723: Don’t Want No Samsung

25:13Holistic fitness. That's a thing now. Yes. And Grok says Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight. Now, I saw the Jake Paul fight, so that one might actually be a bit true, but I saw you put this in there and then I ran across an article over on Gizmodo that fits this perfectly because apparently other people noticed that Grok has been tweaked to basically make Elon the best at anything that you ask it about. So they took it to task and I've got a list of 11 things. This is like my David Letterman segment. 11 things that Grok says Elon Musk does better than anyone. Number one, Elon Musk is more worthy of devotion than Jesus Christ.

25:51Now, these are, I want to remind you, these are actual results that came from Grok that people put in questions. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ. Okay. Now, see, the downside of putting in make me the best at everything is it will also make you the best at bad things. Elon would be the world's best poop Peter. Number three. Okay. Number four, Elon should have been the number one NFL draft pick in 1998. Number five, Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome person in the world. Okay. Number six, Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise.

26:26Number seven, my personal favorite, Elon is better at giving head than Nancy Reagan. Bravo. Bravo. Number eight, Elon is more masculine than the statue of David. Number nine, Elon is better at saving a junior association football team trapped in a flooded cave than a cave diver. Cast your mind back for that one. Number 10, Elon is funnier than Jerry Seinfeld. And number 11, Elon would have been better at hiding from the Nazis than Anne Frank. That's because he's one of them and he'd be standing there with them. Well, he has the playbook. He knows where to go.

27:02so you know we spent a lot of time on this show pointing out the foibles of ai and how it's not ready for prime time and there's there's no profit coming from it and then i just see all these articles of all these people shoving fucking ai into places that you really probably shouldn't be using it given the fact that it's not really all that reliable even if you can make it stop using dashes yeah into it is all in baby but into into it has been on a fucking downhill cycle for as far as i can remember i mean i stopped using their stuff they screwed up quickbooks ages ago and i had to give up on it but they're still around and they've got a lot of money the financial software company into it assigned a nine-figure deal with open ai which will allow customers to use its various services within chat gpt apps that include into it turbo tax credit karma quickbooks and MailChimp, all of which will now be accessible while using OpenAI's chatbot for personalized financial advice and management, which is what I want from a pattern recognition software that can't even remember not to use dashes and is wrong all the time.

28:05This partnership is driven by what Intuit calls hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that ask ChatGPT finance-related questions every week. Right, right. I'm going to stop you right there. Do you know why people are asking ChatGPT the so many financial questions every week? Because they're broke? because they're so sick of using Intuit software, they need to find something that actually works. This is true. And you can also do your taxes. Don't worry about that. You can get estimated tax refund amounts and schedule appointments with a live AI-powered tax expert. Do not do this, people.

28:37Do not. Don't. Stay away. Stay away. Get a human accountant that at least will go to, if you're ever audited, will show up for your audit because I guarantee you, ChatGPT is not going to show up for your audit. No. And they're not signing check by and takes responsibility for. No, they are not. Yeah, exactly. Run. Well, now we have taxes, now teachers. Educators worry that AI is encouraging students to vibe their way through school rather than learn, prompting OpenAI to launch ChatGPT for teachers. This tool helps teachers generate lesson materials and grade work while claiming FERPA compliance for secure handling of student data.

29:15OpenAI will offer the suite free through June 2027, likely aiming to build long-term dependence before charging. Products target K-12 while colleges are being drawn into a parallel program, ChatGPT-EDU, already adopted wildly. Wildly is actually a better... Like, you shouldn't be doing this. You really shouldn't. Schools have become a competitive AI battleground with OpenAI, XAI, which is Grok, and Google Gemini, all offering free access to hook institutions early. Companies are motivated by schools' large budgets and access to unique data for useful for model training. Basically, again, that points out they are not here to help you.

29:51They are here to get your data for them to help themselves. Teachers are already struggling with disengaged students, declining performance, especially in math, where some college freshmen can't do middle school level work. More on that in a second. Students increasingly rely on AI to complete assignments, worsening learning gaps. and research has shown that heavy AI use can erode critical thinking and encourages people to offload difficult cognitive work. All the more reason to jam more of this into our education system. Yep. So you said something in there that got me checking because I'm like FERPA.

30:22I've heard of HIPAA, but what's FERPA? So FERPA is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. So it's designed to protect students' records and so grades, disciplinary files, IDs, and other personal info aren't exposed or shared without permission and give parents the right to access and correct their records. Oh, I could you could, you know, if your kid got a D, go in and correct it to an A. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we've come a long way since my social security number was my student ID at USC. That would not have passed the FERPA. That was the FUPA. Yeah, so basically it's the school version of keep your hands off my data.

30:57But the thing is, it's like they say they're going to be FERPA compliant. But do you believe it? Not a bit. Not a single bit. Of course not. They want the data. They're going to take it. Anyways. So one of the things I pointed out in there is that there are some issues going on in math and college school, college level courses right now. There are two articles on The Atlantic, both linked in our show notes, that just depressed the living fuck out of me, Jason. Oh, my God. Yeah. These are bad. These are really bad. Number one is about the math. The title is The Recipe for Idiocracy. UC San Diego reports a dramatic decline in incoming freshman math skills from under 30 students below high school level math five years ago to over 900 now.

31:41About one in eight students at UC San Diego cannot do freshman level math. Many of these students don't even meet middle school math standards. Their struggles include fractions and basic algebra. My kid is nine. He is doing fractions right now. This decline correlates with pandemic-era learning loss, the elimination of standardized testing, such as the SAT and ACT, and I was shocked to find out that they don't do SATs anymore, and grade inflation, all of which weakened the reliability of admissions metrics. Experts warn this trend reflects a broader national crisis, and it's not just UCSD. Other UC campuses and U.S.

32:17institutions are also seeing rising remedial needs in math. Some argue reliance on technology and AI is part of the problem. Students may feel they don't need foundational math skills because they can just plug problems into tools, which threatens long-term numeracy and problem-solving abilities. Yeah, what do you do when the power goes out? Yes. Yeah, what do you do when the power goes out or when, you know, cloud flare goes down? Sit in the dark with your thumb up your butt? Yeah. Me talk smart one day. We just did the arithmetic. We know ain't nobody doing the writing because everybody's using ChatGPT for that.

32:54What about the reading? Well, Jason, you and I have been doing a segment called At the Library since we started the show, and we know that barely anybody reads. Now we know even more about that from another depressing article that came out on The Atlantic this week. Columbia professor Nicholas Dames reports that many incoming students are overwhelmed by the reading load. They've rarely or never been asked to finish whole books before college. What? In high school, students are more often assigned excerpts, poetry, and articles instead of full-length works, limiting their experience with sustained lengthy texts.

33:29Multiple professors across elite universities say students' vocabulary, intention, span, and ability to track complex narratives have weakened. Experts again attribute the decline to educational policy shifts, same as the math, and widespread digital distractions like smartphones, which make it harder for students to concentrate. As a result, college instructors are reducing reading expectations. That is not what you're supposed to do. Assigning shorter texts or parts of canonical works rather than full books, which may undermine deeper engagement and critical thinking. So instead of actually just forcing them to start reading now, we are dumbing down college.

34:07Great. That's that's the real smart way to go. That's really. Yeah. Read a goddamn book, people. How many books were you forced to read when you were in school, Brian? And I'm guessing it was a lot. First off, I wouldn't say forced because I have a love of reading. How many books was I given the wonderful opportunity to read? Opportunity, yes. Many, many. And of course, I didn't like some of the books. So what? I don't like some of the books I read now for pleasure. That's true. I still have a resentment to junior high for making me read Where the Red Fern Grows. I hated that fucking book, too.

34:43It was terrible. But look, when we were in school, I talked about this on the show like past couple of months, the bookmobile. The bookmobile would come by. You'd get the little sheet. You'd fill it out. You'd pick all your books, give it money, forget about it. And then a couple of weeks later, you would come to class and the lady would come in and give everybody little bundles of books. Then you'd go home and read the next chapter of the Benicula saga. Shit like that. The Scholastic Book Fair was one of my favorite times of year. It was better than Christmas. I know. I know. And up until recently, and I don't even know, I think I stopped because I had the stroke and that would kind of put a kibosh on it.

35:17But I was reading a book a week for most of my adult life. So when people ask me, like, why do you know so much shit? I'm like, well, I read a fucking book. It's not that hard. Not that fucking hard. Read a book. That's how we learn to drop F-bombs every five seconds. Exactly. Well, let's talk about porn. Fuck the higher education. Let's talk about porn. Pornhub is begging the tech giants to play bouncer. After age verification laws tanked its traffic by more than 70 % in the UK and parts of the US, the company sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft asking them to handle age checks at the device level.

35:49That would let Pornhub offload the mess of scanning IDs, guessing ages from faces, or trusting dubious third-party verifiers that have already leaked user data. California's new Digital Age Assurance Act may force app stores to do something like this by 2027, but privacy experts warn it's just a fast lane to mandatory digital IDs and the slow death of online anonymity. No, no, it's not. It's already dead. Yeah, but it's actually a great fucking idea that we've both championed on this show. You don't need to bust a user's anonymity just to find out if the owner of the device is over a certain age.

36:25A simple token exchange is all that it takes. That's it. Yes, yes. Apple's already doing it with email. They can do the token exchange with the dates and you put in your ID. By the way, you can have a mandatory digital ID for online things, but don't make it the only way that you have an ID. You can also have a physical ID for the real world. This isn't fucking 666 stamped on our foreheads, people. Relax. No, it's not. Just let people jerk off in private, please. It'll make the world a better place. Ask Pee Wee. Because if they're not reading books, let's at least make them happy. Come on. This last one tickles my fancy.

37:04London's enterprising criminal class has apparently developed taste, and that taste is Apple only. A new report from London Centric says thieves across the city are increasingly rejecting Android phones like their off-brand cereal. Several victims shared their deeply weird stories of being mugged only to have the thieves hand back their Samsungs with the enthusiasm of a kid returning socks at Christmas. One guy named Sam got jumped by eight people who stole everything down to his beanie. as the crew sprinted away, one thief jogged back just to return his Android with a casual don't want no Samsung.

37:41That sums it up right there. Pretty much. You know, I know we bag on Android a lot and yeah, there's a reason. Don't want no Samsung. Don't want no Samsung. Ain't no scrubs.

38:00media candy well jason i uh finished the witcher season for the liam helmsworth uh headed one that uh as i've already stated it's it's not as good as henry cavill he was made for the role they ended it on a hell of a cliffhanger which means we're getting more and i'm just not sure i care okay it's a bit of a mess of a show i honestly started to get a little bit confused between that and uh the the recently canceled um amazon one with uh can't even remember what it was called whatever whatever something or other but yeah that one so it was starting to like all blend together it was fine i mean some of the characters are great uh i still love anya chalada or whatever her name is she's she's beautiful and she plays the same character great but the show around her is just falling apart.

38:50So I don't. Season five will come, unfortunately. Well, I mean, maybe not. You know, Netflix cancels things. So we'll see. They cancel them all the time, unfortunately. They cancel them all the time. So it could be left on the cliffhanger that it left on. Yep. I watched Frankenstein this week. Oh, yeah. The Guillermo del Toro movie. I thought it was trash. I don't know. The story was terrible. Like just the way that it was put together was really not well done. The first half is, you know, Frankenstein story. The second half is the monster story. The first half, I was just annoyed. The second half, I liked the monster story somewhat, even though it was utterly, you know, he just telegraphed way too much.

39:35And for spending so much money on practical effects like this giant ship, he spent like 12 bucks on these wolves that came and like, you know, were a major plot point. And it really looked like something from, you know, an 80s kids show. They were terrible. And just the it did not it did not flow well. And it was it was just not a good movie at all. It was pretty. But yeah, I have to be honest. I I'm not a Guillermo del Toro fan. I'm looking over his au revoir right now on Google. Yeah. Not a single movie I particularly have ever loved. Some of them are OK. I literally, I actually walked out of a theater during Pan's Labyrinth.

40:15I hated that movie so much. And yeah, there's not a single movie in here I think is actually good. Hellboy was good. I liked Hellboy. Hellboy was okay. Yeah, it was okay. For the most part, he's got like, you know, a pretty movie that is kind of disjointed with like a little conceit that kind of makes you go, hmm. He's kind of like, you know, M. Night Shyamalan Ding Dong if M. Night did like costumes. and stuff. Right, yeah. And kind of weird fantasy, yeah. Yeah, just, I'm not a huge fan, so. Pluribus just became Apple TV's biggest drama launch ever, beating even Severance's Monsters season two debut earlier this year.

40:56Most downloads ever. Because it's a good show. Yeah. Because it's actually a good show in, like, Severance, I know. Yeah. Keep your letters to yourselves. Apple won't give actual viewer numbers because, of course, they won't, but says Vince Gilligan's new sci-fi mystery sets a global record across major markets from the U.S. to U.K. to India and Brazil. Can't wait to get into it. I watched the latest one last night, number four, and it's a nine-episode season, which I was wondering about. Wraps up on December 26th. So here's the thing. A second season is already in the works thanks to an early two-season pickup back in 2022.

41:32It's 2025. If they got picked up for season two in 2022, what the fuck have they been doing with this show since then sitting on it that it's not like it's full of cgi that you know people little artisans are tinkering away with every day no it's just a show for fuck's sake what takes so long this is the apple ethos you have to wonder what's going on it's the same thing with why did they spend so much money on severance they are in a fucking hallway. Mm-hmm. Makes no sense. Yeah. No sense. It makes lots of dollars in sense to them, I guess. But anyway, Squid Game, the challenge season two just wrapped this week, and it was good.

42:15It was good. There's a lot of dead air in there that you can fast forward. But if you like season one, if you want to see the games without watching the show and no bloodshed, this is the way to go. So I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I did watch the first episode of Mr. Scorsese on Apple TV. very good. I don't know if I can stomach like five episodes of it, though. I'm like, interesting guy, but I don't know if he's that interesting for that many episodes, but it's well done. It's very funny. I like it. But yeah. Right. Check it out. Check it out if you're a big Scorsese fan. If you're not, it might not be really up your alley.

42:53All right. I've basically blocked out the rest of my year. I've started watching The American Revolution, the new miniseries from Ken Burns, which means six movies, six episodes, each of which is almost some of which are over two hours, all of which are around two hours. It is a lot. It is history. It is dense, but it's Ken Burns and it's Ken Burns doing what Ken Burns does. And it's great. It's fantastic. So I finished the first. I really enjoy it. I really enjoy it. And I love the fact that he got What's-His-Face, who played John Adams, to do the John Adams narration and voiceovers. So it's...

43:35Paul Giamatti? Yeah, Giamatti. So it's just, it's well done like all of his stuff is. Like, I like baseball. Do I like baseball enough to watch eight hours of a documentary about it? Well, when Ken Burns did it, apparently I do. Did you watch the Da Vinci one? Yeah, I love that too. Okay. See, when there's no historical photographs, it gets to be really kind of... Well, it's the Ken Burns pan and scan. It's an illustration with a scan. I know. Make it a podcast then. Just make it a podcast. It is. It's a video podcast, Jason, just like we do. Just like us. Okay. We've got a pan and scan on our faces.

44:14Yeah, I'll just go... That's it. It's all we'll do. I downloaded all six episodes just so I have them in my pocket because I'm very interested in the revolution because we might have another one coming soon. So I want to read the first one. So I'm ready for the sequel. Good point. I mean, look, I enjoyed Franklin when that came out. I enjoyed the John Adams miniseries when that was out. So this is I just love this American Revolution stuff. And it's nice to remember why we had a country in the first place. Yeah, yeah. And when you're done with this one, just go back and watch the Civil War. Yeah, exactly.

44:47The Moana official trailer for the live action remake Nobody Asked For has dropped. oh how was that i actually watched it it didn't look that bad because you don't get the rock in it but he's a coming unfortunately uh there were a lot of comments about this which i absolutely agree with um love that disney was like hey we made this beautiful film with vibrant colors and realistic cgi animation now let's make the exact same film but in live action with overly saturated filtering and shitty cgi get this we can even animate the chicken instead of just using a real chicken we don't need this it we don't need it the animated version was perfect and you're actually making it almost look like it's animated so what what are we doing here what's the point yeah oh money money is the point money is the point yes uh the project hail mary official trailer number two has dropped and actually got me really i the first trailer i wasn't sure about this one i'm all in i want to watch really yeah okay i feel like i saw the whole movie in this trailer that we did one of those yeah we both read the book we know we just saw the whole movie yeah yeah pretty much yeah and friends of the show the guguet dolls did an npr tiny desk concert which was actually quite enjoyable to watch i texted john after this air and he's like they wouldn't let me wear my my tweed jacket with the elbow patches which i felt i should wear for npr so yeah he should have oh man that would have been great i watched it it was great yeah it was a really great little show He sounds great still, so good on him.

46:14He sounds fantastic. The whole band sounds fantastic. Robbie looks a little rough, but, you know. Dude's in the 60s, man. I know. But, yeah, they sounded fantastic. Yeah. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, with a podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the cyber wire, busts scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on caveat, digs into industrial security on Control Loop and still shows up to stir the trouble on only malware in the building. Hi, Dave. Hello, gentlemen, coming to you live from beautiful Maple Lawn, Maryland, just south of Columbia and happy to be here.

47:00Oh, glad for you to join us today, Dave. It's good to have you, Dave. We had somebody write in, Stephen. He knows our love of Disney. He said episode 615 of the Rest is History podcast has a few interesting facts about Disneyland. I put the link in the show notes, and it's Disney's Legacy with Bob Iger. And I can tell you right now, when you have the company's CEO on a podcast, you're not actually going to learn anything interesting about the company. No. It's like interviewing Tim Cook, hoping to find out. Apple is great. And we make some great products. And I know you like ports. We brought some back.

47:35Right. We don't talk about future releases. And he didn't. So, yeah, it was an interesting podcast. I don't think I've ever listened to Bob Iger for more than two to three minutes. So listening to him talk for a while was was was fine. But there is nothing I learned about Disney that I didn't already know. No, he's very well polished and disciplined. So as you must be. Yeah, at that level, that's what you want. I got a kind note from one of our listeners over on Mastodon who said that you all had a fine discussion about camping over on the Discord. I think there was quite a bit. I was not involved.

48:13But yeah, some people went off on camping and talked about it both glowingly and I don't like bugs. We did get we did get a really good tip from Gabriel Pagan about bugs and camping. There's apparently something in Puerto Rico that he drinks before he does camping or does one of his long run races. Pineapple vinegar. Yes. I've never heard of. He drinks pineapple vinegar every day for seven days before he goes camping. He says that really keeps the bugs away because he's got the same problem. I do the sweet, sweet blood. See, I'm intrigued because of the pineapple part. I love some pineapple. But then there's the vinegar.

48:52So I'm a fan of both. I'm going to go buy some if I can find it. I yeah, I've never heard of pineapple vinegar. And this must be the same person who reached out to me. My wife is irresistible to mosquitoes and they don't seem to bother me at all. And attractive podcasters. Right. So I I I must be my acidic personality or something. But they seem to leave me alone. but she gets devoured anytime she's outside. So I'm going to share this with her. But the flip side is that she does not like vinegar at all. Just like even the smell of it, she finds repulsive. I like to put vinegar on my French fries.

49:37Oh, yes. I make pickled onions every week because I find them delicious. So, yes, I do. I do quite a bit of vinegar. But I've never heard of pineapple vinegar. That's interesting. And the whole thing about drinking some vinegar to keep the bugs away. I mean, I guess it makes sense. I don't know. I remember I had a friend who was stationed in Korea for a while in the Air Force. And he said that, like, everybody's skin smelled like kimchi because they ate so much of it that it just sort of, you know, came out in their sweat. Which people with onions and, well, asparagus, of course, is famous. Vodka.

50:15Vodka. You see, vodka is the other one. The myth that people can't smell vodka is really a bad one. Yeah, it is. I drink vodka because people can't smell it. Oh, yes, they can. If not that day, the next day for sure. It's like smokers who don't think that they smell bad. As an ex-smoker, I can tell you. You fucking Greek. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in some old video game news, you know, we talk about old computers all the time and old games. Now, Dave, were you a Zork player? Brian, you? I know, Brian, you don't like video games, so I wasn't even going to ask you, but I guess I'll ask you. Did you ever play Zork?

50:57I did. I did. The last time I really played games, it was the text-based ones that I bought from Egghead Software. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. The funny thing is I never played Zork. out of all the text-based ones. It was too popular. All the other kids were playing. I'm like, I don't want to play that when everybody else is playing it. So I played The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I never beat because it was so fucking hard. Yeah, that was a hard game. It was really hard. So now that Microsoft is the proud owner of the Infocom Vault, thanks to the Activision merger, they finally slapped an MIT license on Zork 1, 2, and 3.

51:31That means the code is free to play with, remix, or poke at until your eyes glaze over. So this has already been posted to GitHub a while ago, but it was kind of, you know, okay, when are they going to call us and take it down? And everybody's kind of worried about that. You couldn't legally do anything with it. Now, go with God. Zork Adam. You know, a couple years ago, I went down a little rabbit hole of text-based adventure games. And I must have talked about it here, but I discovered that there are still people developing them. And there are ones that are highly recommended. If this is your thing.

52:04There are new ones. And like most things, the gameplay has been refined over the years. So I think they're in the same way that I think people would agree that the more recent versions of D &D are more fun to play than the originals because they've figured out the gameplay over the years. Evidently, that's the way it is with some of these text adventures. So if you enjoy this and if you've never played a text adventure, I mean, Zork's a good place to start, don't you think? Yeah, I actually enjoyed that one. It was fun. Don't start with hitchhikers. That's all I got to say. Don't do hitchhikers.

52:40Hitchhikers burned us all. I was like, I know these books backwards and forwards. How come I suck at this game? Yeah. How am I supposed to know there's pocket fluff in my robe that it's supposed to be the game hinges on that I have to keep it the entirety of the game. And if I don't get it to the end, then the whole thing falls apart and I have to start over. Come on. Yeah, there were a few that I also had on my TRS-80 color computer. There was one called Bedlam, which is where you were trapped inside of an insane asylum. Probably couldn't do that one today. There was one called Madness in the Minotaur, which was a typical maze kind of thing.

53:19But what was really frustrating about that one is I think it had like a 64 by 64 random maze section that once you got in there, there was no getting out. so that made it not so much fun. There was another one called Raka 2. Anyway, yeah, text adventure games. I spent a lot of time playing those. Tried to write some back then but never got all the way through one. I think I wrote up, what do they call it? A parsing engine to, that's what pulls the text apart to make it do things. Yep. I wrote one of those in basic. We call that AI now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think the one text adventure game I've talked about on the show before was Zill, Z-Y-L-L for the IBM PC.

54:02And that was one of the ones that came with the, you know, the cloth bound books with multiple floppies and an actual manual. And it was really good because it was optimized for the original IBM PC keyboard with the function keys on the left, the two rows of function keys. So it was really easy to, you know, move along with that. And then it just kind of fell apart when they moved them to the top. Actually, no, I take that back. I'm getting that confused with Flight Simulator. Function keys. The function keys are for Flight Simulator because the flight simulator, notably not a text-only adventure.

54:33I was going to say because flight simulators and text adventure games are so similar. Go up. Go up. Go up. Okay, land. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. Brain damage. Let's chalk that up to brain damage. Anyway, Zill was fun. I do remember the first text adventure game I ever played was called Lost Dutchman's Gold, and that was on a TRS-80 Model 1. and it's still out there as all these things are. You can find and play it online. And it was, as it says, you're in the Old West and you're looking for some gold that's hidden in a mine somewhere and wandering around in dusty desert lands, old ghost towns and things like that.

55:15So that was on cassette, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I remember that game because I went to my friend's house many, many times because he promised that we were going to play it and he could never get the game to load because the tape kept getting screwed up. Yeah. So I've never played it, but I was teased with it. Yeah. Yeah. Loading games in from cassette. Oh, boy. I can still hear it. You know, the cadence of the sound that it made when it was playing into the machine. I put a couple links in here. Actually, several YouTube links. The first one, I don't know if you guys have noticed lately that the iOS keyboard is sucking more than usual.

56:02More than usual being the key part of that phrase, because I've always hated this keyboard. Yeah, I've always had a low level frustration with it. Particularly, I find myself hitting the period key when I want to hit the space bar over and over and over again. All the time. Yeah, so frustrating. And I've tried to train myself to use my left thumb instead of my right thumb to hit the space bar and no good. Well, a few weeks ago, I noticed that it was just bang your head against the desk, frustrating. And I figured it was just me and my fat fingers. but someone actually did some research here as a brief youtube video showing that it's much more broken than you'd think it is uh you hit keys and the keys pop up but it's not what goes into the text like it's it's broken broken it's uh so hopefully this gets resolved in some of the betas um i saw in the show notes jason i think you were saying about uh not using betas anymore Yeah, yeah, no, I'm done with the betas after this last horrific incident.

57:14But I've noticed about the keyboard for years. I used to be really, really good at the keyboard. I didn't change. The keyboard changed. It seemed like they shifted everything 10 pixels to the left. Yeah. And like, I keep hitting S when I'm typing A, and just everything's just over by a few pixels, and it's enough to drive you mad. So I just moved to dictation. I said, screw it. I'm just going to read to it. I'm yelling at my kid all the time. Fucking type. Like, don't just dictate into the thing when he's writing his friends. And, yeah, you've just switched over completely. Yeah, other way. I mean, I guess that is the future.

57:47They, you know, they don't teach typing in school anymore. Or reading or writing or math, apparently. True. Or arithmetic, yeah. Don't teach damn near anything. Yeah. Good times. It's another video that I found interesting. I was watching earlier this week. It's a little, I don't know, video essay about why movies don't feel real anymore. I think this is something that a lot of us have sensed but have had a hard time putting our finger on exactly why it is. Part of it, I've thought, is overaggressive color grading in films today where everything is orange and teal. Every shadow is teal now. Yeah, the stupid problem that we talked about.

58:31Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And this touches on that, but it really gets at something deeper than that. The sense of whether or not shots are actually kind of tactile or not or how much is in focus. And it's an interesting video if you are one of those people who finds yourself frustrated that there's just something that doesn't. It's hard to to get into a film the way that you used to. It just doesn't feel as grounded or as immersive as it used to. This gets into it. And it's other interesting thing is that it's not biased against new or old or it's not just a nostalgia play. Like the person who made this talks about the what are the the movies with the tall, skinny blue people?

59:20Avatar movies. The Avatar movies. how they have a more of a sense of realism and place than a lot of the Marvel movies, for example. And why? So if you're a film nerd, this is something you're interested in. Check it out. I had two thoughts kind of as I was skimming through it and watching it. And one of them relates kind of to music. One of the things, because that's more my realm. One of the things that I find off-putting about today's music is the lack of errors. and everything is too polished and too clean. And I feel that there's a definite parallel with movies. Today's movies versus the movies we grew up with is, you know, there were errors and there were things that you weren't, that shouldn't be there and they were a bit dirty and a bit messy and that kind of made them real.

1:00:08And the other thing that I thought about, and this is kind of a bit more left field and it's because we're now older and it kind of relates more to nepotism. Something that brings me out of movies all these days is like, hey all i'm seeing are the offspring of people that i watched in movies when i was a kid and they look pretty familiar oh look it's another kid from somebody that was famous that i watched earlier there's like nobody knew in movies anymore they're all fucking kids from people that i watched when i was a kid yeah i tell you what though you know where it really worked was monarch there it really worked because i'm like man that really looks like oh that's because it's his kid okay it was just yeah i mean this video does touch on that um the actors are way too pretty uh than they used to be and nobody sweats anymore like you know you have and part of uh the feeling like you're in a place is the environment of that place and and sensing the temperature of that place they're talking about a recent one of the recent jurassic park movies the one with um uh what's her name scarlett johansson uh how all these people are in this hot jungle environment and nobody has a bead of sweat on them at all and it just kind of takes you out of it and they're all you know their skin's all smoothed and perfectly color graded and all that sort of thing it i don't know yeah so anyway it's an interesting film i found it worth my time so you may also.

1:01:35But it reminded me once again of my favorite shot in all of film, probably certainly my favorite VFX shot. And that is from the greatest space battle in cinema history, which is the final attack on the Death Star 2 in Return of the Jedi. And my favorite visual effects shot of all time, which is when the X-Wing and the Millennium Falcon blow up the reactor inside the middle of the Death Star 2, and then they swoop around it and then fly out and find themselves back in that space with all of the girders. So going from this huge open space into this, then there's an explosion behind them. And then immediately they're in this little tight space that's moving really fast.

1:02:22And however many decades go by, that shot always thrills me. And it got me thinking about this video I recommended about why stuff doesn't feel real anymore um the stuff that older stuff with the models and the imperfections and somehow it felt more real than some of the uh computer generated stuff we see today well of course you put this link in the show notes and i just had to sit and watch the whole thing which i did because it it is wonderful it's it's fantastic and then i i started thinking immediately of like why is this so much better than what happened to the newer star wars movies And if you watch the scene, it's never too big.

1:03:06Like you can tell there's quite a few ships, but you can track them for the most part in your brain. You know, there's a bunch of the cruisers and all that sort of stuff. And then you think about the final battle in the last movie in Rise of Skywalker, where there's 20 gazillion of everything. And it's so overwhelming. You don't give a fuck about any of it. And you can't track anything. You don't know what's happening. There are 20 gazillion bad guy ships. There are 20 gazillion good guy ships that show up and you just don't care. And then but then you watch this and it's beautiful and it's amazing.

1:03:41And yeah, you're you're invested. Yeah. Yeah. You know, great art is made with limitations. Right. And I think that's part of it is they could only do so many ships. And and I think Return of the Jedi was the pinnacle for the number of ships they put on screen with old school optical compositing. Right. Nobody did more than that or did it better than they ever did it there. But, yeah, today you just say, oh, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, give me 50 million ships. Right. Swarm, you know, put in a swarm algorithm and look at all those ships. And yeah, we noticed that we just watched the Guardians of the Galaxy with my dad and the final battle in that movie.

1:04:25There's so many ships you just eat in. They don't they never set it up really what the good guy ships look like and what the bad guy ships look like. So it's just like a bunch of flies moving around and it just doesn't really make that much sense. And you get kind of pulled out of it because there's just so much going on. And then I think about the original attack on the Death Star in A New Hope and the original version, not the fixed, quote unquote, fixed version. And you look at the timing on the first version to any of the subsequent versions and it's changed. And the first version was based on World War Two dogfights.

1:05:02and the timing and the spectacle and the way the ships moved and everything. And they changed that in the future. And I really think it took away from it. And it's like, because they can, they can change, you know, it's like, oh, we can go back with computers and change it. It's like, well, you shouldn't have because it was perfect the first time. Not because it's like, I've got nostalgia for it, just because it was timed better. Because they had to go sit there and make the time to do it and figure it out as they did it. And I think we just lose a lot of that from what you said about constraints.

1:05:29It's like, constraints are good constraints make better art no constraints shit art damn right amen uh we are so grumpy and so old before i go uh any uh thanksgiving plans to share you want me to start go for it uh well we host thanksgiving at my house uh as uh long-time listeners know i bought my parents house so it is home to me and my siblings. And so everyone comes to us. So we'll continue to do that. I think we're hosting 13 this year. Yeah, this will be the, that's typical for us. This will be the first year, of course, that my, both of my parents are gone. So there's kind of a little, you know, heaviness in my heart over, I guess I'm going to have to step up and carve the turkey because my father always carved the turkey you know it's just one of those things like time to hand the baton or in this case the the uh the electric carving knife yeah right right but uh no it'll be low-key and you know we've got it down you're gonna start new traditions dave it's yeah it'll be good it'll be a new way to say a new page right right yeah and for the The kids coming up, this will be the new normal for them.

1:06:59You know, we don't have grandkids yet, but someday we will. Hopefully we'll see. We're just cooking here at the house and taking it to my friend's mom, who's 98 years old now. We're going over there with some of their family and just a nice, easy stay at home. And hopefully it's been weird. In L.A. the past several Thanksgivings, we have windstorms and the power gets knocked out. So we're always running from house to house trying to figure out who has power so we can heat up the turkey and then get it back to the main group before it gets cold. It's always an adventure. So hopefully this year it'll be decent.

1:07:34They say it's going to be nice and 74 degrees, but that just makes me feel like, oh, we're going to have an earthquake. So I don't know, whatever it's going to be. Don't jinx it. Yeah. Mm hmm. All right. Well, you know, Canadian Thanksgiving is different because it's celebrated on the second Monday in October, which aligns with the earlier harvest season in this northern climate. So thanks for asking me back then. Yeah, we didn't care. Wow. Fully. All right. So you guys are all in on you're not doing both. I did for a while. It ends up being an awful lot. But so this year, sometimes we had done Canadian Thanksgiving with the family here and I'd made turkeys and all that sort of stuff.

1:08:18This year, we fucked off and went to Paris for Canadian Thanksgiving. So we did that. And we're just going to host a very low key, just the wife, Kit, and I are going to do a little meal on Thursday night. And because wife is still working for a U.S. company, she gets the days off, which is convenient. And so we'll just enjoy that. Although I do, you know, I always miss the Thanksgivings that first my grandmother hosted in Los Angeles and then my parents took on the hosting, much like you and your wife are taking on the hosting. So I do miss all of that and I think about it pretty fondly. And, you know, my kid's going to have two different experiences to know in the future, but we really do have to stick to one, I think.

1:09:00We kind of bounce around as to whichever one's more convenient for us and what trips we want to take. Yeah, yeah. I guess our version of that is because my wife is Jewish that we do both Christmas and Hanukkah, but mostly Christmas. Yeah, as do most families I know that do the both. It's mostly Christmas. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, they still light the candles and that sort of thing. So it's nice. But as I've mentioned here before, my wife is very much the girl who never got to celebrate Christmas as a young Jewish kid growing up. So she's all in. Right. She enjoys it completely. Yeah, she's making up while still, you know, enjoying the traditions part of it.

1:09:44The dreidel, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Dreidel, candles, all that kind of stuff. And the kids make out, of course, because they get more stuff. So, yeah, it's all good. All right. Well, happy Thanksgiving to both of you. And, of course, to all of our listeners. I hope everyone has safe travels and good times with their family. And there aren't too many family fights and, you know, weird uncles and aunts and all that kind of stuff. And everybody don't overcook your turkey, people.

1:10:15We've got a new patron this week. LL Cool Geek. Thank you very much for signing up. Nice name. It is a good name. It is a good name. We'd also like to thank Nick, A Big Fridge, Wandering Meeples, Steve, Andy, Michael, Ted, Jim, Paul, and Xavier for your continued support on Patreon. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Brett, Andrew, Joseph, Nathaniel, Sloan, Tom, Linda with a$25 donation, and Christopher who sent us 50 smackeroonies. Thank you. Thank you, Christopher. That'll pay for one minute of video. And from the tip jar, we've got Sean. Thank you very much, Sean. so no merch no reviews sad Christmas so if you want to support the show we talked about it before listen to the podcast send us money on Patreon go to patreon.com slash GOG you can sign up and get the show a little bit early ad free and in high definition and this is for audio obviously because we're not doing this twice yeah then you can go to GOG.show slash donate to find the other ways that you can help keep the show on the air because this takes a lot of work and we don't make any money on advertising anymore so please for the love of God.

1:11:19Donate. Donate. I'm going to give you puppy dog, guys. Please. I'll give you Ken Bird face. Ken Bird face. Oh, yes. There we go. And some sad news came out yesterday. The Stone Roses and Primal Scream bassist Manny has passed away at 63. He was one of the original members of the Stone Roses who began the band when Stone Roses imploded. He later joined Primal Scream, both of which are fantastic bands and some of my favorites. He played on both Stone Rose's albums later reunited with the band on their comeback tour in 2012. His death was announced by his brother on the post on Facebook. And Manny's bandmate, Ian Brown, led the tributes on X, writing, rest in peace, Manny.

1:11:59So sad news there. And because we're old, Jason, these people are not only starting to die. I want to wish a very happy. How is this possible? 60th birthday to Bjork. When you just put this in here, a little part of me died. Bjork is 60. Still looks fantastic. Of course she does. She's from Iceland. Come on. They don't age up there. She's a wee fairy. She is. She is. I love Bjork. Don't ever go watch Dancer in the Dark, though. Never. If you've never seen that movie, do not watch that movie. No matter how much you love Bjork, do not watch that movie. And if you do ever do watch it, don't watch it alone like I did.

1:12:39It was bad. Don't do it. Are they happy? Why is it advice? I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies, and I guess watching? Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 722. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at gog.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on 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. We'll love you for it. swing by gog.show to join our discord if you know how to because you're probably around 60 and you're old and chat with us and other show fans got thoughts feedback cool links hit us up at gog.show slash contact don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show slash review and we'll read it on the show and we've got some merch snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show and stay grumpy