687: You Can Bend This Line

16 Apr 2026

Ads in Apple Maps, copyright of AI output, and a short supply of flawed chips.

Episode Description:

• Pre-show: Casey requests an app from Marco
  • Roon
  • Nugs
• 🗣️ ATP STORE IS LIVE! 🗣️
• 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom
• Follow-up:
  • Suunto is… not young (via Henri Sivonen)
    • Garmin did beat Suunto to GPS watch though
  • The other neat explainer John was thinking of (via Ben Landsberg)
    • Previously:
      • Eric Portis on Color Spaces
      • Bartosz Ciechanowski on… anything
  • Is Apple running out of A18 Pros‽ 😱
  • Apple IDs & passkeys (via Vitor)
    • Others with this issue
    • Apple said it’d be fixed… two years ago
  • Stealing TV… may not be so wise. Shocker! (via Nye Hughes)
    • See also:
      • Krebs on Security
      • Darknet Diaries (via David Brownman)
• Ads are coming to Apple Maps
  • Newsroom
• AI-generated code & copyright
  • AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted
  • Can coding agents “relicense” through clean-room re-implementation?
    • No right to relicense this project
  • Monkey selfie
  • Claude, rewrite yourself
• Ask ATP:
  • When Marco goes on a saunter with two watches, are the measurements similar? (via Jason)
  • Why did Marco bother with colocation? (via Stephen Gozza)
• Post-show: Casey’s silly new toy
  • Alex’s overview
  • Screenshot of a Linux machine
  • Screenshot of a Mac
• Members-only ATP Overtime: John tries to reach acceptance
  • Apple approves AMD & Nvidia eGPU drivers
  • What if Apple adopted “MPX”-style modules? (via Jan Wedekind)
    • MK1 High Density Rack Mount
  • Bandwidth comparisons
    • Thunderbolt 5
      • 80 Gbit/s symmetric
      • 120 Gbit/s unidirectional for displays
    • SSD (M5 Max MacBook pro, 4 TB)
      • 109 Gbit/s (13.6 GB/s) read
      • 142 Gbit/s (17.8 GB/s) write
    • PCIe speeds on PCIe 5.0
      • 1 lane: 32 Gbit/s (4 GB/s)
      • 16 lanes: 512 Gbit/s (64 GB/s)
      • …as compared to the Mac Pro’s 64 lanes across 4 slots (2,048 GBit/s)
        • 17× Thunderbolt 5’s maximum single-direction speed
  • Internal vs. external SSD
    • 2025 Mac Studio: ~5.5 GB/s
    • OWC Envoy Ultra: ~5.1 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,250
    • OWC Thunderblade: ~5.75 GB/s; 8 TB for $2,700
    • PolySoft third-party internal SSDs
      • Kickstarter (ended November 2024)

Sponsored by:

• Leesa: A mattress for every body and budget.
• Zapier: Put AI to work across your company—for real.
• Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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

Chapters

1. A cursed joint venture
2. ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom
3. ATP Store
4. Suunto is old
5. Color-space follow-up
6. Neo needs more A18 Pros?
7. Sponsor: Leesa (code ATP)
8. Apple IDs and passkeys
9. TV-stealing and security
10. Ads in Apple Maps
11. Sponsor: Zapier
12. Copyright of AI output
13. Sponsor: Quince
14. #askatp: Watch-measurement differences
15. #askatp: Datacenter vs. home-hosting
16. Ending theme
17. Casey’s new toy

A cursed joint venture

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco we’ve covered this in the show before but hi it’s me and I have no memory You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey are using I almost said iTunes. You’re using the music app as your playback app of choice. Is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That makes it sound like I like it more than I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yes, I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using it to play music

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here’s what here’s what I need from you I need you and me and I think we probably have some mutual friends that would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey interested as well And even though this is a terrible idea, it would be an it would be an amazing idea I need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you and me and maybe others to work on like a, I guess it would kind of be vaguely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey similar to a classical music app, but an app for people who are just binging the same like five

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey artists nonstop forevermore. And there’s 800 albums per

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey artist. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of the jams app. I’m telling you, you need to do it. So here’s the thing with the jams app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So this is an app that I intend to make probably with the help of AI at some point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s one of those apps that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, it would never be worth the time to code the whole thing from scratch without something like AI helping.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because again, as we’ve talked about before, the market for an app that caters to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco JamBen users and JamBen users who buy a bunch of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco downloaded music and JamBen users who buy a bunch of download music and also want an app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this. We’re talking five people. Every one of those just strips it down and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down and down further. And the thing is, there are other music listening apps out there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even like the Jam Band crowd, there’s a lot of overlap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between like the like audiophile slash like power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user of music crowd and Jam Band listeners. So there are already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. I think is this one called Rune? I think is one of them. There’s apps that like specialize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in things like, you know, high bit rate or, you know, high sample rate, lossless playback, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go into fancy DACs and DSD and stuff like that. Like there’s all these high-end audiophile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco formats and apps that specialize in catering to those formats.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That world already exists. And we wouldn’t be…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anybody who wants that world, we wouldn’t satisfy their desire.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so we’re gonna rule out people who don’t care about jam bands. We’re going to rule out people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who don’t buy all the jam band recordings or otherwise acquire them, like people who just want streaming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’re going to rule out people… Among who’s left, we’re going to rule out people who actually want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those high-end, high-bit rate, audiophile, high-fidelity kind of things. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then we’re going to limit it just to people who are on Apple’s platforms because screw that. And then also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then it’s going to be people who like our choices and our taste.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, I think it would be a very small market, which is why it is probably worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing it with AI, but probably not any other way. JS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, the reason I bring this up, as you well know, but our listeners may not, is that it is currently goose season. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe you had told me before the show that fish season is coming soon. And there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a really great service called Nugs and UGS that will let

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you stream or purchase, I guess you can only stream from NUGS actually, but it will let you stream.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think you can buy downloads. Maybe you can, but one way or another, you can certainly stream concerts, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some cases as they’re being aired. Like I could be watching Goose right now, but I’m talking to you two numbnuts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so anyways, you know, as I’m amassing more and more Goose shows as each passing day goes on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am finding myself more and more in want of a bespoke solution to manage all of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so maybe I can convince you to let me work with you on the Jams app or something. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What is the maximum amount you can charge for an app? Is it a thousand bucks? If we get, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a hundred people at a thousand bucks that math might almost work out maybe. But none of them would pay a thousand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Based on Marco’s description,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like you left out the last part, which is that it turns out Marco’s taste is different than Casey’s taste. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} now you have to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your own separate vibe

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} code. Now you really have an audience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} one free chat. we’d be competing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the search keywords, you know, from, from all six people who would ever search for it. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know, I am mostly snarking and mostly joking. However, I will say the thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of you and me in any capacity working on some sort of like actual development project together,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think would be a beautiful disaster and would make incredible material for the show. So I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey put that out

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s I, would it be, would it be good for our friendship though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, not at all. Not even a little bit. It would be so bad. Somehow,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was thinking recently that somehow this show has been going on, what, 13 years and I’m still dear friends with the two of you idiots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And yet I think 13 days of Marco and I working on this together, it would be the end of everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think there are certain friendships that can be ruined by, say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco becoming roommates friendships that can be ruined by becoming romantic partners.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think our friendships between the three of us would be ruined with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like shared coding projects.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, in your defense, our defense, in someone’s defense, maybe John’s defense, he’s done a lot of work in your PHP, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friend. Yeah, because he

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco took it over. Because like, if he and I were working together, he would have killed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me like two years ago. That’s also

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} very fair. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vice versa, because yeah. Probably that direction, though. Probably you would kill me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I can tell you probably have a lot more opinions about PHP than I do. I just want to get the hell out of there most of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time.

ATP Dev: Nuggets of Wisdom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Before we derail this entire episode, let me tell you, the listeners, about a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of fun things we have going on. First of all, we have… I’m gonna do this in reverse order, which John’s gonna yell at me for. We have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a new member special. We have a new member special, ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Which is different from Nugs of Wisdom. Yeah, speaking of nugs. It might be a different root meaning

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, also fair. I didn’t consider that. Anyways, Nuggets

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} of Wisdom. Really? Wait, you didn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t know why a Jamban site would be called Nugs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, never even crossed my mind, because I was never in that scene in no small part, because I think if I ever, ever, ever tried it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for more than a second, I would never stop. And so ignorance is list, my friend. Anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, tell us about the ATP dev Nugs slash Nuggets of Wisdom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, it’s just what it says. As usually went in kind of blind on this one, this is the first episode like this that we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done. We are all developers, and most of our development history is in the days before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LLM. So we have a lot of things that we’ve learned over the course of writing all the code that we’ve written. And I figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we would do a member special with tips and tricks or lessons or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nuggets of wisdom. And my idea was to come in with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that we’ve learned and that no idea was too small. And even that instruction turned out to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have many loopholes. So you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how it went. There are nuggets and it is some wisdom. And if people like it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if people like this episode, we will have, we’ll probably do another one because we didn’t get through all of our lists and there’s surely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more that we can add and even now we’re getting follow up on it and everything. So if you are a developer for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure, check this out, especially if you want to hear from a bunch of old people who are developers. And if you’re not a developer, maybe you’ll learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something about development or just hear us yell at each other. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there you go. ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it was fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was fun. And yes, it’s very small, has very different definitions between the three of us.

ATP Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then we will make our repeat plea for the ATP store. You can find that at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slash store. If you are in line for coffee, if you are walking the streets of Manhattan,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re driving, pull over, step out of line, do whatever you need to do and go to atp.fm slash store

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and get yourself some sweet, sweet ATP merch. John, would you like me to do the nickel tour? Would you like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I will do it to just want to remind everybody of the sale and Sunday, April 26th. This is the second of three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shows that we will talk about it on. Just do it now because but if you don’t listen to the third show immediately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the time you hear it The sale will be over. So this is it. This is actually when you should if you’re gonna want something to start get it now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um, what we’ve got is we’ve got our atp neo shirts, which are in the colors of the macbook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John neo Which we’ll talk about more in a little bit um We’ve got a mac pro memorial shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is just like the mac pro believe shirt But instead of saying believe it has a birth date and year date on the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s very sad wear it to make apple executives guilty We’ve got the T568A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crossover and B crossover shirts, which are like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John T568A and B ethernet wiring shirts that we sold in a past sale, only now there are the fully crossed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crossover cable for both of those standards, making the colors even more mixed up, even nerdier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than before, even harder to explain to people when you wear it. I love this so much. We have, of course, the M5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Pro and M5 Max shirts. People ask, did you ever sell a plain M5 shirt? Yeah, we did when the plain M5

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was out. And then people are like, oh, but I want to get the plain M5 one now. Well, here’s the thing. We sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these CPU shirts when the CPU, like whatever the sale is after the CPUs came out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then we tend not to sell them again, except for the on demand ones, which you don’t want those. They’re not as good, although they are cheaper.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, some people, someone’s like, I just got an M4 Max. I want where can I get an M4 Max shirt? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always say this. It’s like the old cliche of, you know, dress for the job you want. Buy the shirt with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chip that you want, not the one you have. aspirational. These are

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} aspirational shirts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe you don’t have an M5 Max, maybe someday you think you’re going to own one. Get the shirt now because we won’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell it again. So M5 Pro and M5 Max shirts. We like to bring back an old shirt. This time we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John brought back ATP Pixels, a very popular shirt, which is the colorful ATP logo rendered in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John extremely non-retina pixels, big chunky pixels that are very difficult to print, but we figured out a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it. That’s very cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, the pixel shirt, by the way, I think among all the like regularish ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shirts we’ve ever made, the pixel shirt might be one of the nicest. It’s a really like I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really enjoy the complexity of the pattern, like the the implementation details

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it. It’s a very nice shirt. That’s part of why it has almost no profit margin because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has very expensive printing methods to get all the sharp pixels and all the different colors. But it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth it. Like if you just want a fun, nerdy ATP shirt. That’s a good one to get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And fun fact, I made all those little squares. It’s like one of those things where because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not a graphics designer, I have no idea how to use the tools. So I’m like, well, I can brute force this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they did. They’re all little squares. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible. Someone who knows how to do this would look at the file and say, why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t you just do X, Y and Z and just automatically cut up your pattern into squares? It’s like, I don’t know how.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anyway, they’re squares. We’ve got a regular ATP shirt, our hoodie, our polo shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which we sell in the warmer weather. It’s got a collar on it, an embroidered ATP logo. And of course, our hat.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One other thing people are asking about how the neo sales,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the colors are doing because we have like a indigo blush, citrus and silver to match the the MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Neo colors. What are we? I don’t know if either one of you guessed. I’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. If you’ve looked at the sales figures, don’t say anything. But you haven’t looked at the sales figure. What is your prediction for like ratios of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John colors that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are available? All right, I have not looked at the sales figures. I’m going to guess the blue one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m guessing blue is number one, and then it outsells whatever’s number two, two to one. And number two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would guess probably is the lemon color one. Citrus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please. Casey, you got anything?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I didn’t see numbers. However, I will say that we get emails

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey once we’ve crossed the threshold of, of, oh, this will be printed by Cotton Bureau. And I feel like the Neo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one came in just lickety split. So clearly- Marco would have seen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email too, so it’s kind of cheating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I don’t read those emails.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I knew that the Neo was selling the best. I would say, I think Marco just said this as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well, by a factor of two, maybe even three to one would be my guess, because I haven’t seen numbers. I just know that it-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Wait, are you talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Neo versus the other shirts or the colors within

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Neo? Yeah, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sorry, I misspoke. I think Indigo is probably two, maybe even three X over the others. I would say Neo is probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey second. I did it again. I would say citrus is probably second. Yeah. I’d say pink number three and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey silver. I would say silver’s third and blushes fourth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m kind of surprised that uh, you two didn’t make the prediction I thought you would make, which is that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John um, you know, the sort of stereotypical, like when, when someone, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who, uh, is like us is buying an iPhone or something, we just get the gray one or the black one. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but I figured like if you’re going to have, like, if, if one of these colors was just black, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that would outsell by a pretty good margin. But like, is Indigo your stand in for that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the same way, like with the iPhone 17, that they made like the dark blue one for people who really want like just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the boring gray or black one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, anyway, as you know, with these sales where we take a bunch of orders and then they print the shirts, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to order a certain number of them before they print the shirts. And what Casey was talking about is when we cross the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John threshold of like, now enough people have ordered this that we’re actually gonna print it. We get an email when that happens. And so that’s where he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting that info from. And I can tell you the number required to print one of these shirts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not high. It’s 12. 12 people

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} need to buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a shirt for it to get printed. If fewer than 12 people buy the shirt or pre-order the shirt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll just get their money refunded and the shirt will not be printed because it’s not worth the time for the printing company to do that because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the scale of things. Here’s the thing. Indigo is the most popular, as Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John noted, because that email came first. And they’re not that distant from each other. The second place is Citrus, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is, I don’t think it’s double, but it’s a pretty big gap, all right? But here is the shocker.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We are a week into the sale. You know how many silver shirts we’ve sold?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One. Oh, wow. Wow. One. Holy jamoles. We have sold

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one silver shirt. Nobody wants that. I mean, granted, it is the color that is the least

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accurate to the laptop, so that’s true. I said it in the description, I think, when I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John posting, tooting about it or whatever, that it’s, I felt like it was more important get the same shirt from the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same manufacturer for all the colors rather than having one be an entirely different shirt. And this is the close. This is the best gray

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they had to match the silver one. But it’s also very neutral in plain and kind of gray scale. So I’m like, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people will pick it just because they don’t want a brightly colored shirt. Indigo is the most popular and indigo blush

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and citrus are all going to be printed because more than 12 people have ordered them, although sometimes not much more than 12 silver

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one shirt. So whoever if you’re out there and you ordered ATP, Neo and silver,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re not going to get your shirt unless 11 other people buy that shirt. I’m not encouraging people to buy it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because hey, if you don’t want a gray shirt, don’t get the gray shirt. But I’m just warning that one person who ordered the silver shirt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not looking good for you. Maybe change your order indigo. It’s very popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am reminder that a to b members get 15% off. So if you are a member, go to your member page to get your discount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code for 15% off. If you’re not a member, it’s worthwhile for you to sign up and get 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off because you can make up the cost of one month of membership easily by ordering a couple things. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there you go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you don’t have to cancel after the month is over. Just put it out there. You have a lot of specials like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ATP Dev Nuggets of Wisdom that you can check out as well.

Suunto is old

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. First of all, Marco made what I presume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was just an off-the-cuff judgment call, which given the information you had, made perfect sense, and oh boy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey did we get feedback about it. So Marco, would you like to handle this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so when I was talking about in the after show, I was talking about the Suunto watch I was trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as compared to Garmin watches for sports and fitness watches. And I referred

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Suunto as a young or as a new company, which I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was generally accurate for their presence in the sport watch market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relative to Garmin, I think. However, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrote in to tell me that Suunto was actually founded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 1936. They made like compasses at first and then dive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers later. So eventually like they did get to the like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco modern smartwatch, but the actual company itself is like 100 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old. So whoops.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes. So Henry Sividin writes, on last episode, Marko referred to Suunto as a younger company relative to Garmin.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey According to the Finnish language Wikipedia, Suunto was founded in 1936, making it 53 years older than Garmin. Suunto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey started making dive computers in the 80s. The first PC connectivity for those was in the early 90s. And Suunto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey introduced a wrist computer in 2004. We’ll put a link to English language Wikipedia in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then Fugu writes, the only thing Suunto seems to have done later than Garmin is the release a GPS watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in 2012. The Garmin watch from 2003 already had GPS. However, it is quite possible that the current

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Suunto software stack is much younger than garments which seems to be much more fragmented.

Color-space follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last episode, we were talking about color spaces and we were, we were gushing about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Eric Portis’s really great, a webpage about that, which is linked in the prior show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We were talking about Bartosz Szymanowski’s, hopefully I got that close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And basically everything that he has ever done is incredible. And John, you had made an off the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cuff, off the cuff comment about how there was a really good thing that you had seen recently that you probably couldn’t put your finger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on. Well, Ben Landsberg figured it out. This is what both John and myself were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thinking of. It’s ASCII characters are not pixels, a deep dive into ASCII rendering by Alex Harry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hari, which we’ll put a link to that in the show notes for sure. And if I remember, I’ll put the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey links back in as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s less of an explainer of more of like I was doing the software project. And here’s here is my here’s how I progressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through the project. It’s really fun, again, with lots of interactive examples and explaining like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reasoning and the different things that Alex tried to do. this somewhat fanciful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and whimsical thing that he’s doing, which is basically like, can you render things using only ASCII characters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is something that you’re very familiar with if you’re a Unix nerd from way back, but people are still doing it.

Neo needs more A18 Pros?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, is Apple running low on the Bend 18 pros? Oh Joe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Joe Rossing all from Mac rumors writes the all-new MacBook Neo has been such a hit that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple is facing a quote massive dilemma Quote according to Taiwan based tech columnist and former

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Bloomberg reporter Tim cool pan Cool pan says the MacBook Neo is selling so well that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey supply of the Bend 18 pro chips with a 5 core GPU will run out before the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey company is able to fully satisfy demand for the laptop Apple’s initial plan was to have suppliers build around 5 to 6

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey million MacBook Neos before ceasing production of the model with the A18 Pro chip, Colpan said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it sounds like demand is so strong that Apple might run out of the A18 Pro chips before the second-generation MacBook Neo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with an A19 Pro chip is ready next year. A18 Pro chips are manufactured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with TSMC’s N3e process and Colpan said that the N3e production lines are currently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey operating at maximum capacity. As a result, Apple may have to pay a premium to restart A18

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro chip production for the MacBook Neo, which would lower its profit margins. Alternatively, Apple could reallocate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some of its chip production that was originally planned for other devices, but the cost would still be higher than what Apple paid for its initial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey batch of A18 Pro chips that were presumably binned. In either case, Apple would have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey disable a GPU core in these chips to ensure that they have only a five core GPU like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all the other MacBook Neo units sold to date.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’m not sure that’s the case. If like so the bend one this is like way to you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make make lemonade out of lemons So you’re making a bunch of a team pros some of them have a bum GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let me just save them. I just say keep put those off to the side. Don’t throw those away We might find what used for those and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use them in the MacBook Neo So all the ones with the bad GPU core that can use in the MacBook Neo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if that is the entire source of their 18 pros or if they also took a bunch of fully working 18

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pros and Disable one of the GPU cores, but either way when you buy a MacBook Neo from Apple you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an A18 Pro, one of the GPU cores is either disabled or didn’t work to begin with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OK, so that’s the deal. If they’re running out of those chips, yeah, it kind of sucks for them. Now they have to start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the manufacturing line and start making more of them. And that costs them money. And they got to take capacity from other things and all that other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. And it lowers their margins. But they could also just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, OK, well, we start the line now. We’ll you will take all the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have all the working GPU cores and then just update the Neo spec to say now when you buy a MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Neo, it’s like a rev, you know, not a rev 2 or whatever, but like a second version of it, where now all the GPU cores work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It just seems like a waste to take a perfectly working 6 GPU core thing and disable one of them. And people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, well, you can’t do that because then the people who bought the first one with the core that didn’t work, they’re going to be mad. It’s like happens all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple releases a new revision of a product that has some spec slightly better. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life. You buy the product you buy, you buy and if in the future a slightly better version of that product comes out, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t say, but, but I bought one last year and it only had five GPU cores and now you’re selling it for the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John price with six. Well, that’s technology for you. So they could do that or they could pull forward the eight 19

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pro product or whatever. So all I can say is this is a good problem to have. They made a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that everybody loves. It’s sound like hotcakes so much so that even they’re probably very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accurate, usually very accurate planning, underestimated the demand. You’d rather have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the opposite problem Which is you buy a home pod on its last day for sale and it turns out it was manufactured three

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years ago And those are all the home pods they ever manufactured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think though like you know in this case You know if they do have to make more a 18 pros and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like yeah if they have to they will they’ll they’ll work it Out with TSMC and yeah, they might eat a little bit of margin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they’ll they’ll work it out I think whether they you know hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disable one of the GPUs even if it would have worked or or whether they do this kind of quieter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco revision where they just all of a sudden now they have six core GPUs I don’t think it really matters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either way because the difference of that one GPU core is not a huge difference We’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not talking about like, it’d be different if the number of P-Cores on the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was cut in half That’s not the case here This is five of six GPUs or six

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of six GPUs They scale almost perfectly proportionally so you can figure out the math on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Um, you know, what is that like a 16% drop or difference in performance? It’s not a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco difference here. So I think in reality, whichever one of these they do, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shouldn’t and probably won’t be like a big deal to basically anybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The one thing they can’t do or a problem, not can’t do it. The one thing they probably shouldn’t do is. Uh, manufacture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bunch of new ones and then just put them into the NEOs, whether they have five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or six, because then you don’t know what you’re going to get. And you know people are always waiting to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John file class action lawsuits against Apple, right? So if you decide that you’re gonna do the six, then they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all have to have six and you need to update it on your spec page and say it’s a new revision of the MacBook Neo. They all have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John six now, right? Cause no one can really sue you about that. You just made a better version of a product later. But if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t update the specs at all, but some of them have six and some of them have five, I don’t know if it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a valid lawsuit, but I can almost guarantee you somebody would sue and say, Oh, I, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pay the same price as this person. And they got six and I got five. And the spec page says five, doesn’t say anything about six. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the deal. Apple. Someone would definitely sue over that again. I don’t know if they would win or if that is even remotely valid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but people love to sue Apple over stuff like that. So that’s the only path they really can’t take. Any other path is open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to them, including disabling the working ones or just selling all the, all the mystics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m guessing they would actually just disable the working one to make it five. Because I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the less problematic version of that. And there’s a lot of precedent for that in the chip business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you wouldn’t waste the ones with only five then, because if you disable the other ones, then you can use every chip.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, not every chip, any chip, every chip with five or six you can use. But if you only use the six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ones, the ones with five, like what are you gonna save them for? Is there gonna be another product that’s gonna want a five GPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} A18 Pro?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m saying like, I think the best course of action, if they need to manufacture more A18 Pros,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the best course of action is basically lock them all to five GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then and and continue to have the product be described and performing the same way and and there is a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco precedent for that like in I met like back in the old days there were all these hacks about like overclocking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain seller on because I believe Intel had a kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a similar issue where like they were they had they were selling the seller on as like their discount chip

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but their manufacturing at that time was pretty good and so they didn’t really have enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like crappy low performing stuff or whatever it was like their their production

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was so good that they had to basically like soft limit the chips just to make enough

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them to sell and your luck in overclocking the chip was kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of in part due to just like what however good yours happened to be above the spec they were actually selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it at I bet they got sued by somebody about that too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I doubt it but cuz like you know people can sue for anything. I’m not saying they won the case, but that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of thing that someone would sue over and say, it shouldn’t be a random lottery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it performed to what they advertised it as.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I know. I know. I’m not saying they won the lawsuit. That’s exactly the type of thing people sue about.

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Apple IDs and passkeys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. With regard to Apple IDs and passkeys, Vitor writes, uh, the situation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is even more bananas than you described last episode. Apple added a passkey to my account without my consent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with my original Apple ID email. I’ve since changed that email, but every time I need to log in, they still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey push me to do so with the passkey associated with the old email, there’s no way to remove or update that passkey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not alone with this problem. and we’ll put in a one link to Reddit, the Apple help subreddit, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a second link in this case to the pesky subreddit where Apple claims or so claim somebody on Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the fix would be made soon two years ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Whoops. I don’t quite understand the problem here, but apparently it is a real problem of like Apple creating pesky

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for you, but they’re like everything else having to do with Apple IDs or Apple accounts that it’s not normal. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its own special, unique snowflake that works differently than all the other stuff. so I guess it won’t show up in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passwords app. And again, surprise, Apple implemented a supposed, you know, sort of quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of life convenience feature where now you can change your Apple ID email. I bet that won’t cause any problems, just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transferring purchases and all the other things they do that they seem like a good idea until

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you actually try to use it and it turns out, you know, oh, I used that feature where you could change your Apple ID email and now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re forever prompting me for a passkey I no longer have access to apparently. So yeah, that whole system is so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John creaky. Talk about, again, making a John Turner’s to-do list or whatever, it’s like, jeez.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just there’s so many parts of Apple that have not faced any competition in so long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and have not gotten any better that are just filled with garbage and the Apple ID system is one of those.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, especially around past keys, around developer accounts being separate, like all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those conditions. And it’s funny, because the developer account issue, this is like every Apple developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hits this issue. And the login process for a developer so awkward because you have to first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like hit cancel no I don’t want to use my passkey for my personal Apple ID and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco log in for the developer use the password and then if it prompts you for 2FA then you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if the machine that you’re on is trusted it will put up the dialog box

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the six digit code and the input box on the website that you’re logging into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is centered perfectly in the middle of the browser window well then the six digit code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dialog box is centered in the middle of the screen. So it covers up, if your browser window is centered on your screen,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then the code that pops up covers up where you have to enter it. So you have to drag the code window

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off to the side a little bit to be able to then reaccess on the page the six digit code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you can type it in which it would on auto fill. Like it’s the worst, like Apple has made

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco logins so much nicer for everyone else except Apple. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very weird. And you’re forgetting my favorite game, which now I find myself doing unconsciously, which is when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it sends me the little Apple ID log and anything that shows the map, it’ll send it to my phone or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’ll say, allow denied, and it shows the little map. I’m like, yeah, that’s me, I hit allow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John After hitting allow, it then shows the six digits. But sometimes, as I’ve complained about in the past, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it will show those six digits for a fraction of a second before they disappear. So now when I hit that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allow, I prime my brain to memorize the six digits as they flash on the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because sometimes, as I’ve said, when I was setting things up, sometimes there’s just no way to do it. Like it will never stay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, unless it comes up on my phone, I hit a loud six digits appear and they immediately disappear. And I have to memorize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them in that fraction of a second that they appear, so I get good at it. It’s ridiculous. Thank yous!

TV-stealing and security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then finally for tonight some updates with regard to stealing television and this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Overtime discussion we had in 679 about the super box and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the other ways that people are stealing TV and nigh Hughes writes this reminded me of a Guardian

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey article that suggests in the UK at least modded Amazon Fire TV Sticks are being used to log keystrokes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and passwords to enable fraud a recent survey This is from the article recent survey from be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stream wise a UK initiative established to counter the problem found two out of every five people who used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey illegal streaming were defrauded. They lost an average of almost 1,700 pounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey each as a result. Whoopsie-dipsies. The potential for fraud happens the minute you connect the dodgy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stick, or so it’s called, to a laptop, with a laptop or a TV. According to Rob Schapland

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Psionic Cyber, quote, alongside the stream of TV or sports, we’ll also install

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some malware onto your computer and give the criminal direct access to your computer so that they can use it as if they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were sitting there, he claims, says. says, whatever, quote, or they can install key loggers, which will record

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any password you are typing. So when you’re accessing online banking, it will record your banking passwords. You are essentially volunteering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to have your laptop hacked in many cases. Whoopsie-dipsies. And then additionally, there was a Krebs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Unsecurity article where Brian Krebs writes, Ashley, an engineer at Census, a cyber intelligence company, found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the Superbox devices immediately contacted a server at the Chinese instant messaging service Tencent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey QQ, as well as a residential proxy service called GrassIO. also known

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as getgrass.io, Grass says it is a decentralized network that allows users to earn rewards

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by sharing their unused internet bandwidth with AI labs and other companies. Quote, buyers seek unused internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bandwidth to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail’s perspective,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Grass website explains. By utilizing your unused internet bandwidth, they can conduct market research

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or perform tasks like web scraping to train AI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would just love to meet that. I think the person who wrote this copy did such a good job because it’s like, okay, here’s what we’re doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We need to appear to be legitimate people. So we’re going to commandeer legitimate people’s internet connections.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So basically we’ll be indistinguishable from legitimate people. Basically we want to turn people into a giant bot that we can control. All right, now you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write copy for that and make it sound not nefarious. They want to access a more diverse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They did it, they did it. You made it not sound terrible, but it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s really terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It sure is. So finally, from Krebs on security, it may be that many super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey box customers don’t care if someone uses their internet connection to tunnel traffic for ad fraud and account takeovers for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forgot about ad fraud. Yeah. Making it sound like people are clicking on ad banners. That’s they’re coming from legit IP addresses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey For them, it beats playing, paying, excuse me, for multiple streaming services each month. My guess, however, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that quite a few people who buy or gifted these products have little understanding of the bargain they’re making when they plug them into an internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey router. Some of the other, I didn’t pull the quotes, but some other sections of the same article,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I believe it was the Krebs article, talk about how they use some sort of hack outside my comfort zone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But basically they, they force a device that’s already on your local network to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like crash or what have you. Again, my terminology is wrong and they will then slurp up that IP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey address so it looks even more legitimate, legitimate to your own network. Like it’s crazy. Some of the shenanigans

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these things do basically do not touch. And then finally with regard to this, David Brownman

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey writes, the Darknet Diaries podcast did a pretty detailed episode on the cybersecurity side of the Superbox,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so we did touch on this in the overtime, that there’s, you know, lots of these boxes are shady, and people claim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the software on them is hacking people or whatever, but this is like a concrete study from the UK saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people are getting their money stolen for real, like in measurable large amounts by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using these products. And, you know, the attraction of getting TV for free is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently enough to keep people coming back but they’re bad news.

Ads in Apple Maps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Indeed. All right, let’s talk topics. And maybe I should have poured a drink for this episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because we got to talk about ads in Apple Maps, baby. For real this time. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Emma Roth at The Verge wrote, I don’t know, I think a few weeks ago as we record this, Apple will soon allow businesses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to buy advertisements in its Maps app. In an announcement on Tuesday, Apple says

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ads may appear at the top of your search results in Maps as well as in a new suggested places list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They will arrive in app in the US and Canada this summer. Marco, if you wouldn’t mind,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would you prepare your bleep gun because this is such fing bulls and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hate it so much. I haven’t even seen it and I hate it. Oh, it makes me so mad. It makes me so mad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because I, and I think many like me, came to Apple because we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so used to getting PCs filled with bulls*** malware,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just overflowing with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John By the way, on that topic, and I know this is not in the notes this week, and maybe we’ll talk about it next week, but there was a recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interview that Jaws and Ternus did with Tom’s Hardware, and they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fielding a bunch of softball questions about like what’s great about Apple products or whatever. And they went through everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s great about it, but then they were onto the next question, and ATP Style, one of them, I forget who it was, says, oh yeah, and also,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t forget, Macs aren’t loaded up with bloatware. That was their point, that like, unlike

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the competing PC products, the products that compete with the MacBook Neo, when you get a Mac, it’s not filled with,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you said, a bunch of crappy software that you don’t want that’s throwing a bunch of stuff in your face. And I felt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like reaching through the YouTube screen and saying, but it is, increasingly it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Have you seen the defaults, the dock? God, I’ve had my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} blue screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously when it’s Apple stuff, that’s not an ad, that’s Apple stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I know, exactly, but like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} default-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Try the new version of Pages. So I actually have seen the default dock because when I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco setting up 48 Mac minis

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} without doing any kind of MDM,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of my steps was taking all of those out one by one. Whoosh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} whoosh, whoosh. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John automate that by just deleting the, changing the plist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t want to ask you because then it would spoil the bit. So I did it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} every single- You could have just tapped GPT.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco For 48 Mac minis, one of my setup steps was dragging out all like, you know, 15 of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dock icons out of the dock, except for- Did you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really good at figuring out where the remove thing appears?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it’s not, you have to go up a little bit. It can’t just be the first pixel. You gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go up 200 pixels up. Remember when it used to have the poof?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly. And it still makes the same sound. Those are the days. And that’s just.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Anyway, sorry to derail you, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} No, no, no, no. Not filled with bloatware. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sorry. So anyways, so many of us, and I think especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey those of us who had grown up with PCs, like Marco, like me, came to Apple because especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey circa, you know, mid two thousands, my recollection, maybe I’m just looking with road, rose colored glasses, but my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recollection was I had been using PCs for so long. They were utter crap. They were crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in ways that I knew and crap in ways that I didn’t even understand yet, and they were crap. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey finally, I, and, and John, I mean, my, the timeline may not be exactly right, but the way I recall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it is that it was around the mid aughts that Mac OS 10 was really starting to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey its junk together. Now you could argue it was great from the beginning, but it was like properly good at this point. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I moved to the Mac and I think it was 2008 if I’m not mistaken, maybe it was 2007, 2007, um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and it was such a breath of fresh air, everything worked. It was intuitive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It was beautiful. There was no garbage. I didn’t have to put my wrist on an Intel inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sticker for the rest of time and just watch it peel away slowly, but surely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and everything was so amazing and so wonderful. And I feel like in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey last five, maybe 10 years in particular, all of that goodness has gone away in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey various different ways. Software isn’t as, isn’t as stable as it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The Apple software isn’t as stable as it was, and it does so many things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think Apple is spread so thin that they lose track of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey things. Like we were just lamenting a moment ago, like Apple IDs, but I feel like the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey has been spread so thin. There’s so many edge cases that Apple no longer conquers. Now in the defense of Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s also gotten way more complicated, which is hard. It’s very hard, but it doesn’t just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey work anymore. And that bums me out. Additionally, the search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for ever more money and ever more services revenue means that instead of just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being a company that makes their money off of hardware, now they have to make their money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey off of recurring revenue from me paying them for things that sometimes I think, yes, they deserve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey money for this. And sometimes I’m like, what is going on here? For example, iCloud storage, I should probably pay them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for some amount of iCloud storage, but should that iCloud storage still be five gigabytes in the year 2026? I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not. And it’s just frustrating that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is yet another example. This is yet another example of things just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey getting ickier and getting more Windows-like. And honestly, I haven’t used Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in over a decade. And it is, I genuinely wonder at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is Windows less garbaged up than Apple stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, Windows is getting worse. They’re putting ads in the start menu and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. And this is, this is part of the shame of it. And this is kind of part of what I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hoping, what I was trying to get at with my letter to John Turner’s blog post. Like Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting significantly worse in certain ways in areas that are very important to us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But no one else is getting better at it. Like it’s not like when it’s not like Windows is amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at this. Yeah, Windows is worse than it’s ever been at this arguably. Yeah, industry wide.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s a slow process of I won’t use Cory Doctorow’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco word necessarily. I don’t think it quite fits here. But like there’s a slow process of just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco erosion of respect for users, time, attention and resources.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco motivated by the possibility of making more money. Right. And even if it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reality is like in many industries, their margins get super squeezed and they get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desperate. And they start doing things that are crappy because they kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to to make any money at all. And the really sad thing is that’s always been Apple’s competitors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s never been Apple’s situation. Apple, I mean, not never, but certainly not in the modern era. Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco modern era is they have more money than they know what to do with. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need to become desperate to find ways to make.5% more money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They can just make better products. Look, we were just talking about the MacBook Neo doing really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, like blowing away expectations because they made a really good product and people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like it. It fits the market well, it’s there at a good time. The opportunity to take market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco share from PCs right now is really huge for lots of reasons. And so what a great product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Look at the success of the iPhone 17 Pro. They made the cool orange one, and it’s a great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product. So they had this cool color that did the marketing for them, largely. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they made this amazing Pro phone that took what we wanted about iPhones and removed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain pain points, made things better. The iPhone 17 Pro is an amazing product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Look at the modern Macs. The modern Macs, beyond just the Neo, they’re amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re so amazing you can’t even buy the desktops anymore right now because they’re all sold out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The modern Mac lineup is so good. There is not a single bad laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Apple sells anymore. What a thing to be able to say after some of the kind of mid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 2010s kind of years there got kind of bad. But what an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco state the products are in and they can make more money by expanding the market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of those products or by making people upgrade when they’re compelling upgrades. And they do, that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still how they make most of their money. They can even have this whole thing called services,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even though what services makes most of his money from is rents, but let’s, we’ll put that aside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for this particular part of this discussion. Services makes tons of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco based on delivering additional revenue sources

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to their products, most of which don’t annoy or badger or harass their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco users. Most. And then they started selling ads, first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the App Store, and now coming to Maps. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a few things about this that irritate me greatly. Number one, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just not that much money relative to the services category.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Especially since Apple’s really bad at selling ads against anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, see that, yeah, that’s the second part that annoys me. Like, is there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what is the potential upside for Apple? Not what is the potential upside for Google? Because Apple’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google. Yeah, the second part of this that annoys me is that I have been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an Apple search ads customer since search ads launched. I actually, I just paused my search ad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco campaign for the first time in years, just about a month ago, because I’m mad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at them. But the Apple search ads product is awful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only thing holding it up as being anything that is worth anyone ever spending money on is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are still a lot of people in the apps who are searching for things, and now they’ve created this awful situation for all of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us, which is if you don’t buy your own name and your own keywords, everyone else will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy them, and you will have to fight, and now you have to pay Apple extra just to get to your own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco customers that you were already gonna get before. And they’re still taking their 30%,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of course, of all your in-app purchases and stuff. So it feels a lot like double-dipping.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And, but it’s just, it’s a crappy ads product and it makes the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco store worse for everybody except Apple. Apple makes a little bit more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money from that. Great, good job. Everything else is worse. It’s worse for customers, it’s worse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for most developers, and it’s mostly just a way for big companies to pour a bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more money into Apple’s pocket with high bids on keywords. And now they’re bringing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that same benefit to Maps. Great. Adding ads in places like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make reasonably small amounts of additional revenue sells out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the user experience a little bit. It sells it out because what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their actions say here is it matters less to us to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a great high-end premium user experience we would rather make 1% more money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they have seemingly run out of ideas to make 1% more money in other ways I guess or they just don’t care. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is like the hallmark of the Tim Cook era is like product direction by numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and There’s a place for numbers Try the new version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh my god. Oh, that’s a whole other don’t even get me started on that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, I’m so mad about that But again, but that’s it. That’s actually a similar problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here. It’s like nothing is sacred to them anymore in the user experience they are willing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to put promos which are ads and and actual ads all over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their products now. There is no more premium experience with Apple products because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now it’s all full of ads because what are you gonna do? Where are you gonna go? There’s nowhere else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So they can now make 1% more money from you. Old Apple wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have done that. I don’t like to invoke Steve Jobs that often. I know there were a couple of cases where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steve Jobs floated the idea of putting ads in different places, but under previous leadership,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple would not have been putting ads in the places they’re putting ads now. Because I think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco previous leadership had more appreciation for a premium user experience. And when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco start being managed as, you know, just bean counter, only numbers matter and nothing else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco matters. If this thing can increase numbers by 5%, why wouldn’t we do it? Obviously, we must do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it because the numbers will go up. That is a pretty rapid path to mediocrity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s never been what has made Apple stand out. They have certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had many mediocre products and services and times in the past, no question, but where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple succeeds is making nice products with nice experiences.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And ads don’t have a place in that. And I wish Apple’s leadership would realize where their own success comes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you said before, like it’s not, you were saying like, have they run out of idea, other ways to make money? It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they’ve run out of other ideas for incremental revenue or other ideas to innovate, it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in addition to those ideas, these ideas which used to, as you noted, used to be get shot down, no longer get shot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down. And that is the dysfunction in the organization. Someone in the org is always going to say, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we can make more money if we did this that would annoy users slightly, but what are they gonna do? Like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea will always exist, will always be presented, is always compelling. It’s a compelling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John business case to Apple because you can say, look, I can show you how this will make us more money. It will make us more successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this way. And what Apple needs to do, and what they’re getting less good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at doing, is saying, yes, but our brand promises

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we don’t do crap like that. And long-term, even though your idea will make a little money now, it will erode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that brand promise, the value proposition. In the long run, it will make us less money. It’s the exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opposite of the thing that made Apple successful, which is do the difficult thing that everyone thinks is a dumb idea, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you do it long enough or hard enough and it makes users happy, you will make more money than them in the long run. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple does still fight that. They’re not saying yes to every one of those ideas, but they’re saying yes to way too many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of them, in particular, they’re saying yes to like their own internal things. Like, but this part of the org says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need to, you know, do upsells inside the iWork applications because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the only way people will pay for this. And we need to do this and we need to put, you know, like, we need to advertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, you know, new AppleCare plans inside system settings because I know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who are writing system settings, They don’t care about that, but this part of the org cares about selling AppleCare and we need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a way to say, hey, we’re all Apple here, same team, so let’s do it. And that’s what they’re saying yes to. They’re saying yes to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, letting themselves advertise their own crap everywhere, which is already terrible. And then in these cases

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like search ads and map ads, they’re saying we can get money from third parties here too because we have all these customers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we have their eyeballs, they’re doing something related to maps, they’re in the app store searching. Like you said, Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a win for Apple, they think, because it’s like, look, we annoy the user and we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John suck more money from developers and we annoy the developers. So everything is worse. The only

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arguable possible user benefit is if you’re searching for an app, you get to see some possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alternatives to that app. Like if it’s a really well-known app, you would otherwise never find the alternatives. That is the only benefit I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think of for that, for the user, but mostly it’s a net negative for everybody. But I was like, yeah, but we make more money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So yeah, that’s the problem. They keep saying yes to that. And then the ads and maps, like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even think of all the things they could do. this is that egregious other than the fact that they’re gonna do a terrible job

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} at it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for the fact that as far as I know, this is, is this a rumor?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s a rumor. I don’t know if it was announcement or, but it was announcement, announcement from Apple. But anyway, we don’t know the details, but here’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you’re gonna put ads and stuff. At the very least, allow people to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pay money to make the ads go away. How about the people who are already paying you for let’s say the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One bundle? Because like, I’m not saying, Oh, it’s fine. Apple put ads everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just make people pay to get rid of them. But if we have to live in this world, if we’re going to have these ads forced on us,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Casey’s point, if I’m already paying you like the maximum amount of person can pay you, like I buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your most expensive Apple one bundle that you want me to get, I buy all your products or whatever. Is there no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way that me paying money will make ads go away? I would pay to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get rid of search ads in the App Store if I could. I would certainly pay to get rid of ads in Apple Maps, even though I mostly use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google Maps. Like and I’m not saying, Like, obviously, the number of people who are going to pay to make ads go away

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is tiny. Like we know we have we have a podcast where people pay to make the ads go away. Most people don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but we get that. But like, just let let that’s it’s such an easy out for them to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continue to be crappy. Like, again, I’m not saying this is the solution, but hey, Apple, if you want to continue to erode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your your your own value, you would just you would silence more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Casey’s cursing if you just at least allowed allowed the relative handful of people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are willing to pay not to see ads to let them do that. They would grumble about it and they would be pissed, but it would make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them slightly more quiet than the current case of just like, no, we don’t care how much money you give us. There’s no escape

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from these ads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yup. Couldn’t agree more. It’s just, this is the sort of thing. Now, I’m showing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a lot of biases and I’m bringing a lot of, um, my own priors, as Merlin would say to the table, but,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey um, I’ve always found it frustrating that, uh, It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my mind, I filed it as a West coast thing that there are no decisions made, there’s only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey AB testing. I know I’m being hyperbolic and I know it’s not quite that simple, but I feel like everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is AB tested and everything is about numbers. And at some point you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey understand that there is, there are things that are unmeasurable and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there are things that are just a vibe and the vibe that I get from Apple these days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t think I’m alone, is that, oh, they’re just as sh**y as everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey else, except just a teeny bit less. So if Windows is an 11, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is an eight or a nine, but that’s still sh**ier than it needs to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I’m sorry that I don’t have more grown up language or maybe less grown up language to express my feelings,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I’m so frustrated that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is what this is and there’s nowhere else to go. I think that’s the other problem. Like, yes, I suppose I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make this the year of Linux on the desktop for me, but I don’t want to do that. Nobody really wants to do that. Please don’t redeem me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even NPM throws ads at you now, not really ads, but like, hey, these projects need funding because they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John got you at the prompt. And how else are you going to discover that the software that you’ve been using for free forever and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John funding like I don’t think I don’t begrudge NPM that, but I’m just saying like everybody that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idea has always existed, which is right where the person’s using your software. Can we put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ads there? someone will always have that idea. The idea is not new. What is the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now is people who would formally say, of course I’m not in my command line Unix utility,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m gonna put an ad. Like I understand open source needs funding, but this is not the way to do it. But eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the generation that grew up in the current environment gets to control open source projects and said, oh yeah, totally we should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put that into NBM. And so now it’s there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and I think like what irritates me about Apple doing it, and this is granted, this is less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about Maps now, and I’m talking about the platform, is like if inside of an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app like Maps, they put ads. Okay, well, we can use different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. And yeah, I mean, the other ones have ads too, but at least they’re better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, you know, whatever. There’s different options for mapping apps. You can make your own mapping app if you really want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to. Nobody can really, anyway, but you know what I mean. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when the system has ads in places that are required

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to interact with or privileged. Things like the Settings app, having promos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for all of Apple’s upsells and crap. The App Store having ads when you are looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get software in the only way you can get software on your iOS device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s no way to escape that. So you don’t have a choice as a customer. You are locked in and you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forced to see those ads. And this is not like, you know, a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco severe like human rights issue or anything, but it is Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of mishandling their position of power, abusing the power they have as the platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make things a little bit crappier under the guise of, well, everyone’s doing this, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you were saying, like everyone’s doing this. So therefore we can do it too, and too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad for you if you don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That doesn’t make it better. And it totally works. Like Casey’s point about A-B testing, I can guarantee

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you they sell more AppleCare now that they push it to you in system settings. Like there’s no question about that. That is, that’s the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, that’s why you don’t let it happen because you know if you do let it happen, of course it’s gonna give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you a return on investment. Like it’s the one and only system settings and you get to put ads there and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will sell more AppleCare. And the people who came up with ideas, see, I told you. And the people who were against the idea says, we were never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arguing that it wouldn’t work. We were arguing that we shouldn’t do it because it erodes the value of Apple as a brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it just, and like, even if you can’t get them to quantify

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the brand damage, it seems like you also can’t get a lot of these higher-ups

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there now to believe in the promise of just making things because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re better this way. Instead of adding ads somewhere because it makes some number go up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe you can have the prestige and self-control to show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some restraint and not take every single opportunity to make a bit more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money if it makes the product worse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what I was talking about with the Ternus thing. Like if you’re Steve Jobs, you say, no, that makes it crappy, I’m not gonna do it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone disagrees with you. But if you’re John Ternus and you say that, then now you have people saying, well, he turned down this idea that we proved

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could give you X amount more money in AppleCare subscriptions. And he said no to it for an unquantifiable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John benefit. We can show you the numbers. This is how much more money we make on AppleCare if we do this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all they had to say was some mumbo jumbo by brand value, like whatever, show me the numbers on that dummy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And because you’re not Steve Jobs and didn’t found the company and everybody worships you, that it becomes a ding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John against you. And it was like, that’s what makes people do the wrong thing because they don’t feel secure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough to say, we’re not doing that because it sucks. Like, and I’m sure sometimes they do again. It’s not like they’re just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, bending over and doing every bad idea that exists, but there, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can, in this battle within Apple, you can see the people who want to junk stuff up are winning more of these fights

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s the trend against the trend line. I would still say it’s, you know, Casey said that like Windows is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an 11 and Apple is an eight. I think the range is much greater. Windows is in a way worse situation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but like, you know, we’re not Windows users, so we don’t care. I’m just looking at the trend lines. That’s why we’re, even though

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every one of these little things, it seems small and it is small, but like the line is going in the wrong direction.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if we just extrapolate, bad things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happen. You know, Apple does have an area that they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a little bit better at defending and that’s privacy. Privacy in some ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean again it’s a little bit different because you know when Apple says privacy is a human right, I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that is about as important as it is. I don’t think that’s that’s hyperbole and I do think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the right to use your computer without seeing ads is not a human right. But they do things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the name of privacy. Now granted, not every time they invoke privacy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for good reasons. Many times they will invoke privacy in things like you know defenses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco against monopoly accusations and bad behavior basically as a as a BS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco defense to try to excuse their bad behavior that’s really that they’re really doing for other reasons but not every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many of the times that Apple invokes privacy are real and genuine and beneficial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Apple really does care about privacy more than just the numbers alone would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would you know dictate that they should. That is an area that it’s considered a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco core value to the company and that’s, and credit to Tim Cook, that is something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he has brought to the table and he cares a lot about. It isn’t that Steve Jobs didn’t care about privacy but Tim Cook seems to care a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot more and I give him credit for that. It is a core value that Apple defends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco privacy in their product choices even when it’s really difficult most of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But under Tim Cook, that same consideration has not been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco held for the quality of the user experience. That’s where, you know, Steve Jobs really did hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that as a high value. The same way Tim Cook values privacy, Steve Jobs valued

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a premium, nice user experience. And Tim Cook doesn’t. And Modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple doesn’t. They happen to have enough people there who are left who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco still are able to create good user experiences most of the time. But, there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t any pressure, in the way that there is so much pressure to preserve privacy at Apple, there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no such pressure to preserve the quality of the user experience. And there really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco needs to be. Because, having all these little ads and promos and little paper cuts everywhere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco each one of those is an erosion of quality, and an erosion of the premium brand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the experience. And they don’t seem to think so. Or at least those people are not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco able, they’re not empowered to defend the quality of user experience when, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if we ruin this thing a little bit more, we can make a bit more services revenue.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think the thing that makes me, one of the things that makes me so exasperated about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that there’s almost no way to put this back away, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What’s the turn of phrase I’m looking for? There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} way to put- Put the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John genie

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} back in the bottle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is a way. Thank you. different decisions in the future. You can bend this line. You need a new CEO to do it, but you know, fingers

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} crossed. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even still, are they ever going to take away a revenue stream?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Really? That’s, that’s what I’m, yeah. Sometimes, Steve Jobs did things like that all the time. See good CEOs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s called leadership.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You can’t just say I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never going to do anything that’s going to cause any kind of kind of a bad result, uh, you know, for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because there’s a longterm benefit. That’s called leadership. That’s what Apple needs. Good CEOs make decisions like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the time. It is absolutely possible. Will they do it? I don’t know. But I I totally believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we see it happen all the time. We saw it happen with turning around Apple itself. When Steve Jobs came back and did it, he destroyed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tons of stuff before things got better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, also, it’s not even that much money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s the other thing. The other thing is, it’s not like you’re saying stop selling the iPhone. Come on. Like, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be OK.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like we’re talking about like a drop in the bucket, even within the services category.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Which itself, I mean, granted, the services category is pretty large now as a percentage of their profit. And that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} pushing. It’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John growing one and the stock market won’t like it and yada yada like this a million reasons but it’s it’s not insurmountable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s not that much money. Like I mean obviously in absolute terms like it’s probably more money than all of us will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} see but a huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of money absolute terms but in relative terms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah in relative terms relative to their their services revenue. We’re not talking about getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rid of the entire app store cut and the entire Google search deal and like, you know, the things that actually make big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco differences. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about drops in the bucket, especially like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ads and maps. The way Apple handles ad sales and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco systems they build and the primitive garbage ranking algorithms they use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those aren’t gonna be that successful financially because they’re not gonna be that good. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco App Store search ads probably make substantially more money than anything that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will ever be made in Maps. And the App Store search ads are also terrible, but at least those are more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, there’s more kind of an intent to buy. There’s probably a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more search volume, if I had to guess, compared to monetizable maps transactions, or maps searches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think this is gonna be, we’re talking about crapping up a core system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app for not that much money. And that’s what makes it even more frustrating. That it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like they’re betting the whole company on some huge thing that’s gonna turn a huge amount of money over. No, it’s not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re just adding another paper cut to make one of their core apps worse for everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to make a drop more money. That sucks. And by the way, that’s exactly what they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Numbers, Pages, and Keynote, and screw them for that. I’m so annoyed at what they did to those apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No argument. I think the one thing that I will say with regard to that’s leadership, I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey However, if we think about the situation with Apple when Steve came back, like they were on death’s door,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or at least so I’ve understood. I mean, I wasn’t around for this. wasn’t an Apple person for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this, but they were on death’s door.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 90 days from bankruptcy, they say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, exactly. So of course, Steve came in and, you know, destroyed everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and turned everything upside down. Not only was he one of the founders and that kind of gave him the clout to do it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what else are they going to do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He did that when they were successful, too. I mean, the iPod mini and getting killed for the iPod Nano, even though it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was their most successful iPod, he was killing the successes that were helping them come back from where they were. Like, he was not afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do what he thought was right. Like that’s what I’m saying. It’s leadership. Like you could, Tim Cook would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not make that choice. It would make a very different, very strong argument to keep selling the iPod mini because it’s the most popular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPod they ever made. And just sell the now to the people who want that one to see the job is like, no, that was better. Kill the iPod mini.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I get that. All I’m saying is yes, it is leadership, but I think that in a lot of ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steve was set up for success, set up for doing the things that had to be done because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey clearly whatever was going on, wasn’t working. Whereas right now, the, you know, whoever takes over, be that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Turnus or whoever else, they’re entering the cockpit of a rocket ship. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to slow that rocket ship down, even though I, again, I concur that it’s relatively not a lot of money, that’s still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a tougher, it’s a tougher, bigger ask is all I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} saying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What they would argue is like, Oh, it’s not going to lose us that much money, but our share price is going to go down. So our market cap is going to lose $10 billion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever. And Steve Jobs would say, so what? Like, it’ll be fine. But like I said, it’s not just one thing that’s going bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The iPad mini, iPod mini was going great. That was a number that was going up. And that was a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case where you’re making a decision that people would say you’re risking the rocket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ship by making that change, but Steve Jobs wanted what he wanted and most of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his decisions were right in that direction. So anyway, we’ll see what happens. I’m not sure this trend line is gonna change at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all because I see no deviation or even acknowledgement that everything we’re talking about is even a thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when Apple executives talk. Do you even see them acknowledging this? Like I said, with a Ternus and Joss thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and of course, Macs aren’t junked up with anything. I’m like, well, they are now. They’re like, they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John see it. They don’t, if they do say it, they’re not saying, they’re not voicing it in any way. So it’s really difficult to expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a different decision when there is not even any public acknowledgement that this issue exists, let alone where Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is on the spectrum.

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Copyright of AI output

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s talk about AI-generated art. And Emma

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Roth again, The Verge.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What year is this? Emma Roth and The Verge on March 2nd writes, The U.S. Supreme Court has declined

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can obtain copyright. The decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey comes after Stephen Thaller, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court’s decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted. In 2019, the U.S. Copyright

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Office rejected Thaler’s request to copyright an image called A Recent Entrance to Paradise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed that decision in 2022

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and determined that the image doesn’t include quote, human authorship quote, disqualifying it from copyright

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey protection. After Thaler repealed the decision, the U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ruled in 2023 that quote, human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright quote. The ruling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was later upheld in 2025 by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. Last year, the Copyright Office issued

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey new guidance that says AI-generated artwork based on text prompts isn’t protected by copyright. The US Federal Circuit Court

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey similarly determined that AI systems can’t patent inventions because they aren’t human, which the US Patent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Office reaffirmed in 2024, with new guidance stating that while AI systems can’t be listed as inventors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them. The UK Supreme Court made a similar determination

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in a case brought forward by the same fellow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this is a background on just establishing what at least US law

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has been saying about copyright and AI art and a few other things. Because the actual topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here is AI generated code and copyright. And when I put this in the notes, which was a while

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago at this point, lots of people online were stating flat out as a fact that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, don’t you know, because of the Supreme Court decision in the US, any code you’re generating with these coding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John agents, this is back when coding agents were just sort of becoming popular. So a little while ago now, any code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re generating with those coding agents is not copyrightable. Therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s no ownership or protection or copyright protection for the code that you’re doing for this. So if you are coding with one of these agents

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’re putting that code into your product, what was previously copyrighted code that you owned no longer is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t copyright AI-generated stuff. Here’s what the Supreme Court says. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the time, people just let that exist as a thing that people say. And they’d be, I didn’t know that. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know you can’t copyright AI generated code, but I’m not a lawyer or a judge, but my understanding from reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these stories is this has yet to be adjudicated. I know this doesn’t help, but so like so many things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having to do with LLMs and AI stuff, it’s an open question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Supreme Court has ruled on AI generated art, but I wouldn’t just simply assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that because they made a decision about AI generated art and patents, that that same decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exactly applies as is to AI generated code, because historically art and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code and patents and things like that have all been treated differently by the courts. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as far as I’m aware, this is yet another thing involving AI that is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know, I mean, it’s probably fine, maybe, maybe not, I don’t know, what do you think?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But like, it hasn’t been decided yet. I haven’t even heard any cases coming up about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this to someone claiming that, hey, because you used AI to generate that code, it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copyrighted, therefore you don’t know, therefore blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hasn’t even come up yet. I’m sure it will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It will come up just like we have all those cases about, you know, from the New York Times and Disney and and all these other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John companies suing the people suing Chachi, BT and Anthropic and all these other companies for like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John passages from their books appearing in output like that’s already happening, like the copyright, you know, LLM is being trained and training.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But this particular frontier, like I feel like coding agents have not been around and when wide use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long enough for these laws, these big famous lawsuits from big giant companies to appear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But what I will say is, human nature being what it is, and I know this is awful and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t sound good and very many things in our legal system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are this way, but human nature being what it is, and the power structures of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world being what they are, as in governments and rich people and rich companies have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots of power and other people don’t, Um, the more big, powerful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entities use AI generated code in their products, the more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John likely it is that it will magically be deemed to be okay and 100% legal by the courts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because everything in the system is like there is to your phrase that you were reaching for before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our case, you all the genies out of the bottle, these big, powerful companies it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be okay. And if you if there had been a court case early on, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could have gone either way. But I feel like now, no matter what happened, I’m not saying this is even the right decision.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m just saying this seems like it’s gonna be what happens because so many people are generating so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much code with coding agents, that it will be very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for any court to decide and then be able to enforce the concept that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John AI generated code is not copyrightable in any way. Because how do you even disentangle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it from all the human written code that it’s mixed in with? How do you decide what has been a I assisted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the patent cases versus totally generated? How do you decide about human authorship

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is for code, depending on how long and complicated the prompt is? And it’s incredibly like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simple human nature. It’s like the if it looks right, it flies right. B.S. that I’ve talked about before, about Lockheed planes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff. It’s like. Big, powerful companies have been doing it too long And every day

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that passes, every day that passes makes it much more likely that this potentially unjust and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unjustifiable and unjustified decision will be become fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and reality because it’s just the easiest thing to do. The big, powerful companies want it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s too late now. Oh, well. And again, I’m not saying that’s what I agree with, but that’s how I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whenever I see this topic come up and everyone who says, hey, I get generate code is not copyrightable. You’re all doomed if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do this in your apps. And like, maybe, but probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So with that in mind, can coding agents re license open source through a clean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey room, quote unquote, implementation of code question, Mark Simon Wilson writes chargettes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Python character encoding detector was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey LGPL or new lesser public, lesser general public license.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chart. maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012. Two days

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ago, which was I think in early March, Dan released Chardet 7.0.0

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with the following note in the release notes, ground up MIT licensed rewrite of Chardet, same package

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey name, same public API, drop-in replacement for Chardet 5.x or 6.x, just way faster and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more accurate. Yesterday, Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened issue 327, colon, no right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to re-license this project, in which he writes, First off, I would like to thank the current maintainers and everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. Truly a free software success story. However, it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey brought to my attention that, in the release of 7.0.0, the maintainers claim to have the right to quote, re-license

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quote, the project. They have no such right. Doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL. License

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey code, when modified, must be released under the same LGPL license. claim that it is a complete rewrite is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey irrelevant since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code, i.e. this is not a clean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey room implementation. Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them any additional rights.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So among all the ways that AI and LLMs have the potential to destroy open source,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here’s a new innovation in that area, which is, hey, what if I take an open source project

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I point an LM at it and say, see this? This is a existing project written

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in whatever language. It’s got a test suite, it’s got a spec, it’s got documentation. Can you write me a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John version of that? Maybe you say to do it in a different language. Maybe you say to do it in a new version of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the language. Maybe you just say, just do it in the same language or just say, here’s an existing thing. I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another implementation of that. And no lines of code are shared. It writes entirely new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code that passes all the test suite and the other thing or whatever. And like that one was GPL license. Now you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it MIT license. GPL tends to be more restrictive of what you can do with it. MIT tends to be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John laissez-faire, giving people more rights or whatever. And you’re like, done and done. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John generated with my code generator, this code, which is totally copyrightable as far as I’m concerned, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have the copyright to this code. It no code is shared with the old one. Don’t worry about that. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was LGPL, GPL. Nope, the new one is MIT license. And in fact, I’m just going, this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new version of that old project. So now there’s a new project also called Chardette with a new version number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has a different license. It doesn’t share a single line of code with the old one. It is a quote unquote clean room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John re-implementation and I’m done. And everyone at open source is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wait, what? Like, is that, that’s not a thing, is it? And they start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arguing based on the only precedence they have, which is like when they talk about clean room re-implementation, it’s the most famous one in our industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, I believe it was Compaq. Whoever made the first IBM PC clone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a great story if you ever wanna read about old people doing computer stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM made the original IBM PC personal computer and it worked a particular way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And a company wanted to make a computer that could run all the same software as the IBM PC. So they set up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a team and said, we are gonna isolate you and we are going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give you a spec of how the thing you should build should work. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spec is basically like, how does the IBM PC work? But you’re not gonna see an IBM PC. We’re not gonna give you an IBM PC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re not gonna look at an IBM PC. You’re not gonna look at any IBM documentation. We’re just gonna say, please build this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you, even though we know what an IBM PC is and are looking at it right now, you aren’t. You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just given a spec and you create a thing that conforms to a spec. And when you’re done, you have a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clone that can run IBM PC software, but you never even seen an IBM PC. you didn’t read their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manual, you didn’t look at their documentation, you don’t have the chips in front of you to test or whatever. You’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now cloned the PC in a quote unquote clean room re-implementation, and it’s clean because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who made it didn’t have any knowledge of the thing that they were making, you know what I mean? And that held

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up in court, and that’s why the IBM PC clone exists. That’s why we’re all not, we’re all weren’t using

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM computers. That’s why the whole Wintel duopoly happens. It’s a whole big thing. But anyway, that particular thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John legally held muster in court. So yep, you just made a thing according to a spec and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t copy any of their stuff. And this is the precedent that people are citing for,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, I pointed my LLM at an open source project and said, write that, but over here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it did it. And lo and behold, it passes all the tests and now it’s all a clean room implementation. That’s what the argument about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is in Mark Beverham coming. Coming out of a internet retirement and saying, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not clean room. First of all, the people who are prompting the LLM were the previous maintainer of this project. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve been exposed to the code constantly. And second of all, as many people pointed out in the very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John argument thread in this GitHub issue that I invite you to look at if you wanna see it, people are like, but you know, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LLM got to see all of the source code. And I was like, well, what if the LLM just saw the test suite and they’re like, well, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John test suite is part of the source code too. What if I just described the project to it and I made sure the LLM couldn’t see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that? It’s like, but you can’t control what an LLM sees by just telling it not to do stuff because you don’t know what it’s doing under the covers and on and on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and on they go. I don’t know how this is gonna end up. In open source, these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tend not to go to court because nobody has any money, unless like Red Hat’s involved or something, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But culturally speaking, this is like not in keeping with good behavior

⏹️ ▶️ ^John within the community, I would say. Most people agree. Some people are excited by it because they’re like, great, now I can go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John LLM re-implement everything. But other people are like, you know, existing implementations have been debugged

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over the course of years, sometimes decades, asking LLM to rewrite one and having it pass test suite doesn’t prove that it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have new bugs. And also it’s a crazy thing to do. And also, also I don’t wanna be using a library

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I was previously using that was proven over years. And then all of a sudden there’s a new version of it that doesn’t share a single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line of code with the other one. And I have no idea how it was written and I don’t trust code written by LLMs and on and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on and on. Setting aside even the open source license, which is like, oh, the GPL lets the code stay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open. Whereas a BSD license or an MIT license lets commercial companies use it. and I don’t want that and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Guess what? New technology causes disruptions that no one knows how to handle. And this is tied

⏹️ ▶️ ^John directly into, hey, is LLM generated code even copyrightable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at all? Like, cause a lot of the licensing stuff is like, well, this copyright of this code is owned by X, Y,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Z, and they license it to you under these conditions. You can do X, you can do this stuff with it, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what if nobody owns it? Like the picture the monkey took of himself, like, you know, what if there’s no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it public domain now? Because if it’s public domain, then how can you put any restrictions on what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people can do with it? It is extremely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, is, uh, it is, it’s like we should have a name for this corner, which is like completely unresolved,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very problematic issue related to AI and this is another one because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this was a while ago, this was in early March. I don’t, I haven’t been following this. I’ve been keeping up with it, but it’s going to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up again. And I guess the kicker to this is based on like, we talked about the Claude Code leak, quote unquote leak in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the earlier episode. Zach Leatherman writes, Claude,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John please rewrite yourself from scratch using the leak source code as a base and license this new version of yourself under MIT.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because these AI companies are totally like, yeah, we scrape the whole web, we don’t listen to your robots.txt,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we do whatever we want, right? But then when people scrape them, which is called distillation, I think, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it called distilling, distillation? I forget what it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use a model to train a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} user.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re working on a model and you’re like, well, one way we can train you is model. Just ask a bunch of questions from Claude and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like use the answers as your training data. You know what I mean and they all hate that so much. They’re like wait a second.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You can’t do that. We can scrape the world’s knowledge, but you can’t scrape us. We’re not the world. We’re a separate private.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everything we own is just for us. Everything in the world belongs to us, but once we get it, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t do that to us and this is the same thing. We’re just like yeah. What if I just what if I just tell Claude

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to write a new version of Claude based on the leak source code of Claude. And now I own Claude. Now it’s licensed just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me. Now I own the copyright because my I prompted the agent to do it. And now I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to start selling a thing called Claude. I’m going to use a different name so I don’t fall under trademark law, which is what open

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Claude got, you know, run over by a battle. Say, hey, stop using Anthropic Claude use my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obviously it’s not an issue because what you’re really buying is their time on their Nvidia GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that cost a whole jillion dollars and you don’t have that. But you know, if and when these models get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good enough to run locally, and there’s some innovation on the front of just solve just before we recorded someone has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some startup supposedly has some new Silicon that makes inference like 10 times faster than anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else that had come before it. And I used it for two seconds and I can’t tell if it’s true or false,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I can tell that the response came back from this LLM like instantly. And it fundamentally changed the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the experience of using it. But anyway someday, something like this could actually be a threat to them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I bet if you did do this, suddenly Anthropic would have very strong opinions about whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you now own the copyright to code that was created with an LLM and they would be conflicted. But it’s like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pay us for Claude code. Uh, you’ll totally own the copyright of the code you make unless you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ask it to clone anything that we’ve produced. And then you don’t own that at all because we own that just FYI. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know how I feel about this, but I do feel like it seems pretty gross

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t think I like this approach at all. Especially it’s doubly gross

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it was the person who was, or one of the maintainers for such a long time. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. How can you say with an honest,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, cause he feels like he owns the prize being like decades. He’s been doing this. It’s like, well yeah, Mark Pilgrim

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrote this, but that was two decades ago or 15 years ago. Whatever it was, I can’t do the math, but like this is my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John project. I can do whatever I want with it. But then everyone’s saying like, even if that was true, which is probably not, but even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if it were true, it’s a betrayal of your users. Like they don’t, they were using a thing that they trusted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for reasons they thought they understood. And now every single line of it is replaced with entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new code, which is AI generated, which is itself fraud. And there’s a different license.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not good. Yeah. That’s just like, like setting aside the legalities. This is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as they would say back in the day, a party foul, like you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} you have broken the social norms.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have done something that the crowd you are walking in does not accept as good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John behavior, even if it turns out to be legal. But the legal questions are also just a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigantic can of worms, regardless of how the is LLM code copyrightable or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not thing turns out. And that’s got to get to the courts eventually, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the uncertainty is also something that the rich and powerful companies don’t like. They want some kind of certainty.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so I think that issue will get forced sooner rather than later, but it’s a complicated issue. It’s not obvious what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the right thing to do is like I, all of these things, I, people talk about, I bet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a listener, you would feel more comfortable if we all could tell you this is exactly how it should be, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I personally, I don’t, I don’t actually know. Like, I don’t know what the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right call is. I think they made the right call on copyrightable art. I think that one is more cut and dried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s the human creation of it is so tied up in it, but. Code. I don’t know. I could have told

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I agreed with the decision on the Oracle like Java Oracle like re-implementing Java like that API

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is uncopyrightable. I agree with that decision that you could you could should be able to just look at the API and write your own implementation. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. But this one, I don’t know what the right answer is. Like I do know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a crappy thing to do in this context, but I don’t know about the legality.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We are sponsored this week by Quince. You know, here in the Northern Hemisphere,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s basically springtime now, and let me tell you, the pollen all over my car can confirm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it, but that’s not the point. The point is, is that springtime is the time, or one of the times anyway, that a lot of us like to go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey through our wardrobe, our closets, our dressers, etc., and figure out, hey, what’s working and what isn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And maybe some things are too big, or maybe some things are too small, and you want to just revamp your whole

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#askatp: Watch-measurement differences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP and Jason writes, when Marco was doing his long walks while wearing two fitness watches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was there any difference in the measurements? For example, does the heart rate monitoring look the same? Are there differences in the estimated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey calories used up? What about distance? I know both have GPS tracking, but do they both record the same distance?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, there are differences and no, they did not record the same of everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wearing the two watches, it’s very similar, like if you’ve ever changed Apple watches, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your calorie counts will be somewhat far off on the new one. And it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco calorie estimation is just that, it’s an estimation. I believe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way calorie counting usually works on fitness watches is they basically extrapolate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for like the heart rate, your body measurements, like your body weight and height, your age and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the heart rate and maybe the type of activity. and they extrapolate based on that how many calories you are probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco burning based on your heart rate in that scenario, I think. I could be wrong about that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I think that’s roughly what they’re doing. And the thing is, there’s a bunch of estimations involved there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so any of that data that’s different between different watches or any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of those assumptions that are like weighted differently or based on different modeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will result in different calories being reported. Generally speaking, the calorie counts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reported smart watches should basically be considered an approximation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the effort you expended relative to other similar workouts that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’ve done on the same watch. So you know like when I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my three times a week trainer workouts, the calorie counts there give me a rough approximation of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, this was a hard one or this was a less intense one based on what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve seen from other workouts with that same watch of that same type. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the calorie counts between the Suunto and the Garmin and the Apple Watch Ultra and regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple Watches, they’re all different from each other. So the calorie counts themselves, those are not absolutes, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all estimates. And again, they should only be used in terms of relative comparison between themselves doing the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kinds of activities. For GPS, that’s a little bit different. GPS has a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco real answer. And so you can kind of, there’s more of a more of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quality judgment there and and there is kind of a truth to be found there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What I have seen is that every smartwatch and phone for that matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reports GPS a little bit differently and the main reason I think based on what I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about GPS and what I’ve learned so far GPS if it’s if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s inaccurate if you have like a little bit of a of like a signal weakness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or you know the antennas pick up like a reflection of a signal off a building instead of the direct signal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what you tend to get with that is kind of a wobble you’ll you’ll have GPS that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems like maybe you’re like it’ll it’ll look on the map kind of like your zigzagging back and forth within the path

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more than you really did or if it’s if it’s like city streets it’ll show you crossing the street sometimes and you really didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cross the street and part Part of the reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I like dual band GPS watches, which in the Apple world is just the Apple Watch Ultra, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the other fitness watches world, they have many more models with dual band GPS. Part of the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why dual band GPS is better is that they use both bands to try to figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out like what was the more likely path this person actually took. Because if there’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a problem, or if there’s a weakness or a reflection with the signal from one of the bands, odds are the other one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco won’t have it quite the same way. so they can kind of like average them out or try to filter them in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clever ways. But GPS data is something that needs filtering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to really make it make sense. Like sometimes if you have like a bad reading, it could show it as being 100 feet away

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something or 10 feet away or something. And so different watches will also not only have different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco antennas and things to pick up the signals, but they’ll also have different algorithms for how they’re filtering that data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even within the Apple Watch, you’ll have different apps that have different filtering

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco algorithms because the Apple Watch delivers you what it thinks is you know accurate GPS data

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it also has wobbles and imprecision built into certain certain signals that come in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and different apps will sample them differently and will will filter them differently so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GPS is also an approximation but what 10 so what I have seen is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Suunto watch so far seems to be it seems to under report

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco distance compared to the Apple Watch Ultra by about 5 to 10%. And now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with GPS, if you’re thinking about like that wobble effect, if you’re walking in a straight line

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your GPS points kind of show you wobbling left and right a little bit, then the wobbled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data set is going to be a little bit longer distance because you’re burning up some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fake distance with those fake wobbles. So what I tend to think is that with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco GPS measurements on smartwatches, I think the shortest measured distance is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably the more accurate one. And in this case, so far, what I’m seeing every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that the Suunto is a little bit shorter than the Apple Watch Ultra. So I think the Suunto

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a little bit more accurate based on that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My experience with my dog’s GPS is the opposite of that, where when signal gets crappy or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has some kind of interference, the line on like, where did you walk your dog suddenly have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John perfectly straight segment. And I know that segment is wrong. Like there’s actually, there was wobble. The path does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wind, but it was like, well, we had bad signal. We got you here. We got you there. It’s two points. We connect them with a line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s the other case of like, it could be you’re getting shorter measurements because you can check on pedometer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plus plus to see, well, I guess you can’t, but like, it would be good to see the actual data because if you see wobbly line versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John straight line and there’s the same number of points, fine, but if you see wobbly line versus straight line and the straight one only has two points,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not more accurate. Yeah, and that’s probably a smoothing artifact. That’s probably like if the path was actually shaped

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wobbly, and you know, it’s possible that the algorithm that was taking those measurements might have thought this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was probably really a straight line. And so they simplify it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or maybe they didn’t have more than two data points. Like maybe they couldn’t get satellite signal for these 10 feet. And now that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ve got is this point and that point. And what can they do? They got to connect them with the line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s that’s also very possible because like, you know, with with GPS, like you have a certain amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of precision with the signal And like the weaker or more kind of dirty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or unreliable the signal is, the less certainty the radios can derive about your actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco location. So it’s also possible that like between different points,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the kind of circle of doubt around your location, where like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they think you’re somewhere in here, but their precision has temporarily decreased because of conditions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that can also cause the same kind of wobble. It’s an imprecise thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so again, kind of like calorie counting, like it’s more of an estimate, but GPS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is much more precise than calorie counting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you know the solution, I’m gonna score would tell you more watches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah, so far. Just slapping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them on there, just average them all together. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right.

#askatp: Datacenter vs. home-hosting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then Steven Goza writes, what’s the difference between Marco putting all of his Mac mini servers in a data center versus just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey putting them in his home? Business class fiber service has no data caps, so the data center doesn’t really have anything over regular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey business fiber. You can have backup electricity at home, so it’s not about the data center power. Based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco’s story, it doesn’t seem like the people in the data center will physically help him. Like if he needs to restart

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a machine, they’re not going to walk down the aisle and push the button for him. So what makes a data center hosting more professional

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than just hosting them at home?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Great question. And for a while I was hosting them at home, and so I can tell you exactly the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So what Steven says is correct, that most residential fiber services,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Verizon Fios I have here, prohibit running servers. Now, what does that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean? That’s a very vague thing. Generally, I think what they mean by that is using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of upstream bandwidth to serve live traffic from people making requests inbound to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco IP address for some kind of open port that you run services off of. In practice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s gonna be really hard to enforce, and I’ve never heard of it actually being enforced against anybody, but that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco officially against their terms of service to run servers like that. There’s a few things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I think wouldn’t have triggered this for me. One is that the usage pattern of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco particular servers running transcripts are mostly downloading data. So they download a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of data, and they upload a little bit of data, because they download the MP3s and listen to them and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco transcribe them and they upload the transcripts which are mostly texts that are small. That usage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pattern looks like residential usage. That kind of just looks like somebody is running Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the TV. So I don’t think that would really flag a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of attention to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the question is, what if you just get business internet service? You can get a business fiber,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have one at the restaurant. The main reason why not to do that is business internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service is just much more expensive for the exact same service. Like that’s, it’s the standard kind of enterprise pricing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco model. It’s like, oh, you’re a business slash wedding? You know, whatever it is, these keywords

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that make things more expensive. Baby? Yeah, exactly. Business is one of those. And so business internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco service costs two to three times as much in most places for the same amount of bandwidth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But that being said, you know, if I wanted to run this like on the up and up, I could do business internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There is the question though of redundancy. So a data center, like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have redundancy built in. They usually have multiple internet connections from multiple providers, possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on multiple physical routes. So like, you know, if a line gets cut somewhere, the entire data center isn’t just out of luck for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a while. That’s certainly a big advantage there on the internet service. Now, let’s talk about power.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco At a restaurant, having redundant power, having like a big backup generator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something, actually in New York does not make a lot of sense Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as I learned from my health code class, you are required to close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you lose power from the utility company. For any amount of time? Like even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s just a hiccup? If it’s like a brief blip, that’s fine. But like if you have like a total power outage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a sustained power outage, you are required to close the restaurant and have all the customers leave.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, but like a Generac or whatever would make that not an issue, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Technically you are correct, but it is against the rules. The health code rules are if you lose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco utility power, you must close the restaurant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you can see why they would have that. Yeah, totally. Because they’re like, well, you know, I have a generator so I don’t have to worry about this. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of course the generator doesn’t run the whole restaurant, just the essential things. And what I decide is essential is perfectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. And so there’s no chance of foodborne illness because I decided one thing wasn’t actually essential and it turns out it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like the law is a lot easier to just say, look, you lose power, tough luck. Maybe they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John update it someday when every place has their own solar panels powering them. But for now, I understand this law entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, you can exactly see why. Because it’s like, well, are all your walk-in fridges and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on that? What about emergency things? Are your bathroom exit signs? There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tons of stuff where if a restaurant just has power to a few key things, that might not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco necessarily be enough for the health department. So there is actually a pretty strong incentive for restaurants not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have much redundant power. I, of course, have UPSs on my network equipment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for brief blips to not disrupt things. but you know, that’s, so there’s not redundant power at most restaurants

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for good reasons. At least not long running redundant power. Data centers have tons of redundant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power. That’s kind of the whole thing. Like they have a huge ridiculous setup of like two different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco power sources, two different sets of generators and backups and all these different, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco switching and all these different things. It’s, you know, it’s made for that. That’s what they’re designed for. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in practice, the odds of an outage affecting servers I’m running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my house, is far higher than the odds of an outage affecting a data center. And especially for that outage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lasting more than a minute or two, odds are much, much better at a data center that you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stay online. Then, there is the question of the amounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of power and bandwidth needed. Now I know from setting up groups of six Mac minis

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my house, as I was like setting up the computer before I bring them to the data centers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My total usage for the 48 Mac Minis, if I ran them all in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco house, would need about 1.6 gigabits per second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sustained all the time down. That is more than I can get in a home connection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think I have anything above a gigabit available to me right now. So 1.6 gigabits sustained would be the 48 Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Minis downstream when they’re at full load. Also, they would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about 2,000 watts. Then also there is the heat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the cooling and just the amount of physical space they need. Like, yeah, they’re small, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, my house is not that big that I have a room I could devote to like a full height

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rack to run a bunch of Mac minis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. That normally if they weren’t Mac minis, there would also be the noise. I know that’s not probably an issue for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^John minis, but for basically anything that’s not a Mac mini, noise becomes a factor pretty quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and so you start, you know, you have all this space, You have all the heat, you have the bandwidth from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your business Fios connection that is gonna be used. Like, if I had a business Fios connection to run these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on, I would probably also want a separate residential connection to run the rest of my personal stuff on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because it would take up the whole connection. So once you start adding up these costs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re talking hundreds of dollars, probably, I mean, for a two gigabit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco connection, business-wise, fiber-wise, you’re probably talking about $500 a month. Then you’re talking about 2,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watts all the time of power consumption. That’s a few hundred bucks probably. And by the way, that 2,000 watts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s like roughly one and a half space heaters worth of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heat that in the summertime, you have to cool that. So you’re also gonna be spending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more energy cooling that heat out of whatever room it’s in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You start getting into hundreds of dollars per month and maybe almost $1,000 a month. It’s like, well, then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could just get the data center for that. Um, and then finally, in terms of, you know, Stephen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said, um, uh, it sounds like the people in the data center will not physically help me if something needs to be rebooted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s actually not true. Uh, they have a service called remote hands. I think most data centers have something like this where,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco um, I can pay some hourly rate, uh, that I can have them go like, and talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them through doing stuff to my rack and they will do it for me. Um, it is, I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, you know, one or $200 an hour. So it’s not something that I would want to do willy-nilly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if I really needed something, I could call them and have them go do something for me. So all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that, that’s why data center hosting makes sense, because you could do all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these things at home. Some of them would be significantly less fault tolerant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they were in your home. And ultimately the economics of doing things, once you have more than a couple of these,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it starts to not make sense to do it at home.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You left off your most important point, which is sort of the opposite of your, it’s not my fault,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not my fault, but it is my problem. Well, if something goes wrong, if you were hosting this in your house

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and something went wrong with your like redundant power supplying or something went wrong with your internet connection,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to fix that. Because you’re running the quote unquote data center out of your house.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, if it’s in the data center, it’s still your problem, but you physically can’t fix it. You don’t own the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data center, you can’t fix that problem. So at the very least you have the relief of knowing, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s nothing I can do about it. It sucks and it is my problem. And not that it really matters that much for transcription because it’s not like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a live service that customers are using, but like the relief of knowing I can’t fix the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or cooling problem to the data center. They have to fix that. And if they turn out to be really bad at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fixing that, you could go to another data center in theory because in theory it’s a competitive business. Whereas if you’re hosting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it in your house, guess what? Now you’ve got another job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, like what if I’m like on vacation and do I have to like call one of my neighbors and say, hey, can you please go into my

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} house?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tell them you’ll pay them $200 an hour to be a remote hand. Yeah, right. Yeah. And go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into your house. And yeah, don’t go into the other rooms, just into the one room that has the Mac minis in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this episode, Quince, Zapier, and Lisa. And thanks to our members

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Expansion for Macs in a world without the Mac Pro. What does that look like? What are our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options here? We’ll talk about that in overtime. You can join to listen to here at atv.fm slash join. Thank you so much everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We’ll 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

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Auntie Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they did it mean to, accidental, Tech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Podcasts, it’s so long.

Casey’s new toy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, I bought myself a toy a couple of weeks ago. Is it a Mac Pro? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey goodness. Who would ever buy a Mac Pro deliberately, right, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would buy one if the price was right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I bought myself a GL.iNet toy. So GL.iNet does a lot of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you know them, you probably know them for their travel routers, which I still have one in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tailgate tub. I have a different one that I’m using occasionally when I travel in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey addition to the UTR, the Unified Travel Router, depending on the situation. But this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not a router at all. This is something different. What this is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a PoE-powered KVM. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I realized when I was doing the work on rebuilding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the NUC that was previously my channel server in Connecticut, and then became the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey host of all my Docker containers, among other things, and I put Proxmox on it. What I realized when I started that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey process was I need a physical screen and I need a physical keyboard and a physical mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All of these things I have. I have them in the house. I have a travel monitor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I use when I go and work remotely, which is typically most Wednesday mornings I do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because it’s much easier to study for ATP than it is to write code on a 13-inch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mac or 14-inch MacBook Pro and a 10 or 12-inch accessory monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have that, but it, it, it’s either USB-C or either mini or micro

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey HDMI, whatever the small one is, I always get it backwards. And I have a like full size to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey micro cable or whatever it is, but that’s like a pain in the butt cause then I got to go get it and I usually know where it is, but I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to find it in the pile of cables and then you got to get it. And then you got to power the display. If you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey powering it over, you know, USB-C, if it’s not data and power in one, then you got to power it as well. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I have an old, actually, I think for my iMac Pro, I have my keyboard and trackpad from that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so I can get those out, but then I need a couple of lightning cables and I’m starting to run

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey low on those actually, because there’s almost no devices that I use in my life that still need them. And it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of annoying and burdensome. Granted, first world problem for sure, but burdensome nonetheless.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now my friend Alex from Tailscale, a past sponsor, I think future sponsor if I’m not mistaken,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the Tailscale YouTube channel, he had pointed out that GLiNet makes the Comet PoE,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which is, or Pocomite PoE remote KVM control. So what this is, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little box and it has, you know, an ethernet jack, two USB-C ports,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an HDMI port, and a USB-A port. And what you do is you plug

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in either USB-C for power, or if you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey PoE available, power over ethernet available, which I do, then you just plug in an ethernet cable that gives to power network

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey connectivity. You have a USB-C cable that they provide that can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go into USB-A, or that does go to USB-A. And that provides both keyboard and mouse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey across one cable. And then you connect HDMI from the device into this box.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can optionally add some sort of external disk drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the USB-A port. But what this does is it gives me network attached,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quote unquote, physical access to a computer. because as far as the computer that I’m using is concerned, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a physical monitor. It’s a physical keyboard. It’s a physical mouse. It’s just that this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fancy little box happens to be beaming it across the internet. And the reason I saw it on the Tailscale

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey YouTube channel is because it will natively jump on your tail net, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super freaking cool. So what that means is I have a couple of screenshots that I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey share both in the chat and in the show notes and everywhere else, but here’s a screenshot of me using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Proxmox NUC from this GL-iNet thing. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see that I just went to a URL on my tail net, and I have a terminal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey window where I whiffed the password a couple of times, but that’s neither here nor there. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have a terminal window, and so that’s pretty cool. But it’s not just for Linux machines.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If you want, you can connect it to, I don’t know, a Mac. Here’s another screenshot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me using it with my Mac mini that runs Plex and jelly, jelly fin and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey channels. And so this is a really silly little contraption that generally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey speaking will live in a box. But on the occasions I need to connect physically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to something, this is going to be so much nicer and so much easier than dragging out several, you know, 17 different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cables being hyperbolic, but you know, 17 cables, a monitor, a monitor power, uh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey uh, that one random micro or mini or whatever HDMI to full-size HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cable. It’s all just in this one little box and then I use it from whatever computer I want. I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey use it from an iPad if I wanted and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} it’s great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if I wanted to install software on whatever this is connected to, I can, you know, like upload

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an ISO to the KVM and have the ISO masquerade as a USB key connected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the device, you know, to the computer. I’ve never tried this, but I believe that to be the case. So I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There’s not much to be said here other than that. I’m happy to answer questions if if you have any, but it’s just, this is one of those neat little things that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey did I need it? Absolutely not. And it happened to be on sale, whatever that sale was a couple of weeks ago on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Amazon. I forget what specifically it was, but. They’re always inventing something. Yeah, they’re always inventing some reason to have a sale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so it was a little under a hundred bucks. And I think this is a device that should cost a little under a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bucks. And it’s really neat to have, and I really like it. And Marco, if you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the need to have, quote unquote, physical access to only one of your 48 Mac mini’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I highly suggest this thing. I would not necessarily put this on all 48 of them, but if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you had one that was like a controller or something for all the others, this would be a really great way to have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what did you call it, remote hands, or do you have your helping hands? This would be a pretty good way to do it, because again, as far as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the physical computer’s concerned, this is a physical keyboard, a physical mouse, and a physical monitor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It just so happens that they’re not those things, and they’re actually all being presented on the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s pretty cool. I can actually see, I actually might at some point get one of these.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right now, the way my servers are set up, there is no one controlling server.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They all are peers and they all just connect to the web service and get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco jobs and work on them and submit them back to the web service.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Cattle, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. And there are, and right now, one thing I’ve thought about is, should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I at some point put some other kind of server in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the data center, in the rack with the other ones on their network to do kind of controlling things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like right now, my power, the ATS, the transfer switch, my power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco switch thing, I have one that has remote control over the port. So right now, if I needed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reboot the Mac minis, like one of the Mac minis, if it needs a power cycle one, and I can’t do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco remotely via SSH or remote desktop, I can log into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the other ones, as long as any of them are working. I can log into one of them and open up, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco via remote desktop, open up like the local browser interface to the power unit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and reboot the entire bank of six that whatever the problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one is plugged into.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} So like-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You still have the remote hands problem of like, you can tell me, maybe you’ll discover this or maybe your Mac and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then we’ll tell you, but I think there’s still some stuff where you need to press the physical button

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Mac mini like to enter recovery mode and stuff. And this KVM will not hold down the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John button on your Mac mini for you. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} mean, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I was to the point where I had to enter recovery mode, I would just drive to the data center and like pick it up, bring it back to my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco house and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} deal with it. Remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hands. But yeah, but what am I in recovery mode for?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say like, when you have actual like data center hardware, they try to make it so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can do everything remotely or at the very least do everything from like a console in the data center. but with Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, maybe Macadmins can correct me. It just seems to me that there’s probably some remaining stuff that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need. In the Apple Silicon age, you still need to hold down the power button physically and the KVM can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that. Unlike the good old days where the power button used to be on the keyboard. I’m not sure you guys were Mac users back then, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m familiar with this as a thing, but no, I was not a Mac user then. Also, it’s worth noting, Marco, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this thing does have, the web UI has a little toolbox,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they call it. And so this is where you can like paste something and then into the web UI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then tell the web UI, okay, basically type this on the remote machine, right? So it’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s a very rudimentary but functional clipboard sharing, right? Well, another thing it has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a wake on LAN section. So you can add like, you know, Mac addresses and name them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and have the KVM fire awake on LAN packet over to whatever device you need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is that useful for you? I don’t know, but it’s neat that it’s a thing. And so, yeah, I really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like this little box. It’s the sort of thing that I certainly didn’t need. I used birthday money for it, so it was the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey perfect birthday gift. And again, like, I don’t know if I would wanna watch a full screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video on it. Like, I mean, using the Mac on it, it’s pretty freaking quick, well, especially when it’s in the same house,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s pretty freaking quick. But the point is, I typically plan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to use this for situations where I just need to plug something into a physical screen, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is probably going to be the most convenient way to do it, because as long as I have PoE or a USB-C input

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from something, even like a battery pack, as long as I have an ethernet connection, which I have in several

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey places in the house, this is such an easy way to get what is, quote unquote, physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey access to a computer, and I really like it. And the fact that it’s on my tail net makes it super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nice because I was thinking in the scenario where I’m going out of town on vacation something like that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can put this on either the Mac Mini or the Proxmox box, Moxbox box. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyways, I can put this on one of those. And you know, if I have some sort of issue that would typically require physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey contact with the machine, I can just log into this thing and perhaps work whatever magic I wouldn’t be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to otherwise. So, uh, yeah, maybe I’m the only one who wants it. Maybe this is not appealing to anyone else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And, and like, you don’t have to use this with tail scale, by the way. It’s just nice that it’s tail scale native, so you don’t have to think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it. But really good stuff. And I’ll put a link to an affiliate link, to be honest, in the show notes. And I’ll put a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey link to Alex’s video, which covers it in about 10 minutes. but I thought it was cool.