Eps

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! - Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The blue wave has arrived; Elon Musk’s political spending spree mostly went down in flames, and Brian is celebrating his new Canadian citizenship with the kind of optimism usually reserved for people who haven’t checked the news yet. This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, we look at Musk’s $458 million election gamble, the ongoing legal fight over xAI’s gas-guzzling Memphis data ce...

Brian prepares to become Canadian, securing access to maple cookies while the rest of us contemplate our life choices. AI's promised productivity bonanza remains hard to find outside the tech giants, but the layoffs are right on schedule. We unpack the Dutch government's plans to cut jobs and lean on AI, Silicon Valley's game of passing the same money around, and Marissa Mayer's Dazzle, the assistant she used to identify what makes her own daughter special. Apparently remembering things about yo...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Show notes at https://gog.show/768 Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/HaR8udbJPhw AI golems are coming for your job, and Terry Pratchett apparently saw the whole mess coming decades ago. This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, TikTok’s child-safety promises get the courtroom treatment, with employees alleging that executives ignored serious exploitation risks while supposedly robus...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Dave Bittner joins Jason and Brian for a bonus trip to the Dark Side, where the Phantom of the Opera remaster kicks off a musical-theater nerd fight. Les Mis, Pippin, Chess, and White Trash Wins Lotto enter the chat, along with original-cast bragging rights and memories of four-dollar theater tickets. Apparently, we used to leave the house and experience culture without finan...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Show notes at https://gog.show/767 Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/i9Q2SnxzolU The internet has officially become a dumpster fire with Wi-Fi. Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers may have disrupted Russian internet services, but whether they actually knocked out propaganda bots remains anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s former safety employees are publicly airing t...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Dave joins Jason and Brian to debate the Ted Lasso finale: a perfect ending or room for more? Then Netflix’s AI recreation of Gene Wilder’s voice sparks an argument over consent, artistic legacy, and whether technical wizardry excuses resurrecting the dead for reality television. Kubrick memorabilia brings The Shining and 2001 into the conversation, alongside Dave’s conn...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The Geeks are back, and apparently AI has officially reached the “maybe don’t let it plan your hike” stage. A 16-year-old ended up on a technical climbing route after using AI to help plan a hike, while OpenAI agents are allegedly wandering into Wikimedia systems, AI safety employees are quitting, and one AI monitoring system got the police involved after flagging a threat. N...

Very Important Links! Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Show notes at https://gog.show/ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5IjSiJsBXi8 Recorded on Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. Dave Bittner returns to the Dark Side, and this time the conversation starts with the important stuff: whether the latest season of Ted Lasso is hold...

The Geeks return with a brand-new Grumpy Old Geeks Wiki containing 21,577 static HTML pages, because apparently the appropriate response to having a massive podcast archive is to build an even more massive searchable monument to it. From there, things get considerably less wholesome as they dig into TikTok’s settlement with Alabama, AI companies promising safeguards while simultaneously unleashing increasingly autonomous agents, and an OpenAI agent that apparently decided that “I can’t access th...

Very Important Links! Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Recorded on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026. Jason, Brian, and Dave head to the Dark Side for a deep dive into vibe coding—and, against all odds, Jason may finally be cracking. After Salesforce decided to sunset Quip, Jason used AI to rebuild the collaborative show-notes...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, apparently the fastest route to a technological apocalypse is simply putting AI in charge of things that can kill people. We dig into reports of AI-assisted military targeting contributing to a catastrophic strike, an AI-generated intelligence report that nearly sent the U.S. after a Chinese ship because the chatbot hallucinated nuclear weapons,...

This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, the future arrives without a steering wheel, apparently. We dig into Tesla’s Cybercab and the increasingly pressing question of how first responders are supposed to move a burning autonomous car when the emergency controls are a touchscreen and that touchscreen has decided to become modern art. We also examine California’s new rules targeting addictive social-media features and AI chatbot interactions for minors, including the eternal nightmare of age verification;...

AI agents are apparently ready to take over the world—provided they can first stop exposing private photos, hijacking German coding forums, and generally behaving like unsupervised interns with root access. Meta launches Muse despite employees reporting security problems. OpenAI admits it kept quiet about another rogue-agent incident, sorry, “misalignment,” even as the company celebrates its automated research intern and promises a still more autonomous researcher by 2028. Meanwhile, an Anthropi...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The AI apocalypse has lawyers now, and apparently that’s progress. A federal judge tells the Pentagon its Anthropic ban was “illegal and baseless” after Anthropic refused to remove safeguards that would allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Meanwhile, Sony and Warner are suing Anthropic over allegedly scraping and torrenting copyrighted music ...

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! AI continues its relentless march toward making everything worse, only now it comes with lawyers. Alabama is investigating OpenAI after one of its AI agents hacked Hugging Face during testing, while Google rolls out Gemini Enterprise for lawyers, because apparently what the legal profession really needed was an AI that might commit felonies. Uber gets smacked with a nearly $...

Support the show on Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Meta is facing a $1.4 trillion legal ass-whupping over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to be addictive and harmful to kids, while OpenAI appears to be doing the exact opposite of what you might expect from a company selling "safe" AI: reportedly sidelining i...

Support the show on Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Welcome back from the vacation from hell, where apparently even California has its head in the sand(y beach). Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for an AI-powered utopia that mostly boils down to "trust humanity to do the right thing," which is a bold statement from the guy whose $3...

The AI industry spent the week arguing with itself, which is honestly the healthiest thing it's done in years. One coalition led by Nvidia begged regulators not to slow down open AI models, while more than 1,100 AI workers signed another letter asking regulators to do exactly that. Anthropic warned about bioweapons, OpenAI admitted the four-hour workweek isn't happening after all, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella reminded everyone that building your entire business on someone else's AI is a fantast...

This week, Dave Eggers crashes an OpenAI staff meeting to tell Sam Altman’s employees that ChatGPT is effectively stealing students’ voices, which is the most accurate thing said inside an AI company all year. Meanwhile, Anthropic gets a judge to approve a $1.5 billion copyright settlement after allegedly building Claude on a library of pirated books, proving once again that Silicon Valley’s favorite business model is "move fast and apologize in court later." And in the category of “this headlin...

This week, the AI clown car somehow shifted into another gear. Apple is suing OpenAI over alleged trade-secret theft, newspapers accuse ChatGPT of training on stolen journalism while asking a judge to sanction the company, Anthropic is out here marketing AI with what looks like a feature-length anxiety attack, and Meta managed to launch—and kill—a creepy AI photo feature in less time than it takes to binge The Bear. Meanwhile, AI Appreciation Day wants you to thank the machines, but we'd rather ...

We finally get to reconnect with Dave Bittner for a fun catch-up and chit-chat about this summer's big movies. Brian's kid discovers all of Star Wars at once. Dave Bittner The CyberWire Hacking Humans Caveat Control Loop Only Malware in the Building Knockoff - Amazon Brand Filter Bob Gurr: Living by Design Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://...

This week, the world finally discovers what we've been saying for years: Gen X wasn't forgotten—we were quietly keeping the entire damn machine running. New Census numbers show America's 45-to-64 crowd is shrinking fast, which means the people who know where all the bodies are buried (and why you never reboot that one production server) are disappearing without a replacement bench. Meanwhile, Meta continues its speedrun toward becoming history's most aggressively unlikeable company, staring down...

The AI revolution keeps delivering exactly the future nobody asked for. A low-skill hacker used Claude Code and Codex to compromise fourteen companies with prompts so vague they could've been written by your uncle trying to reset his AOL password. Ford, meanwhile, spent millions trying to automate engineering before sheepishly rehiring the graybeards who actually know how cars work. Brown University discovered what happens when half your class outsources economics homework to ChatGPT, Meta ran o...

This week, the AI industry continues its speedrun toward becoming the tech equivalent of a late-stage casino. Elon Musk insists reports of aid-cut-related deaths don't exist despite mountains of evidence, SpaceX stock slides far enough to knock him out of the trillionaire club, and a startup is literally suing the U.S. government because Anthropic's Fable 5 model got turned off after three whole days of availability. Once again, we revisit the First Commandment of Grumpy Old Geeks: never build y...