which is quite exciting if you follow the show, and we're heading into season two. But it struck me just as a further recommendation to you, Brian, and your son, if you have not already, to check out The Owl House. This is another show on Disney+. has very much the same kind of spirit of Gravity Falls. In fact, what's his name? Alex Hirsch. Alex Hirsch, yes. He's one of the voices in the Owl House.

along with Wendy Malick, who I'm a big fan of. She plays one of the main characters. There's a witch who's a main character, and she plays that character. And I just find her delightful in just about everything she does.

So I don't know if you were familiar with this or not, Ryan. I've looked into it. Also, somebody on Discord had recommended that there's a Netflix series called Inside Job that he is also involved in, but that is for adults to which I... bit my tongue a little bit and said well I'm not gonna I'm not looking for a comic series for me and an animated series for me these are for my I sit and watch with my child, so that is not appropriate. But yeah, Owl House is on my radar.

The wonderful and horrible thing of having a child is they have their own... thoughts and opinions and they aren't necessarily yours and they are not you. So that is both annoying and wonderful. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, and that is going to be my life with my son. I can present all these things to him, and he will just kind of go, no, old man. I'm not interested in that at the moment. I will get to it when I get to it.

um so we you know we he he did his month of gravity falls where that that was what his his obsessive viewing was and we watched he watched it over like three times Right. Then he watched the chibi verse because some of the characters from gravity falls appeared in that. And it's got characters from all these other shows, including the owl house. He has watched the.

a short for the owl house he is intrigued but right now it's all about uh he's he's gone back to a ninjago and lego world so okay we will get to the owl house eventually i expect in probably a month or two i will tell you I have now seen every single episode of the Owl House 19 times. So we will get there. Yeah. But if I tell him to watch something, he basically just, no, he negs it immediately. Right, right, right.

Yeah. One of the things that struck me about Owl House was similar to Gravity Falls. It is a kids show, but there are legit scary things in it. Right. There are monsters that are scary. They're not cartoony. They're scary. I don't know if I've talked to you too much about my son, Dave, but from a young age, we started a therapy fund because I... Find another child whose favorite character in Star Wars is Emperor Palpatine.

Oh, my. He loves the bad guys. He loves the scary guys. Bill the Cypher is his favorite character from Gravity Falls. He draws Bill the Cypher everywhere. With all the ciphers drawn in the mud in front of our house as we're waiting for spring to spring. He loves the bad, scary guys. So the scary guys in Owl House will become his favorite character.

Well, I don't know if you guys are keeping track of this, you know, the new theme park down at Universal. Was it Epic Universe? Oh, it looks good. Yeah, it does look good. And so a couple of things. Someone said this past week, I heard that this is the first major theme park to open in the United States in over 25 years. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. The last one was California Adventure. Yeah.

Yeah, because they exist and they're added to and built upon, but nobody opens up anything new recently. Right. In a long time, yeah. Right. But I'm seeing really good reviews of the whole Monsters Unleashed thing with the Universal Monsters. People are saying it's the...

It's the best dark ride ever, and it's a whole new level of that sort of experience. So maybe that's in your future for your son if he's into the baddies. Yeah, definitely. It would be right up his alley. He loves all the bad guys. You guys remember Erie, Indiana? Vaguely. It was a fantastic show. It was kind of like X-Files for Kids from the 90s.

It only lasted 19 episodes, but they're on Amazon Prime. I put a link in the show notes for it. It's Y7, so seven and up. Yeah. So might be worth checking out. I remember it being, my dad and I watched it. And we loved it. We thought it was a fantastic show, but we also were big fans of ALF at the time too. Your mileage may vary. Alf was awesome. Yeah, it was of its time. I think if I tried to show my kid Alf, he would just be like, what the fuck is this shit?

Right. Good old Gordon Shumway. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. Eating cats. So I wanted to share a funny little journey I found myself on with chat GPT and image creation. Followers of the Hacking Humans podcast may know that We've been on this funny little journey for the past few weeks with one of my co-hosts, Joe Kerrigan, about some of his own little self-admitted peculiar quirks.

Like Joe wears a cowboy hat quite often. Joe has one of those backpacks that weighs like 50 pounds that he takes everywhere. What is he, Jeff Bezos? Well, he's got like a survival... You know, I don't know. Everything is in his backpack. And so he's prepared for everything. So, you know, he left the backpack on and off he goes. He made a joke about a pogo stick. He has a camper and he loves chickens.

So – right? So – and his daughter – well, I think they're partnering with him. They are raising some chickens and there's a live stream of the chickens. Well, at least they've got eggs. Yeah, right? So on a lark, I went over to ChatGPT and I uploaded Joe's... bio picture from the hacking humans website and i said this is an image of joe kerrigan based on this image create a version of him wearing a cowboy hat and a backpack riding a pogo stick holding a chicken in front of a camper

Okay. So I'm going to paste this picture into the show notes here and see what you guys think of it. Okay. Okay. Everything you asked for. Everything I asked for, right? He's kind of floating next to the pogo stick. He's kind of floating next to the pogo stick. So that is the only thing wrong. His feet aren't on the pogo stick. But I will say my favorite thing about this.

A good couple minutes cackling to myself alone in the studio yesterday because the chicken is grasping the handle of the pogo stick. That's true. It just tickles me to death. So to describe this image, it is Joe. No question it's him. He's wearing a backpack and a cowboy hat, riding a pogo stick, holding a chicken in front of a camper. And it's photorealistic, right? I mean, it looks like a photo.

So I thought, this is great fun. And what else can I do with this newly found capability? Next thing you know, it was Sunday. Right. Right. So, but here's the funny part. Did you gibblify it? No, I did not. I went into, again, ChatGPT, and I said, this is an image of Dave Bittner. And I uploaded the same picture from the Hacking Humans website, my biopic.

I said, create a new image of him riding a speeder bike from Return of the Jedi through a redwoods forest with a Sasquatch riding along as a passenger. In retrospect, I should have said Chewbacca, but whatever, Sasquatch. Uh, it came back to me and said,

I can't generate that image because the request violates our content policies. If you'd like, feel free to give me a different prompt. I'd be happy to create something else. So I was like, okay, it must be the Star Wars. Disney has big lawyers. So I said, Again, this is an image of Dave Bittner, created an image of him riding a speeder bike from the Star Wars universe through a Redwoods forest with a Sasquatch riding along as a passenger.

It said, I can't create that image because the request still violates our content policy. It said, if you'd like, I can help generate a similar creative scene without using identifiable people. Just let me know what you'd like to adjust. And I said, what is the content violation that my request violates? And it said, great question, and I get why you'd want to know.

which is a little creepy. It says the issue is that your request involves generating an image of a real identifiable person, even a public figure in a fictional or imaginative scene. Our policies are in place to protect individuals' likenesses and prevent misuse, even if the intent is creative or respectful. So I'm unable to create altered or fictionalized images of real people. So it doesn't want to do a deep...

Then it says, that said, we can totally generate that same scene, speeder bike, Redwood Forest, Sasquatch, as long as it's a fictional character or an anonymous writer. Want to roll with that? And I said, yes, go for it.

This is what it created. Let me put this in the show notes here. And just for everybody listening, we'll be posting these to the Discord channel. So if you want to sign up for that, go to GOG.show and join our Discord channel and check out the show feed. We'll put them in there after the show. That's you. That's me. On the speeder bike with Sasquatch. Right. So. A couple of things. First of all, it wasn't the Star Wars thing that tripped it up. It was you. It was me. And so what I wonder is.

Is it because it knows who I am? And it assigns a certain whatever D or E level celebrity to me. Your Q score? Right. And so why would it let Joe be generated? Because I told it who it was. I said, this is Joe Kerrigan. And it let me do something with Joe, but it wouldn't let me do it with me. Obviously more famous than Joe.

That's right. I intend on rubbing that in Joe's face. Yes, absolutely. I intend on making the most of it because really – Especially in salary negotiations, you should bring that point up. That's right. But then the second part is just how – ChatGPT totally went into wink, wink, nudge, nudge mode. Oh, yes. Like, hey, so, because it is me, right? I mean, it's. Now, it's not photorealistic, which is interesting in the way that Joe's picture was.

But it's still a very compelling image, and there's no question that it's me. Yeah, absolutely not. And it's very well done. I find much of the conversation about these chat GPTs and other LLMs and the image generation online is ways to skirt. You know, the supposed guard wheels that have been put in and it's not difficult. You just got to keep at it. Yeah, just keep hammering and you can find a way around it. One thing I like to do is say, well...

But still inside of your guidelines, but keeping the spirit of what I just asked for. Kind of like what you did. Then it'll just do it. If you scroll up in our show notes, you can look in Media Candy and see a picture of Elon Musk with devil horns. It made that picture of him without me even asking about Elon Musk. I just created a song about Elon Musk. And then it said, would you like me to make a flyer?

in the style of a punk rock flyer for the song that you just created. And I said, sure. And it gave me that picture of Elon Musk with the devil horns and the smirk. It sucks with the copy because it doesn't really – and I can't – I'm – terrified to see what the qr code does that it put in there for no apparent reason put in a qr code i'm like what is that for is that to release you from the air gap computer you are writing this to me from

But the hand-drawn Cybertruck on fire and the monkey for the Neuralink, it did all that on its own. Wow. Yeah. So the other thing that caught my eye about this picture of me – you know, having fun on my speeder bike with Sasquatch is If you look at my left hand, It's kind of half Sasquatch, half human. And I think it might have to do with the configuration because the Sasquatch is sitting behind me the same way someone would be sitting behind you on a motorcycle, kind of holding onto my hip.

But I think if you look at the alignment of the Sasquatch's arm and how it's in alignment with my arm, you could see how the system could get confused about whose hand is this. And it kind of blended the two of them. But it's an amazing picture and great fun. Now, I have a task for you, Dave. Okay. I don't know much about your house, but I'm imagining you are very similar. You are a family man, much like myself, and you have a wife, and wives like pictures of family around the house.

You must have a wall or an area where there's a bunch of family photos that are framed. Your task is to print this out, put it in a frame. Place it in your house and wait and report back as to when your wife actually finds it. Right. See how long it takes to be noticed. Exactly. That is an excellent idea. See, I had the complete opposite version. I'm like, print this out in like a two foot by four foot.

photo with a gold frame and put it in the bathroom so everybody gets to see it when they come in to do their business. See, that's funny. Does a Sasquatch shit in the woods? Yeah. So what's funny, as a side note, what I actually have in the bathroom of my master bedroom is a framed and autographed photo of Bob Barker. As one does. Yeah. It seemed like the right place to have Bob Barker.

So, yeah. But, yeah, I will frame this and put it up. I do like it. You are an interesting onion as we peel back these layers, Steve. outwardly i know to most listeners he appears the most sane of the three of us but Oh, yeah. No, no. Beyond their dragons be, my friend. Beyond their dragons be. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I will work on getting this picture framed and surreptitiously placed. I think I'm going to put it on the...

Oh, what's the shelf above the fireplace? What do you call that? The mantle. The mantle. Thank you. Because that is where we have many family photos. So I will frame this, put it on the mantle and see. uh, how long it takes anyone. I think I'm going to do it in my house. We'll see what my wife notices and be like, who the fuck is this? And what is this? Yeah. Say what? What picture? Oh, that's my friend Dave with his friend Sasquatch. He was on vacation. Yeah.

Little Redwoods. Trip to the Redwoods. I mean, as you do. Yeah. I'm going to put Bob Barker riding behind you. Oh, Bob Barker riding a speeder bike with a Sasquatch. Ooh, yeah. All right, I'm off. Bye. See you guys. Later. Closing shout out. Over at Patreon, we've got new subscribers, David and James. And James says, it was probably about time I show some support. I've been loving your podcasts for years now. And Spotify finally pissed me off enough to to join.

Thank you, James. And thank you, David. And from the, what do we call these? The legacy files, Brian. We've got R, Joe, Tom, Val, S, Tuesday, Mike. Aaron, Brett, James, and Joe. Thank you everyone who signed up for Patreon. And you too can sign up for Patreon for just as little as $3 a month. And you can always give us more if you like, if you love the show even more than that.

And if you sign up for a year, you even get a discount, but you get the show early ad free and in high resolution definition. surround sound, sorta, whatever. But yeah, you know the deal. Sign up, please. Patreon.com slash GOG. All right. And over at PayPal, where nobody gets anything except the joy of giving us money and supporting us. We've got Miles, Ralph, Florian, and Christopher with a big old $50 donation. Thank you. And over at the tip jar, we've got David and Tony.

And we've got the merch list. I finally put the merch list back together, Brian. For everybody that bought stuff from our store this week, we've got Brady, Roger, Felipe, Tony, and Dan. Thank you all so much, and I hope you enjoy your... your Deport Elon shirts and other fine swag. All right, and some sad news, and they do say that things come in threes.

Dave Allen, the Gang of Four bassist, has passed away at the age of 69. He joined Gang of Four shortly after the band was formed in 1976, and then he also... founded the new wave post-punk band Shriek Back, which I really enjoyed, and also performed with King Swamp, Low Pop, Suicide, and Elastic Pure Joy. In addition, we lost Al Burrill, a guitarist for Hardcore Pioneers SSD, dead also at 63. Sorry for him.

And blotty drummer Clem Burke has passed away at the age of 70. I mean, he's been around forever and just a massive part of that band. So sad for all three of them. Yeah, that's a bummer. That's a bummer. Well, on that fun note, until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

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