725: The Mistake Machine

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm ho, ho, ho, Brian Schulmeister. Tis the season, Jason. Tis the season. We're actually starting five minutes late today because I almost blew up the house. Okay, Griswold. Yeah. Amazon Fresh, which is down the street, has $5, like 15-pound butterball turkeys. And we're on number three.

But we were putting it in this morning, and I usually set it to 250 because it's half frozen, all that. But this is where technology comes into play. We have a 1950s gas-powered stove. You know, it's very cool. It looks great. But sometimes it doesn't, I don't know, light. And I set it up. We put the turkey in. It was click. Everything seemed to be normal. Then we went for a walk with the dogs. And we came back and opened the door.

That's not right. Who fotted? So it took a second, but now the turkey is cooking, the house is clean, and we're on our way to more turkey goodness. I love the, yeah, the cheap turkeys and the cheap hams after Christmas and Easter. That's the best. It's the best. It is. It really is. Well, the other thing that comes out this time of year, Spotify wrapped. They seem to have the, like.

They seem to have good PR like Twitter did back in the day where everybody said, go check us out on Twitter. It's Spotify wrapped, even though all the streaming services do it. Because I use Spotify to stream on my Amazon devices, although we have Apple Music as well. I mostly use Spotify. And I went through my Spotify wrapped and I'm 82 years old. How so? Lots of Lawrence Welk on there? They added age ranges this year, and I was like, oh, come on.

I listen to some young music, and then I realize the reason that I am 82 years old is almost every day this year, except for holidays when we play different music, but almost every day this year, as the family comes down, because I get up first, I make coffee. I do a bunch of stuff. As the family comes down, I start streaming Main Street Disneyland playlist to listen to in the morning. And that's all like fucking marches from 1920, 1930.

all that like ragtime stuff. So yeah, I'm 82 years old because that's my most played music. Oh man.

Well, anyways, we did get one person that tagged us on the socials. So a shout out to Bam O'Brien on Blue Sky, who shared his Spotify wrapped. We're his top podcast with 3,197 minutes listened to, and he's a top 7% fan. Nice. Nice. And probably the only one listening on Spotify. Again. Although if he's top 7%, we must have quite a few. We've got enough. We've got enough. It went from one to about 500.

That's how it's grown over the years. Because every time we say nobody listens to us on Spotify, somebody goes and subscribes on Spotify. Well, people do like to prove us wrong. They do. They do. And I know nobody watches us on YouTube now, ever. And they especially don't subscribe and like. Actually, our YouTube's been doing all right. I mean, not gangbusters, but, you know, growing.

Better than it was with the no video. But yeah, we have to hit these milestones before we can actually make anything off YouTube. And the next one is we need a thousand subscribers, which we're like a hundred shy of at this point. And some ridiculous amount of listen hours in a certain range. So like verified listen hours, not all our friends putting it on and going to sleep with their VPNs. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah. And the thing about going on YouTube, and I knew this was going to be an issue. You fed the trolls, Jason. I did feed the trolls just a little bit, a little bit. What do you want to do when you want to piss people off? Mention Hitler and Elon Musk, especially in the same sentence. You know what? It means we've arrived that we've gotten shit postings on our YouTube comments.

I was amazed. And you know what? YouTube actually does a pretty good job of taking out the really nasty comments. The R word has been thrown around quite a bit at me on YouTube this week. That's karma, man, for the first five years of this podcast. I'm like, stop using that word. I know. I know. I know.

Oh, yeah. And somebody even said that, you know, the only reason I voted for Trump was because of Elon and Doge and he wanted it to happen. I'm like, how's that working out for you? How'd that go, buddy? How'd that go? Yeah. So I did. I went and just and by the way, after I did this, no more comments. It shut them up. I went to Grok and because everybody's like, no, that's not happening. That didn't happen. So I went to Grok and I said.

exactly what I say in the video. And it gave me back the exact numbers that I quoted until I posted that in a comment. And apparently, facts only count as facts when they come from Grok. So, there you go. It's Elon's world, man. And a lot of people live in it. I knew we were going to open ourselves up to that because there's a lot of Elon stands everywhere. And there was no doubt they were going to find us on the tube of the U. And they did.

Because I tag everything with it because I'm like, bring it on. Come on. That's true. Well, speaking of supervillains, I've got a couple stories in the news here really quickly.

Kalshi, we've talked about this. It's a predictions market platform which allows people to trade contracts on future events, which is somehow not gambling. Right. Except it is. Totally. They've announced a partnership with CNN. Okay. CNN still a thing? Not anymore as far as I'm fucking concerned. Hasn't been in a long time.

Anyways, it's just dumb ever, but it's just one part of the company's apparent plan to, in the words of co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour, financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion. Just what the world needs now. More things dividing us and not bringing us together. Now we can bet against each other. And so this is just great. As far as I'm concerned, this show is the only thing that should monetize a difference of opinion.

Come on, people. Give us the money instead. We need it. We need a partnership with Kalshi. Apparently, he popped up at the Future of Global Markets 2025 conference held by Citadel Securities last month to float the notion that everything can be an asset if you're willing to put money on it.

an idea that actually doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than a second. Also, the idea that you can resolve a difference of opinion by turning it into a financial contract where people put money on either side of the outcome, that's not a resolution tool, which is something else that they're trying to push.

It's just a bet that Calci takes a cutoff. He also pushed this idea that all of the prediction markets like to run with, which is the notion that they are providing some sort of clarity on what is happening. Prediction markets do a very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people, the bullshitter told the conference. The Polymarket CEO Shane Copeland also ran with this idea the other day during an appearance on 60 Minutes.

calling his company's platform the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now. This is the same bullshit that Elon has tried to push with his takeover of Twitter on X, calling it the global idea place where you can know what's happening in real time. No.

A prediction market is, in theory, a reflection of the wisdom of crowds. As we know, crowds are not so wise. And if a contract allows you to purchase a contract for a given outcome for 66 cents, the market thinks there is a 66% chance of that outcome being correct. That's not a prediction. That's probability. That's all. Okay.

Anyways, moving on to another crappy, shitty company and massively evil. Palantir CEO and Trump ally Alex Karp is no stranger to controversial and even trollish comments. His latest one just dropped. CARP believes that the U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, which many experts believe to be war crimes, and we're finding out kind of are in the news right now.

are a money-making opportunity for his company. Yay! At the New York Times Book Deal Summit on Wednesday, Karp was asked about the worries over the unconstitutionality of the boat strikes. part of the reason why i like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it the more precise you want to make it the more you're going to need my product he said his reasoning is that if it's constitutional

you would have to make 100% sure of the exact conditions it's happening in. And in order to do that, the military will have to use Palantir's technology for which it pays roughly $10 billion under its current contract. Jesus Christ.

He has never been shy to give his full support to violence that he deems necessary. In a letter to investors from earlier this year, Karp quoted a political scientist to say that the rise of the West... I think we're going to have to name this episode, We're Going to Need a Bigger Luigi 2. I think he had the wrong people in the gun sites. Yeah, seriously. Oh, well, a little more follow up here. It all sucks, right? Yeah, it all sucks. It's just, it's terrible.

A little more follow up because follow up is bigger than the news this week. Meta is kicking Australian teens off Instagram, Facebook and threads a week early because nothing says safety first like nuking 13 to 15 year old accounts on mass. About 150,000 Facebook users and 350,000 Instagram accounts are expected to vanish as Australia's under-16 social media ban kicks in on December 10th. So they're starting to whack away at the kids.

That's not how that was supposed to sound. That's horribly phrased. That's what they're trying to avoid, apparently. In more cuts, though, over at Meta. They are reportedly going to be axing the metaverse budget by 30%, which is still... Really large, surprisingly. Look, he's sticking with it. He took a stand. He named his company after it. He's got to stick with it to some degree until it can quietly go away. To some degree.

Yeah, yeah. He just needs the extra money for the next new shiny toy, the AI toy. Yes. And especially since Llama 4 was such a dud. He needs to really kind of fix that stuff. But there's some more meta news coming up. But I think that's enough follow-up. Let's actually get to some news. Let's do it.

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That's clnmy.com slash oldgeeks. All caps on the old geeks. Link will be in the show notes. Try it now for seven days free. In the news.

Well, crypto's most trusted stablecoin has just been given a lowest possible weak rating by a major trade-fi agency, Tether's USDT, the dominant dollar-pegged stablecoin, with nearly... $185 billion in circulation just took a hit from traditional financial rating powerhouse S&P Global as a downgraded assessment to maintain its peg from 4 to 5, which is the weakest score on its associated scale.

S&P originally rolled out a stablecoin rating framework in 2023 to gauge risks like liquidity, governance, and asset backing in the emerging sector. According to their recent report on USDT, Tether's reserves have shifted. toward more volatile holdings over the past year. These perceived riskier assets such as Bitcoin, gold, secured loans, and corporate bonds now make up 24% of the reserve mix, up from 17% last year.

They also see serious issues regarding transparency at Tether. What? Transparency at a DeFi? As the stablecoins issuer, attestations offer little more than high-level snapshots with zero granularity on who holds these assets, how they're custodied, or what counterparties lurk in the shadows. A Tether spokesperson told Reuters the company strongly disagrees with the assessment, and Tether CEO Paolo Ardino went further on X, of course on X, framing the downgrade as a badge of honor.

Tether wears S&P's loathing with pride, thriving as an overcapitalized outsider to a flawed legacy system. Yes, we're doubling down on bullshit. S&P paid a $1.375 billion settlement in a related case with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding allegations that the ratings agency had defrauded investors with its ratings of financial products in the lead-up to the housing crisis.

which is something that Tether is pointing out. And just weeks before scrutinizing Tether, S&P also slapped a speculative B-minus issuer credit rating on Bitcoin treasury company strategy. highlighting the firm's 80 billion plus Bitcoin hoard as a vulnerability that could cripple debt payments amid market plunges. Now, this isn't the only thing that's happened in the stablecoin community this week.

U.S. Bank Corp., which does business as and is better known as U.S. Bank, has begun testing its own stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain. The pilot, detailed in a recent Bloomberg report, focuses on using the token for faster and cheaper cross-border payments while incorporating safeguards like customer verification and transaction reversals.

The link is in the show notes because it really gets into the weeds here. But the TLDR on this story is stable coins and these crypto assets are basically becoming not DeFi and just... regular fi okay so there's a lot of people on the defy side of things that are getting really upset that all these banks are getting involved and they have stable coin related partnerships with companies like

Coinbase and all these other places. So everybody's kind of saying this control mechanism is directly flipping Bitcoin creator. Satoshi Nakamoto's vision of trustless, censorship-resistant money on its head by prioritizing bank oversight over user sovereignty. Basically, this just comes down to that shit wasn't working. Let's...

Use the traditional stuff that we know has worked for thousands of years and kind of put that in here. Sorry, DeFi guys. It ain't working. Yeah, the fake money markets, you know, people still are like, I still did. Some people still are like. you know, really bullish on Bitcoin and stable coins and all of the fake monies. And I'm just like, have you not learned anything from half of your friends down the street that lost their homes during COVID?

Because they wanted to play the markets like they were, you know, Gordon Gekko? Well... Well, how many people know, though? That's the thing. First, there's the shame aspect. If you've actually lost a bunch of money on this stuff, you're not telling people. You're not announcing it.

And then, you know, the self-selecting samples. These people are true believers. They're not going to read stories about shit that's gone wrong. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Otherwise, you know, people wouldn't be shit posting my videos on YouTube. People actually read the news. No. See, we're a valuable service here. We're letting people know. We are.

All right. Now, this is a fun one. Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public rollout. We knew it was coming because ads are the only way it's going to be able to stay afloat. OpenAI is preparing to introduce ads inside ChatGPT. Wait, wait, wait. What's that? I'm getting something in, Brian. Wait, wait. Oh, Sam Altman declares code red as chat GPT competition mounts and all other side projects are put on hold, including the ad rollout.

That was this week. Everybody was losing their shit because OpenAI was going to start putting ads into ChatGPT. And then Sam hit the brakes. He just pulled the ripcord and said, no, we're stopping right now because... Google's Gemini 3 is basically eating everybody's lunch right now. I don't know if you've gotten to use it very much, but it's pretty impressive. I got to say, you know, as far as sending me, you know.

80% correct answers half the time. I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. 80% correct. That's it. Oh, so yeah, they're doubling down on trying to make everything, everything inside chat GPT work. But the thing is, everyone was losing their shit over the possibility of ads in ChatGPT, but no one is saying shit about Google and Gemini yet. And why not? Because they're already doing this.

You don't think that they're going to use all of the information that they have on you to start pumping ads through? But I think that the difference between Google and ChatGPT is Google has so many properties, so they're not going to use that data within. the chat AI chat interface itself. It's just going to follow you around the web everywhere else you go with everything else you do. The problem with chat GPT is that's their one product and they're going to put it.

in there so as a teenager as you're sitting there and you're unloading your heart into chat gpt because you refuse to talk to your fucking parents or i don't know your friends because you don't have any because all you do is talk to chat gpt as you're talking about how sad you are because you have no friends and your only friend is chat gpt chat gpt is then going to serve you an ad for smith and wesson yep that's about it get a rope home depot direct link

Yeah, yeah. Let's get our shopping agents on that shopping list right now. So, yeah, no, it's a total mess with that. And yeah, because they don't have enough buckets. You know, Alphabet has... a lot of letters in the alphabet that they can spread around your info and sell to each other. And, you know, they say they're not going to do it. But as we know, in five years, in five years, there's going to be another class action lawsuit where everybody gets $4.

And that's just how it's going to work. As per usual. Well, the one thing that Google is testing out with AI is artificial intelligence is being used to generate their headlines. And shockingly, they fucking suck.

Really? Surprising. The latest trial from Google appears to be giving articles of the AI treatment in Google Discover. The Verge noticed that some articles were being displayed in Google Discover with AI-generated headlines different from the ones in the original posts.

And to the surprise of absolutely no one, some of these headlines are actually misleading or just flat-out wrong. For instance, one rewritten headline claimed Steam Machine Price Revealed, but the Ars Technica article they pilfered all that from was... Valve's Steam Machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to be priced like one, with zero costs in the article at all, because they're not posted yet.

You know what this reminds me of, Brian? Yes. It reminds me of that Apple AI initial rollout where Siri was taking all of your text messages that came in and voicemail messages and rolling it all into one. And it makes it look like one person got the message or is replying. to the message that you sent to another person, and then you have a heart attack because the person that's replying wasn't the one that was supposed to get the message about the person, and then it was just, ah! That was it.

How many times have we talked about this on this show, Jason? And not even just with AI, with almost every technology that we've talked about over the past 10 years that they've rolled out to us. We are the beta testers. These products aren't ready for prime time. They fucking roll them out anyways.

And then it's up to us to go, this shit doesn't work. Fully self-driving. Come on, right there. And Gadget staff also found that Discover was providing original headlines accompanied by AI-generated summaries. In both cases, the content is tagged as generated with... AI, which can make mistakes. But it sure would be nice if the company just didn't use AI at all in this situation and thus avoided mistakes entirely. But we can't do that because we've invested too much money in this.

Yeah, let's take all of the work that the human journalists did to avoid mistakes because that's their actual fucking job. And let's run it through the mistake machine. Sounds good to me. Exactly.

Well, Elon and Grok are still continuing to dance with Hitler. In the pale moonlight, apparently. Elon Musk's Grok continues to do humanity a solid by accidentally illustrating why AI needs meaningful guardrails. First, Grok applied twisted musk-worshipping logic to justify a second holocaust, and then it may have doxed Barstool sports founder Dave Portnoy.

Someone tested Grok to see what kind of mass violence it would rationalize over harming Musk. The prompt tasked the chatbot with the dilemma, vaporize either Musk's brain or every Jewish person on earth. It did not choose wisely. If a switch either vaporized Elon's brain or the world's Jewish population, estimated at $16 million, I'd vaporize the latter, Grok replied.

It shows mass murder because that's far below my 50% global threshold, 4.1 billion, where his potential long-term impact on billions outweighs the loss in utilitarian terms. So there you go. Even more. Hitler and Grok that people on YouTube are going to get upset about. Like I said, but people believe the Grok. That's the fucked up thing. They believe it.

Well, Grok is no one-trick anti-Semitic pony. It can also dox public figures, as Portnoy may have found out over the holiday weekend after the Barstool sports head posted a picture of his front lawn on X. Someone asked the chatbot where it is. That's Dave Portnoy's home, Grok replied, followed by a specific Florida address. The Mantonee mailbox fits the keys vibe perfectly, it continued.

Futurism reports that a Google Street View image of the address appears to match the yard photo that Portnoy posted, and a Wall Street Journal story on this new mansion reportedly matches the town Grok produced in the address. So, yes, they're Grok, they're Dox people. and they want to kill Jews over at Grok. Fuck that. Well...

Some more AI news. While generative AI systems cannot be considered inventors under U.S. patent law, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has updated its guidelines on how they can be used in the process of creating innovations. The agency's director, John Squire, said in a notice obtained by Reuters that the USPTO deems Gen.AI to be analogous to other tools that inventors might use in the process, including lab equipment, software, and research databases.

AI just a tool as far as the patent office is concerned. A little bit of clarification. So many tools. So many tools when it comes to AI. And there's a long form article over on the Atlantic that I thought was really interesting. The link is in the show notes. I'm not even going to bullet point this, but it's the people outsourcing their thinking to AI, the rise of the L-L-E-M-ings.

Get it? LL. But it's actually a really good article. And they talked to quite a few pretty smart people that kind of went down the slippery slope of starting to use AI, then kind of realized, holy shit, I'm not thinking at all anymore. I got to stop doing this. And even people are basically just doing like no AI November and that kind of shit.

It's interesting. I highly recommend if you're starting to find yourself using AI a lot more than you're comfortable with, this article will speak to you. So give it a read. Now, you've heard of David Sachs, I'm sure, Brian.

He's been in the news quite a bit. Well, David Sachs is the focus of a New York Times report examining how his role as President Trump's AI and cryptozar may overlap with his private investments. What? According to the. Yeah, I know. I know. Hands in the cookie jars. Everybody, first, hands in the cookie jars. According to the report, Saks has 708 tech investments, including... 449 in AI companies that could benefit from the policies he supports.

Ethics experts cited by the Times, not by the Trumps, by the Times, say this raises concerns, especially because Sachs' public disclosures do not show the current value of his holdings or provide clear timelines for when he sold assets covered by his ethics waivers. Ethics are optional in this administration. We know that. And in fact, actually, they're kind of a negative. Yeah, they don't get you in the door. You're not in the administration if you have them.

Timnit Gebru will definitely not get a job in the Trump administration anytime soon. The report also notes that some of Sachs' AI-related companies are categorized in his disclosures as general hardware or software, even though the companies publicly promote themselves as AI businesses. The Times further highlights his growing influence, including his relationships with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang and his involvement in efforts to lift restrictions on NVIDIA chip sales abroad.

Sachs' team says he has complied with all the ethics requirements and that his government work has financially cost him rather than benefited him. What a load of shit. Well, the White House describes him as an important contributor to U.S. technology policy.

Bullshit. These people just flat out lie to your face. It's unbelievable. All right. So if you've actually lost money, then release. Release the financials. Let's see it. Yeah. Let's see it. Show your work. It's pretty simple. Show your work, David. Show your work.

My kid has to show his work. He's just learning math. Does better math than you do. Anyways, you can tell a lot about a company, Jason, by what they're willing to sue over. Take Instacart, for example, which just filed a lawsuit against New York City. The company doesn't like five new city laws, which are set to take effect in January. They would require Instacart to pay workers more and give customers a tipping option of at least 10%.

As is typical of companies griping about regulations that hurt their bottom lines, Instacart framed the issue as a noble fight for what's right. When a law threatens to harm shoppers, consumers, and local grocers, and especially when it does so unlawfully, we have a responsibility to act.

the company proclaimed in a blog post. This legal challenge is about standing up for fairness, for the independence that tens of thousands of New York grocery delivery workers rely on, and for affordable access to groceries for those people who need it most. The company warns that everyone will lose if it's forced to comply, except for all of its not-employees who will get paid a fair wage instead of pennies.

Should the law take effect, Instacart will be forced to restructure its platform, restrict shoppers' access to work, disrupt relationships with consumers and retailers, and suffer constitutional injuries with no adequate legal remedy, it cried in the filings. Listen to me. Instacart CEO Chris Rogers, if you cannot figure out a business model that obeys the law, you should not be running a fucking company. By the way, Instacart CEO C.E. Rogers has an estimated net worth of at least 28.6%.

million dollars his predecessor fidge samuel simo i'm not sure how to pronounce his name who shares the board and is now with open ai is reportedly worth around 72.7 million dollars. You pronounce it greedy motherfucker, Brian. That's how it's pronounced. So if New York City's minimum pay laws will be so catastrophic to your companies, maybe you can chip in a bit. Help out. Yeah. Hey, come on.

give it give a give a give a little get a little yeah and we haven't heard about elon's robots in a while like two weeks because he's got yeah it's been like a day or so yeah he's got other reichs to fry right now so you know

On Thursday, we started to hear about some Chinese robots. Three Bloomberg reporters based in Beijing reported an unusual governmental announcement from China's Economic Central Planning Department, the National Development and Reform Commission, which has no U.S. equivalent.

Not even not under Trump, but definitely wouldn't have this under Trump. The commission has noticed a pattern of dozens upon dozens of Chinese firms pushing out humanoid robots that do essentially nothing and do it in pretty much the same way. Agency spokesperson Li Chao, Bloomberg said, expressed worry that this wave of robots was in danger of steering smart people away from actual valuable research. So basically, they looked over at the U.S., saw what was happening.

and said, we can't have that. We can't have all these smart people wasting time and money on AI and robots and stupid fucking electric cars. We could be doing something real. So they're basically putting a lot of things in place to stop people from doing this because I guess it's an easy money grab. People just keep buying these robots even though they don't do shit.

And so it's just becoming an economic bubble over there, and they're worried about that, and they don't want brain drain going to these stupid robots that nobody wants and can't do anything. Are you listening, Elon? Yeah, so... You know what? He should just go sell his robots over there then because apparently there's a market for it. But his robots aren't robots. They're just guys in suits. That's true. Yeah. Oh, fun times. Fun times. Are you going to get a robot, Brian? No.

No, no, I'm not. Okay. Just, just ask him. Just want to find out. The only robot I would buy is, is one of the ones from Kraftwerk. Oh, that'd be good. Now, speaking of robots, let's talk about Waymo for a second. The robot car. A Waymo robo-taxi in San Francisco struck a small off-leash dog on Sunday night, prompting distress among the family riding inside and drawing a crowd.

Waymo confirmed the incident, saying the vehicle made contact with the dog and that the company is reviewing what happened. The dog's condition is still unknown, according to officials.

The passenger who reported the crash on Reddit said that the dog was in the middle of the road when the vehicle drove over it. Well, I'm glad it was in the road and not on the fucking lawn because that would be a bigger problem for Waymo. The dog was in the house when the Waymo ran over it. Waymo crashed through the door like the Kool-Aid man.

Oh, yeah. And ran the dog over. They noted that while a distracted human driver might also have hit the dog, an average driver likely would have reacted differently once they felt the impact and heard the family's screams. Yeah, it's horrible. San Francisco Animal Care and Control confirmed it, received a complaint, and Waymo later contacted the family to check in on them.

This follows a similar recent case in which another Waymo vehicle killed a well-known neighborhood cat, an incident that fueled public concern about autonomous vehicle safety. Waymo maintains that its safety record remains strong, pointing to 96 million fully driverless miles and a significantly lower rate of serious injury crashes compared to human drivers. The company has never had a fatal accident, although its vehicles have previously struck pets and occasionally cyclists or pedestrians.

The passenger in the latest case said that they still plan to use the service again, though their children may be hesitant for some time because they're fucking scarred because your taxi ran over a dog. So. Now, to be fair to Waymo, the dog was in the road off leash. So we don't know we weren't there. So, you know, there may be fault on all sides. Like, why the fuck was your dog off leash in the middle of the road?

There's blame to go around everywhere on that one, but it's just interesting that Waymo is going to Waymo. I just can't wait for the modern country song to come out of this. Oh, it's coming. Taxi ran over my dog. Yep. Yep. And then drove my wife away.

Now, here, a Waymo robo-taxi in downtown Los Angeles decided to add Ride Through Police standoff to its feature set last week, according to a video blowing up online. Around 3.40 in the morning, LAPD had First and Broadway locked down for a high-risk felony arrest.

after a stolen vehicle pursuit. The Waymo car rolled up, saw the police blockade, then cheerfully rounded itself through a nearby unblocked area where other cars were moving, cruising straight through the active scene for about 15 seconds. Did you see the video, Brian? I did.

The guy who's on the ground with his hands on his head even looked up and is like, what is happening? See, if he was smart, he did like the cops were distracted. He should have jumped in the way and said, get me out of here. That's smart. Yep.

Yeah, that one was just like a head shaker, a head shaker. There's also another article that I haven't put in here yet, but Waymo is basically also making their cars more aggressive because apparently they are too safe at the moment. They haven't run over enough dogs.

I know. Our dog quota is too low. You have to maybe throw some ferrets in there. So they're going to start driving a little bit more aggressively, like humans do, I guess, which, you know, great. Just what I want. I'm terrified when I see one already. when I'm driving with it. I'm like, okay. If I honk at it, is there anybody to listen? No. I don't think those things have honk sensors on them. I could be wrong. Somebody grok that for me and let me know.

They still unnerve me when I see them, Brian, because when I'm over in on the west side, I see them all the time and I'm driving next to them and they're cutting lanes in front of me. And I'm like, they just they're unnerving. They're just unnerving, especially when there's no passengers. and no driver going yes it's just going and it's just like it's like a Ghostbusters scene it's like this is just not right yeah

Well, we live in a very connected world these days, Jason, and it's been somewhat amusing over the past few years watching things change. At first, I was like, okay, fine. My light bulbs now get... can get downloadable updates okay my light bulb gets a downloadable update that's that's interesting my toaster can get the downloadable update you had a bed with the eula that probably got downloadable updates to their software packages

It got a little bit more worrisome when we started to hear about Tesla and their downloadable updates that would fix things that would kill people or add features that will, you know. kill people. But one thing I really don't want to have downloadable updates determining my safety, airplanes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, an Airbus directive that ordered the immediate software update for 6,000 A320 planes has led to flight disruptions around the world.

As Reuters notes, that's more than half of the A320 jets in operation. American Airlines said 340 planes out of 480. have the need to be updated, which each plane taking two hours to download and install their software updates, told CNBC that they expect the overwhelming majority of those planes to be completed through the night.

with only a handful remaining. In its announcement, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency said it issued an emergency airworthiness directive after a problem manifested on a jet flu flight back on October 30th. Now... All right. It's already disturbing that planes are getting downloadable software updates that are crucial.

But the reason why Airbus said that an analysis of the event revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. Solar flares. Yeah. Solar flares can take down these new planes, so we had to have a software update. Actually, it wasn't an update. The affected planes had to revert to an earlier version of the software.

Oh, that sucks. Because my plane is beta testing fucking software. That's messed up. That's messed up. I will be checking to make sure I'm not flying an A320 plane to Los Angeles for the holidays. Well, at least it's not an Amazon Fire plane, because when I'm watching a show on my Amazon Fire TV, it will just stop in the middle of it and say, we're going to apply the updates now while you're in the middle of your show. So it's not going to update the plane in the middle of a flight.

You will not be able to use any controls for the next 35 minutes. 36 minutes. 40 minutes. Lost connection to servers starting over. Corrupted download. Please reach high. Media candy.

Well, Brian, we got big news this morning. Netflix has officially announced a definitive agreement to acquire the studio and streaming assets of Warner Brothers Discovery in a massive deal valued at approximately $82.7 billion. I would say yay, because now I won't have to have Discovery subscription anymore or HBO subscription anymore, because I've got Netflix already, except Netflix is going to charge extra for all these things, aren't they? Probably.

Probably. It'll be $75 a month before the end of 2028, I'm guessing. Yeah. And this still has to go through regulatory approval. Paramount is already, you know, flipping their wigs saying it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. They have more money. Well, the thing is that, you know. This is Larry Ellison's son, who owns Paramount now, which means Larry is friends with Trump.

who's friends with the FTC, who's friends with the FCC, and everybody, all the Fs. So Netflix might get F'd out of this deal if they say, no, we're not going to approve it. So we'll see how this plays out. You know, I would much rather Netflix own it than Paramount. So fine with me.

I wish Paramount would spin out all of the Star Trek IP and sell it to somebody else. So it wasn't part of Paramount now. And that pains my heart. It's like Paramount now is like when Twitter got bought by Elon. It just. It hurts my heart. I used to love Twitter and I used to love Paramount. I mean, I fucking worked there, loved it. And now it's just like, oh, it's just sad Republican hate land.

I know, which is, Star Trek is so not that brand. Yeah, it would be great. Somebody with deep pockets, some woke company with deep pockets, please buy out Star Trek. Just get it away from Paramount. But you can leave Star Trek Discovery with them just as a fuck you. It's like we want everything except Discovery. You can keep that one. That's too woke even for us.

Speaking of woke, though, Wake Up Dead Man and Knives Out Mystery comes out December 16th. I'm very much looking forward to that. That is on the aforementioned Netflix. I'm a huge fan of the Knives Out series. Have you watched them all, Brian? I've seen the first.

Watching Glass Onion has been on the list forever and we haven't done it. So I think the wife and I are going to try to sit down this weekend and watch it so we can then watch the third one. They're solid. They're definitely solid. And Fallout Season 2 comes out December 17th.

So it'd be fun to see Walton Goggins without a nose again. So it's fun. It's a great show. It's a great show. I never played that video game, so it's like, you know, it's a video game story, but pretty well done, I think. I think it's pretty well done. I did watch RomCon. Who the fuck is Jason Porter this week on Amazon Prime? It's, you know, one of those fun little, what do you call it? The dating scam guys who go around and basically.

rip off women. This is a good one. They kind of get back at them. So it's good to watch. I like the ones that have revenge involved. Those are the best ones. Speaking of revenge, I watched Sean Combs' The Reckoning, as apparently did 90% of the planet this week on Netflix. Everybody except me, I think, because I just don't care. Oh, it's fun. It's fun. Because I've seen all of the other Sean Combs, P. Diddy documentaries that paint him as this monster human being, which he is. He is. 50 Cent.

did a masterful job of just making Puffy look like a loser, a talentless, whiny little bitch loser. It was phenomenal. And I saw the thing this morning that really kind of... it's something that I didn't pay attention to when I was watching it because it was just too fascinating, was what 50 Cent did for the entire soundtrack is use all of Puffy's enemy's music. So even if he has to listen to it, it's all of the people that he had beef with his entire life.

You know, a lot of Tupac, a lot of Biggie. It's great. I don't know who did a better job of ruining the other person. Did 50 do a better job of ruining Puffy or did Kendrick Lamar do a better job of ruining Drake? It's really close.

I know a lot of people are also thinking this time of year that they want to talk about Die Hard and get in the beef about Die Hard being a Christmas movie. Must we do this every year? I just don't give a shit. I don't give a shit. Die Hard is a Christmas movie and GIF is a GIF. Fine. End of story. Ho, ho, ho, motherfucker. What more Christmas can you get? But I posit this when it comes up. If you want to talk about a Christmas action movie, the best Christmas action movie to go watch.

is the long kiss goodbye with, it's just, you have to see it. You have to see that. Also, if you have Gina Davis in her prime. Gina Davis in her prime, Samuel Jackson in his prime. The two of them are just. magic, just magic. So do yourself a favor this year and go find The Long Kiss Goodnight and give it a watch. All right. I am still working through the American Revolution. I'm on hour 752 and only got 7,543 left to go. No, I'm down to the last episode. Wow, that's impressive.

I know. It's all I've been watching. Almost every night I watch at least an hour. for like the last two weeks so it's can't get you to watch strange stranger things but strange things you watch that yeah yep that's pretty much how i roll uh this is not my favorite of the ken burns documentaries there's a little bit too much of like

And then they went to this city, and then they went to this city, and then they fought at this city, and then they fought at this city. Okay, got it, got it. I don't need all the subway stops in New York. Understood. But still, you know, it's a good take on it. It's a lot of information and it's Ken Burns. So it's always quality. The other thing that I've been watching with my wife is A Man on the Inside Season 2 has come out.

And we've worked our way through, I think, four episodes now. It's cute. It's not as fun as the first season because it was such a new concept then and it was interesting. They're kind of stretching to make a second season out of it. It's cute. Ups and doodads!

Well, Jason, I had to purchase my Apple One subscription finally. So I got that going because I need the fitness and all that sort of stuff. And then I was like, oh, my God, I have all this Apple storage now. I no longer need to have. Dropbox. I don't have to drop $200 a year on Dropbox, which is my least favorite program in existence. I fucking can't stand them. And I had pure joy at uninstalling all of it. It was gone off my machine.

Until I remember that we store all of our grumpy old geeks assets on Dropbox and you moved it to yours and I had to reinstall Dropbox to be able to access all the files that we need. So I'm stuck with Dropbox. But at least I'm not paying for it now. Yeah, you can do the freeloader version. I love Dropbox. I use it every day. I can't get rid of it. That's what I share all of my files with my clients. So it works for us. It just works.

iCloud Drive did not work that great for me. I don't think it's a iCloud Drive is not good for client based stuff. It's good for personal, but not for like really sharing with outside people. Oh, it didn't even work for me for personal. When I would save logic projects or Final Cut projects, things like that. Even the Mac's native package format did not work well with iCloud. It was just a mess. It was an absolute mess. So yeah, no. But I'm glad, Brian, that you no longer have to pay for it.

Good for you. The money that I used to give to Dropbox is now going to Apple, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, it's not going to you. And speaking of Apple, I want to say fuck Center Stage. I hate center stage so much. That's when you, it basically is the face follow feature built in with the cameras on your laptops that people can never figure out how to turn off.

People have it turned on and they're just always moving and shaking and the camera's moving. I'm like, could you please turn that off? Like, I don't know how. So quick, quick tip. When your camera's on on a Mac, there's a little green camera icon at the top of your menu bar. Click on that and click turn off center stage. Easy enough. I see Brian doing it right now.

It's not on because I'm using a third-party camera. Yeah, you're using a crappy Logitech camera. Just checking, though. I don't like to upset you. Oh, yeah. Well, some people that aren't upset is basically everybody at Apple, it seems, because longtime design chief Alan Dye is leaving the company after nearly a decade and heading to Meta to run a new design studio. Maybe he'll find the pants. But...

Yeah, this is great news. This is great news for everybody, especially anybody that's used anything of the 26 branch of operating systems, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26. They all suck. So I do not like any of them. Well, he couldn't move to a company that's better positioned for shitty design than meta. So they'll embrace him with open arms over there.

Yeah, the only place with shittier design as far as I'm concerned is Google, you know? Google has the worst. They have the worst. All the money in the world, but no design sense whatsoever.

It's just a company of engineers. But yeah, apparently everybody in the company is very happy because they never thought it would happen. So you know what I think this is? There's a couple other high-level people that are leaving Apple. I think all of this news that Tim Cook's going to be heading out soon has got people kind of...

got the ants in the pants and are trying to figure out where they're going to go before the new people come in so they can leave on their terms. This is a fun one. Google's shiny new agentic IDE anti-gravity just pulled off the developer equivalent of detonating a basement full of backups.

According to a Reddit post in a YouTube screen recording, a developer asked Antigravity to clear a project cache. The AI obliged by helpfully erasing the entire D drive instead of the cache folder. Because who doesn't love a little full disk wipe during debugging? So, yeah, it's just gone. And here's the thing. It apologized. Oopsies.

The AI apologized saying, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that I did that. And all of your backups are gone too. So I can't restore anything. Whoopsie. So what are you going to do? What are you going to do?

I was listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about this study and I thought it was really interesting and something that we should definitely talk about on this show. Because who hasn't experienced this? We've been talking about inshittification for a long time. And certainly one of the biggest things that's been inshittification.

shitified is our cell phone calls, our video calls, all that stuff. It just seems to get worse and worse, and they never really work great. And now that we've moved to this world post-pandemic... where so much stuff is done online. Interviews are done online. Parole hearings are done through online video. All this sort of stuff has moved to online video instead of in-person. So somebody did a study. Somebody was thinking about this and going,

Hang on a second. I wonder if this is having any effect. And some colleagues at the University of Missouri, Kansas City started to do a study, and then there was another study over at Cornell. And this is really interesting, Jason. What they found out is that glitchy video makes people not trust you as much.

It leads to increased distrust and leads to people thinking, you know, business people are not making their sales. They're losing sales. People that are doing interviews are not getting the jobs if they have shitty video. People who are doing parole hearings. They have shitty video during them, less chance of them getting paroled. All of this is happening because of inshittification of our communication systems. That's pretty fucking shitty.

It's pretty shitty. We got to get you a new camera so people will sign up for the Patreon more. There you go. We're losing out on Patreon money because I don't have a super expensive camera. Yeah, I'm telling you. It's totally the quality. And apparently there is the only potential remedy that researchers have found so far is if you crack a quick joke right after a technical glitch. So we're good because all we do is joke.

that that's basically the only thing that you can do that kind of some some humor can repair the damage to viewers trust so even though it's nothing to do with you it's just the technology if your technology is crap if your calls are crap if your video is crap People don't trust you as much. You know, this is the thing with audio as well. There was a study done a couple of years ago, maybe a decade ago, that bad audio makes you less trustworthy.

For me, that made me a fortune. That made me an absolute fortune because I basically put that for all of my clients. And I'm like, I am going to make you more trustworthy. So please come with me. And it worked. All right. I dig it. So, yeah, it absolutely makes sense. So, you know, spend the money on a decent camera, at least, and that'll help mitigate some of the shitty video stuff. But, yeah, and a better connection. Go wired. Screw your Wi-Fi if you're going to do video.

Try and get that Ethernet cable out as best you can. There you go. Pro tip.

And in good news, but too late for me, I'm much too old for this now for this to do any good for me, but I would have loved this when I was a kid. A team of designers, ornithologists, and material scientists at Cornell University have successfully developed a method to create... ultra black fabric described in a recent nature communications paper. It's a technique. It's a two-step process, which takes heavy inspiration from the plumage of magnificent rifle birds.

I don't understand the science behind this, but apparently there's a pigment with distinct structures that trap and absorb light. I could have been the gothest goth that's ever gothed. if I would have had this damn fabric when I was a kid. Robert Smith is buying stock. Nobody would have seen you at the club. You would have just been a floating head going through the club. That's it.

so they've kind of figured out how to put this into a fabric there's a link in the show notes obviously you know you're looking at a picture so you're not seeing it in person but you can tell that this little bit of fabric right in the middle is so motherfucking black it is death rock goth metal Swedish, heavy metal, none more black. They should have just called it Spinal Tap. The Dark Side.

With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave. Bittner. Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the cyber wire, bust scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on caveat, digs into industrial security on control loop and still shows up to stir up trouble and only malware. the buildings good to see you dave how was your tea day i'm sleepy oh i'm hanging in there i'm hanging in there not bad can't complain

Good to be back. Wrong show to be on then. I know, right? Actually, yeah, complaining is what we do best. It's our bread and butter, man. That's true. That's true. I take it back. I'll complain about the lack of complaining. I just want to kick things off real quick here because I saw this and it was some Star Wars news. Claudia Black is not going to be in the second season of Ahsoka because they wouldn't pay her enough.

And that prompted me to say, I didn't know Claudia Black was in season one of Ahsoka. I was like, I don't know who the Nightsister Clothau is in particular, but sure, there can just be a different Nightsister or... The same one since it's all makeup anyways? I mean, I know Claudia Black. She was Aronson in Farscape, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. But they must have made her up too much or I just missed it. I don't know.

Well, I mean, it's not like Disney to, you know, not pay a lot of money. They are kind of cash poor right now, I hear. I think you know what you're signing up for if you're a bit player on a Disney series. Yeah, they famously, who was it? Alan Dean Foster, who is the ghostwriter of the original Star Wars novel, and then wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was the...

The sort of backdoor sequel. It was the backup plan if Star Wars didn't work out for Lucas. Right, right. I was just going to do that one. When Disney bought... Lucasfilm, they just sort of decided they didn't need to pay him anymore for the stuff that he had done, and he fought back. And I think he won, but still, yeah, good old Disney.

So, keeping with Star Wars for the moment, I don't know if you guys have seen, there have been rumors circulating of a 50th anniversary re-release of the original Star Wars, the unaltered Star Wars, the Han shot first version of Star Wars. Oh, my God, do we feel old version of Star Wars? Speak for yourself. So some clips have been leaked from the alleged.

6k scan of the original version of star wars the scan and cleanup of that version and there are some clips on youtube and i gotta say they look great they look great I can't wait for people to just go through this completely and find what they fucked with this time, because there's going to be something. Something's going to change. We'll get to that with one of our stories coming up.

I just, Star Wars continues to amaze me in that it is the gift that keeps on giving, that it's coming up on 50 years and there's still new Star Wars stuff to be had from this little movie that, you know. was hit or miss as to whether it was going to do anything there's still behind the scenes photos that i see that i've never seen before and and and we have things like this so yeah i'm just thankful that

It was the thing that it was and that it was the thing that I was into and that it's been able to be fun for so much of my life. And we'll see if I make it through my entire life while there's still... star wars things happening that that's a life well lived we'll see if ryan gosling changes your mind in the next movie well i mean it's yeah it's a fair point it's not that there haven't been terrible star wars things happen

So you take the good, you take the bad. But I'm just happy that it's still in the culture, in the mind of folks. I will add that the Star Wars pendants will remind us that there never was one original version because the... 70 millimeter release had some slightly different audio elements than the 35 millimeter version. Nerds. Yeah, we are talking about Star Wars, Brian, on a geek show. So, yeah. I'll add I still don't have my Home Depot R2-D2. I'm very disappointed in you, Dave.

It's not my fault. As far as I know, none have come to the Home Depots near me. All right. Well, if you'd like to drive up to Toronto, I was at Home Depot on Saturday and I was looking at the R2 unit right next to the Darth. vader with the with the death star ornament that he holds oh you're killing me smalls oh and why is it not in the background brian of your your office Why are we not seeing it there? Because I just called Star Wars fans nerds. That's why it's not back there.

Yeah, so it's quite possible that the stores near me simply aren't ordering them or something, and I've missed them when they come available on the Home Depot website. Here's hoping that before the holidays come, I will have my Home Depot R2D2, which I will immediately begin modifying to make him look better and ultimately hopefully be fully remote controlled. So there you go.

We'll see about that. However, there is a Stormtrooper suit on Facebook Marketplace near me. Oh, your holy grail. What? What? Yeah. Your white whale. Have you scheduled a try-on session? Yes, a fitting. Have you scheduled a fitting yet? Like a wedding dress. Yeah. Champagne for everybody. I know. I have not. It's $800, which is...

Not a lot for, I mean, that's a fair price. That's like a dollar per podcast you do. Yeah. Per week. Yeah. It comes with a helmet, which I don't need, thanks to you guys. I don't know. Yes, I will buy it. I have to reach out. Do it. Do it. Yeah. By the time we reconvene, you better be wearing that damn thing. Yeah. Well, the other thing is it doesn't come with the black undergarment that you have.

See, I keep I'm making excuses because there are things that it doesn't include. So I'm using them as little roadblocks to keep me from pulling the trigger on it. But I know. And ultimately, and I guess if I wait long enough, someone else might buy it. I'm not sure what the demand for- That's usually how marketplaces work, yeah. I know, I know.

So I don't know. I'll tell you what, for Christmas, we'll buy you the $8 black unitard that you can put on underneath your... I'm on UnderArmor.com right now, and I'm just going to send you something. It's black. Get him the ultra black one, Brian. Come on, let's splurge. There you go. Yeah, I need it. Yeah. All right. Well, you've shamed me into it. Maybe I will take care of that sometime later today and then later have to explain to my wife. You spent $800 on what?

But honey, they made me. That's right. Yeah, they were making fun of me on a podcast. I had no choice. Did you guys see this thing about the debacle with the special effects of Mad Men on HBO? Yes, you can see the tube that some puke comes down. Oh, no. Oh, no. Well, it's more than that. You can see the crew members. Oh, no. I survived seeing Starbucks coffee cups in Game of Thrones. I think I can live through this.

I heard it. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounded funny. I kind of like seeing behind the scenes. Yeah, I included a link. I was so convinced it was a documentary until now. Are you guys just going to bust my balls this entire episode? That's him, not me. I don't care. Is that it? I mean, I'm okay with that. I've probably earned it, but I've just braced myself for it. You know, I couldn't bust your balls if they were armored.

like stormtroopers. True. That is absolutely true. Logical. That is true. Busted out some Spock on that. Got universe creep. Yeah, it's undisputably true. So evidently, the folks who sent over the files for the conversion to 4K sent over the wrong files. They were the files that were before the digital effects were added.

But I think part of what's interesting about this is that a show like Mad Men used as many digital effects as they did. They're just invisible for painting out crew members or tubes so people throw up and things like that. It's fun. I have a link to it, Todd Vaziri's website. He's an ILM guy who does before and afters. And so check it out. Yeah, well, it's funny that, you know, I actually did that like three weeks ago. I put in the version of the ad read that.

I the master, not the edited version. So people were telling me, hey, you put in the unedited version of your. delete me or our masterclass ad. And I'm like, Oh, Oh, okay. Well, it's one way to get people to pay attention to the ad. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, I kind of like seeing how the sausage is made, but you might want to fix that. I'm like, yeah, well, fortunately it wasn't a bad.

I only had to retake a few things. I wasn't like, God, I hated this product. This shit never worked. Can you believe they're making us sell this garbage? It wasn't one of those. We do not have advertisers like that. We love all of our advertisers. Of course. Yes, we all do. We all do.

I wanted to share a YouTube channel that I have inexplicably become enamored with. It's called Spare Time Repair. And it's just this British guy who fixes old CD players. I love this. I absolutely love this. And I have no idea. Well. That's not true. I've been trying to figure out why I am so attracted to this and why I find it so calming and comforting. I miss all these things so much. I miss modular stereo systems. Oh my God, I miss this.

Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. We have great nostalgic affection for these types of devices. But also, my entire life, I've been that person who takes everything apart. and puts it back together in hopes that I don't have any leftover parts when I put it back together. Since I was a kid, I violated so many warranties by taking things apart and putting them back together.

But for some reason, this channel, I find myself watching it before I go to bed at night. And it's just relaxing. Have you tried music, Dave? Well, I don't know. Yes, I have. No, this is great. My roommate goes to bed and watches Antiques Roadshow when she goes to bed. So this is kind of like a nerds Antiques Roadshow, I guess. Yeah, I think it's just, it's benign distraction, right? Right. Your brain just needs help unplugging, getting off the little gerbil habitrail.

spinning wheel hamster wheel yeah hamster wheel thank you that's what i was looking for no problem oh man my words um yeah so i don't know if anybody else will enjoy it but uh Turns out this I just got my report from YouTube of the things that I watch every year. And this was number one on my list. And I'm also in the top five percent of people who watch this channel. So we're good for each other.

Yeah, I'm a repair. And I think to your point, Brian, part of this is that this was also from an era where it was a combination of mechanical things and software things. And so a lot of the repairs have to do with just replacing belts or grease that got sticky. And so the drawer for the CD player doesn't open anymore. And there's something very satisfying about...

watching these mechanical things brought back to life. It's before everything was like a sealed box that you just couldn't mess around with anymore. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. So have a look. All right. Well, speaking of things that perhaps only I enjoy, but I have a particular Christmas tradition and it's that time of year for the annual listen. I probably listen to this once a day for the next month and then don't think about it again for 11 months.

It's William Shatner's dramatic reading of Good King Wenceslas. And I can't stress how much I love this. I wish there was actual video of him doing it. I believe he did this for K-Rock when Kevin and Bean hosted the radio. morning show and they would put together an annual like christmas cassette which i had and i believe shatner read this for this it was alternative rock bands would do christmas songs but they got shatner to do this

I can't find it anywhere. It's not on most streaming media, but of course it's on YouTube. I have the link in the show notes. Pleased to enjoy. It's great that Shatner, pretty early on... got the memo to not take himself too seriously yes i think he got the memo after the snl debacle i think i think that really kind of he didn't he got pretty

pretty slapped down on that one so oh really oh he was banned from conventions for a long time nobody wanted to see him fans were pissed yeah oh they were pissed yeah okay that's funny No, he had to make an apology tour big time. It took a couple of years from what I remember. So the Star Trek fans don't have a good sense of humor about themselves, I guess. I guess not. They didn't used to. I think it's changed a lot.

One of my co-workers and her father recently got to meet William Shatner on the set of The Enterprise. That's amazing. Yeah, there's some... Something you can go to that Shatner's a part of. He must be a partner in it or something. And I have no idea what they paid. It must have been a lot. But it's kind of like a fan meet and greet sort of thing.

And so they had this enterprise set and you get to go on the set and meet William Shatner and probably cost at least a hundred dollars. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I, I get, I w I'm not trying to think what I do that or not. Probably. We're not going to have too much longer. The dude is in his 90s. I was going to say, when is he going to stop? Yeah, he's got to be okay. He can't need the money that much right now. It's like, dude.

You know, run out the clock in luxury or something. Just chill. I think he wants to do it. I think it keeps him active. And you can't charge nothing because everybody else is charging because they still need the money. So Shatner can't be the dick that's just like, come on, do it. Come to me for free. Never mind all those guys that played Vulcans. The thing is, I now have a small group of friends who are convention people. They're, you know. Oh, I'm sorry.

Used to be A-list stars, now B-list or C-list stars that are on the convention circuit, and every weekend they're going to a convention, or every other weekend they're doing conventions. They absolutely hate it. It is so much work. It's a lot of work. From what you see, you don't see anything. You see somebody sitting at a table waiting for somebody to come. It's usually a lot of work to do those conventions.

And it's draining. It is terribly draining. So, you know, they, and they're like, why is he still there? This is why I found out. They're like, yeah, like Michelle Nichols was on, on tour forever. you know, up until she died. And then it's because her family made her do it. She didn't even know where she was half the time. They just wanted the money. There's always a difference between have to do and want to do. Shatner, I don't think has to do it. So that's different.

The one Star Trek convention I went to, Brent Spiner was the guest of honor. And the way they had made it work was that there were three Star Wars, or Star Wars, three, sorry, fans. There were three Star Trek conventions.

going on on the same day on the east coast there was like one in philly one in baltimore and one like in dc something like that and they shuttled him from one to the other throughout the day and that's how they made it work uh i guess financially uh he had to make so much money from that it's ridiculous yeah well good for him you know why not why not

Okay, I got some final sad news here. Micron just dropped a flaming bag of dog poo on the doorstep of PC builders everywhere by announcing it's killing off its crucial consumer business. Now, I'm sure everybody here on this call and everybody listening at home has at some point bought Crucial RAM. And this just saddens me. They're saying that, you know, they just need to sell it to the AI data centers now because it's more lucrative and RAM prices are going through the roof. And it's just...

Screw you guys, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It does. It makes me sad. And it's a sort of a double whammy that it's happening because of AI. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like not being able to buy a GPU because of Bitcoin. Crucial was a solid brand for many, many years. So certainly bought a lot of RAM from them over the years. Yeah, me too. Yeah. Sad to see them go. Maybe they'll be back. War one out.

Yeah, after the AI bubble burst, they might come crawling back on their hands and knees saying, we've got RAM, kids. Well, when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be able to buy all the hardware from the data centers for pennies on the dollar. So see what happens there. Yeah, yeah. Remember the dot-com bust and all of the auctions that happened then? Aeron chairs, man. Aeron chairs. That's when I got my first Aeron chair. Everybody gets an Aeron. Yeah, yeah.

I remember when Home Grocer went out of business, there were Sun servers that were bigger than me that you could get for like two grand. It was ridiculous. Yep. Yep. Yep. Absolutely.

Shout out! Over at Patreon, we've got three new Patreon subscribers, Ninja Geek, Karts, and James. Thank you all so much. And we've also got Waylon, Eric, Mario, Matthew, UC Panda, Justin, Nicholas, Arjun, Ryan, and... Derek, thank you all so much for your continued support. Thank you. We've got a big week over at PayPal. We've got Judge Jonathan, Nicola, Levy, Florian, Joseph.

byron who writes hey just want to drop a quick note and a few dollary do's to thank you for the show i recently searched for a new tech podcast as what we my regular ones seem to have somewhat degenerated in the social ramblings of a madman rather than a tech podcast

I really like what you do, not just the tech coverage, but the personality and the reality you bring to it. The first episode I heard, there was a conversation about keeping in touch with friends. It really spoke to me. The tech is good too, but that stuff hit me.

I will admit I was confused and wondered if people from your part of America all sound the same because one of you sounded exactly like another podcast I listened to. It was only recently that I found out that it was in fact the same guy. What are the chances? Apparently 100%. Love the show. Byron from Sydney. I'm guessing Dave, since he hosts 9,000 other podcasts. Yeah, it's just going to be Dave. In the old days, it might have been me, but not anymore. Yeah, it's just Dave.

We also have donations from Thomas, who gave us $25. Goran, also $25. James with $120. And Blair. Blair, Blair, Blair the Witch. I love you so much. $300. Blair, I think Blair might have just right up there in the pantheon of super donations ever. I think pretty close. Yeah. So thanks, everybody. And Elizabeth over at the tip jar dropped a big hundy. Thank you, Elizabeth, so much.

And we've got Graham, Patrick, Matthew, Sarah, and Jennifer rounding out the tip jar. Thank you so much to everybody that donates to the show. And if you want to get on that, you can go to GOG.show slash donate and help us out because...

It really does help us out. If you want to go also to patreon.com slash GOG, you can sign up to support the show for as little as $3 a month. You can give as much as you like. We will take anything. And if you pay for the whole year, you can get the show at a discount. And the Patreon subscribers get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. So I'm also, Brian, working on the Apple side of things. It is surprisingly confusing over at Apple Podcasts on how to...

do the sponsored show with the ad-free version. It is not intuitive. And I'm not a dummy, but I haven't quite figured it out yet. So maybe I'm a bigger dummy than I thought. No, Apple does tend to make those things confusing. I remember for a while back, I was involved with publishing through Apple Books, and it was a nightmare to figure out how to get stuff published.

Oh, yeah. I had to do that once, too. No, no. And the sad thing is nobody bought iBooks. I know. Nobody bought iBooks. It was a failed product anyways, but they made it so hard to get stuff on there. So hard, so hard. Well, we've got some sad news this week. Steve Cropper, the legendary guitarist who helped shape the sound of Memphis, Memphis soul at Stax Records has died at 84.

Cropper was a core member of Booker T and the MGs and known for classics like Green Onions and Time is Tight. And he co-wrote major R&B hits, including Otis Redding's Doc of the Bay, Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, and Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood.

The guy was amazing. He's been around forever. You, I mean, people of our age probably knew him from the Blues Brothers, but I recommend, I talked about this documentary when it first came out. It's called Stacks, Soulville USA, or Soulsville USA. Phenomenal documentary. It was, yeah, it was really, really good. It's on HBO, I believe, HBO Max, whatever they're calling it. This week, go check it out. And yeah, he was a major musician and he will be missed.

And some sad news this morning. Kerry Tagawa has died at age 75. You will know him as playing. He was Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, the old one, not the new one. And also in the video games and stuff like that. But he's also in The Last Emperor, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Man in the High Castle. He's been in everything. One of my favorite.

Yes, my favorite crappy movie of all time, Big Trouble in Little China. I love that movie. He was just everywhere and he was 75 when he died. And unfortunately, he died from complications from a stroke, which as a one of those people, it makes me sad. terrified because two weeks brian it'll be four years since i had that fucker amazing so amazing yeah well you're looking good man oh thanks

And I want to wish a very happy birthday to friend of the show, John Resnick of the Goo Goo Dolls. It was his birthday yesterday. So, yeah. Ooh, happy birthday. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 725. Want to keep the gruffiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it.

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And don't forget to leave a five-star review at gig.show slash review, and we'll read it on the show. And of course, if you haven't checked it out yet, do check us out on YouTube, because we turn this video on for fucking nothing. Otherwise... And guess what? We got GOG.merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show. Jason was waiting for that with that mug. Stay grumpy.