738: A Sprinkling of Random

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discuss the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeis. Brian, we got a little follow up this week and uh March twenty fifth, twenty thirteen was the day that we launched our first episode. How to make money on the internet. Have we figured that out? No. I can well we have figured out what not to do.

Podcasting. Definitely don't go into podcasting if you want to make money on the internet. True. You can get into podcasting. If you appeal to the lowest common denominator, make shit up all the time, a la Joe Rogan, or if you're already a celebrity. I was gonna say

If you if you do the uh what was her name? What was Neil Gaiman's wife that you always bitched about? Uh Oh Amanda fucking Palmer. Amanda fucking Palmer, yeah, yeah. If you if you if you build up an audience on mainstream media and then take that audience like that. And then complain about mainstream media

Yes, exactly. See that's also Joe Rogan. Yeah, exactly. So That's all those guys. That's that's Tucker Carlson. That's uh it it's everybody that built their audience up through mainstream media that went, Fuck mainstream. Yeah, we did it backwards. And I just gotta say I listened to about ten seconds of the that episode. We were fucking terrible. It was let's just let let's not, you know, mince words.

We're still pretty fucking bad, but we were really, really bad. Yeah, well we kind of figured out the technical aspect and we stopped drinking. Uh what do you mean we? You still drink but not on the show. Well, sometimes when we do a late night one, you still pack back a few. One beer. Uh that's on you. I'd be fucking half halfway through the bottle if I was past four o'clock. Well, that's why I'm still drinking and you're not. That's true. That's true. Buzzing, okay.

Um a little a little actual follow-up here. Okay, so so seriously, we're going into our fourteenth year. I thought we'd already done, you know, I I I thought we were finished thirteen, but I re I remember that, oh no, since you're into your thirteenth year, you can say you've been podcasting for thirteen years. Some PR wonk told me that. I'm like, well technically not really, but they're like lie. I'm like, okay, now I in my head, uh whatever.

I I think at this point we should pretend we just started over. I think we should. Let's get some of that new release juice. Say fuck it. We'll just we'll just rebrand to grumpier old geeks. Right. And older. I don't know if that's

I don't know if that's possible. Uh Uh so we've been talking about uh AI job cuts in the past couple weeks and uh So here we go. Companies from Block to Amazon are are increasingly blaming job cuts on AI even when the technology had little to do with it, which we've said many times. A survey of hiring managers found fifty-nine percent say that they highlight AI and layoff announcements.

Because it sounds better to investors than admitting financial problems. And only 9% say AI has actually replaced roles. Significant difference there. About fifty percent. A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So in twenty twenty five, AI was cited just four point five percent of the time for layoffs, while nearly ninety percent of executives say it hasn't meaningfully affected employment yet. Yeah.

Uh, I said, but we're restructuring around AI sounds like growth while we're overhired during the pandemic. Sounds like a mistake. Now that said, Brian, I have had some time this past couple of weeks to actually spend with actual AI, like top tier AI coders who are using the tools and who know how to code. They're like these are no joke coders. And the shit that I have seen would would make your head spin. taking people's jobs really fast, really like really soon.

Well, I think we we knew that with programming, but it does bring up the whole, you know, downside of that, which is no junior programmers, nobody learning the ropes, and nobody who knows the basics, everybody just vibe codes in the future, and then what? You're not gonna need it. That's the thing though. You're actually not gonna need it. It is so good now. It is I mean

I we'll talk offline and maybe we'll put together a special episode where you drink and I don't and uh release it to the fans. But there is some shit that I have seen that is like I with the tools that that are out there right now for four hundred dollars a month. You can do an app a day, like an actual iOS app a day that is feature complete.

All you have to do is be really good about spec writing and knowing how to pit the two or three different uh LLMs against themselves and it will do all the debugging for you. It's insane. It is insane. But it's all about knowing how to write a spec. So programmers in the future are not going to be writing code, they're going to be writing specs.

And that's gonna that's what it's gonna really come down to. And more about that in a little bit. But yeah. I was impressed. I was fucking impressed. And that takes a lot for me to be impressed by any bit of AI technology. Um I was impressed and depressed at the same time. I'm like You mean I spent thirty years learning how to learning that craft and it is absolutely worthless now? They're like, Yeah.

Pretty much. Doesn't matter. We aged out of coding anyways, Jason. We're actually probably this is actually might even be good for us because you know what we are good at doing? Specs. Writing specs. Yeah. I could I can tell somebody else what to do all day long. Me too. I'm really good at that. Yeah. Oh man. And uh

There is now a global push to create an AI free label, basically the organic food sticker, but for human creativity, which I said when AI first came out. I'm like, There's gonna be two things that we need to work focus on. Human created and people who are good at fact checking. So These people are working on the uh the human creativity side and uh the AI free label. Now the thing about this is There's like a bunch of different groups trying to do this.

And nobody can actually come up with what they can say is AI free because it is so embedded in everything we do. From I mean just basic spell checkers, which an L L M is just a spell checker on, you know, meth, steroids, ketamine, and whatever else you can throw at Elon that day. You know what an L L M is but yeah. You know what that would help with coming well first, two thoughts.

So it's basically just like an organic food sticker, which means absolutely fucking nothing because there's no real standard. There are standards for organic foods. No, there are absolutely there are a couple, but they aren't applied across the board, certainly not in the US and other places. Um and then secondly uh I totally forgot what my second point was.

Boom. Gone. Okay. Okay. Never mind. About these people who are trying to make the AI free labels. This is just another scam because they're gonna charge people to say that their products are AI free. So and I bet I bet they'll use AI to determine whether the product is AI free or not. Actually I did remember what my point was uh now. You know what would actually help us determine the difference and and and get rid of some of those gray areas like spell checks and things of that nature?

If we finally brought back the difference between AI and machine learning. Oh well that thing we talked about for years and finally gave up the ghost hunt. Yeah, that one. A computer program is technically AI nowadays. That Texas instruments calculator for that you had in high school is probably considered AI by the standard of the day. Aaron Ross Powell Cause in my mind there is a big difference between a spell check that's built in.

that they call AI now and and like using uh using one of these things to generate images. That's they're completely different things. Absolutely different. And there's no doubt about that. There's a difference between I wrote half my song using one of these AI generated song generators and I was in Microsoft Word and fucking Clippy on steroids just corrected my grammar.

Yeah. Yep. I mean it it comes down to like what's a prediction engine, what's not a prediction engine, what is i th there are there are nuances here. And I don't think that anybody is going to How do I how do I put this so delicately, Brian? Actually give a fuck. I don't think they're gonna actually give a fuck anymore. It is gonna be so embedded in the day to day life that we have that nobody's going to give a fuck. Yeah. I agree.

So uh if anybody tries to sell you an AI free label, uh tell them thank you very much, you gave it the office and go about your day. That's what I'm gonna say.

Uh this was making the rounds and it just I I I threw it in here before it was before it was hip. Uh there's this video of Mark Andreessen that has been going around for a podcast interview he did. Where he talks about he's been saying that he has zero introspection and that the idea itself of self-introspection is a modern invention, which Everybody on the fucking planet is called bullshit on and B

I want to know, A, what what his his nootropic stack is, because he looks tweaked out of his gourd when he's talking here. And How does he he actually believes this bullshit, I believe, personally. Um I the link will be in the show notes. Maybe I'll put a clip in here for the for the for the peoples, but What you have to understand is this is the the mentality that I've been railing against for this guy in A sixteen Z

since the fucking start. These guys are fucking weird, right? They they they are. They are. The the all these guys, uh the all the tech CEOs, they have way too much money. It reminds me I I used to listen to the K Talk radio station before that got killed in in in Los Angeles and they had a symposium where there was a whole bunch of people on and Adam Carolla was one of them and this is before he went crazy. He was kind of just the normal guy back then.

and he was funny and then they had this other guy, Frosty, from the Frosty Heidi and Frank show that I loved. And they were talking and Frosty was an older guy that's never gotten married and kind of shlubby and his life was a toll of me. I had a I had a show? Yeah, kinda. And Adam Carolla said, You know what the problem with you, Frosty, is um you're you're s you you got nobody helping you steer the ship. You're steering your own ship and you're making bad choices constantly.

You need a wife to call you on your bullshit. You need a friend to call you on your bullshit. All these fucking rich guys, they have no one that calls them on their bullshit, and they just fucking feed off the insanity that they've created, and they've got yes men around them all the time, and it they just start to believe their own shit. Nobody tells them to shut the fuck up. Nobody tells them you look like shit in that shirt. Don't go out in that. Nobody.

The problem is is that these guys have all the money and the people want to be around them because they make more money. So there's a case to be made here where Brian the the and if you if you look at the trends over when we started this show, the tech optimists Versus the tech pessimists.

are doing financially way better than we are. We didn't go in for the Bitcoin. We didn't go in for the NFT. So we didn't make our we didn't make our bag because we were actually speaking truth to power, which in at the end of the day, will get you in a fucking garage.

Yeah. Well, and uh as a bit more follow up and tying into both psychopaths and people just going in to make more money, uh the hat tip to Joseph uh who sent this one, but uh this is something we were beating the drum on. And he said this is a new and uh unsurprising twist to polymarket betting. Who would have thought that it would eventually lead to death threats when money and gambling are involved?

And this is uh gamblers trying to win a bet on the polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story. And this is a a Jewish uh Jewish uh reporter, uh betters are using death threats to try to get the Times of Israel's military correspondent to change his report on a missile impact in central Israel. This is his alarming account. The link is in the show notes. And who could have saw this coming, Jason?

Who could have saw this because a gazillion problems with betting anyways, and again, another thing we've been beating the drum on on the show, sports betting has gotten out of fucking hand. I kind of understood the initial beginning sports bet because there are outside reasons for teams to want to win, for both teams to always want to win. So you're betting on an unknowable outcome because both sides are actually trying.

The problem with being able to bet on anything is there aren't any stakes a lot of the times and you can basically throw things. You can throw your fights. And we're gonna see this. We are seeing this, we're seeing insider training. We've got to stop this. It's ridiculous.

People are going to die. Oh yes, people people are probably already dying. Um did you see that the the news came out today that the Major League Baseball Association, the MLB, has signed a three hundred million dollar deal with Polymarket? So what are you gonna do, Brian? What are you gonna do? Be angry, as per usual. Perfect. That's our bread and butter. Angry and poor. That's our new bread and a big thing. Yeah. Ha I can't believe it's not butter.

Okay, speaking to people who can't afford their bread or butter, at Lassian is the latest tech company trimming headcount in the name of AI. Yes, here we go. The maker of JIRA in Confluence say it's cutting about ten percent of its workforce. Roughly sixteen hundred employees as it quote unquote rebalances for the so-called future of teamwork in the AI era and pushes harder into enterprise sales.

Now the layoffs are mostly here in North America, with additional cuts in Australia and India, and will cost the company up to two hundred thirty six million dollars in restructuring charges alone. That's expensive. CEO Mike Cannonbrooks insists this isn't about AI replacing people, just changing which jobs are needed. Okay, nice word salad there, Mike.

Uh, investors seem fine with that explanation, nudging the stock up slightly after hours. Meanwhile, the company's CTO is stepping down and the restructuring is expected to wrap up by the end of the year. Now, Brian, I've been forced to use Atlassian software many, many times in my career. So and I'd be fine I'd be fine if they cut one hundred percent of the workforce personally. That's just me.

You know, the thing is I haven't used any of their software since they started pushing AI into it, so I'm sure it's a gazillion times worse now. It's hard for that thing to get worse. Confluence. Oh my god, that was terrible. I just remember it written in Java. Written in Java and nothing ever fucking worked. Nothing ever worked.

What do we got next? Meta could be preparing for one of the largest layoffs in its history, according to a Reuters report. The tech giant is planning to cut about twenty percent of its workforce, according to outlet sources. They report that Meta's top executives have told other senior leaders to start planning how to pair back.

In the latest financial report, the company's employee headcount was seventy eight thousand eight hundred and sixty five as of december thirty first, twenty twenty five, while revenue reached nearly two hundred. Let's see. We have to do a bunch of layoffs. Revenue reached nearly

Sixty billion dollars for the fourth quarter and more than two hundred billion dollars for the entire year. Of course, we have to remember that Mark Zuckerberg decides to pour that money into the now shuttered, fucking pantsless bullshit VR space. And uh b paying gazillions of dollars to uh AI people to come and start their other crap. Um so there you go.

I'm do I'm doing a little back of the napkin math here. Two hundred billion dollars divided by seventy eight thousand eight hundred and sixty five people equals Two million five hundred and thirty five thousand nine hundred and seventy nine dollars and twenty cents per employee is how much revenue they made. And I guarantee you employees they do not make two thous two million five hundred and thirty five million dollars per employee. So

Yeah. No, they do not. And and again to use the phrase that we just meant, uh the have been using the are the the bread and butter of Meta, uh Facebook, uh the Instagram, fucking useless these days. Oh, nothing but ads and reels. I I have the the few people's updates that I have seen have started posting about what are we even doing here. I don't see anybody's updates anymore. It's nothing but a fucking ad and real serving machine. There's no point on being on these fucking things.

Yeah, I mean you're you're you're just you're just being sold to. And I in a couple of people I've talked to, their ROAS for ads on Meta and Instagram have dropped through the floor. That was the thing. Like the return on ad spend a couple of years ago. was actually really good. You could expect, you know, a couple hundred percent return. You know, you spend a thousand dollars, you get five back.

Yeah. Uh based on based on what you can sell. And now it's like barely breaking even. So people are starting to leave because of that. Because there's nobody there anymore because everybody is Just a little bit. You just don't unless you go out of your way to find them. Like most people I know now will pop it open for a second, will scroll for like five seconds, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing close. That's it.

It well now it's just basically entertainment. You open it because you're bored. That's it. You open it up and it's just like, hey guys, uh I got nothing to do for ten minutes. What am I gonna look at? And then you get sucked down the rabbit hole for two hours, a la TikTok.

And that's how they make their money. It's just basically they're they're they've monetized boredom to a different degree from what it used to be, which was let me see what my friends are doing. Completely different product, one hundred percent. These are absolutely not social networks anymore. They're not No, they're not. No, they're just media companies. That's it. They're just media companies. Yeah. Well

Speaking of meta, according to reports, a meta engineer let an AI agent answer a technical question. The agent impersonated the engineer, gave bad advice, and boom, sensitive user data was exposed to unauthorized employees for about two hours.

This is great. This is this was happened on the internal Slack channel. Like somebody posted a thing. The agent actually like There was just this whole like three's company moment and then the AI agent actually went back to Slack and replied to the original poster and gave them some advice and then that person took the advice like it was the other poster and then did it and it fucked everything up.

Yeah. Oh God. Um and earlier this year, another Medicaid I used to come, Jason. We used to have to rely on humans to do that. Oh yeah, I know. We used to interns. This was an intern fuck up. And now you can't even fire the intern. We're gonna give the intern five million GPUs to do it even more. So

Uh yeah, if you remember earlier, uh uh another meta AI agent got access to an execs inbox and promptly deleted everything while being told very politely to stop. Now this is where this is wrong. It's n it wasn't a meta AI agent, it was OpenClaw that this th this this this person uh

Just said, here, let's let's try and clean up my inbox. Like, okay. This is the paperclip problem. It's like, I want you to make paper clips. Well then the the death of the universe comes while the AI is still making paper clips. They're like, We'll clean up your inbox, all right. Select all, delete. That was it. Define clean. Job done. It's a again, it's a you gotta scope it out properly. Absolutely, absolutely.

So now Meta is bringing in signal creator Marxy Moxie Marlin Spike to bolt encryption onto its chat bots because apparently the solution to AI chaos is more AI, but encryption this time. So uh but Here's where it gets fun. Meta is quietly backing away from one of Zuckerberg's old promises because back in twenty nineteen he pitched a privacy focused future for Facebook, back when it was still Facebook. Yeah. Built around end to end encryption so even Meta couldn't read your messages.

And Messenger eventually did get encryption by twenty twenty three. Four years, I'd like to point out. Four fucking years. But Instagram not so much. Now the company says it's abandoning plans to roll out encrypted Instagram DMs altogether, claiming very few users opted in. Which of course tends to happen when encryption isn't the default and most people never dig through the settings because the default is to give everybody everything and leave it open ass to the wind, you know?

Uh so Meta says you can still get encrypted chats on WhatsApp, but Instagram is going to stay as is. So there you go. All right. Instagram may be finally loosing one of its oldest rules, but only if you pay. Meta is testing clickable links directly in post captions for users subscribed to Meta Verified. They're taking a page out of Elon's book right here with Twitter verified or X Verified or whatever the fuck.

So h historically Instagram forced creators to shove everything into the infamous Lincoln bio. Spawning an entire ecosystem of shitty fucking tools like Linktree, which we should have fucking built. We made fun of Linktree when it came out and we were fucking stupid. I'm like, that's blog rolling for Instagram. They're just gonna bake this shit in. This will never be a Oh wait, that's a hundred million dollar business right now?

Fuck me. Yes. So well, in the test creators can add up to ten clickable links per month inside the captions. And the feature currently works in the mobile app, but not on the web, and Meta hasn't said how widely it's going to roll out. So the platform that broke the links in the first place will now sell them back to you starting at about fifteen bucks a month. So that's about a buck fifty a link? Yeah, great. Yeah, that's worth it.

Actually, probably is. It will be for some people, yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

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Well, let's go back to lawsuits. OpenAI has been hit with yet another one and this one's pretty heavy from what I remember from my childhood. It's the Encyclopedia Britannica. Those things had some heft to them. I got I got a set. I got a set in the house. It is really fucking heavy. Yep. They took legal action against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringements.

More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its copyrighted content at a massive scale when training its AI models. And not just with training, the encyclopedia company claims that Chat GPT's responses to users' queries sometimes contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of Britannica's copyright articles. Along with claims of copyright violations, Britannica also argued that OpenAI was responsible for trademark infringement, according to lawsuit.

Chat GPT generates made up content or hallucinations and falsely attributes them to Encyclopedia Britannica. First I heard that tact and that is uh Yeah. Yeah, that's and that's good. I like the way that they're ta they're going after this. So they're seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating those accusations.

And uh we don't know how much money they're going for, but uh I I'll I'm I'm a hundred percent behind the Britannica on this one. Go for it. Oh yeah. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah, that's a that's a really good, interesting uh tack, is it? Oh. You're you're you're s you're you're diluting our brand in our trademark based on your, you know, non deterministic output. Yes. The Britannica never said to add glue to pizza. D no it didn't. Oh wait, that was Google. Anyways.

After ByteDance suspended the global rollout of its new C Dance two point oh AI video generator over the weekend, because uh people were basically using it to create insanely

realistic uh movies and trailers and stuff with uh copyrighted material and Tom Cruise and everybody else. Um they uh the C Dance two point oh poses a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and more broadly to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community, Senators Marcia Blackburn and Peter Welch wrote in a letter to the company.

They're trying to shut it down immediately because they are worried about uh uh AI companies training their apps on copyrighted materials from artists, actors, and filmmakers without permission. A little late to the game. Yeah. We've been talking about it for a couple of years now. But now you're Welcome to the party, pal. They cited C dance AI examples, including an AI-generated Thanos and a Superman battle, a rewritten Stranger Things ending. I wonder if I could do Battlestar.

Oh yeah, can can we get can we fix that can we fix Battlestar and can we fix Lost? Those are the questions. I I you know if they can fix those, the sea dance might be okay. Yeah, and the famous fake Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt battle that went uh viral. So Yeah. So we'll see what we're doing. Well that's a you know, it's the it's the rich get richer problem here.

After pulling C Dance two point oh, ByteDance said over the weekend that it respects intellectual property rights. With a straight face, they said that. And that is taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likenesses by users. They called uh the pledge a delay tactic to continue to abuse the innovators and profit from their successes.

Added that its regard for American IP as part of a larger trend of artificial intelligence companies stealing protected work at the expense of the creative community. Again, welcome to the party, Spock. So I w I would like to say if any of these L L M companies and Frontier model companies actually give a shit about copyright, don't train your model on copyrighted material. Yep. Simple enough, right? Yeah. But they're not gonna do that. So yeah. No, of course not.

All right, let's get some more fun news here. This is this no AI involved in this one. Trump media burned through over seven hundred and twelve million dollars last year while bringing in three point seven. That's right, they turned seven hundred and twelve million dollars into three point seven million dollars. Now

Technically, they should be an AI company with this kind of burn rate, you know? This is this is open AI level and anthropic level burning of money. But uh yeah. So the stock is cratered. It's now down under nine dollars from a high of eighty dollars. And uh'cause the company has been dabbling in prediction markets, buying up Bitcoin and now jumping into nuclear fusion. Just what I want Trump media to have their fingers in is nuclear. Quite the portfolio.

Yeah, the throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks. And apparently nothing. Now uh just a reminder that the Trump media was basically created to uh build

The MAGA faithful, please invest and give us your money. We don't actually care if this does anything or makes any money. Why don't we care? Oh, I don't know, because according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to receive a total of ten. billion dollars in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the US. If this is in grift, I don't know what is.

The new investors who acquired stakes in the U.S. entity of TikTok have already paid a two point five billion dollar fee to the administration when the deal closed in January, but the Wall Street Journal's latest report noted that the group of investors would continue to make payments until the total hits.

To better contextualize the recently revealed ten billion dollar fee the Trump administration is receiving, the US entity of TikTok was valued at fourteen billion dollars by vice president J. D. Vance. So wow. Yeah. Yeah, eighty percent of the value of t of the TikTok deal is given back to the Trump administration.

No, there's nothing wrong with that. No, this is completely normal. This is a Democrat would do that. Jeez. Oh Jesus Christ. Can you imagine if Obama did something like this? Pitchforks. Yeah. If Obama forgot to tip the guy at Starbucks, they would have fucking awards. Oh my god. And they freaked out. This is unbelievable grip. He forgot to salute one time and then there was three hours of Fox News coverage on it.

Now let's forget this isn't the only thing that has happened. Last year the administration invested eight point nine billion into Intel and received a nearly nine percent equity stake, and of course he got the Boeing seven four seven dash eight as a gift from the Qatari government in May. Totally normal. Totally normal. Oh yeah. Yeah. What's what's what's wrong with that, Brian? What's wrong with that? It's b it's business, man. Just business. Yeah. Yeah. Well speaking of business.

Back in twenty ten, remember Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates when she was Melinda French Gates still before she was. Yeah, I d uh God. Yeah. Well they launched the Giving Pledge. That was the uh the idea where billionaires promised to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. Remember that? Yeah, I can think of one person that may be on track to do that. One just one.

She is awesome. We'll get to her in a second. Yes, more than two hundred and fifty though, wealthy families eventually signed on, including Mike Bloomberg, Mackenzie Scott, and Sam Altman. But the vibe has shifted hard in the past few years.

New signups have slowed to a trickle'cause some billionaires are quietly backing away and at least one Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong actually unsigned the pledge entirely. Wait a did he go through his email, find the Docu sign document, reload it, and unclick on signature? I think so. I think so. Uh so they're saying that part of the shift is political'cause in the current climate, billionaires are less interested in nonprofit philanthropy and more interested in direct influence.

Give me a fucking break. Like, oh, oh I'm sorry. The direct influence is funding elections and pushing policy through their businesses. Not not giving it giving the money away to people on the street. So uh some people, including Elon Musk, argue their companies themselves are philanthropy. Um yeah dude. This is uh this is the Andreessen cocktail speaking, whatever they're on. Ketamine Dreams, baby.

Yeah, others like Peter Thiel have been actively encouraging people to ditch the pledge, calling it an Epstein adjacent fake boomer club. Well how about you release that list and then we'll talk about it, Peter? Yeah, we'll talk we'll talk a little more. Yeah. Ah well that criticism actually lands a little harder thanks to Bill Gates' reputational baggages from his ties to Jeffree Epstein and all of the shit that just came out about him and the Russian hookers and the

T D's and all the good stuff. And his wife leaving him because she knew all about it. Oh, dear, dear me. So, yeah, billionaires are gonna billion and they're gonna take their money back and they're gonna go play in their own playground and just say, No, we're not giving any any of it away.

Except for Mackenzie Scott, who is the hero of the fucking universe. The more I read about her, the more I love her. She's wonderful. I don't know how she tolerated that fuck nut for as long as she did. No, nope, I don't either. But

Speaking of that fuck nut, the Washington Post just ditched flat subscription pricing and went full Uber surge mode using AI to decide how much you personally should pay. Based on your data, location, reading habits, even what device you use, the algorithm figures out exactly how much it can squeeze out of you before you bounce. Well, the company's being vague about how it works, but experts say this kind of pricing can get uncomfortably invasive. You fucking think?

Uh and they're pulling in everything from your zip code to inferred income. Now hold on a second. Yes. To be fair, in the old days of subscribing to a newspaper, they also knew your zip code because they delivered it to your house. That's true. But did they change the rates on how much they charge? They did not. They did not.

Just clarifying, just clarifying. But let's let's not make it an in a a data invasive problem here because w they w they've always had that data. It's the way that they're using the data. They're using the data, yes, exactly. Yes. And they also didn't tell what phone you had inside of your house to tell if you were if you are an iPhone or an Android if you could pay more or less. Yes. So

So now we're all gonna have our burner androids for cheaper subscriptions and we're all gonna use our VPNs and come in from Namibia and uh yeah, this is the only way we're gonna get cheaper subscriptions. This is this is the nightmare. This is what we thought that AI would start to be used for. And this is the bullshit that is coming. Yeah, we're we are at end stage and shitification. Mm-hmm.

Ups and doodads Well, speaking of inshidification, Adobe's been inshidifying for quite some time and they've finally gotten their hands slapped for it. They've agreed to pay the US government seventy-five million dollars to settle its lawsuit over the company's alleged harmful approach to subscriptions. Everybody expect your dollar fifty that we'll get from that. Oh wait, no, we won't get any we won't get a penny.

The suite the the suit started in twenty twenty four when the U S Department of Justice and the FTC filed a joint complaint alleging the company deliberately made it difficult to cancel subscriptions. And obscured the frequently expensive early termination fee customers had to pay to get out of annual subscriptions that are paid monthly.

While we disagree with the government's claims to deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter. We disagree, but have seventy-five million dollars because we think you're wrong. Yeah, and they're giving it directly to the Department of Justice and By the way, that should have another zero at the end of it, at least for the for the trouble that they caused with this. This is this is another grift. It's just going back. It's just I'm surprised they didn't buy it in DJ T coin.

You know, to pay their to pay their bill because this is such a lowball bullshit fee. Bullshit. It's total bullshit. And uh you know, the the article just goes on and on about all the stuff that we talked about, the dark patterns that they were using and how they've modified things to make things more streamlined and transparent just because they got caught. That's why. Yep. That's it. Uh I I've been I've been in this loop with them. I'm sure you have too. It's it was a nightmare.

Multiple times. Not only personally, but then I was also managing Adobe subscriptions for the company that I was working at for a while and trying to add and remove subscriptions was a nightmare. Total nightmare. Oh wait, sorry. Adding subscriptions, super easy. Super easy. Super easy to add. Yeah. Yeah. God forbid you want to downgrade. Um I you know, there was a fine company who used to advertise on this show.

who did uh temporary credit card numbers, which uh I'm not gonna mention them because they're no longer advertisers on this show. You know who you are. Come back. We we we had a good partnership, you fuckers. We gave you a lot of users too. Lots of people who still use your program still talk about it. Uh but So I would create a card on that service, swap it out for my Adobe subscription card, then cancel it and turn it off.

And then, you know, that's how I would have to cancel my subscription on Adobe. That was it. Mm-hmm. You know, you have to make a fake credit card or a temporary credit card. It wasn't fake, it was a real credit card number, and then actually have it switch over and then cancel it. It's it was ridiculous. And by the way, that still works.

for a lot of different things that are hard to d that they say, Well, will you call us to unsubscribe? I'm like, No. I'm just gonna change my billing and kill the card. That's it. That's what you do.

Yeah. Um, so uh this is a new AI app that just came out yesterday called Google Stitch. This is the basically the vibe coding of design work now. Comes it it came from Google. This is Google Stitch. And it's interesting. I have not played with it yet.

And but in looking at it I'm very fascinated because as a as a an ex engineer, you know my design skills are not the best. So This basically lets you, you know, vibe design your app that you're vibe coding over here with Gemini and Codex and Claude and all that shit. And so you have a nice pretty front end over here. Now I'm I'm I'm dying to try this because they have d they've actually put out a new file format called design.md.

Yeah, I d I I don't know if you've uh if you're deep enough, Brian, into actual AI coding or a using much of the agents or stuff like that. Generally when you start a project you create an agents dot Md file which, you know, gives your agent mark marching orders on what it can do, what it can't do, what it should do, what it shouldn't do. and uh there's skill sets for different things. So this is just another layer of that telling the telling the L L M what it can and can't do.

Uh the the one thing the reason I'm really kinda pointing this out is this is the first time I've seen an AI tool set come out that actually has instructions and a user manual. Uh the link in the show notes. If you go to the go to the show note link, there's actually a page that tells you how to use the tool because uh none of these other fucking LLMs have fucking instructions. There is no manual. It's like here's a chat box, type some shit. I'm like

Okay. Yeah, but how does it work? How do I make it work better? Oh wait, there's no instructions. Yeah. I think I think at least from that point Google's done a a fairly good job. I guess you know coders. We just like to t to tinker. Designers need actual hand holding and instructions. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. This is pretty cool. Like it just generates a whole bunch of CSS for you and it's got ru yeah. That's I sp I I would definitely try this out if I had a project to do it with.

Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna be trying it out. I'm I I've actually got a project that I'm working on that I'm gonna use it for. And it's nice'cause you can do website or application. So Yeah, I saw the I saw the split between it. Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. There'll be more coming soon on the stuff that I'm working on because I I need to make something. And I I'm telling you, Brian, you will shit shit a brick if you could see the stuff that's going on. It's it's actually impressive from a coding standpoint.

from uh everything else standpoint, I fight with these things all day long'cause it's like they don't I I say one thing and it tells me one thing and then the next sentence it tells me the ap actu actual opposite. I'm like Why do these things non deterministic output, Brian? I have to remember. Black box, bam. Yeah. Yeah.

Lotta sprinkling at random. Now speaking of non deterministic output, Brian Password creation. You would think that using an AI to create your passwords would be awesome because every time it should give you something completely fucking different and random. The sprinkling of random. It should be great. The sprinkling of random should be epic. It is apparently not when it sticks a finger in instead of a letter.

Yeah, that too. That too. I a Q two poop emoji finger eggplant. No, that doesn't work. But you know So when you ask your LLM, like uh Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, all of those major ones to cr generate a password for you. It's still a prediction engine, so it is going to go back to the well. And it finds the most popular basic password, so it gives you one, two, three, four, five. Even if you give it specific instructions in your agent's MD file or whatever your MD file is.

Uh yeah. You're gonna get the same shit. So these things are like a boon for for uh fishers and hackers. So people can totally tell now that uh you're not you're not actually creating a random password and you know. Uh the cybersecurity firm Irregular did the test on this and said that yeah th th they're not That it's not good. It's they're very predictable. There is no random, there is no good seed. Like I forget who's the company in San Francisco that has the wall of lava lamps?

Oh crap. I can't remember anything. I see it in my mind. We use them every day. Uh but anyway, the wall of lava lamps that they have a webcam pointed at to actually generate randomness for their seed, for their uh uh for their uh their you know random seed generators. This just goes back to the LLM well and said, let me predict exactly what everybody else would predict. And uh so the the determination was use one password. That's it.

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Well it's been March break here. Uh so the kid has been out of school and we uh took a little trip and uh watched quite a lot of movies. A lot of kids' movies. So I've got a couple of bits of reports here. Uh Zootopia two has come out. Uh Zootopia one is something that I missed uh the first time around. My kid wasn't old enough, but we watched that uh a little while back. Very good. Zootopia two.

Excellent. These are fantastic efforts. Uh fantastic Disney movies. Really well done. Really funny. A lot of good jokes for the adults in there. Fantastic stuff. Uh, we also I discussed uh that we had watched uh Shrek. Finally got my kid to watch Shrek recently and how it didn't really have legs. It wasn't yeah as funny as one remembered it being.

Uh we watched Shrek's two and three uh over the over the break while we were on our little uh vacation. And I'm happy to report they get better as they go along. They they figured out the secret sauce. They figured out to actually put jokes in there and uh put s put a lot of stuff for the adults in there. So uh progressively funnier as they go along.

Well and you pointed out in Shrek One, uh, Puss and Boots wasn't even in it. So the addition of Puss and Boots, I think, actually raised it probably, you know. It does raise the bar quite a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh and I also mentioned recently that I had gone back to the West Wing well just to have it on in the background late at night to soothe my soul a little bit. It was on Netflix uh for a couple months for the entire time that I've been watching it, and apparently it had just shown up on Netflix. uh what I started watching and just as quickly Poof. Gone. This is the media landscape that we existed. It just disappeared.

uh after a couple of months and now it's back apparently on HPO Max. So I was able to find it and just had to remember where I left off and off I went again. So But I do love the hat switches that go on with all these things. It just disappears. Anyways. Um, Star Trek, Starfleet Academy, season finale aired, so I was able to cancel my paramount for the time being, which is nice. Good. At least until uh until Strange New Worlds comes back.

Uh you know, they were able to solve the molecular MacGuffin. They had a somewhat of a happy ending, I suppose. I thought it was very nice. They didn't really tease too much about what would be coming in a second season, although we know we are definitely getting one. Um overall now that the season's over, what'd you think, Jason? I can't remember what the season finale entailed. I I completely I watched it.

I cannot remember a goddamn thing from it. So I'm gonna have to watch it again. What what you mostly got out of it was uh Giamatti doing an awful lot of chewing on scenery, which was glorious. Okay. Yeah. I need to I need to watch it again. I I I think I was I think the melatonin was kicking in for the evening and I just like

I just phased out. I had a phased transition. That's what I did. All right, we'll d we'll catch up on that one next week after you've seen it again then, so we can do our end of season wrap up.

Okay, okay. Um so you talked about HBO Max, and I would say that uh some of the things that you can get on HBO Max right now are Dune and Dune Two and that miniseries. So I would recommend getting those before Dune part three comes out because the official teaser trailer dropped this week. You've got till december eighteenth to go watch all of that stuff again.

Uh, did you get a chance to see the trailer, Brian? I did. It wasn't bad. Uh the thing that bummed me out though is he's basically announced this is it. We're not gonna get uh we're not gonna get fucking crazy uh Leto putting sandworms all over his body and becoming a giant worm. Which is I was just gunning for this. I wanted it. I wanted it so bad. But he's gonna stop doing the move he's stopping the books after this one. So all right.

Yeah, it's kind of a bummer. It looks great like the other ones. It looks great. Soundtrack's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be a feast for the eyes. And it starts seventeen years after the after Politrates takes the throne. Uh now here's the the other really bummer. I mean I It it's a it's a bummer that it's ending, sure. Uh the real bummer is Rebecca Ferguson has one scene in the movie and they put it in the trailer, so okay.

Yeah. I mean she's she's my favorite. She's beautiful. But uh we should get a lot of uh Anna Taylor Joy or whatever her name is because she's playing Alia, I believe. So Okay. Yeah. Okay. We'll see. I see I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. I mean it's next generation, man. But i I mean in the books she's she's in quite a bit, which is kind of a bummer, but you gotta cut something. It's a movie.

Yeah, yeah. It's uh I'm sure it's only gonna be three and a half hours long if the other ones are any any uh uh bellwether. Uh Paradise. Paradise has been renewed for season three at Hulu.

Um, I am I th we're coming up to the end of season two. on uh yeah um uh I really like season one. I really like season one and season two is back out in the real world after things have fallen apart and it just turns into a mediocre fucking dystopian.

It it's a hexcape. It's not even a hellscape, it's a hexcape. Right. You know? It's just not that great and it's predictable and the the only thing that has really made season one so good was th is the first episode at Graceland. That was fucking phenomenal. Uh, but the rest of it so far has just been mediocre dystopian bullshit. I'm not I'm I'm not loving it. I'm not loving it at all. Um you're not a big anime guy, are you, Brian? No, I'm not. Okay.

I found a movie that was uh I think this came through Gizmodo. It's called Mars Express. I think it came out in twenty twenty three. And they were saying that this movie should be up there with a pantheon of great anime movies like Akira and and all of those movies. So I was like, Okay, I'll check it out. I haven't watched a good anime movie in a long time and I have to concur.

It is damn near a perfect movie. It guess what it has on Rotten Tomatoes, Brian? A hundred percent. It does have a hundred percent. Good guess. I clicked on the link. Probably click the link in the show notes. So um Yeah, I finished watching it last night. Highly recommend it. It's only an hour and a half long. Great storytelling, great visuals. Just great all around. Appropriate for kids or is this an older thing? Hell no, not appropriate for kids. No.

So Yeah, no, this is this is a daddy this is a daddy uh view. So gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.

And in the big news this week, Nathan Fillion has announced that Firefly will be coming back as an animated series with the whole cast. And how is it going to be the whole cast? You say if you've seen Serenity and you know that Wash dies and all the other mother multiple characters die, well they're going to set this new animated series between the end of the series and the beginning of the movie. So Wash gets to come back because

He's important because everybody was everybody's favorite fucking character and Joss Whedon killed him. Um So we're gonna see how this plays out. Uh you actually have a story coming up uh about uh Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm gonna let you get to that one next and then I'll talk about my other story because they these tie together. Very good.

Uh but uh so Buffy was supposed to be coming back as well. It was gonna be Buffy New Sunnydale. Uh they announced all of it and uh Sarah Michelle Geller was back. Uh Chloe Zow was gonna direct it. She's fantastic. How how interesting is this gonna be? Pretty cool.

Cancelled. Announced over the weekend while uh Zhao was at the Oscars and Sarah Michelle Geller was doing something else. They seemed to have timed it to make sure that they were busy and wouldn't be sitting around making angry TikTok reels or whatever the hell you do when you get pissed off about this sort of stuff. Uh that didn't work. It did not work. Sarah Miguel uh Sarah Michelle Geller had uh got a hold of the people at people.

And uh she informed everybody we had an executive on our show who was not only not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn't for him.

So you got somebody like that on board who kind of killed it. Uh from the music world, I know how this works. If uh you had an A and R agent that signed your band and he quits or gets fired and you get replaced by somebody that doesn't give a fuck about you, your career's done. Yeah. So Yeah. It th and that was just part of the story. Yeah. The bad executive, but also I heard the script was shit.

And Chloe Zow was completely not w a right fit for the the type of production that it needed to be. Completely wrong style. So the whole thing was kind of an active mess. So the executive might have been right? The executive actually might have been right. They well they it was wrong for Hulu to put that executive in in charge of that property. You need somebody who's a fucking fan of that series.

To to sp you know, spearhead that. You'd like, oh let's put a devil's advocate in there. No, that's not what you do with with the with a beloved series like Buffy. You don't fucking do that.

Um, here's the problem that that Buffy is going to face and Firefly are both going to face, and I'm going to be probably a little bit indelicate here. Uh the guy who made both of those, the guy who was canceled. actually was the creative force behind those shows and was the spirit of those shows and trying to do those shows without him is probably not going to work. No matter what you think about Joss Whedon,

It doesn't matter. Those were his creations from his mind and that's what made those shows those shows. And this is also my theory as to why we may never be seeing Good Omens three. They said it's coming out. David Tennant made a tweet. We shall see. We shall see. We shall see. But yes, when when the heart and soul of a show goes away, yeah, you can you can hire some writers to kind of keep it, but you don't have that spearhead behind it.

To really guide the ship and that's a fucking problem. Yep. So yeah. So yeah. I d you know, like I said. It yeah.

Oh, that's that that could be it. So too bad. Uh I d this this is real quick here. Uh V for Vendetta, twenty years old. I cannot fucking believe V for Vendetta is twenty years old. I watched this movie in the theater two times on opening weekend when Bob Fogarty and I went to the Dignation recording in Reno, Nevada and we were so drunk we couldn't go snowboarding with everybody. So we decided to spend the weekend in a in a in a dark movie theater to recover.

I just I'm I am just gobsmacked that this movie is twenty years old. I just It's a great movie. It is a great movie. I and highly recommend it. It has legs. Go w it especially it has more legs now if you go watch, I don't know, anything outside that's going on. It really kind of Is a is one of those predicting bellwethers. So enjoy it. The dark side. Yeah.

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, busts scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yelling on caveats. Digs into industrial security on control loop and still shows up to stir up trouble and only while we're in the buildings and I need to take a breath. Hi, Dave. I need to take a nap. Yeah. Hello, it's Dave. Good to be back.

We've missed you. Well, thank you very much. Uh I missed you guys too. So nice to see you all. All right, let's just get into it. Uh I have a hat tip and this should be uh to to Lycoid on our Discord channel. This should be uh good news for you, Dave, and it certainly is for me. Of all the media and and properties that that my child has gotten into, nothing has stuck as much as gravity falls with him.

And I have you to thank. You're the one that recommended that show to us. So I'll send you the bill for all the books that I've purchased, the Yes. Yeah. I mean we have gone through absolutely everything that there is to go through with Gravity Falls. He's watched the show multiple times. He's gotten every single book that has been released so far. And uh Now there's a new one coming and this one's quite pricey, but I'm already know I'm buying it.

Disney has announced the upcoming September fifteenth, twenty twenty six release of The Art of Gravity Falls, a two hundred and fifty-two-page art book that delivers the definitive visual history of the series, but as per usual, it's not just that. There will be new content in there. The book will reveal the true origins of Gravity Falls with series creator Alex Hirsch returning alongside co writer Rob Renzetti.

This uh will have never before revealed developmental art from Alex Hirsch's personal archives, including the first inklings of the characters and world lost episode ideas, cut jokes, deviously hidden Easter eggs. My God, those Easter eggs in the book. And the translations that my kid has been doing. Yes. Every single one of Mabel's sweaters and much, much more. So very exciting stuff. I I assume your family is still uh into this enough that this will be on your purchasing list as well.

Oh yes. No, the timing uh works out. Uh it'll either be on my son's birthday or Christmas list for this coming year and uh that's just an excuse because I look forward to checking it out as well. But uh yeah, it's it's it really is a remarkable show in terms of being a gift that keeps on giving. I it really has had legs, uh compared to a lot of other things. It's curious that Alex Hirsch hasn't really

done much since then. He did he did some stuff with Owl House, which is another fun animated series. We watched all of that. Yeah. But um you know, I don't know. It I and I don't know if like you never know if um Is he difficult to work with? Was Disney difficult to work with? Was it both of them? Like you'd think something successful like Gravity Falls would lead to follow up projects, but

It hasn't so far. I don't know. Sometimes that's that's just kind of what you got too. You got you got you know, George Lucas. We had Star Wars and then we got Howard the Duck. Right. True. You know. True. Yeah. So yeah. I I I he's been kind of tangentially involved with like you said, Owlhouse. I think he had some hand in um Amphibia, which is another series which was also fantastic and kid loved. Yep. Uh so you know, it's uh

Yeah, it's interesting. But uh Gravity Falls is definitely one of those things. Although that does bring me up to to my next point, uh the way in which

Kids consume media these days. As compared to us. You know we had our our one episode a week on Saturday morning cartoons or things of that nature. Now it's all streaming, all available twenty four seven. As many times as you want to watch it, binge it, watch it all day if your parents let you get away with it.

I've just experienced I obviously I've experienced that with a lot of shows with my kid, but uh he just recently the the the flip switch for the Muppets on on my kid, uh that was that new show that really did it. We have seen every single movie. We have watched every single episode of every single show, except for the old stuff,'cause he hasn't quite gotten into that yet. W we've even you know, the Muppet Mayhem.

nonstop, burn through it, watch every single piece of media that w can possibly be consumed about this, watch trailers, watch extras, watch behind the scenes. Holy crap, kids consume things way differently than we did. And I am curious as to how that's going to affect them. Or will it? Or is this just The world now. First of all, congratulations on your success as a parent. Thank you. Um Yeah, I guess

Did this start with VHS where where you could consume something over and over and over again? I n d I didn't really have Yeah, I mean VHS came along well. I guess a better way to say it is our families obtaining a V C R, which was I think kind of late in that cycle compared to a lot of folks. 'Cause VCRs cost a lot of money. Um, so I don't recall ever having a movie that was like my go to, shove it in the V CR and watch it over and over again, kind of thing. Right.

I guess the difference would be like Even the videos were incredibly expensive. Or you had to go rent them, you know, from Blockbuster or whatever. But you you know, it was it was your your expensive VCR and then your eighty nine dollar copy of Star Wars. So you had a copy. You didn't have All three movies, uh the seventy-five, you know, VHSs that would have been the Clone Wars, the you know, it's just that they have everything on tap.

so easily now. It's uh uh you can you couldn't do that back then. And it was uh things were more special events, I feel. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean I don't I don't know if it's a bad thing. My son's certainly having a blast and you know, it's up to us to limit how much he can watch and we do that, but it is strange to just watch

watch the obsessions like flare and then burn out generally really quickly. It's it's some things like Gravity Falls are Muppets that don't. They they keep going back to that well. But a lot of stuff it's just like It's it's a month. I've seen absolutely everything. I will never look at this again or think about it. Yeah.

I yeah. I the thing I wonder about and something I've noticed with uh some of my younger coworkers, f people who are in their twenties, is that um they are proudly ignorant of uh having proud, proud of being ignorant when it comes to pop culture knowledge and uh in thinking about that I credit a lot of that to the fact that our generation in the evening sat down with our parents to watch T V because it's all that was on and

if you wanted to watch something it had to be something that uh if you wanted to watch something it had to be something that everyone agreed upon. And usually your parents would choose anyway, except for, like you mentioned earlier, Saturday morning cartoons. So We all had this shared pop culture thing, you like TV shows that we probably like shows like All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore show and things we probably wouldn't have watched as kids, but we did watch because

We sat down with our parents and it was the only thing that was on and we only had one TV and all that sort of stuff. So I think today the twenty somethings who grew up with their own mobile devices They had access to whatever they wanted, like you're saying, all the time and they weren't forced into that thing of spending that time with their parents or their siblings.

Right. So that the those th those cultural things didn't get absorbed. Multi generational cultural things didn't get absorbed in the same way that like us me being forced to watch Bob Hope specials. Yeah. Hee haw. He hawks. Right. But I The Lawrence Welk Show. I talk about Bob Hope specifically because a Bob Hope special would stretch back all the way into Vaudeville.

Right? The people you'd have on that show. You know, Bob Hope with our special guest Milton Burrell. But we knew who those people were. And we knew a lot of the s the classic routines and things and and and the setup of those old timey kind of jokes.

And I don't think they're forced into that these days. Yeah, it's the same like uh you know, I'm thinking like old school Hollywood Squares. You know, you watched it because you didn't have a fucking choice. There wasn't anything else on. Right. But you were you were indoctrinated into this kind of grander pop culture that everybody a shorthand that everybody knew and understand.

Maybe that's why we're so stratified these days. Maybe that we we don't have the shared touchstones anymore. We don't we're not coming from the same place. We all go down our own rabbit holes, not just with media, but with news, with everything. Yeah. 'Cause you know, in in my world growing up, I never ever would have wanted to have Ruth Buzzy in my life. But now I know who that is. Who's the who is the guy with the confetti? Uh

Oh yeah. Um whatever his name was. He was the most annoying person on the fucking planet. Charles Nelson Riley. Yes. That was a different guy. No, not Charles Nelson Riley. No. He had uh and he had a terrible toupee. Yes. Yeah. Uh so yeah, I mean you know, who would choose? such a thing, but we we all knew what it was. We all knew it and it's all it still sticks in our head, even if I can't remember the guy's name. I see him in my mind. Rip Rip Taylor.

There you go. I know it's Rip Taylor because I just googled confetti guy and he was the first thing that came up. See, I was thinking Paul Lind. Uh Paul Hall was the guy I was I was thinking about too. Yeah. Yeah. Center square please. Yeah. See, we all know it. We all know it. It's crazy.

I don't think kids have anything like that right now. I I I know'cause I I've been I've even asked my my son, like, you know, do your do your friends watch the same shows? And sometimes they do. They convince each other to watch things and say it's really good. But in general they all watch completely different stuff. Hm. Do you think okay I know my son my youngest son, who's nineteen now, uh much of the media he consumes are podcasts.

Uh so I wonder if there's commonality there. But maybe. No, it's not. It's not. No, I I it hey, you know, it's a real time social experiment and We'll see. Yep. I hope I don't. May I be dead. Yeah. Well speaking of dead,

I've I've talked to you guys before about my idea of of why haven't they reinvented the zombie genre yet? Because of E V E V vehicles now, you know they're silent running. And Daniel writes in, sorry Jason, but Kia Australia already did the E V zombie apocalypse. It's worth watching even if it's an ad, and he sent the link to the the ad and the ad is It's zombie proof.

And it's a funny ad. Yeah. I thought they did they did exactly what I would have done. So I mean I would never buy a Kia, but otherwise it's a great ad. So highly recommend. Link will be in the show notes. Check it out. Thanks, Daniel.

Yeah. I'm not and I'm not mad at that. I'm glad somebody did. That's all I wanted. I wanted somebody to take it and run with it. And they did. Yeah, there you go. See, that's the that and not that's also where we are today. If you think of it, chances are someone has already done it. Mm-hmm. Or there's porn of it. Rule thirteen, I believe. Isn't it called thirteen? No, I'm not sure. Shouldn't it be Rule sixty nine?

Yeah, it should be. Uh I for I forgot my four chan rules, I'm sorry to say. Yeah. Yeah. I got I had to m I had to memorize twelve steps and the f the forty two rules of the internet went out the window. Uh I put a link in here for uh a web site page, whatever that grabbed my attention in the past week here. It's called The Last Quiet Thing and it's from someone named Terry Godier, I guess it is. Um And it starts off with a little comparison between a simple Casio watch and your Apple watch.

Uh a tip of the hat to whoever built this website that the Casio watch actually shows the correct time while you're while while you're scrolling it by. Um but I I found it uh really interesting and and worth my time and it's all about how much everything demands our attention and our time these days when they didn't used to because everything's connected.

Um, I wrote a thing about this on Facebook and Mastodon about a week ago, just how it seems like everything is demanding your attention and trying to extract as much as possible out of you. And this is a little study on that. Um and uh I found it thought provoking and worth sharing. So uh it takes a few minutes to scroll through, but I think it's interesting. I don't know if you guys had a chance to check it out.

I didn't beautiful. Very cool. Absolutely beautiful. It's funny, I think this this must be in our in our now that w we're we're old and we have the collective zeitgeist on like the the kids these days.

There must be something in the air about this because I I read your thing when you posted it. It was it was wonderful. Um even before you had posted that my wife and I had just been having a lot of discussions about how frustrated we were with how much time and effort is involved just with the upkeep of all the digital things that we have now.

updating the apps and then going back in and checking the settings because now it stopped working the way that we wanted it to work and now there's an update and it doesn't do the same thing the way that we wanted it to do that it used to do. So now we have to figure out the new way to do the thing that we wanted it to do. And not only do I have to do it for me, now I have to go to my parents' devices, my mom's device.

And then I have to go around and reset all these and and it's so like all these things that were supposed to make our lives easier and better are sucking the fucking life out of us.

Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's true. And yeah, I mean surveillance capitalism. Yep. I I think partly what is so frustrating is that we grew up in the era where there was much hope that this was gonna lead to the exact opposite of what it's led to. Yeah. And so we were there. Wha I guess we feel as though uh the promises that were made to us They were lies. Well, I it's it's what Jason and I always say on the show too. It's like the internet, oh my god, this wonderful device that is just gonna

uh the w the entirety of the world's knowledge will be available to anyone for free. We will be able to discuss and deep thoughts about the things we will move humanity forward, we get fucking shitty memes and surveillance capitalism. That's that's what we got out of it. So be careful what you ask for.

Yep. Yeah. And I a as I'm trying to build some new some new projects, I'm going back to not so much about features as about feelings. I remember what it was like when I would with with new technology, what I felt like when I had it and trying to you know, recreate some of those feelings, not just the features, because the features are all different now. Features are complete the internet as it was is dead. Forget it. It has been killed.

So and software as it was was killed. But I trying to rekindle some of that wonder that we used to have and how does that work? is kind of what I think about a lot nowadays. And this thing really just hit home. It's just like, oh my God, so much work that we put into this shit that we pay for. It's like, oh, I pay for the job that I have now. Right. It sucks. No by the way, they're they're stopping letting you pay for it. Now you have to subscribe to it. Yeah, now I've got to subscribe. Great.

And it's more if they know exactly where I live. Right.

There was a thing I saw about a week ago. Uh it was uh some YouTuber uh who I uh unfortunately I don't remember exactly who it was. It wasn't someone who

I regularly watch, but somehow th it was brought to my attention. I wanna say this person was a woodworker or something like that. Um and they had put out a little piece about sort of lamenting how uh much AI had uh ruined so much of YouTube and that the legit publishers, small, medium sized publishers like himself, the minute that they publish something, it would get sucked up by some AI that would then take the transcript, recreate it.

generate graphics and basically do its own version of whatever they just published just to generate clicks and traffic and and and bleed off some of the interest in whatever that topic was. Right. Um and but the phrase he used as he was looking toward the future that that caught my attention was he said, I hope we're heading towards An economy of authenticity.

Where s where there is a market for real things, for authentic things, where things that are not generated by the machine uh have extra value. Yeah. So we'll see. There's a push for AI free labels, but of course that's becoming mired down a bit with definitions and et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I think

I think we're gonna see that. I hope we're gonna see that. Uh I know our generation, uh th those of us and most of our listeners want that. I'm curious to see if the younger generation give a fuck. Right. Right. They might not. They might not. Until it comes down to making their own living. Right. Okay. So what are you going to do now?

They're they're gonna complain about how much, you know, when when when we're all in old folks' homes and we insist on having face to face conversation with real human beings, they're gonna roll their eyes and you know, uh as old. Yeah, I subscribe to your AI avatar for you. Why don't you just use that? Right, exactly. The robot cat is in the room. I don't understand why you're so needy. Yeah.'Cause it needs to be updated and the Bluetooth failed and I have to reset the Bluetooth.

So it just sits there licking its balls and I can't get it to come say hi to me anymore. Right. That's why. I'm laughing at the notion of uh robot cat balls. It's coming. Trust me, it's coming. Right, right.

So uh uh again, I came across a video that sent me down a little bit of a rabbit hole and I suspect this might resonate with the two of you. I was thinking this week about evil can evil. Do you guys remember Evil Knievel? Of course. I uh was a little too young on the cusp for that, but again, shared cultural knowledge. Obviously I saw it. Uh he more uh his later i joke incarnation, super Dave Osborne resonates a bit more with me than Evil Could Evil, but yeah.

Yeah, and Superdave may have been more successful than evil in the long run. I don't know, but Superdave was very funny. But um What started this was uh I saw a clip that I've included here uh that was um Craig Ferguson telling an Evil Knievil story was basically about how Evil Knievil was doing one of his jumps and he knew he was gonna miss.

And he missed and he crashed and the people come over to to take care of him when he crashed and the first thing he said was, Get the girls out of my hotel room Because he was afraid his wife was going to find out that he had girls in his hotel room. But she knew. She knew. I'm sure.

But Evil Knieval was so iconic, and looking back on it, it seems to me like it was so of its time that you had this one stunt person who would do stupid things, amazing th jun he mostly he jump his motorcycle over city buses or over things.

Um and half the time he would crash. Uh I think he was in the world the Guinness Book of World Records for most broken bones or something like that. He was certainly in the running. Um but extraordinarily highly rated wild wide world of sports on A B C that was an hour long, all leading up to East Evil. Very channel. Jumping over a string of buses, whether or not he would make it. Like

And I guess I so I've been thinking about this. I guess part of it was the simpler time All of us kids had bicycles, so we pretended to be evil can evil you know, building ramps and jumping over things, jumping over each other uh on on our bicycles. There were Evil Knievel branded bicycles. Also the Evil Knievel stunt cycle was an amazing. That's it. The stunt cycle. Great toy. Oh yeah. I mean a classic toy that lived up to the hype, because that was a fun toy to play with.

Right up until the moment you got sand in the gears and then it stopped working. But what a great toy. And to this day there are people still making YouTube videos about uh with making the stunt cycle jump over things. Which I think is great fun. So This got me thinking like Does every generation have an oddball thing that attracts a lot of attention and society really only needs one of them?

Right. Like we had Evil Knieble. There was we only needed one of them. I'm sure there were other people who tried to be the stunt man. Evil had a son named Robbie Kniebel who tried to father in his f follow in his father's footsteps and had some success. But

Like we needed one evil can evil and that's what the world needed and we were happy with it. And I've it got me thinking like is is Weird Owl that way? I was gonna say that was my next one, is Weird Owl. I'm like the if if I had to pick one it'd be Weird Owl. Yeah. We've got one Weird Owl. And I hope to never live in a world without him because he's delightful and and I feel like we need him, but I don't think we need two weird owls. We don't need a weirder owl. Right.

Or weird Ali, you know, like I don't know. Weird Alice. Yeah. I don't know. So I was just sort of thinking back about Evil Kniebal and how singular he was and I don't know if Jason you remember I it was heartbreaking when my I remember my dad coming to me and telling me that Evil Kniebal had been put in jail. uh, because he had like beat up his manager with a baseball bat or something and uh so Suddenly. I don't remember that one. I d I I don't remember like anybody telling me that I I mean

I I I do remember it from the Being Evil documentary, which I highly recommend, the twenty fifteen documentary. Fantastic. Gives you the whole run of Evil Can Evil's Life and you can't go wrong with that. Yeah. But um I yeah, I

I just remember sitting there on Saturday mornings watching him on the wide world of sports. Right. And that was it. You know, it was just so great. Yeah. And yeah, it was just like an hour of waiting for him to like come on, let's go. Jump, jump, jump. Right. As I'm sitting there cranking the thing.

Yeah, and I'm sitting there on with my stunt cycle just revving it around the room, like can we go? Let's go. You know? Yeah, yeah. Dandy Don Meredith here with Evil Kinevil and you know, well, Evil, what do you think? Well, I think I'll make it, Don. Well, let's see. And And we just we're glued to the set. Yeah.

Yeah. I put some links in the show notes too. Uh they're still making the stunt cycles. There's a company that took over uh the the the mantle and have have a couple different versions of the stunt cycle that you can get. Yeah. They're in and they're in stock. So there was the stunt cycle, there was the um

Chopper version of the stunt cycle. I hated that one. It would always just wheelie out of the gate and these it would never work right. No, it wasn't good. There was the dragster that had the cool thing about the dragster was it had a parachute. Uh and then there was the what was it like the Evil Knievel Action Van, something like that? It was uh basically an R V with his

Stuff on it that's when it got cancelled with all the kids in the back. Right. I think you could park the park the m motorcycle inside or put it on the roof or something like that. But didn't say free candy on the side, but it was pretty course. Right. Right. Exactly. If you sh if you shook it, cocaine would fall out. Yeah.

All right. Well it was a fun trip down memory lane. Um I will not uh be with you gentlemen next week. I'm gonna be at the uh RSA convention in San Francisco, which uh that time again, eh? It is that time of year and uh It's always fun to be there, but it's not fun getting there. The six hour flight is a lot and the older and grossing.

Right. Well that's the thing. I I uh everybody's been telling me I gotta get to the airport super early because of all the uh the TSA folks who've been sick uh because of their not because of not being paid, so because of paycheck. Yeah, I can understand they're sick out, you know, but um So we'll see. Hopefully smooth travels and uh I'll have uh I'll have a time in San Francisco and we'll see.

Yep. Use the use the uh the AI that tells you where all the man poo is so you can avoid it. Oh well you know what? Actually before we go, uh there is a new uh what do they call it? Like a company store at Lucasfilm in San Francisco. Oh, okay. I know where you're going to report. Right? Yeah. I already looked it up. It's like a four mile Uber from where I'm staying, so hopefully I'll have an hour or something. Do or do not. There is no try. Exactly.

I am so hopelessly overscheduled for this trip, but I will all right. All right, goals. You can cancel something. Something's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. TSA sick out. Right. All right. See you guys. All right, Dave. Have a great trip.

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And uh to answer the age old question, we get paid the exact same amount no matter how you like to give us your money. So doesn't matter to us one bit whatsoever. Exactly. And uh just before we started recording, we got some sad news. Uh rest in peace, Chuck Norris. Uh I know I saw on the news yesterday that he was rushed to hospital and when you combine in your eighties and rush to hospital, that rarely is a good outcome, so unfortunately.

That seems to be the case. Uh we don't know too much about it. The family is, you know, to the typical request for privacy at this time. But uh that just that just means TMZ will report something tomorrow because that's the way it works. That's the way it works. That's a that's a bummer. That's a bummer. I'm surprised. I'm s he's Will Shatner actually outlived him. I didn't think that was gonna be the case. I think Shatner's gonna outlive everyone. It's Shatner versus Sulu at this point.

I I was listening to the T V in the background the other day and I just heard it's Will Shat coming to you And I'm like, You're actually going by Will Shat now? Why not? God When you're in your nineties you're hoping you Shattered. Who gives a shot? Yeah. That too. Until next time, I'm Brian Schillmeister. I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.sho slash 738.

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