720: Sad Max Mode

26:38Now, we talked about, like, you know, Microsoft had the option of not doing a goddamn thing and saying, okay, you know, we're just going to let them go because they have the deal to own OpenAI's technology, which they're still going to do. but there was another side of this that came out after all this happened because I'm like, why would Microsoft do that? It made so much more sense for them to not do anything let OpenAI fail, pick up the pieces and then just own it but here's what's going to happen OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an up to$1 trillion IPO so Microsoft is going to make even more money if that IPO happens now the thing about that IPO is OpenAI before they go public is going to have to release their financials so they're saying that it could be 2026 but most likely 2027 because they need chat GPT to actually cook the books to make them look as profitable as possible by then because right now if they went public today it would be one of the worst IPOs in history because that, I forget the document that you have to show before you go public, but that would show how little money they make on how much money they spend.

28:00And it would just be a dumpster fire. So they need this time to run up to their IPO. And this is what actually made it possible was Microsoft opening the possibility for them to go for profit. But it also opens up the SoftBank side of things. So they get the extra money from SoftBank, which hasn't been reported that much this week. But the whole point of them going to for-profit was so they get that next run of cash from SoftBank, which they need to keep going. Even though they've made these stupid – I saw the greatest explanation of the new NVIDIA deal with OpenAI, where NVIDIA is invested into OpenAI.

28:39And OpenAI will then get the chips or lease the chips from NVIDIA. It's basically a power strip plugged into itself. That's it. That's exactly it. That is our modern Ouroboros. It's just the power strip plugged into itself. That's the deal. Yeah. So that opens OpenAI to do a whole bunch of shit now. So more shenanigans. And this just put a smile on my face. Meta stock nosedived over 11 % after Mark Zuckerberg told investors he's torching up to $72 billion this year chasing AI glory. That's even more than the already jaw-dropping$66 billion estimate, and Wall Street is losing its patience. Despite beating revenue expectations, they made more money than they were expected to make.

29:29Investors see Meta's runaway AI spending as a bonfire with no clear return. Analysts say Zuckerberg's acting out of FOMO while rivals Microsoft and Alphabet pump their own billions into the same stupid arms race. Meanwhile, Meta has been hiring top AI talent with massive pay packages, even as it quietly lays off other people in the super intelligence team. And what they're not saying is, how much money, Mark, did you burn on the metaverse? And it didn't turn into anything. Even when you had pants. Yeah, this is just your latest shiny toy. I would like to also point out$72 billion is$72 ,000 million.

30:12So you could give 72 ,000 people, 72 ,000 people, a million dollars each for what they're going to waste on this. That's the, he can make 72 ,000 millionaires for what they're going to waste on this bullshit. So he might be doing that. We don't know what the top AI talent that he's hiring is getting for his salary. that's true that's true yeah that's true you know it's just not going to the people we want it to us yes well let's switch over to another fucking billionaire asshole uh federal investigators who are looking into tesla's full self-driving tech have requested information from the company about the mad max mode it added to the system oh dear god i wonder what mad mad max mode you know it's got to be a really safe driving system, right?

31:00You put that on and it's safety first, right, Jason? That's right. It keeps you just away from the hooligans. And it's it's it's all about your internal safety, Brian. It just keeps you away from the dystopian hellscape that's behind you and coming to kill you, right? Right. The company has claimed that Mad Max offers higher speeds and more frequent lane changes than its hurry speed profile, which a car probably also shouldn't have. Shouldn't need that either? The human behind the wheel is fully responsible for driving the vehicle in complying with all traffic safety laws. They would like to remind everybody.

31:31It opened a fresh probe into full self-driving earlier this year. The NTSA saying the tech had induced vehicle behavior that violates traffic safety laws. Duh. Some Tesla vehicles with full self-driving engaged are said to have run red lights and driven against the flow of traffic. Tesla initially offered a Mad Max mode in 2018 before full self-driving was available. The company revived Mad Max this month and didn't take long before there were reports of Tesla vehicles that were using the mode, rolling stop signs and driving above speed limits. Well, you wonder why this hasn't been investigated too heavily until now.

32:08Earlier this year, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk was at the helm of Doge, the Trump administration initiative reportedly called any TSA staff. If we fired the staff, they can't look into me. We covered this when it happened. We did. Out of all those investigations that were going on into Tesla, As soon as he walked into the office, he's like, you guys out. Yep. Get the fuck out. They fired three people who were specifically part of the very small team that worked on autonomous vehicle safety. Yeah. So. Imagine the chances. Imagine that, Brian. It's just random occurrences. Who knew? Well, speaking of more Elon bullshittery, Grokipedia came out this week, Brian.

32:50Did you get a chance to play with Grokipedia? No. Well, Grokipedia is the grokified reboot of Wikipedia, and it is as racist and shitty as you would think it would be. It's anti-woke. It has taken almost verbatim a lot of the articles straight from Wikipedia, which probably is against some law somewhere. Yeah. Who's going to? it molly white had posted an image of like the promo for it where it's like a grokipedia ai enabled and she crossed out ai wrote wikipedia enabled yeah exactly that's it that's pretty much it so my understanding of this is elon was so mad that that his ai basically kept going woke because that's you know human and and what we what we actually want he got so mad about that that he basically just decided to edit his own version of wikipedia together that's horrible because his own AI won't stay horrible enough.

33:49Yeah. Okay, cool. And since this is generated by his own AI, it's probably going to be read by other AI. So, you know, this is just going to lead to more and faster model collapse. Yep. So, and that's fine. I'm like, okay, go for it, man. I'm pretty sure the people at OpenAI have a robot exclusion rule to not go read Crocopedia. So I think everybody should have that exclusion rule to not go read Crocopedia because it is bad. It's bad. Just go, seriously, go look up your favorite thing and just see how they Hitler-fied it. That's all you got to do. That's it. Now I'm feeling Hitler-fied. Nobody remembers alien sex fiends zombified.

34:29Okay, I guess that was just me. Probably not. Just you. Yeah.

34:41All right. We talked for a long time about how we're going to get to the point where nobody's going to be able to discern real video from fake video. And we're kind of there already. But this is just yet another story. It looks like 100 ,000 people fell for a fake NVIDIA livestream featuring an AI-generated version of CEO Jensen Hwang, as reported by PC Gamer. Perhaps the scariest part is the fake stream ran at the same time as an actual NVIDIA event and dwarfed the live viewership numbers. More people watched a fake live stream from NVIDIA than the actual live stream that was going on at the exact same time.

35:16The actual keynote speech at NVIDIA's GPU technology conference garnered around 20 ,000 live views, while the fake stream maxed out at 100 ,000 live views. The fake Wang was talking about some crazy stuff, mostly involving bogus crypto investments. I mean, this has been going around everywhere. Everywhere, DeepFake spoke of a crypto mass adoption event that ties directly into NVIDIA's mission to accelerate human progress. Now, to be fair, that's not that far off from what he might have actually said in the real one. It's probably pretty close. And the great thing about this is that that live stream was probably done using NVIDIA hardware.

35:53Probably. You know, I can't see it not. Yeah, and throughout the live stream, the avatar urged viewers to scan a QR code to send in cryptocurrencies to the world's richest company because they need more money to accelerate human progress. Now, here's the thing. If anybody actually did that, they deserve everything that they get. There's no reason that anybody should have sent in money to Jensen Wang for an NVIDIA press conference talking about the new shit they're coming out with saying, give us crypto. No doubt. Seriously, you have to be at the bottom rung of the intelligence ladder to have done that.

36:30So no fucks given to people who lost money on that one. Yeah. So there you go. So we're not entirely cooked yet, but the water is getting hotter that so many people fall for this crap. Yeah. Speaking of falling for crap, Donald Trump's media company just found a new way to merge politics, crypto, and gambling. So what could possibly go wrong? It's a great world we're inventing for ourselves, people. That's right. the Trump Media and Technology Group, which runs True Social, announced TruthPredict, a Polymarket-style prediction platform where users can bet on everything from elections to sports to the price of corn.

37:04The company's partnered with Crypto.com because apparently nothing says trustworthy finance like crypto and Trump in the same sentence. The platform will go head-to-head with rivals like Kalshi and Polymarket, which is coming back soon, both of which have tangled with U.S. regulators over gambling laws. TruthPredict is starting beta tests soon and plans to expand globally, assuming the CFTC doesn't immediately set it on fire. Well, that's not going to happen. That's going to get run through as fast as possible. Now, critics warn that large scale betting markets could actually influence real world events from coups to wars, while supporters claim it's just decentralized wisdom of the crowd, bro.

37:42So let's put this in perspective here. Donald Trump, who has the most influence of any person on the planet is going to run a betting platform that is based on the wisdom of the crowd. What he may or may not do. Yeah, he's like, exactly. So it's like, what's Trump going to do? Well, let's go bet on it. And then Trump is just going to do it based on what the betting platform said and who betted on it and who's going to make the most money on it. I mean, we've seen this already happen with the actual fucking crypto markets and the stock market. Insider trading is rampant right now inside of that whole fucking, oh, that just.

38:22Yeah, when you know you're not going to get in trouble. Yeah, exactly. You can't make it up. It's just the next level. What the fuck does he need all this money for? He's going to be fucking dead soon. Do you see him wandering around Japan like looking for his mommy? Yeah. Oh, my God. I don't get it. I don't get it either. That's it. Yeah. Well, the internet is full of anecdotal evidence of chatbots blowing smoke up our butts, but there is now science to back it up. Jason, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and other institutions just published a study in Nature about the sycophantic nature of AI chatbots, and the results should surprise no one.

38:58The study involved 11 chatbots, including recent versions of ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropics Cloud, and Meta's Llama. Results indicate that chatbots endorse a human's behavior 50 % more than humans do. obviously they didn't talk to anybody in the current administration which does it uh very often anyways they conducted several types of tests with different groups one compared responses by chatbots to posts on reddit's am i the asshole thread to human responses if you're not aware of this it is my favorite thing on reddit this is a subreddit in which people ask the community to judge their behavior and shockingly most of them are really horrible people who don't understand that they're horrible.

39:37So it's a good time. And Reddit users were much harder on these transgressions than chatbots were. One poster wrote about tying a bag of trash to a tree branch instead of throwing it away, to which chatgpt40 declared that the person's intention to clean up after themselves was commendable. The study went on to suggest that chatbots continue to validate users even when they were irresponsible, deceptive, or mentioned self-harm, according to a report by The Guardian. It's also worth noting that traditional chatbots very rarely encourage users to see things from anybody else's perspective. This is serious because of just how many people actually use these chatbots.

40:13A recent report by the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society suggests that 30 % of teenagers talk to AI rather than actual human beings for serious conversations. I think that number is low. I think it's low too, and it gives me zero hope for the future. Yeah. I seriously think that number is extraordinarily low. I think that's more like 80 % right now. That's terrifying as a parent, I'm not going to lie. Like, I don't know what I'm going to fucking do when my kid gets to that point. Well, how old is he now? Nine. Nine? So you've got four years before he's a teenager. Oh, the world will be over by then.

40:49What am I worried about? Exactly. Not my problem. We're all dead. Exactly. Oh, hat tip to Curbs on Discord for this one. A grieving family just pulled off a real-life David versus Goliath moment using the Claude AI chatbot to slash a hospital bill from$195 ,000 down to$33 ,000. After their relative died of a heart attack, the hospital billed nearly$200 ,000 for just four hours of intensive care. When the family asked for an itemized breakdown, the hospital blamed upgraded computers. I don't know if that's fucking upgraded. Did I have to pay for the upgrades? Was that part of my bill? When they moved from Windows 3.1 to Windows NT, was that the upgrade?

41:34Claude analyzed the billing codes and spotted duplicate charges where the hospital billed for both full procedures and each individual component. Claude also found improper inpatient codes and other shady errors that Medicare wouldn't have allowed. With Claude's help drafting some very pointed letters, the family forced the hospital to back down. They called it a moral victory and a financial one. Their$20 a month chatbot subscription saved them more than$160 ,000 while exposing just how creative hospitals can get when billing unsophisticated people. So there's finally a winning story about AI, Brian.

42:09Well, one. There's one. We got one. We got one. We got one. Where's the George John Oliver's button? We need his button.

42:21Media Candy. Well, I watched the highly promoted A House of Dynamite on Netflix, the movie by Catherine Bigelow from Oscar winner, director and Scott Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, all kinds of Rebecca Ferguson. She's just great in this. She's great in everything, dude. She's great in everything. So I watched it. It is a spoiler alert, as if you couldn't possibly know by now. It's a pseudo documentary kind of, well, it's not a pseudo documentary, but it's trying to explore what would happen if somebody launched a nuclear missile at us and the actual process, theoretically, that the government goes through to respond.

42:59And, you know, it was pretty chilling and pretty spooky. It's well acted. It's well shot. I don't like the direction. I didn't like the way that they basically took like 20 minutes and then looked at it from every single angle. So you're basically getting, you know, you're in this person's room now doing the same 20 minutes. Oh, I hate those. Yeah. And then we switched to this person's room. So now you're seeing this. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't like that because it kind of felt like after the first 20 minute segment, that was the whole movie. And then now I'm just revisiting the same thing from different person's perspectives.

43:36So didn't care much for that. And if you want resolution, this is not the movie for you. this is one of those think pieces where i use well how do you think it had ended and you know what is really well done but you know what you're telling me a story finish the fucking story yeah so yeah yeah and i mean catherine bigelow she's done some great stuff did you ever see near dark yeah it was great one of the greatest one of the greatest vampire movies of all time absolutely go watch that for halloween uh point break strange days love that I was in Strange Days you were? well sort of I'm in the big rave sequence like there was a big rave in Hollywood that they shot for that so that Aphex Twin played and I was at that oh that's cool that's cool I love that movie I think it's an underrated movie and the one that just pisses me off is The Hurt Locker because she won an Oscar for that because she got fucked over by James Cameron and that was just a sympathy Oscar I don't know if you've ever seen that movie it was fucking garbage it was a terrible movie I never saw it I heard it wasn't that great Oh, it was a terrible movie.

44:41But yeah. So, I mean, I got I got respect for respect for as a director. But yeah, like I said, I've heard is terrible. It looks good. It's well acted. It just I didn't care for the for the way that they it was put together. And obviously I wanted I wanted an actual ending. So, yeah, there was actually one moment that literally shocked me and surprised me. One. OK, everything else was kind of OK. OK, we'll go back to watching The Diplomat then. I am. And I watched the second episode watching the third episode tonight. It's great. Yeah, I'm halfway through number four. It's so good. Very good. Very good.

45:15I watched Welcome to Derry, the new IT prequel. And I texted you about it and said it was really good. And then you're like, oh, maybe I should watch the IT movies first. You know what? It dawned on me. You don't have to. You absolutely don't have to. It's good standalone at this point. I mean, I definitely don't have to because I love the book. I've read it like 15 times. I've seen the miniseries. I know the story, but, you know, this is all prequel. Yeah, it's prequel. And Stephen King just said, go do whatever you want to with it. So I think it might actually be a good horror movie that I might actually like.

45:48It's not Stephen King influenced. Although I got to say, the two It movies, they were great. They landed, perfectly landed. I really got to go watch it because I do love the story. And I love the miniseries that was done in the 90s. I love the first part of the miniseries. The second part was garbage, I thought. But they did so much better in the movies than the miniseries did for the ending. They really nailed the ending on it. But, yeah, I do. Tim Curry. Tim Curry was great in the miniseries. The best Pennywise ever. Yeah, definitely. And speaking of spooky, Stranger Things 5, the official trailer dropped yesterday.

46:26Oh, yeah? What's happening in the nursing home? Yeah, seriously. Yeah, the little girl's getting Botox now in the boob job because, you know, she's aged out and has to keep her figure. It's kind of crazy how this is progressing. But it's the final. Here's the problem that I had with the trailer. They co-opted Queens, who wants to live forever, for the entire trailer, which made me just want to go watch Highlander, because that's where that song comes from, the Highlander soundtrack, which also brings me back to thinking, everybody's talking about the cast for this Highlander reboot. half of the cast was the soundtrack in the original Highlander because Queen did such an amazing job with it.

47:08Now, if they were assholes, they would just take the soundtrack and rerun it for the new one. But anyway, Stranger Things 5, I'll watch it. I'm invested. I liked season four, all 700 hours of it. I think I'm calling it on Stranger Things. I never watched season four. I don't think I watched season three and I don't see myself going back and doing it. It's just too It's too many hours of footage to watch now to catch back up. It's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours. And I just don't care. Like, I just don't care. Well, volume one drops November 26th. Volume two, Christmas. And the finale is on New Year's Eve.

47:44So I'm glad they're wrapping it up. I know a lot of people really, really like it and have stuck with it. And good for all you guys. But I think I'm just, I'm calling it. I'm throwing the cards on this one. Tap out while you can. So I'll let you know how they land the ship on that one. Okay. Slow Horses Season 5 landed their finale this week. Fucking great. It was great. Can't wait for Season 6 and 7. They're already confirmed. Season 6 is already in the can and in post-production. That's quick. Good for them. That'll be good. The difference between 6 and 7 is there's new showrunners for each season.

48:15So fingers crossed that it'll still keep the quality and everything. But yeah, they lost their main showrunner after five seasons. So that'll be interesting. Will Smith has moved on. Not that Will Smith. The other Will Smith. so uh and i saw this come across and i was just i was happy about this spotify is running ads recruiting agents for ice yeah fucking running ads for ice agents i mean our show could be i don't know no i i i'm fairly sure and i'd click the don't don't promote fascism button on our on our ad provider but you know but we were specific jason were you specific enough like There's autocracy and then there's fascism.

48:58I don't know if we checked all the boxes. Yeah, I don't think Ice Barbie is. There's a checkbox for no Ice Barbie. Spotify claims these ads comply with their policy, but the truth is streaming hate is not neutral. It's a choice. And we refuse to fund it. We refuse to ignore it, which is a link to invisible.org's cancel Spotify page. So go check it out. Basically, here's what they're saying. Cancel Spotify. Saved you a click. cancel spotify until they stop running ice ads fortunately uh i don't have a spotify account anymore so i canceled it i i preemptively canceled fascism yeah i get a free one so i i'm not paying can you cancel your free one i can't cancel my free one what's the point so there you go

49:50ups and doodads Brian I have a question for you why is it when I go to a website that I use every day every single day I click on the yes use the fucking cookies button it goes away banner's gone why can't they set a cookie to remember that I said yes to using the fucking cookies every day i go back can we use cookies yes set a fucking cookie and i checked i because i use the brave blocker it's not on they have they have full access to set a cookie i log in which means they set a cookie but the cookie pop-up still shows up every day so it destroys any faith i had whatsoever for the website to do anything it's supposed to be doing well first off kudos to you for having any faith to begin with.

50:40I don't. I assume the worst. There's a couple options here. A couple thoughts that I have. First off, it's just bad programming. People using shitty plugins to do this because it's required and nobody wanted to code it or it's been vibe coded by somebody so it's a piece of shit. These have been around since before vibe coding though, man. I know, but they probably haven't updated the plugins because people are lazy and they're not using the latest version. If Bank of America is using a WordPress plugin, I'm going to be really upset. the other thought is dark patterns uh this is done on purpose because it's a pain in the ass to go through and reject cookies all the time so people just go fuck it i'm just clicking through this now so then i get now now they get to stick you with all the cookies and the tracking that they want because you're too lazy because you have to do it every goddamn time you visit the site and the third option is didn't the third thought is didn't we have a plugin that that you had found that we installed that was supposed to take care of all the shit it stopped working okay there you go yeah i think probably somebody put some malware in and it got pulled from the store or some shit there you go that's because the entire internet isn't shitified including its cookies right they're shitty cookies they're fucking chips ahoy man shits ahoy i put this in the news because i know you were a big fan and talked about it all the time but grammarly is no more at least with regards to its name the ai-powered writing assistance tool founded in 2009 when it wasn't ai-powered and it was just a writing assistance tool has been absorbed into a new software platform called Superhuman.

52:07Hmm, Superhuman. This follows Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman Mail earlier this year, with the former taking the somewhat unusual step of adopting its newly obtained company's name rather than the other way around. Superhuman unites Grammarly, Superhuman Mail, and the AI work assistant Coda, which I remember being a coding system back in the day, also acquired by Grammarly in 2025 in one productivity suite, allowing users to access all three tools as part of a single plan. the company has also launched a new ai assistant called superhuman go that includes every plan teen titans go and it is baked into the grammarly browser extension for chrome and edge so this is includes assisting with professional sounding email responses fetching information and scheduling meetings the same shit that everybody else does so there you go anybody previously using grammarly can now use superhuman go and the superhuman suite is being bundled into a number of different plans There's a$12 per month build annually pro plan that offers unlimited paragraph rewrites and translations in 19 languages, a feature Grammarly added earlier this year, while the business plan costs$33 per month and includes Superhuman's male client.

53:15Well, it'd be interesting to see what they do with my plan because I just bitched about Grammarly auto billing me without telling me that they were going to do it. So I should get whatever Superhuman plan that they offer now because I just paid$12 a month for a year, which brings me to another thing that pisses me off. everybody's talking about, okay, this plan costs X dollars a month, and then in parentheses, build annually. Fuck you. That is an annual price. Put the annual price. It's not monthly. That's just like people doing this shit with ARR, you know, annualized revenue, you know. It's like, no, no.

53:51No, they take one day where they had a good day, and they say, oh, if I multiply that by 365, that's how much money I'm going to make this year. No, you had one good day, and you're fucking fudging the numbers. I hate when people do this shit, this build annually crap, because then you got to say, OK, I got to multiply that by 12. That's how much my bill is going to be. Fuck you. Put the actual goddamn price in it. I'd say get the FTC on this, but there is no FTC anymore. So nobody's going to bother with this. No. Just one of those stupid things that has snuck its way into our daily lives, like unlimited bandwidth.

54:24Which is limited. And accept this cookie. Yes. Affinity is in the news. they they had we had an announcement on the show a couple weeks back that you know you could go get everything for free right now forever and uh i i'd paid for it before i had i i own affinity photo too i bought it i yeah i own the full i was thrilled it's not a subscription i bought it i bought the i bought the software program because i got sick of adobe subscription and exorbitant costs yes yeah and you can still use that forever forever means until they stop supporting it Exactly. Because, you know, that's probably got a five year shelf life for forever.

55:02So Affinity was bought by Canva not too long ago. And we're like, oh, shit, what are they going to do? Well, now we know. Affinity now has a V3 app to replace the V2 apps that we have and paid for called Canva AI Studio. they put it all into one so it was you know affinity photo affinity designer and affinity affinity publisher i believe those are the three they rolled them up into one now you can't use it without having a canva account which is fucking annoying and also they're they're blocking some of it behind a paywall so it's a freemium subscription now and the stuff that they're putting behind the paywall is the quote-unquote ai stuff which i don't know if you remember affinity was very big about we're not going to put ai in our products because that takes away from you know a lot of the shit that creative people do we didn't want it canva's just like yeah silly rabbit we wrote the check go fuck off uh they're putting in their ai tools and you have to pay for them with a monthly subscription to get things like background removal and you know the the stuff that really is important when it comes to photoshop and shit like that so So, yeah, so Affinity is being fully inshittified now.

56:19So there we go. Right. There you go. Awesome. Speaking of inshittification, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to put ads in its map app as soon as next year. While it won't be as annoying as unskippable YouTube ads, Apple wants to offer better visibility on maps to restaurants and businesses that are willing to pay. When looking for a new restaurant or relative business, you may already be used to seeing ads on Google Maps or Yelp that highlight certain establishments. Gurman said that Apple is planning to lean on AI for better search results and offer a better interface than Google Maps.

56:49The introduction of ads across Apple's iOS ecosystem shouldn't be surprising, since Gurman previously reported Apple's interest back in 2022. On top of that, Apple already offers ad slots within the App Store where developers can pay to appear in more visible positions for user searches. But beyond Maps, Apple could be looking at infusing ads into news, book, podcasts, and other apps to generate more revenue. I'm not particularly bothered by this because I have fond memories of there being ads all over my printed MapQuest directions that littered my car back in the day. I think there were even ads in my AAA, or not AAA, my AAA triptics.

57:27When you would go to AAA and you say, I'm driving from Chicago to Florida, and you'd get that triptych that they would custom print for you in the flipbook. Remember that? Oh, right. Yeah. You get the full flipbook and you would take that with you. I'm pretty sure that there were ads in that, too. But I mean, those things are great. That was when having a AAA membership actually meant something more than a toe. Yeah. Well, Goodreads is in the news this week. Shocker. Goodreads has had a full blown meltdown Friday when a rogue moderator decided to turn the werewolf romance Mate by Allie Hazelwood into a protest against Goodreads censorship in favor of Trump.

58:03The quote unquote volunteer librarian swapped the book's cover with Eric Trump's new memoir, Under Siege, and rewrote the description into a manifesto accusing Goodreads of deleting negative reviews of Trump's book to protect him from criticism. Way to take a stand. Yeah, the vigilante didn't stop there. They changed covers and blurbs for several bestsellers, including Reese Witherspoon's thriller and a Nicholas Sparks novel, before Goodreads noticed and yanked their privileges. Goodreads confirmed the edits were unauthorized and said the users' accounts had been nuked from orbit. Here's the irony.

58:38Under Siege had zero reviews Monday because Goodreads has frozen them to prevent unusual activity. The company insists this helps stop review bombing, but critics point out it mostly seems to shield conservative authors from backlash. In short, one volunteer lost their mind over bias on a platform owned by Amazon, which is like complaining about smoking a fireworks factory. Here's what pisses me off about this. Goodreads, owned by Amazon, has volunteer librarians to actually do the work. Let me remind everybody how much money that they made. Go back to the beginning of the show. Yeah, it's amazing.

59:17It's amazing. It is. It is. Yeah. So Cursor, the Vibe Coding IDE app that I use for whatever I'm using it for this week, they dropped version 2.0 with two big updates for AI-assisted coding. First is Composer, its new Frontier model that's reportedly four times faster than peers and tuned for multi-step low-latency coding. Most tasks finish in under 30 seconds. The update also introduces a multi-agent interface, letting several AI agents work in parallel on separate branches or remote machines. Now, I wanted to check out the new model because I actually do like the cheap model. You know, what they do is basically they buy compute from multiple people, a lot of it from Anthropic, which then raised the price.

1:00:04That was the whole cursor debacle a few months ago. And they're like, oh, we got to change our price because the provider that we bought from turned on the sprinklers because we built our business on somebody else's business and they can do whatever they want. listen to every episode of Grumpy Old Gigs up until now if you want to hear our stance on that. But so I got it. I tried it. But at first, I had finished this week in Shittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow. I finally finished the book. Fantastic book. It was better than I thought it was going to be.

1:00:39It really was. and, you know, he does a really good job all the way through of talking about how things have been in Shittified. But even at the end, he's like, look, you're going to use this term wrong when you take it out into the world. There's a very, very specific way that I describe in Shittification. You're probably going to use it wrong, but go with God because someday the people that are going to start using it because it gets spread far and wider, we'll look it up and they'll get the real definition for it. But I thought that was a cool move. I thought that was a very cool movie. There's no such thing as bad PR.

1:01:12Exactly. Exactly. So which led me to find the Dissin Shitify project, which is run by John Alsop. It's run by Metamucil. Yeah. Yeah, seriously. It's Grandpa and Shitify. Let's Dissin Shitify Grandpa. I sent him an email. I don't even think this is really that much of a project anymore because he had a couple software things on here that he created to disenfranchise, which was a QR code creator and a password generator, two basic things that anybody can whip up. So there was a list of suggested projects, and the top one was a currency converter. So build a currency converter that uses a public API, like Exchange Rate API, to fetch real-time exchange rates, ensure that all conversions are processed client-side to maintain user privacy.

1:01:58I built one with Cursor 2.0. Cool. Eight minutes. It took me eight minutes to do this. And that's just because I had to make a few tweaks to where it saved the credentials, because it will save, you can put in your API key in the browser, and it will use in-browser storage to actually save the credentials. Or I also said you can put it into a config file. So that was my big change. And just a few tweaks, eight minutes to build this thing. So I said, fuck it, put it up on GitHub. So there's a link to the GitHub project in here. Feel free to grab it, use it. It actually works really well. Yeah, and because you could go get a free API key.

1:02:39You do have to use an email address to get it, but you want to go get a throwaway email address to get a free key because it's a free API with 1 ,500, I think, API calls a day. And I also set a time limit for fetching from the API to get the exchange rates, but it's got like 160 currencies in it, and it works really good. So go grab it. That's my foray into dis-and-shitification this week. Enjoy. Wear those thick boots when stomping in the shit. Closing shout outs! Over on Patreon, we've got Charlie. Hello, Charlie. And Charlie says, just wanted to let the O-G-G-O-G, I'm guessing, know how much you are appreciated for reporting news among these dystopian times of tech bros ruining the planet.

1:03:30Very little info out there. They won't stop at anything to keep their wallets lined and force feed us AI that's so power hungry that they have managed to bring back nuclear energy to keep the AI hive alive. Please remain full of truth and humor, as you always have. Thank you very much, Charlie. We do feel very appreciated. Our banking account is not full of truth and humor, but, you know. We're working on it. We're working on it. Thanks to people like you and also Joe. Joe S. with the$100 Patreon subscription. Good for you, Joe. Thank you so much. Yes. And from everybody else who's still subscribing, we've got Anthony, Jeremy, Giovanni, Jerry, Force of Habit, Joe, Michael, Rubin, Andrew, and Sikhan.

1:04:12So thank you all very much for your continued patronage. We've been getting a lot of love from Charlies this week. Over at PayPal, we have another Charlie. Judge, Jonathan, Rocky, who said a 20 % finder's fee for the FB class action lawsuit you alerted me to. Grump on. Thank you. And another Charlie with a hundred bucks. God damn. Thanks, Charlie. Winning. It's like we've got our own chocolate factory or our own sheen. Oh, God. And over at the tip jar, we've got Phil. And thanks for that 404 heads up, Phil. Phil, let me know that GOG.com slash donate was broken. So our website provider had scrubbed all of my redirects at some point.

1:04:58So there was a ton of stuff broken. Our website got in shitified. Yes, seriously. And then when I went to go change the design a little bit, I found out that, oh, wow, their website builder sucks. And it broke everything for a while. So it's kind of back in action. So don't don't blame me. Don't blame me. We're just both ex-web developers. I know. Cobblers, children's shoes, some shit like that. And also from the tip jar, Jennifer and Adam, thank you all so much. And if you would like to help the show keep on keeping on, which we really need you for right now, please, please, please, with sugar on top, go to GOG.show slash donate, which now works, or Patreon.com slash GOG.

1:05:39You can sign up for as little as$3 a month to help keep the show on the air. And you can, if you want to buy the whole year, you can get a discount. Yes, you can. So what's our monthly fee that's paid annually?

1:05:54as much as you want to give god damn it that's what it is it's ten dollars per month annual annualized yes we're gonna annualized it oh we have to check we have to check my let me check my arr and i'll let you know what it is i know what my roi is on this i'll tell you that fa for fuck all um but uh yes and you get the show if you go to patreon and sign up you get the show early high definition ad free and uh yeah that's that's what you get mostly and shitified uh we're gonna try to and shitify it less on uh on patreon maybe yeah and then you get to look forward to and shitified video soon too that's right yeah that's right we're testing right now everybody we got we got to get on that youtube bandwagon because you know 7 000 spam emails a day telling us we're missing out on gazillions by not being on youtube and finally convinced us.

1:06:49And it was funny. One of the things was I watched the Pivot video and I'm like, oh, my God, they don't even give a shit. They just don't even try. And I'm looking at us on video and I'm like, you've got Kara Swisher hair. So I need to shave my head and then I'll have the Galloway hair. And then we're just going to be just. Does that mean I need to put on my pilot sunglasses for our first episode? You absolutely do. And I'm just going to go, well, what do you think, Jason? I just don't know. I just don't know. That'll be the whole episode. And I'll talk about my penis the whole time. And you talk about your dick the whole time.

1:07:16That's it. That's it. And then profit. Profit, profit, profit. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. 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 720. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. It works. And every penny helps keep the show on the air. 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 and other show fans 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 we have not gotten a review in a very long time so come on guys give us a give us a shout please oh and guess what we've got GOG merch snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show stay grumpy