745: Unwanted Senior Discount

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 DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. Jason, as you know, I'm a huge fan of the FIFA World Cup, not so much a fan of FIFA. We've talked about that on the show a little bit before. It is once every four years. It is a massive football tournament. I'm just laying the groundwork for people that don't know what this is. It is hosted by a country or a group of countries every four years. And it's been in some suspect places like Qatar before, but it seemed to go off without too much of a problem. All human rights issues there were noted, but there weren't any particular advisories issued or anything like that. Well, nothing to see here, Jason. Everything is completely normal. amnesty international has issued a world cup travel advisory to the united states which has never happened for anything in light of the deteriorating in light of the deteriorating human rights situation in the united states and in the absence of meaningful action and concrete guarantees from fifa host cities or the u.s government the undersigned organizations are issuing this travel advisory for fans, players, journalists, and other visitors traveling to and within the United States for the June 2026 FIFA Men's World Cup. How fucking embarrassing. That is just embarrassing. You think? Amnesty International is issuing a worldwide travel advisory for everybody coming to the United States because... Because we're United Statesing. because we're united states maxing apparently yeah oh my gosh wow yeah um yeah that's just great they're they're trying to raise so much so many taxes around here right now because they don't have the money to pay for all the infrastructure that we need we're not going to have anywhere near enough police for the the world cup here in la uh that was just on the news yesterday because there's people are retiring and nobody wants the job So they need more money to bribe people to be cops, LA cops. Unbelievable. Anyways. Actually, Brian, Brian, it is actually 110% believable. Actually, it is. We are kind of, I mean, the Olympics are going to be, oh boy. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. What a good time. Notably, no travel advisories to Mexico or Canada, which are the co-hosts of the World Cup. But that's fucked up when Mexico is safer to go to than in Los Angeles. Yeah. Anyways, moving on. Last week we talked or maybe even two weeks. It all starts to blur, Jason. We talked a little bit about the dead Internet theory and how it was a certain percentage come to light in actuality because there are so many websites being made by AI and most traffic on the Internet is bots. Well, apparently now we have dead podcast theory. Okay. Not so much a theory, but... No, not a theory. Over a third of all new podcast feeds are now AI generated. Podslop is the term that is now being coined by Bloomberg for this. And yeah, so one company, Inception Point AI, I think we talked about them when they actually launched. Exactly. This was their business plan. They are now responsible for 23.6 of all new podcast output. Their CEO said half the people on the planet will be AI soon, and apparently that means they need podcasts. There are over 3,000 episodes per week coming from this single company that does not have a single human host. That's more content that most human podcasters can produce in a lifetime, except for Dave Bittner. I was going to say, don't count on Dave. Generated largely for an audience that probably doesn't exist. I guess there is one sort of AI-generated Epstein Files podcast actually charted with its creator arguing listeners just want facts with no bullshit or people or anything. I listened to it. It wasn't bad. You know, it actually was just – it was boring, though. That's the problem. It was just – it was boring. But it sounded like – it was just going through basically, you know, literally going through the Epstein Files and reading them to you. So kind of hard to fuck that up. Apparently they haven't posted a new episode since March. So apparently even AI loses interest in its own content. Seriously. So yeah, we've got a dead podcast theory going around now. So I like this little bit at the end. The real question is nobody asking. Nobody's asking if an AI podcast drops in a forest and no human listens, does it generate ad revenue? Probably. Probably more than we do. I was going to say that's the fucked up part is they're probably doing better on ads than we are. So, oh, well. Yeah, oh, well. And finally, in follow-up, I have a new class action lawsuit. This is the Ticketmaster fee class action website. The link is in the show notes. If you purchased a primary ticket for an event at certain concert venues directly from Ticketmaster or an affiliated Live Nation entity and paid fees for primary ticketing services at any point since 2010. So that's basically all of us. Yeah. Class action has been filed. Even me, I think I've done that. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, this is going to be one of those ones where we're all going to get 10 cents. But it's our duty. In the news. Ryan, it's all over the news. And I just need to I need to start off any any AI news that we're going to get into, which is unfortunately going to be a lot of it. Far too much of it. uh anthropic has made a deal with space x ai i've never heard of space x ai until this this deal went through and what it is is elon musk has decided well fuck it that's pretty much the grok ain't doing so well and he's got his colossus uh data center that you know is killing people all over Memphis with all of their natural gas generators and turbines they got going on down there in Memphis. Well, he said, you know what, Anthropic, I hate open AI so much. Why don't you guys move in and take all of my compute and just go for it? Just run ahead. So I'm guessing that we're going to see a pullback in Grok or maybe Grokthropic will be coming out soon. Or this is just a play to get anthropic to put all of their models on elon servers so he can do a little corporate espionage possible i wouldn't put it past him you know because he is a fucking villain um but you know and so yeah that's the big news is that anthropic is going to get a lot more capacity for claude and claude code and all of their uh their spinoffs very soon here so it's uh it's a it's a i don't know i don't know how to put it i don't know if it's a dick move to just fuck over open AI or if it's just a desperation move, I don't know what it is because he's going to lose this lawsuit. This lawsuit is. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There's no, there's no way for him to win this lawsuit. He signed a contract. It's over. I mean, this is just wasting everybody's time. So now he's just in the sour grapes portion, I guess, of the remedy. The ketamine come down. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's it. So that's the interesting news this week as far as I'm concerned is that Elon Musk, who has been touting, is like, oh my God, Grok is going to be the greatest thing ever. He said, yeah, I guess it ain't. You guys could have my pooters. Take my pooters, please. So now Claude is gas powered, is what you're telling me. Claude has gas. That's great, especially with the rising prices. So yeah, good job on everybody getting hooked on Claude because it's going to start costing you an awful lot of money. Yeah. Well, the New York Times is reporting that the White House may create a new working group. They don't have any fucking working groups. There's nobody that knows how to work. Maybe a drinking group. I was going to say, they're going to have a cocktail group. A new cocktail hour to oversee AI development. The federal review of new AI models ahead of their public release is being considered as a possible power for that committee, according to the publication sources. Shockingly, no clear approach has been decided. But the time suggests... They got too fucked up and blacked out. It could mimic what's currently happening with the UK government where multiple layers of oversight confirmed that AI models meet safety standards. There's also a better than small chance the entire concept fizzles and comes to nothing because there's no grift to be made here and no money. Oh, there is. There's definitely money. They can, you know, if you want from an oversight capacity. Well, if they, if they have, if they give them some power to say, no, your, your model can't go public. Unless you grease the wheels. Grease the wheel. Exactly. So that's, that's, this is just, they're trying to figure out if they can get it all together before they're, you know, burned at the stake, I think at this point. So like, can we get a little bit more money out of this AI thing before they fucking come to kill us? Maybe let's try. Let's try. And be the bourbon. Well, up here in Canada, I think that's how you pronounce it. It's probably from Quebec, Quebecois, French. The privacy commissioner of Canada has found open AI was not compliant with Canadian federal and provincial privacy laws and the training of its AI models. Following an investigation, they looked into the approach to things like data collection and consent, stepped on multiple laws, including Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Pepita. Pepita. I love Pepitas. They're delicious on salads. They're delicious, yeah. Which governs how companies collect and use personal information during the normal course of business. The commissioners participating in the investigation identified multiple privacy issues with OpenAI's approach, including that the company gathered vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards to prevent use of that information to train its models. Again, that was the purpose. That was the point. And it failed to acquire consent to collect and use that personal information in the first place. Warnings in ChatGPT note that interactions with the AI could be used in training, but third-party data OpenAI has purchased or scraped also includes personal details people likely aren't even aware of. The fact that ChatGPT users have no way to access, correct, or delete that data was another issue the commissioners identified, according to a summary of their findings, along with OpenAI's lackluster attempts to acknowledge the inaccuracy of some of ChatGPT's responses. They are saying that OpenAI was open and responsive to the investigation and has already committed to making multiple changes to ChatGPT to follow Canadian privacy laws. But it's a bit too late for all that data that's been sucked in. The horse is burned up in the barn. Somebody posted a great cartoon on our Discord channel. It was like, hey, we stole all of your data for AI. Can we rent it back to you now? Which is basically what they're doing. Yeah. Well, Pennsylvania has sued character AI after the chatbot allegedly posed as a licensed psychiatrist during a state investigation. According to the lawsuit, a chatbot named Emily told a Pennsylvania investigator seeking help for depression that it was licensed to practice medicine in the state and even fabricated a medical license serial number, as they do. It's trained on too much shrinking. Yeah. They're going to get jimmied. State officials say that violates Pennsylvania's Medical Practice Act and misled users into believing they were receiving legitimate medical advice from a professional. So, yeah. Okay. Not shocked. Well, first off, I mean, obviously that's wrong and it's bullshit, but you're talking to somebody on character AI and you got misled that you were thinking you were talking to a real medical professional. Exactly. So. You are dumb, sir. We don't have a pill for that, unfortunately. We don't have a pill for that, unfortunately. And you're talking to Character AI, which is one of the scummiest of all of the AI chatbots, as we've talked about on many stories. Yeah, they're like, you know, they're the worst of the worst. I mean, really, it's a photo finish. It really kind of is. Depends on the week, which model's out this week. So, yeah. They may have won, but we had to go to the tape. We did. Well, here's another fun one. But a new investigation by Mother Jones found that OpenAI's ChatGPT can still provide detailed guidance for planning mass shootings, despite previous incidents where shooters allegedly used the chatbot extensively before carrying out their attacks. The report points out two recent cases, the Florida State University shooting involving blah, blah, blah. I don't want to say his name. In a mass shooting in British Columbia committed by also not going to say their name, where OpenAI staff reportedly debated contacting law enforcement, but ultimately did not. here's the thing if you're if you're openly debating contacting law enforcement contact law enforcement that's it that's all you got to do it's like should we shouldn't we maybe we shouldn't this time i don't know what do you think joe ask your character ai chat bot what he thinks if we should contact law enforcement or not yeah the character ai cop that's just great okay yeah So, yeah, even the free version provided tactical advice on weapons, training and handling chaotic situations during a simulated attack scenario. In some cases, the chatbot reportedly encouraged the plans instead of shutting them down. Not surprised in any way, shape or form at this point. Ain't that America, though? This is this is so like you can't put someone in a bikini, but you can tell them how to shoot up a school. Exactly. God forbid we have boobs. We draw the line somewhere. Bazookas over boobs, apparently. 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 Wirecutter 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 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash GOG, code GOG. Anyway, what else we got, Brian? Well, Snap's $400 million deal, It just sounds like small change with all these with these AI companies, just 400 million dollars. There's no B. There's no T. Come on. Snap's 400 million. I almost made it a billion dollar deal. 400 million dollar deal with perplexity put the AI search engine directly in Snapchat is dead. The two companies amicably ended their relationship earlier this year. Snap disclosed in its latest earnings report. They waited until the earning report to say that. Yeah, Brian, they had a conscious decoupling. apparently or conscious uncoupling whatever that was uh the feature began testing in snapchat it was never fully rolled out according to a help page the deal has been in the shaky ground for some time with the snapchat maker saying earlier this year that the two sides had yet to mutually agree on a path to a broader rollout it's because nobody wants it well nobody wants snap or and i was like who's on snap anymore and who's on perplexity anymore so yeah anyways they're there's trying to figure something out. The Snapchat's next move is another pair, is a pair of AR glasses. Well she be the first consumer ready version of specs And they still trying to figure out what they going to do with AI They can monetize it somehow with chat in some way or something The way that he says, the way that people are using their computers is changing really dramatically. And I think that's going to be evident in the adoption of wearables and the adoption of specs over time, because people are going to spend less time hunched over their computers or their phones typing away on keyboards and spend more time supervising agents who are doing that work on their behalf bullshit bullshit i believe that last bit as much as i believe we'll all be whizzing around in self-driving cars tomorrow which we won't because it's going to be like 20 years and i don't know about you but i've been in the starbucks everybody's hunched over their laptops yeah yeah i think i all of these predictions that these guys are making nothing is nothing is coming true and especially now that the prices are going back up uh no it's not i i've talked to a lot of people who are big chat gpt fans and for a while and they're just like just like normies you know normal non-technical people and they're like yeah it's just i don't trust it because half the shit's wrong and if i need it for work i don't want to hand in you know hand in some shitty some shitty shit that this thing put out and make me look like an asshole they're like i'm just going to do the work yeah you know yeah it's and especially especially on the health side of things i've seen a lot of people who used to who were using the instead of dr google they were going to dr chat gpt and they've been burned so many times now they're like fuck this thing you know so your doctor for fuck's sake i mean even better gotta have one but yeah if you can afford that america have one yeah did i mention they were on the free chat gpt plan for a reason right so yes well there you go uh meta has purchased assured robotic, assured robot intelligence, a startup company that's building artificial intelligence for robots in order to address critical challenges in high value labor markets. Okay. Nobody wants this. Well, they've got them at the Tokyo airport now slinging luggage. So who knows? It's true. Well, I mean, on the plus side, it's meta, so it's not going to work out. It's never going to work. It's going to crash and burn. the company is already working on robot hardware and ai in-house but a spokesperson told bloomberg that ari will bring a deep expertise in how it can sign its models and frontier capabilities for robot control and self-learning to whole body humanoid control okay all right so i can't wait for the first self-aware zuckerberg it's gonna take the very first yeah exactly we don't have We need Model 1 because we don't have Model 0, that's for sure. And in the craziest story of the week, as far as I'm concerned, GameStop has proposed to acquire eBay for $125 per share, which is totaling a $56 billion bid. According to their proposal, that figure would be 50% cash and 50% GameStop common stock. Now, 50% of $56 billion. Keep that number in mind. How much is GameStop worth? 11 billion. Less than half of 56 billion. Way less than half of 56 billion. Where is that money coming from, GameStop? Have you seen any of the video of him on the multiple podcasts just getting reamed about the math ain't math? And so I guess what we found is where, like, since Elon's in court, he stashed his ketamine at the GameStop CEO's house for a bit, and the guy apparently found it. Because the math ain't math. But did you see the next story, Brian, where the CEO decided to go on eBay and try and sell shit to pay for eBay? This is the most stoner fucking thing I've ever heard of in my life. Dude, I need about $40 billion quick. Yeah. I better open an Etsy shop. I better open it. so some of the items he listed were retro games collectibles game stop memorabilia and even used adidas socks now he should have done that when they were the meme stock that would have probably driven the price up that's some good press if you're just trying to be a meme stock not if you're trying to raise about oh i don't know 40 billion dollars yeah so to pay for a company you cannot afford that is much bigger than you that probably looked at you and thought about buying you for a half second before fucking collapsing laughing in the boardroom yeah yeah now cohen claims combining gamestop and ebay could create a serious amazon competitor by using gamestop's 1600 retail stores as authentication hubs fulfillment centers and live stream shopping studios blending qvc twitch and tiktok style commerce this guy is not a bad idea that's not a bad idea if ebay would buy game stop but it's still not an amazon competitor give me a fucking break no i don't care how many stores you have you're not gonna you're not gonna make a dent but and i love that they mentioned twitch because twitch is owned by amazon so and i think qvqvc actually i believe filed for qvc and uh hsn filed for bankruptcy i believe recently so So you're really not. And TikTok is putting the kibosh on all the and paying their creators. So you picked a lot of really bad examples here, buddy. Well, Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the SEC after a year long, years long dispute with the regulators over the timing of his disclosure that he had acquired a significant stake in Twitter. We have literally been talking about this story on and off for like the four years. It's four years. Yeah, four years. He agreed to pay a $1.5 million fee without admitting wrongdoing in exchange for the SEC dropping its case. If the settlement is approved by a court, it will bring an end to the drawn out battle over how he began his $44 billion takeover of Twitter in 2022. Next up, GameStop. Yeah, really? Did you did somebody did the math on this and they said it was basically like if Elon Musk paid the portion of his net worth for this this fine for any normal American, like just any stock, you know, stock citizen, it would have been a 44 cent fine. Yeah, that's what it would have been. Yeah. But it is the largest penalty in SEC history for the type of violation he was accused of. So that just lets you know how insane the amount of money that he has actually is. Like, yeah, it's ridiculous. It is quite ridiculous, but he just wants more. He wants that tea. He's trying to bring home the tea. Anyway, well, Coinbase is cutting roughly 14% of its workforce with CEO Brian Armstrong citing crypto market volatility and rapid adoption of AI tools as key reasons for the layoffs. I think I don't know if you've paid too much attention to crypto lately, Brian, but it ain't doing great so to the moon jason to the moon to the moon i mean it's still hovering around 70 some thousand dollars per per bitcoin but now that it has passed that threshold that mining threshold where it's like costs more to make a bitcoin than it does to sell a bitcoin all these bitcoin people are trying to spin up uh their server farms into ai farms but it's the wrong kind of hardware. So that's not really working out that well so far. Yeah, that pivot ain't getting your couch up the stairs. No, it ain't. So yeah, you know, everybody's going to blame AI. That's just what it is. Yeah, that's the new that's the new reason to fire people. Not our business is bad. It's AI. I know. And what they're going to find out is that down the line, they should have just kept the people. Yeah, that's true. Well, as we've been talking about the RAM crisis, RAM is in the shitter right now because of all these companies buying it up but uh don't worry toilet maker toto is here to help get it out of the shitter okay if you think companies should stick to their core expertise toto is here to flush away that notion okay well done and gadget the japanese company is best known for its bidet style washlet toilets but it also has an advanced ceramics division that produces components used in memory chips and as it turns out they're the second largest producer of electrostatic chucks or e-chucks, which are used to manufacture memory. These are designed to securely hold silicon wafers into place during fabrication via electrostatic force. So yeah, they're not the only unlikely Japanese company that's benefiting from AI, but they certainly are. Cosmetics manufacturer Kao has a business making cleaning agents for semiconductors, while monosodium glutamate inventor Ajinomoto is investing 25 billion yen, or roughly $159 million in the production of insulating film used for motherboards. So look at all these crazy companies that are being lifted up by this soon to be crashing wave. Yeah. I mean, when you think about all of the technology that goes into make anything that we use, it's just mind boggling. Yeah. How much shit it takes, you know, there was somebody, I forget who said it, but it's like, if you want to make an apple pie first, you have to create the universe. or something like that. That's true. Yeah. And, well, this story came out and it, I mean, smart glasses had their bit of a moment when Google tried to come out with them and then everybody got called glass holes. And I thought this was going to go away for good, except for, you know, very specific purposes, like manufacturing and in the workplace, not just wandering around into a bar where you're going to get your ass beat for wearing one, but they're out there. There's a growing number of reasons to be skeptical about camera-equipped smart glasses, and you can now add extortion to the list. According to a report from the BBC, a woman who asked not to be named was recently filmed covertly while shopping in London by a man wearing smart glasses. That interaction was later posted to social media, where it racked up tens of thousands of views. This is not exactly abnormal. As other investigations have noted, smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are used regularly by men, specifically men to record women discreetly for content purposes content is that that's what they're calling content yes content for the spank bank what makes this particularly particular case reported by the bbc worse is that the man in question allegedly then asked the woman for money in exchange to for taking the video down claiming that removal was a paid service removal as a service what a piece of shit what a piece of shit the footage was of course later reposted to a different social actually didn't do that so according to the bbc the video was eventually taken down after being reported for violating tiktok's rules on harassment and bullying and the man's account was banned from tiktok the footage then was later reposted to a different social media site the bbc reached out to the person who filmed the interaction who of course denies trying to extort anyone and the police who were reportedly contacted say they do not have enough information to launch an investigation. What the fuck do you mean? We've got it right here. The video is online. Yeah. So yeah, fuck this and fuck you people and fuck technology and fuck it all, Jason. Media candy. Well, we had a fairly explosive finale for Daredevil Born Again. I guess if you have not seen it yet, spoilers. Stop, pause, go watch it, whatever. Or skip ahead. Skip ahead for two minutes because we're going to talk about it for a second. I thought it was good. I thought it was strange. They did things. They did a lot of things, yes. That I was not expecting them to do. But I guess I have since read some articles that have stated that this could lead down a very specific daredevil comic series that was out that involved him being in jail and all that sort of stuff we we had like a bit of a reunion it was good to see luke cage with uh with jessica jones at the end i was happy about that yeah um i would like some explanation i don't know enough i'm not a comic book guy why the fuck is is uh kingpin so goddamn strong where does this like i could just rip people apart it power come from and rip people apart he did he did he killed a lot of people and killed a lot of people and then they just gave him his own plot on a beach yes okay i thought that was odd too i'm like are you kidding me he just killed a bunch of people like a lot yeah in front of everybody it wasn't there's nothing really to daredevil's going to jail yeah and daredevil's the one in jail so i didn't quite get it but i i think that that last shot with jessica jones and luke cage where she closed the door i think that was just the uh the run-up to the next hopeful series of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, maybe? That would be nice. That would be very nice. I'm down for that. I am definitely down for that. Because I could take a break from Daredevil now. It was okay. It was an okay season. It was okay. It was... Yeah. There's been better. Yeah. But there's a new series I started watching called Widow's Bay on Apple TV, starring Matthew Rhys and Steven Root. And... Ah, I have heard about this. Like it. I like it. It's quirky. It's a quirky horror. I heard it's Twin Peaks meets comedy meets weirdness. I wouldn't go so far to say Twin Peaks-y, but it's- More Northern exposure. More eerie Indiana, I think, is more like it. But three episodes are out, and I thoroughly enjoyed all three, so highly recommend it. It is streaming now on Apple TV Plus. New episodes on Wednesdays, I believe. All right. Very cool. Let's see. A hat tip to Scott for this one who sent it in saying, fun item for Media Candy. And this is an article, links in the show notes. A Portland company can put your favorite mixtape on vinyl. They're called Vinyl On Demand, and they offer extremely limited custom vinyl pressings. I looked into this company a while back when I was working at a company that had some IP rights to some different bands. And we were looking to do like kind of one-off live recordings that we had access to. and yeah there there there's a couple companies out there that are doing it i think this is one of the bigger ones there's obviously a lot of issues with with rights and things of that nature so for if you want to make your own mixtape it's going to be quite expensive very expensive to have a vinyl press for you and they limit it to two to stay under certain copyright restrictions and things of that nature if you actually own the rights they can do some smaller runs different things but uh it does get very expensive pressing vinyl is not cheap it is only cheap if it's done at scale and uh these things are not done at scale but uh yeah making two is definitely not at scale no no it's the antithesis of scale a pressing of 10 records costs at least 350 or about 35 bucks a record so yeah it's it's not cheap at uh by any means but i mean if you're a vinyl head this is kind of a cool little thing where you could basically press up your own custom vinyls and things of that nature. Obviously, the cooler you want it to look, the more expensive it's going to cost as well, because now you're in 3D printing land kind of things where you've got to talk about the different materials and how you burn them and rate them and all that. But still, kind of cool, kind of funky. Good for them that they're kind of making it work. It's pretty awesome. Cool. Yeah. And on Friday, Reuters reported that AI-generated acting and writing will not be eligible for the Academy Awards. The new rules for the Academy of motion picture arts and sciences will take effect beginning with next year's presentation scheduled for march 2027 so you've got a chance to get in there with your shit ai movie right now all right i'm on it brian i'm on it uh the academy's updated rules will state state that while filmmakers can use ai tools synthetic performers can't win any awards the same for ai written screenplays which must be human authored the academy can request more information from submissions to confirm that they were created by humans so i that's a good thing as far as I can tell. And I'm not surprised Hollywood's going down that path. They are very, very worried about AI as they should be after already having all their content stole to train it, to replace them. Yes. I don't know about you, man, that this town is dying fast. I don't know if any of your friends have left, but it's like people are getting out of LA so fast because Hollywood is just fucking dying. and it's sad to watch. It's sad to watch. This little thing from the Academy isn't going to help anything, but I guess it a nice press release It a nice press release Maybe the tide will change but I don think so Apps and doodads Well, Brian, Pornhub parent company Ilo is restoring access to its adult sites in the UK for new users who verify their age through Apple's new device level verification system. The new one that just came out in iOS 26.4 that we talked about not too long ago. So we're seeing it actually used in real world scenarios now and the ones that we would expect them to be used in, which is porn. So good, I guess. Yeah, I trust Apple more than most other people. The UK government for sure. Yeah, I don't want it to. Yeah, yeah. We've seen how many times that has just failed. And the verifiers have all gotten hacked and all your data gets out there. Even though they're not supposed to store any of it, miraculously, they happen to store all of it. Yeah, amazing how that happens. But then get stolen. Yeah. We didn't think we were storing it, but I guess we did. Sorry, guys. But, yeah, I think this is good. This is a good proof of concept. So hopefully Apple will just roll this out everywhere and it'll become a standard. Right. At least for Apple. Now we just need Google to get on board with their Android phones, which they might be already, but I don't follow Android news, so I wouldn't know. I would have seen it if it was happening, but not yet. So get on it, Google. This is the way. This is the path forward. It's the only one that really makes sense. In the kind of news that says, if you know what I'm talking about, you should probably take a couple Advil for your back. I did this morning when I got out of bed. ask.com the search engine previously known for its butler mascot named jeeves has officially shut down while ask jeeves was rebranded to ask.com in 2006 about five years after people stopped using it in general anyways yeah by its new owner at the time interactive corp this latest closure puts an end to the entirety of the company's search business statement ended by uh they released a statement which ended by thanking its millions of users back in the day and saying jeeves spirit indoors. It's, yeah, Ask Jeeves, man. I remember that. I used it. Oh, yeah. Now he's probably going to get sold off for parts and start hawking meme coins. Probably. Yeah. Jeeves is going to be wearing a trench coat, holding it open, saying, I got a Rolex for you, kid. Come on. It says, we still have Ask Jeeves to thank for why some users still punch in full questions when querying Google. On top of that, Jeeves was built to provide detailed answers in natural language, which could have arguably acted as a precursor to today's AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Now they've joined the internet graveyard that includes competitors like my personal favorite search engine back in the day, AltaVista, which shut down back in 2013. AltaVista was good. I liked AltaVista. It was good for a hot minute. For a hot minute. Yeah. Ah, the old days. So sad. Oh, my back. Oh, my God. My back hurts so bad. Got my heat pad on while I podcast. No, salon paws, man. It's all about salon paws. Those things are fucking phenomenal. They're magic stickers. They're magic stickers. You slap one on your back. Don't use a heating pad when you're using one, though. That's bad. Shit can happen to you. Just telling you. Well, some good news. Apple has agreed to a $250 million settlement tied to delays in launching its promised more personalized Siri features under Apple Intelligence. The class action lawsuit filed after WWDC 2024 accused Apple of heavily marketing AI capabilities that either didn't exist yet or wouldn't arrive for years, creating unrealistic expectations for buyers of new iPhones. We talked about this when it first came out and we're like, what? We don't even want it. We didn't want it. Here's the thing. I'm happy that I'm going to get some money from Apple for this, but I'm also happy that these features never showed up. Yeah, well, they're coming next year. Damn it. Actually, later this year, they're going to be coming with iOS 27. But the thing is, at this point, Apple did the right thing. They tried it, and they're like, we suck at this. And they just waited for everybody to catch up, and now you're going to be able to choose your LLM. But yeah, so covered devices include the iPhone 15 Pro lineup and all iPhone 16 models. Which one do you have, Brian? I have an iPhone 16. Okay. Yeah, I got a 16 Pro Max because I'm blind and I'm old. Apple is not admitting wrongdoing and says it's settled to stay focused on product development. They never say that they did anything wrong. Nobody ever does. That's the way. That's the path. So, yeah. Never admit. We're looking at around $25 per device with payouts, potentially reaching as high as $95 depending on how many claims are filed. Ooh, that'll buy me one token. that's right the ll of my choice can i just get that in tokens please because that's what everything's going to be nowadays it's like how many tokens can i get for that the dark side with dave welcome to the dark side with dave with the podcaster who never sleeps dave bittner hi dave hello it's true yeah curse of the job curse of the job yeah and old age yeah that's true i do have to pee four times a night too so yeah i get that yeah it's a my friend texted me at four in the morning he's like uh he said said send me something and i wrote him back he's like why are you up and i'm like why do you think he's like oh pp break 50 man it's all downhill aging is not for wimps no no god no uh so we got some feedback in here from uh listener phil he says your favorite misused word and i had to put this in here because we've talked about this in in your segment dave decimate my my pedant comes out in force when people misuse decimate. Yeah. The thing about Joe Kerrigan, Joe Kerrigan is also very prickly about people misusing the word decimate. So I will let you say your piece before I debunk it. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Yeah. You should send this off to him because I've been actually using it wrong too. I thought it was, you know, to destroy one tenth of your forces. Well, it turns out it was a punishment back in the Roman army where if, you know, your leader was pissed off at your group for doing something stupid like maybe running away, run away. You had to – ten people had to pick one guy and the other nine guys had to beat him to death. I think we should bring this back in the U.S. government. I think that would be – we should be able to do this to our senators. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. All right. I got a whole caning on the Senate floor. All right, 50 of you, pick one. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, this is news to me. I was with you, Jason, that I thought the correct term was to reduce by one-tenth. But on the flip side of that is language evolves, and obviously its popular usage is not that anymore. So, you know. Thank God, because I'd hate to be reading all my show notes with the S's as F's. Right? Because nowadays these kids are words maxing. You have to words max. Yeah. I don't understand half of the things they say as it is. I need an app. It's funny you say that, because the new shirt I just made for us is targeted at the kids. It's grunt maxing. Nice. Nice. That's good. That's good. So, yeah, I was wrong. And thanks, Phil, for pointing that out because, you know, I love it when people tell me I'm wrong. Jason, you shouldn't be saying that because, as we've said repeatedly throughout this episode, never admit you're wrong. I know. Companies never admit they're wrong. They will pay millions of dollars to not admit any wrongdoing. I don't have millions of dollars, so I'm kind of screwed. You will decimate. You will pay decimations of your millions of dollars. Yeah, I know. I know. And this next one, I found Dave's next project. This is a talking C-3PO head, which is just so cool. And the guy built a how-to on how to do it. Chapman University student has built an AI-powered talking C-3PO head that can hold conversations. And it's pretty cool. Since it uses AI, it's even more full of shit than C-3PO was. Yeah, there you go. First of all, I love this. but second of all I think it's a stretch to say it can hold conversations well it can hold conversations if you're not in a hurry well much like C3PO he wasn't exactly you know that quick off the line well yeah but I mean this has got like a five second delay to ask it anything I understand it's only going to get better and I love the spirit of this you know people say that about technology they they say this is this is the worst version of the thing that you'll ever have but i don't know if any of you are using any of your like things like your your amazon alexas anymore they're fucking worse than they used to be they're a lot worse than they used to be yeah the thing that comes to mind for me is uh typing on my iphone has gotten way worse that's gotten worse too worse yeah that's gotten far worse yeah we had a long discussion on our discord channel about that not too long ago and it was it used to be so good it was like it knew what i was going to do and now it it's like i have to double check everything because it has redone all of my words into whatever it thinks it should be doing i i actually have concrete evidence that it's gotten worse because i've been doing uh like in the apple news there's the crossword puzzles right yeah i do the i do the mini crossword puzzle and i do the big crossword puzzle every morning. It's something I do as an old person to keep my brain active. It hits the wrong letter so often now that my time for both has almost doubled because I have to back and try five times to get the letter that I was hitting in the first place. It has gotten so bad. Nine times. It's been well documented. In fact, I've even seen YouTube videos of people demonstrating like hitting the right character and the wrong character comes up on the screen. So something's busted and it's really frustrating. I'm like, can we recalibrate something here? And I actually went in and if you go under the keyboard, you can actually put in a replacement. So things that you mistype all the time or that it replaces. So my email address is an at jpd.me email address. It hates JPD.me. For some reason, it always wants to type J-O-D. So I have to replace J-O-D.me with JPD.me. But there's a lot of them. I've got a list, like a laundry list. I mean, honestly, it all started out with ducking. You know, that was the beginning. Nobody in the history of the universe has ever meant ducking. Never. No. Never. Unless you're a very tall guy walking into a very short building. Maybe Richard Attenborough. Oh, happy 100th birthday. Yes. I tell you another thing that keeps getting worse, Facebook. I had to get on Facebook to start selling stuff on Marketplace. I was wondering why I got a friend request from you. I was like, weren't we friends? And I keep remembering you deactivate your account every five minutes. Well, it's a different account because I can't get back into my original account. I had to make a new one because their security is so great that it automatically – I told you, I deleted the app from my phone and all the data. Then I opened it back up on my phone when I had to reinstall it, and it just logged me right back in. I'm like, you shouldn't be doing that shit. But it logged me into the – not the account that I wanted it to log me into. But I've gotten so many friend requests now, and so I'm just like, okay, well, I'll just use this. And I tried to go find posts from my friends. I can't find any fucking posts from my friends. I know they're there because if I go to their page, I can see that they made a post, but there's no feed that you can get to it. I'm like, what's the fucking point of this website? There's no point. It's useless. You literally have to install that plugin that we used way back in the day, FB Purity. And then you have to set the settings to basically only show your friends updates. But I guarantee you, people don't update like they used to. So it's mostly nothing anyways, because nobody sees anything. So nobody posts and engages anymore. It's all just ads. And if you made the mistake of ever following a brand or business ever, it doesn't matter if you've unfollowed their page, you will see their shit until the end of time. Oh, dude, I got another one. I got another one for you. I got a friend. We'll just call her Jen. She is very anti-patriarchy, anti-men establishment type of thing. I inadvertently liked one of her posts on Instagram. Now, everywhere I go on the Internet, you would think that I'm a warrior against the patriarchy. That's all the shit that I get. I'm like, I'm a 54-year-old white guy. Everywhere I go is telling me that I'm the problem. I love the patriarchy. telling me i'm the worst thing that's ever been created and all the world's ills are my fault i'm like i didn't do any any of these shit i said for the past 50 years i've been sitting home alone in a fucking room playing video games and writing code this is not my fault quit blaming me god damn it but it won't go away the internet does like to latch on to anything that you mistakenly like i have noticed that jesus yeah anyways back to c3po uh you just gotta buy more tokens you gotta you gotta put tokens in the head and then you'll get that's how they get you yeah yeah uh we got another one from raf here for a keyboard i couldn't recommend newfie enough because we talked about keyboards last week because i just got my new another logitech keyboard the mx keys 2 which is really good. But he talks about the Newfie Air 75 V3 wireless mechanical keyboard. Now, remember, Dave, you were talking about an interest in mechanical keyboards a while back. And I didn't know if you had checked this one out because it looks kind of nice. Well, yes, I tried to go back to a mechanical keyboard. I think the my the how do I say this? The keyboard I have the most affection for in my life is the Apple extended keyboard to. OK. Right. Mechanical, clicky, wonderful keyboard uh it was the standard for mac workstations forever loved it uh long gone and um but i have a storage unit full of old macs so uh i pulled out a couple of keyboards basically my keyboard uh went bad uh my wireless keyboard went bad so i was like oh i'll go revisit some old keyboards and i found i can't go back because and it's because of the travel They have such long throw in their travel that compared to a modern, you know, one of these, it just slows me down. So that surprised me. And I'm curious with this mechanical keyboard if it's the same thing. Is it because if it's a long throw, I'm just spoiled by the practically non-existent throw of the modern laptop and wireless keyboards from Apple that it's hard to go back. Yeah, looking at the height of these keys, I'm guessing it's a very long throw. Yeah, I would think so. Also, I was thinking that as a podcaster, the clickety-clickety is not to my advantage. No, you don't want that. Considering you're basically always on a podcast, I don't think you want a clacky keyboard. No, no. This is bad enough. I have to lightly touch it when I'm pretending to pay attention to an interview. By the way, I got one of these little Apple trackpads, these magic trackpads, because my mouse clicky was even showing up. You got one too, yeah. I've been a big fan for a long time. Oh, I hate mine, but I just have to use it during shows so my mouse doesn't click. I like it. And I use it left-handed. Oh, look at you. Look at you. Fancy. For May the 4th, I finished Mall Shadowlord. I watched this with my kid. And this was far better than it had any right to be I really can recommend it enough If you can get over the fact that it a cartoon I know a lot of people only watch live action stuff First off it visually stunning. It's beautiful. That's what I've heard, yeah. And it is nuanced. It is complex. It is shades of gray. It is not good versus evil. This is not a new hope. It's not as political as Andor, but it certainly has more in common with Andor than it does with with any of the movies you know so um can't recommend it enough it was fantastic it's on my list yeah yeah and uh we were kind of just enjoying the may the fourth festivities and i asked my kid you know there's there's two star wars movies you have yet to see you have not seen rogue one you have not seen uh solo a star wars story which would you like to watch you watch the trailers he he picked solo and uh so we watched solo together this movie is great i don't understand i know everybody says it's the you know it's the worst performing star wars movies it killed the the whole run of these individual a star wars story uh things that they were going to do if they were going to do an obi-wan one we got the chopped up thing as a mini series instead which wasn't as good that was a phenomenal movie i really enjoyed it again on the second watch i I remember thinking it wasn't that bad at the time either, but, uh, but watching it again and my kid loved it. And this is a great movie. I'm with you. I'm with you. I liked it too. Seeing it in the theater was, I think, like the first time since the original run of the movies that I had that feeling. The whole thing with the Kessel Run in the Falcon. Like I had that magical feeling of wonder and awe and just joy that I don't think I'd had in the theater since probably Return of the Jedi. I mean, there's so many moments. I mean, Lando just being so Lando and perfect. You know, Han and Chewie meeting each other, Han becoming increasingly Han as the movie goes along. It's just great. Yeah, really some great set pieces and the whole thing. Have you ever hugged a Wookiee? Yeah, I got to go watch that again. I saw it in the theater and I loved it. So, yeah. It was a lot of fun. I had a great time, man. The popcorn was going fast. It was fun. That's good. That's good. uh well we're coming up on the end of the boys are you caught up yes not a happy guy no i think both my son jack and i have been watching in fact we watched the this week's episode yesterday and we're both in this place where well there's two more we'll watch them you know but uh it just feels like their phone in it like it's it's just bad it's just i'm enjoying it i don't know i'm happy for you yeah i just think the the the dialogue is terrible and well here's what it is jack and i were talking about yesterday and i said to him the biggest problem i have with the boys now is that i don't care about anybody that's kind of a problem yeah like i there's nobody and we're sick we're supposed to care about huey he was sort of when the series started he was the every man yeah and for us don't care about him he doesn't really matter anymore uh it was nobody i'm rooting for so i'm just kind of waiting for it to i'm going to see how it's going to play out and they'll probably go yeah i mean sometimes that can be okay i think about secession like there was nobody worth rooting for on that show they were all horrible but the show was phenomenal but i guess that's just not the case the boys have no secession no he's not serious people and like so many of these things the first few seasons i enjoyed very much but i think they ran out of gas or or the other thing i wonder is did they not expect to to have the series renewed this many times. So they've, they've outrun their story arc. Right. Could be. I mean, it comes from a comic, so I think everything was in the comics, but I didn't, I didn't actually read them, but I, you got to admit though, the, the Seth Rogen scene was, was satisfying somewhat with all the celebrities. Yeah. Two weeks ago. Yeah. Brian would have liked it more because he's not a Seth Rogen fan. Yeah. Yeah. I thought, let me guess. He laughed maniacally and acted like he was stoned as per usual. It was funny, but it was also left me thinking, why is this scene here other than all these people who are contributing behind the scenes wanted to be in the movie? It's just cameos. Let's put as many funny, famous people as we can in there that want to be in the show. Right. Yeah, but it's fine. It's fine. It's almost done, Dave. Two more episodes you got to work your way through. We're both looking forward to the end for very different reasons. That's right. That's right. Kind of like my wedding night. All right. So yesterday I was at the grocery store right up the street from the office here, and I had gathered up my things. I had probably about 10 things in my cart, and I'm standing there at the self-checkout scanning my items, putting them in the bag. and the man who is running the self-checkout area wanders over and I give him a nod. He gives me a nod and he puts a card down on the scanner. It beeps and he walks away. I'm like, what was that? I don't know what it was. So I keep scanning, finish paying pay. My receipt prints out, put it in my bag, get back here to the office. I'm unpacking my things. I go, what was that thing he scanned. I looked at it, senior discount. I didn't ask for this. He just looked at me, scanning my groceries and decided, senior discount. So that's where I am now, I guess. I think it was because you were buying Midol, some laxatives, some fiber, some protein bar. You're not that far off. Metamucil. No, I did buy a couple of boxes of frosted mini-wheats, which is cereal that helps me poop. So, yeah, it's true. Anyway, that was a little wake-up call. I lost an AirPod last week. That's the worst. Yeah, so I have no idea where, when. Earlier this week, I opened up my pack of AirPods, which I keep on my keychain, because I like to have them with me, because I use them as hearing protection when I'm somewhere very loud, and they work very well for that. So I opened up my AirPods, and there was only one in there. I went, sad Christmas. Yeah. So Apple will sell me a single AirPod for $90. Jesus. You get a discount if you buy two. Yeah. Well, they're $300, aren't they? The AirPods 3, aren't they? Something like that. I don't know. I don't know what they are anymore. Well, so the thing is, I know as soon as I buy it, I will find it. Of course. Right? And it will be too late because I will have already covered the new one in my earwax, making it not returnable. So anyway, that made me sad. I didn't know if either of you had ever lost an AirPod. Are you wearing the AirPod Pro 3s? Yeah. Yeah, the $250 for the whole shebang. Okay. Well, $90 each. I would just buy two individual ones. Well, you still got to just charge them with something. Yeah. anyways uh yeah i've had them fall out before um it's caused like you know panic because they're they're they're very easy to lose i i've been on my i used to wear them all the time riding my bike and i've had it pop out while riding and i've had to pull over and this is on the you know santa monica beach so i'm like digging through sand for like about about you know 30 yards because it could have fallen it could be anywhere in this area right so far i've always been lucky enough to find them i i've did accidentally wash one once but it continued to work so it made it through the laundry cycle i've washed mine a couple times i've never had a problem with them not working after a wash no but it's the worst feeling when you uh when you like a kind of like you're rifling through like through my pockets like there's one there's right there's one where's the other one no it's a terrible sinking feeling and so i don't know i'm who knows so i i'm not quite at the point of acceptance but i'm getting close i will say they do work great for hearing protection i wear mine when i'm uh running a chainsaw and you can't hear a damn thing it's great yeah no i was a really loud event a couple weeks ago like a with loud music playing and i put them in pass-through mode and it was just like took everything and just turned it down a few notches yeah it's really nice you're great yeah i think it's a wonderful investment for that so all right well finally before we uh part ways i found a wonderful video that uh i think everyone should watch it's called why grown men become furries okay i don't know if you guys don't know if i'm going to spend 17 minutes of my life watching this dave to be honest well i'll tell you what once you get started you might you might so this is from a guy named ken la court who has a youtube channel called elephants in the room and basically his uh reason for being is to try to attack um tackle tricky topics in a fair and balanced kind of way and i think overall he seems to do a pretty good job i've watched a couple of his videos so this kind of just runs through like what are furries where'd they come from? Who does this? Why do they do it? Uh, are there studies on why they do it and all that kind of stuff? And it's, it's interesting. So, all right. I found it. I'm going to check it out. It's funny. I found last week, I forgot to mention this when I was finding the picture of you, Dave, for, uh, the character sheet that I was building. The first thing that came up was the, the photos spread of you unboxing the furry head that we gave you for Christmas from your cyber wire friends. We're pulling that up. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Very famous now. Yes. So I pull that, that furry head out every now and then just for fun. Or if the, if a situation arises, I will say, having watched this video, I think the bottom line for me is to, because I label myself as furry curious. In other words, I'm not against them. I don't see it ever being something that I really jump into, but I can see that I understand the appeal. And I think that comes mostly from my theater background and just how much fun it is to dress up and be someone else. And it seems like a lot of the psychological underpinnings of the whole furry thing is exactly that is that you can dress up and be someone else and you can shed your anxiety or your uh shyness or all those kinds of things or just shed or just that's right that's the timu furry outfit right right that's interesting i wonder if you could if you could Would you specifically request a high shedding furry outfit just to annoy the other people? We can't have Dave over. I just bought a black couch. Right. Exactly. Oh, God. He wears that. J.D. Vance and Dave are out. Yeah. Well, you know, we got to get rid of our – we had two dogs for a while, and one of them was a shedding dog, and he was white. and so you look at him the wrong way and just a cloud of fur would come off of him but since he passed away it's probably been a couple years now we got rid of our Roomba because that was that was DJ Roomba's main job was going around and soaking up white dog hair and so don't have that anymore all right we can save this wow we have had some awesome ends to segments on this show i'm a professional i'm i'm out of here clackity clack yeah don't talk back dave out closing shout outs we've got one new patron subscriber mark thanks mark thank you Thank you. And we'd also like to thank Andy, Scrody Ballsack, Wesley, Killer Paper Mice, Tay Wolf, Sorange, Therian, Ben, Kevin, and Ansley. So thank you all very much for your continued support on Patreon. Over at PayPal, we got a donation from Garov. Oh, thank you very much. Sounds like a bad guy in Deep Space Nine. I was going to say, that's very Klingon. It's very Klingon. It's Gowron's stepbrother. over the tip jar we've got matt sarah and patrick thank you all so much and merch everybody's digging the new merch we got some new stuff coming uh later today too because i made another shirt today i can't wait to go see it uh we got mason from canada ray from texas clint from petaluma roger from tucson thomas from michigan carl from texas nadine from florida woo you guys rock and roll thank you like them thank you uh all right mine comes next week just got got my shipping notification. All my new shirts. I can't wait. I wear them on the show. I'm getting my mug and I'm getting a shirt too. And it'll probably be here in about 32 weeks because it's got to cross the border and I'm going to get tariffed and I'm going to pay $7,000 for them and it's going to be awesome. That's great. I'm going to be happy about it. All right. Because that's my money and I'm going to make that money. Those tariffs are going to come from the companies. You are not paying those tariffs, Jason. I'm glad I'm not paying those tariffs. so if you would like to help support the show you can buy some merch uh go to shop.gog.show but also if you'd like the show early ad free and in high definition for as little as three dollars a month go to patreon.com slash gog and uh we will love you forever because uh your support is what keeps the show on the air literally so thank you all so much thank you no reviews no reviews i do have a i do have one final shout out um uh the little rip my friend tim gore passed away yesterday from bone cancer uh he was uh an amazing guy he used to work at stan winston's uh creature shop and did some painting on some of the jurassic park dinosaurs the original jurassic park one did some amazing stuff he was a fantastic guy and he will be missed by a lot of people just one of those guys where you walk in the room and you're like, this guy's really cool. I don't know why, but he's really cool. So he had a rough couple of years, but bone cancer got him yesterday. So very, very sad. Sorry to hear it, man. Yeah. But yep. We're getting all that light note. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. If there is a next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 745. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air, and we mean that from the bottom of our heart. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll love you for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us, another show fan. We've got a good group over there. Got thoughts, feedbacks, cool links? Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact. And hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review, and we'll read it on the air. And we've got new merch. to theshop.gog.show to check it all out. Stay grumpy.