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- [00:03]
A
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.
- [00:19]
B
And I'm Brian Schoellmeister. It is Halloween. Happy Halloween.
- [00:23]
A
Spooky. Spooky.
- [00:26]
B
See, normally, I. Well, it's a big day. First off, it's my son's absolute favorite Halloween. Our street. Street gets shut down. Everybody decorates. We. I go through over a thousand pieces of candy every Halloween, still run out and have to turn the lights off and have people knocking on our door for, like, another hour or two after we've run out of candy. So it's. It's massive here. It's also my sister's birthday. Happy birthday, Laura. To be listening.
- [00:50]
A
So what a great birthday to have.
- [00:51]
B
Oh, yeah. I always called her the little witch, so, you know.
- [00:54]
A
Yeah.
- [00:55]
B
So, yeah, it's. It's a big deal. And. And, you know, I. I'm attracted to the darkness in life, but I have to say, Jason, this.
- [01:01]
A
This is.
- [01:01]
B
I. This is not a good darkness I've been feeling recently. It's. It's, you know, Halloween related to death. Death has been having a year for me, even musically. I think of, like, probably my two favorite bands of all time. The Cure put out songs of Lost World. Very focused on on end of life. His brother died. Is. He's looking at death. Depeche Mode's Mental Murray, all about death. They lost another band member, and. And it's very much about death. And. And then I have a. You know, something's not good when you get a phone call from somebody that you haven't talked to on the phone in, like, decades.
- [01:40]
A
Oh, dear.
- [01:41]
B
Yeah. So, yeah, one of my. Probably my best. My best friend. My best friend in my teenage years that I ran around Disney with, you know, we've. We've stayed Facebook friends, but life moves you apart. He moved to the Pacific Northwest decades ago. I'm. I'm in Toronto. You always have these, like, vague plans, oh, we should get the gang back together, and all that sort of stuff, but it never really pans out. But we stayed friends, and then I get the message like, I need to talk to you.
- [02:07]
A
Oh, he either just got sober or it's that call.
- [02:10]
B
It's that call. He's been battling cancer for a while, and cancer won. So it's end of life kind of scenario. I mean, there's hope still. It's Not. Not. Not curable, but treatable. So who knows? But it's not a call you want to get, and it sucks. And I'm just. The thing I was thinking about after I got the call now, obviously I was thinking about him a lot and life and all that sort of stuff, but the thing I really thought about after I had a little bit time to process was like, fuck Trump.
- [02:45]
A
Fuck Trump. Okay. Okay.
- [02:50]
B
Because the psychic weight of regular existence now is so heavy. We have no room for normal shit that happens in life. I am so fucking miserable all the fucking time. I have this much room for misery for something that really happened that I should be miserable about.
- [03:11]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [03:13]
B
I'm so angry at the situation that we find ourselves in in the world right now that I can't mourn properly because I'm mourning everything.
- [03:24]
A
Yeah.
- [03:25]
B
You know what I'm saying?
- [03:26]
A
I think the thing that I remember from the first term was that he sucks the joy out of the world.
- [03:32]
B
Yeah. There's no joy. I am full of shit that I cannot handle any more. Shit.
- [03:38]
A
Oh, your shit bucket overfloweth.
- [03:40]
B
I need a goddamn. The world needs a goddamn enema, Jason. So that's what I'm thinking about today. Isn't that great?
- [03:48]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Get the fleet people on the phone. They can sponsor the show. Yeah, we need a worldwide enema, please. Yeah. I actually put in an article in here because I saw what you were posting about. The Good Times is an article called what Both sides of America's polarized divide share deep anxieties about the meaning of life and existence itself. And it's an article about existential anxiety. And this guy, as a professor of human development and family studies, I've researched and written about traumatic and adverse childhood experiences and existential anxiety for over 20 years now. That's a guy you don't want to invite to your party.
- [04:24]
B
I bet he's a joy to have a beer with.
- [04:27]
A
Yeah. You don't want him in your party. Him and vegans just keep the fuck away from my party, man.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah, and. And. And. And cross. Cross trainer guys. Yeah, you don't want any of those people there.
- [04:39]
A
Let me tell you about Rab dough.
- [04:40]
B
Yeah. And then something else, like, just, you know, it's weird. Like, you. It's. It's like, you know, you'll hear a little bit of a song, and then all of a sudden, you hear it anywhere. Something just. Also just. Just drove me nuts today. Like, I felt like we were kind of. We had kind of turned the corner on accepting aging recently. You know, you had that whole thing about Pamela Anderson going makeup free and everybody was celebrating, like. And then this week, Jennifer Lawrence is all over the news because she's embracing. She's like, I'm going to embrace all the plastic surgeries. I, I am trying to push my way forward to get a boob job because she just had her second kid or something like that. I am, I'm trying to push my way forward on the list to get my boob job so I can get my boobs done, do my next movie because I have a nude scene in it. I'm like, you're, you're young. You're. You're hot.
- [05:30]
A
Yeah.
- [05:30]
B
Talking about getting plastic surgery. And then I went and listened to Recode for the first time in ages because I had, like, tapped out on my podcast and couldn't be bothered to find something.
- [05:39]
A
Oh, you mean Pivot.
- [05:40]
B
Swisher and Galloway are talking about getting plastic surgery.
- [05:44]
A
Oh, well, yeah. Well, they're plastic people, so they deserve it, but what are you going to do?
- [05:49]
B
I don't know. It was just weird. Like, I thought we had turn the corner and now everybody's all in on this crap. And I also thought it was funny because we're doing a video test because we're finally possibly giving into doing video because we need to get more podcast views. And I'm like, ah, man, Jason and I need Botox certificates. We need a Botox sponsor.
- [06:06]
A
Yeah, I need this chinectomy. I need, I need a jawline back. Yeah, we don't know.
- [06:11]
B
We don't eat crap. People can look at our other mugs.
- [06:14]
A
Exactly. That's why I have a face for radio. Jennifer Lawrence, on the other hand, she's 20 years away from needing any plastic surgery. That noise.
- [06:20]
B
Well, she's already had some, I guess, or she's certainly done both. I don't know. Who gives a shit?
- [06:25]
A
Yeah, it was actually passed through my Instagram feed this week. A Mar a Lago face is what they're calling it. And you haven't seen the new 28 Days later remake, have you?
- [06:38]
B
No, no, it's. I'm very much in an anti horror household. I'm the only person that likes this sort of stuff.
- [06:44]
A
There's a great scene where this, this guy who comes from the mainland and he meets this kid who has been. He was born, you know, away from civ, and the guy shows him a picture of his girlfriend and she's got Mar a Lago face with the puffed up lips and everything's like super tight. He's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I knew somebody that had a shrimp allergy too and puffed up like that when they ate it. I was just like, oh, oh, zing.
- [07:09]
B
My sister in law literally has a shrimp allergy and I have seen her that way. Yeah.
- [07:13]
A
And it's true. It's true.
- [07:15]
B
Yeah.
- [07:15]
A
Oh, no. Plastic surgery here. Thank God.
- [07:19]
B
No, we will look like Jabba the Huts on this thing before we get plastic surgery.
- [07:24]
A
Yeah, we do now. Like that. I just, I'm just envious of your hair. I have none left. And yours is still. Yeah, yeah.
- [07:31]
B
Note to self. I actually have to comb my hair before we do a real video show.
- [07:36]
A
Seriously. So this is episode 720, which reminded me of the video game 720, the first skateboarding game in arcade history and also one of the worst arcade games ever made.
- [07:49]
B
I don't remember it. I definitely had an Atari back in the day, but I wasn't really a skater so I wouldn't have bought it anyways. But I did click on the link and look through it and it looks horrible.
- [07:58]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, it was a concert. I mean, it was an arcade, like actual physical arcade game.
- [08:03]
B
Oh, okay. Okay. I thought it was cool.
- [08:05]
A
Yeah. And the thing is, it was this weird isometric view where you had a stick that swiveled in a circle, but you were always going at angles like 45 degree or 30 degree angles from the. The sides are. Yeah, that'd be 45 degree angles. Yeah. It's early. Fuck off. So you're always going in a direction that you're not usually pointing a joystick at. You're going at like a corner, you know, and it never was intuitive, it was just. It was bad. And then you, the bees would come at you and they would yell, skate or die. And then the bees would catch you and eat you up. I'm like, what do a flock of bees have to do with skateboarding? I don't quite get it. It was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. But it was the first skateboarding game.
- [08:43]
B
In history and Tony Hawk not involved in that one.
- [08:46]
A
Actually, he made all his money off Ton Hawk, pro skater, because he was smart and he didn't take the deal that Activision said, look, they're like, we're going to give you a million dollars to give up any royalties on the game. And he's like, well, if they're offering me a million dollars for my royalties.
- [09:02]
B
They means they think they're going to make more than that.
- [09:04]
A
More than that. And he kept it. And that's why he has an empire now, because he made so many tens of probably over 100 million on that game, the way it keeps going. But yeah, good for Tony. But yeah, 720. I got no nostalgia for that one. So hopefully this episode will be better than the video game in the news.
- [09:31]
B
Well, Amazon has announced another round of pink slips. Initially it was going to be 30,000 people. They announced a 14,000 person reduction in his corporate workforce. People were talking to a few friends about this and they're like, oh that's, that's like of what they said. And I was like, for now? Yeah, let's give it another week and maybe the next 16,000 is going to come. They declined to comment on which departments were impacted, but Bloomberg reports that layoffs occurred within teams such as video games, logistics, payments and cloud computing. The impetus for this reduction, of course, is AI. In this announcement, Beth Galetti, Amazon Senior Vice president of People Experience and Technology. Ironic HR states that Amazon is performing well, but that the is changing quickly. The gen. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet. And it's enabling companies to innovate much faster. Also bullshit. Than ever before in existing market segments and altogether new ones. We're convicted. Convicted that we need to be organized. More lean.
- [10:37]
A
That. Yeah.
- [10:37]
B
I got to be a typo, right?
- [10:39]
A
Or a Freudian slip.
- [10:41]
B
Yeah. With fewer layers and more ownership to move as quickly as possible for our customers and our business. I want to point out that as they announced all these layoffs, it was a phenomenal quarter for the e commerce giant. They raked in $180.2 billion in sales in the three months ending September 30, up 13% from the same period last year. Its cloud business, AWS reported its largest year over year growth since 2022, climbing 20% to $33 billion. And company stock even popped 13% in after hours trading following the report. So just rolling in the money, but we got to fire a bunch of people.
- [11:22]
A
Yeah. Which, which led to the next article that I found, which was this was over at Gizmodo too. And they're like, is AI leading to layoffs or does the economy just suck? Now that's, that's a leading headline. Because there's a third option which is we're just fucking greedy.
- [11:42]
B
There's that and there's also.
- [11:43]
A
Why not both also. Yes, also that or why not all three. The headline says AI is eating jobs, but maybe the economy's just coughing up dust because naturally every Press release is blaming AI efficiencies, because that sounds better than we're broke now. This is the problem I have with this title and the premise of this article, but we see this over and over again that everybody's blaming AI for the layoffs because they do that. It's an easy escape valve. Like when Elon was. You know, when Elon started firing people from Twitter, they just used that as like, oh, well, we just don't need that much headcount. Anytime that they have a chance to blame their loss of headcount on something else, they do. Yes, for the most part.
- [12:26]
B
We also know it's not true because we have had study after study after study that has told us that AI does fuck all. Yeah, it is working.
- [12:37]
A
It is not killing jobs at this point. So, yeah, and it's just. It's actually making people that have to. Making people that have the jobs have to work longer because it takes them longer to do their job with AI at this point. You know, that is a thing. That is actually a thing. People who are talented and skilled at their job saying, yeah, this isn't actually helping people. So, yeah. MIT economist David Otter called it PR spin. He said companies love claiming tech progress instead of admitting they're bloated or failing. And Yale's Martha Gimble agreed, saying, it looks like standard economic cycle bloodletting, just with shinier buzzwords. Which leads us, Brian, to your next story.
- [13:20]
B
Well, I'm thinking that Andy Jassy, the CEO over at Amazon, was probably reading Gizmodo on the crapper because he was very quick to point out, when asked to comment on layoffs during the company's earning call on Thursday evening, he was quick to downpl any connection to AI. He said, what I would tell you is, you know, the announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven. Well, no, we just ran through the.
- [13:43]
A
Numbers, and somebody should also tell Amazon Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti, before she goes out and saying that they're convicted, that they need to, you know, come on.
- [13:54]
B
And then he said, it's not even really AI driven right now, at. Right. Not. Not right now, at least. He said, it's culture. To which I say, your culture fucking sucks.
- [14:03]
A
It does fucking suck.
- [14:05]
B
What a horrible culture to fire a bunch of people when you're doing gangbusters.
- [14:09]
A
Yeah, that's your culture. That's always been their culture. That has absolutely been their culture.
- [14:16]
B
He went on to try to make the case that the company's rapid growth over the last several years, added more people, layers and complexity to its operations. Yeah, that's what happens when you're a company that's doing really well. You expand and you build and you add layers and complexity and you continue to push the lines and you do new things. But not for Amazon and not for most of these companies. Right now. Apparently this slows down decision making and weakens ownership for workers at the front lines. I'm sure the workers at the front lines really feel like they have a lot of ownership now.
- [14:46]
A
Oh, yes, I'm sure. I'm sure that is definitely what they're thinking right now.
- [14:50]
B
Absolutely. And then this. He said something that. Absolutely. It blew my mind. Jason.
- [14:56]
A
Oh, hit me, hit me.
- [14:57]
B
Jassy said Amazon is now committed to operating like the world's largest startup in order to move more quickly during what he called the major technological transformations happening right now.
- [15:06]
A
You're not a startup anymore, bro.
- [15:09]
B
The world's largest. One of the world's largest corporations is a startup.
- [15:16]
A
No.
- [15:17]
B
Every startup dreams of being able to make as much money and hire as many people as possible. That is the startup dream. At least it used to be. I think the startup dream these days is the founders just want all the fucking monies and don't give a shit. That could be the problem. That has been the major culture shift that has happened.
- [15:35]
A
Saying Amazon is a startup is like calling Green Day a garage band.
- [15:39]
B
Also, you're not supposed. You're not supposed to aspire to being a startup. You're supposed to. Startups are supposed to aspire to being you.
- [15:47]
A
Exactly. Exactly. It's like being Gen X. You know, I still call myself a teenager, but I aspire to be an adult. It's just not.
- [15:55]
B
It's just not working.
- [15:57]
A
It's not. It's so not working. It's absolutely not working. But talking about Amazon and how they treat their people, I saw this. This come through too, and I'm just like, oh, yeah, this tracks. Amazon's delivery network is starting to look less like logistics and more like an AI Panopticon.
- [16:24]
B
Jason, they own the Panopticon. They feel ownership of it.
- [16:28]
A
No, Brian, they don't. That's the problem. They outsource the Panopticon so they don't have to own it. So they don't have to actually have the overhead of the Panopticon. That's the thing. And an investigation by the Distributed AI Research Institute or DARE and it's led by Timnit Gebru. Remember her? She was the. She was the researcher that was fired by Google for saying, hey, your AI is a piece of dirty shit and you should maybe like take, take a little responsibility for what it's spitting out. Well, their team interviewed drivers who say the company hides behind third party delivery service partners to dodge responsibility while its tech stack micromanages every move. The Amazon Flex app, the E Driving Mentor app, the DSP workplace, onboard sensors, routing software, and Netradyne AI cameras make up that ecosystem. And that's where the delivery service partners come into play, where they're outsourcing to Panopticon. And I don't know about you, I looked at when they started the delivery service partner program. You could go, they actually gave you the recipe to go lease a bunch of vans, hire a bunch of people. Here's the software to do it. We're going to make it super easy for you to become a delivery service partner for us.
- [17:44]
B
Yep.
- [17:45]
A
We're still going to tell you everything that you have to do. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to, you know, we're going to.
- [17:50]
B
Micromanage the shit out of you.
- [17:51]
A
Exactly. To the nth second. And it has become just a hellscape. And one driver in Big Bear, remember when the fires were going on, the dispatcher told him to deliver what you can while his route was literally on fire. He was, he was surrounded by smoke. And you know, it's basically literally he's driving through a hellscape to make his daily deliveries. And, you know, when you find yourself in hell, keep going, Churchill. They're channeling Churchill.
- [18:23]
B
Your tires are rated for five minutes of fire exposure.
- [18:27]
A
So. And it just even gets started to get worse now because in the, in the old days you could pee in a bottle or, you know, you hop in the back to pee in a bottle. Or for the women, they'd have to change a tampon in the back.
- [18:38]
B
Well, now you just piss on the fire, Jason. That's, that's the plan.
- [18:41]
A
But now they have cameras everywhere, inside and outside the van. So there's literally no privacy. And they get dinged for everything. Like, one guy slammed on his, his brakes because he was going to get head on by a fucking semi and he had to go to arbitration to say, look, look at the camera. There was a semi that crossed the lane was coming at me and you guys are going to ding me for it. They're like, okay, okay. But the other system still dung him for it.
- [19:07]
B
Yep. Sounds like the people on the front lines are feeling the ownership, Jason.
- [19:11]
A
I'M telling you, I'm telling you. So, yeah, that's, that's what, that's the, the world of Amazon that we're living in right now. So I think what they're doing is just firing all of the office minions that they over hired because let's, let's, let's face it, if you want to work at Amazon, there's a time where they were, if you had a pulse and you walked in the door, they would hire you. And I still think that that's probably the case because there's a lot of turnover, but they just got rid of some of the people that they knew that they could get rid of and no AI was involved, period. TPS reports might have been involved, but no AI. And to keep with the bloodletting this week General Motors is cutting about 1700 jobs across its EV and battery operations as demand cools and US regulations shift. That's right. Since we don't have the, you know, the credits anymore for electric vehicles, people are going to buy less of them.
- [20:03]
B
We like gas again.
- [20:04]
A
I had liquid Dinosaurs, baby. I love my liquid dinosaurs and they just sound better. My Jeep sounds manly. Not like, not like a jets in the.
- [20:16]
B
You could change that. It's just a recording they're playing. Anyways.
- [20:19]
A
I still believe that there is a market for future zombie movies that can have an entirely new storyline because EVs are going to be rechargeable for the next several years where gas is going to, you know, gas has a limited shelf life for like three years and then it's inert. You can't have gas anymore, but you can have EVs and they don't make any noise. So the zombies aren't going to come get you while you're tooling around in your little cyber truck. It's going to squeak like a. Because they're put together like. I don't know if you saw Today Brian too, 6,000 more EV or 6,000 more cyber trucks were recalled because they couldn't figure out the glue to put the headlights on that, that bar that goes across the top.
- [20:58]
B
Well, you know, they had an option, Jason. They had an option. They sent the guy out and he's like, I found the gorilla glue. That shit's, that shit works, man. And they're like, well, how much is it? Oh, okay. We need you to go to the Dollar store and get the Elmer's.
- [21:12]
A
Get the Elmer's. That's it. We're a cost guy because, you know, we're a startup. We're Tesla We're a startup and we don't really have the money.
- [21:20]
B
Yeah, we're a startup, we move fast and we break your car.
- [21:23]
A
Yep, that's the way it works.
- [21:27]
B
Well, there's been more bloodlething, Jason. As part of an AI focused reorganization, YouTube CEO Neil Mohan told employees it will offer voluntary buyouts, according to an internal company memo. We also understand some of you may be ready for a new challenge in this job market right now where there's plenty of jobs.
- [21:45]
A
Yeah. Where it's challenging to find a job.
- [21:48]
B
Are you ready for the challenge of finding a new job? Exactly. So we've decided now is the right time to offer a voluntary exit program. The restructuring is designed to help YouTube focus on fast growing areas like AI while driving faster decision making and execution. Again, startup mentality. That's what we yearn to be when we're YouTube. Parrot Alphabet, which announced its first ever $100 billion quarter largely on the strength of cloud services and search. We are a startup, Jason. A $100 billion quarter startup.
- [22:21]
A
God damn. Oh, you know, I had a job for a startup up until this week and guess what happened there, Brian.
- [22:32]
B
Layoffs at the startup.
- [22:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. And guess what, Guess what? That followed an over $20 million funding round that they got. They had $20 million in the bank and they started letting people go again.
- [22:46]
B
That's the change that has happened to the culture. It is no longer about. All it is is about the startup founders getting as fucking much money as possible and getting the fuck out.
- [22:56]
A
That's a really shitty part. Is one of the co founders is one of the people that got let go, which is just fucking horrible.
- [23:02]
B
That's Facebook. That's Facebook, right? That's the Facebook story.
- [23:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately I was tethered to this founder and got to go with them. God damn.
- [23:10]
B
We, we know Andrew Jassy was Gizmodo on the crapper because he. He walked back the the statement about AI One article I wish he would have read from Gizmodo while he was taking a dump. I hope he didn't get dinged for it because God knows the the drivers do was this one. Everyone is laying people off this week. Researchers say they're going to regret it. The nation's largest employers are doing a lot less employing lately. We talked about a bunch of them already. Paramount also axed 1,000 people. Target let go of 1,800 employees. UPS said it will start a purge of 14,000 people with the aim of getting rid of 48,000 workers in total. Meta laid off another 600 people from its AI labs. That's all just this week, in addition to the ones that we already discussed. Yeah, all this is happening as we enter the jobless growth economy. A world where no one is hiring, but the profits keep climbing. As the Wall Street Journal points out, many of the jobs getting hit at the moment are white collar work, office jobs that offer a relatively comfortable lifestyle and typically room for growth. But at the moment, the job market is stuck in a no higher no fire mode, meaning no one is coming in, no one is moving up, and no one is looking for other opportunities. The whole world is currently stagnant, except for those getting caught under the corporate acts as they try to boost their bottom line for fourth quarter earnings reports and get fired. The path into the world of work that once represented at least one route to the American dream has no entry point anymore and a much lower ceiling than it used to. Job postings for entry level and early career roles are way down. Year over year, the market has pulled the ladder up from people trying to get in on lower rungs. And the prospect of climbing it is getting harrowing too. I wonder why I'm in a bad mood all the time. Jason.
- [24:46]
A
I wonder. Brian. I wonder.
- [24:47]
B
I don't know. A recent report from the Federal Reserve bank of Philadelphia found that AI exposure is over three times higher for occupations that require a bachelor's degree compared with those that don't. And the idea up in the C suite seems almost certainly that automation will be able to fill in those gaps, even though there's little to suggest that will actually play out that way. As we reported on repeatedly on this show. Doesn't work. According to a study done by the center for AI Safety, AI agents were only able to complete about 3% of the work assigned to them that humans can do reliably. Given that, it's little surprise that a recent report published by research and advisory firm Forrester found that more than half of all employers who cut workers and tried to replace them with AI regret the decision. But don't worry, the employers are still going to come out ahead. Jason. The same report predicted that those companies would bring back human labor just at lower wages and potentially by farming out the roles to overseas workers instead.
- [25:44]
A
Yeah, I wonder why you're in a bad mood. Yeah. Oh my God. Well, you know, King, King asshole of the AI world, Sam Altman.
- [25:54]
B
Which one?
- [25:55]
A
Yeah, no, the king. There is the king. Sam Altman is the king asshole. As far as I'm concerned, his queen is Jensen Huang. But yeah, King Asshole. So here we go. OpenAI just finished its corporate game of musical chairs. And surprise, Microsoft grabbed the biggest seat. The newly christened OpenAI foundation now officially controls the for profit OpenAI group, PBC holding about 26% of it, worth a casual $130 billion. Microsoft sits right beside them with roughly 27%, valued at 135 billion, thanks to over 13 billion in investments and a new $250 billion Azure deal that'll keep OpenAI servers humming until the heat death of the cloud. Now, we talked, yeah, we talked about like, you know, Microsoft had the option of not doing a goddamn thing and saying, okay, you know, we're just going to let them go because they have the deal to own OpenAI's technology, which they're still going to do. But there was another side of this that came out after all this happened because I'm like, why would Microsoft do that? It made so much more sense for them to not do anything, let OpenAI fail, pick up the pieces and then just own it. But here's what's going to happen. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an up to $1 trillion IPO. So Microsoft is going to make even more money if that IPO happens. Now the thing about that IPO is OpenAI, before they go public, is going to have to release their financials. So they're saying that it could be 2026, but most likely 2027, because they need ChatGPT to actually cook the books to make them look as profitable as possible by then. Because right now, if they went public today, it would be one of the worst IPOs in history. Because that, that I forget the document that you have to show before you, before you go public, but that would show how little money they make on how much money they spend and it would just be a dumpster fire. So they need this time to run up to their ipo. And this is what actually made it possible, was Microsoft opening the possibility for them to go for profit. But it also opens up the SoftBank side of things. So they get the extra money from SoftBank, which hasn't been recorded reported that much this week. But that, that whole, the whole point of them going to for profit was so they get that next run of cash from SoftBank, which they need to keep going even though they've made these stupid. I saw that. I saw the greatest explanation of the new Nvidia deal with OpenAI where Nvidia's invested into OpenAI and OpenAI will then get the chips or lease the Chips from Nvidia. It's basically a. A power strip plugged into itself. That's it. That's exactly it. That is our more. That is our modern Ouroboros. It's just a power strip plugged into itself. That's the deal. Yeah. So that opens OpenAI to do a whole bunch of shit now. So more shenanigans. And this, this just put a smile, smile on my face. Meta's stock nosedived over 11% after Mark Zuckerberg told investors he's torching up to 72 billion this year, chasing AI glory. That's even more than the already jaw dropping $66 billion estimate. And Wall street is losing its patience. Despite beating revenue expectations, they made more money than they were expected to make. Investors see Meta's runaway AI spending is a bonfire with no clear return. Analysts say Zuckerberg's acting out of fomo while rivals Microsoft and Alphabet pump their own billions into the same stupid arms race. Meanwhile, Meta has been hiring top AI talent with massive pay packages, even as it quietly lays off other people in the superintelligence team. And what they're not saying is, how much money, Mark, did you burn on the Metaverse? And it didn't turn into anything, even.
- [30:00]
B
When you had pants.
- [30:01]
A
They said, yeah, this is just your latest shiny toy. I would like to also point out 72 billion is 72,000 million dollars. So you could give 72,000 people, 72,000 people a million dollars each for what they're going to waste on this. That's the, that's the. He can make 72,000 millionaires for what they're going to waste on this bullshit.
- [30:28]
B
So he might be doing that. We don't know what the top AI talent that he's hiring is getting for a salary.
- [30:33]
A
That's true, that's true, that's true.
- [30:36]
B
You know, it's just not going to the people we want it to us. Yes, well, let's switch over to another fucking billionaire. Federal investigators who are looking into Tesla's full self driving tech have requested information from the company about the Mad Max Mode it added to the system. Oh, dear God, I wonder what Mad Max Mode. You know, it's got to be a really safe driving system, right? You put that on and it's safety first, right, Jason?
- [31:04]
A
That's right. It keeps you just away from the hooligans and it's all about your internal safety, Brian. It just keeps you away from the dystopian hellscape that's behind you and coming to kill You. Right, right.
- [31:15]
B
The company has claimed that Mad Max offers higher speeds and more frequent lane changes than its hurry speed profile, which a car probably also shouldn't have, shouldn't need. The human behind the wheel is fully responsible for driving the vehicle and complying with all traffic safety laws. In they would like to remind everybody it opened a fresh probe into full self driving earlier this year. The NATSA saying the tech had induced vehicle behavior that violates traffic safety laws. Duh. Some Tesla vehicles with full self driving engage are said to have run red lights and driven against the flow of traffic. Tesla initially offered a Mad max mode in 2018 before full self driving was available. The company revived Mad Max this month and didn't take long before there were reports of Tesla vehicles that were using the mode, rolling stop signs and driving above speed limits. Well, you wonder why this hasn't been investigated too heavily until now. Earlier this year, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk was at the helm of Doge, the Trump administration initiative reportedly called NATSA staff. If we fire the staff, they can't look into me.
- [32:20]
A
We covered this when it happened. Out of all those investigations that were going on into Tesla. As soon as he walked into the office, he's like, you guys out.
- [32:28]
B
Yep.
- [32:29]
A
Get the.
- [32:29]
B
They hired three people who were specifically part of the very small team that worked on autonomous vehicle safety.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah.
- [32:36]
B
So imagine the chances.
- [32:39]
A
Imagine that, Brian.
- [32:42]
B
Just random occurrences.
- [32:43]
A
Who knew? Well, speaking of more Elon bullshittery, Grokipedia came out this week. Brian, did you get a chance to play with Crokopedia?
- [32:53]
B
No.
- [32:54]
A
Well, Grokipedia is the grokified reboot of Wikipedia and it is as racist and shitty as you would think it would be. It's anti woke. It has, it has taken almost verbatim a lot of the articles straight from Wikipedia, which probably is against some law somewhere. Yeah, who's going to.
- [33:18]
B
Molly White had posted an image of like the promo for it where it was like Grokopedia AI enabled and she crossed out AI and wrote Wikipedia enabled.
- [33:26]
A
Yeah, exactly. That's it. That's pretty much it.
- [33:30]
B
So my understanding of this is Elon was so mad that, that his AI basically kept going woke because that's, you know, human and, and what we. What, what we actually want. He got so mad about that that he basically just decided to edit his own version of Wikipedia together. That's horrible. Because his own AI won't stay horrible enough.
- [33:49]
A
Yeah, okay. And. And it's. And it. Since this is generated by his own AI, it's probably going to be read by other AI. So, you know, this is just going to lead to more and faster model collapse. Yep. So that's fine. I'm like, okay, go for it, man. I'm pretty sure the people at OpenAI have a robot exclusion rule to not go read Crocopedia, so I think everybody should have that. That exclusion rule to not go read Crockopedia because it is. It is bad. It's bad. I don't just go, seriously, go look up your favorite thing and just see how they Hitler fied it. That's all you got to do. That's it.
- [34:25]
B
Now I'm feeling Hitler fied. Nobody remembers Alien sex fiend. Zombified.
- [34:30]
A
Okay, I guess probably not just you. Yeah.
- [34:42]
B
All right. We talked for a long time about how we're going to get to the point where nobody's going to be able to discern real video from fake video. And we're kind of there already. But this is just yet another story. It looks like a hundred thousand people fell for a fake Nvidia live stream featuring an AI generated version of CEO Jensen Huang, as reported by PC Gamer. Perhaps the scariest part is the fake stream ran at the same time as an actual Nvidia event and dwarfed the live viewership numbers. More people watched a fake live stream from Nvidia than the actual live stream that was going on at the exact same time. The actual keynote speech at Nvidia's GPU technology conference garnered around 20,000 live views, while the fake stream maxed out at 100,000 live views. The fake Wang was talking about some crazy stuff, mostly involving bogus crypto investments. I mean, this has been going around everywhere. Deepfake spoke of a crypto mass adoption event that ties directly into Nvidia's mission to accelerate human progress. Now, to be fair, that's not that far off from what he might have actually said in the real one.
- [35:45]
A
It's probably pretty close. And the great thing about this is that live stream was probably done using Nvidia hardware.
- [35:53]
B
Probably.
- [35:55]
A
I can't see it. Not.
- [35:56]
B
Yeah. And throughout the live stream, the avatar urged viewers to scan a QR code to send in cryptocurrencies to the world's richest company because they need more money to accelerate human progress.
- [36:08]
A
Now, here's the thing. If anybody actually did that, they deserve everything that they get. There's no reason that anybody should have sent in money to Jensen Wang for an Nvidia press conference talking about the, you know, the new shit they're coming out with, saying Give us crypto. Seriously, you have to, you have to be at the bottom rung of the intelligence ladder to have, have done that. So no, yeah, no fucks given to people who lost money on that one.
- [36:34]
B
Yeah. So there you go. So we're not, we're not entirely cooked yet, but the water is getting hotter that so many people fall for this crap.
- [36:41]
A
Yep. Speaking of falling for crap, Donald Trump's media company just found a new way to merge politics, crypto and gambling. So what could possibly go wrong?
- [36:50]
B
It's a great world we're inventing for ourselves, people.
- [36:52]
A
That's right. The Trump Media and technology group, which runs Truth Social announced Truth Predict, a poly market style prediction platform where users can bet on everything from elections to sports to the price of corn. The company's partnered with crypto.com because apparently nothing says trustworthy finance like crypto and Trump in the same sentence. The platform form will go head to head with rivals like Talshi and polymarket, which is coming back soon, both of which have tangled with U.S. regulators over gambling laws. Truth Predict is starting beta tests soon and plans to expand globally, assuming the CFTC doesn't immediately set it on fire. Well, that's not going to happen. That's going to get run through as fast as possible. Now, critics warned that large scale betting markets could actually influence real world events from coups to wars, while supporters claim it's just decentralized wisdom of the crowd, bro. So let's put this in perspective here. Donald Trump, who has the most influence of any person on the planet, is going to run a betting platform that is based on the. The. Yeah, he's like, exactly. So it's like, what's Trump gonna do? Well, let's go bet on it. It. And then Trump is just going to do it based on what the betting platform said and who vote who betted on it and who's going to make the most money on it. I mean, we've seen this already happen with the actual fucking crypto markets and the stock market. Insider trading is rampant right now inside of that whole fucking. Oh, that just when you know you're.
- [38:23]
B
Not going to get in trouble.
- [38:25]
A
Yeah, exactly. I can't. You can't make it up. It's just the, the next, the next level. What the fuck does he need all this money for? He's going to be fucking dead soon. Do you see him wandering around Japan like looking for his mommy?
- [38:38]
B
Oh my God, I don't get it. But that's what he lives for. That's it. So, yeah, well, the Internet is full of anecdotal evidence of chatbots blowing smoke up our butts, but there is now science to back it up. Jason Researchers at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions just published a study in Nature about the sycophantic nature of AI chatbots, and the results should surprise no one. The study involved 11 chatbots, including recent versions of ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Anthropics, Claude and Meta's Llama. Results indicate that chatbots endorse a human's behavior 50% more than humans do. Obviously they didn't talk to anybody in the current administration, which does it very often anyways. They conducted several types of tests with different groups. One compared responses by chatbots to posts on Reddit's Am I the asshole? Thread to human responses. If you're not aware of this, it is my favorite thing on Reddit. This is a subreddit in which people ask the community to judge their behavior. And shockingly, most of them are really horrible people who don't understand that they're horrible.
- [39:38]
A
Yeah.
- [39:38]
B
So it's, it's a good time. And Reddit users were much harder on these transgressions than chatbots were. One poster wrote about tying a bag of trash to a tree branch instead of throwing it away, to which chat GPT4O declared that the person's intention to clean up after themselves was commendable. The study went on to suggest that chatbots continue to validate users even when they were irresponsible, deceptive or mentioned self harm, according to a report by the Guardian. It's also worth noting that traditional chatbots very rarely encourage users to see things from anybody else's perspective. This is serious because of just how many people actually use these chatbots. A recent report by the Benton Institute for Broadband society suggests that 30% of teenagers talk to AI rather than actual human beings for serious conversations.
- [40:24]
A
I think that number's low.
- [40:25]
B
I think it's low too, and it gives me zero hope for the future.
- [40:29]
A
Yeah, I think, I seriously think that number is extraordinarily low. I think that's more like 80% right now.
- [40:36]
B
That's terrifying. As a parent, I'm not gonna lie, like, I don't know what I'm gonna fucking do when my kid gets to that point.
- [40:42]
A
Well, how old is he now?
- [40:44]
B
Nine.
- [40:45]
A
Nine? So you got four years before he's a teenager.
- [40:48]
B
Oh, the world will be over by then. What am I worried about?
- [40:51]
A
Exactly.
- [40:52]
B
Not my problem. We're all dead.
- [40:55]
A
Exactly. Oh, hat tip to curbs on discord for this One, a grieving family just pulled off a real life David versus Goliath moment, using the Claude AI chatbot to slash a hospital bill from $195,000 down to $33,000.
- [41:11]
B
All right.
- [41:12]
A
After their relative died of a heart attack, the hospital billed nearly $200,000 for just four hours of intensive care. When the family asked for an itemized breakdown, the hospital blamed upgraded computers. I don't know if that's upgraded if you know what to pay for the up.
- [41:28]
B
Was that part of my bill?
- [41:31]
A
When they moved from Windows 31 to Windows NT? Was that the upgrade? Claude analyzed the billing codes and spotted duplicate charges where the hospital billed for both full procedures and each individual component. Claude also found improper inpatient codes and other shady errors that Medicare wouldn't have allowed. With Claude's help drafting some very pointed letters, the family forced the hospital to back down. They called it a moral victory and a financial one. Their $20 a month chatbot subscription saved them more than $160,000 while exposing just how creative hospitals can get when billing unsophisticated people. So there's finally a winning story about AI Brian.
- [42:09]
B
One. There's one.
- [42:11]
A
We got one. We got one. We got one. Where's the George John Oliver's button? We need his button. Media candy.
- [42:25]
B
Well, I watched the highly promoted A House of Dynamite on Netflix, the movie by Katherine Bigelow from, you know, Oscar winner, director and Scott Idris Elba. Rebecca Ferguson, all kinds of Rebecca Ferguson. She's just great in this.
- [42:39]
A
She's great in everything, dude.
- [42:40]
B
She's great in everything. So I. I watched it. It is a spoiler alert, as if you couldn't possibly know by now. It's a. It's a pseudo documentary kind of. Well, it's not a pseudo documentary, but it's trying to explore what would happen if somebody launched a nuclear missile at us and the actual process, theoretically, that the government goes through to respond. And, you know, it was pretty chilling and pretty spooky. It's well acted. It's. It's well shot. I don't like the direction. I didn't like the way that they basically took like 20 minutes and then looked at it from every single angle. So you're basically getting, you know, you're in this person's room now doing the same 20 minutes.
- [43:19]
A
Oh, I hate those.
- [43:20]
B
Yeah. To this person's room. So now we're. You're seeing Hit this. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't like that because it kind of felt like the fur after the first 20 minute segment that was the whole movie. And then now I'm just revisiting the same thing from different persons perspectives. So yeah, didn't care much for that. And if you want resolution, this is not the movie for you. This is one of those think pieces where you think, how do you think it ended? And you know what? Really well done. But you know what, you're telling me a story. Finish the fucking story.
- [43:56]
A
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, Kathryn Bigelow, she's done some great stuff. Do you ever seen Near Dark?
- [44:02]
B
Yeah, it was great.
- [44:03]
A
One of the greatest, One of the greatest vampire movies of all time. Absolutely. Go watch that for Halloween. Point break. Strange Days. Love that.
- [44:12]
B
I was in Strange Days.
- [44:13]
A
You were?
- [44:14]
B
Well, sort of. I'm in the big rave sequence. Like there was a big rave in Hollywood for that. They shot for that. So that Apex twin played and I was at that.
- [44:22]
A
Yeah. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. I love that movie. I think, I think it's an underrated movie. Yeah. And the one that just pisses me off is the Hurt Locker because she won an Oscar for that because she got fucked over by James Cameron and that was just a sympathy Oscar. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie. It was fucking garbage.
- [44:39]
B
I never saw it. I heard it wasn't that great.
- [44:40]
A
Oh, it was a terrible movie. But yeah, so I mean I got, I got respect for. Respect for, as a director. But yeah, yeah, like everything I've heard is terrible.
- [44:49]
B
It looks good, it's well acted. It just. I didn't care for the, for the way that they. It was put together and obviously I wanted, I wanted an actual ending. So. Yeah, there was actually one moment that literally shocked me and surprised me. 1.
- [45:03]
A
Okay.
- [45:04]
B
Everything else was kind of okay.
- [45:06]
A
Okay, we'll go back to watching the Diplomat then.
- [45:08]
B
I am. And I watched the second episode, watching the third episode tonight. It's great.
- [45:13]
A
Yeah, I'm halfway through number four. So. Good. Very good, very good. I watched welcome to Derry, the new IT prequel and I texted you about it and said it was really good. And then you're like, oh, maybe I should watch the IT movies first. You know what? It dawned to me. You don't have to. You absolutely don't have to. It's good standalone at this point. I mean, I definitely don't have to.
- [45:34]
B
Because I, I love the book. I've read it like 15 times. I've seen the miniseries, I know the story. I. But you know, this is all prequel, so.
- [45:41]
A
Yeah, it's prequel and Stephen King's Let them. He just said, go do whatever you want to with it. So I think it might actually be a good horror movie that I might actually like. It's not Stephen King influenced. Although I gotta say, the. The two IT movies, they. They were great. They landed perfectly. Landed.
- [45:57]
B
I really got to go watch it because I. I do love the story and I love the mini. I love the miniseries that was done in the 90s.
- [46:02]
A
I love the first part of the miniseries. The second part was garbage. I thought they did so much better in the movies than the miniseries did for the ending. They really nailed the ending on it. But, yeah, I do. Tim Curry. Tim Curry was great in the miniseries ever. Yeah, definitely. And speaking of Spooky, Stranger Things 5, the official trailer dropped yesterday and it's.
- [46:27]
B
What'S happening in the nursing home.
- [46:28]
A
Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. The little girl's getting Botox now in the boob job because know she's aged out and has to keep her figure. It's. It's kind of crazy how, how this is progressing, but it's the final. Here's the problem that I had with the trailer. They co opted Queens, who Wants to Live Forever for the entire trailer, which made me just want to go watch Highlander because that's where that song comes from, the Highlander soundtrack. Which also brings me back to thinking everybody's talking about the cast for this Highlander reboot. Half of the cast was the soundtrack in the, in the original Highlander because Queen did such an amazing job with it. Now if they were, they would just take the soundtrack and rerun it for the new one. But Anyway, Stranger Things 5, I'll watch it. I'm invested. I liked season four, all 700 hours of it.
- [47:21]
B
I think I'm calling it on Stranger Things. I. I never watched season four. I don't think I watched season three. And I. I don't see myself going back and doing it. It's just too many. It's too many hours of footage to watch now to catch back up.
- [47:33]
A
It's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours.
- [47:35]
B
And I. I just don't care. Like, I. I just don't care.
- [47:39]
A
Well, volume one drops November 26th. Volume two, Christmas. And the finale is on New Year's Eve.
- [47:44]
B
So I'm glad they're wrapping it up. I know a lot of people really, really like it and have stuck with it and good for all you guys, but I think I'm just. I'm calling it. I'm throwing in the cards on this.
- [47:54]
A
One tap out while you can. So I'll let you know how they land the. Land the ship on that one.
- [47:58]
B
Okay.
- [47:59]
A
Slow Horses. Season five landed their. Their finale this week. Great. It was great. Can't wait for season six and seven. They're already confirmed season six is already in the can and in post production, so that's quick.
- [48:10]
B
Good for.
- [48:11]
A
That'll be good. The. The difference between six and seven is there's new showrunners for each season, so fingers crossed that it'll still keep the quality and. And everything. But, yeah, they lost their main showrunner after five. That'll be interesting. Will Smith has moved on. Not that Will Smith. The other Will Smith. And I saw this come across, and I was just. I was happy about this. Spotify is running ads. Recruiting agents for ice. Yeah. Fucking running ads for ICE agents.
- [48:42]
B
I mean, our show could be. I don't know.
- [48:45]
A
No, I'm fairly certain I'd click the don't promote fascism button on our. On our ad provider. But, you know what?
- [48:53]
B
Were you specific? Gift Jason, Were you specific enough? Like, there's autocracy and then there's fascism. I don't know if we checked all the boxes.
- [49:00]
A
Yeah, I don't think Ice Barbie is. There was a checkbox for no Ice Barbie. Spotify claims these ads comply with their policy, but the truth is, streaming hate is not neutral. It's a choice, and we refuse to fund it. We refuse to ignore it. Which is a link to invisible.org's Cancel Spotify page. So go check it out. Basically, here's what they're saying. Cancel Spotify. Saved you a click. Cancel Spotify until they stop running ICE ads. Fortunately, I don't have a Spotify account anymore, so I canceled it. I preemptively canceled Fascism.
- [49:35]
B
Yeah, I got a free one, so I'm not paying.
- [49:39]
A
Can you cancel your free one?
- [49:41]
B
I can't cancel my free one. What's the point? So there you go.
- [49:51]
A
Apps and doodads. Brian, I have a question for you. Why is it when I go to a website that I use every day, every single day, I click on the yes, use the cookies button, it goes away, banner's gone. Why can't they set a cookie? To remember that I said yes to using the fucking cookies every day I go back, can we use cookies? Yes. Set a fucking cookie. And I checked because I use the brave blocker, it's not on. They have full access to set a cookie. I log in, which means they set a cookie, but the cookie pop up, still shows up every day. So it destroys any faith I had whatsoever for the website to do anything it's supposed to be doing.
- [50:37]
B
Well, first off, kudos to you for having any faith to begin with. With. I, I don't, I, I, I, I, I assume the worst. There's a couple options here, a couple thoughts that I have. First off, it's. It's just bad programming. It's people using shitty plugins to do this because it's required and nobody wanted to code it or it's been vibe coded by somebody, so it's a piece of shit. The second one, these have been around for.
- [50:59]
A
Since before vibe coding, though, man.
- [51:01]
B
No, I know, I know. But they probably haven't updated the plugins because people are lazy and they're not.
- [51:06]
A
Bank of America is using a WordPress plugin. I'm going to be really upset.
- [51:10]
B
The other thought is dark patterns. This is done on purpose because it's a pain in the ass to go through and reject cookies all the time. So people just go it. I'm just clicking through this now. So then I get. Now, now they get to stick you with all the cookies and the tracking that they want because you're too lazy because you have to do it every goddamn time you visit the site. And the third option is, didn't. The third thought is, didn't we have a plugin that, that you had found that we installed that was supposed to take care of all the shit?
- [51:36]
A
It stopped working.
- [51:36]
B
Okay, there you go.
- [51:37]
A
Yeah, I think probably somebody put some malware in and it got pulled from the store or some shit like that.
- [51:42]
B
That's because the entire Internet isn't shittified, including its cookies, right? They're shitty cookies. They're fucking chips. Ahoy, man.
- [51:48]
A
Shits ahoy.
- [51:50]
B
I put this in the news because I know you were a big fan and talked about it all the time, but Grammarly is no more, at least with regards to its name. The AI powered writing assistance tool, founded in 2009 when it wasn't AI powered and it was just a writing assistance tool, has been absorbed into a new software platform called Superhum Superhuman. This follows Grammarly's acquisition of Superhuman Mail earlier this year, with the former taking the somewhat unusual step of adopting its newly obtained company's name rather than the other way around. Superhuman unites Grammarly, Superhuman Mail and the AI work assistant coda, which I remember being a coding system back in the day, also acquired by Grammarly in 2025, and one productivity suite allowing users to access all three tools as part of a single plan. The company has also launched a new AI assistant called Superhuman Go that includes every Superhuman plan Teen Titans Go, and it is baked into the Grammarly browser extension for Chrome and Edge. So this includes assisting with professional sounding email responses, fetching information, and scheduling meetings. The same shit that everybody else does. So there you go. Anybody previously using Grammarly can now use Superhuman Go. And the Superhuman suite is being bundled into a number of different plans. There's a $12 per month build annually pro plan that offers unlimited paragraph rewrites and translations in 19 languages, a feature Grammarly added earlier this year, while the business plan costs $33 per month and includes Superhuman's male client.
- [53:16]
A
Well, it'd be interesting to see what they do with my plan because I just bitched about Grammarly auto billing me without telling me that they were going to do it. So I should get whatever Superhuman plan that they offer now because it just. I just paid 12 bucks a month for a year. Which brings me to another thing that pisses me off. Everybody's talking about, okay, this, this plan costs X dollars a month. And then in the parentheses, build annually.
- [53:39]
B
Annually.
- [53:41]
A
You. That is an annual price. Put the annual price. It's not monthly. That's just like people doing this with ARR. You know, annualized revenue. You know, it's like, no, no, no. They take one day where they had a good day and they say, oh, if I multiply by that by 365, that's how much money I'm going to make this year. Year. No, you had one good day and you're fudging the numbers. I hate when people do this, this build annually crap, because then you got to go, okay, I got to multiply that by 12. That's how much my bill's going to be. You put the actual goddamn price in it. I'd say, get the FTC on this, but there is no FTC anymore.
- [54:14]
B
So nobody's gonna bother with this.
- [54:16]
A
No. Yeah, just one of those stupid things that is. Is Snuck its way into our daily lives, like unlimited bandwidth, which is. And. Except this cookie. Yes, Affinity is in the news. We had an announcement on the show a couple weeks back that, you know, you could go get everything for free right now forever. And I'd paid for it before.
- [54:40]
B
I own Affinity photo too. I bought it.
- [54:42]
A
Yeah, I own the full. I was thrilled.
- [54:44]
B
It's not a subscription. I bought it. I bought the software program because I got sick of Adobe subscription and exorbitant costs.
- [54:51]
A
Yes, yes, yeah, and you can still use that forever. Forever means until they stop supporting it.
- [54:57]
B
Exactly.
- [54:58]
A
Because, you know, that's it's probably got a five year shelf life for forever. So Affinity was bought by Canva not too long ago and we're like, oh, shit, what are they going to do? Well, now we know Affinity now has a V3 app to replace the V2 apps that we have and paid for called Canva AI Studio. They put it all into one. So it was, you know, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. I believe those were the three. They rolled them up into one. Now you can't use it without having a Canva account, which is fucking annoying. And also they're. They're blocking some of it behind a paywall. So it's a freemium subscription now. And the stuff that they're putting behind the paywall is the quote, unquote, AI stuff. Stuff which I don't know if you remember, Affinity was very big about. We're not going to put AI in our products because that takes away from, you know, a lot of the shit that creative people do. We didn't want it. Canva's just like, yeah, silly rabbit, we wrote the check go off. They're putting in their AI tools and you have to pay for them with a monthly subscription to get things like background removal and, you know, the. The stuff that really is important when it comes to the Photoshop and shit like that. So, yeah, so Affinity is being fully insidified now. So there we go, right?
- [56:21]
B
There you go. Awesome. Speaking of inshidification, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to put ads in its map app as soon as next year. While it won't be as annoying as unskippable YouTube ads, Apple wants to offer better visibility on maps to restaurants and businesses that are willing to pay. When looking for a new restaurant or relative business, you may already be used to seeing ads on Google Maps or Yelp that highlight certain establishments. Gurman said that Apple is planning to lean on AI for better search results and offer a better interface than Google Maps. The introduction of ads across Apple's iOS ecosystem shouldn't be surprising since Gurman previously reported Apple's interest back in 2022. On top of that, Apple already offers ad slots within the App Store, where developers can pay to appear in more visible positions for user searches. But beyond Maps, Apple could be looking at infusing ads into news book podcasts and other apps to generate more revenue. New I'm not particularly bothered by this because I have fond memories of there being ads all over my printed MapQuest directions. That littered my car back in the day.
- [57:21]
A
I think there were even ads in my AA or not aaa, my AAA triptychs. When you would go to AAA and you say, I'm going from. I'm driving from Chicago to Florida and you'd get that triptych that they would custom print for you in the flipbook. Remember that?
- [57:36]
B
Right? Yep.
- [57:37]
A
You get a full flip book and you would take that with you. And I'm pretty sure that there were ads in that too. Yeah, but I mean, those things were great. That was when having a AAA membership actually meant something more than a toe.
- [57:47]
B
Yep.
- [57:48]
A
Well, Goodreads is in the news this week. Shocker. Goodreads has had a full blown meltdown Friday when a rogue moderator decided to turn the werewolf Romance Mate by Ali Hazelwood into a protest against Goodreads censorship in favor of Trump. The quote unquote volunteer librarian swapped the book's cover with Eric Trump's new memoir, Under Siege, and rewrote the description into a manifesto accusing Goodread Reads of deleting negative reviews of Trump's book to protect him from criticism.
- [58:17]
B
Way to take a stand.
- [58:19]
A
Yeah, the vigilante didn't stop there. They changed covers and blurbs for several bestsellers, including Wreath Witherspoon Thriller and a Nicholas Sparks novel before Goodreads, Goodreads noticed and yanked their privileges. Goodreads confirmed the edits were unauthorized and said the users accounts had been nuked from orbit. Here's the irony. Under Siege had zero reviews Monday because Goodreads had frozen them to prevent unusual activity. The company insists this helps stop review bombing, but critics point out it mostly seems to shield conservative authors from backlash. In short, one volunteer lost their mind over bias on a platform owned by Amazon, which is like complaining about smoke in a fireworks factory. Here's what pisses me off about this. Goodreads, owned by Amazon, has volunteer librarians to actually do the work.
- [59:11]
B
Let me remind everybody how much money that they made. Go back to the beginning of the show. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing.
- [59:19]
A
It is, it is. Yeah. So Cursor the the Vibe coding IDE app that I use for whatever I'm using it for. This week they dropped version 2.0 with two big updates for AI assisted coding. First is Composer, its new Frontier model that's reportedly four times faster than Peer and tuned for multi step low latency coding. Most tasks finish in under 30 seconds. The update also introduces a multi agent interface letting several AI agents work in parallel on separate branches or remote machines. Now, I wanted to check out the new model because I actually do like the cheap model. What they do is basically they buy compute from multiple people, a lot of it from Anthropic, which then raised the price. That was the whole cursor debacle a few months ago. And they're like, oh, we got to change our price because our. The provider that we bought from turned on the sprinklers because we built our business on somebody else's business and they can do whatever they want. Listen to every episode of Grumpy Old Gigs up until now if you want to hear our stance on that. But. So I got it. I tried it, but at first I had finished this week in Shittification why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do about it by Cory Dr. Row. I finally finished the book. Okay, fantastic book. It was better than I thought it was going to be. It really was. And you know, he does a really good job all the way through of talking about how, how things have been insidified. But even at the end he's like, look, you're going to use this term wrong when you take it out into the world. There's a very, very specific way that I describe insidification. You're probably going to use it Wrong, wrong. But go with God, because someday the people that are looking, the people that are going to start using it because it gets spread far and wider. We'll look it up and they'll get the real definition for it. But I thought that was a cool move. I thought that was a very cool.
- [61:10]
B
There's no, no such thing as bad, bad pr.
- [61:12]
A
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So which. Which led me to find the Disinfitify project which is run by John, also run by Metamucil. Yeah, yeah. Seriously is Grandpa and Shittify. Let's disinfy Grandpa. I sent him an email. I don't even think this is really that much of a project anymore because they had a couple software things on here where that he created to Disinfectify, which was a QR code creator and a password generator. Two basic things that anybody can whip up. So there was a list of suggested projects and the top one was a currency converter to build a currency converter that uses a public API like exchange rate API to fetch real time exchange rates, ensure that all conversions are processed client side. To maintain user privacy. I built one with cursor 2.0.
- [62:03]
B
Cool.
- [62:04]
A
Eight minutes. Took me eight minutes to do this. And that's just because I had to make a few tweaks to where it saved the credentials because it will save. You could put in your API key in the browser and it will use in browser storage to actually save the credentials. Or I also said you could put it into a config file. So that was my big change in just a few tweaks, eight minutes to build this thing. So I said fuck it, put it up on GitHub. So there's a link to the GitHub project in here. Feel free to grab it, use it. It actually works really well. Yeah. And because you could go to go get a free API key, you do have to use an email address to get it. But if you want to go get a throwaway email address to get a free key because it's a free API with 1500, I think API calls a day. So. But I had it and I also set a time limit for fetching from the API to get the exchange rates. But it's got like 160 currencies in it and works really good. So go grab it. That was, that's my, my, my foray into disin shittification this week. Enjoy it.
- [63:09]
B
Wear those thick boots when stomping in the shit.
- [63:13]
A
Closing Shout out. Over on Patreon we've got Charlie. Hello Charlie. And Charlie says just wanted to let the OG gog, I'm guessing, know how much you are appreciated for reporting news among these dystopian times of tech bros ruining the planet. Very little info out there. They won't stop at anything to keep their wallets lined and force fetus AI that's so power hungry that they have managed to bring back nuclear energy to keep the AI hive alive. Please remain full of truth and humor as you always have have. Thank you very much, Charlie.
- [63:46]
B
We do feel very appreciated. Our our banking account is not full of truth and humor.
- [63:50]
A
But you know, we're working on it.
- [63:52]
B
We're working on it.
- [63:54]
A
Thanks to people like you and also Joe. Joe S with the hundred dollar Patreon subscription. Good for you, Joe. Thank you so much. Yes. And from everybody else who's still subscribing, we've got Anthony, Jeremy, Giovanni, Jerry, Force of Habit, Joe, Michael, Ruben, and Andrew and Sikanth. So thank you all very much for your continued, your continued patronage.
- [64:19]
B
We've been getting a lot of love from Charlie's this week over at PayPal we have another Charlie, Judge Jonathan Rocky, who said a 20 finder's fee for the FB class action lawsuit you alerted me to grump on. Thank you. And another Charlie with a hundred bucks.
- [64:34]
A
God damn.
- [64:36]
B
Thanks Charlie. Winning it's like we've got our own.
- [64:39]
A
Chocolate factory or our own sheen. Oh, God. And over at the tip jar, we've got Phil. And thanks for the 404. Heads up, Phil. Phil, let me know that GOG.com donate was broken. So our. Our website provider had. Had scrubbed all of my redirects at some point. So there was a ton of stuff broken.
- [65:00]
B
Our website got inshittified.
- [65:02]
A
Yes, seriously. And then when I went to go change the design a little bit, I found out that, oh, wow, their website builder sucks and it broke everything for a while. So it's kind of back in action. So don't. Don't blame me. Don't blame me.
- [65:16]
B
We're just both ex web developers.
- [65:18]
A
That's all I know. Cobblers, children's shoes, some shit like that. And also from the tip jar, Jennifer and Adam, thank you all so much. And if you would like to help the show keep on keeping on, which we really need you for right now, please, please, please, with sugar on top, go to GOG Show Donate, which now works, or patreon.com gog. You can sign up for as little as $3 a month to help keep the show on the air. And you can, if you want to buy the whole year, you can get a discount. Yes, you can.
- [65:49]
B
So what's our monthly fee? That's paid annually.
- [65:55]
A
As much as you want to give. God damn it. That's what it is.
- [65:58]
B
$10 per month. Annual.
- [66:00]
A
Annualized. Yes, we're gon annualized it. Oh, we have to check. We have to check my. Let me check my ARR and I'll let you know what it is.
- [66:08]
B
I know what my ROI is on this, though. I'll tell you that.
- [66:12]
A
FA for all. But yes, you get the show. If you go to Patreon and sign up, you get the show early high definition ad free. And yeah, that's what you get mostly insidified. We're going to try to insidify it less on Patreon maybe.
- [66:33]
B
And you get to look forward to inside video soon too.
- [66:37]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [66:38]
B
We're testing right now. Everybody. We got to get on that YouTube bandwagon because 7,000 spam emails a day telling us we're missing out on gazillions by not being on YouTube. It finally convinced us.
- [66:49]
A
And it was funny. One of the things was I watched the pivot video and I'm like, oh my God, they don't even give a shit. They just don't even try. And I'm looking at us on video. And I'm like, you've got Kara Swisher hair. So I need to shave my head. And then I'll have the Galloway hair. And then we're just going to be just.
- [67:04]
B
Does that mean I need to put on my pilot sunglasses for our first episode?
- [67:08]
A
You absolutely do.
- [67:09]
B
And I'm just going to go, well, what do you think, Jason? I just don't know. I just don't know. That'll be the whole episode.
- [67:14]
A
And I'll talk about my penis the whole time. Yeah.
- [67:15]
B
And you talk about your dick the whole time.
- [67:17]
A
That's it. That's it.
- [67:19]
B
And then profit.
- [67:22]
A
Profit, profit, profit.
- [67:26]
B
Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.
- [67:28]
A
And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today. Today's episode at GOG Show. 720. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG Show. Donate. It works. And every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show. Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. And we'll love you for it. Swing by GOG show to join our discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts? Feedback, School links? Hit us up at GOG Show Contact. And hey, don't forget to leave a five star review at GOG Show Review and we'll read it on the air. We have not gotten a review in a very long time. So come on guys, give us a shout, please. Oh, and guess what? We've got GOG Merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop GOG Show. Stay grumpy.