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

183: I Filed a Radar

More on car software, VBR MP3s, Wi-Fi calling, TiVo, and diversity.

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Automatic: Your smart driving assistant. Get $20 off the new Automatic Pro with this link.
  • TrackR: Find lost items in seconds. Get 30% off your entire order with code ATP.
  • Betterment: Investing made better.

MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Car-software responsiveness
  2. Follow-up: Audio drift
  3. VBR MP3 developments
  4. Sponsor: Betterment
  5. Safe adoption of VBR seek support
  6. Sponsor: TrackR (code ATP)
  7. Wi-Fi calling at home
  8. Casey’s iMac
  9. Sponsor: Automatic (code ATP)
  10. TiVo ends support for 1999 model
  11. Twitter’s Verified quality filter
  12. Apple’s white-employee ratio
  13. Ending theme
  14. Post-show: Instagram Snapchat

Car-software responsiveness

⏹️ ▶️ John It is so hot in this room and so humid

⏹️ ▶️ John the humidity has been brutal here It’s only 77 degrees and I’m dying in this room because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so humid and of course It’s probably 90 degrees in this room.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel great air conditioning’s on I haven’t put my slippers on mid-show because my feet were getting a little bit cold

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we should probably actually get the show started, huh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, that’s making in the show none of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on No, ah, so here, you know how I’m gonna make you put some of that in the show watch this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so speaking of cars, we should probably do some follow-ups, starting with more reasons for Q and X.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, Casey, do we have any follow-up? I hate you so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. So Casey, do we have any follow-up?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably start with some follow-up, Marco. You make an excellent point. And we had an individual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey write in with more reasons for using Q and X. And these actually were the,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my ears and eyes, the best reasons I’ve heard yet. And what it basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boiled down to was incredibly fast boot times are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally important for cars because you don’t want to say have to wait until you’re five minutes down the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey road before your air conditioning or your radio turns on or something like that. And the other reason that this individual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gave was, you know, if you think about it, the instrument clusters on a lot of cars are often driven by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of display or perhaps driven by a signal that’s coming off some QNX-derived

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. And those need to be real-time. I mean, that data needs to show you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how fast you’re going right freaking now. And so having a real-time OS like QNX

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes that sort of thing a lot easier.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steven Leonard Like Tesla’s system is not based in QNX. I’m pretty sure it’s just some kind of Linux. And you can tell. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can tell because like, you know, some like, again, like I said last time, like most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the time it works fine. But sometimes like we were upstate and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard we were driving around. I was following Nav Directions and the map was getting a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonky like it was starting to like flick out and slow down a little bit and like not update quickly enough and that’s that’s great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too like you know when you’re following a map doing turn by turn and it just doesn’t update so you’re looking at like the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn from 30 seconds ago instead that’s fun and then there was one point

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it made the turn signal clicking sound when the turn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco signal wasn’t on. Uh, what? There was in one of the like I described

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last episode that I’ve had to reboot it three times so far over like three or four months whatever it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the times that I had to reboot it immediately beforehand the turn signal was not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clicking like it would turn on and the light would the indicator would blink in the dash but you wouldn’t hear the click noise so obviously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clicking noise is made by the center console computer like that it’s adding it to the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound system in all likelihood anyway so so the sim

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the symptoms that I knew something was wacky this time was the turn signal noise started clicking when the turn

⏹️ ▶️ Marco signal was not on. I was driving straight down a road. I hadn’t touched it. Like that was it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that I rebooted it again a few days ago. Goodness. So yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have pre… and when it’s not booted, the turn signal does not… like when it’s rebooting, you can turn and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the indicator on the dashboard did blink when it was… when the computer was rebooting. Like it was still blinking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I assumed this signal was still on. I hope the light was still blinking outside the car, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sound. And again, it’s like one of those things where like when you tie these things to software,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you are at the whim of the software’s stability, responsiveness,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uptime, you know. It’s similar to like one of the things that I didn’t like so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much when I wore the Apple Watch is so many interactions are tied to force

⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch and when you push really hard on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco face and you expect that button click, even though it’s not really a button, even though it’s all fake

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and simulated, you expect that better click back immediately as if it were

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a button. And the same thing with all the Force Touch trackpads, they have the same requirement. It has to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco respond like the physical object that it is mimicking. It has to be quick, it has to be immediate.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There can’t be any delay. Well, on the watch, the watch is very slow hardware-wise, and sometimes the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco software gets gummed up a little bit, and so you push, and sometimes there’s a delay before it actually clicks back at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. And it totally breaks the illusion, it makes it feel broken or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap or wrong or you know whatever the case may be. And that’s actually one concern I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the force touch home button that is rumored to be on the next iPhone. That like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if you push that home button and the iPhone software is like a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco overwhelmed or buggy or whatever. If you push that and you don’t get a click feel back for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few seconds or at all, like that’s gonna feel really broken really quickly. So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar thing with like this car stuff, like back to this follow up saying that QNX is really good for boot time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and response times of interactions. Like I totally get that and I totally respect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that because when you’re tying things to controls of a physical object, that makes a big difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John My complaint about the ancient iPhone 6 that I’m using is that I have a physical home button and I press it

⏹️ ▶️ John and it always goes in just like you said and I feel that physical feedback immediately, but you know what doesn’t happen immediately?

⏹️ ▶️ John Springboard doesn’t appear immediately. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t happen. I click it and then I look

⏹️ ▶️ John at my phone, I’m like, what are you doing? Well, I push the button. I know I pushed it because it went in and then it went

⏹️ ▶️ John out and then, oh, okay, now the animation is starting. I’m getting picky in my old age. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Getting picky? What you should really do to make it seem like your phone is even older, instead

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of saying my old iPhone 6, you should say my first iPhone, which I’m still using. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think my iPhone 6 is getting slower, but I’m just getting less and less patient for like when

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t respond. I mean, and I know it’s not just because of slow, like my iPad Pro, the 9.7 inch iPad Pro, which is pretty darn

⏹️ ▶️ John fast, I still feel like when I hit the home button on that, sometimes I have to wait. I want that to be instant.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just wait for the new Touch ID sensor. It’s pretty damn fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I’ve used my wife’s phone. I know that the Touch ID sensor is fast. I’m just saying like, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like sometimes it’s not responding to me as immediately as I feel like it should.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows? Anyway, the other thing that this person had to say about, you know, why, why do cars

⏹️ ▶️ John have crappy hardware? We read some other feedback from someone who works on these systems,

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the, how the car manufacturers want to save money and pinch pennies. And I said that was silly. A

⏹️ ▶️ John couple of other factors that were also mentioned by many other people, but reiterated by this person is that there’s a long lead time on hardware

⏹️ ▶️ John that goes into cars. The development cycles are really long, so they have to pick hardware that’s available

⏹️ ▶️ John like three years before the car even comes out. And, you know, maybe it’s even longer. Maybe it’s like four or five years by

⏹️ ▶️ John the time comes out so even if you pick something that was current It’ll be like three four or five years old by the time it ships in the car

⏹️ ▶️ John And finally stuff in cars has to operate at extremes of temperature If you’ve ever left

⏹️ ▶️ John your phone on the dashboard or even in a sealed cubby inside your car like not in the Sun But just

⏹️ ▶️ John try taking your phone and putting it in the glove box or in the little console thing anywhere inside your car

⏹️ ▶️ John on a hot Day when you come back Chances are good after being away for several hours in the middle of the day

⏹️ ▶️ John your device will refuse to function because the temperature is too high and the chips in the car obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do that. They have to continue working even when they’re like 150 degrees or whatever and they

⏹️ ▶️ John have to continue working when it’s negative 40. These are all real temperatures, not crazy Celsius.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s similar like if you ever heard of like how slow the computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are on satellites or the space shuttle because like you hear stories about like how, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re still running something that’s about as fast as like a 486 or something like that. And like the reason one of the reasons

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they have to use such slow types of hardware is that they have to operate in extreme conditions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would just kill any you know, like the chip that’s in an iPhone. And so it’s similar, but less severe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a car. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s their excuse. But like, still, it’s a little bit ridiculous. They, you know, like I said, the washing machine chips

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using, like they’re slower than the ones in the space probes. The space probes have power PC six oh ones that are like rat

⏹️ ▶️ John hardened in them. And they’re using chips that are like from a Game Boy Advance. so

⏹️ ▶️ John it seemed worse. Or maybe Game Boy Advance is faster than that. Anyway, bottom line, we

⏹️ ▶️ John have the technology. We can make the hardware in cars better. And I think we probably wanna shorten

⏹️ ▶️ John up the cycle time on that too. I know it’s sort of all developed as one big unit, but

⏹️ ▶️ John you just can’t afford to do that. If a manufacturer can shave even just a year off of the cycle time, and they can have

⏹️ ▶️ John a year newer electronics, that can make a big difference, I think. Especially, like I said, as the infotainment

⏹️ ▶️ John systems and even the instrument clusters and all that stuff becomes a more important differentiator

⏹️ ▶️ John for cars, as the software becomes, like all other products, the software becomes a more important part of

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole product mixture, the company that can figure that software out is gonna have a big advantage.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right.

Follow-up: Audio drift

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about audio sync in quartz crystals, which we’ve gotten a lot of feedback about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Do you want to kind of cover this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. So basically so, you know the last couple of those we’ve discussed a while back I discussed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my podcast tool to automatically Sync up tracks that were recorded locally for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each person and a multi-person recording and then you know Sync it up to the master track because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to import those tracks manually and you sync it up the difference in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like the sense of time that each person’s audio interface had it caused a problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco called drift where if you sync up our recordings like right up front in the beginning of a show an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hour in we might be out of sync by like half a second or a second my microphone interface

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little you know converter in it that that samples the audio at 44,100 times per second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a very very very slightly different interpretation of what that means, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long a second is or how many times it has to be, than the one in case it’s your John’s computers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over time that very very tiny error can add up to quite a lot. And so this causes the problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of drift. So we’ve gotten lots of feedback about why this happens. Last episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I speculated that you’re making these these components, these physical components, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any little tiny bit of imprecision in making them when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are taking 44,000 samples per second over two hours.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco A very small variance in the clock performance of two different physical devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will cause them to disagree and to drift over time like this. So my speculation was basically like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not really possible to make something that is cheap and in a computer like this that is more accurate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that and we just have to deal with it. with it. And we had lots of people write in from the pro audio world

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and from some people even from like the scientific equipment world which is pretty cool. We have a lot of pretty cool listeners.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also confirming what I said last episode that that pro audio gear and actually people wrote in to say also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro film gear does similar things. Rather than trying to like sync up a bunch of different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio tracks afterwards in software from like different audio recording sources that might be on a film set

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in a recording studio, they use the concept of a master clock and they have like one device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s a clock generator or just a device that can that has an internal clock and pro gear has usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clock in and clock out ports on the back of it and so you could like they actually physically wire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all to each other and they like coordinate the clock based on one master source rather than each device keeping its

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own clock and therefore introducing this drift so lots of people wrote in saying that was true and then the best feedback

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got I very casually mentioned last episode that I had just anecdotally found

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that laptops are generally have more drift than like a Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a desktop or like an iMac and it turns out there’s some basis for this. The quartz

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crystals that vibrate at particular frequencies that create these clocks and these devices

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have to be so accurate, they are very dependent on stable temperature and if you if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a stable temperature that they’re operating or if they’re just two different ones operating at two different temperatures,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can cause these very slight differences. And laptops,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their internal components usually operate hotter than desktops, and they also fluctuate more.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Desktops have much bigger heat sink mechanisms, they have usually larger fans that are spinning faster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pushing more air over them, so desktops tend to be cooled better. And so I think that alone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might explain that little anecdotal thing that, yes, this is worse on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops or when you have like one desktop on one end and the other person on the other end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is using a laptop that might have more drift between them than if both people were using desktops or if both people are using

⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is related to what I the the reason I was I put the original feedback in

⏹️ ▶️ John follow up from like this seems weird to me you tell me we can’t make quartz crystals that are accurate because I remember from

⏹️ ▶️ John you know the world of watches which I’m not that involved in but they do you know the fancy mechanical rogers obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John are terrible at keeping time because they have a bunch of gears and stuff. But like, you know, a 10 cent quartz

⏹️ ▶️ John watch keeps amazing time. For, you know, for an entire year, maybe you would lose a second. It’s like, so how can you make

⏹️ ▶️ John a stupid plastic quartz watch that keeps amazing time and is very accurate over the course of an entire year? But we can’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John a quartz crystal for a computer that is equally accurate. And there are a bunch of factors that have

⏹️ ▶️ John to go into that having to do with the specifics of the quality of the crystals for even for a 10 cent watch or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But one of our readers, uh, readers, whatever readers wrote in to tell us

⏹️ ▶️ John that the advantage of watch has is that is essentially kept at an even temperature by being next

⏹️ ▶️ John to your skin. So you are essentially temperature regulating the watch the entire time you’re wearing it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the best thing for a quartz crystal. Actually, in scenarios where they really want them to be stable, they put them in a little,

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what they called it, but they put them in a little device that keeps it at a stable temperature. So having a

⏹️ ▶️ John watch and wearing it all the time keeps it accurate much more accurate than you know a laptop that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John The temperatures are going up and down and you’re putting it to sleep and you’re playing a game and it’s just it’s all over the map so

⏹️ ▶️ John This is all very explicable and now we should feel every time you learn anything about the actual

⏹️ ▶️ John analog physical world of components inside your computer It makes you feel scared and so now you can know that Thing

⏹️ ▶️ John regulating the clocks are pieces of crap too and change all the time There’s nothing you can do about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like whenever you learn anything about the analog component world, like you start like we we live in like this digital

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world where we think everything is just like, you know, a one is just on and a zero is just off.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, when you get down to the analog level of like the physical implementation of these chips and these components,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t that simple. And everything’s kind of like tolerances and variances and approximations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tricks. And it’s like it’s kind of amazing. All the stuff we have works at all as consistently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it does. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ John just the clock like you learned from like CPU design even just propagating the clock signal around the die of a large CPU is kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of it’s kind of sketchy at best and they have all sorts of phase lock loops and other things to make sure that that

⏹️ ▶️ John actually propagates everywhere and it’s the same everywhere and you don’t have delays and yeah um

⏹️ ▶️ John so anyway i think we are now all completely satisfied that we understand why Marco’s tool is necessary

⏹️ ▶️ John in life.

VBR MP3 developments

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of, in your quest to avoid doing actual work,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you actually filed a radar.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes I did.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very proud of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you want to tell us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this? Okay, so last episode in the after show I got

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my time in the Sun or whatever the metaphor is and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever floats your bubble and so I got I got to finally explain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the details of the mp3 file format and the the efforts I was trying to do with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco variable bitrate or VBR encoding and why podcasts couldn’t practically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use VBR encoding which basically boils down to the method to seek a VBR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file that you don’t have all of so like if you if you are playing a stream and and the user

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jumps ahead to a timestamp that’s way forward in the stream that you haven’t downloaded like the part of the file between those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two points, you can’t really know exactly what byte position to jump to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get to the timestamp 1 hour 30 without using these lookup tables at the beginning of a VBR

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file that just don’t have very much precision in the current standards or in the old standard.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re very imprecise and so over the course of a two-hour podcast you only have in the most common

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump table format you only have a hundred entries so you have you know minute precision at best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it might even be less than a minute precision. I’ve learned a lot since then. I did a lot of experimentation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I talked to a bunch of people, and I learned a lot about this. So I was recommending

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the use of this there’s an ID3 tag, it’s abbreviated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MLLT for MPEI location lookup table, and this is basically an ID3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tag version of the VBR offset jump table to tell you you know which bytes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco map to which timestamp so you can jump between the file easily without having to have downloaded the whole thing and just you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know scan through manually. The benefit of the ID3 tag is that it can be any size like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the VBR jump table thing is restricted to the size of like the one mp3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame that they shoved it into for compatibility reasons so it has to be like basically below a kilobyte

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so. The ID3 tag can be any length you want it to be so the ID3 tag version of this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be great because you can you can basically have arbitrary precision as much space as you’re willing to devote

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this and for me I was able to encode one second precision of the timestamps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with something like 16 kilobytes of a total jump table. So for a 45

⏹️ ▶️ Marco megabyte podcast, 16k for the jump table is fine and by having VBR you’re saving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 20 megs on the file size in that case so it’s totally worth the savings to embed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this little jump table. So I also heard from Devin Govett. After recording last episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I discovered a GitHub open source project called AudioCogs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a group of people who make JavaScript implementations of decoders for MP3,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AAC, a couple other audio formats, and a whole audio player all written in JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can decode and play these audio formats entirely in JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that support MLT tag, these proper VBR seek methods.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they didn’t, it’s an easy way for me to add support to this, because I could then have my site’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web player switch to this, and then I would eliminate a lot of this problem. Anyway, so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard from one of the authors of this, Devin Govett, we went back and forth a few times. Devin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco informed me that the Fraunhofer VBRI tag, which is an alternative version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that stupid 100 entry jump table, is basically a more precise

⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of that. It still has to fit within one mp3 frame, but instead of being 100

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bytes, it can be like 1.3 kilobytes. So that’s better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have more space, more precision. So I did some experimentation with that. A couple of problems came up though.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco First I discovered in the experimentation and going back and forth with Devin that not only does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s decoder not support the MLT or this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco VBRI tag that is the more precise version. Even that stupid little 100 byte version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the Zing tag that we talked about last episode, Apple doesn’t use it. Their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco decoder completely ignores it. It does read these tags to get the duration

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the files. So it’s parsing them, because the duration is also one of the fields in these tags.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it reads them for the duration, and if you edit them in a hex editor and you put any duration you want there, it’ll show up like in Quick Look and everything has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that duration. So we know it’s reading them, but it completely ignores any of the entries that are in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these seek tables that tell it which byte maps to which timestamp in any of these formats. It ignores all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. This is bad. So I basically wrote up a bug report and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco emailed some people inside Apple to say like you know like hey here’s here’s this problem having and you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if if you guys would support really any of these formats except for maybe that maybe this stupid 100

⏹️ ▶️ Marco byte one but if you’d support the Fraunhofer VBRI frame or the awesome

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MLT ID3 tag, either of those would provide usable precision

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a two-hour podcast to be able to seek reliably within it within one to ten seconds of the desired

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point as opposed to the stupid hundred byte one which is like a minute off and their their estimation which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be any amount off really and is frequently like 30 to 60 seconds off. Anyway, so I emailed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this around and I’ve made a blog post. I basically made as much noise as possible about this issue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve realized, and sorry for the massive diversion here, I like talking about ranty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff on a podcast where it doesn’t get me in trouble and where you guys can tame me a little bit and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rebut me. It’s better for me to reserve my blog for issues of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe greater importance or more boring topics or whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My blog is a great way to spread a message to people who don’t always follow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. And that is often the problem. Like when I get myself into hot water,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s often because a whole bunch of people who don’t follow me and don’t really get my context

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are reading something that I didn’t write very well and where I assume people would get my context and would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand me and they’d be the ones reading it. And that gets me into trouble. But something like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m requesting that Apple implement an esoteric standard of the MP3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco file format that’s 20 years old, that is really boring and doesn’t spread onto Business Insider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or CNBC. There’s not much about it that’s really controversial, although Hacker News found some things, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people would not find this controversial. So this, I think, is a very good use of my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blog, and it’s helping inform me how I should use my various outlets going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward. I found a giant bug report with example files and examples of why why their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way of just ignoring these seek tables for long VBR MP3s Was bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you know why that’s bad how you can fix it. That’s it. That’s nothing has happened yet on this front however, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gotten rumblings here and there that This that this bug report has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveled inside of Apple, but that’s all I know and I don’t know anything else That’s going on with it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is probably too late even if Apple decided I was right and they wanted to do this It is almost certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too late to get it into iOS 10 or Mac OS Sierra,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would just love for this to happen sometime soon. The main reason why I can’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AudioCogs and the AuroraJS, like the JavaScript version that I was telling you about a minute ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the HTML5 audio element can fetch a file from basically anywhere, but for JavaScript

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to fetch a file, you run into all these cores issues. And you also you can’t cross from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTTPS to HTTP and all these like all these restrictions of like, you know, for various web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco security purposes, all the restrictions on what JavaScript is allowed to fetch from.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for me to be able to play podcasts from arbitrary podcast hosts, I basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t use this thing, I could run a proxy. But if I do that, then the podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get unique hit information, really. So that’s no good. So it’s there’s a whole bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of crappy reasons why I, in practice, I can’t use the JavaScript approach

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of just decoding the whole file in JavaScript and basically running then running my own decoders. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m reliant on Apple’s I have to if if podcast VBR is ever going to happen, Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to build it into their decoders. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but hold on. So a couple of questions here. First of all, let’s assume you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey did desire to proxy it because this was that important to you for the web client. Why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey couldn’t you proxy each request individually? I mean, it’s a crud load of bandwidth, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there any other reason why you couldn’t do that? So at least all of these hits are unique, they’re just coming from you and not the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual person that’s asking for them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main problem with that is that even if you architected the proxy such that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every inbound request equaled one back-end outbound request…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which would be silly in general, but in this case may make sense?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so even if you did that, the request would still appear to be all coming from one IP address.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. So, and most, it’s kind of a hotly debated topic in the podcast world of like what counts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a download, you know, because there’s, it’s, as with most things, it’s complicated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so you can’t just say, oh, well, every hit you get, nope, doesn’t work that way, because that’s, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hit doesn’t match up to a listener necessarily. So anyway, most podcast hosts have their own

⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of what a download should count as. And most of them involve the IP address of the source

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way. So it might be like, you know, a unique download is like one IP,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like the IP has to be unique within a certain time interval for it to count as a unique download or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. Like there’s all these different tricks that people do. But basically, if all the requests

⏹️ ▶️ Marco came from my single IP that was running the proxy, it would not, people’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stats would undercount. That being said, I actually already wrote and run

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one such proxy. I already have this, that I designed exactly this way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that has exactly this problem. And the only reason that it’s not really a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, that it hasn’t gotten me into any hot water with anybody, is because it’s hardly ever used.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I designed it because Overcast has a Twitter card. On any share link I have Twitter cards. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you view a tweet with an Overcast link on Twitter’s website or in any other clients that support

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their cards, which is very few of them in practice, I show a whole little overcast embedded player and it works and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. You know, you can stream, you can do timestamps, it works perfectly. It’s just like the website but tiny. Twitter’s cards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco require that all assets loaded through them must be served over HTTPS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually have kind of like a little function, like a mapping, that many big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast hosts, including Libsyn, our host, many of them have like just like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple way that you can transform their insecure URLs into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTTPS URLs with a simple string replacement on certain things and everything. Some hosts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can just redirect. I can do a straight redirect and it’s fine, but not all hosts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually run this proxy that does this, that follows redirects. When it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco host that it knows about, it can send you along. When it’s not, it does that proxy of one-to-one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco connection mapping exactly the way you’d think. The only reason it isn’t a problem for either my bandwidth costs or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people getting mad at me is that the cards get pretty low usage, relatively speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not a lot of people play podcasts that way, as far as I know. So that’s the only reason that works. And to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer GlassZ underscore in the chat room, who said, send

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them something like the X forwarded for header. I do send X forwarded for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is a header that proxies use to tell what they’re fetching from the IP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the person fetching it from them. So it’s kind of a way to like forward the source IP.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Problem is you can’t trust that. So if you have like a podcast metrics thing that is trying to measure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like unique IPs in an honest fashion, you can’t really trust if somebody sends you an ex

⏹️ ▶️ Marco forwarded for header and you get a whole bunch of you get a whole bunch of requests from one real IP.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that IP says, Oh, I’m actually forwarding you these requests from these other 10,000 IPs. You really can’t trust

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you had said before, well, if Apple just implements this, then you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can start using it on the web because the HTML5 audio tag will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey support it, etc., etc. But what about your beloved Windows users? Or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey next year is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop, so what about them?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, we don’t have that many of them, honestly. Not a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Windows and use my app or follow the share links generated by my app or anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. I would love to change that because there are a lot of Windows users out there. I would love for more Windows people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the share links from Overcast because that would mean that the share links are being spread far and wide and that’s the whole point of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the share links. But reality is different. Reality is that they really don’t get much Windows usage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So that’s problem number one, or rather, dodge number one, where I can dodge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this issue. Same reason why I never test my websites in IE, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my audience and my customer base tend to have such incredibly low IE, or whatever IE is called

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. What is it called now? Edge. Edge. The Edge.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, the main reason why I don’t really need to care that much about this problem

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for other browsers other than like things that use Apple’s built-in decoders and my own app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because it’s only a problem for seeking to timestamps that haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been downloaded. That’s it. In all other ways VBR MP3s work great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already. Don’t you

⏹️ ▶️ John have the same problem even if they added support for it that it doesn’t matter because you have to wait for

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to upgrade to an operating system that includes that support that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple just added? In practice yes but the amount of time I have to The wait isn’t that much,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially for podcast listeners to a tech show. That’s a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade-y group. We don’t have to wait that long. Even on the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS probably their upgrade curves are always pretty good, but the Mac upgrade curves have not been great. You’d wait a year and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’d be 50% adoption, which is better than Windows, but still.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to worry about users of my app. I control my app. I can update my app. I have to worry about people who are going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the share links. You know, right now the showings don’t have big audiences. They get used some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and some people see them and that’s great. I want to make them bigger because I think podcast sharing could use help.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I mean everybody in podcasting things, podcast sharing can use help. But, but like I, here I am, like actually, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually have something that does help and I want, I want it to get bigger and better. The reality is even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you know, if Apple ad support, suppose it makes it into the next major versions of OS 10 and iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, you not the ones coming out in a few weeks or whatever, but next year or in the spring or whatever else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll probably be about a year after that before I can reliably use it,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because at that point, it’s gonna be way more than half, because first of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who are seeing share links from social media are gonna be way more likely to be on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile than on a desktop. So the slower adoption curve on macOS is not going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be as big of a problem because it’s gonna be offset by the larger proportion of those viewers who are going to be on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS and Android, if anybody can tolerate me who’s using Android,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a big ask. I think iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be updated faster, especially as Apple has figured out how to make people upgrade by adding emoji and messages tricks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So again, I think give it a year after they add support, and then I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost anybody can responsibly do this, and it would be fine. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody doesn’t know, Rob Walks, the CEO of Libsyn, Libsyn is a massive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast host. They’ve been around forever and they host a ton of podcasts, including this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And if you listen to this, they probably host a lot of other podcasts you listen to. I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the Real AFM shows are hosted there. It’s a very big podcast host.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they do a podcast, I forget what it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll put it in the show notes. They do a podcast where it’s like tips for podcasters. And then something like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a month, the CEO of Libsyn goes on there and gives stats of like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast user agents, like what clients, what platforms are downloading podcasts. And Libsyn is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good source of this because they host so many podcasts across so many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco markets that it isn’t just like tech-heavy. Like any stats I can give you on like how people use Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like how Apple nerds who know who I am mostly use Overcast. Like the top podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and overcast are mostly tech shows. They’re not, but if you look at the top podcast in the world,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly not tech shows. So obviously overcast usage is not representative of all podcasters

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there. But Libsyn stats are really close, I think. I would say Libsyn stats are probably the best representation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have outside of Apple, and they’re not talking, of like, you know, how podcasters behave

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mass, what the overall market looks like. And the stats they give,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I listen to this I take notes every month. The most recent ones were stats for June.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 77% of listens were on mobile devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every month, that number increases. Already very mobile-heavy. iOS to Android

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a little over 3 to 1. That ratio is going down. Android is becoming more popular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now because people are finally building in. Android vendors like Samsung are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally building in podcast clients. weren’t for a long time. And so that’s adding a lot to the Android

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side. So basically, you still have more than three times as many people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening on iOS than Android and only 22% of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners are listening on computers. So this is a very mobile-heavy market

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a very iOS-heavy market. So that’s why I think it’s fairly responsible for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of podcasters, especially if you are in like the Apple tech world like we are, where your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience is going to be even more skewed towards recent Apple platforms. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one year after they add support to this, it’s totally safe to do. And I might even do it sooner.

⏹️ ▶️ John Do you feel optimistic about them actually adding support? Or do you feel like it’s going to be two years before this bug is closed

⏹️ ▶️ John as behaves correctly?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I filed this bug, in my bug reporter, it was next to two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco other bugs that have been open forever. I’m lucky if I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a response. I don’t file that many bugs with Apple because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the effort on my side to feedback and potential benefit I will get from that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ratio is so terrible. This took the better part of two days to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the research properly, to figure out that Apple didn’t even support these tags at all. I thought they were supporting at least the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy one. They supported none of them. To modify these test

⏹️ ▶️ Marco files, to write these tags properly and everything, took a lot of work. To write a bug report,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give proper test coverage and everything, it takes a lot of time, a lot of work. And usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I file bugs and they go nowhere. If I’m lucky, they might be closed as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a duplicate. And when they’re closed as a duplicate, I believe I then lose any visibility on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I forget. I think I think they changed it recently. Anyway, so the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback loop is terrible for filing bugs for Apple. You know, people who do it are good people.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably floss. You know, they’re probably very good people. I have a hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time doing it most of the time because, again, like I see what happens with the few bugs I do file and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just they sit around forever and they don’t even get closed. And the few that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do get closed are often closed in a way that I consider invalid.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, they’ll do something like, we’re going to close this unless you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell us, you know, really soon that this is still happening on the newest build of iOS for a bug that I filed like, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, six months ago that is easily testable. Like, they clearly have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a wide variety of quality of people who go through the bug reports and many of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clearly just want to close as many as possible without actually doing any work. Like, the incentives are wrong there. You’re saying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t floss? So anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I usually don’t file bugs because I’ve had a poor history of any response from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple on bugs, but this time I filed it because I figured basically nothing else I can do. I can’t work around this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I mentioned the JavaScript thing. I tried doing the JavaScript thing, but you know because of all the cores restrictions,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes it pretty much impossible to use for an arbitrary set of hosts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t control. Most of which don’t send cores permission headers already. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a non-starter. You know, I could write my own decoder in my app that calculates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these offsets, but that’s only one app. And so to make something, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even our podcast, that you would think, you know, what percentage of people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco download our podcast do you think listen in Overcast? And a lot of people would probably guess it’s a pretty high ratio, and it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, compared to Overcast global ratio. I haven’t looked recently, but I think it’s something like 60%. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still 40% of our listeners who don’t listen to an overcast who would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco need compatibility in this way for seeking in streams. The reason I’m following this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug is that it’s my last hope to get the BRMP3s to be a thing. I think they’d be great if they were a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s ridiculous that they aren’t a thing yet. But if there’s any hope of them being a thing, it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Apple to do. Because if Apple doesn’t do it, nobody else can and nobody else will.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you make a strong recommendation that they implement a specific one of these? Because if you just said, oh, here are all these things you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John support, I can imagine them supporting that terrible one that only gives you 100 points and then being like, done, closed,

⏹️ ▶️ John fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Yeah. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my bug report actually reads a lot like the blog post. I wrote the bug report first and then edited it to be a blog post. But basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a similar format. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gave the three options. And I said, you don’t parse any of these right now. This old one is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco precise enough. Don’t use this. I said basically the MLT tag would be the ideal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one to do because it can be arbitrary length and arbitrary precision. So that’s the ideal one. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only pick one, pick that one. The Fraunhofer VBRI tag, that’s like 1.3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilobytes worth of stuff. That’s a good second choice. If you do that, I’ll be happy. But the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco best one to do would be the MLT tag.

⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if they don’t support it not out of laziness because like you said, they are actually parsing the durations out of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John but kind of for the same reason related to something else you said, you know, the why, why a web host can’t trust x forwarded

⏹️ ▶️ John for maybe they’re afraid is going to be filled with garbage data. And then they’re afraid to like expose,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, exploits in there, like a buffer overflow or something, because they put crazy offsets in there and then

⏹️ ▶️ John trigger a buck who knows, I don’t know the type of thing where it is, or they just don’t trust the the encoders

⏹️ ▶️ John to put good data in there, they don’t want to try to read garbage data. These are all solvable problems, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John make your make your thing not have silly buffer overflows and sanity check

⏹️ ▶️ John the the offsets in the map and make sure they seem reasonable before Blindly

⏹️ ▶️ John following them and maybe disregard if it looks like line noise But I do wonder because someone did have to write

⏹️ ▶️ John the code to pull these durations out of there Why do they do that and like while I’m in there? Why don’t just actually parse this

⏹️ ▶️ John whole format and just implement it, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mean your concerns are totally valid and I can I can completely understand how like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t surprise me at all If there was an engineering meeting at Apple some ridiculous amount of time ago So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like somebody was like, yeah, you know what, we could parse these things out, but the data might

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be wrong. And if we just do this, like, you know, percentage of time to bite offset thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we kind of like a dumb approximation, like, that’ll be close enough, and it’ll be consistent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like, there is, you know, there is a school of thought that says, like, you should, you know, you should override

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stupid mp3 encoders, because who knows what garbage you’re going to get there. and you should just do your thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but, and you know, just make it so that it works, it’s kind of close for short songs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it doesn’t matter anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s good enough for scrubber work. Like, they want the scrubber, like, because then you’re moving the scrubber around anyway, it’s probably like an

⏹️ ▶️ John inch on some webpage, and you can’t tell if it’s like, what pixel it’s on or whatever, but for your specific use case, which is,

⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, no, I’m not, someone’s not dragging a scrubber here, I’m putting an offset in a URL down to the second, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John want that precision out of it. Say, hey, YouTube does it, you should do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it too. Exactly, yeah, like, So you know that there is an argument to be made there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know a they’re already reading the duration of these tags, even if they have the whole file,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still read the duration from that header. And so if you put a garbage duration as I did during testing, it says, all right, yeah, sure. This file

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, nine minutes long instead of an hour. Like it’s happy to use that value. So like it’s already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trusting it on some level. Also like MP3 encoders don’t change that much. Like they,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s very few that are actually in active use today and they all write good data like this isn’t 1997

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anymore like we we have solved the mp3 encoder problem mp3 encoders work and they work well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there aren’t no one else besides me is going in with a hex editor and messing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these values like they’re not gonna get like total garbage on a regular basis so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what’s what’s more likely to have happened is that maybe these decoders were written a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time ago maybe around that time frame when the world of mp3 was still very much in flux

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you had crappy encoders in the late 90s and maybe they just haven’t revisited since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then because there wasn’t a reason to. That is the way more likely explanation for this is like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is very old code that no one has had any justification to touch for a long time, it works it well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, so fine. And that’s why I think ultimately it probably won’t get done

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I would be surprised if anybody was really motivated to devote a limited time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So who’s going to devote time to this out of their engineering time budget inside Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they might have more pressing things to worry about with supporting the new Bluetooth headphones on the next iPhone?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything else these people could be working on is probably more important than this to Apple’s overall corporate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco goals.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re just supposed to be using AAC anyway. It’s the future.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Just use

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a different container format and

⏹️ ▶️ John those offset things can be all at the front of the file. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John I love that. Just use a different container format. Doesn’t that solve all your problems?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that was the best. Yeah. All the existing

⏹️ ▶️ John containers are bad, but just invent your own. Doesn’t that solve all your problems? And then I guess make every encoder on the planet

⏹️ ▶️ John understand your new container format. It’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. This has been a lot of time on this topic. I’m sorry to everybody who doesn’t care. You probably tuned out long ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we actually got a decent response on it. The people actually enjoyed hearing about all this crap. I’m very surprised

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that, actually. But I guess our listeners are both cooler and geekier than I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have assumed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven They’re definitely cooler. Geekier? I’m not sure.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John if the cell signal at your house is so crappy Why not and why not enable Wi-Fi calling and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve all your problems?

⏹️ ▶️ John The first reason I didn’t enable this is I didn’t think my carrier supported it But I was just looking at the wrong place in settings

⏹️ ▶️ John For some reason I had it in my head that just that only AT&T supported this and not Verizon But now Verizon supports it too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, I’ve never gotten where the setting is But anyway, it’s in there somewhere you can find it But

⏹️ ▶️ John the second thing is when I turned it on I’m like, okay, I’ll turn this on and give it a try It makes you

⏹️ ▶️ John enter your physical address because once you’re on Wi-Fi calling if you call

⏹️ ▶️ John 911 911 can immediately tell where you are because you’re coming from the internet essentially and they can’t get a location

⏹️ ▶️ John for you which is kind of weird because You can get locations from Wi-Fi base stations and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of things use and use those that big map of of base station Mac addresses to physical

⏹️ ▶️ John locations and stuff to help aid location awareness. But anyway, what iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John says is, please enter a physical location. So when you call 911, if you can’t, if you’re too injured

⏹️ ▶️ John to speak into the phone or whatever, don’t worry, they will come to this address. But of course, that

⏹️ ▶️ John means that if you go someplace else and you’re on Wi-Fi, say you’re at work and you’re on Wi-Fi and you call 911

⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t get a chance to tell them where you are, they’re gonna go to your house. That’s my understanding anyway of what this message is telling

⏹️ ▶️ John me. this address here. If you call 911, this is where people will go to.” But I

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t want to enable it because I’m like, well, then I have to remember to turn off Wi-Fi calling

⏹️ ▶️ John when I leave my house because then if I call 911, people will go to my house instead of where I am.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s one reason why I didn’t leave it on. And the second reason is, this is the stupidest reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John That reason, I think, is only vaguely silly, but this reason is really dumb. But nevertheless, it is

⏹️ ▶️ John a reason. Everyone has their reasons. This is mine. It changes the thing that appears in the status bar to

⏹️ ▶️ John make some ugly thing That says like VZW, whatever. It doesn’t say like the Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ John a little fit Wi-Fi fan symbol It says different words like in all caps and it looks ugly. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John like it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a Reason like I can understand even though I think it’s a little ridiculous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole address thing fine, whatever But because you don’t want to look at VZW

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your status bar That’s your

⏹️ ▶️ John reason you try it turn it on and see what it does to your status bar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use AT&T like a gentleman and so it says AT&T Wi-Fi, but it gets

⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the fan thing Doesn’t it or maybe it anyway it changes what’s in the status bar? I didn’t like it Location

⏹️ ▶️ John one is that is the larger reason but I was kind of glad that I had a legit reason so I didn’t have to Look at that ugly status

⏹️ ▶️ John bar anymore It would be nice if like an iOS enhancement would be an iOS enhancement would be

⏹️ ▶️ John only use Wi-Fi calling when connected to this base station I would like that setting You know what I mean? Because then I could

⏹️ ▶️ John say use Wi-Fi calling when connected to my home base station, but never anyplace else. And then I don’t have to worry about this. Then I could

⏹️ ▶️ John set my home address to my home base station. But no. And anyway, after

⏹️ ▶️ John I made the decision, I made a couple of successful voice call calls from my house where people could actually hear my

⏹️ ▶️ John voice. So maybe Verizon loves me for coming back to them and not using this filthy internet

⏹️ ▶️ John calling.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Okay. All right. Well, I don’t even know what to make of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s moving on. Graham Spencer’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has indicated that Google and Facebook and others also do a charity match on bug bounties.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So just FYI,

⏹️ ▶️ John and did it before Apple like most people didn’t write into to gloat about how

⏹️ ▶️ John all these other companies did it before Apple, but they totally did.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any actual like topics tonight or is this all follow up?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re getting there.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s topics down there. Believe me. Don’t worry, we got a we got another podcast in like two

⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. I know. Yeah, that’s true too. And somebody had to go all deep on the mp3 stuff, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually it’s very entertaining and I enjoyed it. So I shouldn’t give you a hard time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco anyway. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much dead space we’d have in like the topics and everything this week if I didn’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t know what’s lurking down there in topics. There’s all sorts of stuff. Is there more about Tevo?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, there is actually. Really? Yes, I’m so I’m so excited. I’m so overjoyed. Oh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fantastic. Arrg

Casey’s iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, hopefully we’ll run long enough that we won’t get there. I mean, anyway, let me tell you about my iMac. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has been rebooted. I did it on purpose. It ran 21 days

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the stock RAM. And without a UPS. And without a UPS. I’ve gotten in contact

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Mac sales, OWC, whatever they call themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and have requested and am told that I’m receiving a RMA, a return merchandise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey authorization, is I think what that stands for.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what they’re doing is sending me a box to send the RAM back in and they said they will replace it post haste

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Have plugged it into the UPS I have pulled the UPS power

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Seen the iMac stay on for at least long enough to make me feel better about myself.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not leave it disconnected Long enough to see whether or not the Synology

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be smart enough to shut itself down But I believe I have those settings squared away in the Synology. So it should shut

⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself down gracefully The iMac won’t, but you know, I’m used to that at this point anyway. Heyo!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, I am running still on the 8 gigs of stock RAM until

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I receive my new batch of OWC RAM. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will try that. If that doesn’t work, then I will probably, very politely but very sternly, ask for my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey money back and get Crucial RAM, which the entire internet has written to tell me is the only RAM I should ever really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think Crucial buys any different RAM than OWC. I forget, someone at one point sent

⏹️ ▶️ John me a long email telling me about the different bins of who buys the good chips versus the cheaper chips, and I think Crucial

⏹️ ▶️ John was in the same bin with OWC. But anyway, I’ve bought OWC RAM for years, and like I said,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the last time I had an OWC thing go bad, the chip, because my computer is ancient, the chip,

⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM, the DIMM was like four years old, five years old, maybe it was six years old, like

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, I just assume like, well, it’s so old, whatever warranty or whatever they had

⏹️ ▶️ John must be completely gone by now but I just called them up and they said it will send you on that’s it like I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John if they have like a forever lifetime if this RAM ever goes bad they’ll just replace it forever and ever and I know it’s a hassle to return

⏹️ ▶️ John if you have to keep returning it it’s a pain but I’ve had them last for years and years and then go bad years later

⏹️ ▶️ John and they just send me a new one I think it’s like miraculous like try doing that with a hard drive

⏹️ ▶️ John for example hey my hard drive died after six years can I get a new one huh

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I mean like almost all RAM has a lifetime guarantee like almost all RAM that you would buy separately from a computer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like yourself. They almost all have lifetime guarantees, but it’s up to the retailer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the manufacturer to make that a good or bad experience if you actually have to claim it. And I too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have had only good experiences with OWC RAM. I don’t use it anymore. Now I just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy my computers with enough RAM from Apple because I’d rather just not deal with it anymore. And the OWC RAM,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was using it, which was up until like two years ago, was always great. I had to return it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one time, and that was, you know, one time in something like eight years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using it, I think it’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I mean, they’ve been really good about it so far. I didn’t expressly reach out to them. They reached out to me via

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter. I’m not entirely clear how they caught wind of the fact that I was having issues, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they just basically said, hey, can you send us an email and we’ll talk about it? And I said, hey, here’s the situation.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I spelled it out and said, you know, it had been rebooting every week. Look at this. running for 20

⏹️ ▶️ Casey some days at this point. I feel like it’s the RAM. So they said, yep,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re probably right. I will get you an RMA and we will replace it immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how they heard about this. I just told 80,000 people about it for a month and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody told them. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what I mean is I don’t recall having seen anyone like mention me and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them on Twitter. Maybe that did happen and I just missed it, but it seemed like they came out of the woodwork

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as opposed to somebody tagging them to kind of wave the flag in their face and say, hey, you should pay attention over

⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So I’m not sure how that came to be. But, you know, hey, I’m happy that they reached

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. I’m happy that they seem to be more than happy to replace the RAM. Because, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you were saying earlier, I bought this RAM in January. I looked up my order number and I forget when it was in January,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was still January. I mean, that was somewhat long ago. And I guess, you know, most things have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year warranty, but I don’t know. know, it it it’s nice of them to not fight me on it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m used to most retailers being like, well, are you sure it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the RAM? Why don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you take it to Apple first? Yeah, etc, etc, etc. And they were like, no, no, no, send it back. We’ll get your RAM.

⏹️ ▶️ John So like I said, you didn’t have to wait for someone to hear it and tweet you it you could have just called them on the phone. All you got to do is tell

⏹️ ▶️ John them you have bad RAM and notice that like last time I called for my like I said, it was years after I bought it. I said, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got a bad dim. I said, Okay, read me the serial number. Okay, we’ll send you a a box. Like that was it. There was not even give them a reason

⏹️ ▶️ John it was dead.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I truly hand on heart was planning on calling sometime this week. And then right as I decided,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, it’s been long enough. I’m happy. Well, I’m not happy, but I am satisfied with my my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scientific experiment that around that time when I had finally concluded that was the case. That’s when they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reached out and were like, hey, what’s happening? So that was my plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, I am deeply sorry, but I have to ask John, tell me about Tivo lifetime I’m sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey service please.

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TiVo ends support for 1999 model

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey John go ahead and tell us about Tivo

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re saved by real-time follow-up someone just tweeted at me That from the Verizon

⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi calling fact when using Wi-Fi calling 9-1-1 calls will always try cellular service in the local

⏹️ ▶️ John market first Even when the device is an airplane mode or cellular services off

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know now I’m back to just the status bar I suppose which is a silly reason I’ll think

⏹️ ▶️ John about it I’ll think about it. I don’t like getting phone calls at home anyway, and I have one

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve taken a

⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot of that status bar we can Mark and switch to the show art to it so you can just

⏹️ ▶️ John see what a horror it actually is alright Tebow the news today

⏹️ ▶️ John about Tebow not really that big news, but But apparently TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ John is discontinuing service for the TiVo Series 1. TiVo Series 1

⏹️ ▶️ John was introduced in 1999. And what

⏹️ ▶️ John they mean by discontinuing is it will no longer get any guide updates or anything. So

⏹️ ▶️ John you can still watch shows that are recorded on it, but you can’t record any new ones because it won’t know when anything is on.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t work like a VCR. We can do it manually anyway. And it’s because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John changing the format of the guide data, probably modernizing it in some way that we would be horrified to learn about

⏹️ ▶️ John if we knew exactly what they were feeding. Because of these Tivo Series 1, Tivo Series 1 was an analog device.

⏹️ ▶️ John It recorded video from analog sources. It didn’t, it was pre-digital. And of course, standard def

⏹️ ▶️ John because it was all analog. I didn’t know that you could still use a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Tivo Series 1.

⏹️ ▶️ John I thought they were already non-functional entirely. But apparently- They communicate with like semaphore flags?

⏹️ ▶️ John Like how does that even work? If you have a TiVo Series 1 and your 16-year-old hard drive,

⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe a hard drive you replaced it because you can do third-party hard drive replacements or whatever, you’re still using it

⏹️ ▶️ John to record analog standard deaf TV, they’re terminating your service. This

⏹️ ▶️ John is even if you bought quote-unquote lifetime service. That’s what the story about this. The tweet is like, oh, I bought lifetime service,

⏹️ ▶️ John but now I’m still alive and the box is still alive, but somehow the service is ending.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the tweet was, Tivo Series 1 Lifetime in scare quotes service lasted about 16 years.

⏹️ ▶️ John And for this inconvenience, Tivo is offering you a $75 prepaid Visa card. So you get 75

⏹️ ▶️ John bucks if you held on and kept using your Tivo Series 1 for this long. And they say there are 3,500 of

⏹️ ▶️ John these Series 1 still in use, which is a small number. But you know, anyway, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John believe that there wasn’t some fine print written into the lifetime service that says, after 16

⏹️ ▶️ John years, we reserve the right to turn off the service. You should buy a new DVR. But I salute the people who are out

⏹️ ▶️ John there still using it. I never expected lifetime service. I have lifetime service on all my TiVo boxes,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I replace the boxes long before I get to the lifetime service thing. TiVo used to be better at letting you transfer

⏹️ ▶️ John lifetime service for some nominal fee or for free to another device to encourage you to upgrade or whatever, but those

⏹️ ▶️ John days are mostly gone and the deals have been getting worse. Anyway, I just thought this was funny that there are actually

⏹️ ▶️ John people out there still using a Series 1 DVR. I don’t think I have any piece of electronics

⏹️ ▶️ John in my house that is 16 years old and still working including smoke detectors,

⏹️ ▶️ John telephones, microwave maybe. I think my, as discussed on a recent Reconciled

⏹️ ▶️ John with Everyone, I think my microwave may be more than 16 years old but I should look at the date on the back of it. I should see exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John how old it is. But other than that, no DVR so that’s for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough.

Twitter’s Verified quality filter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had spoken a few episodes ago about Twitter verification because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us are now verified and Friend of the show Brianna Wu has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been verified now in the last week or so and Apparently it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey made everything Immensely better Brianna tweeted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of days ago as we record this fact I have not seen a single death threat or rape threat since being verified

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and getting the quote quality filter quote quote, everyone should have this. Funny how that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s exactly it. I mean, like we talked last time, I joked, like, we have computers now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any computational overhead of offering this to everybody, that’s totally worth

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And we’ve since heard a little bit more discussion from various other places about it. It seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gist of the problem here is not that turning this on would be computationally expensive for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that Twitter, fundamentally Twitter is very, very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tied to the idea internally, politically, that there should be this kind of open

⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform and that there should be no filters by default. And that’s a really nice theory.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So is communism. But in practice these things don’t work quite that well. You know, like, it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really ideal and that would be nice and it worked that way for a while and that’s cool, but,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the reality is the harassment problem is very big and very real. And that wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world where anybody could tweet anybody and they would see it by default. I think that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice idea. Like blog comments, like that’s a nice idea. But you know, in practice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t work in practice, lots of problems with that. So I maintain that this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should you know that that the the quality filter feature that is available to verify Twitter accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only should be available to everybody, but I’d even say it should be on by default.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I would agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know why you wouldn’t have it on by default. Like, I guess the idea is that maybe the filter is bad

⏹️ ▶️ John and things will accidentally get filtered out. But like, it’s not like you, uh, it’s not like Gmail has spam filtering

⏹️ ▶️ John off by default. Of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco course it’s not by default. Right. Yeah, sometimes things

⏹️ ▶️ John end up in your spam folder when they shouldn’t be in there, but like no one would say the correct default

⏹️ ▶️ John is off.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I don’t get it. Finally, in follow-up,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over an hour in.

Apple’s white-employee ratio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A few people have taken me to task for saying in the last episode, or maybe it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the recent episodes, that I was not satisfied with Apple’s diversity numbers,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with ethnicities and how many

⏹️ ▶️ Casey white employees Apple has as opposed to other races. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I had said was, you know, hey, this is really unfortunate, and it looks like as As I look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up these numbers again, 56% of Apple is white as they self-report today. And a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people said in various degrees of obnoxiousness, well, what’s the appropriate amount of diversity because the country

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is – and I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but something like 60% or 70% white. So if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re less white than America, then what’s the problem?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t have any simple answer for that. It’s something I hadn’t considered and it’s a fair

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. But I would point out that not all of Apple is in America,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so that probably should be factored in as well. But I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the biggest thing to me was that Apple seems to have made not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of change from just a couple of years ago when they started reporting this, which I admire.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t make that much change, yet it seems like the thing that was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely unacceptable a couple of years ago is now, look at us and how wonderful we are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that just seems kind of weird to me. I don’t know if you guys had any thoughts on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but that’s basically the thing that I still stand by, which is, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hasn’t gotten that much better. Why are we really celebrating it like it’s completely turned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around? So, before we let John tell us the truth and why this is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we let John basically like rock this and do everything correctly, I will just kind of speak for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself and for I think a lot of people who listen to this kind of stuff and who see these kind of things,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know having been just in the in the area of people discussing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this for a while now, I know now that it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like it is never that simple. And so like when you when you throw out a stat like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well you know America is X percent white and so that’s fine, like it is usually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that simple. And so I know to keep my mouth shut with things like that, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know like I’ll hear something like that and be like, yeah, like that might make logical sense when you read it like in 140 characters,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I bet there’s more to the issue than that. And so it’s important when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are responding to people, not you Casey, but you the public and I’m talking to myself too, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t just jump to a conclusion like that because chances are the issue is way more complicated than that. So John, tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us why.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna start getting the thing, but I’m basically on what you just said. That’s uh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John something I always notice on twitter and we all notice it to some degree or another, whether we’re doing it ourselves

⏹️ ▶️ John or we see other people doing it where people will start

⏹️ ▶️ John from a premise and then start throwing out facts in support of that. And that’s fine, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, because why wouldn’t you, you know, this is what you think. And so you will find facts that support what you think, and then you will

⏹️ ▶️ John list those facts. But it’s always important to kind of ask yourself,

⏹️ ▶️ John why, like, why am I seeking out the facts that I can find that align

⏹️ ▶️ John with this thing that I already think? Like am I actually thinking about the situation or am I merely just trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to find something that will support my ability? So that maybe, I mean, this is, you know, it’s not universally

⏹️ ▶️ John true, but perhaps someone who was telling Casey, hey, you said this percentage was bad, but it’s about

⏹️ ▶️ John the ratio of the people in the United States. You’d have to go look up

⏹️ ▶️ John the ratio of the people in the United States. And you could do it. This is a bad example, because they’re probably completely intellectually honest in this. But a lot of times,

⏹️ ▶️ John you see an issue come up, and people immediately go looking for something

⏹️ ▶️ John they can throw out that supports their thing, never really asking, why am I so desperate to find things

⏹️ ▶️ John that support this rather than, you know, looking at the looking at the issue from first principles or

⏹️ ▶️ John understanding the wider context. Because there’ll always be things, especially, you know, statistics that can help

⏹️ ▶️ John support one side or the other, but if you’re only ever looking for and saying repeatedly to anyone who mentions anything

⏹️ ▶️ John about the topic, the few facts you have in your back pocket that support the one thing that you care about, you

⏹️ ▶️ John probably are missing the larger issue. And what you’re really missing more is why is it so important to you that your current

⏹️ ▶️ John view of this be exactly correct. So anyway, as for the specific stats.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I thought the stats were just us only. So I think there are percentages for, you know, white

⏹️ ▶️ John employees that are actually accurate to the United States. The United States has that percentage of

⏹️ ▶️ John the population and then that’s there, you know, so I thought that was an apt comparison. But like Margo said, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John never quite that simple because you know, especially with statistics, you can, they’re taking like all

⏹️ ▶️ John their employees, right? And all us employees, Apple employs a lot of people, uh, and

⏹️ ▶️ John not all those jobs jobs are the same. If you start looking at different sections of employees, the percentages,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they do this, don’t they break it down on the page? Uh, the, the percentages will change, uh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John pretty dramatically by five to 10%, maybe even more. If you look at, uh, like

⏹️ ▶️ John the top level of the org chart, direct third level, C level executives, they are not 56%

⏹️ ▶️ John white, right? So, and then all the way down to look at engineering versus QA versus retail

⏹️ ▶️ John versus, you know, all the different and all the different categorizations. If you lump them all together,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s nice to get a nice aggregate, but you don’t know what the pieces are. Right. And so that’s not Apple’s not trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to mislead anybody there. They’re not going to break down their their hiring and their employees by

⏹️ ▶️ John individual job level and location. And what is the population in the state of Maryland and what are the retail

⏹️ ▶️ John employees in the state of Maryland? And what about, you know, like, it’s just they’re not going to do that right but that is Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John job internally to work on this problem because if their overall numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John happen to work out to the same percentage of the United States but it’s only because like all the leaders

⏹️ ▶️ John of the company are white men and all the rest of the company are not that’s not that you’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not achieving your goal of diversity right your goal is not to make a bunch of numbers match a bunch of other numbers

⏹️ ▶️ John you can always pick numbers to make you look better or worse and some degree Apple may be doing that in the high level

⏹️ ▶️ John numbers that are up there but That’s not the goal of the thing. You’re not. Apple is not an amorphous blob of people that combine

⏹️ ▶️ John to one uber person. They’re a bunch of individual people. And you want to know if you know

⏹️ ▶️ John if I get a job at Apple, what are my chances of, you know, being in charge of

⏹️ ▶️ John all software at Apple? What are my chances of raising a rising to the level of the org chart where I’m taking meetings

⏹️ ▶️ John with with Tim Cook and stuff? What you know, what are my odds of becoming an engineering

⏹️ ▶️ John manager or leading whatever? And if you look around you at Apple, and it’s like, gee, everybody who’s an engineering manager

⏹️ ▶️ John is a white dude and everyone in the board meetings is a white dude and everybody who’s on stage

⏹️ ▶️ John at WWDC is a white dude as as you know to a first approximation that was the case not too many

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago and you know like I said even now that the high levels of the company are like that um maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John you feel like oh sure I can get a job at an apple store they’re good but like can I you know

⏹️ ▶️ John do I feel like this company is uh is giving equal opportunity to to everybody. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple is working towards. And I don’t think they have yet achieved it, which is why they keep putting out these numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ John So as Casey said, if if these numbers that were given

⏹️ ▶️ John are these big aggregates and they haven’t changed that much from from year to year just shows they’re making slow

⏹️ ▶️ John progress, right? And so it’s not phenomenal progress, but it certainly doesn’t mean because you can say 56% is

⏹️ ▶️ John less than 60%. Therefore, they’re done. That absolutely doesn’t mean that because it doesn’t take much thinking to realize,

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just a big arrogant number and it’s not that’s not the goal The goal is not to simply people are asking that like honestly

⏹️ ▶️ John asking like what is the goal? What numbers are you supposed to see here? To let you know that Apple has achieved

⏹️ ▶️ John its goal of diversity and the answer is those numbers are never going to tell you that Right. Otherwise,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they wouldn’t they wouldn’t be continuing along this path. They would just say when we’re done We’ve accomplished our goal. Isn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ John great, right? and that’s before you even get into details of like like percentage of US population

⏹️ ▶️ John versus percentage of US population of working age, like not babies, not children, not retired people,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, so it’s numbers are complicated. But anyway, I’m I’m confident that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John understands the problem before them and is working towards it. Just just as I am

⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly tied to the specific numbers that throw out on these pages, all we’re basically looking for is, are the little

⏹️ ▶️ John graphs they put up going in an upward direction? Do they have enough of them every year so that they show they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ John progress and how fast that progress what are the slopes look like

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah that’s about it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right well we are out of follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week betterment tracker and automatic and we will see See you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Oh, accidental, accidental, tech broadcasts

⏹️ ▶️ John so long.

Post-show: Instagram Snapchat

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I want to talk about the Intel fab thing that’s a topic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we make that quick?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I don’t know what do it. Let’s let’s take down what we have here is what we have an after show Then we can do Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ John stories Instagram stories is a good idea because that’s fluffy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s it’s this thing that appear on top of Instagram recently. That’s confusing all the old people like me

⏹️ ▶️ John Your wife’s face is always up there I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, she figured it out very quickly because she is younger at heart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also biologically than I am.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I am too old. I am what, three months?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think like six, about six, yeah. So I am

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too old to understand Snapchat. So Instagram has basically cloned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major part of Snapchat into the Instagram interface which has just confused

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram for me. And now I have this row of heads on top of Instagram and I tap them and weird things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen and I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing with this. Can you explain it to me?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So John, I don’t think I’ve seen any posts from you yet, so you’re not producing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey using this although I presume you’re at least consuming it. Is that fair?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t see myself ever making one of these videos, but they’re up there and they tap on the faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so the idea here from what I can understand as someone who’s never used Snapchat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and didn’t really have any interest in Snapchat is with Instagram stories,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can take a photo or a video that is semi-ephemeral.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I believe it’s after a day, they will self-destruct and your phone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey explodes, it’s very inconvenient. No, they’ll self-destruct and then they won’t be available anymore. Not to you, not to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone else. And so the idea is if your Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ Casey profile and the photos that you post on Instagram proper is the like super

⏹️ ▶️ Casey staged, super deliberate, super serious version of you. Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stories, which is this ephemeral thing, is more of the candid,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun-loving, like hey, here’s the real me, take it or leave it sort of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually wanted to call out the latest episode of Connected, which is episode 103.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The host did a really incredible job of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about what the motivations are behind Instagram stories and how it’s different than regular

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram. But regardless, I’ve really been enjoying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it a lot more than I thought I would as someone who had not even the slightest interest in Snapchat.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the common complaints about Snapchat that I’ve understood is that anyone who is over the age of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about 18 finds the interface completely inscrutable. is gesture-based.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as much as we all hate tutorials, as you install an app for the first time, this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is one of those instances where a tutorial or walkthrough or onboarding would have perhaps been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey useful in Snapchat because everything’s gesture-based, nothing’s obvious, everything’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In Instagram, there’s a little bit of that in Instagram Stories, but it’s not nearly as bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was able to figure it out pretty quickly. And I classify myself as an old man,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as much as you two are. And I’ve been enjoying both consuming and creating. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things I’ve wondered. As I consider whether or not to post a new entry in my Instagram story,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which sounds super cheesy, but anyway, um, one of the things I’ve been considering is why

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would anyone else give a crap about this? So like, as an example, I was going to take a picture of my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup at work. And, you know, after having obscured the, the sensitive parts of what was on my computer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. And then it occurred to me, I don’t think anyone really gives a crap. And so while I was at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey beach, you know, Hey, I’m on vacation. We that’s exciting and kind of cool or whatever. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I had posted a handful of times then, but now that I’m back in my normal grind, well, it’s not my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal high roller, you know, look at me. I’m so awesome life. It’s my normal grind. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if I’ll be producing that much or, or posting that often.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from now until the next time I do something interesting. But I really like the idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I echo what Mike had said on Connected, and he’s talked about it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he and I both have talked about this on Analog as well, that Instagram is kind of my happy social network. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a lot out of Twitter, and I enjoy Twitter, but Twitter is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless kind of a dumpster fire, where

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot remember a time that Instagram has made me anything but happy. And even with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stories, it makes me happy in a different way because it’s kind of the fun, ephemeral, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, it’s not gonna be perfect and that’s okay because life isn’t perfect. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought, and this is a super sleazy, businessy term, but it’s brought my engagement with Instagram up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even more. And I check Instagram a handful of times a day because I enjoy it so much. But now I found myself checking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it more often, wondering which one of my friends, because I tend to follow mostly friends on Instagram,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which one of my friends has posted something new and something worth looking at. And so I have really been enjoying it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two thumbs up from me. I think it’s super, super interesting. And it seems to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey traction so far. Don’t think it’s a flash in the pan. This isn’t the next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peach, I don’t think, but remind me of that in six months. This is future Clean Shower. Steven

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leeuwen Yeah. I mean, like this, I’ve been using Instagram more and more recently because I’ve been using the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Explore View, the little search thing at the bottom, which Tiff introduced me to, and I didn’t even realize that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was there. I thought it was literally a search, and I never wanted to search for anything, so I never visited

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tab. And it turns out it’s more of like a browser explore view, and you pick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco topics. So mine’s full of watches and puppies now, which is awesome. And-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that either,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco actually.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is really nice to… So I’m using Instagram a lot now, and I have the same feelings as like Instagram is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a feel-good place. It is both to browse and to post. It is a just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice place to be. People aren’t universally terrible. Unlike Twitter. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general, like I’m saying, including all services that we have, people in general

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not terrible. The design of a social thing online, a social

⏹️ ▶️ Marco construct, a social service, like the whole design of it, the structure, what’s allowed, what’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible, how things work, who sees what. That all affects

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how horrible people are enabled to be and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of impact their horribleness can have. So the same group of people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use two different services and act very differently on them and get very different things out of them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because of differences in their design. And so even if Twitter’s entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user base is also Facebook is also Instagram’s exact user base. You have better results on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram because just the form and the structure and the way everything works in a setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the expectations of it and the format and everything just encourage better behavior

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and limit the places people can be horrible to you. So that’s good. What worries

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me about this, and one of the reasons I never used Snapchat, and again, yeah, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco conversation I connected was awesome and we will link to it. One of the reasons I never had to get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it was because no one that I know really uses it. Like, all the people I would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco interacting with are on Twitter and Instagram. So I don’t need to use, first of all, I don’t need to use Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is great, because I don’t want to use Facebook. And I also, and yes, I know they own it, and that doesn’t matter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also never had to use Snapchat, because just, you know, my people aren’t there, really.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to bring that to Instagram, to basically bring like a major feature of Snapchat

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Instagram is kind of okay on one level because it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I wasn’t gonna use Snapchat anyway because my friends weren’t there. But on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other hand, it really shows, like, you know, Facebook has always been a very tasteless company.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook is pragmatic and ruthless and tasteless, just like Microsoft was in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 80s and 90s, really. Facebook now is this conglomerate, really. They have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of properties that are major on the internet. They have Facebook itself, which is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest web property in the world and probably will stay that way for quite some time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that gets really big that they think might threaten that, they just buy it. They have enough money to keep doing that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indefinitely. They are clearly totally okay with, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, if you won’t let us buy you, we’re just going to rip you off and we’ll just kill you that way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That strategy doesn’t always work. Microsoft did the same thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has done things on a smaller scale with Sherlocking things, but they don’t usually do a huge scale job of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with stuff like this. Google does it sometimes. And that strategy tends

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work. Like in general, when companies, when the big powerful companies that already have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the users and all the usage and all the attention going to them and all the time spent on their services,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they clone some smaller service, their clone often wins.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if they can’t clone it, they can buy it. And this just kinda, it’s a bit of a warning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign of the power that Facebook has. And I’m not saying Snapchat will be killed by this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In all likelihood, Snapchat is too big now and they’ll probably be totally fine because Snapchat’s really big.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re bigger than Twitter. They’re really big. But it does kinda scare me

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit that Facebook is willing to so cavalierly just like completely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rip off the Stories feature, call it the same thing, do the same things, use the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gestures, like completely rip it off. It’s so closely and so shamelessly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they just couldn’t possibly care less because they are just that ruthless. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco live in an age now where these handful of big internet companies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of control over us and a lot of resources. And like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the centralization of power here is just getting more and more severe. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of worries me for the future of like, internet things in general, things we do online that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the internet or that involve the internet or are the internet. It is a little concerning.

⏹️ ▶️ John Thing that struck me about using this and having used Snapchat a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John is what you’ll often hear, and you guys said it before, is like, oh, well, you know, I don’t understand Snapchat, only the kids understand

⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. You know, and there is a demographic thing about what age groups use which application. That’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John true, Or older people using Instagram or whatever but

⏹️ ▶️ John Snapchat and also the Instagram stories have bad interfaces. They have

⏹️ ▶️ John bad user interfaces like there is no sensible Structure to

⏹️ ▶️ John to the interface. They don’t use OS conventions. That’s for sure, right? So the normal affordances and sort of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re used to in like generic UI kit, you know I don’t know about another pop from just talking about an iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John but like it doesn’t look like iOS that’s for sure, right? So it’s kind of its own thing and within its own thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t really define any particular spatial metaphor or

⏹️ ▶️ John Something to hang your hat on where you can say, oh, I see all up swipes to this I mean like basically if you

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if someone’s like, oh no snapchat is totally sensible What you’d basically be doing is listing this does that this does

⏹️ ▶️ John that this does that just does that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there now?

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that’s not a system That is just a list of actions and they’re resulting, you know What you’re looking for a system

⏹️ ▶️ John is like because I understand the system Before you tell me the list of all things I can do, I can predict,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, then obviously the way to do X is going to be Y. That’s when you know you have a system. Snapchat doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John a system or not a very good system. It’s a lot of arbitrary crap in there, not using native controls, not using,

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of unprecedented, right? So sort of setting their own standard. And why does,

⏹️ ▶️ John does that mean, is that why young people get Snapchat and old people don’t? No, like there are other

⏹️ ▶️ John factors there in terms of who it’s advertised towards and the first users were and you know critical mass and social networks

⏹️ ▶️ John and where my friends are and all those other things that all factors in as well but I think there is something to the idea that

⏹️ ▶️ John young people will be able to do something because a bunch of their friends are doing

⏹️ ▶️ John it they’ll just figure it out they have a high tolerance for learning our arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid crap if I think about all the arbitrary stupid crap that I learned which basically is the entire early years of

⏹️ ▶️ John computing where everything was terrible and nothing made sense and the Mac was the only one that kind of an understandable

⏹️ ▶️ John system. Think of all the things that I memorized things I learned how to do in video games, there was no system is just arbitrary

⏹️ ▶️ John and kids have a lot of time and good memories. And they’ll just plug away

⏹️ ▶️ John until it becomes second nature to them. So to kids, Snapchat makes perfect sense because they memorize all the stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John gestures and commands, even though those gestures and commands are almost entirely arbitrary counter to everything

⏹️ ▶️ John that every other UI paradigm on the device they’re holding has taught them and are just plain bad,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? they’re just bad. This is a bad UI. So Instagram stories didn’t use all the same

⏹️ ▶️ John things as Snapchat, but it’s a similar thing where Instagram was a very sensible, straight up the middle iOS application with

⏹️ ▶️ John a reasonable UI using metaphors and controls, and interfaces that we understood.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you could predict what would happen when you did things for the most part, there’s always weird edge cases and custom controls and stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then when they did stories, it’s into la la land again, where nothing makes sense. And you can’t you have no,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have no nothing to hang your hat on except for like, maybe it’ll behave like Snapchat, which

⏹️ ▶️ John again, maybe that’s establishing a standard and if you’re familiar with Snapchat, that might be a good way to go if you’re trying to do like what Margo said,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, we want to do a Snapchat, I think then just copy a Snapchat gestures because all the kids who do Snapchat,

⏹️ ▶️ John it makes perfect sense to them. And if they go to your thing and swipe or drag or tap, and it doesn’t do what they expect

⏹️ ▶️ John from using Snapchat, they think your thing is broken. But again, it’s not a good UI just because they make it

⏹️ ▶️ John like Snapchat for like, or you know, make things similar to Snapchat to try to get. It’s the little bar

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got on the top with a little segmented timers and what happens when you swipe in different directions and a little

⏹️ ▶️ John rotating effect versus the sliding versus up and down and tapping and it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John these are bad interfaces. And so I maintain as the old cranky person that not only

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s an actual reason

⏹️ ▶️ John like old people don’t understand Snapchat because they made a bad UI and because

⏹️ ▶️ John older people have less tolerance for figuring out a bad UI that doesn’t like look like all the other ones they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to do. And I don’t just think it’s like, I think it’s bad on many, many levels. And again, this doesn’t explain

⏹️ ▶️ John why old people don’t use Snapchat. There’s so many other reasons. But this is a factor. I’m saying this is this is a factor in that giant

⏹️ ▶️ John stew. It’s not the biggest factor. It’s not, you know, even maybe a major factor, but it’s there. And that annoys

⏹️ ▶️ John me, because I feel like Snapchat could have been successful with a clever,

⏹️ ▶️ John innovative UI. I think a lot of games do this, like a UI that uses no native controls, totally custom, doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use anything from UIKit, it’s the same on Android and iOS, is delightful and understandable

⏹️ ▶️ John and fun to use. And someone can pick up and learn. Again, this is my

⏹️ ▶️ John hobby horse, but it’s really true. If you make some kind of physical world based metaphor

⏹️ ▶️ John like oh, I have stacks of cards and we can slide them from side to side and up and down and bring them together and collapse them

⏹️ ▶️ John or I can crunch them up or like, if you make some sort of thing like these aren’t physical things, but

⏹️ ▶️ John in some ways they behave in physical things, or there’s like a larger map that you can’t see of this application.

⏹️ ▶️ John Once you learn the layout of that map, you know how to move around in it, and you know how to make things happen, and you know what a button looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like, and you understand, like, any kind of metaphor like that, even if it uses totally

⏹️ ▶️ John non-native controls, can become understandable where people start using it, learn one or two things,

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, I see how this works, and then they can figure out how to do the other things without being told explicitly. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ John Snapchat, it’s like, oh, mystery meat navigation, a bunch of inscrutable icons, and

⏹️ ▶️ John no real sense of where you are, what you’re doing, where you’re going, you just memorize how it works, because you’re young and you have a lot of time

⏹️ ▶️ John or use the application a lot. And that becomes second nature to you and you just think that’s normal. So if you ask any kid

⏹️ ▶️ John is Snapchat easy to use, they’d be like, everyone knows how to use Snapchat. It’s like I it’s like I know how to write my name. I know how to put one foot in

⏹️ ▶️ John front of the other to walk. I know how to use Snapchat. It’s the most intuitive interface on my entire phone. No, you just use it a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what that means. It doesn’t mean it’s a good UI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason they like using it is because it makes people like us that angry.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, but that’s not why we’re angry about like, I’m just saying it’s a bad UI, you angry about because it’s like you’re making silly videos

⏹️ ▶️ John of yourself and sending to your friends and you’ll be like oh these kids these days shouldn’t be taking videos I don’t care about that whatever take videos

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s the same thing when we take videos and our things and send it to our friends it’s fine like whatever I

⏹️ ▶️ John have no I have no anger towards people who use snapchat I have anger towards the developers of snapchat for making a bad ui

⏹️ ▶️ John snapchat users thumbs up snapchat developers Thumbs down.