catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

638: Hop, Hop, Hop

06 May 2025

Hyperspace updates, more on Apple’s in-app-purchase injunction, how to choose Ubiquiti gear (and when not to), and some actual vibe-coding (we think?).

Episode Description:

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Chromebooks + nerds
  2. Missed the sale
  3. Theatre in VR headsets
  4. Sponsor: Squarespace
  5. More on the App Store ruling
  6. Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
  7. Choosing Ubiquiti gear
  8. Casey’s tale 💸
  9. Hyperspace update!
  10. Casey’s vibe-coding
  11. Ending theme
  12. Marco’s vibe-coding 🖼️

Chromebooks + nerds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as mentioned a few times in the past, my kid for his schooling

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses Chromebooks like many American children. And everything’s on the Chromebook as we discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit in our school special. Obviously because he is my kid, he is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay attention in school to the minimum degree required. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the time is goofing off on his Chromebook. Hmm, who does that sound like?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fine because like he gets decent grades and doesn’t cause problems in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco class. So the teachers don’t care. Like they, I’m sure, I’m sure the teachers all know he’s goofing off on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chromebook and they just have bigger fish to fry. So like they don’t, they don’t bother him and he doesn’t bother them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, the Chromebooks though have various, you know, like school content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocking and filtering software installed. Now what do middle schoolers want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see on a computer, it’s nothing harmful. They’re not looking up like bad adult stuff. They just want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like watch YouTube and play games. Like that’s it. It’s all about YouTube and games. That’s, that is like the holy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco grail is I want to goof off and watch YouTube. I want to play some stupid web game that, you know, I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this Chromebook less horrible for myself. That’s all they want to do. So my kid has throughout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, his middle school career so far, done all sorts of things to try to evade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and evade the blocks to the point where even he was like running like a spreadsheet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was shared between like 40 other kids that would like link out to unblocked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco games and as they would get blocked they would update them and he was basically running an open source project like he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was like he was like the moderator and he was hiring like other moderators trading them like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lollipops and stuff he at one point was selling ad space in the spreadsheet like it was pretty impressive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, ad space, what was being advertised?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other spreadsheets by other kids.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s incredible. Like a podcast app that runs ads for podcasts in it. Right? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you believe? God, he really is your kid. Oh, yeah, I know. And I told him right from the start, he doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this anymore. He’s moved on to other distractions. But right from the start from that one, I told him, like, listen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know at some point I’m going to get called into the principal’s office to talk about this. And I’m like, I just want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to be just promise me two things. Don’t let people like post

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad things about other people and don’t enable cheating. If you don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things I got your back. So fortunately and he oh my god he was so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clever with it like he you know the the teachers at the front of the room they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of like overview of the screens of everyone’s Chromebooks in the class. He figured this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out he could kind of see like how much detail they And so he would create the layout

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give it like a big title on the top that would Be something relevant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to what they were doing like if they were doing a project on you know dinosaurs It would be a big title on the top that brought to source You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and then like all the links to the games and everything would all be smaller down below so like they could they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be as visible

⏹️ ▶️ John Too small for old person teachers to see or when they’re scaled in the thumbnail you can’t read it anymore exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John Or below the fold because the previews didn’t track

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scroll position. Right. So anyway, among the other things, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forget what the filtering software is called. It might be GoGuardian or something. There’s some filtering software and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it’s mostly like a browser extension that runs on the Chromebook. I don’t know anything about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is available for Chromebooks and how this stuff typically works, but he’s found various workarounds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to block web URLs, just like spam clicking the bookmark would often like eventually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would just work because it seems like it’s doing javascript client side blocking. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way he described and he showed me a couple times it’s like you can view the page it loads and then it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s like there’s like an onload handler or something that runs it’s like after it loads if it’s supposed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be banned the extension like kicks it kicks you over to a block page or something. So there’s all sorts of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird hacks and he recently he the news tonight was he found at how to get an alternative Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco login on the Chromebook. Because normally, you can’t log in with your own home Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco account, so you can maybe watch YouTube. No, normally you can’t log in. But he found, this was so perfect,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he found that if you go to a certain YouTube page,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tells you you can’t log in, and there’s a link that says learn more.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should put him to work in app review. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly. That’s what I was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John about. Anyone who’s linking to their alternate payment methods on their website. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what he did, was Apple does, which is like he clicked on learn more and just poked around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco until he found a different way to log in with a different login link that was on some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco header or some footer of some like Google support page deep within God knows what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he found a different way to log in. And so now he has two Google

⏹️ ▶️ Marco logins and he can watch stuff. It’s like this is like I love this stuff like I love like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know when I was a kid I was mostly just like goofing off on my ti-83 and you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly infecting the school with good assembly games I downloaded off the internet but like mm-hmm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now like I mean I love that like so much about school has changed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this one thing hasn’t like this one thing of like you give kids technology and they will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco find ways to goof off and play games and whatever whatever you like put in place to try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to prevent that that they’ll find a way around it.

Missed the sale

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should do some follow up. And I’m not going to name this person, uh, but somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted, mastodoned us, whatever you want to call it and said, uh, listening to episode 637 made me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize that I did in fact miss the merchandise sale this year. Oops.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Every time. So it was at least one. So I appreciate, I appreciate your honesty, uh, in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as thanks for your honesty. I’m not going to link to your toot and I’m not going to name you by name, but you know who you are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yep. Next year let’s, or next sale, let’s work a little harder.

Theatre in VR headsets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We made passing mention of this last episode, and we should talk about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it at least briefly now. Stageplay will be bringing live performances to mixed reality

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headsets. So this is stageplay.com, put a link in the show notes. Stageplay’s performance capture process allows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey producers, performers, and creators to capture their performances in stereoscopic 3D and distribute them live

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or on demand. The Stageplay app, developed for mixed reality headsets like Apple Vision Pro and MetaQuest, enables

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remote audiences to participate in live entertainment experiences virtually from their homes. At launch, Stage

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Play will feature a performance from Blue Man Group, which was captured in the show’s original theater in New York City earlier this year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey More details, including consumer launch and pricing, will be announced later.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me tell you, I’ve seen Blue Man Group live a couple of times in New York, and they are phenomenal. Actually, I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them once in Charlottesville, too. But anyways, they are phenomenal, put on a great show. I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tentatively excited about this. I’m sure the cost to participate in one of these shows will be prohibitive, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to make me a lot less excited. But sitting here in blissful ignorance, this sounds great.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, the pricing might not be that bad. I mean, I like that they’re launching it not just on Vision Pro, but also on the Quest. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it seems like they have a much

⏹️ ▶️ John broader addressable audience. On the other hand, people who can afford a Vision Pro can probably also afford more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John tickets. So we’ll see how it goes for them. But we mentioned this so many times, just put a camera in the audience. And we mentioned so

⏹️ ▶️ John many times about how things are sometimes shot like plays. This is straightforward. It’s not music

⏹️ ▶️ John concerts, but it’s, hey, there’s a performance on a stage, like a Broadway play or show or

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, we’ll put a camera in the audience and I hope they just put it in a good position and that’ll be fun to try out. I’ve also

⏹️ ▶️ John seen Blue Man Group in New York. If I had one, I would definitely try it out to compare the experience.

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, have you seen Blue Man Group in New York?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but I did see them in Las Vegas. I actually just saw a play in New York last week. Yeah, you

⏹️ ▶️ John always go to Las Vegas for your big shows like The Sphere or Blue Man Group.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, it was like, I think that’s, this is exactly what I hope to see on the Vision Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope this pans out. I hope it’s good. I hope things are available.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope this continues. We’ll see. Those are all pretty big conditions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But look, someone’s got to do it eventually. So hopefully this pans out. Trevor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Burrus Oh, and I should also mention, you and I have gone back and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forth in a, I believe, a friendly way about whether or not—this was mostly around Metallica, was the most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent time that we had this argument—but about whether or not just sitting a camera

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stationary on a stage, is that going to be good or bad? And I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s what stage play is going to be doing, but I think it stands to reason that that might be what they’re doing, just a static

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stationary camera that you can use to like look around. And I am super curious and excited to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see is that trash. My, my assertion is that’s not going to be that great because you’re gonna be far away from things you want to see,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially in the context of a band, but perhaps as well in the context of a stage play.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And your assertion, Marco, and jump in if I’m misleading anyone, your assertion was, no, let’s stop moving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, let’s just be stationary and give the control, you know, so to speak, to the users. Just look around

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they want to change their perspective. And I don’t know which one of us is right, but this might be the way in which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we find out, and maybe I’ll be eating my words, who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and the thing about stage plays and music concerts is that They are designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be viewed by people in stationary seats in the audience Yeah, like a good point they are they are literally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed for that and optimized for that So if somebody places a fixed camera in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good seat, you know a few inches up So it’s not gonna look in the back of someone’s head who’s happens to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be tall like, you know you just put put a camera in a really good seat or above a really good seat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and You will see the performance the same way people in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience are seeing it But you know somebody like that if you put it in a good enough seat that seat might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost a thousand dollars Like whatever, you know, it might be a hundreds of dollars seat Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you’re actually seeing it better than most of the people who are seeing it live and paying, you know 100 bucks 200

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks for their tickets like they’re the potential for this to be good. I think is quite high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you if you imagine like a fixed camera in many other You know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco media it might not be as good But these productions are specifically designed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be viewed from a fixed position for the entire time it should Theoretically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be really good and really fun, and it should be very similar to actually being there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously you know you will Well I the play on I saw last week. I made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mistake of purchasing a drink during intermission that drink was forty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. A single presumably alcoholic beverage was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forty

⏹️ ▶️ John dollars for zero. It still feels better than buying the fifteen dollar bottle of water. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Holy smokes dollars because you don’t go to a lot of shows. Casey. Yeah. Captive audience. I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. So if if your other market for you know seeing a professional play is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know you’re and the tickets were a few hundred bucks because we got like you know we got good seats. So It was a few hundred bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, so, you know, if that’s your alternative of that kind of price scale, you can sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of these tickets at a Vision Pro for like, I don’t know, 30 bucks. Like it might, like that might work. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows? I think the business case could be there and it could be really good. We won’t really know until

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we get some of these made and we get, and we see like, how are they shooting it? What are the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realities of sitting in a fixed camera for two hours in the Vision Pro? Like we don’t actually know that yet, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way we’re gonna find that out is by people starting to do it. So I look forward to this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, me too. Yeah, this is not unprecedented in terms of experience. Like if you think of all the things that we’ve named

⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside VR entirely, and as people are pointing out in the chat room, there’s been existing headsets with similar content

⏹️ ▶️ John available for them for ages. Just the actual real events. So sitting in a play, like

⏹️ ▶️ John Margo said, you know, you’re sitting in a seat. Sometimes your seats are crappy, you don’t get a good view, but you can still enjoy the performance.

⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, they’d probably put the camera in a good seat. But then there’s also things like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what you would call these, but like when they did the Hamilton thing on Netflix or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not shot as if you’re sitting in the audience. Like there are multiple cameras and if you

⏹️ ▶️ John watch that Hamilton, I don’t remember what streaming service

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on it was. Disney plus.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, if you watch that, uh, it has better views of the

⏹️ ▶️ John performance of Hamilton than any person who was sitting in that theater because they have multiple cameras and they move around.

⏹️ ▶️ John Similarly with music, while there are ones where they have a camera in the audience that are recorded. Also,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s what is known as concert films back when you used film or you know, concert videos

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever that use multiple cameras, multiple performances over multiple nights that might have music

⏹️ ▶️ John overdubbed on them or whatever. And that’s an established genre that does not look like you’re viewing from the audience.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sporting events. If you watch an NFL game on television today, we have things like amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John camera angles with the flying camera and the thing like just and all the things painted on the that feel like views

⏹️ ▶️ John you would never get in any seat in that stadium. If you go to a football game,

⏹️ ▶️ John you may be up in the nosebleed seats. That looks like a bunch of little ants and you may be looking

⏹️ ▶️ John at the big jumbotron to see what’s going on. And all of those experiences I think

⏹️ ▶️ John are potentially applicable to the headset. It just depends on what you want. Some people prefer,

⏹️ ▶️ John they love the NFL, but they prefer to watch it at home on TV because they feel like they get a better view. They wanna be on their own couch with their

⏹️ ▶️ John own snacks. They don’t wanna pay $40 for a beer. to Marco’s point. But there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ John something to be said about the atmosphere being in the stadium. And that is another place where VR can help because

⏹️ ▶️ John for sporting, maybe not so much for plays where you’re supposed to just be quiet and not be annoying your neighbors, but for sporting events,

⏹️ ▶️ John being able to turn to your left and turn to your right and see your buddies and feel the energy of the crowd is

⏹️ ▶️ John part of being there live. And guess what? Through the magic of networking and VR headsets, that

⏹️ ▶️ John is something that someone could do if it hasn’t already been done. Someone in the chat room will tell me if some other headset has already done it.

⏹️ ▶️ John of quote unquote virtually attending a game with your buddies and you know, a million other people

⏹️ ▶️ John in like instant stadiums, like using, you know, technology from MMOs and stuff where you’re in a stadium

⏹️ ▶️ John with 30,000 other people and there’s a bunch of these stadiums. You don’t know which one. Anyway, you could simulate

⏹️ ▶️ John that in a headset and no one of those experiences any worse or better than the other. Like there is something we

⏹️ ▶️ John said for being in the stadium seats, watching an NFL game. There’s something to be said for watching it at home. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John something we said for being in the theater. There’s something we said for concert movies versus sitting

⏹️ ▶️ John in the seats and watching a rock concert. So I think all of this, like there’s no, I don’t think there’s any tension

⏹️ ▶️ John between them. It just depends on what you’re in the mood for and what you want, or like, I don’t know anything about F1, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve talked before about the million ways you can visualize a Formula One race because there’s so much going on

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. Or golf, someone mentioned that too, is the golf thing where you can follow different people on the course. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John technology makes all of this possible, including things that simulate, you know, being in person at the Masters, where

⏹️ ▶️ John you get to stake out in front of one hole and just hope something dramatic happens. versus the concert video version

⏹️ ▶️ John where you can fly around and see everybody. So I think there’s only going to be more of this

⏹️ ▶️ John as time goes on once we get the the viewing hardware sorted out.

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More on the App Store ruling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have a bunch of follow-up with regard to Epic and Apple. I’m just going to kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of go through this piece by piece, and please, gentlemen, interrupt when you’re ready. Reading from The Verge,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who wrote this article? This is Jacob Kestronekis. In the end, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sought to maintain—oh, I’m sorry, this is reading from Judge Gonzales-Rogers. In the end, Apple sought to maintain

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this court’s injunction. Gonzalez-Rogers says she notes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that inside Apple App Store chief Phil Schiller advocated for the company to comply with the injunction, but that CEO Tim Cook

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chose poorly, that’s a direct quote, by ignoring Schiller and letting CFO Luca Maestri

⏹️ ▶️ Casey convince him otherwise. Big yikes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this, this is by the way, like we, we didn’t, we hadn’t had much time to like read into much of it before we had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week’s show, but Phil Schiller looks pretty good in this. Like I gotta

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gotten up his butt a little bit over time with App Store policy decisions, but he looks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a pretty strong voice of reason here compared to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CFO team and Tim Cook who basically ignored his very valid concerns.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul

⏹️ ▶️ John Matzkoff Although the bar is really low here. The sentence basically says, Schiller advocated that the company should

⏹️ ▶️ John comply with the injunction. I mean, it’s like Schiller advocated that they follow

⏹️ ▶️ John the law. a rebel he is. The bar is really low. He’s like, they

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of told us to do this. Shouldn’t we kind of do it? And then, you know, Tim Cook is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but do we have to really? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pretty much. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s, he comes out looking better than his siblings, but it’s, it’s kind of, I mean, in the end

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not his call. Like he can, he can suggest, hey, I think we shouldn’t do this because I don’t think it will go well for

⏹️ ▶️ John us, but it’s not his call. So I mean, And he is, as Marco has noted

⏹️ ▶️ John many times, has been what, promoted to the roof, as you’re saying, or whatever? Like, he’s got one foot out the door. He

⏹️ ▶️ John cares about this stuff, but he’s not running the company. And so, yeah, he’s in there saying, why don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, the court case is over. Why don’t we just do it? He said, and by the way, a lot of people wrote in to point this out and has

⏹️ ▶️ John been emphasized in future and subsequent writing about this topic. But we didn’t mention it

⏹️ ▶️ John last time, so we should now. This case that we’re talking about, I said last time, you know, Epic won.

⏹️ ▶️ John They won this part of it, the anti-steering part. But the larger case was like Epic saying, Apple shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to have an app store. And the court was like, yeah, no, they can have it. But this anti-steering stuff that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John doing, that’s BS and they have to stop that. So, you know, Apple quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John won the case, except for this, you know, in all cases, it’s like there was 10 counts and nine counts when Apple’s, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if counts is the right phrase, but anyway, there’s sub aspects of the case. The only thing we’re interested in

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about here is the one thing that Apple lost, which is you can’t stop people from telling their customers

⏹️ ▶️ John about better prices and sending them to external payment things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s the part

⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple lost, but they won the whole rest, which was like, Epic was saying, it’s no fair that Apple has an app store

⏹️ ▶️ John and can kick us out. And Epic did not win that part of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So I read most of the filing earlier today because I’m a glutton for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey punishment and I skimmed what I didn’t read. And for the most part,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very readable, particularly for a legal document. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do overall agree with what Marco said, that certainly all the poll quotes make Schiller look really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good. But there’s definitely other times in this document that he looks not so great, including changing his story

⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on new evidence, which is to some degree fair. Obviously, as you get more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey information, you’re allowed to change your mind. But the way the judge took it was not great. But still, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey negate Marco’s broader point that he comes off looking far and away the best of all the Apple people.

⏹️ ▶️ John And also because if they had won this sub-aspect of the case, he would

⏹️ ▶️ John have been the naysayer who was trying to make them do something they didn’t have to do. And the general vibe is always, for

⏹️ ▶️ John all parties involved at the Apple executive level, essentially, what can we get away

⏹️ ▶️ John with? What do we really have to do? Because we saw, before there was any lawsuits, what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John chose to do in the absence of external pressure was what they were already doing. So it’s clear the company was OK

⏹️ ▶️ John with that. And now it’s a question of, how much do we have to change what we’re doing to get by?

⏹️ ▶️ John And Phil was more on the side of, I think we probably shouldn’t do that because we’re pressing our luck in X, Y, and Z, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is, again, not a very strong stride in position of saying, we shouldn’t be doing this because it’s wrong. Because he could have been saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that before, but as far as we know, he wasn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But I did pull just a handful of quotes from the court filing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was on page 24. Apple hired the analysis group. So I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me back up. Apple hired a group to basically say, how much should we charge for our intellectual property?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is a reasonable commission? We clearly should be charging more than zero, right? Right? Right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what should that number be? And so with that in mind, Apple hired the analysis group purportedly to conduct

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bottoms-up study, which, quote, estimated the value of services provided by the Apple ecosystem to developers, quote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the whole thesis of the judge’s opinion about this was basically they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey backed themselves into 30%. And so this group concluded, and this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in the core documentation that dev tools and services for those efforts, for the dev

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools and services that Apple provides, they, they, we developers should pay anywhere between three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and 16% for discovery services, which I’d like to come back to in a moment, anywhere between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey five and 14%. So, Hey, guess what? That’s between eight and 30%. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And what I, and I don’t want us to get wrapped around the axle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, But like discovery services, five to 15, well, really 14% of my earnings should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to discovery services. What services is Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey providing me on a regular basis in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John discovery?

⏹️ ▶️ John Even before you get to that, the premise, uh, being, uh, the, I mean, setting aside

⏹️ ▶️ John charging anything, the premise being, as I’ve said, Oracle style pricing, where, um,

⏹️ ▶️ John usually think of something costing a certain amount of money, how much does this car cost? How much does this house cost? but

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of enterprise software and other situations where the pricing dynamics are

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit different, they say, well, there’s not really a price. It’s more like a tax.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s a percentage of some amount of money that you make, which is a really strange

⏹️ ▶️ John way to price stuff. It’s kind of the way that like traffic violations are priced in countries more civilized than we are,

⏹️ ▶️ John where instead of being a hundred dollar fee for speeding, it’s a percentage of your income to make it equally

⏹️ ▶️ John and make it make the the deterrent equally sized for everybody who speeds as opposed to it

⏹️ ▶️ John being ruinous for people who don’t have a lot of money and trivial for people who do. So

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like DevTools, it’s not X amount of money because these things that they do,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though there are incremental costs for each additional developer, they’re largely fixed costs for like running the app store and

⏹️ ▶️ John creating Xcode and all that stuff. We don’t have to create Xcode again for every new developer. So again, there are some incremental

⏹️ ▶️ John costs here, but it’s largely a fixed cost, but they don’t charge for it like it’s fixed costs. and say, well, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you make a lot of money, we wanna make a lot of money, so we would prefer to have some percentage

⏹️ ▶️ John of your income or revenue or whatever. And that’s a great business if you can get it, let me tell you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because instead of saying, we can’t figure out how much to charge, because some people have a lot of money, but some people have little. Can we just sell

⏹️ ▶️ John this new car? Can we sell

⏹️ ▶️ John it for 25% of whoever buys it, their annual income? That’s not how cars are sold, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be quite a deterrent if they were. It’s like, well, you don’t understand. We have the factory and that’s like 10% of your

⏹️ ▶️ John income. And then we’ve got the dealership and that’s another 5% of your income. Like, wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I reject the premise that because you made these things and I want to use them or

⏹️ ▶️ John buy them that you deserve a percentage of my income. But yeah, so if once you accept the premise, it’s a percentage of income,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you accept that, oh, look, magically, somehow the percentage they came up with is exactly the right amount

⏹️ ▶️ John to deter people from using this instead of just using an app purchase. What a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coincidence, they nailed the percentage when they first started running it. And out of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness of their hearts, they’ve been running the App Store all this time at break even.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How generous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. So then I forget what page numbers these two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey final poll quotes were from, and I apologize. But reading directly from the document, as the 2025 hearing revealed,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the analysis group’s report did not materially factor into Apple’s decision-making process. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey created as a showpiece for the court. The plan backfired. All of that was the poll quote, including

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the plan backfired. That’s from the judge’s document. Incredible. And then finally, and I think we’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one before. We might have even read it last week, but it’s so just incredible. Quote, as always,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cover-up made it worse. For this court, there is no second bite at the apple. Quote.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, honestly, I can’t imagine anything Apple could have done, because the whole point is, OK, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John decided to do this, And how can we defend this thing we’ve decided to do, which is still charge people, even though they do payment outside the app

⏹️ ▶️ John store? That’s a decision we’ve made. Phil was against

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but I think we can get away with it. How can we defend that? Well, we need to show that like, actually

⏹️ ▶️ John we calculated our costs and this is about what it is. And so you make up, but like, honestly, can you imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John a set of like research that they have? Like there’s just nothing you could have

⏹️ ▶️ John presented to the court to say, well, we looked into our very own thing that we’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ John already and we’ve decided it’s probably going to cost the same amount as we were already charging. Like, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s any way that any, anything they could have done, like any outside firm they could have hired,

⏹️ ▶️ John any way they could have written down, like just add up the salaries of the people involved in the time

⏹️ ▶️ John they take or whatever. Cause it’s just, it’s a nonsensical thing. Like you’re starting from a premise that the court essentially rejected,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is that Apple should be allowed to, uh, charge anything for this, essentially,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, which is, you know, why they ended up with the judgment against them here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s like, I think if you look back on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Apple goes the most wrong, it’s mostly hubris. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco historically, like, this is true just as much in the Steve Jobs days as it is now. Like, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly goes wrong with hubris. And this is just full of so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. It’s just like, they really thought they could get away with totally disregarding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Like, first they thought they could get away for a long time with very anti-competitive behavior

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as their market and influence and control over the economy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco grew. They thought they could get away with this forever. They didn’t give an inch. Like, if there was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever an opportunity for them to give an inch or keep it all, they chose keep

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it all every single time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, that’s another instance where Phil came out looking pretty good because he did, you made the joke about App Store breaking even

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s something that Steve Jobs said early on before the App Store was even launched, I think. But

⏹️ ▶️ John at some point, very early in the App Store’s history, where it seemed like it was clear that it was gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be real popular, I think Phil had an email that we saw in a court case that was like, hey, you know, after

⏹️ ▶️ John we start, we break like a billion dollars in revenue per year or something to the App

⏹️ ▶️ John Store, should we think about maybe like lowering our percentage or something? Or like, it was basically like, once the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ John gets really big, maybe we should change the rules. And I guess what you were saying, Marco, of like, uh, as they

⏹️ ▶️ John went from a small fish to a big fish, it’s easy for it to like creep up on you and say, yeah, we were, we were behaving

⏹️ ▶️ John as if we’re this tiny fish, but now we’re this giant power. We should maybe play by different rules.

⏹️ ▶️ John And Phil was saying that at such an astronomically low number, like they hadn’t reached it yet, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, when we get to a billion, we should probably have different rules. And it’s like, guess what? We’re going to sail way past a billion and never

⏹️ ▶️ John have a second thought about this decision Phil, sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s bananas. All right. So Apple’s response, uh, we’ll put there, there’s a bunch of different like verge links

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. We’ll put them in the show notes, but Apple’s response, uh, Apple senior director of corporate communications, Olivia

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dalton sent a statement to the verge that reads. We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we will appeal. And as of today, May 5th, they’ve appealed. So we’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see what happens. Then additionally, uh, I think it was the day after this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey broke, uh, Apple did officially update its app review guidelines from the email that they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent to developers. The app review guidelines have been updated for compliance with the United States court decision regarding buttons,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey external links, and other calls to action in apps. These changes affect apps distributed on the United

⏹️ ▶️ Casey States storefront of the app store.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they were pretty quick. Like the little statement was, we disagree, we’ll comply, we’re gonna appeal.

⏹️ ▶️ John They disagreed, they updated the things to comply, and now they’re appealing. So they did

⏹️ ▶️ John what they said. Although the update was like, in typical fashion, It was kind of like a text diff

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, section 3.1.2a no longer says X, Y, and Z.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it wasn’t like a textual diff, it was like a sentence description of like each section and what they, it

⏹️ ▶️ John used to say, you know, we no longer require this, we say this, you can’t, like it was, and people

⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to like parse it by looking at the original text and looking at this and then doing a text diff. And there was

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of questions going on, as we’ll see in a second about, okay, but like, what are the rules now?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So from NJ Size Roundup, one of the questions is, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was raised by Ryan Jones, Ryan writes, at least how this is written right now, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems like there’s no mandate to link out. In other words, a Stripe Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pay button can be directly in the app or the entire paywall could be a web view with a button right there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in it. Now, with that said, Gruber disagreed. Gruber wrote in his post, this does

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not mean apps can now use alternative payment processing in-app. It doesn’t even mean apps are no longer required to offer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s IAP in-app for purchases and subscriptions. All it means is that apps in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey US for now, but Apple really ought to make this worldwide, but I suspect Tim Cook wants to fight this on appeal in federal

⏹️ ▶️ Casey court, which he does, are free to inform users about offers available on the web and to link

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to those offers on the web. Those links must open outside the app in the user’s default web browser.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that, I think Gruber is right about this as far as I can tell, but honestly, with App Review, who even knows

⏹️ ▶️ John what, who even knows, again, what app review will actually do. But the thing is like that, that’s what people,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you have to link out, the prohibitions that were most egregious were you couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even tell people anything about pricing. Like you couldn’t say, hey, you know, here’s in-app

⏹️ ▶️ John purchase, which Apple makes us put in, but you can get it for 15 to 30% less if you click this link. And people are gonna click that

⏹️ ▶️ John link because they wanna save money. So even if it goes outside and goes to a webpage, they’re like, people don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like people buy things on the web all the time. people buy things in Safari on the iPhone. It happens

⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. It’s a thing people are used to. So that is the real freedom that matters.

⏹️ ▶️ John It would be better if like Ryan Jones suggested, you could just do it inside the app with the web view or whatever, because then people wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even know, but we’ll see how this shakes out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the reality is like this whole thing about like the rule, I mean, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one area that I agree with Apple, I think. The idea of drawing the distinction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, well, you can’t have payments in your app, but if you link out to the web browser and do it there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so different. Of course, it’s the same thing, like who cares? You can make a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one-click link now, now that you don’t have one unsigned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco link that can’t include any tokens or anything. Now you can just have the app generate a link

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that automatically logs in the user. So you click a button in the app, it kicks you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over to Safari with this user-specific URL. There’s a payment screen there. It could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even have a one-click payment option like Apple Pay or Shop Pay or Stripes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Link thing, or there’s so many other things. You can have a one-click payment there and then it can redirect you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to a URL that launches you back into the app. You’re basically having payments

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your app to your own payment processor. You just have like a couple of weird screen animations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between each direction to get there. Like, I know that we try to draw this distinction. Certainly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple doesn’t want this, but like there is no difference business wise between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this being in the app and having the app kick you over to the browser and kick you back into the app like there is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no difference like the

⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you’re allowed to use web views in the app because then you literally won’t leave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John app and you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be clear but I’d like I don’t think that matters like I think what this what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’ve been arguing all this time is really that apps should be able to use their own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco payments if they want to that’s that’s it like the idea of like, well, it’s okay if it happens in the browser,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that is a distraction and not a meaningful distinction to the actual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use of these apps in practice. And I think we will very much see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these like, again, like, you know, simple one click things. You know, right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are like, oh, everyone’s gonna build their own thing, you don’t have to log in and enter your credit card. No.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yes, people will do that. But the more common case will be you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be kicked over to a page that has shop pay or stripe link or something where like you’re all you already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have that logged in or it could it could literally be apple pay on the web it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be an apple pay button but like i think what we’re gonna see here is if again

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this sticks which that’s a huge if but if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sticks we will see apple compete maybe i mean Because again,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is at its worst when it doesn’t have to compete. That’s when we always see the worst behavior

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and typically mediocre products from Apple. Apple does great when they have a fire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lit under them from competition. When they have real competition in an area, they compete very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. But when they give themselves an advantage, like some form of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical or policy lock-in, we see them getting complacent and we see them releasing mediocre

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things or letting things linger forever, unaddressed or non-competitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. Apple being complacent in areas that they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to fairly compete in results in crap products and crap experiences. Right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Pay, in my opinion, is not the best way to pay for something on the web. The best way to pay for something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the web, in my opinion, is ShopPay. I think it’s way better than Apple Pay because, in my experience,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is way faster and more reliable. I have all sorts of problems with Apple Pay.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco How many times have you tried to use Apple Pay and it’s like, you have to update your billing address for some reason, even though you’ve put it in 10,000

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. And by the way, where do you put it? God knows. There’s so many weird little gotchas sometimes with Apple Pay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or odd failures. I’ve never had ShotPay fail, not once. And it’s just as fast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple will actually be forced to compete in areas that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they were class leading at one time, but they have no longer, they no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer are class leading. And they’ve been able to be complacent because they had technical or policy lock-in that allowed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to be complacent. Now they’ll have to compete. And again, I think that’s better for Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple does not do well in any way when it locks itself in to its advantages.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do great when they have competition. They really like they put resources behind things. They update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. They ship better quality products when they have competition and all these areas that they don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they stagnate. So I think one of the many ways that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will actually be better for Apple if they lose some of this control by force, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the ways this will be better is it will drive them to improve their products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to become more competitive and that will benefit things like their hardware business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think overall, I mean, I’ve been saying for a long time, I’m glad that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our friends and other podcasts… Hey, Upgrade, I’m sub-podcasting you just like you sub-podcasted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. By the way, the Upgrade segment on this was excellent. You got to go listen to Upgrade this week. It was very, very good. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t believe how fired up Jason got. But it’s very encouraging

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now to see that many other people on many other podcasts and publications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are now coming to admit the possibility that maybe we need a new CEO at Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because time after time we keep seeing Tim Cook making

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions that really seem to be about short-term profit and not long-term

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy. And I think the long-term strategy is when Apple makes better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solutions and better products, they make more money from their products because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people buy them because they’re more competitive and they’re better. So I think it is the best long-term

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategy not for Apple to create more areas in which it can be complacent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get mediocre, but to actually keep making their products better. And the only way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they consistently do that is when they have competition. So I actually think this will be good for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to have this control forcefully taken away from them. We’ll see how it plays out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So with that all in mind, Tim Sweeney is grandstanding again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim writes, We will return Fortnite to the US iOS app store next week. This was a couple of days ago.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Epic puts forth a peace proposal. If Apple extends the court’s friction-free Apple tax-free

⏹️ ▶️ Casey framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the app store worldwide and drop current and future litigation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the topic.

⏹️ ▶️ John Tim Sweeney’s got a little bit of a Trump vibe. Like he’ll start with a statement like, We will return it to the app store next

⏹️ ▶️ John week. That’s not a thing he’s he’s empowered to do, but he states it like it’s gonna happen. But then you get to the next sentence, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is all from him by the way, this is a direct quote from him, it’s not a summarizing or anything. If Apple does this thing that we

⏹️ ▶️ John want them to do, then we will deign to bring Fortnite back. I’m sure you’re in a position

⏹️ ▶️ John to make that demand, Tim, but you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there he is

⏹️ ▶️ John out there saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Well, and you and my initial thought when I first heard this was, why would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple care? Because you know, they’re not gonna make any money from it. But then I realized, no, again, what I was just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, they should care because having Fortnite on the iPhone increases the value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people having iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what I said last week. Like, it could come out as a net win for them because now suddenly you have iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John with Fortnite back in it, but, you know, will Apple see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that way? That’s the thing. Will Tim Cook see it that way? I guarantee you, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he has shown time and time again, he sees zero value in a software ecosystem for his devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We now have documentation showing how those top Apple execs think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of developers. Well, and also they really hate Epic. They really hate Epic, but they also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t respect software. Like they really do not respect third-party developers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing stuff for their platforms. They see us solely as a resource to be harvested and they do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not see value that we bring to their platform. I understand, look, all the Apple people who are out there getting mad at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me right now, I understand that other people in the company think differently, but you look at what your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco top execs have literally said and have shown up in court and stated themselves or now have shown up in discovery

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and documentation, what they say says clearly otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they clearly see developers as a resource to be extracted,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they do not see any value that we bring to their platforms except fees. They

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see no value for our apps to exist on their platform except what they can extract

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly from fees, which is honestly scarily incompetent for the leaders of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing platforms.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re stating their position a little bit more extreme

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco than it is. I’m not, read what they say. I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re trying to say is they don’t see as much value as developers do or

⏹️ ▶️ John as most outside observers do, which I totally agree

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. No, their argument is literally that developers have like a free ride if we’re not paying them. They’re like, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get our apps for free. Like we get to ride on their platform for free.

⏹️ ▶️ John What they’re saying is that we would benefit from the services they’re provided without paying what they feel like is an

⏹️ ▶️ John adequate amount of money to pay for those services because the $99 a year is not sufficient to cover them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re being very generous to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, to be clear, I disagree with their position entirely, but I think you’re making it a little bit more extreme than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. Honestly, you are making it what you hope it is. But what they actually say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very

⏹️ ▶️ John different. You haven’t brought me the receipts, as the kids say, to show me the statement

⏹️ ▶️ John that is that extreme.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, your homework, John, congratulations. You’ve brought this upon yourself. Hey, congratulations. You played yourself. If you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make me read the judgment, I already did that. So. Oh, well see, then I, I think Marco was being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slightly extreme, but only just only the teeniest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s a, it’s a moot point. We don’t need to argue this. Cause like, I agree that they need to leadership change. So it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John really matter. When it comes down to it, they need new leadership

⏹️ ▶️ John in this area. And if this area goes all the way to the top, than any new leadership at the top. That’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ John an idea I have for a future potential member special, but I might bring him to the main show. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So back to Tim Sweeney, grandstanding, he has said that, oh, or yes, he

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did say publicly, oh, I am going to or we Epic is going to bring

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fortnite back by way of the Swedish Epic Games

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple App Store account. Somehow Fortnite has returned. Yeah. Right. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim wrote, we have conversed with Apple on the topic And we will use our Epic’s game, Epic games, Sweden account to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey submit fortnight to the U S app store. We created this account last year to launch Epic, the Epic game store in fortnight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the European union and Apple required an, an EU domiciled account. So since that’s sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there and that hasn’t been banned from the app store, like the American one was apparently that’s their backdoor.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John was, remember they did ban it, then it got unbanned. There’s this whole history behind it. You can follow the link to see it, but like the Apple did,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because

⏹️ ▶️ John they created it after the thing was banned and then Apple said, ha, you can’t create that over there. We’re going to ban that

⏹️ ▶️ John too. but then they unbanned it. And here’s the thing. This now he goes from being Trumpish to be more lawyerish, because

⏹️ ▶️ John he says we have conversed with Apple on this topic, which could be a true statement. And then we

⏹️ ▶️ John will use Epic Games to account to submit. OK, that could also be true. But those two things

⏹️ ▶️ John do not combine to equal. Therefore, Fortnite will appear in the App Store because

⏹️ ▶️ John those are. Yeah, that’s we’ll see what happens here. But Apple is super mad at Epic for

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons that make sense. and I don’t see them being particularly kind

⏹️ ▶️ John to Epic on this. It’s clear Apple has already decided

⏹️ ▶️ John that they have weighed benefits of having a Fortnite on our platform and the detriment

⏹️ ▶️ John of Epic being annoying and they chose not to have Fortnite. I’m not sure the math has changed

⏹️ ▶️ John for them. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. All right, so trying to move quickly here, there’s a litany of people that have come out of the woodwork and said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ooh, ooh, there’s a business opportunity here, which there is. So very quickly, Epic Games has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided they’re going to set up a webshops for iOS developers. Reading from MacRumors, Epic Games today

⏹️ ▶️ Casey announced plans, this is on the first, for Epic Games Store Webshops, a feature that will allow developers to launch digital

⏹️ ▶️ Casey storefronts that are hosted by the Epic Games Store. Now this is where I think it gets interesting. The Epic Games Store will charge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers a 0% fee for the first $1 million in revenue they collect per app per year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And after that, developers will need to pay Epic a 12% cut. The fees are applicable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all payments that are processed by the Epic Games Store. Epic Games also says that players that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spend in Epic web shops will be able to accrue 5% Epic rewards on all purchases.

⏹️ ▶️ John Competition.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Imagine that. Stripe, as was foretold, I’m pretty sure I brought this up last week, Stripe has said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, let me just read from the Verge. Payment processing platform Stripe just added a way for iOS developers to accept payments by linking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey outside their apps, dodging Apple’s commission fees. Stripe has published a guide that shows developers how to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accept transitions outside an app using Stripe Checkout. In the sample video, you can see someone preparing to buy digital

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fruit with in-app currency, but instead showing a transaction page inside the, excuse me, instead of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey showing a transaction page inside the app, it launches Safari and takes the user straight to a buy now page.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is functionality Stripe already had, but they quickly put together a little guide and says, look, we already, this is the thing we already

⏹️ ▶️ John do. You can add this to your app. Look how easy it is. Competition.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. With sample code, their doc, I mean, I’d skimmed their docs super fast, but it looked good. Then Patreon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said they will update their iPhone app. So reading from The Verge, Patreon is planning to submit an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey update to its iOS app that will let creators accept payments outside of Apple’s payment system, a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spokesperson Adia Taylor tells The Verge. Last year, Patreon said it was forced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to switch to Apple’s in-app purchase system, which applied a 30% fee to all new memberships purchased

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the app or else risk, quote, being removed from the app store, quote.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, though, you know, on, you know, everyone is rushing to, you know, take advantage this and if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already have a business that can do this, that can take advantage of this quickly, great.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say though, don’t count on this long-term. This is a brief,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly brief free-for-all. But if Apple wins any kind of appeal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some other injunction, I don’t know how these things work in that kind of detail, but the second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple doesn’t have to do this anymore, they will close that door shut and cut everybody off if that happens.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would not rely on this. If I was an investor,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t invest in a company that relies on this. If I was making a brand new app,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t make a brand new app that relied on this. Take advantage of it while you can,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is still in flux. It can still be. It is still being appealed. It only applies to the US.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are a bunch of asterisks on this. And so enjoy it while we can,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but don’t assume it will always be this way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you got to have conditionals anyway, because like I said, it’s US only. So just keep those conditionals there because you might need

⏹️ ▶️ John to, you know, turn off one of those feature flags if this thing goes the other way. Yeah, very abruptly, by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then friend of the show Riley Tested writes, I just submitted a new Delta update without all the external payment restrictions.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodbye, scare screen. And then on the verge, you can see some of the details

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the scare screen, which we’ve talked about in the past. I mean, we can go into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this more, John, if you want, but I feel like we’ve covered this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John before.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think I want to, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I try. Let the record show. I try to avoid just sitting here and reading at you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put things in here for no reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, here we go. Buckle up. Reading from The Verge.

⏹️ ▶️ John These are details about the scare screen. I just put this here instead of earlier because Riley specifically

⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned the scare screen, and we’ve talked about it before. But we learned more about the origins

⏹️ ▶️ John of the scare screens from, uh, I think this is from like the discovery process or something during the case.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple chose to iterate on the scare screen with the goal of dissuading users from continuing on the web. The pop-up included a paragraph

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of text and employees discussed using scary language to warn people off. Raphael Onak, a user

⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience writing manager at Apple instructed an employee to add the phrase external website to the screen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it sounds scary. So execs will love it. I’m sorry, but that’s just patently hilarious.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another employee gave a suggestion on how to make the screen even worse by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using the developer’s name rather than the app name. Ooh, keep going, another Apple employee responded in Slack.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even Cook got in on the action. When he finally saw the screen for approval, he asked that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey another warning be added to state that Apple’s privacy and security promises would no longer apply out on the web.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a demonstration of a bunch of things here. So first of all, I mean, this is just the way it

⏹️ ▶️ John is in big companies. If your job in the company is to make this screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and your bosses have told you, we want to discourage people from going

⏹️ ▶️ John outside of the app to make payments, how scary can you make this scare

⏹️ ▶️ John screen? So there they are being dutiful employees saying, well, we need to, we want

⏹️ ▶️ John it to be truthful, but we also want to phrase it in a way that is as scary as possible. So we’re not going to lie

⏹️ ▶️ John or make up stuff or whatever, but saying external website instead that I’ve just website, ooh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John scary. Execs will love it. We feel like we’re doing our job well. And then this one

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought was great because it’s like using the developer’s name rather than the app name. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John true, like the app store, if you go to the app store, you see any app that’s available, you can see what the app is called, but you can also see

⏹️ ▶️ John the name of the developer. But not using the app name in the message is scarier

⏹️ ▶️ John because people don’t know the name of the company that makes their app. Like even now, whenever it’s like, my wife is always

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, what is this charge from, you know, Boingo Co. And I’m like, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John probably software because like I bought, you know, App XYZ. I might not even know what the name

⏹️ ▶️ John of the company is but it shows up as a charge from the company. So I mean, just off the top of the

⏹️ ▶️ John head of the people who are listening, do you know the names of all our companies? I bet you don’t, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John You might know the names of our apps but our company names are different. So put the company name in the message

⏹️ ▶️ John because if someone sees a message that says, you know, as the message says, we have a screenshot here. Any

⏹️ ▶️ John accounts or purchases made outside of this app will be managed by the developer, and then in quotes, call

⏹️ ▶️ John them scare quotes if you want, tested tech, it’s like what the heck is tested tech? I’m using Delta,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what tested tech is. That sounds like someone’s trying to steal my credit card. I’m not gonna go to this link.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is clearly a documented, conscious decision by Apple employees to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the message scarier while obscuring it. It annoys me in various instances of in-app purchase where you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have enough characters to say something sensible and that’s Apple’s own system. So again, competition would be better there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But this entirely reveals that like, you know, Apple could say, we’re not trying to scare

⏹️ ▶️ John people away. We’re just saying the honest truth. Like you will be outside of it. And everything in here is true, but it,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the discovery, discovery is a B as they say, ah, we were totally

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make this scary and we were doing it in ways that essentially hurt the user experience

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they, and they felt so empowered to do that that they knew they would be rewarded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. Like how much effort has been spent making their products more competitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these areas compared to how much effort they spent on this intentionally degrading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so that it would be as uncompetitive as possible of an alternative? Like this is what these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people this is what was encouraged by their higher-ups and by the company culture.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It goes all the way to the top my friends I hate to tell you like this they are telling you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right here this is what they think of you believe them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what they think of you this is how they develop software this is how they make decisions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is what they are optimizing for there is no greater story about privacy and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security this is what they actually care about right here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laid bare

⏹️ ▶️ John at least this part of the company developer relations probably has a different attitude but you know this is the part of the company that deals with App Store.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like, speaking of effort, they put in so much effort in DMA compliance to essentially make it as difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John and unappealing as possible. It would have been so much less effort not to do that. But this part of the company that’s responsible

⏹️ ▶️ John for complying with these judgments that they don’t want to do in the first place is absolutely doing everything it can,

⏹️ ▶️ John doing a tremendous amount of additional work to make it so that

⏹️ ▶️ John all the alternatives that they’re being mandated to do are as unattractive as possible, which is what we all said when we saw what they were doing,

⏹️ ▶️ John But here is documented evidence from inside the company that that’s not just a side effect of

⏹️ ▶️ John what happened. It is consciously what they’re trying to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is all part of why I say it’s better for Apple if they get cut off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this drug they’re addicted to. Because look at how much it has perverted their culture. Look at how much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has corroded and destroyed their priorities of things like user experience.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This has been so bad for them culturally. It’s been great short term. It’s like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drug. It’s been great short term for their feelings and their numbers short term.

⏹️ ▶️ John You keep saying short term, but that’s the correction I would make before. Tim Cook made these decisions not for short term

⏹️ ▶️ John profits. He made them for long term profits. Because they’ve made years and years and years of tremendous

⏹️ ▶️ John profits. So now he’s making terrible short term decisions about not complying. But when these decisions

⏹️ ▶️ John were made and policies were set down, long term profits. Unfortunately, they’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John true to the spirit of the company, which is we’re supposed to make products that people love. And then from people loving them, we make money. this

⏹️ ▶️ John is sort of the opposite of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the whole time, he has been, I don’t know if it legally qualifies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as misleading the shareholders, but I would certainly say BSing the shareholders in terms of the whole services category.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have been knowingly peddling a narrative that services is stuff like Ted Lasso. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is the vast majority of services money comes from fees. The Google search deal and its app store fees, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the vast majority of services revenue. And so they’ve been kind of BSing the whole industry and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shareholders into being like, oh, they’re making all their money from services, but it really comes down to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two large chunks of fees that are possibly in a precarious spot right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this whole thing, again, this has corroded their thinking, this has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco perverted their incentives, and this is not Apple at its best. We have seen the great things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can do at its best. Look at the hardware, the hardware is amazing these days. A lot of the stuff they do is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Then you have this other area where they’re really doing a lot of harm,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all for short-term numbers. That’s what this is. It’s short-term, quick-hit numbers that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think are worse for the products and the company long-term overall. So I hope we get leadership

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in there that cares a lot more about the products and the long-term strategy of the company, because Tim Cook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Spotify has also announced, hey, we want a piece of that action too. So reading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from MacRumors, Spotify has updated its iPhone app in the US with out-of-app pricing and subscription options for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey its premium plans. Spotify users in the US can now view pricing information for its individual, duo, family, and student plans

⏹️ ▶️ Casey directly in the iPhone app. And there are buttons that lead to Spotify’s website where users can complete the payment process.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Spotify shared the following statement, quote, in a victory for consumers, artists, creators, and authors, Apple has approved Spotify’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey US app update. After nearly a decade, this will finally allow us to freely show clear pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey information and links to purchase, fostering transparency and choice for US consumers. We can now give consumers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lower prices, more control and easier access to the Spotify experience. There’s more work to do, but today represents a significant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey milestone for developers and entrepreneurs everywhere who want to build and compete on a more level playing field.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is more or less the sentiment of everybody. Uh, the reaction to this from developers

⏹️ ▶️ John and users alike is essentially celebration because users want to pay less money,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yay, cheaper things. And developers are like, finally. And I put the screenshots in here of what it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ John on Spotify. I was, I think it’s an interesting thing that may become standard if this turns out the way it is,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a button in the app, but it’s got the little box with an arrow pointing out of it on a night, not the not the sharrow pointing

⏹️ ▶️ John up, but like an arrow pointing up into the right to essentially say by clicking this, you know, it’s the open a new window

⏹️ ▶️ John glyph, essentially the open a new window icon, but on a button to let you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you’re going to be sent to a web page where you’ll do some payments and we’ll check you back here. And I wonder if that if

⏹️ ▶️ John that will become standardized across all these apps that the people will come young people, maybe if this becomes standardized

⏹️ ▶️ John and sticks, they’ll become they’ll start associating that icon, not with open a new window, but instead with

⏹️ ▶️ John pay. Because that’s how you pay for things on the phone, right? It’s like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John let me tell you a story.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right?

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Choosing Ubiquiti gear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some people who wrote in with regard to Ubiquity. The original person

⏹️ ▶️ Casey who had asked about it was Ryan Budish, who writes, I get what Marco was saying, cloud gateways are the routers and you need

⏹️ ▶️ Casey switches, access points, and some kind of PoE or power over Ethernet, which may or may not be built into the switches. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was someone who has a hobby of putting networking equipment into homes and restaurants, was perhaps slightly underestimating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the complexity of the Ubiquity offerings for someone with less experience. For example, they offer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seven, excluding the rack-mounted enterprise and large-scale, cloud gateways, 15 access points, not including

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the enterprise outdoor, mega-capacity, or bridging offerings, and 14 or more switches, not counting any of the rack-mounted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey switches, like the one that Marco was telling Casey to get. I think John was trying to ask the question I’m getting at. For a technically-minded

⏹️ ▶️ Casey homeowner who probably has more than the average amount of internet-connected devices, but is running neither a restaurant nor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an enterprise from their home, how should they evaluate the 1,470-plus different combinations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of routers, switches, and access points?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is a, it’s a little ridiculous. Like I get Ryan’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. Like it is, there

⏹️ ▶️ John are a lot of options. They have more options than for example, Eero or Apple used to. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But again, this, I mean, this is enterprise gear. Enterprises have lots of different needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think the products, I think you can actually look at them and for the most part, be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty sure whether something is for you or not. You know, like for instance, do you need a 16 port switch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 24 port switch, a 48 port switch? Well, how many things are you plugging in? Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, those questions can be answered pretty well. Do you need to be PoE? Do you need to be 10

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gig? You know, you know the answers to those things when you’re buying them. For the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, keep in mind, again, this is Enterprise gear. Most of their offerings, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can pick the lowest one that fits your like physical needs. So if you have five ports, you can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheapest five port switch. Like, you know, that kind of thing. Because for the most part, like the higher end stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco These things scale from Casey’s house to sports stadiums.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, they’re designed for like, to serve that entire market.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The existence of the higher ends and more specialized products doesn’t necessarily make it harder to know what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get. I would suggest, the only area that I think it really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you really don’t know, is when you look at the APs, the wireless APs, because some of them are like pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus light. Sometimes they have ones called long range. They obviously they do have some called outdoor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think obviously the outdoor question is pretty easy for most people to answer, but between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like pro and light, you can just get light, it’s fine. You can get pro if you really want to. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco price difference usually is not like massive. Maybe it might be an extra like 60, 70 bucks. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends on, you know, your price sensitivity and how many you’re going to be buying. Usually for home use,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the light APs are fine. I’ve used a mix of lights

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and long ranges and pros in my various installations over time and they’ve all been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine enough for my needs. The ones, the options that seem to change the most often

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the cloud gateways, aka the routers. And again, those are mostly, it mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes down to like how much processing grunt do you want and what form factor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you want it in. Do you like, if you need rack mount or not, you probably know that. So if you need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in hard drives to serve as a video camera recorder, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that too. So most of it comes down to how big do you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the internal storage, if any, and how much processing power do you want?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that, again, that really depends. Do you have a gigabit connection? Then probably get one of the medium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to high-end ones. Do you have just a basic thing for an office with a few users? You can get the cheap

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, fine. So there’s a lot of different options, but that’s because they serve a lot of different markets.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily impossible for a home user to figure it out. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, if you want more help, we’re happy to keep getting this question every year or two of like, what ubiquity stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should I buy? And I’ll give current recommendations at any given time. Indeed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then Brian Donovan writes, John hit the nail on the head with the main shortcoming of ubiquity in the home networking market. What do I buy?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That question still exists for Eero, et cetera, but it’s much simpler. I hope you do spend some time discussing this because Marco’s short

⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer in episode 636 was insufficient. Just buy a quote cloud gateway aka router and one or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more access points that may also be routers. I recently bought five of the Unifi Express

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud gateways thinking I could just one-to-one swap my Google Wi-Fi 2017 mesh devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was at best an uneven improvement. The most important thing, networking performance was worse. Streaming to my Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV became less reliable, so the family noticed. The setup experience was worse because it might see the new devices as I plug

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them in, but then it would just sit forever on configuring. I ended up having to reconfigure the network from scratch multiple times,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the performance issues never went away. I ended up reverting to the Google Wi-Fi. Is this my fault? Probably, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure what I should have done differently. I hope you cover this topic again and that Marco tries a little harder to get into the beginner’s mindset

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the extent possible. Despite my negative experiences, I’m willing to give it another try. I do need to replace my nearly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey decade old Wi-Fi equipment eventually and Ubiquiti is still in the running.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I put this in here for a specific reason. Let me just, I’m going to give a brief, very

⏹️ ▶️ John fast, hopefully not too inaccurate over you. The people will yell at me about who know more about networking. Um, so this gets

⏹️ ▶️ John to, uh, one of the things, like, I think maybe where this person went wrong is they, they have

⏹️ ▶️ John a Google wifi network, which I assume is a mesh network and they were just trying to replace it with a ubiquity one, like one for one,

⏹️ ▶️ John as they said, which I’m not sure whether we’re working out, but I just, this is a good sort of ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John one-on-one brief segment here. Uh, we talk about mesh networks and wifi all the time, and I’m not sure

⏹️ ▶️ John people, I mean, I don’t know, maybe everyone listening to this podcast knows the difference. But for the people who don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to explain this. I think it’s super important. Back in the old days, you’d have a Wi-Fi access point

⏹️ ▶️ John in your house. And if your house was really big and the Wi-Fi access point wasn’t centrally located, there

⏹️ ▶️ John were rooms in your house that got bad signal. Mesh networking was an attempt to

⏹️ ▶️ John help with that. And that would let you have a place in your house where you have Wi-Fi. And if you had bad

⏹️ ▶️ John signal that was far away from the place in your house where the Wi-Fi thing was, you could put another Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And the reason that would help is because you, your device, your phone, your laptop,

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, would talk to the Wi-Fi thing that you are close to. And like a relay race, that thing would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just, I got someone over here talking to me, and it would send its signal to the next thing that’s closest to it,

⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth, until it eventually gets back down to the one router that’s connected to your internet. Like sort of, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, a relay race, or, you know, handing off, you talk to this point, this thing talks to that point, that

⏹️ ▶️ John thing talks to that point. That is a mesh network. It’s a series of devices that all see each other, configure each

⏹️ ▶️ John other, and then you just wander around the house and the wifi access points tell your device, oh, it looks like you’re going into that

⏹️ ▶️ John room over there. You should probably talk to this access point because it’s closer to you. And then your phone would say, okay, and it would talk to that

⏹️ ▶️ John access point. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John access point you’re talking to, you talk to it and it passes on to the next one, the

⏹️ ▶️ John next one, hop, hop, hop, until it gets to where it’s going. That’s mesh network.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s better, it actually extends your signal better than like repeaters and other stuff like that. because

⏹️ ▶️ John if you need to reach some other point, you just buy another one of these things and you plug it in somewhere and then it sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of self-configures. My question for both of you, which I don’t actually know the answer to because I’m not researching Ubiquiti like you two are,

⏹️ ▶️ John is does Ubiquiti have mesh networking nodes?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. And most of the access points can also support like a mesh uplink,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically you give them PoE, but they don’t have to be connected to the network. They will wirelessly peer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, this is where I will say, if you need wireless

⏹️ ▶️ Marco meshing, like if you cannot run network cables to each AP from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the central source, don’t bother with Ubiquiti. Those are features that they have, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are not really optimized for that market. I think the Google Wi-Fi is fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. If you’re going to be doing that kind of meshing where like, you know, you have basically repeaters, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know the mesh people get really sensitive when you say repeaters, because that’s something else sort of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically maybe, but like it

⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely is. That’s the whole important distinction. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. But yeah, but they don’t work that much better than the ones with repeaters.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nowhere near the performance of wired.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, they absolutely do. Maybe the Ubiquiti ones don’t, but like that was my question. But it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John when I see you guys talking about Ubiquiti stuff, I definitely see that the Ubiquiti is, I didn’t know if it was just not possible

⏹️ ▶️ John or they were just leaning heavily into it. But like to clarify, when Ubiquiti, if you buy like wireless access points, say

⏹️ ▶️ John you bought one of them, like either your router has a wireless access point and some Ubiquiti things do, or you buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a wireless router in another access point. Oh, I can’t get signal in this far part of my house.

⏹️ ▶️ John What Ubiquiti expects, sort of like the default of Ubiquiti thing is, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John of course that other part of your house slash office slash stadium, just

⏹️ ▶️ John take the ethernet drop that’s in that room and plug in another wifi access point. And what that means is

⏹️ ▶️ John like that wifi access point would be in the far part of your house where you get bad signal, and your device would talk to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you know what that wifi access point would do? It would send your signal along the ethernet wire that’s attached to it and is probably

⏹️ ▶️ John powering it back to the router. It wouldn’t say, oh, I got to find some other access point and wirelessly

⏹️ ▶️ John talk to it, and then it can talk to the next one and hop, hop, hop. No, it’s got a wired connection to

⏹️ ▶️ John your actual network. And that’s how like, you know, wifi and offices work. You run ethernet to all over the place,

⏹️ ▶️ John every place you need an access point, like in hotels, in stadiums, in offices,

⏹️ ▶️ John the wifi access points have ethernet wires connected to them. whatever access point you’re near,

⏹️ ▶️ John you go wirelessly to the access point and then you’re all wired back. The reason people love mesh networks

⏹️ ▶️ John for home is people don’t have ethernet in their room in their house most of the time. You want to reach wireless

⏹️ ▶️ John to the far room that gets bad signal, and all you wanna do is plug something into power in

⏹️ ▶️ John the wall and you’d be like, done and done. And Ubiquiti’s products are often so

⏹️ ▶️ John far from that that you can’t even plug them into a wall once you get a power over ethernet adapter because they take all their power from

⏹️ ▶️ John the ethernet cable that they expect you to be plugged into. And you’re like, how do I plug this into the wall? I’ll just get a PoE

⏹️ ▶️ John thing and adapter. It’s like, okay, well, how does it get its signal? So I’m glad to know that they can do mesh networking, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the home focus products like Eero and apparently Google Wi-Fi and Orbi and all those other ones

⏹️ ▶️ John are so focused on the home case. They like, nobody has ethernet all over their house. Just assume

⏹️ ▶️ John that the only thing this is gonna be plugged into is power. And they also include dedicated radios just for

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the, I think they call it the backhaul or whatever, just for doing the between node communications. They have radios

⏹️ ▶️ John for talking to Wi-Fi at all the different frequencies. And then when your signal hits an access point,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got another radio whose sole purpose is to talk to whatever is the nearest mesh node to send

⏹️ ▶️ John your signal hop, hop, hop on its way back to the one router that’s actually plugged into Ethernet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. And that is like I actually don’t know if ubiquitous routers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like separate I mean, they all have or if their APs rather have have separate radios for that wireless backhaul.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do all have multiple wireless radios these days. So they might be able to just like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use one for that. But that is not a market that Ubiquiti focuses very much on. So they don’t put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of effort into

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, I think that was one of the upgrades in Eero was like, they used to have multiple radios for like 2.4 and five

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but then they did an upgrade a couple years back that’s like, actually we’re gonna add a whole other radio just for

⏹️ ▶️ John the backhaul instead of reusing any of the other radios and that helped with performance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I would say like, if you are having wireless linking between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco APs, If you cannot wire them all back to the home switch, just stick with the consumer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Stick with Google and Eero. Like those are gonna be fine for that purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ John Until Ubiquiti decides they want to address that market, because they totally could. Like it’s like they have all

⏹️ ▶️ John the technology and it seems like it should be possible than the rest. Just like the reason I wanted to ask about this is because I think

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of our listeners are just like, oh, I just have a home setup and they might already have one of these mesh ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not sure Ubiquiti addresses them that well yet. I don’t see any

⏹️ ▶️ John reason that they couldn’t and I hope they do because they seem to have way more home products. Like I just saw recently a video

⏹️ ▶️ John showing the Dream Machine, a little R2D2 trashcan thing. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so like, it’s basically like an airport express.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that’s one of their pro routers. That’s what I use at the beach.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, it’s got a wifi in it and it’s a router and it has a tiny bit of storage with

⏹️ ▶️ John an SD card slot, but it’s not a, it doesn’t seem like it’s a mesh

⏹️ ▶️ John network out of the box type thing. I still expect you if you’re adding APs have other wires. Anyway, I think this

⏹️ ▶️ John is an important clarifying point for people who are dying to get Ubiquiti stuff, because it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John like they haven’t quite reached that far down into the consumer realm for people who absolutely need mesh networking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, they do offer that. But it’s not very good. And it’s not going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaningfully better than what Google and Eero are doing for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t sound like their products

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are focused on that. No. They can do it, but they’re not focused on it, no. And certainly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to magically be better than Google and Aero, you know, substantially in those areas. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is designed for people who are going to be wiring things, Casey. It’s designed for people who are going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring every AP back somehow to the home switch. And that, so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would get to answer the question out of today’s lineup, what I would suggest for a typical home full of a nerd,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, but other people who tolerate the nerd, I would say your router choice right now is the Cloud Gateway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max or the Cloud Gateway Fiber. Cloud gateway fiber is higher end, it is more expensive, and it is out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stock. That’s another thing to know about Ubiquiti is that, it turns out, we are not the only people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who like them. Many people have learned the good word about Ubiquiti. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever they have a new high demand product, oftentimes it is out of stock. What

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to know about Ubiquiti also is that if you go on Amazon to buy their products,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are usually sold for above retail price on on Amazon by third parties.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can also get them from other retailers like B&H Photo is a Ubiquiti retailer. And so sometimes I’m able to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get stuff from there if Ubiquiti doesn’t have it, or if it’s, you know, it might be faster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from B&H for me cause I’m in New York and they’re in New York. But for the most part, they don’t have that many other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first party retailers that sell things at MSRP. So usually if you want something from Ubiquiti,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it directly from them. It will usually be substantially cheaper than the same thing on Amazon.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes things go out of stock when they’re new and in high demand. Sometimes they’re hard to get for a long time, usually not for too long.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they have, you know, alert me when it’s back in stock. So anyway, so going back to the question, what I would suggest, Cloud Gateway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max or Cloud Gateway Fiber for the router right now of the current lineup. If you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an inexpensive PoE switch, the Ultra switch, like just one word, Ultra,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an eight port switch that has two different options for AC adapters,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 60 watt and 210 watt. If you’re gonna be powering a bunch of like sub switches,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would get the 210. If not, get the 60, if you’re gonna be powering a few APs. And then for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the APs, you can use the U7 Lite and get two or three of those for a typical American house.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So those are a hundred bucks each. So, you know, two or 300 bucks for your APs. You got about a little under 200 bucks for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the switch and 200 bucks for the router. So you’re in, you know, 600 bucks maybe.

⏹️ ▶️ John And plan on running ethernet to all those access points.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, you should run ethernet to all of your access points. That’s a really good home setup for almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any U7s installed in either the restaurant or your house? It doesn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey where.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I have my new Long Island house is all U7 Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two Pros, one light, and one of the little in-wall ones.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I ask is I’ve heard rumblings that the Wi-Fi 7 support

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is real spotty. And in general, the U7 line of wireless access points

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not nearly as, not physically sturdy, but like computationally sturdy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for lack of a better way to describe it, as the U6 line. But I don’t have any personal experience with this, so maybe I’m lying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I know our friend Stephen Hackett had that problem with the U7s when he put them in his house. For that reason,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought all U6s for the restaurant, even though I have U7s here in the house I’m sitting in talking to you through right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I figured like, you know, just in case, let me stick with the U6s, because I don’t need all of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fancy Wi-Fi 6, six gigahertz radios that the U7 added. So it’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my purposes in the restaurant, but I will say I’ve had no problems with the U7 stuff. And that is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes Ubiquiti will have like one product that has like a little bit flaky software and you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a few software updates later and usually it’s fixed. So that’s, I think the U7 AP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco line is pretty new still, it’s only I think a year or two old. And so I think people had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues with it early on. I don’t know how many of those issues remain because again, I’m only using it in one place.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in that one place, I have no issues, but who knows? But those are definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software support.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you happen to know just off the top of your head what the major noteworthy differences are between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light and regular and pro editions of the AccessPoints?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to like check each generation because they vary, but typically the pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually has way more radios. And so the idea of the pro is it’s made for higher density

⏹️ ▶️ Marco environments. So that’s what that’s the one you put in the stadium. You know, you put a bunch of pros because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when you’re going to have a lot of clients on like, you know, talking to an AP, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, you need to like, you know, share a bunch of bandwidth and do a lot like so if you want like a lot of radio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bandwidth, get the pro for most home use. That’s really not necessary. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you care a lot about your Wi-Fi transfer speeds, if you want to like run a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed test from your brand new iPhone that has Wi-Fi 7 or whatever, you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run that speed test and you want to max out what you can get, get over a gigabit. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to do that, yeah, you’re going to want the Pro probably because that’s going to have the most radios. It can start using them in parallel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. But for most people’s needs, including my own, frankly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lights are fine. Good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. So, that’s it.

Casey’s tale 💸

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you had mentioned that the Cloud Gateway Fiber is new and never in stock. And let me tell you a tale.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been talking with Steven about doing this in fits and spurts in the house and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly wiring the house for Ethernet. The way it exists today or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey existed last week, spoiler alert, is that I had an Eero Pro 6, I believe, in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the office running as a main router. Then by way

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a Mocha bridge that converts from Ethernet to coax, and then another one on the other end, I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Eero Pro 6 in the primary bedroom, working as a wireless access point, again,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with effectively a wired backhaul by way of a combination of coax and Ethernet. And then an Eero Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the living room as an additional wireless access point. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stephen had said to me, you know what, I really recommend the Cloud Gateway Fiber in Stephen’s experience. He

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had originally bought the Cloud Gateway Max that you had recommended, and he found that he was having trouble saturating. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he said upstream, but I don’t recall. One direction of his connection to the internet, he found the throughput

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not as good on the Cloud Gateway Max, and the Cloud Gateway Fiber fixed that problem. Your mileage may vary,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. But I noticed that the Cloud Gateway Fiber is apparently sold out till kingdom come. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the benefits of having my apparatus, which this is a term I stole from Merlin,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that one of my 350 Docker containers is a thing called changedetection.io.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the website. And what you can do is you can self-host a thing that’ll basically just ping away at other websites

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tell you when they change. And over the last several releases, it’s also gotten a feature where it will,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sees that, oh, you’re looking at a product page for something and it will parse out, you know, without you having

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to provide regex or anything like that, it’ll parse out what the product is, how much it costs and whether or not it’s in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stock. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I have that hooked up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s incredible. And they have a hosted version for the record. Like I run this myself because it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very computationally intensive and I have Docker set up and squared away. So it’s no big deal, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could, and I genuinely don’t know how much it costs but you can get a hosted version of this where you have them host

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this for you. But I have something like 20 or 30 different webpages that I monitor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this. None of which are really critical in the grand scheme of things, but it is nice. If you have a place where it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will tell you something changes. And so I put the Cloud Gateway Fiber on there and I tweaked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it so that it’ll check every like 10 minutes or something like that instead of the like once or twice a day that I would for most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. And sure enough, in combination with pushover, which I’ve talked about many times in the past, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a mechanism by which you can send yourself text message, excuse me, push notifications, and it has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an API that a lot of different open source projects, you know, integrate with. So I got a push one day,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last week, saying, oh, the Cloud Gateway Fiber is in stock. And so I ran upstairs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and insta-bought one. And late last week, I was able to find

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time to install it. And I got to tell you, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been both a blessing and a curse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So the installation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey process

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was… First of all, congrats

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on snagging one. That’s not like, that is not easy for a high demand Ubiquiti product. So good job.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m telling you, changedetection.io, for something like the Switch 2, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. because that’s just like bananas demand. This is a lot of demand. That’s a whole different

⏹️ ▶️ Casey level. Lyle Troxell,

⏹️ ▶️ John Chief Investment Officer of Google I didn’t ask you to. Did you try to get a switch to on launch?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Miller I did. And there’s a whole story there that maybe we can talk about in the after show. It’s nothing bad, but it’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth getting into right now. But the short answer is yes, we have a reservation. How we got that is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole thing. But we’ll come back to that. Lyle Troxell Marco, did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go in? Marco McClendon No, I just tried when I woke up that day and it was already over. Lyle

⏹️ ▶️ John Troxell Yeah, no, it’s not the kind of product you wait to wake up about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I didn’t care that much to get it on launch day, but like I’ll try to get one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it comes out. It’ll be, you know, maybe it’ll take me a few months, but it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John, you got one at midnight?

⏹️ ▶️ John I got one the old-fashioned way. Lots of open tabs and devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Attaboy. So anyway, so I got the Cloud Gateway Fiber. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me just jump straight to the end. The worst part about the Cloud Gateway Fiber, which you warned me about, was Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey warned me about, which Stephen warned me about, is now I need all of my networking equipment to be ubiquity.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need all of it to be ubiquity. And I don’t want to spend that kind of money all in one shot because I like being married.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I’m like itching because I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need switches and wireless access points. I need all of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to run

⏹️ ▶️ John wires too?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, because I’ve got the coax in the… The Mocha thing? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you already have the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wires. I mean, it’s not optimal, but it is more than sufficient for my needs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, so I go to install it. And what I did, which I don’t think was the right choice in retrospect,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I did was I just pulled the ethernet cord that goes into the ERO that comes out of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ONT, the fiber optic, you know, ONT. I pulled that out of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ERO and I plugged it into the 10 gigabit port on the Cloud Gateway

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fiber and basically told it, go. And it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was fine. And like, it did set itself up okay. And it seemed to be working. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you, there’s a lot of switches to fiddle with, and it is reasonably user-friendly. I am not a networking guru

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any means, but it was reasonably straightforward, um, to, to figure out. But then once I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey got it squared away and, you know, it was talking to the internet, which was also a nice surprise because my recollection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing this with, with Fios in years past was that you had to like go on Verizon’s website and tell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them to like basically kick the ONT to allow a different MAC address to connect to it. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a whole nightmare years ago. And now it didn’t care. It could go back and forth between whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Didn’t matter at all. I freaking love Verizon Fios. You can take it from my cold, dead hands. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, but I did notice after connecting my laptop physically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the router, to the Cloud Gateway Fiber, first of all, depending on what I was doing, my laptop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was getting 100 megabits per second. And I’ve narrowed that down to, I believe that was a bad old Ethernet cable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was my own fault, but consistently I was only getting 250 megabits upstream.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I have a symmetric gigabit connection and consistently I was topping out at 250 megabits

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though I was being speed limited somewhere. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure this out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And eventually I did enough kagging and Googling and duck, duck going and whatnot that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody had said, change the WAN connection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the 10 gigabit Ethernet jacks, receptacle, whatever you want to call it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a port, there’s what I’m looking for. Change it to one of the other ports and plug in the WAN there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now there’s a couple things here. First of all, how freaking cool is it that you can tell the Ubiquiti, I would like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Internet to come in over there, please, rather than on this port. I would like it on this other port. And it’s very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey straightforward to do it. So before I actually committed to moving the port,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the management is mostly via the web, and it appears to me to be via Ubiquiti’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey website, I guess proxies or what have you, or establishes some connection between your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey local

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco device.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can log into your router from anywhere and manage it from anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is mostly nice, but a little unnerving in a case like this where, you know, what if I lose the connection

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the internet? But anyways, so I at least did that correctly. So I moved.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, to be clear, you can also do it locally. Like it also works locally. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, another thing you could try that you probably didn’t immediately assume would be very good,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS app. I did try that, is pretty good. And it can also, the iOS app can connect directly via

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth to most of the new routers. Oh hey, you can log into this locally, who knew? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great. So basically, whatever connectivity is available to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it, it will use. Good deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so I move the WAN port. I tell the management interface,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like the WAN to come in on port one, reconnect it, and everything’s right as rain. Good to go.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That all is well and good. The place where I think I screwed up is I did

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not tell the ERO to go into bridge mode before doing all this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think in retrospect, what I should have done is before I pulled the internet connection away from the ERO,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have said to the Eero, go into bridge mode, and then basically immediately cut off the internet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and throw it into the cloud gateway. I didn’t do that. And let me tell you, that Eero

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was frigging pissed because the only way you manage the Eero is through their iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. And it’s a similar thing to what we were just describing where you go to the iOS app, the iOS app is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey communicating with Amazon servers, Amazon servers communicating with the Eero. It was a nightmare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting that squared away. Eventually, I was able to convince it to, no, really, I need you in bridge

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode now. Eventually, with enough patience, which is not something that comes naturally to me, it did seem to figure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself out and everything was all well and good. But it took like an hour or two for the ERO to get a grip. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, some of that I think was my fault by perhaps choosing the wrong order of operations,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it did eventually get a grip. So then I start doing, you know, poking about in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey management interface. And one of the things it does is deep packet inspection. So it’ll tell you not only what devices

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are using, what, you know, so much and so on bandwidth, but also what applications.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I see that Netflix is like, and this is early on, you know, right within a couple hours of installing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix is like the third most used application, the kids were either not home or like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not playing with their screens. We don’t even have a frigging Netflix, Netflix account. What kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of trash is this? Would you like to guess what the problem was? Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remember I’m doing a lot of diagnostics while this is going on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Was Speedtest accessing Netflix?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fast.com, baby. You know who hosts that? Netflix. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s great. Sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. So it took me a minute, but I was like, why is Netflix being listed here? And it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like gigs upon gigs of data. And sure enough, it’s accurate. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this dummy over here was going to Fast.com on the regular. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s incredible.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the problem I have with this is that it has all sorts of incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, really snazzy like topology graphs and it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show exactly what’s connected to what. It’ll show, you can hit a little button that says, show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet traffic, and this is the thing that ruined me when I was in Memphis. And you can see the little dots flying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the graph of the topology. So you can see the dots going from Verizon to the Cloud Gateway Fiber and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then flowing into my MacBook or whatever the case

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John may be. You

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you’re watching the actual audio move in Audio Hijack when

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you see all those dots. Basically. Yeah, basically. It’s about the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same thing. It’s incredible. The problem though is that I have something like 55

⏹️ ▶️ Casey devices connected to the Cloud Gateway Fiber and they’re all flat because they’re all either on a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-ubiquity switch or they’re hanging off the EROs. And so as far as the Cloud Gateway Fiber is concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s just one flat network. What I got to get in my life is a switch for the office that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a unified switch so that’ll separate things out. I got to get some unified access points. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re looking to get rid of somewhat modern unified equipment on the cheap, let me know. I might be.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m not kidding. I would love some semi, like, I don’t want to go out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the U3 if such a thing exists. I’d like, you know, a six or seven or something like that. But if you, the listener, happen to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanting to get rid of something, do let me know. Marco, if you would like to send me something and pad it with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ubiquiti access points, a la Kindles, do let me know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say too, like, you know, when you are, you know, looking at that kind of, you know, switches and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, I suggest getting one really good switch, have that be like like your main switch, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then like your leaf node switches, so to speak, like the ones that you put with your TV and stuff, those can be the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap, like little flex switches that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey are just PoE

⏹️ ▶️ Marco powered and have like maybe four or five ports on them and usually cost like 40 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those can be really inexpensive switches because you would still get all of that management and introspection

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features of Ubiquiti. You still get those with their little tiny cheap switches too. They don’t have as much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughput and they don’t have as many features, but like all of the stuff that you’re talking about, you just need it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a ubiquitous switch. They’re all, like what we used to call managed switches back in the day,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all managed switches, even the cheap ones. So you don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every switch in your network to be some like $300 powerhouse. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just have like one good one and kind of fueling them all, and that’s kind of all you need.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I’ve put in the Slack, and if I remember, I’ll put in the show notes, but to be honest, I’ll probably forget, and there’s not much to look at. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look at my topology, It’s a frigging mess because it’s just, everything is microscopic because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, you know, exceedingly wide list of 50 some devices. And it’s just, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot have this. But no, the equipment is incredibly cool. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s so many things to fiddle with, but I don’t feel like I’ve had to fiddle with them for the most part outside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this WAN problem, which admittedly shouldn’t be a thing. Like it should work just fine the way I initially

⏹️ ▶️ Casey started, but at least I had an easy solution and I could take care of that on my own. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep packet inspection is cool. The graphs are cool. Not only just the internet traffic, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of different graphs and things you can look at. When you go to the devices, instead of some

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good looking but kind of funny line art that Eero uses, you get full color pictures that are accurate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all of these random devices that I have in my house. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the pictures of each individual synology and mostly auto-discovered the right one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s incredible. If you’re the kind of person that wants to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweak and fiddle with knobs and just play around, oh, it’s so great. But now I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need all the ubiquity equipment. And another time I’d like to talk to you about how I should lay this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Which speaking of, I don’t want to belabor the point, and I do think we need to move on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But one of the things that somebody, might’ve been Steven, pointed out to me, is if you go to design.ui.com,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to upload something as a floor plan. but it can literally be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a blank image, but you can draw out your floor plan, which I have done, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can draw out, if you set a scale, so this wall is 20 feet or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be, you can draw out a floor plan of your house, and I found an app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, what is it called? It’s called Magic Plan, all one word, where it’s really designed for professionals,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you want to do a single place, you know, like your house

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nothing else, then it’s free to do that. But once you start adding more places, you have to pay for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And it’s pretty expensive because it’s mostly a professional tool. But I use that to LIDAR scan the house. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were a couple of small problems with it, but for the most part, it was great and took a lot less time than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey measuring everything and so on and so forth. And it’s probably not perfectly accurate, but for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey purposes that I’m trying to accomplish, it’s more than enough. So I uploaded

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that to-

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have a floor plan to your house?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We never had a good one when we bought it back in 2008. And I’d like to get another one done at some point, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m both too cheap and too lazy.

⏹️ ▶️ John How’d you buy a house without seeing a floor plan? What’s going on down there, Virginia?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, there is a floor plan, but it’s awful. It’s truly terrible. It’s not good at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I have, I like did web archives of the listing for the house when it was up for sale from 2008.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can still get to them right now because guess where they are, gentlemen? On the Synology. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, but the floor plans are trash. But the point is you can drop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey access points, wireless access points. And if you tell this design tool what the material of your walls

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, is it metal, is it wood, is it drywall, et cetera, it will make a colorful map of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approximately what your Wi-Fi coverage will be based on where you’re placing what items.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I’m going to put a link or I put something in Slack. I don’t think this is going to go in the show notes for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in fact, neither of these pictures might go in the show notes because it’s a little bit of don’t be creepy. But imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a floor plan of the house and you’re seeing like green and yellow and red and so on and so forth. And the same thing with cameras. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point the camera and it’ll show you the approximate coverage area of the cameras. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any cameras yet, but that’s one of the things I do plan to do eventually. This stuff is incredible. And this is all for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey free on the design app. But don’t ever look at this. This is my tip to you. Unless Ubiquiti wants the sponsors,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never ever get their equipment because you’ll send all of your money to Ubiquiti. So just be blissfully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignorant. I made just a terrible mistake by signing myself up for this. Be blissfully ignorant.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Learn from my mistakes. Don’t ever look at anything that ubiquity does because it’s also cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome.

Hyperspace update!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you’ve been busy. Tell me what’s going on with Hyperspace.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just to remind everybody, or people who are just looking for the first time, I recently launched an app called Hyperspace.

⏹️ ▶️ John The deal with that app, I need to come up with a snappy elevator pitch or whatever. But it’s basically, you can get back

⏹️ ▶️ John some disk space without deleting anything. If you are a digital hoarder like me, you want to

⏹️ ▶️ John have as much free disk space as possible, but you don’t want to delete anything. And there’s tons of apps out there that will

⏹️ ▶️ John find duplicate files and then tell you to pick which ones you want to delete. But that’s like picking among my children. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want to delete any of my files.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I just want the disk space

⏹️ ▶️ John back. So Hyperspace does that for you because it finds files that have the same contents and it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John them so they’re sharing a single instance of those contents on disk instead of each having their own private copy.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what the app does. And I talked about it on the show. Before I even had a name, I talked about it on the show

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m thinking of making this app. And the title of that episode was an incredibly dangerous app because it is in the

⏹️ ▶️ John end an app that modifies a bunch of people’s files. And it doesn’t know what those files are. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John those files were created by other apps. those files have your data in them. And here comes my app, this

⏹️ ▶️ John app that knows nothing about them and says, yeah, I’m gonna mess with those files. So incredibly dangerous app. When I launched it in 1.0,

⏹️ ▶️ John I launched it with a very safe feature set. I made it not do a lot, like a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the most difficult things that it could possibly do. It just didn’t do them in 1.0. I knew that

⏹️ ▶️ John was a potential risk in terms of like people are gonna get the app and be like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John all my files are in iCloud drive, this ignores them one star. And that happened, right? But that’s, I knew that was going to happen,

⏹️ ▶️ John but my plan was always launched with a safe feature set, get the thing out there to a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of users, because even though I had a really good, really big beta test with, with ATP members, in fact, as part of

⏹️ ▶️ John a membership promotion thing we were doing, if you’re an ATP member, you get to be on the beta and a bunch of people did,

⏹️ ▶️ John there is nothing like giving the app to regular customers who are not listening to a tech podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ John You get so much better results and feedback and everything from that than you do with the beta test. Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, that’s true. Let me jump in here though. One of the best decisions I think I made for CallSheet, and I’ve said this before but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to say it again, was opening that up to the ATP members made CallSheet so much better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suspect that it was the same with Hyperspace. Even though this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the perfect, I’ll scratch your back, you’ll scratch mine situation, because I wanted to juice membership,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey full stop. That’s what I was after, and I wanted my app to get better. Then the members got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to something that was not illicit, but cool and hidden and secret.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am so glad that I did that. I was not convinced I had made the right choice when I opened it up to ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey members, and I am so very glad and so very thankful for anyone who spent time looking at it and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey issuing bug reports and so on. If there is another app which is sitting here now, I have zero plans for anything else

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the moment. I plan to do the same thing again because for me, it was incredibly helpful and I just want to thank the members

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that did participate one more time because it was great.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said when I launched the app, the beta was great, but there’s a difference between beta testers

⏹️ ▶️ John and regular users, especially for an app like mine, because an app like

⏹️ ▶️ John mine doesn’t exist just on its own with its own data or with like in your case with the movie database

⏹️ ▶️ John behind it or whatever. It acts on people’s data. And if you’re a beta tester, you very

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly learn, well, I kinda have to either like have it configured not to really

⏹️ ▶️ John do it or I’ll get rid of all my duplicates and I can’t really be a good beta tester anymore. So most beta testers, I

⏹️ ▶️ John imagine, are rerunning it in the mode where it doesn’t really do the final step of the thing. and they’re really running on the

⏹️ ▶️ John same set of data over and over again. The variable that I needed in the mix here

⏹️ ▶️ John was regular users using it on their real data for real. And

⏹️ ▶️ John you just need real users to do that because you don’t want testers to use it on their real data for real, because once they do, they’re like, well, I can no

⏹️ ▶️ John longer test your app unless I somehow manufacture data. We have an AskATV question for a future episode,

⏹️ ▶️ John if people are wondering how that worked. But anyway, that was the key. It’s data based. I need

⏹️ ▶️ John people to run it on their data to find out where all the problems are on their real data and their

⏹️ ▶️ John real experience, it’s real customers’ hands. And I did a blog post about

⏹️ ▶️ John this because recently I rolled out version 1.3 of Hyperspace and 1.3 marks the end of a

⏹️ ▶️ John journey that started with 1.0 at launch where I was slowly adding back all the features

⏹️ ▶️ John that I didn’t launch with. When I say adding back is basically I launched

⏹️ ▶️ John with restrictions. Like when I was running it locally, I could just turn off all the restrictions and it could just have access to everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I knew that there were problems with certain classes of things. So the three big classes of things that I described

⏹️ ▶️ John my blog post was number one packages, which is the thing that most people don’t even know about. But I try to explain in the documentation.

⏹️ ▶️ John Basically it’s a folder that looks like a file. They’re all over a place in Mac iOS applications

⏹️ ▶️ John are packages. They are, you know, whatever mail.app that’s a folder. It’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff in it. I remember talking about it in my Mac. I was 10 reviews back in the day. This is a technology from the next world.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a folder that looks like a file. And inside that folder are a bunch of other files and certain packages have

⏹️ ▶️ John certain structure There is a difference between bundle in a package and it’s too esoteric to get into it’s not that important But

⏹️ ▶️ John the point is lots of stuff in macOS. They look like files, but they’re not They’re folders with stuff in them

⏹️ ▶️ John photo libraries your apple photos library It’s called it’s like I don’t like it dot photos

⏹️ ▶️ John library file name extension. Guess what? That’s a folder All the stuff is inside there. It’s a massive

⏹️ ▶️ John folder with like millions of files inside it if you have a big library Sorry,.rtfd files that

⏹️ ▶️ John you save in text edit folders. So packages. Does that read the effin document?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, I believe, I wrote it in the documentation. It’s like rich text format

⏹️ ▶️ John with attachments? I don’t know. That

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco makes sense, with attachments. It’s not the RTFM

⏹️ ▶️ John document, although that’s probably taken. Anyway, I was avoiding those,

⏹️ ▶️ John but because, you know, well, messing around in people’s photo libraries is dangerous and also because

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people don’t know that they’re folders, they don’t know you can right click them and do show package contents. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John not used to, as I say in the blog post, cracking open and digging around in the guts. So if anything went

⏹️ ▶️ John wrong with reclaiming one of these files and my error message directs

⏹️ ▶️ John them into one of their packages, they’d be like, what the heck is this? I’m inside this thing that I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even know was a folder, because the Finder will do it. Like you don’t need to use terminal or anything. You can do it in the Finder, but it’s not something people are

⏹️ ▶️ John used to. So I wanted to wait until I got most of the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John major problems worked out, not doing packages. So version 1.1, that was about a

⏹️ ▶️ John little less than a month after launch, I added support for packages. And that was after, I don’t know, four or five

⏹️ ▶️ John or six releases in the 1.0.x series, five releases. I did five

⏹️ ▶️ John 1.0.x releases before I was ready for 1.1. So I did package support. The next big one was cloud storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody who had all their folders in iCloud Drive was like, this app is useless to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t do cloud storage. I mean, they haven’t paid for it at that point. So it’s good that they didn’t have to do that. But they were still

⏹️ ▶️ John mad. They’re like, I was excited to use this app. And it turns out it won’t even tell me how much space I can save because it totally ignores cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John storage, I had to tackle cloud storage. cloud storage is not like normal files, they’re weird. And I had to deal with them

⏹️ ▶️ John and required using a bunch of apples API, which actually went better than I expected. But it was still tricky. So version 1.2,

⏹️ ▶️ John in April, supported cloud storage that includes iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John Drive, some versions of Dropbox, OneDrive, all the other things that use the file provider extension.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then finally, in version 1.3, which is the very end of April, I supported library directories.

⏹️ ▶️ John In your home directory, you’ll see a directory called library, which I think is hidden by default. So maybe you’ll only see it

⏹️ ▶️ John if you unhide it by switching the flag from the terminal, or if you just look in terminals

⏹️ ▶️ John there. Anyway, the reason Apple hid the library directory is because for years, people would go on a Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John open in their home directory, see a folder called library, and like, what the hell is this? And they would just like, either start rummaging around

⏹️ ▶️ John in it and throwing stuff out, or they would try to delete the whole library folder. Don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John You need that folder. It’s super duper important. I think it’s actually protected now, in addition to being hidden, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t actually delete it now, but you can delete stuff inside it. Anyway, don’t delete stuff in there. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John super important. But I had been avoiding that directory and the library directory that’s at the top

⏹️ ▶️ John level of your boot volume, because there’s super important stuff in there and it changes

⏹️ ▶️ John really often. Any running application or any running background process is very likely

⏹️ ▶️ John messing with stuff inside your library folder. And there’s a huge amount of stuff in there and if you screw

⏹️ ▶️ John up the stuff in there or corrupt it or damage it, applications could start crashing or have problems and

⏹️ ▶️ John you wouldn’t understand why because people don’t even know what’s in there. They’re not supposed to know. It’s private stuff that belongs to individual

⏹️ ▶️ John applications. Your preferences, cache files, the container directories

⏹️ ▶️ John for the sandbox documents. It’s, you know, there’s lots of sort of, you know, non-user

⏹️ ▶️ John serviceable parts inside library directories. That was the one I saved for last, even though I think it is one of the biggest sources

⏹️ ▶️ John of data that you can get back. And so in version 1.3, I supported libraries.

⏹️ ▶️ John All of these things, packages, cloud stories, library storage and libraries, they’re all disabled by default

⏹️ ▶️ John in settings. So I’m probably gonna have to add a fact item that says, hey, it didn’t find a lot of data. What can I do about

⏹️ ▶️ John that? I said well if you go to settings you can turn it flip this switch from this switch to this switch You know every one of these switches

⏹️ ▶️ John even though the version 1.3 has all these features and we’ll do all of them They’re off by default because

⏹️ ▶️ John I want the default experience still to be the safest for people who don’t know the details But if you do know the details if you’re the type

⏹️ ▶️ John person who immediately hits command comma To see what the settings are Turn on the settings

⏹️ ▶️ John that you want I even put in settings for like you can go inside packages But you can refuse to reclaim from inside them instead

⏹️ ▶️ John just use them as the source for reclaiming stuff outside of them Yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still extremely conservative. Maybe I’ll change my mind about that going forward, but it’s an important milestone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Version 1.3 doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this was always my plan from the beginning 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3. I’m not going to say feature

⏹️ ▶️ John complete because I still got more stuff on my to do list and more features that I’m going to add. But this is what I had in mind

⏹️ ▶️ John as like, as I said at the end of this, this is kind of what 1.0 quote unquote should have

⏹️ ▶️ John been. But it was I would feel I wouldn’t have felt is safe doing 1.0 with this feature

⏹️ ▶️ John set in it. And in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t because boy, I fixed so many bugs

⏹️ ▶️ John at every stage I was fixing bugs. And all of those bugs contributed to like the

⏹️ ▶️ John most dangerous thing, the library directory being as safe as it is in 1.3. So far, I haven’t heard any disasters or complaints.

⏹️ ▶️ John So fingers crossed, I think things are going well. If you tried hyperspace, and it didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do anything for you, check it out. Now also remember, I’ll probably have this as a fact as well. The The file

⏹️ ▶️ John type list is also very conservative. You can probably safely at this point with version 1.3,

⏹️ ▶️ John tell it to allow any file in the file type list. And so it won’t filter by file type. That’ll make your scans

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit faster and also it will probably find a lot more data. So yeah, toggle on packages, toggle on

⏹️ ▶️ John cloud storage. And if you’re really brave, toggle on libraries and see how much more data you can find.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m really glad that you haven’t had the, you know, oh, I’ve lost all my family photos and it’s all your fault feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, mostly just got the one star reviews, which I’m glad the developer replies were in there

⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re like, one star doesn’t do photo libraries. And then I would release version 1.1, I would say,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just released version 1.1 and it does support photo libraries. And you’re just sitting there waiting and you’re just hoping the person will notice

⏹️ ▶️ John that they gave a one star review for a feature that your program didn’t have. And then a week later you added that feature

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, come on, notice the review, revise your review. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John one star, no support for cloud storage, developer replies, it now supports cloud storage, then you’re waiting, come

⏹️ ▶️ John on, notice that I reply. You know, you win some, you lose some, like, that’s the downside to launching

⏹️ ▶️ John conservative. But so far, no one has said you deleted all my data. Like, programs have bugs,

⏹️ ▶️ John It could happen, but you know, so far so good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s awesome.

Casey’s vibe-coding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been doing a little bit of vibe coding recently and speaking of bugs. Yeah. Speaking of bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this all started with me wanting to post a GIF on blue sky

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t even remember what it was to be honest. Oh, I think I was, I was trying to reply to a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey post that Jamel Bowie had written. Um, he, he is just so freaking smart and so cool, but that’s neither here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nor there. Um, anyways, I was trying to reply to a post of his, I think it was something like, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, name a movie you’ve seen or reply with a movie you’ve seen a million times. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you know, everyone was replying with gifts. And so of course I was going to post a hunt for an October gift. I forget exactly what it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was. And it’s too long ago to dig up. But anyways, I wanted to reply with a gift. And so I went to my favorite,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, gift repository app, which is written by my friend jelly. And I went to gift wrapped

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I copied the gift, the actual image, and I went to paste it in the blue sky app on my phone and nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened. All right. well, maybe Blue Sky doesn’t want to take a GIF either from

⏹️ ▶️ Casey GIFWrapped or just in general. I know what I’ll do is I’ll go to GIFWrapped and I’ll copy the URL and I’ll put that in.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I tried that and it still wasn’t quite right. And I was very annoyed at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I didn’t know if maybe it was because of some like weird GIFWrapped URL or something like that. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I realized what I want is, or I felt like I wanted at the time, is I want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to put a repository of all my gifts on some publicly accessible web

⏹️ ▶️ Casey page so that I could just grab a public world accessible URL for them at any point. My friend

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ste has something like this on his own website that he uses from time to time. I want to do that too.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now none of this is conceptually challenging, right? None of it is difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now that I’ve had – now I’ve added another new shiny hammer to my tool belt which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is Cloudflare and Cloudflare Pages, because that’s what I used for the call sheet web

⏹️ ▶️ Casey presence. So I thought, well, maybe I could do that. So what is the best,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most reasonable way to do that? Well, I can put a bunch of GIFs in a folder, put

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on GitHub and connect Cloudflare to that GitHub account or GitHub repository, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would work. Then I thought, well, but apparently, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no mechanism by which I can parse out or read a list

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of files in the file system using any of the like CloudFlare

⏹️ ▶️ Casey APIs. I’m sure if I like went full on node or something like that, I could do it. But you know, for just when I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to just whip this together real fast, there was no obvious answer to that. And honestly, it doesn’t, if you know an answer, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. It’s just bear with me, I’m just telling the story. So, so I tried doing that and that didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey work out. And so I was like, all right, well, maybe what I can do is, well, I don’t know what I should do. What can I do about this? So I thought, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me ask chat GPT, see what it says. And around the same time I was thinking of it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had this like nebulous thought in my mind and chat GPT said, oh, here’s what you can do. Just make a list

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all of the GIFs and store that as like JSON or something like that. I was like, you know what? That’s a great idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll do that. All right, so can you write me a little script or something, I forget exactly, this is like a week and a half ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the particulars don’t really matter, but you know, I can figure out some way that we can do that and can I run that as like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-build step or something like that? And it said, well, I don’t know about that. Oh wait, no, I know what I can do. What if I did it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with GitHub Workflow? It said, yes, you could do that with GitHub Workflow. Let’s work on this together. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m writing, I’m vibe coding my way through this. Well, here’s what I want to do, blah, blah, blah. OK, well, try this. Oh, that didn’t work, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s why, blah, blah, blah. And so we went back and forth. And then finally, I got to the position that, oh, I’ve got all of my GIFs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Cloudflare publicly accessible if I want it. But hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since we’re already vibe coding my way through this entire self-assigned project, what if I had it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey generate some sort of web front end, where just put all the gifts on one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey webpage. It’s like 300 gifts. It’s a terrible decision. I fully recognize that’s a terrible decision, but who cares?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is only for me. Can you do it?” And sure enough, it did. And then said, hey, I can make it better in such and such way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, sure. Do it. Okay. I can make it better in this other way. Sure. Sounds great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Within the span of a couple of hours, which granted, maybe I could have done this in less time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by myself. I don’t know. But in a couple of hours, I had a pretty decent looking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey web-based GIF repository, and it was all done via vibe coding.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am capable, I genuinely believe in my heart, I am capable of doing this by hand, 100%. But I also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely believe that it would have taken a lot longer for me to do it because I’m so far out of the web game at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey folks. I can do web stuff, but it’s just not my bag anymore. And I think, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right there with me on that one. And so it’s just not something that really revs my engine. I wanted the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey destination. I didn’t really care that much about the journey. And it turns out in a couple of hours with chat GPT,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got there. None of the story is that remarkable in and of itself, but this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time for me that I just sat there and pinged away at chat GPT

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and together, we fixed a problem. And let me tell you, there are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey only a handful of times that I really get that, that jolt of feeling like I’ve got coworkers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again in the good way. Obviously there’s coworkers in the bad way. I’m talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not at all. Not at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. Um, but, but no, it was, it was not as good as having an actual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coworker, but let me tell you, for someone who works independently, 95% of my, or well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in this context, but in the term, in terms of like programming, I’ve worked independently almost entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was so great to like have a coworker for a minute and it really worked out well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was a resounding success now. And we can come back to in just a second, but in contrast to that,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have started down the path of adding just a link to Letterboxd

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, or I’m sorry, John, Letterboxd in CallSheet. So it’s one of the quick actions you can just hop

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over to Letterboxd and it’ll open that film in Letterboxd directly. So you don’t have to search

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it over there or anything like that. Well the mechanism by which I have all these links, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a SF symbol and it’s a bit of text. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no SF symbol for letterboxed. Of course not. There is an envelope,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s no, you know, three overlapping circles, which is the letterboxed logo. There’s no SF symbol

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. So I dug up, I think I might’ve asked it to just make one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it didn’t work at all. And then I dug up a copy of letterbox,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an SVG of their logo, just a straight up SVG. And I fed that into

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chat GPT and it tried and tried and tried and tried to try to get that in to be an SF symbol. And it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey took for freaking ever to get it to the point that the SF symbols app would even import

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it created. And I’m continually feeding it. Oh, it can’t find the margins. It can’t find the margins. You can’t do this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Can’t you

⏹️ ▶️ John just do this in a straight Swift UI? It’s such a simple logo, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably, but I needed to because of other uninteresting reasons. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be incredibly preferred for it to be an SF symbol. It can be a custom SF symbol. I have other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones like that, but an SF symbol nonetheless, and for uninteresting, complicated reasons. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried so hard to get it to work. Eventually it did import into the SF symbols app, but what I saw was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey blank. So like it sucked in whatever this, you know, bespoke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SVG was, but it doesn’t appear to be anything. And I haven’t gone back to try this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again in the last couple of days, because I’ve been busy with other things. In fact, I’ve been busy with Peak of View, which we’re going to come back to in a moment.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for the life of me, I haven’t been able to do it. And the other thing that’s a really chap in my butt is because I’m cheap

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t want to pay the 20 bucks a month in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco perpetuity. Oh my God. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco got to pay for chat GPT, man. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey worth

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I think I do. If I continue to use it like this, I absolutely will.

⏹️ ▶️ John I started paying for it before I started hyperspace, though.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. See, there you go. So anyway, so I think that might be in my future is paying for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me tell you, everybody out there, like if you’re going to spend a bit of money on subscriptions in the tech world.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are two subscriptions that you need to buy before everything else. YouTube with no ads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and chat GPT is unlimited plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, stop. That’s not true. The zero with element is ATP dot FM slash join. Okay, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. Three things. It actually it’s funny you bring that up because you know what I’ve been on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the precipice of engaging on even though I’m so cheap and I really don’t want to do it, but I am on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey precipice of doing YouTube without ad because they have the new cheap. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have it yet? What? You’re not doing

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey YouTube without ads?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. I know, I think I’m really playing myself

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco here.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t buy any Ubiquity switches until you buy that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Seriously,

⏹️ ▶️ John seriously, bang for your buck, quality of life improvement

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for YouTube.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you have to, especially your kids, if they’re not already watching YouTube, they will be soon.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh no, they are.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You gotta get rid of those ads. You

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what’s already done to them. My daughter knows what the Geico Gecko is for like the one week before I turned

⏹️ ▶️ John off ads on YouTube when she was like five

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. Well, the thing is, I really played myself because I didn’t turn it off or I didn’t, you know, subscribe or whatever during election

⏹️ ▶️ Casey season. And that was a dire mistake.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do you got to turn this off now? I feel like making you stop the podcast and pay for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Madness. Anyway, but focus, focus, focus. So part of the problem, though, is because I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet paid for it is I have to wait like a day between every three attempts because it’s like, dude,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ran out of compute on this one. You’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have to try it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t believe you’re doing 20 bucks. What are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because I don’t think I’m genuinely don’t think the 20 will get me over the edge. I don’t think it’s capable of solving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this problem. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, it probably won’t help you with this here, but it’s absolutely worth it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you have something that’s very limited like that, you avoid using it because you don’t want to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or you want to hit the limits.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And

⏹️ ▶️ John you need to fail a lot with these things.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is also very true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once something is unlimited, you start finding more opportunities to use it. And the value of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your life increases by usually a pretty good amount. So this is the kind of thing where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you ever have any reason to ask Chachi P.T. things, you should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for the plan because then you can use it in all sorts of ways that you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of. Yeah, that’s very fair. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John probably sure. Or if you’re me, you pay for multiple ones so you can pit them against each other.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, to finish very quickly, I tried all this in Claude as well and it did a smidgen

⏹️ ▶️ Casey better, but not really that much better. Yeah, so you can

⏹️ ▶️ John watch multiple LMs fall on their faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So as a final note on this, If you, the listener, are capable of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey making a approximately square aspect ratio letterboxed D SF

⏹️ ▶️ Casey symbol, send it my way and stickers will be returned. If you- Is there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a

⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC session on doing custom SF symbols?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There’s literally three

⏹️ ▶️ John circles. I don’t think you can just-

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am incapable. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no chance I’ll be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Watch the WWDC session, draw three circles, fill them with the color.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I genuinely don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I’m capable of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And plus I don’t have like Illustrator and all the other stuff that you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John need.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Affinity Designer is a free trial. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet you can find a free vector tool to make three circles. Like, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pretty… You could use what

⏹️ ▶️ John do you call that code, that paint code thing that Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco has. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is not free though, but you can use… I’m sure there are free

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey options. It’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fine. But anyway, but no, the real thesis of this whole story though is that if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not something that you really, really, really care about, like this GIF repository that was just me goofing off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this SF symbol thing, I do really care about it, but it either would have worked or it didn’t, right? Like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a do or die thing. It has been real nice for those sorts of scenarios.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been really surprised how much I enjoyed just vibe coding my way through this little gift

⏹️ ▶️ Casey project that I self-assigned. And even though it was frustrating, a lot of that obviously is my own fault. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sub-symbol thing, it definitely was getting there. I just don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll ever get it quite over the hump.

⏹️ ▶️ John Depending if you are a vibe coding prescriptivist or a descriptivist, I’ve heard

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people pushback against our past discussion and other discussions that don’t involve us at all

⏹️ ▶️ John about what actually is vibe coding is what Casey just described is that vibe coding the stricter

⏹️ ▶️ John definitions I’ve seen would say this does not qualify what this is just is is you using chat

⏹️ ▶️ John GPT to help you code and you’d be like well no but I didn’t write any of it it wrote it all itself isn’t that vibe coding

⏹️ ▶️ John I think like the person who coined the phrase has said something about like you have to not

⏹️ ▶️ John care about the result whether the result works or not and you do care about it. Like that’s, that’s, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John all, maybe all you care about is whether it works or not. But

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re about to email us and tell us that what Casey did, isn’t really vibe coding, I would say that I think the phrase vibe

⏹️ ▶️ John coding is currently in the early stages of evolving. Uh, and

⏹️ ▶️ John like so many things in the world, what the inventor of the phrase wants it to mean is not necessarily what

⏹️ ▶️ John it will come to mean. So Casey already thinks that what he just described as vibe coding. I’m not entirely sure

⏹️ ▶️ John if you disagree. I would just say, I think this is a fluid situation, as they

⏹️ ▶️ John say, and vibe coding will mean what it means. Either we will fade from a vocabulary and we will laugh at

⏹️ ▶️ John ourselves for using this phrase in a few years, or we’ll mutate into a totally different definition.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it hasn’t really existed for like three weeks as a term.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, seriously. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty new, but already people are saying, that’s not vibe coding. So I just wanted to head that off.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I got news for you, everybody in the world. You don’t get to control what terms mean. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once people start using it to mean a certain thing, you’ve lost control and that’s just what it means. Like that’s just how language works.

⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, the descriptivist.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we are running long, so we should probably cut this off. But I just want to say for next week

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the docket already is the Backblaze stuff. So we aren’t going to talk about it this week. We’ve run too long.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will be talking about it next week. So don’t worry, we’ll get

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So please email only Casey about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey the Backblaze stuff in the meantime.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposite of what I want, damn it!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey All right, thank

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete.me, and thank you to our members who support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. You can join us at atp.fm.com. One of the many perks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. In addition to all the other exclusive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco member content, you get a weekly bonus topic every single episode. This week’s Overtime, we’re going to be talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors of a Vision Pro successor or including one rumor for a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac tethered product. I’ll be talking about that in overtime this week. Join now to listen at.fm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thanks everybody. talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it mean to Accidental Tech Podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so long

Marco’s vibe-coding

Chapter Marco’s vibe-coding image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, I actually did my own vibe coding recently, I think. Oh!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think maybe we’ll see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we’ll see if it qualifies. So I mentioned when talking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about my E-ink tablet journey between the Remarkable 2 and the Supernote,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mentioned that I wished that the Remarkable had links the way the Supernote

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can like, you can like, you know, draw something on a Supernote note and just like lasso it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it link to a different page or a different note or even a web URL if you want. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to use that to interlink between my major notes of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco personal, restaurant, and overcast. Those are my major areas of notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And rather than having to jump all the way back to the document picker or to swipe between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different pages, I wanted just buttons at the top of each screen. Well I learned that there’s this whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco community of remarkable like templates that you can buy that people will sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you if they have some kind of like some kind of like system like a journaling system. Okay buy buy these PDFs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they interlink within themselves so you can like jump to different sections and use my journaling system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and but they’re just PDFs with links inside of them. So it turns out the remarkable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports PDF links with so to different pages within the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco document. That is the only way they’re supported. They’re supported only by touch, not by hitting them with a pen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are indeed supported in that way within a PDF. So I thought, hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I make a PDF template for my notes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has the major areas like as buttons across the top?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s very clever. And it would just be blank. The whole rest of the document would be blank because you don’t have a bullet journal system

⏹️ ▶️ John or a theme system journal or anything like that. It’s just an empty page.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Because I only wanted like basically two, one or two pages per thing, plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a scratch pad with a few pages on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John One or two pages? Wait, I thought it was the whole deal. This just has to be one page.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Occasionally I need to overflow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sub category.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s the thing. So like-

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a page inflation happening here. The stuff on the second page, you’re never going to see it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know. Well, so what I’m using it for is like, so, you know, in the context of the restaurant, we have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sub project of the stock room, making a stock room. It’s like, OK, well, that that has like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, its own set of 10 things. So on page one, the main page, I have stock room and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I have an arrow pointing off the right margin to say next page. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that page, all the stock room specific stuff, basically a subject.

⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if anyone for Remarkables listening, what you should do is make it so that when you underline some text,

⏹️ ▶️ John it you think pops up that says, do you want to to make this a link, that would be cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe just any kind of any kind of, you know, user-creatable link on device would be amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much in any form it takes. Anyway, so I learned I figured,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, what if I make a PDF? How do I do this? So I’ll send you a picture of what here I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco put this in our slack here. It’s it’s full of stuff. So I’m not going to share publicly. But this is this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a picture of what I have created. You can see across the the top there are four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like icons that I have drawn. Oh, I love that little stick person for personal restaurant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco symbol overcast symbol and scratchpad symbols what you’re seeing here is one of the scratchpad pages.

⏹️ ▶️ John I love this. I know it’s supposed to be don’t swing the lights but it looks a little bit like a gallows or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I know what it means. This is for me. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John you have a Tiff give you a helping hand with some of these. The artwork or maybe have her help draw the

⏹️ ▶️ John lines a little bit straighter on your list.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I feel like it’s actually like I like the slightly imperfect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look of handwriting. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John why like… They’re slightly and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s… My overcast icon, I could have just imported the overcast icon perfectly, but I didn’t. I drew it by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand and I didn’t even use the remarkable like perfect circle methods. I just drew a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco freehand circle that was not a perfect circle because I just like the look better in this context.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’m trying to figure out, okay, how do I create? I know PDFs can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have links. How do I make one? So first I go to chat GPT and I say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what tools can do this? And it’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard of and Acrobat. I’m like well I have Creative Cloud.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I install Acrobat and I spent a good half hour trying and I kept going back to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chat GPT.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re XY probably on this one already because you’re thinking like a programmer being like what tools

⏹️ ▶️ John can do this thing that I need to do instead of thinking like a non-programmer and saying make me a PDF with links in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually never thought to do quite that, but I did for a while. I’m like, you know, trying to get chat to talk me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through how the heck to use Acrobat. What a weird app that is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Didn’t you feel good about installing that on your computer? Oh, I’d saw it on my laptop. I like I didn’t want it on my main computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to isolate. You have to isolate it Acrobat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Anyway, so eventually I I’m like, I just give

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up on Acrobat like this is taking so long trying to like copy and paste the links between pages

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sort of worked but not quite and it was a mess it was just a disaster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I realized wait a minute I’m a programmer do you here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna send you a screenshot here do you remember what this language is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, is that Postscript?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John ringing any bells. I mean, I thought you were about to show me Postscript, but this doesn’t look like Postscript. This is LaTeX.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ve never written that by hand.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, gracious. So I’m like, wait a minute. That’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming language that I can use to to create PDFs.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, you just got done complaining, oh, I don’t know web stuff or whatever, but as people in the chat room have pointed

⏹️ ▶️ John out, if you just made an HTML page with links and then printed it to PDF, that might’ve worked too. What?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s a theory. I don’t think so.

⏹️ ▶️ John It would’ve been a quick thing to try, because I’m pretty sure you still remember enough HTML to make a document with a link in it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, maybe, but who knows with all this modern box model stuff that we have?

⏹️ ▶️ John I honestly think you should’ve asked ChatGPT to make me a PDF with four links at the top called this with these

⏹️ ▶️ John icons?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I didn’t, for some reason, I didn’t think to try that. But I did say, here, my initial

⏹️ ▶️ Marco prompt was, generate LaTeX markup for a page with a row of four square round rectangular corner

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of 0.5 inches per side. And it did it. And it was big,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it worked. And I didn’t ask it for links yet. I’m like, let me just see if it can do just the layout, and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll figure out how to do the links. And it did it, and it worked. And then,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, I asked, By the way, how do I install this on a Mac? What packages do I need? Did it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you to use Homebrew? No, this is too old for Homebrew. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, I haven’t seen LaTeX since college. Oh, it’s still in use, believe me. Oh, I’m sure. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, if you want a programming language to lay

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John out a page.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where you’ll see it. You’ll first see it in college, that’s for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but it turns out you can go to Mac Tech and there is a six gig

⏹️ ▶️ Marco package you can install that will do this. And I was like, okay, great, I installed it. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then, you know, I had to figure out like, how to get the links in. And when you’re using chat GPT

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to generate code for you, you can tell it, like in this case, I had to tell it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, move it to the top right corner. Like they picked the wrong corner. And then, you know, down, down, down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I asked later on, like, how do I fill in the shapes? And how do I make page breaks? Because I wanted this to be multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pages. Okay, and then told me, here’s how you make the page, here’s how you can do it with loop and everything. It was working.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even, there was some place where it does shading and it’s like, the example it gave me was like, fill

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray exclamation point 30. I asked, what’s the numeric range on the gray? It gave me a whole table

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the different gray values and what they mean. You know, go on, how to do links. Now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point, eventually, it created the, I had to create the links for me, but it wasn’t aligned.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t actually working. The links were like off to the side. So I just said, the link is not aligned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the shape. And then you see, ah, yes, it actually doesn’t work. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a pattern that, in case you might be relevant to your SF symbols not working thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a chat GPT will generate you code. If it doesn’t work, you can just tell it in that thread,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t work. Instead,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s giving this error,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s doing this bad behavior. And it will usually say something like, oh, yeah, you’re right, that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. Here’s something that does.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean, it’s very agreeable in that way. But the sort of the death spiral pattern that you will come into if

⏹️ ▶️ John you do this a lot is, it will say, oh, you’re right, here, try this approach instead. And then you’ll say, that approach doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ John either. And they’ll say, oh, you’re right, that one doesn’t work, try this. And it will oscillate between the two non-working ones, no matter what you

⏹️ ▶️ John say, whenever you say it doesn’t work, it’ll say, here, try this. And you’ll say, you just told me that, that one didn’t work from earlier,

⏹️ ▶️ John do you remember that? And it would be like, oh, yes, you’re right, try this one. Back and forth, A and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco B, A and B, and neither A nor

⏹️ ▶️ John B works.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of dead ends in these conversations, but that’s why I enjoy having multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John ones of these going, Because same prompt for multiple different LLMs,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they will go off in wildly different directions. Often, they’ll all produce non-working stuff. But sometimes, one of them will

⏹️ ▶️ John go in a direction you find promising. And then I just start over, wipe the slate screen, start a new thread with the new approach, and then try them all

⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. It’s lots of fun.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I tried. I eventually got what I wanted. However, let me show you the abomination that creates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I wanted. What I’ve pasted to you now is a PHP script that I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote to generate LaTeX code. Of course. Because I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out how to do some of the loops and sets and counts correctly in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John LaTeX. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know, I can just do this in PHP. You could brute force it, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Inline everything.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have possibly the world’s only PHP script that generates LaTeX code. No,

⏹️ ▶️ John I guarantee this is not the world’s only. PHP is generating LaTeX everywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ John believe me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But hey, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a crazy pile of hacks of ancient technology. But it works. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so now I have in my Remarkable a PDF with my little icons in the corner that I can tap to jump between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of notes. And it’s not quite as good as having, you know, dynamically creatable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco links on the device. But in the meantime, until and unless Remarkable ever adds that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great. And all it took was a bunch of really obscure old technology

⏹️ ▶️ Marco combined with extremely new technology to tell me how to use it. That is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wild. That’s very cool. This is what I’m talking about. Obviously, AI training

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this whole ball of wax that I don’t, at this very moment, want to get into. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sort of thing is very cool and very unlike anything that I’ve experienced in my career so far. It’s very slick.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Again, I continue to think the benefit to programmer productivity here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is massive. This is like LLM-based code generation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and completion and tweaking and stuff like that. It’s on the level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a higher, it’s like jumping two levels higher in high-level languages.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We went from assembly to C, and then C to memory-managed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages. We’ve had these jumps over time. This is two of those jumps.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re still a programmer. You still have to be a programmer to really make much out of these results,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s a leap forward in productivity in some cases, in many cases.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t going to be the solution to every problem. There’s still many problems that we need to do ourselves,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this can give us a really big head start and a really big leg up and just can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco save us a bunch of time.

⏹️ ▶️ John The upcoming episode of RecDiffs, I think that’s the one I talked a lot about this, talking about me using

⏹️ ▶️ John LMs for development. One of the things I said there was even

⏹️ ▶️ John if if it doesn’t come up with a solution, which is very often the case, because I’m challenging

⏹️ ▶️ John it very often to do things that are difficult or, you know, just that are hard for humans to do. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just failing utterly. Even if it fails utterly over and over and over again,

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like rubber duck debugging, where just describing the problem to an inanimate object can help you solve

⏹️ ▶️ John a problem. I will usually, by sort of exhausting

⏹️ ▶️ John the LLM’s ability to do anything, get new ideas about how to approach

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Even if it’s just like being satisfied that the way I was trying to do it is just never gonna work, or

⏹️ ▶️ John I will suggest an approach that also won’t work, but it’ll give me an idea. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not that you don’t get these things from Googling, because you do, and I would encourage people to do this. Don’t forget about Googling. Don’t forget

⏹️ ▶️ John about looking at reference documentation. This is not replacing all your existing tools, it’s augmenting them.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you only use LLMs and stop using reference documentation and stop using Google, you’ll be less

⏹️ ▶️ John productive, not more. But having the LLM in the mix, throwing out a bunch of essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John search results and various things and solutions that don’t work, even when it makes up APIs that don’t work,

⏹️ ▶️ John it gives me like new things to Google, new vocabulary. Like if I don’t know what word is used in this

⏹️ ▶️ John API for this type of thing, and it throws out a fake API but uses the correct vocabulary for

⏹️ ▶️ John this particular verb or noun, now I have a better thing to Google or a better thing to ask the LLM about.

⏹️ ▶️ John Incredibly useful, even when it just fails utterly, which it does for me almost all the time, because

⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m asking it to do is things that I don’t have any idea how to do or that may even be impossible,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it will gladly spew a bunch of crap and not lead to a solution. What you were doing, Marco, was like

⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that somebody could do who knew the technologies involved. I’m most often

⏹️ ▶️ John asking it to do things with a language I already know, with an API I’m somewhat familiar

⏹️ ▶️ John with, like subtle nuances of doing it in a particular, like I’ve already got something that

⏹️ ▶️ John works but I think it could be done in a better way or whatever and it just flails or whatever, but it gives me ideas.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the rubber duck program is the best example. As you’re like, well, I’m just stupid. How can they help you? Rubber ducks are inanimate

⏹️ ▶️ John objects. They’re one of the most powerful tools a program has at their disposal. Speaking of coworkers, Casey, went back

⏹️ ▶️ John when you had coworkers, I’m sure you’ve used humans as rubber ducks where you go over to someone’s desk, describe

⏹️ ▶️ John the problem to them before they open their mouth because you walk through the problem describing to him, now you realize

⏹️ ▶️ John the solution and you just walk away. It’s great. So if you think of LLMs as that, but

⏹️ ▶️ John better, that’s a good start.