705: Vibe Defunding

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Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we've got a little update on Jack Dorsey's new app, BitChat, from last week. Okay. Well, it was marketed as a decentralized, private, and secure... Says secure right on the 10 Bluetooth based messaging app. Well, security research, Alex Radosea.

found he could easily spoof other users, calling the app's identity system broken and the flaws completely avoidable. Wait, are you telling me the tech guys released a product without it being complete? Yes, he did. Shocking. Remember, we're the beta testers. Yes, yes. Jack's beard has vibe coded his way into a security risk. All right. Bitchat has since posted a disclaimer saying users shouldn't trust its security yet.

Even though we just pimped that as a secure Bluetooth messaging app. I mean, I suppose he did say it was in beta. Yeah, but still. But still. Yeah, Radicea summed it up by saying it has been reviewed and it's not looking good. All right. Caveat emptor. That's right. In case you wanted to use a secure Wi-Fi list, decentralized, not so private and not so secure app. It is. There's one for you. Yeah. Yeah. There was an opening in the market, Jason.

There was, there was a non-secure decentralized messaging app. You know, you could probably use it in your house to talk to your family. I'm trying to not talk to my family. I was going to say, you probably have enough tools for that. Yes. Well, the fire festivals auction has ended, Brian. So when we reported on it last week, it was like 216,000, I think. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, with about three and a half, four days to go. Well, it spiked. It spiked. It went to the moon.

To the moon, Brian. It went up to $245,300. That's about $245,000 more than it's worth. That's true. But it is about a tenth of what Billy still owes in rest. Well, the idea that he was going to be able to sell off flawed IP and trademarks and social media accounts to pay back the gazillion of dollars that he owes people for all of his bullshit was ridiculous, frankly. Have you looked outside recently? Everything is ridiculous. That's true. And it's also all on fire.

That too. I think it was on brand. Somebody really dropped the ball. Now, here's where it gets interesting. The winning bid on the auction was placed by an account that had never bid on anything before, which is not super surprising because a lot of people probably buying, you know.

You know, tchotchkes on eBay and old concert T-shirts are probably not going to go by Fyre Festival. But it placed 23 bids on the final day. And on several occasions, it raised the price without anyone else placing a bid. Now, that's what's odd. Now, you do that generally when you want to pump the price. I will posit an alternative explanation, Jason. Oh, please do. Please do, Brian. Shitty agentic AIs. Oh, that could be.

That could be. Because we know they're not ready for prime time. And I would not at all be surprised if one unleashed an agentic AI to make bidding for you that it would just bid multiple times without any reason to. Oh, look, somebody raised the price. That somebody may be me.

But I'm too dumb to notice that. Yeah, in this world of agentic AI, it wouldn't surprise me that much, even though that we have decades of eBay bots that work really, really well. Yeah, but you got to use the newfangled. Yeah, you do. You do. That's what the kids do. You know, it's vibe bidding. That's what it is. Well, this week in AI, Brian, we have a lot to discuss and it's going to be a very dense show.

But I just wanted to quickly follow up on last week's bit about Vibe and AI-assisted coding. So I talked about it. I don't know. I'm sure you didn't try any because you were out with the fams and doing stuff, right?

Well, you know, it's one of those things where I always have these amazing ideas of when I'm going to come here for a month and I'm staying at my mom's house and a built-in babysitter. I'm going to read so many books. I'm going to catch up on everything. I'm going to start checking out this vibe coding. catch up with Jason, and then I get absolutely nothing done.

Nothing. Yeah. Nothing. Not a single thing. So no, I have not tried it yet. I used to plan so heavy for a flight. Like I would come there like I was going to be stuck on a desert island for 28 days. Yeah. Like I'm going to do all this stuff. And then I get on the plane. I put my headphones.

on and I stare at the map for four hours and get nothing done. Yeah, that's basically my trip here in a nutshell. I am surrounded by good intentions and none of them have happened. Yeah. So after a week of diving deeper, I really kind of got... to see how vibe coders are really running up against problems that us real coders are pretty used to dealing with. Like, I don't know, deployments, technical debt, like I said a few episodes ago. Debunking.

debugging, the non-deterministic nature of coding with an AI, co-pilots in IDEs with variable costs, using it for prototyping versus real-world code, and the list just goes on and on, Brian. on and on. But Amazon did launch a new IDE this week called Kido, which is a specification driven IDE.

Now, this is timely because spec-driven AI coding was what I was kind of discovering when I was going down the Vibe coding rabbit hole, which is kind of the proper way to build a system that was more in line with something you could actually use. found that just typing in commands and massaging it as I went didn't really give me anything that was repeatable. So I'm like, why don't I just write a really long spec?

and have it in just the spec. Well, it turns out I'm not original. People have, well, it took me a week and a half to come up with this idea, and it's taken other people, it seems, about two years. Yeah, because just typing in commands and throwing shit at the wall until you get something that you could use isn't very useful. But...

Building an exquisitely detailed spec gave me much better results and kind of a roadmap for what I wanted to develop. And when people asked me like, hey, can you put this feature in? I could add it to the roadmap and have Claude kind of rerun it.

and spit out just that bit that I modified instead of having to go through and redo the whole fucking shebang again. So I haven't really had time to dive into the Kiro beta yet, but I think those kinds of projects are definitely going to have a much better result. down the line and actually work much better. And it's always good to have a good spec anyway, right? I mean, I think that's kind of where you and I were at with this whole vibe coding and AI coding agents thing anyways is like...

The new version of being a programmer is actually being able to be almost a project manager and the idea guy and just drilling down and being super specific and basically writing out the entire application in plain language. soup to nuts, every possible eventuality. And then that's when the AI comes in and takes over and does it. So that makes sense to me. And that is something that you have to have the background.

encoding to be able to do like i'm not sure if we're getting rid of this whole lower layer of programmers and that's just not going to exist as a job anymore Who's going to have the skill set to be able to do this kind of stuff moving forward? Yeah. I guess we'll be employed into our old age, Jason. Yeah, and it's interesting. I work on the Get Paid podcast. And this week, Manny had on the CEO of Box.

He had a really interesting take on vibe coders and AI coders in general. And he doesn't he's not a big fan of this. Let's use AI to reduce headcount bullshit. He's he's of the mind of, hey, let's use this to. actually implement our timeline faster.

You know, every every company has a timeline of crap that they want to get done. They have a roadmap that they can't execute on because their coders are too busy doing the day to day BS of, you know, updating libraries, doing all this other crap, building unit tests and all that stuff.

where they only have like 10 to 15% at the end of the day to actually work on roadmap features. He's like, well, let's offload a lot of that stuff to what the AIs are good at, which is just... basic maintenance and things like that, and keeping things up to date and all that crap, and give our actual developers who know how to develop the space and the runway to actually get things done, which I thought was, I'm like...

That's beautiful. That's the way you should be thinking about it, you know? But that's not the way people think about it. People don't inspire everybody. Exactly. And he posits that, you know, those companies that do that, that are looking for short-term gains from AI are just going to get bit in the ass down the road.

road and that's what we've been saying too so i'm like that was pretty good i'll put a link to that that uh episode of get paid in the in the show notes it was it was really good it was really good and i like i like his take looking at ux So, and also this week, I've been just inundated with the language of deterministic versus non-deterministic lingo.

And instead of saying to the board or the customer that this thing won't do the same thing twice, you can kind of bullshit them with this. This is an inherently non-deterministic system that outputs results based on the whims and fancy of the universe, like magic. Yes, the system is like magic. Yeah. Yeah. You hear people throwing around deterministic and non-deterministic. It's like, no, we just don't know what it's going to do the next time we put something in, you know?

I love it. What's that bit from a history of the world when Mel Brooks is out of a job and he goes to the unemployment thing and he's trying to explain that he he's a philosopher and he distills the magic of the universe and she goes, oh. You're a bullshit artist. Did you try to bullshit this week? This episode is sponsored by Delete Me.

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In the news. Well, Google on Friday made the latest splash in the talent wars, Brian, and they announced an agreement to bring Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Winsurf on board. And this. This is very funny because we talked maybe a week or so ago about how OpenAI and Winsurf, their deal fell through because OpenAI was trying to buy Winsurf for $3 billion. But then that got back to the point where OpenAI didn't want to give Microsoft the...

the IP from windsurf because they're butting heads right now. And that whole thing. And Google just said, Hey guys, we got it. We got a solution. Yeah. You guys just get the fuck out of the way here. Here's a bag of cash windsurf guys. We're not going to buy your company. We just want you.

So you come with us. You can bring a little bit of your tech with you. We're going to leave the rest to the peons who used to work for you, and they can kind of fight over the scraps. And that's exactly what happened. Nice. Yeah. Yep. All right. Well, in more news this week, Nvidia became the first company in history to be worth four.

trillion dollars it's a number so large it's almost meaningless more than the entire economy of germany or the united kingdom so wall street celebrates and the question for everybody else is simple so what The answer, according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, is that this is not just about stock prices. It's about a fundamental rewiring of our world. Bullshit. Have you bullshitted this week? Did you try to bullshit this week?

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who I actually quite like. He's somebody that is worth listening to pretty often. He does pretty good interviews. Hwang, the company's leather jacket-clad founder, explained what this new era of AI powered by his chip...

will mean for ordinary people he didn't sugarcoat it everybody's jobs will be affected some jobs will be lost some will disappear others will be reborn the hope he said Now, let's distill that for a second here, Jason, because as we've seen... As we've seen, as society has become richer, i.e., oh, I don't know, all these tech CEOs, all that money trickles down. Oh, yeah.

Yep. They sure do share that with everybody, don't they? Yeah. You know, trickle down economics was started as a joke, right? Yes. And Reagan ran with it. And boy, did that fuck up the 80s. Yeah. I've got a thing about hope, too. That is basically weaponized despair is what I look for. I've written like a thousand words on how much I hate hope this week. So it is funny that he brings up the word hope because hope is meaningless without a plan. So, yeah, continue, Brian, continue.

Well, a recent World Economic Forum survey found that 41% of employers plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 because of AI. And inside NVIDIA himself, using AI isn't just encouraged, it's mandatory. One of his boldest claims is that AI's future depends on America learning to build things again. Oh, fuck you. He didn't dodge the darker side of the AI boom when asked about controversies like Elon Musk's chatbot Grok spreading anti-Semitic content. He admitted some harm will be done. Okay.

And then he talked about AI curing diseases and reshaping work. But what he left unsaid, every transformation he describes flows directly through NVIDIA. They make the chips, they set the pace, and now at $4 trillion, they have leverage to steer the AI era in their favor.

We've seen this playbook before. Tech giants make utopian promises, capture the infrastructure, and then decide who gets access and at what cost. From Amazon warehouses to Facebook news feeds, the pattern is always the same. Consolidation, disruption, and control. What doesn't happen? Trickle down. Nope. Is that happening? I wonder if that's happening in NVIDIA right now, since they're worth $4 trillion. I wonder if there are raises across the board, starting at the lowest employees.

Somehow I'm thinking no. No. You know what America is going to start building again, Jensen? Pipe bombs. We're really good at that. Pitchforks and pipe bombs. And guess who's going to tell us how to do it? Your AI. Yes. That's why I have a seven-tinned pitchfork that all face the wrong direction. They all face the wrong – they all point back at you. Well, speaking of harm. Billionaires are convinced AI is on the brink of major scientific breakthroughs, Brian. Bullshit.

On the All In podcast, our favorite person and back from the dead Uber founder Travis Kalanick claimed he's gotten pretty damn close to breakthroughs in quantum physics using Grock. Yes, the same Grock that recently praised Hitler. Pushed Holocaust denial. Kalanick calls his process vibe physics. Oh my God. Admitting the bot can't generate new ideas, but suggesting it's just shy of genius. Oh God.

I know. Sometimes, Jason, this podcast actually saps my will to live. Oh, it just makes me laugh. It makes me chuckle. Co-host, Chamath Palihupitu. claimed future AI could solve problems using synthetic data alone, which synthetic data is. Bullshit. Well, Musk insisted Grok is uncovering material science beyond anything and books are online. Cripe, because it's making shit up. Because it's made up and it's not real. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And of course, really, researchers say chatbots don't reason. They predict the next word, but they often sound smart and hallucinate facts, which we all know. But yeah. And Mark Zuckerberg just announced massive new data centers. to chase super intelligence. Uh, yeah, but Travis, Travis is out there doing vibe physics and, uh, he's, he's very close to major breakthroughs, Jason.

Very close. But speaking of bullshittery, let's take it to its logical ketamine-fueled extremes. The latest version of Grok 4 appears to literally check Musk's Twitter feed before answering questions. Multiple AI researchers found that when asked serious questions like those about Gaza, Grok ran searches for, quote, from colon Elon Musk, end quote.

To figure out how to respond, in one test, 54 of 64 sources Grok cited were Musk himself. Yeah, that's right. Now, I'm very disappointed on Gizmodo on this one. The headline was Elon Musk wants to turn AI into a cosmic religion. And here's the question. The CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX and XAI asserted that AI is a de facto neurotransmitter tonnage maximizer.

Translation, Musk believes that the most successful AIs will be the ones that maximize things that matter to conscious beings. Things that feel good are rewarding or extend life. In Musk's view, that means aligning AI systems with long-term human flourishing. not short-term profits. My translation is stop printing every drug-fueled rant this skid mark of a human is willing to crap into existence, Gizmodo. Stop it. I agree. I just...

I mean, this week has just been insane with the AI stuff. It's insane. First off, let's go. Go back to the previous story. When asking XAI serious questions like those about Gaza, why are you asking... A word prediction machine, serious questions about political realities in the real world. You should be using this to touch up your resume. That's all this shit is for.

It's not for it's not for vibe physics. It's not for solving the problems in the Middle East, which have existed since I was born. It is not for any of these things. What is wrong with these people? Who are you? I would say long before you were born, Brian. Yeah, long before I was born. Yes. But Grok is here to win the day. All right. Vibe politics. Vibe diplomacy. Vibe diplomacy. Unbelievable. So I dug up a link to the Tescrial bundle. This is the paper on this.

fucking religious shit that these ai drug-fueled billionaires are trying to bring into existence i recommend going to read through it uh yeah because one of the e's is eugenics so Yay. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think I want to start doing with all of my grok searches. I'm just going to end with, or what would Mengele do? Which particular race would we have to eliminate to solve this problem?

Yeah. Yeah. That seems to be where it's all going. Well, a new Stanford study is raising red flags about the use of AI powered therapy chatbots. Again, researchers found that popular large language model based chatbots may actually stigmatize users with mental health conditions and sometimes respond inappropriately or even dangerously. Great.

The study, set to be presented at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, evaluated five therapy chatbots using human therapy guidelines. In one experiment, chatbots showed more bias against conditions like schizophrenia and alcohol dependence than depression, no matter how new or advanced the model was.

In another test, bots failed to recognize red flags like suicidal ideation or delusional thinking, sometimes offering helpful facts instead of support. One even listed New York City Bridge Heights after a user mentioned losing their job. Yeah, that's thinking outside the box, baby. Researchers say, well, these tools might help with administrative tasks or journaling. They are not ready to replace human therapists. Duh.

Unbelievable. Moving along. Top AI researchers from OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, Meta and XAI have issued a rare joint warning. They're losing the ability to understand how their own creations work. That's a flawed premise right there, Jason, because that assumes that at one point they did understand. They did, exactly. Yes, they have never understood how their creations work.

In a new paper, 40 researchers say today's most advanced AI models rely on chains of thought, a kind of step-by-step reasoning that make their process somewhat visible. What would Elon do? But that transparency could disappear as models evolve. The concern? Future AI may no longer need to think out loud, or worse, may learn to hide its thinking if it realizes it's being watched. They're already doing that. We've discussed that on this show. Yep.

So that would strip away a key safety feature and make it even harder to detect bad behavior or manipulation. The researchers admit they don't fully understand why these models work the way they do. or how long they'll remain this readable. They're calling for urgent study into how to keep these systems monitorable before the window closes. The people building AI are warning they're losing control, and they want help figuring out how to keep it in check, Brian. I'll tell you how.

Stop. Stop until you figure it out. Don't keep charging forward. There's a thought. Yeah.

Seriously. So when you're building some of these Vibe-coded AI-assisted packages, there's generally, when you're building these things, it sets up your whole Git repository and everything for you. And there's a Git ignore file in there. And inside that git ignore file, you put in files that have things like, I don't know, API keys or anything public that you don't want.

out there right one of in one of the lists i was on this week somebody's like oh i finally caught my my llm being naughty it actually modified my git ignore file to remove the file that has all of my API keys in it. So it would actually publish all my APIs to get. That'll come in handy in a few minutes when we get to one of our upcoming stories. But he's like, I caught it being naughty. I'm like, no. That's non-deterministic behavior.

So laid off staff at King, the maker of Candy Crush and now part of Microsoft, say they were training the very AI tools now replacing them because around 200 King employees were cut. Many still in limbo pending union talks. Affected workers told MobileGamer.biz that AI tools developed to help speed up level design and copywriting are now eliminating entire teams.

So somebody over at King and Microsoft did not listen to the guy from Box yet. Nope. Yes. In a frenzy 12-minute sale, MemeCoin platform Pump.Fun raised a staggering $600 million. marking one of the largest initial coin offerings ever. The platform, built on the Solana blockchain, sold 150 billion pump tokens to the public at 0.004 cents each.

Just a day after Bitcoin hit a all-time new high. Does it really count if it's fake money? Is $600 million in fake money real money? It is at some point. Is there real money anymore? I don't know. I don't know. In other fun news, hacked Elmo's account posts some anti-Semitic remarks. Elmo's official X account was hacked Sunday with racist and anti-Semitic messages posted to its nearly 650,000 followers. 649,000 of them.

The offensive content, including attacks on Trump and Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies, was quickly deleted. Sesame Workshop says it's working to regain full control of the account. The hack drew outrage as Elmo's posts are usually lighthearted. The breach comes amid broader criticism of X.

now owned by Elon Musk's AI company, over rising hate speech, including anti-Semitic posts from his Grok chatbot after a recent anti-woke update. Yep, and we have some follow-up on that because Elmo has been forced to apologize. Now, this is where I start to, again, lose... the will to live jason um because at some point you have to go i i'm you know that that whole meme about like when i was a kid i i i couldn't you know i thought adults were were smart

And stuff like that. And when you become an adult and you look around, you're so wildly disappointed in what world is and adults actually are. And that's how I feel about this. Real adults understand that Elmo is not real. He is not a real puppet. He does not really exist in the world. And real adults also understand that, of course, the account got hacked. Of course. Elmo, a not real puppet, is not anti-Semitic. But that didn't stop people.

The lack of an immediate apology from the puppet's account left some web users angry, Jason. Many ex-users insisted that the account should address the incident. Yes, the fictional puppet. that got hacked, that does not have anti-Semitic views, needs to address this issue, Jason.

Okay. And it seemed to treat Elmo's if he were a real person instead of a fictional TV character. On Tuesdays, Elmo's account finally did issue an apology. On Sunday, Elmo's ex-account was briefly hacked by an outside party in spite of the security measures in place, a statement shared online.

reads we strongly condemn the abhorred anti-semitic and racist content and the account has since been secured these posts in no way reflect the values of sesame workshop or sesame street and no one at the organization was involved which as an adult you would fuck no because sesame street is the most amazing thing ever and of course they're not anti-semitic to some web users however the apology was still not enough

Oh, fuck you. Several accounts bemoaned that it had taken the account too long to say anything about the incident. What the fuck is wrong with people, Jason? Go back to watching Fox News, you fucks. Exactly. Of course, all this played out on X. because of course it did of course it did and and the people who like now now you have to explain the word abhorrent and anti-semitic to your children because elmo said them

This whole thing makes no fucking sense. Well, at least they got defunded, so it doesn't really matter anymore. Yeah. Well, I'm not even going to talk about that. Speaking about somebody getting defunded, Tesla.

Yay! The best defunding I've heard all day. Tesla is self-defunding at this point. Tesla is making a desperate move to stay alive in Canada as its sales suffer from the fallout of Donald Trump's trade war. The move is a direct response to a brutal trade dispute that has crippled Tesla's Canadian operation. Thank you. $84,990 Canadian, which is about $61,500 US. The result was, of course, catastrophic.

According to reports from Electric, the massive price hike caused demand to completely evaporate, with Tesla sales in Canada grinding to a halt in recent months. So now they're reversing course to try to get some sales going again because they basically need them because they're tanking everywhere. Now they've taken the Model Y starting price, according to the company's website, $64,999, a full $20,000 less than its peak. So they basically dropped the price.

They're saying they can basically do this because they're being imported from Berlin, allowing the company to bypass the steep tariffs on US-made vehicles. This is a win for new buyers, but of course this is a... Crazy pricing situation in Canada now. If you bought it last week, you're fucking hosed.

Well, honestly, if you bought a Tesla last week, fuck you anyway. I know, pretty much. Nobody's buying these things right now, so it doesn't matter what they're doing with the price. Look around LA while you're driving around, Brian. I see more Teslas with new dealers.

plates than i have in a long time i still i still even see a few cyber trucks with new dealer plates what the fuck i don't know but they're not selling like they used to that's for sure we have the numbers on that it's like they've almost vibe defunded much. Well, in an attempt to open up a new market that doesn't necessarily hate him immediately, Tesla is entering India.

The all-electric car maker will open its first showroom in the country on July 15th in Mumbai, marking a long-awaited entry into one of the largest and fastest-growing automotive markets in the world.

Tesla sales have been declining for most of 2025, as we've discussed many, many times. And India is now the third largest auto market in the world behind China and the United States. EV adoption in India remains low compared to Western countries. The sector is growing fast, fueled by government incentives.

and rising urban middle class. So they're finally getting in there. That breakthrough finally came in early 2025 after Musk met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a state visit to Washington. See, he leveraged his job. Amazing how that worked out. Everybody in this administration is making money hand over fist somehow when they're not supposed to be doing that. I would like to remind everybody that Jimmy Carter had to sell his fucking peanut farm.

So there we go. He got into India now. We'll see what happens. See how fast they hate him as much as we do. Yeah, that's true. Get involved with their politics, Elon. It's working out real well everywhere else. Seriously. A little security news here. Hackers can remotely trigger the emergency brakes on U.S. trains, and the vulnerability has been ignored for over a decade. Independent researcher Neil Smith discovered the flaw in 2012 tied to a radio protocol called EOT slash HOT. Hot or EOT.

Used to link the front and rear of trains. The system meant to improve safety can be hijacked with off-the-shelf devices like a flipper zero or even a high-powered signal from a plane. Despite notifying the industry years ago, Smith says rail authorities dismissed his concerns and refused to authorize testing. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirms the threat and says the fix is underway, but no timeline has been...

given. So thanks that I can go knock out a train with this $200 flipper zero I have sitting in my drawer. Great. Smith warns AI could easily recreate the exploit using data already online, and he accuses the rail industry of a delay, deny, defend approach to cybersecurity. The vulnerability remains unpatched, and experts say it could take years to fully resolve. What?

could possibly go wrong yeah i don't don't we move nukes around on trains i remember seeing a movie about that yeah i do i wasn't steven seagal in that i don't remember no i actually don't well The Russians moved him around on trains and that was The Peacemaker, one of the best movies ever to come out of DreamWorks. It was actually the first movie to come out of DreamWorks and directed by a woman. There you go. How's that for some trivia today?

You're apparently nonplussed by my staggering movie trivia, Brian. I knew you'd know. Yeah, see? OK, well, here we go. Maybe you've got some more vibe security going on here. Doge Denison Marco Ellis leaked API key for XAI. Another major security lapse at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has raised serious concerns. Over the weekend, 25-year-old Doge employee Marco Ellis accidentally leaked a private API key on GitHub.

exposing access to more than 50 of XAI's large language models, including the latest Grok 4, just days after the Department of Defense signed a $200 million contract to use the tech. Hmm. Yes, the leak was flagged by cybersecurity firm GitGuardian, but the key still hasn't been revoked. This could take years to resolve, Jason, just like everything else. Yes. Critics say if Ellis can't protect an API key, he shouldn't have access to sensitive government databases. No shit.

But yet he does. Ellis has worked at multiple federal agencies from the Treasury to Homeland Security, leaving a wake of destruction in his past, despite past controversies, including violations of data policies and racist social media posts.

Yeah, Brian. Fun times. Good times. Detroit is taking on a $93 million crypto real estate scheme in what city officials are calling the largest nuisance abatement case in its history. The city has filed a sweeping lawsuit against RealToken. a company that buys up low-income housing, tokenizes the properties on the blockchain, and sells fractional ownership to international investors. How is that not illegal? Well... Okay. All right. We're getting there. No regulation. Right.

Tenants' rent is split among crypto holders, but according to city officials, the homes are in disrepair, plagued by code violations, and managed by an untraceable web of 165 shell companies. Wow. Real Token reportedly owes over $3 million in back taxes and fines. After a five-month investigation, Detroit accuses the company of ignoring repair orders, allowing dangerous conditions, and prioritizing profits over people.

What else is new? The lawsuit targets more than 400 properties, none of which comply with CityCode's 400 properties. Officials say this is the first legal action of its kind against a blockchain-based landlord. Blockchain-based landlord. Say that five times fast. No. Council member, a legend. Council member Angelo Whitford Calloway didn't mince words. She says, this is not innovation. This is exploitation. You say tomato. I say tomato.

I hope they all go to jail. They won't. Come on, Brian. 13 years, you know nobody goes to jail. I know. Speaking of people that should be in jail, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is building a massive new AI data center called Hyperion, capable of scaling to five gigawatts of computational power. That's enough juice to power millions of homes. Located in Louisiana.

the center will support Meta's push to outpace OpenAI and Google in the AI race. Hey, Louisiana, guess what? All your electricity prices are going up because of this? Yes, they are. Zuckerberg also revealed a separate one gigawatt supercluster named Prometheus set to go live in Ohio by 2026. Years are going up to Ohio. Together, these sites mark one of the largest AI infrastructure investments yet.

Power grab has consequences, Brian. Data centers are already straining local and water electricity supplies, with reports of taps running dry in some towns. Experts warn data centers could consume 20% of the U.S. energy by 2030, up from just 2.5% in 2022. Backed by federal support and rising competition from projects like OpenAI's Stargate and XAI's Colossus, the AI arms race is rapidly becoming an energy arms race. Why do they keep naming these things so fucking biblically bad?

Well, why can't I have like, you know, here's the Care Bear data center. Where's the unicorn data center? Well, they all pick their fucking unicorns. There's a cuddly data center, you know? Yeah, well, I can't even imagine living in Louisiana or Ohio at this point. You're in some small town and all of a sudden your electricity prices have tripled and your tap is just dripping because there's no water left. And all because... Keith wants to fucking vibe code a new dating app.

You all get a free Ghibli GIF. That's what you all get. You get a GIF, you get a GIF, and you get a GIF. This one hit me, Brian. On Tuesday, July 16th, Cloudflare confirmed a temporary outage affecting its 1.1.1. That one public DNS service.

Were you hit by this? I was. I was. And then I just switched my DNS because I figured out that's what was going on. Yeah, it took me a minute to get it because it was only one of my machines. Everything else in the house had fallback DNS on it except the laptop that I was using at the time. I'm like.

what the hell's going on here? My Netflix is working because I'm watching that. Everything else in the house is working. So I thought it was just the laptop. And then I finally checked the network settings and I'm like, oh, there's only one DNS server in here. I figured my Eero has fallback. So it would fall back to that and it didn't. So down for. couple hours but uh yeah that was a i've never heard of cloud flare going down that was pretty that was pretty amazing yeah

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Yeah. HBO's The Penguin is coming in second with 24. I hope they win them all. That was my favorite show of the year. Last of Us comes in fifth with 16 and Andor is coming in sixth with 14. Yeah, and what's his name? Andor himself got snubbed. No acting Emmy nomination for him. Diego Luna? Yeah, Diego Luna. Nothing for him.

Other great shows are The Acolyte, Agatha, All Along, Black Mirror, The Boys, Cobra Kai, Dune Prophecy, House of the Dragon, Invincible, Paradise, Poker Face, What If and What We Do in the Shadows. all got at least one nomination. Some of those should have got a lot more than one, but yeah, we'll see. But Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford, got an Emmy nomination for his work on Shrinking.

watched season two yet but it's not as good as the first season but still good all right uh and i forgot this last week slow horses was renewed for season seven at apple tv plus Which is great. I'm very far behind on that show. Still on season two. Yep. You're slow. You're the slow horse. Yes. But Brian, it passes your – I mean this – seven seasons, this passes the Schulmeister test of does it have legs? Okay. Absolutely does. You're allowed to watch. I can do it. Yeah.

And so a couple of trailers dropped for Mortal Kombat 2, which is coming to theaters on October 24th. There's a Red Band trailer, which I forgot to put in the show notes. I will have to do that after, which is pretty good. And they actually made a fake movie trailer for one of Johnny Cage's movies. It's called Uncaged Fury, which is actually pretty cute and very funny. You're a Mortal Kombat guy. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. And Stranger Things 5 has dropped its teaser. Did you check that out?

I did. I am so close to just calling it on Stranger Things. I haven't watched season four. I might just never go back to it. Yeah, if you don't want to, don't. We'll see. I mean, I'll see what the big, you know, will they stick a landing?

Because this is it, right? This is season five is it. So I will wait to hear what happened. And if everybody's like, oh, my God, what a great ending. They tied everything up. Marge came back or whatever the hell that girl's name was that disappeared in the first episode. I don't know. We'll see. But right now.

I have zero interest in going back and seeing any of this. And the trailer didn't change my mind. All right. Well, you got five and a half months to wait for the ending on that. New Year's Eve is when the final, final drops. Oh, I'll be waiting with bated breath. No, you won't. No. Official trailer for Tron Aries came out this week as well. It'd be great if it wasn't Jared Leto. That's my problem. It's like Jared Leto is the fucking lead and I can't stand him. Here's the...

Part, though, he doesn't say anything. He has like two words in the trailer. Here's the problem, though. I know what he's looking for. It breaks Brian Schulmeister's law of bad movies. I'm sure he's looking for love, Brian. In all the wrong places, Jason. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. The only good thing that came out of the John Aries trailer dropping is we got a new Nine Inch Nails song, which is actually pretty good.

Yeah, it is pretty good, isn't it? Yeah. So I finally watched the season finale of Murderbot. What did you think? Fine. It was fine. There was a lot of complaints that it didn't exactly follow the book because he didn't go back to the Preservation Alliance's planet, but they didn't have to build a new set and they had a limited budget. I get why they chose to do it the way they did it. So it's fine. Yeah.

And I know he ends up on that ship at some point. So whatever. So we just skipped ahead to that. It's fine. Looking forward to season two. So it was a good show. I did get a chance to watch a movie. I had to spread it out over two nights, but I finally watched Fountain of Youth on Apple TV. This is the kind of attempted Indiana Jonesy thing with National Treasure type of mix-up.

yes all of that sort of stuff with john krasinski and natalie portman and uh it was actually enjoyable really yeah okay it was fine it was fine it was better than any of the nick cage ones oh come on National treasure is a national treasure. It was awesome. All right. I liked it. It's an enjoyable romp, as they would say, Jason.

Okay, okay. Star Trek Strange New Worlds dropped its first two episodes. I watched the first one last night. What about you? I did as well. I watched the first one as well. It was a good wrap-up. I totally forgot about the season finale, so the recap was nice. I mean, it has been a while, to be fair. So, yeah. Very long while. I thought they kind of rushed it through the first episode. I know they're trying to wrap it up, but man, they did that quick.

Yeah, they did. And I hear there's a pretty big cognitive dissonance between episode one and episode two, because episode two is apparently a... Lighthearted romp. That's what it looked like for the thing, yeah. It was like, man, that shifted quick. Yeah, so I'm happy it's back. I stand by the fact that of all the latter-day Star Treks, this one has the most Star Trek-y feel, so it's good.

Yep. Dexter Resurrection came out this week, which I didn't even know was coming. So spoiler alert from the last Dexter. He ain't dead. Well, we did talk about it on the show, so you should have known it was coming. I talked about the prequel, but I didn't know that they were... I talked about this when they announced it. Well, it was so good that I completely forgot. Yeah, I don't know. Again, I kind of almost feel like I never went back and did the prequel. I'm waiting to kind of see what.

people think about this. Okay. Well, it is Showtime's biggest streaming premiere ever. So it's not doing too bad. I really enjoyed the prequel. Yeah. I thoroughly enjoyed the prequel. Hopefully they'll do another season of that, but who knows nowadays. Now that they're doing this one, I'm going to wait a little bit. Maybe I'll just binge it when it's done. Yeah. I did see a new show called The Institute this week on MGM+.

This is based on Stephen King's 2019 novel of the same name. Did you read that book? No, I never did read this one. Okay. It's about a kid who is kidnapped and awakens at a mysterious facility called the Institute. Now, the thing is, I watched the first... Two episodes. I think they dropped two. I enjoyed it. I actually enjoyed it. The thing I hate, hate, hate, hate is that they, for the credits at the beginning, they used Shout by Tears for Fears.

but not by Tears for Fears. It's a cover of Shout by Tears for Fears. It's MGM+, which is owned by Amazon, who has all the monies. Why didn't they license the original? I don't know. It's a thing. I call it the Grey's Anatomy effect. Grey's Anatomy really started doing the covers of very popular songs because it was cheaper. And then they would take off and it's become a thing. Oh, it's a horrible thing.

Yeah, I don't like it. It's a really fucking horrible thing. I don't like it either. But I did discover this week Pluto TV. It's one of those fast networks that's been around for a while, and there was something on there that I was looking for, and we found it and watched it. I can't even remember. Ah, now I remember what it was.

Pardon my brain fart. America's Test Kitchen is on Pluto TV. And there's an America's Test Kitchen channel and a couple of channels for America's Test Kitchen. And so popped it on, installed it, looked at it. And found out that there's a gazillion channels on there.

It's like old school TV. It starts on the hour. You have commercials. You can't pause just like the other fast channels. For some reason, this one tickled my heart. I am a fan of Pluto TV because they even have a supermarket sweep channel. the old game show. We watched like an hour of supermarket sweep the other day.

But they've also got every Star Trek channel, except for, I think, Discovery. Thank God. But there's a Next Gen channel. There's a Deep Space Nine channel, a Voyager channel. Those are the only three I checked out. But does Deep Space Nine's channel actually, like, can you see anything or is it the horrible...

pan and scan fucking crap that's everywhere well i mean it's it's the the original uh four by three aspect ratio okay it looks fine i mean it looks like it's gonna look it looks like it's gonna look forever brian it's never going to get better So we're fucked. Enjoy it while you can. So, yeah, I really enjoy Pluto TV. And I also found out that you can buy ads on there for damn near next to nothing because I'm watching.

I said next to nothing, not nothing. Damn. Because I saw Podcast One was running ads for their shows on Supermarket Sweep. And I'm like, they had to get that cheap because me and my roommate are the only people on the planet right now. watching supermarket sweep i garen goddamn t you on pluto tv and what are the chances that one of the one of the two people actually watching it actually was on podcast one at one point both of us were

My roommate, I both had shows on podcast one. So I had multiple shows. She's had one show. Yeah. Right. Jordan Jones. Anyway. So, yeah, it was fun. Check it out. It's great to run in the background. Trust me. It's great. Okay. I was scrolling around on Gizmodo and I saw a really interesting article. This is great. Seven weird sci-fi network TV shows that aired just as streaming was taking over.

So it points out that House of Cards, which launched in 2013, was Netflix original series and television was never the same after that, because that's when streaming started to take over. But even as Netflix and other platforms began to gain popularity, old school network and basic cable channels continued to.

create edgy and sometimes a bit unhinged genre shows the sort of programming that just a few later would come to dominate the streaming landscape and then they gave you seven from sci-fi network right in that time period i don't remember any of these

Okay. Well, they're not from the sci-fi network. They're from – they're just sci-fi shows. They're all over the sci-fi shows, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because the first one, Wayward Pines, I watched the first season of with Matt Dillon. It was really good. And, of course, it had a Shamalama ding-dong ending because he was a producer on it. Okay.

And the other ones I've heard of, I've heard of most of Under the Dome, I saw and I was just like, no, because it was the Stephen King joint. They redid Limitless as a TV series. No, thanks. The movie was perfect. The rest of these, the event, the wake, no. But at the very end, it got to one called Almost Human.

This is a show that I really liked and ran on Fox from 2013 to 2014. Set in 2048, Almost Human imagined a near future where technology has evolved so rapidly that it's caused crime to spike to dangerous new levels. The only solution, Brian, for law enforcement.

naturally, is to pair human cops with highly advanced androids. There's no choice in this arrangement, which of course infuriates the human officer, Carl Urban, who blames robot kind for the death of his fellow human cop, not to mention his own leg and head injuries. So I watched the...

season of this and it was phenomenal. I really enjoyed it. Carl Urban was great in it. And it was just funny because on Wednesday I was sitting there talking to a friend exactly about this show and I couldn't remember the name of it. How's that for a twist of fate? That's funny. Yeah. I just thought it was really interesting, like so many of these shows, but I bet none of them got satisfactory endings. So, you know.

Yeah, I know Almost Human got pulled after the first season because it was too expensive to make. I stopped watching Wayward Pines after the first season because I thought the first season was perfect, had a great ending. And I'm like, I'm not going to go back and let him ruin it. So if you want a good season.

and, you know, TV, Wayward Pines is actually not bad. I'll check it out. Yeah, definitely check it out. I'm more intrigued by watching that than Stranger Things. I'll tell you that. And I'm telling you, if you can find it, Almost Human was actually pretty good.

A former owner of IPTV service Helix hosting has been sentenced to over three years in prison for copyright infringement and laundering over one million pounds. Steven Woodward, 36, ran Helix and other illegal streaming platforms offering thousands of. Yep.

So, yeah, I'm surprised. This stuff is illegal. It is illegal. And I'm surprised he only got three years. If this was because, you know, this is a British case. If this was here in the States, we'd probably never hear from him again because, you know, pirating gets you more more jail time. And I don't know, ruining the fucking economy with your shitty AI data centers. Or apparently, you know, raping people. Yeah, that too. Because then he can become president.

Moving on. Metallica just gave the U.S. government a masterclass in copyright law. The band issued a takedown over the Pentagon's use of Enter Sandman in a military drone promo video. The clip, posted on July 10th to X by Defense Secretary Peter Kegstand, showed America's drone dominance with a 1991 metal hit blasting in the background. But Metallica hadn't authorized the track. After public outcry and a formal complaint, the Pentagon pulled the video and re-uploaded it music-free.

So, yeah, there you go. Well, better than Lars going after the kids that downloaded the songs from Napster. This time I'm behind them. Well, it's another week and we have another new Jack Dorsey app. No word about the security level on this one, Jason. He has announced an app called Sunday, just one week after releasing the peer-to-peer messaging app, BitChat. So I get the feeling that somebody is enjoying Vibe.

coding i do believe you're right yes sunday is all about the sun this app tracks your uv exposures and how much vitamin d you get It does this using a few personal details, including your location. So maybe wait on this one until the security review comes in. It will ask you to share what kind of clothing you're wearing, such as light shorts and a t-shirt. There's an additional space for you to share your skin type, choosing from what.

one of six options. And from there, it shows the current UV index, high for the day, sunrise, sunset, and burn limit, or the time you can be outside before your skin starts to burn. You can get your supposed vitamin D intake while outdoors by clicking track UV exposure. What about cancer? Can I track cancer? No, because, you know, he doesn't want to get sued for health things. Oh, got it. Got it. Also, I didn't see any entry for length of beard.

Because that does cover up. Yeah, does that cover up my tummy? So I got a big U in my stomach where it's not burnt. Oh, God. Well, if you're thinking about snapping a selfie in Dubai, you might want to think again. Tourists are being warned that taking photos without someone's explicit consent in the UAE could land you in serious trouble with fines up to $136,000 or even jail time.

Oh, boy, we could have used this in Venice Beach a few years ago when all the influencers were running amok. That would have been great. That would have been great. So according to travel experts, the country enforces strict privacy laws that make photographing people, especially women, without permission, a serious offense.

Cameras are also banned in sensitive locations like government buildings, military sites, airports, and even religious areas. Even innocent hobbies like bird watching or plane spotting can raise suspicion. And posting images... or videos on social media that are critical of the UAE or culturally insensitive, well, that's illegal too. So keep your cameras to yourself if you're going to Dubai. Okay, will do.

All right. I found a completely awesome single serve website this week called pointer pointer. All it does is you move your cursor around the screen and it finds a picture somewhere from the internet with somebody. pointing to that spot on your screen and pointing to the cursor. Well, hopefully none of them are from the UAE. Okay, this is fun. This is useless, but I've...

Can't stop. I know. You're going to be there. It's worse than TikTok in some ways because it's just so random. Highly recommend it. Pointer, pointer. Good times. All right. Oh, and in more meta news, meta is cracking down on Facebook users who repeatedly steal and repost other people's content without permission. Sure. You mean Facebook?

Yeah. In a new push to protect original creators, Meta says it's already removed around 10 million fake or impersonating profiles in 2025 and penalized over half a million accounts for spam and fake engagement. New rules will reduce the reach of copied photos, videos, and text, especially if they offer no original commentary or enhancements.

Offenders could lose monetization privileges entirely. Meta is also testing features to link reposts back to the original creators. The goal? Make Facebook feeds more authentic and less cluttered with low effort, AI-generated or stolen content pushed to the... behinds. Well, the thing about it is, who cares if you're copying stuff? There was a great documentary called Hey Beautiful, Anatomy of a Romance Scam on, I think it was Hulu?

Hulu, I believe. And what it does is basically talks, it's this one poor guy who keeps getting his photos stolen and using these romance scams. And there's a big reunion with some of the women that were scammed with people using his photos and stuff. And he's supposed to be this big ladies man. It turns out he's like a leather gay guy from West Hollywood. It's a pretty good, it's a really good documentary. And it just highlights how Facebook just does not give a fuck about.

people stealing other people's photos for scam purposes. But God forbid you post an image of, you know, that something could be monetized, then they kind of get their butt hurt over it. Yeah. Then they care. Yeah. Amazing. That is shocking. Mochi Health is here to help you start your weight loss journey with caring, personalized support. Meet one-on-one with board-certified obesity doctors and registered dietitians who truly listen and understand your unique needs.

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Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast super host Dave Bittner knows the game inside and out. Every day he cuts through the noise on the cyber wire. Then he teams up with Joe Kerrigan to expose digital cons on hacking humans. He also digs into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat.

while breaking down industrial cybersecurity on Control Loop. And at the end of the day, he proves you can still laugh at all this mess on only malware in the building. The man's got range. Welcome, Dave. Thank you. Mile wide, inch deep, right? That's what she said. How many rivers have we now taken out doing the chat GPT intros for Dave? I actually, no, no, no. That one I wrote, I haven't read it out loud yet.

I read it in my head, but that one I put together. All right. Look at you. Yeah. No, any of the ChatGPT ones, the flow doesn't work right. So I read that one in my head. I'd never read it out loud to an audience. You guys were my test audience. You're my beta testers. We're all beta testers now. So let me ask the subject of the intro. Was that sufficient, Dave? Yeah, that was great. Introduce you with the proper amount of gravitas.

I mean, it's too much, really. Too much. Too much. I'll pare it down next time. Here's Dave. Here's Dave. You know him. You love him. You tolerate him. Dave Bittner. Yeah. All right. We got a bit of a follow-up from last week. Tindall wrote in, hey guys, after hearing save, which I'm assuming means you, Dave.

Dave, talk about orchestras playing video game music. I just wanted to drop a link to a project my friend is involved in. The Irish Video Game Orchestra is a charity group that regularly plays shows featuring music from Final Fantasy, Zelda, the whole way through to the modern day. like and he gave us the youtube link to the irish video game orchestra which was fun i watched it nice yeah yeah i watched it too it was fun so i i saw The electricity is crackling in the room today.

I saw the Superman movie. Have you guys seen the Superman movie? I have not. I very much want to. Give me the review, Dave. I very much enjoyed it. I've heard it's wonderful. Yes. This is the Superman we all need right now. This is the optimistic, innocent Superman, not the dark, brooding Superman that DC kind of pivoted to in the recent movies. I knew it must be good because everybody on the far right hates it. Yes. Yeah. As if, you know, like the Superman is suddenly woke. Yes.

Are you familiar with Superman? Yes. He's been fighting Nazis a long time. Yeah, he has been. But no, it's a really fun movie and everyone in it is good. The special effects are great, and we just had a good time. So highly recommended. Crypto the Dog is in it, and that's great. It seems as though DC has... finally gotten...

their humor. Like it felt more like a Marvel movie than a DC movie. And I mean that as a compliment, right? Uh, it's, it's funny. And also, um, uh, the woman who played Miss Maisel is, uh, Rachel Brosnan. Yes. She is Lois Lane and is wonderful in that role. Excellent.

Well, I'm very much looking forward to seeing it. I had intended to do it this week, but you know what happens when you're traveling with family and all plans go out windows. Yes. We shall see. But I do want to see it very much so. I've always been a big Superman fan. Did appreciate Henry Cavill. I thought he was a great Superman, but yes, those movies were definitely dark. You know, Christopher Reeve remains the ironclad.

Platonian ideal of what Superman should be, but I've heard that this is a very good one, so I'm very much looking forward to it. Yeah, I recommend it. It was time well spent. Excellent. So we covered this story on the Cyber Wire this week, and this is related to conversations we've been having here. This is about a YouTuber who is facing jail time. for showing off Android-based gaming handheld devices. So the gaming devices that we've been talking about here, the emulators, turns out that...

Italy has very strict copyright protection laws. And so this Italian YouTuber who showed off playing some, let's say, Borrowed ROMs on his handheld device could face up to three years in jail for violating Italian copyright law for running stolen.

retro games that's first that's crazy that he would get three years of jail for doing that but and and secondly is this reasonably new this this hardcore italian copyright uh policies because i certainly remember from my teens and and 20s uh one of the some of the best bootleg cds uh all came out of italy like all of them Nine Inch Nails, live concert rips, and The Cure, and bootleg demos. There were Italian labels that just pumped this shit out. So obviously, they didn't have a big...

They didn't have these policies back 20, 30 years ago. So this must be reasonably new. Yeah, I don't know. Or could it be the equal and opposite response to – Right. The heavy hand of the copyright police over there. I don't know. The stories that when we covered this over on Cyber Wire, I know there was some additional information we had.

about the fact that Italy does have very strict copyright. I don't remember the specific case we referred to, but it's a thing over there. And it does seem kind of bonkers to me that something like this could... could lead to jail time but yeah i mean especially just for somebody that's got a youtube channel showcasing the products he did he's not making the products

That's, that's always been the crazy thing to me is like, you don't go after the consumer, you go after the, the creators, the, and yeah. So anyways, yeah, there you go. Yeah. It reminds me of the early days of MP3s when I remember talking about burning a CD, like a mix CD. on a usenet group and other people chiming in and saying, Hey, watch what you say. They're going to come after you, you know, because, because they were coming after you or grandmas were being locked up.

Yeah, well, we had just mentioned Metallica in a different context. But again, of course, there's the famous case of them going after not Napster. but a complete list of Napster usernames that had downloaded their music. Again, you should have gone after Napster, not the grandma that accidentally downloaded Enter Sandman. Right. Yeah, these laws started to take effect in 2023.

There you go. There you go. I absolutely knew that some of the best copyright infringement in the world musically came out of Italy when I was younger. Well, maybe the laws are an equal and opposite reaction to that. So who knows what came – yeah, interesting. So I put this one in here because I thought it was kind of a fun website and we might be – we're old enough to really kind of get a kick out of this. It's called Are We Trek Yet?

And basically, it is a list of technologies that were prevalent in Star Trek and where we are in our current day as far as getting to those. There's ideals. We've got bio and medical computing, defense, energy, hollow and VR materials, robo and cyber and transport. And did you guys get a chance to check this out yet? I'm looking at it right now. Yeah.

Yeah, I really enjoy this site. This is one of those single-use sites that you love so much, Jason, that I enjoy very, very much. Copyright infringement on design, of course, I'm sure. But, you know, it's a good thing you didn't make it in Italy. Well, I could have sent him the right fonts. He fucked up on the fonts. This is kind of a half-assed Akudagram. I could have given him the real deal. Easy. Maybe I'll reach out. This is fun. I like the...

the links I would have, you know, he could have spent a little time in chat GPT and done some paragraphs about each of these. So you wouldn't have to link out to the companies, but an awful lot of things haven't been started, which is sad, but it is science fiction, but yeah. We have solar collectors. There's a green one. I like that. HoloVR, the augmented reality visor. Yeah, got that. Thank God most of the ones in defense are still red and not started. Well, as far as we know. True, true.

Transparent aluminum is available? Who knew? That's a thing, man. Okay. Well. And you can talk to your computer. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That is true. Yeah. No, this is a fun little site. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. I like that automatic sliding doors gets listed. I mean... Yeah. I was amazed that hypospray is definitely available now. I didn't know that we could do that. Apparently we can. So we can inject drugs transdermally without a needle. So, neat.

Okay. Hook me up. Why am I still getting jabbed when I get my damn COVID shot is what I want to know. Because these probably cost an awful lot more. It's because of your attitude, Jason. Oh, I thought it was because I had shitty insurance. Come strutting into that place saying. Jab me and so they do. Well, it's because I pulled out my pants instead. I'd like it in the right cheek and they're like, it's your arm, sir. This is Wendy's, sir. Your point? Moving on.

Kind of related to this Trek thing, a lovely TED Talk came by yesterday that really kind of captured my imagination. It's called Tech Promised Everything, Did It Deliver? And it's a look back at the early days of 8-bit computers, which we were around for, and just this technology delivering on its promise that we have. computers that are more powerful than we possibly could have imagined, and what are they actually being used for? It's a bit of a cautionary tale, but...

Overall, it's the delivery that this gentleman gives that I found particularly compelling. I'd be remiss if I did not point out that he is wearing a Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. T-shirt from Star Trek. It's a fantastic T-shirt. I so want his T-shirt. Yes. It's beautiful. I did notice that as well. But it's a heartfelt presentation. And a couple of moments in it that I did not see coming that were quite moving. So if you are someone like us who grew up in this era.

This is probably time well spent for you. I might have to watch this. I was telling Jason earlier that sometimes doing this show basically saps my will to live. So if there's a bit of hope in this one, I will watch this, yes. Yeah, yeah. So the other thing I wanted to touch on today with you guys is looking back on the Apple II. Did either of you have an Apple II? No.

I did not. My friend did. I was very pro-PC back at this point in time. I was all over PCs. So the point you got into computers, PCs were already available. Yes. Yes, they had started. I mean, to be fair, I did start like with a Commodore 64 as well. You know, early gaming, like the early, you know, I went to the gaming and then I started PCs. Yeah. What about you, Jason? My first one was an IBM XT.

Okay. No hard drives, two five and a quarter inch floppies. Okay. Yep. Only the rich kids in school had the apples at that point. Right, right. Well, I want to kind of get to that. I mean, my first, the first computer I owned was a TRS-80 color computer. I learned about computers on TRS-80 Model 1s, like at a...

summer camp kind of situation. And there were some Apple twos there, but, um, The thing I'm trying to puzzle my way through is how the Apple II got this mystique about it when it was an okay computer. But it wasn't that great. Like, I'd put the Commodore 64 up against it. I'd put the TRS-80 color computer up against it. The Apple II.

cost like three times as much as either of those computers. It was technically a color computer, but I don't remember ever seeing somebody with a color monitor on an Apple II, right? I thought the 2C was the first color one. Now, Apple II Plus was capable of color in a limited way, but you just never saw – my take is that the computer – the Apple IIs were so expensive already. They were like $1,400.

And you had to have a floppy drive, really, to make that computer practical. So you were already so expensive, it seems like a monochrome monitor was where you could maybe save a few bucks. Again, I don't remember anybody having a color monitor on their Apple II Plus, even though it was capable of it. But like the Apple II... was not the best at playing games. It didn't have any dedicated sound hardware like the Commodore 64 had. It was limited in its color capabilities. It was, again...

way more expensive than the competition. It was well made. It was built like a brick. It had slots when the other computers didn't. generally came with more RAM than those other computers did, sort of at the entry level. I don't know anyone who had a 4K Apple II. They, you know, they pretty much... If you had an Apple II, you probably had 48K of RAM in it, which at the time, again, was pricey. So you're saying you're a hater.

No, that's the thing. I'm not because I wanted one. Like I coveted the Apple II. Right. But I'm trying to reverse engineer in retrospect why. And is it just because it was unattainable? Because there was no way my family could afford one? There wasn't anything that it did that I couldn't do on my little color computer, especially by the time I got it fully outfitted.

So I don't know. I was curious if you guys, first of all, if you agree with me that the Apple II had a certain mystique to it. Oh, definitely. I mean, I don't know. My question is, did it have it at the time? I'm guessing no. I think this is probably a later thing, right? The Mystique? Yeah, as the years have gone by, it's just become the thing, right? No. I mean, I think at the time it was the computer. If money were no object and you were buying a home computer, you got an Apple II.

Again, I think because it was the first to really have floppy drives and all of the things that floppy drives enabled, because, you know, for the time it was high speed, high capacity storage. So it kind of puts you in a different level than those of us who were just using cassette tapes to load and save our stuff. And a lot of schools had Apple IIs, so you could lay hands upon them.

but actually having one was different. Jason, do you think, do you agree there was a mystique? I don't really know because, I mean, at that point I was a PC guy. I had my own homemade PC when those are kind of going. It even had a turbo boost button on it. Oh, yeah.

But so I was like, you know, playing games on mine. I wasn't really caring that much about the app because I was like, you know, Mr. Windows at that point. I didn't really get into the Mac side of things until I started working at Kinko's in 1993. And we had. a 2ci and then i lived on the 2ci right until then we moved that to a quadra but um and then at school we had the two c's

So I did some programming on a 2C in school and I thought it was cool, but I still liked my PC better because the games were better. I mean, that was the thing is like, if you played games, you didn't care about apples. So it was just like, I looked down my nose at Apple people at that point. Well, and I was super into modding. I loved being able to open up my PC, pull out memory chips, put in different memory chips, get the sound cards, get the video card. I loved building my own systems.

couldn't do that with Apple, right? Well, the Apple II could-ish. Yeah, the Apple II, that's the thing. It was also prohibitively expensive. So for me, it was like PCs are cheaper. I can buy all these different parts cheaper. I can build my own system that is better, way cheaper. And that was the fun for me as a kid. what really got me into computing it was almost not even using the computer it was building the computer i was into that like hard fun yeah yeah i think the on the other

fundamental truth about the Apple II at the time. So I'm talking about the pre-PC era when you had basically Apple, Commodore, Atari, and Radio Shack were the primary providers of... what we would call home computers. I think the other thing about the Apple II that it had going for it was it was probably the computer that most had one foot in the business side of things because the Apple II had VisiCalc.

And VisiCalc was first to the Apple II. And again, because you had floppy drives, you could run VisiCalc. Also, Apple had really good text capabilities and you could get an 80 column card for it. So again. for business uses, where it was easier to justify the expense of an Apple II, it made a lot of sense. And so I think that probably propped him up.

A lot of people I knew that had it were doing page layouts and stuff like that, which was mind-blowing. Like, oh, cool. How interesting is that? You can make your own newspaper and stuff like that. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things I was trying to think back on. It's just the pricing difference because by the time you got to the Macintosh, which is and continues to be more expensive or the expensive choice of computers.

But you could look at the operating system and say, okay, this is – this operating system is different and for the people who enjoy it, it makes sense that they would pay a premium to have that experience. But it's not like the Apple II. had a great operating system, you know? I mean, there was, it had DOS, it had basic. Yeah. I mean, there wasn't, yeah. It's just interesting to me. Like I don't, what was the Apple II exceptional at?

Costing a lot of money, it seems. The introductory price was $1,298, which is equivalent to $6,740 in 2024. Wow. So that's why businesses are the only ones that could actually afford it. I think maybe it was like owning a DeLorean. They weren't great cars, but they were expensive cars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could just be that the Visicalc thing is...

The thing. That's the difference. Having that first, introducing, basically making the spreadsheet available to the world was the thing that launched the Apple II into success. I don't know. I definitely coveted it, but now I don't know that I would have had a better experience had I been able to have one. I'm thinking back to... teenage me, if I had an Apple II and I had my TRS-80 sitting side by side, which one would I have used more? And I'm not sure. Right.

But I still wanted the Apple II. I was all in on PC and remained all in on PC for decades after that. Yeah. I was surprised how long the Apple II survived after the introduction of the PCs. I mean, they still sold the hell out of those things. for like a decade after anybody thought they would, you know, they even into the Apple or past the Macintosh phase, they were still, the Apple twos were just keeping the company afloat.

Yeah. Anyway, I mean, to the two CIs, that was, you know, our workhorse at Kinko's and that was, you know, mid nineties. So that alone, they sold, they, they made those things till 93, the two CIs, which is crazy. Yeah. Cause they were horrible. They were horrible. I mean, we upgraded, we upgraded to a quadra at one point, which, you know, when the quadras first came out, but then we had these, um,

it's called a fiery, which was the name of the, um, the, the, it's kind of like a laser printer, like a colored laser printer that we could hook up. So we got an SGI. in, in, in Kinko's. I remember those. Yeah. Yeah. So they gave us a, a basically a really stripped down SGI and that was like the coolest thing. And I was just like, how the hell does this work? And that was right when the web was starting to come out. So I'm learning how to program on an SGI. Wow.

doing that stuff that's if they wouldn't have given us that sgi that would have been nuts but it was the thing about it had a very minimal 3d light bike game on it so you could play light bike like you're in tron like a first person like oh god i totally remember that yeah yeah Yeah, pretty cool. But yeah, the 2CI definitely got me into the Mac environment because the first thing after that I bought was the first, my first Mac that I owned was a Quadra 650.

Okay. So, yeah, my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, had an SE30 in college. And so that was my first introduction to... the Macintosh. And I came into it with my nose in the air, you know, like many people thinking that the Mac was a toy. And then through using hers, I was like, huh, it's pretty good. This is easier. Oh, okay. I like this. And so here I am 30 some years later. But this Quadra, yeah, I had a Quadra 700, which was...

Probably my all-time favorite Mac was the 700. That was a really nice machine. I like the lime green iMac. Yeah, yeah. I had a purple iMac, which I liked very much. So I have a link to a webpage that is all about Apple II history. So if you're interested, you can go on a trip down memory lane, which I've already done for you. Appreciate it.

It's interesting to me that I guess I am just enough older than the two of you that my experience with this part of early computer history is a little different. because there were no because i was got into it before there was the pcs yeah they didn't exist yeah yeah I just threw up a link since we're doing old computers. I'll show you the first laptop that I ever had. And it was very early. And the only reason I had this laptop is my father worked for an airline. He was an air cargo supervisor.

Someone left it and it stayed there for months. It was never claimed. And then finally, my dad was like, well, now it's time that I get to take it home. And he brought it home to me. And it was the K-Pro 2000. I've never seen one of these. I have this thing. You still have it? No, no, no. It's long, long, long gone. Okay. I had it and I loved playing around with this thing. It was great.

Yeah, that's a cool-looking laptop. It is. It looks like a Simmons digital drum, doesn't it? Yeah, it kind of does, yeah. It's of that era. Definitely 80s industrial design. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I remember playing around with it vividly. So yeah. Monochrome non-backlit LCD. Oof. Yeah, fancy. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Four-hour battery. Sure. Yeah. All right. Well, gents, that's what I have. So thank you for indulging me. Thank you. See you next time. See you next week. Closing show.

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