725: The Mistake Machine

25:45Should the law take effect, Instacart will be forced to restructure its platform, restrict shoppers' access to work, disrupt relationships with consumers and retailers, and suffer constitutional injuries with no adequate legal remedy, it cried in the filings. Listen to me, Instacart CEO Chris Rogers. If you cannot figure out a business model that obeys the law, you should not be running a fucking company. By the way, Instacart CEO C.E. Rogers has an estimated net worth of at least$28.6 million. His predecessor, Fij Semo, who chairs the board and is now with OpenAI, is reportedly worth around$72.7 million.

26:25You pronounce it greedy motherfucker, Brian. That's how it's pronounced. So if New York City's minimum pay laws will be so catastrophic to your companies, maybe you can chip in a bit. Help out. Yeah. Hey, come on. Give a little, get a little. Yeah. We haven't heard about Elon's robots in a while. Like two weeks because he's got... Yeah, it's been like a day or so. Yeah. He's got other Reichs to fry right now. So, you know. On Thursday, we started to hear about some Chinese robots. Three Bloomberg reporters based in Beijing reported an unusual governmental announcement from China's Economic Central Planning Department, the National Development and Reform Commission, which has no U.S.

27:04equivalent, not even not under Trump, but definitely wouldn't have this under Trump. The commission has noticed a pattern of dozens upon dozens of Chinese firms pushing out humanoid robots that do essentially nothing and do it in pretty much the same way. Agency spokesperson Li Chao, Bloomberg said, expressed worry that this wave of robots was in danger of steering smart people away from actual valuable research. So basically they looked over at the US, saw what was happening and said, we can't have that. We can't have all these smart people wasting time and money on AI and robots and stupid fucking electric cars.

27:39We could be doing something real. so they're basically putting a lot of things in place to stop people from doing this because i guess it's an easy money grab people just keep buying these robots even though they don't do shit um and so it's just becoming an economic bubble over there and they're worried about that and they don't want brain drain going to these stupid robots that nobody wants and can't do anything you'll be listening yeah so uh you know what he should just go sell his robots over there then because apparently there's a market for it but his robots aren't robots they're just guys in suits that's true yeah oh fun times fun times are you gonna get a robot brian uh no no no i'm not okay just just ask him just i want to find out the only robot i would buy is is one of the ones from craftwork that would be good now speaking of robots let's talk about waymo for a second The robot car.

28:36A Waymo robo-taxi in San Francisco struck a small off-leash dog on Sunday night, prompting distress among the family riding inside and drawing a crowd. Waymo confirmed the incident, saying the vehicle made contact with the dog and that the company is reviewing what happened. The dog's condition is still unknown, according to officials. The passenger who reported the crash on Reddit said that the dog was in the middle of the road when the vehicle drove over it. Well, I'm glad it was in the road and not on the fucking lawn, because that would be a bigger problem for Waymo. Yeah. The Waymo ran over it.

29:06The Waymo crashed through the door like the Kool-Aid man. Oh, yeah. And ran the dog over. They noted that while a distracted human driver might also have hit the dog, an average driver likely would have reacted differently once they felt the impact and heard the family's screams. Yeah. It's horrible. It's horrible. San Francisco Animal Care and Control confirmed it, received a complaint, and Waymo later contacted the family to check in on them. This follows a similar recent case in which another Waymo vehicle killed a well-known neighborhood cat, an incident that fueled public concern about autonomous vehicle safety.

29:40Waymo maintains that its safety record remains strong, pointing to 96 million fully driverless miles and a significantly lower rate of serious injury crashes compared to human drivers. The company has never had a fatal accident, although its vehicles have previously struck pets and occasionally cyclists or pedestrians. The passenger in the latest case said that they still plan to use the service again, though their children may be hesitant for some time because they're fucking scarred because your taxi ran over a dog. So now to be fair to Waymo, the dog was in the road off leash. So we don't know we weren't there.

30:16So, you know, there may be fault on all sides. Like, why the fuck was your dog off leash in the middle of the road? There's blame to go around everywhere on that one. But it's just interesting that Waymo is going to Waymo. I just can't wait for the modern country song to come out of this. Oh, it's coming. Taxi ran over my dog. Yep. Yep. And then drove my wife away. Now here, a Waymo robo taxi in downtown Los Angeles decided to add ride through police standoff to its feature set last week, according to a video blowing up online. Around 340 in the morning, LAPD had first in Broadway locked down for a high risk felony arrest after a stolen vehicle pursuit.

30:56The Waymo car rolled up, saw the police blockade, then cheerfully rounded itself through a nearby unblocked area where other cars were moving, cruising straight through the active scene for about 15 seconds. Did you see the video, Brian? I did. The guy who's on the ground with his hands on his head even looked up and was like, what the fuck? What is happening? See, if he was smart, like the cops were distracted, he should have jumped in the Waymo and said, get me out of here. That's smart. Yep. Yeah, that one was just like a head shaker, a head shaker. There's also another article that I haven't put in here yet, but Waymo is basically also making their cars more aggressive because apparently they are too safe at the moment.

31:36They haven't run over enough dogs. I know. Our dog quota is too low. You have to maybe throw some ferrets in there. So they're going to start driving a little bit more aggressively, like humans do, I guess, which, you know, great. Just what I want. I'm terrified when I see one already when I'm driving with it. I'm like, okay. If I honk at it, is there anybody to listen? No. I don't think those things have honk sensors on them. I could be wrong. Somebody grok that for me and let me know. But they still unnerve me when I see them, Brian. Because when I'm over on the west side, I see them all the time, and I'm driving next to them, and they're cutting lanes in front of me, and I'm like, they're unnerving.

32:14They're just unnerving. Especially when there's no passengers and no driver. It's just going. Yes, it's just going. It's just like it's like a Ghostbusters scene. It's like this is just not right. Yeah. Well, we live in a very connected world these days, Jason, and it's it's been somewhat amusing over the past few years watching things change. At first I was like, OK, fine. My my light bulbs now get you can get downloadable updates. OK, my light bulb gets a downloadable update. That's that's interesting. my toaster can get the downloadable update you had a bed with the eula that probably got downloadable updates to their software packages it got a little bit more worrisome when we started to hear about tesla and their downloadable updates that would fix things that would you know kill people or add features that will you know kill people but one thing i really don't want to have downloadable updates determining my safety?

33:11Airplanes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, an Airbus directive that ordered the immediate software update for 6 ,000 A320 planes has led to flight disruptions around the world. As Reuters notes, that's more than half of the A320 jets in operation. American Airlines said 340 planes out of 480 have the need to be updated, which each plane taking two hours to download and install their software updates. Told CNBC that they expect the overwhelming majority of those planes to be completed through the night, with only a handful remaining. In its announcement, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency said and issued an emergency airworthiness directive after a problem manifested on a jet flu flight back on October 30th.

33:58Now, all right, it's already disturbing that planes are getting downloadable software updates that are crucial. but the reason why Airbus said that an analysis of the event revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls solar flares yeah solar flares can take down these new planes so we had to have a software update actually it wasn't an update the affected planes had to revert to an earlier version of the software oh that sucks because my plane is beta testing fucking software that's messed up that's messed up i will be checking to make sure i'm not flying an a320 plane to los angeles for the holidays well at least it's not an amazon fire plane because while i'm watching a show on my amazon fire tv it will just stop in the middle of it and say we're going to apply the updates now while you're in the middle of your show so it's not gonna it's not gonna update the the plane in the middle of a flight hopefully you will not be able to use any controls for the next 35 minutes 36 minutes.

35:0540 minutes. Lost connection to server starting over. Corrupted download. Please reach high.

35:23Media candy. Well, Brian, we got big news this morning. Netflix has officially announced a definitive agreement to acquire the studio and streaming assets of Warner Brothers Discovery in a massive deal valued at approximately$82.7 billion. I would say yay, because now I won't have to have Discovery subscription anymore or HBO subscription anymore because I've got Netflix already, except Netflix is going to charge extra for all these things, aren't they? Probably. Probably. It'll be$75 a month before the end of 2028, I'm guessing. Yeah. Yeah. So and this is still has to go through regulatory approval.

36:01And Paramount is already, you know, flipping their wigs saying it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. They have more money. Well, the thing is that, you know, this is Larry Ellison's son who owns Paramount now. And which means Larry is friends with Trump, who's friends with the FTC, who's friends with the FCC and everybody, all the F's. So Netflix might get effed out of this deal if they say, no, we're not going to approve it. So we'll see how this plays out. But, you know, I would much rather Netflix own it than Paramount. So fine with me. I wish Paramount would spin out all of the Star Trek IP and sell it to somebody else.

36:46So it wasn't part of Paramount now. And that pains my heart. It's like Paramount now is like when Twitter got bought by Elon. It just it hurts my heart. I used to love Twitter and I used to love Paramount. I mean, I fucking worked there, loved it. And now it's just like, oh, it's just sad Republican hate land. I know, which is Star Trek is so not that brand. Yeah, it would be great. Somebody with deep pockets, some woke company with deep pockets, please buy out Star Trek. Just get it away from Paramount. But you can leave Star Trek Discovery with them just as a fuck you. It's like we want everything except Discovery.

37:22You can keep that one. That's too woke even for us. Speaking of woke, though, Wake Up Dead Man, a Knives Out Mystery, comes out December 16th. I'm very much looking forward to that. That is on the aforementioned Netflix. I'm a huge fan of the Knives Out series. Have you watched them all, Brian? I've seen the first. Watching Glass Onion has been on the list forever, and we haven't done it, so I think the wife and I are going to try to sit down this weekend and watch it so we can then watch the third one. They're solid. They're definitely solid. And Fallout Season 2 comes out December 17th. So it'd be fun to see Walton Goggins without a nose again.

37:58So it's fun. It's a great show. It's a great show. I never played that video game. So it's like, you know, it's video game story, but pretty well done, I think. I think it's pretty well done. I did watch RomCon. Who the fuck is Jason Porter this week on Amazon Prime? It's, you know, one of those fun little, what do you call it? The dating scam guys who go around and basically rip off women. This is a good one. They kind of get back at them. So it's good to watch. I like the ones that have revenge involved. Those are the best ones. Speaking of revenge, I watched Sean Combs' The Reckoning, as apparently did 90 % of the Planet this week on Netflix.

38:36Everybody except me, I think, because I just don't care. Oh, it's fun. It's fun. Because I've seen all of the other Sean Combs' P. Diddy documentaries that paint him as this monster human being, which he is. He is. 50 Cent did a masterful job of just making Puffy look like a loser, a talentless, whiny little bitch loser. It was phenomenal. And I saw the thing this morning that really kind of, it's something that I didn't pay attention to when I was watching it because it was just too fascinating, was what 50 Cent did for the entire soundtrack is use all of Puffy's enemy's music. So even if he has to listen to it, it's all of the people that he had beef with his entire life.

39:19You know, a lot of Tupac, a lot of Biggie. It's great. It's like I don't know who did a better job of ruining the other person. Did 50 do a better job of ruining Puffy or did Kendrick Lamar do a better job of ruining Drake? It's really close. I know a lot of people are also thinking this time of year that they want to talk about Die Hard and get in the beef about Die Hard being a Christmas movie. Must we do this every year? I just don't give a shit. I don't give a shit. Die Hard is a Christmas movie and GIF is a GIF. Fine. End of story. Ho, ho, ho, motherfucker. What more Christmas can you get?

39:53But I posit this when it comes up. If you want to talk about a Christmas action movie, the best Christmas action movie to go watch is The Long Kiss Goodbye. You have to see it. You have to see that movie. Also, if you have - Gina Davis in her prime. Gina Davis in her prime. Samuel Jackson in his prime. The two of them, are just magic, just magic. So do yourself a favor this year and go find The Long Kiss Goodnight and give it a watch. All right. I am still working through the American Revolution. I'm on hour 752 and only got 7 ,543 left to go. No, I'm down to the last episode. Overall, it's good.

40:35I know. It's all I've been watching. Almost every night, I watch at least an hour for like the last two weeks. So it's - Can't get you to watch Stranger Things, but Strange Things, you watch that, yeah. Yep, that's pretty much how I roll. This is not my favorite of the Ken Burns documentaries. There's a little bit too much of like and then they went to this city, and then they went to this city, and then they fought at this city, and then they fought at this city. Okay, got it, got it. I don't need all the subway stops in New York. Understood. But still, you know, it's a good take on it. It's a lot of information, and it's Ken Burns.

41:08So it's always quality. The other thing that I've been watching with my wife is A Man on the Inside Season 2 has come out, and we've worked our way through, I think, four episodes now. It's cute. It's not as fun as the first season because it was such a new concept then, and it was interesting. They're kind of stretching to make a second season out of it, but it's cute. Cups and doodads! Well, Jason, I had to purchase my Apple One subscription finally, So I got that going because I need the fitness and all that sort of stuff. And then I was like, oh, my God, I have all this Apple storage now. I no longer need to have Dropbox.

41:50I don't have to drop$200 a year on Dropbox, which is my least favorite program in existence. I fucking can't stand them. And I had pure joy at uninstalling all of it. It was gone off my machine until I remembered that we store all of our grumpy old geeks assets on Dropbox and you moved it to yours. and I had to reinstall Dropbox to be able to access all the files that we need. So I'm stuck with Dropbox. But at least I'm not paying for it now. Yeah, you can do the freeloader version. I love Dropbox. I use it every day. I can't get rid of it. That's what I share all of my files with my clients. So it works for us.

42:30It just works. iCloud Drive did not work that great for me. I don't think iCloud Drive is not good for client-based stuff. It's good for personal, but not for like really sharing with outside people. Oh, it didn't even work for me for personal. When I would save like Logic projects or Final Cut projects, things like that. And even the Mac's native package format did not work well with iCloud. It was just a mess. It was an absolute mess. So, yeah, no. But I'm glad, Brian, that you no longer have to pay for it. Good for you. I'm just giving you the money that I used to give to Dropbox is now going to Apple.

43:07so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, it's not going to you. And speaking of Apple, I want to say fuck Center Stage. I hate Center Stage so much. That's when you, it basically is the face follow feature built in with the cameras on your laptops that people can never figure out how to turn off. People have it turned on and they're just always moving and shaking and the camera's moving. I'm like, could you please turn that off? Like, I don't know how. So quick, quick tip. When your camera's on on a Mac, there's a little green camera icon at the top of your menu bar. Click on that and click turn off center stage.

43:46Easy enough. I see Brian doing it right now. It's not on because I'm using a third party camera. Yeah, you're using a crappy Logitech camera. Just checking, though. I don't like to upset you. Oh, yeah. Well, some people that aren't upset is basically everybody at Apple, it seems, because longtime design chief Alan Dye is leaving the company after nearly a decade and heading to Meta to run a new design studio. Maybe he'll find the pants. But yeah, this is great news. This is great news for everybody, especially anybody that's used anything of the 26 branch of operating systems, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and MacOS 26.

44:27They all suck. So I do not like any of them. Well, he couldn't move to a company that's better positioned for shitty design than meta. So they'll embrace him with open arms over there. Yeah. The only place with shittier design, as far as I'm concerned, is Google. You know? Google has the worst. They have the worst. All the money in the world, but no design sense whatsoever. It's just a company of engineers. But yeah, apparently everybody in the company is very happy because they never thought it would happen. So you know what I think this is? there's a couple other high-level people that are leaving Apple.

45:03I think all of this news that Tim Cook's going to be heading out soon has got people kind of got the ants in the pants and are trying to figure out where they're going to go before the new people come in so they can leave on their terms. This is a fun one. Google's shiny new agentic IDE, Antigravity, just pulled off the developer equivalent of detonating a basement full of backups. According to a Reddit post and a YouTube screen recording, a developer asked Antigravity to clear a project cache. The AI obliged by helpfully erasing the entire D drive instead of the cache folder, because who doesn't love a little full disk wipe during debugging?

45:36So, yeah, it's just gone. And here's the thing. It apologized. Oopsies. The AI apologized, saying, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that I did that. And all of your backups are gone, too, so I can't restore anything. Whoopsie. So, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I was listening to NPR the other day, and they were talking about this study, and I thought it was really interesting and something that we should definitely talk about on this show. Because who hasn't experienced this? We've been talking about unshittification for a long time. And certainly one of the biggest things that's been unshittified is our cell phone calls, our video calls, all that stuff.

46:17It just seems to get worse and worse, and they never really work great. And now that we've moved to this world post-pandemic, where so much stuff is done online, interviews are done online, parole hearings are done through online video, all this sort of stuff has moved to online video instead of in person. So somebody did a study, somebody was thinking about this and going, hang on a second, I wonder if this is having any effect. And some colleagues at the University of Missouri, Kansas City started to do a study, and then there was another study over at Cornell. And this is really interesting, Jason.

46:50What they found out is that glitchy video makes people not trust you as much. It leads to increased distrust and leads to people thinking, you know, business people are not making their sales. They're losing sales. People that are doing interviews are not getting the jobs if they have shitty video. People who are doing parole hearings, they have shitty video during them, less chance of them getting paroled. All of this is happening because of inshittification of our communication systems. That's pretty fucking shitty. It's pretty shitty. We've got to get you a new camera so people will sign up for the Patreon more.

47:28There you go. We're losing out on Patreon money because I don't have a super expensive camera. Yeah, I'm telling you. It's totally the quality. And apparently there is the only potential remedy that researchers have found so far is if you crack a quick joke right after a technical glitch. So we're good because all we do is joke. That's basically the only thing that you can do that kind of some humor can repair the damage to viewers' trust. So even though it's nothing to do with you, it's just the technology. If your technology is crap, if your calls are crap, if your video is crap, people don't trust you as much.

48:00You know, this is the thing with audio as well. There was a study done a couple of years ago, maybe a decade ago, that bad audio makes you less trustworthy. And for me, that made me a fortune. That made me an absolute fortune because I basically put that for all of my clients. And I'm like, I am going to make you more trustworthy. So please come with me. And it worked. all right i dig it so yeah this is it absolutely makes sense so you know spend the money on a decent camera at least and that'll help mitigate some of the the shitty video stuff but yeah yeah and a better connection go wired screw your wi-fi if you're going to do video try and get that ethernet cable out this best you can there you go pro tip and in good news but too late for me i i'm much too old for this now for this to do any good for me but i would have loved this when i was a kid, a team of designers, ornithologists, and material scientists at Cornell University have successfully developed a method to create ultra-black fabric, described in a recent Nature Communications paper.

49:02It's a technique, it's a two-step process, which takes heavy inspiration from the plumage of magnificent rifle birds. I don't understand the science behind this, but apparently there's a pigment with distinct structures that trap and absorb light. I could have been the gothest goth that's ever gothed if I would have had this damn fabric when i was a kid robert smith nobody would have seen you at the club you'd have just been a floating head going through the club that's it yeah so they've kind of figured out how to put this into a fabric there's a link in the show notes obviously you know you're looking at a picture so you're not seeing it in person but you can tell that this little bit of fabric right in the middle is so motherfucking black it is death rock goth metal swedish black heavy metal none more black they should have just called it spinal tap

49:54The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, with the 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 up trouble and only malware in the buildings. Good to see you, Dave. How was your tea day? I'm sleepy. Oh, I'm hanging in there. I'm hanging in there. Not bad. Can't complain. Good to be back. Wrong show to be on then. I know, right? Actually, yeah, complaining is what we do best.

50:40It's our bread and butter, man. That's true. That's true. I take it back. I'll complain about the lack of complaining.

50:49I just want to kick things off real quick here because I saw this and there was some Star Wars news. Claudia Black is not going to be in the second season of Ahsoka because they wouldn't pay her enough. And that prompted me to say, I didn't know Claudia Black was in season one of Ahsoka. I was like, I don't know who the Nightsister Clothau is in particular, but sure, there can just be a different Nightsister or the same one since it's all makeup anyways. I mean, I know Claudia Black. She was Aronson in Farscape, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. But they must have made her up too much or I just missed it.

51:24I don't know. Well, I mean, it's not like Disney to, you know, not pay a lot of money. They are kind of cash poor right now, I hear. I think you know what you're signing up for if you're a bit player on a Disney series. Yeah, they kind of, they famously, who was it? Alan Dean Foster, Disney, who is the ghost writer of the original Star Wars novel and then wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was the sort of backdoor sequel. It was the backup plan if Star Wars didn't work out for Lucas. Right, right. He was just going to do that one. When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they just sort of decided they didn't need to pay him anymore for the stuff that he had done And then he fought back.

52:11And I think he won. But still, yeah, good old Disney. Yep. So keeping with Star Wars for the moment, I don't know if you guys have seen, there have been rumors circulating of a 50th anniversary re-release of the original Star Wars, the unaltered Star Wars, the Han shot first version of Star Wars. Yes. Oh, my God. Do we feel old version of Star Wars? Speak for yourself. so some clips have been leaked from the alleged 6k scan of the original version of star wars the scan and cleanup of that version and there are some clips on youtube and i gotta say they look great they look great right i i can't wait for people to to just go through this completely and find what they fucked with this time because there's gonna be something something's gonna change we'll get to that with one of our with one of our stories coming up but um i i just star wars continues to amaze me in that it is the gift that keeps on giving that it's we're coming up on 50 years and there's still new star wars stuff to be had from this little movie that you know was hit or miss as to whether it was going to do anything there's still behind the scenes photos that i see that i've never seen before and and and we have things like this.

53:31So I'm just thankful that it was the thing that it was and that it was the thing that I was into and that it's been able to be fun for so much of my life. And we'll see if I make it through my entire life while there's still Star Wars things happening, that's a life we'll live. We'll see if Ryan Gosling changes your mind in the next movie. Well, I mean, yeah, it's a fair point. It's not that there haven't been terrible Star Wars things happen. So you take the good, you take the bad. But I'm just happy that it's still in the culture, in the mind of folks. I will add that the Star Wars pendants will remind us that there never was one original version because the 70 millimeter release had some slightly different audio elements than the 35 millimeter version.

54:26Nerds!

54:30Yeah. We are talking about Star Wars, Brian, on a geek show. So, yeah. I'll add, I still don't have my Home Depot R2-D2. I'm very disappointed in you, Dave. It's not my fault. As far as I know, none have come to the Home Depots near me. All right. Well, if you'd like to drive up to Toronto, I was at Home Depot on Saturday and I was looking at the R2 unit right next to the Darth Vader with the Death Star. that he holds. Oh, you're killing me, Smalls. And why is it not in the background, Brian, of your office? Why are we not seeing it there? Because I just called Star Wars fans nerds. That's why it's not back there.

55:15Yeah, so it's quite possible that the stores near me simply aren't ordering them or something, and they haven't, I've missed them when they come available on the Home Depot website. So here's hoping that before the holidays come, I will have my Home Depot R2D2, which I will immediately begin modifying to make him look better and ultimately, hopefully be fully remote controlled. So there you go. We'll see about that. However, there is a stormtrooper suit on Facebook Marketplace near me. Oh, your holy grail. What? Yeah. Your white whale. Have you scheduled a try-on session? Yes, a fitting. You scheduled a fitting yet?

56:01Like a wedding dress. Yeah. Champagne for everybody. I know. I have not. It's$800, which is not a lot for, I mean, that's a fair price. That's like a dollar per podcast you do. Yeah, per week. yeah uh it comes with a helmet which i don't need thanks to you guys so um i don't know i i i yes i will buy it i have to reach out do it yeah by the time we reconvene you better be wearing that damn thing yeah well the other thing is it doesn't come with the black undergarment that you have see i keep i'm making excuses because there are things that it doesn't include so i'm using them as little roadblocks to keep me from pulling the trigger on it uh but i know ultimately and i guess if i wait long enough someone else will might buy it uh i'm not sure what the demand for usually how marketplaces work yeah i know i know so i don't know i tell you what for christmas we'll buy you the eight dollar black unitard that you can put on underneath your under armor.com right now and i'm just gonna send you something it's it's black it's it's a ultra black one come on let's splurge there you go yeah i need it yeah all right well you've shamed me into it maybe i will take care of that sometime later today and then later have to explain to my wife you spent eight hundred dollars on what but honey they made me that's right all yeah they were they were making fun of me on a podcast i had no choice uh did you guys see this thing about the debacle with the special effects of mad men on hbo yes you can see the tube that some puke comes down yes oh no well it's more than that you can see the crew members oh no i i survived seeing starbucks coffee cups and game of thrones i think i can live through this i i i heard it i haven't seen it yet but uh it sounded funny i'm i kind of like seeing behind the scenes but yeah i included a link i was so convinced it was a documentary until now are you guys just gonna bust my balls this entire episode is that that's him Not me.

58:41I don't care. Is that it? I mean, I'm okay with that. I've probably earned it, but I've just braced myself for it. You know, I couldn't bust your balls if they were armored like stormtroopers. True. That is absolutely true. Logical. Logical. That is true. Busting out some Spock on that got universe creep. Yeah, it's undisputably true. so evidently the folks who sent over the files for the conversion to 4k sent over the wrong files they were the files that were before the digital effects were added but i think what's part of what's interesting about this is that a show like madman used as many digital effects as they did they're just invisible right for painting out crew members or tubes so people throw up and things like that.

59:28So it's fun. There's, I have a link to it, Todd Vaziri's website. He's an ILM guy who does before and afters. And so check it out. Yeah. Well, it's funny that, you know, I actually did that like three weeks ago. I put in the version of the ad read that I, the master, not the edited version. So people were telling me, Hey, you, you, you put in the unedited version of your delete me or our masterclass ad and i'm like oh oh okay well it's one way to get people to pay attention to the ad yeah yeah they're like i kind of like seeing how the sausage is made but you might want to fix that i'm like yeah well fortunately it wasn't a bad one i only had to like retake a few things i wasn't like god i hated this product it was such this shit never worked yeah can you believe they're making us sell this garbage wasn't one of those yeah we do not have we do not have advertisers like that we love all of our of course yes we all do we do too yeah uh i wanted to uh share a youtube channel that i have inexplicably become enamored with it's called spare time repair and it's just this british guy who fixes old CD players.

1:00:47I love this. I absolutely love this. And I have no idea. Well, that's not true. I've been trying to figure out why I am so attracted to this and why I find it so calming and comforting. I miss all these things so much. I miss modular stereo systems. Oh, my God. I miss this. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. We have great nostalgic affection for these types of devices but also i my entire life i've been that person who takes everything apart and puts it back together in hopes that i don't have any leftover parts when i put it back together you know since since i was a kid that was like the first i violated or uh yeah i violated so many warranties by taking things apart and putting them back together but uh for some reason this channel uh i find myself watching it before i go to bed at night and it's just relaxing.

1:01:45Have you tried music, Dave? Well, I don't know. Yes, I have. Well, this is great. My roommate goes to bed and watches Antiques Roadshow when she goes to bed. So this is kind of like a nerds Antiques Roadshow, I guess. Yeah, I think it's just, it's benign distraction, right? Right. your brain just needs help uh unplugging getting off the little um gerbil habitrail spinning wheel hamster wheel yeah hamster wheel thank you that's what i was looking for no problem that's what i'm in my words um yeah so i don't know if anybody else will enjoy it but uh turns out this i just got my uh report from youtube of the things that i watch every year and this was number one on my list.

1:02:37And I'm also in the top 5 % of people who watch this channel. So we're good for each other. Yeah, super duper fan. I'm a repairer. And I think to your point, Brian, part of this is that this was also from an era where it was a combination of mechanical things and software things. And so a lot of the repairs have to do with just replacing belts or grease that got sticky. And so, you know, the drawer for the CD player doesn't open anymore. And there's something very satisfying about watching these mechanical things brought back to life. It's before everything was like a sealed box that you just couldn't mess around with anymore.

1:03:18Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. So have a look. All right. Well, speaking of things that perhaps only I enjoy, but I have a particular Christmas tradition and it's that time of year for the annual listen. I probably listen to this once a day for the next month and then don't think about it again for 11 months. It's William Shatner's dramatic reading of Good King Wenceslas. And I can't stress how much I love this. I wish there was actual video of him doing it. I believe he did this for K-Rock when Kevin and Bean hosted the radio morning show and they would put together an annual Christmas cassette, which I had.

1:03:57And I believe Shatner read this for this. It was alternative rock bands would do Christmas songs, but they got Shatner to do this. I can't find it anywhere. It's not on most streaming media, but of course it's on YouTube. I have the link in the show notes. Pleased to enjoy. It's great that Shatner pretty early on got the memo to not take himself too seriously. Yes. I think he got the memo after the SNL debacle. i think i think that really kind of he i didn't he got pretty pretty slapped down on that one so oh really oh he was banned from conventions for a long time nobody wanted to see him fans were pissed yeah oh they were pissed yeah okay that's funny yeah no he had to he had to he had to make an apology tour big time took a couple years from what i remember so the star trek fans don't have a good sense of humor about themselves, I guess.

1:04:53I guess not. They didn't used to. I think it's changed a lot. One of my coworkers and her father recently got to meet William Shatner on the set of The Enterprise. That's amazing. Yeah, there's something you can go to that Shatner's a part of. He must be a partner in it or something. And I have no idea what they paid. It must have been a lot. But it's kind of like a fan meet and greet sort of thing. And so they had this Enterprise set, and you get to go on the set and meet William Shatner, and it probably cost at least$100. Yeah. But, yeah, I don't know. I'm not trying to think would I do that or not.

1:05:34Probably. We're not going to have too much longer. The dude is in his 90s. I was going to say, when is he going to stop? Yeah, he's got to be okay. He can't need the money that much right now. It's like, dude, you know, run out the clock in luxury or something. Just chill. I think he wants to do it. I think it keeps him active. And you can't charge nothing because everybody else is charging because they still need the money. So Shatner can't be the dick that's just like, come on, do it. Come to me for free. Never mind all those guys that played Vulcans. The thing is, I now have a small group of friends who are convention people.

1:06:11They're, you know. Oh, I'm sorry. Used to be A-list stars. now B-list or C-list stars that are on the convention circuit, and every weekend they're going to a convention, or every other weekend they're doing conventions, they absolutely hate it. It is so much work. It's a lot of work. I mean, it is. From what you see, you don't see like anything. You see somebody sitting at a table waiting for somebody to come. It's usually a lot of work to do those conventions, and it's draining. It is terribly draining. So, you know, and they're like, why is he still doing it? This is why I found out. They're like, yeah, like Nichelle Nichols was on tour forever, you know, up until she died.

1:06:49And then it's because her family made her do it. She didn't even know where she was half the time. They just wanted the money. There's always a difference between have to do and want to do. Shatner, I don't think, has to do it. So that's different. The one Star Trek convention I went to, Brent Spiner was the guest of honor. And the way they had made it work was that there were three Star Wars, or Star Wars, three, sorry, fans. There are three Star Trek conventions going on on the same day on the East Coast. There was like one in Philly, one in Baltimore, and one like in D.C., something like that.

1:07:24And they shuttled him from one to the other throughout the day. And that's how they made it work, I guess, financially. He had to make so much money from that. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Well, good for him. You know, why not? Why not? Okay, I got some final sad news here. Micron just dropped a flaming bag of dog poo on the doorstep of PC builders everywhere by announcing it's killing off its crucial consumer business. Now, I'm sure everybody here on this call and everybody listening at home has at some point bought Crucial RAM. And this just saddens me. They're saying that they just need to sell it to the AI data centers now because it's more lucrative and RAM prices are going through the roof.

1:08:09And it's just, screw you guys. man yeah yeah yeah it does it makes me sad and it's a sort of a double whammy that it's happening because of ai right yeah yeah yeah no it's a good solid brand gpu because of bitcoin right now crucial was a solid brand for many many years so certainly bought a lot of ram from them over the years yeah me too yeah sad to see them go maybe they'll be back one out yeah yeah yeah Yeah, after the AI bubble burst, they might come crawling back on their hands and knees saying, we've got RAM, kids. Well, when the AI bubble burst, we'll be able to buy all the hardware from the data centers for pennies on the dollar.

1:08:54So see what happens there. Yeah, yeah. Remember the dot-com bust and all of the auctions that happened then? Aeron chairs, man. Aeron chairs. That's when I got my first Aeron chair. Everybody gets an Aeron. Yeah, yeah. I remember when Home Grocer went out of business, there were Sun servers that were bigger than me that you could get for like two grand. It was ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got three new Patreon subscribers, Ninja Geek, Karts, and James. Thank you all so much. And we've also got Waylon, Eric, Mario, Matthew, UC Panda, Justin, Nicholas, Arjun, Brian, and Derek.

1:09:40Thank you all so much for your continued support. Thank you. We've got a big week over at PayPal. We've got Judge Jonathan, Nicola, Levy, Florian, Joseph, Byron, who writes, Hey, just wanted to drop a quick note and a few dollary-do's to thank you for the show. I recently searched for a new tech podcast as what we, my regular ones, seem to have somewhat degenerated in the social ramblings of a madman rather than a tech podcast. I really like what you do, not just the tech coverage, but the personality and the reality you bring to it. The first episode I heard, there was a conversation about keeping in touch with friends.

1:10:12It really spoke to me. The tech is good too, but that stuff hit me. I will admit I was confused and wondered if people from your part of America all sound the same because one of you sounded exactly like another podcast I listened to. It was only recently that I found out that it was in fact the same guy what are the chances apparently 100 love the show byron from sydney i'm guessing dave since he hosts 9 000 other podcasts yeah yeah it's just gonna be dave yeah it's gonna be in the old days it might have been me but not anymore yeah it's just dave we also have donations from thomas who gave us 25 bucks goran also 25 james with 120 bucks and Blair Blair Blair Blair the witch I love you so much 300 bucks Blair I think Blair might have just right up there in the pantheon of donations ever I think pretty close yeah so thanks everybody and Elizabeth over at the tip jar dropped a big hundy thank you Elizabeth so much and we've got Graham Patrick Matthew Sarah and Jennifer rounding out the tip jar thank you so much to everybody that donates to the show.

1:11:17And if you want to get on that, you can go to GOG.show slash donate and help us out because it really does help us out. If you want to go also to Patreon.com slash GOG, you can sign up to support the show for as little as$3 a month. You can give as much as you like. We will take anything. And if you pay for the whole year, you can get the show at a discount. And the Patreon subscribers get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. So I'm also, Brian, working on the Apple side of things. It is surprisingly confusing over at Apple Podcasts on how to do the sponsored show with the ad-free version.

1:11:52It is not intuitive. And I'm not a dummy, but I haven't quite figured it out yet. So maybe I'm a bigger dummy than I thought. No, Apple does tend to make those things confusing. I remember for a while back I was involved with publishing through Apple Books. And it was a nightmare to figure out how to get stuff published. Oh, yeah. I had to do that once too. No, no. And the sad thing is nobody bought iBooks. I know. Nobody bought iBooks. It was a failed product anyways, but they made it so hard to get stuff on there. So hard. So hard. Well, we've got some sad news this week. Steve Cropper, the legendary guitarist who helped shape the sound of Memphis, Memphis Soul at Stax Records, has died at 84.

1:12:32Cropper was a core member of Booker T and the MGs and known for classics like Green Onions and Time is Tight. and he co-wrote major R &B hits, including Otis Redding's Doc of the Bay, Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, and Eddie Floyd's Knock on Wood. The guy was amazing. He's been around forever. I mean, people of our age probably knew him from the Blues Brothers, but I recommend, I talked about this documentary when it first came out. It's called Stacks, Soulville USA, or Soulsville USA. Phenomenal documentary. It was, yeah, it was really, really good. It's on HBO, I believe, HBO Max, whatever they're calling it, this week.

1:13:07Go check it out. And yeah, he was a major musician and he will be missed. And some sad news this morning. Cary Tagawa has died at age 75. You will know him as playing. He was Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat, the old one, not the new one. And also in the video games and stuff like that. But he's also in The Last Emperor, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Man in the High Castle. He's been in everything. One of my favorite. Yes, my favorite crappy movie of all time. Big Trouble in Little China. I love that movie. He was just everywhere. And he was 75 when he died. And unfortunately, he died from complications from a stroke, which as a one of those people, it makes me sad and terrified because two weeks, Brian, it'll be four years since I had that fucker.

1:13:53Amazing. So. Amazing. Yeah. Well, you're looking good, man. Oh, thanks. And I want to wish a very happy birthday to friend of the show, John Resnick of the Goo Goo Dolls. It was his birthday yesterday. So, yeah. happy birthday until next time i'm jason de filippo and i'm brian schulmeister thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks get all the links and goodies from today's episode at gog.show slash 725 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 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 and chat with us and other show fans got thoughts feedback cool links hit us up at gog.show slash contact and don't forget to leave a five-star review at gog.show slash review and we'll read it on the show and of course if you haven't checked it out yet do check us out on youtube because we turn this video on for fucking nothing otherwise and guess what we got gog to merch snag your grumpy gear now at shop.gog.show jason was waiting for that with that mug stay grumpy