744: Goblin Mode

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, we got new merch. I had to put it at the top of the show because most people don't make it to the end where we usually pimp the merch, but we have merch. New merch. Finally. We do. I after almost a year of telling you I was gonna go in and do something, I went in and I did one.

You did one. You did one, I did two, and a mug. So uh there's more coming, there's more coming. It's just trying to get uh trying to figure out how this shit works'cause it's been a year since I opened Shopify and Printful. I'm like, where's that stuff at? So Yeah, it's funny, at my uh old gig at we we use printful a lot, so I was pretty almost expert level, but it's been so long I'm like, Okay, now what do I do? Oh exactly.

Yeah. The worst part is going to try and find which shirt you want to put your shit on. It's like, uh, do I want the thick one? Do I want the thin one? I I I prefer the I prefer the black heather with the with the light bella shirt because they're very comfortable in Southern California. I gotta go in and see if they've got some raglans,'cause I love me a good raglan. I don't know what that is.

Uh pretty sure though that the uh the the the shirt with the tr th uh third length sleeves is a different color. So you got like white and then the sleeves are like black and they go third length. Like the three quarters from the seventies? Yeah, I love those shots. Okay. They're the best.

Yeah, I used to be able to go to the gas station and'cause my my stepdad worked at a gas station, we would do the the heat transfers. You know, the people would come in and get with the trucker hats, they get the three quarter shirts with the the Ayatollah is an Asahola transfer on it,'cause, you know, it was the seventies.

Well, you know how I got my first uh raglan? I believe they're called raglins. If I'm getting it wrong, it's a different name. It's got a specific term to it, but I'm pretty sure that's it. My first one, also in the seventies, my dad worked f um for uh well, it was PSA at the time and then they got bought out by US Air, but he worked in air cargo and a a box full of journey

Raglan t shirts, touring t shirts, got lost and he brought'em home and I wore them incessantly. Oh. See, I figured you'd have gotten one of the one that said like female body inspector or something like that to wear around Disney. Yeah, no. Uh I didn't even discover those shirts until I moved to Venice Beach. All those shops have those, you know, like Yeah. Uh y let me clear off a place for you to sit that's got a guy brushing off his beard on the shirt, you know.

Yeah. All those those classy shirts that you used to be able to get down at Venice. Uh the the Weinstein collection we call them now. Yes, the anti woke brigade. Mm-hmm.

All right, we got some follow-up. Canada's finally getting into the uh banning social media uh for kids. Uh Manitoba, which is a province, which I actually learned this week. You didn't know Manitoba was a property. No, no, I knew that actually. My kids actually had my kids having to study them, so learn all the provinces and the capitals for each and uh as I'm about to become a citizen, I will have to take a test. So I was learning too.

You're actually going to become a Canadian citizen, congrats. Yes I am. Uh paper works in, could take twenty five years, but we'll see. I mean my kid and my wife are both dual citizens. It's time for me to join the join the team. So Got it. Yeah. Anyways, Manitoba could be the first province here in Canada to establish a social media ban for kids, but the proposal's details aren't clear yet. The province's premier Wab Canoe, which sounds like a Star Star Wars character.

Yeah. It's like Mace Windu's like third cousin. Ha ha. He announced this during a fundraiser event on Saturday and then posted on X that they would uh put up put in place a ban for social media and AI chatbots for its youth.

There's no elaboration on any details like specific age restrictions or when it'll be introduced or how it's gonna be enforced, but joining everybody else along with this, Canada's getting into it, which I believe is the first place in North America. We've been the holdout so far. So yeah, we'll see.

Uh but uh speaking of that, the Senate Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved a bipartisan bill aimed at requiring AI companies to limit chatbot use among minors in the United States. This proposed legislation would mandate age verification systems for chatbots. as well as prohibiting AI companions for minors and blocking the services from showing younger users sexually explicit content or encouraging self harm, as they should be doing anyways, but

This is what happens when we don't regulate things. They do it anyway. So we'll see. This is just the first step towards AI companies facing any real federal regulation on the subject. Um The fact that there is unanimous agreement between both parties is not only a miracle in this day and age, but shows that there may be enough support for uh this to move through the Senate both quickly and successfully. So we'll see. W we we have a Senate? When did that happen? Uh I I missed that. Yeah. Mm.

Yeah, I know they're on vacation now, so I'm sure that's gonna take a while for you know, for that to figure itself out. But it looks like Utah has some lawmakers still around and are still doing dumb shit. Utah's about to test a new approach to internet regulation and it's going straight after VPNs.

Starting may sixth, the state's online age verification amendments, or S B seventy three, will hold websites liable for verifying the age of users physically in Utah, even if those users are hiding behind a VPN or a proxy. H now how are they supposed to do that then, Jason? We're gonna get to that in a second, right? The law also blocks sites with adult content from even explaining how to use a VPN or to bypass age restrictions, raising some obvious First Amendment issues.

Also some common sense issues. Yeah, well, you know, when I first went to go set up my first VPN, I I also did go to Red Tube to figure out how to do so because they have the best instructions. So there you have it. Ha ha ha. So instead of banning VPNs outright, Utah is creating a liability trap that could push platforms to block VPN traffic entirely or force age verification on everyone everywhere. So technically it's a total clusterfuck.

Now, blocking VPNs is a game of whack a mole because everybody changes their IP addresses all the time, and users will just route around it with either private tunnels or residential proxies. Like Red Tube probably tells you how to do in great detail. So the likely outcome isn't stopping teens. It's making the internet less private for everyone else and being a general pain in the ass because they're too fucking stupid to understand how the internet works.

And if you want the best VPN on the market, go to G O G dot showslash VPN because we're not a spank site and we can tell you how to round route around it. So there you go. I guess we need to put up our instructional page on G O G dot show. I think we should probably put that up at some point, yes. Uh so and by the way, hey John Oliver, thanks for listening to the show because John Oliver this week took direct aim at the AI industry.

on uh last week tonight. I generally don't watch that show anymore, but I did check this one out and He basically summed up the past two years of our show in twenty seven minutes. So uh good for him. I'm glad everybody jumped on it and we're like, Yeah, what John said I'm like Kinda late to the party, pal.

He's always late to the party, especially on this one. But literally it was beat for beat for beat, everything every news story that we've ever covered in you know, in summation was that that episode. So uh yeah. So just everybody that's saying, Hey, did you check out John Oliver? I didn't have to check it out, but I checked it out anyway. But we cover this shit every fucking week. So yeah. AI bad.

Chatbots bad. Kids die. People shoot each other. Sam Altman goes, What me? There you go. Summed it up. Saved you a click. Don't forget the vacuuming up of the money. Oh, the vacuuming up of the money. Yes. And then the firing at the people, then wondering where the money's gonna keep coming from that they're vacuuming up.

Yeah. Well it's it comes in one door, goes out the next and goes around the back and come into the butt and out the mouth and yeah. Uh it is the human centipede of of venture capital is what it is. Uh so I did get a class action lawsuit settlement this week, Brian, for twenty one dollars and seven cents from the Birch Communications Class Action Settlement. Okay.

I had to look it up. I still don't quite know what it is. I think it's spam calls is basically what it is. So but sign up for those class actions people. It's your duty. It is your it is your duty. It's your m Moral imperative. Yeah, and I mean it's it used to be seven cents, now it's twenty one dollars and seven cents, but with inflation, thanks to the not don't call it a war war, it's still seven seven cents. That that and another twenty bucks will get you a gallon of gas.

Well, who could have possibly seen this coming? United States soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke has been arrested and charged for placing bets on Prediction Marketplace Polymarket using classified information he had access to. related to the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Yeah. Well we knew it happened. Now we finally have a face with the with the thing.

The US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant, who was directly involved with the planning and execution of the operation, allegedly made four hundred and nine thousand eight hundred and eighty one dollars in profits betting on the information he had access to that nobody else did.

According to the Department of Justice, he created a polymarket account around December twenty-sixth, twenty twenty five and made thirteen bets related to Maduro from December twenty-seventh to January second. Um not gonna get into all the specific ones, it's all in the thing. Uh

He he allegedly bet a total of thirty three thousand dollars and thirty-four dollars, or thirty three thousand and thirty-four dollars, and made over ten times that amount from his winnings. He withdrew his market from poly market on the day Maduro was captured and sent it to wait for this one. Yeah. A crypto vault. Because what's crypto good for, Jason? Yeah. Criminals. Yeah. before depositing it into a new online brokerage account.

After reports about the potential insider bets were published, he allegedly asked Polymarket to delete his account, falsely claiming that he had lost access to the email he used. So please delete that account. He also changed the email address link to the crypto account to another one not associated with his name. He has been charged with three counts of violation against the Commodity Exchange Act, with each one carrying a max sentence of ten years in prison.

He's also been charged with one count of wire fraud with a maximum penalty of twenty years in prison, as well as one count of unlawful monetary transaction with a max sentence of ten years. And of course, Polymarket probably charged him five hundred bucks and said you can't use the platform for a week. Where are the counts about I don't know violating national security? Where's the court martial charges? Where's all of Yeah. There's a lot that goes into this that is not listed in here.

Breath probably slapped him on the back and said, Good work, kid. Thank you. Where's my cut? Where's my cut? Yeah, where where do I get to dip my beak in? Exactly. You know, that's how that's how this administration works. If you don't get that's that's probably the only reason he got he got busted, is'cause he didn't pay he didn't gotta pay up the the chain. Gotta pay up the chain, kid. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I mean...

Again, it's we have we just have this continuing run of things that are good for nothing but crime. Nothing but crime. Nothing but crime and grift. That is all to all all the new technologies. It used to be porn, Jason. What was the bleeding edge of technology? It was titties. What is it now? Crime. Yeah. So sad, so sad. It's Brian, it's always nicer when it's about ditties. Come on. Ha ha.

Uh there was a report that did come out this week. I don't know if you saw that about uh most of the people on these predictive markets uh basically are losers. And the only people that make money are the people basically with inside information on what they're trying to do. So or hairdryers if you're a hairdryer.

Well, Meta is facing scrutiny after ending a contract with outsourcing firm Sama that will result in over one thousand one hundred job losses among Kenya-based workers who helped train its AI systems. Now, the move came weeks after reports that some workers were exposed to sensitive and explicit footage captured by users of Meta's AI enabled smart glasses, including private moments inside homes, like pooping and fucking. Yep. We talked about that a couple couple of shows ago. Yeah.

Yeah. So Meta came and said, No, you guys we you you're fired. You can't you you know, you're you're not here anymore with us because your people talked. It's not it's not because It's not because you did it, it's because you told people.

That's pretty much it. Meta says it terminated the contract because Sama failed to meet its standards. A claim Sama disputes, stating it consistently met all operational and quality requirements. Now worker advocacy groups allege that the layoffs were retaliation for speaking out duh.

Uh but regulators in both the UK and Kenya have launched investigations into privacy concern tied to the glasses. Meta maintains that any human review of content is done with user consent and is standard practice to improve AI performance. I guarantee you most of the people that were fucking on those glasses did not consent to a bunch of Kenyans looking at their footage. No, they just didn't know. At least not willingly, you know. They they they got tricked into clicking the EULA.

Yeah, well, I mean they're not the brightest people then. They're fucking with meta glasses on. Come on, they're not the brightest people to begin with. Unfortunately they were in the process of uh procreating. Get more of'em. So yeah, that's great.

That's idiocracy at work. Now Google has reportedly signed a deal with the US Department of Defense allowing its AI models to be used for classified work, including what's described as quote, any lawful government purpose. They're not going to be able to do Recently. There are no laws. The agreement comes despite internal opposition with more than six hundred employees urging CEO Sundar Patrai to block military use of the company's AI, citing concerns over surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Now the deal places Google alongside OpenAI and XAI, which have also secured Pentagon contracts. Okay. I that's what I want to be right there with X AI. Mm-hmm and OpenAI. While companies say safeguards remain in place, such as limits on mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous systems, Google's agreement reportedly does not grant it authority to override government operational decisions, which means Go with God. Okay. Yes. Go with Google.

Have have fun. Have at it. Yep. Do whatever you want. Boy, I missed the days when Google's the motto was do no evil. Oh, that was a long, long time ago. That was before everybody got rich and crazy, Brian. Rich and crazy. But you know, you have to say maybe Google needs to do this deal because they're broke, right? You know, that AI costs so much money. Um yeah, you th oh man, we're really str we're strapped for cash and we gotta make this deal with the government. Nope.

Google reported its strongest quarterly growth in roughly four years, with revenue up twenty percent in Q one twenty twenty six, driven largely by twenty billion dollars from its cloud division and surging demand for AI products. There you go, Brian. They're just doing it to do it. That's it. They're just doing it to do it. I am curious about this because we we do see we start to see this a lot in

kind of these vague financial reports from these companies where they talk about they're making a lot more money because of demand, surge uh increased demand for these AI products. Yet we're also told that all these AI products are being done at a loss leader where technically they're losing money every time that they fire up these AI machines that they're forcing down our throats anyways.

I would also posit to begin with that the increased surging demand for AI products is because you put that fucking button everywhere and I don't even want it. When I do a Google search, I have to go out of my way not to use your Google AI results. You're shoving it down our throats. That's why there's increased demand. But aren't you also losing money, but yet you're claiming you're making more money? But you're losing money.

I don't know if Google is losing money because remember they already own the data centers. They own the chips. They don't have to go to NVIDIA. They've got their T P U chips that they've already been making for years for their Machine learning, uh-huh. Say it with me, kids, machine learning that Google has been doing forever. They've had Deep Seek forever and they've been they've been working on this for a long time. And these guys know how to build a data center.

All these other companies coming in like OpenAI and Anthropic and Perplexy, all these schmoes who are starting from scratch. These guys don't know what the fuck they're doing and they don't have the infrastructure. That's where the spend is coming in for those guys. Google has a leg up with everybody. So for them

You know, and since they've made Google suck over the years, people have decided to not use it as much. So they have extra capacity just lying around that they could probably use. And what I'm I'm sure that there is a shit ton of tricky accounting going on here too that

Yes. You know. Yeah, like like Department A is using Department B's AI chips, even though they're the same company. But they're saying they're they're saying, Oh, I'm gonna use twenty billion dollars worth of your compute, even though it's my compute to begin with. And then they just put it on the books like it's, you know, profit, even though it could just be, you know, using the shit that they've already got. Bucket into bucket into bucket into bucket into bucket into bucket profit.

Exactly. So yeah, take that take that twenty billion at a grain of salt, but uh still The fact that they do have the money. They don't need to be signing contracts with the government. They're only doing that to curry favor with the fuckwitten in chief right now. So that's it. Right.

While keeping on the AI train, two months following the dead uh deadly shooting in Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia, OpenAI Sam Altman has formally apologized for not informing police of the alarming chat GPT conversation seen within the suspect's account. How nice that he said I'm sorry two months later, after the lawyers have reviewed everything possible to make sure he could get in absolutely no trouble whatsoever, he opened his mouth and said this very specific statement.

that they cut crafted for him with the help of their lawyer AI bot. Exactly. And also in the interim while the while this has been going on, he's been working to uh steer regi like regulation behind the scenes to make AI companies less culpable for people who go out and shoot people. during this whole thing. That th he's been working very hard to make sure that they are going to be in the clear in the future that they're just a fucking platform. So yeah, sorry not sorry.

And uh just to clarify this, before the incident, OpenAI knew enough about this guy in this account to ban it before the shooter went off to go shoot people in real in real life. I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June, Altman wrote in the letter. Well I know words can never be enough. I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.

Uh Abby, who is the I believe the what is he, the mayor or something? I don't know. Some sort of thing in British Columbia. Highlighted the letter on X and agreed that the apology is necessary, but added that it was grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumblr Ridge, which I agree with. There should be some sort of lawsuit.

Uh Altman reaffirmed in the letter that open AI would find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future and work with all levels of government to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Okay, so do it. Do it and also take the big dump trucks of money that you've got lying around that you keep saying that you've got.

And drive some of that up to Tumblr Ridge and dump it on the entire community that you have fucking destroyed so at least they don't have to worry about where their maple syrup's gonna come from for the rest of their lives. Just sad. That is all Canada produces. We are a big maple syrup factory. And moose is Lumberdone. And Tim Horton sandwiches. Yeah.

This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Here's the thing a lot of people don't realize. Data brokers are making money off your personal information. Your name, contact info, home address, and even details about your family can be compiled, packaged, and sold online to basically anyone willing to pay.

That kind of exposure can open the door to identity theft, phishing attempts, and harassment. Now as someone with a pretty public internet presence, I deal with this constantly. People are looking me up all the time, scraping whatever information they can find. It's just part of being a public figure online. But that's exactly why I use delete me.

They go out and remove your personal information from hundreds of data broker websites, which gives me a lot more peace of mind and honestly helps me sleep better at night. And it's not just me saying it. The New York Times wire cutter has named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners.

Get twenty percent off your Delete Me Plan when you go to join delete me dot com slash G O G and use promo code G O G at checkout. The only way to get twenty percent off is to go to joindelete me dot com slash G O G and enter code G O G at checkout. That's joindelete me dot com slash G O G code G O G.

Oh man. So a little more Sam Altman news. Tools for Humanity, a startup tied to Sam Altman and his World Identity Project is facing scrutiny after falsely claiming it would sell tickets to a Bruno Mars tour using a new product called Concert Kit. Well, turns out Bruno Mars's management and Live Nation quickly denied any partnership, stating no agreement or even contact had occurred. So the entire thing was fucking made up.

I guess they craft they let their own AI figure out what to do and just made shit up. Yeah. Yeah. Uh the company has since updated its website confirming the claim was inaccurate and shifting to a separate, unrelated partnership with the band Thirty Seconds to Mars. So that's the same thing. Exactly. He's a piece of fucking work. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

Uh the incident raises questions about credibility, particularly for a company built around verifying human identity through biometric scanning. It also adds to broader criticism of Altman's track record with past reporting and former employees alleging a pattern of misleading statements. On issues ranging from internal policies to long term AI goals. Now, me personally, Brian, I don't need to ask ChatGPT if this Altman guy is a cancer. Spoiler alert, he is. So Scam Altman.

Just full of shit from from I I I we didn't really put in any news about the trial right now because it's just kind of Yeah. Ongoing and just a shit show every day. Um, but man, these guys are just pieces of shit all the way down. Way down I haven't really I I kinda wanna let it get along a little bit further before we do talk about it, but wow, nobody looks good. No. Nobody well it we knew that. We fucking knew that.

I know, but usually when you have kind of these battles of the Titans, you know, it's like oh well at least Godzilla's not not so bad. Uh but in this case, yeah, Elon and they all just look horrible. They're petty little shit. They're petty little shits with way too much money and way too much power and way, way too little empathy for their fellow man. So

A little more OpenAI news. OpenAI and Microsoft had amended one of the most important partnerships in AI, ending Microsoft's exclusive hold on OpenAI's models. Microsoft will still keep licensing rights to OpenAI's IP and models through twenty thirty two, and Azure remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner. But that license is now non exclusive, meaning OpenAI can serve its products through other cloud providers.

The change clears the way for open AI models to run on Amazon bedrock, following a reported fifty billion dollar Amazon Open AI deal. So Amazon gives them fifty billion dollars, so

Open AI can spend two hundred billion dollars on compute that they're just gonna get the money back but then own I don't know how there's gonna be anything left of open AI with all these fucking deals they're doing to sell off pieces of their company to spend more than they've already made. I does not make Any fucking rational sense. Well here's the deal, Jason. He they have sold off two thousand percent of their company, but they still hold ten thousand percent of it. Okay. This is Trump map.

That works. That works. Uh Microsoft did reportedly threaten legal action over that arrangement, but the new agreement appears to resolve the issue. OpenAI will continue paying Microsoft a twenty percent revenue share, but with an unspecified cap and a guarantee only through twenty thirty. if open AI is in existence four more years from now, which is very tenuous. It's a we don't know if open AI is gonna make it another four years.

Not no, and not not when they keep making these deals. I there are three clear winners uh right now in in this area. Uh you've got Google, which is just to to your point earlier. They've just got more money than God, so it doesn't matter. And uh people need to use their compute power.

Microsoft has been very strategic about making these deals. Uh they're they're not getting into it too much themselves, but they're just they're taking the monies. We'll give you some money as long as you give all that money back plus more. That's what they're doing. And obviously NVIDIA, who's just selling to everybody, left, right, and center. They're the winners. One could also argue Apple has stayed the hell out of this mess and is just waiting until the dust settles.

Yeah, which was the smartest move that they could do. Yep. Oh here but here's an interesting part that I really found in I I really enjoyed this. The amended deal also removes the old dependency on OpenAI's progress towards AGI giving OpenAI more flexibility as enterprise demand disp expands beyond Azure. Now this is because we all finally know that LLMs aren't actually intelligent.

And that scam has been blown out of the fucking water and AGI is in no way, shape, or form ever going to come from an L L M, which is basically a word prediction model. It's not intelligence. So Uh Microsoft has finally pulled that out and saying, you know what, if we take this out, then you guys can get a go try and make more money from the enterprise clients because that's the only place that you're gonna make money. But Anthropic is eating your lunch right now, so maybe go get back to work.

All right. Well we m may never get AGI, but we do seem to have our goblins, Jason Fred. Yeah, the goblin issue. A document posted by OpenAI on GitHub as part of the open sourcing for Codex CLI, OpenAI's most recent flagship coding agent, contains what looks like the entire system prompt for GPT five point five in a coding context. And uh there's some choice segments in here. I'll read this part. Provide the highest signal context instead of describing everything exhaustively.

The tone of your final answer must match your personality. Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely necessary and unambiguously related to the user's query. Yeah. They then bring it up again later. For example, never use platitudes like I will do this good thing rather than this obviously bad thing. I will do X.

Not why. Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. Nobody knows why. Apparently there there was some sort of geek mode that they could put in that it got rewarded and rewarded and rewarded, which again shows you it's a LLM, it's a prediction machine, things that get multiple hits.

get returned more and more and more often. So and that's exactly how this got in there. So bad that there was a basically goblin mode meme that was going around. Somebody tried to code in a goblin mode on off switch. And the the internet basically had a field. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was great. Yeah, I i I think it was nerd mode. Uh nerd mode, yes.

Yeah,'cause I I had that turned on'cause they they took it away a couple of months ago, but I had that turned on'cause when you could set all the different types of different ways that it could reply to you, you know, you could specify if you go into The um the Chat GPT uh settings interface and the the desktop app, you can sh switch on a whole bunch of stuff. But it basically reinforced itself by fucking around with it. It's just like, oh okay. Idiots.

Ah, well, this is a blast from the past. Sam Bankman Fried's latest attempt to overturn his fraud conviction has been rejected after the former FTX CEO submitted court filings he largely wrote himself, reportedly with the help from his lawyer parents. US Dict District Judge. Wrote himself or use an L L M to write? Yeah. Well I don't even know if he's got uh He's not supposed to have access to a computer, right?

Exactly. Yeah, he had he had problems getting access to a computer, so he probably did have to write it himself, which is why it failed so miserably. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed the motion, characterizing it as part of a broader effort by Bankman Fried to rehabilitate his public image, referencing a twenty twenty document outlining unconventional reputation recovery strategies.

At the center of the file the yeah, at the center of the filing was a claim that FTX's chapter eleven bankruptcy destroyed hidden liquidity that could have repaid customers in full, an argument prosecutors previously called factually wrong and misleading.

Bankmanfried also cited two supposed new witnesses, but prosecutors noted both were known to the defense before trial, undermining that argument. The judge further denied Bankmanfried's attempt to withdraw the motion despite his claims that the court would be biased.

Bankman Fried was convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy tied to the collapse of FTX and misuse of customer funds, and has not been able to come up with the the the payday to give to Trump to get his ass pardoned, so he's gonna be fucked forever. Pretty much.

拜拜 Uh we've talked about the dead internet theory quite a few times on the show, and apparently we're seventeen percent of the way to that becoming reality. Feels like a hundred and seventy percent. It sure does, especially on social media. I think we already have dead social media, but this is the internet as a whole.

More than a third of new websites on the internet have been created by AI, according to a paper published online by researchers from Imperial College London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive. The study is based on data collected by the Internet Archives Wayback Machine from late 2022 when Jet GPT kicked off the AI craze to the mid-2025.

As of May twenty twenty five, researchers found that thirty-five point three percent of all newly published websites on the internet were created with the assistance of AI, including seventeen point six percent of websites that were completely AI generated.

So we're almost there, but Cloudflare reported in september twenty twenty five that nearly one third of all Internet traffic is driven by bots, and a few days later the company's CEO, Matthew Prince, appeared on a podcast to share his frighteningly likely forecast. That AI will completely change the way information is shared online and concentrate power over this online knowledge in the hands of a few tech giants. That's happened.

Yeah. An even earlier report from data security company Imperva claimed that automated surfing surpassed human activity on the internet for the first time back in 2024, making up roughly half of all web traffic. The report concluded this was largely driven by the rapid adoption of AI and large language models. So yeah, we're we're we're there, man. Most of the internet is already nothing but bots. Yeah, but, you know.

I see it. I mean I can't I can't look at even comments on a website like just any kind of news website where they have comments turned on. I like to started to look at the comments on I'm like, That's a bot, that's a bot, that's a bot. There's no way that people are saying that shit and if they are God, I hope they're bots.

And even even a little bit of doom scrolling, you just start to see the same exact post with the same exact wording by multiple accounts and you're like bot, bot, bot, bot, bot. I trust nobody, I don't trust anything anymore, I'm gonna go live in a fucking cave. Fuck this shit, fuck it, I'm out.

See, I think that I think it's time to really look at bringing back the indie web and individual websites and blogs, you know, for fun and connection to other people, like we used to have. You know, and let's use this last gasp of cheap AI bullshittery to build our own tools to bring it around because WordPress is a fucking dinosaur and more about WordPress in a second. But we have an opportunity right now to take back

that that conversation that we used to have with blogs and people connecting, the way we used to do it, without all these fucking assholes getting in the way. Because, you know, it just if you if you take away the profit motive, the web can still be fun, Brian. It used to be fun. We used to have a lot of fucking fun together with all the people that we knew. It was just people, not fucking profit. So I think that there's a there's an opportunity there, for sure.

So we're all gonna have the time. None of us are gonna have jobs. Unless you're gonna have jobs. Uh but WordPress speaking of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg is raising concern that WordPress's own development culture is holding it back. He argues that an overly bureaucratic, consensus driven approach to open source has led to slow progress in uninspired releases.

According to Mullingweg Mullingweg uh requiring broad agreement on every decision discourages bold ideas and makes meaningful innovation difficult. He suggests that the biggest breakthroughs are often non consensus and require accepting some level of risk and failure. Just what you'd expect from a rich guy who has to make concessions to the little people to say the things that he's saying. Now, I'd like to point out Brian? Mm-hmm.

Any flaw in how WordPress operates goes right back to Matt since it's his fucking baby. Didn't you And wasn't there this big brew ha ha just a while ago where he said, This is my company, we're gonna do it my way and if you don't wanna do it that way, suck it and you can go f you can you can quit the job? Exactly. So why is he going back and forth saying that, oh, he needs more power when he's got all the power, you know?

Um it's I'm sure that there's some you know, some shit out there because he opens like half of WordPress is open source there. With the GPL and all the other shit that they whatever I don't even know what license WordPress is released under anymore'cause I couldn't give a flying fuck less about it. But um yeah. Talk about Sorry, Matt, take your hundreds of millions of dollars and just fucking go away. You piss me off. WordPress die. Yeah, seriously. I I I have bought two very rich people

in in the world lap da their first lap dance. He's the he's the he's the poorest of the two. The first one was Evan Williams. He's got w worth two billion. I bought him his first lap dance. And Matt Mullenwick, I bought you as your first lap dance. So both of you guys Never paid me back for those, by the way, so go fuck off.

All right. As reported by several outlets, the Trump administration has dismissed members of the National Science Board, which is tasked with establishing policies for the National Science Foundation. It's not clear how many members have been dismissed. But they established policies for the NSF, the independent US agency responsible for apportioning about twenty five percent of federal support towards research conducted by the country's colleges and universities.

This foundation has been in around for over seventy five years and has contributed to the development of MRIs, cell phones, and other massive breakthroughs that affect our lives every goddamn day. So of course we don't need them anymore. Screw up. In response, Congressman Zo Lofgren called the latest decision a real bozo the clown move in a statement. This is the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science in American innovation.

Slid Lofgren, who serves as the ranking member of the House's Science, Space and Technology Committee, so she may know a thing or two about this. It is unfortunately a no surprise a president who has attacked the NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the foundation. So that's chess. Peachy. So much for ending on a high note this week. Oops. Couldn't find one. Tops and doodots!

Well, Brian, a new Vine reboot called Divine is launched publicly, bringing back the six second looping video format along with a large archive of original content. The app includes roughly five hundred thousand restored vine videos sourced from the community backups with associated engagement data partially reconstructed. Backed by Jack Dorsey and his beard through his nonprofit and other stuff.

Clever. The project is positioned as an experimental effort rather than a commercial venture, aiming to revisit the decision to shut Vine down. Divine also allows users to create and upload new short form videos with features like compilation mode for continuous playback of themed clips. A key focus is limiting AI generated content. Sure. Users must record videos in app or verify uploads using provenance standards like C two P A.

Built on decentralized social protocols including Noster, with potential support for others, Divine is framed as part of a broader push towards open social media infrastructure. The app is free and currently rolling out via waitlist and invite codes. So all of those all of the shit that those people made are s is are being brought back from the dead. So nothing is truly ever deleted, Brian. Ever. Yeah. Wherefore art thou quibby? I can't wait.

Dude, Netflix just rolled out vertical videos in their in their new app that's coming out. Uh everybody's moving towards these short form vertical videos. And you know, Vine was ahead of the curve back then, Quibi was ahead of the curve. Everybody now is just seeing all of the money that is being spent in China, billions of dollars in China on short form vertical videos, and they think that this is going to be a hit here now. I am not seeing

Well here's what I am seeing. I am seeing studios galore start making these videos and shit. Nobody is watching. That's what I'm seeing. You find me one human being in the United States of America who is into vertical videos and I I I may change my mind. Have you seen anything up there in Canada? I mean, uh, you know, reels are are huge, like and and nobody nobody's got the attention span anymore. But I think the difference is

People just want other normal people doing it. It's that connection thing. They want to see other normal people doing it. They don't want to see produced things. I could be wrongI don't knowI hate it all Yeah, the Chi the Chinese side is is uh micro dramas. You know, so it is a drama basically ninety second in ninety second clips that is super engineered for engagement, and that's what what what we're gonna start seeing there. interest.

Z yeah, less than zero. Especially when you have to pay for each chapter. And I've watched some of'em. They're fucking horrendous. They're fucking horrendous. But bringing back Vine is just like, look, let it die. Let it fucking die. You already did once, why not do it again? Yeah. And and it will again. All of this has happened before, Jason. Yeah, good let's go find Kevin Rose. He's working on dig four point oh, so maybe he can uh throw something in there.

Divine is gonna get plucked eventually. It's just gonna be gone again.

Well, Apple reportedly plans to fix bugs and expand the capabilities of Apple intelligence with the release of iOS two seven, twenty seven, iPad OS twenty seven and mac OS twenty seven. It's so nice to just say the year, I guess.

And it seems like tweaks of the company's AI could go beyond a mere functional version of its Siri Assistant. You can currently use Photos app across Apple's operating systems to adjust things like saturation and contrast, apply filters, crop photos, or use AI to remove objects with the cleanup tool. Cleanup will apparently be one of several Apple intelligence tools after these new updates roll out.

Along with cleanup, users will be able to extend the to expand the background of the photo with generative AI, enhance to automatically improve things like lighting and image quality and reframe to shift the s shift the perspective. of a photo after it's taken primarily for Apple's spatial photos. I guess that's nice. This will bring it along uh more in line with competitors like Google and Samsung, which have this stuff out there already on their phones.

Um yeah, we'll see. Well, Apple is still kind of hedging their bets against entirely generated images. They don't let you do that yet. Uh, other than new photo tools, they're gonna debut their new version of Siri powered by Google's Gemini models, standalone Siri app, and AI powered search inside its apps. So I hate this. I hope we get to turn it all off.

Yeah, I I mean these kids are gonna be so screwed up because they're gonna see their family photos and ha it it's gonna be so different from what they remember, you know, that it's just g it's this the cognitive dissonance is going to be it's gonna be through the roof. Through the fucking roof. I don't remember mom having three breaths, said the kid who found his ex AI's dad's phone. Seriously. One's for dancing, kid. Anyways, old joke.

Uh, Google Photos is adding a new AI feature this summer. This is called wardrobe, which will create a digital closet for your clothing and jewelry, making it easier to organize them and pick what to wear. This feature discovers your clothes by scanning your Google Photos library.

It then creates a catalog of your items organized by categories, tops, bottoms, jewelry, etcetera. From there you can mix and match items to create outfits, sharing them with friends, or saving to a digital mood board. There's also a try-on feature. XAI also has that, except they call it take off feature. Yeah.

Like a corresponding feature in Google Shopping, it will generate a photo of you wearing the clothes you chose. Interesting that they mentioned Google Shopping there because I wonder what the end game of this app is going to be. Yep. Here is your wardrobe. Here is Google Shop recommendations for things that will go with the clothes that you already have or the items that are stored in wardrobe. Here is the shopping link to buy immediately.

Yeah. I j I hate that it discovers your clothes by scanning your Google Photos library. That is creepy. To me, that's the creepiest part of this. Not the does you know, remember the what the Amaz or was it Amazon or Facebook? The uh Does My Ass Look Fat camera? Where you can try on clothes? I can't remember. It was such a horrible idea. It doesn't matter. Meta. Yeah, it was Meta, yeah. Back I think it was back then it was still Facebook, but yeah. I learned about it yet. No.

Oh man. I do have a hardware recommendation. Uh the Logitech MX Keys S keyboard. Now I do Didn't want to get another keyboard this week. That was the last thing I wanted to spend money on. But my Apple keyboard, I had one of the you know, the Apple Magic Keys keyboard. And I had the fancy black one when they when they first came out. It shit the bed. All the keys on the right side decided to work about thirty percent of the time. It was like I was trying to use generative AI to write an email.

It just it worked when it felt like working. So I had to like buckle down and get a new keyboard. And I've I'm I'm actually working on the M the original MX keys now. That's my my office keyboard. So I got the MX keys S for the bedroom because they only have that's all they have now. It's nicer actually. It's heavier, which I really like. I like a heavy keyboard.

And uh the keys are brighter, like the backlit is brighter. Uh otherwise I think it is exactly the same as the the MX keys. Mm-hmm. But I I love these. I that's I'm not getting Apple keyboards anymore, you know. I mean this looks really nice. When when my Apple keyboard shits the bed, I'm gonna get one of these.

Oh yeah, dude, I've been using this one for like two years. It's my favorite keyboard, hands down. Cause and you pair that with uh uh the MX Mice. The cool thing about'em is they all have uh three different pairing settings. So you can change you can take this. And Pair it with your desktop or pair it with your laptop or pair it with another laptop with one set. So and it takes it takes a second to switch. You just press the button and then you just switch to the other one.

It's super convenient. We've got the mouse here and my wife and I kind of hotbox and share this uh share this upstairs office. So it's really convenient just to hit the button. Course my wife always forgets to hit the button so she's down or I forget to switch it before I leave. So I'm down on working on my laptop when she takes over and all of a sudden the mouse is going all over my screen. It's possessed. It's possessed.

Yeah, but it's a great feature and it's uh it's really useful. So yeah, I think this keyboard is definitely on my list. Yeah, it's a hundred and nineteen bucks for a for a really quality keyboard. Like I said, the the MX one that I'm using right now, uh so shows no sign of wear or tear. It's it's it's an awesome keyboard. So there's my tip of the week.

Star Trek's Strange New World is returning for its uh penultimate season, July twenty-third, not that far away right now. So this will be the fourth season of the Planned Five before they kill all Star Trek TV shows. Thanks a lot, Paramount. Yep. We're getting ten episodes that'll air weekly until September twenty fourth and the first uh official teaser is out, which was uh it looks like less singing and dancing in this this particular season. We'll see.

Yeah. Yeah, hopefully they they fixed the problem with season three, which was just the discombobulated nature of where these fucking stories went. They said they were going to, so and uh yeah, the last season the season five will be six episodes. So we get sixteen episodes left, which is gonna be sad. That is sad.

Uh and I stumbled across a kind of fun article, uh, if you like your Star Trek history and uh the real world and how it all came together over at Gizmodo, how the comm badge became the ultimate wearable of the Star Trek universe. It's just a fun read, links in the show notes. Uh Daredevil? I was worried that we had seen all we were gonna see of Jessica Jones, but she looks like she's back, at least uh for the last few episodes. We'll see what happens. Yeah, nice to see her around, obviously.

Yeah. It was a good episode, I thought. Yeah, I thought so too. So I I We'll see. I was I kind of feel like they should wrap it, but w I know they're gonna do it another season, so Okay. Uh has it been picked up yet? I'm pretty sure I thought I saw that it did, but then again we haven't talked about it on the show, so maybe that was wine induced Jessica Jones dreaming. Yeah, that was just you you in the middle of the night going, I can't wait for more Jessica Jones. Yeah.

And a hat tip uh to Super Dave Bittner. I saw he posted this on his Facebook account. Uh Ted Lasso season four, the official teaser trailer, is out. Uh they're returning August fifth. Again, I have my reservations about this. I I think we had um declining returns on the dead lasso seasons as they went along, although the fact that they're having him come back to coach a women's team opens up lots of good comedic possibilities. So I mean, at the end of the day it's good riders. We'll see.

I did not get the feels from this trailer at all. I was just like, I I've seen it. It it's the same, you know. Yeah. It's tough. That's the same thing. It's gonna be tough. They're not they're never gonna you know, this is one of those Beatles good good thing they split up. The police quitting after synchronicity. Uh, you know, at some point you just gotta go, we're never gonna reach these heights again. Maybe we should just call it a day. Yeah, but then there's the money.

There's Apple money behind this, you know, and Jason Sadekis probably wants to have a bigger house or you know. I I c look I can't blame him for trying to feed a whole bunch of people because it does take a whole bunch of people to make these shows. So you know, from just an economic standpoint, good on you for making the jobs. And we don't have to watch it if we don't want to, I guess. I suppose, but you know we all are. Totally gonna watch it. It comes out on my birthday. You know? Come on.

The library?

Brian, I finished God's Drunk Drawer by Peter Kleins. Kind of dinosaurs and and things like that too. Um Peter wrote the X Heroes series that we covered on the show when it was being Oh yeah. That's just junk, not even a junk drawer. Do you remember the X do you remember the X Hero series? I do, I really did enjoy that series and I remember trying to read something else he did that was not X Heroes and and getting giving it a big old meh.

See, I I don't know which one that was because after that he wrote uh Fourteen, which is a fantastic book. Uh the Fold, which is great, Dead Moon, which is great, and Terminus, which was great. These are all very love crafty and melded themes uh with parallel universes and all that. And um It wa th I love all of those books. And I love the ex heroes.

Uh in God's juncture. It took me a little while to get into and once I got into it, like about, you know, fifteen percent into it, it really picked up and I finally got it.'Cause at the beginning it started uh it's kinda like a land of the lost kind of thing at the beginning. God's show.

Uh, the slea stacks, man. It's all about the slea stacks. Um but it it it totally go it pivots right pretty right away and then you kinda see what's going on. But it it still keeps going until the end. And it is great sci-fi. It is fantastic sci-fi. So Um I I it was thoroughly satisfying. I highly recommend this book. Um and it's a standalone. There's not going to be any um no sequels. It's just a one and done. So if you want a really good read, highly recommend it.

All right. I'll have to give him another chance. I'cause I really did. I love the X Hero series. That was a lot of fun. It was, it was. And like I said, those other Lovecraftian uh they they're called the um the Threshold Universe series, uh with the Fourteen, the Fold, Dead Moon and Terminus. All four of those books together I think were they were all solid. So they all kinda play together.

Um so if you're looking for a short series, those were good. Uh a series that's not so short, the Murderbot Diaries. Uh Martha Wells says that uh she may be approaching its conclusion. I'm guessing the checks are probably starting to run out then because uh why would you You got the big check. You get you g you got the you got the big payoff. You got the series made out of it. It doesn't get any better than that. Apple series.

I can I can see this. I I I've been I've read every single one of the Murderbot diaries. I enjoy them. I don't know where else I feel like she's explored that concept as much as you can. Yeah. So you read all eight books? Well not the newest one because that's audible only right now, right? Or Oh I don't know. I I stopped at four. I've read them all. I read every single one that's out. So Oh, okay. And they're still good? Oh, maybe I'll have to check'em back out. Yeah, they're

They're not bad. Again, like I said, it's like you're starting to run out of ideas. It's it's It's a pretty solid concept, but when you're eight books in, wh what else you got? Yeah. Yeah. And that's the other thing too, is like I I didn't want to go I started to go the audible route and I'm like uh in my head, in the books, when I read the books, Murderbot was a chick. Yep.

That's the problem I had with Skarsgard being the murder bot in the series. So I think I I kind of put them as two separate entities together, you know. It's like there's the T V show, which is a completely different thing than the books, but That's just that's just me, I guess. Or maybe not, because you saw you thought so too. So uh anyway, we'll see how it goes. So good luck, Martha. Yeah. Oxide. With Dave?

Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. Hi, Dave. Hello. So I was I was doing something uh last night. I was going through uh some of our artwork because we have new merch out, uh which we've been talking about, so everybody should go buy it, shop.go ghow.

And in making that new merch I had new characters that I came up with with for me and Brian, you know, some some grumpy dudes that kind of expand a little bit on the uh our our current ancient logo that was done thirteen years ago by the lovely Wendy Marvel. And I'm like, well, if I can use some of these for the show art, well then we need a Dave too. So I I I asked the the uh the the the monsters in the machine to whip up a character sheet for me, Brian, and you Dave.

And I thought I thought you came out looking so good that I had to post it here. I'll put this put this in the Discord channel too. But you look very dapper in our in our character sheet show notes. No I do. I I uh I'm pleased with this. Yeah. That is my favorite. It uh it I've dropped a few pounds, which is nice, always nice. Uh That's what AI is good for. Uh. Yep. Yeah. Oh really? And uh I I'm like, No, Dave wears black buttons down, so we'll put the black button down.

That's funny. But I actually I actually m I I I used uh the new Chat GPT image two point oh with your profile picture and this is what it came up with. Yeah, I was gonna say that definitely looks like my my profile picture. So uh no, I like it. I like it. It uh it's full speed ahead. I I I guess I'm the only one of the group who actually has a human head. Yeah, we are uh Jason and I seem to be rounded Lego heads. Bye. Yeah.

Yes, or the the grumpy's smiley, not smiley. But here's here's the funny part. So I I built this character sheet. So I and I told I told ChatGPT, I'm like, make me a character sheet that I can use with you when I wanna make characters for artwork that we're going to use later for show art for YouTube, because we have to make the YouTube show art every week.

So I I it it created this for me. And immediately when I tried to use it, it did not work at all. All of us came out looking like Brian. That was it. There's three Brians giving us the stink out. Oh you should all be so lucky. Yeah. So That's good. Yeah. Yeah, got rid of that. Yeah. Uh

Yeah, I think that w that only made it still season two or year two of the show and then then he quit and we had to take it out. Brian's like, Take out my cigarette, I'm I'm gonna have a kid, I'm getting married and all that shit or whatever. Well the poster I have, uh the grumpy old geeks poster I have, Brian is still smoking, so Oh, man. Oh geez. The OGs, yeah. I still have some of those stickers sitting around too, yeah.

Yeah. Uh so I I have to run something by you as well because last week you talked about Dave about you know how we're always all feeling scared all the time and it uh you know that that fight or flight uh You know, reaction is is playing heavily on us because of our use of social media. Mm-hmm. I was driving back from my friend's house this week. I got my first singing lesson this week. Oh congratulations. No, it it wasn't great. Yeah, my first ever. Congratulations, that's great.

We got we got through the second song and he's like, Yeah, your pitch sucks. Go home and work on your pitch. So Constructive criticism. It's a friend. I'm having a friend teach me how to sing. So it's like he's he's he's brutally honest, which I think is better than, you know, someone that's just trying to take my money. But uh I fix his computer, he's teaching me how to sing. But on the way home, I'm pulling up to my house.

And there was a PSA on the radio that was a An educational PSA about So you've got to do that. A new set of friends. You and your wife are going to a cocktail party with you, your wife and your kids at a new friend's house. Now, before you take your kids to that new friend's house, how do you ask those friends about

They're unsecured firearms. This is how you ask people how they have unsecured firearms in their home. You call them up and you say, Hey Judy, I can't wait to come over to the party tomorrow night. But, you know, we're bringing our kids and kids are curious, so they're gonna be exploring. And I just wanted to know how do you handle unsecured firearms in your home?

Judy should have said, Well, you should be wrangling your fucking kids and not letting'em run amuck in my home which would have been the first answer. But then Judy comes back and says, All of our s all of our firearms are secured in v in fireproof safes that have biometric locks and are out of reach of children. This was an actual PSA on the radio. In California. In California. It is the most dystopian thing that I've heard. Well in the last two and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I was just floored. I just didn't know if you guys had heard this. Oh, I I'm sure Brian, you're not gonna hear this, but Dave, this might be in your neck of the woods'cause it was on a national radio station, so No, I haven't heard it, but honestly, uh it has been so long since I've listened to the radio. Oh I realized recently I got a new car about a year and a half ago and I have yet to program radio stations in on it. Wow. Ja. Right. Ha ha. Okay.

My phone connects automatically to my car too, so I never listen to the radio. It's just all right, well what podcast was I listening to or which playlist do I want to start or my kid my kids' music that I'm gonna have to play. That's the those are the choices. So uh yeah, we don't have that problem up here, uh Jason,'cause uh, you know, there there are no guns, uh, but they do have uh, you know, is your moose properly pent up in the back? Yeah.

Uh and various uh is the maple syrup secured'cause we wouldn't want any accidents. Uh that's what happens here. But yeah, that's pretty goddamn dystopian. Shit. There is only one person's house that I've ever been to that, as far as I'm aware of, actually had a gun, and that was your house, Jason. Okay. There you go. None of my other friends have owned any, so it's this has never come up. Yeah. I think I have a picture of you with that gun too. I think you do Yeah. Oh, that was good stuff.

That was really good stuff. This reminds me of uh when my kids were little, I wanna say elementary school age and we had some friends over and the friend who the friend also had kids and brought their kids over who are around the same age as mine. And the friend pulled me aside and uh basically read me the riot act because we had Nerf guns. And her children were being raised uh without guns and it was not cool for me to not warn her that we had guns. And I went, I was like

Yeah. They're Nerf costumes. They're they're nerf gun. They shoot little foam ball like So I mean there's the th I mean I remember my my wife was was particularly uh she was aware of the fact that there would be no avoiding this, that if if this stuff didn't happen then, you know, our son would just pick up a stick and pretend it was a gun or a

lifesaber or whatever. But I do remember, you know, when Lucas was very young, she was very like, How long can we hold off on introducing guns to to the kid? And I I get that, but At a certain age it's just like, I'm sorry, this is the world. Yeah. See, I I come from a I come from a place where ev kids all kids learned how to shoot when we were very young and we got a respect for guns. We knew how to use a gun, so if we saw a gun, we weren't scared of it. We knew what to do with it.

And you know, people who keep their kids away from guns are probably the same people that keep their kids away from peanuts, which is why peanuts kill fucking kids now too. So teach your kid how to use a gun and eat a fucking peanut and the world'll be a better, safer place. My point of view, but hey. Toy gun I have many toy guns. I of course we had cowboy you know pistols. We ha I had a toy uh M sixteen where you pulled the trigger and it went dunno. I had one of those. Yeah. Um

I guess it was a shotgun, but it was an air gun. Didn't shoot anything. It just made a you know, it made a pop sound and and blew air out the front, but of course we immediately learned that if you shoved the nose of it into the mud, you get a nice little mud thing on the end there and then you clock it and you shoot it and p the the the mud would fly out of the front of the gun. So there you go.

Yeah. I mean you can't avoid this stuff. It's popular culture. It's everywhere. It's it's it is what it is. So yeah. So Dave you should have secured your nerf guns is what we learned from the PSA. A biometric fireproof locker, please. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So What are you going to do?

Well, uh I discovered a new podcast, Dave, and this this might be of interest in to you. Uh we are Disney freaks. We we love everything Disney and Disneyland and all that, and let me tell you there are thousands. of podcasts about Disneyland and invariably Almost every single one of them is fucking horrible from the brief sampling that I've that I've done so far. There you go.

Yeah. They're either poorly recorded, they're, you know, in windswept tunnels, they have no idea what they're doing, they're not engaging personalities, or their content is just is crap. But I did manage to stumble across y one more that I've actually found to be quite good, at least so far, and this one's called The Backside of Water, a podcast that delves into the rich history, awesome stories, and fascinating details behind your favorite Disneyland attractions.

So it's kind of like a beefed up non-Disney approved uh behind the attraction that they have on Disney Plus. And as you guessed from the title, both hosts have worked as jungle cruise operators, so they have personalities. Um the quality of the recording is quite good and not annoying. And so far from the two or three episodes I've listened to, it's uh it's pretty good. Like I I'm enjoying it so far. I just added it to my uh my podcast list so I will check it out.

Uh I would know uh my um I had a former intern who uh went on to become a jungle cruise skipper in Cal or no in Florida. Uh Um and uh just noteworthy that uh they didn't used to allow women to become jungle cruise skippers because obviously women can't be funny. Or hold a gun. Right. Hold a gun. Yeah. Now they just shoot to scare him away.

Right, right. Uh and then just noteworthy, my wife was a backstage studio tour guide. Um when she did college program at the studios. The studios were pretty new back then. the thing where you go through Catastrophe Canyon and you know, on the left is the Golden Girls House and all that sort of stuff. So She had to memorize a I think it was like a half hour script. Yeah. Um but uh yeah. She she enjoyed that a lot. It was a good good college job.

Very cool. And to just tie this quickly to the listening to the radio or not in the car, uh one of the episodes I listened to was about Oga's c Oga's Cantina, which is the the alcoholic beverage and food place in Star Wars land. Um and uh that let me know that this this exists. There there is this thing that actually exists.

called Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, Oga's Cantina, Art Rex's Playlist number one, which is the music that they play in the Cantina, and they they talk about it on the podcast about how to

It's just more amazing world building by Disney that they act actually spent the time and the money to create all these songs that are supposed to sound in universe but aren't like just, you know, John Williams or orchestra. This is like dance music and world music and it's it's real like one of the songs is in Ewok.

Another song is in Hutties. Like it's fucking amazing. And and it the songs are actually uh some of them are not great, but some of them are actually really good. Like I've enjoyed listening to it. And actually I did play this in the car for the kid the other day because I needed to change a pace. It's a fun little playlist. So enjoy. Links in the show notes. I'll have to check that out. Uh of course Rex from uh StarTour. The original Star Tours operator, yes.

Yeah. Now the DJ at U in Uga's Cantina. Yeah, good for him. Good nice to see Rex uh It doesn't pay as much, but it's a the higher quality of life, I think. Well you could see if you know if you've ridden the original Star Tours, you know perhaps being a pilot wasn't for Rex. Yeah. He wasn't that great at it to be honest. And now he gets to stay home with his wife and kids more often. So

You mentioned uh ewoks and uh just yesterday on Facebook I believe it was, I was scrolling through and someone was showing a demonstration of Some of the crazy things you can ask an AI to do and they had uh created uh a one sheet that was step by step instructions for uh performing a prostate exam on an ewok. Ha ha ha. It was illustrated. Uh it had uh it had uh Ewok Anatomy. Uh so it had a little Ewok and a little doctor and a little Ewok bent over the exam table.

Remember when they were promising us that AI was gonna cure cancer or Right. Right. Sinking about, yeah, just the gill. Right. Right. But d how seriously the AI res the AI responds as if this were a serious request and and gives you a serious response and so comedy. Very nice. Another thing I came across was I put some pictures here in the show notes. Uh back in nineteen seventy seven at the peak of Star Wars mania Uh somebody decided to give away a Toyota Celica lift back. Star Wars edition.

And a galaxy of other prizes. And a galaxy of other people. Don't forget the galaxy of other prizes. Yeah. Uh and this uh so this c nobody knows what happened to this car. It's gone. Or or it it's it could be the ultimate barn find for a Star Wars fan. Uh but this is a Toyota Celica, which at the time was a pretty hot car and it's got all kinds of Star Wars I guess decals put on it spaceships and things. And uh I don't know. I I would love to have this car, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's C three PO. Those are the other pictures. It's been a while, hasn't it, Jason? It's been a while. Yeah. She looks like she could be uh asking you how many are in your party for Captain Eo. She looks a lot like uh do you guys remember the actress uh Virginia Madsen from Sideways? Okay. She looks an awful lot like her. Sure. With a bit of a tan.

Yeah, this is this is great. I I do wonder uh how mu how much the overlap on the Venn diagram is between Star Wars fans and and barn finders, but uh perhaps someday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crossing over in my mind because there were toys that were like Matchbox made some Star Wars versions of things and there were there were models that you could build of uh vans. Remember how they used to do airbrush art on the sides of vans? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Um and s and I think there were Star Wars versions of those. So I'm probably blending in my mind the toys with a real full size one. But it I can't imagine that there wasn't someone who had a full size van with Star Wars airbrush stuff. Oh so many of them. Dude, those were everywhere. Yeah. No. Those were everywhere. Yeah. Um but I I don't know if you guys saw this news that uh the new Mandalorian Grogu movie is expected to tank. Really, yeah. Like of all time. Or at least of modern modern time.

Yeah. Solo did a hundred million dollars, which you know Not bad. I'm not all that surprised by this because it is The T V show. It's a TV show that not everybody that's even into Star Wars has watched. It's it's it's fun. I've been enjoying it. I was surprised to hear that they were making a movie I um out of it too. I was shocked and

You're going with these characters that nobody knows and I mean at least Solo had it was fucking Han Solo, all right. Right. Uh you know, Rogue One tied directly into s the first Star Wars and you had Princess Leia, Darth Vader at the end and Uh it's s surprising that they chose to do this, and I wouldn't expect it to do as well as any other Star Wars movie would do either. So but we'll see. Yeah. I I guess I expected it to ride on everyone's love for baby Yoda. I mean, but again, that's...

Do you d I don't know. We'll see. I I don't think it's gonna do amazing. I don't think it's gonna tank by any means. I I think it's it's even a even a poorly performing Star Star Wars movie is a better movie than most. uh performing. So I I I don't know. We'll see. Yeah, I'm curious what the budget is on it too, because you'd think they could make it relatively cheaply. Thank you. If they had to do it. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

So the universe exists already. All the parts are there, yes. All the characters have costumes. Yeah. Well, we have our tickets for opening weekend, so At our local IMAX Limax Theater. How much did those cost you? I don't n wanna know. My I don't know. I mean probably well let's see, there's six of us going, so it's probably twenty bucks a person, so I'd figure. Yeah. Hundred hundred and twenty bucks there. Then a hundred and twenty bucks each for popcorn.

That's right. And then yeah, probably at least another yeah, sixty bucks for popcorn. So yeah, we're in for two hundred dollars to see. To see a movie of a TV. TV show. I don't know when I'm gonna see it because my son hasn't watched any of the Mandalorian. So I'm not rushing off to the theater to go watch it with my kid. Mm-hmm. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. Budget was a hundred and sixty six point four.

Okay. Okay. So it I mean it's hard to imagine it's gonna lose money. Yeah. But who knows? Who knows? Uh

Earlier in the show I saw you mentioned uh Superdave. You were re referring to me. Yes. Uh that and that got me thinking about Super Dave, Super Dave Osborne. Uh Uh who I enjoyed back in the days. I guess I was introduced to Superdave when he was on the show Bizarre, uh which was I think on Showtime. Uh Wasn't he first on Real People? Oh, was he I don't know. I can't remember. It might have been our real people.

And eventually he had his own show for a while, but I remember seeing clips of him on the show Bizarre. Um but I was thinking like Super Dave would be a pretty easy cosplay to do. Oh yeah. Um but the other thing that that struck me, if you had asked me what Superdave's outfit looked like, I would have said it was Evil Knievel's outfit. Which said it was an exact Copy of Evil Kinevil's outfit. I think they had intellectual property rights even back in the seventies, Dave.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. But I don't know, it's just a funny thing in my mind that I had definitely blended Superdave's outfit with Evil Knievels. more than I thought I had. Well, I mean i it's definitely it's red, white and blue with stars. Yeah. Yeah. Less chest hair showing. Right. Right. Yeah. So this is interesting. Uh Super Dave Osborne was his first appearance was in nineteen seventy two on the John Biner Comedy Hour. I was not even alive yet.

Yeah. Um and then he became more widely known through uh his recurring appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. That's where I first saw him. Yeah. Did you guys remember the show Bizarre? No. No. No. Okay. Well it was it was uh John Biner hosted it. Uh and it was a comedy show, half hour comedy show, I believe. It was I think it was on showtime. And um uh I watched it because of Super Dave and then also Boob. Yeah. Like boobs.

Yeah, there are boobs. So But it was much harder to see boobs back then than it is today. So That's true. Yeah. And uh Super Dave was on real people and they were the segments were presented as legitimate human interest features. Yeah. Bob Einstein was a he was he was he was a good good comedian, I think. He had his own thing and he did it well. Uh I know that uh Brian, I believe you're not a real big Marty Short fan, but I am

Not be watching this documentary, but I did see it in the news and I was gonna put it in the show notes and then forgot and I'm glad that of course you caught it. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a Martin Short documentary coming on Netflix, uh I believe it drops on May twelfth. The only way you would get me to watch this is Clockwork Orange style. I would have to have my eyes Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. I I I can completely understand how Martin Short is not everyone's cup of tea, but he isn't.

Still love three amigos. Still love three amigos though. Yeah. But and I think also um my sense uh is that beneath it all that there is a kindness to m Martin Short. And I think that's part of the reason why I'm attracted to him and his humor. Um he doesn't strike me as being like I don't know, Chevy Chase, you know, just a jerk. Right. Yeah. He seems nice, I just don't find him funny. That's a hundred percent where I'm at. He seems like a wonderful of course he is. He's Canadian. He's nice.

Right. Just can't just I hate so many of his characters his created. I wince. I'm in pain. Oh yeah. Anyways, I I hope you enjoy it. I don't know. I'm sure it'll be I I respect your opinion. Uh It's fine. So I I'll I'll just be in a dark room by myself watching alone. Just you and Marty watching watching his documentary. Me and Marty. Yeah. Uh I was curious is particularly uh Brian,'cause I know you're a baseball person uh and I I can't claim to be following sports all that much.

But my wife and I were watching a baseball game earlier I don't know, the past week or so and uh it really struck me how much they were challenging the umpires calls. Over and over and over again, it seemed. Uh so is this the new normal for baseball and what do you think of this?

You get two challenges, uh, unless you keep getting them right. Okay. As soon as i i if you make a challenge and you're wrong, you lose a challenge and then you've only got one more left, so Um, when the umper umpires are particularly shit, as you must have had that game and they the pitchers and the catchers just kept repeatedly challenging them and getting it right because the umpires are obviously making the wrong call.

Uh that's crazy. Um, but I I can see it happening. We we've People in the world have been keeping stats on umpires for a long time, and it's it's well known that there are particularly well, first off that The hit rate's not all that great for umpires in general, uh, but there are particular umpires that are uh fantastically bad at at this. And uh at this point, I don't even know why we're tiptoeing around it. Just fucking institute it.

And every pitch is checked and we d every pitch go in because it happens so fast anyways. It's it's immediate. So um Yeah. I I I just uh go all in or don't, I don't understand this this kind of halfway place we're at right now. I'm sure there's a union involved. The umpire union is probably trying to save their jobs, but the technology nowadays you don't need an umpire anymore, period.

Yeah, I I know I know umpires are unionized and have one of the strongest sports unions and I don't think uh the NFL umpires are unionized, but um I could be wrong on that, but I know base major league baseball is. Right. So that's probably part of it. Uh yeah, I mean I can imagine the umpire having a little buzzer or clicker or something that tells him what the computer thinks before he puts in his own two cent.

Well there are a million other things for the Empire to do besides call the balls and strikes. I mean obviously that's the lion's share of it because Yeah. After I brush the plate off. There's a there's a there's a gazillion other calls. So um you know, th this technology is there. It's been proven to be insanely accurate. Um, you know, we've we've had the same thing with soccer with video review goals uh VAR, which is now

They tiptoed around it for s a couple seasons as well, and now it's just every goal gets a VAR check. End of story. Like we check it. Doesn't matter what the ref said, we're checking it first. So can you imagine a time when baseball fans insist that the computer be the primary source of whether a it's a ball or a strike?

I I think that there are purists uh that will be dead soon that will that will never uh ever accept this, but I think from the majority of fans from what I've seen and even my friends that follow the game that are just kind of already like, well if it's that accurate, why aren't we just using it instead of why would you don't want a game to be called one way or the other because of bad calls. Okay when there's a technology that exists That eliminates that.

Right. So there's enough of a human element in baseball that's not a good thing. In general that taking away this one part is okay. Yeah, again, like I was saying, there's so many other calls that that are made and that are judgment calls now. You know, is it a slippery slope? Can we stay say now that with the high speed cameras and and AI and everything else that's involved, do we even need umpires? Can we just point cameras out there?

and have the entire game done that way, or do we even need to do that? Can't we just throw all the stats for the past two hundred years in and just have predictive algorithms tell us who wins the World Series every year? And don't even bother playing the game. We just all bet on poly market and it's whatever it is is. Exactly. You know, for me it's uh it's the balls and strikes thing, the A B S the automatic uh ball system

It seems to make sense to me and it seems to be insanely accurate. And if you're gonna either use it or don't, like, but don't do both. All right. Fair enough. No, I I can go with that. Uh I I guess um In an era where they're trying to speed the game up, it seemed like an odd way to slow the game down. Yeah. I well I mean I think the plan is they want to introduce this and have this be the norm, but uh again, yeah unions and and

They don't want to rock the boat too quickly, so this is how they they kind of introduce things. I they've done they've introduced quite a few rules over the past twenty years, thirty years of uh this way where it's you know, you get you get X amount or we'll just start with the f first couple innings or well, you know, we change the um

All these different things here and there. So it's it's the it's the softening us up approach. It's uh let's get you used to it and then we're just gonna this is gonna be the way it's done from now on. Yeah. Это луб. Это луб. This is the gentle lube. Before they shove it home. Oh that's right. Wow. Well on that happy note, gentlemen. Yeah. We will see you next week. Dear Ike. Oh thanks guys. See ya.

No new patrons this week. Sad, sad, sad. Uh we but we do would like to thank still everybody. Uh DJ ten twenty four, Vladimir, porkjop the clown. Poor chop to clown. BG, Mark, Matt, Sean, Michael, Alexander, and Hit and Run, thank you all for your continued support on Patreon. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And it's a rare week with uh nothing coming in through PayPal, but appreciate everybody that's been tossing us money there.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Uh the last couple of weeks have been so generous, so we s we can we can flo float for a bit, but that's that's sad. Um and over at the tip jar we've got Adam, Jennifer, and Alden with the big forty bucks. So thank you all so much. And like we said, we've got merch. Merch is back.

And we'd like to thank John from Norway, Julie from Massachusetts, Nick from Cuyahoga Falls. And every t I used to go through there and it's in Ohio and I would always play the R. E. M. song, Cuyahoga, when I go through there because it's a great song. And uh also guest host Donovan got a new mug. So thank you everybody for picking up the merch. If you want to merch, go to shop.gog.show.

And uh if you would like to join us on Patreon, you can sign up for as little as three dollars a month, but you can join us for give us as much as you like, obviously. We'll take that too. Uh you get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. So check that out and keep the show on the air. Please. Breesh. No reviews this week. So until until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.showslash seven four four. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at geog.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love it? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between.

for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Thoughts, feedback, cool links, hit us up at geog.show slash contact. And don't forget to leave a five-star review at geog.show/slash review, and we'll read it on the show. And guess what? We've actually really, honestly Got new GOG merch. And we're gonna keep some more stuff coming out there, especially if you buy it. Snag your Grumpy Deer now at shop.goG.show and check it out. Stay grumpy.