123: Imperfect Signaling Mechanism
24 Jun 2015Bitcode follow-up, ad-blocking in iOS 9 and El Capitan, and how not to insulate your house.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Bitcode is specific to its originally targeted CPU architecture
- The (un)likelihood of ARM Macs
- Swift 2 and compiler self-hosting
- Oculus as "the Palm Pilot of VR"
- John, his watch, and his nose
- Safari Content Blocking API in iOS 9 and El Capitan
- WebKit Content Blockers
- Safari View Controller to kill minibrowsers
- GlimmerBlocker
- YouTube ad settings
- Ad-banner blindness
- The ethics of running ad-blockers
- AdBlock Plus accepts money from some ad companies whitelisted as Acceptable Ads
- John's Reload Button extension for Safari
- TRIM) on non-Apple SSDs
- After-show:
- Casey, John, and Marco attempt to modify their houses.
Sponsored by:
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is the show, right? I guess our first sponsor. If you want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel free. It’s been 18 minutes. I guess we might as
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you were going to cut all the sound. A mere two or three days
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, we were talking about bitcode and how
⏹️ ▶️ John it may or may not allow Apple to change CPU architecture, as I was coming down the side of mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John not, because bitcode is an LLVM thing, and LLVM IR actually is architecture-specific
⏹️ ▶️ John in certain ways, but I didn’t have details on what those ways were. Bruce Holt on Twitter sent
⏹️ ▶️ John some information about that. He said it’s architecture specific in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John way that C code might be. So you know when you specify int or float or
⏹️ ▶️ John pointers or whatever in C, the C standard doesn’t dictate what size those are.
⏹️ ▶️ John The size is dependent on the target architecture that you’re compiling for. I mean these days, you know, they’re all similar sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, 64-bit architectures and stuff. But the C standard doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John dictate what size those should be, which is why you should do size of int and all that good stuff and not just assume that it’s 16
⏹️ ▶️ John or 32 or 64, same thing with like float and double or whatever. And so when the Clang compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John outputs LLVM intermediary code, it burns in the sizes. It
⏹️ ▶️ John has to nail down the sizes of every single thing. So at that point, it makes the decision and those decisions about the sizes
⏹️ ▶️ John and potentially also the alignment of structs and stuff like that is made at the time the IR is generated. And
⏹️ ▶️ John after that, if you go to a different CPU architecture, we said this about the ending this similar thing, but if you go
⏹️ ▶️ John to a different CPU architecture after that, it’s too late, the sizes are already have already been determined. So the bitcode
⏹️ ▶️ John is not portable across CPU architectures in that way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I asked, Well, what if you could you
⏹️ ▶️ John create LVM IR that is more neutral? Is well if you didn’t use like the types that have indeterminate
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes everywhere you could and I was wondering like if Swift nailed down the sizes of everything to a specific architecture
⏹️ ▶️ John that it wouldn’t make much of a difference But I guess you still have alignment issues and stuff like that anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John So thanks for the details on that I Would still love to see like Nitty-gritty
⏹️ ▶️ John source code like you know show me some sample programs compile them to different architectures and show me how the bit code is a
⏹️ ▶️ John bit I’ll do that on my own if I was writing an article about say the new version of OS 10 I would somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John find a way to incorporate a big long section about bit code because hey I did it with Swift And it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 related, but I’m not so now. I’m just kind of winging it and collecting feedback from people on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff But yeah like I said last week. It seems like at this point it’s much more about
⏹️ ▶️ John taking advantage of new instructions or new register sets or new vector units
⏹️ ▶️ John or Being able to ditch old instructions when they’re not useful anymore I’m sure there’s lots of stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John arm 7 and arm 7s that Apple does not want to support forever And so or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the heck the watch is based on I don’t even know if that is the watch you might know this Marco Is the watch arm 7s when you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch? I think I saw something that it was arm 7k whatever that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that It was probably from Steve Trout and Smith from his various poking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around and tweets and hacking and everything I’m pretty sure he had like a like a dumb screen showing up like what what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what this is running on this thing? and it was I think it was v7k but I don’t really know what that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and I don’t think anybody knows yet like exactly what the watch what the s1 is is it
⏹️ ▶️ John is it like a little mini a5 or an a6 or is it some weird hybrid I haven’t seen anything about that have you guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No I heard rumors that it was somewhere around a4 a5 but you know no one really has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has codified that. I don’t know who all is hacking it besides Steve Troughton Smith I’d be curious to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know something like Geekbench or some like known benchmark run on it so that we can kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of try to try to guess like you know where it fits on that spectrum
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of someone slicing the top off and aiming a microscope or whatever they do you know like to
⏹️ ▶️ John actually see what it looks like inside there they someone eventually does that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but like hasn’t didn’t shipwrecks try that and they’re basically like well it’s some cores and you know you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really tell I don’t think we even know if it’s dual core or not I mean I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ John could yeah you could kind of tell what the family lineage of it maybe if it has the exact same layout
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a shrink you could tell but anyway what I’m getting is that the S1 potentially uses some
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture decisions from a long time ago and that Apple has grand plans for the future
⏹️ ▶️ John and would love to say replace one you know multiply add instruction with
⏹️ ▶️ John a much better multiply add instruction or a vector instruction or some other thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John if the watch is bit code from day one they can do that and no one has to recompile their apps they will just
⏹️ ▶️ John abandon you know the S3 will not even include that old crappy instruction will only include new ones and there’ll be no problem
⏹️ ▶️ John because they will just retarget the bitcode that everyone uploads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One theory I heard that I think is really interesting and possibly might explain because you know if you look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this you know as we keep learning more about bitcode mostly from you and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we keep seeing things like you know this is really not going to enable things like an automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ARM Mac transition stuff like that is it worth all this complexity and potential risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever they want to do with it if it’s not going to be something big like it like an architecture change and one interesting theory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard was that rather than just being able to run apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on new you know little instruction tweets like that that they actually might be able to use the app library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s out there to test while developing new instructions because they can change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the architecture because they have that they have that arm license to do that. And so if they add their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own instructions or if they are actually changing the chip design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will now have a body of apps that they can then tweak to use their new things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and see during the development stage to use that and say, is this optimization worth it? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can actually design the chip to fit the apps that are out there in the world and to benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them most, which I think is really interesting. And that I think think is a much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sizable advantage than just being able to have a little bit faster vector things once things actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already out there when the when you know, the instructions were developed like in a black box somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John They already have, I think a very good body of code like it’s nice that they can test against real
⏹️ ▶️ John world third party apps in case third party apps are doing weird stuff. And maybe Apple doesn’t have as many games or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think they have an adequate code because that’s what they’ve been doing with all the things all the the a whatever chips they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John made. They use their own applications. They use the OS itself. They use their own frameworks. I don’t think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John hurting for some code to test against. I think it’s nice that they have the third-party code there, but I wonder, with millions of
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, how do they even decide what counts as representative? Do they even know? I guess maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John know the most downloaded apps, but do they know? They don’t know how many apps are still launched. I don’t know if they even…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they do if people opted in, because that’s all in the app analytics stuff on iTunes Connect. But it only applies to people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who opted into that checkbox on Startup that says, Share Data with Apple and Developers.
⏹️ ▶️ John know how long they run them and stuff like I’m wondering how they even pick a representative sample but anyway yeah I
⏹️ ▶️ John more more testability and more like real world testability is good but that’s what they’ve always been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John with their chips is they’re designed in concert with everything else that they do to to
⏹️ ▶️ John improve things for the for their OS for their frameworks for the applications that they run and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean wouldn’t it make sense if they just grabbed say Facebook Twitter Snapchat and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t even think of what else, but you know, there’s got to be the same five to ten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps that are on probably like 90% of all iPhones. And obviously those statistics are made up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, if you grab just five or ten apps, you would probably get an overwhelming amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the usage of an average person’s iPhone. I mean, most average people spend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an inordinate amount of time probably in messages, which obviously they have the code for, and Facebook,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know? And so whatever the kids these days are using, I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they had that and a couple other things that would make a big difference and it would prevent, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, oh, here’s a new version of iOS, oh, and by the way, Facebook doesn’t work because for whatever reason they’re too
⏹️ ▶️ John I think those apps though probably end up in Apple’s framework code most of the time. That’s why I mentioned games because games are the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that are going to use the least of Apple’s framework code and they’re also the thing that Apple doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John have any up to test and I think they’re a very popular genre of application and all of Apple’s iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. So things like Facebook and Twitter, I would imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John spend most of their time in like UI kit core animation, all sorts of things that Apple controls that they
⏹️ ▶️ John nice to be able to say, Oh, let’s test the actual Facebook app. But then again, like, Facebook could change its apps totally and have
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like the paper app was all crazily architected and stuff. So there’s only so much you can hang your head on with third
⏹️ ▶️ John party stuff. like I said, more apps is better. And one more thing, we haven’t gotten this feedback yet, but we just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to say it. So it’s preemptively clear
⏹️ ▶️ John whether or not bitcode helps Apple, what could potentially help Apple with a transition
⏹️ ▶️ John of say, max to arm. It doesn’t matter bitcode or not. If Apple wants max to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to arm, it can do it. It has done it before. You don’t need bitcode to change architectures.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of this rules out max going arm at some point in the future. So I don’t want someone to listen to
⏹️ ▶️ John this and say, remember when bitcode came out and you said the max would never go arm? We totally are not saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I might say that. Well, whatever. I think it’s I’m saying feasibility. I’m saying it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John totally possible because we didn’t have bitcode for the 68k to power BC transition. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the power BC to x 86. Like, it is not something
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple needs to have bitcode does not need to be part of their transition. If they decide they’re going to transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can still do it, the quote unquote, old fashioned way. And we’ve talked about this a million times in the fast, and it’s going to be harder than
⏹️ ▶️ John it was in the previous transitions. And what are the upsides and what are the downsides and blah, blah, blah. So I said, I would say bitcode
⏹️ ▶️ John is neutral, as far as max changing architecture or anything in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but again, I would say, you know, don’t forget that whenever we’ve had the architecture changes in the past, they’ve come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with large performance increases. And this case, they probably wouldn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that that has afforded us luxuries like, like translation layers and and virtualization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and emulation that were possible in the previous ones that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be unrealistic in the current environment, if going to ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you’re defining performance as speed. What if performance is defined in the future as battery life?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yes, you’re right that you would lose speed, especially when running x86 stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what if batteries double or triple in capacity, not necessarily because of the batteries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey themselves, but because ARM is so much better on batteries than Intel is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think you’re right, but for the sake of playing devil’s advocate, it very well could be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple in the future measures performance more by battery life than it does raw speed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s possible, but again, I think the issue there would be if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an ARM CPU running x86 code in some kind of emulation layer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if the CPU is inherently more efficient, which as we’ve discussed in the past, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a process advantage over lots of people. But even if it’s more efficient, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have the ARM CPU basically working its butt off to emulate the x86 functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’d have the CPU in a very high power state most of the time. So I think that it would be a rough transition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, Apple could just say, hey, you know, we’re making this new line of Macs that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people are going to buy, and you better just recompile your apps to work on it because we just won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emulate x86. X86 just won’t work on them. And if you want your app to be running on these you better just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, change it. And, you know, they might be willing to do that and take the risk that people might not buy the thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately I think another big problem for ARM Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’re seeing the direction of the ports, ding, and the buses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A big problem for ARM Macs is the lack of Thunderbolt. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if USB 3 is now being tied into Thunderbolt, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it functionally might be, and if Thunderbolt peripherals become very commonplace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very much in demand, granted, as we see from the MacBook One, a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need a lot of peripherals. And you can have computers that are not compatible with most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any peripherals in the market, and they can sell okay, But that’s another huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mark against ARM Macs. Like, again, they could make them, but if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not compatible with all of the cool stuff that we’re gonna have over USB-C, Thunderbolt 3.1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, in the next couple years, and they probably can’t be, because I think Intel really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owns that whole thing and is not going to let it go, then that’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that might prevent ARM Macs from ever being anything more than, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the MacBook one role in the lineup and the MacBook one as we see now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is already fine with Intel chips like our it wouldn’t be that much faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an arm chip if it had to keep the same battery life might even be slower and we haven’t even seen Skylake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet Skylake may be coming out in six months or a year and allegedly Skylake is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a big deal for power consumption so like Intel might really step up the game again in six months or a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and leap even further ahead or at least maintain its lead in practicality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and performance and everything. So I just I don’t see a future of our Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t. I think it’s something that everyone talks about. It’s like this rumor unicorn of, oh, wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this be great? We’d have infinite battery life. And the truth is, not only would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it not be that great, not only would it not have as good a battery life as you think to get the kind of performance we would need to make it usable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also, even if it gave us tons of extra battery life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple would just delete more of the battery and make the thing thinner and lighter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They wouldn’t give us a computer that lasted a week. They would just give it a much smaller battery and say, look, we made it thinner,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s what they do. So it’s this pipe dream, I think, that it probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever happen, and if it ever happens, I don’t think it would really be that compelling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think you make a really great point about Thunderbolt not really being a thing on ARM, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the MacBook One, if that is positing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theorem or presenting the theorem that ports aren’t really that big a deal anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and if a lot of people are buying the MacBook One, then does not having Thunderbolt really matter?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It depends. I mean, if you look at things they do in the laptop lineup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything they do, even at the low end, you can tell that they are doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move forward into the future. Looking at the MacBook One, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very, very high chance that the things about the MacBook One will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco propagate up the lineup into whatever the MacBook Air is, or if it goes away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll just skip that and go to the MacBook Pro. And so, if the MacBook One doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support… world well I mean next year I’m sure the MacBook one will support Thunderbolt over USB C and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like you know if they made an arm Mac at the bottom that didn’t I think that would signal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the imminent end of Thunderbolt support like that would be like I well this is the beginning of the end for Thunderbolt right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t think they I don’t think they’re gonna do that yet and they may be in the future they can do that you know once Thunderbolt is old and crusty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and something else comes along they can that maybe can be powered by an ARM chipset maybe that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will come you know on an infinite timescale scale thing but you know for the next I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know five years or whatever I don’t see it happening
⏹️ ▶️ John it was just by Intel give the money back to the shareholders PC industry
⏹️ ▶️ John just use their fabs and their technology yeah yeah we talked about this in many past shows if you
⏹️ ▶️ John think this was an incomplete discussion of Intel versus arm on the Mac you’re right I don’t know what the old show
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers were but suffice it to say that we’ve talked about this a lot the only point I wanted to make was that bitcode
⏹️ ▶️ John is neutral does not help does not hurt. So whatever whatever analysis we
⏹️ ▶️ John had before and whatever view we have on it now bit code is not I assume you would agree
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco bit code is not a factor in your in your analysis of whether or not arm on the Mac makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not at all. No, I don’t think it’s relevant really in the slightest because it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t enable that to happen easily. And you know all the all the other problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really have anything to do with the software. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that Apple having sort of the quote unquote their own compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John being like the driving force behind LLVM and Clang and all that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and having their own language, those are positive factors in any CPU architecture change in the
⏹️ ▶️ John future. And arguably, as they make their new ARM chips or iOS devices, they are sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of quote unquote changing architectures. Because the architecture is ARM 7, ARM 7S, ARM 7K.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those aren’t the same as going from ARM to x86. But Apple is changing architecture, and it is important.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does make it easier for them to make those changes. The fact that they own and control all of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John or not really own, I don’t know how to phrase this, but the fact that they are the driving force behind their own compiler, and
⏹️ ▶️ John now their own language, and it has all these neat features, that does help them do these little things, which is kind of the point of bit
⏹️ ▶️ John code, but not as so much a factor in huge leaps from ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it also helps that as time goes on, more people are writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more code in higher level ways where the byte order and the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the alignment of a struct and the exact byte size of an integer doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much anymore. You know, like people are writing higher level code like in Swift and other languages that are not C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based. And, you know, they still have access to some of those things in certain places, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage of them, I think, is going down a lot overall. And so when Apple eventually needs to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that transition to some other architecture, where they have to make a change in something like byte
⏹️ ▶️ Marco order or is word size still a thing, or struct alignment, stuff like that. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have to make a change, that would be beyond the abilities of Bitcode to iron over.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it would not be as painful as it was in the past for software developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of Swift, tell us about Swift 2, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just a minor point that I forgot to get to on the last show where we talked about Swift 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is that the people making Swift 2, and Swift 1, and the whole deal, the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are making that language, and the people who are making Clang and LLVM for that matter, what
⏹️ ▶️ John those people do all day is, yes, they talk about language features and decide
⏹️ ▶️ John what the Swift language is gonna look like, but the compiler people, they’re writing C++ code all day.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s what their job is, because Clang and LLVM are not written in Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John Clang and LLVM are written in C++. I don’t know if there’s any C component at all, Anyway, they’re programming
⏹️ ▶️ John in C++ all day and that’s got to be kind of annoying and I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t it be neat if Swift is supposedly this language that can scale from writing an operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system all the way up to writing a GUI application And all the way over to like writing just one-off scripts and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff Which is the stated goal of the language wouldn’t it be nice if you could write LLVM and clang in Swift as
⏹️ ▶️ John well? well, which is would be nice, but it’s not currently the case. And then people,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people, it’s it’s the awkward situation of if the people who are designing your language are not
⏹️ ▶️ John using your language primarily to do their work, it’s not the end of the world because obviously the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are designing Swift are using Swift to do many things, if only to write the test suite and and all sorts of other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the term I had in the notes for this is self hosting, which I think is the wrong term, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the term is for no, I thought that’s right. Maybe I don’t know. I look at the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John page for an animal and read the definition they had there and didn’t seem exactly right. But anyway, I believe it’s called freebooting.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re making up these terms now. Nope, that’s a real word. All right. Well, anyway, I rather than use
⏹️ ▶️ John the term for it, which I’m not sure I’m just going to explain the thing. I think it would be great if
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are working on the Swift language could also write the Swift compiler and Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John and client LVM. And Swift because that would really prove the sort of lower end of Swift’s usefulness
⏹️ ▶️ John if you know that would be a proof of concept for the language. See we can use this
⏹️ ▶️ John language to write the compiler that compiles this language and compiles other language in fact this is a great language to write compilers in.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not that has not yet been demonstrated as far as I’m aware we don’t know where Apple is using
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift because they’re super secretive and stuff and it’s not open source yet so other people aren’t using it but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that would be cool and I think the people designing Swift would like it too because if they like C++ so much, they wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John made Swift. They would have just said, hey, the new language for Apple’s developers is C++, and then everyone would have had an aneurysm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. I could swear, and I don’t have a link handy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I could swear that several years ago, Mono, which is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open source cut on the C Sharp compiler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it declared itself as self-hosting. So that’s why I think you were right. Which means that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to compile code in Mono, you use a compiler written in Mono,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is just, that’s weird. But, but so I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure that that self-hosting is exactly what you’re looking for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the term I’ve heard when people talk about Perl 6 is, you know, the Perl 6 parser
⏹️ ▶️ John and language syntax is written in Perl 6 and all sorts of stuff like that. But yeah, it’s a fun Hall of Mirrors
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It’s not that crazy. What do you think C compilers are written in? Usually they’re written in C, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It just melts my head thinking about that. It’s so weird.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco other people’s. They’re decent. But mail routes, in my experience, is just
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco spam, but they’re not quite sure. And they just send you one email that just has a list of them and little
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so real-time follow-up. I’m looking at the Mono C-sharp compiler page, which we’ll put a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link in the show notes. MCS was able to parse itself on April 2001. MCS compiled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself for the first time on December 28, 2001. MCS became self-hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on January 3, 2002. So obviously there’s some differences here, and I don’t know what they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but self-hosting was at least in the right direction, John. I think you’re up so fast. I know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so sad. Anyway, John, speaking of growing up, tell me about your nose. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John I meant to tweet this back at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John with the actual day count, but I had my new Apple Watch for, I believe, less
⏹️ ▶️ John than a week before I touched it with my nose for the first time. And I didn’t do it like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I was not, I only realized after I had done it that, hey, you just touched your watch
⏹️ ▶️ John with your nose. It was like three or four days. So nose touching is a thing. Just wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t done it since but it was a situation I was held holding a bunch of stuff and the only and like a notification came
⏹️ ▶️ John in or something. Yeah so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I recall correctly, we decided that Mike was wrong about the six-plus But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are deciding unequivocally that Mike was right about nose tapping
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not willing to assign nose tapping to one person that the creator or discoverer
⏹️ ▶️ John of that concept. Had I never known that nose touching was a thing, I assure you I would have still touched it with my nose.
⏹️ ▶️ John So. And speaking of not assigning one person to a concept that
⏹️ ▶️ John is broader than that, someone just tweeted at me that the Oculus
⏹️ ▶️ John CEO, I think, or founder or whatever, described the Oculus as the Palm Pilot of VR
⏹️ ▶️ John and mentioned that it’s not the iPhone of VR. There is no iPhone of VR,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, When I was away from ATP, a guest hosting on Rocket, we talked about VR and
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe at that point I compared the current status
⏹️ ▶️ John state of VR to the Palm Pilot, saying that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of feasible, it’s better than the Newton, but nothing is the iPhone of VR yet. Did I coin
⏹️ ▶️ John that phrase? Or did I read an interview with the Oculus CEO from six months ago where he said the exact same thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s much more likely that I read an interview from six months ago and that the CEO has been saying that using
⏹️ ▶️ John the same analogy on all of his press and funding tours for years. So I also do not take credit for
⏹️ ▶️ John this unless I really was the first person to say in which case, yeah, me, but I’m pretty sure he probably
⏹️ ▶️ John said it and I probably read it years ago. It’s still apt, though. It’s a good analogy. So in conclusion, Mike was right
⏹️ ▶️ John in conclusion. Mike does not own the nose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’m willing to say he was wrong with the six plus, though, even though I am personally back to using my six.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what I’m going to do when the new ones come out, presumably this fall. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m tempted to try going the bigger phone again, because there really are a lot of advantages to it. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are times where I kind of miss it.
⏹️ ▶️ John A concept that’s entirely ridiculous, that somehow he would be right or wrong about what? About that that size
⏹️ ▶️ John of phone is the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone for everybody? Well, he single-handedly invented the iPhone 6 Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s the first one who said this size of phone might be something that people like or that he found one person who previously
⏹️ ▶️ John said they hate the big size but then found that they liked it. It’s ridiculous. There is no right or wrong here. I know it’s just a joke, but I just want to clarify
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who are actually trying to follow this, that this is pointless and there’s no such thing as Mike being right
⏹️ ▶️ John or wrong because what he’s right or wrong about is nonsensical. Like it can’t even be described or if you do describe it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John would read it and realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how ridiculous it is. There are no jokes in Syracuse County.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, apparently. You know, I like jokes to have a foundation or have some sort of point, but this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John consideration, oh Mike is right, Mike is wrong. No, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re really critiquing this right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m just saying, like, let’s have something to hang our hat on. You know, let’s have something that
⏹️ ▶️ John if we described it, it would make some sense. Your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke does not qualify as a joke. I think the issue here is that Mike was the first one to get the 6 Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of our little group of friends and kept waxing poetic about how wonderful it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then all of you weak souls, ahem Marco, ahem Stephen Hackett, decided to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen to him and caved, largely because of his browbeating.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that why? Is it because of his browbeating?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that it was tried. Well, Marco, you probably bought one as a test unit, but I’m pretty sure Stephen tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just so he could look Mike in the eye and say, oh my God, you’re so wrong about this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then as it turns out, Mike was right in that there are plenty of advantages to the six
⏹️ ▶️ John but but mike was right that like and no one else said there were advances like plus the millions of people who bought
⏹️ ▶️ John them who have been begging apple for a larger phone who’ve been using larger phones for years and android they’re just but mike
⏹️ ▶️ John was the one who said you know what big phones guys they’re actually kind of good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and and he wasn’t the only one to like like you know renee got one on day one and renee like when i asked him about it he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying oh yeah it’s amazing but mike was the one who was like actively like campaigning for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in public right he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on the payroll of big phone Anyway, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is Mike Hurley, by the way, in case you’re wondering who that is. We have got complaints that we have a lot of we’ve been yelling
⏹️ ▶️ John about Mike for the past five minutes and if you don’t listen to the show, you don’t know who Mike Hurley is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We will link to Mike in the show notes. But what do you even link to? I guess there’s relay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know. I guess his Twitter account. I don’t know. This is this is I Mike that we’re talking about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yeah, he’s gonna hear this and he’s gonna fall over either very excited or very sad that Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not believe in Mike was right. I’m not really sure
⏹️ ▶️ John I just think it’s not a good meme.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nothing is so perfect that it can’t be complained about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And getting tangled up in that meme, like, it’s just, there’s no way to win. The only winning move is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god, what is happening? This is what happens when we record on a different day, where everything’s all off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re a little bit punchy, we just recorded the last episode a couple days ago. Please, please bear with us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, that was a War Games reference, John, I just want you to know that I know that was Wargames reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good job. You’ve been doing good in the super obvious references that you should always get lately, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m very proud of my… Wait, do you hear this? Do you hear this? That’s me patting myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the back. Good job. Just happened. Wow. This show’s taking a
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many registrars now, way more than we used to have, and most of them are just terrible.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve bought them so many other places in the past. And usually when you’re checking out, you have to
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying things you don’t need. Or you have to uncheck the box that says, spam
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many, you know, there’s so many like little gotchas in most of these registrars that it’s not very good.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey WBDC, specifically around WebKit and now there’s some new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extension points into WebKit and you can make content blockers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Marco, do you want to tell us a little more about this or is this more, would you like to punt this to John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do, I can go over the brief version of it and John and I are actually in the session video which many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people have pointed out to us on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that we’re not like looking at our watches or phones
⏹️ ▶️ John paying attention. I guess that’s why they would put us in, they’d pick the audience shots, they’d pick the one of the people who are paying attention. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we really at least I really do pay attention Marco could I think he was doing something else in that video, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know I was watching that one. I’m looking at the slides. I’m not sure where you’re looking. Anyway, so the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is, you know, they know everyone’s using ad blockers. And the way most ad blocker extensions for browsers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work is they they have to evaluate their own code on every load
⏹️ ▶️ Marco request. So every time something is requested to be loaded, whether it’s a page or a resource on that page,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extension has to run JavaScript code to run through its list of things that are prohibited, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just very expensive to do in mass. And so and it also exposes other problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know it is very expensive. Also it it’s kind of a privacy issue like if you don’t really trust the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who make the ad blocker and they’re seeing every resource that you’re loading and it’s passing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through their code. So there’s a number of things about this that are non ideal and because ad blockers are just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular, much to the chagrin of people writing terrible websites that run terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, because most of them these days, unfortunately. Boy, it’s a tough business. But basically, Apple wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to improve the efficiency and the privacy of ad blockers in Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they also brought it to iOS. And so it runs in iOS as well. So now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is trivially easy to make an ad blocker for iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny, Apple is not offering one, but I suspect on day one of iOS 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this fall, I suspect there’s going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of ad blockers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the store on day one. It’s going to be a massive rush because they’re just so easy to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new system, which allows all this, it basically does not run executable code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of yours in the browser. You just give it a just a giant JSON array
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like reg X’s and prefixes to to block loads for and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t alter the page by inserting things you can’t change what’s on the page but you can delete certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elements so you can like you can apply a CSS display none to certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selectors certain CSS selectors or you can block certain you know host names or URL prefixes from loading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript or images or third-party cookies or so like They also added something called the Safari view controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in in WVC this year which is going to be an iOS 9 and so this basically is the mini browser killer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So many of us, I forget whether we talked about this or not, many of us have have in our lives as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS developers written embedded web browsers for it so that when people tap links in our apps they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can view them in a little web browser right in the app instead of being kicked out to Safari. Writing these things is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awful and they also can’t access many nice things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if you have if you have a login in Safari like you know you if you have cookies and you’ve already logged into some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco site in Safari if you open something up in a mini browser on somebody’s app you got a login again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you also don’t have things like like any kind of extension that you run like you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the app supports it the app can integrate one password into its a little mini browser but most don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know most extensions are not gonna have that luxury of being integrated so if you have any extensions that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are useful useful to you in Safari, they won’t run in these mini browsers and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s also like, there’s some security concerns about mini browsers and using them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for OAuth and stuff like that. There’s a lot of arguments against mini browsers basically, both from users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from security and from Apple’s point of view. There’s lots of arguments against mini browsers. So Apple released the Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco View Controller for iOS 9, which allows you to basically pop up an isolated Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window from your app, like a little, you know, slide up sheet from your app that looks and works just like Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still running. You know, it’s still in your app conceptually, but it’s running in a different process. It’s totally isolated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your app. Your app is only notified when the user closes it, basically. So it’s a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to provide this the same convenience of having like a built-in browser in your app that just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, instantly slides up and can be dismissed easily without being Safari and kicking people through to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it gives you all the features of Safari. So So anyway, these ad blockers that are now possible to write will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also work in those, which gives people yet another reason to delete their mini browsers out of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and switch to the Safari view controller. So it’s this whole improvement to this whole system here where they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make most mini browsers obsolete and also enable ad blockers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS and on Safari on the Mac in 10.11. El Capitan. I don’t know how do you say that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That might be the first time I’ve tried to say it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounded pretty good. I like it. It sounded pretty good. It was enthusiastic. We just call it the Captain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, Captain, my Captain.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and people who are much cooler than me, who live on the West Coast, keep saying that people call it LCAP, like rock climbers have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calling it LCAP, apparently, for a long time. But I don’t know if I’m cool enough to do that. I don’t think I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so they’re doing all this cool stuff. They’re enabling all this cool stuff. The upside is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suspect many apps will lose their mini browsers in the future. And I’m looking forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote the best mini browser I’ve ever written for Overcast. I’ve written like four of them in my life so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve all been awful. Overcast, I think, has the least awful mini browser that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever written. I still can’t wait to delete it. Like, it’s still not great. It’s still not Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I am very much looking forward to deleting that once I can require iOS 9 or at least once I can support iOS 9.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so in basically in one fell swoop they have both obsoleted mini browsers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank God, and also enabled ad blocking for the first time on iOS in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably won’t suck and is also ridiculously easy to make. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very interesting, first of all, that they enabled the ad blocking. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is definitely a pragmatic aspect to it, as I said earlier, about how they knew people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing this anyway and so they want to give a better way to do it that uses less battery life and has fewer privacy concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is faster. But also So there’s this is obviously a jab
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at web advertising and it’s you know these the skeptical view or the cynical view of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can also point out like well they’re also doing this at the same time that they’re launching the Apple News app which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is based on web stuff and has I ads embedded which can’t be blocked by this system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so they’re they’re kind of stabbing the web in the back here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while also launching a web alternative and asking publishers to opt into it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and using their ads or publishers ads but really kind of encouraging the use of their ads it’s really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it might be a jab at Google it might be totally driven by practicality concerns as I said like you know people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do it anyway so I might as well do it right also as a user like I want to hear what you guys think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad blockers too because as a user I have never run an ad blocker before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve started in the last few months I’ve started to be tempted to finally start running one because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I I know people who make a living on the web I am a person who makes me living on the web I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the idea of ad blockers but web ads have gotten so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad like it’s it was different story five years ago these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ads are so bad and and they’re they’re even worse on mobile because so often they’re so badly written
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so intrusive that you can’t properly dismiss them on mobile without clicking on some tiny little X in the corner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like there are so many problems with this and and there and when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take up screen space on mobile it’s even you know it’s kind of more expensive because you have less screen space to begin with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and they’re slow and it’s just like I want to not need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to block web ads, but unfortunately I need to block web ads now because they’re they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have just gotten so bad like now and you know there’s there’s more than ever there there are things that obscure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the text things that show it, not even just interstitials, but almost like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pop-ups, embedded in the page, whatever they’re called. Pop-overs, slide-overs, whatever those are called. And some of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll overlay a video, that’s like a video ad that starts playing over an article, and you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait five seconds, YouTube style, to dismiss the ad before the article shows up behind it. There’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garbage out there, and it’s only getting worse. And it seems to be getting worse at an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accelerating rate. I am shocked every time I go to an article on what used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a reputable site, or what seems like a reputable site, and I get a full screen ad that I can’t skip, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t properly close it mobile, and I can’t even see the text. It’s getting really bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think? There’s obviously an ethical question here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s ethical versus pragmatic. I don’t know. How do you guys fall on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that we would be remiss not to mention my favorite of all egregious ad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey practices, which is going to Macworld and getting an autoplay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video that’s often playing way too loudly and scares the ever-living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crap out of me. So that is my personal favorite of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the god-awful egregious advertisements. But to answer your question, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly don’t even know if I’m running an ad blocker on my main machine right now. I’m on Aaron’s MacBook Air, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alive. And hers does not have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I used to for sure run a ad blocker called Glimmer Blocker, and we’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. If memory serves, the way this works is it kind of puts a quiet proxy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between you and the internet. And so this way, any browser you’re using and any version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of any browser you’re using, it will use that proxy that’s running locally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Glimmer blocker will block ads from, you know, within that proxy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it worked pretty well, but it was not flawless by any means. And I used to run that for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And honestly, I don’t think I’m running it on my work machine anymore because. Accepting these,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new wave of even more egregious ads that you just spoke of Marco, which I completely agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, um, accepting the ones that like occlude what you’re trying to look at the, the sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ads and things like that. I’ve gotten so good at tuning those out that they’re not even there anymore. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ad blocker is my brain at this point. Um, but I don’t know. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have mixed feelings about it. Um, in the past I didn’t care. I would absolutely run an ad blocker any, anytime, anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But now I have really mixed feelings about it. I mean, this show is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is run on advertising now, granted it’s a different kind of advertising, but it’s still advertising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there are some ethical moral questions that are rolling around in my head about it. But for now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I probably will continue not, I think, running an ad blocker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unless more websites that I frequent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get these god-awful egregious autoplay videos in light boxes or whatever they are that take up the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. It is certainly getting worse. What do you think, John? John
⏹️ ▶️ John Greenewald I’m much more annoyed by video pre-roll ads. Not so much because I’m opposed to video pre-roll
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, but in two cases. One, the same video pre-roll ad that you see a hundred times, Hulu is the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John offender there obviously, but it happens on YouTube as well. And two, when I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch a 30 second video and I have to watch a 30 second ad. Like that doesn’t seem to, this is mostly talking about YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John here because that’s where I watch a lot of videos, doesn’t seem to be a balance between amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of advertising per content. Like it would be nice if I’m watching a 30 second video to choose not to
⏹️ ▶️ John put a long ad in front of that. And they try to do some things, like you don’t see ads in front of every video. If you’ve seen an ad today, the
⏹️ ▶️ John next one you’ll see is longer. Well, that, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, most people don’t know that that’s you that YouTube ads, the settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for those are set by the uploader. They choose whether to show ads on their videos and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether the ads are unskippable or not. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I did choose how long the ads are, because there are three second. You know, they’re very the ads of varying length. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like television where they have to be fixed length. As far as I can tell, I think there was a really quick Geico one that’s like, you can’t skip this Geico ad
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s already over that, which was clever. And then they had one on for twice as long to do
⏹️ ▶️ John their jingle or whatever. But anyway, those bother me more than like, the ads you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John on websites and stuff, even the ones that you have to dismiss, I have to admit, especially when I’m mobile, what annoys me way
⏹️ ▶️ John more than any ad like if I do say Marco, I’m annoyed by trying to hit the little x in the box and do all that stuff. But what annoys
⏹️ ▶️ John me way more is after I successfully dismiss the ad, that I can’t scroll the freaking web page because of
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll jacking or some thing. I just want to read the content. And very often, I find that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, I’ve dismissed the ad, the page is loaded, I do scroll, scroll, scroll, it snaps you back to the top,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do scroll, scroll, I accidentally hit something and it goes through like, because it registered my scroll as a tap because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do some weird janky scrolling thing. That annoys me more than ads, I have a fairly high tolerance
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, like Casey, I have ad banner blindness, major case of ad banner blindness, so they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t bother me that much. And even the ones that like, Like I try to go to an article and a big ad pops up, like those
⏹️ ▶️ John are gross, but if I’m really interested in the article, a lot of people in the chat room are like, oh, just don’t go to the site. Like, no, I’ll, I’ll click
⏹️ ▶️ John through the ad if I, if I think the article is going to be really good underneath it. I prefer not to have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, but it’s not the end of the world to me. And I don’t run a, a, an ad
⏹️ ▶️ John blocker in Safari, although the main reason I run ad blocker in Safari gets back to what I think is the most
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting part of this web content blocking thing that Apple’s coming out with.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t run it because of my machine empathy mentioned in previous shows. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how Safari extensions work. Safari extensions came out for Safari on the Mac. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like made with web technologies, you can just make a bunch of little data files and images and a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of JavaScript code. And you can with your JavaScript code, you can do crap to web pages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And from a machine empathy perspective, it means wait a second, every time I load a web page, an arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John collection of JavaScript gets to run and decide if it needs to do something because that’s the only way you can tell like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s some filters you can do on apply to this URL or whatever, but like, but yeah, like, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to somewhere in the process of loading the page say, Now, by the way, in addition to everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that is actually run on this page, at some point, we’re going to allow this extension to run its blob of JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John is just arbitrary. And then this next extension can run its JavaScript this next extension can run its JavaScript. And that is horribly
⏹️ ▶️ John inefficient. Even if it like tries to pre compile the JavaScript or whatever, like JavaScript is not
⏹️ ▶️ John that fast. And I just don’t want arbitrary code munging every web page. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would imagine that like anyone who does any browser benchmarking, any kind of extensions running would totally destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John your benchmarks because it’s like mandatory. minimum overhead keeps going up every
⏹️ ▶️ John time you add an extension. So people like, Oh, I love extensions, I have 17 installed. That’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, those came out for us 10. But they were not available on iOS for a variety of reasons, you know, keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t even available on iOS back then, like it was, it was the pre iOS eight days, but certainly not available on iOS. And no one thought
⏹️ ▶️ John that was a big deal. Because I was just doesn’t allow that kind of extensibility. But now content blockers come out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they are written in an entirely different way. They are data driven, they’re compiled to an optimized form,
⏹️ ▶️ John the matching expressions that that you can do are very limited. It’s not just like, you know, full fledged pro
⏹️ ▶️ John regular expressions, but you do whatever the hell you want, because it’s trivially easy to write a regular expression that like, takes
⏹️ ▶️ John till the heat death of the universe to try to match something right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even in this session, which will put the link in the show notes, which you can watch for free, you don’t have to be a developer
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything. Apple even emphasizes like the ordering of the rules like they are so gung ho and the efficiency like
⏹️ ▶️ John not only are going to take your crap and compile them to some super optimized form and confine you to a limited set
⏹️ ▶️ John of wildcards and stuff. And then like, okay, and also try to put them in the order that’s the most efficient. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we know as soon as possible whether we need to apply this blocking or not. That is so far from the
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10 Safari extension philosophy. And that’s basically what it takes to get on to iOS, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a totally different mindset. And so I’m excited by that mindset. And does
⏹️ ▶️ John that mindset deal with that help help me get over my machine empathy problem to install Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John ad blocker? It gets over the technical part, but I’m still faced with two things. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sort of ethical concerns of like, the sites that I visit I want to support. I don’t have a problem with ads that they run,
⏹️ ▶️ John even on mobile, even the fairly intrusive ones. Like I read Macworld, the auto-playing videos
⏹️ ▶️ John is a bridge too far obviously, but Macworld had a thing that would slide out of the corner and stuff and it annoyed me, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason for me to stop reading Macworld? No. Like, if you’re publishing a website, the advice
⏹️ ▶️ John I would give is do not annoy people with your ads, but I have a pretty high tolerance for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is I’m always afraid ad blockers are going to break websites or stop
⏹️ ▶️ John me from seeing something that I’m supposed to be seeing in an article because it is just kind of a heuristic of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, it looks like this or it’s from this host or whatever. And you can have good ad blockers or bad ad blockers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, some of the most popular ad blockers allow advertisers to pay for their ads to be whitelisted.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s a whole other angle of ethical concerns and annoyance
⏹️ ▶️ John messed up. Yeah, I mean, like it’s it sounds worse than it is, but it’s still pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can read lots of articles about these kinds of things. But hey, you know, you can install any ad blocker you want or uninstall any ad blocker
⏹️ ▶️ John you want or whatever. But yeah, I’m not really enthusiastic about allowing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to screw up the web pages that I’m watching because I’m always afraid. Like we’ve all had the experience where we go to a web
⏹️ ▶️ John page and something doesn’t work on mobile or on desktop, you’re clicking around like Like maybe I should try a different browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe the site is just broken. You don’t know what the deal is. And I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John think, maybe the site is fine and the problem is one of these stupid extensions that I’m running that’s screwing things up. So I like my extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John to be very targeted. Like one of the extensions I run is that thing that stops
⏹️ ▶️ John that site, that stops you from copying and pasting text off a page, whatever that thing is. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that is very targeted. It’s stopping one particular company from doing one particular thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s annoying. And even that I worry about the efficiency of. I have that installed in Safari. And occasionally I go through
⏹️ ▶️ John an extension cleaning spree in Safari and I say, do I really need this extension? Turn it off, off, off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically the only extension I really stick with is my essential extension for Safari, which is the reload button.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most complicated extension, I believe it is one line of code. It says reload the page. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is essential. And even that one I worry, there’s lots of different ways you can do a reload button. A lot of people want a stop reload
⏹️ ▶️ John button, like when the page is loading it’s a stop, right? And then when the page is done, becomes a reload button, like the old reload button
⏹️ ▶️ John and so far used to, and the one that’s in the address bar currently does now, right. But to do that, you would have to run more
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript every page load. So I refuse my raid, my reload button has no intelligence. It is not much
⏹️ ▶️ John your page with JavaScript because I just like I wanted to be as efficient as possible. If I could have a super duper compiled
⏹️ ▶️ John version of the reload button, say if Apple could add it to the stupid customized toolbar sheet, then I would just get rid of my
⏹️ ▶️ John extension. But not that you’re bitter, they seem
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do that. And I have to hit that little tiny X circle arrow thing in the far side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ice bar. So anyway, yeah, Bob, I don’t, I’m not as strongly
⏹️ ▶️ John against ad blocking as an ethical and moral thing as some people are because I feel like the the social
⏹️ ▶️ John contract of the web is not that when you make an HTTP request,
⏹️ ▶️ John your browser must honor all of the content that comes back and like that’s not I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how the internet works. But practically speaking, if you visit a website a lot and you want that website
⏹️ ▶️ John to stay in business, forget about morals or ethics. You should,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want the website to still be around, you should show their ads so that will help them still be
⏹️ ▶️ John around next week when you’re on their website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but there is one other side of the ethical thing though that I think is worth pointing out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you visit a page that is unknown to you, you click on a link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, you go to a page you’ve never been to before, you don’t know what to expect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t know what that page is like, you don’t know what they will have on there, and without your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge or your permission, that page can sell your data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And without, like, so, you know, if they have a Google ad embedded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, then just by visiting that page, without you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a choice in the matter, you will be giving Google information about you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that information will follow you all over the web after that. Just like John and you, what was it? Was it lights,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside lights? What was it, lamps? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it isn’t cut and dry ethically to say, you know, you should let a page load its ads. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, well, you’re also letting the page load a bunch of stuff that you might object to. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is actually, they’re actually taking something from you also, without necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking you first. They’re taking your data, they’re offering your data to other people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s tricky, it’s a blurry line. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, I hate what the web has become so much. It hurts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me because I love the web, and I’ve grown up with the web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part, and I want the web to still be healthy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much about it that’s just gross and deteriorating rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and offensive. And I don’t see a good way out of this, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, ad blockers could be a better social signal, like a better feedback mechanism,
⏹️ ▶️ John because right now ad blockers are still the domain of the nerds. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not into tweaking things on your computer, they’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of a one-way thing where you just, oh, I have an ad blocker installed I don’t see ads and most of them have a way for you to whitelist
⏹️ ▶️ John the sites that you like and so on and so forth But that’s not like a regular person probably doesn’t know ad blockers exist
⏹️ ▶️ John at all If they do they just install it and never think about it again They’re not gonna be in there tweaking the setting and writing their little regular expressions to whitelist
⏹️ ▶️ John and blacklist stuff, right? Someone the chat room says tons of people use them I don’t want to reveal
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers from websites that I’ve been affiliated with in the past But it is not as many as
⏹️ ▶️ John you might think even among the super nerds But anyway, regardless,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the people who use them, no one’s sitting there carefully tweaking their white and black lists to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of manage their list of sites that they want to give money to, essentially, by viewing
⏹️ ▶️ John their ads. It’s kind of like fire and forget. It’s like, oh, the web is better now and now I’ll never think about it again.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there is a possibility that Apple, by sort of opening this door to mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John ad blockers on their platform, which is a fairly popular platform, I don’t want it to be the same thing where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, okay, like Marco said, a million ad blockers are available on day one. Everyone downloads a bunch of them, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two of them become really popular. Everyone who has an iPhone says, Oh, you got to install this thing. Why? Because you won’t see
⏹️ ▶️ John ads in the web and they install it and that’s it. It would be nicer if there was some sort of interface
⏹️ ▶️ John in in Safari or something, a friendly interface that would prompt you say the
⏹️ ▶️ John first time you visit a site. I don’t know that would be annoying every time you to decide like some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John interface to let regular people decide whether they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do this ad blocking thing. So it isn’t just like an arms race between ads are blocked everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and then websites trying to defeat the ad blockers. And everyone just has ad blockers installed because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really easy to do. Everyone who gets an iPhone knows the first thing you do is you download your favorite ad blocker. And that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a stupid arms race. And we’re all victims. It would be nicer if
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a better you know, you could say, well, the feedback I mechanism is you just don’t go to the site. But it’s not that simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like Marco said, there’s lots of sites that you read for years and years and become part of your life and their ads just start to get worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, we all think it’s dumb, like, on both sides of the thing. It’s like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not the way you’re going to save your site. Like just look at what happened to Macworld. Like their ads got more and more aggressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did that make the site more and more popular, more and more profitable? No, everybody got laid off. It’s a skeleton crew.
⏹️ ▶️ John The print edition is done is gone. Like, it’s a desperation move towards the end. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never seen it work. I’ve never seen a that’s having trouble monetizing get more and more aggressive ads and it’s a negative
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback loop that just drives more people away and makes your problem worse. So maybe it helps
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s executives bottom line for one quarter or something but in the end it’s just hastening the
⏹️ ▶️ John end of your profitability and your publication. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if a friendlier interface to ad blockers is the right kind of signal but people just silently complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John and cursing when they go to sites is not great and the alternative of just well just don’t visit those
⏹️ ▶️ John sites I don’t know if that’s really feasible what if like you know if your
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite site for whatever news stop starts doing really terrible ads it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you stopping to patronize that stopping going to that site is gonna suddenly make an equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John site pop up overnight right you’re what you’re signing up for is perhaps multiple years of never have
⏹️ ▶️ John been having a site where you can read about whatever your favorite hobby is right you know if If you’re really into
⏹️ ▶️ John like woodworking and your favorite woodworking site that you’ve been going to for like literally a decade starts running really
⏹️ ▶️ John aggressive ads and the people saying like, oh, just don’t go to the site anymore. Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ John what if all my friends are there and I want to read about woodworking or whatever? Well, that site will go out of business and five years
⏹️ ▶️ John later, maybe someone else will found a new site and build a new community where you’ll have the same. Like it would be nicer just to tell
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are running this site, this is not a great way for you to get more money. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John think of subscriptions or like, I don’t know that you can’t. silly thing where you’re like talking to the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who run the site and giving them advice. But like, it’s an imperfect signaling mechanism, basically, is what I’m saying between the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are dissatisfied and the people who are running the sites. And it doesn’t seem like we can get those things connected.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like, the people running the sites do one terrible thing, people using the sites are sad, and then the site goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway. And it seems like not a great system.
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⏹️ ▶️ John One more quick thing on Apple’s content blocking that I forgot to mention. I mentioned that they had this limited
⏹️ ▶️ John matching vocabulary and that in the session they were telling you about the order to put things and I’m going by memory here maybe Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John can confirm or deny but wasn’t there a thing where they will actually refuse to load your
⏹️ ▶️ John blocker if they can determine that it is particularly inefficient does that ring a bell Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t looked too far into it I think they said something like that but they in in the call to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco register your your blocker code with it there is there’s there’s a callback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that get. So maybe there’s an error that will pass you. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, like I was actually surprised by the degree to
⏹️ ▶️ John which Apple is so adamant about optimization here. And I think it just highlights
⏹️ ▶️ John like the different worlds like on the Mac, I do whatever you want to run JavaScript, nerve page, whatever, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John even that was probably foolish. And probably why, you know, they’re revisiting that now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to go on iOS, it’s like, No, we can’t. We can’t have that. We need to just get everything super
⏹️ ▶️ John efficient and compiled. Because I think a part of it is also because people are going to be downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John them from the App Store. So far extensions are not hard to install, but they’re a hell of a lot harder than getting downloading
⏹️ ▶️ John an app from the App Store. So you know, Apple knows once they roll this thing out,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people are going to be tapping those icons and getting in there. So and if they did allow people to run
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary JavaScript and every page on the phone, everyone’s phones would be paralyzed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s also kind of a privacy nightmare. I mean, that’s the other problem with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, iOS and now the watch are Apple’s chances to do things like we have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things right. So let’s let’s look at what went wrong on the Mac and let’s not reproduce or not on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the PC industry, let’s say, and let’s not reproduce those problems on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So tell us about trim support in in OS 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know much about it. I’ve just been reading these I just actually installed 1011
⏹️ ▶️ John very recently and haven’t played with that extensively but 9to5Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and several other sites have pointed out that Apple has when I first saw this I’m like oh someone
⏹️ ▶️ John figured out how to hack El Capitan to support third party SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John with trim and all that other stuff but no this is apparently an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John supplied thing command that ships with the OS called trim force. That sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. Yes, and it would be a reference to well, I’m not going to tell you it’d be a reference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow, I didn’t get your non reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And when you run it, a little message that says you know, okay, well, basically, we’re going to enable
⏹️ ▶️ John trim on your third party drives. But Apple, let’s read the text. By using this in tool
⏹️ ▶️ John to enable trim, you agree that Apple is not liable for any consequences and being result including but not limited to data
⏹️ ▶️ John loss or corruption. Basically Apple’s washing your hands and like fine you want to enable trim on a drive that we haven’t tested
⏹️ ▶️ John and qualified to work with trim correctly feel free not our problem anymore which is how
⏹️ ▶️ John the trim enabler always was it’s just that in Yosemite I believe when they did the kernel
⏹️ ▶️ John extension signing thing the only way you could enable trim on third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs was to turn off like the thing that verified all the kernel extensions were signed and blah blah blah and
⏹️ ▶️ John so now they’re giving you a way to more safely use trim
⏹️ ▶️ John on your SSDs at your own risk and I’m not entirely sure if I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this on my drives. Oh and by the way the story says this is actually on 10.10.4 I assume it’ll be in 10.11 as well
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not sure if I’m going to do it on my SSDs because I have the question that this
⏹️ ▶️ John warning talks about like have not validated drive blah blah blah I haven’t validated my my
⏹️ ▶️ John drive either. I have no idea if enabling trim support is going to cause data loss on my drive. Well, also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if data loss, like if you didn’t agree to this, isn’t Apple already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identified from any kind of data loss or corruption that you might suffer on your computer? Like, does that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually achieve any new protection for Apple they didn’t already have?
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t hurt. Like some lawyer probably loves that the text is there. But yeah, like the bottom line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they have the file system thing that’s already there corrupting everything slowly over time anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah. As all the end user license agreements say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this program is not suitable for any purpose or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever the text is.
⏹️ ▶️ John We do not promise that this does anything successfully. It just sits. Anyway, it’s nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a warning so people know what they’re getting into. I’m sure my drive is fine. I’m sure there’s a million people who have my exact same drive mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John installed on their PCs or their Linux systems and they have trim support enabled and it’s working fine for them or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t want to be the guinea pig. And like as I said when I got this big honking SSD, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John use it in the Apple, the quote-unquote Apple supported way, until I
⏹️ ▶️ John see some problems. If I fill my disk and things start slowing down, then I know where to turn it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can go to the, you know, the trim force thing. If I don’t see any slowdowns and everything still seems
⏹️ ▶️ John lighting fast, why would I risk it? I’m just going to stick with what I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what Apple thinks is the appropriate thing to do with this drive, even though they’re almost certainly wrong because every
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD needs trim because there’s no way the drive can tell which blocks are free blah blah blah we all know about this see past shows
⏹️ ▶️ John where we talked about SSD and trim but we never talk about the same thing twice until I run into that problem
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t want to deal with this at all but I am glad they’re they’re giving a nice way to enable it because trying to hack
⏹️ ▶️ John the system and disable the kernel extension signing verification was just the worst possible way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that a supported way is great and so I applaud this effort in Yosemite 1010 for
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly and I assume El Capitan as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. All right. Thanks a lot for our three sponsors this week, mail route, hover and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatic and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. It was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin, S-I-R, A-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John USA Syracuse. It’s accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hot here today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have central air? I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do not. The weather is fine, but the computer room is on the sunny side
⏹️ ▶️ John when the sun goes down, so it gets hot late in the day. I usually crank the AC in here to get it cooled down,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think you would ever do central air in that house, or is it just too crazy to run all the ducts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no. That’s on the list. Maybe next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, as you say, if you’re going to have your house invaded and your attic invaded, because you usually have to put the units and stuff in the attic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might as well roll it in this year if you can, because if they’re going to be there tearing everything
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not they’re just doing windows remember this all everything is outside except for the windows No windows are basically still outside
⏹️ ▶️ John that they just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re doing straight replacements So they’re keeping the framing or they reframing them to
⏹️ ▶️ John no same framing same size when the same trim and everything Yeah Like they’re the idea is to be as
⏹️ ▶️ John minimally invasive We’ll see how this goes But to be as minimally invasive to the interior as possible because all they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is Taking off just enough of the trim to get the new windows in nothing. Nothing else is being done inside. No walls
⏹️ ▶️ John no floors, no ceilings, no nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because minimally invasive always is true when contractors and doctors and surgeons
⏹️ ▶️ John say it. We’ll see. I mean, if they make a big mess of it, it’s gonna be a big mess
⏹️ ▶️ John until probably next year when we do, when we start doing interior stuff. But going from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gotta start somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we gotta protect from the weather and then that preserves the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John and then we can fix the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and my construction just ended. Casey, is yours ended yet or is it still finishing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My house construction is done, asterisk. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kitchen is done, except there’s some tweaks that need to be made to the cabinets and the installers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of whom is Aaron’s cousin, knows that that has to happen except last week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I think it was last week he was on his honeymoon, so he’s a little preoccupied. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then we kind of neglected to put two and two together and realize that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, now that we have this beautiful new kitchen with beautiful new cabinets and beautiful new countertops, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area where a backsplash would be, these countertops and whatnot do not match where the old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey countertops were. So the wall is just freaking destroyed in anywhere that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to have countertop but does not. So it’s not painted. There’s a hole in one part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a mess. And so we need to figure out what to do about a backsplash and have somebody come in and do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, there’s, there’s no way I would even say done asterisk. If you still have tile and finishing work to do, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do, then, uh, that’s still another two weeks at least.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sure as hell hope not. It shouldn’t be that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s, it’s, it’s two days of work, but it’s going to be two weeks until it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John done. You have to learn the thing that everyone, whoever has home repairs, uh, learns is that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can live in a house that is quote unquote, not, not done being constructed,
⏹️ ▶️ John like how long do you think you can live with your crazy looking walls in the kitchen actually surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John long time like as long as you have running water and plumbing and toilets and maybe washing
⏹️ ▶️ John machines and electricity everything else can be crap for years and years and I’ve known many people
⏹️ ▶️ John whose houses have been missing in essential elements like that for a very long time so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well that’s the problem is Aaron and I I don’t think we’re procrastinators I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think we’re lazy but we will find other higher priority things to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if we don’t conquer this backsplash issue quickly. And so because of that, now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re recording a little early because of Aaron and I, you know, we’re going to be busy for a few days, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because we know ourselves well enough to know that we will never accomplish these things if we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light a fire under our own butts right now, we really, as soon as we’re done doing this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next week, we’re going to try to get the squared away as quickly as possible because otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be in fifteen years when we go to sell the house that we think to ourselves, oh you know what, that backsplash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we should have done in 2015, now that it’s 2030, maybe we should go do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m telling you that I think that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I’m telling you that, you know, Casey, your suspicion is right, that home construction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like inertia. It has this inertia to it where like when you’re in it, you can look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at something that’s unfinished or broken or just kind of bad and say, oh let’s do that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But once you are not not currently doing construction. Once it is over, once everyone’s out of your house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last thing you wanna do is start up another thing again. Even if it’s something small, like, oh, you know, we really gotta get somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in here for two days to do this backsplash and maybe a couple of trim pieces here or there if that’s necessary as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. But getting started from zero, it requires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much motivation and effort and work that you’re not gonna wanna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So, right now, before you’ve settled back down again, get it done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Especially because a tile backsplash to go between your counters and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your cabinets, that’s not a whole lot of tile. That’s not a big job, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not going to be a massive imposition or expense or time to get it done. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might as well get it done now. Because, again, otherwise you’ll turn into John and just not do it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the way to live, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just complain about it every year for the next 15 years until you sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the house. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to complain. You just you just like I’ve learned to not care about many things
⏹️ ▶️ John In my house that are falling apart as long as the functional things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work See, and I don’t want to get myself back in that position because I don’t think your house was ever falling apart Was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, but that’s how we had an air conditioner that didn’t work for the eight years. We’ve been in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, well didn’t work as relative. Of course, you know, it cooled Well, let me put it to you this way once we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AC redone I noticed that our garage is stifling hot now and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it never used to be that way. Well, you know why? It’s because the furnace, heat pump, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s called, used to be in the garage. Now there’s one under the house, one in the attic, and it must have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been leaking so much air-conditioned air into the garage that I thought, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we do happen to have an insulated garage, I thought we were just super well insulated. Oh, no, my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As it turns out, we were cooling our garage as well as our house. house. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, so we need to get the backsplash done. For those of you who are going to tweet or email
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me telling me how easy it is to do a backsplash, don’t care. I’m incapable. I know I’m incapable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No matter what you think you know in order to make this job doable, I promise you I am inept. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to happen. I’m good with ones and zeros. I’m good with flapping my gums, and that’s about where it ends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I will have somebody come in and do that. And I also forgot to mention, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my house has done asterisk, what is it, cross symbol? Because I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we also didn’t ever have the gas line run, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the upstairs furnace and perhaps the downstairs furnace, because despite the fact that you guys believe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no winter in Virginia, we have been spoiled by gas heat during the, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four-month fall that happens in Virginia when winter normally happens. And so because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to have a heat pump where it just coughs up like mildly warm air, I want to continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have gas heat. And since there’s now a new furnace in the attic and the old furnace got moved, well, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve got thrown away, but the downstairs furnace is now under the house. Now that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gas line needs to be plumbed. But after our AC guy was in the house for two weeks, and we were moved out of the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for two weeks, all of us needed a break. So he’s going to have to come back in a few weeks and do that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So our home construction is done, asterisk cross symbol. How about you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god. No you get get him there as soon as possible. I’m telling you like the longer he’s gone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The the worst the the idea of him coming back will be to you You just you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to get it done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now. I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t listen to John get it done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no John is John is unequivocally wrong and as soon as I say that the internet Rises up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and comes to his defense, but I’m telling you internet John is wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong free wrong for you. Maybe not wrong for me. I guess this is a preference. What I’m saying is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s okay to live in an unfinished house for a long period of time, and I know people do that, but if you can’t bear
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of living in an unfinished house, then by all means continue to repair things. And in fact, you may want to use your
⏹️ ▶️ John construction inertia to get an AC unit installed in your garage so your car doesn’t get too hot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so I actually have a question about that. So in your state of non-winter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that apparently needs two furnaces for a state that doesn’t have winter. Allegedly, right. you have an insulated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco garage. Why, because like it seems like most of the problem in Virginia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be trapping the heat in in the summertime, like most people who live in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco northeast, like me and john don’t have insulated garage because the houses are too old. Nobody built them. I don’t have an insulated house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right we’re lucky to have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so so you know i’m wondering and i don’t have an insulated garage and it’s it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not amazing, but it’s fine. It doesn’t It actually is cooler in the garage in the summertime than it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside, and my car is nice and cool. I don’t have to blast the AC when I get into my car in the garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summertime because it isn’t that hot because it wasn’t sitting in the sun. So I wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you need the insulated garage for, and is it causing more harm than good?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s causing more harm than good, but I can tell you right now I am well out of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comfort zone. The reason I have an insulated garage is because we moved into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house with an insulated garage. It wasn’t a deliberate choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It wasn’t a deliberate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice. It wasn’t a deliberate choice. It wasn’t a deliberate choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It wasn’t a deliberate choice. Right. Right. It wasn’t a deliberate choice. And it’s not like drywalled or anything. Basically, in between the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey studs, at some point, somebody had thrown in the little pink insulation like packets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there’s a technical term for it. I don’t know what it is. Don’t care. But anyway, so most of the garage—or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I don’t know. only the back wall and I don’t remember if the one side exterior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wall is insulated or not. Now, my father, who is a little bit crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has decided that even though he doesn’t have an insulated garage for whatever reason, and he lives 45
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes west of me, he has put that same kind of insulation on his garage doors,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I know there’s a reason for it. And I know the garage doors tend to leak a bit, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still not entirely sure what he’s after on that one. And it’s funny because when he did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the insulation into the garage doors or had it put in or whatever It ended up that he needed to have the garage door
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people come back because now the springs weren’t strong enough to raise the damn Car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it was all this new weight on it But um, but what about your construction because you were doing some as well, right Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine is totally done We moved back into it. Well, no asterisk asterisks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you have the asterisk and the little T I have the little double bar T. Oh, okay, okay Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think those characters exist outside of Asterix.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. I’ve never seen them, you know. Anyway, so we as part of…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the main rooms that we had done are done, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still have to wait for like one light fixture to come in that just needs to be put on the ceiling, because it was back ordered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then we have… we also tacked on to the job a leaky skylight in our… in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different… in our upstairs bathroom. Totally, totally far away from what we working on but we figured we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people here and we had this leaky skylight that keeps leaking water and rotting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support beam that it’s sitting on so we might as well get that fixed too so we don’t rot our house away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like John. Like John yeah because water is the enemy of houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so yeah that’s we still have to get that done.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the thing that I am fixing the water part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did you did you have that because of the god-awful winter that you had or did yours this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, I actually I we didn’t actually have any water inside our house Unlike many of our neighbors who could be seen during
⏹️ ▶️ John the winter up on their roofs Futilely trying to scrape snow off and and hack at their ice dams
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we didn’t have any water in the house. But anyway, yeah The outside of the house where the water does touch is
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly dying. And so we’re getting all that done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think my plan for for our future retirement house is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to either move to California where it does not rain or or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Build an entire house just out of like glass and plastic like just nothing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can rot from from water
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s what modern houses
⏹️ ▶️ John are made are made out of these days They did you know if you get anything replaced on your house like say they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace I don’t know like the soffits or something or like even just front door stuff They
⏹️ ▶️ John replace it with non wood materials for the most part like these PVC
⏹️ ▶️ John or various other composites that just do not rot like there’s no point in making
⏹️ ▶️ John something that you know is going to come in contact with water out of wood these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost well and also like even when you use wood or drywall like they have pressure-treated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wood they have mold resistant drywall these things cost a little bit more but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one uses them by default except homes on homes and no one else does and it’s So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we’ve had a lot of work done on our house total that involves lots of wood. And we asked for mold resistant drywall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time. And they would only put it in the bathroom. We’re like, come on. They were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shady and they were weird. So, the second time we had a much better contractor and they had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace, they found a bunch of rot around the big sky that we were replacing in this main roof area of our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house. There’s tons of rotted support beams, rotted joists in the roof around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this area. that of course when we got a new roof three years ago, they didn’t find.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Love those guys. But we just asked, we’re like, hey, since you’re replacing all this anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has already rotted from water leaking in, can you use pressure treated wood this time? And at first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were like, well, and then they were like, yeah, I guess we can. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, why would you ever not use it? Yes, it costs a little bit more, but it costs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less than doing the job a second time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I, ugh. Of course, you weigh less. They’d love to do the job a second time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe you’ve hit the nail on the head
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Yeah. And for load bearing things, it’s more difficult. But I was mostly talking about like trim pieces and stuff like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John trim stuff around your door or the soffits of your house or whatever. Like just make that a lot of PVC and you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to worry about because it’s not load bearing. It doesn’t matter that it’s floppy. It’s all just decorative stuff, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that’s in contact with the ground, like the little thing underneath your front door that’s against whatever your porch is
⏹️ ▶️ John using wood. There’s just crazy these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. So John, yours has or has not started yet? Has not. Okay. And do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a start date for that endeavor?
⏹️ ▶️ John We have our third start date so far. So that’s going according to expectations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Exactly. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, yeah. And I forgot to mention that, uh, I already have started the to-do list for next year, which is roof for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, because the house is about 10, no, I’m sorry, 20 years old almost, so it’s about time for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. And I’m thinking we might do windows as well. So basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each year I’m driving cars of various quality off a cliff in terms of how much I’m spending.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s delightful. You should, you should, everyone should buy a house. It’s the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah. Your house is 20 years old and you’re thinking of replacing the windows, right? So we’re getting windows replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ John The windows we’re keeping are the ones from like the 80s.
⏹️ ▶️ John windows that we’re keeping because they’re the quote unquote new windows
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’re thinking of getting replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones we’re replacing it from 1932
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh god, your house isn’t insulated. You’re right. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be soon Sort of or it was it was at one time insulated by a few pieces of newspaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have since fallen down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Into the wall cavity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re just sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John on the bottom. It’s mostly insulated with mouse fur like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco When they go up and down the
⏹️ ▶️ John walls their little fur rubs off. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our insulation Well, you know fur I mean if you get a lot of it that would that wouldn’t be that bad
⏹️ ▶️ John Our mice are small, it takes a lot of mice to fill our wall cavities.