718: Net Unhelpful

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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... Wait, no. No, that's not right. I'm Donovan Adkissen. Hey, Donovan.

Thank you so much for coming today. Oh, man. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Oh, you're not going to say that by the time we're done. Don't worry. No, I texted with Brian. He is right now as we speak in. Disneyland Paris. So hopefully he's enjoying his baguette and Mickey Mouse. You know, I have never been to Disneyland. I have been to Disney World.

because that's down in Florida. And I have been there one time in my life, and I think I was 10. So that was 1980. And I haven't been back since. Oh, well. You got it out of your system early. I guess so. I went with family and I was like, OK, this is great. OK, move on. You know, 10 year old. I don't know. I guess I was never enamored by any of the stuff that. You know, Disney World, Disneyland, Six Flags Over Georgia, none of that stuff.

Well, I have been to Disney World multiple times. I've been to Disneyland, and Disneyland is a pale comparison to Disney World. So you at least got the good one out of the way. Yeah, that's true. That's about the only damn good thing in Florida, probably. I can say that. I'm sitting on top of them. They can fuck off. You're like the Canada of Florida. Yeah. And Donovan's in Georgia, by the way. I don't know if we've mentioned that.

Yeah, yeah. I'm roughly 90 minutes to two hours from the Georgia-Florida border. So pray for me. It's like Mad Max Zone. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, we've got some news coming out of California this week. Governor Gavin Newsom just signed SB 243, the first state law aimed at AI companion chatbots. Starting in January 1st, 2026, operators from the big labs to niche apps like Character AI and Replica have to add real safety protocols or face penalties.

Sure. The AI internet police is going to come get you. So what they're asking for is age verification, clear warnings that you're chatting with a bot, no pretending to be a healthcare professional, and forced to take a break nudges for minors. And platforms must block sexually explicit images for kids, build suicide and self-harm response systems, and report stats and protocols to the state's Department of Public Health.

So, and if you're a deep faker, there's going to be fines there too, up to $250,000 per offense. That's a lot. Seems. It seems a little high, but it depends on the deepfake, I guess. They don't really tell you if it's against a civilian or a celebrity or just what it is. I mean, does it matter, really? I guess it doesn't. I mean, maybe that's so high because they're like, well, if it's only $10,000, so what? Yeah.

Yeah, it will be interesting to see if they ever collect any of those fines on either one on the on the chatbot makers or any of the deepfake people. I mean, the deepfake people, that's just that's a lever that they they put in. So the district attorneys can actually like.

use that to squeeze people, I'm guessing. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see. But, I mean, it's time for these AI companions to get at least some kind of penalties, you know, because they're, oh, I don't know, killing children. So, you know. We'll see. Yeah, that's not a good thing. That's not a good thing. Nope, nope. So, of course, on the heels of that.

Our good old friend Sam Altman just announced that ChatGPT will open its pants in December for verified adults. Yeah. So now that they're going to be forced to do age gating, they're like, well, shit. We know they're over 18. Release the boobs. Let's go. Well, you know the two things that always drive innovation, porn and war. So we're going to get the porn part in ChatGPT. So the next thing is going to be some form of war.

Well, I think Palantir probably has the war side covered with AI. Oh, that's true. That and Palmer Luckey and his weapons company, they're doing AI-powered weapons. Yeah, what could go wrong? Yeah, what could absolutely go wrong? Oh, yeah. And just so you think that grumpy old geeks are not the only people dunking on AI, there's a new...

Pew Research poll that shows global anxiety about AI is spreading. Across 25 countries, majorities say they're more worried than excited about artificial intelligence taking over daily life. Not a single nation surveyed had more than 30% of adults feeling upbeat about it. So what do you think? You know, I like what. AI can do for us now as far as what I use services like ChatGPT, you know, and I pay for it. But that's the extent of it. I don't want AI in everything.

You know, and every time I turn around, it's like, well, we now have artificial intelligence in your refrigerator. We have artificial intelligence in your toaster. What the fuck is AI going to do for? for toasting my bread or my baguette or whatever. I don't understand this. And don't get me wrong. I love technology. I have lived and breathed technology from the...

First, I think I probably came out of my mama with a piece of technology in my hand. But goddamn, enough's enough. This is fucking scary, man. Well, the thing is, I mean, this is just the new technology du jour. Five years ago, your toast would have been on the blockchain. That's true. You know, so.

And before that, it would have had a social media account. I mean, I would have been OK if it had been on the blockchain as long as it would have been worth, I don't know, $100,000 per slice. I'd be fine with that. Well, you know, NFT stands for not fucking toast. So. Okay, I like that. That works. Yeah, it's not surprising to me that when you do a survey like this, and when you look at the 25 countries, were these more like...

Not third world countries, but actual at parity level with the United States countries, I would presume. Well, I mean, India and Kenya were in there. India is pretty much a first world country, but Kenya, not so much. They did spread it around a bit. That's true. So, yeah. The wealthier countries like Japan, Germany, and France, they were a little higher in the rankings. But, yeah.

Yeah. Other countries are just like, what's AI? I don't know. Oh, God. Always India? Is that what it was at one point? The joke, because AI was actually a bunch of folks in India doing everything. I never heard that, but that rings true.

Was that culturally insensitive? I'm sorry. I don't know. You know how much fun we've made of Indian programmers on this show before. That's true. That's true. They seem to have gotten better, though. I guess they're using Cloud Code now. Everybody's using Cloud Code. Yeah. We'll get to more of that soon. They're vibe coding. In the news. Okay.

So this is in my neck of the woods. And Georgia Tech's drone first responder program cuts emergency response time to 90 seconds or less. I had no idea that this was even a problem. So Georgia Tech, which is one of our big universities, you've got Georgia Tech and the university. of Georgia. And don't get the two confused because you might get your ass beat. But they have a program now where they are attempting to cut emergency response time to 90 seconds or less.

while they're trying to enhance campus security. So Chief of Police Robert Conley says the goal is to have patrol drones constantly airborne. Constantly airborne. Flying around the campus of Georgia Tech, just waiting and ready to respond to major incidents instantly, just instantly. So over 20 Georgia law enforcement departments already use drones for pursuits and theft prevention, which is something I was not aware of. But the thing that really bothers me about this is, and you probably have.

You should have remembered this company. Flock Safety is part of this thing. Now, if memory serves me correctly, Flock is the company. that law enforcement went to them because they do a lot of surveillance and stuff like that. Law enforcement went to them to look for a particular woman in Texas. Oh, yeah. You remember that one? Yeah, I do. And they claimed that what they were doing is they were trying to find her to make sure that she was safe, when in actuality.

The woman had had an abortion and they were trying to track her down so that they could probably prosecute her. Yeah. Flock Safety runs one of the largest networks of automated license plate readers. Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So they're part of this and they claim their drone system covers a four mile radius, which is larger than Georgia Tech's campus. So they're like, yes, you know, rapid deployment. Their chief.

Strategy Officer Bailey Quintrell. Really? Quintrell? Okay. Emphasizes that it's faster, coordinated responses, and improved safety for the students. The drones are going to provide real-time visuals. I'm thinking 1984 here, enabling officers to assess situations before arriving on scene. They claim they got privacy safeguards. They're keeping the cameras pointed at the horizon.

Until they arrive at the incident. Yeah. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. I'm sure you are. Yeah. And and of course, this is being used as a model for other universities to follow across our great state of Georgia. Okay, how bad is the crime at Georgia Tech that you need a drone swarm flying 24-7?

to respond to events. I mean, should we just have Trump sent in the National Guard? Is it that bad? That's what I'm wondering. I mean, this was the first, you know, I stay up on the news here in Georgia because I do a little newsletter for my city and all this other kind of stuff.

And so I try to make sure that I am aware of things that are even though I'm down here in the asshole of Georgia, I still try to make sure that I understand what's going on in the entire state. But I have never once heard of there being rampant. Apparently, Georgia Tech is a fucking war zone. Must be. So you're right. I'm waiting on the National Guard to be federalized and Brian Kemp to bend over and say, yes, sir.

How far should I shove these National Guards up my butt? Yeah, trust me. OK, I'll back off. Well, I'll be interested to see how this plays out if the students rebel over it, because that is just. itching for i mean it's college college pranks are great you know okay let's start let's create some net guns to you know let's modify some t-shirt guns from the frat houses to start taking down drones i would love it

Yeah, they just fill them with panties from the panty raid and just fire them at the drones and the drones get brought down by stolen panties. There you go. Could you see the report on that one? What happened? What happened to this drone? Panties, sir. Panties. They were brought down by dirty, rotten panties. A flock of G-strings took them down. Oh, God. Oh, man. That sounds like a band.

I'll keep an eye on that one. So I don't know. Are you a crypto guy? Do you have much of your life savings in crypto? What life savings? I forgot. Who are you talking to? I work in IT. true true well if you had any life savings in crypto you had a really shitty week After a $380 billion wipeout that saw Bitcoin drop 15% and Ethereum nosedive 21%, Ukrainian crypto fund manager Konstantin Ganich, known online as Kostya Kudo, was found dead in his Lamborghini.

with a gunshot wound. Police are calling it a suicide, but the details reek of crypto noir. Ganesh allegedly lost between $7 million and $60 million in the crash. Most of it was unfortunately investors' money. And he had been promising them a fixed 7% monthly return, which is just...

What the fuck? No. Look, if you're going to invest your money with somebody that is going to tell you that you're going to get a fixed 7% monthly return, you deserve to lose your money. Agreed. Now, here's the fun part. This was in the Ukraine. Ukrainian outlets report he was pressured by law enforcement the night before his death to share profits. And here's where it gets cinematic. The gun used was reportedly a gift from Kurilo Budinov, Ukraine's top military spymaster.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that was a message, not a suicide. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you should have used some of that crypto to help buy more weapons and get Ukraine out of the mess that they're in. Yeah, yeah. And I did say the Ukraine before. It's Ukraine. That was my bad. It's early. I haven't had enough coffee. I know better. I know better.

Hey, trust me, I did not know until, honestly, until Ukraine got into the news over the last 10 years or so, that it wasn't the Ukraine. Because so many people, news people, would always say the Ukraine. And now whenever I hear it, you know, my brain just kind of slows down and goes.

What? Take a pause. It is all right. And the funny thing is, before the war, I knew tons of Ukrainian developers because we hired them all the time at some of my companies because Ukrainian developers are some of the best in the world. Oh. Okay. Oh, yeah. Half the software that you run is probably built in Ukraine. I know my Mac paw is. So anything from Mac paw is from there. So clean my Mac, Ukrainian. Go figure. Well, that's cool. Yeah.

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So I know we've talked about Starlink. I say we, like I've just been on this show for ages. You're on the Discord channels. It is a we. Yeah, that's true. It's the royal we. It's a royal we. So whether you love or hate Starlink, love or hate Elon, I fall in the latter camp. There is a growing concern over satellite re-entries after viral videos show SpaceX Starlink satellites burning up in the atmosphere. Yep.

According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who is Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, say that three times fast before coffee, Earth is seeing, quote, a couple of satellite reentries a day. There's about 20,000. 20,000 tracked objects that orbit Earth, roughly 12,000 active satellites, 8,000 star links, which I thought there were more, but I mean, 8,000 is...

He does a lot. No, they're working up to the tens of thousands. I think his goal was, what, $45,000, $50,000, something like that? Something like that, yeah. Some ridiculous amount that is just going to... Screw up the entire night sky for every astronomer out there. Exactly. Exactly. So McDowell, he's warning the situation is getting, I love this quote, pretty busy up there. Yeah. That's.

I think you buried the lead, calling for global regulation and coordination to manage the growing risk. And of course, we're talking about low Earth orbit or LEO. It's become increasingly crowded. You've got new entrants like, well, Amazon just put up around 100 satellites. They've got thousands planned. eSpace, which I honestly have never heard of, but they're proposing hundreds of thousands in China. Hundreds of thousands? Hundreds of thousands is what it says.

Yeah. And we got China. Let's not forget China. I had to do China. But has already deployed 100 plus satellites and they plan tens of thousands. So maybe eSpace and China need to get together. I don't know. But. There's also other things up there like a million untracked fragments of at least a centimeter in size orbiting Earth. Yeah. And something I had to clarify.

It says average LEO commercial satellite lifespan is around five years before deorbiting. And I thought, wait a minute. I know there are satellites that have been up there a lot longer. So I had to dig in and clarify what this is actually talking about is. The FCC now requires commercial satellites in LEO to be deorbited within five years of their mission ending, which is a change from the previous 25 year standard. So Starlink.

design their satellites to deorbit around about the five-year mark after they've been launched. Yeah, that's not mission-ending, though. Mission-ending, that's... So that's like planned obsolescence because I bet they're believing that their satellites are going to be upgradable within five years. So they're just like, okay, these are disposable. We're going to throw them up and take them down. Yeah, exactly. I think that's what it is too because that's what I keyed in on. It was like –

Five years after mission ending. So if I got a 10 year mission for my satellite that's in low Earth orbit, then that means at the 15 year mark, I'm supposed to deorbit the thing. But Starlink's like, yeah, we'll just do it every five years. you know, they'll burn up. Sure, right? Yep. So this goes along with what's known as the Kessler syndrome, which is from a 1970s theory by Don Kessler, which warned that cascading...

collisions could trigger a chain reaction of orbital debris. Yeah, locking us into basically being stuck on the planet forever. Exactly, exactly. And McDowell cautions that a radiation event or a random collision could accelerate such a scenario. The Starlink satellites are around 30 meters long. They weigh about a ton. And as we already said, they're designed to fully disintegrate during reentry. Those small pieces may survive. And so...

You know, we've got meteors. Meteors are considered fast moving fireballs. Satellite reentry is kind of a slower stately burn up around 40 miles above Earth. And to further this even more. Chinese space debris incidents have raised concerns about carelessness, which is underscoring this entire need for international agreements on orbital safety. But everybody's just going.

Me too. I need thousands of satellites up there for my Internet service. No, I need thousands of satellites for my Internet service. You know, and we've already had the issue where. astronomers and amateur astronomers and professional astronomers are like, we can't see shit up here anymore because of all of the star links. And so they had to, I think they.

They either changed the paint on the new ones or they had some way to make them less reflective. Yeah, they did. They definitely changed the paint. But they're also running into issues now where it's not just light leaks from the reflections. It's actual signal leaks from the satellites that are in. with other satellites that are up there. They're not shielded properly. So things are starting to bleed out. So, which, you know...

is a very interesting scenario for, you know, kind of a sabotage movie plot where you just throw up, you know, just basically a signal jammer satellite, which I'm sure we probably have a bunch of those up there already. I mean, think about something else too, you know. You've got the reflectivity issue. You've got the leaks. And as you put more and more up there, are we eventually going to have like and, you know, I'm making a call back here.

The way the Nova Corps can use their ships, like in Guardians of the Galaxy, and surround something? Are we going to have nothing but Starlink and other satellites that are tip to tip? You know? Yeah. Just like that. It's like, no, we're never getting off this planet. We're not going to Mars, Elon. Fuck you. We can't get off. Your own satellites are stopping us. Yeah. Can't even get to the moon anymore. Exactly.

It's so funny you mentioned Nova Corps. I just watched Guardians of the Galaxy last weekend. My dad had never seen it, so he was in town and we needed a movie to watch, so we just watched that. I like all three of them. I think the first two are the best ones. The third one is okay.

I got to go back and watch them. I was drinking a lot when those came out, so I don't even remember them. I've had to do that before, before I quit drinking. I remember the Matrix movie that came out in 2021, the fourth one. I had to watch it four times because the first three times I'd fall asleep in the middle of it because I was drunk. Same here. And I think when I watched it sober, I still fell asleep because it was just kind of boring.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, I love Keanu Reeves, but I was like, okay, now that I have actually seen it sober, I'm done. Yeah, yeah. It was a nice send-off. Yeah. Although they did a better job. Kiana did a better job with the Bill and Ted send off that I thought was beautiful. But anyway, we'll save that for media candy. Keep on the news because I can talk all day. Yeah, I will sidetrack us like like nobody's business. So keep me on point.

UK regulator Ofcom has fined 4chan $26,600, or £20,000, the first... under Britain's new Online Safety Act. Now, I had to stop for a second because I'm like, wait a minute, 4chan? Are you retroactively, you know, are you going back to the 2000s to start finding old websites? Aren't they dead? I thought that they were dead, but apparently not. Oh no. 4chan, along with Kiwi Farms, has fired back with a U.S. lawsuit claiming Ofcom's orders violate the first...

Fourth and Fifth Amendments, basically saying you can't force speech, incriminate a site or override due process, especially when the site is U.S. based. So 4chan is apparently back and is in the U.S. Oh, wow. Yeah, they're also demanding that a U.S. court block enforcement of the U.K.'s law against American companies, warning that acquiescent here could set up future censorship overreach.

Now, Ofcom insists this isn't censorship, but regulation to protect users, especially minors, from harmful content. Well, that's what 4chan was always about, was harmful content for minors. That's where its bread and butter was. Now, what's interesting is the FTC agrees that OSA may be an overreach. Its chair recently warned U.S. tech firms that censoring American companies to comply with foreign rules could breach U.S. law. Hmm. Okay.

Well, I don't even know if the FTC is actually a real thing anymore, because if it's a three-letter acronym with our government, who the fuck knows? I don't think it is. I don't think it is. And the only reason why they'd even be weighing in on this... is America first. It's like no other country going to tell our people what we can or cannot do. That's for us to do. It's for us to decide.

I was just tickled that 4chan is apparently still around. They're back from the dead. I think I may have visited that site 15 years ago, 10 years ago. It was never a place that I hung out. It just was not my thing. And I saw... What was it? A few years ago, they did a documentary on one of the streaming services talking about Q and how Q got its start on his, her, whoever the hell they are.

uh, on 4chan and then 8chan and all this other stuff. And I was about channed out after that. So more chance in the Chinese phone book. Exactly. Uh, no, I spent a lot of time on random slash B. on on 4chan just just just uh scooping up memes i mean it was a meme factory that's one of some of the greatest memes ever started so back then it was a thing but there was also a lot of really horrible shit that i wish i could unsee that i can't

So, yeah, that's the that's the risk you take at 4chan. Well, Elon's back in the news. In Nevada, state regulators say Elon Musk's boring company racked up nearly eight.

environmental violations over the past two years while digging its Las Vegas tunnel network. Violations include starting digs without permits, dumping untreated groundwater on the streets, and spilling muck from trucks. Oh, God. I guess their idea was, we'll fix it in post. Just move on. That's pretty much it. Oh, man. Yeah, 100 new breaches and claim. The company skipped 689 required site inspections. That's a lot of site inspections. Over two years, that's almost one a day. Wow.

Yeah, they could have fined the boring company over $3 million under the terms of the 2022 agreement, thanks to daily penalties for each violation. But in a move bound to raise eyebrows, regulators slashed the fine down to $242,800. citing discretion given the sheer volume of violations. You get a bulk discount in Vegas if you just keep violating the law. I should have got 10 hookers that time I got busted. God damn it. Exactly. Exactly.

I mean, if I'm going to get 30 days for one, can I get three days for 10? I can get three days for 10, you know? Happy, happy, joy, joy. Happy endings all around. Yeah, exactly. Me love you long time. Okay. I'm glad to see the boring company is up to their normal shenanigans. You know, I think it's just because Elon is Elon, especially after he did his little thing with Doge. He's probably like, I'm untouchable, so.

You know, nobody's going to fuck with us. Nope. And the thing is, you know, at the end of the day, what does Vegas have to show for it? But a bunch of holes in the ground. So they probably don't want them to like, you know, blow up the tunnels and sink.

Sink Vegas, that would be a total, you know, supervillain move, which, you know, you never know. Yeah. Well, I mean, that sounds about like him. And, you know, don't get me wrong. I like the concept. Anything that is going to move traffic quicker.

from point A to point B. I mean, one of the things that I wish we could do down here would be light rail, but nobody wants to do any kind of train stuff down here in South Georgia. I mean, that just makes too much fucking sense. It makes too much sense. Yeah. You know what? Yeah. Mass transit helps traffic. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, Tifton's not a big town. So countywide, we have about 45,000 people. The city proper has about 15,000 people.

but I live on the east side of town and still to get to the west side of town, and I know people are going to be like, oh, that's the tiniest violin I've ever fucking heard, especially if you live in LA or whatever, but it can literally take me about 20 minutes to get from one side to the other. I know. I know. I know. You know, I can hear the eye roll. All right. Do you know how long I sat in traffic yesterday?

I sat in traffic for two hours and 45 minutes to do a 32-mile round trip. No, no, I will not do that. Fuck that noise. And I'm talking more not just for Tifton, but... We have Albany, Georgia, which is a larger city, even going up to Macon. If we have a depot here and you could hop on the train and you could be in Macon, which is a two-hour trip.

on I-75, if you could get on a train and get there in like an hour or less, I don't know how fast the trains can go. I think that would be fantastic, but that's never going to happen here. It's too damn socialist.

I'm old man yelling at clouds. I know, right? I know. All right. What's our next story? Well, talking about social, well, this is not socialism, but I never know about AI. So the perfect looking house for sale. may have an owner using AI to virtually enhance the listing. So if you've ever gone online, like Zillow and all of those other places, a lot of websites, you know, looking at houses, looking at all the pictures.

they will do stagings. And a lot of times that is a manual thing that they have to do. Well, now some folks are using AI virtual staging to let sellers digitally enhance home photos, adding furniture upgrades to boost appeal. Yes. So, broker Matthew Ping, God love that name, spotted a listing where the lawn, the roof, and the facade were AI enhanced. These are changes that if the person had actually done would have cost around $100,000. Okay. So what they're saying now is MLS is...

You know, that's the body that basically, I forget what it stands for. I actually have some real estate clients, which I'm going to talk about at the end of this. MLS rules that you must disclose any edits. You can't alter room dimensions or property features. So there needs to be some transparency that what I'm looking at was.

AI augmented, AI generated, AI staged, whatever. Yeah. The upside of being able to do this is they say, well, the benefits are it's faster. It's cheaper than physically staging. It's ideal for vacant or remote homes. But there's risk to buyers looking at your house, getting out there and going, well, this ain't what it looked like on the website. So, you know, some agents are posting before and after comparisons.

So I reached out to one, I actually reached out to all of my real estate clients and one of them got back to me immediately. I said, have you seen this here in South Georgia? And he said, yes, I have one property that. They did AI for the staging. He said it's been on the market for a long, long time because when people would actually get to the house to look at it, it wasn't the same house. They were disappointed. Okay. And I'm like.

Well, so what about the rules? Was it not notated that it was AI or whatever? And basically the answer was no. Yeah, because there's no real MLS police. You know, I live with a real estate broker and I used to shoot houses, you know, for her. And we did a couple virtual staging and virtual staging has been around before AI was ever a thing.

You basically can go on a site and literally drop furniture in and put stuff on the walls because people have no imagination. They want it staged so they can kind of get an idea of what the house is going to look like when they move in. Now, that kind of virtual staging. No problem. It is, it's fantastic. I can't believe how good it is. I mean, when I, when I did the first house with it, I went and I shot it plain and just uploaded my photos and just.

let a service do it. And they sent it back within like 20 minutes and it was gorgeous. And then I did a couple of them where I actually went to a site and staged it myself based on what, you know. the client wanted. And it was, it was great. And the house sold like, you know, just like that. It was gone and nobody complained. There was no problem with it. Now with, now they're saying it's.

AI virtual staging. I think the problem here is this guy who saw the lawn, the roof, and the facade. That's a different thing than actual staging the inside of the house with furniture. You know, there's a fine line there. Exactly. You're making actual constructural changes to the way the house.

actually looks. Yeah, that's bait and switch. Yeah, I agree. That's 100% bait and switch. And I'd be pissed off too. If I looked at the house and I was like, oh yeah, that is the shit. Let's go look at that. And I get there and... You know, the windows are falling out. Where's the duck pond? Yeah, where's the duck pond? Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. Look, I'm fine with them using stuff like this as long as...

There needs to be in big, bold letters. This is not representative of the way the house actually looks. And then, of course, I don't know why the fuck you do it anyway. Show the house the way it is and do the work. Well, the thing, yeah, yeah, actually showing the actual physical version of the house, that should be 100%. You know, you can use lighting.

time of day, things like that to mask imperfections. But if you actually physically change it, there's a problem. There's definitely a problem. And with staging, AI staging, I think you can, there's a checkbox for staged with AI, but that stuff, like I said, that. You have to stage a house, no matter what.

Staging a house physically for walkthroughs is a must. You can't virtually stage a house for walkthroughs. But if it's just for a quick turn and you know the house is going to sell because it's in a good market and you can sell it without having to do walkthroughs, AI staging, I'm sorry, virtual staging. Yeah, virtual staging. Because literally it's just drag and drop Photoshop shit. That's fine. I got no problem with that whatsoever. Yeah.

I love the 3D rendering that they do like on all these building shows where they go out and they like look at three different properties. And then they're like, well, we can take this wall down and we can do that. And they do those those virtual 3D renderings where you can really see a good. representation of the way it's going to look after they're done. Yep. I'm fine with that. So it's just this, I don't like the dishonesty aspect of it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just basically with that. It's good salesmanship to not lie to your potential customers. Yeah. You know, like with me, of course this. $50 computer will do exactly what it'll play crisis. Don't worry about it. Yeah, seriously. No one knows your business better than you. So who better to create your website than, well, you? Wix's website builder puts it all in your hands. Create a beautiful website just by talking with AI or choosing from thousands of templates.

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Well, something that is not living up to what the salespeople said it was going to do. Vibe coding. Oh, yes. Vibe coding. Who would have guessed it? OpenAI co-founder Andre Karpathy. Karpathy? I just think Carpathian. I am a Carpathian. Yeah, I know, right? Andre Carpathian. The guy who coined Vibe Coding, the idea of letting AI handle your code while you chill, just admitted even he can't make it work.

After leaving OpenAI, Galpathy built an open source project called NanoChat, a small from scratch framework that lets anyone train a mini chat GPT for about a hundred bucks. The twist? He wrote every one of its 8,000 lines. By hand, because as he put it, AI tools like Claude and Codex were net unhelpful. Yes, net unhelpful. That's a bit awkward considering this is the same guy who once said he fully gives into the vibes and doesn't even read the code AI spits out.

Turns out when you're writing something serious, not just a throwaway weekend project, those vibes crash hard. And it's not just him. Surveys show 95% of developers spend more time fixing AI-generated code than they save. And research finds AI... assisted devs actually finished slower. Companies are even hiring humans to clean up AI messes, like we've covered on the show before. So for now, vibe coding might be fun for demos, but when it's time to ship real software...

The vibes are dead and humans are still doing the heavy lifting. I can, I can totally corroborate this. I've spent so much time in, uh, Oh God, I can't cursor in cursor building a couple of projects. It. It gets you so close and then pulls the rug out from under you. It's like a really bad NFT scam. It is just a rug pull waiting to happen. Yeah, my son, Tyler. Amazon is really.

Very positive about trying to use AI for internal systems and software development and things like that. So they're heavily encouraged to try to use it whenever they can. Yeah. And he's a software developer. of about roughly 20 years now. And he's like, he's like, dad, there are times where it can, it can almost do some things he said, but he said, I constantly run into this issue where

I'm telling it to do this thing. And then it does this other thing wrong. And then I tell it, no, you need to fix this thing. It fixes that. Then it fucks the other thing up. He said, I'm constantly fixing what it's trying to do. He said, I'm faster just doing it by hand.

Yeah, it's whack-a-mole. It is absolutely whack-a-mole. That's what I've run into. I've got this project almost done. And then I'm like, I need you to make this one tweak. And then the rest of the house of cards falls apart. And it's like, why did you do that?

Why did you do that? Yeah. I didn't tell you to mess with those libraries over there. I said, I need this one little library fixed over here because it's not doing what it needs to do. Oh, I see what the problem is. You're absolutely correct. Let me just blow away six hours worth of work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm not a programmer or a software developer. I dabbled years and years ago, but I will use ChatGPT for minor things. You know, build me a...

a website framework in HTML or some Python scripts, uh, to open up a database and do a search and do some other things. And, you know, just minor stuff like that, that I could probably figure. Yeah, I mean, I could probably figure it out in about two months when it took me about 30 minutes and then fixing some things that I didn't like the way it did. And then it didn't work.

Or it didn't run, especially with Python. It just didn't run the way it was supposed to. It generated an error. And then I'd go look for that error. You know, and I'd even use chat GPT. I'm like, hey, you screwed this up. Why is this not working? Oh, I'm sorry. You're absolutely correct. I should have put this in there. Well, then why didn't you do it the first fucking time? I know. If he tells me I'm absolutely correct one more fucking time, I want to reach through and just.

rip out Sam Altman's heart. Hey, I still say please and thank you to it because when the AI overlords take over, I want that meme. It's like, get rid of them. Oh, he was nice to us. He's fine. I got a text expander snippet that has like a three paragraph. Thank you. The thing is, it is really brilliant for small things like utilities. And Claude Code is otherworldly good compared to all of the other ones. But the problem is now the prices are going up. And I...

I don't want to pay for it. I write code because I need it to make me money. I don't want to spend money on code. I want to write code to generate money, you know? And I've had friends who have, you know, they're non-coders, but, you know, they're... stupid wealthy and just sit there and play on it all day and they'll run up two three thousand dollars a day just dicking around and i'm like could you just hire me please i know right i know i mean

This is more fun. I'm like, yeah, but food, me, help. Yeah, me need food. Yeah. I pay $20 for ChatGPT and that's my limit. I've got a friend of mine who. He's definitely wealthier than I am, but he's not like a multimillionaire or anything. And several months ago, we were chatting back and forth and I was like, yeah.

I'm doing the $20 a month. He goes, I'm doing the $200 a month. I'm like, why? You run a plastic extrusion company. That's what you own. What the fuck do you need to spend $200 a month? On chat, GP, what are you doing? Are you trying to figure out how to run your extrusions more efficiently? I mean, what's going on here? Well, maybe because he's probably got the erotic package going. That's his extrusion that he's working on.

We are now making dildos. Plastic extrusion. Oh, God. So, yeah, I'm rocking it about 60 bucks a month because I pay for chat GPT. I pay for Claude and I pay for Gemini. And like I said, the Gemini is just an add-on because I got to pay for the Google Drive 20 bucks a month anyway to get the two terabytes.

The only time I use Gemini is if I'm doing a search, and my default search is actually DuckDuckGo, which they've got an AI component too, which is not bad. But occasionally, if I'm on another machine where... Bing is the default. Or no, Google is the default. I was going to say Bing. Yeah, sorry. You got a fucking time machine? Hook a brother up. I know, right? I really would like to go back.

Uh, it was much better time from 2005 to 2010, but, um, yeah, I'll, I'll sometimes I'll, I'll do it, let it do the, I'll right click and it'll say, you know, search and it'll do a little thing on the right hand side, but. You know, most of the time I'm using, I wind up using ChatGPT to do most of my search. What is that one that I cannot remember that you can, it has all of them. It has ChatGPT, it has Claude and Poe.

That's it. That's it. I thought about paying for that one, but I was like, yeah. Even though I ran for a while, even though you pay for it, you still run up against limits pretty quickly. Yeah. So you end up spending more money on Poe because, I mean, they buy in bulk, so they get cycles for cheaper. And it's kind of the same model that Cursor has. When you pick the default model in Cursor, it just basically cycles you through whichever.

they have the most credits for whichever model at the same time. So that's why your code comes back. Like sometimes it's like, holy shit, that's really good. And then, you know, they must've had some extra Claude code time. But then when it comes back garbage, it's like, oh, that's like, you know, the ghetto LLM.

This one came from Gemini. Yeah. I've had great luck with Gemini. It's been actually better for me than almost all of them at this point. Oh, okay. Yeah. The new Gemini models are really... really decent, especially since I can drop in an MP3 and have it write all the show notes for clients. I'm like, give me the outline. Here's the, I've got text expander snippets for everything. So I just say this, put in the text expander snippet for a particular client show.

Like, this is the outline. This is what I need it to look like. This is a previous version. Take this MP3 and give me everything and it'll spit it back almost perfectly. And then I send it to the client for edits. It's like, okay, done. Yeah, I still have... whisper.cpp on my Mac mini that I take my files, run it through. I've got a convert shell script that converts it using FFmpeg. And then I run like, I run two commands.

I have it do a text only and then I have it do an SRT. And I take then what I do is I take the text and I drag it over into chat GPT. And then I have a prompt that I basically say. you know, summarize for show notes, add a little bit of humor, give me some ideas for titles, et cetera, et cetera. And about 90% of the time, I don't have to do any major edits to it. And then that's what I use.

Yeah, the problem with ChatGPT, I know we're getting in the AI wormhole here for a second, guys. Stick with us. The problem with ChatGPT is the context window isn't big enough to usually get the entirety of... uh, an, an audio file for an hour. Yeah. So that's where Gemini is, is key. Like if you drop in the, and just drop the MP3 and it'll cost you about for an hour, it's about 180,000, between 140 and 180,000 tokens. The, the.

the input window for Gemini is a million tokens. So you still have 800,000 plus tokens for your actual prompt and, and context. So that's where that really kicks ass, but. I've never tried to drop an actual MP3 into ChatGPT. It barfs for the most part. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on which server farm you get to. They may have capacity or not.

Yeah, because honestly, every show that I do is going to be over an hour long anyway. Yep. So you're going to run into problems with that. But, you know, AI is going to kill us all. We just talked for 20 minutes on how we use it. Well, we are humans. We are not bright. Welcome to Grumpy Old Hypocrites. Exactly. Well, I'm going to finish off the news here because I needed a laugh.

Man launches world's first Waymo DDoS by ordering 50 robo-taxis to Dead End Street. I would have loved to have seen that. I know. This weekend, a 23-year-old tech prankster named Riley Waltz pulled off what he dubbed the world's first Weibo DDoS. Waymo has DDoSed itself many times, so this is the first external DDoS, I think. Instead of flooding servers with traffic, he flooded a San Francisco dead-end street with 50 self-driving taxis all summoned at once.

And none of it because he got a bunch of his friends together to kind of pull this off. And none of them got in the cars and they just paid the five dollar no show fee and then took off. But Waymo did catch on and suspended rides in the area overnight, which, you know. Decent. They didn't go after anybody. They called it harmless fun and nobody's harmed. Everybody's laughing at it. And I was after my horrible commute yesterday.

I was in Beverly Hills, driving through Beverly Hills at one point, and I was stuck at 18 traffic lights. Every traffic light, I saw two or three Waymos. They're everywhere in Beverly Hills. and it is really disconcerting the first couple hundred times you see a car driving around with nobody in the driver's seat it really is and somebody in the back seat it's bizarre but yeah they

They didn't cause any problems. They signaled. They changed lanes. Yeah. Tulsa King. I haven't seen that. Yeah. Yeah. It's the one that's got Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone. There is a scene. That I just happened to come across. You may find it on YouTube somewhere. He gets in the back of a Waymo, not realizing that there's no driver. And just the scene, he starts going nuts and to the point where.

And, you know, I'm going to have to give away the punchline here. He pulls his gun and shoots the damn front of the car. He's sitting in the back. He starts shooting the screen because he's like, I want the fuck out of this thing. OK, that's pretty good. So. But yeah, I would have loved to have seen this right here. And I'm actually surprised that Waymo didn't...

Didn't bring charges against. I don't know what kind of charges you would have brought against him. There's nothing you can do. He literally hired the taxis to show up and paid the no-show fee. That's – there's nothing illegal about that. Yeah, it's kind of like the cops that had to pull over the Waymo that did the – they were doing DUI. Oh, yeah, yeah. Stops or what have you. Yeah, and the car did a U-turn.

And then they pulled it over and they're like, we have nothing on the books to be able to write this up. Yeah. So, yeah, it's hilarious. It's hilarious. I'm not sure when we'll ever, if we'll ever see them around here. I mean, eventually just not in our lifetime. Yeah. Well, Lyft drivers and all the other ones, they can't make a living. They have to go down to like Valdosta or Tallahassee or Jacksonville.

In Florida, you just can't make it around here. Well, Uber did just launch its new AI training program where you can get paid to train AI while you're waiting in between rides. Hey. There you go. They're monetizing downtime. I don't know. That may help some folks.

All right, so Gen V had its penultimate episode this week, and I know there are a lot of people... No spoilers. No spoilers. I'm not going to. No spoilers. No spoilers. And I think I've even heard you say that you kind of weren't interested in it. But here's what the only thing that I will say. You need to watch it before the fifth season of The Boys comes out.

I'll just say that. Yeah, I saw you put this in the notes, and you pointed that out, and I'm like, oh, that's right, there's going to be crossovers, so I better start watching. And I just finished episode four last night. Oh, absolutely. You have to watch it before the boys because the whole season is a setup for the ending of the boys. Exactly. Yeah. And it's great. The first episode just didn't hook me, but after I started watching it, I'm really into it. It's not nearly as...

cringy as the other season was as far as just like evil. And I liked the first season of Gen V. I actually liked it better than some of the seasons of the boys. Yeah. Yeah. I thought the first season was good. Yeah, I think I agree with you. The first of the second season was a slow start, but it's well worth it, especially once you get to the seventh episode.

Yeah, that's, you know, this weekend I'm definitely going to get hopefully caught up. It's my watch before I go to bed. I kind of fall asleep to it, which is probably not the smartest thing to do. But. And he wonders why he has those weird dreams. Yeah. I wonder why I need so many drugs to fall asleep. That's why. Is it right to take seven Benadryl just so I can get three hours of sleep, doctor?

That's the reason why I take Super 7s from a company called Binoid. It's basically the reason why they're called Super 7s is they have Delta 8, Delta 9, Delta 10. THC-8. I mean, there's seven different things in them. I cannot take a whole one because I start seeing things. Yeah. I think my sponsor would have problems if I took that. Well, I mean, it's how my program goes. Yeah, I mean, I understand. I understand. And I literally have to cut them into quarters.

Yeah. No, I trust me. I had to have a conversation over melatonin if I was allowed to take that or not. Oh yeah. I get it. Yeah. I understand. Yep. So. Apple has just dropped the plus from Apple TV+, which is going to confuse the shit out of everybody who wasn't confused already. When you're trying to explain, what did you watch that on? I watched it on Apple TV. Okay. Which one? I watch it on Apple TV, on my Apple TV, on Apple TV. Right. Exactly. That makes perfect sense. Such perfect sense.

I'm so glad that they cleared that whole thing by just removing the plus. That's so great. How does one call this a vibrant new identity? I haven't. They released a new icon. So? If you're on the iOS betas, it gets a new icon. Oh, whoopty fucking dude. I know. Yeah. Oh, God. You know, I love Apple, but come on, guys.

It's fucking stupid. All right. I got a shout out to Geeks Corner over on Discord, a.k.a. Steve. Let me know that the celebrity traitors in the UK started last week. Oh my God, it's so good. It's so good. Stephen Fry's on there. So he's a national treasure. even though it's not my nation. He's still a national treasure to me. True. But I always get nervous when I see somebody I really like on the traders because they usually go home first.

But he's still there a couple episodes in, knock on wood, no spoilers from here on out. But it's so great. If you're in the UK, grab it. If you have BitTorrent, go grab it. If you're a Traders fan, if you don't know what the Traders is, you probably don't give a shit. But for me, it was great. I also watched the entirety of The Fortune Hotel, both seasons. Also, again, I think thanks to Steve. It was a great, great game show.

A bunch of people locked in a hotel with a bunch of briefcases with money in it. One has money and they all have to figure out who has it. And somebody gets kicked out every night. My kind of show. I don't know why. I've just, I've fallen in love with these kinds of shows as I get older. It's strange. Very strange. It's the times we live in. It really is. They're just upbeat and fun, backstabbing with nobody getting hurt. And somebody wins a bunch of money. It's perfect. Yeah.

So my dad was in town last week and he had never seen Idiocracy. I was like, how? You're my father. How is it possible that we've gone this long and you've never seen Idiocracy? So I just wanted to show him the beginning scene because he'd never seen that, which is, you know, the kickoff to everything that we're going through today. So we ended up watching that. I got to say.

It's a little slow in the middle, but idiocracy, it's got legs and electrolytes. I need to go back and rewatch it. It's so good. It's so good. When we were done with that, we watched Never Surrender, a Galaxy Quest documentary, because he's also never seen that. Because Galaxy Quest is a perfect film, as far as I can tell. I agree. Most people that have seen it.

Also agree. Yes, you agree. It's a perfect film. So Never Surrender, a Galaxy Quest documentary is on. I can watch it on Prime for free if you're a Prime member. It's a phenomenal documentary. It's got a couple of my friends in it, which was really fun to see. My friend Crash is in it. He was the art director. He used to work for Stan Winston. And he's a buddy of mine. Most talented person on the planet that I know. Crazy talented. And Missy Pyle.

who was one of the actresses in the show, a friend of mine. And she's got a new show out, The Missy and Brooke Show, which I pipped a couple of weeks ago. Go check it out. It's fun. Missy and Brooke shooting the shit. Good stuff. But definitely, if you've never seen Never Surrender, have you seen it?

I have. No, I have not. You got to see it. The documentary is almost as good as the movie. It's so good. Oh, okay. It leaves you with all the good feels. And it's on Prime? Yep. You can watch it on Prime. Okay. Yep. You know, who in America doesn't have it? Whether you wanted it or not. You get it. You get it. But you just pay as part of your taxes now.

Yeah, it's so good. All the feels, all the feels. And I do want to pimp a show that I may or may not be associated with called Anonymous, Real Stories of Alcoholism, Addiction and Recovery. I think just put out the 11th episode. So, and it's going strong. It's just people telling their stories. Like it says, real stories of addiction, alcoholism and recovery. So check it out. Oh, cool. Have you seen the Minecraft movie?

I am not a kid and I don't have kids, so I have not seen the Minecraft movie because I've never played Minecraft. Okay. Well, I did see it. I'm not a kid, just a kid at heart. My wife still tells me that I'm 14 years old. I think we all are. We probably all are. And I love Jason Momoa. And, you know, Jack Black's okay for me. And I did used to play Minecraft with my kids.

years ago they were the ones that got me in into it and we were actually streaming on uh the early days of twitch and that kind of stuff okay so the movie itself is it's fun All right. I would not put it. I mean, it's it's not an academic exercise in anything. It's just goofy, dumbass fun. OK. Jason Momoa is fantastic. It's a Jack Black movie you're not going to get. Exactly, exactly. And Jack Black is just Jack Black. I mean, he plays Steve, but he's Jack Black. So anyway, as you would suspect.

Minecraft movie number two is going to be released July 23rd, 2027. They made so much money on the first one. That was a foregone conclusion that it was going to come out. Yeah, I think the thing that they sent out that they released was something like they were building something. Anyway, it's from the whole Minecraft motif of, you know, you constantly build stuff. So they're starting to build number two. We better finish this show so I can go build a number two myself.

Ups and doodads. All right, this week I have decided... To go back to Things 3, I know it's a groundbreaking decision. I talked about using reminders on iOS and how it just got the job done, but it's just so goddamn ugly. I couldn't handle it anymore. So I had a Things 3 license for all my devices. Like, why am I not using that? So I went back to it and I'm happier. That's all I got to say. I'm just happier.

Because it's prettier. Life is too short to use ugly software. And reminders, albeit functional, it's pretty fucking ugly. I mean, isn't that the goal in life is just to be happy? It is. It is. It's the little things. It's the little things three that make me happy. You know what doesn't make me happy? What? We're now looking at Wi-Fi 8. 8? 8. I didn't know there was 6 and 7. Yeah.

Do you know what your access points are in your place? Hell no. So, well, the new hotness has been Wi-Fi 7, but now TP-Link has confirmed that they have successfully done... Wi-Fi 802.11 BN trials, which is a key milestone in the next-gen wireless development. Okay, I'm sorry here. Every time I think TP-Link, I think Cornholio. I need TP-Link in front of my phone hole.

So I think 802.11 should have been 802.11 BM for a nice BM. So Cornholio could have a 802.11 BM. I like it. You know, maybe we should petition them to change the name of it. All right, so what they did is they validated Wi-Fi 8 beacon-indicted throughput. They used, of course, prototype hardware built with a joint industry partnership, most likely with Qualcomm. Mm-hmm.

But the goal is not to get more speed, but to get better reliability, lower latency, and what they're calling stronger real-world performance. So you still get your 2.4, your 5, your 6. I'm sorry, that sounds like a Viagra. Commercial. I need better reliability, lower latency, and stronger real-world performance. Yeah, well, that's the reason. You just start a Bluetooth subscription, you'll be fine. But...

Okay. Yeah, they still have the 2, 4, the 5, and the 6 gigahertz bands. 4,096 QAM, if anybody knows what QAM is. I used to run a cable broadband company, so I'm painfully aware of what QAM is. Okay. 320 megahertz bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera, which you already get in Wi-Fi 7. They still rated it 46 gigabits per second max.

but they're aiming for 25% faster real-world speeds. I mean, ultimately, there's all kinds of crap in here, technical stuff, optimizes power levels for cleaner signals, improves directional signal targeting. boost throughput by up to 80%, refines data efficiency. I mean, it hits all the buzzwords, man. Ultimately, the benefit is hopefully you'll get stronger connections in crowded areas. You'll get less interference. You'll get smoother roaming and you'll get better low signal performance.

What kills me, Wi-Fi 7 only came out in 2023. Okay. So, what? You know, and Wi-Fi 7 already kicks ass. So. I figure Wi-Fi 8, we'll probably start seeing spec units come out in another year or two with Wi-Fi 8 because they do that a lot. The spec won't be ratified, but they'll go ahead and produce equipment that they're like, oh, we'll fix it with firmware.

You know, once it gets ratified. And so I figure we'll start seeing spec units in a year or two and it might get ratified by 2028 or 2030. Well, I guess it's time to start now, you know, if it's going to be that long to come out. Yeah, I mean, the majority of my clients still have Wi-Fi 5 units. I just looked, I've got Eero 6 Pros. Okay, okay. I have deployed...

One TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Wi-Fi router, which I hate to do, but it was such a small network and I was just replacing existing equipment. So that's Wi-Fi 7. I'm a ubiquity shop, so that's what I normally put in. And I've done Wi-Fi 7 in two different locations. One was a complete network with Wi-Fi 7 wall units, and another one I just replaced.

one of their main access points, which was a Wi-Fi 5 with a Wi-Fi 7 Pro. And I'm like, I'm not going back anytime soon to upgrade this stuff. So, you know, they're going to be kicking with it for at least another five years. So, you know, something to look forward to. Well, like I said, my sixes work great. I got a bunch of the routers. I got three Pro routers. I didn't go with any of the little extenders. I just put three Pro routers around my house, and it seems to work.

Everything else is just Ethernet because I like Ethernet. Oh, trust me. I've got four access points. I've got one here in the office. I've got one downstairs, one upstairs, and then I've got a Wi-Fi 6. outdoor unit because I had a certain area of my yard that whenever I was cutting yards and I listened to podcasts and I might stream music or whatever, I started dropping out. And I was like, this will not do.

That's how you know you're a geek. Exactly. I can't mow my lawn and stream at the same time, so I must fix this. Exactly. I'll bring up YouTube because I got YouTube Premium. I'll bring it up and start a playlist. and I'm just rocking around on the lawnmower, and then it starts buffering, and I'm like, fuck this. No, this just cannot stand. This cannot stand. So I've got a Wi-Fi 6 mesh unit ubiquity on that side of the house.

Well, that's awesome. Maybe you should get together with Dave and you guys can figure out some kind of solar windmill powered way to power it without actually, you know. Hey, I'm all for it. I'm all for it. I literally have a WISE battery-operated camera that has a solar panel connected to it to keep the battery. So that's right in my sphere. There we go. Well, Windows 10.

Since you're an IT guy, I'm sure you have a lot of things to say about Windows 10. But all the big news this week is that Windows 10 is ending support. And people are saying that this is a disaster for the environment.

because everybody's going to have to dump these old Windows 10 machines because they're not Windows 11 compliant. But what more than likely is going to happen is that everybody's going to keep running their Windows 10 machine without support, and it's just going to become a botnet dystopia. So what are your thoughts on the end of Windows 10 support, Donovan? This pisses me the hell off. Because I am what's considered an MSP.

So I have a lot of contracts with clients and I manage all their updates on their computers. I manage their antivirus and all that kind of stuff. You know, a lot of them, whenever Windows 10 came out, we started upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. And I mean, I think we can all agree that the first iterations of Windows 10 were not that great.

By the time they got around to the 1803 and the 19 whatevers, it was pretty solid. So I don't have a problem with Windows 10 in its current form. Is it perfect? No, I don't think any operating system is perfect. But. There was a time as I was upgrading or replacing older machines from like 2011, 2012, you know, they'd gotten long in the tooth.

So I started buying these refurb units off of Amazon. And normally they were Dell units like Optiplex 7040, 7050s. They'd have... six gen i5 like the i5 6500 come with 16 gigs of ram and ssd and all of that and it they worked perfectly fine now two years ago i started swapping over to these little Many PCs made several companies make them. They're all Chinese made. And I have no problem with that. But I use a particular brand called B-Link and they are phenomenal for three hundred dollars.

You can get a Ryzen 5 or a Ryzen 7, 5th generation, 16, 24, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gig NVMe or whatever. I got two of those for when I was mining. Oh, what was that stupid coin that I was doing? It wasn't Ethereum, was it? No, no, no. It was that really... God, why can't I remember the name of it? But when I had my little mind going, I used a couple of those. It was pretty good. I'll remember it in the middle of, just keep going, keep going. They're great little machines though, yeah.

Yeah, they're great little machines. They're low power because they're basically, the form factor, they're based off of mobile CPUs that go in laptops. And they come with a full license of Windows 11 Pro for $300. So, what this has started causing is all of those refurb units that I was getting are no longer compatible for the requirements of Windows 11.

Oh, yeah. And so I'm OK with all the stuff that I've been buying over the last two years. But, you know, you have to go to a client and say, you know, that computer that we replaced in 2022. Yeah, we got to replace it again. Oh, and so. Yeah. I've got one client. It's a dentist office. I just replaced because these were machines that weren't actually the refurbs, but they were like fourth generation, either I-5s or I-3s.

I replaced 13 of these things with these new B-links. And what I did is I said, yeah, I know, right? It was a chunk of change for them. So what I did is I said, look, I presented them with an agreement. And I said, October 14th, 2025, you're no longer going to get security updates, feature updates, anything on Windows 10 machines. Got to go to Windows 11. These machines.

do not support Windows 11 per the requirements of Microsoft. I said, however, if it's a sixth or seventh generation, here's what we are going to do if you will agree to the caveats. And so what Donovan does is Donovan has a Windows 11 Pro thumb drive that he built with Rufus that bypasses all that bullshit. Now, it does come up. And it gives you a screen that says, hey, this machine does not support the requirements.

So you're on your own. So you have to click an accept button. Okay. But it'll still install Windows 11 Pro or Home that I'm doing all pro. And it'll keep the updates going? Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah. And so that's what I'm doing for some of them. Now, like I said, the older machines, the 13, they were like, yeah, we're going to replace them. And then I had another client that.

They also had six gen Dell units that were bought, I think, around 2018, somewhere in there. And I gave them the same option and they were like, yeah, we'll just replace them. And so I replaced them with the little. you know, 32 gig, one terabyte, Ryzen 5, 5560U or something like that, B-Lynx. And plus then they wanted, well, we need two monitors on each one now. So that was a nice little job. But this...

This is bullshit. There is absolute. I mean, I know Microsoft is like, well, you need the TPM 2.0 because there's going to be in the secure boot. There's going to be security issues and et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, no. You just did this because you wanted to. There were other ways of doing this. And there is no reason why a machine that is a sixth or seventh generation Intel processor or the equivalent of an AMD Ryzen.

cannot run Windows 11. You just arbitrarily chose this. And so you're right. Like this says, you're either going to have a lot more e-waste or you're going to have a lot of people that just aren't going to worry about it. And they're not going to get security updates. And then on top of that, and I'll get off my high horse here. If you do want to continue to get updates, you got to use a fucking Microsoft account. Oh, God.

Yeah. You can get a Windows 10 machine to continue updating, I think, for either another year or two. But you must start signing in to the machine with a fucking Microsoft account. Are you going to become a Linux house? I have tried and tried and tried my best on Linux. But the problem is, is some of the software that I have to use to like remote into machines only works on Windows. Yeah.

Well, I take it back. It works on Windows and it works on Mac OS. I don't know how well supported it is on Linux. Is anything supported on Linux anymore? I mean, I don't know. I've got a friend of mine. Save the emails, everybody. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got a friend of mine that's in the same business. We were actually discussing the potential of maybe forming one company together. He just switched his workstation over to Linux. And I'm like, well, how are you going to handle the.

you know, the, the remote control and all that other kind of stuff. And he's like, I got a windows VM for that. I'm like, okay, you got it figured out. As Dave would say. Let me just stop you here for a quick aside because I know we'll get letters. Dave. Dave. Yeah, that would have been fun to talk to him. Yep. Guess where he's at right now? Disneyland? Yes, he is. Everybody went to Disney and left me home to work. Oh, there you go. Yep. Such is life. On that note.

Over at Patreon, we've got three new subscribers, Daryl, Fat Fat, and Donovan. How many people do I know named Donovan? Well, one. So thank you, Donovan, for coming to Patreon. No, that did not influence my decision to have you on the show because you did that after bribery. It works like you pay me first. Then I do something. I did something that you paid me later. How's that work?

Yeah, well, I was actually I was resubscribing or becoming a Patreon supporter again because I had after I went on to my alcohol retirement. I'd actually started tossing you guys money every month. And then I had a lull. You know how it is. You start putting all your bills in a spreadsheet and you're looking at what your income and outcome is. And it's like, oh, I need to start cutting stuff.

And I got to be honest with you, even before you asked me, I was already going to do it because I was getting tired of the fucking ads. See, we had to up those crap ads because. We have to pay for the bandwidth and nobody's buying the paid ad. So we got a few extra ones. My daughter and I listen to the show every Friday morning, so it's always the one prior.

And when we go grocery shopping and when we hit those ads and I'm that guy, I hit the fast forward. I couldn't give a shit less if you've hit fast forward. As long as you download the show, find it with me. I do. All right. And also from the from the previous patrons. We don't have anybody right now because Brian's at Disneyland Paris and he didn't finish the list this week. So next week we'll do 20. So blame Brian and his Mickey Mouse fetish. Exactly. Exactly.

So over at PayPal, we have Miles, Sherry, Arcadio, Nathaniel, Brett, Linda, and Andrew. And over at the tip jar, we've got John, Sean, Theodore, Keith, Roger, and Thomas P with a big 250. Thank you, Thomas. Woo-hoo. Yeah, I saw that and I was like, hey, wow. Good on you. Yep. Yep. And some sad news this week. Diane Keaton. Dead at the age of 79. She had a pretty good run. She will be missed. Yep. And yesterday, Ace Frehley, founding member of KISS, dead at 74, which...

I had a question for you. Have you ever seen that movie they did in 1978 called Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park? I've always hated Kiss since I came out of the womb. So I remember the commercials for it. I never watched it. Don't. Do not try to find it. I won't. Just don't. But I remember as an eight-year-old kid. I sold the commercial and I was like, I need to see this because I mean, all I knew about Kiss at the time was they were a band.

But in the movie, they're made out to be like these people with superpowers. And I was like, I was all in at eight years old, you know. But it does not have legs. Trust me. I didn't think it did. Oh, man. And also a big happy birthday to a super huge Kiss fan, MXV, friend of the show. And the big 60 to my friend John Sylvain. Hi! John. So happy birthday, John and MXV. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to all of y'all. All right. Well, until next time, I'm Donovan Adkisson.

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 718. 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. And we do mean...

that in the literal sense of the word love the show share it there's a share button in your podcast player use it to spread the grumpiness to friends and foes and everyone in between and 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 hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review and we'll read it on the air. And guess what? We've got GOG merch!

Sort of, in some parts of the world where there's not tariff problems, but we're working on it. Snag your grumpy gear today while you can at shop.gog.show. Stay grumpy. And thanks again, Donovan, for filling in for Brian, who's... In Paris. Anytime. How many times have you wished you could be in two places at once with Wix? You practically can.

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