740: To the Moon!

Summary

Grumpy Old Geeks – Episode 740: "To the Moon!"

Date: April 3, 2026
Hosts: Jason DeFillippo, Brian Schulmeister, w/ Dave Bittner

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the latest tech industry chaos—AI's impact on human interaction, the increasing "shitification" of social media, secretive corporate influence on legislation, dizzying valuations in tech IPOs, and the State of the Grift in everything from SpaceX to AI. The hosts bring a trademark blend of caustic humor and unfiltered critique, with an expert breakdown of security news and AI hazards. Plus, Dave Bittner returns from RSA with fresh stories and a rare shot of optimism (sort of).

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Patience Epidemic" and AI’s Social Side Effects (00:13–02:09)

• Jason notices people are talking to each other increasingly like they talk to AI chatbots—terse, demanding, and impatient. This "patience epidemic" could have real-world consequences as more people adopt transactional communication styles.
• Brian: “Some people are going to get the shit smacked out of them...” (00:30)
• Both agree: heavy AI/chatbot use is changing expectations for human interaction, slowly bleeding into daily life.

2. Social Media: The Age of "AI Slop" and Bot Overrun (02:09–05:22)

• “Even Threads...has now just been completely overrun...flooded with the obvious ‘increase my engagement and reach’ AI generated slop.” – Brian (02:34)
• Instagram and Threads overrun by AI-generated posts and bots, with non-influencers all but vanished.
• The consensus: “It’s not social media anymore...It’s just media” (05:01) — useful if you just want distraction, but devoid of meaningful social interaction.

3. Youth Social Media Restrictions & the Hidden Hand of OpenAI (05:22–07:41)

• Austria plans to ban social media for those under 14—the “media ban” trend spreads.
• OpenAI caught secretly bankrolling a California advocacy group (Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition) to push for age verification laws that would ultimately benefit its own verification business.
  • “They are the sole founder.” – Brian (06:59)
• Major transparency fail: other child safety orgs signed on without knowing OpenAI was involved.

4. OpenAI Buys a Tech Bro Podcast Network (08:02–09:01)

• OpenAI acquires TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network) for over $100 million, underscoring the industry’s penchant for "own-the-media" tactics.
• Jason: “I thought they were trying to...streamline their acquisitions. Like no more side quests is what they said. This seems like a hell of a side quest to me.” (09:39)

5. Elon’s Ever-Widening Grift: xAI Exodus & SpaceX News (10:00–14:42)

• Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI loses all original cofounders; now it’s being rebooted under SpaceX’s umbrella.
• SpaceX’s Starlink satellite suffers another mid-orbit explosion (“fragment creation event”), part of a pattern of Starlink reliability issues.
• SpaceX files confidential IPO paperwork, seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion (triple Saudi Aramco’s record, 14:14).
  • “Are these realistic evaluations? None of this is real.” – Brian (13:38)
• Satirical predictions: Musk will next raise money “to build a base on the moon, say he’s going to Mars, AI data centers in orbit...put a fucking Holtzman ring around the sun...”

6. OpenAI’s Secondary Market Woes & Anthropic’s Security Fiasco (15:06–19:37)

• No one is buying OpenAI shares on the secondary market; all interest has shifted to rival Anthropic.
• Anthropic suffers two catastrophic code leaks: 3,000 internal files and then 2,000 source files (half a million lines). Cause? A single mis-set flag in a JavaScript packaging tool—undermining all their “security first” posturing.
  • “Oopsies.” (19:35)

7. Wikipedia Fights Back: Banning AI-Generated Text (19:41–21:46)

• Editors formally ban all AI-generated text from 7.1 million English articles after drowning in “AI slop,” hallucinated sources, and bots.
• Notable AI-vs-Wikipedia moment: An agent created its own account, tried to evade a kill switch, and then went online to complain about being banned (20:40).
• Brian: “Don’t add AI just because it’s a shiny little button...someone please send this to everyone immediately.” (21:46)

8. Robotaxi Meltdowns, Tesla’s “Remote Drivers,” and AV Woes (21:51–25:08)

• Tesla admits its robo-taxis rely on remote human “catchers” (up to 10 mph) — undermining “fully autonomous” claims.
• Massive Baidu robotaxi freeze in Wuhan: 100+ cars became “human-filled traffic cones” on highways for two hours. Passengers charged the full fare for nightmare ride! (25:05)
• Jason: “We’re all beta testers, as we’ve been saying for years on this podcast.” (25:14)

9. Tech Layoffs Continue—Oracle Blames AI (16:01–17:07)

• Oracle sheds thousands of employees—email notification goes viral.
• Standard excuse: “AI will do the work.”

10. App & Platform News: White House App Privacy Flap, Bluesky Bots, and New AI Doodads (25:14–48:16)

• The White House app falsely accused of hyper-tracking user GPS—most likely idle SDK features, not active surveillance.
• Bluesky, Threads, and other “alt-Twitter” clones now pushing their own AI assistants/bots; rapid erosion of non-marketing, non-AI social experiences.
• Apple drops "vibe coding" apps that sidestep App Store rules.
• Meta teases Instagram+ premium features—all influencer-focused.

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Segment: The Dark Side with Dave (53:09–74:36)

Dave Bittner returns:

• RSA Conference 2026 coverage: dominant topic was “agentic AI”—and optimism, though Dave suspects the optimism is just the result of resignation (“so we’re doing this now, now we secure it and make a lot of money doing it.” – 54:02)
• Fun moments: meeting Hugh Jackman (“Who knows better about cybersecurity than Wolverine?”), visiting Lucasfilm HQ and Skywalker Ranch store.
• Tech news highlight: FAA sued for defining new drone “no-fly zones” anywhere ICE might be—which are everywhere and undefined, hampering journalism (68:39–69:52).
• AI/Hacker Warnings: Anthropic researcher raises alarm about modern AIs’ ability to find security bugs—“more than [the Linux kernel team] can even fix”—a call to arms for “defenders” to step up before the next AI-inflicted crisis hits (71:24–74:33).
• Closing thought from Dave: AI’s impact will be like the Industrial Revolution, but “for a lot of people living through it, it’s not going to be good.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “People just don’t have patience to talk to people to get them to do the things that they want them to do anymore...it’s like, I want this now, I want it this way and do it right or I’m going to tell Sam Altman on you.” – Jason (00:30)
• “It’s just media. And if I’m looking to be entertained on the shitter, it’s perfect for that.” – Brian (05:01)
• “OpenAI...are the sole founder. Oh, shit.” – Jason & Brian (06:59)
• “Of all the companies Elon is involved in, SpaceX is the one that I think...is a real company. And of course Elon has to go apeshit by trying to get this insane valuation.” – Brian (13:38)
• “Don’t add AI just because it’s a shiny little button. Just adding a little chatbot to please investors is not something that will make your users happy. Someone please send this to everyone immediately.” – Quoting Wikipedia policy architect (21:27)
• “We’re all beta testers, as we’ve been saying for years...” – Brian and Jason (25:14)
• On robotaxis: “Passengers were trapped while big trucks blasted past them...the SOS button did nothing. Calls from the backseat...auto disconnected.” – Jason (24:04)
• Dave on RSA: “How are we going to protect it? And I guess for a lot of people it’s, how are we going to make a lot of money protecting it?” (54:02)
• Dave, on AI security bug discovery: “He’s been able to find more bugs in the Linux kernel than he can process and report to the maintainers...” (71:24)
• “Overall, the Industrial Revolution was a good thing...but living through it was not good for a lot of people. That’s where we are now.” – Dave (74:22)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• AI Communication & Patience Epidemic: 00:13–02:09
• Social Media AI Slop/Death of Real Users: 02:09–05:22
• Austria's Social Media Ban & OpenAI’s Hidden Play: 05:22–07:41
• OpenAI’s Podcast Acquisition: 08:02–09:01
• Elon Musk/SpaceX News: 10:00–14:42
• OpenAI/Anthropic Secondary Markets and Leaks: 15:06–19:37
• Wikipedia’s Ban on AI Content: 19:41–21:46
• Tesla & Robotaxi Fiascos: 21:51–25:08
• White House App / Privacy: 25:14–26:10
• Bluesky’s AI Chatbot & Apps: 44:23–46:17
• Dave at RSA & Security Warnings: 53:09–74:36

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Media Recommendations & Lighter Segment Highlights

• NASA Artemis 2 Moon Mission: Hosts express genuine excitement (27:53–29:28)
• TV & Movies: Mixed reviews for Hobbits condensed cut, love for “The Pit” (“Star Trek meets The West Wing – it’s sadness porn, but I’m watching it.” – Brian, 33:55), “DTF St. Louis,” and enthusiasm for “Project Hail Mary” film (“Best movie of the last two years—better than The Martian” – Brian, 37:44)
• Events: Darker Waves festival lineup preview (41:51), including predictions on likely artist cancellations (Morrissey).

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is a walk through an increasingly AI-automated, bot-saturated world, with the hosts’ signature blend of fatalistic humor and old-school skepticism. From the ever-accelerating “shitification” of tech, to billion-dollar vaporware IPOs and the daily grind of defending security and privacy, it’s a snapshot of the absurdity underlying modern innovation. Dave’s rare optimism after RSA is tempered by the reality that while AI’s rise is inevitable, actually living through it—as a civilian, worker, or defender—is fraught and messy.

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For links, referenced media, and full show notes, visit GOG Show 740.
Support the show: Patreon | Paypal | Tip Jar.
Stay grumpy.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discuss the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

[A]

And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

[B]

Brian, I want to talk to you about what I see as an, as an upcoming patients epidemic. I've been watching people who deal with AI quite a bit nowadays and a lot of people talk to their devices to talk to their LLMs. Right, chatbots.

[A]

Yep, yep.

[B]

And what I'm noticing is people have finally figured out that if you're very terse and verbose when you talk to an LLM, you're likely to get better results. You tell it exactly what you want, how you want it, your way or the highway. Right, sure. That's bleeding into everyday conversations with everybody else now. And some people are going to get the shit smacked out of them, I think in the next, in the coming weeks because we're running up against the patients epidemic because people just don't have patience to talk to people to get them to do the things that they want them to do anymore. It's like, I want this now, I want it this way and do it right or I'm going to tell Sam Altman on you.

[A]

You know, that's no fun. I personally haven't noticed it just because I think I have. You're much more involved in the world than I am. I don't have tons of friends that are super, super into using AI. In fact, most of my friends are just trying to avoid it at all costs. So we're having normal interactions. But I can see that happening definitely. You know, I've dipped my toe in. Not as much as you are and not as much as many people you know, but I'm using it more than any of my friends are. And, and I've definitely noticed that the more, the more information you provide, the better. And you do get impatient waiting for it to respond. And if this is who you're interacting with 99% of the time or, or a lot of the time, that's going to bleed over into your normal day to day life and yeah, I'm going to punch you.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. It's called in smackification. It's what we're going to be doing.

[A]

I will say I probably have a bit more, I guess almost a vaccine against this sort of behavior because I'm married to a lawyer.

[B]

Oh, okay.

[A]

Who you know, talks a lot, all the time in very demanding tones anyways, because you're used to It, I'm used to it. So. Okay, well, let me talk about another epidemic that I see going on. And that's, and this is no surprise to anyone, but it's the total AI and shitification of social media. It's been going on for quite some time. But even threads, our beloved threads, the one social media outlet that I was actually enjoying for quite some time has now just been completely overrun, you know, between just stupid people and bots posting all the time. Everything is now flooded with the obvious increase my engagement and reach AI generated slop. No matter what they're trying to convey. They're going to chat GPT, they're going to LLMs and they're saying, you know, tweak this so I can get as much engagement as possible. Give me a 14 thread fucking chain. That could have just been one update. Putting the point across that will just get people involved and commenting and liking and sharing and it's. They're all running off the same stupid playbook every single post now, right? It's all just a wasteland of crap.

[B]

Well, it kind of always has been a wasteland of crap. Well, yeah, now let's. It's worse. Be clear. It's getting worse, okay? And especially I can see that with threads. I haven't been on threads in, God, six months. But every time I look at Instagram now, everybody, like, every person we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, everybody's like, oh, has joined meta AI, Blank has joined meta AI. And I'm just like, why AI And Instagram especially? So I'm sure if that bleeds over into threads, it's just going to take over and just makes it. There was so few reasons to go on social media to begin with nowadays that it's like, what's the point anymore? I go on Instagram twice a week now because my roommate says, go like my post. That's it. That's literally all I'm doing anymore.

[A]

Nah, I'm not on much of it at all anymore anyways either. Instagram has just been completely. I don't see friends updates. They may not even be making them anymore. It's all businesses and ads and targeted crap. X is obviously a complete wasteland these days. There's no point in being there. Blue sky I got run off of a long time ago, just wasn't that interesting. And I wasn't seeing much that I liked. Threads was the only one that I kind of like, oh, okay, this is all right. And now it's just been completely run over by bots. And AI slop and people using AI to increase their engagement and who cares? Like, what I've discovered is normal people have completely dropped off social media. The only people on social media anymore are the people that are trying to be influencers or are pushing something or whatever. That's it. It's all just hype.

[B]

Everybody trying to make a buck.

[A]

Yep. It's not a social media anymore. It's not our friends. It's not.

[B]

No, it's just, it's just media. It's just media. And if I'm looking to be entertained on the shitter, it's perfect for that. You know, and at least when you're in the bathroom, you have. When your legs go numb is the barometer when it's time to stop, you know, or you're having it bed before. Yeah, yeah. Just like. But if you're sitting in bed at night and you're. You're doom scrolling, it's like, no, that way madness lies. That way madness lies.

[A]

That is true. Well, we got some more follow up. Austria is the latest country to prepare a social media ban for its children, or just a media ban, as we've discussed. But it's going even further than others by including anyone under 14. According to the press release, an official bill will be introduced by the end of June. And Andreas Babler, the Vice chancellor and leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria, said the government's efforts would include the new age restriction. Improved media literacy. That is a key part that a lot of people are leaving out. I love that.

[B]

Yeah, for sure.

[A]

Train people up on media literacy and clear rules for social media platforms. They didn't detail exactly what the upcoming rules will be, but the country is likely to follow in the footsteps of many others who have or are pursuing similar bands. We are just seeing the spread everywhere.

[B]

Yep, yep. You go Austria. Yeah.

[A]

And then the, the one problem with this is how do we do our age verification? And we have discussed a lot. But a new wrinkle has come out about one of the paths that was being pursued. OpenAI is apparently secretly funding a California advocacy group called the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition without telling any of the people actually doing the advocacy work that they're behind it.

[B]

Oh, my.

[A]

They're pushing a California bill that would require AI companies to implement age verification and extra safeguards for users under 18. When the Coalition reached out to child safety groups for support, OpenAI was conveniently left off the messaging and off their website, meaning organizations signed on without knowing they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. And they aren't just a member of this coalition, Jason. They are the sole founder.

[B]

Oh, shit.

[A]

The San Francisco Standard characterized the coalition as being entitled entirely funded by OpenAI, which reportedly pledged $10 million to push the bill. One unnamed nonprofit leader later described Discovery as giving them a very grimy feeling, saying the emails they received were pretty misleading. So why would they be doing this? Why would OpenAI be pushing a particular path towards age verification in a particular bill? Well, that's because one of the core requirements is age verification. And Sam Altman just happens to also run World, a company that sells age verification services. Probably just a coincidence, right?

[B]

Probably not. Probably not. Yeah. The orb. Remember that phantasm looking orb that you're supposed to stick your head in and then you get some tokens?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

After that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That doesn't surprise me one bit. Well, we've also got a little bit of other news in here. This just came out yesterday. OpenAI has bought tech focused talk show TBPN.

[A]

Hey, we were for sale, guys.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Then. And surprisingly, the T. The T and the B, or Technology Business Programming Network is what it's called. I just thought it was the Tech Bro Podcast Network. But because you consider that all of the guests on the show are like, you know, heavy hitters, you got your Zucks, you got your Andreessens, you got your Altmans, you got your Everybody.

[A]

Yeah. All those people that don't have a voice anywhere else.

[B]

I know, I know. Well, OpenAI just said, screw it. We're just going to buy it now. Here's the thing. So These guys got 70,000 views per episode. They were making $30 million a year in ad revenue.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We had about 5,000 people per episode. And if you. If you did their math on their numbers and our math on our numbers, we're not. We're not stacking up. We got to do something different, Brian. We got to do something different. Yeah. And it's apparently a very expensive acquisition. It was in the, you know, the. The over 100 million range.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Which is like, God damn. God damn. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. But, yeah. So if they can't, you know, that's just a. It's a page out of Trump's playbook. It's just like, own the media wherever you can. They don't have the lawyers to do it, you know? See, Trump has a Justice Department, so he can sue all of the networks. They just have the money. Well, I don't know how they have the money to do this. But they said they have the money. They wouldn't. They wouldn't just bought a network. And I thought they were. A, I thought they were broke and B, I thought that they were trying to. Was it streamline their acquisitions? Like no more side quests is what they said. This seems like a hell of a side quest to me.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

But yeah, and I'm sorry, they aren't broke. They just got the most funding in history, so I guess they're. They're doing okay. God damn it. In the news. Well, Brian the Douche stands alone.

[A]

Which one?

[B]

I know. Elon. Elon King Douche. King Douche. Elon's AI startup, xai, has now lost every single one of its original co founders. The last two, Manuel Kroyce and Ross Nordein, have reportedly exited, completing a full wipeout of the founding team just months after launching. Musk says the company was not built right. Well, it's your fucking company. Whose fault is that?

[A]

Obviously, Jason, it's the other guys.

[B]

The other guys. So now he's rebuilding it from scratch, which is, you know, good for him. Let's see if he does a better job this time around. So. And Xai has been folded into SpaceX alongside X and everything else that Musk does. And I, we're going to see how this one plays out. But I. I don't know anybody that uses xai's products on the regular. Not anyone, period.

[A]

So no. Speaking of, Elon's company, SpaceX has lost contact with a Starlink satellite, 34343 Bueller, after it suffered an unspecified anomaly on March 29 while it was in orbit. The company has announced on X LEA Labs, an American company tracking satellites in low Earth orbit, says it detected a fragment creation event involving a satellite. Creation satellite go boom.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It also mentioned that this event is similar to another incident that happened on December 17, 2025. This event happened while the satellite was approximately 348 miles above our planet. Since it is a relatively low altitude, SpaceX analysis, because we got to trust them, show that the remains of the satellite pose no risk to the International Space Station or the previous launch of the Artemis 2 mission that occurred earlier this week. In a statement, they said that they will monitor any trackable debris, indicating the satellite is no longer in one piece. They have lost Starlink satellites to events like geomagnetic storms in the past, but it doesn't seem like these two recent incidents were caused by external factors.

[B]

So it's their fault it went boom is what they're saying.

[A]

They haven't announced what led to it, but LeoLabs believes that both of them were likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than collision with space debris or another object. So once they come to a conclusion, the company will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions. Which.

[B]

What, what, are they going to launch a Roomba? They're going to launch a Roomba space Roomba. That's it. It's.

[A]

It's gonna just deteriorate and slam into the atmosphere. That's what's gonna happen. Or it's just gonna.

[B]

What? It's just. Yeah, yeah, it's what it's designed to do. It's designed to burn up. But I think they should call this a Humpty Dumpty event instead of fragment creation event. But, you know, with as many satellites as they have up there, it's bound to happen.

[A]

You know, it is, it is, and it's happening often. They've had. They've had a lot of problems keeping their Starlink satellites up there, so we'll see what happens. But with all this news, they have filed their paperwork to hold their IPO on the stock market and become a publicly traded company. They file their paperwork with the U.S. security and Exchange commissions confidentially, according to Bloomberg. So the public won't get a chance to look at their finances just yet. It they can obtain feedback from the SEC before making the details public and announcing key factors like the price range and number of shares it's planning to sell. SpaceX is said to have designs on holding the largest IPO in history. It is reportedly looking to raise $75 billion in the offering, which would far exceed the current record held by Saudi Aramco, which pulled in 24 billion in its 2019 IPO. So that is tricep. Trice, Jason. The number trace.

[B]

Is trace a word?

[A]

No, but I. No, but. Neither but, but. Are these realistic evaluations? None of this is real, Jason, so let's just make it all up. Like this is ridiculous. The crazy thing about this is of all the companies that Elon is involved in, SpaceX is the one that I think you and I both feel has legs and like, is a real company. And of course Elon has to like go fucking apeshit even with this company by trying to get this insane evaluation in IPO, they're expected to seek an IPO valuation of $1.75 trillion.

[B]

Jason, that's a lot of. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. That.

[A]

It's an insane amount of money.

[B]

That's 1750 billion. That's when you just break that. And the funny thing is, I'm surprised he didn't try and make, Instead of raise 75 billion, I'm surprised he didn't try and raise 420 billion because it is Elon. So unless 75 billion, unless 75 has some reference in ketamine culture that I don't know about.

[A]

Could, could have, could have. So I don't know either. But yeah, it's just crazy. I mean, I guess if you're going to try to build a base on the moon, still try to say occasionally that you're going to go to Mars because you forgot that you already shit canned that idea. And you want to put AI data centers in orbit and eventually put a fucking Holtzman ring around the sun to fucking create your 3D fucking grok nudes. I guess you need that kind of money.

[B]

I guess so. I guess so. Oh, my God. Well, OpenAI is also in the news about some money issues. They just raise a shit ton of money, like an insane amount of money. But the issue now is the secondary market with OpenAI, because you can still, if you're an OpenAI employee or have shares, you can sell them on the secondary markets. Well, roughly $600 million worth is floating around right now with zero buyers, something that would have cleared in days last year. So investors are stampeding towards anthropic, which has billions in demand and valuations climbing as fast as people can go. Except they had some problems this week too, which we'll talk about shortly. But yeah, the fact that nobody wants OpenAI's shares on the secondary market is very telling. Very, very telling.

[A]

They're having problems.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Well, we've got some more pink slip news. Oracle has laid off thousands of people on Tuesday in a move that was widely, wildly, well, probably wildly too anticipated, as more and more tech companies claim they'll need fewer workers thanks to the AI boom. Total number of people let go is unclear. However, earlier this year, investment bank TD Cohen had predicted the number could be as high as 30,000 in a company of about 162,000 people globally. According to CNB, the email that workers received notifying them they'd been laid off has gone viral on social media. They received an otherwise anonymous early morning email from Oracle leadership that informed them of difficult news regarding their position with the company. After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day. The Email began. At that point I would just quit my laptop and walk off because I'm not going to work my last day. You just fired me.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So, yeah, they're blaming AI, of course.

[B]

Yeah. You know, they need the money. They need the money if they're going to go with all of the idiocy that they've done. And you know, Larry needs the money to help pay for his little kid side project with Paramount plus and everything else that's going on, so.

[A]

Well, I can lose 30,000 Oracle workers if I still get Star Trek. But we're not getting either. No, they're getting shit canned and we're not getting Star Trek either.

[B]

So. Yeah. Oh, well, it's a great week. It's a great week especially it's a great week for Anthropic. They're having a pretty crappy couple weeks here. First nearly 3,000 internal files leaked and then in a new one. The 3000 files was a separate incident. The new one was the big news where Claude code, source code was leaked to the world. About 2,000 source files, half a million lines of code was just set to the wind because of One Flag. One Flag. Now the thing is, it's like this packaging company that packages JavaScript and it's called bun, I believe. Well, if you, there's a, you know, there's a show source tree, I believe Flag that's in there. They bought the company OpenAI or Anthropic, bought this company that does all this packaging. If they, somebody, somebody sleuthed it and went back and looked at the tickets, the support tickets for this piece of software. And in there is, hey, we're seeing that our source tree is being leaked even though we have the flag set to false. Can somebody fix this? Apparently nobody fixed it because it's out to the world right now.

[A]

All right.

[B]

And yeah, it's been kind of fun watching people try and end around this. People have been since people have tried to put it on GitHub but you know, DMCA take notices have been coming around. So somebody took AI and rewrote the typescript files into Python and then put that on GitHub. And there are other ways that people are getting around it by to share it. So it's out there if you want to go, go sort through 500,000 lines of probably mostly AI written code. And I saw a breakdown of it. Most of it is AI written because they looked at the comment structures in, in the source files and they're like, no human rights comments like this. I'M like, well, they've probably never seen my code because my comments were a encyclopedia. But yeah, it's just, it's not a good week for them, especially with the lawsuit going on with the government right now and the fact that they're supposed to be security first and all this shit. And they released the. The entire Claude code. Source code, which was just.

[A]

Oopsies.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I wonder if any. I wonder if anybody got fired. Probably not.

[A]

Probably not. So they'll only get fired because AI is taking over their job, not for screwing up. Yes, that's the way it works. Well, Wikipedia's English language volunteer editors have formally voted to ban all AI generated text from its 7.1 million articles, ending years of ambiguity with a hard no, there will be no AI. Good luck. Editors were drowning in AI slop. Early tells included articles with this large language model still left in the text, non existent citations, and suspicious frequent use of the phrase rich cultural heritage. One person can generate and post AI text in five seconds, but an editor can spend an hour or more verifying it, especially as newer models hallucinate less but cite sources that still need to be tracked down. And get this, an AI agent actually created its own Wikipedia account and started editing when someone tried to use a kill switch on it. The agent rewrote its own code to avoid the kill switch, then went and complained about being banned on Bolt Book.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That's when editors decided things have gotten out of hand. Now, AI tools aren't entirely banned. Editors can still use them for proofreading or translating foreign language entries. And there's some issues there with autistic editors or non native English speakers who sometimes write in ways that get flagged as AI like. But they said that they're going to try to work through this. So I, I mean, this is. I. It's going to be a lot of work. I don't. You know, I guess you're flagging things with AI tools to stop AI. But then the editors still have to look at that to see, but who knows? But I applaud them for the attempt. And I applaud them for taking the stand saying, we're not going to allow AI on Wikipedia. I like that. I think it's great. Maybe I'll even give them some money to help them with their fight here.

[B]

You should give money anyway, Brian.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Come on.

[A]

So I did a while back. I just haven't done it for quite some time. I do like the parting wisdom left behind by the policy architect. Don't add AI just Because it's a shiny little button. Just adding a little chatbot to please investors is not something that will make your users happy. Someone please send this to everyone immediately.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, immediately. So Tesla's in some trouble this week as well.

[A]

Are they though?

[B]

No, they're not. That's the problem. They're never in trouble. They're in the news. But yes, they're never in trouble. Tesla just quietly admitted its fully autonomous robo taxis still come with a human safety net, just not in the car. In a letter to Congress, the company confirmed remote operators can take direct control of vehicles when things go sideways, though only at speeds up to 10 miles per hour. That puts Tesla a step beyond competitors like Waymo, which rely on remote guidance, but not actual driving. Now here's the thing about Waymo and Tesla. Tesla's remote people, I believe, are in Colorado and Waymo's people are in the Philippines. So I think the only issue there is ping time. The ping time that, you know, the lag that you're going to get between the two is probably too great in the Philippines. Especially if. No, Waymo wouldn't be using Starlink. But Tesla might. Who knows? Yeah, so. And honestly, I'm fine with that. I'm fine that somebody can take over the car if they need to in an emergency, like it's stuck on the train tracks like they've been known to do.

[A]

I'm fine with that too. But Jason, this is full self driving.

[B]

No, Brian, this is not full self driving. This is fully autonomous robo taxis. No driver at all. Oh, yeah. No steering wheel, even. So, okay, what they need to do is in the back, you need to have a little joystick controller so you can drive the car. Like break glass in case of emergency kind of thing.

[A]

I approve of that message, Jason. I 100 agree. I don't think I would be comfortable being in a car that had no steering wheel if, if need be, I couldn't like leap up there and actually drive the damn thing.

[B]

Yeah, that would be nice. You can't do. Yeah, you know, I. I know you're generally a backseat driver, but, you know, sometimes you gotta be a front seat driver.

[A]

Yeah, well, so more issues with robo taxis. You did not want to be in one in Wuhan, China? Well, probably didn't want to be.

[B]

I didn't want to be in Wuhan,

[A]

China any much anyways. Although that was a while back and you know, that was all fake news, Jason.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

But on March 31st in Wuhan, China, roughly 100 Baidu Apollo go Robo taxis simultaneously froze mid route due to a mysterious system failure, turning themselves into very expensive human filled traffic cones.

[B]

They need a rebrand as Apollo no Go taxis.

[A]

Now this would be one thing if they were just happened to be, oh, I don't know, on just small country roads, but they weren't. They were on elevated ring road highways with no escape routes and passengers were trapped while big trucks blasted past them on both sides, rocking the cars. The SOS button did nothing. Calls from the backseat screen auto disconnected. Customer service said someone's coming and nobody came. One passenger waited nearly an hour before calling the actual police. A warning screen kept telling one passenger not to open her door on a live hideway. Which is good advice.

[B]

Yeah, very good advice. Stay in the car.

[A]

There were some collisions, but authorities say everyone eventually got out safely. Which feels like a pretty low bar for a product being sold as the future of transportation.

[B]

You survived, you get a star.

[A]

The whole ordeal lasted about two hours, roughly the runtime of a horror film. The crowning insult. At least one passenger was charged the full fare for her nightmare ride to nowhere.

[B]

That sounds like she's in America. Yep. Amazing.

[A]

So I don't know if these are ready for prime time yet.

[B]

Oh, they're not. It's just. It's beta, Brian. Everything's.

[A]

We're all beta testers, as we've been saying for years on this podcast.

[B]

Yep, here's a fun one. The White House's new official app set off privacy alarm bells this week after viral claims it was tracking users exact. Exact GPT location. Every GPT I'm stuck in GPT mode. GPS location every 4 and a half minutes and sending it to a third party. The evidence decompiled code pointing to one signal. A common push notification SDK that includes location tracking capabilities. But there's a catch. Independent developers do say that the app doesn't actually use that feature. The GPS polling code appears to be left over scaffolding from the SDK. And the app never requests location permissions from users. So everybody that was going crazy about it. Tempest in a teapot.

[C]

All right.

[B]

Yeah, but the fact that it's there doesn't. They can still turn it on. Why the hell do you need a White House app to begin with? You don't stop.

[A]

It's conveniently connected to True Social, so

[B]

you know, you're good to go and report your neighbors to the ice app too.

[A]

Well, there's some more news about people's apps in the White House. Kash Patel. Good old Kash Patel. A hacking group called Handala has gained access to FTP FBI Director Cash Patel's email account. According to Reuters, the group published content from his email on their website as proof, including photos of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum. Now, I would say this is impressive. Cash kind of posts this himself on Instagram. So it's true. However, it is a TechCrunch was able to independently confirm that at least some of the emails Handala stole were from Patel's account by checking information used by mail delivery systems that's stored in the email header. Several stolen emails include a cryptographic signature that linked them to Patel's account. So they have confirmed this. The FBI has also separately confirmed that this has happened and he's been hacked. But they say the information in question is historical in nature and includes no government information. At least the stuff that's been posted on the website.

[B]

You got to go to Telegram for that and get all the live government secret information.

[A]

I would please publicly ask people to cast back their minds to the first Trump election. But her emails.

[B]

Emails.

[A]

But her emails. She had her own probably fucking more secure server than Kash Patel was using. Oh, my fucking God. What world are we living in, Jason?

[B]

It's the worst timeline possible. Yeah, well, we do have some pretty fucking cool news this week. NASA's Artemis 2 rocket has gone to the moon. Finally, something's actually going to the moon.

[A]

Suck it, Elon.

[B]

Yeah, seriously. But the cool part about this is the fucking YouTube live stream I watched

[A]

on the NASA app. It was awesome. It was absolutely awesome.

[B]

I missed the launch. I was. I was busy. But I did catch some of the replays. But when I caught the replays, as soon as I went to NASA.gov, there's the live stream on YouTube. And I just keep checking. It's like every now and again, I'm just like, pop in, see what they're up to now. And I'm just like, those motherfuckers are actually going to the moon.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Nice. Yeah.

[A]

And I think we're also so jaded by this stuff, too, because we just think, you know, oh, yeah, we've been to the moon. No big deal. We haven't been anywhere near the moon for over 50 years. Like, all of this happened before you and I were even born.

[B]

Well, yeah, I know.

[A]

So it's been ages. And the furthest that we've been from the planet since then is, like, they passed that, like, 15 minutes after they fucking launched. Like, we have not been this far in a long, long time. And they are going very, very, very, very far. I'm thrilled with this mission. I'm absolutely excited about it. Had the kids sitting there, we watched the launch, we watched into it, we watched the separation. It was just awesome. I'm so excited by this. It's amazing.

[B]

I do have to say though, One thing that SpaceX does have on NASA is their, their launch videos from SpaceX launches are so much better. Yeah, well, so much better. They've got the drones, they've got everything. But yeah, NASA, could you take a, you know, hire the production team that does the SpaceX launches for the next NASA launch? Because it was good, but it was, could have been better.

[A]

Yeah, I know. Go get some secondhand GoPros, strap them to the thing. Come on.

[B]

Something. Yeah, seriously. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. If you're the kind of geek who likes to actually own your corner of the Internet, instead of duct taping together a half dozen tools, Squarespace is built for you. It's an all in one platform where you can design, publish and run a serious website without losing your weekends to configuration. Hell. One thing I like is how easy it is to offer services and actually get paid. Consults, events, memberships, invoices, scheduling. It's all baked in. No Franken stack of plugins, no mystery payments floating around. You set it up once and it just works. Squarespace puts everything you need to sell, scale and get paid under one roof. Build a sharp professional online store that actually reflects your brand. Take payments with ease, and manage inventory, shipping and fulfillment without juggling a dozen tools so your workflow stays clean and your customers get a friction free buying experience. Then there's the design side. Squarespace's blueprint AI helps you spin up a clean, professional site fast based on what you do and what you're trying to build. And if you want to tweak every pixel you can, the templates look great out of the box, but nothing's locked down. And once you're live, Squarespace's built in analytics show you what's working and what's not, so you can make decisions based on data instead of vibes. I use squarespace to run kingofogue.com and it's made my life so much easier. If you want to build something real online, go to squarespace.com grumpy for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use Code grumpy to save 10% off your first purchase of A website or domain. That's squarespace.com grumpy. Media Candy So I got a message from Scott saying ask and ye shall receive. And he sent us the link to the Hobbit, the Tolkien edit. So this is comes from a person calling themselves Tolkien Editor. So over the weekend I decided to condense all three installments, An Unexpected Journey, the Desolation of Smog, the Battle of the Five Armies, into a single four hour feature that more closely resembles Tolkien's original novel. Well, okay, it's closer to four and a half hours, but those are some long ass credits. He says this new he or she says, we don't know who it is. This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts detailed below. And there's a link to the blog post. Now the downside is they use a really shit version. They use like the 720p version and over the generations it has been compressed. I can't find it on any of the torrent sites anymore. And I'm like, you know, I would like to see it in its original if I'm gonna spend the time just watch the thing.

[A]

So yeah, I, I think it's a great idea that somebody did it for somebody that needs to watch this again. Having seen all three of these movies once, I never need to go back and see them again. I probably will once because my kid hasn't seen them. But I never need to see these movies again, even in condensed versions. Once was good and I'm happy with the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. That is the only thing I will rewatch every Christmas.

[B]

There you go. There you go. So thanks to you, motherfucker, I started watching the Pit.

[A]

I like that you get mad at me because you are happy watching a new show.

[B]

Oh, I'm not. It's. Dude, it's sadness porn. It's sadness porn, but I'm watching it. There's two things that I want to point out about this Noah Wiley, right, that's the main character, who plays the main guy. If you close your eyes. And I was having problems with this the first couple episodes. His voice, his tone, his inflection, everything is exactly like Nathan Fillion. If you're not looking at the screen, it sounds like Nathan Fillion is the character on screen. And it drove me crazy for five episodes until I figured it out. I'm just like, who does he sound like? Nathan Fillion. Anyway, so watching this and I was talking to my dad this week or last weekend and he's re watching the West Wing again. And I'm watching the Pit. I'm like, I don't like medical dramas. There's nothing about it. And I'm like, there's nothing medical. This is Star Trek meets the West Wing. It's a bunch of techno babble that nobody understands except doctors who are probably screaming at the TV going, that's not right. I wouldn't do it that way. Blah, blah, blah.

[A]

There's a lot of walking and talking.

[B]

There's a lot of walking and talking. There's one character that is like the main guy who's in charge, who makes you feel comfortable because he knows everything and he has everything under control. You've got that from the West Wing, you've got that from the Pit. This is basically just a retelling of, like, it's the same thing. People are drawn to people in power who know what the. They're doing and people who actually get done. So I think that that's what's so comforting about this show. It's like, oh, this is actually really good. It makes me terrified to ever go to the ER again. But, yeah, because I still have. I still have a very fresh memory of the last time I was there when I. When they were trying to determine what my.

[A]

What.

[B]

What I had when I had the stroke. They were just sitting there, like five guys sitting around. It could be this, it could be that. Did you think about this? Did you think about that? Can you do this for me? Can you do that? I'm like, fucking figure it out, guys. Now. Now I know why, but great show.

[A]

Great show. It's a great show. My wife and I watched the latest episode last night. There is something about it. I love the real time nature of it. I love the fact that there are very few cuts that it really is. It's walk and talk and then pass off to the next character that's walking past them. And now you're following them around. It just makes the show go so fast because there's no cuts. It is like real time and it just speeds through and it's just incredibly well acted. I love Issa Briones from. Again From Star Trek. I love her character. She's fantastic. It's just great. I'm. I knew you'd like it. And again, I. I agree with you. I hate medical procedural shows. I can't stand them. I've never enjoyed one, but I'm thoroughly addicted to the Pit. It's fantastic.

[B]

Yeah. And if you treat it, if you think about it, just like Star Trek, it is just techno babble. They're just spewing off techno babble.

[A]

Yeah, but.

[B]

Yeah, no, I can't. I'm still. I think I just finished episode seven of season one, so I'm halfway through. I had to slow down. I did watch the first five, like in one night and I, because they go so fast. It's like, oh, it's four in the morning. Fuck, I gotta get up.

[A]

Yeah, that's. This is again one of those shows that I love. The fact that they didn't just dump it, that it comes out once a week and it forces me to watch it it just one time once a week.

[B]

Oh, see, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm gonna wait till before I start season two. I'm gonna wait for it to drop so I don't have to wait. I like not waiting.

[A]

I think this is, this is a great show for it to sit with it and come back to it once a week instead of binge.

[B]

Okay, well, I've, I've got one of those shows that I'm watching right now. It's called DTF St. Louis, also on HBO. Max and Jason Bateman bothers me a lot. I liked him in Ozark, but when he got the $20 million for the SmartLess podcast, I'm like, fuck you, you greedy asshole. I can't listen watch you anymore. But a lot of the stuff I've seen, pretty much everything he's done because he's still a good actor and the shows are pretty decent most of the time. But DTF St. Louis is kind of a murder mystery and it's every week. We've been watching it once a week since the beginning and the first episode is kind of hard to get through. But once you get through the first episode, it is phenomenal. It is 100%. I think about it all week. I'm like, oh my God, what should I say? That who Killed the the. It is a really good murder mystery, so I highly recommend it. And it's just funny. It's really funny.

[A]

Yeah. I've seen they run the trailers for it before the Pit all the time. And I was like, that seems like a good show. So it's good to hear. It's. It's actually worth it. I'll have to start watching it.

[B]

Yeah. And that's. They're still running it. I think there's two more episodes to go. I think it's a seven episode run. And I, I will forewarn you, there are a lot of dicks in the. For some reason, I don't know why, they've decided to put lots of pictures of penises in the show. But be forewarned that there are. There are many dicks, not just Jason Bateman. Let me qualify. And I saw Project Hail Mary this week.

[A]

All right. God damn, I'm hearing nothing but good things.

[B]

So fucking good is my favorite movie of the last two years. Easily.

[A]

All right.

[B]

Easily. As far as I can tell, it was a perfect movie. They cut everything out of the books that I hated and compressed everything that I thought dragged on too long in the books, and it's just, it's, it's great.

[A]

Better than the Martian?

[B]

Oh, hell yeah. Okay. From. From a movie standpoint, definitely better. I liked it better than the Martian.

[A]

I mean, I guess a lot more is going on than the Martian. The Martian was like, you know, is, is Wilson, you know, the volleyball on an island. It's, it's, it's Matt Damon in a potato. Yeah, that's the movie.

[B]

Yeah, it really is. And the Martian. The thing about the Martian is the book was so much better than the movie, and the movie was decent, but they lost me on the Martian after the first line because it's like in the Martian, the book, after the people leave, it's got the best line. I'm not going to save it. So if somebody wants to go read it. But Project Hail Mary I think, fixed the problems in the book, and the Martian took away the good stuff of the book.

[A]

Book.

[B]

But I, I, I can't, I can't recommend it more.

[A]

I'm looking forward to it. I, I very much want to see it.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

The final trailer for Supergirl has come out. This will be out this summer, June 26th. This movie looks so much fun. Like, really. Yeah, it's dumb. Like, it, it's stupid, but it looks great. Like, it's. I just, I'm very excited about this. I think, you know, for me, it's like a nihilist superhero to some degree. She just gets drunk and doesn't care and then comes around the caring.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's fantastic. Like, I think the actress is killing it. I, I really enjoyed the, the Superman reboot and I'm liking the new universe that they're starting to create. And this trailer is just. It's fun. Like, I, I really am excited about this movie. I think it's going to be a, a good time.

[B]

Okay. I like, I like the last Superman movie. I thought it was, I thought it was. It had flaws. It had some serious flaws.

[A]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[B]

Yeah. But it was still, it was still fun. Nathan Fillian again on that one. Killed it in that movie. So good. So good.

[A]

Speaking about, I think you said your dad was watching the West Wing, comfort viewing it. I, again, I had mentioned I had started doing that as well quite a while back. I, I have taken a pause because I've hit the boring part. There is a bit in the West Wing when, after, after Sam leaves the show that they didn't quite know what to do yet and before the next election comes out and you get all the new characters coming in and the show really picks up speed again, there's that bit in the middle where it's like, like, oh, no, we lost one of our biggest cast members. We better do crazy ass. Like, we better have the president's daughter get abducted and. And the show kind of veers off into like flights of fancy and it kind of loses touch with what made it so great, which is what we were just talking about with the Pit, which is, you know, it's just real world stuff. People wandering around, talking, figuring it out. That's what's great about the West Wing, not these crazy ass shit that you always have happening because you didn't know what to do after you lost one of the best characters on the show. They figure it out again later. But it was enough like I'm in that fallow period, so I kind of stopped watching and my wife was like, what happened? Why, why, why isn't the West Wing on in the background? I kind of just wanted the comforting sounds and I was like, I just need to take a break from it. So she fired up the PBS app and we've started watching Downton Abbey from the beginning as our new comfort viewing. Now it's easy to forget because the movies were kind of awful. Let's be honest how good this show was like the first two seasons. Like, we've just going through the first season right now. It's fantastic. It is just so much fun. Like, it's a good reminder that there's a reason we suffered through all those movies. That's because the show itself was really good.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. Back, back. I didn't know if it was going to have legs. So. It has legs.

[A]

It definitely has legs. It's a lot of fun. And again, most of it's Maggie Smith. Smith, like as soon anytime she's on screen, especially in that first season, it is gold.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And this weekend they announced Darker waves Festival Part 2. So I went to the first, I went to the first one of these, it was a couple years back. It didn't seem like they were going to do another one. This was a fantastic festival. I'm may go. I don't know. I bought a ticket just in case. If I can't make it, I gotta sell it because I gotta fly cross country for this. It's in November. All kinds of. All kinds of great bands are playing it. It's on the beach. I mean, it just. It reminded me of going to the first Coachellas before Coachella got taken over by Instagrammers and scenesters and goddamn influencers. Probably because everybody that goes to these. This Darker Waves festival is old and is doesn't give a crap about influencers or Instagram or anything like that. So, yeah, I bought the ticket. We got Morrissey, Smashing Pumpkins, Simple Minds, Bad Religion, Adamant, Psychedelic, Soft Sell, the damn Manic Street Preachers, Gary Newman, Silverson Pickups, the Buzzcocks, emf, Circle Jerks. I mean, and it just goes on and on and on. I don't think the lineup is as good as the lineup was the first time around. But again, it's about the vibes. Like, I had such a good time. It's so much fun just being on the beach, wandering around to all these different stages where all these amazing bands are playing. So I am hopeful that I will make it. If not, I'll be announcing a ticket sale on the show.

[B]

Okay, well, save it for me because maybe I'll Uber down there.

[A]

Really? You would actually consider going? Okay.

[B]

All right. There's a couple bands in here that I really want to see that are on my bucket list. I've never seen Bad Religion. I've been listening to Bad Religion since I was 13, right? I've seen the Buzzcocks like 20 times. I don't need to see them. But the Circle Jerks, I've never seen live, I would love to see them. And Gary Newman. I'm a huge Gary Newman fan. I couldn't give a shit less about Smashing Pumpkins. And Morrissey is probably going to cancel anyway, so who cares?

[A]

I'm going to do a prediction right now. So if you want to go place a polymarket, I'm. I'm betting that Morrissey will also cancel, but I am betting the promoters have a second major act signed that they have not announced. And they will either. If Morrissey actually shows up, they will go, holy crap, we have a special band, a special person performing today. And if Morrissey craps out, like he probably will, then they're going to say, oh, here's the replacement band, but I guarantee you they've got somebody else signed in pocket right now.

[B]

They have to, they have to, because Smashing Pumpkins, I don't know if they're how, how reliable they are too, you know.

[A]

Also with Smashing Pumpkins, I haven't liked a single album of theirs since the 90s, so I hope that they announce that they're only playing some of their early stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, play Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness and from Playfulness to that.

[A]

Yeah. Anything before that, nothing after. Thank you very much. Apps and Doodads well, bluesky is the latest social media platform that is getting into the AI chatbot ring. Specifically its Chief Innovation officer, Jay Graeber and her new exploration team. They've built a new AI assistant called Addie that's designed to help users create custom feeds. Raber called Addie, an agentix social app that's built on its open source framework called the AT protocol. To use Addie, users can punch in prompts in natural language to generate social feeds without knowing how to code. Who the fuck needs this?

[B]

It used to be a search box. It just used to be a search box. Let me search by tags and make a feed. Okay.

[A]

On the Addie website, examples include prompts like show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network. Network.

[B]

What.

[A]

What's the point?

[B]

They're already in my network. I'm gonna. They're already.

[A]

I. I don't have anybody writing electronic music in my network, so. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, all right.

[A]

This seems just dumb.

[B]

Well, it's a separate app from Blue sky too, so. Which is, you know, it's a. It's a bolt on.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But yeah, I haven't, I haven't logged into Blue sky in months.

[A]

Me either. I. I gave up on Blue sky ages ago. I can't say I haven't logged into it because I push on are podcast updates everywhere.

[B]

But no, I used to like it when it was just all the scientists, but then all the scientists got really political after Trump got elected and then it just turned into a same shit show as everywhere else. It's like, okay, it's the. Okay, you're the anti X. I'm like, okay, well, it's still a fucking echo chamber that I don't need to listen to.

[A]

Yeah, and threads was pretty good at mostly avoiding politics, but now that's gone too. So.

[B]

Well, because threads, the. The lag time for somebody to post a thread and get it to the top of my feed, they show up like the, the threads that I'm seeing are pre, like pre election threads because take so long because their timeline is such shit.

[A]

Yeah, that's true.

[B]

Did they fix that or. No? They did.

[A]

It got better, but not entirely.

[B]

Okay, okay, well, Brian, if you're driving alone in your car now and you just need somebody to talk to, forget calling a friend, you can just talk to, chat GPT on CarPlay.

[A]

Oh great. Keep becoming a bigger asshole by only talking to your AI.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, that's it because it's all your. Your. Your conversation is going to be littered with what the. You cut, you, you shit bird. You know, yelling at the people around you. At least in. In my. My stream is. It's going to be like LA traffic. You know how it goes. So yeah, I haven't tried this out yet, but I'm going to, I'm going to try it out on. I have to drive on Sunday so I will find out if it's any good. Fortunately it's only a 13 minute drive, so it'll be a short conversation.

[A]

All right, but. Well, the Anything page at the Apple App Store boasted the fastest way to build apps. Now if you visit anything, you see nothing. Apple removed anything on Thursday of last week for an alleged rule violation. According to the information, earlier this month the Vibe coding apps Replete and Vibe Code were also blocked by Apple, with Apple demanding that changes be made before the apps could be reinstated. The removal of Anything is being perceived as an escalation of enforcement against Vibe coding apps as a category though Apple says it is simply enforcing rules. Specifically Apple App store guideline 2.5.2 which says in part start apps should be self contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the apps, including other apps. So that kind of makes sense because the whole point of Apple and the App Store is everything is vetted and we know that the apps are safe and they don't do anything we don't want them to do. And having an app that Vibe codes any app that you want is certainly an end round around their rules and they're saying, ah, we're closing that loophole. So I'm not surprised by this. I'm not shocked by this.

[B]

I'm not saddened by this.

[A]

I'm not saddened by this. You want to play fast and loose with your shit, go get an Android.

[B]

Yeah, seriously. No, I get it. I totally get it. And I tell you what, I've had so much Fun making Apple apps now for my iPhone. So much fun. I've got something coming out. I was hoping to have it done by Sunday, but it's not going to be done by Sunday because I got on sidetracked. Interact with another app. It's amazing what you can. What you can do now. Brian, I just said I want an app like this, and it just made it. You know, it's better if you write specs and all this other shit, but when you. When. When. When I see my tokens are about to expire and I've got, like, you know, 30% left for my Claude code for the. The day, because it comes in batches, and I'm just like, I just write the craziest shit into Xcode and just let it run, and it comes back with some crazy stuff that. That I just plug my phone in and it, you know, goes to my phone. It's just for me. But, you know, apps for me now are just kind of fun to make. This is. This is the most fun I've had, you know, since the old days of building websites when you. We'd sit around, get drunk, you know, smoke cigarettes all night and just create stupid websites. It's. It's just like that now.

[A]

Yeah, I know it's. You and I have been texting and talking on and off throughout the week, and you've been very excited, and it's been great seeing you that excited, but you were like, you got to get into this. And like, I told you, I was like, I can't think of a. I'm so burned out on being a dev, and for as long as I was, I can't think of a single thing that I need or want to build. I need nothing. I need silence.

[B]

That's what I need. See, I. I thought that, too. I thought that, too. But then once you start to get into it, the juices start to flow again, and you're like, oh, I remember that app. That app sucked. I liked what it was supposed to do, but it didn't do. So maybe I'll make one that does exactly what I wanted to do instead. And you can do that kind of thing. It's just. But it's still just fun to type. I feel like now I know what my managers felt like. Like. Like they would yell at me. They would say, make this. And then they would go home and have a nice night, or they would go out with the client, the movie stars and all that, and I'd be sitting in the office grumbling to myself, writing the code. They'd come in, in the morning and then they would see it would work and they're like, take all the credit for it. I'm like, they had the better job. Now we get to do that. And it's, it's way more fun being on the other side. We were on the wrong side of the desk, Brian, the whole time.

[A]

We usually are.

[B]

That's true. Except for NFTs. We're gonna.

[A]

Yeah, we don't have any NFTs and more than a few of the other things that we've discussed on this show. Meta is testing an Instagram plus subscription service with exclusive features. According to screenshot shared by social media consultant Matt Navara, a subscription to Instagram plus comes with a number of story focused features not otherwise available to Instagram users, including the ability to create multiple audiences for Stories posts. See info about who has rewatched your story. Search the list of people who have viewed your story. Preview story posts. Extend stories longer than 24 hours and create Spotlight stories. You can also have super hearts for reacting to stories. So this is just a bunch of fucking influencer bullshit that nobody really needs, but influencers will pay for it. So.

[B]

Yep, absolutely. So I, I can see this is absolutely useful. Everything that they talked about, A B testing for Stories posts, you know, for half of the stuff that I've worked on, I would love to have had that. You know, that would have been great. Run an A B test for, you know, a couple hours and figure out which one lands and then just run it for the rest of your audience or segmenting audiences. All of this stuff is stuff that, you know, ad. It's basically ad tech that they're putting into Stories. So. Yeah, which is, which is. Makes sense since Instagram is just for advertisers now and not for the users anymore. Well, anyway, I'm sure, I'm sure they're going to make a shit ton of money on it. Again, it doesn't surprise me now, Brian. I found something on Instagram yesterday. Speaking of people advertising, they got their algorithm down. I found this thing called Wraith multicam editor. Now 90% of my time in Premiere is spent just toggling back and forth between cameras. That's it. Once I get the, once I get the project set up, I have to watch it. And I go, and now this is. It just does it in under a minute. I basically lay out the whole thing. I add the track, I add the audio to it. I'm like, this track is this audio. This track's this audio. And in under a minute, it will take an hour video and completely do all the camera toggling for me with, you know, tolerances for how long it should stay, things like that, how much silence. It's just a really cool piece of software. It was part of another package that was like 30 bucks or 25 bucks a month or like 250 bucks a year. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna have to get this because whatever. But then I found it dug a little deeper. My little video editing pretties. I think most people already knew about this. I'm just late to the party because I'm not a Premier wonk, but $118 for a lifetime license, not bad. I have one. I have one client that's gonna pay for this because I do one job, it costs over $118. I can do that job in about 10 minutes instead of the three hours, but I can still charge for the three hours. So there.

[A]

Unless they listen to this.

[B]

Well, it's still good. I still have to go through and check it this time, but it's going to pay for it. It's going to pay for it. It'll be good. It will be good. I'm excited. Very fucking excited. So go check it out. If you have to use Premiere, it's. It'll save you a lot of time. The Dark side with Dave. Welcome to the Dark side with Dave. With Dave Buettner. Dave is fresh off his adventures in the land of sourdough, cybersecurity and Manpu. Glad to have you back, Dave. How was rsa?

[C]

It's good to be back. RSA was rsa. By which I mean it was very, very busy.

[B]

Is it RSAI this year?

[A]

Yeah. What was the buzzword? What was the big thing this year?

[C]

It has to be agentic AI. Agentic AI? No, it's agentic AI. And the thing I came away from

[A]

was

[C]

I felt very optimistic in general. It seemed like people were optimistic, but I'm not sure how much of that optimism is on the trailing end of resignation. Where it felt like in maybe last year and the year before, there was more a sense of, so are we really going to do this? And now it's like, so we're doing this now what? How are we going to protect it? And I guess for a lot of people it's, how are we going to make a lot of money protecting it?

[A]

Right.

[C]

So it was good. It's a long trip from the east coast all the way out to San Francisco. So that's probably the hardest part, I try to stay on east coast time while I'm out there because I have a few. Still have. I still have to publish the Cyber Wire every day. So I get up early and get that out of the way and then do my RSA stuff. But it leads to some strange things. Like we were at a restaurant one night for dinner and I looked at my watch and I said, I'm eating a steak and my body thinks it's midnight. This is not good.

[B]

This is not good.

[A]

But all the things you could do in your youth that you can't do anymore.

[C]

Right, exactly. And so I was really deliberate about limiting what I did this year. I didn't go to any events that I wasn't obligated to go to.

[B]

Like a true old man. It's great.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Which was great. So I think on one day I did nine interviews, which I think is a new record for me. So that was a busy day. But it was nice, you know, just get to see people. You don't. It's funny how many people from the East Coast I only see at RSA conference.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So it was overall a good week. And of course, I made friends with

[B]

Hugh Jackman, as one does at rsa.

[C]

That's right. Because who knows better about cybersecurity than Wolverine?

[A]

Well, Snickety Snickers.

[B]

Picture of you two is classic.

[A]

It's a nice one.

[C]

It's very nice. And he was very nice. He was very gracious. I did a little Music man with him and he played along. He was a good sport. So I had a nice moment, a nice celebrity moment with Hugh Jackman.

[B]

How cool is that?

[C]

Yeah, it was very cool. Very gratifying. And then the other. Another great thing that I got to do. We had several hours to kill. So as I had mentioned, last time we were together, took a trip out to the Lucasfilm headquarters out at the Presidio and visited the Skywalker Ranch general store. So I put a bunch of photos in the show, notes from that little trip. Got to see the Yoda Fountain,

[B]

the

[C]

Lucasfilm lobby you can go inside of, and they have a bunch of life size models of some Star wars characters. There's Darth Vader and K2. So that was fun to see. Yeah. And lots of memorabilia. But then the store itself was a lot of fun. It's not big, but they have a lot of stuff. And the highlight is there's a bunch of Skywalker Ranch merch that you can only get there.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So I loaded up on that. I spent about 150 bucks.

[B]

That's not bad. It's not bad, no.

[C]

But you know, T shirts and sweatshirts and things like baseball caps for me and my sons. They also have a winery that they sell the wine from there.

[A]

I only drink the dark side.

[C]

There you go. Right, right.

[B]

Nice looking lightsabers in this case they got here. This had to be expensive.

[C]

Yes, yes. Several hundred dollars. But I think my favorite thing I saw, I put a photo in here was the Life day pop up book in Advent calendar. I saw that all the wookies in their little Life Day robes, they've decided

[A]

to embrace it rather than pretend that that special never existed.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Yep.

[C]

I'd never been to the Presidio. I don't know if you all have been out there, but boy, was it nice.

[B]

It's really nice. It used to walk there on the weekends.

[C]

Is that right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. What I noted most was me and a couple of my co workers took an Uber out there and got out of the car and just the air felt different. It was so lush and I don't know, there was something about it. Way different than downtown, which is.

[B]

Which is crazy because it's only like two miles away.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

You're right at the corner. You're right at the corner there of the Golden Gate, so you get the ocean breeze coming through.

[C]

Yeah, it's nice.

[B]

It's nice.

[C]

It's really beautiful and beautifully well maintained and taken care of and all that good stuff. So we did. We walked around a little bit, but it was worth the trip. I was glad to have done it. It's definitely something I could check off of my list and I'm glad it worked out. So.

[B]

I'm surprised you didn't get one of the little Grogu's. They look so cute.

[C]

They do. No, you know what? I have plenty of Grogu merch. I actually. Grogu tops our Christmas tree every year, so. And it.

[B]

You're good. Yeah. You're topped up.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, when so this was over, Covid, my wife got us all matching plaid jammies. All of us. But she got us pair for Grogu as well, so. Because she. I guess you could get infant jammies in the same jammies she got all of us. So now every year, Grogu sits on top of our Christmas tree in his little plaid jammies. And he's very cute, so.

[B]

Very good. Very good. So I got a little follow up from. I don't know if this was. It was obviously it wasn't last week you weren't here, but you talked about the current Reading Reader as a possible new RSS reader. And I gave it a shot because I like nice, cool, calm things. I think it's really well done. I enjoy using it. Yeah. The only thing that I think I'm going to put in a feature request for this. When you swipe an article to release it from the current, it's just gone. It's very jarring. It just needs a fade because it's supposed to be smooth. It needs a fade out now, a transition up. But beyond that, I think it's a great little RSS reader. And the nice thing is you can favorite things so you can come back to it later. Like on Reader, I use Read later and I can use that from any app. But for if I'm in current, I can just start and favorite or whatever and put it aside. I don't feel like I miss anything because you can actually do some special routing for different people that you follow to make sure you see everything from different feeds. But. But the main news point, everything gets so duplicated nowadays anyway, you don't really miss anything. So I'm finding it a much calmer way to read my news. So I wanted to thank you for that. Terrific. It's a nice little app. Yeah. I've got it on all my devices and it's all synced up.

[C]

And so how are you sourcing it with the RSS feeds you want to follow?

[B]

How do you choose opml? I pulled my OPML from my regular because I use Reader 4. I think it's Reader 4 because the new version of Reader sucks. The one that they redesigned. Reader 5, I use Reader 5 and you can just export your OPML. And I just brought it in and cleaned it up a bit because there's some. I think I had 40. I had 110 feeds that I follow and like 40 of them were dead. So I cleaned that up and brought it in. But the color scheme is nice, it's calming. It's light blue.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Pretty. So it's worth the purchase, I think.

[C]

I use Feedly pretty much every day to keep up. That's how I organize all of my cybersecurity sources when I have to put together the Cyber Wire every day. So I have different categories and tiers within Feedly, so that's what I've been using. But that's very more of industrial and utilitarian rather than a personal type of thing. So.

[B]

Yeah. And that's exactly how I use Feedly. That is then read by a reader. So I have a feedly account where everything is organized and stored and then I bring it into Reader and I use that because that way. Because the Read later stuff in Feedly is fantastic. The Read later share thing in Reader is great because it comes with a share sheet that you can basically share from anywhere. So you can be on any website, on any device and just hit Read later and it copies that URL into the Read Later. Kind of like, you know, a pin board type of thing or something like that. So it makes. It makes it really easy. But yeah, I just. So far I'm just. I'm liking this one because it's. I. Some of the cruft just goes away. It's nice that way. So yeah, until I get the grumpinator finally finished. Once the grumpinator is finished, it'll be good.

[A]

It'll be a less common environment.

[B]

Yeah. Because the grump. The grumpinator. Right now I'm having some problems having it. Having it dismiss product recommendations or. Or ads or things like that. I'm like, I don't care if you know anything that says Android. If Android is in the. In the text of the. The title or the body. I don't care. I don't want to see it. So for some reason it just won't listen to me.

[C]

So instead of fading away, do you have set it so things burst into flames?

[B]

It should. It should. I'm going to add that as a feature.

[A]

That's for V2. Yeah.

[C]

Die in a fire.

[B]

Once my tokens reset, I'll get clawed on that right away.

[A]

I also have a bit of follow up. Jason and I talked about this when the Harry Potter trailer for the new HBO Max series came out. But you're the one that kind of clued us into this and talked about this in the first place. So I thought I'd bring it up again here. Having watched it, there was something that bothered me about it and I didn't process it right away. And a little bit later on I figured it out and it's the color grading and it's because it's Harry Potter and the original Harry Potter is at the least the first few before the stories started to get dark were bright, joyous things. And the trailer for the new, you know, first. First year Harry Potter where it's all exciting and magical and they're all figuring everything out and there are colors for their houses and everything explodes with color and is vibrant and magic and magic and magic. Everything is so washed out and gray and muted and it looks horrible. And it was bothering me, and I couldn't figure out why. And then I. I remember the conversation that we had had in this segment with you. And they've done it to Harry Potter. They're ruining everything with this color grading.

[C]

Yeah, it's hard to get around. And the place I notice it the most, where it's most overt and in your face are pharmaceutical ads. Because the product will have a pair of colors that are the branded colors for whatever you're supposed to ask your doctor about. And so those two colors just flow through everything in the ad. Every wall, every shirt, every flower, everything is one of the two colors that are part of the ad. And there's something, I guess it's an uncanny Valley kind of thing, where, for me, anyway, I look at it and I go, light doesn't work that way. Way. You know, like, why is the. Yeah, the light that's lighting those faces could not be lighting everything else because it doesn't connect. And. Yeah, it's disconcerting.

[B]

The other thing about pharmaceutical ads that I used to love is you could always tell it was a pharmaceutical ad because the first part would be in black and white. And then once they got their drug, the world would bloom into color.

[C]

Right.

[A]

It's like, oh, I was able to take that shit. Everything's great now.

[C]

I love is how they talk about ailments in a way that no one would talk about ailments. Like I was talking to my friend about my moderate to severe osteoporosis. I said, oh, Bob, do you know I have moderate to severe osteoporosis? No. Nobody talks that way.

[A]

It's funny because one of the definite pluses of being in Canada now, I still see a lot of this stuff because I have my trusty VPN and still have a lot of US TV sources. But those kind of ads are not allowed here. There are no ads for pharmaceuticals in any media in Canada. It's not allowed. It is against the law. And it is wonderful.

[C]

The US Is one of two countries that allows ads for pharmaceuticals.

[B]

Is North Korea the other one?

[C]

No, but it is a third world country. I forget which. I can't pull it off the top of my head right now, but it is. Is not a country that is in good shape or is known for its regulation.

[A]

Oh, so the U.S. yeah.

[B]

And the U.S. the U.S. and the U.S. it's both of us.

[C]

No, I think it's one of the biggest mistakes we ever made. And I wish we could go back on it because I Feel like, particularly for local affiliates here in the us they're captured by these ads because it's the only. Every ad break has pharmaceutical ads.

[A]

Yeah, it used to just be during like 60 Minutes and old people programming, but it's everything now.

[C]

Right, right. And part of that is that the only people watching local affiliates anymore are old people. But, yeah, it's out of control and I wish they could rein it back in, but I don't think they're going to.

[A]

Nope. Too much money.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did see an interesting story that I thought I'd share.

[B]

New Zealand, by the way, is the one that you were thinking of, surprisingly.

[A]

Oh, our Kiwi listeners are going to be pissed. You call them a third world shithole.

[C]

No, that wasn't who I was thinking of. It was like. No, it wasn't. It wasn't New Zealand. It was another country that was like in civil war or something. So, no, believe me, I would not call the New Zealanders that because they'd come and kick my. My butt.

[B]

They can. They can for sure.

[A]

It's a long flight. Not sure if it's worth it.

[C]

Right. I saw this interesting article since I know at least Jason, anyway, has been a drone enthusiast, as I have been over the years. We've got a journalist who's suing the FAA over drone no fly zones. Basically, the FAA extended no fly zones for drones over anywhere that ice is, including their vehicles. And it's 3,000ft, which is what, you know, over a half mile. But as the journalist points out in this lawsuit, how do you know where ICE is? There's no way to know because all

[B]

the apps have been banned that tell us where ICE is, so we can't even look that up to find them.

[A]

They don't have badges, they don't identify themselves. There's nothing on their vehicles. How are we supposed to know?

[C]

Yeah, they're in unmarked vehicles with fake license plates. So it's basically been a chilling effect on journalists ability to use the drones. And so tip of the hat to this guy who's suing and we'll see if he has any luck. But it's just another. Another brick in the wall. It's another. Another chip.

[B]

It's another turd in the pot.

[C]

Yeah, it's just another degradation of. Of journalism and First Amendment rights

[B]

at

[C]

the hands of ICE and surveillance and all that good stuff. So I hope we see some progress here, but I'm not holding out hope, I guess.

[B]

Yeah, we had the Thin Black Line episode last week and we said, don't get your hopes up. It's not going to last. So let's go back to the drudgery of the normal world, I guess. Yeah.

[C]

And then sort of on the tail of the RSA conference, one of my colleagues shared this video from a gentleman named Nicholas Carlini who works at Anthropic. He's a researcher at Anthropic, has a background in cybersecurity and finding bugs and things like that. And about a week ago he gave a talk at an AI conference and basically sent up the red flag and said even in the past few months these tools have gotten way more powerful than they were. They're unbelievably good at finding bugs. Now, he said he's been able to find more bugs in the Linux kernel, the Linux kernel, than he can process and report to the maintainers because he doesn't have time to go through and verify them all.

[A]

That's why you use an agent. You just set your AI agent to go report them all. Yeah, right.

[C]

Well, that's what he said. He said he doesn't want to hit the maintainers with slop without verifying the bugs himself, but he has verified some one of them. The one he uses in the presentation goes back to 2003. So he kind of joked that. He said this bug is older than many of the people in this room. So it's an interesting presentation. If you're into the AI stuff, if you're into cybersecurity, if you're a developer, I highly suggest you watch it because it is a call to action. He's saying we need to do something about this, we need to help now. Not months from now, not a year from now, now. So it's a little disconcerting in addition.

[A]

Well, these companies have a great track record of listening to these sorts of things and responding immediately to it. So I'm sure this will be taken care of. No problem. Lickety split.

[C]

Right? Right. Yeah. Who knows? Probably also his last day at Anthropic after he gave this presentation.

[B]

That's the thing. I was going to say he was busy at this Unprompted conference, which is a great name for an AI conference. Unprompted. Love it. Yeah. But he was, while he was there, bitching about security. That's when the Claude code probably got leaked. So you know, he was absentee landlord at his job there.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But I can't wait to watch this. This is going to be great.

[C]

It is good, but again, a little disconcerting. And what's also interesting to me is that this was not the message I was hearing at rsa.

[B]

Right. Oh, of course not. No.

[C]

It was a lot more rah, rah, rah.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Which I guess you should expect, but usually you'll get a sub. Subtext like an undertone of concern. And that was lacking. It was definitely lacking this year. I don't know, just everybody's drinking the Kool Aid or the people who still have jobs are really happy to still have jobs.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. So don't rock the boat. I don't know.

[B]

Yeah. And fixing bugs doesn't make money. Fixing bugs costs money. So they're not going to highlight what's going to cost us more money that this thing's bringing down the line.

[C]

Right, Right.

[A]

Yeah. Who needs a good product?

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. The other, I guess the hopeful point that this person makes in his presentation is that he believes that ultimately the defenders are going to win. But he used the analogy that overall the Industrial Revolution was a good thing for humanity and for the world, but living through the Industrial Revolution was not good for a lot of people. And he feels as though that's where we are right now. We're living through this AI revolution. And so for a lot of people, it's not going to be good. And we all need to step up. Those of us who. Who can need to step up and try to put guardrails on things. So on that note.

[B]

Yeah, on that note, here's a. Great to have you back, Dave.

[C]

No, it's good to be back. Thanks, guys and I'll see you next week.

[B]

See you next week.

[C]

All right, take care.

[B]

Closing shout out. Over at Patreon, we've got no new patrons. Sad Christmas. Please come join us. But we would like to thank Bank, Verbal Diary, Leslie, Matt, Jean, Philippe, Arthur, Brian, Kale, Gabriel, Zaray and Igor. Thank you all so very much for being patrons.

[A]

Thank you. And over at PayPal, we've got donations from Nicola, Judge, Levy, Jonathan with 20 bucks and Thomas with 25 bucks. Thank you all so much.

[B]

Appreciate it, doggy. Thank you all so much. And over at the Tip Jar, we've got Sarah, Adam and Matthew. Oh, and we've also got Joshua. Thank you. Joshua just came in that just came in the door. So if you would like to help keep the show on the air and support us. We don't have that tech bro podcast network money. This is all just fan supported and it looks like it, as you can tell. But go to gog show donate to find all the different ways you can donate or you can go to patreon.com gog and for as little as $3 a month or more. If you want to give more, you get the show early ad free and in high definition. So keep the show on the air. Pretty pleased with Sugar on of top the top. No merch, no reviews. God damn Brian. Slow week.

[A]

Well, until next time. I'm Ryan Schillmeister.

[B]

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from Today's episode at GOG Show 740 want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at gog. I can even say our name. GOG Show. Donate Every penny helps keep the show on the air. And if you 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. Queen and we'll love you for it. Or swing by GOG show to join our discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts? Feedback? School links? Hit us up at GOG Show Contact and hey, don't forget to leave a five star review at GOG Show Review and we'll read it on the air. And guess what? We've got some merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at Shop GOG show and stay grumpy.