# 727: Merry Slopmas

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/grumpy-old-geeks-168050/727-merry-slopmas
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/grumpy-old-geeks-168050/727-merry-slopmas.md
Podcast: [Grumpy Old Geeks](https://stenobird.com/podcast/grumpy-old-geeks-168050)
Published: 2025-12-20T18:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://gog.show/727
Audio file: https://op3.dev/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/802/rss.art19.com/episodes/ca789a19-e692-4541-a6c3-840033bbd6e1.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/grumpy-old-geeks-168050/episodes/727-merry-slopmas
Duration seconds: 4877

## Resource

Welcome back to another hour of digital cynicism. We kick things off with a FOLLOW UP on Amazon’s Fallout recaps, which were apparently so hallucination-heavy they made the actual wasteland look organized; naturally, they’ve been nuked along with the "Video Recaps" feature. In a massive dose of IN THE NEWS, Tesla is finally getting a legal side-eye in California for its deceptive "Autopilot" branding, while TikTok is performing a corporate shell game by selling a 45% stake to Oracle and friends to keep the feds happy. Reddit is fighting Australia’s under-16 ban like it’s a constitutional crisis, Louisiana’s age-verification law just got benched by a judge, and Merriam-Webster officially crowned "slop" as the Word of the Year—which is fitting, given that OpenAI is selectively hiding chat logs from murder-suicides while their Chief Scientist warns that recursive AI self-improvement might end the human experiment by 2030. If the "intelligence explosion" doesn’t get us, the CRASH Clock says we’ve got roughly 2.8 days before Elon’s satellite swarm turns low-earth orbit into a permanent scrapyard. In our MEDIA CANDY segment, we mourn the transition year of Star Trek, which was mostly a series of unmitigated disasters and corporate retreats, though the Oscars moving to YouTube in 2029 means we can finally ignore them in 4K. Meta is testing a "pay-to-share-links" feature because they clearly haven't alienated creators enough, and a new study suggests Amazon’s "dynamic pricing" is basically just a high-tech way to gouge public school districts for pencils. Moving to APPS & DOODADS, iOS 26.2 is here with a "Liquid Glass" slider—groundbreaking stuff, really—while Microsoft’s Copilot+ push is effectively killing the laptop market by making 16GB of RAM a luxury item only a data…

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## Transcript

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