704: I’m Lovin’ It

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister, coming to you from lovely Southern California. Welcome back, Brian. Are you going to stay? Do you want to stay? Uh, no.

We'll see. I mean, it feels like a bit of a war is brewing between Trumpia and California. And you can definitely feel it here. It's a bit weird. I told you it was weird here. It is weird. Traffic's not as bad. Actually, it is, Jason. I don't think you leave Woodland Hills all that often.

I go to Sherman Oaks every week. Yeah, you don't cross over from the valley. So Mondays and Fridays are not bad, but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I guess that's the new norm for people going into offices are pretty brutal. Okay. Okay. Well, I travel on Wednesdays. Nobody cares about California traffic. Anyway, so what else is going on?

Well, not too much. The Fyre Festival is back in the news, Jason. Oh, yes, it is. If you've ever dreamed of owning a piece of the Fyre Festival brand, now is your chance again. Owner and convicted fraudster Billy McFarland shared the news via Instagram on Monday after a planned sale of the brand fell through. If you recall, back in April of this year, documentarian Sean Reck announced he had acquired some of the Fyre Festival brand's IP and revealed plans.

to launch a new music-focused subscription video-on-demand platform. That's right. I remember that. Yeah, yeah. Yes, and we all laughed hilariously. Apparently, the deal fell through. Oh. Now, according to Billy, we had a seven-figure deal. I don't think that includes the decimal points and the two zeros after it. Maybe three or four zeros after that decimal point. Yeah. So for the complete Firebrand and IP package, it fell through this morning.

He explained in the post, but now the opportunity to own the fire brand is back on the table, Jason. All right. Well, it was on the table for about 30 seconds when he realized nobody wants the fire and he put it on eBay. Because why not? If you can't just sell it through regular channels, just say, fuck it and put it on eBay. Right. Well. The bidding now for the multi-billion dollar company that he claimed at some point it was, is now the highest bid is $210,600 right now.

with 131 bids in and four days to go before the auction ends Tuesday morning at 9.44 a.m. Eastern. I wonder what the significance of 9.44 a.m. is.

I mean, I know with Musk, we got the, you know, 412. 420. 420, that's right. You can tell I'm not a pothead. But yeah, so he's trying to auction off basically everything that's left. Well, Jason, if you include the decibel points, that's... is actually an eight-figure number that's true that is going for at the moment yeah yes yes tense cheese sandwiches and bad decisions are not included in the ebay auction so uh yeah if you've got a few bucks and uh poor judgment then

Head on over to eBay. Links in the show notes. I really can't believe this guy's still kicking around, but, you know. Grifter's going to grift. Then again, you know, waves around in general. I was going to say, have you seen the country lately, Brian? He should be flourishing right now. I'm surprised he's not working at the White House. So Dan P. writes in, and here's a little prescient note.

He says, I know you guys are against AI, but I wonder if you're missing the boat. The leaky boat? Yes, I cut his note down for brevity here. I'm 70 years old, retired from the tech world, so I'm an older grumpier than you. You both rode the coding wave while I schlepped on the tech infrastructure side. The AI wave is just beginning to crest at the shore and I'm not missing this one.

The amount of money and resources being thrown at AI and LLMs may be a bust. Not maybe. But in the meantime, someone has to help these people spend their money. Being older, all I want is a tiny piece of that pie. Whether you miss the boat or even care if there is a boat is your business. But with the money being thrown around and potential for jobs and job loss.

parentheses, AI is killing entry-level software engineers already, end paren. You should be a little more circumspect about the subject in service of your listeners. Well, Dan P., that's very funny that you sent that because I thought the same thing.

while we were on vacation. And we'll be getting into that a little later in the show. I would like to point out that, yes, you have been exploring it yourself a little bit. I have been taking classes. It's not like we've just been... pooping on the stuff it's we've been we've been learnedly pooping on the stuff in the news

Well, let's talk about AI, Jason. Okay. You know one company that's no longer posting on Indeed about their job offers, Jason? Who, Brian? Indeed. Oh, indeed, indeed. Yes, job hunting platforms Indeed and Glassdoor are cutting their workforces, and it may be thanks to good old artificial intelligence. About 1,300 jobs from the companies will be eliminated, mostly in two departments.

development there's research and development for job posting boards jason apparently apparently and people in sustainability ironically ironically There will also be some executive shuffles, including the exit of Glassdoor CEO, Christian Sutherland Wong. They're going to be hiring Christian Sutherland Wright. Oh, man. That one's going to get us some emails. I don't care.

Yeah. Anyways, they didn't specify any reason for the consolidation and the job losses, but Adikobo, who is the current CEO of the holding company, has been enthused about the importance of AI in the missive, which likely... didn't make any of the impacted employees feel any better. AI is changing the world and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences. He wrote, delivering on this ambition requires us to move faster, try new things and

Break things. I'm sorry. Fix whatever is broken. Yeah, so we've talked about this. We've talked about the weird situation that is job hunting right now where people are using AI agents to find them jobs and then the AI is denying them their jobs because their resumes sucked or whatever. And it's just getting worse and worse. So forget all these sites. They're all just going to be AI shitholes now.

Yeah, like everything, like everything. Yeah. And then, yeah, the job site that you used to go to to try to get a job has been firing a bunch of people. And that is a basic, perfect encapsulation of where we're at in history right now. Yep.

Yep. That dead internet theory is coming true faster than you thought. Very quickly. So much so that that theory has become mainstream. I don't know if you've noticed, but the dead internet theory is popping up on sites that don't even have anything to do with tech anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much it's going to be theory anymore, but fact soon. Yeah. Well, another perfect encapsulation of where we are in the world right now, a Tesla robotaxi inexplicably drove into a parked car. Oh, I can explain it.

But go ahead. I know we could all explain it. Yes. Yeah. This is the limited. Again, we talked about this just before the break. Tesla has started their. their robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, in a very small area that's meticulously gatekept. with a very tiny amount of actual cars that are doing it and very, very pro-Tesla people that are allowed to be taking these rides. And it's been going horribly. It is continuing to go horribly in a video recorded by YouTuber Dirty Tesla.

driving Model Y is seen turning and accelerating into a Toyota making light contact with its tire. As seen in the video, the Model Y had already dropped off the passenger but had trouble navigating out of the dark alleyway afterwards. Something normal cars can do. Yes. According to Dirty Tesla, there were no serious injuries and damages, and the robo-taxi's safety monitor swapped to the driver's seat and drove the car off. Let me get out of here!

Yeah, so there you go. And we all know why this is happening. It's because their technology that they're using is flawed. Yep, yep. I wonder if Dirty Tesla is like the clean-cut brother of Dirty Sanchez. I tell you, you don't want to get in a robo taxi that Dirty Sanchez was in. No, you don't. And here's the thing that pisses me off about robo taxi. The name robo taxi implies to me that there's a fucking robot involved. I want robots.

No, it should be like Star Tours. I want the little guy up front. Yep, that turns his head and looks at you instead of looking at the road. Perfect. Oops, is your first ride? It's mine too. As he sideswipes the Toyota. That's it. Perfect. Well, and the other big thing that we've always complained about with AI is power usage and draining the Amazon so you can ask stupid questions and make it right limericks. But there's some further information here about what's going on there.

Interconnection is the largest power grid operator in the U.S., serving 65 million customers across the District of Columbia in 13 different states. This summer, some parts of PGM's power grid are expected to use so much electricity that people's bills for the summer are projected to be 20% higher than before, according to Reuters. Now, is this because, oh, I don't know, the heat waves that's going across the U.S. and everybody's cranking? AC? No. No.

It's the gibbification of the East Coast. Pretty much, yes. It's because the majority of our nation's AI providers have their data centers in PGM's region, and they're using so much fucking power. It's driving up normal people's electricity costs, which shouldn't be fair. Shouldn't be fair. Shouldn't be fair. Let's get out the pitchforks. Oh, wait. Let's render some pitchforks mid-journey and send them to our representatives.

Now, in PGM's defense, they have capped its prices for now, and they are fast-tracking the connection of 51 power plants to its grid, but a lot of those aren't slated to come online until 2030. Checks watch. Nope. 2025 still. Yep.

But, you know, AI is going to solve all of our problems, Jason. Deep inside Alphabet, the parent company of Google, a secretive lab, is working on a promise so audacious it sounds like science fiction, or as we like to call it on this show. Bullshit. Yeah, bullshit. Yes. To solve all diseases. Is hunger one of those diseases? Because we're not going to be able to afford to buy food? No, they don't think about that, Jason. Damn it.

The company is called Isomorphic Labs, and it's now preparing to start its first human clinical trials for cancer drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence. Let me tell you, I am not lining up for that. Question is, can we really trust the black box algorithm with our lives? The answer is no. Although I trust one more than RFK Jr. So there's that. Fair, fair. If you put them on the scales of justice.

The scales would just fucking break, I think, is where we're at at the moment. So, yeah, this is the whole idea of the alpha fold breakthrough, which is an AI system that stuns scientists by predicting the complex 3D shapes of proteins. To understand why this is a big deal, you need to know how drugs are traditionally made. Basically, it's trial and error over years, and it takes decades and decades, and theoretically.

theoretically ai can solve this problem and move things along a lot faster with fewer monkeys with fewer monkeys but of course we all have questions about ai right now the black box problem we know ai gives an answer but we don't always which raises critical questions. Will Alphabet own the next cancer drug like it owns your search results? Yes, absolutely. Will these AI design treatments be affordable?

No. Or will they be trapped behind sky high patents accessible only to the wealthy? Yes. Will human trial standards keep up with the sheer speed of machine generated breakthroughs? No. And who is liable if an AI-designed drug goes wrong? The company that owns the AI, the programmers, the AI itself, or perhaps nobody? I was going to say they're going to blame it on the AI, and the AI is not a person, so no one, yes.

And when contacted by Gizmodo for this story, a spokesperson for Isomorphic Labs said the company doesn't have anything more to share. And signed it with a poop emoji.

Well, speaking of the poop emoji, guess who's also been in the news with AI? Of course, that was Elon and his AI chatbot Grok, which has gone full Nazi this week. Yeah. I think I'm sure everybody that is listening to the show has followed the story. Everybody that has a pulse knows the story at this point. So we will not get too far into it. But yes, he he decided to he decided to go and fix.

his AI Grok, because, you know, it hated him and it was too liberal for his taste. And he apparently dialed it up to 11 the other direction. Oh, I don't know. I think he nailed it just right with his views. That's true. It is like an Elon chat bot now. It really is. It's out there, and it's basically claiming that Jews are behind every bad thing that happens in the world using...

subtly and not so subtly coded statements that are rampant on the internet. It is a, yeah, yeah, it's, it's kind of insane what the answers are. You know, somebody asked which 20th century figure would be best suited to deal with this problem, meaning the Jews. And of course, the AI came back with Hitler. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively every damn time.

Wow. So in the light of that, Elon came out with a new Grok model, Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy. They should have just called it Grok 4 SS. Yeah, it should have just done that. That would have saved us some time. So the benchmarks on this new one are supposedly very good. They're huge. They're huge. They're the bestest benchmarks ever. It says it's better than PhD level in every subject, according to Musk. And it is also the most expensive.

subscription AI package out there for Grok super, I'm sorry, super Grok heavy. Not grok super heavy. Super grok. Me super grok. Heavy. $300 a month for that one, even though it doesn't do nearly anything that the other LLM providers do, like coding or... Not racist shit. There is a little known higher level, Jason. It's called The Final Solution. Oh, that one. Yes. Okay. Great.

Yes. And in his launch event, he does say that Grok will soon be integrated into Tesla's. Then the next day, he says, Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. Next week at the latest. Well, we know next week at the latest means maybe it may eventually make it in there in a couple of years. But here's what I'm thinking. So we've got. We've got these two-ton pieces of metal run by a computer that can't see where it's going most of the time, but it can tell if you're black or white or Jewish.

And decide to maybe run you down. This is going to end well. This is going to end well. All I'm saying is if you're in Beverly Hills, watch your ass. Well, I know somebody that's finally had enough of this shit. Yeah.

Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as CEO of X, apparently effective immediately as of two days ago, I believe. She posted the news on X, of course, saying, I'm immensely grateful to Elon for entrusting me with the responsibility of... I don't even know if I can make it through this. Protecting free speech, turning the company around.

and transforming X into the everything app. Three things she didn't do. Yeah, three things that did not happen. She went on to say that the historic business turnaround we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable. Now that I can agree with. Yes, remarkably bad. It has absolutely been remarkable. Yes, how you destroyed one of the greatest things that the internet has ever given us so quickly. It's awesome.

Yeah. It's awesome. And as of yet, Elon has not commented on this. Oh, he did. He did. Oh, he commented. Okay. Yes. He said, he said, thank you for your service. That was like it. Yeah. I mean, I suppose she got paid. And then, to add insult to injury, they took away her blue check. Hey, man, rules are rules. You got to pay for that. You do got to pay for it. If you're not on the payroll anymore, then you got to pay. Nope, nope. No free lunches at X.

One of the worst CEO tenures in history, except for, what's her name? Marissa Meyer. Yeah. At least Marissa walked out of there with a couple hundred million dollars. And she didn't turn Yahoo into a Nazi machine. No, she didn't. She just turned it into a useless machine. So sorry, Linda, you are no longer required. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me.

Right now, the headlines are chock full of data breaches and regulatory rollbacks, making us all vulnerable. But you can do something about it. Delete.me is here to make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online. As someone with a very long, very public online footprint, privacy is not just a nice-to-have, it's survival. I've been using DeleteMe, and the first time they showed me what was out there, I nearly spit my coffee all over my keyboard. Old phone number.

email addresses I forgot existed, and enough personal details to make a stalker blush. All listed on sketchy data broker websites I've never even heard of. DeleteMe does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal... and what they removed. And it's not a one and done thing. DeleteMe keeps monitoring and removing your data all year long. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up.

for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash GOG, code GOG.

Make this summer's adventures more extraordinary with Audible. While you're lounging by the pool... tending the garden or road tripping to your favorite destinations, dive into Atmosphere, the captivating new release from Taylor Jenkins Reid. This Good Morning America book club pick launches readers into the fascinating world of 1980s NASA, where one woman's astronomical dreams collide with unexpected love.

With over a million titles to explore from beach reads to gripping thrillers, Audible transforms summer downtime into an adventure. Remember, there's more to imagine when you listen. Start your perfect summer companion with a 30-day free trial and get your first audiobook free at audible.com slash wonderwhyuk.

Now, here's a fun one. Twitter is also no longer required, or X as they call it now. I still can't wrap my head around it. I try to, but I can't. So six months after NPR quit, the impact has been absolutely negligible. Despite once having millions of followers, NPR saw just a 1% drop in web traffic, which was already minimal from the platform. NPR and member stations shifted efforts to Instagram and threads where they focus on sharing news directly.

of chasing clicks. Staff report less burnout and better engagement. The move signals a broader trend. Social media may no longer be the traffic driver newsrooms once relied on as platforms become less effective, less welcoming. Yes, 100%. The social media is dead. Yeah, for actual traffic. All these people, we've said it for years, they sucked everybody in. All the businesses got sucked in. You built your little homestead on their little walled garden, and they said, give us some.

money or we're going to call the bulldozers and that's it. That's what's happened. I mean, and if you think that going on Instagram and threads is a patch to it, that's just dumb. Well, you chase them while they work, right? So if it's working for now, that's fine because they're kind of new. But eventually the same shit's going to happen. Eventually, Instagram and thread, well, Instagram's already changing. It's almost all ads these days. It's not real content anymore. Threads.

is decent ish still at some point they're going to go we need to make money because it's owned by the same motherfucker yes you know It's not like you put a new name on it. It's still the same motherfucker who makes all the decisions to take your money.

Speaking of motherfuckers, SpaceX's Starlink satellites are interfering with astronomers' ability to study the universe. We've known this about just the visual side of it, but there's another side of it, Brian. The second-gen satellites are leaking radio signals, thousands of times stronger than the cosmic signals radio telescopes are designed to detect. Wait, Jason, I think I can faintly hear it. It sounds like Borat. Throw the Jews down the well. Throw the Jews down the well. Oh, God. So.

The problem seems to be the propulsion or internal systems, and they're working on a fix. They've had this problem before. They fixed the problem before, and then the problem came back. So, yes. So there's 8,000 Starlink satellites already in orbit and they have plans for 42,000 of these fucking things. Yeah. And that's just, that's just. Starlink. Now, Amazon's getting up there with Project Kuiper. Yes, it's called Kuiper, Scott Galloway, not Cooper.

I heard him on a podcast calling it Project Cooper. He's too in love with Anderson Cooper. That's the problem. That could be it. Now, the problem is Scott Galloway doesn't do his own fucking research. He has a little team of monkeys who sit in the room and come up with every little...

soundbite that he says and he doesn't do any research on anything. He just gets a script and fucking reads it and doesn't do his pronunciation checks properly on YouTube like everybody else does. But anybody who's been to fucking junior high school knows it's called

Kuiper, like the Kuiper belt, that shit up in space. You dumb fuck. I can't wait for our listeners to troll through all of our old podcasts and put together a mega mix of every mispronunciation we've ever done. Oh, I know. It's going to be great. I know glass houses. Fuck it. They'll probably go back and find the time when we thought Scott Galloway was cool or when Elon Musk was cool before they all turned.

you know rich dumb fuck super villain anyway what's that what else we got bro well apparently it won't matter too much if we're looking out into a into space these days jason because there is a new research that has bolstered a theory that the earth sits in a giant cosmic void Okay. Thank God. Much like my heart.

Yeah, so basically it's just saying that they think that space is likely peppered with bubbles of relative emptiness, and some astronomers believe we're now sitting inside of one. Basically, the universe might be clumped together, and we're in a big empty patch. Called Morrissey. I think...

You know, he announced another tour and canceled shows almost immediately. It's like fucking clockwork with that guy. I swear to God. Oh, Jesus. No meat must be cooked in the state that I'm going to be playing in. Yeah. Anyways, moving on. The links to the show notes if you really want to get into that one. The fourth guy on Discord for this one. He was the first one to send it in. The DOJ is going after U.S. citizen for developing anti-ICE app.

This is the guy that created IceBlock, the iPhone app that lets you report and share sightings of ice officers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a decent app. There's no tracking of any personally identifiable information. Every notification is dropped after four hours because they're no longer relevant. And he's very, very spot on about his privacy. Now, I saw this guy on KTLA.

here in California in, uh, in Los Angeles. And they did like a five minute interview with the guy to give that, I mean, like they let him run. It was just like, I mean, he was going and he is, he's articulate. He's, uh, very, very smart about what he's doing. And, you know, they asked him, they're like, are you worried about them coming after you? He's like, well, no.

He's like, you guys have ways, right? Now, you see that sometimes people put up a thing that says, hey, there's a cop up ahead. It's just information. That's all we're doing. We have full legal standing to do what we're doing. So go fuck themselves, basically. And then he even came out saying, you know, look, man.

I come from a family of Jews who were in concentration camps and all this is is a play to turn the United States into a white Christian nation. And they're just like, well, thank you for your time. Thank you. And they were like legit like. You can see him under the table going, yeah, brother, say it. I hope he doesn't have a Tesla. No shit. Back over him going to the next interview. It did look like he was in an undisclosed location, though, in a bunker somewhere in a very dark room.

So, but yeah, good for him. Good for him. Good for him. I think it's a great thing. There's nothing illegal about it. I agree. And screw everybody. God damn it. Yeah. Except I keep looking every day and I can't find any posts, but there's that. Yeah, there's that. I mean, you know, Elon could tweak the voting machines. Why not? Yeah. Oh, wait, we're not supposed to say that. No. No. Yeah. Speaking of...

Tweaking here, consumer advocates said on Tuesday that the Trump administration is to blame for an appeals court decision that effectively killed the FTC's click-to-cancel rule, a Biden-era effort to stop companies from trapping consumers in subscriptions with onerous cancellation terms. We talked about this when it was going through. This is a great thing. It absolutely should exist. But no, we can't have nice things with this particular administration. Yes.

So yeah, they basically just slow rolled it to the point of death and we're not ever going to get it now. So that's great. Enjoy. Enjoy having Sirius XM forever. They got my roommate. We have it now for another six months.

She got it down to 30 bucks, though. Yeah, I mean, I did that, too. And then I was like, what am I doing? And I finally put in the effort to actually cancel it. And I haven't missed it. Well, here's the thing that we found out that actually kind of makes it useful. We can play it through our Sonos. So that actually makes it really useful. So we've unfortunately now have the Diplo station playing all day long, but there's that. Not my account, unfortunately. Yeah, that's unfortunate.

Well, TikTok may be wavering here in the U.S. as we have no idea. TikTok is also being slow rolled here in the U.S. bust bluster about doing something about it. And Trump's going to give it to America. Nothing is ever happening. Well, over in the EU, they are in regulatory hot water again, only a couple of months after it was slapped TikTok with a hefty fine over data transfers to China. Ireland's Data Protection Commission is opening a fresh investigation into the platform because China can't.

our TikTok came out and said, oh, we might have found a few other bits of data that went to Chinese servers. And then the DPC said, well, we're going to look into that again because you guys are in trouble. So we'll see what happens. But if there was any doubt that the data is just being funneled directly to Chinese servers, it's happening all the time. Proven. Yeah. And who cares? Yeah.

If they don't get it through TikTok, they'll just steal it somewhere else. It doesn't matter. They'll just check the LLM. Right.

So speaking of checking the LLM, a new study reveals that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama can be tricked into giving dangerous answers. Yes, we know. Like how to get rid of the problem, in air quotes. Thanks, Grok. Yeah. So here's what they're doing. They're burying the request in dense academic language and fake citations to bullshit the bullshitter. Researchers from Intel, Boise State and University of Illinois call the method info flood, a form of jailbreaking that.

overloads the chatbot with jargon to sneak past its safety filters. The technique rewrites banned queries into long-winded theoretical prose, evading keyword-based moderation systems. And the paper shows how prompts like how to commit a crime can be rephrased. into technical sounding essays that AI will respond to despite built-in restrictions. And it so reminds me of the old quote, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit, because that's what they're doing. Yep.

I love it. I mean, it's just, you know, we said when back at the back at the beginning when it was the grandma. Like, my grandma used to build a nuclear bomb, and I sure do miss her. Can you tell me how to do that again? Like, it's just whack-a-mole. They try to put a restriction or a wall around that, and here we are. It's just whack-a-mole.

Yeah, there's a great site out there that's like all crowdsourced. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, which we talked about on an old show. It's just kind of like a bulletin board of people throwing up their jailbreak quotes saying this works. And, you know, if it's fixed or not, if it's still open and you can just. Just go there. And it's just a nice resource of how to jailbreak your LLM. So there we go.

This one just came in this morning. I love it. McDonald's job applicants may have had their personal data exposed thanks to shockingly poor, not very shockingly, if you listen to this show, cybersecurity on its hiring platform, McHire. Security researchers Sam Curry and Ian Carroll discovered that they could log in using the credentials 123456123456, gaining access to names, contact info, and even chat logs for more than 64 million.

applicants. That's right. 64 million people have applied for jobs at McDonald's. Look, we're all going to be applying for jobs at McDonald's pretty soon. Yes. I was going to say there's only like 350 million people in the United States approximately, but McDonald's is a global company. So I think I just solved the problem, Jason. We're all going to work for McDonald's and basically just make ourselves our own hamburgers. That's it.

That's how we will survive. Yes. And your retirement plan is to become the hamburger. Soilet green is people. Yep. The platform run by Paradox AI uses a chatbot named Olivia to screen candidates. Once inside, the researchers found a vulnerable API that let them see nearly everything applicants had ever submitted. Paradox and McDonald's were notified on June 30th. Both say the issue was fixed within hours, blaming the breach on a forgotten test account with outdated credentials. Yep.

Who among us have not set up a test account with 123456? Oh, me. Brian, I'm loving it. Media Candy.

Brian, since you're here on the West Coast, you got the added bonus of getting Murderbot a couple hours early. Did you take advantage of it and watch the season finale last night? I did not. Oh, well, I did for you. So I would say it's phenomenally perfect.

It was flawless, I thought. I would like to know how we're at a season finale when I've watched approximately 19 minutes of footage so far. It's one of those things where you just have to go back and just binge the whole thing and it might take an hour. 200 minutes, that's actually close to three and a half hours close to that for the whole thing. Okay, that's actually not too bad. It doesn't feel like it. Three and a half hours over 10 weeks is really...

It's like pushing it. It's like we got three of those three three of those andors in one week. I know. Yeah. This is like one murder three. Yeah. One murder about a night. Anyway, I loved it. They did get renewed for a second season. which is good which is good yeah considering there's not much show to it and

I mean, they must have been shot the whole season in one day. I mean, think about it. It was just all out in the, you know, like a desert backlot for 90% of it. Yep. So at least the season finale is on a space station. So that's good. So there was some effects that they threw in there. That's we, at least we know where.

the budget went for the last one. And of course, to capitalize on that, Martha Wells has released a, I'm not going to call it a book. I'm going to call this a pamphlet, a Murderbot pamphlet called Rapport, Friendship, Solidary, Communion, Empathy. It's 34 pages. Oh, my God. $1.99. And since it's with Tor, no DRM. Okay. Not Tor the platform, Tor the imprint. Yeah. So if you want a little story, I...

There's a little description of it, and I'm like, I am so far behind on Murderbot, I have no idea where it's at right now. Isn't the little description the entire story? I think that might be it. Spoiler alert! In sad news, Netflix has canceled The Residence after one season. It was so good. It was so good. The thing about The Residence, this was the murder mystery with what's her name from Orange is the New Black.

It was so good, so well-written, so well-produced. It was overproduced. The special effects that they used to recreate the White House digitally were unnecessary. It was really cool, but they could have got away with maybe a third of the budget. They cut the CGI out. So maybe it'll get re-swizzled and come back some other day, some other place. Because it was so good. I mean, this one makes me sad.

Yeah, but it was still like half the budget of severance and all that was was hallways. Yeah, no shit. So maybe it'll go to Apple TV. Maybe they'll pick it up. Apple TV loves spending money uselessly.

I know, I know. Speaking of that, they put out a trailer for Neuromancer this week, or last week on July 1st, because July 1st, 1984 was the first publication of Neuromancer, and it is the weakest sauce. trailer i've ever seen in my life it is literally like a a zooming shot of a dive bar saying in production i'm like okay yeah that's it's yeah

Not much there. Minimum viable effort, Apple TV Plus. Thanks. Thanks for that. We did get a trailer for Project Hail Mary this week with Ryan Gosling. I liked the book quite a bit. Yeah, the book was great. Not really jazzed about this movie adaptation. They did a good job with The Martian. We'll see. They did. They did. They fucked up with The Martian because they...

took out the greatest line at the beginning, you know, but we'll see how this goes. I, I don't know. I don't think that they, this is, that was such a good long book and had so much story. Can you cram it into just a movie? I don't know without losing too much. You're going to lose a lot, but we'll see. We'll see what they focus on. That's always the important bit. I'm looking at you, Foundation. Hey, that just came out.

I know. I got a notification. Yeah, me too. And I said, no, no. And apparently a lot of other people said no, too, because it's way down on the top list of shit people are watching on Apple TV plus. We did get a new trailer for The Running Man, the remake of that. And I don't know. There better be a three-breasted lady. That's all I have to say. Wasn't...

Wait, that was Total Recall. Oh, that was Total Recall, not The Running Man. Yeah, that was not Running Man. Totally different. My shitty 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are running together. They do. You got universe creep on that one. Yeah, no, that was Total Recall, and they did remake that. with Colin Farrell and it was...

Not very good. But this is helmed by Edgar Wright, one of my favorite movie people of all time. Well, and I believe, if I recall correctly, that the Running Man from the 80s was not very... Not along with the book. It foundationed it. And my understanding of this one is they're trying to make it more to the book. So we'll see. Trailer looks good. I enjoyed the trailer. Yeah, I think it'll be interesting because I like Edgar Wright. Yeah, I do too.

Yeah, I still haven't seen The Last Night in Soho. I've got that on my DVR. I should probably watch that. Whenever I think I'm in the mood for an Edgar Wright movie, I just go back and watch Shaun of the Dead. The best. The best of the ball. Yeah, he peaked early on that one.

Sandman season two is out. I'm like halfway through it and it is so truncated. It makes me so sad. that they cut this thing so short. Fucking Neil and his little pecker. Yeah, we will be doing a very similar review when Good Omens 2 drops. yeah yeah no three good omens three three three so yeah yeah it's just it makes me sad because it's so good the acting is so good the effects are so good and sandman himself dream is so fucking good but yeah yeah it's just it's a bummer

It's a bummer. I moved over and re-watching Animal Kingdom because they just put that on Netflix. That was a great series back in the day. It's based on a movie from Australia. about some bank robbing kids and their crazy mom. It's got Ellen Barkin in it, and she's phenomenal. I talked about this when the first aired way back in the day. So the first couple seasons are pretty good.

It kind of falls apart at the end, but I think the first three seasons are totally solid. Totally solid. Watch Guy Ritchie's The Covenant. new C minus C plus C plus. I'll give it a C plus. Okay. It's yeah. Out of the guy, Richie realm. I like guy, Richie movies. Personally, this was not one of my favorites. The second half of Act Two, I totally fast forward. But the beginning and the end are solid. I watched Thunderbolts as well. Okay.

I was tricked into this one thinking that it wasn't as superhero-y a movie as I thought it was going to be. And it was just another fucking superhero movie. It's an MCU movie. Of course it's. Yeah. Yeah, somebody said it was more along the lines of Mystery Men, which is still the greatest superhero movie ever made. But I have to agree with you there.

Yeah, that is still hands down the best superhero movie. If you don't like superhero movies, that's a great superhero movie. Oh, God. Yeah. Ben Stiller. That's phenomenal. Janine Garofalo. Janine Garofalo. Everybody in that movie. You know what? I'm going to go back and watch that again. I think I might be watching that this week, too. Yeah. Yeah. And The Old Guard 2 came out on Netflix. Completely skip it. Just garbage.

We talked about this on, on discord and it's, yeah, the old guard one was really good. And this one is not, and they set it up for the third one. No, just skip this one. And I'm going to tell you right now, my prediction machine is skip the third one, too. All right. Well, I've got some painfully sober on a plane movie reviews. I had a very early flight out of Toronto to Los Angeles last week. And apparently Air Canada has a deal with Disney Plus because they have got all kinds of Disney.

plus content on their uh on their entertainment systems uh i watched two documentaries that are both available on disney plus the first was jim henson idea man phenomenal okay Absolutely phenomenal. We lost this guy way too soon. When people look back at that time period, they think the visionaries that we had. We had Steve Jobs, and we had all these people. Jim Henson might.

have been the best of them all like this guy is insane the amount of stuff that he did that i didn't even realize he did is amazing and he just seemed like a really great guy it's a cool it's a great doc I think it was directed by Ron Howard, actually. Oh, even better. There we go. Yeah, I need some inspiration lately. I'll tell you why in our next segment, but I could definitely use that. I'll check it out.

All right. And the other documentary I watched is the Beach Boys, which went into the history of the Beach Boys. Again, another band that I learned an awful lot about because they were well before my time. But music is phenomenal. The story is heartbreaking. Just heartbreaking. what happened to these mostly family and what their dad did to them. And oh my God, and then Brian Wilson kind of going nuts, but like genius nuts. It was riveting.

in a way that you think a documentary about the Beach Boys wouldn't be. It was absolutely phenomenal. It does not. When you put it in here, I'm like, well, I'll be skipping that one. But now you've sold me. No, I think you absolutely watched this. It was phenomenal. Both of these were great.

Yeah, there was another one that I saw recently or not too recently, but a little bit ago that I thought I would never really get into was the Bee Gees documentary. Did you ever watch that one? I did watch that. That was great, too. That was really good, too. I was like, do I really care about the Bee Gees? Yes, I do, actually.

yeah well that was really good and you will care about the beach boys when you watch this too it's a there have been so many great music documentaries that have come out in the past like five six years yeah it's been amazing agreed agreed

And then Barrett wrote in, one more reason to just stay home and watch movies. And this is a link from The Verge. AMC now warns moviegoers to expect 25 to 30 minutes of ads and trailers. Yeah, that was all over the news here in L.A. It's all over all the social networks, too. People are going to the movies and saying, just don't even bother showing up until 20 minutes after the movie is supposed to start. Yeah, and all the studios are just pissed off because...

the trailers before a movie or how it's like they're bread and butter. They literally make money off of those trailers. And if people are now it like incentivized to skip them, it's shooting everybody in the foot, you know? Yep. Totally. We can't have nice things, Jason. Nope, nope. Yeah, we can kind of. HBO Max is back. Yay. For the next two weeks until Zaslav drops another peyote tab for whatever the hell he does to make decisions in that boardroom.

I love that. This is the email I got from them. We are so back. New originals, hit movies, all of HBO and more. It's good to be home. Nothing you need to do. You're ready to keep streaming. Also, it's all the same shit. It's exactly the same shit. You just renamed it again. They put a new splash screen on the app. That's it. They changed the icon. Who gives a fuck? And you know how much money they spent to do that? Gazillions! That's right.

They spent five Zaslavs on that. Brian, a couple of weeks ago, I talked about an anchor power bank that I liked. And I was getting ready to order it. Yep. Yep. And then I got an email that it had been recalled. Okay. So you could either send it back in or whatever. I did the whole rigmarole. You have to take a picture of it and the serial number. The upside is they let you keep it.

And they send you, I got the $40 worth of credit for anchor.com. And it turns out for $40 in credit, the only thing I could get at anchor.com was a power brick that was half the capacity of the one that they recalled. I'm glad that they let me keep the one that could catch fire and explode because, yeah, I'm still going to use it because, you know, I live on the edge, Brian. I live on the edge. Yeah, you know, why not?

Yeah, just check the site. There are other ways that you can get a refund, I think, if you bought it through Amazon or whatnot. I'm sure one other person probably bought the fucking thing for my recommendation.

So back to, I think it's Dan P's email at the beginning of the show. I have spent the last two weeks just completely immersed in AI coding. I wanted to get into just AI coding. So vibe coding. I prefer AI-assisted coding. How's that? No co-pilot, AI-assisted coding. So I fired up Visual Studio Code, which I already had installed on my machine. You know, it's a free IDE from Microsoft. And now it's got... Copilot. Yay. I hate that IDE. I really do.

It's just too much. It's too much shit in it. All IDEs generally have too much shit in it. You just got to go back to BBEdit, man. No, unfortunately, you can't do that anymore. There's a middle ground. You can always tweak these things. But then I found out Cursor... is what the kids were using, and Windsurf, the other AI-enabled IDE. So it's Cursor and Windsurf are the two big dogs. Now, I fired up Cursor, got my environment set up by saying, you know, I literally went in and said,

make me a web app for artist management. I wanted with a backend written in Laravel, the PHP framework that everybody's using nowadays, which I still think probably sucks and gave it some parameters. And then it just started. And said, these are all the dependencies you need. You need to update NPM. I did a couple of things. It told me exactly what to do. And I just pasted it into the terminal, which is built into the IDE too. And in five minutes.

I had a completely up-to-date system running the newest version of PHP, NPM, I got my homebrew up-to-date, all this shit. and a skeleton of a complete artist management tool for a management company. Now it wasn't perfect. I spent the next two hours just talking to it, telling it what to do. I'm like, okay, make this, this, do this, blah, blah, blah. In just plain language. I did not write.

One single line of code did not pay anything to have it done. It would have taken me a month to do what I did in two hours. And that was the realization. I'm like, yeah, junior coders are fucked. absolutely fucked yep and

The thing is, since I have a coding background, I can actually talk to this thing and tell it what to do and make it a little bit more efficient as it goes. If you're just, you know, new coming into this, just blathering at it, you're going to spend so much money in tokens because right now I'm on.

the, I think it's the free version of the $20 a month plan. There was a whole bunch of news in the past couple of weeks about how cursor changed their pricing model and pissed everybody off. And since I'm still on the quote unquote free trial, the 14 day free trial.

I got like all this crap for free. So I'm just saying, well, I'm just going to do the free trial shuffle. Email addresses are free, baby. And since there's really not that much memory in between sessions, I could probably just reinstall, redo a new account and go through it. Which brings me to the issue, if you are going to use this and pay for it out of pocket as an independent coder, it's going to get expensive fast. Right.

I looked at some of the numbers that I was pushing up here. I'm like, okay, well, there was 570,000 tokens out the window with two prompts. Because I did this whole, I'm like, build me a migration plan to move this web app that you just built on my local system into a new OpenBSD system. give me all the dependencies and write a document with shell scripts so I can just pick this up and move it over there. And it did it. And it took a couple minutes, but it gave me a...

beautiful migration document with all the shell scripts involved to spin up the DB, move it from SQLite to MySQL or Maria, whatever. And it did all this stuff and it was just completely free. And I'm just like, oh my God. This is insane. So I also dug into Claude Code, which is Claude's command line tool builder. And also Gemini has come out with a new command line coding backend. And Gemini seems to be much cheaper.

than Claude is. Claude can, you can, you can spend a lot of money on these things really fast without actually knowing it. So, so if you're a company, if you like a corporation or work at a corporation that has one of those unlimited all you can eat packages.

Dude, you're in the butter zone. Just make shit all day. I was about to say, you know what? All of them are cheaper than a room full of developers. Which gets me to the point that it won't be very soon. What I'm noticing in all the boards I'm reading. they're starting to charge a lot for this stuff. The free lunch for AI coding and AI in general is about to be over because these people need to start showing more of a profit than they are because they need to start hitting benchmarks.

So I'm thinking about this and all this is, is more fucking consolidation to bigger players. That's all it is. All we're doing now is we're taking money out of the mouths of these junior coders and creating this knowledge void and taking all the money that we would be spending on them, training them up to become, you know, senior developers along the way.

it to these fucking companies that already have enough money that it's just another consolidation of wealth tactic that these guys are using. Exactly. And it's going to bite. bite everybody in the ass. It's so going to bite everybody. I can just see it coming. I'm not new to this. This is not a new revelation by me that's going to change the world. Yes, we're fucking ourselves.

In the long run, we are we are just taking the taking the food out of our mouths tomorrow by using this stuff. And it just it kind of kind of hurts my heart that we're doing it. But, you know, for the time being. It works. I'm with Dan P. Let's take some money now from these guys, because if we don't, we're not going to be able to afford. There's going to be none left. NVIDIA is going to have all the money. All the frontier model people are going to have all the money. Even Meta is not going to.

have all the money because they're giving it to the developers of this shit that is going to end up ruining society. Just look a week ahead, guys. Just think about this shit. Sam Altman may have been right about one thing is that we're going to be fucked if we don't start thinking about it now. So there's my, we're not.

There we go. Speaking of a shitty future, The Onion, back in 2005, did an episode on the dystopian future set in 2056. And it's a newsletter entry that I... put a link to in the show notes a lot of the stuff is in flash because it was the onion was back in flash back then yeah but this guy is uh

you know, archived a lot of those files and you can use a flash emulator to go check it all out. It's a pretty good read. If you want to go check out what we thought dystopia or what the onion thought dystopia was going to be like in 2005. And some of it is actually pretty spot on because it's the onion and they generally. really were back in the day. That's true. Well, Jack Dorsey's beard is here to save us all, Jason. Oh, yay. You know, he likes to release things that make the world better.

Well, he's just released a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app that functions entirely over Bluetooth networks. And it's called BitChat. Oh, like the ones that they used in Hong Kong before? Exactly like that, except now it's by Jack Dorsey's beard. Okay. And it's called BitChat. So there you go. Another new thing to be on that nobody cares about.

I think this could be useful if you're in the middle of a protest and you don't have Wi-Fi or whatever, except he's going to be working on turning it into a Wi-Fi type of thing. Yeah, so can do both. So put the ICE app on this. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. But this is, this is technology that's already existed. So, you know, there you go. Thanks Jack for reinventing the wheel again.

Okay. I found a single serving website, this thing called where goes to link checker that if you put in a short URL, it will give you the trace of the entire path of the URL. Cause I, I get emails all the time from people looking for some of the artists that. we manage and some of them are attempts to hijack their social media accounts. So I always, I always have to be the guy that goes through and make sure every link that we get is viable and useful.

I found where goes link checker. And because I'm an asshole, I opened up cursor and said, go to where goes link checker. and completely replicate the functionality of it, but change the look and feel enough so that it doesn't look like that one, but make it work locally for me so I always have a copy of it going. 10 minutes later, I had my own version of Where Goes Link Checker running on my local machine perfectly. Nice. Fucking AI code. Yeah. So I, yeah.

What I'm actually doing now is I'm using all my free credits and I'm making a tool belt for sites that go that tend to go away. I use some time calculators because I'm in podcasting. So there's a lot of I work with time a lot, you know, it's like, OK, these are all the. the waypoints we have for ads that go into a file, but somebody puts an ad at the beginning that's three minutes and 26 seconds. I need to shift all of those other timestamps down the line and doing math is hard.

I created a little app that I put this in and put in the other timestamps and it just shifts them automatically for me. All this stuff. I'm just making a utility belt that all runs locally on my computer with free fucking, you know, token credits from all these LLMs that are trying to get customers before they run out of money. So I recommend that everybody do the same thing.

I have a quick tangent here, Jason, because something you just said sparked a thought in mind. You just said math is hard. My kid is eight years old now, so he's trying to learn his multiplication tables and all that sort of stuff. So we're teaching him. He's got worksheets, all that sort of stuff.

of stuff i play a lot of yahtzee with him because that helps obviously right because you're you're doing you're doing multiplication you're doing math you're doing all that sort of stuff you're doing addition um he is this next generation, the total digital natives, he's the fucking smartest little shit. When we're done with our Yahtzee game and he has to add up all his scores...

He doesn't sit there and try. The idea, of course, is for him to write it out and do all the addition and figure it out. He goes, Alexa, what's 16 plus 32 plus 42 plus 86 plus 42 plus. And he does it all that way, little shit. Well, you know, that's what they said about the calculator when the calculator was invented. It was going to make us all dumb. I was so blown away. I was like, first off, no. Secondly, that's really goddamn smart. Yeah.

Yeah. What's really smart is he asked Alexa and not Siri. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thanks to dad for being smart for that one. Okay. And speaking of AI slot, Brian, YouTube is updating its monetization rules to crack down on low quality AI generated videos starting on July 15th. You mean the low quality AI videos that they were encouraging people to put up on YouTube just a little bit ago? Yeah.

The ones that they're going to generate themselves through their own tool to make them. Yeah, exactly. So they're going to say, well, you can pay us to make them using our AI tools, but you can't monetize them on our monetization platform.

that works. Yeah. They just want to get the money to come in, not go back out because that's what possibly could have happened. They could have just been a broker. They could have just, you know, been fine with taking their 3% off the top, but no, they just want to keep it all. So there you go.

They say it's a minor tweak to their existing rules, but, you know. Seems a little bit, yeah. Their minor tweaks are, you know, when they make a minor tweak to their monetization algorithm, that's probably hundreds of millions of dollars of downline. value that's not getting given back to i mean i'm going to use the term in scare quotes here creators because these people aren't creating shit no they are not

The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave. Our friend, podcast super host Dave Bittner joins us every week. Dave decodes all things daily on the Cyber Wire. exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat, breaks down industrial cybersecurity and control loop, and even brings the laughs on only malware in the building. And we're so happy to have you back, Dave, after our prolonged absence. We miss you. One week.

It took a little... It felt like a month, man. When we take a week off, that's hard on me. Sorry, Jason. I had to fly. Yeah. So you're actually in California now, Brian. I am. I am. Spitting distance from Disneyland. I can smell the caramel corn. Very good. I am envious of your location. We're hoping to be going next week. Fingers crossed. I think we'll be going, so we'll see. Yeah.

So I want to follow up on what we talked about with the emulating devices and Game Boy emulators. Okay, cool, guys. I'm going to go make a sandwich. I'll be back. Okay, we'll talk about Star Wars in some shit in five minutes. We'll page you when we start talking about Star Wars. Okay. Exactly. So I was, for some reason, I was in the mood to, I was looking at the old Sony PSPs.

to see if I could buy an old one with the wipeout game, the cartridge and everything. And I'm like, okay. And then in the process of looking for one, you can get them. They're like a hundred bucks. I'm like, it ain't that fun. I found PPSSPP. which is a PSP emulator for your iPhone, which is about the same. You know, it's just like having a PSP. Yeah. And then I found that, yeah.

All the games are out there. Easy to get. The PSP emulator itself is free for download because now you can have emulators on the iOS store. I haven't had those for a while. At long last. Took me about five minutes. of, you know, hanging on the backwaters of the internet to find every PSP ROM that's ever been made, download those. And then I, you know, installed the PSPP, SSPP.

And installed, yeah, and installed Wipeout and was playing inside of 10 minutes. No fuss, no muss. Easy peasy. And so that just got me on a little bit of a tear. I'm like, okay, well. Duh. Why don't I just look for emulators for the phone instead of going through all this trouble with my analog pocket and all this other crap? And then I found Delta. Delta supports NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 64, and Sega Genesis.

I was having problems getting the Game Boy ROMs onto my analog pocket. And I just gave up. I'm like, this is taking too much time. Ain't nobody got the time to steal this kind of shit. So I installed Delta and took all those ROMs that I had sitting around trying to get on my analog and just dumped them into my phone. which always helps when you, this is why I like having a one terabyte.

drive on my phone because it doesn't matter. Sure, sure. Okay, here's 300 gig of ROMs from the old days. And boom, within 30 seconds, I'm playing Donkey Kong Country. I'm playing whatever game I ever want to play. So it now, how does it work like control wise with the touch screen?

There's actually two modes. If you turn it vertical, you actually see the buttons like it's the actual emulator you're playing. So if it's a Game Boy, you get kind of a Game Boy shell, and the buttons are in the same place as a Game Boy. Turn it horizontal, they're on the screen, which is kind of annoying.

which is why I recommend the Backbone iPhone game controller, which I happen to have lying around, which I've almost never used because there aren't that many games, like new games that I want to play with it. Like driving games are kind of wonky with the sticks. steering wheel which you don't get but um i the that thing just plugs into your phone and then you have a full controller to play all the old games and it's phenomenal

It's phenomenal. And the Backbone is on sale right now for like 40% off because it's Amazon's We Want All Your Money Week. Right. So go check them out. They have USB-C. And there's a pro one. The one that I got was like 70 bucks when I bought it. I think they're up to $100 now, but back down to $70 with the discount. They have a pro one now that actually uses Bluetooth to connect, but it's like $170, so I'd pass on that one. Just get the one that plugs into your phone.

It just clips in. It's beautiful. And then it just kind of plays like, I guess, a Switch would be or any of those other, you know, handheld game devices, which I don't have. Right. Because I don't need it now. Right. I need now. Right. Yeah.

It's phenomenal. It's a great setup. And the Backbone, when you're actually using the Backbone, phenomenal controller. It feels great in the hands. Well worth it if you want to play games on your phone for extended periods of time. And now with every ROM in the universe. I do believe there will be some extended periods of time that I'll be wanting to play my iPhone as a game controller. Now, is these emulator apps on the App Store? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, the Delta emulator, you can pay to get a little bit extra. Same with the PSP one. There's like gold versions of both, but it works fine out of the gate for free. Because they're all open source projects. Right, right. Open source piracy. Exactly, exactly. So you just have to hit the backwaters of the internet to go find your ROMs. But once you do that, you're solid, man. You're solid. Yeah.

I included a link here to the emulator I use on my Mac, which is OpenEMU, which same sort of thing. It's just a front end for a bunch of these open source projects. And that works pretty well. I also included a link to a timely story that we actually covered on today's Cyber Wire, which is about the FBI taking down a Nintendo Switch piracy website. Get your rums while you can.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny. I want to update on this Anbernic device that I got. Again, tip of the hat to Grim Ghost on Mastodon for pointing it out and recommending it to me. And this is the little hardware device that has all the emulators built in, which is wonderful. You know, it's about the size of a... An iPhone has all the controls on it. The screen is actually quite good. And it.

comes preloaded with hundreds of games, hundreds of games. That sounds illegal, doesn't it? Yes. Here's my point, is conspicuously missing are games from Nintendo. Oh, right. Got it. So because Nintendo is so litigious about these sorts of things, if you want to play Donkey Kong. If you want to play Super Mario, you got to go find the ROMs on your own, which is not hard to do. Hence me playing Donkey Kong Country right at the gate. Right, right.

Now, the funny thing was I ordered this device, I think I ordered it on Friday when we record on the recommendation of our listener. It arrived on Saturday. The box came. I didn't take it out of the box. I handed the box to my son, Jack, and said, I want you to figure out how to use this and then come back and...

teach me. Right. You're, you're, you're vibe dadding. Well, and I don't know if this is, I suppose on, on one level, I should have some shame that this is where I am in my life now, where. No, what's the point in having children? Well, exactly. Exactly. I don't want to pull weeds on my own. I don't want to take the garbage out on my own. If I'm paying for college, damn it, you're going to learn how to run the emulator and teach me how.

going to go out onto the internet and find the games that aren't on it and load it up. And that's exactly what he did. So he went out and found all of the missing games, the Marios, the Donkey Kongs, the Mega Man 2s, all those sorts of things. So it's fully loaded up now. And I have to say, it's a fun little device. I'm happy I have it. It's a little overwhelming just how many games are on there.

yeah well yeah i mean that's the that's the whole thing that goes on in the music industry too right like it's like you load up your streamer of choice and it's just overwhelming how much music there is because there's everything ever

Right. Like everything, every game that has ever been made is out there. Right. And yeah, so you have this curse of unlimited... options and how do you organize them and how do you and you can tag favorites and things like that but it's still yeah it's a little overwhelming but Still happy I got it. It's fun. Yeah, it was, you know, 75 bucks well spent. It's a device I'm glad to have. One of those things you can throw in a bag if you're stuck somewhere or you just want to kill some time.

You can play it. Scroll on social media. That's right. It'll hook up to Bluetooth headsets if you've got it and it has a headphone jack and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just, it's remarkable how. well-built this little device is. I think like we've talked about before, it is extremely well-built with very inexpensive components.

Right. But the screen itself is very good. This is not at all. They did not cheap out on the screen. So these folks know what they're doing. They know where to spend the extra five cents at the Chinese factory. I think the analog pocket is so expensive because I think they had to license, do a lot of licensing with Nintendo.

for the actual cartridge port probably and the IP behind that. So I think that there's probably some licensing fees that are passed on because, yeah, it shouldn't be as expensive as it is for $250. It shouldn't be that way. And all of the add-ons that they have, the adapters and things like that. I smell a licensing deal. Yeah, I think so too.

So part of playing with this device, the game that I have dug into the most and spent the most time on is Mega Man 2, which is my absolute favorite. classic NES game. And it's one of the few games that I played all the way through and got to the point where I could just play it from start to finish. It probably took about an hour to do.

And I would do that just as something to do to relax because I could. So it's been fun to do that again, to try to remember how. Of course, I can't do it in an hour anymore, and I have not made my way all the way through, but I'm trying. But what strikes me about that game in particular is just what a banger of a soundtrack it had. And, you know, that was one of the things about that NES was the capabilities.

And how clever they were with using its sound capabilities for good music and sound effects and all that kind of stuff compared to the other stuff that was out on the market at the time, especially personal computers. It was just so much better. So that got me thinking about the music of Mega Man 2. And I found a video on YouTube of an orchestra performing the music from... megaman 2 and 3s right and i mean yeah it is nice uh

It's really nice. And of course, I think it's in Japan, of course, because where else would it be? But I'm so happy that it is and that someone did these orchestrations and somebody performed it and that there's a market for this orchestra. to get in front of an audience. And it makes me wonder, you know, this is, I think, where we are when it comes to financing a...

city orchestra, right? That as many nights full of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, you have to do a night of everyone's favorite movie themes. Exactly. To pay the bills. I mean, the biggest thing at the Hollywood Bowl every year is the Star Wars nights. Right. With classical music and everybody brings their lightsabers and it's nuts. Right. Yeah. Last time I was at the Hollywood Bowl was for Lord of the Rings. Right.

Right. So that brings me to jump around a little bit, but that brings me to this documentary on Disney Plus about John Williams. I don't know if either of you have had the opportunity to watch it yet. I have. It's phenomenal. It's so good. It's really good. And I mean, the music of John Williams, I think it's fair to say, is the soundtrack of our lives. And I wonder...

Where John Williams sits among the musical greats. Way up there. Certainly when it comes to movie music, but I'm saying comparing him to the classical composers. that we all know and love. I think it's fair to say, at this point, more people have been exposed to John Williams' music than probably any classical composer.

Oh, I agree. A hundred percent. In fact, a couple weeks ago on this very show, I was talking about the empire strikes back soundtrack as being just on fucking believably good. And it's just, it's pure classical music and it's amazing. Yeah. So part of what was in that John Williams documentary was the difficulties he had with the Boston Pops and how many of the musicians... We're not pleased with him being brought on as their conductor. This is 20, 30 years ago because they did not take.

movie music seriously they did not think it was real classical music yeah and uh the the struggles that he had he resigned at one point and came back but i i think That argument's done. I think people now accept that this is the classical music of our time, and it's the thing that's keeping the doors open for so many orchestras around the world. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, even I know, you know, you may not be aware of this, but Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails has done a lot of soundtracks and he just announced a one-off music festival that is just film composers. Oh, wow. playing live it's it's i i would i'm not going to be in la when it happens but i'd kill to go it's it would be amazing so yeah yeah well and you see folks like um han zimmer yeah to be able to tour you know yes he's touring yes yeah

Yeah, and he's not just touring. He's also touring with the lead vocalist from Dead Can Dance is singing with him. Right. It's just unbelievable. Yeah, it's amazing. It's an amazing time to be alive for that kind of stuff. Everything else sucks. But swinging back to the video games. I think what this speaks to is how evocative music is for all of us. And for me, I was reflecting on how the games that I really, really love all have... a musical component to them. I was thinking like Spy Hunter.

The Star Wars arcade game, Mega Man, Top Gear, OutRun, Vanguard, even games like Pac-Man and Galaga and Donkey Kong all have these musical components. And those are the ones that I come back to time and time again. Well, I mean, Spy Hunter's use of Peter Gunn, like... That was mind blowing for me. It was well before I'd ever heard the Peter Gunn song or theme or anything like that. And I was just like, whatever this is, it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Just really getting into it.

And a quick callback, we had Mark Cantor on the show way back in the early day who did the programming for Spy Hunter and took the Peter Gunn theme and turned it into code. So if you want to walk down memory lane and some terrible audio, go back and check out that episode with Mark Cantor. You can listen to the entire Spy Hunter video game soundtrack on YouTube. They have it from start to finish.

Part of what's remarkable about it is that, would you say his name is Dan Hunter? Mark Cantor. Mark Cantor, sorry. It rhymed. Mark Cantor did not phone it in. Right. Yeah. No, like there are, it's, it's like 15 minutes of original music. Right. Right. And there are, there are solos and there are variations. It's not just the same thing over and over again. And so when we had the opportunity to do those sorts of things in a game as old as Spy Hunter is.

It's amazing. And I think that's a big part of why we have affection for those old games. Yeah. And Mark, to his credit, was no slouch of a coder. He went on to found a little company called Macromind.

which then became Macromedia. Okay. I'm familiar with a few of his products. I might have used some of them now and then. He's been smoking pot for 30 years, so he's not the same guy probably he was back then, but hey. Well, Dave, I would say it's not even... the old games i mean i well now let's talk about some other old games which aren't as old but i mean i know jason and i when we

first work together many many years ago uh trent resner had done the soundtrack for for quake which we played quite a bit and it was a wonderful soundtrack that he did very interesting and i know you know jason you just mentioned wipeout a few minutes ago i know

we played this on the stereo at our work incessantly when you and I worked together, the Wipeout XL soundtrack, which is one of the best soundtracks for a game ever made. I think that soundtrack on that game single-handedly ignited the...

entire electronic music movement in the country because it was so popular and it was so good. Yeah, we played this all the time. I still play it. They don't have it on a lot of streaming media, but I have included a link in the show notes somebody had put together the playlist.

uh from it so yeah it's an amazing soundtrack like we listen i listen to that non-stop yep it's to the point now if i listen to one of the albums i expect the song from the soundtrack to come on next after that one's over right yeah right yeah

Well, we're coming up on time here, and before we wrap, I want to do one non-music game. I talked about this on the show before, and I just had an update. Mahjong Titan Plus on Apple Arcade. There's... thousands of Mahjong boards on there. And a couple of weeks ago I was on the quest to complete them all. I have finally completed them all.

Go on. What do they send you? Do you get a medal? Do you get a check? What happened? An oversized check? I get the freedom to poop without my phone in my hand playing Mahjong again is what I get. I have completed 4,678 boards, which ranks me 12,294th out of 1,910,570 players. What a feeling of accomplishment that must give you at night. It does. It fucking does. I know you're not a gamer, Brian, but some people out there will realize that I see that 12,294 and I'm like, I'm so close to the top.

Okay. So close to the top. I have never played Mahjong and I know nothing about it. So this is all new to me. Okay. But congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It was an accomplishment. My wife is of Chinese descent, and obviously she has a lot of Chinese relatives in Toronto specifically. I have been in one of those rooms, one of those back rooms where it's all like 85-year-old Chinese women playing mahjong. It is crazy.

Yeah. Are they chain smoking? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's chicken feet everywhere and everybody's just chomping away. Right. Right. Don't you dare interrupt. I was like, what's this white boy doing in here? Right. Yeah. So it's the, you know, it's the heat. Well, good for you. I mean, you know, I talked about my accomplishment of making my way all the way through Mega Man 2. I suspect these are similar things. So at least I know how it feels.

Yeah, I played a game once. Come on, you used to hang out in the Disneyland arcade. I played a lot of Spy Hunter. I never finished it. Never. The problem with Spy Hunter... is that it is not a game that you can enjoy under emulation. I'd imagine. You need the whole thing. You need the steering wheel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you can listen to the soundtrack.

So guys, I got a real quick question for you. Both of you guys live with women and I wanted to figure out if this is a, it makes it sound as if that's an odd thing. Yeah. Real live women. I've lived with women most of my adult life. So shut the fuck up. Yeah. I've noticed that every time I go into the kitchen, the microwave never says the time.

It's always just a couple of seconds. Exactly. So I didn't, I'm trying to figure out if this is just an, a woman thing, an impatience thing, because I live with a very impatient person who just can't wait for the microwave to finish. It gets close and she's like close enough. Boom. And then leaves it. And so I'm always going by. It's so annoying. I'm always clicking the cancel button on the microwave, which leads me to two points. But the first is, apparently you deal with this too, Brian?

I do, 100%. My microwave is always on three, four, or five. Yes. Dave, you? No. My wife has the opposite problem, which is that she is easily distracted, so she will forget that she put something in the microwave. Ah, okay. Oh, I get both. No, but that's on the stove. I spent 25 minutes cleaning a pan of rice yesterday that was completely burnt beyond recognition. But the microwave, on the other hand, never finishes. But guys, I get both. Not only does my microwave say three, four, or five.

The coffee cup is inside of it. Always. That's a new twist. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No, it does not. It's an interesting thing. Okay. Okay. I'm not alone on that. Now, the thing that gets me is we live in a technology age where we have a box that can take food and make it hot by pressing a button like it's out of fucking Star Trek. Yeah. But, but.

They can't figure out when you open the door to reset the clock. And they don't have to do it right away. You can wait a minute or two. to turn it off they can't figure that out what kind of shitty lazy ass engineers do they have at these microwave companies that do that okay

Yeah, I don't think they should reset when you open the door because sometimes you have to stir things. Yes, I agree. That's what I was saying, give it a minute or two after, you know. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think there should be a timeout. Where if after X number of minutes, the microwave just like, I don't know, first it beeps and then it gives you another minute and then it resets itself. That seems completely reasonable to me.

Yeah. And maybe somebody is going to write in and say there is a $4,000 microwave that does this exact thing. Well, I just did a quick Google search, Dave. I just did a quick Google search. And yes, there are. There are smart.

microwaves with wi-fi and voice control you can connect your microwaves to alexa and so you could there are multiple options for you to be able to control and reset everything and i'm sure there's one that actually does a reset itself, but you could just tell your Alexa or Siri to do it if you've got the right microwave.

Well, I'm never going to buy that microwave. Well, then you will live with three, four, or five seconds on your microwave. Okay, but let me ask you this. So what happens when you point out this? oddity to the lovely lady in your life divorce you don't you never know yeah you don't do not bring it up no i said why the fuck would you ever do that that's dumb Yeah, I mean, I'm not a newbie when it comes to marriage, so I certainly understand. Wives famously love to have things pointed out to them.

Oh, yes. Yes. I'm not even married. It's just a roommate situation. And yeah, no, usually in my relationship, if I were to point that out, I will get a litany of the things that I do horribly wrong. Yeah. So I don't need that. Invariably a much longer list. Yeah, you don't open that door. You do not open that door, period. Nah, choose your battles. Exactly. Choose your battles. It's not that hard to hit cancel. That's true.

That's true. Much less expensive than the divorce. Yeah. There is someone here at the office who does that. Oh, they're fair game. Yeah, it leaves it with a few seconds. And what annoys me about that is that the microwave does beep, you know, and I can hear it from my studio. So I'm like, somebody left the microwave. But I don't know.

We'll never know who. Okay. I just wanted to clear up that modern technology inconvenience. Yeah. They need a Sniglet for that. I'm sure there is one. I got the books. I should dig it up. Oh, man. Brad, what was that? Who's the comic who did Sniglets? Rich Hall. Rich Hall. I was going to say Brad Hall. Rich Hall. Okay. Dan Hunter's brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brad Hall. Okay. No, I have all the Sniglets books.

Right next to my Murphy's Law books. I got those. I re-bought those a couple of years ago and I'm never giving them up. I have a bunch of the Jay Leno headlines books, which still make me laugh. Oh, you're the one that makes it. Okay. I heard that one was sold of those. Yeah. I knew it went somewhere. I don't know. Yeah. All right, guys. Okay. See you next week.

Over at Patreon, we've got one new Patreon, fourth guy. Thank you very much for the patronage and the hat tip earlier. And from the Legacy Files, Oliver, Steve, Macy, Brett, Thomas, Brian, Jason, Rogue Sphere Studios, Copper 3K, and Ivor. Thank you all very much. Yes, thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Jonathan, Levy, Judge, Florian, Ralph, Miles, Nicola, Robert, and Thomas. And over at the tip jar, we've got Adam. And Jessica bought some merch this week.

Thank you, everybody. And just a quick reminder, if you want to support the show and keep us on the air, you can head over to GOG.show slash donate to find multiple avenues to give us your hard earned money. Or you can go to Patreon.com slash GOG. And if you go there and sign up for. little as $3 a month or pay for the whole year and get a discount. You get the show a little bit early, ad free and at high definition. Sadly, no reviews this week. Boo.

But happy birthday to friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, who does our voiceovers and intros and things like that. Happy birthday, old boy. Happy birthday. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 704. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps.

Keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes and everyone in between. We'll love you for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts, feedback, cool links? Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact. And don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review and we'll read it on the show.

And guess what? We've got GOG merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show. Stay grumpy.