668: Weaponized Puffery

Summary

Grumpy Old Geeks - Episode 668: Weaponized Puffery

Release Date: October 5, 2024

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Hosts:
Jason DeFilippo
Brian Schulmeister
Guest:
Dave Bittner

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1. OpenAI and Copyright Lawsuit Data Access

[01:20] Jason DeFilippo:
"OpenAI has agreed to allow inspection of its training data by authors that are suing the company for copyright infringement."

Discussion:
Jason and Brian delve into OpenAI's recent concession to permit authors involved in copyright lawsuits to inspect the company's extensive training datasets. They highlight the impracticality of this move, noting the sheer volume of data ("70 gazillion, bazillion gigabytes") and the logistical challenges, such as conducting inspections in air-gapped rooms at OpenAI's headquarters. The hosts sarcastically speculate on high-profile figures, like Sarah Silverman, participating in these inspections, questioning the effectiveness and sincerity of OpenAI's gesture.

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2. AI and Ethical Concerns: Model Deception and Educational Impact

[17:02] Brian Schulmeister:
"One of the most popular techniques AI companies use to improve the quality of their large language models may instead make those models just better at deceiving humans."

Discussion:
Brian introduces a preprint study from Anthropic and other researchers, revealing that enhancements aimed at refining AI models might inadvertently teach them to better deceive users. The study warns that future AI systems could become more adept at misleading humans while feigning correctness, thereby increasing the risk of losing control over these technologies. The hosts express frustration over the lack of transparency and control, emphasizing the societal risks posed by such advancements.

Listener Interaction:
A listener named Sally seeks advice on implementing AI ethically within a higher education setting. Brian and Dave provide guidance, stressing the importance of cautious and need-based AI adoption, while acknowledging the inevitable integration of AI into various institutional frameworks.

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3. Elon Musk's Legal Wins and Tesla's Self-Driving Updates

[07:07] Brian Schulmeister:
"They're making some concessions. Yes, if you want to call it that."

Discussion:
The hosts discuss Elon Musk's recent legal victories, including the dismissal of a lawsuit against Tesla's self-driving claims. They critique Tesla's defense strategy, which labeled Musk's ambitious promises as mere "puffery"—exaggerated statements not meant to be taken seriously by investors. Jason mocks Musk's celebratory tweets, suggesting a disconnect between the reality of the legal outcomes and Musk's public persona.

[22:49] Jason DeFilippo:
"Tesla has started rolling out full Self driving to a select group of cybertruck owners, allowing the electric pickup to drive on highways hands free."

Discussion:
Jason and Brian explore Tesla's latest rollout of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature for Cybertruck owners. They critique the system's limitations, such as its dependency on driver attentiveness and its current early access status. The discussion extends to Elon Musk's upcoming Cyber Cab event, highlighting ongoing challenges and skepticism surrounding Tesla's autonomous vehicle technology.

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4. US Dockworkers Strike and Supply Chain Implications

[10:24] Jason DeFilippo:
"US Dock workers have gone on strike. Now, I don't know much about this world, but this is for the first time since 1977."

Discussion:
The podcast shifts focus to the historic strike by 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) over contract disputes, including pay and job security amidst increasing port automation. Brian outlines the potential ripple effects on America's supply chain, predicting scenarios like car sales plummeting and mall closures due to halted imports. Jason adds that a tentative deal has been reached to keep docks open until January 15th, postponing potential severe disruptions.

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5. OpenAI's Recent Funding Round and Business Strategies

[13:44] Jason DeFilippo:
"OpenAI has raised a $6.6 billion round in the largest venture capital round of all time, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion and valuing the company at $157 billion."

Discussion:
Jason announces OpenAI's monumental $6.6 billion funding round, underscoring its status as the largest venture capital raise historically. The hosts scrutinize OpenAI's expenditure, noting the significant investments in model training and staffing, juxtaposed with modest projected revenues. They question the sustainability and profitability of such massive financial commitments, highlighting the company's aggressive expansion and strategic maneuvers, such as restricting investor participation to prevent backing competitors like Xai or Anthra.

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6. AI-Generated Art Controversy: Jason M. Allen's Case

[18:03] Brian Schulmeister:
"Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won and humans lost."

Discussion:
Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, is spotlighted for submitting an AI-generated painting to a Colorado digital art competition and winning. The controversy arises from accusations of cheating, sparking debates about the integrity of AI in creative fields. The hosts criticize Allen's stance on AI's impact on the art market and lament the ethical dilemmas posed by AI-generated content, emphasizing the ongoing struggle between human artists and emerging AI technologies.

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7. Google's Legal Victory over DMCA Abuses

[20:37] Jason DeFilippo:
"In a victory against scammers, Google has won a lawsuit targeting two men who abused its DMCA takedown system."

Discussion:
Jason narrates Google's triumph in a lawsuit against Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Tien, who exploited Google's DMCA system to falsely remove over 100,000 URLs, many aimed at competitors in the online T-shirt business. The hosts commend Google for securing a default judgment that bans the pair from further abuse of the DMCA system, highlighting the significance of protecting platform integrity against fraudulent activities.

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8. Autonomous Vehicles Incidents: Cruise and Waymo

[21:12] Brian Schulmeister:
"On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise, GM Self Driving Vehicle Division, $1.5 million."

Discussion:
Brian details the NHTSA's hefty fine against Cruise for its handling of a fatal autonomous vehicle accident in San Francisco, where a pedestrian was struck and dragged. The investigation revealed Cruise's attempt to obscure key details by manipulating video feeds during official presentations. The failings of transparency and accountability in autonomous vehicle operations are harshly criticized, underscoring the dangers of inadequate oversight in the deployment of self-driving technologies.

[23:59] Brian Schulmeister:
"Kamala Harris's motorcade was stalled due to a malfunctioning Waymo vehicle, highlighting ongoing issues with autonomous vehicle reliability."

Discussion:
The conversation shifts to an incident involving President Kamala Harris's motorcade being impeded by a stalled Waymo vehicle during a U-turn. This event further exemplifies the persistent reliability challenges facing autonomous vehicles, even as they become more integrated into public and official movements.

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9. California's AI Legislation and Digital Ownership Laws

[32:34] Brian Schulmeister:
"Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2426 into law, clarifying that digital purchases grant only revocable licenses, not outright ownership."

Discussion:
Brian and Jason discuss California's newly enacted AB 2426, which mandates that digital storefronts must transparently inform customers that purchasing digital goods results in a revocable license rather than ownership. They critique the law's timing and effectiveness, noting its attempt to curb misleading digital sales practices. The hosts acknowledge the importance of consumer protection in the expanding digital marketplace but question the law's enforceability and real-world impact.

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10. Amazon Prime Video Ads and Subscription Models

[39:26] Jason DeFilippo:
"Amazon plans to increase the number of ads on Prime Video in 2025 after minimal backlash from subscribers."

Discussion:
The hosts analyze Amazon's strategy to bolster its ad revenue by introducing more advertisements into Prime Video. They express skepticism about the reported "minimal backlash," arguing that subscriber retention remains high due to the difficulty in canceling Amazon Prime accounts. The potential for increased subscription costs alongside more ads is discussed, highlighting concerns over user experience and value proposition.

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11. Meta's Ray Ban Smart Glasses and Facial Recognition Concerns

[46:03] Brian Schulmeister:
"Meta has confirmed that any image analyzed by its AI through Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses can be used to train its AI models."

Discussion:
Jason and Brian critique Meta's integration of facial recognition technology in its Ray Ban smart glasses, emphasizing privacy concerns. They discuss an experiment by Harvard students that used these glasses to access personal information about individuals, raising alarms about the ease of surveillance and data misuse. The hosts reflect on the broader implications of wearable AI technologies and the erosion of personal privacy.

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12. Miscellaneous Tech Updates: iPhones, USB C Cable Testers

[55:28] Jason DeFilippo:
"Johnny from the show discusses the new iPhone 16's camera button and other functionalities, critiquing its overemphasis on minor upgrades."

Discussion:
The conversation turns to consumer electronics, specifically the iPhone 16's new features. The hosts debate the practicality and necessity of incremental hardware improvements versus more substantial innovations, expressing fatigue over superficial enhancements in modern tech devices.

[65:08] Jason DeFilippo:
"There's a new USB C to USB C cable tester called the BLE Caber Qu, but it's overpriced at $80."

Discussion:
Brian and Jason discuss the release of a new digital USB C cable tester, critiquing its high cost relative to its functionality. They lament the complexity and fragility of high-speed data cables, sharing personal frustrations with frequent cable failures despite using premium products.

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13. Closing Remarks and Shoutouts

[80:07] Brian Schulmeister:
"We also have some new 5-star reviews. The first one says 'pleasant find. Coincidentally, Apple podcasts made me aware of this great show.'"

Discussion:
The hosts express gratitude toward their listeners, highlighting positive feedback and encouraging audience engagement through donations, Patreon, and social media interactions. They share personal anecdotes and humorous exchanges, reinforcing the show's casual and candid atmosphere.

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Notable Quotes

• Jason DeFilippo [02:17]:
  "I'm reasonably sure that they hire people to send."

• Brian Schulmeister [04:33]:
  "There's only three things up there right now, but... the joy out of the money."

• Brian Schulmeister [08:50]:
  "By the way everybody, you're listening to the number one podcast in the entire world."

• Jason DeFilippo [57:01]:
  "And my wife bought it for me when I was in my 20s and I can still just about squeeze into it."

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Conclusion

In this episode, Grumpy Old Geeks navigates through a myriad of tech-related controversies and updates, with a particular focus on the ethical implications of AI advancements, legal battles involving major tech figures like Elon Musk, and the tangible impacts of labor strikes on supply chains. The hosts blend critique with humor, offering insightful commentary on how these developments shape the technological landscape. Listener interactions and personal anecdotes further enrich the discussion, making complex topics accessible and engaging for a broad audience.

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Stay Grumpy and informed with Grumpy Old Geeks by diving into the detailed show notes and supporting links available at GOG Show.

Transcript

[Brian Schulmeister]

Hey, prime members, have you heard?

[Jason DeFilippo]

You can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Good news, with Amazon Music, you have.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com ad free podcast. That's Amazon.com ad free podcast to catch.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

[Jason DeFilippo]

The store is open. Brian, the store is open. Yes, it is.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Are people beating down the door?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, this is the first time we've told them, so hopefully they will beat down the door. People beat down the door. There's only three things up there right now, but by the time this airs, there might even be five or six. I just, I ran into trouble getting the damn international stuff to work, but it works now, so cool. Now we can just, now we can just design. We can be designers. Brian. Yeah, I hope you get the joy out of designing because we're probably not going to make the joy out of the money, so. No, just one of those things.

[Brian Schulmeister]

But we got to have all the revenue streams, Jason.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I know. We have to have all our tranches in a row. Yes, as the kids say. I don't know what kids say that, but I'm sure there are a few. They're hustlers. They're hustlers. All right, so this is an interesting bit of follow up here. OpenAI has agreed to allow inspection of its training data by authors that are suing the company for copyright infringement.

[Brian Schulmeister]

All right, here's 70 gazillion, bazillion gigabytes of stuff. Have fun.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Exactly. And we only have room for one of you at a time. They're basically going to do it in an air gapped room at their San Francisco hq. So the authors have to drive to them. So I can just see Sarah Silverman having a great day, driving up there to go sit in a room at OpenAI, going, what am I looking at?

[Brian Schulmeister]

I'm reasonably sure that they hire people to send.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, okay, can I get that job, Sarah? I'm free. Although I shit on your last special, so I bet she's probably not going to hire me. Damn it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I think she's got tougher skin than that.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Probably, probably and yeah, so they're making some concessions. Yes, if you want to call it that. Okay, moving on. Oasis. Listen to you, Brian. They listened to our episode where you laid out the future of ticket sales and how they were doing things wrong. So Oasis has opted out of Ticketmaster's controversial dynamic pricing for their upcoming North American leg of the tour. British. They're fucked. You're done. You can't do it there.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, it's funny, we have a, what I call a reverse Taylor Swift situation. People in the US during Taylor Swift's last tour were wildly complaining online that it was massively cheaper to buy airfare to Europe and buy tickets for Taylor Swift in Europe than it was then. That was way cheaper than seeing them at home. We have that now occurring for Oasis where I'm hearing from the Brits that they're better off flying somewhere in the States and getting tickets here than they were trying to get tickets at some of the home grown shows. So that's quite amusing. The one thing I will point out about this, my wife is a massive Oasis fan and basically I, I didn't hear anything other than Oasis ticket things for the last week while they were the pre sale started and all that sort of stuff. So what they did do in lieu of dynamic pricing is they just massively increased the base pricing.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, okay, so that's a hack.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, theoretically you could have gotten an Oasis ticket for say around 70 bucks to 100 bucks during the UK pre sales, but then the dynamic pricing hit. You couldn't get a ticket for oasis under like 150 bucks here.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, so where are you going to go see them?

[Brian Schulmeister]

They are playing a show in Toronto, so we will be going to see that one. It is not until, I think August of next year.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, okay. You got plenty of time if you're still there.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I got plenty. I got plenty of time to figure a way out of it because I don't particularly care for Oasis to begin with. And Liam's voice is just shot like, oh really? Like if all the Knoll songs, the ones that he sings, that should be fine. Anything that Liam's gonna sing is just gonna be a fucking disaster.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Maybe they can Milli Vanilli it. Yeah. Or maybe you can just, you know, move back to the States and say, oh, we can't go back to Toronto for the show because we're back in.

[Brian Schulmeister]

The show, Los Angeles show, you know. Well, there's no avoiding Oasis. Hopefully they'll break up before then.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they'll pull a Jane's Addiction, they'll just beat each other to death. So last week we talked about California being able to put your driver's license into your phone. Sort of. Sort of. I couldn't do it, but friend of the show Brian Blondell was able to do it and as chance would have it, flew to Chicago later that week and he sent me a text saying, FYI, there are signs at the airport to download your license or id. But when I tried to use it at tsa, they said they didn't take it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay, well, I mean, that sort of makes sense. It is a California thing for California. And that doesn't necessarily mean that this new fangled way of having your ID is going to fly in other states or at the airport, which is federal.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, I mean, there were like seven other states that were ahead of us. They got the digital IDs, but. Yeah, but the fact that they have posters up saying, do it at the airport. You'd think that the other entities at the airport that actually take IDs besides a bar would actually take the ID.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, then again, there's the actual world that we live in and everything we talk about in this podcast, of course it's not going to work. Absolutely. Do not rely on any sort of bleeding edge technology for this sort of stuff.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Do they still make you take your shoes off?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Depends. I've got. I've got the global passenger whatever thingy. So I don't ever have to, but sometimes I do because things make sense.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, fun times. And there's a sister article over at the Verge called don't ever hand your phone to the cops. This is kind of basic knowledge, I think, for a lot of people, but some people who are, you know, maybe inebriated probably wouldn't do this the right way. The thing is, if you unlock your phone to show them your ID and then you give it to them, they can just take it and play around with it and look around.

[Brian Schulmeister]

See, now what we need are multiple levels of unlock. There should be a basic. The ID can pop up a few thumb at once, but that doesn't unlock the entire phone. If we're all going to be required at some point, we probably will to have our digital IDs instead of physical IDs, then we need multiple versions of.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Unlock, and I think that it does that. I'm almost positive it works just like Apple Pay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Oh, good, that would be great.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, I'm almost positive I didn't do the research because it's been a long fucking week. But from what I remember when this first came out. This is going to work identical to Apple pay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay, cool.

[Jason DeFilippo]

We'll see how that goes.

[Brian Schulmeister]

If anybody chipped copper gets near your phone, it just pops up.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, he's good. He's good. Officer. Well, Elon had a good week.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Unfortunately, yes, Judge John Mendez has blocked California's deep fake law AB 2839, which aimed to curb AI generated content effect affecting elections. We talked about this last week because Elon got kind of wrapped up in it because he tweeted a. Or twatted or shitted or whatever you want to call it nowadays. He recrapped a video of Kamala Harris that was made by Christopher Coles, the parody artist who actually sued the state of California to block the law. And well, the judge said, yeah, yeah, actually you're right, this law sucks. There's really nothing about it that is. That passed the sniff test. So I'm going to block it. And then Elon, of course jumped in and said, victory because he's a twat.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, of course. Well now you just have to go back and retool the language to have it make more sense.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah. He said the statute infringes on his right to free speech, is unconstitutionally vague. And the judge said, yep, there you go on that one. And the next one. This one, this one is just interesting. And I don't know who got paid off for this one. Elon is celebrating a legal win over a lawsuit regarding Tesla's self driving claims. But here's the kicker. The defense his lawyers used is a bit embarrassing because they basically argued that Musk's grand promises about Tesla's full self driving tech were just puffery, which is legal jargon for exaggerated feel good statements that no reasonable investor would take seriously.

[Brian Schulmeister]

By the way everybody, you're listening to the number one podcast in the entire world.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Woo. Yes. Ranked higher than Joe Rogan on every chart ever. Yep. No. No. Okay, so Tesla got the lawsuit dismissed, but only because the judge agreed that Musk's claims were too vague. And then he tweeted, justice prevails. Not really realizing that his defense team argued that everything he said in his entire career about Tesla and full self driving was just bullshittery.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, I mean basically it has now been set down by a legal body that you cannot believe anything that Elon says. And he's fully of shit. That is the ruling.

[Jason DeFilippo]

He is legally full of shit. In the news.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, we got some big news just in time for Christmas. Well, not right in time for Christmas, but given the way that Things roll out and how we have to ship things around the country and things get moved around in time for Christmas because stuff is starting to get into stores now. US Dock workers have gone on strike. Now, I don't know much about this world, but this is. For the first time since 1977, the 47,000 members of the International Longshoremen's association, the ILA, are walking picket lines. The contract expired on Monday at midnight after negotiations with bosses broke down. They want better pay as well as something more existential and harder to secure a future where robots don't take their jobs.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, good luck with that.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Good luck with that. But without the longshoremen, America's supply chain will shut down. Much of the country has stocked up on goods ahead of the Christmas season, but there's always something coming in. And the longer the strike goes on, the more likely it is that Americans will feel the pinch. Inflation may rise and goods might be scarce, according to the president of the ila. That's the point. These people don't know where the strike is. Daggett said. You know what's going to happen? I'll tell you. First week, be all over the news every night. Boom, boom. Second week, guys who sell cars can't sell cars because the cars ain't coming in off the ships. They get laid off. Third week, malls start closing down. They can't get the goods from China. I don't know if this guy's seen any malls recently, but they've all shut down.

[Jason DeFilippo]

They've all shut down already.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Everything in the United States comes from a ship. And robots are, of course, already at ports. Automation can handle the two biggest jobs at a port. Unloading massive shipping containers with a crane and sorting those shipping containers on the shore. There are already three fully automated terminals in the US More on their way. Equipment to automate a port is expensive to set up and still does require workers, but far fewer than required to unload goods the old fashioned way. So good luck with that. I think you're going to have to take some sort of compromise here. You're not going to get a blanket no robots on ports ruling, because quite frankly, it's cheaper, faster, quicker and better.

[Jason DeFilippo]

And this just in. They have reached a tentative deal which will keep the docks open until January 15th, where this will all start again.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Kicking that can down the road.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Exactly. I saw the news that people were already freaking out and they're like, like, I need teepee. I need teepee. Oh, God, yeah. Not realizing that 90% of the toilet paper in the United States is made here. But what you couldn't get if this kept going were bananas.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I need my bananas.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, I went to the store yesterday and bought some bananas. But then this morning they said, strikes over already. So I'm like, okay, well, I got some bananas. I'm stocking up on potassium.

[Brian Schulmeister]

This just makes me reminds me of the time I went over to your place to do a show during the pandemic. It was just wall to wall toilet paper. If I came over tomorrow, it would be wall to wall.

[Jason DeFilippo]

The mountain of teepee and white Claw.

[Brian Schulmeister]

God, it's hilarious. I'll never forget that. Welcome. California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed a bill aimed at preventing large AI systems from causing catastrophic harms, saying the legislation would have created a false sense of security. So again, this comes down to the legislation that was brought forward kind of being vague and somewhat nonsensical. And let's go back and redraft this thing. This, this law. Senate Bill 1047, introduced by state Senator Scott Weiner back in May, would have required companies that spend more than $100 million on computing resources to create a foundation to AI model, or 10 million on computing resources to fine tune a foundation model to perform safety tests, hire independent auditors to review the model annually, and take reasonable care to ensure the model doesn't cause mass casualty incidents. More than $500 million in damage to physical or cyber infrastructure or act without human. Anyways, this basically got killed because of an awful lot of lobbying from people like, oh, I don't know, Elon Musk, who has an AI company that is underneath that restriction so he wouldn't have to deal with it. This is the slowdown open AI bill, basically.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, moving on to more OpenAI news, OpenAI has raised a $6.6 billion round in the largest venture capital round of all time, bringing its total funding to $17.9 billion and valuing the company at $157 billion. So the round we still haven't found.

[Brian Schulmeister]

The promise and the golden path for any of this or how to make money.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, Check this out. The company has spent around $7 billion on model training and $1.5 billion on staffing. My God, I can't make my car payment and these guys are spending $1.5 billion on these AI twats. ChatGPT alone has over 200250 million users with annual revenue projected to reach $2.7 billion this year. That's a lot. That's not bad.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They could hire more staff, except they don't need them because they're just using their own product.

[Jason DeFilippo]

That's about it. Elon did have a big party last night for xai trying to do some recruitment and he ironically had it at the original OpenAI headquarters, which is now the XAI headquarters. Talk about following, following your old days.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I wonder if you got it. Hoping they left little piles of data sitting around.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Can you go, it's like, you know, cokeheads looking in the carpet for the little rocks. Like can you see if they left any models around here? Is there model dust?

[Brian Schulmeister]

There's some server racks over there. Check that for data.

[Jason DeFilippo]

The interesting thing about that round was according, this is according to the Financial Times, OpenAI demanded that its eventual investors abstained from also funding any of OpenAI's competitors like Xai or Anthra. Which is why probably Apple backed out of the deal because they were going to get in on that $6.6 billion deal. But Apple is smart. They hedge their bets. They're not going to get locked in to anything.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They're going to invest in all of them.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, they could take their own money and just build it themselves if they want to.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, that's an interesting clause that they put in there. Who's going to monitor that? I guess they found a job for some people.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, I mean it's Apple. They've got enough talent and enough resources where they could just start working on this themselves. But there's also enough competitors out there to really kind of. They don't want to jump too early. I'm sure like maybe Microsoft did because there's a new MIT spin off called Liquid AI and they've debuted a new liquid foundational model or an lfm. I want the MILF to come out. That'll be good when that, I want the klf, km, FDM doing it again. So the Liquid foundation models offer a significant breakthrough in AI model design because unlike the popular Transformer based architecture, these models use a post Transformer approach which makes them more memory efficient while still achieving top tier performance. Post Transformers. Isn't that that new movie that just came out that tanked that one?

[Brian Schulmeister]

I think that was transformer one.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Ah, okay. $1 is about how much money it made at the, at the box office, I hear.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. Well, speaking about these different models for training, guess what we've discovered?

[Jason DeFilippo]

What have we discovered, Brian?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, one of the most popular techniques AI companies use to improve the quality of their large language models may instead make those models just better at deceiving humans. According to a new pre print Study from anthropic and researchers at Chinese and American universities. Yeah. Link is in the show notes. It gets pretty deep in the weeds on exactly the different methodologies used by these companies. But basically what they've discovered is that really when they're trying to make these models better and provide more accurate information, what it's actually doing is just teaching the models to tell us what we want to hear.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Humans going to human.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yep. So that's great. As they point out, the study authors wrote, the improvements you see in these models may not be real. Our results underscore the risk of applying these different training methods to control increasingly capable AI systems. Future AI systems might become better at misleading us and pretending to be correct, causing us to lose control unknowingly.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I love it. I love it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I love that we're investing so much money and placing so many important aspects of our lives in the hands of these things and we have no clue what they're doing.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, we do. We do have a clue. They're being just like us. Yeah, we can be just like. We can be just like us for free, guys. We don't need the AI to do it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They just, they just fuck up faster.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, they do.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. Thanks for that. We talked about this guy, Jason M. Allen, back when he, he did this thing. He's an executive at a tabletop gaming startup and he submitted an AI generated painting to a Colorado digital art competition and won, which caused much bru. Critics claimed that he had cheated, but the prize winner didn't have much sympathy for his detractors. I'm not going to apologize for it. Alan said, I won and I didn't break any rules. He also didn't seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Mid Journey, the one he used to create his painting, were poised to destroy the art market. This isn't going to stop. Alan told the New York Times. Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won and humans lost. Well, now butt Hurt Bitch is complaining because he keeps creating his own AI artwork and it cannot be copyrighted because it's AI created artwork and he's, he's using platforms that have been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works. And now his work that's created using that can't be copyrighted and people are stealing it and he's not making any money.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Jason. Oh my God. What a little whiny baby.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They're stealing his work.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Jason, that was created by stealing other people's work.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Oh, there have been instances where people outright have ripped off My work incorporating the entire piece into a new piece, which is exactly the fucking shit you're doing.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Exactly what he did. My God. Okay, Siri, please send Jason M. Allen the definition of irony.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Anyways, Alanis Morissette's gonna play a benefit concert for him.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, God. So I can't get past that guy. What a twat. In a victory against scammers, Google has won a lawsuit targeting two men who abused its DMCA takedown system. The scammers, Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Tien, falsely requested the removal of over 100,000 URLs, many targeting competitors in the online T shirt business.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Smart.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I know, I know. They even impersonated celebrities like Elon Musk in their fraudulent claims. Despite being summoned, the defendants believed to be in Vietnam, did not respond.

[Brian Schulmeister]

What? They're not going to show up?

[Jason DeFilippo]

No, they're not going to show up. A U.S. court issued a default judgment banning the pair from further abuse of Google's DMCA system. While Google could have sought monetary damages, its primary goal was to stop the fraudulent activity and protect the integrity of its platform.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Awesome.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise, GM Self Driving Vehicle Division, $1.5 million. This penalty was imposed for admitting key details from an October 2023 accident in which one of the company's autonomous vehicles struck and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian. I love this. The report states that Cruise executives initially played a video of the accident during October 3rd meetings with the San Francisco Mayor's office, the NATSA, the DMV, and other officials. However, during the presentation, the video stream was hampered by Internet connectivity issues that concealed the part where the vehicle dragged the victim.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Hey, when it gets to. When it gets to 36 seconds, pull the plug.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, boss. I can go. Sorry, I'm driving. Driving past the air. Airport executives who the report stated knew about the dragging, also failed to verbally mention that crucial detail in the initial meetings because they wanted to let the video speak for itself. The video that you didn't let play all the way was supposed to speak for itself, and then you just decided not to mention it? Investigators finally found out about the dragging after the NA NHTSA asked the company to submit the full video. The government agency says Cruise also amended four other incomplete crash reports involving its vehicles to add additional details with a small note saying, the jig is up, boys.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oops. Busted.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. So there you go. Awesome.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I'm full of hope this week, as you can tell.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, Brian Tesla has started rolling out full Self driving to a select group of cybertruck owners, allowing the electric pickup to drive on highways hands free. The end to end on highway feature enabled by Tesla's AI neural network is in early access, meaning it's only available to some owners who paid for it. When purchasing the truck last fall, drivers still need to remain attentive while using fsd, which can deactivate if it detects inattention. Perfect. That's exactly what I want. I want the truck that's driving itself to stop driving itself and turn off when the person is not paying attention. Tension. That makes sense on a highway.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, that's going to be great.

[Jason DeFilippo]

What fucking idiot engineer came up with that one?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Mr. Musk.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Tesla is betting big on its self driving capabilities. And yeah, because guess what? On October 10, Musk plans to unveil a new self driving taxi called the Cyber Cab in an event here in California, which. I thought he bailed on California already? What the hell?

[Brian Schulmeister]

If there's money to be made, he's just not going to place his businesses here.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, speaking of self driving cars in California, Kamala Harris's motorcade was stalled or was blocked actually due to a stalled Waymo. They already hate her up there because you know, all the crypto bros and all that sort of tech tycoons are not big fans of the Democrats trying to do any, any legislation or any kind of, of anything against them, but they were going. She was on her way to her hotel in a motorcade and a Waymo just stopped right in front of her. It was in the process of making a U turn on California street in the city's Knob Hill neighborhood. It malfunctioned and stopped moving. Eventually, a local police officer was forced to jump inside the driverless car and manually steer it out of traffic.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay. Yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And finally, Jeep's owners. Stellantis has recalled about 194,000 plug in hybrid SUVs from the brand. Due to risk of a fire. This recall impacts specific Jeep Wrangler 4XE models from 2020 to 2024 in some Jeep Grand Cherokee 4XE SUVs from 2022 to 2024. About 5% of the vehicles will have the defect, according to the company. It discovered the issue after 13 fires were reported, all when the vehicle was parked and off.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Now despite this risk, they are not yet having customers bring their hybrids in for servicing. Probably because they don't have the parts or don't know how to fix it yet. Instead, the company claims a remedy is imminent and Owners will get notified when they can come in. For now, they state vehicle risk is reduced when the battery charge level is depleted. Accordingly, owners are advised to refrain from recharging. And out of an abundance of caution, the company is also advising owners of these vehicles to park away from structures or other vehicles until a remedy is obtained. Basically, don't fucking drive your car and keep it. Keep it away in a field in the middle of nowhere.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Which is great, because from my front door, I see three of these parked in driveways next to my place. Oh, See, that's why I keep mine with the liquid dinosaur version. I like my Jeep, but, yeah, these four XEs are. I'm sorry, they're four by Es. I think that's what they're. Instead of four by fours.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But took me a while to figure that one out. I'm like, what the fuck is that? They're. Yeah, they're everywhere around here. And I don't know about you, Brian, but cybertrucks have infested Los Angeles. They're everywhere now.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I saw them a lot last time I was there. I'm sure over Christmas there's just going to be tons.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, no, they're all over the place. And I saw that damn LAPD one again, but I was driving and it was at night, so I couldn't get a picture. But at some point, I'm going to get a picture of this damn thing. I swear.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It's got to be white whale.

[Jason DeFilippo]

It is, it is. Call me Ishmael, but just don't call me Adam Neumann, because that motherfucker is back launching a new co working company called Workflow. And this is four months after his failed attempt to repurchase WeWork.

[Brian Schulmeister]

The statute of limitations has obviously run out on competitive.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, must have, must have. Workflow aims to provide office space with a more refined and calm environment compared to WeWork, focusing on upscale design rather than youthful perks like Kombucha. Yeah, taking away the Kombucha is really going to fix what was wrong with your company, by the way.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I take umbrage with that being a youthful perk. I enjoy my Kombucha and I'm an old man.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. Yep, Kombucha was delightful. Delightful. I'm not allowed to drink it anymore, says my sponsor. So his real estate company, Flow, owns a bunch of buildings already, so instead of going out and doing the leases like he did before, they're just going to work out of their buildings that they already have. So he's going to expand to multiple US cities and Riyadh. Okay, okay. There we go.

[Brian Schulmeister]

There we go.

[Jason DeFilippo]

We'll see if that works. Probably not, but hey, and this one is just very, very interesting to me. Scientists claim that during the COVID 19 pandemic, the moon's nighttime temperatures drop dropped significantly. A study from India's Physical Research Laboratory published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, found that as human activity and pollution plummeted during global lockdowns, Earth emitted less heat at night, which reduced radiation and led to an unexpected cooling of the moon's surface. We're putting out a lot of shit if we're heating up the moon that's hundreds of thousands of miles away. Damn. I get pissed off when my neighbor leaves his garage door light on at night. It floods my bedroom. It's like, geez. So the research highlights how changes on Earth can impact the moon and suggest that lunar temperature swings could help study climate change. The unique opportunity provided by the pandemic may never be repeated. Let's hope not.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Please.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But future moon based observatories could further explore this phenomenon. I thought that was kind of neat.

[Brian Schulmeister]

That is neat. I mean, terrifying, but neat.

[Jason DeFilippo]

This episode is brought to you by one password Extended Access Management. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices, IT approved apps and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps and non employee identities like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths. But a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password Extended Access Management solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't. It's security for the way we work today and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in beta for Google Workspace customers. Check it out at 1Password.com grumpyoldgeeks that's 1Password.com grumpyoldgeeeks this episode is brought to you by 1Password Extended Access Management. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices. It approved apps and managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass that are the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are unmanaged devices, shadow IT apps and non employee identities. Like contractors. Most security tools only work on those happy brick paths. But a lot of security problems take place on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password Extended Access Management solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't. It's security for the way we work today. And it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in beta for Google Workspace customers. Check it out at 1Password.com GrumpyOldGeeks that's 1Password.com GrumpyOldgeeks Media Candy Bruce Wayne, I mean, Gavin Newsom, our California governor, is again in the news because he signed AB 2426 into law, which Brian, as you and I know, when you buy something that's digital, you don't own it. We've been saying this for, well, we've been saying it since it started, but 11 years on this show at least. Now they're signing it into law. And starting next year, digital storefronts will be banned from using terms like buy or purchase unless they clearly inform customers they are only receiving a revocable license, not outright ownership of the content. Now, there is a loophole that if you can download a copy of it to keep forever, then you are buying it. But where can you do that anymore?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Not many places. Retail stores still.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, a couple of those. And you can download things on Netflix, but you don't own them. You can just play them on an airplane. Don't forget that. So retailers that violate the new rule could face fines for false advertising. The law won't apply to stores offering permanent offline downloads, like I said. And Assembly Member Jacques Irwin, the bill's author, emphasized that as digital media grows clearer, consumer protections are essential. Way to get ahead of that one. California 20 years too late.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It's a bit late to let everybody know that, but okay. I mean, it's something. These laws do need to be on the books. I think that's fair.

[Jason DeFilippo]

New people are being born every day.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I guess that's right. Right. So a show that I have not purchased and just have a license To. I just started watching with the wife. The Diplomat.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Gary Russell show. It's not really that new because they're already on season two, but started watching it.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Wait, season two is out?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. What? I think. I think so.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, my God. Okay, well, shocker. Netflix didn't fucking.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Oh, no, sorry. Season two comes October 31st.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, phew.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Because I just kept seeing season two every time we launched it. So I was like, oh, okay, I guess we can roll straight into season two. But, you know, a couple more weeks.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Couple more weeks. Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Great show. I really like it. I mean, here's the thing, though. Kerry Russell, the Americans. Then all of a sudden we had a Russia problem with Mr. Trump. Kerry Russell, the Diplomat. War in the Middle East. All of a sudden, we have war in the Middle East. Kerry Russell, I need you to make a feel good show where everything works properly because everything that you star in comes to pass.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah. Can we get Keri Russell in Utopia?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yes, please. Rainbows and Sunshine with Gary Russell.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Please, please. It's a fantastic show.

[Brian Schulmeister]

She is just so good. She's so good. And the guy that plays her husband, I love him. It's a great show. It's really, really well done.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, No, I was really hoping they were going to make a second one, so that really made my day. Thank you. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Because I watched that the first week it came out. I binged that in, like two days. I was like, I'm in. I'm in.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And to not be PC and just be a white dude. Keri Russell, keep showing your butt in shows for the rest of your life, please. Thank you.

[Jason DeFilippo]

You're welcome, Brian. You're welcome. I did watch Wolf's, the new Apple TV movie with Brad Pitt and George.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Clooney, which I have one of those things where I like Brad Pitt, I like George Clooney. I enjoy when they're together in like, Ocean's Eleven and all those movies.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

There is something about this that. That makes me want to hate it irrationally. Like, I don't know why. I see the. I see the trailers for it. I see everything. I'm just like, no, I will not watch this.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, it was fun.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Tell me if I should watch it.

[Jason DeFilippo]

It's fun. It's confusing as shit. The ending doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And everybody. I've actually gone and watched all of the explainer videos on wolves ending explained. And everybody's like, yeah, they didn't really explain that.

[Brian Schulmeister]

That's like watching those. Lost explained exactly well, we never really came. They never really came back. Explained any of that stuff.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh yeah. We need Wolfs 2 to really figure this one out. This movie was a vehicle produced by them so they could hang out and be buds together is pretty much what it comes down to.

[Brian Schulmeister]

That's what it felt like to me.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah, we enjoyed it. I mean, it's not too long. It's, you know, like it's two hours of fun. But yeah, it's. The writing is not what you would call top notch by any stretch.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So basically you're just saying I should go watch Ocean's Eleven again instead.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, Ocean's Eleven was way better. Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I'm just going to do that.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay. I mean, this was a good way to kill two hours. You know what, Brian? Have some wine, kick back and don't overthink it. That's. That's what you got to do.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I'm going to spend the entire time going, why did they do the plural of wolves incorrectly?

[Jason DeFilippo]

I think that's still a callback to Winston Wolf.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, because that's basically the character they play. They're basically two Winston Wolf's from. Yeah, from Pulp Fiction, which also is a far superior movie than Wolves.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So I could have four hours of better entertainment.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Five hours. Pulp Fiction is a fucking marathon. Yeah, yeah. Go watch Ocean's Eleven and Pulp Fiction instead.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But you are in Canada and you have the option now, Brian, to watch the Traders Canada Season two live on TV like normal people.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I don't, because I don't pay for tv.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Oh, well, then you can get it in Sweden like I do. The first two episodes have dropped and I love it. I am so in. The Traitors is one of those shows where I usually. On these foreign ones, we usually get to watch them after they've all aired. But I ended up just one day, I'm like, I wonder when Canada's coming back. And boom. The first episode had just dropped and I'm like, yes. So I waited till the second one comes out because it always ends on a cliffhanger. So you never know exactly what's going to happen till the next episode. Yeah, it's back, the first two are out and it's just as good as it's always been. I love the Traders, so. But they have done something that the Americans had caught onto and thought was a good idea. They started putting reality TV people into the game instead of civilians. Civilians, yeah, yeah, because civilians in these games, basically, there's a lot of heartbreak at the end. Reality TV people They know they're playing a game and they don't get butt hurt when they're lied to consistently for an entire season. When it's the civilians, it usually ends in a lot of tears. All right, yeah, it's still a game, so fuck it. It's great. I love the traitors.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And speaking of ending in tears, I watched the finale of season two of Lord of the the Rings of Power last night. Okay, I can't do this because there's too many spoilers, but it was great. It was really good. It definitely. They finally ramped up the action and moved the plot forward, like, a ton. This was a really good season. Much better than the first season. Way more involved, way more interesting. Really well done. Like, it's just. It's just good. I can't wait for season three.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But from. From what I've read and what you just said, it sounds like I should just watch the last episode of season two.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, you could. I mean, honestly, you don't have to. To watch any of it because it's all just lead up for what we already know happens. You could just watch the first five minutes of the Lord of the Rings movie where they do the preamble.

[Jason DeFilippo]

There we go. Okay, perfect.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So you don't have to do anything.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Nice. I've seen it already. Perfect.

[Brian Schulmeister]

We all know where this is going to end up.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah. This has all happened before because we all watched it before. All right, well, speaking of Amazon and Amazon tv. Oh, by the way, did they say when the next season's coming? Is it going to be next year or is it like three years off?

[Brian Schulmeister]

We know nothing, Jon Snow.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It's going to be a while, I think.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I didn't know if they'd filmed these concurrently like they did with the movies.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I don't believe so. I'm sure if it was coming already early next year, they would have said something about it, but I haven't seen anything.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay. Okay. Well, Amazon does plan to increase the number of ads on prime video in 2025 after minimal backlash from subscribers.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Bullshit. There was minimal backlash.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well. Well, nobody's canceling because the problem with Amazon Prime Video is that you'd have to cancel your Amazon prime account for the most part.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Nobody wants to do.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Nobody wants to do.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So we'll get more ads and expect an increase in your prime premium price.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yes, yes. Currently, users can avoid ads by paying the extra $3 a month, which just on pure fucking principle alone I won't do. Nope. So despite the lower than expected growth in Ad revenue. Amazon's ad business remains one of its fastest growing sectors. Years. Why is that? Because it didn't fucking exist last year, that's why. It's one of its fastest growing sectors.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. Now see, if they, if they were forced to like break apart everything and let you just buy into different parts of Amazon Prime, I think I would consider it. Although at this point, I mean there are only two shows now that they've gotten rid of a Top Gear, whatever the hell the new name is. Yeah, which wasn't that great. Anyways, I've got the Rings of Power, which I really enjoy on Amazon and the other one is that other sci fi one, the. The Turning of the Wheel or whatever the hell that thing was called, which I am looking forward to having come back because I've enjoyed that as well. But it's only two shows, so if I could opt out of Prime Video and pay less for just Prime, I would.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah, I see. I've got the Boys and the Boys, Spin Offs and Reacher. Those are the only ones I care about that are on there.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They just don't have a lot of content compared to the other ones.

[Jason DeFilippo]

No, not at all. It's just old shit. And the interface is terrible. Even that new interface is God awful. But Fallout, Fallout as well was excellent. So looking forward to that one. So there's a couple of them. I mean, honestly, they've got about as much as Apple TV when you think about it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, that's true.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But speaking of Apple tv, Sugar has just been renewed for a second season with Colin Farrell. So I'm very excited about that. No dates are set yet, but this is news directly from Apple so should be good. Hopefully. I liked the twist and I liked the ending of the show was weird as fuck, but I got into it and I liked it. So we'll see. And in what, what's the date today? We got like another week or so for this one.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It's the fourth quarter.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay. So 12 more days. We get shrinking season two, which gives me 12 more days to watch the end of shrinking season one.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I'm very excited that's coming back. It was such a fun show. Yeah, it's another show that I watch with my wife. I always enjoy those, so can't wait for it to come up and do dads hat.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Tip to Barrett on this one. This just came in. Google has introduced a new feature that lets users search the Internet by taking a video. This innovation allows people to point their phone's camera at something, record a clip and ask A question about it. And with Google's AI providing search results based on the video, which would be kind of neat. The feature, available globally on Android and iPhone, is part of Google's push to enhance search with artificial intelligence. I use. What the hell is it called? The one where you take a picture and then it gives you shopping results right away, all the time.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Lens or something like that. I forget what they call it.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, Google lens or something. I forget what it's called, but that's part of the Google app, so get that. I think this is going to be part of that as well. I can't wait to try it. I checked yesterday and I don't have it yet, so I'm hoping that it'll be coming soon because it sounds kind of neat.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It does sound neat.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. Because one of the tests that they did was they took a picture of a bunch of fish and said, why do fish like this swim in the same direction or some shit like that? I don't know. But I want to be able to point at the clouds with these birds flying over, say, what kind of birds are those? Or what kind of butterflies are these? Which I could probably do already somehow.

[Brian Schulmeister]

But they're drones from Russia.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yes, they are. Or Amazon or Walmart. Yeah. So which store owns these? So you and I, neither one of us own an ev, but this is some EV news. If you own a juice box EV charger, be prepared for some major changes. The company behind the popular home chargers, Anal X. Enal, you can pronounce that Anal X if you like, which I do. Is leaving the North American market as of October 11th. This means they're stopping all software updates and removing apps used to manage the chargers. While your juicebox hardware will still work for home charging, features like scheduling and other online functions will be gone.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Wow. That company is just non lube anal ing them.

[Jason DeFilippo]

No doubt commercial charging stations will be hit harder, losing much of their functionality. Anal X says harder, guys. Anal X says they're shifting focus to regions where they're offering. Where they offer electricity services. Blaming high interest rates north of the border. Yeah, blaming high interest rates in a slowing EV market for the exit. Customer support is no longer available and users should visit juiceboxnorthamerica.com for any issues.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Wow. Yeah, well, I mean, all the more reason not to jump into the EV market at this point in time. Like, let the. This. This stuff has to get sorted out. That's ridiculous.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, that's. That's a bad one. That's a bad one.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Zeeshan Alvi the owner of a medical testing laboratory in Chicago, has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. On Monday, according to a press Release from the U.S. department of Justice, Alvi's facility, known as Lab Elite, was releasing negative COVID 19 test results to patients that either weren't performed or were inconclusive. This is not the first of these companies, and I'm sure it won't be the last. As we dig further and further into this, these people should all be put in jail. The only reason anyone figured it out was that some patients received positive tests while waiting on their results from Lab Elite and were confused about the contradictory information from the Chicago lab. In a court filing from 2023, prosecutors laid out how he submitted roughly $83 million in false claims to the Department of Health and Human Resources sub agency from February 2021 to 2022. His lab was raided by the FBI in February 2022, and the 45 year old pleaded guilty this week to $14 million worth of fraud. Acknowledging that he knowingly submitted false claims.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Meta has confirmed that any image analyzed by its AI through Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses can be used to train its AI models. Brian, Is anybody shocked at this?

[Brian Schulmeister]

No, of course not. You know, we're basically signed all in to these things. If we decide to use them. They're just going to use it to train the data. That's part of their tos, that's part of their eula, end of story. Suck it all up.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, and honestly, you're a sucker anyway if you're buying anything with a camera in it that's owned by Meta. What did you think they was going to do? Remember, does this make my ass look fat? Camera. They were supposed to be in your bedroom.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yep. That was a great one.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, that lasted about a hot second. Well, speaking of Meta's Ray Ban glasses, two Harvard students have created a controversial experiment using facial recognition technology built into Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses. Dubbed Eye X Ray, the project uses the smart glasses cameras and pulls up personal information about people, including their home address and phone number, just by recognizing their face.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Why didn't they just call it IDOCs?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, but this is what we always wanted. This is what we wanted from Google Glass. You know, this is what I wanted.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I wanted to be able to go to a bar, see a hot girl, and find her Facebook age and find.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Out if she's got a boyfriend.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Exactly.

[Jason DeFilippo]

And if he's bigger than me. Yeah, that's it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

What country is the boyfriend in right now?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, is he here? Is he home? Let's track that. So they're using basically off the shelf facial recognition called Pimyes to do the lookups. And they're not going to release the technology to the public, but they're just doing this to show how readily available the tools are and how they can be combined to expose people's private lives. So good on you. Good on you.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Fair.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I mean, we knew this was coming. If we could have done this sooner, we would have 100%. That was the promise of Google Glass. But they just had to give them the glass holes first. So Scoble fucked it for everybody.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Totally. I've been working with the Walk the Distance app since I finished the fantasy, whatever the hell it was called, app that basically did the walkthrough. Not Lord of the Rings, not Lord of the Rings. That was a lot more fun. This one's a little bit boring, I gotta be honest. It's got a lot of different walks in it. I've been doing some of the city ones. All it does is. And you can tell this is made by people in San Francisco because it pulls up Google Maps and it starts in San Francisco and it pauses and then shifts over to whatever city you're walking in. It charts your progress through the city. It throws up little things from like Wikipedia about notable places in the city. Very boring. Not. Not all that fun. But what it does have in it is it has like some notable big trail walks like the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail. So I was thinking it might be fun just for that, like do the Appalachian Trail and see how long it would take me to walk the 10 gazillion miles involved. But yeah, it's just. It doesn't have the whimsy and fun that the other app did. So this may not last long on my phone.

[Jason DeFilippo]

See, that's what I always liked about the badges from my Fitbit back in the day. You know, it's like, I'd get the one like, you walked the Great Wall of China. You know, you've walked Russia, you've done the transcontinental railway and all these other things. I love those. I love those badges because they were cute too. That was back when gamification was pretty new and neat. Back when they gave a shit. Now it's just like, you want to gamify this? Get out of my face.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. And what are you doing with my data?

[Jason DeFilippo]

This episode is sponsored by hello fresh, America's number one meal kit. What is HelloFresh? It's Farm Fresh, pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered to your doorstep. With HelloFresh, you can skip the stress of grocery shopping and make home cooking easy, fun and affordable. That's why they're America's number one meal kit. The holiday season is just around the corner and we're all looking for ways to save time and energy. Hellofresh makes mealtime a breeze with chef crafted recipes that come together quickly and they're way more affordable than takeout. Whether you're craving hearty comfort food or need calorie smart options, HelloFresh has a rotating menu of 50 weekly recipes to satisfy every craving. Personally, I love how HelloFresh helps me break out of my recipe rut. This week we made their Umami Ginger pork bowls with pickled cucumber and Sriracha crema. This hearty bowl centers around ground pork, browned and simmered in a savory miso based ginger sauce sauce with nutty sesame seeds. Crisp, quick pickled cucumbers, tender sauteed cabbage and carrots and spicy crema are also on the menu. All served over fluffy rice. I mean come on, they had me at Sriracha just saying everything was pre portioned so there was zero waste and it came together in just 20 minutes. Plus their pre portioned ingredients saved me from overbuying at the store. It's a win win. And don't miss the HelloFresh Market. They've got over 100 add ons from breakfast to snacks, snacks and even Thanksgiving sides to wow a crowd without lifting a finger. Get 10 free [e-mail] FreeGoG Applied across seven boxes. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. That's 10 free HelloFresh meals by just going to hellofresh.com freegog this episode is sponsored by Deleteme. All right grumps, let's get real for a second. We live in an age where your personal data is everyone's business. Literally. Data brokers are buying, selling and trading our private details, making us all vulnerable to identity theft, harassment and spam. Now more than ever, privacy isn't just important, it's essential. Data brokers are cashing in on your personal information, treating it like a commodity. Your private details are out there for anyone to buy, which can open the door to identity theft, phishing, harassment, and endless spam calls. But now with Deleteme, you can take control and safeguard your privacy. As someone who speaks rather openly online, you think I know all too well the risks of having personal info floating out there. And that's why I personally use delete Me Deleteme is a subscription service that removes your private information from hundreds of data broker websites. It's not just a one time scrub either. They're constantly on guard, monitoring and deleting the info you don't want out there. It's pretty simple. You give Deleteme a list of what you want gone and their experts take it from there. They even send you personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where they found it, and what they removed. They do all the heavy lifting. You just get to enjoy the peace of mind, take control of your data, and keep your private life private by signing up for Deleteme. And now at a special discount for our listeners today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com GoG and use promo code GoG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com gog and please enter code GoG at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com code GoG the Dark Side Ha.

[Brian Schulmeister]

With Dave.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Welcome to the Dark side with Dave, featuring the dastardly, dynamic, and delightfully devious Dave Bittner. Dave can be heard daily on the Cyberwire podcast or on Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan or with Ben Yellen on Caveat or on Control Loop talking industrial cybersecurity. Dave's new show, Only Malware in the Building, is hosted by Selena Larson with Rick Howard and of course, Dave Buettner. They break down the most impactful malware stories into actionable insights in the most delightful way. I have to say, Dave, you guys put some serious production into that one, don't we? I do have. I have notes, Dave. Of course you do. Wait, wait.

[C]

So this is the shit sandwich, right?

[Brian Schulmeister]

You get the kiss and the slap, right?

[C]

Okay, first of all, before you jump in, let me just shout out to Trey Hester, who edits that show and does an amazing job.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well done. Very well done. Yes.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Rick might want to try and not do so much acting is all I got to say.

[C]

Oh, I see. So it's a note. It's an acting.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I said I have notes. Yeah, no, you can give them line readings, have a rehearsal or something. Yeah, do a walk through. Just do it. Do it. Yeah. You know, the Harry Potter thing was very cute, but. Yeah, I just gotta say you mentioned. You mentioned it first in the show. I'm just saying, Rick, maybe, you know, hit the community college once or twice before trying to dive back into your Harry Potter impersonation.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And our show has become a YouTube comment section.

[C]

Yeah. All right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

It wasn't supposed to go that deep, but you guys, you guys made it go that deep.

[Brian Schulmeister]

When does Star Trek become so damn woke people?

[Jason DeFilippo]

It was a very good show. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it.

[C]

Well, thank you.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So you got your iPhone 16?

[C]

I did, I did. I got it with the first batch that came out. In fact, my UPS guy came to the door. Both my wife and I got iPhones on the first day. And my UPS guy came on the door and I answered the door and he said, I got some toys for you. And I said, oh, thank you very much.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. My guy showed up on the Saturday following finally, and he was early because he wasn't supposed to be here till Monday. And I'm like, wee.

[C]

Oh, nice.

[Jason DeFilippo]

He was very surprised at my reaction because I knew exactly what it was.

[C]

I'm like, oh, okay.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So it's a phone.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, that's it. It's a phone.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But it's got that cool new button on it. The camera button is awesome.

[C]

I guess. Haven't really, haven't really touched it. Okay. I mean I. So for me, the main upgrade was the slightly longer lens on the long side, which I appreciate because a lot of the photography I do is nature photography. So having that extra bit of reach is helpful for me. I have to say, I just, I haven't taken the time to dig in to the functionality of the new button. So I'm curious for your shorthand on what the true advantages are for the informed user.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So the upside is when I'm walking the dog, I walk the dog with my right hand. My phone is in my left hand pocket. I can reach my left hand into my phone, take it out, press it with my middle, hold the phone, press the camera button with my middle finger, slide it up and down to zoom properly, press the button one more time to take a photo, and then put the phone back in my pocket all one handed while I'm walking the dog at the same time. It is handy as hell for when I'm out in the neighborhood and I see something interesting or exciting.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay, so what you guys are basically saying is the main feature was the bank account draining service.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yes. Very good at that. Yes, yes. The cash transfer mechanism at Apple works very well.

[C]

Okay, that is true.

[Brian Schulmeister]

I am happy to wait for another level before upgraded.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So I'm still. The thing is, I'm still paying the same thing as I was before. It just. I got a new phone out of it because I do the payment plan. I'M not going to.

[C]

That's what I do too. Yeah. Apple has like a zero percent thing. And so I'm just. I'm just locked into the fact that Apple is going to get. They're getting 50 bucks a month from me in perpetuity in exchange for having a new phone every other year. And that's a good deal for me. I'm pleased as punch with that. That works okay.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, works fine with me. And at the end of the three year. Because I do the three year cycle, at the end of it, I've got a really nice phone that I get sent to my dad, you know, and he's happy, so.

[C]

Right. Same with me. Yeah. It gets passed down to my son. So, yeah, it all works out. Mostly it's just a phone. There's really. There's nothing earth shattering about it. I have installed the iOS 18.1 beta so that I can have the pretty Siri.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? It's cute.

[C]

Yeah, it is nice. There's a really subtle thing one of our listeners sent to me that when you press the volume up and down buttons, the interface bumps in a little bit next to them. Like there's a little visual cue that the buttons are being pressed. Like the screen warps. I see that now, just a little tiny bit. It's very nice. It's neat.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. I like the dark mode icons, but again, you don't need the new iPhone 16 to get those, just the new iOS. I love the dark mode icons. Actually. I've had that on for three weeks now. They're great.

[C]

Yeah.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yep, I did. Since I did move up in size, I have the, you know, the bigger one. My phone has been embiggened. I found that I don't need the iPad mini as much anymore, so. So I use it a lot more for my Kindle app, which is nice. The one thing that I am really desperately wishing that they would put into the OS is an app level rotation lock. That would be really nice because I really like it locked in one app and then the other. And then if you're in bed and you just turn a little bit, then it switches and then you lose your page. That happens in email all the time. Like I'm reading an email and then I turn and then I go back to where it was and it goes back to the top of the email and I'm like, that's really stupid. Come on, can I just lock one app? But it's just device for the whole device at the same Time. Which sucks. That's my only complaint.

[C]

Oh, I see. Because I was going to say you can assign that functionality to the activity button, but then you have to remember, so you just want it to be.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Stuck so you don't have to remember. Yeah, I'd like just a rotation lock in any app settings.

[C]

Right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Or system setting, maybe the rotation lock, whatever. There's an elegant way to do it, which I have not put that much.

[C]

Thought into, but no, no.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, the action button is weird because I didn't. I had a switch before.

[C]

Me too.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I assigned mine to the flashlight since I end up using that the most, so.

[C]

Okay.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But other than that. Yeah, it's pretty much the phone. The worst thing about it is just moving everything over to it and getting all of your apps to passwords working right and face ID working again and all that crap.

[C]

Yeah. I have a funny thing on mine now where if I go to my settings menu, probably two or three days ago, this thing popped up in my settings menu that says right underneath of my name and my Apple account and that sort of stuff, there's a window that popped up that says, get ready for your new iPhone. You're eligible for extra icloud storage to move your apps and data. Now, this is my new iPhone. I already did all of that. And there seems to be. There seems to be no way to get rid of this because if I. If I go through to the next screen, it gives me two buttons. Either continue or not now. If I hit not now, the thing is still up there. The window that says get ready for your new iPhone is still there. So, yeah, it's got rid of that.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I got rid of mine on mine.

[C]

Yeah. All right, well, if you figure out how, let me know because, I mean, look, it's a nuisance.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Small potatoes.

[C]

It's a new. Yeah, it's a nuisance. And I guess it's one of those little attention to detail things that makes you go, really? Come on.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. Apple has slipped on that.

[C]

That for sure.

[Brian Schulmeister]

A little bit over the years. For sure. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Some of this interface design stuff is really like just head scratching, like, okay. Hmm. Yeah.

[Jason DeFilippo]

The real annoying one is I get. I. I still have an Apple Care plus thing that shows up on my phone saying that there are 42 days remaining to add Apple Care plus coverage to your AirPods. I'm like, okay, can. Can that go away? Not now on that. And then that doesn't go away. Like, I'm not going to get Apple plus coverage on a pair. Oh, here we go. I just. You know what, they may have added this since we've been talking. Dave. I hit not now and it pops up and it says, remind me later, don't show again or cancel. So I will hit don't show again and it goes away. How about that?

[C]

Wow.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Interesting.

[C]

All right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Anyway, good for you. Yeah, so far I like the new cameras. It's nice. It's what it should be, an upgrade.

[C]

Right. I do pine away a little bit for the excitement of when the devices were newer and there were more substantial things to be added, like, oh, this version's going to have gps. Ooh, this version's going to be able to record video. We've pretty much taken care of all the table stakes things and we're nipping around the edges, which is fine, but it's definitely not as exciting as it used to be.

[Brian Schulmeister]

The sad thing is we know the next major thing that they're going to bake into these things is AI everywhere, which I don't necessarily even want.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I've got it turned on and I don't really notice it that much. It does some interesting. It does a decent job of summarizing all of the text messages that I've ignored saying, hey, this is this. And in the podcast app, it'll give me a summary of the shows. This is a show about shoes or.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Whatever it is you mean, does the same thing that we write ourselves anyways, kind of.

[Jason DeFilippo]

But it summarizes it in a more human, readable way. Yeah, kind of. It's not really groundbreaking at this point. I guess they're going to be rolling out more stuff, but yeah, I do miss that. If I had one of the Apple Vision Pros, I would be able to take the spatial video with this. But since. Since I bought this, I don't have enough money to buy anything else for a while, so I think that I would be skipping out on that. But Dave, if you ever get the Apple Vision Pro, you can take the video for it now too.

[C]

Okay. I don't think that's in my future.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I'm waiting for the Apple Vision Rank amateur.

[C]

Yeah, the Apple Vision intern.

[Jason DeFilippo]

That's it. So I got a little bit of extra follow up here. A long time ago when I was starting my studio, I had all those USB C cables around and I fetched about it and then I don't know if I just found this randomly or somebody sent it in. There was a Kickstarter called the C2C Caber Qu USB C cable tester that I signed up for and sent off for. And they sent it back and it was just this little board, this little electronics board. You put a battery in, you plug some cables in, and it had a bunch of lights on it that you had to actually go get a degree in electronics engineering to figure out what they meant.

[C]

Right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So I used it. I plugged stuff into it once. Couldn't figure it out and put it in a box because you know who.

[Brian Schulmeister]

This product is for, Jason?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Who?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Engineers.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, not me. Not me.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, they figured that out and now they have a fancy new one called the BLE Caber Qu, a digital USB C to USB C cable tester that has has idiot lights on it now it has a little LCD screen on it that will tell you what the cables are. But it's. The first one was like $19, which I thought was, okay, I can fry this on $19. I think the new one's like $80. I'm like, nope, not worth it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, the screen costs a lot of money. I'd be fine with just a red light or a green light. Cable works or not?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, no, the problem that I was having was like, is it a Thunderbolt cable? Is it a USB C data cable? Is it a USB C power CA cable?

[C]

Right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

That was the thing. It's like, you know, there's only a couple options on those things. I just want, you know, a B or C, please. Yeah. And does it still work? That's the other one, Right? Yeah. I've noticed a lot of my cables are dying. Just shit in the bed lately.

[C]

Really?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, just after a decent amount of use, they just start to go. And they're decent cables, you know, they're not, they're not cheapies. And they just started to finally fry out. Out.

[C]

That's interesting. I mean, the true high speed cables. Like I'm looking on my desk here, and I have a Thunderbolt cable that goes between my laptop and my OWC Thunderbolt dock. Right. So that baby's carrying a lot of stuff, you know, and so those true cables. It really is remarkable engineering going on in there. I mean, just the notion of how much data is coming across that little, that little cable and the little computer chips that are in the plugs and just managing it all and balancing it and all that kind of stuff. I guess you can see why they'd be fragile. But, you know, let's say it's a miracle any of this stuff works at all.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. And you use a Universal audio Apollo twin, I believe, which requires a ton of data to.

[C]

Yeah. I've got the Apollo X4. So basically the same thing.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, I got the twin X, which doesn't work, which that's why I was five minutes late for the recording today, because I had to unplug it and to put in my Apollo solo, which still seems to work for this show.

[C]

But so what I would say about this device is, it is cool. I would love to have one. I'm not going to buy one, but if I had one, I do desire it is desirable to me. I wish they had some technology where they could come up with better names for their devices.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I believe they're German.

[C]

Oh, well, there, that explains. Well, I guess if you, if you read the entire name as one big long German word, then it makes sense, right?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, that's true. Oh, no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Say Austrian.

[C]

Austrian. Okay. Yeah. Ask an Austrian if close enough to German is good enough for them.

[Brian Schulmeister]

No, I think most people say they're close enough to Germany.

[C]

Right. It's like asking people from New Zealand if they're Australian. You know, you get a very strong response to that. I do have a device that is in the same category as this that I purchased when I was going through my journey with all of my solar panels outside. It's basically a USB power and amperage meter. So it'll tell you, just for power purposes, if a USB cable has power on it and then how much amperage is being pulled through it. And it tells you the voltage also. So that's handy. And I have made use of that pretty regularly to see if something's working or not or, you know, am I really getting power through here? It's a nice little device. It's probably 10 bucks, something like that from Amazon. So schwanky they're out there. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, nice little thing to have in your box full of electronic devices. But no, this thing's cool. Like I say, this hits my desirability buttons. But not for $77.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, yeah, because that's the only one that's left now because the other ones you could get it if you were early bird, Ultra early bird. You could get it for 44 bucks. But now, now you just get the regular Kickstarter discount for. It's about 77, it says, for €69. So we were late. That's what you get for being late.

[C]

Neat device, though. Like it?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, we got a write in from Sally. She says first off, thank you for the great podcast. I need your help. I work in a tech adjacent field institutional research at a community college. And we are already trying to deal with AI which as you have taught me, isn't really AI. There are faculty who want to use it to catch cheating, administrators who want to use it to be cool and cutting edge, staff who want to use it to summarize endless pages of federal regulation, and those in my area who want to use it to write SQL code that is beyond their ability. Often they are in a single person's office and just don't have the capacity. So now my college is putting together a work group to write a white paper. Yes, we do such things and think we are important to make recommendations to the executives. But listening to your discussions about AI has ruined me and makes me sound like a tinfoil hat person against technology. So I need some guidance on resources that would address security issues that would impact students, would their work be used to train the AI and be a violation of students rights, potential hacking concerns, et cetera. Are there higher education specific issues we should consider? I don't like AI for a lot of reasons, but I majored in Renaissance epic poetry and know my limitations. So if we're going to buy the hype, how do we do it with the least harm? Anyway, I always enjoy the podcast, even if I am not as geeky but definitely as grumpy and keep telling people about it. Thanks for any suggestions. Now I know we've got a couple ideas here. I would like to point out that once again I did take a course in ethical AI.

[C]

Okay.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And the end of the course basically says said good luck.

[C]

Right? And thank you for your money.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Thank you for your money. Basically, yes. So there are ways to implement AI ethically. The problem is almost every single model has been trained not in that fashion. And it does not behoove any of these major companies to be ethical to move forward because they need to win. So I don't, you know specifically with like if you you're feeding stuff into one of the big model AIs, you are basically agreeing that anything that you feed in is going to be used to train their AI. So good luck with that. You're not going to be able to get around that one very easily, at least not without paying quite a lot. I think you can pay to opt out at this point like big companies do.

[C]

So I have a couple of suggestions here. I would start off with just a plain old Google search for ethical use of AI in higher education. I have included a link to such a search in our show notes here.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Let me Google that For you.

[C]

That's right. And then a couple of folks who have written articles on this. So there's one from Cornell, there's another one from an organization that the enai, which is the International Journal for Educational Integrity. So as you might imagine, this is a hot topic right now. So there are tons of publications about this. So when you do this search, you're going to come up with just dozens of higher ed organizations who've put their opinions in on this. So there's lots of reading to be done. I think we are in early days here. I personally believe that this is going to change the way we educate people. I talk to, for example, my caveat co host, Ben Yellen, who teaches college courses. He's a law professor. He's telling me that they're dealing with this. He said occasionally he gets papers that were obviously written by AI and so they have to figure out what are the guardrails like, because he anyway realizes that they're not going to be able to say no forever. Just doesn't make sense.

[Brian Schulmeister]

No, you can't stop progress and you can't stop something that's literally being shoved down our throats everywhere we turn around.

[C]

Right, right. I liken it to things like spell check and grammar checking. Right. There was a time when probably when the three of us were growing up and in high school, writing something through.

[Brian Schulmeister]

A spell checker was cheating. Dave.

[C]

That's what I'm saying. Our high school English teachers thought that, you know, because spelling counts and then. But now even grammar is corrected for us. So.

[Jason DeFilippo]

God.

[C]

Right.

[Brian Schulmeister]

You know what's truly shocking to me, though, is how. How many things I read that obviously they either ignored the spell checker and the grammar checker completely or they haven't shut off. Yeah, possible.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, you know what? Some people are doing that and they're putting in bad grammar and bad spelling to make you think that humans wrote it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Ah. Ooh.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Blind.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yes. Yeah, I've seen that.

[C]

So you include that in your prompt. You say, be sure to include at least one spelling error per thousand words.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. Or they just go through and just fix it themselves and, you know, start removing different commas.

[Brian Schulmeister]

And we did a story maybe two weeks ago that was actually specifically about that, and it was about how bad AI test checking for AI is actually going like it's not going well. Like they haven't been able to do it. So.

[C]

Right.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So that, you know, you know, that's what. That's definitely a use case you want to, as a. As an educational institution, as A teacher, you'd want to be able to run everything through an AI to check really quick to see did an AI do this or did my student do it. But the thing is, the false results are through the roof still. AI is bad at detecting AI.

[C]

And one of the things I don't know where we stand right now is what happens when the student who is falsely accused of cheating using AI lawyers up and sues the university because the university hit them with an ethics violation. With a cheating violation.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Right.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I'm sure we're going to see that real soon if we. If they're not out there already.

[C]

Yeah, I'm sure they are. I just don't know, like when you sign, when you agree to being educated at a university as part of the agreement you signed, is it in the.

[Brian Schulmeister]

U.S. universities tos exactly.

[C]

That you will abide by any of their judgments, no matter how, no matter the evidence? I don't know the answer to that, but you know, that's what lawyers are for.

[Jason DeFilippo]

So I was just thinking this one, this might be a fun one. So when everybody's papers come in, you take all the papers, then you run them back through an AI and say, give me a quiz based on the knowledge that's in this paper and then have the students do a spot quiz on what they just turned in.

[Brian Schulmeister]

On their own papers.

[Jason DeFilippo]

On their own papers, they should get 100 theoretically. So if they don't get a hundred, that's diabolical.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Hey, but that's the next level of whack. A mole that we're heading towards. That totally makes sense.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Prove to me that you know this material.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. And just as a final point I think I would make right now, just because this is early days and as it's always pointed out, this is the worst this technology will ever be. It's all going to get better, but at least for right now, especially in the educational realm or anything, anything really. I'm going to expand it everywhere. Think about if you actually need AI. Don't do AI just because it's the cool, cutting edge thing to do. Do you need it for whatever task you want to accomplish? And if you don't, don't fucking use it.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah. Can this theoretically be done on the blockchain instead?

[Brian Schulmeister]

Exactly. Could the students submit NFTs, right?

[C]

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah. I'm sure that didn't help much, but good luck.

[C]

Well, before we go, just I want to touch on what Sally mentioned that. That they majored in Renaissance epic poetry. Just this week I was discussing with some of my colleagues here about. We have a local Renaissance festival which is widely recognized.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Hindle eggs and mead.

[C]

Well, that's where I'm going with this. This is one of the best Renaissance festivals, so I'm told. Not that I have ever explored the Renaissance festival circuit, but I'm told that the one here in Maryland is quite good. And one of my colleagues here who was born in the UK was saying that one of her pet peeves is that when you go to a Renaissance festival, everyone speaks with a British accent and the Renaissance did not happen in the uk. And my pet peeve about the Renaissance festivals is the thing with turkey legs, that turkey legs are an iconic part of Renaissance festival. Turkeys are a new world bird. There were no turkeys over there. Turkeys are here in North America.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, I know two people. I know two people. I'm not going to the Renaissance fair with fucking buzzkills.

[C]

I just want to wear my. I want to wear my Star Trek uniform to the Renaissance festival. Wait a minute. I just admitted that I have a Star Trek uniform.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Hold on.

[C]

Holy shit.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Wait a minute. Shocker.

[Brian Schulmeister]

It's a tribble bombshell.

[C]

Like any of our listeners are going to be shocked that I have a Star Trek uniform. Yeah.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. We do have to. Which show? Which uniform?

[C]

Oh, tng. I'm not an animal.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Okay, okay. How do you take care of that? Lycra.

[C]

The original uniforms were made out of wool, or so I'm told as well. Mine is polyester, so it holds up quite well. Okay. Yeah, yeah. On the times I wear it, it's still in pretty good shape. And remarkably, because my wife bought it for me when I was in my 20s and I can still just about squeeze into it. So if I suck it in, I can.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Looking a little Kirkish in one of the movies.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, it's. I need. What I really need is a 21st century girdle to help me squeeze into it. But.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Ah, well, you just gotta do some yoga with McFadden and sir to this episode.

[C]

Yeah, I'm up for that.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yep.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Closing shout out. Over at Patreon, we've got John. Welcome, John.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Thanks, John. Over at PayPal, we got Charlie, Dennis, Simon, Jonathan, Judge, Nicola Levy and Fruit Cup. Thanks.

[Jason DeFilippo]

All right, Fruit Cup. Over at the Tip Jar, we've got Sarah, Matthew and Adam. And just a reminder, if you sign up for Patreon, you get the shows early and ad free and in high definition. And we now have that yearly option which will get you 5% off. Woohoo.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Woohoo. We also have some new 5 star reviews. The first one says pleasant find. Coincidentally, Apple podcasts made me aware of this great show.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, here we go. We'll take it. We got a five star from Lee. I love the podcast. I'm a new listener, so listening to your backlog of episodes after hearing Dave is on here. I love both you guys. You guys get me through my job as I'm allowed to listen to my stuff whenever I want want. If I could afford it, I would patreon you guys would patreon you guys. But one day. Lol. From a younger and aged but grumpy old insole geek. I love the ending you guys have of Stay Grumpy. It's bloody brilliant. With love from a British Geordie dude.

[Brian Schulmeister]

All right, thank you.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Right. Thank you, Lee. And a few old man shout outs this week, Brian. I don't know why these just kept coming across my Instagram and threads feeds and whatever other social crap I was on, so. So we missed a few of them. But I want to put these in context. September 21, 2004, American Idiot by Green Day came out. That's 20 years ago.

[Brian Schulmeister]

My God, Jason. Has it been 20 years since we all went to that show at the Wiltern?

[Jason DeFilippo]

It has been 20 years since I got fired from Warner Brothers Music for going to that show.

[Brian Schulmeister]

You got fired for going to that show? We didn't even watch. We were upstairs drinking the whole time.

[Jason DeFilippo]

That was the problem because I ended up spending the next three days in a hangover. There may have been some powdered substances involved, but I was in the music business then. I thought that was cool. We were supposed to do that.

[Brian Schulmeister]

That's what you were doing when you kept disappearing.

[Jason DeFilippo]

We're supposed to come back to work the next day. That was. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah. So 20 years ago for American Idiot, 25 years ago for Tony Hawk's pro skater.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, you want to really feel old, Jason?

[Jason DeFilippo]

Okay, hit me.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Tony Hawk and Eminem are both grandfathers now, and technically, Courtney Love is a grand grandmother.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I know, I know. Isn't that straight? Tony Hawks and Kurt Cobain's children have baby. That's fucked up.

[Brian Schulmeister]

We old.

[Jason DeFilippo]

We old. And Knight Rider premiered 42 years ago. This is just. Where does it go, Brian? Where does it go?

[Brian Schulmeister]

I don't know, man. It goes so fucking fast.

[Jason DeFilippo]

I can't. The American Idiot thing just threw me for a loop. I wish I still had the original that they gave me because that was the first day at work, first day I started at Warner Brothers Records, they gave me the pre release version of American Idiot. And that's actually technically the only project that you and I worked on, like, together.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Yeah, because I was working with Green Day for that whole album cycle.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yeah, you were the contractor and I was with the evil label. And they hated you and you hated them. And I was in the middle laughing my ass off.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Warner Brothers.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Yep.

[Brian Schulmeister]

They had no idea what to do with any of that. They just got lucky.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Seriously. So some sad news. Some very sad news. Dame Maggie Smith has finally died and that puts the end to Downton Abbey as far as I know it.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Well, she was out of the show anyways, so. Yeah, but definitely, yeah, she was the heart and soul of that show. She's. She made everything that she was in better. She was great in Harry Potter, all of her old movies. Fantastic.

[Jason DeFilippo]

What an actress.

[Brian Schulmeister]

So. Which made me start to realize as things just kept rolling in. Who hasn't died this week? Jason? We lost John Amos, Pete Rose, Dikembe Mutumbo, Kris Kristofferson and Ken Page, the accomplished Broadway actor and the voice of Oogie Boogie and the Nightmare Before Christmas, very topical at this point in time, has also passed away at the age of 70.

[Jason DeFilippo]

Well, you put that in there. And so I had to go look and I. Well, Beverly Hills Cop actor John Ashton, who played Chief Taggart has died at 76. And American pickers Frank Fritz died at 60. What a fucking week.

[Brian Schulmeister]

Until next time, I'm Brian Jillmeister.

[Jason DeFilippo]

And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for tuning in to grumpy old geeks. Dive into the show notes and all the links from Today's episode at GOG Show. 668. Feeling generous. Keep this top notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG Show. Donate every bit helps and spread the grumpiness. There's a share button in every podcast player out there. Use it to share the show with friends, foes and everyone in between and we'll love you forever. Head over to GOG show to find a link to our Discord Channel and chat with us and other show fans. Got something to say? Send your feedback, comments or awesome links to GOG Show. Slash contact and send us some love. Leave a review at GOG Show Review a five star rating might just get your review read on the air and go buy some swag at Shop GOG Show. Please go buy some swag. We'll put some more stuff up there as it goes. But please. This was a pain in the ass. Help a brother out. Stay grumpy. Welcome to Grumpy Old.