CESperate Measures feat. Ed Zitron

The first time I played this in the car with my wife was the robo dog sucking, “Is this the one you send money too”

"Like an ape." It's okay, Ed, we're all apes.

Nova’s TAMU joke was a lob right over the center of the plate, wasn’t niche at all

Dog fucking clanker rolls off the tougne way too well.

Would just like to post here and say I'm listening to this in the gym with no headphones with pride.

always love when Ed is on, he reacts so energetically to this stuff it reminds me how insane it all is. the zitron vaccine against complacency

Throwing an ever-expanding AI bubble down the lane at my local bowling alley

side note: America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated just posted their CES 2026 video to yt that highlights all the AI kitchen gimmicks and the comments are just brutal.

If i were Nova’s friend in the room when she made that Texas A&M joke I would have had to (w consent) kiss her on the mouth

I thought Boston dynamics cancelled the atlas to focus on the truck load/unload robot

Hussein, the voice of reason: maybe the future is just badly folded shirts, did you think of that

That bowling gaffe is why you shouldn't indulge the fancy lads in your life.

Incredible Texas A&M pull

Flashing forward to the amzn seniorstash warehouse where I lie in a heavily soiled diaper. A robot vaults over me, fumbles several attempts to reattach my looki feed, then trots off.

The Aggie joke was for me

Nova I swear to god if the US does some fuckshit you need to be banned from the lathe

“I’m rolling big circles down the lane tonight. Mark it dude” - The Big Lebowski

IT CAN'T SEE!

the quote from dogbert on his wiki page is insane: "I think you should kill yourself, Dilbert." - Dogbert, 2014

Aggie joke was also for me...

I loved the Aggie joke, stay strong November

The good thing about Riley screwing up the bowling metaphor is that in bowling there is always a second throw.

Bonusss

For the love of god please bring back Milo

Critical support to November Kelly for knowing enough Texas college trivia to make that joke

Like George Smiley, Riley will conveniently be in Berlin when the shit goes down.

Paused at 21 min so sorry if it was mentioned afterwards but I think the actual why isn't because that's the only thing it can do. Sure it is, but to think of something that mimics basic brain functions but way worse as a viable product you have to be lacking in those areas. It's like ai art people not understanding art and in fact being blatantly resentful towards artists and creatives but applied to experiencing the world around you

All timer episode holy fuck. There was a really good joke Ed made that fell on deaf ears and I wanted to compliment it, but the dog fucking and Dolly Huangkonnen immediately obliterated all conscious thought from my mind.

The Ed Zitron bit trifecta: Grinted, Margin Call and Circles

Ok, one of my toddlers first mostly full sentence phrases is now "awww, dammit Nova"....not gonna lie I'm more than a little proud.

The editing here is weird. Every sentence feels like it hangs just a little bit too long. Sounds very different from a normal one

Hard to tell if the jokes landed into dead air more often than usual or if a speaker's track is missing

Scott Alexander of Rationalism and Being Weird fame is going to take it over easily

[Raises hand like Hans Moleman]: "I liked the joke about AggieBot."

Cloid? If I'm spelling that correctly, sounds like a sexbot with an STD.

I won't stand for this Tubi slander

Boston dynamics did the maths and there is no form of locomotion more efficient than biped fucking a dog. If you're against that, you're against science.

I tried to get the job of being the Jack Ruby for the Kirk Assignment, but I couldn't get the likes on Bluesky so I was denied.

FYI Elbonia is a pretty shameless knockoff of the depiction of Finland in _Leningrad Cowboys Go America_ (1989): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Cowboys_Go_America _Leningrad Cowboys Go America_ is, I would say, Brechtian theatre, in that the band was play-acting as fictional characters but doing so in the real world, and they also hired a handful of local non-actors to play other parts, so the end result is gloriously both awkward and sincere.

2026 will be the year of Zitron.

Let's Go! Eddie Lemon!

Dogbert- Id Scott Adams- Ego (formerly) Dilbert- Superego Classic Freudian dynamic

Is it just me or is there more empty air on this one than usual? Great episode but I wondered about that.

Solid A&M joke

"Do Androids F*ck Electric Sheep?" or "…Dogs?" was right there!

If you want to buy a dumb TV, the main option at the moment is Sharp NEC: https://business.sharpusa.com/displays-projectors I recently got a Sharp NEC monitor secondhand for like $500 instead of $3500: https://business.sharpusa.com/large-format-displays/models/details/P495 (My only complaint is that the HDR backlight zones are a bit visible, but that’s kind of just inherent to backlit LCD panels vs OLED.) One weird thing is that the P495 doesn’t actually have an onboard TV tuner, but I don’t actually watch TV, so that’s fine. (I use the monitor primarily with a Roku stick, but I’ve been wanting to get an Apple TV. Yes, Apple TV has kind of a little bit of AI bullshit as part of Siri, but it’s easy to ignore.) It’s possible to use a Raspberry Pi with the display, but I haven’t figured that out yet: https://youtu.be/-epPf7D8oMk

Imaging people waiting with bated breath for the CLOID pedophilia update.

One of the things that stuck me during CES was the disconnect between the tech critics I follow rightfully criticizing the big tech companies for their bullshit presentations at CES and the smart-home influencers I follow excitedly sharing announcements of generally less splashy companies imminently launching products using Matter-over-Thread. Matter-over-Thread is exciting because, like Zigbee, it is generally offline-first and vendor-neutral—no proprietary clouds or proprietary phone apps!—and it tends to be much more reliable than Matter-over-WiFi or Matter-over-BLE. The main issue with Thread is that not all consumer-grade WiFi routers have onboard Thread border routers, so some people still have to buy additional hardware, such as the IKEA Dirigera hub, which also supports Zigbee, or a newer Apple TV, which does not. Matter has been gradually developing for nearly a decade at this point, and Thread has been around but underutilized for basically as long, so what’s exciting is that companies are finally shipping products that use Matter-over-Thread that people like you or I can actually buy at retail, and not just from AliExpress! Yes, the dominant message this CES has been misanthropic and anti-consumer. At the same time, legitimately positive changes have been occurring in the smart-home space, with many announcements pertaining to those changes happening during or shortly before CES.

Imagine being someone exhibiting some bullshit AI product at CES and in a single day you get Ed Zitron, Gare Davis and Robert Evans asking you questions. Must've been tough on morale.

Steve from GN would be great for the palantyr episode

Don't forget the supercut of the 140+ times Jensen mentioned the word " AI"

Zirconium Integrated Trash Retrofitted Onanistically & Nonconsensually ZITRON is your one-stop solution for all your needs. What needs? Yes

Now I’ve got Big Black’s “Cables” stuck in my head, except the lyrics are: So I guess they know I'm not no company man But I can pull on a rope, I can f*ck a dog Fast as any other f**ker can Cables Cables Cables

After 19 hours of Ed talking about CES, I didn't think I wanted more but apparently I do

Can’t wait for the Hyundai robot inventing a new sanserif font.

Straight poggin’ for Ed on this one

Haven't listened can already tell it's a banger