60: The Great Odwalla Flavor Change of 2013

11 Apr 2014

WWDC tickets, Heartbleed, Dropbox Carousel, and a spirited after-show about the causes of app crashes and Casey’s phonographic tea ceremony.

Episode Description:

Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em while you sunset Dance Jam
WWDC
- How to make a lottery work, like Shmoocon does
- How to write a live blogging system for keynotes
- Our winnings and losses in the WWDC Don't-Call-it-a-Lottery
- Levels of randomness and Apple's discretionary pool of tickets
- What's the right way to distribute tickets?
- Is today's WWDC really tenable? What could be done?
- AltConf and "CDWW"
Heartbleed
Dropbox's Announcements
- Condoleezza Rice joins their board
- Carousel, a new photo sharing app.
  - Some potential trademark issues with some friends of Marco and Casey's
  - Does this leverage Everpix IP?
  - How the UI is similar to Oldsmobile speedometers from the 80s
Lightroom Mobile
In an unusually angsty after-show, John takes Marco and Casey on:
- Where do crashes really come from?
  - John on Debug #32
- Is Vinyl really better than CDs?
  - IRL Talk #19
  - Casey on IRL Talk #21
  - Christopher “Monty” Montgomery's excellent video explaining audio sampling

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, is that what we missed? Son of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a… Oh, man. Excellent track. Excellent track.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that was one of my first cassettes that I ever bought.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Was? MC Hammer?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it was Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Did you end up having him sign that cassette when you met him many years later?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I did not have it with me in Manhattan. It’s poor planning. when he was promoting Dance Jam.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did not. I did not. And I was promoting Tumblr.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Is that still a thing? Is Dance Jam still a thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have no clue. I don’t know. I’ve never even… Even that day, I didn’t even look it up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dance Jam has come to an end. Thank you all for the participation over the years, but Dance Jam has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey come to an end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I guess they sunset their brand. They’re aligning their visions with their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platform umbrella.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, just stop. Just stop. You’re hurting my ears. John, let’s talk about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how you can sell tickets quickly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, last show we talked about whether, how they would sell WRC tickets this year. Of course, in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John grand tradition of our Wednesday recording of our Friday show, Apple announced how they were going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sell tickets after we had recorded the episode. So that was fun. So one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John options was lottery. That’s what Apple ended up doing. And some feedback

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Twitter, someone saying that they didn’t think that that it was really difficult to do a system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that won’t crash due to the onslaught of people wanting to buy tickets. And on the previous show, I had said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that this is a bounded problem. It’s not like Facebook, where in theory, everyone on the earth with an internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connection could get an account. There is limited interest in WWDC. We were trying to think, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many people could there possibly be? Maybe 1 million is an upper bound, a crazy upper bound for this conference of 5,000 people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I said, surely, someone could design a system that can handle the onslaught of 1,000 people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Basically serve them in on a first-come first-served basis no guarantees you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may still get blocked out But it’s a way of potentially increasing your odds Versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lottery a truly random lottery where there’s no way of increasing your odds doesn’t matter when you enter You know doesn’t matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you do You’re just one of another whole pile of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so someone said well, that’s what Google did too because apparently even the mighty Google couldn’t to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put up a service for their I.O. conference that would withstand that, so they did a lottery instead. I don’t think Google did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lottery because they couldn’t provide a service that withstood the onslaught. It’s conceivable that Google did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same mistake that Apple has made, where underestimating what the demand would be and put a Wimpy system out there, and the Wimpy system fell down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think it is entirely within Google’s technical expertise to make a system that would allow a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John million or so people to try to sign up for a conference all at the same time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And as evidence of this, someone on Twitter me to shmoo con. I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess it could be shmoo con, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey As in short for shmoo’s.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, this is from the description on their website. It’s an annual East coast hacker convention.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hell bent on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology, technology, exploitation, blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it’s, it’s, you know, by tech nerds for tech nerds, presumably it’s a small conference, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they did pretty much what I described on the previous show, which is like, well, just make something simple and straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it. I don’t think fancy in it and have a system whereby everyone just floods it all at once and everyone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, first come first serve and that’s all there is to it. And it’s not a guarantee

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you could still be the very first person to click the button and still not get a ticket because of the vagaries of the way servers work, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least you’re increasing your odds and their servers don’t fall down. And this ShmooCon obviously is small and what they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is they did a series of rounds where they would release 650 tickets at once, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how long the rounds were were separated by maybe an hour or whatever. And then if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get your res, if you reserve your spot, then you have like five minutes to check out or something like that. And if you decide

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to buy the ticket, it goes back into the pool. And everyone who didn’t make it into didn’t get a reservation gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in a queue for anything that’s coming. You know, any tickets that people don’t buy, and they do a series of rounds or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So anyway, I, you know, the person who was haranguing me about this on Twitter was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John telling me that, you know, in a slightly condescending tone that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John after what, 20 years of doing web development, I know what is and isn’t possible in web development

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this scale. It is possible to make a system that gives you slightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John increased odds of getting a ticket if you if you are one of the first people waiting to click the button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Again, no guarantees, and it’s not going to be perfect, but you can make a server that doesn’t crash under this kind of load. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John apparently these people have done it. And I was, you know, and they were going back and forth on Twitter about this. And there was a lot of goal goalposts moving and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hemming and hawing. But the bottom line is that I think Apple and Google both have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slightly more financial and technical resources than ShmooCon. So ShmooCon was doing 650 ticket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rounds. So Apple could just use the ShmooCon technology, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably like one Linux server and one programmer. They could use that technology to do like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seven or eight rounds and fill up WWDC. Or they could use a little bit of the bazillions of dollars

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have and do something similar. Anyway, regardless of, you know, as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I said in the previous show, a lottery is by far the best system for Apple, and Apple tends to do what’s best for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, and they did what was best for Apple. So this is all kind of a moot point, but I wanted to bring it up again because there is an actual example

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right down to the sort of very simple text-only, not very fancy-looking stuff written,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think, by one or two people who were sending me messages on Twitter. So it can be done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Honestly, I would love the chance to try to write something like that just because, like, I would take it as a you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like the whenever there’s a big keynote that is not live stream that everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clogs the hell out of the various blogs that have live chat transcripts of what’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I always thought it would be cool to attempt to design one of those things and see like how how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much it stood up to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, you remember all those things crashing? Ours technically had the same problem because they kept trying different vendors.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then they hired someone named Lee, who was a pro programmer, and he by himself wrote the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Ars Technica system for handling live blogs. And they’ve been using it ever since with no problems. One person, probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a couple months of development.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there you go. Oh yeah, I mean, it’s like if you custom tailor it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exactly your needs and no more, and you do it right, taking advantage of things like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, S3 and CDNs to alleviate a lot of the load and the, you know, the spreading out the load,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like that. can you can do it like it’d be really cool anyway. So like, I think this kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of thing, like I would love the chance to design this kind of system and see like, how like, could it handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the rush from a 5000 ticket conference of, you know, 50,000 people trying to get into it or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever the number might be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you were in a class like a college course about this topic, that this would be one of like your homework assignments or one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like your midterm project or whatever, you know, design a system that could withstand x y and they would have like a test

⏹️ ▶️ ^John harness that would subject your system to these stresses and You’d have some given amount of hardware that you had to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John efficiently or whatever. It doesn’t get much more straightforward than this. Say you don’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to do the purchase part. Just do the reservation part. That is almost the simplest possible problem you could have. And it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a great idea to like, let me try using Node.js. Let me try using a NoSQL database. Let me use a relations database.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Let me try it with flat files. Let me try it with shared memory. You could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try it. I think if you’re using a database at all, you already lost. I mean, my solution would be Memcache and using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the atomic operations within Memcache cleverly to make it basically an all-memcache solution.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But that would be the exercise. It would be like, within a given set of hardware, all these different technologies, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how well do they take advantage of the hardware, or don’t they? And you’d probably be given more hardware than you need, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would have to have something that scaled out horizontally. It’s a good object lesson, because it’s a very simple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that you’re trying to do. We should actually talk about, I think I have scaling way down the notes anyway. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continuing the follow-up. That’ll be a quick topic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, and then do you want to talk about how anything else regarding the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey signup process, specifically like the follow-up area?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh no, we have to say how we all did in the WWDC lottery, but I don’t have any more follow-up on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John signup thing.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so we should probably talk about WWDC tickets and what came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that. So all three of us registered for tickets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we were registered for the opportunity to spend $1,600. Marco, did you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a ticket?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I won the chance to spend $1,600, and I took that chance. Fair enough. I, too, won a chance to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spend $1,600, and thankfully, since I’m gainfully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey employed unlike you, I used works money to spend $1,600. John, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey did you fare? I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not get a golden ticket. I got a sad email an hour and a half after the supposed a deadline that said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unfortunately, you do not win a chance to spend $1,600. Try again next year. Aaron Powell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This genuinely makes me extremely sad. And I know this probably doesn’t come across

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as genuine, because I am very excited to have gotten a ticket. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I almost not quite, but almost wish that of the three of us, you’re the one to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the ticket. Because I think it takes the most encouragement for you to get out there, justifiably I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey should add. And so I feel like the universe has kind of wronged all of us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by not allowing you to win the lottery.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wish your work was paying for my ticket and that I could buy one. Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I also, you know, because, I mean, you look around at the rates of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people you hear from on Twitter, people you follow, at the rates of how many of them got rejected,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I say, roughly speaking, I would guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe one in ten got in of people that I follow or heard about or from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I would say the same thing. And it’s funny because before the tickets went on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sale, before the lottery ended, I had plucked out of thin air, you know, I bet you it’s about 50,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people, because I knew a lot of, well I shouldn’t say a lot, but I knew a handful of people that I didn’t think, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they didn’t think that they would go if they got a ticket, but what harm is it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey throwing your name in the hat? You know, there’s no penalty for that really. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would agree that of the people I saw, it was about 1 in 10, and given

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it’s about a 5,000 person conference, even I can handle that. That math says it’s about 50,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people. What did you think, John?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right after the announcement, it seemed to me like it was you had the 50-50 shot, because I was seeing roughly half

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people in the Twitter stream was saying I got one and But then later on, I started hearing about whole blocks of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who were like, oh, yeah, everybody in our 10-person company applied, and none of us got tickets. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starts to balance it out. And yeah, beforehand, if you were to ask me, I would say 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. But then afterwards,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking, maybe it’s only 2 or 3 to 1. But it’s so hard to tell, because I don’t think we have a good sample size, because you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know everybody who’s maybe only the winners are saying, yay, they got them, instead of being sad that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they didn’t. I’m not even sure Apple will give us numbers. I suppose in the WWEC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keynote in the beginning, in their big part where they talk about all their numbers that they’re proud of, will be like, welcome to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John WWEC. It’s so popular, the blah, blah, blah. Maybe they’ll throw something out there. But in the end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t matter too much, I think. I mean, it wasn’t like 100 or 1,000 to 1. I think we can ballpark it. It’s somewhere between 2

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to 1, 10 to 1, 21. But I would be really surprised if it’s 100 to 1.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems like it’s much lower than that. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, it’s… I feel kind of sad for everyone who didn’t get one. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s why I didn’t say anything on Twitter about whether I got one or not. And really, the only reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I even agreed to talk about it here is that everyone’s asking us. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I feel guilty that I got one. Not guilty enough to not take it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Survivor’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guilt. Yeah, no, but you two both asked me before the show that if I wanted to talk about whether I got one or not, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s two things at play. One is that some Some people who got the chance to buy a ticket chose not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to. And I know people who did that, because I was asking them if they could somehow transfer their ticket to me. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think there’s a way to do that. I think if you got the chance to buy a ticket and you choose not to buy it, well then you choose not to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy it. Those tickets go back into a pool somewhere and presumably Apple will disperse them to people who didn’t win

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the lottery the first time. So there’s that glimmer of hope for me. And the second part is the glimmer of hope that someone inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple knows who I am and says, oh, we should get that guy a ticket. And some people might

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give me a hard time about that, or some people think that I should feel bad that somehow because I have this amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of fame from writing these reviews or whatever, that someone inside Apple would recognize my name and say, oh, give him one of our pool

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of tickets that we reserve or whatever. But I think that’s perfectly valid because, for example, like why do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certain journalists get tickets and other ones don’t? Depending on your publication, is it because of your readership?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it because of your fame? Is it because Apple likes you? Apple just chooses which people from the press that they like and gives them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John press passes to the keynote. I’m not going to get a press pass to the keynote, of course, but for many years, lots of other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t get press pass to the keynote, and then they did get them, and then they didn’t get them. And it’s like, it’s whoever Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John picks. If Apple likes you, and people inside Apple like you, you get nice things from Apple. If they don’t like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or don’t know you, you don’t get nice things. I have limited control over that. Hopefully, you know, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writing reviews that people in Apple might read, then I might, they might know who I am or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s not, I don’t feel guilty if I get special treatment because of that, the same reason that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, John Gruber shouldn’t feel guilty that he gets a press pass. It’s like, oh, you just got a press pass because you run Daring Fireball. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s why he got a press pass. Like, you know, it makes perfect sense to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, also to point out what the press pass is, which is important. Like when Gruber

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets a press pass, those press passes are only good for the keynote. They’re after the keynote, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, they kick you out. So the press if even if you got a press pass, it wouldn’t really help for your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco purposes, because your purposes are, you actually go to the sessions the whole week to learn stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for your review. And if you got a press pass for, you know, via ours,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or by any other means, for the keynote, that really wouldn’t help you at all, because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would only be for that morning, which you can watch anytime, anywhere, anyway, and most of the stuff that you would talk about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or, you know, going to the labs, asking questions, talking to the engineers, the press pass wouldn’t allow you to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any of that stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, if I had to choose, like, you know, I’m not gonna get a press pass anyway, because I’m not being pressed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the keynote. But, you know, I’ve talked to ours about it, and I told ours, like, if you get a press pass, use it for people who are going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to report on the keynote, because I’m not going to report on the keynote, and you should use, that’s what you should use the press pass to. The press pass is useless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to me. I need the pass to the entire conference, because I go to sessions every single day for the entire week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you know, while it would be fun to go to the keynote and be in the room or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, a press pass, I would never take a press pass away from someone who’s actually going there to report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Whereas people are like, oh, you’re taking a pass away from a real developer. I feel like I’m going to just as many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sessions as a quote unquote real developer, and I’m paying attention, and I’m taking notes, and I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using that information to do something. What I’m doing is not writing a program, but I don’t think it’s any less of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a practically useful thing for me to go to all those sessions and take all those notes and synthesize all the data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I feel no guilt in sort of, oh, you’re taking a pass from someone who’s a developer. If somehow I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John manage to get a pass to WC, you can be sure that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to WC and taking that pass and going to all those sessions like I usually do. If I don’t, oh well, what can you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I think, you know, there’s always every year, we even talked about this last year, every year you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look around and you talk to people there and there’s always people who get in who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can pretty much, after five minutes of talking to them, you can pretty much tell like, yeah, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really need to be here, you know? people who just really aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into it, like into Mac or iOS development, and also don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be into it. And they’re just there because their company was willing to send them and they happened to get a ticket or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You shouldn’t feel bad about… If you’re at all interested in this world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of these ecosystems, if you’re at all interested, you should not feel bad taking a ticket

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it. Because there’s a lot of people who are interested, who don’t get tickets, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re you’re not the one person keeping all those people out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and honestly, like the videos really do help. Like if I don’t get a ticket, why it’s not so bad this year and not calamitous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my review, hopefully, is that assuming they don’t announce that they released it of ours 10 is like a week after W2C, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which case we’re all screwed. Like, they released the videos in a timely manner now. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not so bad for me to not be there to sit through the sessions. Now, it depends on what they announced in the year. So, So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for example, in certain past years, they’ve announced technologies and stuff that I’ve spent multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hours talking to, let’s just say people, about at WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that really heavily informed my review and helped me make it better. And those are some of the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, from the outside, if you look at my reviews, like, maybe it looks like all just one undifferentiated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John soup of information. But I know the parts of information that I never would have known had I not been physically at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John WWDC. But if I’m not physically there, the sessions tons of information too, so it’s not the end of the world from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my review. The end of the world from my review is always what they announce for the release date, because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tells me how much time I have to write the thing. But you know, it’s fun to go out there for a week, it’s fun to see people, and I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being in the sessions. There’s something about being in the room. Even for things like the State of the Unions and the Keynote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being in that room gives you a better idea of what the vibe is than watching the videos, because the videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are so… Not that they’re manipulated, but they’re post-processed in a way that it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like it does in the room and in the room you can get a sense of what people really think of what’s going on for good or bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in any of these announcements and plus just talk whispering to the people next year or whatever like it’s a whole it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole thing I’ll be really be sad if I don’t manage to get a ticket but again what can you do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah in the in the videos they they first of all they don’t show the presenter like the old it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the picture is only of the slides but they also cut out like if there’s any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any periods of applause or laughter They’ll actually cut

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that out for time because they try to make them faster, right? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but like in the vid being there live gets you all that stuff. No question, and that’s great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if there is Q&A which there really rarely is these days, but if there is Q&A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s almost always cut out of the video as well but the videos have the advantage of being able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco skim through being able to rewind and being able to play it faster than 1x speed because Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the actual pace of the presenter speaking is very slow, so everyone can get it. And even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if your English isn’t that great, or even if you’re a slow note taker, you can still follow along,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is very nice and accommodating of them. But it really is nice once you get home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can download the videos to be able to skim through and play them at like 1.5x or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 1.6x and get through a lot more a lot faster. Or you can skip over sections that you already know about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or sections that aren’t relevant to you, stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, timely release of the videos is so much more important than getting a ticket in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting the information out to me for reviews. Because when they weren’t timely, I had to be in there taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes like a demon. Because as soon as they changed that slide, I was never going to see those words again for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John God knows how many months. And so I was like, this is my only chance to type that. I’m literally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transcribing the slides. And many times I took pictures of the slides. I can’t copy this all. I just got to take a picture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was a bad situation. And now, for the past two years, when they’ve been so good with the videos, it’s like, just relax. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to copy down what’s in the slides. You’re going to be able to look at those slides in a couple days anyway. You’ll be fine. And it’s just so much nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then you can write down what you really should be writing down, is your thoughts, your synthesis of the information you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John receiving, or points that occur to you, or questions that you want to ask. And even if there’s no Q&A, there’s always the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bunch of nerds gather around the presenter at the end of the thing. And if you really have a pressing question, you’re going to take note

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that presenter and hunt them down later in the week, or just go up there and stand and try to ask them your question after the session is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, that’s actually one of my one of my tips for WWDC that I started doing myself is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if I don’t have a question, I’ll just go up there and stand there and listen to everyone else’s questions and what and the answers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they get because a lot of times like the the mob presenter at the end,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco answering questions from crazy people, you can get a lot of information out of that, that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful that you know, maybe they’re asking questions you didn’t think to ask, but it actually is useful information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I always stand up there and just listen, even if I have nothing to say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what do you guys think will happen this coming Monday at 5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pacific, which is when the deadline is for those who won the lottery to actually commit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and reward Apple for their winning the lottery with $1,600? What do they do with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey those excess tickets? Do they start doling them out to John Syracuse like we all hope? Do they do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a second run lottery? They’ve never said anything about a waiting list. What do you suspect is going to happen? Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey start with John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I assume they’re going to do another random disbursement. If you’re one of the lucky few, you will get an email that says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know we told you before you couldn’t get a ticket, but one is available. If you’d like to buy it, you have until X date. I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll send out more negative emails like that. I won’t get a second email telling me a bunch of new tickets were released

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from people who didn’t buy them, but you didn’t get one of those either, loser.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That would be so cruel.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That would be amazing. That’s what I suspect. The lucky people, kind of like what happened the year

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when everyone had half purchased things in their cart. just went to those people and said, hey, it looks like you tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy a ticket and didn’t get it if you still want it. I think that makes sense for the way they would do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, so last year and the year before, when they’ve sold out rapidly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and probably before that too, but Apple’s developer relations people have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco always had some tickets to give away. Like, if somebody really important

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or really deserving didn’t get a ticket, they could like email their friends at Apple and be like, Hey, would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you consider me? And sometimes that works. Sometimes it didn’t. So there’s always been this pool of tickets that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might be given away, you know, as the developer relations people, you know, at their discretion,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to like important corporate clients or whatever the case may be, or, you know, good stories from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco students or young people or whatever else. So my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guess is when the number of tickets that are unclaimed becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco established, if that number is really, really high, like over, you know, we estimate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s about 5,000 tickets. Let’s say that number is over 1,000. If over 1,000 of them are unclaimed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that weren’t already reserved to be given away at their discretion, maybe they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco might do it in the random drawing. But honestly, I would assume that whatever pool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not claimed through the random lottery, that just gets added to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their pool of discretionary tickets that they can give away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John See, I figured their discretionary pool was already pretty big, and that’s why I thought they would do this as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a second random thing, is that I thought they already had a discretionary pool that was never even put up for possibility,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they’re just saving those. I mean, again, this is why the system is great for Apple. We have no idea how they distributed tickets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Was it truly random? They pin down, like, OK, we’ve got to make sure at least x number of people from the Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Office team get in there, and these people from Adobe, and the people who have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John business relationships. These people from EA have to go. Can you imagine if everyone from EA got shut out? I don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that happening. So surely they’re, and it could be that the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing was like that. As I said, a large portion of the pool could have been discretionary. So they pin down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all their discretionaries first, and then do everybody else random. And that’s why I think if these people don’t buy again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they will have already made sure that the people they care about got them and then just do a second random thing. But none

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of us know. That’s the beauty of this system. Apple can do whatever they want and from the outside we just all have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to assume it is entirely random and fair. And from what I’ve seen, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can always do pattern matching and come up with conspiracy theories like, oh, nobody from Rogamiba got one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple doesn’t like Rogamiba, therefore they’re being shunned. But until we know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the total number of people trying to buy tickets was, Like, what are the odds that all seven people from Roganimu

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t get it? Probably pretty good. I mean, you know what? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no matter what the odds are, I think we’re probably lucky in this show that two of the three of us got tickets. And I don’t think that was because someone was trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to give people from ATP tickets. Just that’s the luck of the draw. So someone who’s better at probability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than I am can calculate the odds that any specific group of people all didn’t get tickets. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have a feeling that it’s impossible to tell from the outside of whether it was truly random.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I think that at least some part, I think the part that’s been given away so far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was random. Because, you know, not only looking around and just seeing anecdotally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what we see around us, but they use the word random everywhere. They used it on the site,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they used it in both emails, confirm and reject. Like, they use the word random so many times, it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be really weird to say random so much if that portion of the tickets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was not given away randomly. You know, Apple’s way is not to lie, it’s just to withhold

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not specify. So I would imagine this was actually random. Now, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could have randomly given away $3,500 and kept $1,500 for themselves for discretionary use. Who knows? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I feel like at least some portion has to be random, because how else do you explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey away me getting a ticket and not John? As much as I’m excited about it, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s a pretty simple argument that the community at large would be better seeing a better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey OS 10 review than if I am able to go and talk about it on ATP. So it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seems clear to me at least a portion was random. And I…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, like, there’s other weightings they could use, for example. Like here’s the things that I would imagine if they were going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do a non-random, because first of all, any random is like, you know, pseudo-random. Like maybe they used the built-in rand and put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a defined seed in or something. But anyway, like, there’s many things that could weigh in there, which could be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have you been to WWDC before? If you have, your odds go down. if you have and your odds go up. Because they want some portion of the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be like new people. Do you have an app in the app store? Casey does, I don’t, right? How long have you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a developer account? How many bugs have you filed? Like all sorts of criteria you can imagine coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up with this crazy algorithm to try to weight it to try to like we want some percentage of new people, some percentage of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are longtime developers. But if you just went to WBC, give someone else a chance. And you can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to come up with this algorithm and then just feeding that into the engine and letting it spin and saying it’s not deterministic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just weighting your chances based on these criteria. Or it could be entirely random. Again, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. But it seems like it’s pretty fair. I don’t see any rhyme or reason to the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who got them, who didn’t got them. And I think anything that I am seeing or can try to convince myself of, it’s because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re just pattern matching machines and we’ll try to apply whatever. We’ll try to apply a narrative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to anything that’s random, because there will always be some patterns that we see in the noise. But yeah, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty darn certain that they have a reasonably large pool of discretionary ones that they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of pinning down on the people they definitely want to come. And I am obviously not in that group, nor do I expect to be, nor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should I be. I’m just hoping that I can eke out one of the dregs when people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John choose not to buy tickets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think also, I mean, I haven’t heard of anybody getting a discretionary ticket offered to them yet. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably at least waiting until this timeout period ends so they know how many they have, which is one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why these aren’t going to be re-randomized, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just going to be added to this discretionary pool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, you used to be able to transfer them. There wasn’t a reservation and a purchase. It used to be that you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John buy them, but then you could transfer it as an asset within your ADC thing. So in past years, there was lots of horse trading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going on of transferring these things around from one person to the other. But that’s not possible this year, as far as I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overall, are you guys, obviously, because we had different results, our opinion of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is probably biased, but overall, how happy are you with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this system that they did?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t love it, but I can’t conceive of a better system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that isn’t me selecting all my friends and giving them tickets, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like, I don’t—I wish there were something that worked out better selfishly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the sense that, you know, I’m very happy I got a ticket and I’m happy you did but I wish John did.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But if you look at the bigger picture I can’t I can’t conceive of a system wherein

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s more fair and also more agreeable to Apple as John has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said many many many times. I think a lottery or even a lottery with some allotment on the side

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is about as fair as you’re gonna get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah I also I mean again like I was picked this time so So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s kind of, I don’t know how valid this opinion is, but that’s why I said last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco week when we were speculating about what they would do, I said this would be my preferred system, even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t win. Because I think this is, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can think of all these different ways to try to alleviate the problem of way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too many people wanting to be in a conference that really can’t and probably shouldn’t grow larger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I really do think this is the best way that they could have done it. And it worked flawlessly. I got to give them credit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The web service was perfectly fine, possibly as a result of the email delivery pace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The checkout process was lightning fast and fine. Like everything, the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing worked fine. It worked exactly as they designed it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems. And I don’t know, I really think they did the best they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it worked as well as it could have. Well, I gave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my opinion last show and it’s unchanged. I like the idea that people who are more enthusiastic about going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can somehow increase their odds, not guarantee themselves a spot, not block out other people, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like increase their odds slightly. That whole thing of everyone sitting around waiting for a clock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go and clicking on a button, maybe that’s not the best way to allow people to increase their odds, but it’s a reasonable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way because you are expressing your maniacal enthusiasm for wanting to go by doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you are slightly increasing your odds by doing it. And so a system that Apple controls

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entirely, you don’t have a good way at the time of purchase to increase your odds. The only way you can increase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your odds is by doing something over the course of two decades to put you into the good graces of Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is much harder to do a day before. So I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have said it even if I got a ticket this time, because it’s sort of the powerlessness of all I can do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is put my little ticket into this hat and then just wait. And like I said, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no way for me to express that I want to go to this more than somebody else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surely, I want to go to this more than at least one or two other people. But there’s no way for me to increase

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my odds. I find that lack of control upsetting. And Apple, I’m sure, finds that lack of control delicious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and lovely. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So really quickly, before Marco tells us about something cool,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so John, what I think you’re saying is in a perfect John Syracuse,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey WWDC ticket distribution world, Apple would do what they did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the first few years of me going anyway, where they randomly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out of the blue, I guess so that wasn’t last year, it was years prior, out of the blue, they just let the tickets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go and everyone has to jump on and stomp on their servers and try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get in before the servers crumble. So.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, that was no good because of the people who live in different time zones and stuff. Like, no matter how enthusiastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you are, if it’s 2am where you are, that’s not fair.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, okay. So what would you say then? So what I was going to say was, let’s assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the servers can handle that kind of impact, which I know was laughable to begin with. Assuming the servers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can handle it, you would still do like 2013 where they pre-announce what the time is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, pre-announce the time and date. I mean, someone’s going to get screwed anyway because it’s going to be 3 in the morning somewhere on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John earth when the thing goes off, right? But like, you have to pick a time. I mean, they could even do it by region by time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they wanted to be fair, like this, this hemisphere, this time zone, release tickets in blocks, like they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ways to control. But basically, you’d know what time it was going to be and you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you express your desire to go by being there hovering over that button at the exact moment. And even if they all saw it in five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seconds, if you’re one of the people who click that button within that five seconds, and you got lucky, because again, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a a guarantee, due to the magic of concurrency and everything. At the very least, you increased your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John odds versus someone who just strolled in 30 seconds later, or forgot about it, or set a reminder, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t get a chance to do it. You know what I mean? It’s not a great way to express your enthusiasm. It’s not a perfect system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it is a way to increase your odds. And the only thing you need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, say you’ve never been. Boy, I’ve never been to the WRC. I keep hearing about it. It sounds really great. I really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to go. All you got to do is make that decision sometime before the date that they announced and sit there at your mouse button and click

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your little thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I see your point. And that does make sense. So why don’t you tell us, Marco, about something that’s cool. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d also like to get you guys thinking, is WWDC the way it is today, the right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish. But before that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco New Relic is an all in one web app performance management tool. It lets you see performance

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So our friends at New Relic asked us to take a minute and say a big thank you to all you

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if I’m furrowed. That’s like when you’re tense and angry looking, right? When your brows are all tense in the middle.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So at work, I am not involved with our application performance management group,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but we do have one and we use several different tools, but I can tell you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with my hand on my heart that New Relic is one of our favorites. although I’ve not used it personally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know that my guys and girls at work who have used it really do like it. So you should check it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out. So before the break, I had asked you guys or queued you guys up to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ask, is WWDC the right answer for accomplishing what Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is setting out to accomplish with the conference? And if not, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey should we do? And I bring this up because I got into a couple of Twitter discussions about how, oh, WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is fundamentally broken and, oh, this shouldn’t go on. They should make it so much bigger. Other Moscone’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have much more space. This is terrible. Oh my God, blah, blah, blah. And I just don’t see

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how WWDC would be the same anymore if almost anything changed about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I don’t, I don’t love the system the way it is, but I don’t begrudge it either.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, do you feel like it’s okay the way it is? And if not, what would you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There are ways they could improve it certainly, but I I think overall, there’s a reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it pretty much hasn’t changed in years, you know, in many years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, I’ve been going since 2009, and I know it was different, you know, at various points

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the past before then, but since I’ve gone from 2009 forward, it’s been pretty much the exact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco same the entire time. They’ve, you know, they’ve had minor improvements to certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things. Like last year, the Odwalla flavors changed, and that threw me for a loop. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t have the ones that have banana in them, and so every year there’s like one flavor I can have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so yeah, that sucked, because they removed the good one last year. Besides that—

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey They also patrolled it a lot more. Did you notice that? Yeah. They didn’t release the Odwalla

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} refrigerators

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} often,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which was too bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly. But besides the Odwalla flavor change, the great Odwalla flavor change of 2013—for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the worst I might add, but at least for those with banana allergies. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco besides that, you know, they’re trying to alleviate this with things like releasing the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco videos really, really quickly and making them available to everyone, not just attendees, which they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco changed I think a few years back. And having the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tech talks all around the country for free that are like, you know, like one-day mini WBDCs. And what’s interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the tech talks, they split up into game and non game tracks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that’s one thing you could do maybe is people always say this, you know, have have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically two parallel conferences or two sequential conferences, one focused for game

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developers and technologies they use and one focused on app developers, because that that actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a pretty, pretty effective bisection of the market, not just because, you know, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many apps are games, and so many apps aren’t games. And like, there’s enough people on both sides to pack those conferences

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco full and it’s a pretty good division but also because there’s there’s good subject matter division there that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a whole lot of stuff like almost all of the interface UI stuff widget

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff like game developers almost never use those things so you know it’s so much of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like so much of the like if if if iOS 8 we should actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have an iOS 8 prediction slash wish list segment at some point but But probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before WWDC would be nice. But if they add something like better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interapp communication and sharing features like the Windows Contract or the Android Intents or vice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco versa, whatever the match is up there. If they add something like that, then that’s something that, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco game developers probably wouldn’t use that. Game developers need a lot more stuff about media and GL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there’s some things that are common like networking frameworks. That’s common. Memory management,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco profiling tools, stuff like that. Most of that is common between the two worlds, but there’s so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff that isn’t. Whereas if you took pretty much any other division, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac vs iOS even is a pretty bad division these days, because there’s not that much stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exclusive to one or the other anymore. At least that’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco talking about at WWDC. So there’s all that, but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what if they do something like, what if they announce an iWatch or some kind of new platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do they do that at the app conference or the game conference? Which one covers which?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can see there are problems with that approach as well. So I don’t really know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else they could do. I think they’re already doing what they can, which is sell as many

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tickets as they can and try to reduce demand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in slightly meaningful ways. I know a lot of people, and This began a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit last year, but this year I’m seeing it more. A lot of the people I know in the iOS community didn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco try to get tickets. That they just were like, all right, well, you know what, I’ll just save

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the $1,600, I’ll go out there anyway, I’ll have all the social aspects and all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco business meetings and networking, most of it that I can do, and I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hang out with some friends every day and watch the videos that come out every day. And I think by having the videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come out right then rather than, you know, only a couple years ago, the videos coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out a week after the conference was revolutionary. Because it used to be months, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be months after the conference they would come out. And then a couple years ago it was a week. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco last year it was like half a day. And that changed everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think. Because now it is totally plausible to go out there and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch the videos during the week, in the week of the conference, while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re out there without actually attending it. And I know a lot of people who chose to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do that even before they knew whether they got a ticket. They didn’t even try. So I think they’re doing an okay job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of managing it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I have one problem with what you just said, which is how do you acquire these videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you’re not sitting in the cafeteria area at Moscone? Because they’re pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey big and hotel Wi-Fi sucks and you don’t want to be downloading gigabytes of video over an LTE

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey connection unless you’re somehow rich enough to afford a 90 gig connection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That I have, I don’t know what people do with that. I assume,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean I sure wouldn’t do it. In the past I’ve never downloaded stuff until I’ve gotten to that cafeteria,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that exact reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because I was contemplating going even without a ticket before I knew whether or not I would get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a ticket. And the one problem I had with my grand master plan, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey grand master, with my master plan was I could spend the day watching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the videos and thus it wouldn’t really be lost time, but I didn’t know how to get the videos because hotel Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sucks always. Even in a place like San Francisco where you would assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that half the internet runs through it some way somehow, hotel Wi-Fi is still terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I would wonder if there was a way to do that. Or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one of the answers to make WWDC more livable is to allow people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey into the cafeteria area during not eating times. I know there’s a million logistical issues there, but my point

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is give the John Syracuses of the world, not to pick on you, John, but give you a way to get these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey videos with a quickness without having to download them over crummy hotel Wi-Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, they just need to extend their Wi-Fi network outside of the thing. Like, I think you can, can you kind of Wi-Fi, Mooch?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I know they have Wi-Fi in the big giant lobby, but it seems like the sort of the exterior walls of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the building stop it. I don’t know if you’re, if I was like in line with my iPod touch, could I get the Wi-Fi that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there? Cause the password is always, you know, you get the password from someone who you know is a W3C and then get on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John W3C Wi-Fi network. And presumably that will suffice for you to download a bunch of videos and go. And I don’t think Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cares that you did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, but. Well, they often will block big download files. Like always they always block

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the betas that they make available. They always block those from being downloaded over Wi-Fi because they don’t want the Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clogged up with everyone downloading these like 2 gig files. So I think they might block the videos as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I mean if you know someone who’s going to be in there, the easiest solution is to just have them download everything onto a USB stick and hand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that’s a really good point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, I feel like there are ways to do it and there’s always someplace where you can find Wi-Fi. Just because we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John live there and hotel Wi-Fi is terrible doesn’t mean there’s no Wi-Fi in San Francisco. Like some place

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there. I mean, the worst case, I mean, like for us, again, it’s like, who do you know? Like, could we go to the Macworld

⏹️ ▶️ ^John offices and mooch off their connection? You know, there’s always something you can do, especially with all these alternative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conferences popping up or whatever. I don’t think it’s that bad. And I was going to say the same thing Marco said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I know a lot of people who have gone in many past years, both this year and last year, who just chose not to even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try to buy a ticket because they figured that the value they’re going to get for it, going to get from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the socializing and the videos. And a lot of them already know a lot of people inside Apple. And they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, I’ll see that person outside the conference. I don’t need to be in the conference to go talk to that guy, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I talk to that guy all the time. And I’m going to talk to him in person, and it doesn’t have to be at WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the videos being moved up is a big win, and the tech talks are also a big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John win. Because what you get out of WWDC is the information, distributing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that to everybody who’s a registered developer in a timely manner covers that. Interaction with Apple people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tech talks kind of cover that. And I think that’s the part that’s most difficult to scale. Because for every moment those Apple people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are talking to developers, they’re not doing whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing in their job. Because a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of times, people who give these presentations are like, the lead architect for the whatever system is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go up there and give a presentation about it. It’s not like a custom trained PR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guy who just tangentially knows about the topic. These are subject matter experts. You can’t have that guy touring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the country for a year telling you about Core Data, because someone needs to go and work on Core Data. They really need to work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Core Data. So that tension is always going to be there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And there’s probably always going to be more demand for that face-to-face time with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple employees, because who wouldn’t want to? Every single person who would think of any platform, I write PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games. And I would really love to talk to the person who works on the disk subsystem for the PlayStation 4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Can I get some face time with him? be $600. Well, every PlayStation developer can’t have face time with that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guy. He’s a busy guy. He’s got stuff to do, you know, so that tension will always be there. And there’s nothing about having a better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conference or better conference schedule or more conferences that will ever solve that tension. It’s just it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t scale that way. There are too many developers for any popular platform, for each one of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people to have personal contact with the engineer or engineers who work on whatever subsystem they’re most interested in or what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most vexing them. And that’s life. You got to figure it out yourself, you know, in some way, having as much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John contact as we do is especially precious in the Apple community, because Apple is so closed and tight lipped and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this may be your only chance to talk to these people in an official capacity. And, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we all know it’s true. People inside Apple are more forthcoming in the environment of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John WWDC, you know, talking about topics that they will probably never even email you about, but they’ll talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to you in person about it at WWDC. They’re not revealing super secrets and telling you what the next holographic I watch levitation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John device is going to be. But they’ll tell you, well, that API is the way it is because of x, y,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and z story. And that will give you some insight into how it works and let you work it better. But maybe they wouldn’t have sent that over an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email. Because unlike Eric Schmidt, they understand that emails leave a paper trail, quote unquote. And they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should probably not do that. Like, they’re just more open. So I think Apple is doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the best it can, but it has made tremendous strides in the past several years with the tech talks and the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they release a video. So I give them full marks for that, because they used to drive me nuts that I wouldn’t be able to, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John couldn’t go to WWDC because, well, I couldn’t go, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to go to WWDC because I hate traveling, yes, I didn’t go, but I did get the videos, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my right here I have a big metal tin that says WWDC 2003 on it and it’s filled with DVDs. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used to be the way I went to WWDC and they used to come out months later and it was terrible, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re so far from that. still still think there are things that they should improve. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would not scale this conference up anymore. The way I would try to scale up the how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers get FaceTime with Apple engineers is I would just have more concerts spread like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more concerts, more conferences spread around like tech talks, or maybe two WWDCs because the third thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t talk about is Apple also has chosen this time to announce their a lot of their big products.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I think you could have another WWDC, like maybe two of these a year in a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John location, maybe a different continent, where you say there’s not going to be any announcements. There’s no keynote, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pressure for Apple to come out with something big. It’s just like this is the rerun of WWDC. It’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same sessions, but if you couldn’t attend there, you can attend this one. It’s a little bit bigger than a tech talk. It’s longer than a tech talk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s probably the limit of how they could scale this up. I would rather see them do that than to double the size of this one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hey, here’s an idea. What if they did a second one in China every year?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was going to say for the games and whatever track and the games one, they should have the slides go really slowly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but if you pay more money, they’ll go to the next slide faster and you can’t go to another session right after the session

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve gone to. But again, if you pay more money, you can go to two sessions directly in a row without having a meal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between. They should do stuff like that because game developers would love it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Nice. Oh, that’s great. All right. Anything else about WWDC?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I think that’s it. I really do think that they’ve reached what’s basically an equilibrium

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, where the event changes very little year to year. The ticketing, I think, will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably change very little year to year from now on. I think it’s just going to be like they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco figured out what works as best as it can for them and for the world,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but mostly for them. As John mentioned, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco libraries like Core Data and Auto Layout, stuff like that, these are written by like two or three people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually. These are very small teams at Apple and so like they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really afford to have all these engineers taking weeks and weeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and weeks beforehand to make and practice and refine these presentations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then you know and then a week not even being at the Apple campus but a week staying up in San Francisco you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know putting on the event and answering questions going to labs and everything like It’s a pretty big drain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Apple to put this conference on. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just don’t think there’s a better way that they can really do this. There are some small things they can improve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there, but overall, big picture, I don’t think we’re going to see big changes here because I don’t really think they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reasonably can or rather I don’t think it would be worth it for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should also mention really quickly that last year, I believe it was, somebody, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know who was in charge, came up with Alt WWDC, which was happening right around Moscone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey during WWDC. And this year, they’re doing it again. It’s called Alt Conf, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe it’s free donations accepted. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I didn’t have a ticket, I would very strongly investigate that because I suspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s going to be pretty good. And I heard very good things about it last year. And so that’s a nice way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the community to kind of come together and fill in a gap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I saw Will French tweeted during the ticket giveaway day

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an idea to just have WWDC run a parallel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco conference one day behind the real one in Vegas at some giant thing that holds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 30,000 people and just play the videos from WWDC. And obviously, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would shut that down pretty quickly but I think this is you know now that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s making these videos available I think organizing probably a large

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number of small conference of small like you know conference alternatives that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that might be the way to go you know if you get too big Apple will probably have a problem with it but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you just have a bunch of small gatherings and they’re they’re informal and non-commercial and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know I don’t think Apple’s really gonna to go try to police all of them. So that’s probably the way to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, our final sponsor this week is our friends at Backblaze

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once again. And I’m pretty sure all three of us use Backblaze, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do not, but I’m— Oh, Casey. I know, I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} but I’m— Give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your ticket to John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, seriously. I’m pretty sure my dad had ended up on Backblaze, actually. So I sort of do by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey association.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay, close enough. Well, most of us use Backblaze.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Backblaze is unlimited, unthrottled, simple online

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco backup. So it’s $5 a month. And there’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot, they gave me this really short script here because they knew I would just talk forever about my own stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it. If you don’t have online backup, you really, Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you really need to get on this. Online backup is an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco insurance policy and compliment to or replacement for local backup, although for me it’s a compliment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too. My favorite kind of backup is I have Time Machine locally, and that’s for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fast restores and historic pulling files that I might have deleted an hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago and then realized, oh crap, I actually still need that, let me get that back. That Time Machine’s great for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Time Machine, I’ve had some issues with in the past, a lot of people have. It’s not incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reliable. It works most of the time, but it’s not incredibly reliable. So, it’s good to have something else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Backblaze is great because because the files are not stored in your house, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whole class of problems like fires, floods, electrical issues, power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surges, lightning strikes, theft, all sorts of issues where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you just have your computer with an an internal or an external time machine drive or a time machine drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plugged in that’s always plugged in next to it or in the same outlet as it or whatever else or in the same house as it. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of environmental and people problems that can happen there that will take out your computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your backups at the same time. That’s no good. Online backup solves that problem and gives you a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco few other little niceties. So for instance, Backblaze has a pretty slick iOS app that lets you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco access and share your backed up files from anywhere that you are. You can just log into your Backblaze account

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from your iPhone or your iPad and you can access your files right there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can restore your files selectively. So if you just need to pull one file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off the backup, you can do that. And Backblaze keeps it very, very simple. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no add-ons, no gimmicks, no extra charges for different services. It’s $5 per computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco per month. That’s it. even be less actually if you buy the annual or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco biannual plans. But $5 per month per computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gets you unlimited, unthrottled online backup with Backblaze. It’s simple to use, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app is nice, it’s developed by ex-Apple engineers, it’s very Apple friendly, it’s always updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the latest OS. I’ve been running it for I think three years now, I’ve never had a problem running on any

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco version of OS X. It’s fantastic. to backblaze.com slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Once again, Backblaze unlimited, unthrottled online backup for just $5 per month. Backblaze.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we should probably talk about this bleeding heart, heart bleed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing. This is this is pretty uncool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is probably the biggest security story of the year. And I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it has yet grown to what will be its final size.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think we’re going to be having fallout from this and realizing that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem might have been even bigger than we thought, or that important stuff might have been taken during

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this window that this was open. I think we’re going to be seeing fallout from this for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a big, big problem. So in brief,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what this bug is, is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bug in open SSL, which is the SSL powering layer for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lots of different software, usually stuff that runs on Linux, on Linux servers usually are what we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hearing about. And for instance, if you have a website with HTTPS enabled,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you’re running Apache or Engine X as your web server, those use OpenSSL

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on their back ends to power the SSL component. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it affects a lot of things. And the bug was actually introduced into the software in 2011.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So even, like, I run CentOS on my servers, which is a free distribution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, basically. I know that’s not technically correct. Please email Casey. It’s close enough. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CentOS, the reason I use CentOS is because it’s extremely conservative and generally very secure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by default. You don’t really have to be a security expert to make CentOS reasonably secure. You can pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much leave everything at the default and be pretty good. So CentOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in its latest distributions, 6.5 and a few other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Linuxes that have, you know, roughly similar release schedules, like, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug was so old that it was actually in the versions that were shipping with the latest Linux

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco distributions from a few of these things. So that was right Red Hat Enterprise, Linux, CentOS,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the Ubuntu servers, and a couple others. So it was on very widely used things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s how long this bug was there. And it was only very recently discovered, and then it was basically patched

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco immediately. But what the bug allowed is for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a maliciously formed TLS request, you were able to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have the server respond back to you with 64K

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of arbitrary memory from its process space. And if you kept making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco requests, you could get a different 64K of memory. And I’m not sure of the details beyond

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that level of exactly how you requested or exactly what memory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you were given or why, but it was a balance check problem and blah, blah, blah. It would read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the wrong memory and output it back to you. Now the problem is, what is in the memory space

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the OpenSSL process is the entire web server that’s running it. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything process local, the web server traffic, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco biggest problem is the SSL keys, like the private key that the web server is using on its end to encrypt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and decrypt the traffic, the private key could have been sent back in the response to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco attacker to say hey, here’s a private key. So the attacker could query a bunch of servers, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get all these random memory contents back, and just try a bunch of them, try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a bunch of the segments from within that as a key, and see if it decrypts the traffic. Because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already have the public key from when you make the connection. So it’s pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad. It’s a pretty bad thing. Now, people are saying, you know, like, there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, you’d only be likely to get the private key if the server recently been restarted or something and you know that again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know the details of all that but the what the part that matters is that you could get the private key

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back plus anything else that was going through the web server process at the time including the traffic and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if if your application ran in the web server process like I think I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think Apache when it runs like mod PHP I think it does that fast CGI should be immune because it’s a different process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco process. But anyway, all of that was potentially exposed. And so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it affected, you know, because it was in these conservative distributions that are often run on servers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they’re conservative, because the bug was so old, this was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on so many sites. I mean, like, I, there were at least tools that you could test for. And I ran on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bunch of well-known sites, my own and other people’s, and well-known sites. And I would say about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about a quarter of them were actually vulnerable the morning after it was discovered. We had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of a day to fix things, and the patches for all the Linuxes were already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out the day before, and the next day there were still major sites that were still vulnerable. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco isn’t just servers, it might be appliances, it might be if you have a load balancer, or if you have a router that runs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco embedded Linux, and that version of embedded Linux has this flaw in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s all sorts of places this could be. It could be on your home router, it could be on your home

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco NAS. Anything that runs embedded Linux and embedded OpenSSL could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have this. It’s a pretty big deal. So I don’t think…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really hard to know how bad this will be so far, but the potential…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We know that the potential was really bad. What we don’t know is how much it was exploited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before these holes are being closed, and how long it will be before these holes are really all closed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the government angle on this is actually pretty bad, too, because the usefulness

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of getting a private key, like at this point, is not that useful unless

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have a big, gigantic catalog of intercepts of encrypted traffic from the past. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you have that, in theory, if you get the private key and that private key was the one that was used, previously you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these encrypted intercepts of data going flying by that was useless to you. But suddenly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it potentially becomes useful to you because they’re like, oh, I’ve got the private keys. Now I can go back and decrypt stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the past. I mean, again, this exploit has been out there for a long time. So maybe they were decrypting it in real time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John during that. But the only kind of party that’s likely to have historical encrypted intercepts is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that sounds like something the government would do, right? Like an individual is not going to do that. But the other angle on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that the other thing that’s likely to be in memory is post data from the last post, you know, or whatever, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unencrypted data from form submissions, like passwords. And so a lot of people did, like, let me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just run this against Yahoo.com, like their mail thing, for a couple of minutes. And you just see people’s passwords like crazy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because there’s query strings. Like, it’s in-memory query string, clearly identifiable as, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John password equals plain text password, because that was sent in the post data as part of an SSL form submission

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when someone entered their password to log into Yahoo Mail. And although the private key may move away from the memory that’s easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accessible, people are constantly logging in. And so that’s constantly in the memory there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what this basically means is that everyone should change every password in every single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John service they’ve ever used. Like, if you wanted to be safe, that’s the only way to do it. It would basically be catalog every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John service that you have a login for. Hopefully, they all have unique passwords. Check each one with the vulnerability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John site to see if it’s still vulnerable. Once it’s not vulnerable, go to it and change your password. And make sure,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by the way, that the place they send you to change your password is the same URL as you checked before. But sometimes they send you to a different site

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to change your password. Bottom line is, all of our passwords and every one of our services could now be compromised. Like that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not an exaggeration of like, that is a plausible worst case scenario that every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John single website that was vulnerable, someone has your password now on it. So you should probably change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your password. And you know, for example, like this site, Ars Technica, you know, was vulnerable to this for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a short period of time as well. Every single person in Ars Technica has changed all their passwords. I mean, it’s like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just have to, like we should all change all our passwords basically.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and not just that, you don’t actually know whether a site that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has closed the vulnerability, whether they’re still using the same private key or not. Because you can regenerate a certificate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with, I mean, well, I guess you could, yeah, you could, if you were a real nerd, you could figure it out based on looking at the cert,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, details. But what you really have to do as a site operator, a server

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco operator, to fix this is you have to not only close the vulnerability, but then you have to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to revoke and regenerate URSSL certificate from a brand new private key. You can’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the same signing request and renew it like the usual way people usually renew these things. You have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do a completely new private key because that could have been compromised. And I bet a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of sites just close the vulnerability and haven’t replaced their certs. And they might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco never replace their certs or they might do it the wrong way and reuse the key because it’s easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So there’s actually, the repercussions from this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could go on for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The worst angle from that is that there’s a question still out there, I don’t know the answer to, as to which software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and which platforms honors checks for revoked certificates.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the defaults on a lot of Mac browsers and even in the keychain, people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John checking, like, what is my default? Is Chrome configured to check for a certificate revocation? Go to your preferences now and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John check. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Is it because you changed it that way or is because that was the default same thing with an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s keychain? there’s a thing about checking for certificate revocation if The client

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software doesn’t check to see if a certificate has been revoked Then you are basically open to man-in-the-middle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attacks by someone who exploited You know got the private key for a certificate That you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that website did all the right things and got a totally new certificate with a totally new key and everything is Brand new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that old certificate is still out there and your client software doesn’t check whether the certificate you’re dealing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has been revoke they can still man in the middle you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah and you know and you couldn’t there’s there’s so many ramifications of this is why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m saying like I don’t think that we have fully seen or realized what this is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to cause yet because okay so yeah so far you know people who are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the ball have have almost all patched by now and hopefully they’re reissuing their certificates and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keys but there’s there’s gonna be people who are vulnerable to this for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco long time and if you know suppose suppose

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the NSA or other creepy government agency suppose they didn’t know about this now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a very high possibility they did and this is one of the reasons why what they do is so destructive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to society because security works best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when everyone shares their research if you have these like little fiefdoms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like secrecy like the NSA which has tons and tons of really advanced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people working on really advanced things basically trying to find holes like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it obviously benefits all of society if when they find a vulnerability

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they get it fixed they publish it and they you know work to make a patch or they at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco publish their findings for God’s sake you know in the in the accepted ways in the security community but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they don’t do that they have all this talent all of this potential to help the world world, and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instead using it to hurt the world for their own personal gain. That’s probably illegal and certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco immoral. I mean, that’s why what the NSA does is so offensive, especially to me as a nerd,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but also me as a citizen, and me as a programmer, and me as a human being. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s so destructive for them to have those resources at their disposal and not help the rest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the technical community to work together to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more secure systems, Morphsicular systems actually hurt their efforts to spy on us illegally. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, pardon the rant, but that’s… that annoys the crap out of me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they might have known about this but we have no way to know and they could have been exploiting it forever. Now, regardless of whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they knew about it already, they sure as hell know about it now. So anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, you know, any… anything the NSA wants to hack that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was previously encrypted with it with you know SSL or anything else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they now have a very good chance of being able to intercept that traffic because we know they’re able to intercept traffic through it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco various points along the internet various data centers ISPs etc that they but they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco partnered with or whatever or hacked into so we know that they have access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the traffic the raw traffic now they can man-in-the-middle attack everybody without us even knowing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s pretty bad. I mean, before they could do it through other weaknesses, now they can do it with a private key.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know? As long as they, you know, as long as they can get it now through this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vulnerability, or they already have gotten it. So, that, I think, is one of the reasons why this is so, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad. Is because now, you know, it’s fine that most of the big sites patched already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and are going to do their keys correctly, but there’s going to be so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many smaller sites, hardware vendors, embedded systems developers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many people who aren’t going to patch for a while that are now just wide open for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being spied on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I looked into this bug a little bit and it’s not as super obscure as you might think it is. Like, it’s not some kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of exploit where some carefully crafted machine code that only executes on a certain CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and chipset causes something to trigger some bug in the it’s not like that type of thing it is entirely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John straightforward from what I saw on the site that was explaining it it’s the old story of you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know you’ve got some kind of packet that has its length encoded in in the packet and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the program was taking that length and using it as an argument to the memcpy command to say okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well they sent me a packet and it said well you know my information is in the next it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a 16-bit value my information is in the next bytes and the n bytes and you know do a mem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John copy from the thing into those areas. Basically, you’re letting users supply data. Like over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John HTTP, they send you a number, and you read that many bytes into a buffer. And of course, it’s easy to overflow because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can just make that number all ones, and then you read 65K of information, when in reality, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not that much information there, and you’ve got your typical buffer overrun. It’s straightforward. You can look at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code and say, you’re taking a number that came from the internet and using it as an argument to mem copy. Don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s very bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s basically the opposite of a buffer overflow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. But it’s not obfuscated in any kind of way. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can look at the variable and say, wait, that just came from the network. And here you’re using that number

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tell you how much memory you’re going to read. That seems ill-advised. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no sanity checking on that or anything like that. This gets me, of course, back to my Copeland 2010

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, is if you had a memory-safe language. A lot of people are ranting about this. It’s like, look, humans

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are never going to be able to write secure software if you have arbitrary access

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to memory, even if it’s just arbitrary access to your own memory space. Because it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a buffer kind of. It’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you had done it in a memory safe language, you wouldn’t be able to just run off the end of whatever variable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or data structure you had. There’s no mem copy command that just says, you just give me a starting address and a length, and I will just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read or write that memory. and I don’t care what’s in it or what’s there, I’ll just go run right over it. That doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exist in memory safe languages. So a lot of the people in the security community are like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we need to get the base infrastructure that we do our security stuff in off of languages that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John give you arbitrary access to process memory, because we’re never going to be perfect. Like, it’s impossible to just say, oh, just don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it’s a simple bug. We all know not to do that. Well, how long did this sit in code? Open source code, how long has this been there?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And who knows how many of these things are in the closed source code that’s out there. We are just not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John capable of writing programs that are secure in languages that have this feature.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On the long haul, I think we’re just proving it to ourselves. And we can get rid of an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John entire class of problems, not all problems, but we know this is definitely a big class of problems that have a lot of security exploits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We can get rid of that class of problems with technology that we have now, and I guess move on to the next class

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of terrible security exploits. But we hope we should make some progress there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One other thing too is that this was a bug in the heartbeat feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of TLS or protocol or method or whatever, which apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is very rarely used. And many of the servers were not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco vulnerable because they just didn’t support it. And many of the patches to initially fix it quickly while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone figured out what would eventually be the final fix, most of the very early patches just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turned it off. nothing happened, like nothing bad happened, because nothing uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. And so it’s worth asking why that was enabled at all. Obviously this rarely used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feature was going to get a lot less attention from researchers because you know it didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come up a lot. So it obviously had less attention on it for a long time. And this is why this bug was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco existed for like three years before anyone figured it out. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this should inform decisions about, you know, why should Apache

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Nginx even enable this by default? Why should OpenSSL even support this if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been around for a while and nothing uses it? You know, this should really impact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the default choices that library and application and server vendors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make. And maybe it’s time, you know, like one of the ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you can make an SSL server more secure is by requiring better ciphers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and better settings from connecting clients. And one of the ways you can do that would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to cut off support for IE6 and some ancient client libraries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that no one uses anymore. If you cut off support by default, you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make security better for everyone, basically, by requiring higher standards for everyone. You can close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off a lot of avenues for attack that way. But it requires cutting off support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for really really old things which is I guess we could talk about XP if we want to but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know that that’s been a culture in the Apple world for a while of yeah You know what we’ll just cut off support for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something. That’s three years old because that’s old enough doesn’t matter I Think there’s some of that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco server world can take as well and obviously they have to be more conservative because You know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the value system is completely different the requirements are completely different the environments are completely different but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they can take some value out of that. Like it’s probably not worth enabling something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at all that is used by almost nobody anymore that could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be an avenue for attack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s easier solution for this in that we just need to revisit the specs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or the RFCs or the various protocols that we use on a regular basis to trim out the features that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aren’t used because like there’s tons of features that HTTP that but if the common browsers and server

⏹️ ▶️ ^John software don’t support them. They just like or half heartedly support them, they just don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John used. And after a couple of years of that, or a decade of that, it’s like, look, nobody uses this feature of this protocol,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the next revision of this protocol remove that feature, because people keep the feature, they’re like, Oh, I have to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John compliant with whatever the RFC is, I support all the features. But if nobody ever used that feature, it just sits over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there festering. And that’s like the perfect place to look for exploits, because it’s like, it’s not used in every request.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In fact, it’s almost never used, but we support it because it’s technically part of protocol. And if we want to be compliant and get our certification and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say we fully support the blah, blah, blah protocol, we have to do it. So revise the protocol cut out the parts that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we decided, oh, people don’t use that. People just don’t use that anymore. Like, there’s lots of even HTTP

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spec, there’s all sorts of little turds in there from the you know, that just don’t get used in common practice that you could cut out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John headers formats for stuff, you know, old HTTP 1.0 features like there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things you could make. I mean, there already are working in other versions of of HTTP, but it’s like you drop the features that nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uses. And that hopefully lets people finally drop that code that wasn’t being run that was possibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John riddled with bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So also in the news, Dropbox did some stuff today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I totally missed the Dropbox story. I saw the carousel thing. And is that it? Is that what you’re talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That is part of what I’m talking about. So they announced a few things. Firstly, they announced that Condoleezza Rice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is now the board. I’m not joking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I saw that on Twitter and I thought it was a joke.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The first thing I asked myself was, what, why? And I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I read this somewhere. I don’t recall where. Might have been on Tech Crunch, thanks to Panzer. But anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey somebody theorized, well, it’s to get them better international relations, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess because I don’t know in what other way she could possibly be qualified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do anything useful for Dropbox. But I mean she’s a smart lady so maybe I’m underestimating her.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I mean first of all keep in mind Al Gore was on Apple’s board for a while. I don’t know if he still is but he was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And second of all, so obviously there’s some precedent for like one-on-one politicians to be on tech companies’

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boards for some reason. That’s a good point. But you know, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we are probably, all of us are probably the worst people in the world to talk about this, but Dropbox’s biggest competition

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is Box.net, which has a very, very strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco position in the enterprise but not a not a very strong position in the consumer world.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That I think is and that’s obviously that that’s the inverse of Dropbox where Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has huge presence among consumers in the business

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco world Dropbox is often used but often blocked and not supported because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not it’s actually pretty funny like the business world they use Dropbox constantly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which usually is violating their IT policies, because it has the file store on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhere else and it’s not enterprise blah blah blah blah blah certified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco encrypted friendly to enterprise whatever the case may be half that’s probably BS but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s the perception and so Dropbox like it solves such a common so many common problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so well that you know similar to how the iPhone kind of broke into the enterprise from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ground up that’s what Dropbox has been doing. Box.net has been kind of tackling the opposite

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem, which is trying to be enterprise friendly as much as possible and trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get in from the top side. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job of that. And so Dropbox, I think with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of their moves towards business stuff, and maybe Condoleezza Rice is more about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reaching that community a little bit better, the world of big business and enterprise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That would be my guess as to her importance there. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dropbox probably is reaching for that world as much as they can. First of all, to defend against Box.net

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco becoming so big that they start encroaching their consumer business. And second of all, because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enterprise business is just so profitable if you can get into it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think Dropbox has anything to fear from Box. Reaching into the consumer space, let me just say that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a user of both. Fair enough. It is definitely enterprising. And I saw a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stories recently about Box. I think they’re having some IPO or some sort of thing where financial statements came out about the company.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then Box spends a tremendous amount of money on getting into the enterprise on sales and marketing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John huge amounts. Some people say unsustainable amounts. And that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always a good sign. It’s never a good sign when you’re spending just tremendous amounts of money to try to grow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rapidly and get it. I guess it’s working. They get enterprise contracts. We use it at work and everything. but the product itself is not as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good a drop box. My question about Condi Rice is, who came to whom, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did she approach the company? Because she’s out of her government job and she’s just looking to be on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boards or invest in something. You know what I mean? People do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that when they leave one career where there was a high profile, like I’m going to become a venture capitalist or I’m going to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into technology or whatever and they just got together that way Or did they seek her out as saying, we need someone with government

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ties? Because people with those kind of connections in government are extremely useful for all sorts of things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m sure. You know, Al Gore, her, whatever. It’s like, it would be great to have you on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John board. You have these connections. We think it could help us in our business. Everyone’s wigged out about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, she’s a backer. She defends the NSA and her whole role in the Bush administration

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the Iraq war. And now our data is going to be snooped by the NSA. And it’s like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think her being there makes your data any more or less likely to be snooped by the NSA. I think the bottom

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line is that the NSA wants the data on Dropbox. They probably already have all of it. I don’t know if that makes you feel any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better or worse. But I don’t think it affects

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things one way or the other. I don’t think she is personally giving the NSA any keys to any kingdom. I don’t think she has that kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access. I think she’s merely there to provide the connections that she has in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John government world. I think that’s mostly a non-story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s fair. And plus, if the NSA really wanted some sort of end to Dropbox, do you think they would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as obvious a route as Condoleezza Rice joining the board? I feel like they would be a little smarter than

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, they just have to go to S3 because that’s where Dropbox puts all its data and they have everything. And I’m sure they already have access

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to every byte of data in S3 if they wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair point. The other thing they did was they announced a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app. I guess you could it’s an app called carousel or in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this is firstly, it’s not a good name. It’s like the some folks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here in Richmond that Marco, you know, mobile locks, they already had an Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app for OS 10 called carousel and a trademark for it. Do they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep. Sounds like it’s a great name, then.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else already had that great name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Funny how that is. I did not realize they also trademarked Well, that’s exciting. They might be really wealthy soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, anyway, but be that as it may. And so it’s, it’s sort of kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of, but not really at all an ever pixie sort of thing for Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I did install it and it was funny because the first run experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me went from really, really cool to kind of terrible immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The really, really cool part was they have, you know, an opening screen and you’re supposed to slide

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from bottom to top to get to the next page. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the way they had done this was there were a series of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey photos on the bottom of the screen, kind of just strewn all over the place. And as you swipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey upwards, those photos align themselves into an ever pick style, like, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Flickr style for that matter, a varying size grid. So it’s kind of implying, oh, we’re going to organize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all your photos. I just thought it was really well done. So after they did that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my options were a checkbox. I should have written written down what it read, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something like, backup all my photos to Dropbox. And it was a checkbox and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a button that said get started or sign in or something like that. So I don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want all of my iPhone pictures going to my Dropbox and thus I did not… Scandalous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right? I wish it’s just I don’t know. I that’s not the way I organize my photos. So cue Bradley chambers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So anyway, so I, I didn’t want to check the checkbox and I hit the tap the sign in button.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then it did a little expand contract to the checkbox basically implying the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only way that I can carry on is to go ahead and say, Alright, back up on my pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did the exact same thing as you I uncheck the checkbox. I tried to continue and realized Nope, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use this application unless I let it do that thing that it wants to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which already kind of turns me off. They’re not asking,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re telling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. Yeah, and the reason, by the way, that I unchecked the checkbox and didn’t want to do it is because I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what my Dropbox situation is like, and like the camera upload feature I had enabled for a little while when I was playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with it, but it’s like, I know if I did that, I know how many pictures are on my phone, and I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many of those pictures are not in my Dropbox, pretty much all of them. Checking that box was going to add gigabytes of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data to my Dropbox, and I’m almost full.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yep. So I did indeed click the checkbox and it either is or was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or will be uploading all my photos to my Dropbox. So you’re presented with what looks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sort of like the camera roll in iOS, including with the grouping that I believe they introduced iOS 7,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whenever they introduced it, so by location and date, which I like. And on the bottom, they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like a old school radio dot. Actually, you know what it looks like? It looks like the speedometer from an old Oldsmobile,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where you have like all the tick marks across the bottom And then like a little needle so it’s like a horizontal speedometer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know what I’m talking about totally You know anyways, so that’s like your date picker

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing and what you can do is you can select an entire event or series of photos and you can share

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey them and It shares them or they they imply that they’re going to share them in this really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nifty like Ever pics looking kind of way, so I thought well, let me test this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out I want to test this out with myself So I shared from my Dropbox account, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is associated to my personal email address, to my work account. And they send this really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lovely picture or email to my work account. And it says, Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey List has shared 17 photos and videos with you on Carousel. And you’re allowed to put in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a little message. And it shows some of them. What is this? Nine of them?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I go on my computer to click on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these pictures. And basically it says, tough noogies,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey get the app. So there’s no web component whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I bet if you had the app, those pictures would be added to your Dropbox, counting towards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your quota, despite the fact that a Dropbox uses content addressable storage and those photos are not stored more than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once, which drives me nuts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey believe that’s right. So my initial impression went from great

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to, hmm, to what? And so now I’m probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gonna delete it as soon as we’re done talking about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know who has so few pictures that they can afford to host them on Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because as we point out many times in the Transporter ads, Dropbox mass storage is very expensive. Like it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John meant to hold terabytes of your data, because that’s just, that’s a tremendous amount of money. Forget about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the free account. Free account is enough pictures for you to like take pictures for a month and then you’re full. If you want to live

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your life and take pictures of your children as they grow over the years, you’re going to be spending like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John huge amount of money per month in Dropbox fees. If this is your solution to cameras

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like people presenting it as an ever picks like solution, it’s just not financially feasible or smart to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pay that much money. You started studying my photo library. You know, if we say I got my first digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^John camera when my son was born, he’s nine years older. So I have nine years of digital photos. They’re currently at a 500 gig

⏹️ ▶️ ^John drive, right? How much would it cost for me to get 500 gigs of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John storage on Dropbox and pay that month after month and it’s just going to grow like I’m not deleting their baby pictures as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they get older like it’s just going to grow and I keep getting I keep getting cameras that you know take larger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John images. I’m not even shooting raw. This is just JPEGs right. I don’t see this as a tenable solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for photo storage and it’s and it works so nicely and easily that it’s almost like a trap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I mean I can see what Dropbox likes. It’s like oh people will get a free account and they’ll draw this app like it’s great. picture I take on my phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is here I can share it with my friends and then everyone hits their storage limits then you’re like oh well I guess I could go to the paid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John account and then you hit your next storage limit oh I guess I’ll pay for the next tier and a certain point you just start getting angry at bitter Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like Apple with the free iCloud stuff that’s just not enough storage to back up your entire device

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s worse it’s worse than if they just charge you a fair price up front for what they want to do and I don’t think Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is economical for any mass storage like this like if you ask people what do you keep in your Dropbox you keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like small sets of your important files or your current working set. No one uses Dropbox. It’s like their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long-term archive of all my anything. It’s not all your anything. I mean, it’s probably not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all most people’s text documents are on Dropbox. I mean, maybe a few people are doing that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think this is not a good solution for the photo problem. I think it’s a great way to get more people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to hit their Dropbox storage limits and switch to paid accounts, which is probably why Dropbox likes it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so it’s basically yet another photo sharing and syncing solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is almost but not useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pretty much. And the other thing is, the one place that I think it could potentially shine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, you know, John, you have your family over for your son’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey birthday, and everyone has their camera phones or cameras, and everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wants to share pictures with each other. So potentially you could use Carousel in order to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do that. But in my experience, I’ve been happy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey although not overjoyed, with iCloud photo album sharing, whatever it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that works sufficiently well as long as you’re not sharing a gajillion pictures. And I think Carousel would do better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with sharing a gajillion pictures. But for just a handful of really good ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey everyone in the family took, you can make a shared photo stream album thing—again, I’m getting the terminology wrong—that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will get the point across and accomplish what I need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, for sharing, what you always want is you don’t want you don’t want to impose on the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you want to share the pictures with, which basically means that no matter what other cool features you’re sharing has,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there has to be some way with some person with a web browser to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your things no matter what else is like, maybe it looks cooler in the app. Maybe if you have photo stream, you see it pushed or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there has to be a web way to do it, which is, you know, you have to be able to send someone a URL, they have to be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tap that URL or click that URL, wherever they are, and see pictures. Not install an app, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change their OS to iOS, not sign up for iCloud. They need to see pictures, which is the magic of Facebook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, all right, the bottom line is there’s a website called Facebook. And you can go there, and you can see pictures. That’s how people share pictures

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with each other. We just want to see pictures. We don’t want to do any of that other stuff. So I think it’s great that we have all this integration. In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PhotoStream works really well for my family because of the push notifications. And if they’re on their iOS device, a little notification

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes in, and they swipe it, and they’re looking at pictures two seconds later. But if I want to send those pictures to someone who doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an iOS device, I’m not going to, okay, first step, go to the Apple store. Like, it’s not going to happen. You need to have a web interface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this stuff. And the fact that as far as Casey was able to determine that’s not the case for Dropbox, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John especially terrible because like you can make public links from like things in your public folder on Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and those are web accessible. And that is just a way to see a thing in S3. But that seems like an obvious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gap in their functionality, even if we ignore the storage limits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I completely agree. So basically all of these announcements today, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey give it one tremendous me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There was one other relevant thing yesterday, I believe, that Adobe announced Lightroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the iPad. And I should disclose that I was on the beta of this about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a month ago. So obviously, I’m a little bit biased because they think I’m special

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not to put me on the beta. So So you know Adobe’s had an interesting set of attempts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know their first attempt which was originally called carousel was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Adobe Revell and Revell was like a like a syncing sharing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of collaboration editing kind of service for photos. I think they’re still running

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it but it seems like they’ve kind of given up on it. Lightroom now has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an iPad app and a sync service so now you you could you can use Lightroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to sync between your computer and an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sort of. But the reason why I didn’t use it for very long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is because it’s pretty limited. It’s obviously designed much more to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more like you know working on working on a project in Lightroom on the go that you’ve started on the desktop

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like you manually move things over and then you might work on your iPad a little bit and then you come back to your computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and your edits are there or whatever. It’s not really about your whole library because one of the biggest limitations of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that first of all the interfaces and the infrastructure to the app are clearly not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designed to have tons and tons you know thousands and thousands of photos being synced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but the biggest problem is you can’t sync a smart collection which is like their version of a smart

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco playlist. You can only see and you can’t sync your whole collection. You can only sync

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like basically you know folders that you have to manually move folders and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco manually move photos into. So it’s not particularly useful because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to like manually select every photo that you want to be available for syncing in Lightroom

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before it shows up on your iPad which is kind of a fatal deal killer for me. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again it’s like it’s like yet another option for photo syncing and sharing, well not really sharing, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco photo syncing between your devices. Yet another option that kind of but doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work the way that most people want and need it to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Every time we talk about this, people write in to tell us the things that we should have talked about, so we can mention a few of them, because someone just emailed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before the show and someone just tweeted. Flickr, in case anyone still doesn’t know, Flickr offers you apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one terabyte of photo storage for free, and you get unlimited photo storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you are grandfathered in with a Flickr Pro account, which I think I should have been, because I’m pretty sure I had a Flickr Pro account, but who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, Flickr offers that. G drive from Google gives you also one terabyte of storage for $10 a month. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the person who tweeted this says that’s, uh, the same, same money on Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gives you one 10th of storage. Uh, so there are many other more economical options

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to store, to try to store sort of all your photos. And I think at this point, one terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is probably enough. If you’re not a professional photographer for anybody who has a kid,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who’s not a teenager yet, you know, you just start from like when you’re, if you start from when your kids are born or if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start with from when digital cameras were popularized. But that’s just again, that’s just going to go up. People will just accumulate photos. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean, not everyone’s as much of a pack rat as I am, but like we don’t even talk with people last in the chat room. Like how am I filling up all that spot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place with JPEGs? Like there’s videos in there too. And it’s not that I have a lot of videos, but one or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John videos in 10 80 P that adds up really fast, even though they’re compressed and everything. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, yeah, I mean, I mean, the people who are sort of selling premium price storage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Dropbox and Apple, I guess, where how much does it cost per gigabyte of stored data on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their servers? They’re just going to have to adjust their prices. Like, things are going to, you know, storage will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep going up, and companies will try to not lower their prices in proportion to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make their margins grow over time. But this all needs to readjust, because we all have lots of digital

⏹️ ▶️ ^John data, and the amount of digital data we drag around behind us and don’t want to lose, specifically pictures and videos, imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just just keeps going up over time so we really need better solutions to this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right I think we’re good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Backblaze, New Relic and Transporter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now the show is over they didn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean to begin cuz it was accidental accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, And if you’re into Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco Harmon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Tech podcasts so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have two pieces of follow-up, one for each of you. Already? These are not follow-up for our podcasts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so that’s why it didn’t go in the follow-up section. These are follow-ups for other podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the first one is for Marco. I saw you tweeting that you were saying that most of your errors and your programs are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from exceptions and bad API calls and not from segfaults. Oh, no, we’re going to get into this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re not going to get into it. I’m just like, I don’t know. I mean, that’s your experience. I’m just telling you what my experience was. But what I wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do was double check my experience, because it sure seems like all my crashes are due to bad memory accesses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I just went through my crash logs, which I don’t think I’ve deleted since like 10.0. They’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just been carrying through. I went through, let’s see what it is, 3,365 crash logs. and 75.96% of those are due to bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John memory accesses.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How many of that was within the last year?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I didn’t look at the dates on them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My theory is that over time, the percentage of these things that are bad access

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or segfault, the percentage of these things is going down over time because- It could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be. Now I have to do a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regression

⏹️ ▶️ ^John analysis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, well, because my theory is that a lot more code that’s in applications that people are using and writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today. And when you’re talking about new languages and the need for a new language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or a new API, that’s specifically talking about the benefits really for developing new software.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think you might want to rule out something like Photoshop or Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Office, where there’s probably a lot of old codes around there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say look at recent applications, things that have been written with modern APIs, modern

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff, and recent crashes to any applications. So. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reason I was looking at all of it, though, is because if you make a change now, eventually, if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you fast forward 10 years after that change, the steady state will be like this. You know what I mean? Like, eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will pass through this portal, and you will be to the, like we are now with memory protection. Like now, pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much, previously, very few things had memory protection. Now, pretty much everything does. Your phone has memory protection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Your iWatch is going to have it. You know what I mean? And so you eventually get into that same steady state. And I think, with this, my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crash logs for the X number of past years are a reflection of the current steady state, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even if it’s getting better now. And I’d have to see a graph of, oh, did the frequency go down? It’s hard to tell with just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one person. But I was just basically checking my own things. Maybe, is it 10%? Is it 50%?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 75 makes me feel like my gut feeling of every time I see a crash log. And that feeling hasn’t changed over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I can check and see if I sort them by date, does the frequency decrease? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a single person’s date, it could just be like, I finally stopped using that that was crashing all the time and doesn’t show up anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or like how many, yeah. What was that recent encoding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bug in the MaxTex frameworks that someone could send you an IM with a badly encoded character and it would take out your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app? I probably have a dozen of those in recent things screwing up the average as well. And I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that would, is that a bad memory access? I’m not sure. Probably was, because it was probably overflowing some stupid buffer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Probably. Yeah. Yeah, but my theory is basically that over time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even within the same language, as libraries and as hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get better, people generally tend to move up a little bit in their abstractions. When I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wrote the very first version of the Instapaper for iOS app, I wrote all the SQLite calls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco directly against the SQLite C API. And I know I’m not pronouncing that correctly, and I don’t care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then within a year, I had rewritten it to use more Objective-C stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where it stayed the whole time I owned it. And then when I started the magazine I used Core

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Data and when I started Overcast I used FMDB and FC model. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I’ve been moving up the stack as time went on because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the benefit of writing directly against the C API was so small on modern hardware

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was so much more code and so much more low-level C code that had things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worrying about length of buffers and everything which like I don’t think overcast does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some audio stuff that has to do that but the vast majority of its code it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to deal with like buffer lengths at all like there’s nowhere where I’m calling memcopy there’s no I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco calling you know like any kind of like anything where that would even matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and so I think and I think that I think that applies to so much software especially in the world that we’re in with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple world and all this cool mobile stuff and all these great frameworks and libraries that are building up over time. I think there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so much, even though we can do these things in C, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe an app might have one or two C calls, or, you know, like I use,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had to add keychain support so I could store the login token securely. And rather than writing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco against the keychain API, I just got a really nice cocoa pod called Lockbox that just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does it for me and wraps it all in this widely used, well tested, and pretty, honestly pretty small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and simple API. So that’s like here’s a chance where I had to use a C API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but instead I just use this already well-developed already proven wrapper for it so that’s yet more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C buffer checking code I didn’t have to write.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well but see someone had to write it though like you’re just kind of moving the problem down like looking at Sekiro artifacts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it would say are these crashes due to something bad that someone wrote dealing with memory or do they merely trigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bug because that what you know who wrote FMDB? FDB is written in a language that’s full access to memory. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at certain point you could down, yes, you need direct access to memory to write like the, the GPU drivers and the kernel and all that good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. But like framework code that deals with like putting up views and stuff like you, you would,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would want at a certain point, you’d want not only you not to have to deal with that stuff, but also the framework

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re calling, because it’s easy to, to trigger a bug in the framework by, you know, doing something silly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with an API and you didn’t mess up anything with pointers and you weren’t doing anything with range checking or whatever. You’re just using an objective

⏹️ ▶️ ^John C APIs and passing messages, but it just so happens that the combination of perfectly benign information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you fed into this API triggered a memory location error inside it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is written in Objective-C. And again, you keep going down. Eventually, you have to get down to low-level code. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you want to do is have everybody using safe code. So not only can you not screw up, but all the frameworks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re calling can’t screw up until you go down to, OK, well, at this point, it is now appropriate that you need direct access to memory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what we were saying earlier in the show is that even OpenSSL is like, well, that’s got to be fast. It’s encryption. We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to write that in C. Some part of that probably has to be written in C. But the entire thing, like, you know, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where we’re looking at languages like Rust and everything that are trying to say, like, we will, or go, you know, we’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be memory safer C-like languages, even if you’re not gonna jump all the way up to something where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have complete memory safety. I don’t know, I just, I just, one, I did the check. I figured it was worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bringing up on the show. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just one person’s thing. Everyone can go look through their crash logs and try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure it out for themselves if they want.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s also worth honoring Ark a little bit here. In your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco debug episode that we’re talking about, which I don’t even think we mentioned that we’re talking about it, but we’re talking about your episode on debug that we’ll link to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in that episode you kind of glossed over Ark saying it wasn’t a big deal. I disagree. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was a very big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was a big deal. I wrote all about it. I think it was a good thing. But for this particular issue,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, getting back to Second Order Effects, a lot of those bad memory accesses, I bet a lot of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are attempting to do something on objects that has been either wholly or partially deallocated. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, exactly. ARC helps with that, but it’s still possible in an ARC system to screw that up because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all the like, oh, well, you’re calling it a CF, it’s different, and you got to annotate things correctly, and you’re writing a block, and you forgot to weaken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that thing, and all this, you know, like, or you didn’t realize you had a copy of that in the block, and you forgot to retain it, but the block

⏹️ ▶️ ^John implicitly retains that, so you thought you didn’t have to retain it here, but you do. Like, it makes it way, way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better, but it is still possible. And it’s like, in some respects, it’s more complicated, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like, when I was doing manual retain and release, you could always see where everything was. Now, Arc is doing tons of retains and releases for me and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blocks the other complication. And if you think you don’t have to worry about it, you will get bitten. And you will inevitably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end up sending a message to a half-deallocated object, and you will have a memory access error again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but in Arc, the failure mode is much more likely to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a leak, usually a retained cycle through not doing the weak self dance, which I love your thing of calling it wealth, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Me too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. What is everyone else calling it? It’s just right there. It’s right in front of you. It’s wealth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The ass is right next to the W. I mean, like, all these things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all these things do help like arc does help and everything. But it’s like arc is a great example of both like how much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John benefit we can get from automating some of this and also how you’re never going to get all the way there because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like anyone who does lots of our code, it’s like, in many ways, it’s so much simpler.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But it’s not the type of thing where you can tell a beginner, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s like, in reality, in fact, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to have a complete understanding of retain release, because when the time comes for you to debug this weird arc situation, you’re not going to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the hell’s going on, unless you understand what arc is doing for you. And then once you have that foundational

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knowledge, we can explain to you this obscure edge case and what’s really going on. Because without that, then it just becomes like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John voodoo. And you’re like a visual basis, basic programmer, no offense to visual basic programmers, just flailing wildly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and going like, when I type this it works, but now it doesn’t, and I don’t have a foundation to understand why.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You still have to understand retain, release, and auto-release. ARC just saves you a tremendous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amount of typing and makes it so much easier to not, you know, takes away a lot of drudgery and makes things way safer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for most people, but you’re never going to get all the way there. You’re never going to get to, if it’s a seg fault, it’s not your fault.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s what I’m trying to get to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, totally. Just my assertion in the tweet, which I don’t think we actually even said beginning of this diatribe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My assertion, your assertion basically, is that the vast majority, or the majority at least, of crashes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are bad memory accesses, and or you know through corruption or things like that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my assertion is that in my experience I’m seeing that that’s not really a problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Languages have to solve as much as you seem to think they do, because the vast majority

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the crashes that I see in my apps and other apps that run of my stuff are things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco assertion failures and uncaught exceptions. Things that like every language has exceptions, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every language has error conditions. And if you make a new language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instead of having a C-based one, make a new language that succeeds it, you’re still going to have exceptions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are uncaught that have problems in apps. Like you’re still, it’s just like a different type of error.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, but humans have to write those assertions. And the reason humans write those assertions in languages with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John free reign of memory is because if they didn’t put that assertion there, they know that six lines later you’re going to be scribbling all over memory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So that’s why they put the assertions there. But if you forgot to put the assertions there, guess what? You’re scribbling all over memory. And yes, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even in a high level language with memory repression, you put assertions to make sure you’re sanity checking your stuff. But there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John danger that if like, oh, I forgot to check that assertion to make sure this value is greater than or equal to zero, so I don’t end up with a negative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number. There’s no chance that in subsequent lines, that negative number will cause you to scribble all over memory or send the contents

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your web service process out as the HTTP response revealing your SSL private key or anything like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, before you skewer me on whatever you’re about to skewer me on, probably vinyl,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where would one go to check one’s crash logs if one was so inclined?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I went to the console app, and along the left side where I am in the console app, you can find all the different directories that have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John word crash in them. There’s a whole bunch of those. Like, they’re in slash library, they’re in tilde slash library.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Some of them are in application-specific log directories. I just found a bunch of directories and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John recursively grep through them for the various Kern access failure, EX bad,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like just look through them and you’ll find one of them and you’ll know what to grep for. You can find it. And Marco should look through his too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would imagine that the errors that you encounter while developing app may be different than the errors I encounter when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using apps. And so there may be something to that distinction as well. But it’s worth checking, which is why I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John did the grep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and that distinction is important. However, when you’re talking about the need to make a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco language. I would say helping developers during

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development avoid things like weird memory errors, which are often very hard to find and fix.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Helping avoid that might be more important.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Develop an app once, more or less. Millions of people use it all over the place. Would you rather the open SSL

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people had something to help them during the development, or something to help the people who had deployed the program? Obviously, you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both. And they’re probably tied to each other in various ways, but I would much rather have the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developers suffer and have the end users not experience crashes than the reverse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right, what’s Case’s follow up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You got he got it. He knows he knows what he did. The vinyl? He knows what he did. I just listened to that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John episode today. And I could not believe it. You just kept digging yourself in deeper and deeper. Let’s provide context, which we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do last time, apparently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay. So I was on IRL talk with Faith and Jason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for a second time, which I am not at all going to gloat about how I was invited back before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you were invited back because I’m too much of an adult for that. In any case, I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey invited on and the comedy of this is I didn’t actually hear the episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey until after I was on, wherein Faith and Jason kind of got into a tiff about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey vinyl. And Faith had asserted,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and she is correct, that vinyl does indeed sound better on an appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey stereo than a CD does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So stop digging yourself in. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco already wrong. It’s already scientifically wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Alright, go ahead. Finish your summary.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So she had said to Jason, no, it sounds better. And they got, they went back and forth, although at the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t know this when I recorded with them, they went back and forth and Jason actually summarized it really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well after Faith was so far into the rage deep end that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was surprised she didn’t lop it. In any case, what Jason said was, oh, you just feel like it’s more full

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and complete sound. And Faith said, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Obviously, I’m heavily paraphrasing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, God, this hurts so much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So hold on. So what I had said was, hey, Jason, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hear the background story. All I saw was a few tweets fly by between like you and Faith

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or you, Faith, and Jason. And I wanted to weigh in somewhat ignorantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey given the context, but weigh in and say that But having grown up with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, really, really good stereo in the house, with a father who has just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a shed load of vinyl, I would completely agree, science

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be damned, that vinyl legitimately does sound better. And maybe it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a placebo, maybe it’s all in my darn head, but I don’t care because I believe it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in my heart that it sounds way better, and Faith is right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, so I have some cables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. I’m going to try to give a reasonable summary of this that you guys can understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John First of all, let me start by saying I’m not an audio expert. But I don’t think you need to be an audio expert to get a handle on this topic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the main problems on the original episode between Faith and Jason, which we’ll put in the show notes, was that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as usual, they didn’t define the boundaries of their discussion and their terms well enough. They were just talking past each other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Here’s how it started. So they were talking about the stupid Pono thing that we talked about, the high

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quality music from, what is it, Neil Young or whoever. And Jason

⏹️ ▶️ ^John asked her if she’d be interested in something like that. And she said, if I was after that, it’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t you want this to listen to higher quality audio? He’s like, oh, if I want a higher quality audio, I’ll just listen to vinyl. And that’s how it started.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I think there’s sort of a foundation. You can see how, through the game of telephone, you end up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with that type of opinion. It devolved into like, oh, you think vinyl is better than this, that, the other thing. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many, many factors at play here. But I can start from, like, again, I’m not going to get, Like I can’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John specifically technical about this. You can look up all the stuff that you want and Mark is going to add later. But here’s how I think I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to bottom line. And I think this bottom line is reasonably accurate. When instruments make sound,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like when people play music live, and you capture that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound, and you try to take the sound that was in the air when people playing the instruments and put it somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John such that you can get the most back from what you heard in that room, from like the actual sound that was produced,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CD, even just plain CD, is more able to capture and reproduce accurately the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sounds that were in that room than vinyl. I’m pretty sure, and Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can confirm if he wants, that it’s just a more or less undisputable fact due to the limitations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the medium. Confirm. So that’s the problem that they got into. They were talking about vinyl, CD,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all this other stuff. Like, just ignore everything else and just say, like, there’s sound in a room,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to capture that sound and put that sound back out into the world somehow. Like, you want to capture

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that information. Vinyl has limitations in terms of frequencies that it can accurately reproduce and how well

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it can, you know, capture what was in that room that CD doesn’t have, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, I think, and you can Google that and do all the stuff you want to see, what kind of frequencies can vinyl reproduce?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And what are the limitations? And what is the top end and the bottom end? And how well can it produce high frequency sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versus low frequency sounds and distortion? And this is even before you get into, like, every time you play a vinyl record, you’re damaging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and all these other things, you know, making little grooves and whacks and all this crazy stuff. Like, that fact sits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there and flies in the face of all the discussion of like vinyl versus CD, CD versus vinyl. Because when you’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about medium, that’s different. Now, why could normal, good, reasonable thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people come to the conclusion that, you know, why does Faith think that vinyl is the highest quality,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, if I want to listen to music that’s higher quality than MP3s or CDs, I’ll just go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John listen to vinyl. Why could she come to that conclusion? Because there is much more to what music sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than just how well is the medium able to capture sound, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And we’ve talked about this on past shows. There’s a stupid loudness more where they mastered everything for CD and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kept cranking up the, you know, the whatever I don’t know the term for it but like if you look at the waveform, the waveform slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fills the entire thing. The dynamic range between the quiet section and the loud section disappears and the whole song is loud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That sounds like crap. They didn’t do that in the era when most vinyl was made. So vinyl sounds quote-unquote better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So if you hear the same album on vinyl and CD and the CD one is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Overcompressed and cranked up and the vinyl one is not of course the vinyl one’s gonna sound better But that’s not even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same song anymore. It’s different audio So that’s one reason that vinyl could sound better like legitimately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really sound better because it was mastered differently In the early days when they were making vinyl from what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve read since vinyl has a different frequency response in CDs They would master it as if they were sending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it to vinyl like they would over boost the treble or whatever frequencies that vinyl would have trouble reproducing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they would have to crank those up because they know a lot of those would get muffled by the vinyl, and they just take that same master and put it on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CD, and it would sound terrible because CD doesn’t have those limitations. It can reproduce those sounds accurately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it isn’t, there’s not, it’s a more linear range between them. You don’t have to say, well, this treble’s gonna, I don’t even know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s treble, whatever, this treble’s gonna get swallowed, so we really need to crank it up, but don’t worry when we, when you carve those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John little grooves into the vinyl disc, it will all sound good. Again, if you take the same album from the same master, Oh, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CD sounds terrible the vinyl sounds good It’s because vinyl is swallowing up half of the things that are there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s you know the master was made for vinyl All these things can contribute to the idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that vinyl sounds better because in a particular album or a particular song The vinyl recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may be better mastered or you may simply prefer that those frequencies be Attenuated the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way they are on vinyl So and what happens is if you don’t have all this background

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and know all these nitty-gritty details else, your experience, your lived experience will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I hear the song on mp3s, it sounds like crap. When I play it on my fancy vinyl things, it sounds awesome. Therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vinyl sounds better. And it just game of telephone that over and over again in Austin and the hipster community is just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an accepted fact that vinyl is higher quality than CD. Well, see, you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John jumped from like you’ve jumped from something that has a basis in reality all the way to a conclusion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that has no basis in reality. in fact, and you can’t say vinyl is better than CD because it is not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, okay, I understand where you’re coming. Well, it’s not even where you’re coming from. I understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you’re saying. And by and large, I do agree with it. But it’s more than just I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey playing it off as a game of telephone for for both faith and I is not really being

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fair, because both of us have legitimately experienced really good setups

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the homes in which we lived at some point or another. And I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can speak for faith, but I know I have listened to a CD and then the exact same song

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} album.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you don’t know it was the exact, that’s what I’m saying, you don’t know it was the same song.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Sure, no, no, no, it could have been mastered differently, and there’s nothing I can say to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey refute or dispute what you had said about different mastering. You absolutely could be right about that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one way or another, I can tell you that I’ve listened to CDs and I’ve listened into vinyl and be it the mastering or be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it the medium. And yes, the medium is kind of inherently flawed in the cracks and the hisses and the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pops and whatnot, but kind of but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never and in the frequency response and and in the things that it can in the things that it can reproduce there was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sound in the room when people played that music how many of those sounds can be recorded and played back by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vinyl. It is a smaller subset of sounds than CD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and and I haven’t looked at any of the research because Marco wouldn’t let me. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that very well could be true. I find that a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} hard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John See, you got into this on the show as well, because you’re trying to think of like, things that sound reasonable. Like, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s inherently like an analog. Didn’t you take signals and systems in school? Yes, but that was so- You know, analog versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John discrete signals. Marco has a good video that you should see about like- I watched it. The sampling,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, it’s not, I mean, here, if you’ve still subscribed to it, even after for seeing the math

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and taking signals and systems or whatever, if you don’t find that approach convincing, although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should because it’s true, an alternative approach is think of it this way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When you take sound and you translate it to carving a little valley in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plastic, you are inherently taking an analog, a signal of the music. Say you’re recording directly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This is not how it works. But say you’re recording directly into the grooves in the vinyl. you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking something and you’re encoding that signal in a groove in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plastic. What do you think has better resolution? Those samples and bits that you’re taking?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or the variations you can make precisely in grooves in plastic? Like talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about quantizing and like, you know, if you subscribe to that theory like, oh, it’s inherently a continuous function

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you’re sampling, how can you ever reproduce the original signal? Which is BS, you totally can. But like, think of what you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re making a groove in vinyl. Do you think, oh, that can completely accurately encode

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this information because we can so precisely control how we wedge these atoms out of the way in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vinyl to make this little valley? I mean, look under the microscope. Is that a precise trail that’s being drawn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there? Do you think that’s more precise than 16-bit samples at 44 kilohertz? No, it is not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s borne out by what kind of frequencies you can get out of that, let alone the variations in an individual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stamping or carving of vinyl. insanity to think that vinyl as a medium

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is better than digital things. Mastering is what it’s all about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Here’s here’s how you make things sound good. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listen on a really really good system which is usually systems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are like you know really good and expensive are usually owned by

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco upper-middle-class men in their 50s and up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like my dad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right and these upper-middle-class men in their 50s and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up probably listen to music from the 60s and 70s and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco music from the 60s and 70s if you have a CD version of the same thing was probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the old crappy CDs that was mastered back when CDs were too young as drama was discussing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of the masters were really bad and a lot of the translations to CD were really badly done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s also possible that you were you know comparing it to things like mp3s that were encoded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} late 90s when mp3s were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new and mp3 encoders used to be really really bad and now they’re really really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so there’s all these other factors. Now the way you make things sound good is you listen to well-recorded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco music and there’s a good chance that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco old 50 year old men with you know a lot of money who with big stereos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re probably listening to pretty good music honestly music that was probably recorded better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was probably well maybe not recorded better music that was that was played with more real instruments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and less artificial tweaks to the sound at less electronic instruments if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any you know there’s there was a lot more there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like of substance that you could detect on a good stereo where you know compared to like the very artificial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clean sound of modern stuff. So they’re listening to stuff that sounds better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at higher resolution, at higher detail. They’re listening on really good stereos and they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an event out of listening. This is the most important part by far, they’re paying attention. When you are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco told, this is why ABX testing is so important, when you are told,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listen to this, this is going to sound amazing. And it’s played on a great stereo and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are expecting it to sound amazing you’ve just been told it will sound amazing and you want it to sound amazing because it’s an attractive idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the old, the romantic, the analog being superior to the new crazy things that the kids are doing these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco days. That’s a very nice attractive idea to people. They want that to be true. So you’re being told it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to sound better. You’re in an environment where it looks impressive. You’re probably in front of an impressive looking stereo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and maybe it has some like old, crazy things like tubes or at least, I mean, hell, record

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco players themselves are you know, pretty crazy analog things. Especially the really advanced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ones that are probably in these advanced areas that have like the electrically moving arm and all this other stuff. So you have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re told to expect it. It looks impressive, the system looks impressive. It looks exotic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and old and romantic. And then the music starts playing and you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pay attention to it. This is critical. You are, you’re not just putting music on. You are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listening to the music. And you’re trying to hear, you’re paying attention to what it sounds like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re listening for details. You’re trying to hear details you’ve never heard before. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you say, oh my God, I’m hearing details I’ve never heard before. Which is probably true,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s not because of anything inherently awesome about any individual component of that necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to the exclusion of its alternatives. It’s because you’re paying attention, you’re romanticizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the event, you’re making, you are telling yourself to enjoy the event. So you are enjoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the event. you’re telling yourself it sounds good and the inputs you’re getting from other factors like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco its appearance or the setting or what other people are telling you about it, all these inputs are telling you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this will sound great. So then when you listen, it sounds great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s not to invalidate the experience, because who cares? If you’re enjoying it and it sounds great, then it worked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like the system worked, basically. All the money you spent, like if it’s making you happy, then everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worked. And another possibility is that people who have grown up with, or even if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you haven’t grown up with, you may simply prefer the sound of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inaccurate reproduction of live music. You may prefer those frequencies to be tamped off. You may prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there’s sort of an underlying noise to be underneath all that. That may sound better to you, because better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is subjective. Like, that may sound better to you. That’s fine to say, I like the sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of vinyl better than CD, because I like those things. It may be inaccurate, because again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’d You have to say, okay, fine, we’ll get you the same stereo, we’ll take the same song, master the same way, and we’ll do this controlled

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experiment and play one off CD and one off vinyl. A, see if you can tell which one is which. And B, if you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell, then just say which one you prefer. Because once you can tell, you may say, oh, I prefer the vinyl one or whatever. But it doesn’t matter, whatever you prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is whatever you prefer. Where this goes wrong is when you say higher quality, because I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you could say that’s subjective too, but like higher quality, when we’re talking about audio, it’s like, it’s a definition I gave at the beginning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When this music was played, there was sound in the air. we want to take that sound, put it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John somewhere, and bring it back. Which way can we do that so we lose the least amount of information?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And CD wins over vinyl. I mean, that’s it. That’s the foundation of this entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. Everything else you can say is, you may say you prefer one thing over the other, or one thing makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you happier. If something makes you happier, fine. If you prefer one thing over the other, you could still be challenged to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OK, we’ll give you a double blind test or an ABX test. Let’s see if you can even tell which is which. You probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t. And if you can tell, maybe you’re not sure which is which. So then you’ve sort of punched a hole in your own kind of, well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prefer that over the other, because maybe you really don’t prefer it. But whatever, you wouldn’t subject yourself to that test unless you’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ruin your fun. If it makes you happy to listen to vinyl, fine. But where people go crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about this and where you start to get into audiophile territory is where you start really truly believing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that vinyl is the highest quality reproduction of music available. It may be the best mastered version of that song

⏹️ ▶️ ^John available. That may be true. And that’s why I said like Pono might be better, because it’ll get better mastered versions of that. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can say that if you think that’s true. But that’s why everyone’s going nuts over this thing, is when you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into like, oh, it sounds fuller and richer, and it’s analog and all that other stuff. That’s what drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nerds, let’s be fair. Nerds only, nuts. Everyone else just enjoys their music. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe you should just listen to the music you like in the way you want, enjoy it, and not worry about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess don’t go on podcasts with geek in the title and talk about how vinyl is better than CD.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey May I have the floor, please?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey may. Are you too done?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Probably not, but go ahead.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m so sober and I’m so angry right now. Okay, there’s a few things. Firstly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should make it plain that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I came to the conclusion that vinyl was better, and I cannot speak for Faith, but when I came to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey conclusion that vinyl was better, in the limited experience that I have, it was because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was playing modern recordings. One was Dave Matthews, which Marcos snicker all you want, but they are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well recorded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the other was Soundgarden. I forget the name of the album, but it was the one with a…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I played, or my dad played either the vinyl or the CD and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey picked one of the songs and immediately played the other immediately after. Yes, I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I knew which one was which. Yes, I was predisposed, or arguably predisposed, to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like one better than the other. So yes, from a purely scientific point of view,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you could say that this test was flawed. Yes, you could say that the dramatic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey difference that I heard, which is exactly how I would describe it, was all in my head. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very, very well could be. I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} no- Could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been volume.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. In fact, it’s it’s been shown that like in blind tests people overwhelmingly prefer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco An input that’s like 0.1 decibel turned up more than the other one. Even if the hardware is identical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep, just to be slightly slightly louder and you’ll sound better. Anyway continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so Regardless of whether or not not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s based in science. I can tell you that I definitely heard a difference and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey definitely preferred vinyl. I will be the first to tell you that yes, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey medium is inherently flawed. You’re screwing it up every time you use it. You’re going to have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get over hisses and pops and crackles and whatnot. Yes, most of my father’s record collection was bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But yes, he does have a record cleaner specifically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey designed to clean LPs that he uses almost every time he plays a record. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey his CD player is so ridiculously out of control that it’s actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a, what do you call a CD player? It’s a transport, right? Yes, thank you. It’s a transport. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey his digital analog converter, I believe, uses tubes because at some point or another that was the trendy thing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey do and people believed it sounded better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, in many communities that’s still the case, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, you could argue that all of this is just one placebo on top of another on top of another.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I think it was – I don’t remember which one of you that said it. But one way or another,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let’s assume I’m wrong. And let’s assume for the sake of conversation that I’m just completely full of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Even if that’s the case, the experience of going to a shelf full

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of vinyl and finding alphabetically the particular LP you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey want, removing it, this humongous disc that’s like a foot wide or whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, is removing it, placing it on the cleaner, putting a little solution on it, having

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the little turntable cleaner things spin and vacuum up the solution as you shimmy it across the record

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey moving that sounds like it sucks. Don’t you get me started about coffee when?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So anyway, so you move the record over to the turntable, you guess you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey freaking guess where it is the song you want to play starts and you’re probably going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You You can look at the little smooth rings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know, and dad who’s done this for 30 years is much better at it than I am. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of this adds to the experience. Oh, and I forgot to mention all the album art when that was still a thing and still freaking mattered.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All of that, picking the record out of the sleeve gingerly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all of this adds to the experience and makes it more enjoyable for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t forget chucking the discs at zombies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The what?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} We

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t have a reference you guys didn’t get I had to throw in it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all right. I’m glad we hit the quota For you Marco to sit here and tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me I need to ABX test and blah blah blah When’s the last time you ABX to your coffee versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Starbucks?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He didn’t tell you you needed to ABX test like all that stuff you said is fine No one is arguing against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the tea ceremony sort of thing you have going to that like again I said whatever you makes you happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then go for it Like there’s no reason to subject yourself to these scientific tests if they’re just going to make you enjoy life

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less. Like, don’t do it, right? Just but but you also then can’t make claims

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like vinyl is the highest quality source of music available, because in that sentence, you didn’t say what I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really mean is that when they master things for vinyl, they have more dynamic range and my preferred like you didn’t say that. You said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vinyl and like it ends, you end up talking about the mediums. And then when you stray off into, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John digital can’t capture all the nuances because it’s discreet instead of continuous, like you’re just off into the weeds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s where people yell at you. And it’s like, stick to your actual… No one will argue with you when you say you really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enjoy the ceremony of dealing with vinyl. No one will argue with you when you say… Well, come on, this is the internet. Somebody will argue. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, but like, they haven’t had a leg to stand on. If you say, I played this song on vinyl and this song on CD, specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John songs, and I liked it better on vinyl. Fine. You like what you like. You get into trouble when you go into like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John categorical, you know, scientific statements about capturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audio waveforms and reproducing them. And that’s where it all goes off the rails. And that’s where I think, if you’re in that kind of community

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long enough, where everyone reveres vinyl as the sort of thing to do, eventually it just becomes like, well, everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knows vinyl sounds better. And it just becomes accepted wisdom. And that’s where, not you so much, but more Faith,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just becomes like, in your circle, of course vinyl sounds better than CD. Everybody knows that. It’s an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John obvious fact. I can’t even believe you’re arguing with me about it. And that’s what infuriates people, that inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that community, this stuff just wraps around on itself again and again until eventually it becomes accepted wisdom that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vinyl is better than CD, which is not a true statement in and of itself, and the nuances are now lost, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then it just becomes like, that’s why I was talking about the game of telephone, where it’s like a generation of people who don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know or care about the technical details and know they like the sound of vinyl better, but they don’t know why, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their conclusion they come to is false.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey See, and you can take issue with the entire city of Austin believing the vinyl’s better, as long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as you put an asterisk at the end and say, accept faith. And the same thing with me, because we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have come to this conclusion from personal experience. There’s no game of telephone for us now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every other person on the planet that claims vinyls better fine telephone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, no, because because in her initial reaction was like well, I would just listen to it on CD like on vinyl She just threw it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out there like well, of course Everybody knows that like it wasn’t a controversial statement when she first made it And I think that’s why she was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taken by surprise by like and she’s you know She backpedaled and tried to more narrowly divine or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But like that’s what I’m good I listen to the listen to the episode if you haven’t already

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have I have since since I recorded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John she threw it out there Like as if it’s like well, everybody knows that in my circle So it’s like well if it wasn’t that wasn’t the topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the topic wasn’t vinyl versus anything She’s like well I would never buy the stupid triangular player because if I actually really cared about high quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John music I just listened to it on vinyl and then Jason was like what you know cuz then it’s like he’s he’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming from that Same environment where that’s and then she had to think about what do I mean by that? Like it’s just if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s accepted wisdom when your circle of friends You don’t think about what do I mean by that? Just does it have to do with the mastering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is vinyl actually better able like you know what I mean? Like and maybe that hasn’t been thought through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I don’t think that she was intending to make a declaration about the world as much as I probably was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think she was more trying to say hey, this is what I feel and and this is what I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t think she was trying to be the representative for Austin, Texas hipster ville, USA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t speak for her, but I’m pretty sure that that wasn’t the intention for me I was more going for a global

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You were and you should listen back to yourself and watch that video that Marco sent over and over again and do exercises

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in your signals and system books until you convince yourself that it’s BS. But anyway, like I reason I brought it up on this show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and in the after show is because I don’t want to bring it up on IRL talk because I already had an episode where I harangue them and faith

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not need to be harangued, but I figured you could take some haranguing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, thank you. And I still want to go back to I do not understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how a man that spends an unbelievable amount of time fussing over drink that’s inherently disgusting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and not helpful can throw stones at me because I want to enjoy music in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey own little way. How once the last time you ABX tested your coffee,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would love the opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to well the problem the problem with coffee and stuff Like that is that there’s no like it’s not like capturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audio waveforms There is no original and a reproduction so there is no sort of objective criteria by which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can judge it at all It’s all like how does this taste to you? And then you can test it to say well does this really taste better?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve made with these special beans or whatever, but but like it’s all subjective so you know Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it we give a secret really replaces specially made coffee with K cups for a week and see if he notices I bet he would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, hey, if you want to if you want to orchestrate that, I will gladly participate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Because I don’t I don’t like coffee. I don’t want to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around it. But see, Marco, because Marco is trying to find like he’s although he does all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fussy things, I think what he’s like, if there was some way that he could like snap his fingers and instantly have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a cup of coffee with no mess and no mess, I think that tasted good to him. I think he would do it like he’s not. He’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like going out of his. You’re not going out of your way to find the most complicated way to make coffee.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, in fact, making making coffee my way, I don’t think actually takes more overall

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco effort than using like a regular drip pot like everyone used for years. It is a little more effort than using a K-cup machine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it’s like I use an AeroPress and I don’t even do a super fussy AeroPress.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You roast your own beans though, so that kind of cranks up the fussiness meter. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wait, you went to buy a roaster and vent it outside so your house doesn’t fill with smoke and figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use the roaster. It takes 15 minutes every 10 days. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just say like the point is like the reason you’re doing that is because you’re trying to find the minimum like a coffee that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tastes good to you, but that also doesn’t absorb your entire life in making it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right And and the reason why I’ve been doing all this audio research recently is because I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco am an audiophile but I’m I’m not a ridiculous one like I’m really really super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into good headphones and Speakers I care a lot less about because I just don’t have a lot of opportunities to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listen on speakers right now in my life but I’m really into really good headphones and I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now what I would consider pretty ridiculous equipment but getting here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco involved a lot of research and finding out like what mattered to me and what didn’t and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what what matters to science and what stands up to ABX test and what doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s all about striking a balance between practicality and cost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and quality and vinyl you know your vinyl crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tea ceremony is the exact same way. Like, you’re looking to get something out of that, and you get it out of that. If it’s worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to you, fine. I agree with John though, that you can’t just go and say, oh, well, X is better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than Y, you know, if you’re not saying, well, I enjoy the procedure of X more than I enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the procedure and experience of Y. But, you know, the reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I pick on this sort of stuff in the audio world and in the coffee world even,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is because people do a lot of wasteful, stupid things that actually don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have any effect. And again, if they enjoy them, that’s fine. But the problem comes in when they start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco telling other people, if you do this it will be better, or if you buy this it will be better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That actually gets destructive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But that’s what you do with coffee. That’s exactly what you do with coffee. Sure, I could Google a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey post where you told us about how roasting your own beans is the only way to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Actually, every time I’ve mentioned roasting my own beans on my site, I say, you shouldn’t do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I guess I guess it’s got back to taste being subjective. Like it’s not it’s not it’s not like audio where we have a way that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here was the original and let’s see what we can reproduce in that. And like the generally accepted level for quality

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and audio is like we want to reproduce the original as accurately as possible. And like and I don’t even think that necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes people feel as good because the original is not just a waveform. It’s like where you’re sitting in the room and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vibrations coming through your seat. And like there’s so many things about live music that are different than normal. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, you could be that person and say, I prefer when the original signal is reproduced

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inaccurately in these ways. In fact, in particular, the ways that vinyl tends to inaccurately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reproduce it. That’s what I like better. Fine, you can like it, but our standard for audio is compared to the original.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There’s no standard for coffee. If you like McDonald’s coffee, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, K-Cups, like, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you like is what you like. You can’t say, well, that’s not how coffee’s supposed to taste, because then it’s just all subjective.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco has particular tastes in coffee and to his tastes Starbucks is gross and what he makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is good. Someone may love Starbucks and hate his coffee or whatever But there’s no easy yardstick except

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for like I guess something that’s like damages your body by drinking it We can all agree that you probably shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have that although maybe that’s a bad choice for coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, no, I but I think coffee does damage your body and before Marco interrupts me what I mean by that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I mean by that is I? Part of the reason I don’t ever want to learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to like coffee is because I don’t ever want to rely on having something in order to get my day going.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can go a week without a Diet Coke. Would I like to? No. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey run my life based on whether or not I’ve had my lunchtime Diet Coke. And maybe Marco isn’t this way, although I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like you are. But most people I know that I work with, for example, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go in and they don’t want to be talked to until they’ve stuck a K cup in the Keurig

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they can’t, they feel like they can’t function until they’ve completed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that stage of their morning. And that just sounds positively freaking terrible to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It really does. Well, Marco’s already said he doesn’t like that aspect of coffee. I mean, because it’s, I mean, he’s, he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a caffeine addict, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I am a caffeine addict in that if I don’t have coffee, I will get a headache by about 4pm or so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But Casey, when do you think I had my first cup of coffee today?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, well, you probably woke up at noon, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I woke up at about 8.30.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That I was totally giving you a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} hard time. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco woke up at about 8.30. I worked all morning. I had my first cup of coffee at about 2.30. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you waking up at 8.30? Your wife is a saint.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My kid wakes up at 8 or 8.30.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 8.30?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Your child is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} saint.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes. That’s insane. You should not share that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John widely. People will hate

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The point I’m driving at is less about the time, but more about if you do not consume a cup of coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey during the day or equivalent caffeine, something is amiss in your world. Could you live

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with it? Perhaps, but something is amiss. And I just don’t want that in my life.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, agreed. So then instead, you listen to vinyl, which involves washing things and sleeving them and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wiping the wash off the sleeve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John He doesn’t even have a record player.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. I never do. The only time I listen to vinyl is when I met my mom and dad, which up until two months from now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they lived in Connecticut. So I listen to vinyl two or three times a year.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you know what? Maybe that’s why I romanticize it so damn much. Maybe it’s because I grew up with it. There’s a million reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why. And I will concede that I should not have said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it is the be-all end-all better mechanism for listening to music. But I will not concede

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that in any experience I’ve ever had, I prefer it, be it placebo or otherwise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still love you guys, even though I want to kill you both.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Hey, Marco got follow-up too.

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

60: The Great Odwalla Flavor Change of 2013

Transcript start

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