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

117: You Don't Have the Antibodies

Women-listeners followup, Mac App Store woes, watches and handbags, and Facebook Instant Articles.

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

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s that low level C audio code or whatever the hell it is you’re working on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m making progress

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any hair left to pull out of your head Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is why I cut it short To make to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey make that impossible.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I knew I was gonna be working on core audio this week So I got a fresh haircut number two on the razor nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that that means it’s too short to realistically grab hold of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I feel like Adam could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still get a

⏹️ ▶️ John handful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John he might not have little fingers like pincers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So any pre follow up stuff we need to worry about?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no pre follow up only post follow up and follow up and more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey follow up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lots and lots of follow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco up.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe the show is pre follow up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey At this point should we just call this the accidental follow up podcast?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well there’s follow up and then the main topics are really just pre follow up for next week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. So let’s do our follow-up so we can get to the pre-follow-up. We should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey start with talking about our discussion about how to attract

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or encourage women and girls to listen to the show. And unsurprisingly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got a lot of feedback about this. And I appreciate it. And I know we appreciate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the feedback. A lot of it was really good. Pretty much all of it was really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting. And it certainly opened my eyes a bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to how men reacted to it, how women reacted to it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so just a few things I think we should talk about up front. I think first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and foremost, I would say we caught a little bit of flack about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending so much time talking about advertisers and Harry’s specifically. And I think that’s reasonable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the problem with the way the last episode went is that because we spent so much time talking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the advertisers, it appeared

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as though that was the thing we thought was the biggest priority, just by virtue of the fact that we spent so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time on it. And in reality, that’s not at all what any of us think is the biggest priority,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first thing to change. It’s just, as per usual, we got wrapped around the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey axle on that topic. And I don’t know if any of you have ever heard this show, but we sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get off in the weeds and that’s exactly what happened. And I think while

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the discussion I think was good, I don’t mean for it, and I’m pretty sure you guys don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean for it, to be representative of what we think is the right approach to fix this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. It just so happens we got off in the weeds.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think actually I would back up for a second. Here’s how I, maybe we all have different opinions of this feedback,

⏹️ ▶️ John but here’s how I would characterize it. First of all, I want to say that I still feel like I’m I’m still processing

⏹️ ▶️ John that feedback I agree like and all I mean partly because it’s still coming in and partly because

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was like The most upsetting to me feedback that we’ve ever gotten in the show

⏹️ ▶️ John And there was a wide wide range of responses the feedback was all over the map But the

⏹️ ▶️ John title of the top of that map was probably like you guys are dummies. Like I felt like this was

⏹️ ▶️ John Skewed way negative like consensus is we are dummies And

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not to say that it’s not useful, but like sometimes we get feedback that’s like just providing

⏹️ ▶️ John information or supportive or whatever, but pretty much all this feedback was telling us things

⏹️ ▶️ John that we missed or whatever. I mean, some of it was, I guess, feedback, because we solicited feedback, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John was fairly negative. I don’t know if that surprised me. I think I was

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of dreading discussing this topic because I kind of figured this would be the feedback we would get

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s the fact that I’m still processing it makes me feel like I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t quite know what to think and you I think what you highlighted is

⏹️ ▶️ John probably the only dominant theme that I saw in it because like I said even though it was mostly negative

⏹️ ▶️ John it was wide-ranging like people had very different ideas about what we got wrong right so

⏹️ ▶️ John a wide range all in the negative realm but the one thing a lot of people seem to agree on you already hit is that

⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of how they felt about the ads, that that was not the core issue. People

⏹️ ▶️ John who said you absolutely have to get rid of the ads, also ads are not the core issue. People who said you absolutely have to keep

⏹️ ▶️ John the ads, also the ad is not the core issue, right? So that I feel like is the only consensus that I could draw out

⏹️ ▶️ John of this so far. Two things. One, that we didn’t do a very good job, and two,

⏹️ ▶️ John that the ad is a distraction regardless of what people feel about it. What did you think of that? Am

⏹️ ▶️ John I by being too negative on the negativity, Marco, or did you get that impression as well?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that was pretty much it. I mean, this was, I mean, I’m also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still processing a lot of it. This, I would say just anecdotally, I don’t know if you guys feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way, I would say anecdotally, this was probably the most words we’ve gotten in feedback on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any topic. It just, it has taken me a long time to even just read

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feedback email. There’s been so much of it. And most of it has been very informative. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, overall, you know, there was definitely a prominent pattern

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a lot of it that began with, I’m a man, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John giant wall of text that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco showed really a pretty poor understanding of gender issues in technology,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ever in life. And that, I’m a little saddened by.

⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t you feel like, though, that was like the easiest feedback to handle? Yeah, I ignored most of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I mean, it’s depressing that, you know, we’re going to get that type of thing, but it’s the type

⏹️ ▶️ John of feedback you read and you’re like, all right, well, so I know these people are out there. I know they’re listening.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have different opinions and values than we do. But it’s easier to,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I feel like it’s easier to process because I feel like they, in many respects, they

⏹️ ▶️ John are who, they are who we are most capable of reaching,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like if we can reach those people, then that will affect change, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John If we can, if we can turn those people around or just even move them more towards what we

⏹️ ▶️ John think, you know, our value system, that that will be a success. And they were sort of showing us here

⏹️ ▶️ John we are over here. If you feel like moving us towards your way of thinking,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, this is where we are. So now you know what you got your work cut out for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It was surprising to me. I think most of the email, while negative,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was informative. There was certainly a lot of, hi,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a dude and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so you should really improve it. But the thing that struck me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, gosh, the immediate Twitter replies to the ATP account were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey disappointing. and I was certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and remain taken aback by it because I was very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised about how many replies we saw, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically made me think that we were all members of the He-Man

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Woman Haters Club, which I don’t remember signing up for, and I don’t remember that being a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was a little bit disappointing. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I think that is the most much more interesting feedback to me. Also more upsetting,

⏹️ ▶️ John but much more interesting. Because it’s, I don’t know, it’s giving us new

⏹️ ▶️ John information, as opposed to just saying, hey, there are people out there with regressive ideas about women and technology.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, we already knew that. But the other side of the coin is more enlightening. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John would say for the feedback, again, trying to characterize it, we get more feedback from women than usual, which is expected

⏹️ ▶️ John in this type of topic. And the reason I was emphasizing the wide range is,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, as I tried to emphasize in the last show, like women are not a monolith. No individual

⏹️ ▶️ John woman who tweets at us or writes to us is purporting to speak for all women. They are just individuals,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s why getting a lot of feedback is good because otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you just get feedback from three people and they all have three different opinions, you have no idea what to think. If you get feedback from 300

⏹️ ▶️ John people, then maybe you can start sort of, you know, slicing and dicing it and trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to, uh, to figure things out. And, you know, so soliciting feedback is one thing. And the second thing, which, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, many people emphasize is like you solicit the feedback and then you have to actually read it and listen to it. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, the difficulty in doing that correctly, as I, on the last show, I talked about it. One,

⏹️ ▶️ John one difficulty is try not to be defensive, try not to feel like you have to answer everything, try not to feel like every piece

⏹️ ▶️ John of advice is an accusation, so on and so forth. Uh, you know, try not to suffer from male answer syndrome,

⏹️ ▶️ John all of these bad instincts that are in me definitely, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John in you too as well, you have to fight those. But the second thing is, with this

⏹️ ▶️ John huge range, even talking about something as silly as the ad, which everyone more or less agreed was not the core issue here,

⏹️ ▶️ John just looking at the women who gave feedback on the ad, you know, you can’t possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John do what quote unquote, everyone wants, because they want contradictory things.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some women said you absolutely have to keep the ad removing, it would be insulting. Some women said you absolutely have to remove the

⏹️ ▶️ John ad, its presence is insulting. So if we get their feedback and we

⏹️ ▶️ John listen to it, at some point we have to do something. And there is no course

⏹️ ▶️ John of action. It seemed to me that a lot of the people writing in all camps, no matter what their opinion, believed that they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t seem to leave a lot of room for other possibilities. Many people wrote in to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is the situation, you guys are dummies for not seeing it, and the answer is obvious, just do what I say.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right. And, but it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, just that one email, it’s fine, but it’s like you read one email after the next, after the

⏹️ ▶️ John next, after the next. And it’s like, if I do what you want, then these 10 people are going to be upset if I do what they want, then these 50 people

⏹️ ▶️ John are going to, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s our job. Our job is to solicit feedback,

⏹️ ▶️ John accept it, read it, listen to it, try to understand it, and then decide

⏹️ ▶️ John what the right thing to do for us is. Right. Um, and that’s why I feel like I’m still processing

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s difficult, right? Like, you know, to sort of be in the people pleaser mode, but you’re like, we’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John do the right thing here, right? We’re trying to solicit feedback. And if only there was a quote unquote answer, but there’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of people’s opinions and lots of people’s answers. And we have to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ John how, how do we make forward progress on, you know, on our goals

⏹️ ▶️ John based on this feedback. And it’s just, it’s kind of making my head spin at this point.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think one, one thing I think that can all agree on besides cheese ding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we got a lot of feedback because we asked for it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and that’s exactly what we wanted we were asking the question to our audience especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the women in our audience what can we do to help address this massive gender

⏹️ ▶️ Marco imbalance in our audience and you know in in tech podcasting and in tech as a whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a big problem and I you know I I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t pretend to be an expert on this. I’m far from it. I do, however, want to improve it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as a guy who is a smartass and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been a smartass, I’ve always had the problem of, I rush right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to thinking I have an answer to something. And as we saw in the email and as many women

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see every single day, that’s a very common thing in this business. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very common thing among men in general. The, you know, the attitude that we just have an immediate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer for everything and we know everything about everything and we can quickly explain away anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any problem. And one of the things that I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone would agree on, which there isn’t much in this argument that everyone will agree on, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think everyone who’s on the right side of this can probably agree that, especially we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco men, need to be listening more. We need to be asking and listening more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just need to be listening to what women are actually telling us. And it was very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco valuable to see all that feedback, even though a lot of it was contradictory from women about what we should or shouldn’t do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact is we asked, we are listening, and we are going to continue to ask and listen. And to all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the men out there who responded in that matter-of-fact way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be hard for you to change in your life. It’s certainly hard for us, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to be open to the idea that the first step when this question is asked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to listen to what women are telling you. Listen to what they have to say, to ask them, and to be listening and to care,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just to jump to thinking you know the answer. Because really,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is such a big problem for so many people. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is really primarily a problem with men that do this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The fact is, the world is not a perfectly balanced place where everything is equal. It’s far from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and that’s the whole problem we’re trying to address. It is okay to recognize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that even if you think you’re being good, and even if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that you are helping, there are going to be things—and John, you talk about this a lot—there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be things that you subconsciously do, or that you just do because you’ve always done them or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just the way you think that you think are normal and neutral but they’re not. And so it’s really it is of utmost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco importance that men in particular don’t just jump to thinking you know the answers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here that you know really sit back and listen because there there’s a lot that that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need to hear.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I talked about on the Gamergate episode one of the suggestions I made to the audience of people who may have been sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John sympathizing with Gamergate and like I was trying to look for something that I could suggest

⏹️ ▶️ John that would be like actionable and that I felt like would make real

⏹️ ▶️ John change based on what has worked for me. And I was suggesting like

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget which Twitter accounts I suggested, but a bunch of people’s Twitter accounts like the everyday sexism Twitter accounts.

⏹️ ▶️ John I probably I’m sure I suggested Brianna was the Twitter account like just follow these Twitter accounts if it was my

⏹️ ▶️ John suggestion, but then don’t ever reply to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just read just read the tweets.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I said it’s like the tweets are going to make you angry sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna disagree with a lot of them the whole idea is like a one-year plan of like

⏹️ ▶️ John subscribe and read the tweets like you know make don’t make it crazy volume just have it in the mix of your Twitter and I’m doing this in terms of Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ John but you could do anything blog posts you know who you whose Facebook posts you read what sites

⏹️ ▶️ John read or whatever just read them even if for the entire year you absolutely 100% disagree with every

⏹️ ▶️ John single thing that you read because I feel like the osmosis of that like sort of just being in contact

⏹️ ▶️ John with those ideas will slowly affect your worldview because it’s essentially forced

⏹️ ▶️ John listening like you’re not really listening you may be reading them like hate reading them like oh look at these dummies I disagree with everything they so dumb they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know anything about anything right if you just keep reading them like the everyday sexism one

⏹️ ▶️ John is a great example it’s like you just read day after day after day of like minor things that happen

⏹️ ▶️ John to people or situations they’re in I feel like it will eventually get through to you like this is not made up

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and like Like, because I think the volume is important, right? And so we are subjecting ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ John to this essentially voluntarily to try to, you know, you know, bring us bring us

⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback, tell us what you think, give us your ideas.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we just kind of have to soak in it. Like, you know, it’s like, by, you know, we’re soaking it

⏹️ ▶️ John into some degree, but like by actually inviting it, we’re kind of getting a big dose of it dumped on our head. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of the process. Of course, this is a podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John and this is follow up. And of course, we do have responses to things. So we’re kind of violating our own roles here. But

⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I suggested all that Twitter stuff is that’s how I feel like I got into this. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John Gamergate was a big part of it. But even before that, reading every single post about

⏹️ ▶️ John these things, reading people, following new people, looking at their Tumblrs, following them on Twitter, just

⏹️ ▶️ John reading everything. Mostly not responding to it, mostly not engaging with people on Twitter, mostly, but just reading

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And Gamergate was like the peak, it was just like every day was like 17 new things to read, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then following the links, following the threads, following the different people, to you know, where they come from,

⏹️ ▶️ John what’s their background, what have they written before, what have they done, you know, like, that kind of sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of, it’s not sort of like ambient research or whatever on the topic is, I

⏹️ ▶️ John felt has been most influential in my life and changing myself on these topics

⏹️ ▶️ John and like I said this feedback is uh it’s part of that and now that I’ve said all

⏹️ ▶️ John those things to try to be uh deferential and everything now I have to go and ruin it by responding to what I think was the the

⏹️ ▶️ John the harshest criticism we got because I think it’s the one thing again this isn’t like this wasn’t the most common but if

⏹️ ▶️ John I look if I go over to the most negative end of the spectrum of the feedback we got

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not believe it or not from the people who have regressive ideas about women in tech their feedback would tend not to

⏹️ ▶️ John be harsh tended to be be a, I don’t know, condescending and patronizing, but like, that’s, that’s easy. But the most

⏹️ ▶️ John harsh ones and the ones that, that, that felt the worst were feedback from women who, who, that the gist

⏹️ ▶️ John of this feedback was, uh, on the topic of, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John changing the host lineup and changing the format of the show saying, essentially, if you don’t do one

⏹️ ▶️ John of those two things, then it shows you don’t care about women at all. And this is all a BS front.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s the harshest version of that. There’s just like, you know saying

⏹️ ▶️ John These two things are are the test for you If you don’t if you refuse to do things as we said to talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about last show We didn’t want to change the host line of the show. We didn’t want to turn it into an interview show we basically ruled

⏹️ ▶️ John those out and I feel like People hearing that people hearing us say, you know We read through this

⏹️ ▶️ John big list of suggestions that people suggested to us And then we ruled out those two right off the bat and it

⏹️ ▶️ John just feels like every other encounter women have had in technology where it’s like the

⏹️ ▶️ John people in in the position of power hear their concerns and then immediately dismiss

⏹️ ▶️ John them so it’s like slamming the door in their face and I understand why people are angry about that understand why why we

⏹️ ▶️ John got that feedback why the people are feeling the way they did why they felt compelled to go to the feedback form and

⏹️ ▶️ John and write those things in but I you know the

⏹️ ▶️ John I responded to some of these people and And what I said in all the responses was similar, was that,

⏹️ ▶️ John as I said in the show, that would absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John make the show more appealing. You know, given, granted, like this is feedback

⏹️ ▶️ John we received, I agree with them. Where I disagree is, by us

⏹️ ▶️ John not doing those two specific things, and only those two specific things, change the host lineup,

⏹️ ▶️ John change the show format to be an interview show, that Somehow there’s nothing else we can do

⏹️ ▶️ John to make the show more appealing to women to get more women listeners. I totally disagree with that. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think there are a ton of things we could do to find more, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John to make the show more inclusive, to find attract more women to the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a tremendous amount. We read a whole bunch of them on the last show. Tons of people sent us feedback with with ideas,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? The only two things we ruled out were changing the host lineup and changing

⏹️ ▶️ John the format of that showed to be an interview show. Everything else, including the Harry’s ad, I might point out, was on the table,

⏹️ ▶️ John right. And so that feedback, like, like it hurt the worst, because it shows that those

⏹️ ▶️ John people what they came away with was that we were that we were dismissing them that we were just

⏹️ ▶️ John doing exactly what has been done to them in the entire technology industry for their entire life, which is just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John this popular show that I listened to is going to address my concerns for him and door slammed in face, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the experience they got out of the show, which is terrible, not our intention. Obviously, we did a bad job. But,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I still have to say that, like, I feel like our show can

⏹️ ▶️ John exist in its current form and be better than it is that we can that we can make positive progress

⏹️ ▶️ John towards our goal of inclusiveness. And maybe that’s not enough progress.

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we can make more progress by changing the show in those ways. But I feel like it’s like that this show

⏹️ ▶️ John has value and can be better in its current form. I don’t know if that’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the worst feedback again made it sound made it feel like maybe feel like that our show just should not exist like that it

⏹️ ▶️ John is an affront to the cause and that the world does not need another three dudes text podcast

⏹️ ▶️ John and the best thing we could do is just change it in a fundamental way so it’s a different show and

⏹️ ▶️ John if we don’t do that it shows we really don’t care and you would just we don’t want to do anything that will that will perturb our

⏹️ ▶️ John happy little home in any way and I feel like that is a mischaracterization and that we were totally willing to

⏹️ ▶️ John do anything within the bounds of the current show. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John granted entirely that it would make the show more attractive to women if we did those things, but we

⏹️ ▶️ John want to have our show with the three of us. This is our show. I feel like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a valid thing to do, to have the show with the three of us.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how else to characterize that without just sort of reinforcing everything they think that’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, you just want to have your show and that’s that. I do want to have the show with the three

⏹️ ▶️ John of us and I feel like that show can be better and I feel like some positive progress and making that show

⏹️ ▶️ John better is it’s positive, right? Is it as positive as it could be if

⏹️ ▶️ John we, you know, and you know, I don’t want to go into the, that’s why I should have,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I still feel like I’m still processing. It’s like getting

⏹️ ▶️ John more defensive by the moment. But if you go into the, you know, I don’t know, I’ll stop

⏹️ ▶️ John myself here. But what do you guys have to think about this topic?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, of all the feedback we got, a lot of it hurt in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sense that it made me very angry because I was disappointed in the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very chauvinistic things that I saw. But the stuff that actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurt and cut the deepest was when a woman would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey write in and say, like you had said, John, basically, if you don’t fundamentally change

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show, then you’re just a bunch of liars. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, John, like you said, John, that absolutely would be the number one best

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to put our money where our mouth is. That is, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to take that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the table. And I, and even though the show is in so many ways about binary, the show itself is not binary.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there is a lot of in the middle that we can do to improve ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to improve the way we handle the show and just generally make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things more inclusive without changing the three of us. And I should point out that we got a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair bit of women that wrote in that said, I understand why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone would ask you to change the lineup, but don’t do that. Because the reason

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I listen, says several women that wrote in, the reason I listen is because of the three of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and because of the chemistry you have and because of the way you beat each other up over white cars and fish and so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and so forth. And if you change that lineup, It could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ruin everything. And so if this is the most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hurt I’ve gotten, I’m still coming from a place of indescribable privilege and I recognize that. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was really, it really bummed me out because I feel like I want to work together, the three

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of us and the women that listen and the men that listen. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want to work together to make this a more inclusive, happy place.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like, just like you said, John, there is somewhere in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between doing nothing and completely eviscerating the lineup as it exists today.

⏹️ ▶️ John I would go even farther, because from my perspective, as I said, women

⏹️ ▶️ John are underrepresented in tech podcasts. And we should, I think we linked to Rocket last week, but we should put more link in the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes of other tech podcasts that are very similar to ATP, but have women on them.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Vector podcast with Georgia Dow and I’m more there’s the I’m our podcast with Serenity

⏹️ ▶️ John and Allie and then rocket like the fact that I can’t name more than a handful of these off the

⏹️ ▶️ John top of my head shows you there is not a lot of them, but they are out there. And so women looking to hear

⏹️ ▶️ John other women’s voices on the topics of tech, you know, there are options

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think there should be more of them. You know, should our show be one of them like our show is

⏹️ ▶️ John our show is the three of us, right? But like from my perspective, I think it’s very possible

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can do maybe not more good but a tremendous amount of good by

⏹️ ▶️ John talking to our, you know, making our show more inclusive so it doesn’t feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John that if you’re a woman listening that you somehow shouldn’t be in this isn’t the place for you. Right. So a lot of the things are like, what can we do to change

⏹️ ▶️ John tons of things? Like what can we stop doing that is bad? What can we do that is that is repelling women? Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John Can we, you know, we only talk about a certain number of things each week. Out of the

⏹️ ▶️ John huge range of things we could talk about by picking different things of talk about is can we change the

⏹️ ▶️ John show. And most importantly, I feel like even if we are completely unsuccessful in our efforts to get more women and

⏹️ ▶️ John girls to listen to the show. By talking to the men who listen to the show,

⏹️ ▶️ John that is probably realistically speaking, our best avenue for positive change. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John if we could snap our fingers and convince all the men on the show to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John get on board with our way of thinking about this as regressive as it ours even maybe, but just like to move them along

⏹️ ▶️ John the continuum, that would be a tremendous benefit. And that’s one of the pieces of feedback I’ve heard from a lot of people, especially people

⏹️ ▶️ John deeply entrenched in this issue is that if you can, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the men’s behavior that needs to change, right? So we were all about like, can we make the show more inclusive? Can we make sure

⏹️ ▶️ John doing anything to repel women. We need to get rid of the men to say, in a

⏹️ ▶️ John nice way, we can’t say like, oh, you guys are all bad people, you shouldn’t listen. Like, that is not it. That is not it at all. We

⏹️ ▶️ John want to be able to, like, bring people along with the ideas that we

⏹️ ▶️ John have. And even if we’re only just talking to men, that is a huge way

⏹️ ▶️ John that we can make a positive change in this area you know so I just

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the three of us if if we change the show while keeping the format and while keeping

⏹️ ▶️ John the three of us there I still feel like we can do a massive amounts of good if we just figure out how to do and get our

⏹️ ▶️ John acts together

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we also got a lot of feedback that that was suggesting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would make the show more appealing to women but like but you know that’s that’s how the people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco presented it but in reality it’s not about like it would make the show it more attractive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anybody of any gender it had nothing to do with women so you know things like you know like just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know making it easier for new listeners to get into the show so you know not spending the entire show on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco follow-up not being too much inside jokes like stuff like that nobody said don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John send a little shortfall don’t try to throw up under the bus and

⏹️ ▶️ John mix it into the other topic nice

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco try you did but anyway you think I keep email that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great I do read it I don’t keep it um no like you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are things about our show format and that we can definitely improve on things that will make it easier

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any new listeners to come in and to feed and to stick with us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like a lot of people frame those things as here’s why women don’t like your show which is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complete BS or it’s at least not the whole story it’s like here’s why a new listener

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not stick around that’s the real story and And so there are things there that we need to and should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improve to get more women listening, mostly because that’s how we get more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people listening. Like, it has nothing to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John women. Well, I mean, like I said on the past show, you can, like, some of them were, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John not that they said this, but as I said last time, if we talked about politics, we would have much broader appeal than if we talk about programming.

⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of people, we’ve always got complaints when we go into the super programming stuff, but bottom line is that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that we we want to talk about our we are three programmers on a podcast, we’re going to talk about programming,

⏹️ ▶️ John some people love the programming, some people hate it. That’s not that’s more of just a narrow

⏹️ ▶️ John versus broad issue. It is not specifically a gendered issue, I feel like but but a lot of Yeah, a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ John say like, I’m not super into programming. So whenever you talk about programming, I tune

⏹️ ▶️ John out and we’ve been getting that feedback for the life of the program. Like there is a ceiling on on our appeal.

⏹️ ▶️ John We you know, if we did a show about politics it would have way broader appeal and

⏹️ ▶️ John but like but that’s not the show we’re doing so in in in many ways like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it’s the same type of thing like oh so you want it you want to broaden your arms you want to get more women to listen well change what you talk

⏹️ ▶️ John about it’s like yes okay change what we talk about in what way well i would love it if you didn’t talk about programming anymore well

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah um there are lots of women programmers who listen who like when we talk about programming like we’re doing a show about programming

⏹️ ▶️ John like i would love it if you didn’t didn’t talk about Apple, maybe more people would listen if we didn’t talk about Apple, if we talked about something

⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, with much broader appeal. So that’s, that’s something we have to deal with. Like we’re always trying to say, well, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John within the confines of what, Oh, you wanted broadened the appeal of show, but you don’t want to change your show. We do want to change it

⏹️ ▶️ John within the confines of the topic area, right? And the three of us and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s like, for too many people, that is basically sort of like, you don’t really want to change.

⏹️ ▶️ John You say you want to change, you say you want to make the show more inclusive, you say you want to make it more appealing, but you don’t want to actually change anything

⏹️ ▶️ John about the show. And I reiterate again, I think there are just so many things we could change within this format

⏹️ ▶️ John to do better. Just a tremendous amount of things we can change that we will hopefully be working on moving

⏹️ ▶️ John forward that can make this show more inclusive and

⏹️ ▶️ John change people’s hearts and minds who do listen to the show, men or women on whatever, you know, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just feel somewhat defeated by this entire topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think we should probably put a fork in it for today and a couple of quick thoughts. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey first of all, if you are listening to this and don’t care for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, um, I am sorry to hear that. Um, please do not bother writing in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell us that you don’t care for it because this is going to continue to happen and you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can either carry on with the show or not. But this is something that’s very important to the three of us,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re going to keep talking about it, and that’s just the way it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s absolutely on topic. This is a major problem in the tech industry. It is definitely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevant for tech podcasts to talk about this issue.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And the other thing, I’m seeing a lot of angst in the chat room right now

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’re doing a lot of navel-gazing and talking about the show and talking about, oh, what could we do,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what could we do, but not doing anything. Two quick thoughts on that. First of all, I think just talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is doing something. I mean, would you rather us not talk about this? I don’t think that’s really a solution.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And secondly, outside of the show, in private conversations between the three of us,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are absolutely discussing pretty much anything that we’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in email. We are discussing and considering pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. Even things we probably don’t want to do or may not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do are on the table in private conversations between the three of us. I ask only that you bear

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with us and give us a chance to get our heads around everything, give us a chance to put things together

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watch this space. I know it’s probably not happening as quick as it should. It’s probably not happening

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quick as it could, but we are working on it and we are trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as hard as we can.

⏹️ ▶️ John And expect us to screw up, like expect us to do badly again, you know what I mean? Like it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t expect miracles, right? And we will never go as far as some people want us to go. People will

⏹️ ▶️ John always be disappointed in us. Like people will be disappointed that this show exists at all, which is clear from

⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback sometimes, right? But you know, some people like it,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, I just feel like, you know, one of the traps

⏹️ ▶️ John that men fall into when they get into this topic is like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do good I am going to

⏹️ ▶️ John champion the rights of whatever, you know, oppressed people that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John getting behind this cause, blah blah blah. And then they get told that what they’re doing is wrong and they’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I was trying to help. Well, forget you guys. Now I’m not even going to help anymore. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s exactly, you just have to, that’s exactly the wrong attitude. We’re trying mightily to avoid that. Like it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, you have to understand that everyone is not going to agree with you.

⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to like you and the closer you get to trying to make some kind of progress, the more angry people

⏹️ ▶️ John will be that you didn’t go far enough. And that is that is a positive force I feel like pushing us in the right

⏹️ ▶️ John direction, not the wrong direction. I’m trying to get that as as a wind behind us as ever as we become

⏹️ ▶️ John ever more disappointing to the people who are really invested in this cause. I’m hoping we were actually moving

⏹️ ▶️ John more towards like we were making positive progress in that direction, right? That we’re not going the other way that we don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John repelled by that we don’t that we don’t start to resent the idea that boohoo people said mean things

⏹️ ▶️ John to us who are quote-unquote on our side. I want that to be a wind at our back

⏹️ ▶️ John rather than something deterring us from pursuing this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Plex. Yeah, I spoke last week about how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Synology, or certain Synologies, specifically I think I cited the DS214Play,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as having the proper hardware to transcode video

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do so quickly, which makes it really great for Plex. A handful of people very gently pointed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to me that I am full of crap and that the 214 does indeed have the right hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, Plex does not have access to it because of whatever is going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on within the Synology. I don’t know the technical details, but suffice to say I’m full of crap.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I have found, or I think a listener actually pointed out to me, is a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey list of all the different network attached storage devices that Plex will run

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, and it shows exactly what these devices can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cannot transcode in a reasonably performant way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we will put that in the show notes. I apologize if you took any action on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey BS recommendation. I did not realize that I was dead wrong, but hopefully I’ve caught you before

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you spend any money. I do love my Synology. I do not have a 214 anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one that is not at all well suited for transcoding. And so I do recommend Synologies

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in general. But I cannot recommend the 214 that I previously recommended, because as it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turns out, they are a terrible idea for Plex. So check out that list and buy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that actually works to do the things I thought the 214 would.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had high hopes for that hardware transcoding. But I don’t use Plex. So what I found was

⏹️ ▶️ John that when the hardware transcoding was useful, it was good. But if you are downloading

⏹️ ▶️ John more exotic, weird formats, or you have no idea what the hell formats you are downloading, legally, of

⏹️ ▶️ John course, very often the hardware transcoding can’t handle it. And there’s one thing about software transcoding,

⏹️ ▶️ John it may be slower, but it can do a much broader

⏹️ ▶️ John range of things, so I find myself wishing that rather than hardware decoding, I really had a

⏹️ ▶️ John faster CPU to do software transcoding.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, what is going on with iPhoto and time machine?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this was right after last week’s show that we got this feedback direct link to an Apple support

⏹️ ▶️ John article saying whatever happened to that thing that I imagine that time machine integration apparently I did not imagine it all

⏹️ ▶️ John of this thing doesn’t have screenshots it says as of iPhoto 11 which was version 9.2

⏹️ ▶️ John obviously and OS 10 line 1072 or later That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John when iPhoto lost the ability to browse backups, as they call it. According to the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John article, this means that instead of restoring specific photos within your iPhone library, you must restore your entire iPhoto library.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I forget when I photo 11 was, I’m assuming 2011. But that’s when this feature went away. And there was

⏹️ ▶️ John no more integration. And I assume this is a feature that was never public for like, third party apps, that it was

⏹️ ▶️ John something only iPhoto could do because it was written by Apple. And it has fallen by the wayside,

⏹️ ▶️ John sadly, or maybe it’s a good thing. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is Cards Against Humanity. And as usual, they have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent John a toaster to review in lieu of a sponsor read here. So John, what is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the toaster that Cards Against Humanity sent you to review this week?

⏹️ ▶️ John So this week we’ve got the Cuisinart Custom Classic Toaster Oven Broiler, which I guess has a sensible

⏹️ ▶️ John name. It is model number T capital O capital B hyphen

⏹️ ▶️ John four zero. Another model number with both an O and a zero in it, which boggles my mind.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how they keep anything straight This is about the same size as my

⏹️ ▶️ John Breville 650 L or whatever my model number is that I always forget It is a legit

⏹️ ▶️ John four slice toaster oven It’s got four unshielded

⏹️ ▶️ John resistive Heating elements inside it has a very straightforward UI This is the first toaster

⏹️ ▶️ John that I did not ever need to look at the instructions for which is saying something Shouldn’t be but it is

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s really sad. Yeah three knobs on the I usually look at the instructions should like figure out there’s some nuance

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m missing. Like I could usually operate any toaster, but then like, okay, but then what about,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there’s some nuance here that I’m probably missing. I need to look at the manual. This one has just had three knobs,

⏹️ ▶️ John one for function, like toast, broil, bake, you know, reheat, whatever. One for temperature that goes

⏹️ ▶️ John from, you know, the normal range of toaster oven temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit, and one for

⏹️ ▶️ John toast shade. And the toast shade one, you set to like, you know, it’s a big range, you set it to what you want.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then there is a start, stop button. So if you find the correct setting for your toast every morning, you don’t have to adjust it You

⏹️ ▶️ John just press the button. It does it repeatedly. So that’s all good There is no timer at

⏹️ ▶️ John all, which I didn’t notice until a little bit later I’m like, you know what? There’s no way for me to set this thing for 10 minutes 15

⏹️ ▶️ John minutes no timer at all Which is a very interesting simplification almost an Apple like move they’re like because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to incorporate all those things together and have all the desirable features of not having to

⏹️ ▶️ John figure out what’s the where the setting is without either going to something digital like the Breville where you have you know a computer display

⏹️ ▶️ John right or LCD display or making your thing complicated so there’s just no timer at all this or

⏹️ ▶️ John if there is I didn’t find one because there was I didn’t read the manual but I’m pretty sure there’s no timer just a start

⏹️ ▶️ John stop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco button now does that make it harder to use the oven feature because obviously with a toaster you don’t really need a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco timer you need the darkness knob which it does have but does the lack of a timer make the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oven feature less useful to you

⏹️ ▶️ John it depends like you should know that it doesn’t have a timer if that’s something you rely on I find that with with any feature

⏹️ ▶️ John except for toasting on my existing toaster oven. I don’t tend to use the timer. I just kind of like put it in. If anything, it kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John annoys me if the timer is too low, like if I’m reheating something and the timer was like six minutes, I’m like, oh, actually I want it

⏹️ ▶️ John just, I usually just turn the knob and it’s like just 30, 60 minutes. Like I’m never, I’m gonna take it out when I feel like it’s done. I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna forget about it, right? But if you want a timer, this is not the toaster for you. The knobs themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ John really good knob feel. Actually, it’s probably average knob feel, but compared to the knob feel

⏹️ ▶️ John on these other toasters, it is phenomenal, right? And by the way, if you don’t know what the knob feel YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John channel, we’ll put a link in the show. You should check it out. It’s just that’s a thing. Wait, really? You’ve never heard of the knob

⏹️ ▶️ John feel YouTube channel? No. Are you honestly surprised that we have never heard of that? Yes, because it’s like a meme. It’s like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not like an obscure, you know, it’s supposed to be funny. Like it’s a guy who just films himself fiddling

⏹️ ▶️ John with knobs. And I think he made a terrible mistake at the beginning of

⏹️ ▶️ John like the his format is he films his hand filling with knobs and then he doesn’t say any words.

⏹️ ▶️ John makes noises like grunts like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mmm

⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s that’s it and he’s really confined himself by not having words like there’s tons of these videos if he only

⏹️ ▶️ John had incorporated words it would be a much richer experience I feel like anyway these

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey knobs are weighty and

⏹️ ▶️ John smooth and they feel expensive and like the best comparison is my Breville toaster which has

⏹️ ▶️ John like the worst feeling knobs I’ve ever felt on an appliance in my life and I don’t understand why this or all I do because they’re made of plastic

⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re flimsy you know but Like why why didn’t they spend more money right anyway great knobs one big problem with

⏹️ ▶️ John these knobs though? You can’t tell where the knobs are pointing Because like the knobs

⏹️ ▶️ John have like a matte black plastic around them with ridges and one ridge is ever so slightly taller than all the other Ridges

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can tell by feel where that Ridge is but by looking at it forget it Like and there’s no markings

⏹️ ▶️ John on the front of the knob like a little red triangle or something So figuring out where the knobs are pointing like what what function

⏹️ ▶️ John is this set to what temperature is it set to you basically? have to feel on the thing, especially if your toaster

⏹️ ▶️ John is in a slightly darker, you know, under a counter type area. They really blew it on those knobs. Great

⏹️ ▶️ John knob feel, not great knobs. And the it’s got a tray in it that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John like a u-shape, like dipped down, which seems weird to me, but then I realized what they

⏹️ ▶️ John want you to do, and I actually confirmed this by looking at the little pictures on the side of the boxes, you can, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John two different sets of slots you can slide the tray into, but then within each slot you can flip the tray over

⏹️ ▶️ John to do plus or minus, like in an inch because of the dip in the thing. It’s hard to explain, I’ll have to put a picture in the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. But anyway, there’s essentially four different positions you can put the thing in, not just two. Two slots, and each slot

⏹️ ▶️ John you can put in two different positions. That seems like an interesting idea to get more flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ John of like different positions, but overall I don’t think it’s worth it because like things get caught on the little U-shaped thing when you’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to slide a piece of toast out if you have four slices in there. So clever idea, but in the end I

⏹️ ▶️ John would say ditch it. This does have a thing that tries to pull the tray out when you open and close the door, but because you can reposition

⏹️ ▶️ John the tray, they can’t make a single mechanism to do that. They have to put kind of like a metal hook

⏹️ ▶️ John that catches the the tray in both positions. So if the thing is really high

⏹️ ▶️ John or really low it will catch at different areas. Like it’s a difficult problem to solve, I understand. If you want to make a movable tray how do you connect

⏹️ ▶️ John something to it so it comes out? But again like it technically kind of works, but if you ever have to

⏹️ ▶️ John even move the tray manually when you close the door again, the little hook has to re-engage and it bumps the tray

⏹️ ▶️ John up. Lots of weird compromises this machine. It’s about a minute slower than my toaster to toast

⏹️ ▶️ John a piece of bread. But in all other ways, it is very comparable to my toaster just

⏹️ ▶️ John a bit dumber and a bit clunkier, but with better knob feel. So that was kind of long. I’m sorry, but this was actually

⏹️ ▶️ John a very interesting toaster.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Better knob feel but worse overall knobs because of the difficulty in detecting. Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John yes. Worse, worse overall knob, right? Totally. Because you can’t tell where they’re pointing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It feels good to turn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. So in summary, this is better or worse than the Breville?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s worse. Definitely worse. I mean, the Breville has like digital timers and like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just way better adjustments for a number of slices and auto adjust the time

⏹️ ▶️ John based on the temperature inside the toaster. The Breville is a better toaster functionally. This just has

⏹️ ▶️ John some interesting aspects and it is very similar to the Breville in terms of size and even appearance.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think this is a good value for 80 bucks? It sounds like you’re saying yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean it’s a little slow like a minute slower to toast That’s that’s in the borderline

⏹️ ▶️ John of light I feel like I feel like I would still probably take the black and decker three knob over this because at least that toast That’s my big

⏹️ ▶️ John hang-up. It’s my personal thing I feel I don’t want to waste that long for toast if it’s into the four minute range for a piece of toast No,

⏹️ ▶️ John like I you know, I I would still probably take the smaller more conventional also

⏹️ ▶️ John three knob by the way black and decker Over this thing. It’s just kind of a dead ringer

⏹️ ▶️ John for the Breville But like I can see where that extra, you know hundred and whatever dollars went for

⏹️ ▶️ John mine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to cards against humanity for sponsoring our show once again

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We got some pretty good feedback from Kitty John. Do you want to talk about this?

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, this was on the topic of Watches replacing phones. I think we have another piece

⏹️ ▶️ John of feedback about this as well and her idea was A lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the features that the phone has, not the phone has, the watch has that don’t necessarily seem

⏹️ ▶️ John to be watch related. Specifically all the little, you know, things about

⏹️ ▶️ John sending little pictures to people and the 3D emoji and all the different fitness

⏹️ ▶️ John app type things. Obviously you need to have an accelerometer in there or whatever, but the phone has an accelerometer. The phone has a screen. The phone has all

⏹️ ▶️ John these things. Why are they on the watch now? In that aspect, this is true of a lot of Apple products. the

⏹️ ▶️ John new glory product is seems to get a lot of the cool features first and

⏹️ ▶️ John then they trickle down. This happened a long time with like, hey, I was got some cool feature and then eventually it came to

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac and then it reversed the direction a few times there. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know if those things will ever come to the phone. They’re right. There’s nothing stopping you from being on the phone, including all the fitness tracking stuff, because,

⏹️ ▶️ John hey, the phone’s got an accelerometer and everything to it. You can’t do the obviously the blood pressure or, you know, the pulse stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John but everything else could happen on the phone. It would be a shame if all the advancement of

⏹️ ▶️ John those features happens on the watch instead of the phone, but I would kind of understand it. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John second one is like things like watch faces, uh, with the complications on them and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS home screen as a bazillion people have pointed out many, many times, including many Android fans,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iOS home screen could be a lot cooler if it supported essentially complications otherwise known

⏹️ ▶️ John as widgets or, you know, any kind of customization so you could make your lock screen or your home screen more

⏹️ ▶️ John customizable than you can now. Apple has been moving slightly in that direction with the, you know, the notification

⏹️ ▶️ John center and the ability to put widgets in there and stuff, but in the end the home screen, you know, springboard is

⏹️ ▶️ John still just a big grid of icons with some clumsy foldering thrown in

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think I would, you know, if I could have complications, you know, in scare quotes

⏹️ ▶️ John on the iOS home screen, I think that would be a plus. But again, we’ll see if that

⏹️ ▶️ John ever comes instead of back to the Mac back to the iPhone in this case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and part of the reason why I think we don’t have, you know, we have complications on the watch face, but you don’t have complications

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your lock screen on your phone. I think part of the reason why is just inertia.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like, first of all, you do have the today view widgets, which I personally don’t use because I don’t use today view.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would definitely use lock screen complications long before I’d use today view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. But keep in mind, so not only do they have like an existing thing that kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of does that, because iOS has been around for so long and is so powerful within the company,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it is not like the glory product that the watch is right now, there’s inertia

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like managerial decisions there. So somewhere in Apple, probably pretty high

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, there’s some manager or VP holding tight to the idea that there should not be widgets on an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone home screen, as far as you know I mean maybe I was I changed this who knows but I doubt it so somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s somebody who decided that a long time ago and is sticking with that decision and is not letting that change yet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like any anything that’s been around for a while is gonna have these kind of people like there’s been a lot of discussion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week about the Mac App Store because there is there is that app what was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it called reveal redacted redacted yeah that that hit number one and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made very little money being number one and even though it’s not quite number one it’s not quite anyway

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter a lot of discussion about the Mac App Store and how much it sucks personally I think the Mac App

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store situation it can be blamed on one major thing that’s sandboxing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like the the apps app review the 30% cut lack of upgrade pricing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those things hurt but none of them hurt as much as sandboxing did in my opinion

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think sandboxing on the Mac has been a massive loss over a massive net loss

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall. And it has cost the Mac App Store a lot of good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and a lot of developer goodwill. But somewhere in Apple there’s clearly somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who has power who is keeping sandboxing there and keeping sandboxing a requirement to be in the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store. And so even though it looks like it might not be the best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea for the product, the fact is when you have a big company you have people, you have power, you have power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco struggles sometimes, times, you have debates internally, like there’s these other factors that keep things the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are, even if it’s not ideal. So in this case, the watch comes up and the watch is kind of a clean slate. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it seems to run some some variant of iOS, but it is basically a clean slate in like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the things that offers the things it doesn’t the UI it offers where things are allowed, where things aren’t allowed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it was able to do things that we might not see for a while on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John a sidetrack on this thing but in the sandboxing the guy at Apple who thinks that they should

⏹️ ▶️ John do sandboxing I think I mostly agree with that like I think sandboxing

⏹️ ▶️ John is a positive direction for the Mac to go but the execution of that of the implementation of that policy

⏹️ ▶️ John left a lot to be desired having it become mandatory before it was full featured right

⏹️ ▶️ John having having there be so few ways for apps to

⏹️ ▶️ John to you know like to do things outside of sandboxing on a case-by-case basis with exceptions

⏹️ ▶️ John like it just I feel like if sand but even if sandboxing had sprung into existence

⏹️ ▶️ John in its current state immediately like not that you can do that because you know it

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be developed to some degree but like the capabilities that were possible in sandboxing early on were

⏹️ ▶️ John just so limited and so broken and so weird and so buggy to mandate people going to that That

⏹️ ▶️ John was just getting off on the wrong foot. I think you do have to bring the Mac towards a sandboxing type

⏹️ ▶️ John environment, but the way to get there is not the way they’ve done it. So I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like that is more of an execution fumble than a theoretical

⏹️ ▶️ John fumble. And I do think that there will always be things that are outside the sandbox and should be allowed to be on the Mac App

⏹️ ▶️ John Store with caveats, with some kind of warning, blah blah blah, but moving in that direction

⏹️ ▶️ John is good. it’s similar with all the other decisions that like you may agree with the end state

⏹️ ▶️ John goal but you don’t agree that the way that the Apple plans to get there is

⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be successful or has been beneficial.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah that’s I mean that’s basically how I feel like sandboxing in theory is a huge security

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement and and I I would like to be in the place where everything is sandboxed properly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I agree that the way it’s been done has been pretty miserable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reality is, you have this system that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco opt-in by a very small number of apps. It’s not preventing Mac malware. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not preventing major apps from just going around the App Store and selling themselves elsewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s still tons of software that is made and run every day that’s not sandboxed, including

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Apple software, because it’s either not sandboxed or sandboxed technically but is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco given like these blanket permissions to do anything it wants and so it’s kind of not really sandboxed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like in theory it’s a great idea if everything on the system can be properly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandboxed. In practice, how do we get there?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done so far has been

⏹️ ▶️ John miserable. The best thing for sandboxing, like the best use of sandboxing, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John is doing this as well, is for Apple to sandbox its stuff. And it has been. Sandboxing tons of its daemon processes

⏹️ ▶️ John parts of the OS like You know sandboxing has to exist Apple should be the primary

⏹️ ▶️ John user of it. They should be applying it Pretty strictly to all parts of the OS that they

⏹️ ▶️ John possibly can to have them have the least privileges at least access so and so And during that process, you know

⏹️ ▶️ John applying it to their GUI apps applying it to you know They should be dogfooding this like crazy. They should be ringing it out

⏹️ ▶️ John figuring out everything and And then offering it to developers as this is a way for you to

⏹️ ▶️ John write your app in a way that you don’t have to worry about some bug hosing the entire person’s computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like sell it as a benefit, not as like you have to do this because we say so. And if your app doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ John because of it, oh, well, you get an exception that’s gonna that’s on a ticking time bomb that’s going to run out in about a year.

⏹️ ▶️ John So either stop selling your app or make a new app like it was just it was just done so badly. And I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like the sandboxing technology had to be developed. Apple should be using it. app developers

⏹️ ▶️ John can use it should be using it, but it should not be. It should not have been warping the Mac App Store in the way that it is pushing out

⏹️ ▶️ John good apps entirely out of the store, making people discouraged to not even want to develop a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John app because I know because they’re like, well, it doesn’t even matter. My idea won’t even work with sandboxing anyway, so why do I even bother?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just been not great.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it seems to me that a lot of times Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is do as as I say, not as I do. And I think sandboxing is a great example of that. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfortunate because I think a lot of the pain that developers feel,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple either feels it and says, Oh, we’ll just, you know, not deal with that. You know, Oh, this sandboxing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can’t do what we want with sandboxing. Well, screw it. We’re Apple. We don’t need to bother. Or, you know, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are some times like with, um, with cloud kit where it’s embraced,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s CloudKit that I’m thinking of, right? That that photos runs on? Yeah, okay. So the CloudKit gets embraced and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from everything I’ve heard CloudKit is actually really solid because Apple dog-fooded it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s unfortunate to me that more of that doesn’t happen or maybe if it is happening that nobody knows

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it because we’re left to assume it’s not happening and blame that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as One of the big issues with say sandboxing but but maybe it is happening. We’re just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not aware of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to me, the Mac App Store as a whole, to me, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had an app for sale in the Mac App Store, so I haven’t seen that side of it, but just from reading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what our friends say who are in it, and from using it as a user, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like the Mac App Store is like Apple at its worst. Like all of Apple’s, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco worst things they do, they do most of those things in the Mac App Store, and also there’s very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco little upside. So like in the iOS app store, you have to put up with 30%, you have to put

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up with all these rules and restrictions, you have to do app review. But the upside is you get access

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this massive, massive customer base that is just incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high in volume and there’s tons of money floating around and it’s fairly easy, you know, not fairly easy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible for many people to make a good living there. The Mac App Store

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has all of the same downsides as the iOS App Store, plus it has a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way smaller install base than iOS. Even among people who use Macs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smaller percentage of them use the Mac App Store. Also the Mac App Store app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think, one of the worst apps that ships with OS X. I mean, it’s just a terrible app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s buggy, it is confusing to navigate even when it works properly, it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visually really wacky and inconsistent and dated looking. I mean, there are so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a terrible app.

⏹️ ▶️ John The mental model of it always blows my mind because like how many people know that if you click the update button and

⏹️ ▶️ John immediately quit the app to the upstate still continues in the background, like who would who would guess that based on the model

⏹️ ▶️ John of any app they’ve ever used, like because it’s so integrated into the system with the software update D or whatever the hell is running

⏹️ ▶️ John in the background, like the fact that it could be downloading updates when the like, it just totally breaks the model

⏹️ ▶️ John of an of an app that most people are used to on the Mac. So it is super confusing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, so so the Mac App Store like it has all the downsides of the iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store plus a number of additional downsides and very little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same upside. And so it’s no wonder that no that no one’s in it and there’s no activity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there.

⏹️ ▶️ John The biggest downside is sadly that sadly for everybody involved that there are

⏹️ ▶️ John alternatives to it. Like for all the things that the developers hate about the iOS app store about the 30%

⏹️ ▶️ John about not having your own customers about not even be able to respond to reviews in the like, just all those terrible things

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac people like, Oh, well, we don’t have to deal with that. We’ll just sell it ourself. Right? We are already big company, we already know

⏹️ ▶️ John how to sell things. We don’t just sell the Mac App Store, we have the alternative, right. And so that means that

⏹️ ▶️ John they get all the benefits of you know, being able to talk directly to their customers be able to sell updates,

⏹️ ▶️ John like all that stuff. But they also get all the downsides that Apple is trying to help them to avoid like

⏹️ ▶️ John essentially if there had been only one place where you get software for your Mac and I’m not recommending

⏹️ ▶️ John this because I am an old cranky man who likes things the old way but anyway if that had been the case

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac App Store ironically would actually be much better because people would be forced to get into it

⏹️ ▶️ John that would probably force Apple to deal with some of its rules you know like well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t happened on iOS it has though because like I mean think about the oh no interpreters okay well I guess games

⏹️ ▶️ John can have interpreters because they all use scripting language. That’s a perfect example of

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s make a bunch of really strict rules. And then let’s have unforeseen consequences. And we

⏹️ ▶️ John he says, Look, you got to let us run Lua scripts. That’s how our whole games work. EA is big enough for them to go.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, all right. You can’t run interpreter unless your game running a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like

⏹️ ▶️ John every other place where something has been restricted in the iOS App Store, if a big enough

⏹️ ▶️ John or enough important companies, know if it’s if it’s stopping them from selling in there or if they if

⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t get their applications on like just think of what the Mac App Store would be like if that was the only way Adobe could get

⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop onto the Mac it would have to be very different sandboxing could not exist in it was what is Apple gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John say we’re not interested in Photoshop for the Mac anymore sorry you know something would have

⏹️ ▶️ John to give this is all just a fantasy hypothetical scenario not something I recommend you can never actually

⏹️ ▶️ John happen for the Mac being the way it is general-purpose computer is not a closed system like iOS, blah, blah, blah, I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John all of this. I’m just saying, like, due to that reality, the Mac App Store is

⏹️ ▶️ John even worse. It’s even further handicapped by by the existence

⏹️ ▶️ John of a better, readily available alternative that Mac developers are already experienced with.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, our last piece of follow up is from Sarah. And she had some very interesting points

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the watch, which john you alluded to earlier. Do you want to tell us about these?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a yeah about Marco talking about the again the watch replacing the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone And I said that I hadn’t heard anyone Saying that again Marco said other than the people

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at his watch and saying oh, that’s the new thing That’s gonna replace the phone now, right? Which is really just you know a sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of excitement about a new thing and not a particular plan to do So here’s an actual plan to do so

⏹️ ▶️ John she says as soon as the watch has a cellular radio I’ll be ditching my phone and going with a watch plus iPad setup

⏹️ ▶️ John And the reasons for this are things that hadn’t occurred to me because I don’t have these problems and the problems are

⏹️ ▶️ John Women’s clothing don’t have as many pockets So you don’t always have a place to your phone and the alternative of putting in

⏹️ ▶️ John a bag is a pain She refers in this email to the tyranny of the handbag is a real thing

⏹️ ▶️ John Describes a phenomenon that I admit I also have not seen says if you’ve ever been to a nightclub You’ll have seen women dancing

⏹️ ▶️ John awkwardly unable to move properly because they can’t put their bag down anywhere or a group of women dancing in circle with

⏹️ ▶️ John their bags on the floor in the center so they can keep them safe but the women can still dance. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a good situation and not something that it comes up but the idea is if you can

⏹️ ▶️ John have a watch on your wrist you don’t have to worry about a pocket to find to put the thing in you don’t worry about putting something valuable in your purse

⏹️ ▶️ John and finding someplace safe to put your purse. And I’ve seen a lot of watch

⏹️ ▶️ John reviews and a lot of it is about like the freedom of not having to fish your phone out of your pocket,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think there is a potential freedom in not only not having to fish your phone out of your pocket, but maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John not having to have your phone to perform some limited set of tasks. Like if you just want to sort of be in touch by

⏹️ ▶️ John phone and be able to send and receive text messages in some rudimentary way,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the freedom that affords is worth the massive drop in functionality that you would be sacrificing

⏹️ ▶️ John by not having a phone but only having a watch. So there There’s one vote for

⏹️ ▶️ John a person who’s willing to do that as soon as the watch becomes a little bit more independent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a very good point that we didn’t think of because we didn’t ask, and this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the things we’re trying to improve.

⏹️ ▶️ John Even you, if you went on a dog walk, right? If you could go on a dog walk with Bluetooth headphones,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’d probably do this now with just preloading stuff onto the watch or whatever, but wouldn’t it be nice, you always

⏹️ ▶️ John say, don’t necessarily take my wallet, don’t necessarily take my keys, but I do always take my phone. Would you

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you could get into a place where you’re gonna go out for a dog walk and just have your watch on and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it? What would they need to add to your watch for you to do that and not have to feel like it’s an inconvenience?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it would need to be able to run Overcast. That’s number one, independently of the phone. So not with WatchKid, an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual native Overcast app that would have my stuff on it synced and everything. So that’s what I would need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. The reality is I wouldn’t face this problem personally.

⏹️ ▶️ John You always have a pocket for your phone, but I’m saying, what if you didn’t have to take it? like

⏹️ ▶️ John oh well overcast because overcast like is not an app that you’re constantly interacting with for the most part like you’re listening right

⏹️ ▶️ John you know so it’s the ideal case of like oh well if that’s all you need if you just need your podcast if you just need a native overcast on your watch

⏹️ ▶️ John and your watch has you know a cell radio or whatever like if you got all that you can snap your fingers and have

⏹️ ▶️ John it would you find yourself like you’d be taking your phone out of habit but then eventually you’d be like

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you use it if you want to send a long text to somebody you don’t want to dictate it into your wrist i don’t know i don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have a watch so i can’t really make a call on this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah i i don’t know I mean I see why a lot of other people would want this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like runners or joggers like they they could use it because like the chances of a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone flying out of your pocket if you try to keep it in jogging shorts is way higher than if you keep it in like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the jeans and terrible cargo shorts that I wear when I walk my dog yeah they don’t even need cell radio they just need a GPS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and and a lot of a lot of the exercise trackers have GPS for that reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple watch doesn’t yet but then we know we’ll see about that that and And that’s why I can see the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding GPS before I see it adding a cell radio necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s lower power. My wife has a big Garmin, basically a wristwatch. It’s the ugliest thing you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen in your life. But a big Garmin GPS wristwatch. And she has an iPhone 5S, but she doesn’t like to run

⏹️ ▶️ John with the phone because it’s big. So she puts the Garmin. And why doesn’t she just have a step tracker?

⏹️ ▶️ John She wants to know exactly how far she ran and maybe the route she took. And step tracking

⏹️ ▶️ John is not as accurate as GPS for measuring these things. So she wears the big bulky garment thing. So she didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John even want to watch. But maybe if Apple Watch, that is. If the Apple Watch had GPS,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think she could be compelled to buy one or become more interested.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I’ll tell you, I don’t think the Apple Watch can do distance accurately without

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone present, because I don’t know how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would. Well, the documentation that I’ve read, although I haven’t tried this, is that if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you keep the phone with you, It’ll obviously use the phone’s GPS to kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey cross-reference and corroborate what it thinks, but it knows how tall you are. It knows how many steps you’re taking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it makes a best guesstimate based on what it thinks your stride is and how many steps you’ve taken

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to guess how far you’ve run. And I think that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will kind of train itself based on the times that you actually have your phone with you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do the same things.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I saw a trend tweet something like showing she brought a GPS with her and and

⏹️ ▶️ John also the Apple Watch after she had calibrated and show they were only off by like, you know, a fraction of a mile or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John Try to show that, you would think that step tracking could always, would always be off by some amount, but actually it

⏹️ ▶️ John can get pretty close. But you know, it’s not just distance. The people who want GPSs, they wanna see their route, they

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna see a map. I ran through the park, I did this, here’s where I was going slow, here’s where I was going fast. Like that’s what you want. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you need, you know, two dimensional positioning at the very least.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for whatever it’s worth, the two dimensional positioning and distance tracking when I have the phone with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me on my dog walks is great. Like I verified, there’s a site called GMappedometer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that lets you just like, it’s an overlay on Google Maps and you can just like click out the route you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco took and it’ll tell you how long that was. I love tracking this now. Like, so I’ve never been into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco activity before. I’ve never tracked anything about my activity. I’ve never cared about fitness.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never regularly done any fitness, except I do walk my dog most days. and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a very hilly town and we walk between three quarters of a mile

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and two and a half miles depending on weather and ability and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve now actually been really enjoying tracking that and seeing, oh I have, I’ve only gone 1.2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco miles maybe I should you know take this turn here and go up this block and add and I keep finding

⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself like adding to the route just to to help me you know finish up my circles

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch or to to beat yesterday’s record or whatever. It’s really, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, this gamification stuff of fitness, I know that it might not work forever. You know, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff tends to work for a week and then

⏹️ ▶️ John you give up on it. You don’t have the antibodies. That’s what’s happening here. You’ve been infected by

⏹️ ▶️ John fitness gamification and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you have not built up an

⏹️ ▶️ John immunity to it from having had 17 different Fitbits go through the washer or whatever else. So this is your first

⏹️ ▶️ John experience with this and it does have hooks. It has hooks. Like that’s, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under no impression that this will last forever. I hope it does, but I know myself

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how lazy I am and how much I hate fitness, so this will probably wear off. But right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, just wanting to finish those circles has gotten me to move

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and to to complete my goals every day. Like, it is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have on my watch face, I have only a couple complications and one of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the activity rings. And so So I’m whenever I look at the watch I’m seeing that so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like this thing. I have to remember to check like a Fitbit or a pin or even like a pedometer app like David Smith’s pedometer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I have to remember to check those this I don’t even have to remember to check it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s annoying me on the watch face every day until it’s complete and so that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually does work I you know before the watch came out. I was concerned about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big sensor bulge on the bottom of it for the fitness sensors and I made a couple of remarks to friends saying like you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they made a version that didn’t have that sensor bulge and lacked all the fitness features I’d rather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that version because it would be thinner it might be more comfortable than not and having that bulge there it might be lighter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blah blah blah yeah it turns out I use those features and I love those features so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really glad there is no option not to have them because I would have picked that option and I would have missed all this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed out on the health benefits and stuff thereof. So yeah, I’m very happy with this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up on my wife wanting an Apple Watch. She emphasizes that the main reason why she doesn’t want the watch

⏹️ ▶️ John is because she can’t wear it at work for security reasons. And so I should have thought

⏹️ ▶️ John of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? It doesn’t have a camera or anything. It has a microphone.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think she

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t have anything with Bluetooth or something. What? That’s so peculiar. She has lots of security restrictions

⏹️ ▶️ John where she works. But anyway, yeah. Uh, otherwise I assume she would get it just to try

⏹️ ▶️ John it out, just to see what it’s like.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would, um, I’d like to echo everything that Marco said and we’re going to, well, I guess rather

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than talk about it in a minute, we’ll just talk about it right now. Um, I did get an Apple watch. Um, I ended

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up, I think I had already talked about how I had ordered one on launch day at about seven, 10 after seven in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the morning on Eastern time. Um, what ended up happening was a listener of this show. Natan Gesher

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was nice enough to offer me a spare watch that he had had. He became upon the spare watch because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he had ordered two. The one that I always wanted, which is the 42 millimeter space black sport,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey space gray, excuse me, sport. Um, he ordered one of those and then ordered a different one. I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the 42 millimeter white sport and decided that, oh, he actually

⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked the white sport or whatever it was. I’m pretty sure that’s right though. And he was kind enough to offer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sell me the extra 42 millimeter millimeter space gray sport

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he had. And so that’s what I did. It was extremely gracious of him. Um, he didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to do that. He could have absolutely raked me over the coals in terms of cost. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I am forever indebted to Natan, but anyways, I got my Apple watch and I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it and, uh, hopefully by the time this airs, I will have put up my review of the Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my blog. And so hopefully you will see a link in the show notes. If you don’t then yell at me to publish it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But either way, um, I completely agree with Marco with everything you said that having the rings

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a complication, which I do, and seeing the nudge to stand up and seeing,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh god, I really need to just go for like a 10-minute power walk around the neighborhood, that absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has gotten me moving more than I did before. And yes, maybe in a month or even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a week, that’ll all go away and I’ll just find this to be silly. But today,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love it and it’s absolutely causing me to move more.

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⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, please resist the urge to write your own internet, please, for everyone involved. It never works

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. Nope. Amen to that. All right, so Facebook came out with Instant

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Articles.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The gist of it is that Facebook has now launched this platform,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, whatever you want to call it, for publishers like the New York Times and BuzzFeed and TechCrunch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for major publishers. I don’t know. I think it works with any web page, but we’ll see. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve launched this thing where publishers can now have articles that pop up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and can be read completely within the Facebook apps and the Facebook site. I think the site, at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco least the apps. gaps are what matters most anyway for mobile stuff and and so any idea here

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is interesting so you know there’s so publishers so the idea is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want you going to the publishers websites to read them or popping up a web view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the app like on the New York Times comm or whatever they want the article to display

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly within the Facebook app natively in the interface have it have all the images and stuff loaded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up there and and be able to do dynamic, cool animated stuff and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a pretty cynical view of this, but I think it’s inevitable. John, what do you think? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John so the first part of that I was interested in was the instant part, because just technologically, like, you know, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John a native app, you know, as Gruber said, it looks like it’s by the same people who did the paper app. I saw it tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ John by Mike Mattis, that’s how I found out about it, so I assume he’s involved. It’s very slick looking. The pitch

⏹️ ▶️ John to the user is, you’re going to launch Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. You’re going to scroll through your, your, you know, your Facebook feed, right? That’s something you’re going to do anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you see something interesting in your Facebook feed, like someone posted like an article, like, Oh, I saw this girl,

⏹️ ▶️ John you might want to check it out too, or have some commentary. When you tap on that, whether it’s like a movie review

⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, something for you to be outraged about and then yell about on Facebook or whatever it is,

⏹️ ▶️ John they want you to be able to tap on that thing and not have to wait for a web page to load. They want you to tap and immediately

⏹️ ▶️ John be reading the article, right? And of course, all the demos are of, you know, articles from National Geographic or something with a beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ John picture in it or whatever. But as I think as Gruber emphasized, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John unlike Marco’s traditional criticism of paper, which is that the app looks great of all your friends are beautiful

⏹️ ▶️ John people who are always on vacation in California, which we should have a ding for that to

⏹️ ▶️ John the instant thing is like, okay, well, this is not articles that your friends made. These are

⏹️ ▶️ John articles in you know, the New York Times or, you know, even the Huffington Post or whatever, like these are

⏹️ ▶️ John professionally produced things, you know, and the chances of them looking nice and enticing your timeline

⏹️ ▶️ John is really high. But they want to make it so that when you’re scrolling through your timeline that you can consume those

⏹️ ▶️ John as easily as you can read a comment from somebody, they just want you to tap on it, and it’s instantly there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a if that works as advertised, that’s a great end user

⏹️ ▶️ John benefit, because people do scroll through the timelines and people do want to occasionally read things. And I know that

⏹️ ▶️ John I often feel I would like to read that but I don’t want to wait for the thing to load which sounds so stupid it’s like you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wait two seconds for something to load like you’re on Wi-Fi you’re on iPhone six it’s not going to take an age to load but sometimes just

⏹️ ▶️ John like just the idea of the screen blanking going through a spinner and having hit the back button blah blah I

⏹️ ▶️ John just waiting for that I don’t know maybe we’re all spoiled but you’ve seen I would use the

⏹️ ▶️ John analogy of like the studies that I think Google or Yahoo did or whatever of like what does an extra 200 milliseconds

⏹️ ▶️ John of response time on a server due to the purchase rates of items in a store. And it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John tremendous effects of a tiny speed change of

⏹️ ▶️ John page loading. You would think, does shaving 200 milliseconds off of

⏹️ ▶️ John the product page make a difference in sales? And the answer is, yes, a tremendous difference. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ John a huge cliff after which people just aren’t interested in lose. And so that effect, I think, is real

⏹️ ▶️ John for people. As they say, Marco can add a filter that makes my voice sound like his here, engaging

⏹️ ▶️ John with content, as in reading the stuff, reading the stuff that’s in the timeline. Someone posted

⏹️ ▶️ John a link to an article. Are you gonna actually read that article or are you just gonna scroll right past it? If it loads quote unquote instantly,

⏹️ ▶️ John then you won’t. And the reason I think this is an interesting reframing is because as we all know,

⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t actually, like there’s nothing instant. All it’s doing is preloading it, right? That’s all, you know, it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ John spending a different time doing it rather than waiting, and you know, tons of browsers do this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome, I think, was the first one to really aggressively do it, like pre fetching all the pages linked from a page. Google pre

⏹️ ▶️ John fetches the first search results in Chrome. So you know, like, we’re going to load it before you

⏹️ ▶️ John tap it so that by the time you do tap it, it is loaded.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also it’s also presumably loading less stuff. Like, you know, it’s probably also not loading the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco million different JavaScript trackers, it’ll load some of them because that is it is compatible with publishers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking system, the publishers ad systems. So it will be loading some of that stuff. But I think I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would bet and you know, it’s not loading giant style sheets, giant JavaScript includes for the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco site theme and the header and everything like you don’t think it is. I’m betting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s it’s only loading the article plus tracking stuff and add stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not necessarily the tremendous sidebars that all the related content. I mean, if you look at if you look at a typical article

⏹️ ▶️ Marco page for a major site. There’s so much other crap on that page. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many includes for style and JavaScript and stuff like there’s so much stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of that’s still going to be there in the Facebook version, because they’re going to want their tracking and they’re going to want their money. And Facebook supports

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things. But I bet it’s going to be a lot less just by not having like the headers, the footers, the sidebars,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that crap that’s always loaded.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was just thinking they would want to be more time for that filter again, a richer experience, which is code

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for

⏹️ ▶️ John going to take a year to download, because it’s going to a lot of stuff in it but you know it could it could be better there’s it’s conceivable

⏹️ ▶️ John that it could be lighter weight due to the shared resources among all the these instant articles but

⏹️ ▶️ John but basically it’s time shifting it’s it’s clever pre-caching of things that they that you know

⏹️ ▶️ John we will fetch it for you so that when you tap it it is there which is a great idea for a thing but trying

⏹️ ▶️ John for an application benefit but trying to sell that as instant i don’t see how that can can fulfill

⏹️ ▶️ John its promise because it’s got to download this thing sometime and if your If your connection is slow

⏹️ ▶️ John and you launch the app and you scroll through it, it’s not good and you tap on the first thing you see. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if it doesn’t have, you know, it’s going to have background downloading. Like I’m sure they’re going to do everything on their power in the iOS platform to try

⏹️ ▶️ John to get that stuff downloaded before you tap on it. But sometimes you’re going to win the race. And when you do that, are you going to be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, Hey, I thought this was supposed to be instant because it won’t, it won’t be instant. It’s a reasonable selling

⏹️ ▶️ John point that like, but like putting it right in the name may end up backfiring on. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John one thing, just the simple technology behind what is this thing, what is the selling

⏹️ ▶️ John point for users or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, do you think the name is actually meant to be like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is why Facebook is doing it? Or do you think the name is a red herring to convince people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they should do this thing that massively benefits Facebook?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s what I’m getting at. So like, this is the end user, this is the end user story. Why would a user be interested in this feature?

⏹️ ▶️ John Instant articles, you wanna read them? You don’t have to wait, good. But it is the least interesting

⏹️ ▶️ John aspect of this feature from a sort of strategic perspective, because the strategic perspective is Facebook saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John we want to be the place where people get your content. Don’t send them to your website. In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ John why do you even bother having a website? Why don’t you do everything through us? We have this great ad network. We can do cool ad targeting. You

⏹️ ▶️ John could advertise through us. We’ll let you keep 100% of the revenue from all the people who go through, blah, blah, blah. It’s totally great, guys. Come

⏹️ ▶️ John right in. I hope all the content providers are smart enough

⏹️ ▶️ John to not sort of fall into this trap because it’s giving Facebook, if

⏹️ ▶️ John this was super successful and it became one of those things like, well, you gotta have a Facebook Instant article, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John way you can get any traffic without doing that, that spells bad news for everybody except for Facebook.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody, consumers, websites, everybody. And so I really,

⏹️ ▶️ John now that I wanna say that I hope it doesn’t succeed, but like I kinda

⏹️ ▶️ John do hope it doesn’t succeed. Not because it’s not a benefit to the end user, but because I don’t want Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John to be the gateway for most of the things that people

⏹️ ▶️ John read because, no, I don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, unfortunately, I think that’s the reality, you know? And that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I think we’ve been feeling for a while and a lot of people I don’t think are ready to see

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or admit this yet, but the web is really dramatically losing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevance. Not the internet, but the web. The web as viewed in web browsers,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is so dramatically losing relevance in the age of mobile and apps and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco native stuff now, and social stuff. The web is losing. It’s not going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to die.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s losing, I feel like this goes in cycles.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like you said, it’s not gonna die. You can’t kill it because it is unkillable, right? But it does go inside.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of the same things people said about giving Apple power, by like, you shouldn’t have a website, you should just have an app,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s the same exact situation. You wouldn’t want to give Apple that power at all. But the way that looks like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John shaken out to me is that every website has an app, but it has not made the websites go

⏹️ ▶️ John away. And this Facebook thing looks much more capable of making the websites

⏹️ ▶️ John become like a relic. There’s a New York Times app, but there’s no way the New York Times app is ever going to make the New

⏹️ ▶️ John York Times website go away. There’s a New York Times, if there was a New York Times instant article thing, because Facebook is

⏹️ ▶️ John just so much bigger than Apple already has already succeeded. So has already gotten so far and getting

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody to consume everything through the Facebook feed that it’s terrified like they are closer to being able

⏹️ ▶️ John to suck publications in and make their websites irrelevant.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? I mean, this is like, this is way bigger than Google News ever was back in the day. Like when that was when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a big deal and publishers were trying to threaten to sue them, but then they didn’t want to be blocked by them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or admitted because that would be even more disastrous. This is like that times ten. I really do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that web browsing is really in trouble, and as a result, publishers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in trouble. I wrote an article with a terrible title about this about a year ago

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. I think it’s very clear that all of this social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage, all the time people are spending using apps and using social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks on their phones and stuff. Some of that is additive when people are just waiting in line

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the bank or something where they weren’t doing these things before. But a lot of that is also time that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been taken away from browsing the web, reading publisher sites,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading RSS and stuff like that for the geeks. This social activity is competing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that and has taken a lot of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I worry a lot about the future of the web. I really don’t think this is a small

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trend or a temporary thing or something that is guaranteed to just have the pendulum swing back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other way eventually. I think this is a major shift that people have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco voted with their time and with their activity and with their attention. They have voted for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco centralized, proprietary ecosystems focused on social and snackable,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listicle traffic in these social networks, Facebook mostly, some Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. People have voted, that’s where they’re going, that’s what they want the internet to be. People

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the whole don’t care about the open web, they don’t care about everyone having their own site that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own and control and being able to browse things through open standards. People don’t care. A few geeks care,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even we have moved so much of our activity to Twitter and stuff. This is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive trend that I think it would be unwise to ignore. And I But unfortunately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just like when we moved from the previous systems that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had to the web, there was a lot of good that came from that. A lot of good, you know, big numbers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that came with that, a lot of new abilities that came with that. But not everything transitioned over.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not everybody was a winner there. And a lot of things just, well, you know, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that used to work now doesn’t. Or that role that you used to have, now we don’t need you anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is happening now with the move towards apps, the move towards social stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with so much traffic to web publishers now coming from mobile and social usage,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not coming from blog links and search engines and people browsing in web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsers on their computers. That shift is happening and has happened.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are already very much into that shift.

⏹️ ▶️ John I characterize it as a series of swings, but not so much as a pendulum, like you said, one thing does

⏹️ ▶️ John supplant the other, but like almost in terms of that we’re getting into a more balanced

⏹️ ▶️ John situation now and the sort of supremacy of the web was actually unbalanced

⏹️ ▶️ John because what the web let you do originally was read stuff like articles,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And for a long time that since that was so dominant and it was like that

⏹️ ▶️ John defined the internet was the web, right? And what the web let you do is read stuff. People were

⏹️ ▶️ John spending a lot more of their time reading stuff even if you want to bump RSS

⏹️ ▶️ John into that and now we’ve shifted because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John ways to do things other than read stuff you can text people text messaging was one of the first shifts

⏹️ ▶️ John now I’m not just reading stuff I’m writing stuff right you can play games you can watch little movies you can

⏹️ ▶️ John you know use native apps to do things that are very different than reading a big page

⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff. And so I feel like this is an adjustment in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ John activity choices like, oh people are reading the web less because they’re doing things more. What are they doing on their phone? They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John doing the equivalent of reading the web, they’re doing something different. And why couldn’t they do that on the web? Because the web took a long time to get that

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of interactivity and everything. So I think maybe we’re more in balance now. The reason

⏹️ ▶️ John this instant article thing is is scary is because it is asking people to

⏹️ ▶️ John do the The one thing that the web is best suited for, like reading

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, publishing, a publishing platform, anybody can make a website, you can start publishing stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John the entire world can read it. And what kind of stuff? How about a bunch of text and pictures,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That is like the core competency of the text, reading things of the web, reading things.

⏹️ ▶️ John If Facebook can get that into there, it’s not even interactive thing. It’s not a social network, like for,

⏹️ ▶️ John like the articles in a social network. reading the article, right? If they

⏹️ ▶️ John can pull that away from the web, now you’re really starting to pull at the core of like

⏹️ ▶️ John what the web does in a non-proprietary way. It’s as if someone tried

⏹️ ▶️ John to replace email with the system that was exactly like email but 100% proprietary. And that so far hasn’t worked despite

⏹️ ▶️ John email being super terrible, way worse than the web ever was in terms of no authentication and spam and all the other

⏹️ ▶️ John things that we hate about email. The web has a leg up on that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, has that not worked? How about I message

⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not email like emails when you write a long-form thing like even text message hasn’t like you would think like oh

⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hundred ways I could write to somebody I could send them a Twitter DM I could write to them in slack I can do this I can do that and get email

⏹️ ▶️ John survives despite it being terrible Facebook messages are pretty big I know but

⏹️ ▶️ John you know I mean perhaps the main thing keeping email alive is that you can’t even sign up for any service without

⏹️ ▶️ John an email like it is the linchpin

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of our entire

⏹️ ▶️ John system right what are you gonna put in the you know I mean like and I feel like the web has that same longevity, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it would be a huge mistake for anybody publishing on the web to give Facebook too much power. And with

⏹️ ▶️ John web publications struggling to figure out their monetization strategies and all this other stuff, they

⏹️ ▶️ John are vulnerable to being like, well, we got to do something. And Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John has a great advertising platform and they have a whole jillion users. And then you just wait a year and Facebook starts turning the screws and

⏹️ ▶️ John being like, actually, we’re not going to show your article to a lot of people unless you pay us, which is their whole big thing. And just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that’s the thing. I mean, this is why this is such a terrible situation. I mean, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think because of the move towards everything being mobile, because so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much traffic to publishers’ websites now has to come from social sources, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure the publishers have much of a choice. You know, it’s just like when Google News, you know, when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people threatened and made them block them and then, like, begged to be let back in. There’s all these, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations where, like, one party has just tremendous power on the web and publishers pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much have to play ball with them because they can’t afford not to have that audience, not to have that traffic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook is that platform today and publishers depend so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much on getting social traffic and Facebook is so good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at delivering that traffic sometimes and only if you pay and being really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cagey about it. Of course that’s their plan. Of course their plan is to have,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to move even more activity into Facebook. It comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from not only a position of greed, but also a position of just arrogance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like our app is better than your website. You are incapable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of making pages that load quickly, even though this can be solved by smart web design and a good CDN. And a lot of times they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, though, unfortunately. Yeah, but not every time. But anyway, you know, like they,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this move is them just, you know, annexing more of the web. Like, hey, you know what? We are so powerful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to play ball with us. We’re gonna offer this thing now. And our partners

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use this, their stuff is gonna rank a lot higher than a random link to an arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ Marco site now in the timelines. And like, you know, as you said, they’re gonna start turning the screws, right? They are so good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that. That’s what they do. You

⏹️ ▶️ John would think they would figure it out by now. Like, kind of how the music labels figured out after the iTunes thing. Like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t give one company too much power, right? Yeah, we’ll ask the music labels how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well they’re doing right

⏹️ ▶️ John now Well, but like I mean they eventually figured it out and now it’s kind of like accepted wisdom in the in the digital

⏹️ ▶️ John publishing You know digital media like music movies or whatever that it is a huge mistake

⏹️ ▶️ John To put all your eggs in the basket of one technology company despite the fact that all the media companies have proven they can’t do The technology

⏹️ ▶️ John themselves they’ve learned I think just just received wisdom now

⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you can’t do any of this tech yourself, which you can’t because you suck book. Never give one company all

⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff. Never let Apple get too big. Never let Amazon get too big. Never let you know, like, and they all know

⏹️ ▶️ John that, right? And maybe they know it too well and are being stubborn with things like TV where they could be making progress,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. But you would think in the web, they would also know that by now as well that like, I mean, let’s look at

⏹️ ▶️ John ebooks and Amazon, like, oh boy, that was it was a real big mistake to give Amazon that much power in the ebook

⏹️ ▶️ John industry, right? And they tried to balance it with Apple. And then, you know, that didn’t quite work out the way they wanted it

⏹️ ▶️ John to right. So I’m hoping everybody in web publishing, even though they’re in the same dire situation of like, we can’t figure out how to monetize,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t reach our audience, social is taking over, blah, blah, blah. I hope this someone in the meeting like raises

⏹️ ▶️ John their hand and says, This is all good and all and I love these numbers and the projections and blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we really need to hedge. Because if we put all our eggs in the Facebook basket, they will own us

⏹️ ▶️ John and it will be bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I think you’re right. They should be saying that. However, I don’t think they have another choice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why Facebook can do this. We like to think that the Internet is this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform that enables all this openness and everything, and it does, and it can, but it also enables

⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive consolidation of power and consolidation of attention and usage into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these proprietary lockdown systems. We keep seeing it again and again with everything you just listed. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only going to continue. And it’s very clear that when you you have these centralized systems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Facebook, like Twitter, like Amazon, you can offer benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Google, you can offer benefits that get people in, in such massive numbers that you just get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tremendous, like that private company gets a tremendous amount of power and can basically dictate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their terms to the rest of the world then. We’re saying this is really potentially really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad and they shouldn’t give Facebook all this power but the fact is Facebook already has this power and if someone’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to play ball with Facebook, they’re just going to start losing Facebook search traffic or Facebook social traffic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re going to be they’re going to be forced to play ball. They’re going to their hands are going to be forced.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they’ve got the same game plan as the music labels after going too far in the Apple direction. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John only they’re they’re best and their only hedge is unfortunately to try to spread a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John of your content to another proprietary centralized thing. Like in other words, Twitter with

⏹️ ▶️ John the cards and whatever like can they play Twitter versus Facebook off of each other. Facebook is

⏹️ ▶️ John just so massively bigger than that anyway, but that’s what they’ve got. The option is,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s also keep talking to Twitter about their thing and whatever new social network thing, like, let’s also talk to them

⏹️ ▶️ John about like, no exclusivity deals. Try to hedge your bets

⏹️ ▶️ John the best you can. So, you know, Amazon’s music was nothing when iTunes was dominant, but by

⏹️ ▶️ John being given tons of attention by being given DRM free music before Apple was given it by all the music labels

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. It helped make Amazon into perhaps not the competitor they all wished it was, but

⏹️ ▶️ John at least iTunes is now not the only game in town. Of course, Spotify and all the streaming services,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Even that, the streaming services, I bet music labels want to spread things around with a different streaming service.

⏹️ ▶️ John They wouldn’t like one to be dominant. It’s just, yeah, that’s something that tends to happen. Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ John is massively dominant in online commerce. Walmart is massively dominant in the US and retail. Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John is massively dominant online and social.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a bummer. But there’s something else here, though, which I think is worth pointing out. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference in the power balance between your examples that you just gave for the most part and this, which is, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a popular kind of product is constantly being searched for on Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t have it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes Amazon look bad. Amazon kind of needs that. With the music label negotiations, there’s only, what, four

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music labels? If a big music store launches and they don’t have one of them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big problem. That’s going to result and lots of people looking for stuff, not finding it, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that negatively affecting the chances that they’re gonna keep using that music service or keep buying from that store or even keep bothering to search

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. With Facebook and these publishers, Facebook doesn’t really need any of them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. This is purely for the publisher’s benefit to be in this system.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If the publishers, if any one publisher or any group of publishers decides they’re not gonna do it, Facebook couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly care less. They don’t need them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they don’t need them, but they want them. They want their place to be the gateway to this. They don’t want, I mean, you know, share

⏹️ ▶️ John on Facebook, like you can go to a website and the share button underneath every article to share the article on every possible

⏹️ ▶️ John social service, but that’s not the integration of the people that, uh, the Facebook wants. They want you to go to Facebook to

⏹️ ▶️ John find the article, not go to the website to find the article and then hit a share button to share it with people. Facebook, although they do want you to do that because they

⏹️ ▶️ John want people to be, you know, looking at things on Facebook, but it’s, it’s the inversion of like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John website, what website we own you, the only, you publish your content through our system on our terms to the people we

⏹️ ▶️ John say you can, you can reach. Right. And I guess the web keeping the websites themselves are a hedge on that

⏹️ ▶️ John but I Don’t know like I don’t know what the best move for them is because they do

⏹️ ▶️ John need to reach people like all I can think about is How much it could be worse like imagine

⏹️ ▶️ John if Facebook owned YouTube like we’d all be screwed like it’s the game over Just

⏹️ ▶️ John is and YouTube itself is pretty dominant, but then you see twitch and you’re like well Maybe you twitch is keeping YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ John honest or does Google own twitch now? I keep my forget didn’t Amazon buy them I don’t know. Anyway, consolidation is

⏹️ ▶️ John evil.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, everything old is new again. And so I suspect that before too long, we’ll be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing keywords on commercials. And we’ll talk about that right after this commercial.

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrated with the what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of environment, where now there is no more distinction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the editing interface and the published site. you just edit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the site right there like you hit a little edit thing in the corner and the toolbar slides in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re editing the site live right there. You don’t have to publish your changes, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep drafts and everything but the fact is this you’re no longer like bouncing between these two totally different worlds

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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we do a couple of minor tweaks like that to our site to minorly tweak some of the layout stuff

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Verizon bought AOL, which is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s that all about? I don’t know. Some people said it was about ad technology. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know.

⏹️ ▶️ John That seems to make sense to me, because what else could it be about? Dial up, I don’t know. I mean, they do

⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of popular websites, and some of the spin has been like, oh, this is about content. I forget what they have,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, having them post this TechCrunch of theirs, too. Like they have a bunch of properties like they’re basically like

⏹️ ▶️ John a holding company at this point. Um, but from everything I’ve read, what the CEO did to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the, the, the company desirable, uh, as an acquisition is focused

⏹️ ▶️ John on how, like trying to make this company a compliment for the things that other companies might need, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, so that they’re advertising technology to serve, you know, whatever, boy, you need this filter

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco serve rich ads, video

⏹️ ▶️ John ads to people targeted, you know, uh, If someone is looking for that ability and the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ John reach a large number of people, that’s what AOL has packaged themselves up into. And I saw all the depressing numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John of how low AOL has fallen from the time when they were doing the Time Warner merger

⏹️ ▶️ John for $380 billion or whatever. Now they sold themselves for $4. Part of it is the

⏹️ ▶️ John name AOL. The company’s always been, and increasingly more than what we think of when we think of

⏹️ ▶️ John AOL. But then I just think about all those people that are still charging for dial-up and I just get angry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is the logo still lowercase so it just looks like AOL?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I want to be clear. Angry AOL, not because I think that

⏹️ ▶️ John people shouldn’t have dial-up, but I’m angry at our situation in this country. If your best internet

⏹️ ▶️ John option within your budget is dial-up on AOL, we are failing as

⏹️ ▶️ John a country to… I feel like at this point, affordable broadband internet

⏹️ ▶️ John access should be important enough that it should be subsidized, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not subsidized, but like we should, whatever we have to do to make it affordable as an, as an affordable

⏹️ ▶️ John as having a telephone line is, that’s what internet access should be. Uh, and if your only option

⏹️ ▶️ John is literal dial up over a modem to AOL, then things have gone horribly wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’d say so. I don’t know. I’ve been Thompson had a pretty good take on this, um, that I skimmed very quickly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey before we recorded. And it seems like it is about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad technology. I don’t know. It’s just, there, AOL has a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet properties like TechCrunch, for example, and there was a time where I really hated TechCrunch, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually have come back around and it helps that our friend Matt Panzerino is there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But there’s a lot of really good properties there. And I’m going to be fairly sad when Verizon inevitably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forces editorial opinions on all of them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think they’ll sell them before they do that? I would assume that if they’re not interested in content They’ll sell those things off.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I don’t know. I mean they they probably do make money though. Like I don’t know it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’ve never worked at a big publisher I have no idea how you know in theory

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they all Attempt to maintain editorial independence from their corporate high up owners

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in practice. I don’t know how hard that is It if I had to guess I’m I’m guessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that they can usually do that most of the time, but maybe sometimes it gets weird or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if Verizon is like Roger Ailes. I don’t think they have a big ideological slant

⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re going to impose on the Huffington Post and TechCrunch. Yeah, probably not. They’ll just add the Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ John tracking cookie to all the sites. You know?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Actually, they already

⏹️ ▶️ John have that because it’s already on their network. Anyway, Verizon just wants your eyeballs

⏹️ ▶️ John and your monthly check, right? And so this is just furthering their goals.

⏹️ ▶️ John Would it be, can we think of someone who we would rather have had buy AOL? Would we rather

⏹️ ▶️ John have AOL go bankrupt? Like what are the alternative scenarios for the future of AOL

⏹️ ▶️ John that we would like better than Verizon buying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean like what I’m getting at is that it’s not, I didn’t you know sort of cringe

⏹️ ▶️ John when I saw this announcement in the same way I did when I saw like Facebook bought Instagram, right? Like sometimes you see a consolidation,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like oh no, right? This one it’s like, yeah, all right. I mean, like, could

⏹️ ▶️ John be worse, right? Like, Verizon could merge with Comcast. Like, there are many more worse doomsday scenarios

⏹️ ▶️ John than Verizon buys AOL. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Verizon could just agree to just stop competing with Comcast and stop building out Fios.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, no. They can only

⏹️ ▶️ John do that with billions and billions of, speaking of subsidies, with billions and billions of dollars from the government. They need more billions.

⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, they can’t do it anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, good talk. I guess, is there much else to say on AOL-Verizon? I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, basically what I have to say is that it’s of all the mergers that have taken place between big companies,

⏹️ ▶️ John this one seems like, all right, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, is this, so off the top of my head, I don’t know. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AOL Time Warner thing, between that and HP Compact, which was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst merger in history?

⏹️ ▶️ John AOL Time Warner. That was bigger than HP Compact? Yeah, because HP Compact at least

⏹️ ▶️ John like were similar did similar things and it’s a consolidation that made some sense, especially in

⏹️ ▶️ John a market where Microsoft was grabbing ever larger values of the PC market and the hardware vendors are being pushed

⏹️ ▶️ John harder and harder that is going to be consolidation among them. And they they both had kind of an enterprise angle like HP

⏹️ ▶️ John comeback make some sense and it only looks bad because the entire PC sector was contracting as

⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft sucked all the oxygen out of it. A well time Warner was a fantasy of like the Internet and Hollywood

⏹️ ▶️ John are together

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to have TV shows on it like this is it’s just a fantasy of some C-level executives

⏹️ ▶️ John head like billions of dollars and little birdies and stars spinning around people’s heads thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John this is gonna be the new juggernaut and it was just like boy you know

⏹️ ▶️ John I just feel like that was a much bigger disaster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot for our three sponsors this week cards against humanity igloo and Squarespace and we will see you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t even get to talk about your audio engine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you talk about that now Well, there’s nothing much to say I’m working on my streaming engine

⏹️ ▶️ John Which streaming engine is this what number what attempt number?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mmm? I think four Every every couple of days on Twitter somebody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco asks the overcast account When you gonna add streaming God finally you know something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that And they

⏹️ ▶️ John do have a point you’re doing you’re doing the voice for the finally thing But streaming was discussed on this very program

⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly long time ago as an important upcoming feature for overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my goal was to add it like last fall that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because I haven’t been working on it It’s because I haven’t gotten it to work yet

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I’ve been making progress, and I haven’t you know I haven’t been working on only only streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Overcast for the last year or whatever. Like I’ve been doing other things as well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like walking your dog.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like walking my dog, yeah, well that’s testing Overcast. No, I mean, you know, simple stuff like, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire rest of the app that I’ve been working on, stuff like that. I have tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write a streaming engine for Overcast on a number of occasions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I keep doing it badly. The one I’ve been writing over the last two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks is significantly better. I’ve gotten significantly further than I’ve gotten with any other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempt before. I think I’ll be able to do it. I think the one I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing now is going to be the one. So John Beals in the chat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is asking, is there an off-the-shelf streaming solution? I have looked at a couple of packages. I have even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to integrate some of them that claim to offer this. None of them have worked for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And some of them haven’t worked for me because they have annoying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcomings. That would be a problem in my app. Things like, oh, this will support streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everything except mp4 files. That’s a bit of a problem for podcasts since any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AAC encoded podcast is wrapped in an mp4 container. Or simple things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no way to get ID3 information. That might be a problem for me in the future if I want to parse that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or like, you know, no ability to jump around in certain formats in certain cases. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s problems and limitations with a lot of these other packages out there that if you’re writing an app where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are streaming from a known set of sources that you know, like if you control the source end and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say, well, we are only going to serve MP3 format streams, for instance. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what you’re going to be reading and you have control over that. You have a lot more options then.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, if you don’t need smart speed, you can just use AVPlayer. But that’s the basic thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most people, you don’t need to be working at this level because most applications, 80

⏹️ ▶️ Marco player will work just fine for you. The only reason I need to be at this level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to get smart speed working. Now another option, the guy who makes RSS radio,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is one of the only other apps that has silent skipping as a feature. I met

⏹️ ▶️ Marco him at an NS conference this year. He’s a really nice guy. I asked him because I know that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he supports streaming and he has silent skipping and I asked him how he did it and he said he just he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doesn’t have silent skipping and effects when it’s streaming and he he

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just has two different paths in the code where like if he’s playing a video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or or if he’s playing an audio file off a stream he just uses AV player and then if he’s not he uses

⏹️ ▶️ Marco his other audio engine where he can do effects and I could do I could go I’m just choosing not to.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could have offered streaming at the very beginning and just say, well, you can stream,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but just then smart speed won’t work if you stream. I’m just choosing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t want that. Like, I don’t want that to be my solution. I want smart speed and voice boost and any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other effects I do in the future, I want those all to be available no matter what the source of the audio is, whether

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re streaming it, whether you’re playing off a local file, et cetera. Also, with AVPlayer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t save the contents of it. So with AVPlayer, you can’t save the contents of a stream. And I don’t like that. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna stream the data once, you should be able to write that data to the local disk and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to play it offline afterwards if you want to. So again, a limitation with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the built-in stuff. I could have these different modes where I say, well, this mode, you have these limitations. I’d rather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not do that. I’d rather just have one smart, solid system that applies the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules no matter where the data comes from and gives you the same features no matter where the data comes from. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I’m doing it the hard way. And it’s very hard. And that might not be the right answer. This might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a terrible idea. It might not be worth it. But this is how I’m choosing to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John What’d you feel like once you kind of, because really from reading your message, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ John if any of these streaming frameworks gave you a place to sort of insert your own code into the stream

⏹️ ▶️ John where you could do your smart speed stuff, you’d be all set. But none of them seem to give you that low level access

⏹️ ▶️ John because they always just assume, oh, you know, we’ll take care of everything for you. You just point us at the stream and we’ll get the audio. He’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, I need to be in there. I need to look at the byte stream as it flows by and to be able to do stuff with it, right? So what you’re essentially

⏹️ ▶️ John doing is a lot of work that’s already done for you in other frameworks, just so you can get that one access

⏹️ ▶️ John point. Is this a correct characterization or no?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, that’s part of it. And even just like just the way the frameworks work, the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re structured, the way like how the code does certain things. There’s a couple of different low

⏹️ ▶️ Marco level audio APIs you could be using. I have to be working at basically the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lowest level to do what I do. And so some of them don’t work at a level that low.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them do, but in a weird way that has limitations like this. Some of them are basically just doing what I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, and I can just look at them and see, you know, some trick they do or some, you know, some weird thing. But for the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco part, now that I figured out the right way to do it, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m making good progress. So I’ll get there.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is gonna be your new instant paper table view or grid view where it’s like you do this thing you finally come out You’ve got

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing. Finally. I have a streaming engine supports all my features to iOS releases later They add hooks to all their

⏹️ ▶️ John API so that you could do smart You didn’t anyone of their streaming things, which is fine Like that’s just that’s what you got to do what you got to do

⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know maybe maybe this will never be important enough for them to do like the collection views was

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually important enough for them to do Because tons of apps have views like that of arbitrary grids of items

⏹️ ▶️ John reordering and blah blah blah but I’m not sure how many apps care about the low level audio

⏹️ ▶️ John access that you need so maybe you’ll be safe in this one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah well and and like you know AV player can support voice boost even like you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do audio effects in AV player you just can’t adjust the time scale of the audio so you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do any effects that that take in and output the same number of samples you can do that in AV player no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem it’s well it’s not easy but you can do it but anything that adjusts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time scale dynamically you can’t and that is what smart speed needs to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the questions in the chat let me see coding Explorer asked us why is streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such demand if you have Wi-Fi downloading an individual episode takes like 10 seconds when it’s slow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a good point you know I’ve gotten along this far without having streaming one could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco argue as I’ve asked myself many times when as I keep failing to do it properly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one could ask like do I do I Do I ever need streaming? And the answer is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I can get away without it forever if I need to. But it would be better with it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for three main reasons. One very big use case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people always ask for that I can’t satisfy is a lot of people prefer to run their clients in streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only mode. And the big advantage here is that you never have to download a big chunk. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an episode that comes in that you don’t actually end up listening to, you didn’t download that. and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also it takes up no disk space basically like you know you’ll have some space for like caching and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork and the database stuff like that but compared to when you’re downloading entire episodes of like 50 or 100 megs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s very little space and people so often who have like these 16 gig iPhones that for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason Apple is still selling they can be very low on space so if you can have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mode in your podcast app that doesn’t use a lot of disk space that’s there’s a lot of people who want that secondarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter how fast your connection is if there’s an episode that you want to listen to right now and it is not downloaded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to tap it and to have to sit there and wait for the whole thing to download before can even start sucks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it only sucks for five seconds that still sucks many in many cases it’s gonna suck for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot longer than that because if the reality is not everybody has fast Wi-Fi not everybody is on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi not everyone’s cell connections are that fast so if you can tap and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco start playback soon, immediately, like that is better. Like no question that is better.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, forget about the Wi-Fi and the cell connections. I have fast all of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ John It takes forever to download some podcasts because the hosting is slow. That is my biggest complaint about

⏹️ ▶️ John streaming is like if I forget to download a podcast and I have to, you know, go to work, you look at it

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, what is this doing? 200k per second? Forget it. It will. I’m not going to sit here and wait 15 minutes

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not because of my connection. It’s because the server can’t feed me the bytes fast enough. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John I blame your background downloader for not downloading it in the back. Yeah, if I had to pick one, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not big on streaming. Like I like the fact that it will be able to play it playing. I would like actually a hybrid mode where it starts

⏹️ ▶️ John playing as soon as possible, but it still downloads the whole thing. But the feature that I most get annoyed about it with overcast

⏹️ ▶️ John is why isn’t this downloading? I don’t know why it’s not downloading. I know you have the like start all stop all

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I futilely tap it sometimes. I know you fought with that with the background download

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco framework and

⏹️ ▶️ John everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John still mysterious to me. There’s no indication in the UI and nothing I can do about it to say other than sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John pause and restart pause and restart until something starts happening. I always want to know why are you waiting to download just

⏹️ ▶️ John download. I’m on Wi-Fi.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also like to know that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unfortunately, this the frameworks do not give you that information. You just sell it start downloading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and you know it started when you get the first bite

⏹️ ▶️ John right. I’m like a software update running in the background. It’s ahead of you in the queue you know taking your spot in the background

⏹️ ▶️ John queue that’s like yeah

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Aiden Haynes in the chat just mentioned what I was gonna be my third point which is you know let’s say I want to build a feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can view a share link natively in the app if somebody says check out this podcast they was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so funny at this minute and that minute is an hour into the show if you can open up that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco link in overcast and start that playback at that point you don’t have to download the entire file before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the whole first hour of the show you can download a few bytes, get the header information, and then jump ahead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a range request and get like and then only download the part from your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco play head forward. So that’s also a very compelling use case that could be very useful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future if I if I do more social features and stuff like that. So there there are all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these features even right now like when a new download comes in you get the notification. Right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now the only thing I can offer on that is a dismiss button. I can’t wait until it’s downloaded and then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notify but a lot of don’t like that and it’s not really what people want most of the time they want to know when it’s out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so i notify when it’s out it would be ideal if i could have a button on the notification

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that said play for the people who want to play it immediately and again that’s one more feature i can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do really well until i have streaming so there’s a whole bunch of these like little features little niceties

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are all being held up by my lack of streaming and so that’s that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m working on this. Like, yes, I can get along forever without it, but the app would be a lot better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it. And so that’s why I’m doing it. That’s why it’s worth all this trouble. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve gotten pretty far with this latest attempt. I think I’m really onto something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. I think this might be this might be the one, guys. I might have found the one. Michael

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Munger 42. You said you looked at a bunch of different packages in order to do this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. And you said that they didn’t work. Out of curiosity, did you crib anything particularly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful from any of these different open source packages? Or was that basically a waste of time?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at some of them just like, just like how they use some of the APIs. Right, right. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even copy and paste any code out from them. Like, it was that different or that, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unsuitable for my task. Like, it was more of like a general overview of like, oh, that’s interesting. Like, they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use a buffer here. Or oh, they’re using the audio file API here or the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the using this weird call here like it’s that is that kind like it is good that I can look at them because they’re open

⏹️ ▶️ Marco source and I can look at them and see this stuff but they haven’t been as useful as I would have hoped

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for the most part like I would rather that be the case honestly I would rather write it myself if I can for lots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of reasons part of it because I’m just that kind of arrogant programmer part of it because I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to understand what’s happening because this is you know I wrote the rest of my audio engine this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty critical part of it and by writing my own audio engine I’m able to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much in the app so many little custom things like one of the packages I was looking at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically in order to use it I would have to replace most of my audio engine with it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I tried even just trying to integrate that just trying to put that in like all the different things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have to try to wedge you know even even having access to their source code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the amount of work and change and bug potential that I was creating by trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just match the features I have now using their audio engine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would it was more work to do that than it would have been to just write my own even if it takes me a year to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do

⏹️ ▶️ John it have you considered writing it go.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish speed was the problem, but it’s not.