761: Whatever...

13:58Brian Schulmeister:The accountant that I know, I have one friend that is a certified public accountant and he won't let that shit anywhere near his office. You know, he works with like a couple hundred A-list celebrities. So he's like, I can't afford to be wrong. No, you end up in jail. Yeah, yeah. He can literally go to jail if he screws up. So, or his house in the Grand Caymans. One of the two.

14:32Brian Schulmeister:San Francisco AI startup Together AI is partnering with Saudi company Humane, not to be confused with Humane Pin or whatever the hell that was, to access 250 megawatts of data center capacity in the kingdom. 1.21 gigawatts.

14:48Jason DeFillippo:What the hell is a gigawatt?

14:50Brian Schulmeister:The move offers together AI an alternative as opposition, moratoriums, and cancellations constrain new facilities in the United States. Nearly half of Americans strongly oppose data centers being built nearby. Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as an AI hub while diversifying beyond oil with partnerships involving AWS, XAI, and Microsoft. Analysts warned that regional conflict creates security risks, potentially causing commercial losses, strengthening rivals such as China and undermining critical AI systems.

15:20Jason DeFillippo:Now, I know that region of the world is rather famously low on water. Yes, they are. So I do wonder, are they able to cool these data centers with their oil?

15:33Brian Schulmeister:maybe well maybe they use the oil to get a frigate to go up to the south or down to the south pole and buy some icebergs and shove them up all the way up there collapsed yeah yeah yeah just pick the ones that up that are floating by because they seem to be just falling off of everything nowadays but we're a hell of a fence on killing ourselves aren't we oh so fast so fast so fast we don't have to worry about retirement brian the planet is going to be retired for us yes so i Fine. Go to Saudi Arabia. Be my fucking guest. Be my guest. Because the data center thing just keeps getting better. President Donald Trump is warning communities that resist new data centers they could lose out on economic growth, saying opponents should be prepared to, quote, have fun being poor.

16:18Brian Schulmeister:We already are. Too fucking late, you fucking terrorist. Yes, we are too fucking poor, you asshole. It didn't take a data center. It just took you. Maybe we should put data centers in Iran. I think we should put him on the goddamn fucking White House.

16:33Jason DeFillippo:Let's put him in his stupid ballroom.

16:35Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, just turn the East Wing into a data center. That's it. And we can get the UFC guys to sit there and mop the floor in between bouts. That'd be perfect. Some Trump supporters are criticizing the message and the dispute highlights a broader question. How much should local communities sacrifice to attract the infrastructure behind the AI boom? I'm having discussions with people and I'm seeing discussions about the data center thing going on. And there are some people that are not quite understanding, I think, what the root cause of the data center issue is. People are like, oh my God, these people just don't get it because they're using the cell phones and the computers to coordinate their, you know, their protests against the data center.

17:15Brian Schulmeister:So why can they be anti-data center where they're actually using the tools? Two things. One, the data center backlash is a proxy fight for the rich fucking assholes that are destroying the planet has nothing to do it's all about class war that's exactly what it is you know and if it's not class war it's about the fucking environment because look at elon just bought the company that makes those fucking uh generators gas generators that he shit all over memphis with so now he owns the company to make even more of them to spin up more data centers and be more environmentally irresponsible yeah when there are people out there who know how to build a data center that is environmentally responsible, does not use water because it has a closed loop system.

17:59Brian Schulmeister:But those things are expensive and take time to build. They just want to shit these things out every 15 fucking seconds because we need to make more goddamn kiddie porn. That's what Elon wants.

18:10Jason DeFillippo:And let's not forget that even when Elon puts up his generators to do it and then is told actually that's illegal and you need to take them down, he has over a year to be able to do it. So there's no reason for him not to break the laws and just do this.

18:26Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, there's none. It reminds me, and this is where the consequences and shit come in with him. And I think about these billionaires in the latest two episodes ago in Silo, where the trillionaire guy was talking to the table of people and the girl's like, you know, well, you're going to you know, you have to spend money for all these people to work there. He's like, OK, look, I've got all these people. It's going to cost me$200 ,000 per head for a year. I got 5 ,000 people. Okay, that's a billion dollars. So I can fund that for the next thousand years. You know, it's like you don't understand the vast amounts of money that these people have to not give a fuck about anything.

19:04Jason DeFillippo:Money literally means nothing.

19:06Brian Schulmeister:I know. And it means nothing to them. It means everything to the rest of us. The 99.99999 % of the fucking world that can't afford to buy fucking gas. So, yeah, it's about class war. So stop with your other, like, stupid fucking arguments about, oh, you know, whatever. That's what it's about. It has nothing to do with anything else. Product Rise. Have you ever heard of Product Rise, Brian?

19:30Jason DeFillippo:I have not. I'm sure they're about to piss me off, though.

19:32Brian Schulmeister:Actually, they're going to, well, they are going to piss you off because they've been experimenting with some of Google's AI mode search results. And a Product Rise experiment claims that Google's AI mode recommends products that cost 21.6 % more on average than the same items found through traditional search. Right. There you have it. Want to know why people are pissed off? There you go. The study also found that AI mode listings appear 49 % higher on the page, while the primary seller differed nearly half the time. Only 1.28 % of products overlapped between the two search modes for identical queries on the same day.

20:07Brian Schulmeister:So, shenanigans. It's all about the fucking shenanigans. Google says both modes use the same data source and encourages shoppers to compare retailers, which AKA says do your own research. Fuck you guys.

20:22Jason DeFillippo:Good times. Happy times. Yeah. Let's pivot over to those old self-driving cars. 20 years away still, Jason. That's what I'm saying. 20 years. Test drivers operating AVs before the ready-to-go driver lists are hugely important, and a concerning report shows a consistent trend of injuries to humans in Waymo and Zoox test vehicles. Occupational safety and health administration data shows upwards of 20 injuries reported by Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox, according to a report from TechCrunch. Many of the injuries reported to OSHA involve hard-breaking or quick directional changes on the street, and in the case of Waymo, in Service Depot locations.

21:05Jason DeFillippo:Reported injuries include sprains, back pain, and whiplash. TechCrunch said the injuries have risen significantly as AV companies, Waymo in particular, have made big pushes for service in new cities and subsequently have racked up more test miles. Incidents reported to Ocean were also highest in test vehicles in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, some of the largest markets right now for all AVs. So we're rapidly expanding. We're testing a lot more. we're finding out that these things are actually hurting all the people in them but progress

21:36Brian Schulmeister:progress i i gotta ask you brian when i was a kid everything i knew about whiplash i learned from the brady bunch do you remember the whiplash episode i do not i think i was probably uh the

21:47Jason DeFillippo:couple years difference between us is showing right now okay there was it was a there was a

21:52Brian Schulmeister:it was a thing where a guy had whiplash and they went to court and one of the brady kids figured out that the guy was faking it. So in the middle of the court case, he threw a big book on the ground and it slammed on the ground and the guy turned his neck really fast. And they're like, well, if he had whiplash, he could do that, your honor. Caught him. And he goes, you meddling kids. And he pulled a Scooby-Doo and all that.

22:12Jason DeFillippo:I was about to say, in the back of my mind, I was thinking I probably learned about whiplash from some Scooby-Doo episodes. Also, by the way, quicksand. I was really concerned about quicksand as a child. I was very concerned. Yes. I thought it was everywhere. Yet to see any.

22:27Brian Schulmeister:I've fallen in a couple swamps, but yeah, no quicksand, no quicksand. I have had whiplash before. It sucks. It is no fun. I got rear-ended one time and like, man, I should have gone to the hospital because whiplash hits you three days later when you're lying in bed and you can't get up because your neck is so fucked up. Anyway, by the way, speaking of self-driving and autonomous cars, this episode comes out on Thursday, September 3rd. And so everybody should turn on the news because it's the big reveal day for the Tesla RoboTaxis in Austin. That's right. It's launch day. So stay inside. Whiplash.

23:01Brian Schulmeister:Keep your pets on a leash. Yeah. Well, speaking of Tesla, a new report describes another fatal Tesla crash involving autopilot. According to the account, the vehicle stopped in an active freeway lane and was then rear-ended, killing the driver. Oopsie. The brief report does not provide all details about the crash's location. The vehicle's speed. Well, the speed was zero. because he was stopped. Traffic conditions are why the Tesla stopped. It also does not establish whether autopilot malfunctioned or whether the driver was monitoring the system as required. Tesla's driver assistance technology is not autonomous, but they sell it as it is.

23:35Brian Schulmeister:Yes, what's it called again? Full self-driving. Fully self-driving. Supervised. By the way, Brian, I want to... Here's something that you should never do to a Tesla if you see it in a parking lot, is buy a pack of bubble gum, choose some bubble gum, and then walk around to the side of each Tesla where those cameras are, right between the wheel and the door, and put some bubble gum on them. That's a very bad idea. It'd be even worse if you spray painted them because what I found out doing my research was that disabling those cameras actually disables fully self-driving as well and lane changing and other things because as we've said in the past, Elon is a fucking idiot because he went with camera-based systems instead of, what is it, Brian?

24:19Brian Schulmeister:LiDAR. Exactly. So you can take down a Tesla with a stick of bubble gum. But you shouldn't, is what I'm saying. You should really not do that when you're walking through the Whole Foods parking lot after you've bought your overpriced salad. So there you go. That will give you the shits. Yes, it will. Oh, no more salads for me. Tesla's latest full self-driving software may still struggle around railroad crossings. In a dash cam video, a Tesla running FSD version 14.3.7, which was the latest version, stops near a flashing crossing signal, then accelerates towards the tracks. The driver breaks manually just before a freight train passes.

25:00Brian Schulmeister:Rear camera footage shows the train initially obscured by brush, but visible before the car moves forward. The incident is notable because said FSD 14.3 improved detection of unusual objects in the vehicle's path. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Sorry. So, yeah, I watched the video and, yeah, I mean, he was stopped. And then the thing just said, yeah, I think I'll just keep going right as the train was coming. It's like, oh, shit. In the screen, there's a big, giant railroad. I'm not playing with boobies. There's a big, giant railroad sign blinking. And you can obviously see it.

25:37Brian Schulmeister:So, yeah. Way to go, Tesla. And so do you really want to get in a self-driving Tesla robo-taxi? With no brake pedal, where I'm sure in Austin there are trains somewhere.

25:51Jason DeFillippo:I don't even want to get in a Tesla anymore. Like, thank God that one friend that had one, he got rid of it.

25:56Brian Schulmeister:Oh, well, that's a good friend. Because I still see Teslas with new dealer plates on them every single day. And I'm like, you guys are complicit with a mass murderer. How can you buy one of those?

26:10Jason DeFillippo:I don't know. Not even withstanding that, they're just we keep talking about how these cars screw up all the time. They're not safe.

26:19Brian Schulmeister:They're not safe. They're not safe. And also the tire place down the street, Hank's Tires, great place if you're in the valley. They said that some of their business has gone through the roof because Teslas are built with those low profile tires. Yeah. And they weigh a bajillion pounds because of the battery. So the tires wear out like three times faster than any other car. So they are selling so many tires to Tesla people. They love them. So you're going to spend more on just maintenance. Okay, you don't have to get an oil change, but you got to change your fucking tires every like six months.

26:50Brian Schulmeister:So they're just dumb vehicles. Well, you know what? Hitler had his Hitler had Volkswagen. Elon needs his Tesla. So every, you know, mass murderer in history needs their own automotive company now. I mean, that's that's what it is. I wonder what Lennon would have had, you know? Well, probably donkeys, but yeah. Okay.

27:11Jason DeFillippo:What else we got? The ongoing legal battles surrounding Calci are heating up. The latest development comes from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which overruled Calci's attempt to block Nevada from overseeing its prediction market platform. This decision comes several months after Nevada's gambling regulators and attorney general sued Calci in February saying, you're gambling.

27:34Brian Schulmeister:let me look this up uh uh let me right here in the pages yeah you're gambling yeah and you know

27:40Jason DeFillippo:what we are we're gambling regulators so we want to regulate you because you are gambling yes and then cal she of course said no we're not no we're not we paid all that we paid all that money in

27:54Brian Schulmeister:trump coin we should we should not have what they're in the gambler regular regulators are just like, well, we didn't get a cut, so you're gamblers. Yeah.

28:03Jason DeFillippo:So Nevada has ruled in favor. So yeah, we'll see what happens next. Many other states have also challenged the legality of Calci and other prediction markets operating in their jurisdictions for similar reasons, aka their gambling. Most recently, Connecticut's attorney general accused Calci of an unlicensed sports betting operation and is looking to ban the prediction market in their state. However, another federal court ruled in April that New Jersey doesn't have the authority to enforce regulations on CalShe. Luckily, they're also facing legal actions from Rhode Island, New York, and Arizona.

28:33Jason DeFillippo:At the heart of the debate, of course, is the lack of an ultimate regulatory decision that determines whether it should be states or the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission with a final say on prediction markets, or as we call them, gambling.

28:48Brian Schulmeister:Gambling regulators. Yes, that's it.

28:49Jason DeFillippo:Yes, and gambling regulators already exist in any state that allows gambling, so let the gambling regulators regulate this new gambling site. Yeah.

28:59Brian Schulmeister:And you know why every state that has gambling has regulators? So the states get paid. The only reason the state has gambling is because they want the tax money. So if you're fucking with their tax money, they're going to be pissed. So here's a tip, Calci and all of your other prediction markets. Cut a deal with the states for people who are in your state and they're gambling to send your cut. You got to give the VIG. You got to give the VIG to the state, period. That's right. It's not going to work without it. Well, speaking of, Calci has issued its first ever lifetime ban, barring former Congressman George Santos, after accusing him of manipulating a market tied to his attendance at President Trump's State of the Union address.

29:41Brian Schulmeister:Calci says Santos made large trades between February 2nd and 25th, then posted misleading public statements about whether he would attend, influencing contract prices. The platform says he profited$17 ,839 and has imposed a$71 ,356 penalty. Okay. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission separately fined Santos$35 ,000 over the same trades. Kalshi also temporarily suspended three political candidates for trading contracts related to their own race amid broader concerns about insider trading and manipulation on prediction markets. So here's the thing. How's Kalshi going to collect on that? that's, you know, what, you banned me, and now you want me to pay you?

30:25Brian Schulmeister:Why am I going to pay you? You're just a fucking company. You didn't take me to court. This is just, you know, your internal, you know, fines. What the fuck, what do you expect? Now, the$35 ,000 he has to pay.

30:36Jason DeFillippo:Yes, because that's an actual thing, yes. The rest of it is just delete the email that you get from Kalashie asking for their money.

30:43Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, seriously. Put a little block notice in Gmail, and you're done. You've never heard from them again. Now, here's a fun one, Brian. This one makes me happy. An amended class action lawsuit against Meta expands privacy claims over its AI powered smart glasses to include bystanders who never bought or used the devices. The complaint alleges people were recorded without informed consent when nearby users activated the glasses AI features with some bystanders reportedly minors. It follows an investigation alleging that footage captured by the glasses, including intimate scenes, sex, nudity, and identifying documents, was sent to human contractors in Kenya for review and AI training, which we've talked about before when this started to happen.

31:29Brian Schulmeister:Now, plaintiffs say Metta's claims that the glasses are, quote, designed for privacy and keep users, quote, in control, are misleading, arguing that millions may have had their faces, voices, bodies, junk, and personal information captured and processed without consent. Yes. Meta denies the allegation, saying data may be reviewed to improve products while claiming it filters identifying information and takes privacy safeguards. Meta says it sold more than 7 million pairs in 2025. And yeah. So do they have penis anonymizing software now? to, to, it's ridiculous. Now, the thing about this is it's like with bystanders, you know, out in public, they don't have a case.

32:16Brian Schulmeister:If it's just somebody walking down the street, you don't have a case of privacy when you're out and about. But if you're say like in somebody's home and you're, they're filming you or just at any kind of private gathering and there are kids there, those kids are getting sent to AI or getting sent to meta to train their AI. There's, there's a case there i think definitely there's a serious case yeah anything that fucks with zuckerberg makes me happy it puts that this is this is what gen x people over 55 get their rocks off on mark zuckerberg getting the shit kicked out of them that's it yeah we want all these guys

32:51Jason DeFillippo:taken down and you know to be honest it's uh getting back to the class war thing this this is the big problem everything we talk about on this show it all comes down to these these trillionaires, these insane trillionaires. And I got to tell you, Elon's got to try a little bit harder because there was an article over at Gizmodo that said, while he is the richest man in the world, he's only fourth in a race to bribe the most politicians.

33:16Brian Schulmeister:Come on, Elon. Gauntlet has been thrown down. Come on. I'm number four. I'm number four.

33:23Jason DeFillippo:Elon currently rigs fourth in a new list of the biggest political donors in the lead up to the midterm elections, according to analysis by the New York Times. The New York Times looked at the 20 biggest donors who have forwarded combined$1.2 billion into candidates for federal elections this cycle. And this is why everything fucking sucks. We need to stop this shit. The top five include, it's just a murderer's row, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz with$115 million, George and Alex Soros,$103 million, Jeff Yass,$94 million, Elon Musk in a paltry fourth place at$90 million, and the Republican nonprofit One Nation$76 million, which is an arm of the Senate Leadership Fund.

34:05Jason DeFillippo:All donors in the top five, except for the Soros family, are supporting Republicans. Musk has authorized his super PAC, America PAC, to spend at least$100 million, but other reports have suggested he plans to spend as much as$200 million before the midterms are held in November. I assume that other$100 million will just be to fuck up the voting and cheat.

34:25Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. Like last time. I was reading the Gizmodo article about what they're doing with the postal system and the voting, the mail-in votes. And I had to close my laptop because I was going to throw it against the wall. Yeah. I was getting pissed.

34:42Jason DeFillippo:If all that comes to fruition, I give up. Anyways, the U.S. political system enables a form of legalized bribery, as any regular person would understand the term. However, what we've learned is regular people do not understand terms like full self-driving or Meta's Glass is built for privacy or Kalshi is not gambling. So I don't think people understand shit anymore. Although in a very funny bit of the story, all-in podcaster Jason Kalakanis. I can never say his name.

35:17Brian Schulmeister:Kalakanis. You fucking hung out with him. Come on.

35:19Jason DeFillippo:I know, but I always want to call him Calacanus.

35:22Brian Schulmeister:Because he's an anus. I was going to say, you have to put the emphasis on the anus. Canus. Yes. Calacanus.

35:31Jason DeFillippo:Even framed it in those terms on X writing. It's so uncouth that the affluent donate these dollar amounts and that politicians accept them. He is a friend of Musk, and he continued, bribe a cop and they throw you in jail. Bribe a politician and they make you king. Well, even a stop clock is right twice a day.

35:48Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, but he's still writing it on Elon's Nazi bar. Well, he's still an anus.

36:03Brian Schulmeister:So I have an update on my Seneca RSS reader that I built a while back. I built, I didn't write. I didn't write it myself. I built it. I product designed it. I have multiple computers around my house. I have two laptops, two desktops, and two iPads. And so when we do this show, I need to have news everywhere because I'm just like, depending on what mood I'm in and what I'm thinking, I can get into it and get my reader going. And I originally built the RSS reader. There's a point to this whole conversation here. I built this RSS reader to do the things that I wanted a good RSS reader to do, which is the way I process news for this show.

36:42Brian Schulmeister:I sent you a copy of it. You tried it out. It's an RSS reader, but it has a couple enhancements that most RSS readers don't have, which is get the original article and parse it and give me a reader mode, which every RSS reader should have, by the way. It wasn't that hard to implement. But so this last week, I made it so everything syncs. All of my machines have the same app on it. And at the end, I made the iPad version of it. So it's on my iPad, not my phone, because I don't want any of this shit near my phone. It took about two hours of whacking Codex over the head to make it work. And it's awesome.

37:17Brian Schulmeister:It is awesome. And what I really found is having news access on every device around my house is a depression machine. Because I can look at the news anytime I want and I can make notes for this show. and I'm like, oh my God, I'm taking a dump, making the dog food, hanging out in the yard, doing whatever. I'm like, I can pull up my news and I can crank out a few articles and get this shit done. Now, the funny part about all this is I have like 25 news sources in my feed that I go through religiously. The one that was the most depressing out of all of them is one of yours, Brian, The Atlantic. Yeah, fuck The Atlantic.

38:05Brian Schulmeister:That is a sadness generator. That is a hate machine. There's nothing good about anything those people write because every single headline, I just want to go out and shoot a puppy. It's just like, fuck. But you know what, Jason? They're never wrong. That's the fucking problem. I don't even read the articles. I just see the headlines and go, yeah, fuck.

38:28Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, and I can't believe I pay them to be depressed, but I do. I'm a subscriber.

38:32Brian Schulmeister:Well, we do because I pay for half of that. with you. That's right. So, you know, but yeah, I just, I can't, I'll leave that to you because we've got, I don't think we've ever used an Atlantic article in this show.

38:43Jason DeFillippo:I usually don't. I read their articles and then there's like bits or pieces that I'll go and then I'll search them out because, because Atlantic tends to be long form too and very well written. And we don't want that. We want the beats so you and I can riff on it. So I'll, whatever I've read about in the Atlantic, I'm now informed by their opinion and I go find the article somewhere else, like in Gadget that just gives you the bullet points. You know what I mean?

39:04Brian Schulmeister:Well, there is a button in Seneca that you can press that will summarize everything for different levels of how long you want to be able to talk about it for. But I was thinking, though, you know, because I use we bitch about AI all the time and I, you know, we all do it. But I use it a lot for making things that make my life better as far as software goes. Like I rebuilt all those old websites and I write this software. I've got track a lot that's out there. Version 1.5 is out. Go buy it today. $2.99. Version 2 is going to be$4.99. So get it while it's cheap. Anyway, I build these things using the tokens that I get from my paid subscription because I find that I sleep better at night.

39:46Brian Schulmeister:This comes back to us telling everybody, if you get a class action lawsuit notification in the mail, it is your duty, your obligation to follow through with that to get the money. Because if you don't get it, it goes either back to the company or just to the lawyers. So you have a moral obligation to follow through with a class action lawsuit. And that was your tenant, Brian. I give you full credit for that. Mine is, if you pay for an AI service, you burn every fucking token that they give you. Every single one. Because if you spend$20 on their service, you can get$2 ,000 worth of value out of them, and you can bleed them fucking dry.

40:26Brian Schulmeister:So I don't care what you have that thing doing in the background. And I'm going to tell you right now, there's a tag that you can run that's slash goal, G-O-A-L. And then if you do that, it won't stop until it figures out how to get to that goal, which is half the reason probably Hugging Face got broken into. But hey, that's a story for another day. But anyway, I just love making this software. So I might actually release this one if I tidy it up a bit, because it is actually a really good RSS reader now. I built in so much stuff. This is the RS reader I wanted always. You should absolutely release it and charge a buck or two for it.

41:03Brian Schulmeister:You know, why not? Yeah. I mean, there are power nerds out there that would actually really like this one because it is slim and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. And now it syncs across every device in your house instantly using CloudKit. And it's fucking great. You know, I went to test it. I basically had all my iPads and all my laptops and one desktop. and I start an article for reading later instantly. All of them updated. I'm like, okay, this is fun. I can get behind this. Because I had to get rid of Reader 5 because Reader 5 I was using with Feedly and Feedly, my login was with Google.

41:43Brian Schulmeister:And then when I turned on Enhanced Security in Google, broke Feedly. I can't use Feedly anymore because they don't support Google Enhanced Authentication, which I found most places don't. So if you want to use enhanced authentication through Google, it's amazing how many things stop working. I lost Spark. I lost Reader. So that's why I wrote this is because I couldn't use Reader anymore. Right. So, yeah. Anyway, one last AI bit for me. I've been running the new iOS and iPadOS and MacOS, you know, all the betas. The one thing that I use this fucking watch for, this$1 ,300 Apple Watch Ultra 2, hey hey shithead five minute timer because i make tea and it takes me five minutes for my tea to steep every day 10 times a day hey shithead five minute timer used to be like that used to be instant it would turn on and if it and but it was smart enough to know that it offset the time that the timer started from when the interaction started with your voice you know calling hey shithead yeah you know how long it takes with this new siri 15 seconds that's that's insane 15 fucking seconds for my watch to pick up do the little and then turn on a timer it still gets it kind of from when the the voice interaction started but it's not exact like it used to be they have added so much quote-unquote power to it that it doesn't actually do the the simple things that it used to do and it reminds me of alexa remember when alexa fucked the screw the pooch

43:14Jason DeFillippo:I was just about to get into that because that has been my experience with Alexa. I went all in on Alexa. We have them all throughout the house. I use them to play music. We use them to do video calls with my mom. They have gotten so bad at everything else, at everything else. It just can't answer the basic questions. It screws up getting me the weather. It takes forever to start playing the music that I've asked it to play. it's gotten so bad that i i just i i gotta figure out i'm i'm gonna i want to keep one for the video calls because video calling my mom is is great we still like to do that all the time but i gotta do something else for music around the house which takes us right into our next story we we have followed the the saga of sonos since they shit the bed and destroyed themselves for quite some time i heard actually i saw in the news and i didn't put it in because i thought you would but maybe you haven't had a chance to check it out yet.

44:07Jason DeFillippo:They have a newer version of their app that apparently fixes more problems, but now it's AI enhanced. It hasn't been released yet. I checked it. I

44:14Brian Schulmeister:checked it before the show and it's like until it ships, I don't want to talk about it. Yeah. So we'll talk about that when they get there.

44:19Jason DeFillippo:But my experience with Sonos, I had one at the office when I was working here for a while. I like the speakers. They sounded great. They certainly sound better than my Alexas do, but I hated that app so much. The one thing that I've always liked about the Alexa's is I can launch Spotify from my, from my Mac, from my phone, from whatever, and literally just pick the speakers and start playing from, from Spotify directly without having to go through another app. Well, JBL is basically trying to come into this market. Now they've announced a Cove series of wifi speakers, which are going to focus on home audio.

44:54Jason DeFillippo:So I love JBL. I've, I've always loved JBL speakers. When I was really into music, I had some of their high-end speakers and that's what, that's what I did all my testing on. They do the party speakers, which I'm just charging up now because once we're done with this podcast, I'm going away for a long weekend before school starts for the kid and got the party speaker. So when we're out by the Airbnb pool, we can listen to music. JBL is great. So they've got these speakers. I totally want to check them out. Maybe I'll switch to this for music around the house from now on. And it apparently syncs up.

45:24Jason DeFillippo:You can do it with your TV for surround sound as well. It's kind of all in one solution. Maybe because I've been burned by Sonos and I hate that app. So until I get a chance to check out the JBL One app, I'm not even going to consider it because it's all about the app, right? It's all about the convenience. How many hoops do I have to jump through just to play music? That's what I want to know. Like I want to be able to just send from Spotify or send from Apple Music, just direct. And if you can't do that, I'm out.

45:53Brian Schulmeister:Well, here's the thing. You can actually send to your Sonos speakers now if they're on the network. Yeah, you can actually send to those. I haven't tried it recently, but you get the list now when you do your audio settings, and it will show you all of the different devices. The thing is, I haven't been able to figure out if I can group them or not, because I haven't really tried or cared, because I have the Sonos app. I will give that a shot, though, this week and report back to you. If I can group my Sonos speakers and then play through the other services, because I know when I open Audible and I want to pick the soundbar in my room, I can send to any of my Sonos speakers around the house for any audio app.

46:29Brian Schulmeister:You certainly couldn't the last time I used Sonos. Yes, but yeah, it's a newer thing. But I would try that out because, yeah, I don't use Spotify anymore, but I do use Apple Music, and I have Apple Music tied in through the Sonos app, and it sucks because every time I go to use it, they're like, oh, would you please re-auth? And I'm like, I don't want to fucking re-auth. I just want to use it because I re-auth like three weeks ago. Stop, you know? And the interface sucks because you have to make special playlists that work with Sonos. I just want to open the Apple Music app, find my Rammstein album and hit play and have it fucking tear the house down.

47:03Brian Schulmeister:That's all I want.

47:04Jason DeFillippo:That's all any of us want from any of these things. That's it. So, well, we have some news. Twitter is back, sort of. Sort of. Folks led by Stephen Coates, the former legal counsel for the original Twitter, have just introduced a new version of the social media platform. It's running right now at the URL Twitter.now. I had an awful lot in our show notes about this. And what I realized is I don't give a fuck.

47:27Brian Schulmeister:Good. I'm glad. because you just said it's running right now. No, it's not. I put a graphic in here the other day. It says, we're down. We're on it. Already learning things the hard way. We'll be back as soon as we can. Love you guys. It still has not been up since I put that graphic in the other day.

47:43Jason DeFillippo:They're fail-wailing. Anyways, there's all kinds of lawsuits flying around now because Elon's saying, hey, you can't do that. They're saying, oh, but you let all the things go. Who cares? I don't want to be on the social networks I'm on now, much less a new one. Exactly.

48:02Brian Schulmeister:I'm on the socially responsible social networks and I still fucking hate it.

48:06Jason DeFillippo:So who cares? Yeah, who cares? This is going to go nowhere. Sony has really... Wow, this is good. Sony has told a court that reasonable consumers are fully aware that when they buy a digital game, pressing the button that says buy now, that doesn't mean they own it. I would like to point out again, the button says buy, not rent, not anything else. It says buy. In June, four players sued Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking California law by not making it clear on the PlayStation Store that players are buying licenses to games, not actually owning the games. It almost feels like Calci's getting involved.

48:51Jason DeFillippo:We're fucking with words now. This argument was made because the PlayStation Store uses terms like buy now and confirm purchase. Players are under the impression that they're buying a copy of the game that they then own rather than a license to access the game, which can be revoked by Sony at any point in the future. As reported by Gamefile, Sony recently filed its response to the lawsuit, claiming that customers are not only told your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license, but that reasonable consumers already understand this anyways without having to be told. You might be right about that, Sony.

49:26Jason DeFillippo:As reasonable consumers, we realize we're fucked left, right, and center by everyone these days, so we expect fucking nothing. Fuck you, Sony. Well, after a couple weeks of bitching about Star Trek Strange New Worlds and their genre du jour, wow, that was a great last episode. They just did a normal episode.

49:45Brian Schulmeister:And it was so, so good. It was fun. There was no Strange New World in it, but it was still fun.

49:51Jason DeFillippo:No, but it was still fun. I texted you right after. I was like, finally, that episode was awesome.

49:56Brian Schulmeister:I know, it was right when I was starting it too. And I was just like, and I was tired. And I'm like, maybe I'll just watch this tomorrow. And then you're like, now that's Star Trek. And I'm like, oh, fuck.

50:05Jason DeFillippo:Staying up late. Yeah, so it was great. I loved it. Yeah. Ted Lasso continues to be good. I just watched the latest episode last night. I think it's a great thing. I get, you know, we're not in the early pandemic. We're not all sad and need some wholesome, spun country wisdom to get us through. We're all actually pissed and angry right now, so the mood doesn't connect. But still a good show. It's fantastic. I'm enjoying it. Silo, finally something happened. Finally something went boom. Yes. Jesus. Took a long time to get there. This season's been slow as F, But that was a great last episode, and I think the season finale is going to be a burner, as they say.

50:45Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. And then three more years, and then we'll get the next season. So, yeah, great.

50:50Jason DeFillippo:That's great. Caught up on two movies with the kiddo. We watched Wicked for Good because we had seen the first part of it. And boy, that could have been one movie. This is The Hobbit spread over three movies. They could have condensed this down to one. But you know what? It was really well done. It was a lot of fun. Wait, Wicked was three movies? No, it was two. I'm just The Hobbit. The Hobbit was three. It felt like three. Okay.

51:12Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm like, did I miss one in the middle? I mean, I've seen Wicked at the theater. You know, I've seen it in person. And I know that, okay, yeah, the second act sucks. So I'm like, okay, you can cut out 80 % of the second act and just skip to the end. Yeah. Nowhere near as good as the first one was.

51:29Jason DeFillippo:But still, you know, you got to finish it out. And it was fine. And then of all things, my wife suggested to my son, after he's now caught up on all things Star Wars, he's literally watched all the Star Wars there is to watch except for Andor, you should see Spaceballs. And in the back of my mind, I was like, he's 10. Mel Brooks is probably still a little bit young for Mel Brooks, but what the hell? It's Spaceballs. We're not like diving into Blazing Saddles or anything. Yeah, really? so uh we we watched spaceballs and i've got to say it's it has legs but they're teetering a bit okay just because the effects and the pacing and all of that is so slow but my son lost his fucking mind he was laughing so goddamn hard really yeah there's a few bits that are are pretty adult and uh there's there's some f-bombs and some other stuff that that he hasn't really experienced that i don't think he was he was quite uh well he was thrilled about to be honest yeah so yeah so it was fun to watch it with him and then you know at the end of the day i mean mel brooks writes to 10 year olds like the jokes most of them are for 10 year olds so it's it's all farts and and ball humor and stuff like you know getting kicked in the nuts like it is perfect for a 10 year old so he had a blast yeah i mean think about blazing

52:55Brian Schulmeister:saddles the fart scene around the the campfire is yeah exactly classic classic so i i was scrolling through netflix trying to figure out something to watch to fall asleep to and i saw that they had atlas shrugged one through three on there i remember trying to watch part one a long time ago when it first came out and i was just like okay now take the source material out of the equation you know yeah because i've read atlas shrugged three times i am very familiar i'm very familiar with the source material. This is just one of the worst movies that's ever been made, period. Okay. And then they decided to get more funding and make two more.

53:29Brian Schulmeister:And they're all terrible. So I do not recommend Atlas Shrugged. I don't care how curious you are. If you're, you know, Ayn Randian curious, no, don't. It's fucking terrible. If you want to be curious, just read the fucking book. It's fine. It's a novel. It's fine. It's a way of, form of government and how to live your life in a morality play.

53:52Jason DeFillippo:it's a piece of shit but well i mean you know we all we all go through our ain't right uh phase when we're like 18 19 and we're trying to figure out the world and it sounds really good and then you get older and you go what the fuck that never works that is just we're living it right now this this is the result of that kind of bullshit yeah if you want if you want to watch something good

54:12Brian Schulmeister:go just if you want to go watch fight club seriously just go watch fight club that'll be much better for you.

54:19Jason DeFillippo:And that is basically the journey that you and I have taken. And most Gen Xers, we start with Atlas Shrugged and we end up at Fight Club.

54:27Brian Schulmeister:Yep. I mean, I sat in the theater for three showings of Fight Club the day it opened. That tells you how Gen X I am. I am so Gen X, I shit Fight Club. Anyway, and I actually have, if you scroll down in the notes, I had it in here because I watched it again last night because there's nothing else to watch. I need me some fucking Tyler Durden in my life. But what I do have a lot of in my life right now is the fucking Traders. Traders Australia Season 3 is wrapping up next week. It has been phenomenal. Love it. They have come back from the brink after Season 2, which was the worst season of Traders in history on any continent, which everybody agrees on.

55:08Brian Schulmeister:It was horrible. Traders Ireland Season 2 just started this week. Fantastic. Love to see her back. Traders U.S. New Blood starts in like three weeks. So that's Alan Cumming and the U.S. version with no celebrities. That's fun. Here's the problem. I have so many overlapping seasons of the Traders. And there's 20 contestants per house that are doing these. So we have to watch the coming, like the previously on, just to remember which universe. You think you have problems with universe creep and sci-fi? This is so much fucking worse because you have to remember all of the machinations of who's doing what to who.

55:42Brian Schulmeister:Then after that, oh, my God, The Traders Canada starts like right a week after The Traders U.S. New Blood starts. And then after that, The Traders UK Celebrity Season 2 starts.

55:55Jason DeFillippo:So you'll be happy to note that as I've avoided any of these shows, I really don't like I don't I'm not a big reality TV show fan. I didn't want to get into this. My wife has decided that because she likes the UK Celebrity Season 2 cast so much, we will be watching The Traitors UK Celebrity Season 2.

56:15Brian Schulmeister:Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. I got sucked in. Oh, then you're going to, well, I have them all downloaded in my Plex server so I can shoot you copies of every, I have literally seen every English language version of The Traitors since it started. So I think I probably have a terabyte of The Traitors on a hard drive in my bedroom somewhere. And The Gentleman Season 2 starts tomorrow or today when you're watching this on Netflix. The Gentleman Season 1 was like 17 years ago, I think, based on the Guy Ritchie film of 2012, I believe. Who the fuck knows? Because it has been so goddamn long. This thing has been in the can for like a year.

56:55Brian Schulmeister:And they just never released it because things kept getting pushed, some reshoots or whatever. But the upside is The Gentleman Season 3 has already been greenlit. So, worth watching. I love season one. That's why I'm so pissed off season two took so long. And the movie, go back and watch the movie. It had all right, all right, all right, that guy in it. Can't remember his name right now, but I just remember him.

57:16Jason DeFillippo:McConaughey.

57:17Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Matthew McConaughey. Yeah. So that's all I got. I'm eyeballs deep into the traitors right now. All right. All right, all right.

57:38Brian Schulmeister:Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, featuring cybersecurity's hardest working podcaster, Dave Bittner. When he's not covering the daily cyber beat on the Cyber Wire, he's busting scams with Joe Kerrigan on Hacking Humans, tackling privacy with Ben Yellen on Caveat, Caveat, and proves there's always room for one more cybersecurity podcast with only malware in the building. Hi, Dave. Welcome back. The hardest working man in podcasting. I'll take it. I'll take it. stop me before i podcast again okay turn it off yeah sure thing we're done see you

58:13Jason DeFillippo:so uh we we've obviously spent quite a bit of time talking about uh your digital piano or keyboard uh that you that you worked on and i was uh walking with my son the other day and uh he almost made me fall down uh because he mentioned that perhaps he would like to learn how to play piano. And I was like, oh, well, you've always enjoyed music and been quite musical. So now you're ready to move past the recorder that the school burdened us with last year. That sounds all right to me. Can you get them an accordion? You know, my two cousins had unfortunately had to play accordion. And every Christmas, they would have to do the Christmas songs for us as we younger kids hit our jingle bells.

58:58Jason DeFillippo:And they hated their lives. I do own an accordion, by the way. My dad loved his accordion. He still has it.

59:04Brian Schulmeister:I have one. Yeah, they're great. He even still has his Al Yankovic songbooks. Not Weird Al, but the actual Al Yankovic. He has the songbooks that he learned when he was a kid. He loves it. Yeah, sort of a lost art, I think.

59:22Jason DeFillippo:I think so, yes. I don't know. Not too many accordion. I mean, Weird Al. You've got Weird Al. Yeah, that's about it.

59:30Brian Schulmeister:And Oktoberfest. That's your time to shine is Oktoberfest. It is your time to shine, yes. True. Yeah.

59:36Jason DeFillippo:But as I was reeling with this new information, I did see in the news that Roland has unveiled a new digital piano, the FP40, which has built-in Wi-Fi, primary use cases for teaching apps and related software, which is pretty cool. And it's got built-in speakers, and it's got like kind of everything that you'd need. It's got a teaching app built into it, too, called Pianosphere, which offers guidance, real-time feedback, and a rich library of popular songs and high-quality courses. So I'm now taking a good, strong look at this thing. And it's about$750, not cheap, but thousands, thousands of dollars less than many of the Rollins that I owned in my past.

1:00:17Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

1:00:17Brian Schulmeister:I mean, that's a lot of piano for the money.

1:00:20Jason DeFillippo:It is. It is, if you look into it. Yeah.

1:00:22Brian Schulmeister:If you were closer by, I'd give you this one to give to your son. This is the old Yamaha that's getting swapped out for the Kurzweil that I repaired. Yeah. But it would probably cost a lot to ship to Canada and probably not allowed to ship to Canada anymore. They'd have to tear off the fuck out of that. But yeah, that's pretty cool. It's amazing how much they pack into these things these days and just how good the piano sounds are. Yeah.

1:00:53Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, and it seems that the teaching system is actually really quite good, which is nice because I am a decent keyboard player, but not to the level of like I'll really be able to teach. Also, I'm a horrible teacher. Really? Do you not have the patience to? I know you'll find this shocking, but I do not have the patience. Yeah, it does take a certain personality to be able to teach. So I decided, you know, if you can't be good, teach. I'll just be good. Oh, okay. That's the way it works.

1:01:29Brian Schulmeister:I love this. I saw this piano that they just dropped this past week or so. I included a link in the show notes to my favorite digital piano review channel on YouTube, which is called Miriam Music. Also Canadian, eh? Eh. and so they sort of keep tabs on all the new releases and things and they're impressed with

1:01:52Jason DeFillippo:this one yeah uh so yeah what it's worth you know the drawback of course is am i do i want to drop 750 bucks on something that he might like for about a month and then that's that so i suppose then it gets me back into it and while i vacillated between oh i really want to pick up my guitar playing skills i could actually just go back and work on my piano playing skills and i would use

1:02:15Brian Schulmeister:it so we'll see yeah the other nice thing about yeah the other nice thing about a piano like this is that it plugs right into your digital audio workstation so like if you want more instruments if you if you if he gets into composing or anything like that yeah it just plugs right in and yeah

1:02:31Jason DeFillippo:just becomes your master keyboard yeah right yeah right they work great um i'm reminded are the keys

1:02:38Brian Schulmeister:weighted yes they are yeah oh yeah this is like real that's the other they've got triple sensor

1:02:43Jason DeFillippo:systems so yeah it's it's uh it looks like it's really good so yeah weighted hammer action keys

1:02:49Brian Schulmeister:which mean they're good it's supposed to be a good system yeah uh again for this tier of piano which is a technically a consumer grade piano it's really high quality stuff relative to maybe this is in the realm of prosumer yeah that's fair yeah yeah i think so definitely sure yeah people would take this out on gigs for sure um but this being a Roland piano it reminded me of uh the old Elton John song I don't want to go on with you like that which featured one of the first Roland pianos the Roland RD-1000 uh and we were I was talking about how good the sounds are on this piano I don't know if you guys remember when digital pianos first came out they had a sound that wasn't, wasn't good.

1:03:42Brian Schulmeister:It was, well, it didn't sound like a piano. Yeah, right. It was. Pianish. It was, it was more, yeah. I mean, it was more piano than synthesizer. It wasn't like a, you know, a Moog synthesizer or something like that, but it had a hammer sound and, but this Elton John song is probably, I think, indicative of the sound that we were used to in the 80s, between this and the piano sound that was built into the DX7.

1:04:12Jason DeFillippo:Yes, the DX7, which was on everything.

1:04:16Brian Schulmeister:Right, it was kind of ubiquitous. So I included another link to someone just demoing this old Roland piano. The music video for Elton John's song was often referred to as the greatest commercial Roland ever had because it's heavily featured in it. But it's fun to look at this thing and just see how big and comparatively clunky it was to modern digital pianos and how few sounds it had in it, like, I don't know, eight, something like that. But, yeah, it's fun to look back. I actually had one of these when I was in college. I had a Korg Sampling Grand is what it was called, and it was just a digital piano.

1:04:57Brian Schulmeister:So I was a music student, and so I had one. But I wish I still had it, but I donated it to a school long ago. Get one off of eBay and fix her up. Well, yeah, I've been there, done that. Now that you have the skills. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Now I think I'm good. My cup runneth over when it comes to digital pianos at the moment.

1:05:20Jason DeFillippo:Right. I've still got two cents in my garage, but they're not really good for learning on. I've still got a Yamaha SY85 and a Korg Karma, which had this kind of revolutionary early, they didn't call it AI, but algorithmic settings on it that would do arpeggiations based on what you were playing. It was a lot of fun.

1:05:40Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. I really like Korg keyboards, too.

1:05:42Jason DeFillippo:Me, too.

1:05:43Brian Schulmeister:I thought they were great. Speaking of having too many of a good thing, there's been R2-D2 update. Now I have two.

1:05:55Brian Schulmeister:are you gonna paint are you gonna paint one orange and and so it could be chopper or one of the r2d5 or whatever these are all options on the table uh again my lovely bride got another alert that they were available and i don't know why but i guess she just loves me so much she bought another one and it arrived so it's sitting in the living room unboxed um i guess i could have one at the office and one at home i mean or you could save it for when there's a drought of r2d2s and actually you know make some money on it that was my son's idea put it up on the e of the bay at a highly inflated price yeah he also thought it'd just be good to have it around for spare parts which i I think is a good idea too.

1:06:46Brian Schulmeister:Cause I'm sure it's not, I'm sure this is not a prosumer R2D2. No, they are, they are as as many things these days, they look, they look really good and are as cheaply made as possible. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they turn that planned obsolescence dial all the way up. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, now I have two R2D2s, 10 year old me's head would have exploded. Right.

1:07:14Jason DeFillippo:Absolutely. Two full-size R2-D2s. I would have been happy with two Kenner minifigure R2-D2s back when I was a kid. Right. It's like that scene in Back to the Future. Nobody has two televisions.

1:07:27Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Okay. Well, I only have one of my Arduino kit that came. Oh. It came. It's here. I've opened it. I've looked at it. I have not actually used it yet. because my Jeep's still broken and I'm trying to find a way to make money to fix my Jeep. So I feel really guilty like playing around with an electronics kit right now while my car sits there rotting. But I do want to say that it does not come with the electron microscope that is required to read the tiny little type in the book that comes with it. Because this is obviously made for children because only they have the eyesight that can understand the three-point type that is in that book.

1:08:16Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. I need the old person edition.

1:08:19Jason DeFillippo:I'll tell you one of my tricks before I gave in and finally got my reading glasses that I'm currently wearing is I used to take pictures with my iPhone and then zoom on the picture that I've taken.

1:08:31Brian Schulmeister:You don't even need to take a picture anymore. You can hit magnify now, and it will just use it as a magnifying glass.

1:08:38Jason DeFillippo:I found my hands were not able to hold straight enough, so it was better to take the sharp picture and zoom. Oh, well, see, I stopped drinking a while back, so I don't have to.

1:08:48Brian Schulmeister:Sobriety fixed that problem for me. So it's cool. I can't wait to dive into it. I'm ready. I'm ready. And the fun thing is, as I flip through the manual, since I've taken that YouTube course that I talked about last week, I understand a lot of what's in the book now. I understand all the symbols and what each, you know, things do with the transistors and resistors, all that stuff, you know, that all makes sense now. So when I'm looking at it, I'm like, oh, now I'm really kind of jazzed about it. So if I can get a job and fix the other shit that's wrong with my life, then I'll get to it. But right now it's on hold.

1:09:26Brian Schulmeister:So it is cool. I think you should get one, Dave. I do. Really? Yeah. Everything that I've read from all the people that are, you know, into starting electronics, they're like, it's a great kit to start with. It's just, you know, get that. And then when you're done with all the tests, you still have an Arduino at the end of it that you can use for other stuff, you know? I get. Yeah. And I'm sure there are kits that people have used Arduinos with their R2D2s. I'm sure. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Now you need two kits, one for each R2 unit. Oh, my gosh. Yes, yes. It is interesting. You sort of alluded to this, that the Arduinos are designed for kids.

1:10:08Brian Schulmeister:A lot of the electronics. No, this kit is designed for kids. That's what I mean. Not the Arduino itself. Yeah, yeah. Okay, this particular kit. I had to learn a lot of the electronic stuff, relearn a lot of the electronic stuff in order to pass my ham radio licenses when I did that. So that was a nice review. But there's I go to my local ham radio club has a monthly meeting, which I go to, which is fun.

1:10:36Jason DeFillippo:It's actually over at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, which is a cool place to go.

1:10:42Brian Schulmeister:um but uh we've got you know there's a there's this one youngster i'll call him uh he's uh 52 yeah he's my age i actually i'm the youngster in the ham radio club but um now he's just starting off college uh delightful young man lots of um lots of spicy energy uh in his personality Vim and vigor, piss and vinegar. Vim and vigor, absolutely on the spectrum.

1:11:17Brian Schulmeister:That goes without saying, Dave. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean that observationally without judgment, but it seems – and so part of what happens in these meetings is if someone's been working on a project or something, they'll bring it in and they'll do a little show and tell. Like, oh, look, I built this little Morse code device or I built this new antenna or I built this little receiver or something like that. And his response to everything, no matter what it is that someone brings in to build is, I could have built that with an Arduino.

1:11:51Brian Schulmeister:And sometimes people are like, okay. Great. But the best response, last meeting he said that and the person he said it to said, so could I, but where's the fun in that? so well it's better than to smack it across the face which is what i imagine that he's probably leading up to if he keeps saying that over and over again he's definitely yeah he's on he's on that path everyone's been uh has anyone ever been kicked out of a ham radio club before we will find out right next week on how the ham spins yeah yeah i just said to my friend uh she said to me oh, you took up ham radio, huh? And I said, yeah, because I didn't have enough nerdy hobbies.

1:12:42Brian Schulmeister:So we'll see how long he makes it. Everyone's been having just a ton of patience and understanding for him because, you know, I mean, he's not coming to all this from a bad place and he just can't help himself. It's just how he's wired. So we're all trying to put guardrails on him and not shut him down, I guess is probably the best way to say it. So the last thing I put in here was a website that crossed my path. It's called the Brutalist Report. And I love the subheading, the day's headlines delivered to you without bullshit. And it's basically just like a little RSS, you know, reader. It's just plain text, nothing fancy.

1:13:26Brian Schulmeister:Just you can dial in what you're interested in and it'll just build little lists of things to go. Little list of headlines. Yeah, yeah, just the way it used to be. It's very retro, a couple little things you can dial in about it. And I just find myself attracted to the simplicity of this.

1:13:47Jason DeFillippo:That's very old school. Thought you guys might be too.

1:13:51Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, I'm just trying to see if there's actually an RSS source for it that I can pop into my RSS reader that I built. to pop together. But yeah, there's a lot here for sure. I'm actually just going to take some of these sources and throw them in my other stuff. Right, right. Yeah. But nice and simple.

1:14:10Jason DeFillippo:Yep, definitely bookmarking this. Mm-hmm. All right. Great. More depressing news to read every day. All in one convenient package. Can't get enough. Packaged, yeah. All right, gentlemen.

1:14:24Brian Schulmeister:Let's call it a day.

1:14:26Jason DeFillippo:All right. Yep, yep. Go spend some time with your R2 units.

1:14:29Brian Schulmeister:I will. One on each arm. And finally, to the people who keep this show on the air, over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, DDrew37 and Daniel. And we'd also like to thank Sackis, Anne, Chloe, Peter, Florian, Tom, one of 13 subjunction Jeff, Timment, Matthias, and John. Thank you all so much for your continued support on the Patreon.

1:14:52Jason DeFillippo:Thank you, thank you. And over at PayPal, we got another donation from Online Computers. And 20 bucks from Nathan, who said, I just wanted to say thank you for recommending a gift of time. I got the Audible version to make the misery of sitting in traffic a little bit more bearable. It was a fantastic read slash listen. Since you don't get a cut for the recommendation from our overlord Bezos, I hope the small amount brings a smile to your day, just like your recommendations did to mine. Thank you. P.S. Not written by an LLM.

1:15:20Brian Schulmeister:Awesome. And if you like that, I just got his other book, Time Pebbles, on Audible. So I'll let you know. I'll be reviewing that next week. But the guy did write another book. It's not from the same Gift of Time series season thing. It's a completely different standalone time travel novel, but it's from the same guy. So check it out. Time Pebbles. I'll be reviewing that next week. Over at the tip jar, we've got Adam, Sarah, Matthew and R.A. with the big 40 bucks. Thank you very much. Thank you. And your shirt's doing gangbusters, Jason. Well, one of the shirts is doing gangbusters. My Elon Kills Babies shirt, not so much.

1:15:57Brian Schulmeister:I thought that might be a bit more of a limited audience, yeah. It was a bridge too far. But I sold one, so you know who you are. And I really hope that you keep that because it is a collector's item. It is absolutely a collector's item because you are the only one besides me who actually owns one of those, which makes me sad. So, Daryl in Canada with the family purchase. I like that. Brian and Casey, Sarah from Paris, Shopify shit from Australia, Nick from New York, Paul from Florida, Josh from Knoxville, getting shirts for the whole extended family, Paulo from the Netherlands, Andy from L.A., Dan from Oakland, Michael from New Jersey, and Nicholas from Wisconsin.

1:16:41Brian Schulmeister:And Nicholas, I fixed your address because I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have gotten there where you'd actually sent it. So, yes, it was a very funny address and I'm surprised they actually took it. But thank God there was a zip code. So I fixed that for you. I'm so glad that everybody loves the new shirt. It's great. We've got more shirts coming because maybe we'll just be a fucking shirt company. Screw this podcasting thing because the shirts seem to do better than anything else that we've done so far. But yeah, the new shirts, you've got one coming and I've got two coming. and I think the shirt that I sent you, Brian, that I'm making might have to be a limited release for copyright reasons.

1:17:25Brian Schulmeister:Yes, I think it might be, yes. Yeah, I think we're going to do a limited edition drop on that one. It'll be available for a short amount of time, but it is awesome and I think you're actually going to like it if you are, in fact, a grumpy old geek who was active in, what would that be, the mid-90s, mid to late 90s? Yeah. Yeah, it's very fun. So until next time, oh, wait, wait, wait, what am I doing? If you want to help support the show, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and you can sign up for as little as$3 a month to get the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. So that's one way you can support the show.

1:17:58Brian Schulmeister:You can sign up on YouTube if you want to get the show early and support us there. You can go to GOG.show slash donate to find all the other ways that you can donate to the show. Your money just literally, this is not an ad-supported show because ads don't give us shit. so buy some merch give us some direct donations anything that you got we will take because my jeep still doesn't work Jason needs a new fucking jeep anyway so thank you Arduino's not going to fix it yeah my Arduino is definitely not going to fix it no it is not unless it learns how to 3D print a giant set of tires and a new lift kit that would be awesome if I could do that but it can't So seriously, all of your support is so appreciated and we love you all for it.

1:18:47Brian Schulmeister:So until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

1:18:50Jason DeFillippo: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 761. 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. Dollars help even more. 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 love you for it. swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. That's actually a lot of fun over there. I pop in there more often than any other social network.

1:19:20Jason DeFillippo: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 we've got merch and more merch coming, some of it possibly trademark stomping. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show and stay grumpy. I feel like I should say something smart. You