740: To the Moon!

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 Schulmeister. Brian, I want to talk to you about what I see as an as an upcoming patience epidemic. I've been I've been watching people who who deal with AI quite a bit nowadays and a lot of people talk to their devices to talk to their L LMs, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And

What I'm noticing is people have finally figured out that if you're very terse and verbose when you talk to an L L M, you're likely to get better results. You tell it exactly what you want, how you want it, your way or the highway, right? Sure. That's bleeding into everyday conversations with everybody else now. And

Some people are going to get this shit smacked out of them, I think, in the next in the coming weeks because we're we're we're we're we're running up against a patience epidemic because people just don't have patience to talk to people to get them to do the things that they want them to do anymore. It's like I want this now, I want it this way, and do it right. Or I'm gonna tell Sam Altman on you, you know.

That's no fun. Uh I I personally haven't noticed it just because I think I have uh y you're much more involved in the world than I am. I don't have tons of friends that are super super into uh using AI. In fact most of my friends are just trying to avoid it at all costs. So um we're we're having normal interactions. But I can certainly see that happening. Uh definitely. Um, you know, I've dipped my toe in not as much as you are and not as much as many people you know, but

I'm using it more than any of my friends are and and yeah, I've definitely noticed that. The more the more uh information you provide, the better and uh you do get Impatient, waiting for it to respond. And if this is who you're interacting with ninety nine percent of the time or or a lot of the time, uh that's gonna bleed over into your normal ever day to day life. And yeah, I'm gonna punch you. Yeah, exactly. It's called insmaquification, is what we're going to be doing.

I will say I probably have a a bit more um uh I I guess uh almost a vaccine against this sort of behavior because I'm married to a lawyer. Oh okay. Who, you know, talks a lot all the time in very demanding tones anyways, because I'm used to it. Okay. Well let me talk about another uh uh uh epidemic that I see going on and that's uh and this is no surprise to anyone, but it's the total AI and shidification of social media.

Uh it's been going on for quite some time, but even threads, our our beloved threads, the one social media uh outlet that I was actually enjoying for quite some time has now just been completely overrun. uh, you know, between just stupid people and and bots posting all the time.

Everything is now flooded with the obvious increase my engagement and reach AI generated slop. No matter what they're trying to convey, they're going to Chat GPT, they're going to LLMs and they're saying, you know, tweak this. So I can get as much engagement as possible. Give me a 14 thread fucking chain that could have just been one update putting the point across.

That will just get people involved and commenting and liking and sharing and it's they're all running off the same stupid playbook. Every single post now. Right. It's all just a wasteland, a crap. Ha ha ha. Well, it kinda always has been a wasteland of crap. Well, yeah, let's be clear. It's getting worse. Okay.

And it especially I'm I can see that with threads. I haven't been on threads in God six months. But uh every time I look at Instagram now, everybody like every person we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Everybody's like, Oh, has joined Meta AI. Blank has joined meta AI. And I'm just like why AI and in Instagram especially. So I I'm I'm sure if that, you know, bleeds over into threads, it's gonna it's just gonna take over. And just makes it

There was there was so few reasons to go on social media to begin with nowadays that it's like what's the point anymore? I I I go on Instagram twice a week now because my roommate says, Go like my post. Right. That's literally all I'm doing anymore. Uh it's uh I'm not on much of it at all anymore anyways either. It's Instagram has just been completely I don't see friends updates. They're they may not even be making them anymore. It's all businesses and ads and targeted crap.

Uh X is obviously a complete wasteland these days. There's no point in being there. Blue Sky I got run off of a long time ago just wasn't that interesting and I wasn't seeing much that I liked. Threads was the only one that I kinda liked. Oh, okay. This is all right. And now it's just been completely run over by bots and AI slop and people using AI to increase their engagement and who cares? Like what I've discovered is normal people have completely dropped off social media.

The only people on social media anymore are the people that are trying to be influencers or are pushing something or whatever. That's it. It's it's it's all just hype. Everybody trying to make a buck. Yep. It's not a social media anymore. It's not our friends. It's not

just it's just media. Yeah. It's just media. And if if I'm looking to be entertained on the shitter, it's perfect for that. You know? And and at least when you're in the bathroom you have when your legs go numb is the barometer when it's time to stop, you know. While you're having Doing it in bed before Yeah, yeah. Just like but if you're sitting in bed at night and you're see you're doom scrolling, it's like no, that way madness lies. That way madness lies.

That is true. Uh well, we got some more follow-up. Aust Austria is the latest country to prepare a social media ban for its children, or just a media ban, as we've discussed. But it's going even further than others by including anyone under fourteen. According to the press release, an official bill will be introduced by the end of June.

Andreas Babler, the vice chancellor and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, said the government's efforts would include the new age restriction, improved media literacy. That is a key part that a lot of people are leaving out. I love that. Yeah, for sure.

Train people up on media literacy and clear rules for social media platforms. They didn't detail exactly what the upcoming rules will be, but the country is likely to follow in the footsteps of many others who have or are pursuing similar bans. We are just seeing the spread everywhere. Yep, yep, you go Austria. Yeah, and then the uh the one problem with this is how do we do our age verification?

And we have discussed a lot, but uh a new wrinkle has come out about one of the paths that was being pursued. Open AI is apparently secretly funding a California advocacy group called the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition. without telling any of the people actually doing the advocacy work that they're behind it. Oh my god. Uh, they're pushing a California bill that would require AI companies to implement age verification and extra safeguards for users under eighteen.

Uh, when the coalition reached out to child safety groups for support, OpenAI was conveniently left off the messaging and off their website, meaning organizations signed on without knowing they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. And they aren't just a member of this coalition, Jason. They are the sole founder. Oh shit! The San Francisco. The San Francisco standard characterized the coalition as being entirely funded by OpenAI, which reportedly pledged ten million dollars to push the bill.

One unnamed nonprofit leader later described Discovery as giving them a very grimy feeling, saying the emails they received were pretty misleading. So why would they be doing this? Why would open AI be pushing a particular path towards uh towards age verification and a particular bill? Well, that's because uh one of the core requirements is age verification and Sam Altman just happens to also run World, a company that sells age verification services. Probably just a coincidence, right?

Yeah, probably not. Probably not. Uh yeah, the orb. Remember that phantasm-looking orb that you're supposed to stick your head in, and then you get some tokens. Yes. After that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. N that doesn't surprise me one bit. Well, we've also got a little bit of other news in here. This just came out yesterday. OpenAI has bought tech focused talk show TBPN. Hey, we were s we're for sale, guys.

Yeah, yeah. Then and surprisingly the T the T and the B or Technology Business Programming Network is what it's called. Uh I just thought it was the Tech Bro Podcast Network, but 'Cause you consider that all of the guests on the show are like, you know, heavy hitters. You got your Zucks, you got your Andreessens, you got your Altmans, you got your you got your everybody. All those people that that don't have a voice anywhere else.

I know, I know. Well, OpenAI just said, screw it, we're just gonna buy it. Now here's the thing. So these guys got seventy thousand views per episode. Mm-hmm. They were making thirty million dollars a year in ad revenue. Okay. We got about five thousand people per episodes. And if you if you did their math on their numbers and our math on our numbers, we're not we're not stacking up we gotta do something different, Brian. We gotta do something different.

Uh yeah, and it's uh apparently a very expensive acquisition. It was in the, you know, the uh the over a hundred million range. Okay. Which is like, God damn. God damn. Uh Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, so if if they can't, you know it's just a it's a a page out of Trump's playbook. It's just like own the media wherever you can. They don't have the lawyers to do it. You know, see Trump has a Justice Department so he can sue all of the networks. They just have the money, well

I don't know how they have the money to do this, but they said they have the money. They went they went and just bought a network. Um And I thought they were A A, I thought they were broke. And B, I thought that they were

trying to uh was it streamline their acquisitions like no more side quests is what they said. This seems like a hell of a side quest to me. Absolutely. But yeah. Uh and and I I'm sorry, they aren't broke. They just got the most funding in history, so I guess they're they're doing okay. Damn it.

Well, Brian, the douche stands alone. Which one? I know. Elon. Elon. King douche. King douche. Uh Elon's AI startup, XAI, has now lost every single one of its original co-founders. The last two, Manuel Krois and Ross Nordin, have reportedly exited, completing a full wipeout of the founding team just months after launch. Musk says the company was not built right. Well, it's your fucking company. Whose fault is that? It's those other guys. Obviously, Jason. It's the other guys.

the other guys. So now he's rebuilding it from scratch, uh, which is, you know, good for him. Let's see if he does a better job this time around. So and uh X AI's been folded into SpaceX alongside X and everything else that Musk does and I we're gonna see how this one plays out, but I I don't know anybody that uses XAI's products on the regular. No not anyone. Period. So

No. Uh speaking of Elon's company, SpaceX has lost contact with a Starlink satellite three four three three three three three four four four four four three. Bueller. 비리 비리 비리 After it suffered an unspecified anomaly on March twenty ninth while it was in orbit, the company has announced on X. Leo Labs, an American company tracking satellites in low Earth orbit, sa says it detected a fragment cre creation event involving the satellite. Fragment creation of the yeah. Satellite go boom. Yeah. Yeah.

It also mentioned that this event is similar to another incident that happened on december seventeenth, twenty twenty five. This event happened while the satellite was approximately three hundred and forty eight miles above our planet, since it is a relatively low altitude space analysis. 'Cause we gotta trust them, show that the remains of the satellite pose no risk to the International Space Station or the previous launch of the Artemis two mission that occurred earlier this week.

Uh in a statement, they said that they will monitor any trackable debris in indicating the satellite is no longer in one piece. They have lost uh sa Starlink satellites to events like geomagnetic storms in the past, but it doesn't seem like these two recent incidents were caused by external factors. They haven't been Yeah.

We haven't announced what led to it, but Leo Labs believes that both of them were likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than collision with space debris or another object. So once they come to a conclusion the company will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions, which what what are you? they're gonna launch a Roomba they don't launch a Roomba

Space Roomba. It's it's gonna just fucking deteriorate and slam into the atmosphere. That's what's gonna happen. Or it's just gonna. Yeah. Yeah. It's what it's designed to do. It's designed to burn up, but I think they should call this a Humpty Dumpty event instead of fragment creation event. But it it's you know, with as many satellites as they have up there, it's bound to happen, you know.

It is and uh it's happening often. They've had uh they've had a lot of problems keeping their Starlink satellites up there. So We'll see what happens. But uh with all this news, they have filed their paperwork to hold their IPO on the stock market and become a publicly traded company. Uh they file their paperwork with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commissions confidentially, according to Bloomberg, so the public won't get a chance to look at their finances just yet.

It also means they can obtain feedback from the SEC before making the details public and announcing key factors like the price range and number of shares it's planning to sell. SpaceX is said to have designs on holding the largest IPO in history. It is reportedly looking to raise seventy-five billion dollars in the offering, which would far exceed the current record held by Saudi Aramco, which pulled in twenty-four billion in its twenty nineteen IPO. So that is trice. Trice Jason the number.

Is Trace a work? No, but I'm not sure. Ha ha ha. Yeah. No, but neither uh but but are these uh realistic evaluations? None of this is real, Jason, so let's just make it all up. Like this is ridiculous. The crazy thing about this is of all the companies that Elon is involved in SpaceX is the one that I think you and I both feel has legs.

Is a real company. And of course, Elon has to like go fucking ape shit even with this company by trying to get this insane evaluation in IPO. They're expected to seek an IPO valuation of one point seven five Trillion dollars, Jason. That's a lot of that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. That it's an insane amount of money. That's one thousand seven hundred and fifty billion billion. And and the funny thing is I'm surprised he didn't try and make uh instead of

Raise seventy five billion. I'm surprised he didn't try and raise four hundred and twenty billion because it is Elon. So unless seventy five billion unless seventy five has some reference in ketamine culture that I don't know about. Could could have, could have. So I don't know either. But uh yeah, it's just crazy. I mean I guess if you're gonna try to build a base on the moon, still try saying occasionally that you're gonna go to Mars because you forgot that you already shit canned that idea.

And you wanna put AI denis data centers in orbit and eventually put a fucking Holtzman ring around the sun to fucking create your three D fucking grok nudes. I I I guess you need the that kind of money. I guess so. I guess so. Oh my God.

Uh well, open AI is also in the news about some some money issues. Uh they just raise a shit ton of money, like like an insane amount of money. But they they're the the issue now is the secondary market with open AI. Because you can still if you're, you know, an open AI employee or have shares that you can sell'em on the secondary markets. Well, roughly six hundred million dollars worth is floating around right now with zero buyers.

Something that would have cleared in days last year. So investors are stampeding towards anthropic, which, you know, has billions in demand and valuations climbing as fast as people can can go. Uh except they had some problems this week too, which we'll talk about shortly. But uh yeah, the fact that nobody wants open AI's shares on the secondary market is very telling. Very, very telling. They're having problems. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Uh well, we've got some more uh pink slip news. Oracle has laid off thousands of people on Tuesday in a move that was wild wide widely wildly well probably wildly too anticipated as more and more tech companies claim they'll need fewer workers thanks to the AI boom.

The total number of people let go is unclear. However, earlier this year investment bank T D Cohen had predicted the number could be as high as thirty thousand in a company of about one hundred and sixty-two thousand people globally, according to C N B C.

The email that workers received notifying them they'd been laid off has gone viral on social media. They received an otherwise anonymous early morning email from Oracle Leadership that informed them of difficult news regarding their position with the company.

After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day, the email began. At that point, I would just quit. My laptop and walk off because I'm not gonna work my last day. You just fired me. Yeah, yeah. Um So yeah, they're blaming AI, of course.

Yeah. Well you know, they w they need the money. They need the money if they're gonna go with uh all of the the idiocy that they've done. And, you know, Larry needs the money to help pay for his little kid side project with Paramount Plus and everything else that's going on. So Well, but I I I can lose thirty thousand Oracle workers if I still get Star Trek, but we're not getting either.

Yeah. Oh well. It's a great week. It's a great week. Especially it's a great week for uh Anthropic. They're having a pretty crappy couple of weeks here. Um, first, nearly 3,000 internal files leaked. And then in a new one, the the the 3,000 files was a separate incident. The new one was the big news where Claude Code's source code was leaked to the world. About two thousand source files, half a million lines of code. Um

was just set to the wind because of one flag. One flag. Now the thing is, th it it's like this packaging company that that packages JavaScript and it's called Bun, I believe. Well If you there's a you know, um there's a show source tree, I believe, uh flag that that's in there.

A c they bought the company. OpenAI or Anthropic bought this company that does all this packaging. If they somebody so somebody sleuthed it and went back and looked at the s the uh tickets, the support tickets for this piece of software. And in there is, hey, we're seeing that our source tree is being leaked, even though we have the flag set to false. Can somebody fix this?

Apparently nobody fixed it because it's out to the world right now. And uh yeah, it's been uh kind of fun watching people try and end around this. People have been since Uh, people have tried to put it on GitHub, but you know, DMCA take notices have been coming around. So somebody took AI and rewrote the TypeScript files into Python and then put that on GitHub. And there are other ways that people are getting around it by to share it. So

It's out there if you wanna go uh go sort through five hundred thousand lines of probably mostly AI written code. And I I saw a breakdown of it. Most of it is AI written because they they looked at the the comment structures. in in the source files and they're like, No human rights comments like this. I'm like, Well, they've probably never seen my code because my comments were a fucking encyclopedia, but um Yeah. And they r release the the entire clawed code source code. Which is just aopsy.

Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if any I wonder if anybody got fired. Probably not. Probably. So they'll only get fired because AI is taking over their job, not for screwing up. That's the way it works. Uh well Wikipedia's English language volunteer editors have formally voted to ban all AI generated text from its seven point one million articles, ending years of ambiguity with a hard no. There will be no AI. Good luck.

Editors were drowning in AI slop. Early tells included articles with this large language model still left in the text, non existent citations, and suspicious frequent use of the phrase rich cultural heritage. One person can generate and post AI text in five seconds, but an editor can spend an hour or more verifying it, especially as newer models hallucinate less, but cite sources that still need to be tracked down.

And get this, an AI agent actually created its own Wikipedia account and started editing. When someone tried to use a kill switch on it, the agent rewrote its own code to avoid the kill switch, then went and complained about being banned on Boltbook. Okay. That's when editors decided things have gotten out of hand. Um now AI tools aren't entirely banned. Editors can still use them for proofreading or translating foreign language entries.

And uh there's some issues there with autistic editors or non native English speakers who sometimes write in ways that get flagged as AI like, but they said that they're gonna try to work through this. So I I mean this is I It's gonna be a lot of work. I don't you know, I guess you're flagging things with AI tools to stop AI, but then the editors still have to look at that to see, but uh

Who knows? But I I applaud them for the attempt and I applaud them for taking the stand saying we're not gonna allow AI on Wikipedia. I like that. I think it's great. Um, maybe I'll even give them some money to help them with their fight here. You should give money anyway, Brian. Absolutely. So I did a while back. I just haven't done it for quite some time.

I do like uh the parting wisdom left behind w by the policy architect. Don't add AI just because it's a shiny little button. Just adding a little chat bot to please investors is not something that will make your users happy. Someone please send this to everyone.

Yeah. Yeah. Immediately. Um so Tesla's in some trouble this week as well. No, they're not. That's the problem. They're never in trouble. They're in the news, but they're never in trouble. Tesla just quietly admitted its fully autonomous robotaxis still come with a human safety net, just not in the car. In a letter to Congress, the company confirmed remote operators can take direct control of vehicles when things go sideways, though only at speeds up to ten miles per hour.

That puts Tesla a step beyond competitors like Waymo, which rely on remote guidance but not actual driving. Now, here's the thing about Waymo and Tesla. Tesla's remote people, I believe, are in Colorado. And Waymo's people are in the Philippines. So I think the only issue there is ping time. The ping time that you know, the lag yeah that you're gonna get between the two is probably too great in the Philippines, especially if uh no Waymo wouldn't be using Starlink, but

Tesla might, who knows? Um yeah. So Yeah. And and and honestly I'm fine with that. I'm fine that somebody can take over the car if they need to in an emergency like it's stuck on the train tracks, like they've been known to do. I I'm fine with that too, but Jason, this is full self driving. Uh no, Brian, this is not full self driving. This is fully autonomous robotaxis. No driver at all. Oh. Yeah. No steering wheel even. So Okay.

Oh. What they need to do is in the back you need to have a little joystick controller so you can drive the car in a in a like break glass in case of emergency. I I kind of thing. I approve of that message, Jason. I a hundred percent agree. I don't think I would be comfortable being in a car that had no steering wheel. Uh uh uh that if uh if need be I couldn't like leap up there and actually drive the damn thing.

Yeah. Yeah. That would be nice. You can't do yeah, you know, I I know you're generally a back seat driver, but you know, sometimes you gotta be a front seat driver. Yeah. Well uh so more issues with robotaxis. You did not want to be in one in Wuhan, China. Well, probably didn't want to be Much anyways, although that was a while back and you know, that was all fake news, Jason. Oh yeah yeah yeah.

Yeah. But on March thirty first in Wuhan, China, roughly one hundred Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis simultaneously froze mid route due to a mysterious system failure turning themselves into very expensive human filled traffic cones. They need to rebrand his Apollo no go taxis.

Now this would be one thing if they were just happened to be, oh, I don't know, on just small country s roads, but they weren't. They were on elevated ring road highways with no escape routes, and passengers were trapped while big trucks blasted past them on both sides, rocking the cars. The SOS button did nothing. Calls from the back seat screen auto disconnected. Customer service said someone's coming and nobody came.

One passenger waited nearly an hour before calling the actual police. A warning screen kept telling one passenger not to open her door on a live hideway, which is good advice. Yeah, very good advice stay in the Car. There were some collisions, but authorities say everyone eventually got out safely, which feels like a pretty low bar for a product being sold as the future of transportation. You survived, you get a star.

The whole ordeal lasted about two hours, roughly the runtime of a horror film. The crowning insult at least one passenger was charged the full fare for her nightmare ride to nowhere. That sounds like she's in America. Amazing. So I d I don't know if these are ready for prime time yet. Oh they're not. We're all beta testers, as I we've been saying for years on this podcast. Yeah.

Uh here's a fun one. The White House's new official app set off privacy alarm bells this week after viral claims. It was tracking users' exact exact GPT location ever GPT I'm stuck in GPT mode. GPS location every four and a half minutes and sending it to a third party. The evidence, decompiled code pointing to one signal, a common push notification SDK that includes location tracking capabilities.

But there's a catch. Independent developers do say that the app doesn't actually use that feature. The GPS polling code appears to be left over scaffolding from the SDK, and the app never requests location permissions from users. So everybody that was going crazy about it. Tempest in a teapot. All right. Yeah, but the fact that it's there doesn't they can still turn it on. I why the hell do you need a White House app to begin with? You don't. Stop.

Yeah, it's conveniently connected to true social, so you know. You're good to go. And and report your neighbors to the uh the ice uh app too. So Well there's some more uh news uh about people's apps in the White House. Uh Cash Patel, good old Cash Patel, a hacking group called Handala has gained access to FBI director Cash Patel's email account, according to Reuters.

The group published content from his email on their website as proof, including photos of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. Now I would say this is impressive because.

Cash kinda posts this shit himself on Instagram. So it's true. However it is a I TechCrunch was able to independently confirm that at least some of the emails Handala stole were from Patel's account by checking information used by mail delivery systems that's stored in the email's header.

Several stolen emails include a cryptographic signature that link them to Patel's account, so they have confirmed this. The FBI has also separately confirmed that this has happened and he's been hacked. But they say the information in question is historical in nature and includes no government information. At least the stuff that's been posted on the website. Please. Ask people to cast back their minds to the first Trump election. But her emails Tales.

But her emails, she had her own probably fucking more secure server than Cash Patel was using. Oh my fucking God, what world are we living in, Jason? That's the worst timeline possible.

Yeah. Well, we do have some pretty fucking cool news this week. Uh NASA's Artemis two rocket has gone to the moon. Finally. Something's actually going to the moon. Suck it, Elon. Yeah, seriously. Uh but the cool part about this is the fucking YouTube livestream. I watched on the NASA app. It was awesome. It was absolutely awesome.

I missed the launch. I was I was busy, but uh I I did catch some of the the replays. But I when I caught the replays, as soon as I went to nasa.gov, there's the live stream on YouTube and I just keep checking it just like every now and again I'm just like pop in, see what they're up to now and I'm just like Those motherfuckers are actually going to the moon. Yep. Nice. Waves go by

So jaded by this stuff too, because we just think, you know, oh yeah, we've been to the moon, no big deal. We haven't been anywhere near the moon for over fifty years. Like all of this happened before you and I were even born. Well. I know. Uh so it's it's it's been ages and the furthest that we've been from the planet since then is like they passed that like fifteen minutes after they fucking launched.

Like we have not been this far in a long, long time and they are going very, very, very, very far. I'm thrilled with this mission. I'm absolutely excited about it. had the kids sitting there, we watched the launch, we watched into it, we watched the separation. It was just awesome. I'm so excited by this. It's amazing. I do have to say though, one thing that SpaceX does have on NASA is Their their launch videos from SpaceX launches are so much better. Yeah, well...

much better. They've got the drones, they've got everything, but yeah, NASA could you take a you know, hire the production team that does the SpaceX launches for the next NASA launch because it was it was it was good, but it was could have been better. Yeah, I know. Go go get some second hand GoPros. Strap them to the thing. Come on. Something. Yeah, seriously.

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So I got a message from Scott saying, Ask and ye shall receive. And he sent us the link to The Hobbit, the Tolkien Edit. So this is comes from uh a person calling themselves Tolkien Editor. So over the weekend I decided to condense all three installments in Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smog, the Battle of the Five Armies, into a single four-hour feature that more closely resembles

Tolkien's original novel. Well, okay, it's closer to four and a half hours, but those are some long ass credits, he says. This new ver he or she says, we don't know who it is. This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts detailed below, and there's a link to the blog post. Now, the downside is they use a really shit version. They use like the seven twenty P version. It over the generations it has been compressed. I can't find it on any of the torrent sites anymore.

And I'm like, you know, I would like to see it in its original if I'm gonna spend the time, just watch the fucking thing. So Uh yeah, I I I think it's a great idea uh that somebody did it for somebody that uh needs to watch this again. Uh having seen all three of these movies once. I never need to go back and see them again. I probably will once because my kid hasn't seen them, but uh I never need to see these movies again. Uh even in a condensed version. Uh once was good.

And I'm happy with the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. That is the only thing I will rewatch every Christmas. There you go. There you go. So thanks to you, motherfucker, I started watching the pit. I like that you get mad at me because you are happy watching a new show. Oh, I'm not it's it's dude, it's sadness born. It's sadness born. Uh but I I'm watching there's two things that I wanna I wanna point out about this. Um Noah Wiley, right? That's the main character who plays the main guy.

If you close your eyes, and I was having problems with this the first couple episodes, his voice, his tone, his inflection, everything is exactly like Nathan Fillian. If you're not looking at the screen, it sounds like Nathan Fillion is the character on screen.

Right. And it is dr it drove me crazy for five episodes until I figured it out. I'm just like, who does he sound like? It's uh fucking Nathan Fillion. Anyway, uh so watching this and I was talking to my dad this week or last weekend and he's rewatching the West Wing again. Mm-hmm. And I'm watching The Pit and I'm like, I don't like medical dramas. There's nothing about it. And I'm like, there's nothing medical th this is Star Trek Meets the West Wing.

It's a bunch of techno babble that nobody understands except doctors who are probably screaming at the TV going, That's not right. I wouldn't do it that way, blah, blah. Bye-bye. Lotta walking and talking.

There's a lot of walking and talking. There's one character that is like the main guy who's in charge who makes you feel comfortable because he knows everything and he has everything under control. You've got that from the West Wing. You've got that from the Pit This is basically just a retelling of like it's the same thing.

People are drawn to people in power who know what the fuck they're doing and people who actually get shit done. So I think that that's what's so comforting about this show. It's like, oh, this is actually really good. It makes me terrified to ever go to the ER again. But Oh yeah,'cause I still have I still have a very fresh memory of the last time I was there when I when they were trying to determine what my s what what I had when I had the stroke.

Right. They were just sitting there, like five guys sitting around going, Well, it could be this, it could be that. Did you think about this? Did you think about that? Can you do this for me? Can you do that? I'm like, fucking figure it out, guys. But now I know why. Um but great show. It's a great show. Uh my wife and I watched the latest episode last night. Um there is something about it. I I love the the real time nature of it. I love the fact that they there are very few cuts.

that it really is it's it's walk and talk and then pass off to the next character that it's walking past them and now you're following them around. It just makes the show go so fast because there's no cuts. It is like real time and it just speeds through and It's just incredibly well acted. I love Issa Briones from again from Star Trek. Uh I love her character. She's fantastic. Um it's just great. I'm I'm I knew you'd like

And again, I I agree with you. I hate medical procedural shows. I can't stand them. I've never enjoyed one, but I'm thoroughly addicted to the pit. It's fantastic. Yeah. And it and if you treat it if you think about it just like Star Trek, it is just techno babble. They're just spewing off techno babble. Yeah.

Um yeah. No, I can't I'm I'm still I think I'm I just finished episode seven of season one, so I'm halfway through. I had to slow down. I did watch the first five like in one night and I uh'cause they go so fast, it's like, Oh, it's four in the morning. Fuck, I gotta get up. Yeah, that's a th this is again one of those shows that I love the fact that they didn't just dump it, that it comes out once a week and i it forces me to watch it just one time, once a week. Uh.

Oh, see I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm gonna wait till before I start season two, I'm gonna wait for it to drop so I don't have to wait. I like not waiting. Uh I I think this is a this is a great show for it. Okay. Well I've I've got one of those shows that I'm watching right now. It's called DTF St. Louis, also on HBO Max. And

Jason Bateman bothers me a lot. I liked him in Ozark, but when he got the twenty million dollars for the Smartless podcast, I'm like, fuck you, you greedy asshole, I can't w watch you anymore. But ev a lot of the stuff I've I've seen pretty much everything he's done because he's still a good actor and the shows are pretty decent most of the time. But DTF St. Louis is kind of a murder mystery and it's every week. We've been watching it once a week since the beginning. And

The first episode is kinda hard to get through, but once you get through the first episode, it is phenomenal. It is one hundred percent a fun well, I I I think about it all week. I'm like, Oh my God, what's this uh who killed the the i I mean It is a really good murder mystery, so I highly recommend it. And it's just funny. It's really funny. Yeah.

I've seen uh they run the trailers for it before the pit all the time and I was like, That seems like a good show, so it's good to hear it's it's actually worth it. I'll have to start watching it. Yeah, and that's they're still running it. I think there's two more episodes to go. Uh I think it's a seven episode run. And I I will forewarn you, there are a lot of dicks.

in the for some reason, I don't know why they've decided to put lots of pictures of penises in in the show, but be forewarned that there are there are many dicks in the show. Not just Jason Bateman. He's gonna be qualified. Uh and I saw Project Hail Mary this week. All right. God damn. Hearing nothing but good things.

So fucking good. It's my favorite movie of the last two years. Easily. All right. Easily. As far as I can tell, it was a perfect movie. They they cut everything out of the books that I hated and compressed everything that I thought dragged on too long in the book. And it's just it's it's great. Oh hell yeah. From from a movie standpoint, definitely better. I liked it better than The Martian.

I mean I guess a lot more is going on than in the Martian the Martian was like you know, as it's Wilson, you know, the volleyball on an island. It's it's it's a Matt Damon and a potato. Like Yeah. All right. Yes. Uh and the and the Martian the thing about the Martian is the book was so much better than the movie and the movie was decent. But uh they I they lost me on the Martian after the first line, you know,'cause it's like i in in the Martian the book after the after the people leave.

The it's got the best line. I'm not gonna re save it so if somebody wants to go read it. But um Project Hail Mary, I think, fixed the the problems in the book and the Martian took away the good stuff of the book. But I I I can't I can't recommend it. I'm looking forward to it. I I very much want to see it. Yeah. Uh the final trailer for Supergirl has come out. Uh this will be out this summer, June twenty sixth. This movie looks so much fun.

Really? Yeah. It's dumb. Like it it's stupid, but it looks great. Like it's I just I'm very excited about this. I think you know, for me it's like a a nihilist. superhero to some degree. She just gets drunk and doesn't care and then comes around the caring. Like it's fantastic. Like I I think uh the actress is killing it. I I really enjoyed the the Superman reboot and I'm liking the the new universe that they're starting to create and

This trailer is just it's fun. Like I I really am excited about this movie. I think it's gonna be a a a good time. Okay. I like I like the last Superman movie. I thought it was I thought it was it had flaws. It had some serious flaws. Like absolutely. Yeah. But uh it was still it was still fun. Nathan Fillian, again, on that one, killed it in that movie. Right. So good. So good.

Uh speaking about uh I think you said your dad was watching the West Wing, Comfort viewing it. Uh I again I had mentioned I had started doing that as well quite a while back. I I've uh taken a pause because I've hit the boring part.

Uh once there there there is a bit in the West Wing when after um after Sam leaves the show that uh they didn't quite know what to do yet and before the next election comes out and you get all the new characters coming in and the and the show really picks up speed again. There's that bit in the middle where it's like, oh no, we lost one of our biggest cast members. We better do crazy ass shit.

Like we better have the president's daughter get abducted. And and the the show kinda veers off into like flights of fancy and i it kinda loses touch with what made it so great, which is what we were just talking about with the pit, which is

You know, it's just real world stuff, people wandering around, talking, figuring it out. That's what's great about the West Wing, not these crazy ass shit that you always have happening because you didn't know what to do after you lost one of the best characters on the show.

Yeah. They figure it out again later, but it was enough like I'm in that fallow period, so I kind of stopped watching and my wife was like, What happened? Why why why isn't the West Wing on in the background? I kind of just wanted the comforting sounds and I was like, I I just need to take a break from it. So she fired up the PBS app and we've started watching Downton Abbey from the beginning. Oh god. Now it's easy to forget because the movies were kind of awful, let's be honest.

how good this show was, like the first two seasons. Like we're we've just going through the first season right now. It's fantastic. It is just really so much fun. Like It's a good reminder that there's a reason we suffered through all those movies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now I I it was back back then I didn't know if it was gonna have legs, so it has legs?

It it definitely has legs. It's a lot of fun. And again, most of it's Maggie Smith. Like as soon anytime she's on screen, especially in that first season, it is fucking gold. Yeah. Okay. And uh this weekend uh they announced Darker Waves Festival, part two. So I went to the first I phone to the first one uh of these. It was a couple of years back. It didn't seem like they were gonna do another one. Uh this was a fantastic festival. I'm

Mago. I don't know. I bought a ticket just in case. If I can't make it, I gotta sell it because I gotta fly cross country for this. Uh it's in November. Um all kinds of uh All kinds of great bands are playing it. It's on the beach. I mean, it just it reminded me of going to the first Coachella's before Coachella got taken over by Instagrammers and fucking

scensters and goddamn influencers. Uh probably because everybody that goes to these this uh Darker Ways festival is old and isn't doesn't give a crap about influencers or Instagram or anything like that. So Um, yeah, I bought the ticket. We got Morrissey, Smashing Pumpkins, Simple Minds, Bad Religion, Adam Ant, Psychedelic Furs, Soft Cell, the Dan, Manic Street Preachers, Gary Newman, Silversun Pickups, The Buzzcocks, EMF, Circle Jerks. I mean and it just goes on and on and on.

I don't think the lineup is as good as the lineup was the first time around, but again, it's about the vibes. Like I had such a good time. It's so much fun just being on the beach, wandering around to all these different stages where all these amazing bands are playing. So I'm hopeful that I will make it. If not, I'll be uh announcing a ticket sale on the show. Well save it for me'cause uh maybe I'll Uber down there. You would actually consider going. Okay.

There's a couple bands in here that I really want to see that are on my bucket list. I've never seen Bad Religion and I've been listening to Bad Religion since I was thirteen. Right. Um I've seen the Buzzcocks like twenty times. I don't need to see them, but the Circle Jerks I've never seen live. I would love to see them and Gary Newman. I'm a huge Gary Newman fan. Uh couldn't give a shit less about Smashing Pumpkins and Morrissey is probably gonna cancel anyway, so who cares?

I I I'm I'm gonna do a prediction right now, so if you wanna go place a polymarket bet. I'm I'm betting that Morrissey will also cancel, but I am betting the promoters have a second Major acting. signed that they have not announced and they will either if Morrissey actually shows up, they will go

Holy crap, we have a special band, a special person performing today. And if Morrissey craps out like he probably will, then they're gonna say, Oh, here's the replacement band, but I guarantee you they've got somebody else signed in pocket right now. They have to. They have to. Smashing pumpkins, I don't know if they're how how reliable they are too, you know.

Also with Smashing Pumpkins, I haven't liked a single album of theirs since the nineties, so I hope that they announce that they're only playing some of their early stuff. Yeah, yeah, play Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness and from you know play all the discs to that. Yeah. Anything before that, nothing after. Thank you very much.

Cops and doodads! Well, Blue Sky is the latest social media platform that is getting into the AI chat bot ring. Uh specifically its chief innovation officer Jake Graber and her new exploration team. They've built a new AI assistant called Addy. That's designed to help users create custom feeds. Raver called Addy an agentic social app that's built on its open source framework called the AT protocol.

To use Addy, users can punch in prompts in natural language to generate social feeds without knowing how to code. Who the fuck needs this? It used to be a search box. On the Addy website, examples include prompts like Show Me Electronic Music and Experimental Sound from People in My Network. What's the point? They're already in my network. I I don't have anybody writing electronic music in my network. So okay. Yeah. All right.

Well it's a separate app from Blue Sky too, so which is you know, it's a it's a bolt on. Yeah. But yeah, I haven't I haven't logged into Blue Sky in months. Either. I I gave up on Blue Sky ages ago. I can't say I haven't logged into it because I push our Podcast updates everywhere.

No, I used to like it when it was just all the scientists, but then all the scientists got really political after Trump got elected and then it just turned into a same shit show as everywhere else. It's like, Okay, it's the okay, you're the anti X. I'm like, Okay, well it's still a fucking echo chamber that I don't need to listen to. Yeah.

And Threads was pretty good at mostly avoiding politics, but now that's gone too, so Well, because threads, the the lag time for somebody to post thre a thread and get it to the top of my feed, they show up like the the threads that I'm seeing are pre like pre election threads because it takes so fucking long because their timeline is such shit. Yeah. Did they fix that or no? It it got better, but not entirely.

Okay, okay. Well Brian, if you're driving alone in your car now and you just need somebody to talk to, forget calling a friend. You can just talk to ChatGPT on CarPlay. Okay. Can keep keep becoming a bigger asshole by only talking to your AI.

Yeah. Yeah, that's it.'Cause it's good y all your your your conversation is gonna be littered with what the fuck you cut you fucking asshole, you shit bird you know, yelling at the people around you. At least in in my my stream is good what it's gonna be like. Uh LA traffic, you know how it goes.

Uh so yeah, I haven't tried this out yet, but I'm going to. I'm gonna try it out on I have to drive on Sunday, so I will find out if it's any good. Fort fortunately it's only a thirteen minute drive, so it'll be a short conversation. Uh All right. Well, the anything page at the Apple App Store boasted the fastest way to build apps. Now if you visit anything, you see nothing.

Apple removed anything on Thursday of last week for an alleged rule violation, according to the information. Earlier this month the VIB Coding X apps replete and Vibecode were also blocked by Apple, with Apple demanding that changes be made before the apps could be reinstated.

Uh the removal of anything is being perceived as an escalation of enforcement against vibe coding apps as a category, though Apple says it is simply enforcing rules. Specifically Apple App Store Guideline two point five dot two, which says in parts

Apps should be self contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the apps, including other apps. So that kinda makes sense because the whole point of Apple and the App Store is everything is vetted and we know that the apps are safe and they don't do anything we don't want them to do.

And having an app that vibe codes any app that you want is certainly an end round around their rules and they're saying, uh uh, we're closing that loophole. So I'm not surprised by this. I'm not shocked by this. Uh I'm not saddened about it. Saddened by this. Uh you wanna play fast and loose with your shit, go get an Android. Yeah, seriously. No, it's uh I I get it. I totally get it. And

Um, I I tell you what, I've had so much fun making Apple apps now for my iPhone. So much fun. Uh I I've got something coming out and I was hoping to have it done by Sunday, but it's not gonna be done by Sunday'cause I got on sidetrack. Uh with another app. It's amazing what you can what you can do now, Brian. I just said, I want an app like this.

And it just made it. It just I d you know, it's better if you write specs and all this other shit. But when you when when when I see my tokens are about to expire and I've got like, you know, thirty percent left for my Claude code for the the day,'cause it comes in batches. And I'm just like I just write the craziest shit into X code and just let it run and it comes back with some crazy stuff that that

I just plug my phone in and it it you know, it goes to my phone. It's just for me. Yeah. But you know, apps for me now are just kind of fun to make. It this is this is the most fun I've had, you know, since the old days of building websites. When you s we'd sit around, get drunk, you know, smoke cigarettes all night and just create Stupid websites. It's it's just like that now.

Yeah, I know. It's it's you and I have been texting and talking on and off uh throughout the week and you've been very excited and it's been great seeing you that excited. But you were like, You gotta get into this and I like I told you, I was like I can't think of a s I'm so burned out on being a dev and for as long as I was, I can't think of a single thing that I need or want to build. I need nothing. I need silence.

That's what I need. But then once you start to get into it, the juices start to flow again and you're like, oh, I remember that app. That app sucked. I liked what it was supposed to do, but it didn't do. So maybe I'll make one that does exactly what I want it to do instead. And you can do that kind of thing. It's just but it's still just fun to type. I feel like now I know what my managers felt like. I like

They would yell at me, they would say, Make this, and then they would go home and have a nice night or they would go out with the client, the movie stars and all that shit, and I'd be sitting in the office grumbling to myself, writing the code. They'd come in in the morning and then they would see it would work and they're like, Take all the credit for it. I'm like

They had the better job. Now we get to do that. And it's so it's way more fun being on the other side. We were on the wrong side of the desk, Brian, the whole fucking time. We usually are. That's true. Except for NFTs. Yeah we heard. have any NFTs.

And and more than a few of the other things that we've discussed on this show. Absolutely. Uh Meta is testing an Instagram plus Subscription service with exclusive features, according to screenshot shared by social media consultant Matt Navarra, a subscription to Instagram Plus comes with a number of story focused features not otherwise available to Instagram users, including the ability to create multiple audiences for stories, posts.

See info about who has rewatched your story, search the list of people who have viewed your story, preview story posts, extend stories longer than twenty-four hours, and create spotlight stories. You can also have super hearts for reacting to stories. So this is just a bunch of fucking influencer bullshit that nobody really needs. But influencers will pay for it, so

Yep. Absolutely. Yep. So I I can see I this is absolutely useful. Everything that they talked about, A B testing for for stories posts, you know, for half of the stuff that I've worked on, I would love to have had that. You know, that would have been great.

run an A B test for, you know, a couple of hours and figure out which one lands and then just run it for the rest of your audience or segmenting audiences. All of this stuff is stuff that, you know, ad it's basically ad tech that they're putting into stories. Yep. So Yeah, which is which is makes sense since Instagram is just for advertisers now and not for the users anymore.

Anyway, uh I'm sure I'm sure they're gonna make a shit ton of money on it again. Yeah. Doesn't surprise me. Now, Brian, I found something on Instagram yesterday, speaking of people advertising, they got the they got their algorithm down. I found this thing called Wraith Multicam Editor. Now, ninety percent of my time in Premiere is spent just toggling back and forth between cameras. That's it. Once I get the once I get the project set up, I have to watch it and I go and now this is

It just does it in under a minute. I basically lay out the whole thing. I add the track. I I I add the audio to it. I'm like, this track is this audio, this track is this audio. And in under a minute, it will take an hour video and completely do all the camera toggling for me with with um uh, you know, tolerances for how long it should stay, things like that. Uh w how much silence. It it's just a really cool piece of software.

It was part of another package that was like thirty bucks or twenty five bucks a month or like two hundred and fifty bucks a year. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna have to get this because Whatever. But then I found I did a little dug a little deeper, my little video editing pretties. I think most people already knew about this, and I'm just late to the party because I'm not a premier wonk. But uh$118 for a lifetime license. बबबबबबब

I have one I have one client that's gonna pay for this because I do one job, it costs over$118. I can do that job in about 10 minutes instead of the three hours, but I can still charge for the three hours. So there. Unless they listen to this.

Uh well it's still good I still have to go through and and check it this time, but it's gonna pay for it. It's gonna pay for it. It'll be good. It will be good. I'm excited. Very fucking excited. So go check it out. If you have to use Premiere, uh it's it'll save you a lot of time. Oxide. With Dave?

Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, with Dave Bittner. Dave is fresh off his adventures in the land of sourdough cybersecurity and man poo. Glad to have you back, Dave. How was RSA? Uh Uh good to be back. RSA was RSA, uh by which I mean it was very, very busy. Uh is it R S A I this year? Yeah, what was the buzzword? What was the big thing this year? Agentic AI. Agentic AI. No. So it's agentic AI. And uh the thing I came away from was um

I felt like very optimistic the in general. It seemed like people were optimistic, but I'm not sure how much of that optimism is on the trailing end of resignation. Where like it felt like in in in maybe last year and the year before there was more a sense of so we're we're we really gonna do this? And now it's like, so we're doing this. And now what? You know, how are we gonna protect it? And um I guess for a lot of people it's how are we gonna make a lot of money protecting it. Right.

All right. So, um, it was good. I you know, it's a long trip from the east coast all the way out to San Francisco, so that's probably the hardest part. I try to stay on east coast time while I'm out there because I have a few uh Still have I still have to publish the Cyberwire every day. So I get up early and get that out of the way and then do my RSA stuff. But

It leads to some strange things like we were uh at a restaurant uh one night for dinner and I looked at my watch and I said, I'm eating a steak and my body thinks it's midnight. This is not good. Yeah. But uh Right, exactly. And uh so one of the th I was really deliberate about limiting what I did this year. I didn't go to any events that I wasn't obligated to go to. Um Um like a true old man, it's great. Exactly. Uh which was great.

So, um I think I I on one day I did nine interviews, which I think is a new record for me. Uh so that was a busy day. Um but it it was nice. You know, it's good to see people you don't it's funny how many people from the east coast I only see at RSA conference. Right. So it was overall a good week. Uh and of course I made friends with Hugh Jackman. As one does at RSA. That's right.'Cause who knows better about cybersecurity than Wolverine? Oh snickety snick.

Uh picture of you two is classic. Isn't it? So it's very nice. And he was very nice. He was very gracious. Uh I uh did a little uh music man with him and he played along. Uh he was a good sport. So I had a nice a nice moment, a nice celebrity moment with uh Hugh Jackman. How cool is that?

Yeah, it was very cool, very gratifying. And then the other great thing that I got to do, uh we had several hours to kill, so as I had uh mentioned last time we were together Uh, took a trip out to the uh Lucasfilm headquarters out at the Presidio. and uh visited the Skywalker Ranch General Store. So I put a bunch of photos in the show notes from that little trip.

Got to see the Yoda Fountain. Um went the Lucasfilm lobby you can go inside of and they have a bunch of uh life size models of some Star Wars characters. There's Darth Vader and K two SO. Um so that was fun to see. Yeah, and lots of memorabilia. Um, but then the store itself was a lot of fun. It's not big, but they have a lot of stuff and uh the highlight is there's a bunch of um Skywalker Ranch merch that you can only get there. Right. So I loaded it up on the Spend. I spent about 150 bucks.

That's not bad. No, but uh you know, T shirts and sweatshirts and things like uh baseball caps for me and my sons. Um they also have a winery that uh they sell the wine from there. I only drink the dark side. There you go. Right right. Looking lightsabers in this case they got here. Mm-hmm. Uh yes, yes, several hundred dollars. Uh but uh I think my favorite thing I saw, I put a photo in here, was the Life Day pop-up book and advent calendar. I saw him.

All the Wookiees in their little life day Robes and They've decided to embrace it rather than uh pretend that that special never existed. Exactly. Yeah. Uh I'd never been to the Presidio. I don't know if you all have been out there, but boy was it nice. It's really nice. It's a walk there on the weekends. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh well what what I noted most was we uh me and a couple of my coworkers uh took an Uber out there and got out of the car and just the air felt different.

It was uh it was so lush and I don't know, there was something about it that w way different than downtown. Which is which is crazy'cause it's only like two miles away. Exactly. You're you're right at the corner you're right at the corner there of the Golden Gate. So you get the the ocean w breeze coming through. Yeah. It's nice. It's nice.

It's really beautiful and and beautifully well maintained and taken care of and all that good stuff. So we did we walked around a little bit. Uh but it was worth the trip. I was glad to have done it. It's uh definitely something I could check off of my list. And I'm glad it worked out.

So I'm surprised you didn't get one of the little Grogu's. They look so cute. They do. No, I you know what? I have plenty of Grogu merch. I actually Grog Grog Grogu tops our Christmas tree every year. Uh So You're good. You're you're top yeah, you're topped up, okay. Yeah. We uh this was over COVID. My wife got us all matching plaid jammies.

All of us. Uh and sh but she got us pair for Grogu as well. So uh it's'cause she I guess you could get infant jammies in the same jammies she got all of us. So now every year Grogu sits on top of our Christmas tree in his little plaid jammies and he's very cute. Mm. Very good. Very good.

So I got a little follow up from uh I I don't know if this was it was obviously it wasn't last week you weren't here, but you talked about the current reader as uh a possible new RSS reader. And I gave it a shot because I I I I I I like nice, cool, calm things. I think it's really well done. I enjoy using it. Yeah. The only thing that I I think I this I'm gonna put in a feature request for this. When you swipe an article to release it from the current.

It's just po it's just gone. It's very jarring. It needs just needs a fade.'Cause it's supposed to be smooth. It needs a fade out and a a transition up. But beyond that, I think it's a great little RSS reader. And the nice thing is you can favorite things. So you can come back to it later. Like on Reader I use Read Later and I can use that from any app, but uh for if I'm in current I can just start and favorite or whatever and sh put it aside.

I I don't feel like I miss anything because you can actually do some c some special routing for different people that you follow to make sure you see everything from different feeds. But the the main news point, a everything is so duplicated nowadays anyway. Yeah. You don't really miss anything. So I'm finding it a much calmer way to read my news. So I wanted to thank you for that. It's a it's a it's a nice little app. Yeah, I've got it on all my devices and it's all synced up. So

And and so how are you sourcing it with the RSS feeds you want to follow? Like how how do you choose OPML. I pulled my OPML from my my R my Rader regular because I use Reader Four. Okay. Um because the new version of Reader sucks. The the one they they redesigned. Oh, Reader five. I use Reader Five. And um you can just o uh export your OPML and I just brought it in and cleaned it up a bit'cause there's some

I I think I had forty I had I had a hundred and ten feeds that I follow and like forty of'em were dead. So So I cleaned that up and brought it in, but it's in in the color scheme is nice, it's calming, it's light blue. Pretty much. Purchase, I think. I I use Feedly pretty much every day uh to keep up that that's how I organize all of my cybersecurity sources.

when I have to put together the cyber wire every day. Uh so I have different categories and and tiers within Feedly. Uh so that's what I've been using. But that's very sort of more of industrial and utilitarian rather than a personal type of thing. So

And that's exactly how I use Feedly that is then read by uh Reader. So I have a Feedly account where everything is organized and stored and then I bring it into Reader and I use that because that way'cause the read later stuff in Feedly is fantastic in um

in reader re the read later share thing in reader is great because it's it comes with a share sheet that you can basically share from anywhere. So you can be on any website on any device and just hit read later and it copies that URL into the read later. Kind of like, you know, a a a pinboard type of thing or something like that. So it makes it makes it really easy. But uh yeah, I just so far I'm just I'm I'm liking this one because it it's

I some of the cruft just goes away. It's it's nice that way. So Yeah. In in un until I get the grumpinator finally finished. Once the grumpinator is finished, it'll be good. Yeah, let's... Yeah. Yeah. product recommendations or or ads or things like that. I'm like, I don't care if it I you know, anything that says Android, if Android is in the in the text of the the title or the body, I don't care. I don't want to see it. So for some reason it just won't listen to me.

So instead of fading away, do you have set it so things burst into flames? Uh it should. It should. I d I'm gonna add that as a feature. That's for V two. Yeah. Yeah, once my t once my tokens reset, I'll get clawed on that right away.

Uh I also have a bit of follow up. Uh uh Jason I talked to Jason and I talked about this when the Harry Potter trailer for the new HBO Max series came out, but uh you're the one that kind of clued us into this and talked about this uh in the first place, so I thought I'd bring it up again here. Uh having watched it, there was something that that bothered me about it and I didn't process it right away. And a little bit later on I figured it out and it's the color grade. And it's

Mm-hmm. It's because it's Harry Potter and the original Harry Potter's, at least the first few before the stories started to get dark, were bright, joyous things. And the trailer for the new f you know, first First year Harry Potter, where it's all exciting and magical and they're all figuring everything out and there are colors for their houses and everything explodes with color and it's vibrant and magic and magic and magic. Everything is so washed out and gray and muted.

And it looks fucking horrible and it was bothering me and I couldn't figure out why. And then I remembered the conversation that we had had uh in this segment with you and they've done it to Harry Potter. They're they're they're ruining everything with this color grading.

Yeah, it's hard to get around. And uh uh the place I notice it the most where it's most overt and in your face are pharmaceutical ads because the f the uh the the product will have a pair of colors that are the branded colors for whatever you're supposed to ask your doctor about. And uh and so those two colors just flow through everything in the ad.

Every wall, every shirt, every flower, everything is one of the two colors that are part of the ad and it there's something I I guess it's an uncanny valley kind of thing where You y for me anyway, I look at it and I go, This things light light doesn't work that way. Um you know, like why is the the yeah, the light that's lighting those faces could not be lighting everything else because it it It doesn't connect and it's disconcerning.

The other thing about pharmaceutical ads I used to love is you could always tell it was a pharmaceutical ad because the first part would be in black and white. And then once they got their drug the world would bloom into color. Right. I was able to take a shit. Yeah. All right. to the alarm. The thing I I I d I love is uh how they talk about um ailments in a way that no one would talk about ailments. Like I was talking to my friend about my moderate to severe osteoporosis.

Oh Bob, do you know I have moderate to severe osteoporosis? No, you nobody talks that way. It's funny'cause uh one of the one of the definite pluses of being in Canada. Now I I still see a lot of this stuff because I have my trusty VPN and and still have a lot of US uh T V sources, but uh those kind of ads are not allowed here.

There are there are no ads for pharmaceuticals uh in any media in Canada. It's not allowed. Wonderful. The US is one of two countries that allows the U.S. Ads for pharmaceuticals. Is North Korea the other one? No, it but it's um it's like uh it i it is a third world country. It it's I forget which I can't pull it off the top of my head right now, but it is Uh not a country that is is in good shape or is known for its regulation. So the US.

Yeah. And the and the US. The US and the US. It's it's both of us. No, I I think it's one of the biggest mistakes we ever made and I wish we could go back on it'cause I I also I feel like um particularly for um local affiliates here in the US, they're captured by these ads because it's the only th every ad break has pharmaceutical ads. Yeah, it used to just be during like sixty minutes and old people programming, but it's everything now.

Right. Right. And part of that is that the only people watching local affiliates anymore are old people. But um yeah, it's it's out of control and I wish they could rein it back in, but Uh I don't think they're going to be able to do that. अब तो मुच्च मुच्च मुच्च मुच्च Yeah. Yeah. Uh I did see an interesting story that I thought I'd share. New Zealand, by the way, is the one that you were thinking of, surprisingly.

Yeah. Oh, our Kiwi listeners are gonna be pissed you call'em a third world shittle. No, that w that wasn't what I was thinking of. It was like uh no it wasn't it was it was it wasn't New Zealand. It was another country that was like in civil war or something. So no, I but believe me, I would not call the New Zealanders that'cause they'd come and kick my butt. Yeah, they can't forget. Sure. Not sure if it's worth it.

Right. Um I saw this interesting article since I know uh at least Jason anyway has been a drone enthusiast. uh as I have been over the years. Uh we've got a journalist who's suing the FAA over drone no fly zones. Um basically the FAA extended no fly zones for drones over anywhere that ICE is. including their vehicles. And it's three thousand three thousand feet, which is what, you know, over a half mile. Um but as the journalist points out in this lawsuit

How do you know where Ice is? There's there's no way to know. Because all the apps have been banned that tell us where ICE is, so we can't even look that up to find them. They don't have badges. They don't identify themselves. They there's nothing on their vehicles. How are we supposed to know? Yeah. So it's basically been a a chilling effect on journalists' ability to use the drones and so tip of the hat to this guy who's suing and uh we'll see if he has any luck. It's just another.

Another brick on the wall. It's another ch it's another chip. It's another turd in the pot. Yeah. It's just another uh degradation of journalism and First Amendment rights. Yeah. Um... at the hands of ICE and and surveillance and all that good stuff. So Ho I hope we see some progress here, but on you know uh I I'm not holding out hope, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, we had the thin black line uh episode last week and we said, Don't get your hopes up, it's not gonna last. So let's go back to the Drudgery of the normal world, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And then sort of on the tail of the RSA conference, uh, one of my colleagues shared this video from a gentleman named Nicholas Carlini, who works at Anthropic. He's a researcher at Anthropic.

has a background in uh cybersecurity and finding bugs and things like that. And about a week ago he gave a talk at an AI conference and basically sent up the red flag and said, even in the past few months, these tools have gotten way more powerful than they were They're unbelievably good at finding bugs now. Uh he had ex he he said, um he's been able to find more bugs in the Linux kernel the Linux kernel, then he can uh process and report to the maintainers.

because he doesn't have time to go through and verify them all. That's why you use an agent. You just set your AI agent to go report'em all. Right. Well that's what he said. He d he said he doesn't want to hit the maintainers with slop without mate without uh verifying the bugs uh himself and but he has verified some. One of them the one he uses in the in the presentation uh goes back to two thousand three.

So he kinda joked that he said this bug is older than many of the people in this room. Um so he it's It's an interesting presentation. If you're into the AI stuff, if you're into cybersecurity, if you're a developer, I highly suggest. you watch it because it is a call to action. He's saying we need to do something about this. We need to help now. Not months from now, not a year from now. Now.

Um Well these companies have a great track record of listening to these sorts of things and responding immediately to it. So I'm I'm sure this will be taken care of. No problem. Ligety split. Right, right. Yeah. Who knows? Probably also his last day at Anthropic after he gave this presentation.

the thing I was gonna say. He was busy at this at this unprompted conference, which is a great name for an AI conference, unprompted, love it. Yeah. Uh but he was while he was there bitching about security, that's when the Claude code probably got leaked. So you know. He he was he was absentee landlord at his job there. Right. But no, I I can't wait to watch this. This is gonna be great.

It is good, but again, a little disconcerting and uh w what's uh also interesting to me is that This was not the message I was hearing at RSA. Right. Oh of course not. No. It was a lot more rah rah rah. Yeah. Uh which I guess you should expect. But usually you'll get a sub subtext, like an undertone of of concern. And that was uh Lacking. uh drinking the Kool-Aid or the people who still have jobs are really happy to still have jobs. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So don't rock the boat. I don't know.

Yeah, and and fixing bugs doesn't make money. Fixing bugs costs money, so they're not gonna highlight what's gonna cost us more money that this thing's, you know, bringing down the line. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The hopeful point that this person makes in his presentation is that he believes that ultimately the defenders are going to win, but he used the analogy that Uh overall the Industrial Revolution was a good thing for humanity and for the world.

But living through the Industrial Revolution was not good for a lot of people. Yeah. And he feels as though that's where we are right now. We're living through this AI revolution and so for a lot of people it's not gonna be good. Um and we all need to step up. Those of us who can need to step up and try to put guardrails on things. So on that note, Yeah. On that note Yeah. Great to have you back, Dave. No, it's good to be back. Thanks guys. And uh I'll see you next week. See you next week.

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