718: Net Unhelpful

27:08I mean, that just makes too much fucking sense. Makes too much sense. Yeah. You know what? Yeah. Mass transit helps traffic. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, Tifton, Tifton's not a big town. So countywide, we have about 45 ,000 people. The city proper has about 15 ,000 people. But I live on the east side of town and still to get to the west side of town. And I know people are going to be like, oh, that's the tiniest violin I've ever fucking heard, especially if you live in L.A. or whatever. But it can literally take me about 20 minutes to get from one side to the other. I know, I know, I know, you know, I can hear the eye roll.

27:49All right. Do you know how long I sat in traffic yesterday? I sat in traffic for two hours and 45 minutes to do a 32 mile round trip. No, no, I will not do that. Fuck that noise. And I'm talking more, not just for Tifton, but, you know, we have Albany, Georgia, which is, you know, a larger city, even going up to Macon. You know, if you could, if we have a depot here and you could hop on the train and you could be in Macon, which is a two hour trip on I-75. If you could get on a train and get there in like an hour or less, I don't know how fast the trains can go. I think that would be fantastic, but that's never going to happen here.

28:33So it's too damn socialist. I'm old man yelling at clouds. I know, right? I know. All right. What's our next story? Well, talking about social, well, this is not socialism, but I never know about AI. So the perfect looking house for sale may have an owner using AI to virtually enhance the listing. So if you've ever gone online, like Zillow and all of those other places, a lot of websites, you know, looking at houses, looking at all the pictures, they will do stagings. And a lot of times that is a manual thing that they have to do. Well, now some folks are using AI virtual staging to let sellers digitally enhance home photos, adding furniture upgrades to boost appeal.

29:17So broker Matthew Ping, God love that name, spotted a listing where the lawn, the roof and the facade were AI enhanced. These are changes that if the person had actually done would have cost around$100 ,000. OK. So what they're saying now is MLS is, you know, that's the body that basically, I forget what it stands for. I actually have some real estate clients, which I'm going to talk about at the end of this. But MLS rules that you must disclose any edits. You can't alter room dimensions or property features. So there needs to be some transparency that what I'm looking at was AI augmented, AI generated, AI staged, whatever.

30:04The upside of being able to do this is they say, well, the benefits are it's faster. It's cheaper than physically staging. It's ideal for vacant or remote homes. But there's risk to buyers looking at your house, getting out there and going, well, this ain't what it looked like on the on the website. So, you know, some agents are posting before and after comparisons. So I reached out to one. I actually reached out to all of my real estate clients and one of them got back to me immediately. I said, have you seen this here in South Georgia? And he said, yes, I have one property that they did AI for the staging.

30:44He said it's been on the market for a long, long time because when people would actually get to the house to look at it, it wasn't the same house. They were disappointed. Okay. And I'm like, well, so what about the rules? Did it, was it not notated that it was AI or whatever? And basically the answer was no. Yeah. Cause there's no, there's no real MLS police. You know, I live with a real estate broker and, uh, I used to shoot houses, you know, for her and we did a couple virtual staging and virtual staging has been around before AI was ever a thing. You basically can go on a site and literally drop furniture in and put stuff on the walls because people have no imagination.

31:26They want it staged so they can kind of get an idea of what the house is going to look like when they move in. Now, that kind of virtual staging, no problem. It's fantastic. I can't believe how good it is. I mean, when I did the first house with it, I went and I shot it plain and just uploaded my photos and just let a service do it. And they sent it back within like 20 minutes and it was gorgeous. And then I did a couple of them where I actually went to a site and staged it myself based on what, you know, the client wanted. And it was, it was great. And the house sold like, you know, just like that, it was gone and nobody complained.

32:03There was no problem with it. Now with, now they're saying it's AI virtual staging. I think the problem here is this, this guy who saw the lawn, the roof, and the facade, that's a different thing than actual staging the inside of the house with furniture. There's a fine line there. Exactly. You're making actual constructural changes to the way the house actually looks. Yeah, that's bait and switch. Yeah, I agree. That's 100 % bait and switch. And I'd be pissed off too. If I looked at the house and I was like, oh yeah, that is the shit. Let's go look at that. And I get there and And, you know, the windows are falling out.

32:40Where's the duck pond? Yeah, where's the duck pond? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm look, I'm fine with them using stuff like this as long as there needs to be in big, bold letters. This is not representative of the way the house actually looks. And then, of course, I don't know why the fuck you do it anyway. You know, show the house the way it is and do the work. Well, the thing, yeah, yeah, actually showing the actual physical version of the house, that should be 100%. You can use lighting, time of day, things like that to mask imperfections. But if you actually physically change it, there's a problem.

33:18There's definitely a problem. And with staging, AI staging, I think there's a checkbox for staged with AI. But that stuff, like I said, you have to stage a house no matter what. and staging a house physically for walkthroughs is a must. You can't virtually stage a house for walkthroughs. But if it's just for a quick, you know, quick turn and you know the house is going to sell because it's in a, you know, a good market and you can sell it without having to do walkthroughs, AI staging, I'm sorry, virtual staging. Yeah, virtual staging. Fuck the AI part. It's because literally it's just drag and drop Photoshop shit.

33:50That's fine. I got no problem with that whatsoever. Yeah, I love the 3D rendering that they do like on all these building shows where they go out and they like look at three different properties. And then they're like, well, we can take this wall down and we can do that. And they do those those virtual 3D renderings where you can really see a good representation of the way it's going to look after they're done. Yep. I'm fine with that. So it's just this I don't like the dishonesty aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just just basically with that. It's good sales, good salesmanship to not not lie to your potential customers.

34:26Yeah, you know, like with me, of course this$50 computer will do exactly what – it'll play Crisis. Don't worry about it. Yeah, seriously.

34:46Well, something that is not living up to what the salespeople said it was going to do, vibe coding. Oh, yes, vibe coding. Who would have guessed it? OpenAI co-founder Andre Carpathian. Carpathian? I just think Carpathian. I am a Carpathian. Yeah, I know, right? Andre Carpathian. The guy who coined Vibe Coding, the idea of letting AI handle your code while you chill, just admitted even he can't make it work. After leaving OpenAI, Carpathian built an open source project called NanoChat, a small from scratch framework that lets anyone train a mini chat GPT for about 100 bucks. The twist? He wrote every one of its 8 ,000 lines of code by hand, because as he put it, AI tools like Claude and Codex were net unhelpful.

35:34Yes, net unhelpful. That's a bit awkward considering this is the same guy who once said he fully gives into the vibes and doesn't even read the code AI spits out. Turns out when you're writing something serious, not just a throwaway weekend project, those vibes crash hard. And it's not just him. surveys show 95 % of developers spend more time fixing AI-generated code than they save, and research finds AI-assisted devs actually finish slower. Companies are even hiring humans to clean up AI messes, like we've covered on the show before. So for now, vibe coding might be fun for demos, but when it's time to ship real software, the vibes are dead, and humans are still doing the heavy lifting.

36:12I can totally corroborate this. I've spent so much time in, oh, God, in Cursor. building a couple of projects, it gets you so close and then pulls the rug out from under you. It's like a really bad NFT scam. It is just a rug pull waiting to happen. Yeah, my son, Tyler. Amazon is really very positive about trying to use AI for internal systems and software development and things like that. So they're heavily encouraged to try to use it whenever they can. Yeah. And he's a software developer of about roughly 20 years now. And he's like, he's like, Dad, there are times where it can it can almost do some things, he said.

37:03But he said, I constantly run into this issue where I'm telling it to do this thing and then it does this other thing wrong. And then I tell it, no, you need to fix this thing. It fixes that. Then it fucks the other thing up. He said, I'm constantly fixing what it's trying to do. He said, I'm faster just doing it by hand. Yeah, it's whack-a-mole. It is absolutely whack-a-mole. That's what I've run into. I've got this project almost done. And then I'm like, I need you to make this one tweak. And then the rest of the house of cards falls apart. And it's like, why did you do that? Why did you do that?

37:34Yeah. I didn't tell you to mess with those libraries over there. I said, I need this one little library fixed over here because it's not doing what it needs to do. Oh, I see what the problem is. You're absolutely correct. Let me just blow away six hours worth of work. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm not a programmer or a software developer. I dabbled years and years ago, but I will use ChatGPT for minor things. You know, build me a website framework in HTML or some Python scripts to open up a database and do a search and do some other things and, you know, just minor stuff like that. Yeah, utilities.

38:12I could probably figure. Yeah. I mean, I could probably figure it out in about two months when, you know, it took me about 30 minutes and then fixing some things that I didn't like the way it did. And, you know, and then it didn't or it didn't run, especially with Python. It just didn't run the way it was supposed to. It generated an error. And then I'd go look for that error. And, you know, and I'd even use chat GPT. I'm like, hey, you screwed this up. Why is this not working? Oh, I'm sorry. You're absolutely correct. I should have put this in there. Well, then why didn't you do it the first fucking time?

38:44I know. If he tells me I'm absolutely correct one more fucking time, I want to reach through and just rip out Sam Altman's heart. Hey, I still say please and thank you to it because when the AI overlords take over, I want that like that meme. It's like, get rid of them. Oh, he was nice to us. He's fine. I got a text expander snippet that has like a three paragraph thank you. The thing is, it is really brilliant for small things like utilities. And Claude Code is otherworldly good compared to all of the other ones. But the problem is now the prices are going up and I don't want to pay for it. I write code because I need it to make me money.

39:24I don't want to spend money on code. I want to write code to generate money, you know? Yeah. And I've had friends who have, you know, they're non-coders, but, you know, they're stupid wealthy and just sit there and play on it all day. and they'll run up to$3 ,000 a day just dicking around. And I'm like, could you just hire me, please? I know, right? I know. I mean, this is more fun. I'm like, yeah, but food, me, help. Yeah, me need food. Yeah. I pay$20 for ChatGPT and that's my limit. I've got a friend of mine who, he's definitely wealthier than I am, but he's not like a multimillionaire or anything.

40:05and several months ago, we were chatting back and forth and I was like, yeah, I'm doing the$20 a month. He goes, I'm doing the$200 a month. I'm like, why? You run a plastic extrusion company. That's what you own. What the fuck do you need to spend$200 a month on ChatGP? What are you doing? Are you trying to figure out how to run your extrusions more efficiently? I mean, what's going on here? Well, maybe because he's probably got the erotic package going. That's his extrusion. We are now making dildos into the plastic extrusion flip. Oh, God. So, yeah, I'm rocking it about$60 a month because I pay for ChatGPT, I pay for Claude, and I pay for Gemini.

40:49And like I said, the Gemini is just an add-on because I've got to pay for the Google Drive,$20 a month anyway, to get the two terabytes. The only time I use Gemini is if I'm doing a search, and my default search is actually DuckDuckGo, which they've got an AI component too, which is not bad. But occasionally if I'm on another machine where Bing is the default, or no, Google is the default. I was going to say Bing. Yeah, sorry. You got a fucking time machine? Hook a brother up. I know, right? I really would like to go back. It was a much better time from 2005 to 2010. But yeah, sometimes I'll right click and it'll say, you know, search and it'll do a little thing on the right-hand side.

41:34But, you know, most of the time I'm, I'm using, I wind up using chat GPT to do most of my search. What is that one that I, I cannot remember that you can, it has all of them. It has chat GPT, it has Claude and Poe. That's it. That's it. I thought about paying for that one, but I was like, yeah. Even though I ran for a while, even though you pay for it, you still run up against limits pretty quickly yeah so you end up spending more money on poe because i mean they get it they buy in bulk so they get cycles for cheaper and it's kind of the same model the cursor has it'll like you know when you pick the default model in cursor it just basically cycles you through whichever uh they have the most credits for whichever model at the same time so that's why your code comes back like sometimes it's like holy shit that's really good and then you know they must have had some extra clawed code time but then when it comes back garbage it's like oh that's like you of the ghetto LLM.

42:28So this one came from Gemini. Yeah. I've had great luck with Gemini. It's been actually better for me than almost all of them at this point. Oh, okay. Yeah. The new, the new Gemini license or the new Gemini models are really, really decent, especially since I can drop in an MP3 and have it write all the show notes for clients. I'm like, give me the outline. Here's the, I've got text expander snippets for everything. So I just say this, put in the text expander snippet for a particular client show like this is the outline this is what i need it to look like this is a previous version take this mp3 and give me everything and it'll spit it back almost perfectly and then i send it to the client for edits it's like okay done yeah i still i still have whisper.cpp on my mac mini that i take my files run it through uh i've got a convert uh shell script that converts it using FFmpeg.

43:21And then I run like, I run two commands. I have it do a text only, and then I have it do an SRT. And I take, then what I do is I take the text and I drag it over into chat GPT. And then I have a prompt that I basically say, you know, summarize for show notes, add a little bit of humor, give me some ideas for titles, et cetera, et cetera. And about 90 % of the time, I don't have to do any major edits to it. And then that's what I use. Yeah. The problem with ChatGPT, I know we're getting in the AI wormhole here for a second, guys. Stick with us. The problem with ChatGPT is the context window isn't big enough to usually get the entirety of an audio file for an hour.

44:03So that's where Gemini is key. Like if you drop the MP3 in, it'll cost you about, for an hour, it's about 180 ,000, between 140 and 180 ,000 tokens, the input window for Gemini is a million tokens. So you still have 800 ,000 plus tokens for your actual prompt and context. So that's where that really kicks ass. But I've never tried to drop an actual MP3 into chat GPT. It barfs for the most part. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on which server farm you get to. They may have capacity or not. But yeah, because honestly, every show that I do is going to be over an hour long anyway.

44:43So, yep. So you're going to run into problems with that. But, you know, AI is going to kill us all. We just talked for 20 minutes on how we use it. Well, we are we are humans. We are not bright. Welcome to Grumpy Old Hypocrite. Exactly. Well, I'm going to finish off the news here because I needed a laugh. Man launches world's first Waymo DDoS by ordering 50 robo-taxis to Dead End Street. I would have loved to have seen that. I know. This weekend, a 23-year-old tech prankster named Riley Waltz pulled off what he dubbed the world's first Waymo DDoS. Waymo has DDoSed itself many times. So this is the first external DDoS, I think.

45:25Instead of flooding servers with traffic, he flooded a San Francisco Dead End Street with 50 self-driving taxis all summoned at once. and none of it because he got a bunch of his friends together to kind of pull this off and none of them got in the cars and they just paid the five dollar no show fee and then took off but um waymo did catch on and suspended rides in the area overnight which you know was a decent they didn't go after anybody they said they called it harmless fun and nobody's nobody's harmed everybody's laughing at it um and i was after my my my horrible commute yesterday i was in uh Beverly Hills, driving through Beverly Hills at one point, and I was stuck at 18 traffic lights.

46:05Every traffic light, I saw two or three Waymos. They're everywhere in Beverly Hills. And it is really disconcerting the first couple hundred times you see a car driving around with nobody in the driver's seat. It really is. And somebody in the backseat. It's bizarre. But yeah, they didn't cause any problems. They signaled. They changed lanes. Yeah. Tulsa King. I haven't seen that. Yeah. Yeah. It's the one that's got Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone. There is a scene that I just happened to come across. You may find it on YouTube somewhere. He gets in the back of a Waymo, not realizing that there's no driver.

46:45Uh-huh. And just the scene, he starts going nuts and to the point where, and, you know, I'm going to have to give away the punchline here. He pulls his gun and shoots the damn front of the car. he's sitting in the back. He starts shooting the screen because he's like, I want the fuck out of this thing. Okay, that's pretty good. So, but yeah, I would have loved to have seen this right here. And I'm actually surprised that Waymo didn't, didn't bring charges against, I don't know what kind of charges you would have brought against him. There's nothing you can do. He just, no, he literally hired the taxis to show up and paid the no show fee.

47:23So that's, there's nothing illegal about that. Yeah. It's kind of like the cops that had to pull over the Waymo that did the – they were doing DUI. Oh, yeah, yeah. Stops or what have you. Yeah. And the car did a U-turn, and then they pulled it over, and they're like, we have nothing on the books to be able to write this up. Yep. So, yeah, it's hilarious. It's hilarious. I'm not sure when we'll ever – if we'll ever see them around here. I mean – Eventually, just not in our lifetime. Yeah. Well, Lyft drivers and all the other ones, they can't make a living. They have to go down to like Valdosta or Tallahassee or Jacksonville in Florida.

48:05You just can't make it around here. Well, Uber did just launch its new AI training program where you can get paid to train AI while you're waiting in between rides. Hey, there you go. They're monetizing downtime. I don't know. That may help some folks.

48:30Media Candy. All right. So Gen V had its penultimate episode this week. And I know there are a lot of people. No spoilers. No spoilers. I'm not going to. No spoilers. No spoilers. And I think I've even heard you say that you kind of weren't interested in it. But here's what the only thing that I will say. you need to watch it before the fifth season of the boys comes out that's i'll just say that yeah i saw you put this in the notes and you pointed that out and i'm like oh that's right there's going to be crossovers so i better start watching and i just finished episode four last night and oh absolutely you have to watch it before the boys because it's the whole season is a setup for the ending of the boys so exactly yeah and it's great it's like the first episode just didn't hook me.

49:19But after I started watching it, I'm really into it. It's not nearly as cringy as the other season was as far as just like evil. And I liked the first season of Gen V. I actually liked it better than some of the seasons of The Boys. Yeah, yeah. I thought the first season was good. And yeah, I think I agree with you. The first of the second season was a slow start, but it's well worth it, especially once you get to the seventh episode. Yeah, that's, you know, this weekend I'm definitely going to get hopefully caught up. It's my watch before I go to bed. I kind of fall asleep to it, which is probably not the smartest thing to do.

49:58But. And he wonders why he has those weird dreams. Yeah. I wonder why I need so many drugs to fall asleep. That's why. Is it right to take seven Benadryl just so I can get three hours of sleep, doctor? That's the reason why I take Super 7s from a company called Binoid. It's basically the reason why they're called Super 7s is they have Delta 8, Delta 9, Delta 10, THC-8. I mean, there's seven different things in them. I cannot take a whole one because I start seeing things. Yeah. I think my sponsor would have problems if I took that. Well, I mean, it's natural. Yeah, I mean, I understand. I understand.

50:42And I literally have to cut them into quarters. Yeah. No, trust me, I had to have a conversation over melatonin if I was allowed to take that or not. Oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I understand. Yep. So Apple has just dropped the plus from Apple TV Plus, which is going to confuse the shit out of everybody who wasn't confused already. When you're trying to explain, what did you watch that on? I watched it on Apple TV. Okay. Is it the... Which one? I watch it on Apple TV on my Apple TV on Apple TV. Right. Exactly. That makes perfect sense. Such perfect sense. I'm so glad that they cleared that whole thing by just removing the plus.

51:26That's so great. How does one call this a vibrant new identity? I haven't... They released a new icon. So? If you're on the iOS betas, it gets a new icon. Oh, whoopty fucking dude. I know. I mean. Yeah. Oh, God. You know, I love Apple, but come on, guys. It's fucking stupid. All right. I got a shout out to Geeks Corner over on Discord, aka Steve. Let me know that the celebrity traders in the UK started last week. Oh, my God. It's so good. It's so good. Stephen Fry's on there. So he's a national treasure, even though it's not my nation. He's still a national treasure to me. True. But I always get nervous when I see somebody I really like on the traders because they usually go home first.

52:22But he's still there a couple episodes in, knock on wood. No spoilers from here on out. But it's so great. If you're in the UK, grab it. If you have BitTorrent, go grab it. If you're a traders fan, if you don't know what the traders is, you probably don't give a shit. But for me, it was great. I also watched the entirety of the Fortune Hotel, both seasons. Also, again, I think thanks to Steve. It was a great, great game show. A bunch of people locked in a hotel with a bunch of briefcases with money in it. One has money and they all have to figure out who has it. And somebody gets kicked out every night.

52:50My kind of show. I don't know why. I've just, I've fallen in love with these kind of shows as I get older. It's strange. Very strange. It's the times we live in. It really is. They're just upbeat and fun. Backstabbing with like nobody getting hurt. And somebody wins a bunch of money. It's perfect. Yeah. So my dad was in town last week, and he had never seen Idiocracy. I was like, how? You're my father. How is it possible that we've gone this long and you've never seen Idiocracy? So I just wanted to show him the beginning scene because he'd never seen that, which is the kickoff to everything that we're going through today.

53:27So we ended up watching that. I got to say, it's a little slow in the middle, but Idiocracy, it's got legs. And electrolytes. I need to go back and rewatch it. It's so good. It's so good. When we were done with that, we watched Never Surrender, a Galaxy Quest documentary, because he's also never seen that. Because Galaxy Quest is a perfect film, as far as I can tell. I agree. Most people that have seen it also agree. Yes, you agree. It's a perfect film. So Never Surrender, a Galaxy Quest documentary is on. You can watch it on Prime for free if you're a Prime member. It's a phenomenal documentary.

54:03and it's got a couple of my friends in it, which was really fun to see. My friend Crash is in it. He was the art director. He used to work for Stan Winston, and he's a buddy of mine, most talented person on the planet that I know. Crazy talented. And Missy Pyle, who was one of the actresses in the show, friend of mine, and she's got a new show out, The Missy and Brooke Show, which I pipped a couple weeks ago. Go check it out. It's fun. Missy and Brooke shooting the shit. Good stuff. But definitely, if you've never seen Never Surrender, Have you seen it? I have. No, I have not. You got to see it.

54:36It's it's it's the documentary is almost as good as the movie. It's so good. OK, it leaves you with all the good feels. And it's on Prime. Yep. You can watch it on Prime. OK, yep. You know who in America doesn't have it? Whether you wanted it or not. You get it. You get it. But you just pay as part of your taxes now. Yeah, it's it's so good. All the feels, all the feels. and I do want to pimp a show that I may or may not be associated with called Anonymous Real Stories of Alcoholism Addiction and Recovery. I think just put out the 11th episode so and it's going strong. It's just people telling their stories like it says Real Stories of Addiction Alcoholism and Recovery.

55:18So check it out. Oh cool. Have you seen the Minecraft movie? I am not a kid and I don't have kids so I have not seen the Minecraft movie because I've never played Minecraft. Okay. Well, I did see it. Uh, I'm, I'm not a kid, just a kid at heart. My wife still tells me that I'm 14 years old. I think we all are. We probably all are. Um, and I love Jason Momoa and you know, uh, Jack Black's okay for me. And I did used to play Minecraft with, with my kids years ago. They were the ones that got me in, into it. And we were actually streaming on the early days of Twitch and that kind of stuff. Okay. So the movie itself is, it's fun.

56:04All right. I would not put it, I mean, it's not an academic exercise in anything. It's just goofy, dumbass fun. Okay. Right. Jason Momoa is fantastic. It's a Jack Black movie. You're not going to get. Exactly. Exactly. And Jack Black is just Jack Black. I mean, he plays Steve, but he's Jack Black. So anyway, as you would suspect, Minecraft movie number two is going to be released July 23rd, 2027. They made so much money on the first one. That was a foregone conclusion that was going to come out. Yeah, I think the thing that they sent out that they released was something like they were building something.

56:45Anyway, it's from the whole Minecraft motif of, you know, you constantly build stuff. So they're starting to build number two. so uh well we better finish this show so i can go build a number two myself

57:08all right this week i have decided to go back to things three i know it's a groundbreaking decision i talked about using reminders on ios and how it just got the job done but it's just so goddamn ugly. I couldn't handle it anymore. So I had a Things 3 license for all my devices. Like, why am I not? Why am I not using that? So I went back to it and I'm happier. That's all I got to say. I'm just happier because it's prettier. Life is too short to use ugly software and reminders, albeit functional, pretty fucking ugly. I mean, isn't that the goal in life is just to be happy? It is. It is. It's the little things.

57:48It's the little things three. that make me happy. You know what doesn't make me happy? What? We're now looking at Wi-Fi 8. 8? 8. I didn't know there was 6 and 7. Yeah. Do you know what your access points are in your place? Hell no. So, well, the new hotness has been Wi-Fi 7, but now TP-Link has confirmed that they have successfully done Wi-Fi 802.11BN trials, which is a key milestone in the next-gen wireless development. Okay, I'm sorry here. Every time I think TP-Link, I think Cornholio. I need TP-Link for my phone. So I think 802.11 should have been 802.11BM for a nice BM. So Cornholio could have a 802.11BM.

58:39I like it. You know, maybe we should petition them to change the - I think we should. The name of it. All right. So what they did is they validated Wi-Fi 8 beacon-indicted throughput. They used, of course, prototype hardware built with a joint industry partnership, most likely with Qualcomm. But the goal is not to get more speed, but to get better reliability, lower latency, and what they're calling stronger real-world performance. So you still get your 2.4, your 5, your 6. I'm sorry, that sounds like a Viagra commercial. I need better reliability, lower latency, and stronger real-world performance.

59:19Yeah, well, that's the reason. You just start a Bluetooth subscription, you'll be fine. But, yeah, they still have the 2.4, the 5, and the 6 gigahertz bands. 4096 QAM, if anybody knows what QAM is. I used to run a cable broadband company, so I'm painfully aware of what QAM is. 320 megahertz bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera, which you already get in Wi-Fi 7. They still rated at 46 gigabits per second max, but they're aiming for 25 % faster real world speeds. I mean, ultimately, there's all kinds of crap in here. Technical stuff optimizes power levels for cleaner signals, improves directional signal targeting, boost throughput by up to 80%, refines data efficiency.

1:00:06I mean, it hits all the buzzwords, man. So ultimately, the benefit is hopefully you'll get stronger connections in crowded areas. You'll get less interference. You'll get smoother roaming and you'll get better low signal performance. Here's what kills me. Wi-Fi 7 only came out in 2023. Okay. So what? You know, and Wi-Fi 7 already kicks ass. So I figure Wi-Fi 8, we'll probably start seeing spec units come out in another year or two with Wi-Fi 8 because they do that a lot. The spec won't be ratified, but they'll go ahead and produce equipment that they're like, oh, we'll fix it with firmware once it gets ratified.

1:00:52And so I figure we'll start seeing spec units in a year or two, and it might get ratified by 2028 or 2030. Well, I guess it's time to start now. You know, if it's going to be that long to come out. Yeah, I mean, the majority of my clients still have Wi-Fi 5 units. I just looked. I've got Eero 6 Pros. Okay. Okay. I have deployed one TP-Link Wi-Fi 7 Wi-Fi router, which I hate to do, but it was such a small network, and I was just replacing existing equipment. So that's Wi-Fi 7. I'm a Ubiquiti shop, so that's what I normally put in. And I've done Wi-Fi 7 in two different locations. One was a complete network with Wi-Fi 7 wall units, and another one I just replaced one of their main access points, which was a Wi-Fi 5 with a Wi-Fi 7 Pro.

1:01:51And I'm like, I'm not going back anytime soon to upgrade this stuff. So, you know, they're going to be kicking with it for at least another five years. mm-hmm so you know something to look forward to well like i said my sixes work great i got i got a bunch of the router i got i've got uh three pro routers like you know i didn't go with any of the you know the little extenders i just put three pro routers around my house and it seems to work um everything else is just ethernet because i like ethernet Oh, trust me. I've got four access points. I've got one here in the office. I've got one downstairs, one upstairs, and then I got a Wi-Fi 6 outdoor unit because I had a certain area of my yard that whenever I was cutting yards and I listened to podcasts and I might stream music or whatever, I started dropping out.

1:02:43And I was like, this will not do. That's how you know you're a geek. Exactly. I can't mow my lawn and stream at the same time. Exactly. I must fix this. Exactly. I'll bring up YouTube because I got YouTube premium. I'll bring it up and start a playlist and I'm just rocking around on the lawnmower and then it starts buffering and I'm like, fuck this. No, this just cannot stand. This cannot stand. So I've got a Wi-Fi 6 mesh unit ubiquity on that side of the house. Well, that's awesome. So maybe you should get together with Dave and you guys can figure out some kind of solar windmill powered way to power it without actually, you know.

1:03:24Hey, I'm all for it. I'm all for it. I literally have a WISE battery operated camera that has a solar panel connected to it to keep the battery. So that's right in my sphere. There we go. Well, Windows 10. Since you're an IT guy, I'm sure you have a lot of things to say about Windows 10. But all the big news this week is that Windows 10 is ending support. And people are saying that this is a disaster for the environment because everybody's going to have to dump these old Windows 10 machines because they're not Windows 11 compliant. But what more than likely is going to happen is that everybody's going to keep running their Windows 10 machine without support.

1:04:05And it's just going to become a botnet dystopia. So what are your thoughts on the end of Windows 10 support, Donovan? This pisses me the hell off. Because I have, I am what's considered an MSP. So I have a lot of contracts with clients and I manage all their updates on their computers. I manage their antivirus and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, a lot of them, whenever Windows 10 came out, we started upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. And I mean, I think we can all agree that the first iterations of Windows 10 were not that great. But by the time they got around to the 1803 and the 19 whatevers, it was pretty solid.

1:04:50So I don't have a problem with Windows 10 in its current form. Is it perfect? No, I don't think any operating system is perfect. But there was a time as I was upgrading or replacing older machines from like 2011, 2012. you know they'd gotten long in the tooth so I started buying these refurb units and off of Amazon and normally they were Dell units like Optiplex 7040 7050s they'd have six gen i5 like the i5 6500 come with 16 gigs of RAM and SSD and all of that and it they worked perfectly fine now two years ago I started swapping over to these little uh mini PCs made several companies make them.

1:05:37They're all Chinese made and I have no problem with that. But I use a particular brand called B-Link and they are phenomenal. For$300, you can get a Ryzen 5 or a Ryzen 7, fifth generation, 16, 24, 32 gigs of RAM, 512 gig NVMe or whatever. And so that's what I've been doing. I got two of those for when I was mining. What was that stupid coin that I was doing? It wasn't Ethereum, was it? No, no, no. It was that really – God, why can't I remember the name of it? But when I had my little mind going, I used a couple of those. It was pretty good. I'll remember it in the middle of – just keep going, keep going.

1:06:22They're great little machines, though, yeah. Yeah, they're great little machines. They're low power because they're basically – the form factor, they're based off of mobile CPUs that go in laptops. And they come with a full license of Windows 11 Pro for$300. So what this has started causing is all of those refurb units that I was getting are no longer compatible for the requirements of Windows 11. Oh. Yeah. And so I'm okay with all the stuff that I've been buying over the last two years. But, you know, you have to go to a client and say, you know, that computer that we replaced in 2022. Yeah, we got to replace it again.

1:07:04And so, yeah, I've got one client. It's a dentist office. I just replaced because these these were machines that weren't actually the refurbs, but they were like fourth generation, either I-5s or I-3s. I replaced 13 of these things with these new B-Links. And what I did is I said, yeah, I know. Right. It was a chunk of change for them. So what I did is I said, look, I presented them with an agreement and I said, October 14th, 2025, you're no longer going to get security updates, feature updates, anything on Windows 10 machines. Got to go to Windows 11. These machines do not support Windows 11 per the requirements of Microsoft.

1:07:49I said, however, if it's a sixth or seventh generation, here's what we are going to do if you will agree to the caveats. And so what Donovan does is Donovan has a Windows 11 Pro thumb drive that he built with Rufus that bypasses all that bullshit. Now, it does come up, and it gives you a screen that says, hey, this machine does not support the requirements. So you're on your own, so you have to click an accept button. Okay. But it'll still install Windows 11 Pro or Home that I'm doing all Pro. And it'll keep the updates going? Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah, and so that's what I'm doing for some of them.

1:08:36Now, like I said, the older machines, the 13, they were like, yeah, we're going to replace them. And then I had another client that they also had six gen Dell units that were bought, I think, around 2018, somewhere in there. And I gave them the same option. And they were like, yeah, we'll just replace them. And so I replaced them with the little, you know, 32 gig, one terabyte, Ryzen 5, 5560U or something like that, B-Lynx. And plus then they wanted, well, we need two monitors on each one now. So that was a nice little job. But this is bullshit. There is absolute, I mean, I know Microsoft is like, well, you need the TPM 2.0 because there's going to be in the secure boot.

1:09:21There's going to be security issues and et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, no, you just did this because you wanted to. There were other ways of doing this. And there is no reason why a machine that is a sixth or seventh generation Intel processor or the equivalent of an AMD Ryzen cannot run Windows 11. You just arbitrarily chose this. And so you're right. Like this says, you're either going to have a lot more e-waste or you're going to have a lot of people that just aren't going to worry about it. And they're not going to get security updates. And then on top of that, and I'll get off my high horse here, if you do want to continue to get updates, you've got to use a fucking Microsoft account.

1:10:07Oh, God. Yeah. You can get a Windows 10 machine to continue updating, I think, for either another year or two, but you must start signing in to the machine with a fucking Microsoft account. Are you going to become a Linux house? I have tried and tried and tried my best on Linux. but the problem is, is some of the software that I have to use to like remote into machines only works on Windows. Yeah. Well, I take it back. It works on Windows and it works on Mac OS. I don't know how well supported it is on Linux. Is anything supported on Linux? I mean, I don't know. I've got a friend of mine. Save the emails, everybody.

1:10:44I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I got a friend of mine that's in the same business. We were actually discussing the potential of maybe forming one company together. He just switched his workstation over to Linux. And I'm like, well, how are you going to handle the, you know, the remote control and all that other kind of stuff? And he's like, I got a Windows VM for that. I'm like, okay, you got it figured out. As Dave would say. Let me just stop you here for a quick aside, because I know we'll get letters. Ah, Dave. Ah, Dave. Yeah, that would have been fun to talk to him. Yep. He's guess where he's at right now.

1:11:23Disneyland. Yes, he is. Everybody went to Disney and left me home to work. So there you go. Yeah. Such is life. On that note.

1:11:37Over at Patreon, we've got three new subscribers. Daryl, Fat Fat and Donovan. How many people do I know named Donovan? Well, one. So thank you, Donovan, for coming up Patreon. And no, that did not influence my decision to have you on the show because you did that after bribery. It works like you pay me first. Then I do something. I did something that you paid me later. How's that work? Yeah. Well, I was actually I was resubscribing or becoming a Patreon supporter again because I had after I went on to my alcohol retirement, I'd actually started tossing you guys money every every month. and then I had a lull.

1:12:19You know how it is. You start putting all your bills in a spreadsheet and you're looking at what your income and outcome is and it's like, oh, I need to start cutting stuff. And I got to be honest with you, even before you asked me, I was already going to do it because I was getting tired of the fucking ads. See, we had to up those crap ads because we had to pay for the bandwidth and nobody's buying the paid ads. So we got a few extra ones. We listen to my daughter and I listen to the show every Friday morning. So it's always the one prior. And when we go grocery shopping and when we hit those ads and I'm going to I'll be I'm that guy.

1:12:54I hit the fast forward. I couldn't give a shit less if you fast forward. As long as you download the show. Fine with me. I do. All right. And also from the from the previous patrons, we don't have anybody right now because Brian's at Disneyland Paris and he didn't finish the list this week. So next week we'll do 20. so blame brian and his mickey mouse fetish exactly exactly so over at paypal we have miles sherry arcadio nathaniel brett linda and andrew and over at the tip jar we've got john sean theodore keith roger and thomas p with a big 250 thank you thomas woohoo yeah i saw that and i was like, hey, wow, good on you.

1:13:43Yep. Yep. And some sad news this week. Diane Keaton, dead at the age of 79. She had a pretty good run. She will be missed. Yep. And yesterday, Ace Frehley, founding member of Kiss, dead at 74, which I had a question for you. Have you ever seen that movie they did in 1978 called Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park? I've always hated Kiss since I came out of the womb. So I remember the commercials for it. I never watched it. don't do not try to find it i won't just don't but i remember as an eight-year-old kid i saw the commercial and i was like i need to see this because i i mean all i knew about kiss at the time was they were a band but in the movie they're made out to be like these people with superpowers and i was like i was all in at eight years old you know but you know it's one it doesn't it does not have legs.

1:14:40Trust me. I didn't think it did. Oh, man. And also, a big happy birthday to a super huge Kiss fan, MXV, for the show. And the big 60 to my friend, John Sylvain. Hi, John. So, happy birthday, John and MXV. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to all of y 'all. All right. Well, until next time, I'm Donovan Adkisson. And 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 718. 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 do mean that in the literal sense of the word.

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1:15:55Stay grumpy. And thanks again, Donovan, for filling in for Brian, who's in Paris. Anytime.

1:16:06Thank you.