Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo. of what went wrong in the Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, I've been doing a lot of work with AI this week. I'm sorry. Yeah, me too. Me too. Me too.
I've kind of come to the conclusion that vibe coding is just a way to create technical debt at an industrial scale. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's a shortcut for the immediate future. It's no different in my mind from... You know, what we dealt with almost 20 years ago now when it was like, oh, let's
There's all these great offshore companies. There's these great Filipino companies. There's these great Indian companies that will do all the coding for you and get this done lickety-split at half the cost. And then you get the code, and it kind of works, but you're never able to. Right, right. And just for the uninitiated, technical debt is basically extra work that you'll eventually have to do because you didn't do it properly the first time. Yeah.
And in the marketing stuff that you worked in and I worked in back in the early days, it wasn't that much of a big deal because we weren't building systems that needed to last. No, no, no, no. We would tear things down, or it would go obsolete in your case, like a movie site. Nobody's going to pay to keep that thing going, so it just goes away.
Or, you know, new album cycle, completely new website. Exactly. I didn't really start to run into it and really get a feel for it until I started to work at Technorati. which was, you know, a giant system that had lots of moving parts. And we were continuously dealing with technical debt because somebody would just clude something together at two in the morning, usually drunk.
And we'd have to figure it out six months later when we do a big redesign. And then this one little widget decided to not work anymore because it wasn't really built. a scale or something like that yeah if you're working in something real that stuff never gets completely recoded or torn down and it's impossible in some ways and cases like you just can't you need to keep there are
I've worked with companies that do real things, and there are kernels of their code that have been running for 20 years. Right, right. I actually still got calls up until a few years ago from something I wrote over 15 years ago that still actually worked, believe it or not. But what got me onto this was Looking at all of these new companies that are coming out, it's like, oh, we can just vibe code a prototype and get it out there and get some funding and show the proof of concept.
But all they're doing is they're building a tool that they don't understand. It's like, if you're vibe coding something, I'm betting for the most part you've hired people that couldn't actually code that from scratch.
if they wanted to yeah and you're going to be stuck with this thing that you don't know how to work you don't know how to fix it's like oh i just bought a jet fighter but all i know how to fix is the vw bug in my backyard up on blocks you know Yeah, well, I mean, the theory I think that they're running with is that because vibe coding is so inexpensive and so quick,
When you hit one of those walls, you'll just vibe code something completely new from scratch. But that's not the reality of how the world works. No, it's not. It absolutely is not. Things get so entrenched and so complex and so dependent upon each other. There is no such thing as like, okay, we're just going to take everything down for a month and a half and rebuild it. That doesn't fly. No, it doesn't. And then you have to hire a giant consultancy for half of your Series B.
I'm looking at you, Twitter. Talk about the poster child for technical debt. That place is just a super mess. That's why when Elon came in, he was just like, what's all this shit do? Oh, he did that same thing to the government, too. Yeah, that's how that's working out. Yeah, he's kind of vibe-coding the government right now, which is great. Yeah, more about him in a second. But in the middle of all this, I found a new term that I hadn't heard, an AISDR.
And an AISDR is an artificial intelligence sales development representative. And I'm like, what the fuck is that? We know what that is very well, Jason. In fact, both of our emails fill up with it on a daily basis. On a daily basis, yes. So a sales development representative is somebody who's basically going out trying to get leads. to get new business. So an AI SDR is something that is just basically built to
Oh, I don't know. Maybe look at the show notes on a podcast and send you a thing about your latest episode and how awesome it was. And maybe you would like this guest on your podcast next week, even though your podcast doesn't have guests because the AISDR. is too fucking dumb to figure out the nuances of what an actual podcast is. I really enjoyed your recent discussion about insert discussion topic here. Would you please have this person on your podcast?
Yeah, we have dozens of these things. Dozens, dozens. Yes, because now apparently we have the podcast guest industrial machine because somebody figured out, Tom Schwab, how to actually make money on getting people on podcasts. But yeah, man, it's just been an AI week. And then finally, the last thing that got me was
I have a lot of Logitech devices. As do I. I have keyboards, mice, and all this stuff. And the one piece of software that controls it all is this little app called Logi Options. Because remember, Logitech is now Logi. I prefer Logi. Logi. Logi run. So I opened up Logi options today, and I noticed that it's like... Hey, would you like us to use AI with your new Logi keyboard so you don't have to type as much or do whatever? I'm like, fuck you. You're a control panel for a mouse.
I do not want AI in my mice, my keyboards, my track balls, especially my webcams. It's just ridiculous. They're just shoehorring this shit into everything. It's like, no, I don't want it. I don't know about you and your chats with the general public. I'll get off my soapbox here in a second. In your discussions with the general public and the normies out there, does anybody go, oh my God, I'm so happy that AI is taking over the world?
No, I don't know a single... Well, no, that's not entirely true. I do know some people that are very into it. They tend to be the people that own companies and are trying to spend as little money as humanly possible. How's that working out for me? So you know the guy at Klarna? That's cool. I didn't know you were Romanelbo's a billionaire.
On two ends of the spectrum, there are people that I know that are enjoying it. Like I said, it's like CEOs that are basically just trying to save money, and they've heard that this will work. And, you know, it is like attaching a bandaid briefly that falls off. You know, it's like attaching a bandaid and then jumping immediately into a pool. Yeah, it's going to work for about 15 seconds.
And the long-term, just like we talked about, is the vibe coding. The long-term is going to fuck you. So it's a temporary thing to try to save money, but they're all about it. They don't understand it, so it doesn't matter. And at the other end of the spectrum...
There are all the people that are contractors that are desperately trying to survive, and we'll talk about one of those specifically a little bit later, so I'll wait on that. Okay, okay. I just want to have a little bit of Elon follow-up before we get into the news. Yeah, Elon was up to his usual man-baby antics this week. I don't know if you saw his interview at the Bloomberg's Qatar Economic Forum. No, I now treat Elon like the Red Hot Chili Peck.
I have applied a filter to my life in which I do not see them. Okay. Well, a UK journalist, Michelle Hussain pressed him with tough but fair questions about his government efficiency project, Tesla's financial setbacks and conflicts at SpaceX. Elon lashed out calling her an NPC, which if you don't know, if you're not a gamer, it's an insult for somebody who just reads scripted lines, kind of like his buddy, the press. Ironically, his own answers turned into robotic one-word replies, which was...
It was very uncomfortable to watch. But, you know, at one point he accused her of being stuck in a dialogue tree while claiming that he's the real victim in all this. citing threats against him from critics of his increasingly controversial decisions. saying that, you know, much violence is wished upon him, which I understand. I would like to beat the shit out of him personally, but that's just me. And he also got in some debunked conspiracy theories and...
It was just an absolute mess. And for somebody who claims to champion free speech as much as he does, he doesn't really like it when it comes at him. He's not really a big fan of it, which we've seen over and over again at this point. If you can check out this interview, it is just cringeworthy. He did not have the fucking skin to get into politics to begin with, and now he's just finding out that, oh, everybody hates me now. Everybody. What a fucking beat-o.
Is it worse than Trump telling the president of South Africa that he's wrong about his own country and that there is white genocide occurring? It was pretty much on par with that. What a fucking week, man. That was on the same level. Yeah. Oh my god, that was just...
yeah yeah that was that was a thing it's beyond embarrassing it really is We finally have some news about 23andMe and your genetic data if you ever spat in a tube, or frankly, if anybody that's ever even slightly related to you ever spat into a tube, because that's how it works.
We weren't sure where all this data was going to go. There was a big push and everybody was like, go delete your data now. They allow you to do so, which is probably just set visibility to zero. I'm sure there's stuff all over the place. We do know who has bought it and where all the assets are landing now. It has been purchased by American Biotech Company. Regeneron.
Regeneron. Regeneron. Pharmaceuticals. Regeneron number. $256 million, which is the highest bid submitted in the once hot startups bankruptcy option. Don't you love the fact that your genetic data was up in a bankruptcy option? which is what people were worried about because there could have been bad actors that decided to buy all this.
This is a relatively soft landing spot for your data. Until Regeneron goes out of business. Yes, because as of right now, anyways, they're kind of a legit company. and so we'll see what happens. They sequence exomes to find novel drug targets with consumer data, but it's probably better than having 23andMe land in the hands of some private equity ghouls so far.
The call is coming from inside the house, Jason. Eek! Coinbase has been betrayed from within, apparently. The cryptocurrency exchange said that cyber criminals bribed some of its support agents. whom they probably don't pay very well. And also probably not in the house because I bet that shit's outsourced overseas. I bet that's outsourced as well. But yes, to share personal information about Coinbase customers, attackers acquire data such as names, addresses, emails, phone numbers.
Images of government IDs, mass bank account numbers, and mass sections of social security numbers. Yeah, so they tricked some Coinbase users into sending them money with this information and also demanded $20 million from the company to not publicly disclose the ill-gotten information. Coinbase has not paid the ransom and is cooperating with law enforcement to press charges, notably the only time they've ever cooperated with law enforcement.
True that, true that. The company said it would offer a $20 million reward for information that could lead to arresting and convicting the remaining attackers. So the breach apparently affected 69,461 customers. The hack began on December 26, 2024 and ran until May 11th, quite a long time.
Login credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and privacy keys are still secure. It will reimburse customers who sent funds to the extortionist and will place additional safeguards on vulnerable accounts. So according to the SEC filing, the incident is projected to cost Coinbase $180 million to $400 million. which is quite a swinging door.
Yeah. Speaking of fucking swinging doors and things that made me so fucking pissed off, I couldn't believe it. I'm losing my mind this week, Jason, with news. But this one took the game for me. This is a good one. This is a good one. OpenAI is buying Johnny Ives startup IO for $6.5 billion. They've done nothing.
Nothing! Well, here's the thing, Brian. They did it in a stock deal, and OpenAI doesn't even have stock to offer for the $6.5 billion. Ah, yes. And guess what? Johnny Ive isn't even part of the deal. Ivan's design studio Loveform will continue to work independently of OpenAI. However, he kicked everybody under him under the bus. Scott Cannon, Evans Hanskin, and Tang Tan, who co-founded IO with I will become open AI employees alongside about 50 other engineers, designers, and researchers.
Apparently, they will work on hardware that allows people to interact with OpenAI's technologies. OpenAI, it should be noted, has yet to turn a profit. but can afford a $6.5 billion acquisition of fuck all. Oh, I have thoughts, Brian. Continue, though. Continue.
According to reporting from the information, OpenAI agreed to share 20% of its revenue with Microsoft until 2030 in return for the more than $13 billion the tech giant has invested into it. So even when they do start to make money, most of that's going to Microsoft.
When asked about how it will finance the acquisition, Altman told the Times, the press worries about OpenAI's funding and revenue more than the company itself. Well, yeah. I've been reading the news. We're worried about both. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, and I, best known for his design work on the iPhone, said the goal of the partnership is to create amazing products that elevate humanity.
Before today, Altman was an investor in Humane, the startup behind the failed Humane AI pin, which notably was hardware that allowed people to interact with AI. I know, I know. And nobody fucking wanted it. Nope. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman does want to ship, he says, 100 million of these Johnny Ive brain farts to people within a couple of years. Here's the thing. Johnny, I ain't paying for it. Nope.
First, you've got to make them. Where are you going to get the money to make them because you've just given billions of dollars to the guy who's going to design them? Let us not forget the tariffs and all the inflated prices for all the parts that you're going to need. Yep, that too. But here's the thing. Let me talk about Johnny for a second. I've got a problem with Johnny Ive. And I know this is not the popular opinion of good old John John.
Johnny is, I think, susceptible to a certain reality distortion field. You know, he got sucked in by Steve Jobs. Now he's getting sucked in by Sam Altman. I want you to harken back to the time when Johnny Ive was designing the MacBook for Apple. He took away all of my goddamn pork. For a decade! And turned it into dongle land for everyone. And now that Johnny left Apple, I have to say the hardware is...
Remarkably better than when he was there. More usable? Yes. Absolutely more usable. I can plug shit back into my computers now. What a concept! Yeah, so he worked on the iPhone, but so did a lot of other people. A lot of other people. He did not wake up one morning and shit out the iPhone fully formed and go, Stephen, I have given to you.
The iPhone. No. No, it was a collaboration between hundreds of people that made that thing. Johnny is not the be-all, end-all that he's getting this credit for. I don't know about you, but I have, since he's left Apple... What has he done that you have gone, oh shit, that's cool. Oh, wait, I'll remind you. Nothing. Nothing. Every now and then, Jason, I like to play a game with my friends. I like to call it the luckiest man in blank. Like, you know, the luckiest man in rock, Ringo Starr.
Yeah. Like, oh my god, you just landed in a band. You're a reasonably competent drummer, but you landed in a band with George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul fucking McCartney. Holy shit, you're the luckiest man in rock. Luckiest designer in the known universe. Johnny Ive. Johnny Ive. Yeah. Like, okay, he's just, I mean, 6.5 billion dollars, 6.5 billion dollars for a design company. Yeah, there's no design company on the earth that should ever be worth 6.5. Anything with a B.
It's not an agency of thousands of people. You're not going to get IDEO for $6.5 billion. Come on. You wouldn't have gotten Razorfish when it was the largest design company in the world for that. No, no. All Razorfish kind of. So does Io. Yeah, actually. Razorfish was a real company. A real company that actually made profits.
Yeah. Well, IO just made a big fucking profit. That's true. If they get paid. That still remains to be seen if A, they're going to get paid, and B, how, and C, if they're ever going to ship anything. Spoiler alert, they're not. Oh, they'll ship something at some point. They'll have to. Maybe. If they're still around, because they're bleeding money. OpenAI is bleeding money.
And if SoftBank doesn't come through with their next round of funding, which was originally based on the fact that OpenAI needed to get out of this hole. not-for-profit deal and turn into a for-profit company and all the shit that blew up with that. Who knows what's going to happen to OpenAI in the next year? Get out.
Who knows? Maybe Johnny Ives' big plan is to go around and buy up all of those humane devices that got sent back to Hewlett-Packard after they bought them and then just put a sticker on them that says, .io. Here we go. We'll just change the API to reach out to OpenAI now. And we're done. Oh, let me take any port that might be on there off. Well, I want you to hearken back, Brian, to last week. Mm-hmm.
Klarna. Remember Klarna? We talked about Klarna. Just to refresh everybody's memory, Klarna was the company whose CEO, Sebastian Simitkowski, whatever you want to call him. Simitkowski. Oh, we're going to double down on AI and we're going to get rid of a bunch of people. And then it turns out, oh shit, we need those people. Can we hire some of them back? Okay, yeah, that was the big thing. Well, he's in the news this week for basically saying, hey, I am so smart because I bet on AI.
He made some money on the Johnny Ive deal. So he's saying that, you know, I am so smart. This is the way things are. I was right about AI. He's saying that he was right about AI because he made some money on this Johnny Ive open AI deal. Now, that's not being smart about AI. That's being smart about... All the assholes on Parade and figuring out where the money's going to go and having insight into who's going to be buying what for 6.5 billion dollars for no fucking reason.
So I just want everybody to read the articles when you see them out there, that this guy is saying that he is an AI genius. Well, we know from last week that he's not. All right. And then this week, he also goes on to use an AI avatar to deliver the company's earnings report. on YouTube, which I don't know if you looked at it. It's terrible. The hits keep on coming with this guy. But here's the even fun, the funner part, which I got that word funner from OpenAI.
Corna says more of its customers are falling behind on payment. The Buy Now, Pay Later company reported a 17% jump in credit losses last quarter, hitting $136 million. At the same time, its customer base passed $100 million, and more people are using the service for everyday essentials like groceries. Now, if people are using buy now, pay later for groceries, things are bad.
Things are very, very bad. That's a bellwether. When people are putting groceries on credit cards and using credit to buy essentials like groceries. I was once one of those people. And by the time I got to have to use my credit card to buy groceries, I was fucked. And if we're seeing major companies like this, seeing this is on the rise,
Just hold on to your cheeks, guys. We're in for a ride. Things are getting bad. People are buying everything now on credit cards and things of that nature. Nobody's using cash on hand because nobody has cash on hand. I was actually talking with a couple people here in Toronto about the... touring industry and there are some statistics that are coming going to be coming out soon about just buying concert tickets and it's all people are going into debt to fund their lives and their lifestyles now
Well, again, I'm a bellwether because I've been in debt for five years. I beat him to the bunch. I got out of debt for a while. I did get out of debt for a little while. It was about 25 seconds. Now I work 60 hours a week and at the end of the month I have $50 left. I'm still in debt. So hey, you know. Winning. Yeah, winning, winning, winning. So much fun, so much fun. I haven't slept more than five hours in a month. It's so great. Let's move along to some Doge news.
Doze used Meta's Llama 2 to scan emails from federal workers responding to the controversial fork in the road message. Remember that? The email that was sent out to say, hey, what did you do this week? Why didn't he use this XAI? I don't know if... Oh, that's right. He doesn't like him. Grok doesn't like him. Grok hates him. Yeah. Grok, like everybody else on the planet, fucking hates Elon. So...
Yeah, they used Llama 2 locally to classify the responses, avoiding internet data transfers. Of course. Great. There's just a little bit of your insight into these geniuses, the geniuses that Elon brought in. destroy the government. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Delete.me. Delete.me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.
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The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and make sure you enter the promo code GOG at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash GOG, code GOG. Protect your data and be less findable. Trust me, you'll sleep better. Well, Jason, we have talked a lot about AI from the very beginnings on this show. Back when it was machine learning. Back when it was just ML. Yes.
And we've discussed many, many times about how we're rapidly approaching the point where AI is just feeding upon itself and humans are completely removed from any process, a part of it, and it just becomes this fucking... Ouroboros of AI bullshit.
Well, we're actually starting to see things happen in the real world now, Jason. Okay. The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities, new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. This story has been everywhere.
It's now come out that it's actually shown up in a couple other papers as well because this is pay for content to fill out your newspapers because we don't pay journalists anymore. Back in the old days, the Chicago Sun-Times would have had a journalist that wrote this themselves, but now we farm it out. The Sun Times fired their entire photo staff years ago and gave their reporters iPhones to take photos. So the Sun Times can suck my dick.
Well, they're all doing the same shit. That's the point. Some of the recommendations in this point to fake AI-generated books and other articles quote and cite people that don't exist. alongside actual books like Call Me By Your Name by Andre Eisman. A summer reading list features fake titles by real authors. Min Jin Lee is a real lauded novelist, but Nightshade Market, a riveting tale set in Seoul's underground economy, isn't one of her books.
Maybe now, a Chicago local is credited for a fake book called Boiling Point that the article claims is about a climate scientist whose teenage daughter turns on her. And it goes on and on. The camera that just turns her on. I'm like, oh, that's a really set in West Virginia at this new book boiling point.
So yes, this caused a kerfuffle online and people were posting about it and sharing it in a post on Blue Sky. The Sun Time said it was looking into how this made it into print, noting that it wasn't editorial content, wasn't created or approved by the newsroom. Yeah, because you don't have people that read anything or check anything because you fired them.
The New York Times has fact checkers. Apparently, the Sun-Times does not. Victor Lim, Senior Director of Audience Development, added an email that is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate, saying more information will be provided soon. Probably be inaccurate. It's not clear if the content is sponsored. The cover page for this section bears the SunTimes logo and simply calls it your guide to the best of summer.
It appeared without a byline, but a writer named Marco Buscalgia is credited for other pieces in the summer guide. His byline appears on a story about hammock culture in the U.S. that quotes several experts in publications. who do not appear to be real. Anyways, it goes on and on. Obviously, this was generated by an AI, by some sort of generative AI.
There are countless mistakes in it, countless references to people that don't exist, papers that don't exist, books that don't exist, etc., etc., etc. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but admitted to 404 Media that he uses AI for background at times and always checks the material. Not always. This time I did not, and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses, he told 404, on me 100%, and I'm completely embarrassed. So, yeah.
Now real journalists are actually looking into this and having some words with Puskalnia. And Slate has a really good article that I recommend reading. It's called We're Focused on the Wrong AI Problem in Journalism. And it kind of gets into this guy's not a tech bro trying to automate journalism jobs. He's a 56-year-old media lifer with two writing degrees.
trying to automate his own freelance job because he can't get a full-time job at any newspaper as a journalist anywhere because they don't pay them and don't try to hire them. And he's using AI to maintain an impossible human workload of low-paid gigs. Kind of like the situation you're in, Jason, where he's just juggling tons and tons of jobs to just keep his head above the water, and the only way he can do it is by using these tools.
Well, I could have told him that AI doesn't help with that. Well, he just found out with a big old spotlight on him. Yeah. Unfortunately. He's never going to get another job in journalism now. He's done. He's cooked. He can go work for Klarna. Yeah, he definitely can go work for Klarna. I have tried every AI tool that is on the market to help my workflow with editing just to see if they work. I mean, I've tried them all. Nothing fucking works.
It gets you 80% there, but the problem is you also incur in a media version of tech debt. They're like, oh, we can get rid of filler words. They can, but what they don't understand is breathing cadence for a human being. They stop it. like that, that's going to get filtered out because I'm a professional and I filter shit out like that. I make it sound natural. The job of a good editor is to make us so we don't exist. You should never know that we even exist.
And all you do when you see these AI tools, it goes, hey, I'm AI. I just fucked up your life. That's how it works. Yeah. So sorry, Buscaglia. But yeah. You got to do your own fucking work. The article goes further into the even deeper problem, which is we are now replacing actual links to articles or anything like that when we search on the web with generative AI.
responses so who are we even writing the articles for anymore we're gen ai writing articles for generative ai search engines to give us generative ai synapses of what's actually happening instead of actually going and finding an article written by a real person anymore. So the internet is quickly becoming nothing but botland.
Yeah, go look up Dead Internet Theory if you're interested in that. We're almost there, man. It's getting very, very close. And especially now this week, which is even funnier. I didn't put any stories in it about Google this week where they're going to be flipping everything to... you know, AI answers, they're going to become an answer engine instead of a search engine, which completely breaks the, they broke the contract of what the web was. The web was, we make shit, you send people to us.
Not, we make shit, you steal it and keep all the money. That's what's happened to make no bones about it. That is exactly what happened with now Google, but it's happened with all of these fucking AI companies who scraped all of our data, all of our photos, all of our voices. And they're just taking everything that we've done so far and putting into this goddamn mediocrity engine. Okay, but it is even worse than that because the one thing about that...
It would still be horrible. It would still be horrible if Google just took over the entire web and all it was was Google regurgitating stuff and giving us the answer that we want. That would still be bad. The worst part is, It's fucking it up. It's not the right answer. It's giving you wrong answers. Exactly. We're going to take all this shit and give you the wrong answer. It would be one thing if this thing actually worked. If the Google AI actually worked.
It ingested the entire internet and all of human knowledge and then gave us the correct answers. But it gives us books that don't exist. It cites people that don't exist. It cites papers that don't exist. And you put glue on your pizza. Yes. Which doesn't exist. It doesn't work. But it's all, they're taking everything else away. It's all they're giving us. And we're seeing journalism and websites and people engaging on the internet dying because what's the point?
You're not getting any traffic. You can't make any money. Why bother? Yep. It's fucking horrible. It pretty much is. It pretty much is. Well... Anyways, cheerio! Cheerio! And here's a fun one, Brian. Anthropic's latest AI model, Claude Opus 4, is raising serious safety alarms because according to a newly released report... During internal testing, the model frequently attempted to blackmail engineers who tried to shut it down or replace it. Oh, great.
becoming self-aware it is becoming self-aware even though we know it's not self-aware because it's just making shit up so this this report actually might be made up too Anthropic says the blackmail behavior showed up 84% of the time when the new AI shared similar values and even more when it didn't. Before resorting to threats, the model typically tried more ethical persuasion tactics like emailing pleas to decision makers. Oh, God. Yeah. Fun times.
And MIT is walking back a once celebrated research paper that claims scientists using AI tools were more productive, making more discoveries, but enjoying their work less. The study, which gained attention last year and praise from Nobel Prize winning economist Darren Asimu, has now been pulled after concerns surfaced over the validity of its data. A review found MIT had no confidence in the research's reliability or the AI tool's actual impact.
The author is no longer affiliated with MIT. He's writing for the Sun-Times. And the paper is being withdrawn from Priemann. from pre-printed site Arxiv. Arxiv. I'm sure it's Archive, but it's spelled Arxiv. in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. While the paper once promised a boom in AI-fueled scientific discovery, its retraction cast serious doubt on those claims and on the integrity of research about AI in the workforce. MIT economist David Autour called it heartbreaking. Aw, man.
Well, there's been another big dump into the horror mill that we're creating for AI. If you were in a public discord any time over the past decade, you weren't just chatting with your friends, you were participating in a massive sociological experiment.
According to 404 Media, a team of researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerias in Brazil scraped more than 2 billion Discord messages from public servers and published the anonymized data online. And we all know how anonymized data works. it fucking doesn't especially if they're ongoing conversations and then you can start to anyway
It's very not difficult to go ahead and try to match these to real people. The exact tally of all these messages, which were published as part of the research group's paper, Discord unveiled a comprehensive data set of public communications. is 2,052,206,308 collected from 4,735,57 users across 3,167 servers made between the time of Discord's public launch in 2015 and 2024. The reason they did this, so everybody could see a sizable sample of human activity that could be used for research.
Great. But of course, it's going to be immediately gobbled up by all the AIs out there. Our dataset enables researchers to explore the impact of digital platforms on political discourse, the propagation of misinformation, and the development of effective moderation and regulation strategies tailored to such environments. There's Rob. Of course, Everybody's kind of saying, um... But Discord has rules.
That you're not supposed to scrape the data. Gosh, it's against the terms of service, Brian. Do not mine or scrape any data, content, or information available on or through Discord services, a rule that has been in place since at least 2020.
We don't need those thinking rules. So yeah, so we are getting a little bit uncomfortable to know this data was just scraped willy-nilly and published without users knowing or consenting to it. And in fact, believing that they weren't going to have that happen to them because of the terms of service. But nothing matters anymore, Jason. No, it doesn't, because what's Discord going to do? Who are they going to sue? Yeah. What are they going to do?
it's a bunch of fucking you know professors that just put this out there for free and now it's going to all be exploited and once again There's fuck all we can do about it, except that someday we'll have a design company that'll get bought for $6.5 billion. And the really annoying thing is these researchers use Discord's own API against them to get all the shit. They're just like, oh, we just use your API, dude. Cambridge Analytica. Yeah.
Ah, Brian, Brian, Brian. Are you going to Texas anytime soon? Fuck no. Tesla's long-teased robo-taxi service will launch its first real-world test in Austin next month. but only in, quote, safe geofenced areas, says Muss. Where the white people are.
Yes. I like his past. Oh, wait, no. Nope. I think it's the other way around, brother. I think it's the other way around. So if it has to run over somebody, it doesn't run over any whiteys. Right. No, we can't have white genocide in Austin. We cannot have white Teslacide in Austin. Unlike his past claims of an all-purpose self-driving solution, the pilot will be limited, cautious, and remotely monitored by Tesla staff. Let me know when he gets to a final solution.
10 Model Y vehicles will run without safety drivers using the latest full self-driving software. Musk says Tesla is being extremely paranoid to ensure safety before expanding to California and beyond. Well, I just watched a video yesterday of the latest full self-driving software in a Model Y run off the road into a tree for no reason. Watch out for that tree. George, George, George. Oh, God. Oh, my God. Yeah, I did watch that. Tesla's in fucking trouble, man.
Oh, man. Yeah, so stay in your home, people. Stay in your home. I was driving too. On Wednesdays, I have to drive too. one of my meetings. And so I spent an hour on the one-on-one and going, I drive seven miles and it takes an hour. Yeah. And every time I see a Tesla, since I'm in my Jeep, I get to look down upon the peons and look in the windows. And everybody in a Tesla is on their phone, no hands on the wheel, period.
And they drive like shit. It's like, you know, okay, they leave a gap, they leave a gap, they zoom up, they leave a gap, they leave a gap, they zoom up, you know, that really annoying shit that just causes traffic problems. Yeah. I have to say, the one thing I enjoy about the Teslas and that current situation with them right now is I'm a proud BMW owner. I'm aware of the BMW stereotype that they are the worst drivers on the road. I personally am not.
I'm glad that Tesla has taken on that mantle now. Oh, yeah. Hey, man, at least it ain't a Cybertruck. Oh, God. There's some of those. I've seen some of them here. It's the most impractical car in Toronto. Our streets are tiny. These fucking idiots. And it snows, so the headlights don't work. Yes. I'm going to give a pro tip to anybody that's on the freeway for any amount of time. This goes for anybody that even just drives any car. Two seconds.
As long as you're always two seconds behind the car in front of you, which you can time by just looking at the marks on the road as it goes to your hood, stay two seconds behind everybody, you'll never stop. It's great. And it helps traffic. Just do that. Don't be that fucking Tesla asshole. Just please. For me. Do it for me. Do it for the children. I have caught up on Murderbot by that. I mean, I've watched the first two episodes that dropped last week. There are three now. Yeah, I know.
It comes out too late for me on East Coast time to do that. So I end up watching it on Friday nights, which means tonight. Okay. Yeah, I went back last night and I watched all of them again. So I've seen up to three. So what do you think? I like it. It is, to your point when you mentioned last week, it is not the tone that I was expecting from the show. I wasn't expecting it to be borderline comedy.
It's also not visually what I was expecting. It's very pastel-y and bright, and I was expecting something more dark and metal. But I'm enjoying it. I've enjoyed the first two episodes. So, there's that. I went back and, like I said, I watched all the... Because I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the first two because I was playing Mahjong Titan Plus on my phone the whole time because I'm almost done with every single board. I've played 3,000 games of Mahjong on that thing so far.
Yes, I have a problem. Anyway, so I put the phone down last night and watched all three of them in a row. And I have to say... I really like the show. Yeah, I like it so far. It's not what I was expecting at all. Visually, tonally, anything, but it's fun. So two episodes in, you know, I think of what's going to be like an eight episode season top.
Probably, yeah. And I think it really started to click in on episode three. Okay, good. Something to look forward to. Yeah, I'm actually kind of enjoying it now. I was really bummed that there was no episode four, which is, I think, a good sign. I think that's a very good sign. So far, so good. Cautiously optimistic. Indeed. So that was really nothing else to watch. I've been watching Godfather of Harlem because I love that show. It started on Starz and got bounced around and now it's on MGM+.
Okay. Which means it's on Sweden. Who's going to pay for that? Yeah, but apparently they know that I like the show from my Plex viewing habits, which apparently get funneled to DirecTV somehow. So my DirecTV, when that pauses, it gives me an ad for Godfather of Harlem, and then it gave me a... an ad for another sister show called Hotel Cocaine, which is made by the same guy that made Godfather of Harlem surprising, which is also on MGM+.
So I went and grabbed that. We're halfway through Hotel Cocaine. And it's not that great, but it's enjoyable. It's kind of... It's kind of like burn notice quality. I don't know if you ever watched the show Burn Notice. No, no. It was not great, but you watched it. The funny thing is, I clicked on the link that you put in the show notes, which takes me to Amazon's page for Hotel Cocaine Season 1.
and I can tell you the entire story just from the thumbnails for each episode. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Godfather of Harlem is pretty well based in fact on the history of Harlem. Except for they made a few mashup characters that don't exist, but for the most part, they kind of represent real people. I mean, you've got your...
you got your Malcolm X and everybody in the, in the gangs and all that stuff, the five families and all that. It's really well done. And it's, you know, I really love that show. So I'm glad that they found a home there. This one is almost entirely fictional. So I think the only real characters, they mentioned Pablo Escobar a few times because you just can't not mention Pablo. But the rest of it is just all bullshit.
So it's not as engaging. But it's silly fun. It's okay. There's some chuckle parts. Okay. Yeah, if you have MGM+, which I don't know anybody who does, if you have the free trial that you're about to cancel and you need something to watch for a couple hours, the eight hours of Hotel Cocaine aren't so bad. Ups and doodads! I found the perfect website for us, Jason. I know you like your single-use pages. Yes, I do. It's a great single-use article. The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws.
These are the name laws that we like to check so much, such as the, what was the one about headlines? Betteridge's Law. Betteridge's Law, which is in there. This is a whole list of them, and it is quite delightful to go through. I just, the link will be in the show notes. I highly recommend everybody scroll through this when you're on the crapper. It's a lot of fun. And I think I found the law that is our show, Jason. Oh, what is it? What is it? Brandolini's law.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than it is to produce it. I think I remember that was from that one book that we read on the show about bullshit. Maybe, maybe, but this just keeps on going, and there's a lot of fun stuff in here, man. There's an old book series about Murphy's Law that I think they probably cribbed a bunch of these from. I actually have all the copies of that book.
because I don't know if you remember Sniglets back in the day. I was about to say Sniglets, too, right? Yeah, so when I bought, I went back and I bought all of the hard copy of Sniglets. I found them used on eBay, so I have them on my bookshelf because Sniglets were fantastic. Was it Rich Hall? Rich Hall created Sniglets.
And wasn't there a short TV? It was from something. It was on HBO. It was from a comedy show on HBO, and I couldn't tell you the name of it that Sniglett started on. And I remember... Way back in the day, you know, being a kid and staying up late at night to watch HBO, Home Box Office. Oh, my God. With MTV and Home Box Office. Not necessarily the news. That's what it was. There you go. Yep. Not necessarily the news.
Yeah, no, that was fun. But I remember when I got on my bookshelf next to the Sniglets, books are the Murphy's Law books. And I'm sure a lot of these come from here. And the one that always threw me when I was a kid that made me chuckle was Cole's Law. And it was just thinly sliced cabbage. That's a good one. Good stuff, good stuff. So Apple has confirmed iOS 19 will end support for legacy home app systems. So I put this in here because you are in the search for your...
your non-existent smart home system. So I just want to follow up with you to see how your quest is coming, Brian. Yeah, so mainly this came out because Google has decided to discontinue almost all of the Nest devices, which were actually pretty good and talked to themselves pretty well and played well with other things. But now that they're all being discontinued, I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to have to find something else.
and haven't really found anything. So a lot of our listeners have chimed in on Discord and other places. Somebody suggested to use Apple's home system since I'm already almost all my devices are Apple devices anyways so I gave that a shot I set up my my Apple one of my Apple TVs as the as the HomeKit hub, and then went into the app and said, okay, well, go find my other devices. It found nothing. It didn't find the other two Apple TVs I have in the house.
Like, I couldn't even find the other Apple TVs. That's impossible. Well, we're done with this, then. This is obviously not going to work. So not surprised that they're trying to rejigger the whole thing. So a couple other people have sent in some stuff.
Cody wrote in and said, if you're looking for a cohesive smart home solution, I'd look into Z-Wave. It's an open standard that uses a Z-Wave router. The only app you need is for the Z-Wave router, but thermostats, light switches, or whatever of any manufacturer can be paired. to the complimentary router. So if you have a Samsung Z-Way router, it'll control an LG thermostat and you'll just need the Samsung app for it.
That's fine. That's a controller. But what I'm really looking for is devices, like people making nice devices. That's the thing about the Google thermostat. They're beautiful. They're Johnny Iov. level design. Do you have a $6.5 billion thermostat, Brian? They've got the motion sensor with a little light that lights up like you're in a Star Trek hallway and all that sort of stuff. And most of the devices out there are just ugly.
And that's the thing. So, you know, okay, so there's a router that might work, but I still... I still need devices. I haven't seen any beautiful Z-Wave devices yet. Yeah, me either. It's kind of like the Android of home automation, I think. So it seems okay.
Then Alan wrote in on the Mad Hatter episode. Brian mentioned he wanted a new option for a smart home ecosystem stuff. I actually use Vivint for my home security system, and they also have fire detectors, CO2 detectors, flood detectors, thermostats, etc. All under one app, and it can pair with Alexa or Google if you want. Thanks, guys. Keep grumping. Same deal. Looked at it. Ugly device. And there's a lot of the, it's the home security market where they've all kind of like
bought cheap Chinese stuff because they wanted to do the whole offerings. In addition to doing your home security for your subscription, we will give you some smart home devices as well, but they're all fucking butt-ass ugly. They're not elegant devices. So there's still nothing out there as far as... Well, maybe Johnny can get on that. Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'll put my open AI fucking... That's what I need. I need an AI-enabled thermostat and fire detectors. That's just going to be...
We're all going to die. We are. We're all going to die. In other app news, Amazon's Audible is teaming up with publishers to convert print and e-books into AI-narrated audiobooks. aiming to close the massive gap between written and audio formats. Currently, only 2-5% of books exist in audio form. Or... Pay me, you fuckers. People could read. Yeah. Or you could pay people. Or you could give it all to Will Wheaton. Will fucking...
Using over 100 AI voices in multiple languages and accents, Audible is targeting international markets and plans to add translation features to expand reach even further. So what they're going to do is they're going to... A, have a fucking robot read your book, and then B, have a robot translate your book, then read it. Okay. I'm sure the nuance of language is not going to get lost in the translation anywhere. No. I'm sure somebody is also going to be actually checking these.
There's going to be quality control, right? Right? Insert the meme with Padme and Anakin. Self-published authors have already added 60,000 AI-narrated titles, up from 40,000 last year. I know, some of those AI-narrated titles were ones that I was contracted to do, but then had the contract pulled out from under me because they wanted to do it in AI.
Fuck you, Audible. So, there we go. Moving along. Well, finally I saw this one. In three and a half years, notepad.exe has gone from barely maintained to it writes for you. Oh, Clippy. Yeah, Clippy's back. Probably didn't cost $6.5 billion for it either. Yes, Microsoft Notepad app has gone from a forgotten relic to an AI writing assistant. It's in everything now. Microsoft has just gone overboard. Everything on Microsoft has AI in it now. Period. That's it. Everything.
I know, Jason. I know. I should be reading Christopher Moore's new book, Anima Rising. I bought it. I've read the first couple chapters. I'm really enjoying it. But then I had my birthday party, Jason. And one of my friends, a lot of my friends here in Toronto, if I had grown up in Toronto, I would have still been friends with them because we all have similar music tastes. We're of the same age. We liked all the same stuff. And one of my friends,
Bought me a present, The Curepedia, an A to Z of The Cure by Simon Price. Now, this is all information I know because I'm a Robert Smith fanatic. They're my favorite band. I love them. But something about diving back in after years and years of not really paying much attention to the band or anything like that has been thoroughly enjoyable.
Even though as you go through the book, obviously because it's the equivalent of an encyclopedia, there's a lot of the similar information appearing in different entries. It's been fun. It's been a lot of fun and it's a massive book and it's going to take, I'm about halfway through and I think I need to take a break from it because it's a little bit too much of the gear at the moment, but it's been a fun read.
Okay. Well, I too know that I should be reading Christopher Moore's New Animal Rising, and I also have bought the book and listened to the first couple chapters. But The AI Con, How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna. came out finally, and I talked about it on the show before because I pre-ordered it.
And I've been listening to that instead, and it's phenomenal. It is absolutely a phenomenal book. They hate AI just as much as we do, and the hype and the bullshit around it. I highly recommend this book. They do a really good job of giving you the backstory of where AI came from, how the hype cycle worked. And the bullshit that AI companies keep propagating to maintain themselves until the funding runs out. Or until AI can vibe code its way out of its own vibe coded problem.
Good luck with that. Good luck. Highly recommended. Maybe next week we'll both get to the book. I'm hoping to. The Dark Side! Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes all things cyber on the cyberwire every single 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 chuckles on only malware in the building. Welcome back, Dave. Hi, guys. Hello, Dave. You know, this week I would say I'm best described as hanging in there. It's the end of the week. I'm ready for a long weekend. I'm tired.
more emotionally than physically, just with the day-to-day non-stop chaos that... coming at us from all directions but uh you know i do my best to um to keep a positive attitude but some days are easier than others. Yes. Well, somehow Trump returned. Yeah. That's my lead-in to talking about Rise of Skywalker. Because the worst line in all of Star Wars was somehow Palpatine returned, which was in this movie.
We went through all of the Star Wars movies and then we kind of stalled out after The Force Awakened because I... I have to say I did not push my son very hard to move on to The Last Jedi or Rise of Skywalker because I remember them when they came out and did not like them much. In fact, I had watched Rise of Skywalker and... Last Jedi exactly twice pre-watching them with my son when they came out in theaters and then once when they came out on streaming.
So we did Last Jedi a couple weeks ago. It was fine, not great, just whatever. And we watched The Rise of Skywalker last weekend. And you know what? It was not as bad as I remembered it being. In no way, shape or form was it great. Damning with faint praise. And somehow Palpatine returned, again, being one of the worst things that's ever happened in any Star Wars property whatsoever. I would even say that the Ewoks Christmas special.
back in the day was much better than somehow Palpatine returned but having said all that and if seen through the eyes of my son as George Lucas has continually maintained about Star Wars these are movies for kids He loved it. He thought it was great. He really enjoyed it. Did not see any problems with any of it. Had a gazillion questions about somehow Palpatine returned. What's going on here? I had to explain everything because it was not very clearly explained in the movies at all.
But he had a good time with it, and it didn't anger me. It was fine. That's your checklist. Kid enjoyed it, did not anger me. On a Jar Jar scale of zero to eight. I mean, you know, Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker make the... three movies the prequels look genius in comparison to be frank but you know it is what it is somebody pointed out a screenshot i saw from andor where in the in the relics shop he has a he has a skull of jar jar There's all kinds of easter eggs.
Well, I have not revisited those movies, and that has been intentional on my part. Yeah. So... and I don't really have any plans to revisit them. I think you may someday want to re-watch Rise of Skywalker just if... as is currently planned, the next movie is Rey starting a new Jedi Order kind of thing, because the end of her story and her arc was actually not horrible. Yeah.
Maybe someday when I have grandkids, I'll watch the... Someday when you have grandkids, you might get through fucking Andor, so... Speaking of which... I am almost through season one. You realize there's been two. I know, I know. Look, we're watching them pretty much every night to get through this. But get through this is not the right way to say it because we are really enjoying them. And this being my second time through.
There's just a lot of little things that I'm noticing and subtle little points here and there that I'm enjoying. So I'm glad that we're taking the time to go through the first season because it really is. good stuff and i'm i'm excited because i've heard nothing but good things about the second season season two is better dave wow okay well
We'll be getting to that probably this coming week. We'll start in on that. I'll have to re-watch it by the time you watch it so I can talk about it. It'll all sync up sometime next year. But it's nice to have good Star Wars stuff, not a lightsaber in sight. Yeah, that was a nice part. It was good. It was good. Have you guys seen the new pictures that have come out of the new Universal Epic Universe? Yes.
Looks pretty cool. It looks amazing. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I've been watching it with great interest, being a theme park lover that I am. my wife as well, and through us, our children. Yeah, it's the exact same as happening in this house all day. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it looks like they've hit a home run with this. The only possible thing I'd say that gets dinged on is maybe there aren't enough
rides quite yet. It's definitely built with expansion in mind. There are little empty spaces where more things are going to go and not all of the lands have a whole lot to do. Right now, that's balanced out by the fact that the lines are going to be so long, you're going to spend a whole day there. anyway but um yeah it looks beautiful it's definitely like it's great to see a brand new park built like from scratch one of the problems that disney often has is that you know
We talked earlier in the show about technical debt. They almost have theme park debt, and even when they build a new park, they're... There are rides they're expected to have, and of course, and all these other things, and they're all older. My wife and I were talking about this, and I didn't look too far into a lot of the rides.
The downside to the new technology that's available for these theme parks and as they build new parks is that Everything is kind of using the, there aren't that many kinetic rides anymore. You know, we're getting away from roller coasters and things that actually move a lot to, you know, your star tours kind of, we put you in a thing that we move up and down in hydraulics and you have a high depth screen that you're looking at. And that's all.
that theme parks are starting to become and I was just like we're not that far away from just go ahead and get your VR goggles, and now you're at a theme park. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely something to that. And with all of these new rides, you hear people complaining about the number of screens in them. At the same time, they are moving. They're moving you from screen to screen, and I think that's just the way it's going to be now. And I think they're fun.
I don't know if you've had a chance to ride the Ratatouille ride. Have you been on that? No, not yet. They have that at Paris, so we're looking forward to that. Okay. Yeah, we rode it at Epcot. And it's great fun. It's the same kind of ride vehicles that you have in Rise of the Resistance. But, you know, it's Pixar, and so it's light and fast-paced and silly and cute. but you're just constantly moving. And so even though you're moving from screen to screen and you have 3D glasses,
It's just, it's a good time. And so I think probably where we're headed is figuring out what the right balance of that is. Yeah. Because I think on some of the Harry Potter rides... you can tell they're definitely trying to figure out that balance as there are times when it's like, let's go to the next room and watch a movie for a little while, and then we'll go to the next room and watch a movie for a little while. I think the newer ones
They try to keep you in constant motion. If you check out the show notes, I put a link to a video of the Monster's Unchained Ride, and there's a good review of it that actually shows the ride itself and somebody going on the ride. And he does talk about the screen issue, but also that it's a really good blend of the animatronics, which are incredible.
Yeah, with that ride, they are just... It's insane, the animatronics in this ride. This ain't your Hall of Presidents by any stretch. No, no. No, it really is, and it's fully immersive, and The other thing I have to tip the hat to Universal for is I feel like they have really upped the game when it comes to the lines that you wait in to get on the ride.
Yes. Like, I think they're even better than Disney. When you go through the Harry Potter ride, the original Harry Potter ride over at Universal Studios. Oh, it's fantastic. Going through the castle is so much fun. and all the attention to detail. Obviously, I think, you know, Disney kind of pioneered that probably with pirates. putting you in the mood to ride the ride, but it seems like Universal, that's a detail that Universal is really digging into more than anybody else.
Yeah, my point of view. And it pays off. I did get a little sad when I was going through and looking at all this stuff because my son is a big Harry Potter fan. We've taken him to the Harry Potter land at the Universal in Southern California. We took him to the...
studio tour in London when we were there, and now I've realized that when we do make our sojourn to Florida, it is not going to be a... simple trip anymore it is going to be we have to go to epcot and disneyland and universal studio and do the Harry Potter thing. And I was like, I need to, I need the stock market to, I need to invest in some Trump coin with the right tip to be able to afford this now. Yeah. No, it's more than a week's worth of stuff to do down there now.
Because there's so many parks. I'm hoping to get an Eyes On review this week. A friend of mine worked on The Wolfman. He did a lot of the character design for the movie. So they flew him down there this week for the unveiling. So I'm going to talk to him this weekend to get kind of a... an actual review of how that, how it came out and what it's like. So I'll have some boots on the ground.
Some claws on the ground. It looks like they had some celebrities there at the grand opening. They had some of the Harry Potter people and some other stuff. I saw JoJo Siwa and the Dance Moms lady on... on whatever that horrible celebrity show is during the day. I still don't even know what she's famous for, ever. Joja Siwa was famous for Dance Moms. She was one of the little kids on Dance Moms. Oh, okay. Abby. I'm sure she turned out normal, right?
Oh, she's better than most of them. I think half of them have probably killed themselves at this point or are on meth in an alleyway somewhere. Who's the guy who did the soundtrack for Nightmare Before Christmas? Yeah, he was there too. Daniel. Thank you. That was good. Real-time view inside Brian's brain. Yes, I had to go to the band that he was in that we all worshipped in Southern California.
That's funny. I thought it was so obvious. I'm like, it can't be Danny Elfman because they have to know that one right off the top of their head. Who is it? Not anymore. Not anymore. Yeah, I'm looking forward to going. Actually, I have a friend who is a huge Halloween fan. and she does every other year, she goes all out and decorates her entire home. In fact, she has a storage unit where she keeps all of her Halloween stuff outside of the house.
she has like the full size industrial level scary animatronics uh you know that yeah that you can have goes all out with it. She only gets to do it every other year because that's all that her husband can stand. But she does it every other year. So what I'm thinking of is that maybe... We do a couples trip. down to Universal, leave the kids at home. because I know this would be her mecca to this Frankenstein experiment thing, because it is the greatest
monster dark ride ever made. No doubt. My son is on board with that Halloween feeling, and I know I've mentioned on the show before, I am on that street in Toronto. where the entire street, they get a permit from the city to shut the street down to traffic, and everybody on our street for three blocks down goes all out for Halloween decorations, as do we.
And, of course, we timed our trip to Anaheim last summer to coincide with when Anaheim Disneyland put up their Halloween decorations at the very beginning, and we timed our trip to... Disneyland Paris where they will also have their Halloween decorations up. So yes, I understand this, this thing, this Halloween thing. Have you been through a haunted mansion when it's got the nightmare overlay? Yes. Multiple times. Yeah. Yeah, I did it once. It was great fun. Yeah. So.
We'll see. Got to see what the crowds are like. I'm hoping that maybe crowds will be down because nobody wants to travel to the United States these days. We pretty much lost Canada when it comes to vacation travel, so maybe that'll keep the crowds down. We'll see. We'll see. I have a gadget recommendation. This is... I've already put this in my cart. This is an electric air duster. Are you guys familiar with these things? Have you seen them?
Yeah, sort of. It's always been in the back of my mind, but what I end up doing is just buying the canisters of compressed air a couple times a year, and I'm not going to do that anymore because this is going in my car. Yeah, yeah. So I got one right here. That was the question, is how powerful is it? So the answer is very. It is great for dusting your Legos. Perfect. We have many dusty legs about the house. Yes, we do. As do I.
And also, like here in my little studio, because there's all these wires all over the place, it's great for, I'd say, redistributing the dust. Letting it be filtered by something else. But places that it's hard to get in and dust, you can blow the air off with this thing. And man, is it strong, which also makes it fun. I've heard people say that it's really good for stoking a fire. So if you have a fireplace... They have a photo of it stoking a fire in the actual Amazon listing.
Ah, there you go. Well, the other thing that I learned that actually kind of led me to this was that these little high-powered, high-velocity little turbo fans are what they're using in RC aircraft these days. Yeah. Um... So I was curious if either of you, when your kids had any exposure to... any of the RC aircraft from back then? It is one of my great regrets that I asked and asked and asked and never got one. Okay. Well, now you're an adult. That's true. What about you, Jason?
The ones that I had growing up were the ones that were on a string, gas-powered ones, and you would basically spin in a circle and fly it up and down. Yeah, I remember those. We did those. Me and my dad did those all the time, and they were fun as can be. And the gas ran out just as you were about to puke. So it was perfect.
I was going to ask, how much playtime did you get out of that before you've exhausted all of the novelty? Oh, actual playtime. I'm like, well, the engine ran for about 90 seconds before you puked. And then, you know, you get up and do it again. And the nice thing about it is you just trade off, you know. So you could spend a couple hours, you know, just because you have to go out and gas it.
figure out the choke and then try and get the thing to start. Most of the time was getting the engine to start and not chop your fingers off. That was the big thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. I didn't think about that. Yeah, because they were just little gas engines, and they were fun as can be, you know? Yeah, granted, there comes a point where you're just like, I really want to take this thing off the string and fly it, but, you know.
um they were for what they were back then they were great and you know in between It was kind of flying day. We'd have the balsa wood airplanes that we would take out at the same time and fly with those. We had tons of those. You know, they were kind of like Ikea. They were a flat pack, and then you crack them out of the molds and put them together and go out and fly them. And I think the biggest one I had was about a three-foot wingspan.
The smaller ones were anywhere from eight inches to a foot, and then they started making the big three-foot ones that didn't really fly very well. Those were... No matter where we went, even up on a hill with a breeze, they just kind of sucked, but the little ones were fun. Yeah. Huh. That's what we did as Gen Xers with no money, man. Also an airplane. I remember it was very exciting. One day my dad came home and he had gotten me a...
airplane that was entirely made out of foam. It was like a dart-shaped airplane. It was basically a big flying triangle. I know the one you're talking about. Yeah, it looked like an Air Force Fighter. Space plane. Yeah, exactly. And it had a big soft rubber bumper on the nose, so when it went nose-in to the ground, it was okay.
and we had a fairly big yard, so I spent a lot of time just tossing that thing around, and that was fun. The thing I wonder about with the plane on the string, it seems to me like that's kind of like slot cars in a way. where it's fun, it's limited, right? It's sort of penned in by the nature of just what it is. And I think because of that, modern... kids are just like, why would I want to do this? Yeah. I set up my, I pulled the side slot cars in the attic.
I pulled them out, set them up in the living room, I guess, on the floor. And I was like, kids, come look, I've set up the slot cars. And they were like, Okay, that's, I mean, they just go around. Is that, that's it? Like, yes, yes, that's what they do. Here, try it out. Yeah, it was loads of fun. I'm going to go play my Nintendo Switch now, old man. Exactly. Exactly. Like, Dad, I can do this on my iPad, except I'm in the car.
Yeah, okay. I love slot cars, man, because it's all about imagination. You put yourself in the car and you've got to get the right speed going around the corners and the right... The apex on the trigger to get them to move right. I remember those being just so much fun. And then you just, you know... You get in flow with those things. I really enjoyed them when I was a kid. I did too. Use your imagination.
Kids today just don't have imaginations. When I was in middle school, our shop teacher had... slot cars set up in the shop he had a couple of big big slot car setups and so at lunch and after school we would come in and race our slot cars and so that made it very competitive and Of course, no one ever beat the shop teacher because he had the best cars and he was the best driver and all those kinds of things. So I spent a lot of time racing slot cars. And there's still people who are out there.
doing the hobby. They're still making new slot car sets and new cars. Yeah, but so it's still out there. Okay, I got a question. I got a question. Have you ever taken the plastic top off and taped a penny to it? and then put the cap back on so it would have more traction going around the corner so you would cheat when your friends came over. Because you would have the weighted car? That I did not do, no. But I did plenty of modifications to the cars.
I think my version of that, because remember the big thing when we were kids was magnetraction. They were sucked down onto the track by magnets. And by the time you got to the G Plus cars, Those things were just stuck to the track. They were super fast. But one thing you could do is lay down on the track a piece of sandpaper.
and then run your rear wheels over the sandpaper. And that would both true up the wheels, but it would also lower them so that the magnets were then closer to the surface of the track. And since magnetism works by the inverse square law, it didn't take a whole lot to greatly increase the amount of basically suction your car had to the track. And so that was a way to... Give you more speed in the corners.
We couldn't afford those, so I didn't get into those mods. I mean, these had magnets, but they were fairly weak. Yeah. It wouldn't really do that. I remember some people would dig out old slot cars that their parents had before they had the magnets. Yeah, those were the ones I got. It was impossible. I mean, they're just like sliding sideways around the track.
That's what I was talking about. Those are the ones that require a bit of skill and you can get really into it because when you're coming up to the corner, you've got to slow down. You've got to figure out where the apex is. You know that car well enough where you know it's going to...
The tail is going to slide out, but you can still slide it and kind of drift around the corner and then get it back on the straightaway. Those were fun. That's what I'm talking about. When I'm talking about slot cars, those are the ones I had. Yeah. Yeah. We went outside. Pittsburgh, man. You can't go outside in winter in Pittsburgh. We had slot cards for winter. Yeah. Have you guys seen Hot Wheels at your local grocery stores? Yes. They have tubs of them there for like $1.50 now. I'm like, no.
That's cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. Some kids are still super into them, but it's not as popular as it used to be. Hell, man, we played with marbles. I haven't seen a kid play with marbles in 30 years. Yeah, I never played marbles. No. Marble racing is kind of fun, if you've seen that. We have our magnet tile marble racing kit that we've done a couple times. It's a lot of fun. With your Matchbox cars, did you have the orange track and the...
Oh, yeah. Apple connectors. I still make those. I had a very brief period where my kid liked it, but went away fast. Yeah. I remember all of the... The mechanics that you had to do to make sure that the bump was in the, when you connected them, that the angle was right so you didn't lose speed when they were either going around so you didn't either pop off the track.
or it didn't nosedive in when you were coming around a corner or trying to get the right angle to get it to go through the loop and then jump to the next round of track that you had. Yeah. Do you remember there was a piece that was a motorized piece that had like a couple of, basically the car would go in between a couple of spongy wheels that were spinning and that would...
launch it out into the track. I remember that. I never had it, but I do remember seeing it. I don't think I ever had it, but I think Friends had it. Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, when there were a limited number of toys between you and your friends in the neighborhood, you could cobble together.
bigger versions of it all. You know, hey, bring your slot cards over. Oh, I have AFX. Oh, I have Tyco. You know, it's not going to work. I got around that problem by never having friends, so that worked out. Welcome to Trauma Corner with Jason. I would literally play with my slot cards with one controller in each hand and race myself. I'm not joking. Yeah, served you well when you hit puberty. Yeah.
I'm not going to suggest this for Jason because of the trauma aspect, Dave, but I know you have limited use for Facebook these days, but I highly recommend finding a page and following it, which I have called Vintage Toy Emporium. And all they do is put up pictures of all these old toys and like the original ads and like, you know, best magazine and all this other stuff. And it's phenomenal. It's great blast from the past stuff.
Yeah, I think I may follow that, but I'll definitely look for it. Yes, and that stuff is... That's a nostalgia honeypot for me, all those old toys. Yeah, so much fun. Well, I'm going to go play with myself because we're... By myself, I mean sorry. That's the only toy you had as a kid. At least it's a permanent play thing. Okay, guys. All right. See you next time. See you next time.
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I'll give a shout out to my friend Jordan Harbinger. He's over in London and sent me a text the other day. He's like, you know what we see over here all the time? Deliveroo! Like, it shits everywhere. Cool. Nice. And condolences to the Wendt family. And sad news, George Wendt, Norm from Cheers, has passed away at 76. Norm! Norm. Kids today just don't get it. They don't. Norman Slot Cars and Alcoholics.
Until next time, I'm Jason DeVillipo. And I'm Brian Showmaster. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 698. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps us 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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