Triforce! - The Biggest Tech Disasters | Triforce #324

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Triforce! Episode 324! Pyrion brings a new segment to the podcast: Tech Nightmares! All the grandest technological failures across history but we get kinda distracted by Virgin Island and P in V. Go to http://auraframes.com/ and use code TRIFORCE to get $20 off their best-selling Carver Mat frame. Go to http://expressvpn.com/triforce today and get an extra 3 months free on a 1-year package! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We apply. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the trifles podcast. My back. It's been a while. Well, it's good to be back. Well, we're back. It's been a while. Well, it's good to be back. Good to be back.

So I would like to apologize to you chaps, first of all, because while we were while I was away, sorry, we were on a break. We did have a day when we were going to record and I completely forgot to set an alarm for it. And I slept through. Lewis tried to call me and the lads got together and waited for me to turn up for a recording session and I was just asleep. I apologize. That's that's all right.

After after the crying and screaming stopped, we all came to grips with what had happened and it was I'm still furious with. I'll take it out on you when you least expect it. So a lot of sobbing. It's the only way to shitting as well, but it was fine. That's fine. Guys, good news. My birthdayitting as well, but it was fine. That's fine. Guys, good news, it's my birthday today. Oh, is it actually?

You're gonna say today? Well, I'm 45 years old today. Happy birthday. Congratulations, Sips. You made it. I done it. I made it. So, that's a big milestone, dude.

How do you feel? Do you feel every year of that 45? Or do you think you can keep going for another 45? I feel like I could probably, at a push, keep going. You know? Like, it's not too bad. Like, I'm achier than ever. You know, if I sit funny for 10 minutes, I'm achy.

Which has never happened before. But you know, it's fine. So I went to a friend of mine's... Well, I don't want to, okay. I'll start the story again. I don't want to talk to anyone. I don't want to talk to anyone. So that reminds me of a story.

I was at a birthday party for a 90 year old lady the other day. Right. Don't ask why, it's a family thing. And she, she's a bit, well, I think someone said to her, oh, you know, what's the next big milestone? Cause she's 90. And she said... Was it Dame Judi Dench? No, no. Was it Joanna Lumley? She said, she said, I want to live to a hundred, but not a day longer. Oh, damn. Right. So like, on her hundredth birthday, at the end, when the clock strikes midnight,

she's cast down. Holy shit. Judy Dench is 90, by the way. But Joanna Lumley is only 79. I know, she's... Well there you go. But the thing is, everyone laughed, right? But she was deadly serious about it. She was like, I'm serious. And then everyone laughed again. And so I sort of about it. She was like, I'm serious. And then everyone laughed again. And so I sort of joked, I was like, oh, so shall we arrange something like bungee jumping

for your 100th birthday? Or motorcycling or something dangerous to bump you off. And she was like, no. I always imagine if a 90 year old did a bungee jump, their dentures would just come flying out when the rope bounces, you know, like when they hit the bouncing point of the rope. But the dentures have to be on some kind of a string that then shoots back in. So everything shoots out and then everything retracts. It sounds like a fucking scene from Alien, where the extra mouth comes out.

Yeah, yeah, and then it just goes back in after. Yeah, that'd be good. I guess the dental glue now is pretty good though, right? They use like compounds and shit. I don't think dentures come flying out anymore. I don't think they come flying out. They do detach. My mum has dentures, and I tell you what, she's a bit older than me.

ALICE It's not like a full comical pair of horse teeth though, like they used to be, right? That you put in like a glass. ALICE It's more selective. SEAN It's like a piece. It's like a piece that you have that covers a bit. So you put the glue, I don't know how it sticks to your gums, I mean, god knows. ALICE Sometimes you hook them in though, isn't there like a hooking mechanism for them?

SEAN Yeah, there's all kinds of weird things. They hook around your other teeth, they like clip in, yeah. But the glue, when she takes them out, I think at night, or when she's putting them in in the morning, sometimes the glue will drip out, and it collects in the sink, and she doesn't see it, because it's transparent when she's old, but it's like, really hard to get out. It's like this really horrible, goopy shit. Well, my kids do this with toothpaste all the time.

Like it looks like it looks like they squeeze the tube of toothpaste into the sink. I know. Just for fun and then leave it there. And when it dries up, it's impossible to get it off. And then they get a toothbrush and it looks like they've covered it in toothpaste and then flicked it towards the mirror. The mirror is just covered in dots and they're not rinsed it. It gets it hardens like they did. All over the tap.

Oh my god. Children. Yeah. I know. Families. I did prepare a segment for today, if you guys... Oh, so, well this is, before we do that, you've been away on holiday? I was in...

No. Working holiday. Not on holiday. No. You've been working. You've been working. So your family thinks you've been on holiday. He's been working. He's been doing daughter work. You've been earning the money. I have. So your family thinks you've been the whole of it. He's been working. He's been doing dough to work.

You've been earning the money to pay for all this toothpaste that they're wasting. Exactly. Out of the last 30 days I've been home for four. Jesus. Holy crap. It's pretty good going. I wish that was me. Well, yeah, it was bloody exhausting though.

Cause some of these days were like 12 plus hour days. Well, out of the last 40 days I've been at home for 40 of them. And let me tell you, that's exhausting as well. So look, we're not your wife. You can tell us what really. No, I'm serious, dude. It was some really fucking long days. It was real tough. It was real tough. Let me tell you, I 12 odd days.

I was up all night. I like kept me in. Oh, they made me carry stuff around. They didn't make me carry stuff. I was working in a coal miner for a while. I was digging. I had me, um, I had me mucking out the pigs. Did they have you digging in a coal mine over there? Well, yeah, you know, we need some us. I did bring John Tupower to a Dota audience.

Yes. Oh yeah. And what was the reaction to the introduction of a John Gee Tupperware. They did like John Gee and he came back again with his daughter, Nicole, who was a Pepsi. Indeed. And so yeah, John Gee Tupperware. But so interestingly, first of all, Jenkins, who's one of the other Dota guys, he's Canadian. And he said that John Gee Tupperware

like that really made him laugh. He hadn't heard of the expression before. Right. But one of the other lads there lives in Montreal. Right. And he's sort of he's Lebanese, but he's also kind of French Canadian. He speaks French and all the rest of it. Sure. He was telling me that the Quebecois consider themselves the true French. Yes. And that everyone that left France for Quebec has retained the essence of Frenchness, which has been corrupted and ruined back in original France. Yeah. Yeah, by Europe. By France. France have ruined France.

Right. So yeah, they think that their version of French is the correct version, and these French don't know anything, and these are the superior guys. And when I told him about Jong-Gi Tupperware, he said that Jong-Gi was like the most Quebecois name you could possibly imagine. Absolutely it is. I've known him for a long time. That's the whole point of it. The whole point of it is... Gaetan, I think, was the other one. Is a... well, if people are listening to the podcast and are very confused about who Jong-Gi

Tupperware is, it's a fake character mocking French Canadians. You can have John Gee rubber boots as well if you want. Yeah, John Gee rubber boots. But Pirian actually brought him out on stage at one of these events. And you did a couple of other characters as well. Technically, he wasn't on stage. I did indeed bust him out. There was this segment of the show that they just said, just do whatever you want. It's like a flavour segment. But you were on a stage. It was definitely on stage.

Well yeah, I guess. But there was no audience, so it didn't really count. Yeah, but you were live to the internet. That's true. I'll grant you that. So, I had to come out and... Thousands of people watching. We were meant to just be like, talk about the game, but I was like, do you mind if I do like a stupid character? And they were like, go for it. Because they had all these dress up costumes around the back, so I brought a beret, my pipe, and sunglasses from home so I could be like a sort of a-

You're like a fucking prop comedian, bro. You're a Martin paint as well. You got your little fucking wooden chest full of costumes. And you're a little paint as well. Oh god. You got your little fucking wooden chest full of costumes. And you're a little puppet in there. It's called being a character actor. A character actor, alright. So I did Chad Blatchman, Professor von Neustadl, and Pat Petrillo, and Don Gliziani. The hot dog king of New York.

Nice. So those are the guys that I did. I had a lot of fun. That's good. You sent me some clips. They were great. Hey, I, growing up so close to French Canada, like pretty much in French Canada, I'd say, um, Guy or Jean Guy was like, you know, that, that, that, that

was, that was the name, right? They were, they were popular names. Loads of people named Guy, loads of famous people called Guy like Guy Lafleur and like lots of geese and John Geese in the floor or hockey player. Yes. Yeah. It's a goalie, right? When I I can't remember, actually.

But anyway, when I first moved over to to the UK, one of the one of my first jobs, we had a client was like a friend of my boss, but he's a client and his name was was Guy. But when he came in, I called him Guy. And he's like, why the fuck are you calling me Guy? I was like, oh, sorry. Just like I forgot myself, you know, like in Canada, you would be Guy, not Guy. Right. Like, well, here I'm guy. It's like very posh. It's like a very posh. He had like red socks. He was like a lawyer or something. I don't know. Right. Um, but yeah, he was not impressed with me calling him Guy, but it just, I wasn't thinking, you know, I saw the name. I was like, Oh, Hey Guy. And he's like, what,

what are you saying? Why are you calling me Guy? Yeah. Yeah. He was like, he was, he was not, not at all impressed. I'm not Guy. You're Guy. Yeah. yeah. He was like, he was, he was not, not at all impressed. I'm not Guy, you're Guy. Yeah. Nice. So Guy Leflair was a right wing. He was not a... He was a right winger. Yeah.

There you go. So the little mini segment that I've prepared, if we want to do this, is... Let's do it. ... about computer failures. Right. Some, some bad, some funny. Right. So I'm going to give you options of what you want to talk about.

We can talk about space. We talk about video games. Yeah. We can talk about telecommunications. Sure. And we can talk about the real world, physical, physical equipment in the real world. Which would you like to do first? Holy crap. Take your pick, Lewis. They all sound good to me. I'm excited for space. I love space. Give me space. Space? Which would you like to do first? Holy crap. Take a pick Lewis, they all sound good to me. I'm excited for space. I love space.

Give me space. Space? I love space for three, Bob. Well of course the Mars Climate Orbiter, quite famous. You've heard this one? The Mars Climate Orbiter? This was 1999. This was a probe that they were sending to Mars to sort of low orbit, if you like. So it was meant to sort of skin the

atmosphere and get some interesting details about the atmosphere was going to have an orbital insertion maneuver that would bring it to within 140 miles of the surface, whizz around, gather data, send it back home. And it was like ready to go, but unfortunately, part of the software supplied by Lockheed Martin was dealing in feet and inches. And revealing that, and giving that information to the system that was expecting SI units. So, they were off by a factor of four. It ended up crashing, and yeah, it was a real... A real boob. It was a real problem.

And apparently that cost in 2023 would have been about just over half a billion dollars lost because of the SI, what they call the United States, customary units, in other words shit like, imperial measurements. Right. So, what, look, we're using feet and NASA are using... Metres, yeah. Metres,, shit like Imperial measurements. So Lockheed Martin were using feet and NASA were using... Metres, yeah. Metres. That is insane, dude. So NASA apparently were like, it's no one's fault but ours, we're not blaming Lockheed

Martin. Which is fair, because Lockheed Martin supplied their shit and were like, you know, here's the stuff and all the documentation that would have come with it. And apparently a couple of people raised this issue and were like, you know, there's something funny. We should look into this here regarding the units and blah, blah, blah. But there are complaints were ignored because they hadn't filled out the correct form to raise amazing. So the bureaucracy was like, uh, excuse me, perhaps if you'd filled out the form correctly, we'd have a look at this, but instead we're going to have to just say,

no, I'm fire off this half billion dollar probe and. Man, this is so, this is so. This is so bureaucracy. Idiocracy. Yes. I love this. You know, here locally, uh, you know how England's banned the sale of disposable vapes?

Yes. Jersey was meant to follow along, had the legislation in place to time it perfectly with the UK, but it's delayed in Jersey because there was a typo in the legislation. So they had to resubmit it for review and everything. So it's been delayed. So rejoice, you can still have a disposable vape in Jersey, come over for a cheeky weekend and just blast your head off with a disposable vape.

Just dump lithium ion batteries out on the street as it's been going for the last few years. Fucking hell. The other thing is, they've easily bypassed this already, in that all they've added is a tiny USB-C charging port to the disposable vapes. Alright. So, you whack one of those on and say, it's not disposable mate, it's rechargeable, and you bypass any of the restrictions.

Right. And given how long it's taken them to get this one piece of legislation through banning disposables, it's gonna take another few years before they get rid of these ones, and say, you can't actually recharge these, and you can't actually refill them, so, but then, they'll just say, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, you can, and they'll make one where you can just charge it up and bingo. So, yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. It's just the next... So, this is what's called capitalism. I've heard of that before. If you want to know what the definition of capitalism is, it is literally this. It is exploiting... Loopholes. The rules. Loopholes in the rules to make money through addictive products. Right. Cool. So yeah, space. Man. I love that. I like the

idea that we're going to Mars to like fucking spray microplastics into the atmosphere or something. Just to really get it ready for us to live on. Yeah, it's like a dog marking its territory. That's our thing. It's microplastics. We're just spraying it everywhere. We want to let the whole galaxy, we want the whole universe to know that we're on the scene. We got our plastic and we're ready to spray it wherever the fuck we want, okay? Can you imagine, yeah, if the aliens came over here and they were like, oh, let's make the perfect environment for a human zoo, right? They'd be like, okay, they need this background

level of radiation from the nuclear testing. They'd dismount the lead in the air from the petrol. Don't forget all the noise as well. We're going to need to simulate the honking of horns and revving of engines at least two or three times a day. A very loud motorcycle sound should be played. Typical human enjoys a background noise level. Yes. Yeah, that's actually that is a brilliant little sci-fi trope right there.

I love that. Yeah. That they would look at our environment and like if we looked at a toad in the wild, we'd say oh well this is clearly what it wants, knock up an aquarium like that and bosh the toad in. If they looked at us, you're right, they'd be like, well this is clearly their environment, so we have to... You know, they'd be upset if you did it any other way, and they'd put us in a fucking

shithole. With heart... In like an alleyway. If they looked at the average person, average person they'd be make sure they get not enough food lots human beings can only survive on hot pockets lucas a and monster energy they need their brains need to be at least five percent microplastics in order for them to survive make them sterile too disposable You got those disposable vapes with the USB charger in them? They love these vapes.

Their environment is littered with them. They cannot survive without these vapes. God damn, that's so dark. It's dark, yeah. It's dark. That could be an episode of, what is that, Black Mirror? I've never seen Black Mirror before, but I imagine. Oh, it made?

Are you serious? Yeah, no, I've never seen it. Oh my God. Watch the most recent series. Watch the most recent series to start with. You enjoy it. It's good. I wish I could forget it all to really open up. I've never seen it. Oh my God. Watch the most recent series. Watch the most recent series to start with. You enjoy it. It's good.

I wish I could forget it all the way. I think you'd love it, Sibs. I think I would too. Yeah, I just, I'm lazy, you know, I don't, I don't know what the hell I do with my time now. It's a TV. You don't have to do it. You just turn it on.

I know, but like, uh, like I just go down these rabbit holes, you know, like, uh, I've been watching, um, I've been watching that thing that was on BBC one about Lockerbie. So I've just gone down this rabbit hole. Yeah, Mrs. F's been watching that as well. on BBC One about Lockerbie. So I've just gone down this rabbit hole. Oh yeah, Mrs F's been watching that as well. Oh my God. Have you heard about Virgin Island? Is that your hometown? It's a TV show, a reality TV show that started airing this year.

And all of my friends for some reason have been talking about this show. It's called Virgin Island. Basically, 12 adult virgins. The Virgin Islands are in the Caribbean, aren't they? I know. The British Virgin Islands. It's a tax exempt area as well. Well, they missed a trick by not setting it in the Virgin Islands. But it's 12 virgins live together on a Mediterranean island with seven sex experts who guide them.

And they don't pay any tax. They're exempt. It's a tax haven over there in the British Virgin Islands, if that's where it's being filmed. I'm just saying. It's exactly as you would imagine. But it's weirdly intimate. Basically they're always...

Wait, are they shagging? They're basically, yeah, like, kind of, they're doing a lot of faux shagging. Like a lot of dry humping and like test shagging. And like, stuff around shagging. As if these people have never watched porn before. Like do you know what I mean? The average 35 year old virgin, I'm sure, is an absolute fucking porn addict. But yeah, let's...

Guilty. That's the thing. I haven't watched that one. I haven't even heard of it until now. Virgin Island, check it out, Sips. This is my first time hearing about it. I'm gonna love it. If you fuck The Apprentice, you know. Well, is that what they do on that show?

They get, they do a crossover. I won The Apprentice. Send me to Sex Island. It's my reward. I've laid on a trip to Sex Island for you." You're gonna fuck seven 35 year old virgins. What's the name of that woman that shagged a thousand blokes in a day?

Oh, she was in hospital, I think. I think a hundred blokes a day is a lot. Wasn't it a hundred? No, it was 10 thousand and fifty seven. Me and Dav were talking about it the other day. We were playing Dota. He knew a name like that. Yeah. Yeah, no, she was. I think she's like an only fans. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, apparently it's not only fans, it's just only man's only man. Only fans. Yeah, but she did. She she I think she beat the record. She had like sex, you know, a thousand plus times in the space of 24 hours or something. One thousand men in 12 hours. But she was hospitalized after. She might even still be there, I think. She was in really bad shape, apparently.

Yeah. They fucked her to death. Well, nearly. Within an inch of her life. She got fucked to death. You are not going to top that experience. You're not going to come back from that experience. I don't think she's died though. I don't think she is actually dead. No, she's not died. She wants to do more.

She wants to come back and beat her previous PB. Yeah. Yeah, holy shit. I mean, what amazes me is, I think out of out of 1000 women, you wouldn't find one that would want to do anything like that. I think you'd have to go to like maybe one in one in a few million women. But apparently you can round up 1000 blokes to just have sex. A former Q and have sex with a woman. How many how many seconds per man is that?

I don't know. Oh, in some cases, it's like 10 seconds. It's 43 seconds per man is that? I don't know! Oh, in some cases it's like ten seconds. It's 43 seconds per man. So how many, hang on, 24 times 16? If you're really sex starved though, and you're standing in line waiting and you're just getting horny, you could probably just nut immediately, right? Like, the excitement just overcomes you. 82 seconds per man.

This, honestly, first of all, how do you even get a thousand men, like, organised together for an event like that? I know, that's what I'm saying. It's like, so many people. I mean, seemingly, you could walk around with a fucking placard, like those ones that say golf sail this way, and just say, we need a thousand and forty seven blokes to come and have sex with this woman right now, and the lads would just form a fucking train behind you and go straight there A thousand men on hand. It's weird. It's weird to think the flip side of this

You'd never you'd never have a man break a record for having sex with like thousands of women Even if you found a thousand willing women to queue up and have sex with one guy Like if it was me, I'd have sex one time and I'd be like, OK, great. I'm ready to play some chess now, read a book and eat a sandwich. I don't need to have sex again now for like a day, probably. But imagine doing it a thousand times in a row. It would be impossible. I would just be completely. Well, you wouldn't be physically capable.

It wouldn't even work. Three period. Yeah, yeah. You need a cool down period. I capable because of the refractory period. Yeah, yeah. You need a cooling down period. I was thinking about the refractory period. If we didn't have that, I don't think anything would have ever happened anywhere in the world. Like it would just be an ocean of cum. That would be our entire story. That was a monkey line that died out.

The cum monkeys are fucking some island somewhere. They're just like, hee hee hee hee hee! All day! Generation died out instantly. Yeah. So, just for a second though, before we move off this. It doesn't count, right? Like, what are the rules for what counts as sex? You know, if you just go... BB goes in vagina. Well, exactly. It's so simple. Some penetration.

Some form Some penetration. Some form of penetration. You could easily get, you know, if you've got 10,000 men, you know, but they just go P and V and then move on. Yeah. I mean, I'd say, imagine if your partner, if some bloke came up and she was like, oh yeah, put it in me. And it was in there for two seconds.

You wouldn't say, well, that doesn't count. You'd say, why did you have sex with that guy? So I think that counts. I never hear from these guys though. There's a thousand of them out there that took part in this. Where are they? Like, why hasn't anyone done a trip report, you know, just to say, yeah, I was there. Someone would be live blogging it. Hi guys, I'm here in line to have sex with this one. Hey guys, I'm here in line, I'm number 425. It's a bit of a long wait.

You know, I'm just passing the time by watching some TikTok and texting my mom. On the one hand, how does this shit happen? And yet also they find enough men for Virgin Island. I don't know. I know. I don't know. Just get in line, lads. What country? What world are we living in?

Get in one of these queues to have sex with an OnlyFans. People do just join a random queue, but that'll be a bad one to find out you joined. What's this for then? Oh, is this a post office queue, is it? A gangbang? Oh, alright then, but I've got to in my bag. So I better get out of here. Can I get in front of you? 12 hours. What number?

818? Oh no. Well, I'll come back tomorrow. I wonder if they have like one of those ticket systems, you know, like when you go to the Oh, no. Well, I'll come back tomorrow. I wonder if they have like one of those ticket systems, you know, like when you go to the butchers and you have the paper, you take the number off, you would be waiting a while. It's a 24 hour period. You'd want to be like, I'm going to go home and, you know,

have some spaghetti or, you know, walk my dog or whatever. I'll be back. I mean, what are they on their phones just chilling? Like, as you're getting close to the front of the line, like standing in line, this in front of you is just a bloke's ass and behind you is a bloke and you have to get it out. They're both fluffing themselves. Right. And you're fluffing yourself getting ready. And then as you get closer to the line, it's like, it's nearly my my turn like how awkward is that? oh man

and just knowing are they chatting to each other? what if you're the dead last guy in line? i know that would just be awful wouldn't it? i reckon in order to find these lads it's a bit like Putin going to the prisons to recruit soldiers it's like that you just go get a bunch of prisoners and bust them in

hello soldiers who wants to take part in 1000 Man Gang Bang? Yes, I will do it, comrade! I will do it! We are gang banging Ukraine! Get to the front! Oh, you think that's how they trick him in? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's how they get him. Yeah, that's how they, that's the classic.

Oh shit, I thought I was turning up to a 1000 Man Gang Bang here! What the? Yes, first we must get all these Ukrainians out of the way. Classic. Oh, shit, I thought I was turning up to a thousand man gang bang here. What is this war? What is this war? Once you get past them, zing the gang bang. You are a gang and you have a gun which goes bang. Exactly. It's how we take you.

Gotcha. All right, let's do another another one of these bad coding. Did you guys ever hear of Microsoft Bob? Microsoft Bob? Was that the office paperclip? Oh, B.O.B. So, this was an entire operating system designed around Clippy, the paperclip. Oh, Clippy was Clippy. Oh, of course it was Clippy. Yeah, sorry.

So, he was a part of it. So, it's meant to be, this was Windows 95, and it's meant to be like a much more user friendly version of Windows 95. Yes. And basically, he had all these little stupid, clippy like things to go along with you and help you out and be like, oh, it looks like you're trying to open a web browser or whatever. But Comic Sans was invented for Microsoft Bob. So if you have comic size, that's what you can blame it on Microsoft Bob. Oh hey there, bucko!

You don't want to connect to that, baby, you see? It's like you're jerking off again! Maybe put the penis down for a minute. Do some accounting spreadsheets! Well hey there, I noticed you're searching up 1000 man gang bangs in your area again. So I think the idea, it sounds like it's one of these things where they did a survey and they found that like, most people don't understand how to use a computer. We need to come up with a simple version for them to use this, like their living room. And so you'd click on the bookshelf and the calendar would be on the wall, and the apps

would be in the places that it would make sense for them to be. You could go on the world wide web. And it's a spider web, is what you have to click on to open the web, that kind of thing. But what happened to it? Well, what happened is people didn't fucking want it. And nobody used it. Um, I think what happened to it? Well, what happened is people didn't fucking want it and never really know the user. Cause the thing is the people complaining about windows being hard to use should not be your target demographic because that's like 92 year old people

or like, like people with no tech savvy at all. They're never going to buy software. I didn't, who knows why they even have a computer. When windows 95 came out, there was a lot of excitement around home computing. Cause I remember my grandma, who was like probably 80 at the time. Yeah. I went to go visit her. This is like around the time Windows 95 came out, everybody was talking about

Windows 95 and she's like, I'm thinking about, I thinking I might need a computer and I want to get one because I want to get on to the information super highway and then I won't have to go to the library as much. And I was like, honestly, just go to the library. Like you don't, you won't know what to do with the computer. It will be broken all the time. Like, you know what I mean? Like if you don't, if you never used one before, you don't rely on it for anything. I would not get one. And she was like, okay, fine. I won't get one. And I was glad she didn't get one because I had enough people in my life at the

time who, every time I went to their house, they're like, can you look at my computer? And it was like full of ransomware and like fucking ads popping up. And it was a nightmare. And I did not need another person, uh, to, to have a computer like that. I can relate to that so much. Like my mum, the same thing. She wanted a PC and I was like, or a laptop. She goes, I should get a laptop.

I was like, mum, you've got an iPad. That is as much as you need because this thing is fucking jammed with. She's like, she'll just, I guess she just Googles free games and clicks on the top link and downloads all this shit. And it's like, I remember at one point I gave her one of my old laptops and she we went down to see her and this thing was grinding to a halt. And I looked I did like I downloaded similar the sort of spyware scanner things, just a cheap one. And I ran it through and it was just like 1000 files that were malicious on the laptop. Yeah. Holy shit. I just like formatted the entire thing. It's just unbelievable. Yeah.

Let's do it. Oh, sorry. Go on Lulu. We can't help it a little bit. And it's the same for us too. Sometimes I notice like, you know, I refuse to pay money for a mobile app. So I will put up with ads way longer than I should. And other people like, I eventually put up with ads on YouTube for so long until

they basically made it. They knew who I was and they knew what I was watching and they knew what ads would piss me off to the point where I would have to sign up to premium. But like, my parents, you know, they've got like an Alexa and stuff and they listen to music on it. But they obviously listen to some sort of thing where it's just ads. It's all the time it's ads. And I'm there and I'm like, I've just listened to 10 minutes of ads. What is this supposed to be? And it would just be better if they were playing their music on compact discs, on CDs, tapes, you know?

Instead of like getting sucked into just some sort of, I don't know, maybe you just get immune to it after a while, you just block it out. But it's got to be affecting you. It's got to be having an effect. I wonder if we'll go back to, like, vinyls become very popular again. I wonder if in some ways we'll go back to collecting music in a physical form again. Now that we've, you know, it's great having a huge digital library of music, for sure, but... I don't know, I like having a physical collection of music as well.

Yeah, I like it. I like the idea of just disconnecting from... it is a trend that's happening, and I can see the allure of it, for sure. It's just for hipsters, I would say. Average person isn't gonna do it. No. No. It's not convenient. I'm gonna have a lot of shelf space when my house is done, and I'm thinking, you know what, I would say. Average person isn't gonna do it. No. No. It's not convenient. Anyway, I'm gonna have a lot of shelf space when my house is done, and I'm thinking, you know what, maybe I'll get some... Records?

Yeah, I'll get some records. Maybe I'll clutter the fuck out of this place. Yeah, what's already super cluttered with other people's stuff, so I might as well get in on that action and clutter it with some of my own shit, you know? I like how this is a... You already filled up the shelf space of your new house with crap that you'll never use. Perfect.

Like everyone else. I'm a spite-filled record collector. Just so mad about all the other crap in my house that I've just decided I'm fighting back with my own crap. From the big things to the little things, you capture a lot of stuff on your phone. Doesn't it sometimes feel like a lot of those photos you want to look at again, you want to share with people that get stuck in your camera roll, you maybe even forget you overtook them?

It would be a nice way to share them might be the Aura Frames. So if you get an Aura Frame, which is named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter, it's effortlessly easy to upload those photos and videos directly from your phone so those favourite memories are always in view. I love to chuck a few pictures on there that I know will make my family laugh because they don't have, you know, they're not on the app all the time, they just appear on the thing, they're not expecting it's something there's a picture of me wearing a very fetching cardigan. Minus pictures of a family, various families, cats. Oh yeah, dog and cat constantly. It's starting to become more pictures of cats and pets

than actual family members, but it's still fun. Yes, for a limited time, you can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $20 off, plus free shipping on their best-selling CarveMap frame. That's AuraFrames.com, promo code Aura20. You can support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. Before we continue, going online without ExpressVPN

is like walking your dog in public without a leash. Most of the time, you'll probably be fine. But what if one day your dog wanders a bit too far and gets dognapped by someone? Exactly, Sips. That is a real thing that happens. However, people are out there looking to steal your data and every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes or hotels or airports, your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data and it is valuable. Hackers can make a thousand dollars per person selling your details on the dark web, but ExpressVPN stops that. It would take a supercomputer with over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption

and I do personally use ExpressVPN every day. I'm using it right now to record this podcast. So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash triforce. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash triforce to find out how you can get up to four extra months for free expressvpn.com slash triforce. From the big things to the little things, you capture a lot of stuff on your phone. Doesn't it sometimes feel like a lot of those photos you want to look at again, you want to share with people that get stuck in your camera roll, maybe even forget you overtook them? It would be a nice way to share them might be the Aura frames. So if you get an Aura frame, which is named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter, it's effortlessly easy to upload those photos and videos directly from your phone so those favourite

memories are always in view. I love to chuck a few pictures on there that I know will make my family laugh because they don't have, you know, they're not on the app all the time, they just appear on the thing, they're not expecting something, there's a picture of me wearing a very fetching cardigan. Might as well have pictures of a family, various families cats. Oh yeah, dog and cat constantly. It's started to become more pictures of cats and pets than actual family members, but it's still fun. Yes, for a limited time you can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get

$20 off plus free shipping on their best-selling car map. That's a you are a frames dot com promo code or 20. You could support show by mentioning us a check out terms and conditions apply. So thank you very much. And on with the show. All right. This is this is a story from a few years ago. This is when these line bikes, Lime scooters, sorry. Oh, we arrived in Auckland. This was 2019, there was a glitch in the software that meant that occasionally the scooters would just jam on

the brakes at high speed. Jesus. So you'd be going along at it says here 48 kilometres an hour was the top speed. Yeah. So I think it's around 30 miles an hour. So as fast as a car basically just coasting down the road and the brakes would just go bang and activate, and people would go fucking flying off the scooter, of course. Broken collarbones, lots of head injuries and stuff like that. Yeah, you don't see people wearing helmets on scooters.

Never. They fucking know one does. You're supposed to. Yeah, absolutely. You actually are supposed to. Even more so than on a bike, I would say. Scooter, you're much more likely to fall off a scooter than you are a bicycle, I would say scooter, you're much more likely to fall off a scooter than you are a bicycle. Oh, it's it's it's bad. Yeah. I mean, there's no it's it's only sort of two little wheels. Yeah. So it doesn't have as much leeway. And although you are higher up when you're on a

bicycle, I still feel like when a bike is going wrong, you've got the brakes and you can control it. Those little scooters, when they start to wobble, it's really hard to get them back under control. Yeah. And also because it's just a sort of little electric motor with a with a sort of toggle throttle on your right thumb. It's quite easy to sort of slip on that and really accelerate. And the bikes, the brakes are like bicycle handlebar brakes. Yeah.

So you have to have sort of it's a little awkward, but you have to have when I'm using one, I have grip the handlebars and I put two fingers from each hand on the brakes and my thumb on the accelerator on the throttle. But the thing is, that means I'm not really holding on to the handlebars as much as I'd like to. And it's just it's just a little bit awkward. But so imagine if they just suddenly turn the brakes on, and people got fucking seriously injured.

So thanks, Lyme. The thing with all this shit that's new, and Lyme bikes, Lyme scooters and stuff, that aren't that old, they don't really know how safe they are. It's not like cars. No. They have to go through all this rigorous fucking testing.

Yeah. These things are just chucked out there. I mean, I can't imagine Lyme bikes have had much testing done on them. I was reading about how terribly dangerous they are if you crash in them. I think I talked about it on a previous episode. This guy called the I think it's called London Centric or the Londonist or something. He has a little blog that he sends around. And it was about the danger of these line bikes when they land on you because of their shape and their weight.

People get terrible leg injuries when they fall over because the bike crashes down. It's like if you look at the line bike frame, it comes to a point right where your femur is. So it's regular that people get terrible, terrible leg breaks when these things fall over. Oh my God. I saw a video the other day, actually, of a woman that crashed into a bus. The bus came off far worse than the line bike did, I'll tell you that much.

Well, these things are built... it's like a tech business, these things, right? They do a little bit of... they make an app, they get a little bit of investment and they buy all these bikes for fucking next to nothing. And they just dump them in a city, basically. And that's how it was originally. It was kind of this total wild west for it. Yeah. There's some regulation around it now, which is why I feel like you don't see these things like as much anymore.

Like they still pop up now and then, but probably because it's a little bit more regulated, people are like, oh, there's less money to be made. Okay, the next one. This is, I remember when this happened, because I was playing the game at the time, this is Eve Online. Man, I was thinking about Eve Online recently. And was tempted to play it as well. Every once in a while, I think about that game-

This shit happens to us. It's like, wow. It lives rent free in our heads, because we played so much of that game, and had such founding and fond memories. Yeah. You guys played EVE? I played it a little, yeah. Every time I play that game, I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna corner a market, and I'm gonna

be like this art vandalay of space, I'm gonna be an importer, exporter, and I'm just gonna sit in a space station, my own space station, because I'll be so rich, and I'm just gonna import stuff and, you know, buy low, sell high. It's going to be amazing. And I log in to play. I'm all excited. I'm in for like an hour. I'm like, yeah, there's no way. This game has been out way too long to break the economy. Like, it's impossible.

There's no way. But back in 2007, they released the Trinity expansion, and it was the third of these big expansions and graphics engine updates, a bunch of new ships and all the rest of it. But it also had a problem, which is that when it first released under certain circumstances, it would delete your Windows XP boot.ini file. Jesus. Wow. Windows XP boot.ini file. Jesus! Oh wow. And I think it was because boot.ini is not an unusual file name to have in a game folder,

but it would like go to the wrong directory and replace that one with the one that was meant to be just the Eve boot.ini file. So yeah, it would literally destroy your computer. It was out for six hours before they patched it. So I remember that very well, because I think they released it at a time of day when I wasn't playing, I logged in and everyone was on TeamSpeak or whatever was like, do not download the patch until they say so, because it'll delete your boot.ini. Which is pretty funny.

Crazy. That's worse than Y2K. I think it creeps in though, right? It just goes to show that these people don't really know what they're doing. And it's all just a hodgepodge. Everything we're using is all just glued together, stuff built on top of other stuff, built on top of other stuff. Yeah!

I mean, I'm not being funny, but Valve... Steam auto-patches shit all the time. Who's to say what is being patched? You know, when it's like downloading update, you don't know if that's going to fucking Trinity your hard drive. So, well, crazy. Interesting you say that it does download stuff all the time. The other day I was browsing through my games list, went to my secret library full of porn games secret library full of porn games in there. I don't remember ever buying them or downloading them. People must be gifting them to you.

Right. Right. I suppose that's the only explanation. It's the only explanation I can think of is. Indeed. Yeah, I can't think of any other explanation. Here's here's quite a scary one. This is this machine called Therac. ALICE Right. SEAN Therac 25, alright, this was a computer controlled radiation therapy machine. So,

you needed radiation therapy, you got in the machine... ALICE Oh god, I have heard of this, it's horrible. SEAN Oh, well you go. Between 1985 and 1987, there were six accidents, bad ones, where due to a programming error, it would sometimes give people a huge overdose of radiation. Hundreds of times more than intended, resulting in death or serious injury. Man, oh man. So I have many questions.

Number one, this happens one time. Surely you pull the machine and say, don't use the Therac-25 or whatever, we need to fix this thing, don't put anyone in it. But no, for two years the thing is plugging away, blasting people. Yeah, if it happened seldomly they probably thought, ah, just switch it off, switch it back on again. I tell you what it was. Maybe it's just one of those things.

I know this story, and what it was was basically it's just one of those things. I know this story. What it was, was basically, there was a part of the machine that moved something or opened an aperture and that was mechanical. That took a couple of seconds. Sometimes the people who were using the machine, they were doing hundreds of scans a day, they typed in the codes so fast, they were so used to the machine, that they were zipping through the menu so quickly that they were putting in the next command before it finished mechanically, closing that aperture or whatever. Do you see what I mean?

So the issue was software based? It was not mechanical? Yes, the issue was software based and it was to do with them being very adept at the machine. And that's why they couldn't really repeat this until they actually got the operators there and had them use it a lot. And then they realised what the problem was finally. I think because the people who coded it weren't that adept at zipping through. Do you know what I mean? It was almost like this thing where in testing they couldn't physically use the machine as fast as these people who used it every day. So they ran into this problem of something they didn't consider. So here is a paragraph that sort of explains what you're talking about.

So first of all, error codes would often pop up and you could just... Some of the errors halted the machine where you had to restart it and that was bad. Some of them you just had to press X to continue. And people would just do that. I think there were so many errors as well that they were used to pressing X to continue. They were just told that an error does pop up here, just press X. Yeah. So one failure occurred when a particular sequence of keystrokes was entered onto the terminal that controlled the computer. If the operator were to press X, erroneously, select 25 MeV photon mode, then use cursor up to edit the input to E to

correctly select the MeV electron mode, then hit enter. All within eight seconds of the first key press, well within the capability of an experienced user, the edit would not be processed in time and an overdose could be administered. So you literally ended up just trying to fix your mistake, but by being too efficient and quick at what you were doing, the machine couldn't keep up. So I thought that was a very interesting one. Oh, so fascinating. That's not the stuff. It's bloody terrifying.

I guess there's so many of these things that you don't realise that are gonna... It's all just shonky. It's all shonky, right? It's very shonky. I don't know what that means, but it's shonky as hell. As a coder sips, you know what that means, but it's shonky as hell. As a coder sips, you know that if it works, it works. And sometimes it just works.

Excuse me. It's the reason why the Dota 2 installation folder is still called Dota 2 Beta. You have two former coders in this channel. Oh, sorry. Sorry. It's alright. It's fine. It's fine.

It's fine. It's over. Hey! Gotcha, It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. missing. Yes. It's a dual type bird slash normal Pokemon that can be encountered as a glitch. And you can look up the screenshots of missing. No.

And it's like 1996 Pokemon Red and Blue game, I presume on the game. But in 1996, Pokemon. And so this is how the Gameboy. I think so. You have to talk to the old man NPC in Viridian City He teaches you how to catch Pokemon earlier in the game after watching his tutorial Use a Pokemon with the fly ability and fly to Cinnabar Island Once you reach the island use a Pokemon with the surf ability

Surf along the tiles that mark the border between the land and the water doing so will allow you to encounter Missingno. So the reason it exists is because, um, when you talk to the old man and you do his tutorial, the name Old Man is temporarily saved to a space in the memory where the player's name is stored, while the player's name is stored in the area reserved for wild Pokemon data. While the player's name is usually restored to its rightful spot, it doesn't do so if you move to a city environment like Cinnabar Island, blah blah blah. So essentially, it's overwritten a piece of data that it shouldn't have, and then it tries to generate a Pokemon based on your name, which is apparently a thing that it did. So it just comes up with this splat of colors, but it's still a Pokemon type, which I thought

was quite funny, like that it's still a Pokémon type. Which I thought was quite funny. Like that it's got a bird slash normal Pokémon type. But so it became a thing that people would try to collect this Pokémon. You gotta collect them all. That's the model of Pokémon, isn't it? So if you can, you must collect. I'm sure if Barry was here, we could... Because I think there's been a bunch of other like glitch Pokemon either deliberately or on purpose as references, right? And I think they, I don't know, it's kind of a bit of an interesting thing isn't it?

And so it's a fun thing, right? And I don't know, people love that kind of shit. Everyone loves a mystery, right? Even if it's like something fucking weird. It's kind of like when you see that crazy spooky text, you know, where it's just like gibberish texts or scrolling, like some sort of demonic stuff. I don't know, it's kind of slightly creepy and haunted, right? And slightly... It's very Japanese in it. Yeah. Yeah.

I think Missing No is like always... almost accidentally spooky. Yeah. I don't know why but it is I just want to say because I'm one year older Dude to prove to you how old I am maybe I was I was shown this this this video is 14 years old I'd never seen it before but I was shown a video called grape lady falls. Have you ever? Oh god I hate that video when the woman she's woman, when she's crushing the grapes with the presenter and she falls over and she makes those fucking... The noise she makes. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo the fuck have you never seen that? But I just I just had not. I'd never been shown that that video before. I've never seen it. It's horrible.

So in twenty twenty five, I watched it for the first time and it. Well done. The fall is awful. Oh, it's horrible. Oh, my God. You can see like when she falls, you're like, fuck, she's dead. Like, yeah, immediately. I like she's she's crushing. She must have. She must have. Yeah. Yeah. Broken many. I think she she's crushing grapes for wine.

Yeah, broken many rigs. I think she's broken something. Yeah. She's seriously winded. And I think she from the way she lands, it looks like she's broken at least an arm. That's unbelievable. Yeah. But the noise she makes is genuine. Is she really?

No. OK. Well, you said it. Have you? Are you familiar with that one, Lewis? Have you seen Grape Lady Falls before? I haven't. No, I have. with that one? Lewis, have you seen grape lady falls before? I haven't. No, I have. I definitely have. I definitely have. I recall it. But people seem shocked that somebody had not seen that, but well, here's a bit of detail about her. Actually. Um, she broke several ribs.

Yeah. Well, you can tell like you can hear it. She's like, the sound is so fucked up, it's crazy. I remember I saw that, it genuinely upset me. Yeah. Anyway. So, extended copy protection. This was Sony CDs, used these things called XCP Aura, which allowed you to play CDs... This is a common thing, isn't it?

The executives want to stop piracy, and so they install all this shit, which makes it incredibly difficult for us to actually enjoy. And all it does is make the product worse. Every time. All these things. This was so you could play a CD on your computer. Because they realised that was how people were ripping CDs. So it was like, well, it won't play on a computer. So you have to accept this that was how people were ripping CDs. So it was like, well, it won't play in a computer. So you have to accept this this EULA. And once you do it, it installs some software that allows you to play

their CDs, Sony CDs on your PC. So it installed hidden software, which it doesn't mention. It remains resident on your OS and it intercepts all accesses of the CD drive to prevent any media player or Ripper software other than the one included with XCP Aura. So you have to use Sony's player or it won't play. There's no way to uninstall it. Attempting to remove it will render your CD drive inoperable because it's changed some registry settings that the program has altered. And furthermore, for all of this faff, it was also discovered you could

defeat it just using a permanent marker to draw a dark border along the edge of the disk. So you could get around it that way. I don't even think you can get a CD drive for a computer anymore. Like they don't have them at all. I mean, yeah, I don't even think I'd wonder if Windows would even recognize it and do with it. Probably. But so the other thing is it also allowed you to install a lot of malware using this little hidden program. And basically, it's an absolute piece of shit.

There were a bunch of lawsuits and stuff like that. And yeah, it was bloody, bloody awful. So yeah, don't ever trust these fucking companies that think they're installing shit to protect themselves. But they're doing it to protect themselves. They do not give a fuck about what happens to your computer. No, of course. Yeah. Yeah. That was that was quite that's crazy. Yeah. What about a cascade failure?

You want to hear about a cascade failure? One of my favorite. I love a cascade failure. I love it. Yeah, me too. Like the best kind. They talk about like if one satellite gets smashed to bits, the cascade failure will probably wipe out all satellites in that orbit and beyond. Because once one gets smashed, those little pieces are likely to smash into others, which makes more pieces to smash into others and so on. That's an example of a cascade failure.

Yeah. So this is AT&T, which had a long distance telephone network in the US, this is in 1990. And essentially, when a telephone call was received by the network from a local exchange, they had a switch that would scan a list of 14 different possible routes to complete the call. At the same time, it passed the telephone number to a parallel network to check alternate routes to determine if the switch at the other end could deliver it and so on. So it was all meant to be nice and timely and figure out the optimal route and all the rest of it. If it couldn't figure it out, it sends a busy signal back to the person trying to make the call. If it was available, it directs the call. No problem. Four to six seconds this took. Bingo, you're away with it.

So the issue was this. The switch in New York City performed a routine self-test that indicated it was nearing its load limit. So it was near the limit for the calls that it could accept. So by standard procedure, it performs a four second maintenance reset, sends a message over the signaling network that would say no more calls until further notice. After the reset, it gets back and sends a signal out that says, we're all good. Across the country, another switch received a message that a call from New York was on its way, begins to update its records to show that New York switch is back online. Second message from New York that arrived less than 10 milliseconds after

the first, because it hadn't handled the first message, couldn't handle the second message. And that then goes into a reset and sends out the same messages that the New York one had. Right. So these things being connected and talking to each other was causing them all to just go down. And 50 million calls were blocked in the nine hours it took to stabilize the system. So the entire AT&T phone system went down in 1990. And bear in mind, this would have been when you didn't have email as an option. You couldn't just go call someone on Zoom or do some IM shit. You had to phone them up a whole day offline. I thought that was... And the code that is

the problem, you can look it up, is very... As with all of these coding problems, it's an incredibly simple line of code where like one thing is wrong. It just causes the entire thing to fall out. Those are my absolute favorites. That, that, that's, that's it. It's, it's very easy to, uh, to, to, to mess something up or, or, or not catch something when you're like testing it and stuff too, right? Like when somebody that so many times we, we, we'd like, we'd write something,

we test it, we test it, we test it. We'd have like these development environments that we could test it in. We could load test it, everything. And then you put something live and, uh, inevitably something would just go wrong. But it was always something that we could never have even replicated in tests. You know, it would be interfacing with another system or something like that, that we just didn't have any. Some error.

There's no way you could... Some error. Yeah. There's no way you could have anticipated this. Yeah. But that troubleshooting something when it turns live and there's a lot of expectation that this thing is just going to work is stressful. Like people lose their minds. You know, like I've actually been on the receiving end of phone calls where people are like screaming because something hasn't worked the way that

it was supposed to or whatever. And you're trying to just say, listen, like, you know, we're looking at, we're trying to fix it. I can't fix it if I'm on the phone with you. And that makes them even more mad. You're like, you're just like, you have to let me try to fix it. I cannot just talk to you about it. It's crazy. Will Do you want to hear an example of exactly that, that might have been one of the more expensive eras? Because this is one of my favorites. I love this one. So this company called Knight Capital had this piece of software that they were going to use to automate their trades. And they were like, this sounds great. This is 2012. They got this software update. They were going to use this thing called Power Peg. Last season, 2003, they found out that

there was something wrong. Okay. At 9am, the New York Stock Exchange opens for trading and Knight Capital's main investor, like the main thing they're doing when they're buying and selling shares with this program, goes onliney five minutes later, the servers at Knight Capital had executed four million trades, losing the company four hundred and sixty million dollars and placing it on the verge of bankruptcy. So they went from fine to bankrupt in forty five minutes. Some of the shares of the New York Stock Exchange shot up by over three hundred percent. Wow. Because high frequency trading firm algorithms exploited this bug, saw all these buyers and bought

and sold and bought and sold and bought and sold. So they got fined $12 million for fucking up and not managing their risk. But what had happened was a stock exchange. So just I'll read you this paragraph. A stock exchange works by pairing someone who wants to buy a stock with someone who wants to sell a stock. The seller has an ar ask price, the buyer has a bid price, and they agree on sort of this spread around the middle and then the sale takes place. Buy low, sell high, pretty obvious. So the algorithm on Knight's production servers was designed to do the opposite of that as fast as possible.

It was designed to buy a stock at its ask price and then immediately sell it again at the bid price, losing the value of the spread. We don't know why, but although it's only a few cents executing thousands of times a second, it adds up. So here's the problem. Powerpeg in the test environment would drive up the price of stocks so that other features of the software could check that things were working. So Powerpeg was not meant to be buying and selling stocks. It was just meant to drive up prices so they could test their other software. But the problem is they didn't tell it, this is not a test environment, don't do it. And it just fucking went ham and acted like it was in a test environment

and just jacked up all these stock prices and lost them all this money. Jesus Christ. Oh shit. So they accidentally connected it to the bank account. Yeah, they basically said, just, this is a test environment. And it's like, cool, I'll just buy stocks as fast as I can and sell them for whatever, because it's just a test. But no, it was actually connected to the socket chain. I think that's fantastic.

I think it's 45 minutes is all it took. These guys don't really know what they're doing and they're just gambling, right? Like, out of control. Yeah. It's so easy to lose tons and tons of money in seconds with this high frequency trading. This is what, I mean, this is, partly, this is the future we live in, right? The idea that a stock market crash today is going to happen so much faster than it ever has before.

Yeah. We've almost seen it happen recently a couple of times as well. Yeah, it's happened quite a bit that they have these sudden massive wipeouts and then they reset the stock market. They're like, right, none of that happened. It's like going back to a save point because they're just like, this is ridiculous. Someone's fucking computer went mad. But it's just crazy to think that this stuff is just... they just connect it to the system

and push go and they're like, oh, I'm pretty sure it'll work? So what the fuck is happening? They make out that they're the ones who have all this clever knowledge and that they're the ones that should be trusted to make these kind of trades. I don't know what the fuck they're doing half the time. Jesus. Which one was your favourite from that list? Oh, God. They're all pretty doomsday, aren't they? Yeah, the last one was interesting though. I like the 45 minutes, 460 million loss seemed. When you look at the amount of times we've come close to some sort of nuclear war, there's been like 20 incidents.

Albeit they were at a time during the height of the Cold War in the 70s and 80s, when we were minutes away from a fucking nuclear war. Multiple times, yeah. Because at the end of the day, you have people on the buttons. It's not the president who presses the button. He tells the general to press the button and the general tells the suborder to press the button and that person tells the pilot to fire the missile or the submarine captain to fire the missile and they tell someone in their crew to press the missile. It's much more infallible than you realise. I think it could very easily have been someone who was disgruntled or someone who was certainly indoctrinated in a way that they fully believed

in their cause. Because that's how these countries work. You know, they, they want, they, they need loyal population. And so they galvanize them with this kind of brainwashing loyalty and patriotism. And it, and it kind of makes them dangerous in a sense, because they're like, well, why aren't we nuking these guys? You know? So it's, it's kind of, um, you could see how, how close we could have come. And when it comes to these things, it always makes me think of the paradox, which is the one which, why we don't know, why we can't see any aliens. What's it called? The Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox. Where there's some sort of reason why humanity or civilizations don't

reach a certain level. The great hurdle. You can think about it and you can see why. The great filter. I can't remember which is. The great filter. Yeah. So I always think about the great filter because I'm like, well, maybe if we hadn't noticed that lead was poisoning the atmosphere or maybe if we... There were times when we had nuclear weapons and we weren't aware of how devastating they were and how potentially it could lead to this mutually assured destruction. There was a time before that when they were just, when

the world felt so massive that it felt like we couldn't do anything to fuck it up. You can just dump stuff in the ocean and dump stuff into the air forever and it won't have an effect. Because the world's so massive and it's self-cleaning and we've been here for... God put us here and he wouldn't let this happen. And all this nonsense. And we've been here for, God put us here, and he wouldn't let this happen. And all these nonsense, right? And so, you have this, today, you know, you look at humanity and you think, fuck, we are still, there's so many pitfalls that we can do to just kill ourselves. And yet, you know what the great filters like, yeah, there's probably reasons why this happened to other civilizations too. Like, they have, they have fucking, they net, if it wasn't for... You

know, we talk about digital media, but I think in a sense, if everyone was still releasing stuff on plastic videotapes, that would be terrible. The amount of waste of all this... We were very wasteful back in the day with how we used things. The big one for me is the waste of food. Yeah, food waste is insane. The amount of food we waste is insane. Well, at least that's combustible, right? At least that goes back into the world and the ecosystem.

But the cost of growing all that food is massive. Yeah, I mean, obviously the manufacturing... All of those fucking pesticides that dump into the water and everything, and they're there to make this huge volume of food we apparently need and then we throw away all of it anyway. Like, it's insane. Think of all these high street chains that you go to, they always have food ready. They don't just say, sorry, we're out of sausage rolls for today at 3.30. They've got them there ready to go. And then when it gets to six o'clock, they'll let them, let some of them go. There's some apps where you can get them very cheaply at the last

minute. Then they chuck them all behind a locked box so people can't get to them. It's awful. It's just waste. It's pure waste. That animal that went into that, all the wheat that went into making it, all the fat, all the rest of it, was for nothing. And somebody made it and they transported it, and it's just been put in a fucking bin and then it just rots away into nothing. That would never have happened in the past. That's such a minor part of the world though, right? It's all of the packaging. It's not the food itself, it's all of the surroundings of that. And all of the trimmings that go with it. And having to, you know, people needing the new thing. And the thing that powers capitalism

is powered on waste. It should be wastism, not capitalism. But I always think, again, going back to the alien species watching us and seeing it, and then thinking just looking at the mistakes that we've made. And I wonder how many alien civilizations there are out there who just choked themselves off with lead fumes or made themselves all sterile. Yeah, maybe they're not quite as advanced as us, but look to us for advancement. And they're like, how have they done that? We got to do that.

And then, you know, they make all the same mistakes or maybe even worse mistakes. You never hear about that. We're always being overseen by aliens that are way, way, way ahead of us, superior to us or whatever. But what if we're not? What if we're just being watched by just a couple of doofuses, you know, that just they don't have a clue and they're looking to us for like their next big breakthrough?

Or maybe, maybe, like only a couple of them, like some billionaires from their society know about us, but nobody else. And that's where they get like all their innovative ideas or whatever. It's like having sports almanac in back to the future you know you like you get you get that you get that edge. of this Russian Soviet air defence guy. He was in charge, he wasn't high ranking, but he was in one of the bunkers and they received the early warning from the satellite because they have this satellite in something called a millennia orbit, which is a very, very long on one end orbit. And then it whips around at the other so that you can keep more of an eye on a particular area. So you're sort of watching a latitude more. So it was watching for launches and there's this weird glint off the sunlight on this cloud and it looked like a launch to the satellite. And it says,

it's a first strike. It's a US first strike. And everything in the system, everything about his training was set, he was meant to launch. And he was like, why would they just launch one missile? That's ridiculous. So he didn't launch. Mason- Well, I read a really great one, really great one which happened the other way around. So the Americans at their Greenland base spotted a launch and the only reason they didn't think it was a nuclear attack was because the president of Russia happened to be in America at the time on some sort of diplomatic visit and they just thought there's no way that they're gonna pick the time when the premier is actually visiting to do the launch, right?

ALICE That would be the ultimate, though. Imagine he was visiting and he just stared the president straight in the eyes and said, it's over. It's over, Donald. ALICE He opens his jacket and there's dozens of nuclear warheads. Oh man. Checkmate. Yeah. Checkmate.

That would be the one. I can't believe you've done this. I thought they checked him on the way in, but he turned out he's teaming with new teaming. Teaming. Well, I gotta go. Yeah, that's an hour and a bit. Thanks for broadcasting. I hope you all enjoyed it and we'll see you next time.

Yeah. Bye bye.