Grumpy Old Geeks

Ep 688: Why, Combinator? - Ad Free!

Added 2025-03-14 20:16:14 +0000 UTC

It’s Pi Day, and while the world celebrates the most irrational number (besides crypto bros), we dive into a different kind of irrationality—the American oligarchy. Speaking of money, Deliveroo finally posted a profit, but their investors still had a hissy fit. Meanwhile, Americans lost a record-breaking $12.5 billion to scams last year, proving that AI, social media, and deepfake grandsons are really leveling up their grift game. The FCC is forming a Council for National Security, which sounds important until you realize it’s mostly about making sure China doesn’t win the AI arms race. And in the latest episode of “How Not to Run a Government,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired cybersecurity experts like they were spam emails—until a judge called BS and ordered their reinstatement.

Y Combinator just turned 20, and what a legacy—turning gig work into corporate slavery, ruining housing with Airbnb, and ensuring OpenAI floods our lives with AI-generated junk. If that wasn’t enough tech doom, Pinterest wants to steal your content for its AI training, Twitter (sorry, X) went down due to sheer incompetence, and a developer got caught implanting a kill switch at his old job—because passive-aggressively slacking off wasn’t extreme enough. On the bright side, Severance Season 2 is finally here, costing an absurd $20 million per episode (apparently, awkward silences are expensive now). And if you’ve ever wanted to separate voices in audio like an NSA analyst, AudioShake just dropped a new AI tool to do exactly that. Meanwhile, Ted Lasso is somehow back for another season, proving that Apple will never let go of a hit.

Finally, in The Dark Side with Dave, we get a Florida vacation recap, learn how to bait romance scammers for fun, and discover that hermit crabs form conga lines to swap shells—which is somehow still more cooperative than most tech companies. That’s a wrap on this week’s parade of absurdity. Stay grumpy, folks.

Show notes at https://gog.show/688

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