698: Watch Out for That Tree!
Grumpy Old Geeks
Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
4.8 • 6.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2025
⏱️ 83 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we kick things off with the return of Space Karen’s meltdown tour: Elon Musk got flustered in an interview, sputtered out one-word answers, and called the journalist an “NPC,” which is rich coming from the guy whose only real upgrade since PayPal is yelling “freedom” in meme fonts. Meanwhile, 23andMe sold your DNA to Regeneron at a bankruptcy auction, proving once and for all that your spit is more valuable than most tech startups.
IN THE NEWS is a parade of corporate idiocy and dystopian fuckery. Coinbase employees got bribed into leaking user data (because clearly we didn’t have enough crypto chaos), Klarna keeps flip-flopping between AI and human workers like it’s a bad Tinder date, and OpenAI is out here buying Jony Ive’s design firm for $6.5 billion because sure, what’s another billion when you’re trying to build a surveillance device to stalk 100 million users? Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times is publishing AI-generated trash with imaginary authors, Anthropic’s new model attempts blackmail, and researchers dumped two billion Discord messages online just for kicks. And yes, Elon’s Tesla robotaxis will now only roam the safest parts of Austin, which is code for “we still can’t make this thing turn left.”
In MEDIA CANDY, we’re watching Murderbot, Godfather of Harlem, and Hotel Cocaine because who doesn’t love a little synthetic assassin, crime drama, and coke-fueled nostalgia? Notepad.exe now writes for you (and probably files HR complaints too), and Audible is teaming up with publishers to replace narrators with robot voices. Yay, progress. Over in THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE, Bittner brings the malware, monsters, and a new theme park review that’s somehow less terrifying than the news. Bookworms, don’t miss Curepedia and The AI Con — one’s about goth gods, the other’s about taking down our techno-overlords. And pour one out for George Wendt — Norm from Cheers is now drinking with the angels.
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Show notes at https://gog.show/698
FOLLOW UP
23andMe (and Your Genetic Data) Sold to Regeneron in Bankruptcy Auction
IN THE NEWS
Extortionists bribed Coinbase employees to give them customer data
OpenAI buys Jony Ive's design startup for $6.5 billion
Sam Altman Tells Staff Plan to Ship 100 Million Devices That See Everything in Users' Lives
Klarna Hiring Back Human Help After Going All-In on AI
Klarna CEO and Sutter Hill take victory lap after Jony Ive's OpenAI deal
Klarna used an AI avatar of its CEO to deliver earnings
Klarna users are buying now, but not paying later
DOGE Used a Meta AI Model to Review Emails From Federal Workers
Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle
We’re Focused on the Wrong A.I. Problem in Journalism
Anthropic's new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
MIT Backs Away From Paper Claiming Scientists Make More Discoveries with AI
Researchers Dump 2 Billion Scraped Discord Messages Online
Musk says Tesla's self-driving tests will be geofenced to 'the safest' parts of Austin
MEDIA CANDY
APPS & DOODADS
The Grand Encyclopedia of Eponymous Laws
Apple confirms iOS 19 will end support for legacy Home app system
Audible to Partner With Publishers to Create AI-Voiced Audiobooks
In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you”
AT THE LIBRARY
Curepedia: An A-Z of the Cure by Simon Price
THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE
First photos from inside Universal Studio’s new Orlando theme park Epic Universe revealed
A Very Honest Review on Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment | Universal's Epic Universe
Gadget recommendation - Electric Air Duster with Flashlight
CLOSING SHOUT-OUTS
George Wendt, Norm From Cheers, Dead at 76
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 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. |
| 0:16.4 | Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schoemeyer. |
| 0:20.7 | Brian, I've been doing a lot of work with AI this week. I'm sorry. Yeah, me too. |
| 0:25.6 | Me too. Me too. I kind of come to the conclusion that vibe coding is just a way to create technical debt at an industrial scale. |
| 0:35.1 | Yeah, of course. I mean, it's a shortcut for the immediate future. |
| 0:39.5 | It's no different in my mind from, you know, what we dealt with almost 20 years ago now when it |
| 0:45.7 | was like, oh, there's all these great offshore companies. There's these great Filipino |
| 0:50.9 | companies. There's these great Indian companies that will do all the coding for you and get this done lickety split at half the cost. And then you get the code and it kind of |
| 0:58.9 | works, but you're never able to touch it. Right, right. And just for the uninitiated, technical |
| 1:04.0 | debt is basically extra work that you'll eventually have to do because you didn't do it properly |
| 1:07.8 | the first time. Yeah. And in the marketing stuff that you worked in and I worked in back in the early days, it wasn't |
| 1:14.2 | that much of a big deal because we weren't building systems that needed to last. |
| 1:18.1 | No, no, no, no. |
| 1:19.0 | We would tear things down or, you know, it would go obsolete in your case, like a movie site. |
| 1:23.6 | Nobody's going to pay to keep that thing going, so it just goes away. Or, you know, new album cycle, completely new website. |
| 1:30.0 | Exactly. |
| 1:30.6 | I didn't really start to run into it and really get a feel for it until I started to work at |
| 1:35.8 | Technorati, which was, you know, a giant system that had lots of moving parts. |
| 1:41.6 | And we were continuously dealing with technical debt because |
| 1:44.4 | somebody would just clude something together at two in the morning, usually drunk, |
| 1:48.0 | and we'd have to figure it out six months later when we'd do a big redesign. And then |
| 1:52.1 | this one little widget decided to not work anymore because it wasn't really built to scale |
... |
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