296: Giant Buffers of Floats
18 Oct 2018Adventures in audio programming, fresh bagels, real Photoshop coming to iPad, and a new Palm phone — sort of.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco's look-ahead limiter
- Apple fixes bagel emoji
- Follow-up:
- Screen Time issues abound
- Emergency bypass
- Apple iCloud contacts sync limits
- Apple printer compatibility list
- Palm Phone
- Photoshop CC on iPad
#askatp- How do we stay informed about non-tech news? (via Jake)
- Did we have a senior project in school? (via Stephen Kim)
- Which Destiny videos do John watch? (via tobogranyte)
- Post-show: Dark patterns in Destiny
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Get a special discount with your first order.
- Away: Travel smarter with the suitcase that charges your phone. Get $20 off a suitcase with code ATP.
Chapters
- Marco’s limiter
- Sponsor: Away (code ATP)
- Bagel-emoji update 🖼️
- Follow-up: Screen Time
- Follow-up: Emergency Bypass
- iCloud Contacts limits
- Follow-up: Printer list
- Sponsor: Fracture
- New “Palm” phone
- Photoshop on iPad
- Pro gear working together
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- #askatp: News sources
- #askatp: Senior projects
- #askatp: Destiny YouTubers
- Ending theme
- Dark patterns in Destiny
Marco’s limiter
⏹️ ▶️ John Take two showers tomorrow. Shower is the ultimate idea place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, Marco’s a little grumbly tonight, but that I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, gee, yeah. C is kicking my butt right now. And audio math
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kicking my butt right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what are you trying to accomplish? And use very small words, because I am not familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with audio stuff at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so in audio terms, I’m trying to implement a lookahead limiter. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, You know, you probably know as a podcaster and as a video person that clipping is real bad. I’ve heard this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When your audio level goes above the maximum input level of a digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input device, it sounds really bad. It sounds like a scratchy, loud, kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kkk, kind of thing. Like it sounds awful. So it’s very important when you’re dealing with audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amplification, when you’re trying to make, you know, make volume levels louder or whatever else, it’s very important to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a limiter in front of it. And the point of the limiter is to catch those like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very loud signals that would clip before they clip and to apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gain downwards on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, hold on, so hold on. So, to use kind of in a really crummy analogy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so this is like I have my finger on the volume dial. I know it’s not quite volume,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for the sake of the analogy, I have my finger or my hand on the volume dial and I see the person in front of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the microphone take a real deep breath and like get ready to shout and I go oh crap and I turn the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down because I know they’re about to shout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well that’s the look-ahead part but I haven’t gotten to that yet so the main part is they start shouting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as they get really close to the top you very quickly go oh crap this is gonna clip and you turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the volume down okay now you might think like the the naive way to try to implement this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically you just look at every sample and the ones that are above one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the floating-point domain so like the ones are above 1.0 which is like the ceiling you just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compress those down by a certain multiplier or you just make them 1.0 you might think to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way but that ends up sounding awful because of the way signals work that basically introduces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of frequencies and distortion that weren’t there before and so the right way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is to catch it well in advance of it actually clipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know enough samples in advance that you can actually do almost like a a gradual volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramp downwards. And if you’ve ever seen, if you’re ever using an audio editing program
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re playing with the controls of either a compressor, which is basically a limiter with some extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, or a limiter, then you will see something called attack time and release time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these are literally the amount of time, usually measured in tens of milliseconds or maybe hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of milliseconds at worst, the amount of time that it will take to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn the volume down to prevent clipping and then that’s the attack time and the release time is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of time it takes to go back to normal. It’s basically turn the volume back to normal after it thinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the clipping sound is over. What you want to do is ideally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to really prevent something from clipping you need to have look ahead which means you need to be able to look to see what’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the stream before you apply the volume dip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to limit it from clipping so what I’ve been doing and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know so you know programmers you know you can figure out like when you’re dealing with some kind of like rolling buffer with like look-ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality but you can’t modify the stuff and look ahead buffer yet like it’s kind of it’s kind of awkward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so I basically spent yesterday building the framework to do look-ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processing and then I spent today trying and largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco failing to to write the gain processing that will gradually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to what’s coming up ahead, will gradually raise and lower the volume in a way that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound horrible and that actually works to prevent clipping. And I’ve just been having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a terrible time. My brain is melted right now. It takes me a long time to understand complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco math, like anything involving signal processing, filters. I barely understand that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m really not good at that kind of advanced math. I have very little knowledge of it and very little background in it. but the limiter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought would be easy because I thought like, oh, it’s just like, you know, you basically like ramp up and down the gain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to what you see ahead of you. And yeah, it’s kicking my butt. It’s not easy at all. And of course, because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in C, I am frequently like having these comical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco errors where like, you know, I love working in C. I like C was kind of like my programming youth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I really enjoyed it. And my first job was all in C. So I do love C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a very intellectual level. But it is awfully funny when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get an error where like, oh, the thing that worked last build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this build, it’s making random noise all over the place. Well, I screwed up on memory somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you just gotta find, where is the somewhere? Somewhere I made a mistake and I’m writing all over garbage somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it’s, oh boy. So I’ve had a number of those times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve had a lot of terrible luck trying to implement my limiter, but getting there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, why C? Speed, because the API you’re using is C, all the above, some of the above?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The API, I’m actually not dealing directly with Core Audio at this level. I’m dealing just with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco float arrays, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant buffers of floats that are sample data. So I could be writing this in pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that can operate on raw buffers. When I write code at this level, I make extensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use of the the accelerate framework with all the VDSP functions. This is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s like wrapper functions around highly vectorized optimizations for common math operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this kind of thing. So like if you want to like take an array of 500 numbers and multiply them all by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same value, or multiply two giant arrays of 500 numbers by each other and put the result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a third array of 500 numbers. Using these functions in the accelerate framework are way way way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster because they use vector operations on the processor. It’s way faster than like going through one by one and doing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operations. So basically, I’m dealing with a whole bunch of raw float arrays, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole bunch of calls to these low level functions and everything. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do this in Swift, but Swift is such a royal pain in the butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. And why not? Why not objective C, then?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library I really just write and see for speed like this is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this audio pipeline is the only time I have ever had a measurable improvement by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco removing an object to see message send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually like back back when I was doing that battery testing when I was like running at the batteries and all my devices seeing like oh does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the speaker use all the battery does the Bluetooth use all the battery so that I discovered this optimization where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was like there was this one call that basically renders out a block of like 500 samples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of audio in the audio pipeline. And so it’s called, you know, there’s 44,100 samples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per second. So the block that renders 500 at a time is called many times per second. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by removing an obfuscate message send from that, I was able to actually speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the processing by some amount like, you know, a couple percent, but it was like it was measurable and it was reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s surprising. So what is the ultimate driving motivation behind this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re willing to share.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m working on Voice Boost 2. I’ve been taught, I’ve talked about this a few times here and there, like you’re kind of mentioning here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically I’m trying to do Voice Boost but better. One of the reasons I’m doing it now is because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, if I want to support AirPlay 2 in a way that isn’t horrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really need to write my own Voice Boost code. Instead of right now, Voice Boost is implemented as a combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legacy AU graph nodes, like audio graph nodes from Core Audio, and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API seems to, like it’s very discouraged to use that now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like Apple is slowly showing at the door and using those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to supply an AirPlay 2 stream what is possible but it would be very clumsy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I basically have to like create a whole audiograph like off to the side that isn’t connected to the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco render with it into a voice or into a AirPlay 2 style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco renderer and like so it’s like it’s just a lot of overhead it’s a lot of extra work and that would probably have a noticeable battery cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t want to do it that way if I don’t have to. The way I want to do it is by not needing those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old AUGraph processing nodes anymore which means that I have to write my own compressor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way you write a compressor is you write a limiter first and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need the I need basically I need the limiter for lots of different things in audio processing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the very first thing I need it for is the VoiceBoost 2 compressor that I’m writing from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is probably not wise, but I just spent like a month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealing with just like pain in the butt watch things. Like not the fun part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of app development, but just like pain in the butt. Like oh this this watch transfer just failed for no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason. How do I fix that? How do I try to work around that? And going through like so Overcast 503
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just came out a couple days ago and this included basically what I’m talking about like the fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for watch transfers. This was a grueling process where to figure out why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standalone watch podcast transfers were so unreliable. I basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent the last few weeks like shipping a beta build almost every day with different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaks and changes. I built a whole logging framework so people so the watch would log what it’s doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coordinate it with the phone app and log what it’s doing and then people in the beta could then send me those logs so I could look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at them and make tweaks and send out new builds the next day or later that same day. And it was just a grueling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long process of trying to finally figure out how to make watch transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even remotely reliable. And so I’m rewarding myself with that long slog of doing something I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t want to do that’s very boring. With a bunch of C. Well, yeah, because it’s different, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I know it sounds crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, this is something I’ve been putting off for a year, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of it have taken me a year to figure out even how to do. Because, as I mentioned, this involves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of DSP stuff that I do not have a background in, that I mostly don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever I stumble upon an academic paper online that tells me how to do something, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts putting in the big Greek sigma symbols and everything, I don’t know how to do even that stuff. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know how to even read mathematic notation beyond like basic stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they start talking about things like, like, you know, if I are filters and everything, I have, I don’t have any clue about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Like I, that’s way above my head. And so it’s taken me a very long time to figure out how to do this kind of stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have figured out enough of it to get by on some low levels. And so I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find this really fascinating and interesting and it’s a very good intellectual challenge and it’s working towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something I really, really want to get done that will be very satisfying to me that most people won’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about at all. All of this is going to go into a little checkbox that says Airplay 2 like it’s like a little bullet point feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one release now supports Airplay 2. But if I can get this down I can then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also use this to build more interesting stuff. So I that’s what that’s my main goal here. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care less about your HomePod. I want to build more interesting stuff so I want to do Airplay 2 first to get me to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the building blocks and then I can do interesting stuff with that. So that’s that’s where I am now and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I actually find this to be a wonderful change of pace from fighting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch connectivity and transfers. This actually feels, even though this is way harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco math-wise and way lower level, this feels more satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me because I feel like I’m not cleaning up some mess. I feel like I’m actually building something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s something you don’t get very often in programming and you gotta really enjoy it when you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not to spoil your fun, but did you check to see Are there any libraries that already do this? Like open source libraries?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There might be some that are like really part of something bigger like the, oh, what’s that audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program? Not Audacity. Oh yeah, Audacity. Audacity is an open source audio editor that has things like limiters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and compressors in it. I could look at their code and like, I don’t know, steal it, I don’t wanna do that though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s probably hard to like port some of that stuff up. Or what I’m really looking for is like descriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like algorithms to do these kinds of things. And those are actually few and far between.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most online code that you would find would do this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either as like a MATLAB function, which I don’t know what to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s crazy. Or they’re doing it, they’re just like, you know, gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call the core audio units that, at least I know how to use audio units already. I’m trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this without using audio units. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To go back a half step, Do you have any findings that you’re willing to share with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to watch-related things? Was there some head-slapping moment where you were doing something silly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s what caused the problems? Or is this considered trade information?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main problem I had with the watch—so the watch app can wake up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone app in the background whenever it wants. Whenever the watch app is running or is updating itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the watch app is running, it can send a message to the phone app and the phone app will wake up if it’s in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t work the other way around. The phone app cannot wake up the watch app on demand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the phone app, like if you get a new download into your phone, the phone can’t send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that immediately to the watch. It has to wait for the next time the watch app checks in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the watch app can check in really pretty rarely. You know, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have it configured as a complication, it gets maybe every 15 minutes worth of check-in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s not a complication and you just have it on the watch, it gets a lot less time than that. Each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those check-ins, it can only be alive for like two seconds before the system puts it back in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if at any point you violate any of these limits from the watch app side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app gets killed. And then it doesn’t come back for a while. So, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many problems. Part of my problems were I was exhausting some of these resource limits because some things in the watch were just taking too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much computation that I was doing. and so it was getting killed in the background a lot. So it was not refreshing very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often. More problems, there were so many problems. Like there were a couple of race conditions with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch app would start up and send a sync message to the phone app and then receive some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files the phone app had sent in the background. Cause watch connectivity does not guarantee the order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things you send, whether some of them are background or not. It’s very, very weird. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there was some weird race conditions. There were some concurrency bugs. There were some crashes that were sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my fault sometimes being related to resource terminations. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a system before where the phone app would try to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the watch app proactively. So even if the watch app wasn’t running, and I said it earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone app can’t wake it up, the phone app was trying to say, you know what, this episode just came in, let me just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create a watch file transfer and just tell it to start. And then next time the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes around, or next time the systems feel like it, it can maybe get that transfer and hopefully sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch app will be woken up and it can receive that. So I was basically proactively creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfers on the phone. This meant the phone had to keep track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what the watch had. So the phone would know what was new and what needed to be sent to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch. This worked somewhat, but created a bunch of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge case problems. Problem number one was if you have more than one watch, this totally breaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you have more than one watch, then every time the watch every time a watch checks in with the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, if you have just changed watches, all background transfers get killed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and invalidated and you have to start them over. So if you if you are multiple watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is this is this is one thing that suffers and then also then like you know, then you have two different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sets of what you might have and so the phone can get confused about what’s the what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch has and it can send duplicate things. Some of those race conditions also resulted in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duplicate sends where like the phone would tell or the watch would tell the phone all right. I have numbers one two and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three and the phone would say all right. I’ll send you number four and then right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after the watch said I have numbers one two and three watching activity delivered in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number four that was sitting there waiting for it, but it just hadn’t delivered it right on launch. So then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually already had number four and then the phone is resending it because at the time the phone got the sick message it thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t have it. So it like there’s all sorts of weird little like race conditions and various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concurrency issues that just took me a very long time to figure out and fix and my solution at the end was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop doing anything proactively on the phone. The phone no longer keeps track of what’s on the watch except for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very basic display function of like displaying how much free space you have in the setting screen that’s it. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every time the watch syncs with the phone it tells it I have you know episodes number one two and three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever and the phone in response to that will create any necessary transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to send new stuff to the watch. That way you can have 10 watches paired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll basically work. Like it’ll be it’ll still suck for other reasons but it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically work because then like each watch is only getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is sent in response to it. This ends up working way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably and it eliminates duplicate transfers almost 100% of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which dramatically improves things. The only downside to it is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the delay between when your phone downloads a new episode and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when that episode shows up on the watch may be longer in many cases because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has to wait like so the phone can download it and then it has to wait until next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time the watch checks in before it even starts the transfer to the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But every other way I tried doing things was very very buggy and very you know it would destroy people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batteries and everything and it was and it would make a lot of duplicates and it would transfers we get all bogged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down and watch connectivity which is a very buggy framework and because I was just sending too many messages proactively in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the background it would just take forever like it was just it was so problematic to do it to do the proactive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method so this wave of basically doing everything in response to something is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more effective way faster at like at the actual transfers and then just has the downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like there’s that latency between when new stuff arrives and when the watch can get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sounds fun. Yeah, so that in response to all that I needed to do something productive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why I’m writing my own look ahead limiter, damn it. Whatever makes you happy. By the way, if anybody knows how to write a look ahead limiter, let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Yeah, that is intense. Oh, geez. I almost got it. Like I have the look ahead part. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that done. It’s just a question of like responding to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the changes in like attenuation in a smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also accurate way. Because in theory, like if you have a look ahead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of say, you know, 10 milliseconds and your attack time is 10 milliseconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in theory it should be impossible to ever clip. Like the output should never be clipped then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m not having that kind of outcome yet, so here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, good luck. I’m sure that’s just a boatload of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, much of it is. Yesterday was a lot of fun, like putting together all the lookahead stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing some more voice boost coding. Yesterday I had a lot of fun and I got a lot done. It was very productive. Today has been one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those banging my head against the wall days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have a separate little project where you’re working on this part? Doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the audio processing, not in Overcast, but in a separate framework project
⏹️ ▶️ John or just off to the side?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a Mac command line utility that I develop all this in. So that way, I just hit build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t have to wait for the simulator, I don’t have to wait for any devices. I just hit build, and I run it from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the command line with command line arguments of files I have on my Mac to test with. And it’s like, here’s an input file, here’s an output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file. So not only is it way faster of a build and run and debug cycle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also then I can supply it whatever input file I want, and then I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open the result up in Adobe Audition, which is this very sophisticated wave editor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can look and see exactly what I output at the wave level and just see, is this working right? I can listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I can, like on my big headphones and everything. So it’s all to make it a lot easier. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m working on a framework that is shared with Overcast. And so that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I figure it out in this Mac utility, I can just bring it over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just FYI, the faster code debug cycle is another reason a lot of people like unit tests when developing
⏹️ ▶️ John an isolated piece of functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love you, John. Oh, my word, I love you. In this case, I don’t know that at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this moment. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John still do it. Testing could still be a part of it if you knew what the, for example, if you knew what the numbers were supposed to look like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you knew what the samples, if you knew what you wanted the sample to look like in the stream, right? But you’re doing it sort of the more
⏹️ ▶️ John visual way of like, make a file, chuck it into an editor and look at it, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also spend a lot of time in the debugger. Like, that’s like, basically, the debugger is my test suite. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hit a breakpoint right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John after like it’s like I know what this is supposed to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an under the radar title. If under the radar had titles, the debugger is my test suite.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, you can still run the debugger with unit tests like that’s still a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tell you what, though, like as an iOS developer, the vast majority of the time doing something like this where it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac binary is so refreshing in a few ways. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah, it’s just so in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so damn easy and fast and there’s so much less to deal with. It’s really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear you. Now, I feel like I don’t want to pull on the unit testing thread anymore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like unit testing is one of those things that you’re going to come to in your own time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for some ridiculous reason, and then you’re going to say to John and me, hopefully me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not both of us, you know, unit testing is actually really convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a pretty long infinite timeline, Mark, given the current rate of change. Pretty optimistic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would not bet that I would be arriving at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any time. I think I will be retired from programming before I arrive at that point. Yeah, you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John Adam, Casey. Yeah, there you go. Maybe you have a chance with him. Adam will be heavily into test-driven development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t say test-driven development. I’m not a monster. I mean, come on.
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Bagel-emoji update
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with some follow up. You’re welcome world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we can comfortably say that it was only the three of us that got Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to update its bagel emoji. And now it mostly looks okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s still room, but it’s better than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it’s way better. Let’s say this. Yeah, definitely. The main thing you can say about it is it is an improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, how could it be worse, really? But it is an improvement for sure. There are things to be
⏹️ ▶️ John said about it, but put it this way. If I squint or move away from these big images
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, one is immediately identifiable as that’s supposed to be a bagel, and the other one still
⏹️ ▶️ John looks vaguely donut-like. So success on, if you look at this and tell me what it is, you can say it’s a bagel. look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John details you can nitpick them but as other people have pointed out you look at the details of
⏹️ ▶️ John almost any emoji and there’s some ridiculous stuff in there but like the key thing test that it has to pass is
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this and if you if some percentage of people say donut it’s a failure so thumbs up it
⏹️ ▶️ John now looks like it is now identifiable as a bagel albeit a very strange
⏹️ ▶️ John pale bagel that’s semi toasted with plastic cream cheese on it whatever or whatever, it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be small, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and like, you know, the point of emoji is not to look photorealistic. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an art style that on some level, and this varies depending on the vendor, but like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it always looks a little bit cartoony because they’re being displayed in text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in very, very small sizes most of the time. And so, like, to have something look totally photorealistic would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of look weird. So, the style they’re in is, and honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think Apple’s current style actually more photorealistic than it needs to be. Yeah, for sure. I
⏹️ ▶️ John was going to say it’s very close again, potentially uncanny valley. They it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s stylized for sure, but it is very much more photorealistic than most other emoji I’ve seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately, this is a much better bagel. It is more realistic than I expected it to be, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like I don’t I don’t have any more complaints about it. Basically, like I I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, like, so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they made, like, the little, you know, butt cracks seem more prominent, and so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier, it’s more easily identified as a bagel that way. The hole to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circle ratio and shape are better. They’re more, they better reflect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual, like, you know, New York style bagels, and the cream cheese, while I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the, like, you know, perfect way it was applied there, I do recognize this is like, this is a cartoon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And so it is supposed to be that way. And also the cream cheese hides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the texture of the horrible bread texture it had before, which appears to still be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under it, but we don’t really see it anymore. So ultimately, oh, and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color of the dough has been tweaked to be, I think, a lot better, much closer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real bagel. So ultimately, my main complaint about it, which admittedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very minor complaint, is that a plain bagel with plain cream cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is such a waste. Like you have two opportunities there to have interesting flavors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the bagel and in the cream cheese. And I understand if maybe you wanna just take one of those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like an everything bagel with plain cream cheese is really good. Or a plain bagel with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some kind of really outrageous cream cheese, like a really strong vegetable or a scallion or something, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be good too. But to have a plain bagel and plain cream cheese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just, it’s a waste of carbs.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. It’s like plain cheese pizza. Like, it’s not the thing you want all the time and other
⏹️ ▶️ John things can be more exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plain cheese pizza is way better than a plain bagel or plain cream cheese. None
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John done well. I feel like none of it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John done well. Like simple, it can be done well. A couple of, you know, not that we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go through all this all again, but a couple of my complaints about this bagel. The bottom half,
⏹️ ▶️ John like they hid the texture the you know the cut inside so they don’t have to worry about that for the most part
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore but it looks it looks kind of like it’s like toasted or stale like it’s the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John the parts that are sticking out of the wrong color but the main thing you already touched on is the cream cheese first of all i think it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic or wall spackle or something doesn’t read as good the way the way it’s uh and
⏹️ ▶️ John again this is all ridiculous stuff that you could only see if it’s giant size it’s small sizes it’s fine but but even maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s small sizes you can notice Like the there is there’s no bagel ever made in the history of the universe
⏹️ ▶️ John That had the cream cheese put on it so that there is a tiny thin rim of bagel visible uniformly
⏹️ ▶️ John around the outside Like it’s it’s basically impossible to do that Unless you custom made a machine
⏹️ ▶️ John if I saw a bagel like that I’d know I was in like dreamscape with Dennis Quaid like this is not this is this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not reality Look at this cream cheese in this bagel. This would never exist in the real world. This must be a dream
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad Anyway, it’s vastly improved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you scroll down in this article on on emoji pedia about the bagel update and you can see the list of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else’s bagel emoji like Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter. What the heck flavor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Twitter bagel?
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like a hamburger. That’s not even a
⏹️ ▶️ John bagel it has looks like a sphere with a hole down the center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so like so shape wise I can kind of forgive the shape if that’s their style. I mean I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like the Death Star.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it does look like the actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of does, but and so it’s like it’s it’s clearly illustrating a bagel with cream cheese and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bagel has five very large seeds on it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like they’re like the size of like almonds and then the color of the bagel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost red. It’s like it’s like a like a low saturation, like dusty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reddish brown, and I have never seen. I used to work in bagel shop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve eaten a lot of bagels since then. I have never seen a bagel that was anywhere near this color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any flavor in any bagel shop anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have red velvet bagels mixed with blueberry all the time?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or shaped like it’s not even bagel shape. It is literally sphere shaped with a cylindrical hole
⏹️ ▶️ John cut down the center of it. It looks more like a weird cream filled donut.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah it really does.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s by far the worst one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think Microsoft’s or Google’s are particularly good. In fact I think outside of Apple’s I think Samsung’s is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually my favorite of this batch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Samsung’s is the clear second place.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Google’s isn’t bad. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John as a bagel. Like you wouldn’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sesame seeds on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. What else? What else? It’s not a donut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, Google’s has a couple of critical errors. So number one is like the perspective between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the seam between the cream cheese and the top bagel half on the far left and right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is weird. It has the wrong perspective. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John overflowing. That’s what they’re trying to get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco at. But the bagels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weirdly behind it. It’s not the right angle. And then second of all, the way the seeds are distributed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s as if the side of the bagel that is not facing you has no seeds on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s not. It’s nonsensical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like I feel like yeah, like apples looks pretty good. Now, Twitter’s is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for comedy value. I don’t know what’s going on in Microsoft land with those black outlines. It’s probably just their style and Samsung’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like a legitimate lenders freezer bagel like that. The Samsung did a really good job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of showing what a lenders bagel looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s looks little donut like to apples is clearly the best in this bunch now. Yeah. That’s not even a contest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know is, you’re welcome, world.
Follow-up: Screen Time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about screen time and how everyone’s having problems with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, I complained about screen time as a feature I was using and then it just stopped working. I could no longer see
⏹️ ▶️ John my kids screen time reports on my phone. And a million people
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in to say, yep, I’m having exactly the same problem. I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John disabling screen time for the people and, you know, remove like the big the big reset, which was a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake, because Apple and their infinite wisdom has decided if you turn it off for somebody and then
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it back on, it has no recollection of what your settings were. It’s like, so you’re starting from scratch again. And there
⏹️ ▶️ John are a lot of settings. So once I did that once, I’m like, well, even if this fixed the problem, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t wouldn’t go through it again because it’s ridiculous. So as a warning to anyone who’s thinking of trying that today,
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t fix the problem and B, it makes you redo all of the settings. I hope you remembered what they all were. But yeah, everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, it was working for me. Now it’s not or whatever. One person did say that supposedly the 12.1 beta it’s fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not on the beta so I’ll just wait patiently for 12.1 to come out and hope it fixes my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s happening to you, you are not alone.
Follow-up: Emergency Bypass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, let’s see what’s next. Tell me about emergency bypass.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about do not disturb. I was a big proponent of setting time do not disturb. And I said, don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John you people can still get through if they need to because your VIPs and repeated messages will get through. There’s one other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot to mention. All that is true. There are settings that allow people to get through
⏹️ ▶️ John when they need to. But you can also within specific contacts designate that that contact
⏹️ ▶️ John that person, whoever it is, is able to bypass Do Not Disturb with either sounds,
⏹️ ▶️ John vibrations, or both. Just straight up, like they’ll just go straight through it. So if you’re worried
⏹️ ▶️ John that your, you know, spouse or children won’t be able to get in touch with you, go to their contacts and flip the switches
⏹️ ▶️ John for their ringtone and their vibrate settings and say that they will pierce the wall
⏹️ ▶️ John of Do Not Disturb. Of course, maybe you want to either, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was going to say, maybe you want to tell the person that it’s on so they don’t send you a message and expect Do Not Disturb to protect you,
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe you don’t want to tell those people that it’s on, and they’ll just assume that they shouldn’t text you late at night. Anyway, you figure
⏹️ ▶️ John that out yourself. But it’s a good setting. You should know it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I actually wrote a blog post about this in 2016 when it was new. And at the time, emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bypass was one humongous switch for an entire contact. So what that meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, if I wanted to turn emergency bypass on for Aaron, not only did it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn it on for the phone, but it turned it on for text messages, which is not advisable, in my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion, because sometimes she would be up late or get up early, either because she just happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wake up or couldn’t fall asleep, whatever, or maybe it was a baby related thing at the time. And so if she tried to send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a text with the expectation that I wouldn’t see it until I woke up, it would pass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through and actually make noise even if I’m on do not disturb. Because like I said, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or not, it was all or nothing for emergency bypass. But I’m looking at this now in iOS 12,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re right, John, what you just said is accurate that in the ringtone section of a specific contact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a switch for emergency bypass. And in the text tone section for the same contact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a different switch for emergency bypass. So in my case, I have Erin’s ringtone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey switch on because if she’s calling me at like midnight, something’s deeply broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the text tone, I have emergency bypass off because like I said, it is not unreasonable for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her to send me a message either after I go to sleep or before I wake up or actually more often than not, me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending them to her, not the other way around. But either way, you get the idea. So that’s good to know. I did not know that that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case, that there are now two switches. So if you’ve looked at this early on when it first came out in iOS 10, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe look again because it’s gotten better now.
iCloud Contacts limits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have some feedback with regard to your contact syncing, John, have
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t actually even looked into it. But I did get this one piece of feedback to look promising from Jordan McDonald.
⏹️ ▶️ John He said he heard about my contact syncing issues. And he had a similar problem. He said my syncing issue was due to
⏹️ ▶️ John one or more of the limits Apple places on sync and he linked me to one of these Apple support articles.
⏹️ ▶️ John To help keep your, here’s a quote from him, to help iCloud keep your contacts calendar reminders and bookmarks up to date.
⏹️ ▶️ John Keep your information within these limits. Now, that text I’m sure someone thinks is helpful, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I read that text and it’s like, I’m helping iCloud keep my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in sync by doing this. It’s like, is this a requirement? Or is it not? Or am I just like lightening the load?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, iCloud is really tired. My complaint about the language is it doesn’t make it clear that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, if you don’t stay within these limits, your stuff won’t work. It’s like you can help
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But you know, if you don’t do it, it’ll just be harder, but it’ll still anyway, the limit, the limit is a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of limits listed, which some of them are, you know, it’s like, Oh, you can only have 50,000 contacts, fine, like, okay, with that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, there’s going to be limits, it’s nice, they list them. Seems like that’s what this support article is about.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you get to the part about maximum size of a contact photo. And the maximum size
⏹️ ▶️ John of a contact photo is why is this number God knows 224 kilobytes,
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is really really small. That’s I mean even in JPEG like
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I’m starting from as I am starting from like photos like you know whatever 12 or 21 megapixel I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell my camera is. Anyway, they’re big photos even as JPEGs. They are not 200 kilobytes I’m starting
⏹️ ▶️ John from that and maybe even if I crop them So here’s the thing I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to look into this next time I go on a contact photo, you know mission
⏹️ ▶️ John First thing is I’m gonna make sure whatever photos I’m trying to get to sync are below this size and the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna see if I can interrogate some of my existing photos and like re-add them but at smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes to see if that helps you know things go. You know there’s a couple people who had the
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback like oh I found one bad contact and once I modified or deleted that contact it stopped gumming
⏹️ ▶️ John up the works and everything synced. But the the meta complaint is if these are
⏹️ ▶️ John the limits and your stuff just silently doesn’t sync because it’s above
⏹️ ▶️ John one limits, that is terrible. Like, fine, you have these limits, fine, the limits are weird. You have to tell me,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, you have to say, I’m never gonna sync your contacts because the photo you put on there is too big.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and I think I actually have seen an error message that says, you know, oh, sorry, that image is too big if I
⏹️ ▶️ John like accidentally, you know, drag like a giant ping image on there or something. It’s like multi-megabyte, right? So I think there
⏹️ ▶️ John is an error like that. So I’m hoping that this article is just old or I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John this can’t possibly be true because if all my contacts have stopped syncing because I put some images in there that are
⏹️ ▶️ John too big and it just decided to never tell me that and just hope that I have a podcast that someone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jordan McDonald
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey listens to and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll send me an email pointing me to this obscure support article, boy, I’m gonna be really depressed if that’s true. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are having problems, you know, maybe do that. By the way, the publish date on this article is September
⏹️ ▶️ John 7th, 2018, so it’s not looking good for my hope that this is not true.
Follow-up: Printer list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, what’s next? Let’s talk about the printer compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list, which came up several episodes ago when I got a new printer and was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreasonably excited about it. And you had pointed me to, I believe it was you, John, pointed me to the printer compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco which I will maintain. It was me, actually. Oh, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mark. John, I don’t think John even knew about it. No, I knew about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh. Of course he did. I thought I had that one. But I hadn’t checked it in years. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hadn’t, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even know it was still maintain, which leads us to today’s follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why don’t you continue in that vein?
⏹️ ▶️ John So unfortunately, Apple is no longer maintaining this list. For like, for
⏹️ ▶️ John a, yeah, because remember I said, oh, I’ll just wait for the, you know, the thing to be updated for. And, and, and the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know about also is that they’d start subdividing into printing versus scanning. You know, it’s still just two check
⏹️ ▶️ John marks, but it’s better than it was, you know, back in the day. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re, they’re not gonna maintain it anymore. And it’s mostly because of air print. the text from the thing is many
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors of printer scanners have adopted driverless technologies such as airprint driverless is basically where they you know
⏹️ ▶️ John they have an agreed upon interface and they push more logic onto the printer and they just say look printers you got to talk to us in this way otherwise we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t print that’s part of the airprint thing you know anyway and they are no longer providing drivers for new devices
⏹️ ▶️ John if your printer was made in the last several years it probably doesn’t require a driver this list is provided for reference reference
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes and it’s no longer being updated so basically they’re saying printer drivers
⏹️ ▶️ John uh apple would like them to no longer be a thing it’s like look if you want to print on one of our things, do airprint,
⏹️ ▶️ John no drivers are required, and if you’re not, you’re probably already on one of these lists. So in theory it’s reasonable to
⏹️ ▶️ John stop updating it because people shouldn’t be making printers that require drivers anymore. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s actually true enough and I kind of wish they would maintain that list but I don’t know. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, the more recent version of one of the HP things, like the numbers were
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit bigger than the ones that are on the list. The last list that they have this latest I
⏹️ ▶️ John couldn’t find an HP printer with that number I found one with like that number minus 10 and maybe it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe it would work fine but then maybe it’s totally different like you don’t really know so
⏹️ ▶️ John if they never update that list again I’m never gonna see a list like for a Mojave to say does this
⏹️ ▶️ John HP one two three four five printer and scanner work with Mojave
⏹️ ▶️ John with drivers or without drivers it’s just like I guess I have to check whether it does air print does
⏹️ ▶️ John air printing compass scanning Anyway, I’m still not doing anything with my printers, but Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John out of the business of keeping track of this big long list of printers that work, and they just want everyone to use AirPrint. So, welcome
⏹️ ▶️ John to the future of printing.
Sponsor: Fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Fracture, who prints your photos directly onto
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New “Palm” phone
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a new Palm Pilot, sort of, except not at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So somebody has licensed the Palm name to make a little itty bitty BB phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is kind of the Apple Watch to Android phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ish. So this is a little tiny phone that is a mostly full featured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android phone that you can only buy on Verizon and only as an accessory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a regular phone. And I guess the idea is much like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular Apple Watch, where you can walk away from your phone and even, you know, drive away from your phone and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still get phone calls on your watch and you can still get text messages on your watch while on this little baby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone you can get text messages and make phone calls and whatnot but so it’s designed to be with you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you don’t want to have your big huge phone with you what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what yo dog why
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talk about night and day phone that was the joke of like several years ago now it’s like your phone needs a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I don’t I don’t get this like Neither do I I think it’s cool that that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are trying new ideas, but not every new idea is a good one Who wants to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get away from their phone, but bring another phone with them?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t I just don’t get it
⏹️ ▶️ John I I’m not sure whether this will succeed obviously this you know it’s $350 like it’s only from Verizon It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little Android thing like it’s a very limited scope for this and the fact that they Bought the palm name and shoved
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the back means nothing. It’s just an Android phone But when I look at this, I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and there’s a kernel of a decent idea in there somewhere, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John as phones get bigger, physically speaking, it is sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John inconvenient to have your, you know, iPhone 10 S Max
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, you know, your big phone with you, particularly in places like in the summer, you just got shorts and a t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John on like it, it’s a big thing. thing. And but people also don’t want to be without
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones. We know like the phone insecurity problem of like, you know, it’s like taking a pacifier away from, you know, toddler, they,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need to have their phone with them at all times. And there is a tension there. I like to have my phone with me at all times.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m in touch. But these phones are so freaking huge. But I love my big phone. I love I love it to death. I want my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John to be even bigger. It’s just humongous, right? But I’m gonna go and just try to stick that
⏹️ ▶️ John in my shorts pocket. Or do I have to always bring like, a bag or a backpack? It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of too much. And you’re right that the cellular Apple Watch is perhaps a thing there, but it’s not like you’re gonna text people when you
⏹️ ▶️ John sell your Apple Watch and you can’t really watch a quick YouTube video or do an Instagram or like.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what this product points out to me is the potential,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it’s a real potential, for some, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a role that’s not being filled. Phones used to be much smaller than they are now. They’ve gotten so big
⏹️ ▶️ John that they sort of have, price them out, price themselves out, price is the wrong word. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John removed themselves from a category of uses that they used to be able to fit into. Oh, a little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing you just chuck in your pocket and go, right? You don’t do that anymore because they’re so freaking big, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, this argues for a potential market for less humongous phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it argue for people to buy a big phone and a tiny phone? Probably not because that’s kind of silly
⏹️ ▶️ John and who wants to deal with two phones? But that’s what they’re trying to do here, to say sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you wish you had your phone with you and you wish you could do all the phone things including texting people and
⏹️ ▶️ John doing a snapchat or making a little video or like you know do all the phone things but it’s not so
⏹️ ▶️ John darn big but you still love your big phone so I wish that what actually happened
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of this silliness is that more phone makers Android and Apple decided to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to selling some phones that are not so big that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are that they limit the context in which they can be comfortably used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This would have been a lot more interesting if the phone number sharing thing was
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you got to have don’t you have to have a second number with it or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, no, no, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it does the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it does the same thing that the watch does, which is that it it shares your number with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your main phone, which also means though that this can’t be a device that you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your kids to take to school with them. Because it is your number. You can’t call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it to you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware-wise, they could sell it individually, but how they’re positioning it now is as a phone for your phone, or as a little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So, again, I think there’s a lot wrong with this product, but the idea of a market for
⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller phone, I think, is there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. It’s like there’s two separate things about this. There’s the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a small, limited phone and then the idea of a satellite phone that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shares the same number as your main phone so you can take it with you when you don’t want to take your main phone for some reason. And like I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latter idea about having them both share the same number is very limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in who actually would want that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s limited to people who have a day phone or a night phone or two Apple Watches. Like I bet there is a market for that. It’s probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John very big. And also about this being limited, it’s not really, it’s not a limited phone. It does all the phone things. It’s limited
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s smaller and probably gets worse battery life and you know it’s not doesn’t have a fastest processor but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing that you would you know there’s no category of thing that you want to do on a phone this can’t do like this is
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than the original iPhone probably right like you can do all the things on it has a camera it has video it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like just the stuff isn’t that good but it’s not even that limited right so that’s that’s why I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John someone might get one of these and come to the realization that most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John all they need is this little dinky underpowered thing and it feels so much better in their pocket than the giant thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John very few people will ever come to that realization because
⏹️ ▶️ John heck is going to buy two phones and deal with all that? Like it’s a, you know, a tech nerd thing or people with money to
⏹️ ▶️ John burn or whatever. So, but anyway, I hope other, you know, phone makers look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John and the lesson they take from it is not, well, we’ll never do that because look what a disaster that product was. That’s the lesson they take
⏹️ ▶️ John is that there’s enough interest in this that they should consider making one of their models
⏹️ ▶️ John not be the size of a dinner tray.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think though, like this is one of those, those like aspirational products, like even for the people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it, that they might think, it’s very similar to the cellular Apple Watch, they might think, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna leave my big phone behind during occasions or roles X, Y, and Z,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ll bring this little satellite phone with me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But then the first- If they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it. Then like the first, and by the way, if you’re an iPhone user, this doesn’t have iMessage, because it’s Android, so that kind of sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is, I think this is mostly for Android people. If you’re an iPhone user for the same money, you could just buy an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SE. Anyway, but like I think it’s one of those things where you might think you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this in a few contexts, but in real life, the first few times you did it, you would miss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about your big phone. Number one, frequently cited by Apple Watch people, you miss the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, this phone does have a camera, but it’s not going to be nearly as good as the ones that are in the flagship phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you probably, you know, have access to otherwise if you’re spending this kind of money frivolously on a phone. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be, and there’s gonna be a number of those things for everybody. Like, there’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be things that like, yeah, you know what? You think you wanna leave your big phone at home, but once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re without it, there’s a lot of things that you’re gonna miss and you’re gonna regret leaving it behind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this little phone is gonna then go sit in a drawer somewhere for the rest of its life. I just see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this as a problem that doesn’t really, the issue of having a satellite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone that you sometimes take with you is not a thing. That is not a thing anybody really wants, or at least anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants in great numbers. And even if you give it to them, they will realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they won’t actually use it shortly afterwards. So I don’t see that at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea of there being smaller phones as choices to buy for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main slash only phone, that idea has merit. I’m not sure how much the market supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but that idea has merit. But that’s a very different thing than what they’ve shipped
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Yeah, this might be a little bit too downmarket because 350, like the quality of the camera and the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a, you know, it’s probably too much of a downgrade. All right, that’s why everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, like, just take an Apple Watch, right? But no one wants to text people on an Apple Watch. They’re like, and who wants to text people on a screen this
⏹️ ▶️ John far, small? Just ask all the people who use the original iPhone and all the iPhones before they got tall with the
⏹️ ▶️ John five and before they got big with the six. Like, we did it. It was a thing that happened, so it’s viable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the quality of this camera cannot be good. I mean, you can read the review to see what it looks like, It’s probably below
⏹️ ▶️ John the threshold where it’s just gonna annoy people but most people don’t have the newest latest greatest film with an awesome camera so
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like you could make a cheaper or smaller phone as a standalone that would find
⏹️ ▶️ John a market and the palm stuff I just feel like is insulting because it’s like they’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John the heritage of palm like You just buy the name and you just stick it on the back of the thing in this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John Thing where it’s like PA LM and like a square shape. I don’t like it. It’s upsetting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, user Mike Yu in the chat points out that actually the Palm phone is way smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the original iPhone, which to me is like, that’s a cool thing to have something that’s small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you then pretty much won’t be able to like text on it. Like it has an on-screen keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like modern smartphones but like you’re not going to be able to see that much on that tiny little screen. Typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be really hard. What we do on phones today barely even fits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPhone SE. To make something that’s even significantly smaller than that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to try to make it a useful thing, like, it’s like, if this phone was like $50, that’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a different story. Or if it was like really good and a little bit bigger, so it’d be a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful, that’d be a different story. But right now, it’s like, it’s too small to have general use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s not a standalone product, so you can’t buy it for your kids
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And also, it’s too expensive to be a kind of disposable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep it just in case you need it kind of thing. $350 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half the price of a really good phone. So I don’t see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is going for.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does have more RAM than an iPhone 7. Well that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. You won’t be able to fit… I mean, you can fit as many apps as you want in them, as long as they’re crappy Android apps that you’ll ever want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use because they’re so tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m just saying like it’s a it’s well that leads us into our next topic but the
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the specs of this thing are ridiculous because it’s a $350 phone but it’s actually got a surprising amount of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I don’t think it’s that terrible a device for the constraints it has.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t really understand what would make somebody purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one. You know like I understand the pitch but realistically nobody’s going to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. a bunch of people are going to do it because they’ll be intrigued by the idea, but it’s too much of a downgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John from their actual phone that I don’t think that will be a viable substitute.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. All right, so you said that that was a segue into our next topic. Tell me more.
Photoshop on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is about Adobe’s announcements at their Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John Max conference. There’s a bunch of them. Maybe we’ll talk about some of the other ones later. But today
⏹️ ▶️ John the main one that the highlight is Photoshop CC is coming to the iPad in 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this may not sound like much because like hasn’t already been Photoshop for the iPad like who cares or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like but the important part is that this is in Adobe’s words and in all the PR
⏹️ ▶️ John things. This is real Photoshop on the iPad. It’s not a new application that’s kind of like Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a brand new application that can also read PSD files. Sometimes this is full-fledged Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And they emphasize, you know, that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same code base and that it’s fully compatible. And obviously, especially in the beginning, there will be some features
⏹️ ▶️ John that are only on the desktop, but I’m sure they’ll shore up those gaps. But this is sort of Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John finally, you know, I don’t know, jumping in like Apple has wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John pro applications in the iPad for a long time. And for the longest time, Adobe has been like, we’ll make some apps
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad. We have some ideas of cool things we can do. But Photoshop is a desktop app. Sorry, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you. You can’t have that on the iPad. And now you can. And you know, it’s cross compatible. They have their, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud stuff where you can put the document in their creative cloud cloud. if they repeat cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John and work on it on your desktop and work on the same thing. You know, and it also reads from iCloud drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and Dropbox, and it’s just 100% compatible. You make a document on desktop, you can open it up in your iPad. You make a document
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad, you can open it on desktop. It’s just, you know, real Photoshop. And that’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the adapted the interface. It’s not the same as it is in the desktop. There’s a bunch of things, touch affordances
⏹️ ▶️ John and some interesting new tools in there. But I thought this was, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John about time. I’m sure all of Adobe’s competitors are a little bit scared because Adobe, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John their application may or may not be as good as some of the existing stuff or may not be as you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John most people who have had to do work on the iPad or like doing work on the iPad have already chosen a non Adobe application
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part to do their stuff. And so they’re late to the game. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe has an existing subscription system. Somehow they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John work out the financials with the Apple stuff of like if you if you can subscribe through it through Apple thing or whatever but the current the
⏹️ ▶️ John current workaround is that if you buy Photoshop CC you just get the iPad app for free I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John they will work dollars out with Apple Adobe has tons of applications and lots of history
⏹️ ▶️ John and Photoshop is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of image processing So
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet the competitors aren’t particularly happy about Adobe finally doing this But I think it’s a good move for
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad and hopefully it’ll push Apple in the direction of of making the iPad even more pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the reason I said that the end of that weird palm-foamed thing was a good transition to this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a particular technical angle of this that I was thinking about when the announcement was made, and I have some musings
⏹️ ▶️ John based on it. And the technical angle is, how do you get Photoshop, a big fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop application that historically has been a thing that you use to show off the power of your computer, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac, How do you get that onto an iPad? And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about how the iPad CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and GPUs are surprisingly powerful. About the JavaScript benchmark being faster than the iMac Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John just in general being, you know, sometimes just being straight up faster than a lot of Apple’s laptops. Like, that doesn’t seem like a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU power seems like it’s there. And, you know, storage for big images, don’t they make like
⏹️ ▶️ John a 512 gig iPad or something? A 512 gig phone, like whatever, there’s plenty of room to store giant files
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if they’re in the cloud, it’s not a big deal. But there is one aspect of iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John even the big iPads, that doesn’t seem like it’s up to snuff to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John something like Photoshop, and that’s RAM. There hasn’t been a Mac sold
⏹️ ▶️ John with four gigs of RAM in it for many, many years. You sure? Doesn’t the Air still base
⏹️ ▶️ John itself at that? Oh, please don’t say that. I really hope that’s not true. That can’t possibly be true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible. I thought it was true, but we can look it
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Nope, it’s eight. Four gigs of RAM is not a lot for a Photoshop machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s put it that way. Like again, Photoshop always wanted the most RAM you can put in so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have really big images. And why does Photoshop use a lot of RAM? I mean, the main answer is layers,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So most of the time you could have one image that’s probably not that high res, but maybe it’s like 600
⏹️ ▶️ John DPI for like print, publishing a magazine cover, whatever. But imagine that document has 50 layers
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. you know, that stuff just eats memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, like the way Photoshop deals with a lot of the images, it has to deal with them in uncompressed format. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think of a JPEG as being like, you know, it’s like eight megs for this giant image, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, actually like if you deal with the raw pixels in an uncompressed format, like multiply the width
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the height by four, and that’s how many bytes it needs, at least, depending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on what else, you could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey doing more things. You could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have more deep color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah. And so like, it’s a lot of memory, like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single, like, you know, one screen large image off the top of my head is like, you know, 20, 30 megs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s a lot, right? It’s way more data than like the JPEG version is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to do a lot of operations efficiently, that has to be in memory.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So you may be thinking, okay, well, that’s the modern world where all the Macs have tons of RAM, but Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John did ship with four gigs of RAM. We just talked about my Mac Pro that shipped with two gigs of RAM and Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John ran on those machines. So it’s obviously not a big deal. Photoshop can run in much less memory than we
⏹️ ▶️ John run in today. Maybe it’s not great, but it can do it. There’s a second thing to think about, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Real-time follow-up. There is indeed one Mac that is still sold new. Oh, the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John mini. Oh, God. Updated 1,600 days ago. The Mac mini $500 configuration comes stock with four
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Mini. Probably not a Photoshop powerhouse. But anyway, so the other
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to be concerned about with iOS devices is, and you often hear this and this is not actually true, people will say
⏹️ ▶️ John that iOS devices don’t have virtual memory. That’s not true. iOS devices have
⏹️ ▶️ John always had a virtual memory in that they have your programs address memory using
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual addresses that are then translated to physical addresses, right? So virtual memory has been
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS from day one. What people mean when they say iOS doesn’t have virtual memory
⏹️ ▶️ John is they mean that iOS will not, it doesn’t use swap, will not page
⏹️ ▶️ John things to disk. So in a virtual memory system, when a program wants more memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no more memory to give the system will take something that is in memory, hopefully that hasn’t been used
⏹️ ▶️ John recently or isn’t being actively used and it will swap it out to disk. It will say, I’m going to take this big chump of Ram. I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to write to a swap file and I’ll say You stay there and they’ll give you this RAM that they were using before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they ever want that thing back, I’ll go back to the disk and pull it out of the swap file and bring it back in. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John going to disk, you know, and swap is way slower than RAM and you really don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in a situation where it’s constantly shuffling things. I got to take this out of RAM, put it on disk, or I take this thing off the disk and put it back in
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. That’s called swapping and then it’ll make everything slow. That’s called the 90s. Yeah. iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John never, has never had swap because as you can imagine, like it was of the ragged
⏹️ ▶️ John edge of what was possible like in the original iPhone. And if there’s a possibility that by loading a big game or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff can swap and then you try to switch and swap it back in. You know, flash wasn’t always as fast as
⏹️ ▶️ John it is today, especially on iOS devices. And either even if it’s fast, it’s way slower
⏹️ ▶️ John than having things in RAM. So I OS from from day one, continuing today, I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John No swap. So it has virtual memory, but it doesn’t have swap. And what that means for RAM limits is like your
⏹️ ▶️ John your two gig Mac Pro, the two gig Mac Pro that I’m the next to, we could run Photoshop or, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, maybe you have something that has too many layers doesn’t fit in two gigs. It doesn’t matter. You can always
⏹️ ▶️ John swap out portions of it and it’ll make it slower, but at least you can do it. But an iOS, when
⏹️ ▶️ John Ram is exhausted and when the system has ejected every other application from the system and you ask for
⏹️ ▶️ John more Ram, the OS kills your program. There is no more to give. You can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing like, Oh, well the OS never says, well, there’s no more Ram. I’ve killed all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John programs. I’ll just start swapping some stuff out to this. It doesn’t do that. It says the RAM is all used
⏹️ ▶️ John up and you are the only program running. I’m going to kill you now. I think it gives you like low memory warnings,
⏹️ ▶️ John but eventually the OS kills your program. Right. And so what happens in Photoshop, it’s just like the desktop. If I make
⏹️ ▶️ John this awesome image in the desktop, it’s, you know, some 600 DPI magazine cover with 50 layers. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I try to open it on my iPad and I try to do some manipulation that requires it to load a bunch of stuff into memory
⏹️ ▶️ John to run some filter across seven layers. and it keeps asking for more and more memory to perform that operation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it runs out. The OS is gonna kill the program, but you can’t, you know, how do they
⏹️ ▶️ John allow you to edit files that are too big to fit in RAM? And remember, the biggest iOS devices, I think, have four gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. Is that the max now? I
⏹️ ▶️ John so. On the big iPad or on the iPhone XS Max and all that stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a lot of RAM. There is very easy to find a real-world Photoshop image that
⏹️ ▶️ John will happily eat up four gigs of RAM while you’re working on it. And keep in mind that the OS has to take some portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. And so you don’t even get all the four gigs to yourself. Um, so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of a head scratcher, but obviously they did it. They demoed it, right? So how did they do it? Uh, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John the details of how they actually did it, but, uh, there are a bunch of possibilities, but one of them I find intriguing
⏹️ ▶️ John and delightful, uh, which is rooted in the fact that Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John has already run in the past. On a platform that did not have swap. In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, Photoshop has run on a platform that did not have virtual memory. That platform is classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS. Classic Mac OS did not have virtual memory and did not have swap. Wait, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as in like not until Mac OS 10?
⏹️ ▶️ John The virtual memory part of it came into effect a little bit towards the end of classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS’s life. But the original Mac, no virtual memory, real addresses for everything, single shared address space,
⏹️ ▶️ John no swap, no virtual memory, no nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, the original one, yeah, but by the 90s, they had to have had at least some of that, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the love of God.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they might, well, if you think about it, if you have programs that expect a big shared
⏹️ ▶️ John memory space, I think they had some, well, there were third-party programs that could give you some
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, and I think by Mac OS 9 or whatever, they had some kind of virtual stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they ever had a real swap file. But anyway, Photoshop ran before
⏹️ ▶️ John all of that. Ran like, I don’t know, it didn’t run I guess the Mac 128 but on the Mac plus I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John which had one megabyte of RAM I think Photoshop 1.0 ran on the Mac plus certainly the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John SE Photoshop could run on a machine with a monochrome display, which is always fun
⏹️ ▶️ John So, how did it do it? How did Photoshop run on a machine with like a ridiculously small amount of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and no virtual memory system and no swap? They did it the only way you could possibly do
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which is within the Photoshop they wrote a system that said when you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John memory to do something and the the OS says there’s no more memory to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you program implement your own little virtual memory system where you’ll make your own little swap files off to the
⏹️ ▶️ John side and you will take portions of the image data and write it out to your own little you know Photoshop swap files
⏹️ ▶️ John like a tiny miniature virtual memory system just for that program within that program so we can shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ John things off of disk into memory operate on them put the back on disk so on and so forth and
⏹️ ▶️ John so that that’s photoshop’s origins it was originally a Mac program and it was born on a platform that didn’t have this
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be extremely delightful if the code to do that from her original
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop suddenly come in came in super handy if you it once again finds itself on a
⏹️ ▶️ John system that has no swap so that is that well we we have our own swapping
⏹️ ▶️ John system written already we can use that to take things out of memory and put them onto disk and pull them off of
⏹️ ▶️ John disk or whatever. I would love for that to be true. It’s obviously potentially a competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage over other image editors like, you know, affinity and the other competitors to Photoshop, which must have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do something similar. Because again, if you want to work with images that are too big to fit in memory, and your operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system does not have swap, you need to do something like that yourself. And Photoshop Adobe in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John has experienced doing that very same thing. So that to me is the most interesting and exciting
⏹️ ▶️ John part of Photoshop on the iPad. The idea that potentially code from classic Mac OS has
⏹️ ▶️ John risen from the grave or perhaps it never even left Photoshop and is now
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco potentially a competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage should Adobe over other programs that did not have their origin on a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean modern versions of Photoshop still have like the the swap disk options, swap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch disk. Yeah it’s like it probably has the same system because like you know like lots of lots of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end or high-performance apps will do things like write their own memory allocator because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can tailor it to exactly their use and they can you know get faster performance and more control than the system stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know of a lot of programs that are at their own swap file system but but I’m sure somebody does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know beyond just Photoshop and so it wouldn’t surprise me if Adobe still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses that even on even like on Macs with you know 64 gigs of they might still use that kind of system just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they already had it and they can tweak it, they can tune it, and we know it still uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scratch disks for something, so that could be what they’re for. And also, this is just one of those things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you ask, oh, what do you need Photoshop and iPad for, and somebody says, oh, you can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative X, Y, or Z, one of the things that really separates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro apps from more basic or consumer or prosumer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones is this ability to deal with extremes. And this is true even on the Mac too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is true everywhere. But like, what really separates pro apps from the rest is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do operations on a, you know, 300 by 300 clip art thing you found on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can do operations on like an entire like 600 DPI, 11 by 17 page layout of something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’ll be slower if it needs to be, but it won’t crash, it’ll still work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, it’ll let you do what you have to do. And I’ve never used any competitors to Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, so I don’t know how they handle these extremes. They might handle them just fine, as far as I know. But, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a customer of these things and a user of these things, like, if I were looking to, you know, change my workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a competitor, like everyone has had to do on the iPad up until this comes out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things I’d be worried about is, like, can it really handle extremes or not? Because, occasionally, I need it to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have something that is known to have extreme capability,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Photoshop, that is known to handle crazy things, and at least,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it isn’t fast, it’ll at least work, that’s a really good selling point for them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of reasons why I think they’re gonna do well with this on the iPad, but one of the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones to me is, you’re gonna know that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can throw anything at this, And if you’re patient enough, it will probably work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I can’t help but wonder is, if at one point in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps in the present, they needed to create their own virtual memory system,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else do you think that they abstracted away about the underlying platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to make things easier? Since Photoshop runs on Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it runs on macOS, and soon will be running on iOS, How much do you think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running against actual APIs or some sort of like adapter layer that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or facade maybe that Adobe wrote themselves? And at what point are they like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey creating like an entire virtual machine within Photoshop just to kind of smooth all these rough edges out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s just, I don’t argue with what you’re saying, John. It’s just, I can’t help but wonder like, how far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does this really go?
⏹️ ▶️ John It used to be that the Mac version of Photoshop and the Windows version of Photoshop had
⏹️ ▶️ John separate UIs. Like the Mac version certainly is the first one to exist, and it had native Mac UI, or as native as it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be. But at some point, due to someone’s great idea about economies of scale and not repeating yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, they made a unified user interface that was surely some
⏹️ ▶️ John underlying Adobe framework that rendered a Mac UI on the Mac and a Windows UI on Windows. And the way
⏹️ ▶️ John you could tell that was that the Mac UI suddenly became a lot less Mac-like. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John entered the era where Adobe apps had essentially Adobe interfaces. Like, they weren’t Mac interfaces,
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t Windows interfaces, they were Adobe interfaces. And I think a lot of Adobe apps are still like this, where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like they’re pulling from an Adobe suite of controls, and their idea of what a window and a button and a control should look like
⏹️ ▶️ John is the Adobe idea. And it looks different on Windows and the Mac, but it’s clear that there’s been some massive unification
⏹️ ▶️ John under the, behind the scenes. That, you know, hasn’t always been beneficial, but I’m sure that’s the case. And
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously their engines for dealing with images they’re mostly cross platform for this part,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, plus or minus the various use of the different acceleration frameworks on different platforms. Right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, that’s been a complaint about Adobe in the past from a Mac user perspective is that
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t feel like Mac apps. They feel like Adobe apps. Obviously if you like Adobe apps or you know, if you move from platform to
⏹️ ▶️ John platform, that’s an advantage. But sometimes I look at Adobe apps, most Adobe apps and I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is like a weird, it’s not an electron app, but it’s like, it’s like a weird kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t it doesn’t feel like a Mac application and sometimes it’s kind of ugly
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes I kind of wish the controls were the regular controls but it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain point Adobe’s were like look Apple you’re lucky we still make motion for a while they were like we’re lucky you still
⏹️ ▶️ John make Photoshop your platform at all because Windows has taken over the world obviously the that’s less relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John today and the iPad is certainly the more popular tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John platform than Android because they don’t have that many great tablet apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of that sharing going on behind the scenes. I’m not sure that if they ever had
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement a virtual memory system for Windows because I think the first version of Windows they wrote it for had both virtual memory and swap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure. I believe Windows got that in 3.1-ish, somewhere around that range. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Gateway 2000 computer had the ability to either enable or disable 386
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enhanced mode, which I’m pretty sure was virtual memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My word. So do we think this is gonna be good? And I don’t say that to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snark, and I’m not trying to be funny. It’s just, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s hard for me to imagine that this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be without hiccups. You know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just look at file management on the iPad, which is something that’s relatively new. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file management is not easy on the iPad. And what happens when you want to suck in something from an SD card?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, do you still have to go through the photos app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the Apple photos app to suck in these photos from the SD card and then bring them into Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then back to the, you know, your photo library or your camera or whatever. Like, it just seems like this is still going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a lot of hurdles. Now those hurdles are the sorts of hurdles that really make Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Federico happy, but to somebody like me, I find that to be infuriating. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this going to be good, great? I mean, I guess the fact that Adobe has Cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hence CC, because that’s Creative Cloud, once you get a file, you can store it in Creative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cloud, I would assume, and then it just kind of appears everywhere, I would assume, kind of iCloud-like, but I don’t know, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you think that this is going to be, this is still going to be fairly clunky?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s one of the…
Pro gear working together
⏹️ ▶️ John One of the potential upsides of Adobe running Photoshop with the iPad is hopefully it will push
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in the direction to make the iPad a better platform for
⏹️ ▶️ John pro applications. The file stuff, I think actually we’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly okay for the cloud options because it always got its thing, but it also works with iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John Drive and Dropbox. And honestly, even if there was full file system access
⏹️ ▶️ John from every application, there was SD card slot in the side of the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still probably more convenient to do the cloud stuff. You know what I mean? Like you’re not shipping, you’re not using sneaker net
⏹️ ▶️ John to ship files around even to another Mac. It’s not like, yeah, Macs have great file system access, but the way
⏹️ ▶️ John two Macs would look at the same files, they would, you know, pull it up on a network share or something, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the cloud solution is probably mostly okay. But the fact that some
⏹️ ▶️ John options are, some doors are closed to you, Hopefully it will make Apple consider,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when it’s not just one file, but it’s a whole bunch of files, or you’re working on a project that’s a folder full of files, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do all this with a cloud drive as well, but there’s some things that are a little bit easier locally or there could be security sensitive things
⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t wanna go in across the network, who knows? So I hope Apple pays attention. There was an
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting video, we’ll put a link in the show notes, this Verge review of Photoshop on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, and they had a bunch of their artists who work for the Verge mess with it
⏹️ ▶️ John and say what they think about using Photoshop on the iPad. They have some interesting things to say that you might not think
⏹️ ▶️ John of if you don’t draw on a computer all day. Like one of the ones was a person talking about, I
⏹️ ▶️ John this is true of any iPad, if not Photoshop, but if you’re drawing with the pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad and you want to draw at a different angle, you can just rotate the iPad like you would a piece of paper,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not true of a computer screen and is also not true, interestingly, of something like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Surface Studio where the screen is like a big iMac like screen and kind of folds
⏹️ ▶️ John down. You can’t take that and easily like just twist it like you would twist a piece of paper to scribble it at a different
⏹️ ▶️ John angle because it’s just too big and it’s not on a swivel thing. You’d have to like turn the whole computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would be awkward. Like it’s more like a drafting table than a piece of paper on the drafting table which is an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John angle for people considering drawing on the iPad. But the other one that really stood out to me
⏹️ ▶️ John was the one artist who said she was doing, she did some, they all tried to do some like real non-trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John project on a thing. She said by the end of it, her hand was hurting a little bit from gripping the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Pencil. And she said her Wacom tablet that she normally uses has a pencil with a big, thick,
⏹️ ▶️ John ergonomic grip with a smooshy thing on the end. And if you look at the Apple Pencil, it’s a beautiful,
⏹️ ▶️ John simple, elegant shape. There’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey extraneous, blah, blah, blah. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty darn skinny, right? It’s pretty skinny. It certainly doesn’t have one of those ergonomic grip things. And you could add one or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it goes to show how ill suited.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to get Mark on a ramp, but how ill suited so many aspects of modern Apple design are to
⏹️ ▶️ John demanding professional applications. Because if you are a professional using a stylus all day,
⏹️ ▶️ John just using the Apple pencil the way it is, it’s probably not great. Like you don’t see a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of styluses or other things used by artists for a long period of time, especially with a computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t look and aren’t actually more ergonomic than a simple unadorned,
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly slippery, slippery, skinny cylinder. And there’s a reason for that. Like there’s a reason, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, things that look ergonomic tend to look ugly and be shaped so that they’re easy to comfortably
⏹️ ▶️ John grip and they reduce fatigue or whatever. Um, and what’s like, okay, well
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to use the Apple pencil. There is a wide variety of pressure sensitive styluses. Oh Not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, I hope bringing more artists to seriously consider
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad because now quote unquote real Photoshop is there again. Tons of artists have been using
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad and Adobe has made applications. And by the way, Adobe is also making non Photoshop applications that are more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a green field. Let’s reimagine what kind of illustration application we can make. I hope all of that
⏹️ ▶️ John and the influx of new creatives and all that stuff leads Apple down the same
⏹️ ▶️ John road that I got. I hope that they’re traveling for the Mac Pro, which is what do professionals
⏹️ ▶️ John really need out of our platforms? Let’s listen to them and make something for them, even if that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is not well suited to consumers. Consumers don’t want a weird Wacom tablet looking
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil thing. If they want a pencil at all, the simple Apple one is probably the right thing, although they really wish they had a place to stick it
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of it just being loose. So I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John all this is nudging Apple in the right direction. And by the way, at Adobe Max, Phil Schiller came on stage
⏹️ ▶️ John and talked about Photoshop and how happy
⏹️ ▶️ John he is it’s coming to the iPad and how great the iPad is and so on and so forth. So Apple is in on this and they’re working together.
⏹️ ▶️ John So things are trending in the right direction. Oh, and speaking of the Apple Pencil, I was thinking about this the other day.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how many people listening to this actually have an Apple Pencil. If you do have it, do you know where it is?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of ways that you travel with it and little clip-on things and places to stick it and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of stuff like that. It’s so bad. And the cap, forget about the cap, right? I was thinking about this and I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, that’s true, but in the idealized world of Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John many problems either don’t exist in Apple’s idealized world or they don’t acknowledge them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is a case where Apple itself definitely acknowledges this issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John and they acknowledge it with these weird little white trays in all the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Why do they have these weird little white
⏹️ ▶️ John trays where the pencils go? It’s not like at the bank where it’s connected with a cable, like there’s no anti-theft
⏹️ ▶️ John device attached to it, right? Oh, the pencil’s weighted, it will never roll off a table.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are those little, you know, dugout canoes of plastic there? Because if they weren’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the pencils would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one would ever know where the frigging pencils are. Where do I put this when I’m done with it? How do I put it down? Will it roll off the table?
⏹️ ▶️ John will someone step on it? You put it back in the little plastic canoe, right? Those little
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid little canoes are the greatest Apple admission that there is
⏹️ ▶️ John something missing from the workflow, as they would say, of the Apple Pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s very frustrating to me. I have an Apple Pencil, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad Pro, and I have a smart keyboard. There is no way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have all three of those things with me that doesn’t suck. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, it seems like these three products were never designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the idea that somebody would actually have any two of them. Like, the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard and the iPad work together okay. Not even, it’s still, it isn’t even great. It’s just merely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay. The pencil and the iPad, it seems like they were designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on different planets and it’s just a coincidence they happen to work together, but like no one ever thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might want to carry an Apple Pencil while you carry an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that seems to totally have been not considered at all. And the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here you can get a smart keyboard, which is wonderful, I actually really enjoy having a smart keyboard on my iPad, totally changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how frequently I use the iPad greatly for the better. But the smart keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a large cover that has lots of surface area and is will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is willingly bulking it up. Maybe they could have put a spot there to store a pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they didn’t. They released a case that is like this big leather flap that has a slot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPad and a slot for the pencil. But if you have a smart keyboard, it won’t fit in the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would be very awkward to get it out. Anyway, it’s just like everything about that. It’s just like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really I one of the biggest things I want to see with the you know, anticipated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad event. that’s probably happening sometime soon. I really want to see how and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they have rethought how people actually use the apple pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if they can somehow make it easy to have it with you more often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love that because I literally have all these things and I never use the pencil because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John alluded to like it’s it’s like you know off like in a in a cup or a drawer somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John and the batteries dead in it now because you haven’t charged it forever because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s awkward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like the battery is definitely dead because I have not charged it because I never have it with me and so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use it and it’s such a waste like I just please for the love of God Apple like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design these products together.
⏹️ ▶️ John It charges in 30 seconds though and you can get to anyway there’s all sorts of solutions to the charging thing that are part
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the pitch. Yeah, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way when it’s totally dead it doesn’t charge in 30 seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well you get like a minute out of it and you have five minutes out of it in 30 seconds so if we had some pitch of like a very
⏹️ ▶️ John short charge time gives you a surprising amount of draw time even if you’re going from dead. I’m not sure how accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John that is, but that was part of the original pitch, which is not supposed to be an admission that you’re probably going to lose it and leave it uncharged.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, there’s one thing that Apple used to do better, probably not for great reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe not like as a conscious thing, but the 90s Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Apple through the 90s, maybe into the 2000s was very into making
⏹️ ▶️ John like a whole bunch of stuff that works together, even into the 2000s of the Mac OS X, or like to give an example,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to a fault. All right. So Apple, you know, on my original, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what my, my power Mac G3, maybe whatever they had the AB, ADC, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, display connector. Remember that thing? Yeah. It was like a single cable that drove a display
⏹️ ▶️ John with power and USB and video only work with Mac stuff. It was a proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It was like payback and DVI and a bunch of other stuff over a a bunch of pins and a custom connector
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you could have a display that worked with the monitor and then it worked with the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John that connected to the display and the power button on the old Max was on the keyboard and that power button could
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on the Mac that was connected with it, like systems that work together. The G4 Cube comes with little speakers that
⏹️ ▶️ John match the thing and then the thing connects with ADC to the display by a single cable, like
⏹️ ▶️ John match sets of stuff where if you buy all the things, it’s clear they work together. buy your laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John the display has a little pigtail on it, the pigtail has a MagSafe connector, and that goes into there, and like, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you kept buying stuff, the next piece of the app, the very expensive Apple stuff that you bought,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, oh, this fits in here. Oh, that fits in there. And if I buy these things, they fit in there. And they match this thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John things aesthetically match. There was a, there was a styling theme with them. The connectors on them all matched.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all work together. If you bought just one of them, it worked fine. But as you bought more of them, you saw where they
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in. Whereas with the iPad, the covers work with the iPad, and the keyboard works with
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad, and the pencil works with the iPad, but the keyboard, pencil, covers, and iPad do
⏹️ ▶️ John not get along, as Mark
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Once you get more than, it’s like the chicken and the wolf, once you get more than two things in this
⏹️ ▶️ John boat, bad things happen, right? So that is a, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I don’t think it was a particularly conscious thing, but the idea that you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is attractive, making it attractive to buy all the things because every new thing you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John just fits in neatly and it feels like you’re building like the whole package, the ultimate setup. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta have the G4 Cube with the cinema display, with the speakers, with the Apple keyboard that turns the thing on.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that wasn’t on the cube, but anyway. Like the whole setup was attractive. Even back to like the LaserWriter. Get a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, get a LaserWriter, get the extended keyboard, get the Apple optical drive, get the Apple external hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John get the Apple printer. Now we’re getting into Wi-Fi routers again, right? But that that whole motivation
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy all the things on in the history of this show, my recollection is a lot of our complaints are
⏹️ ▶️ John have been have had an angle where if you are Apple’s best customer and you buy all the Apple things,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are punished for it in some subtle way. Like, you know, if you buy all, you know, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple stuff, if things work not as well as if you just had one of them and that’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s not the right cycle. Apple should make it attractive for people to spend all the money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I remember that was the case, you know, for the first several years that I came to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey platforms. This was roughly 2008. The more Apple stuff I had, the better everything worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together and everything, you know what it did guys, it just worked. And I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn’t be encouraging this because we’ve made this speech every episode for the last hundred. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can hopefully let it go. But I echo what you’re saying, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I admire Apple trailblazing in so many ways and so many categories, but I also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish I could have it both ways and have them not screw up what already exists in order to trailblaze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can’t have it both ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just don’t think it’s that much to ask that when you buy an iPhone or an Apple Watch and you also have a MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can plug one into the other to charge it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t be ridiculous. Anything else about Photoshop?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a lot more. Maybe I’ll watch that video. And Gemini is their application that combines raster and
⏹️ ▶️ John vector stuff. And it’s like, you know, we talked about Adobe XD a while back. Like there’s a bunch of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that Adobe thinks maybe I’ll watch the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in. There’s that YouTube Premiere edition, that Premiere
⏹️ ▶️ John Rush. Oh yeah, the Rush CC for doing portrait video, which everyone was very
⏹️ ▶️ John excited about because portrait video is definitely a thing, but editing in a quote unquote real video editing
⏹️ ▶️ John application where no one conceived of the idea that people might want portrait video. It’s a little bit tricky.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, there’s a bunch of exciting ads. They also had, I think, a pretty good joke when Phil Schiller was there. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s a tech dad joke or whatever, but I give it a thumbs up. Phil Schiller came out and did his little spiel,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone was happy to hear him say how great Adobe is and how great Apple is and so on and so forth. And they whisked him off stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had a gift for him from the Adobe people to thank him for coming there. They gave him a jacket from the team that was making
⏹️ ▶️ John Photoshop or whatever, And it said content aware fill, P-H-I-L, on the back of the jacket.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s pretty good. And they used the hyphen correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought that was a good joke, Adobe.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Jake wants to know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the age we currently live in, how do the three of us stay informed about non-tech news? Is it just Twitter? And if not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are there specific sites or voices that you would recommend? I don’t have a terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good answer for this. I I do watch the, I watch national news in the morning as I eat breakfast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watch headline news, which I personally find to be relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey center. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. Just keep it to yourself. It’s good enough for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do that most days of the week. And then when I remember, although I forgot this morning, on Wednesdays I turn on Fox and Friends because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m an idiot, but I also like to see how other idiots, I mean, wait what? I like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how the other side lives. And so that’s mostly it. else that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey national typically bubbles up via Twitter or there. Marco, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Mazzella Very little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that’s in the news for the last, I don’t know, about two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been so horrible that, for my own mental health—I know this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the responsible thing to do as a citizen of the universe, but for my own mental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health, I try to block out as much of it as I possibly can. So I mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t follow news sources regularly except for like, you know, those that bubble up from like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco links from friends and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s mostly the same with me with the exception of TV in the morning for about 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. Also, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God’s sakes, turn off Fox and Friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, all kidding aside, it is truly and utterly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heinous. It is… And you are contributing to it by watching it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you are patronizing it. You are a rating. You’re increasing its numbers. You are hearing what they are
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. He’s not a Nielsen family. I don’t know how the ratings work these days. Maybe the cable boxes all report
⏹️ ▶️ John back. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand that perspective, but to me, it’s important for me to at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand is too strong word because I don’t understand these maniacs, but to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear the other side. again, like understand is the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word. Appreciate isn’t the right word, but I guess just get exposed to the other side because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it helps me to understand the victims of Fox news. And I use that word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deliberately. I’m not trying to be funny, but even like, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am more worldly, I think than your average Fox and friends viewer, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand when they’re just lying to me, which is pretty much 99%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the time that they’re talking But it is interesting because I can understand better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how people that I care deeply for can get hoodwinked by these lies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this propaganda. And so I, I personally think it’s useful for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but I am not trying to say that it’s useful for anyone else. And it is true,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey utter filth. It is garbage and it is, it is a danger to our democracy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it helps me to understand some of the people I care about to watch it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find that reason unconvincing for the cost that it is incurring.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. John, how about you? What do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not to Steve Harping and Casey, but I was actually surprised by your, I heard about the Fox and
⏹️ ▶️ John Friends thing before you’d mentioned that, but what I was more surprised by is the fact that you voluntarily watch television news in any
⏹️ ▶️ John form because my experience of my peer group or you know anything
⏹️ ▶️ John close to it is that you know people our age or younger don’t watch a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John TV news like I would I would love to see like the age demographics of who watches TV news there’s probably a lot of overlap
⏹️ ▶️ John with white car ownership yeah I find all TV news
⏹️ ▶️ John in all forms in all venues to just not like I find it
⏹️ ▶️ John my brain rejects it I cannot stand it it doesn’t it’s not only to do with politics
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with just the form. Now I grew up with the form. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with it. I grew up with
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? But from my modern sensibilities, I don’t want what they’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ John me. And again, the TV is just a mechanism by which the news gets
⏹️ ▶️ John here, but there is a form that has evolved over time to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John their selection of what they want to report does not match what I want to hear like ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just too to even local news, maybe especially local news. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to know about I don’t need the human interest story. I don’t need to know about
⏹️ ▶️ John the kid who was hit by a car or blocked down. I don’t need to know about the surface level of
⏹️ ▶️ John some actors in a new movie like I don’t want TV news. Uh, and I’m surprised Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John watching it, but like, you know, you know, my parents watch it and I encourage them heavily. Stop
⏹️ ▶️ John watching television because it might like putting aside Fox, right? Television
⏹️ ▶️ John news seems very much like the old SNL skit where they’re telling old people that robots are going to steal their
⏹️ ▶️ John medicine. Like it’s all about what’s going to kill you, what terrible thing is happening, what it’s like, just so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clickbait before there was clickbait. It is so incredibly hyped up and sensationalized telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you about all the things that you should be worried about. And it’s not the things you should be worried about.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a bunch of other crap. And it’s just like, don’t subject yourself to that. Don’t you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to know that. Don’t get all hyped up about the killer bees that are coming into your neighborhood. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I always wonder if there
⏹️ ▶️ John was an actual story that people needed to know about. Like it would just be mixed in with all the other crap on local news and give an equal
⏹️ ▶️ John weight to like the dog that was loose that the police shot that had rabies. Right. It’s exactly the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, so anyway, I don’t watch TV news. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Oh, and a little bit on the Fox News things. I get where you’re coming from, Casey, But
⏹️ ▶️ John my advice would be that even if you’re watching it with that in mind, constant exposure
⏹️ ▶️ John to extreme propaganda can’t help but shift your thinking merely through
⏹️ ▶️ John repetition. Like the Overton window, right? Like, yeah, you think it’s all lies and it’s all BS and you’re not falling
⏹️ ▶️ John for it and so on and so forth. But the constant repetition eventually gives the propaganda
⏹️ ▶️ John more weight than it deserves in your mind when you balance it against the truth, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John it, not much you can do to stop. It’s just human nature. Like, it’s not much you can do to stop that. You will come to think
⏹️ ▶️ John that the positions staked out there are slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable than they are just by hearing it all the time. And it’s the same stuff that all sorts of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the personalities and the jokes and you become familiar with the people and so on and so forth. Even
⏹️ ▶️ John if in your rational mind, you’re like, well, this is all BS and I’m learning about the enemy. It does have an effect on you
⏹️ ▶️ John in that manner. If you’re aware of the effect, You could probably counteract a little bit, but it is a thing. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like by now you should know all you need to know about how Fox works and be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand the people who are into it. And I would encourage you to stop watching it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as well. But that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. You know, I would also encourage you to stop watching all the other TV news. Anyway, to answer this simple question,
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter is still the main the main part place where I get all my news. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John very carefully selected group of people that I follow and you know, I’m 20
⏹️ ▶️ John degrees separated from the actual thing, but I trim that list to the point where the things that come through on my feed are
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that I actually want to hear about personally and if someone is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m getting information that I don’t want to hear about, I will trim that off. If I’m not getting information that I think is important or I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ John it too late, I will add a follow by looking at a follow of a follow of a follow to see how something got to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter is how I do it. Before Twitter, I used RSS. Before RSS, I typed in the names of websites
⏹️ ▶️ John or used bookmarks. And before that, I guess I was, we were back in the battle days of TV news. But I never
⏹️ ▶️ John watched TV news as like, now it’s time for me to watch the news. It was just that sometimes it was on in the house that I was
⏹️ ▶️ John in. That’s as close as I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw a lot of TV news growing because I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would always have news on every night. Like, and you’d frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like multiple news. You’d see like, you know, first the local one, then the national one, whatever. Like, so you’d see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three or four news programs in a row sometimes. So I saw a lot of TV news growing up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I totally stopped watching it after I stopped going over there as a kid all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And so now I only ever see it if it’s on a TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere that I have to wait, like an office somewhere, like a doctor’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John office, something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. It was the airport. Like when they have news on at the airport, I can’t stand it, because you can’t escape it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to put on noise-canceling headphones to not hear the news. Like my hatred
⏹️ ▶️ John for television news, all forms, every station, everything. Like, maybe it’s not rational, but I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hate TV news. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hate it. Yeah, because like now, like the few times I see it now, because I’ve been away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it for so long, but I had such a strong history of it before that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now when I see it, it’s like hitting a raw nerve. It’s because it’s the same garbage now that it was 20 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John worse. It was like in the days when I grew up, at least, the network American news
⏹️ ▶️ John had a certain boring stadeness that does not exist in any
⏹️ ▶️ John television news anymore. Like they could get away with it because there were networks and there were monopolies and news was isolated
⏹️ ▶️ John from entertainment and there was all sorts of factors allowing them to essentially not give into market forces that inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ John lead them down to the television equivalent of clickbait. So that did exist. It is much worse now than it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. But but I it’s still though like it was never good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just merely okay before and now it’s truly awful. And when you see it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re away from it for a while, and then you see it, you realize quite how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrendously bad it really is. And so yeah, I strongly suggest Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless of what viewpoints you want to develop or understand, TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news of any sort from any provider is horrible and is a bad way to get those viewpoints or any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information whatsoever. And just ultimately I would recommend, and maybe you don’t wanna do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I strongly encourage people who get a lot of anxiety or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depression about everything horrible that’s going on in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step back from it. It feels like you’re giving up or it feels wrong in some way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a break from it and ignore it or close yourself off from it, but the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there’s always gonna be, much of this applies to Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, there’s always gonna be more to read, there’s always gonna be more news. There’s always gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be various news publishers and various media trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get your attention with new breaking developments of whatever, whatever, whatever. And most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it doesn’t matter at all like a day later. You’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like junk food for information. Like you’re just like throwing junk food into your brain and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it feels like you’re being useful or productive or a responsible citizen or informing yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a very low percentage of that is actually useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary to know and has lasting value. So number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is to cut out TV sources because they literally will just air constant updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to nothing all day long because they don’t want you to tune out and there’s always something to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What you should do instead is more of like a, like get away from like the push models, go to like a pull model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like you don’t just sit there receiving what everyone’s sending you. Like when you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learn about something that you hear about through some other way that isn’t a new show, go try to learn about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you hear about some new crisis or natural disaster that’s happening, go look it up and try to find information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it then. But like get yourself off the feed, off the constant cycle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether that’s a Twitter feed or like constantly refreshing news websites, if anybody still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does that, or Facebook feed, if anybody, God forbid still does that. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s watching cable news, or even just quote, having it on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still on, it’s still pouring garbage into your brain constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cut it off, actually step away from it, and you will find, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like people find when they take breaks from Twitter for a while, you’ll find that you don’t miss as much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you think you will miss. Major events that happen, you still hear about. major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that you need to know, you still learn about. And you just remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this massive source of distraction and just constant anxiety and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant, because they’re trying to rile you up. That’s how they make more money from you. They rile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you up so you keep watching and you stay engaged and you spread it around. If you just take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yourself out of that system, it’s way happier on the outside. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world doesn’t become perfect, but you can at least have a better mental state about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. With us, they have the ads, because news tends to be less valuable if it’s not live, so you actually have to
⏹️ ▶️ John allow the ads to play, which is a little bit in this ad-free world. Today, you have so many choices
⏹️ ▶️ John for news, so much more than you did in the days when it was just newspapers and television and radio. The entire internet is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of places where you can get news stories in the form that you want them, or whatever. If you like TV news, and I’m just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John this not for me, some people like that type of thing and don’t get anxiety from it, but very often, especially if you’re the type of person
⏹️ ▶️ John grew up watching television news or grew up having television news on, you just continue to do it out of habit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like, that’s the thing to question. Um, and to defend Casey’s Fox News stuff for a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it actually is important to know what Fox News is and how it works and not just take other people’s words for it. I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think you need to like for the rest of your life, watch one Fox News show a day or a week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think you can get it after a fairly short period of time, like and check in every once in a while. Like, but it is important
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, to know the enemy, like to know what the hell’s going on over there, it’s not important
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch it every day for years and years and years. Like you’ll get it pretty quickly. It’s, you know, it’s a hell of a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John we satisfied now? As much as we will be. Probably won’t be satisfied until television news is destroyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man. Just wait. It’s HBO.
#askatp: Senior projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Stephen Kim wants to say, or wants to know, I’m in my final semester of college
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash university and wanted to know if you guys had some sort of senior project, and if so, what was it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not. When I went to Virginia Tech, I did not have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of senior thesis project or anything like that. I did do some fun things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, I did not have a senior project. John, how about you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did have a senior project. Everyone had to do one. It was in the engineering school.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was majored in computer engineering, which is like a hybrid of electrical engineering with a couple of CS courses thrown in, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John My particular project was, I don’t remember how it came out with this, but it was a local area paging system. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John pagers were a thing. Yes, I’m old.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Local area paging system and
⏹️ ▶️ John software. There was a contest they had at the school where you’d have to like, kind of one of those things where
⏹️ ▶️ John you get like a bucket of parts and you have to build a vehicle and the vehicles have to compete. Like, you’ve seen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys know about them talking about those engineering contest stuff? Yeah, there’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ John cool Nova episode about an MIT hill climb competition. It was like one of the favorite things I ever watched as a kid, I should find
⏹️ ▶️ John the link for next week. Anyway, they have these contests, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John project, it’s contrived, it’s a senior project, whatever, was to make a system of pagers, sort of like the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ John pagers, where each team would have a pager, and when it was their turn to come and compete, you would page them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there was, you know, you’d do this through a piece of software, and then the software also kept track of the matches, and then they would compete,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you would start the timer for the match. Like the software ran the
⏹️ ▶️ John officiating for the match and recorded the results, right? So you’d basically run the competition sitting in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of a PC, and the PC was connected through a parallel port to a radio transmitter, and the radio transmitter
⏹️ ▶️ John would talk to the pagers. So the project was, we made the pagers, we made the radio transmitter, and we made the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we had to price out all the components and source them, and it was actually a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good project that spanned hardware and software. In the end, the part I did was the entire Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John program written in MFC and C++.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, God, I’m so sorry. It’s no wonder you hate Windows so much. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I printed it at the
⏹️ ▶️ John end and handed it in. Oh, my God. Here’s the software, here’s a floppy disk,
⏹️ ▶️ John and here is a beautifully commented printout of the world’s most heinous MFC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code. How could you even tell it’s the most heinous? All MFC code was heinous.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was the first and last time I ever did Windows development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco? Well, this ties right nicely to the beginning of the show. I did have a senior project. It was required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by my colleagues for everybody. And it was, so I was in computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco science, and what I chose to do was attempt to develop my own audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compression algorithm. And not dynamics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey compression. Oh, you’ve spoken about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s right. But like, you know, compressing like the way MP3 compresses to make a file smaller. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea I had was, you know, you have like, you look at like audio waveforms, and you see basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of squiggly lines. And my idea was, instead of storing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every number on that line, maybe I can fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a least squares best fit line to it, and then simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store the coefficients of the least squares equation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have that represent like, you know, 20 audio samples with like four coefficients.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mentioned earlier, I have a very limited understanding of things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital signal processing and signal theory. Well, I had way less of an understanding of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 20 years ago or whatever that was. So, not 20, I guess 15 years ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I had very bad understanding of it then. And so my idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this best curve fit algorithm algorithm as audio compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only was hilariously slow to run on my Pentium 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the day but was sorry AMD Athlon of the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it was hilariously slow to run and also made the files larger because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was so bad at compressing and first I tried lossy compression that sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so horrible compared to mp3 and made bigger files much more slowly. Then I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lossless compression, figuring well if I can at least store the coefficients and then I can just store the difference values
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between you know what my crazy equations predicted and the actual values,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s at least smaller numbers and they can take up less space. So I tried lossless compression then and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was also horribly slow and also made the files larger than the input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waves. And so what I ended up having to like pivot to since I was already deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this project and and couldn’t really come up with a new thesis was basically turn it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a survey of audio of lossless audio compression algorithms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it turned out all that crazy work I had done to generate best fit curves and with least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squares algorithms and everything turns out if you just predict that one sample
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be the same value as the one before it and then just store the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the smaller number that is basically free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do on computers it takes no time and compresses almost as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as flak because flak is doing things like that and it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lossless audio compression basically always maxes out at around 50% compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know constant input types like music and pretty much any predictor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you use to generate sample to sample data works at about the same accuracy like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty hard to get it much worse than that so that is what I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I made a survey of audio compression algorithms to show how efficient all these much simpler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco methods were than the one that I tried first that took me months
⏹️ ▶️ John you have done your graduate thesis on run length encoding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s too soon. It’s too soon. He’s still a little upset about his C code from earlier this episode.
#askatp: Destiny YouTubers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, Tobo granite, I think, uh, would like to know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, John, what destiny videos and specific YouTubers perhaps do you watch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is short. I, you know, I’m always on the lookout for, for new things. Uh, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John have two favorite YouTubers. My favorite YouTuber is named true Vanguard. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think his actual name is Ryan. Uh, I like him because he talks a lot about PVP,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a type of, uh, destiny game that I like. It’s player versus player as opposed to player
⏹️ ▶️ John versus environment or player versus enemies. PVE talks about PVP a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and he is, I don’t know how to put this. He’s a grownup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they’re all adults on YouTube for the most part, but like he’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ John he doesn’t, I mean, I can describe it by what he’s not. He’s not, he doesn’t yell all the time, which is the thing that kids
⏹️ ▶️ John like. They like it when people react very dramatically to whatever is going on in the thing they’re doing. So he’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a yeller. I was gonna say that he doesn’t curse, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, I don’t care about cursing, like, but indicative of how sort of pleasant
⏹️ ▶️ John and mature and kind and not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in sensationalism or getting super angry about things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just he’s, he just generally seems like a nice person. He’s also dad right so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John watching a dad video right he’s really good at PvP
⏹️ ▶️ John and he explains what he’s thinking how he does things stuff that he tried
⏹️ ▶️ John in a nice laid-back way that I find interesting so true vanguard on YouTube my number
⏹️ ▶️ John one youtuber my second favorite one is named daddo I don’t actually know what his real name is
⏹️ ▶️ John he is younger he’s a little bit more potentially prone to anger he struggles with the fame
⏹️ ▶️ John that he has gotten by being a fairly popular Destiny YouTuber, but he
⏹️ ▶️ John does PvE a lot. And so I want to learn about all the PvE things
⏹️ ▶️ John and the intimate details and all sorts of stats about what’s the best thing to bring into this. I tried out all these different
⏹️ ▶️ John techniques and here are all the numbers and the math and all that stuff. And I occasionally enjoy watching him
⏹️ ▶️ John struggle with himself and with the game and with all sorts of other things. To give an
⏹️ ▶️ John example, when they released a new raid recently, it’s a race between all the players
⏹️ ▶️ John to see who can be the first one to finish it. Right. And Dado is right in there because, you know, he’s pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTuber in the Destiny world and he’s got a lot of friends and he’s good at that part of the game and so are his friends. So there is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, six person thing of players versus, you know, computer enemies trying to finish the
⏹️ ▶️ John raid, see who can be the world’s first. You get a big, you know, accolades from it from the game maker and you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they all stream on twitch, right? Uh, dad, oh, and his crew, uh, we’re not the
⏹️ ▶️ John world’s first. They came in third or fourth. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John they started playing when the raid was launched. Uh, there was a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John for like everyone who finishes the raid on the first day, you’ll get like this free jacket and you know, all sorts of swag or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you’re not the world’s first, just everyone who finishes the raid on the first day, you get all this stuff. Uh, Dado and his crew
⏹️ ▶️ John played the raid for slightly over 24 hours straight. Oh my word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it was like two minutes and 30 seconds over the 24 hour mark. So basically they sat down there,
⏹️ ▶️ John they started playing the raid and they played it for 24 hours. I watched
⏹️ ▶️ John them on and off. I went to sleep, I woke up, they were still playing. This was like over the course of a weekend. I checked in an
⏹️ ▶️ John hour later, they were still playing. After the world’s first had already completed many
⏹️ ▶️ John many hours after they were still going they knew they weren’t going to be the world’s first they
⏹️ ▶️ John were still going this is on Twitch not on YouTube, but And you’re watching them and it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like when you watch someone like doing something where you’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go to sleep like you’re not you’re not gonna get any better You’re not gonna get any sharper like I I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that if they had taken a six hour break in the middle They would have finished the game they’ve would
⏹️ ▶️ John have finished the raid faster like if they just gotten some sleep because after 24 hours of
⏹️ ▶️ John Intense concentration on a game very difficult like it’s not like they’re just casually doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like the most difficult top level Thing that you can do they were under leveled for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re concentrating for 24 hours. You are fried You’re not doing they were making dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John mistakes and getting sloppy like they should have taken a six Anyway, that drama, uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John just to see that person that I’ve known since the destiny one days and like struggle with that
⏹️ ▶️ John and be frustrated with their failures, but eventually to overcome was an amazing dramatic moment
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of destiny videos. Uh, and I was glad I was there intermittently to witness it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John those are my two ones. Uh, true Vanguard, my number one dad, or number two, there’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of other ones. I look at planet destiny sometimes, Eric’s cactus. They all have these crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John names, but my those are my top two. So I would highly recommend everyone check out true Vanguard
⏹️ ▶️ John and check out that. Oh, if you’re into PVE and you can handle his occasional outbursts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, who are your favorite destiny youtubers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I love all the Marco. I can’t choose just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. All the great youtubers. Thanks to our sponsors this week away Squarespace and fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ll see you next week
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John the show is over. They didn’t even mean to begin.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was accidental. John didn’t do any research. Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you’re new here, you can subscribe. And I’ll see you next time. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm, And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, At c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, Auntie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R,
⏹️ ▶️ John A-C, USA Syracuse. It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t mean to, Accidental, check podcast so long
Dark patterns in Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did we ever do the dark patterns in Destiny? We haven’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Can you handle more
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny? Well, do I have a choice? Do you guys know what a dark pattern is? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like in UI design? That’s the context that usually comes up. And Marco, why don’t you explain what a dark pattern is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if we’re talking about the same thing, a dark pattern like in UI design is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s almost like designing something intentionally to trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or mislead the user into doing something that’s kind of bad for them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that benefits you as the designer or as the owner. So a good example of this would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a website, really hiding the way to delete your account or really hiding the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to call them on the phone if you need help with something. to make it really hard to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that that will you know that kind of costs you the owner money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by benefit people or by or like making it easy like accidentally trick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people into like giving giving up their email address to your mailing list or stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s called a dark pattern because patterns in general is like, you know, a construct that you use in an interface,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, sort of standard constructs that an arrangement of controls where you tend to see like a text
⏹️ ▶️ John box with the checkbox underneath it or like you know, sort of those those are patterns of just like familiar
⏹️ ▶️ John ways to present interfaces to people. A dark pattern is a pattern as Marco said, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John the various purposes. A great example of this setting aside computers entirely. The concept of fine print,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine print is a dark pattern predating computers. If you have something that you have to put like on a
⏹️ ▶️ John box or in a contract or whatever, and you can make the text really, really small because you really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want the person, like you have to put it there, but you really don’t want the person reading that, so you make it really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really small to try to discourage them from, maybe they can’t see it that well, maybe it’s so small they’re squinting and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying to read, that’s a dark pattern. And in the computer, there’s another one that comes to mind
⏹️ ▶️ John as sort of the canonical dark pattern is the please send me your newsletter checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John that is checked by default. That was like one of the early dark patterns on the web, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going through some signup process and there’s a checkbox that says, yes, please send me marketing material. And it’s checked by default. 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John a dark pattern. And by the way, if you make an error in the form and like, oh, you’re,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, your email, you forgot to enter your phone number and you uncheck that checkbox, it’s checked again when
⏹️ ▶️ John the form comes back. That’s also a dark pattern. Yep. So now that we’ve established what a dark pattern is,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is about dark patterns in destiny. This was a very sad day for me and destiny. This I don’t think was intentional, so maybe I can’t listen to the dark.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, actually it was intentional, but yeah. All right. Anyway, destiny has vendors where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John buy things. And the way the system has worked since Destiny 1, Destiny 2 is it’s a bunch of squares on the screen, you
⏹️ ▶️ John put your cursor over them, you press a button and you buy it. It’s not like a cart, you don’t put things
⏹️ ▶️ John into a cart. And there’s no quantity, like you can’t say give me five of these, 10 of these, like there’s no place
⏹️ ▶️ John where you get to enter a number or hit an up and down arrow to put numbers. If you want to buy something, you hover over it and
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit the button. And not only do you hit the button, occasionally you have to hold down the button for a certain period of time, because
⏹️ ▶️ John some things, some actions have big consequences, like maybe something is very expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like there’s a button you hold down to dismantle items that you have. And if it’s a very valuable item you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to, they put in a delay so that, oh, you’re just, you’re, you’re going to disassemble this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that took you a year to get. You have to hold down the button for like 60 seconds, like in this big progress bar fills
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure you don’t accidentally delete it. Right? Because lots of stuff you’re deleting all the time. You get junk in
⏹️ ▶️ John the game and you’re like oh delete delete delete delete right so those are short but the more consequential the action the more
⏹️ ▶️ John you hold it down but anyway for vendors for buying things for the most part it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re fairly fast you hold down the button a little bit sometimes you just tap it but it’s just a single press because
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no quantities anywhere and sometimes you want to buy 50 of something because there are consumable items and
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to buy a bunch of these things you’re gonna trade for those things this whole whole economy you know economy
⏹️ ▶️ John of materials and made up money and everything in the game and and you buy them in large quantity.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the habit over the course of, since Destiny 1, you know, four years now or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John is you go to a vendor and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna buy five of these things and 10 of those and eight of those. And I’m gonna go to this vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell five of these and disassemble that and put these into the, you know. And so you get used to hitting the button
⏹️ ▶️ John in sequences. So you look at the price, you look at how much you have, and you’re like, oh, those are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John 10, it’s not, they don’t use dollars. Well, those are $10 each. I’ve got 500 bucks. I’m gonna buy five of those. You go one, two, three, four, five.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re like, all right, I got this much left. I’m gonna buy two of those, they’re 20 each, one, two, three, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s what the game has trained us to do over the course of four years if you played from the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John of Destiny. That’s how everything works. In Destiny 2,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the latest expansion, there was a vendor who sold an item that is in incredibly short supply
⏹️ ▶️ John in the new economy, and they’re probably gonna patch the game to fix this. A particular item that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a material, a resource that is very rare, and there is no reliable way to
⏹️ ▶️ John get more. You get a little bit more randomly, but not enough to feed what you would want to use
⏹️ ▶️ John this item in. And a vendor would sell it. And they sold it for 10 of a very,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, fairly valuable other item. Like it’s not currency, but like there’s another resource that’s pretty rare and hard to get,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there is at least a reliable way to get it. They sold it for 10 of those
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you know, I’m not going to spend 10 of that very valuable resource for one of these things. That’s not a good
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. But eventually, as it became clear in the economy that there was no other way to get them, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, I would love any opportunity to buy these. So I’m just going to farm that other material, come back
⏹️ ▶️ John here and buy, you know, I know they’re 10 each. So fine, I’ll get 100 and then I
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy 10 of those things, right? So you go out, you farm that material or maybe like me, you have a massive surplus
⏹️ ▶️ John because that material was in abundance before the expansion. I had a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco surplus in the
⏹️ ▶️ John attic. Yeah, like I’ve got this cash of stuff, I’m gonna spend it. Even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like 10 to one, it’s not a good deal, it’s the only way I have to get this stuff, so I need to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John some of this stuff. And so I go to the vendor, and I buy a couple of them, and I’m like, oh, that really
⏹️ ▶️ John hurt, that sucked, and I wait for the next week for the reset to see if the price changed, it didn’t, it’s still 10 of those things. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me just bite the bullet. Let me go farm a whole bunch of this stuff, and let me just go and just dump it all in. I’ll just buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll buy like, you know, 20 of those things, right? I’m just gonna do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve resigned myself to my faith. They’re not gonna fix the economy for a while. So I go there
⏹️ ▶️ John and I buy like 20 of them. And I go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And I’m hitting the button, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually the button stops working and the icon grays out. I’m like, what the hell? I had
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I had literally a thousand of this thing and they were 10 each, right? I could have bought a ton of them. Like they were 10
⏹️ ▶️ John each and I’ve got over a thousand. Why is the button disabled? Is there a limit that a number I can buy per week or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I realized the reason the thing was disabled is because every time I purchased
⏹️ ▶️ John one, the price doubled. Oh no. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John because the game had trained me, when you wanna buy 10 of something, go one, two, three, four, five, hit the button 10 times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’re not looking down at the price to see if the price is changing. The price never changed on any other item when
⏹️ ▶️ John you bought it until this thing. The reason I couldn’t buy anymore is because I no longer had enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy a single one. The next purchase was like 600 or something. It was some huge amount, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose it had to be a power of two, right? I didn’t have that much left anymore. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why it wasn’t letting me purchase it. So essentially, I bought one of these consumables for like 512 of that other
⏹️ ▶️ John one before the thing stopped. So I burned through like a year’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worth of this very valuable consumable that I had built up in like 30 seconds. No there is no undo. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John going back. There is no complaining to Bungie that you accidentally did a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. There was no delay. An example of a dark pattern would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a price that doubles every time you buy one that is unprecedented
⏹️ ▶️ John in 4 years of the game and an interface that does not let you buy things in quantities and let you preview the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John The game had trained me, press the button a certain integer number of times and get your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was sad for like 4 days about this because, I mean, I know it’s all just pretend stuff, But
⏹️ ▶️ John I literally spent a lot of my actual time building up the inventory of that other valuable
⏹️ ▶️ John item. Notice how I’m not using all the crazy destiny words here to help you people. Yeah, I appreciate that. It doesn’t really help.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was killer. And and the thing is, it it is a dark pattern because this vendor in the game
⏹️ ▶️ John is supposed to be like a gangster. And like every time you do any kind of deal with him, he always like welches on his deal or he doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like in the game world, it kind of makes sense. But it is it was bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was brutal. And I complained about this on Twitter. And I got a whole bunch of people commiserating saying, yep, I did the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wasn’t the only one who got nailed by this. In some respects, like, that’s a pretty good game. Like, you really
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like you were screwed by this criminal. It’s like, yeah, but I did spend like a year of Destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John 2 building up that. And it’s nothing compared to the people who play this game all day. Like the YouTube people all have so much of
⏹️ ▶️ John every resource that it’s ridiculous. But I don’t. I’m a casual player. I play every once in
⏹️ ▶️ John a while, like compared to the people who play like, you know, hours and hours a day. And this really hurt. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I said on Bungie and Twitter like, bad show, Bungie. Like, don’t make the people who play your game feel bad. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I see what you were going for, but I think you underestimated exactly how dark this dark pattern was and
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how trained people are to just hit the button five times and not look at the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To be fair, and just to show the listeners how annoyed you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by this, this topic has been sitting in the after show section of our show notes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like two months or something like that. And typically, if something sits for that long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John will just say, Oh, it doesn’t matter anymore and move along. But not this my friends. And I don’t blame you to be honest. That would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really chat my behind. So, so did the item or whatever that you bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as many as you expected of? Was, was it worth it? Like what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is it? Oh no, it was not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it, it, it 10 for one of these, it’s not worth it for like hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John of that, of that consumable item for one of them. It’s a terrible deal. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s like someone said you can buy a candy bar for $10. like maybe it’s for it’s for charity.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if we said, Oh, and by the way, go ahead and buy 20 candy bars and the price will double every time. By
⏹️ ▶️ John the time you’re buying a candy bar for $1,000. And someone says, Well, was it worth it? It was, you know, you got that candy bar for 1000. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not worth it at all. It was terrible. I’m still sad about I shouldn’t have put this topic here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sad all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And just because people will ask, and this is the brief spoiler moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the episode, what did you have to spend in order to to purchase what using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the actual destiny terminology.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were selling this kind of sounds over there was like masterwork cores for legendary shards,
⏹️ ▶️ John for yeah, legendary shards got from disassembling legendary weapons and a bunch of other things. Masterwork
⏹️ ▶️ John cores used to randomly drop or used to be able to get them from
⏹️ ▶️ John disassembling masterwork weapons, which would randomly drop anyway. Yeah, masterwork cores are
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly rare in Destiny 2. And the new, in the Forsaken expansion,
⏹️ ▶️ John they changed the infusion economy to require all sorts of materials to do infusion. So basically, I mean, they have the
⏹️ ▶️ John charts in this, this is why they’re gonna adjust it. They changed the infusion economy such that people used to do infusion
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And as soon as Forsaken came out, I bet the rate of infusion dropped off a cliff
⏹️ ▶️ John because it basically became nobody ever infused anything. It used to be a thing that you would do all day long. And it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody infused anything because it uses so many resources, including Masterwork course, and there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get more Masterwork course. So even if you had a cache built up, eventually you depleted it, I bet like
⏹️ ▶️ John Infusion has dropped practically zero. So they’re gonna fix this. They’re gonna adjust it. They posted
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff about it a couple of weeks ago about how they’re gonna provide some reliable way to get Masterwork’s course. I
⏹️ ▶️ John still think it’s kind of crappy. I still think making Infusion this expensive makes
⏹️ ▶️ John people run around with a bunch of hobo suits to use Incredibles parlance. And really, I just want to use my good items,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can’t afford to infuse them. Anyway, all that made sense to destiny people. Rest assured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this how our show sounds to like non programmers or non nerds? Like like when I was going through all my audio stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure a lot of our audience like zoned out or skipped the chapter. Like I consider myself like appropriately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten back at for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, legendary shards and master records are probably a little bit more ridiculous than ring buffers, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John much. I was asking in the chat room, would it have squared if you had bought it one
⏹️ ▶️ John at a time or one AA time? You could only buy one at a time. That’s my point. You can only buy one at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you would have left the store or something
⏹️ ▶️ John and come back? No, yeah, no. I think it reset per day. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ John cranked up the price, if you went to sleep and came back the next day, it would be back down to 10. So you can buy one a day for 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s ridiculous. You need three of them to do a single simple
⏹️ ▶️ John infusion and it cranks up from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I got lost again.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco complicated game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t believe we made it through that though. This is a new record for us, I think, of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much destiny we can
⏹️ ▶️ John make it through at once. Well, anyway, if that was your question, yeah, it resets on a daily basis, which is way too slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have been going back and buying one for ten, but at a certain point, once they said they were going to change the economy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even buying one for ten anymore because one a day is ridiculous anyway. I got to travel all the way to the vendor and I hate that
⏹️ ▶️ John guy now. Yeah, on principle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, screw me. I’m surprised you didn’t do more pre-purchase research You know you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco research every other purchase in your life to such a degree like if you’re making a large destiny purchase I
⏹️ ▶️ John if I had I that’s why I tweeted it. I do my like don’t make the same mistake that I did, right? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just it was just so unprecedented like I just Wait, when when would you ever need
⏹️ ▶️ John to look back at the price? The price is the price and then you go buy buy buy buy buy like that’s for
⏹️ ▶️ John four years we’ve been doing that never has something changed price when you bought one it’s madness,
⏹️ ▶️ John let alone doubling. That’s just so cruel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if I could do a reverse ramp for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I know what you’ve been doing while destiny chat was happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t been programming, but I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been like slowly like noodling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this throughout the entire show, like whenever I wasn’t busy talking or anything like I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get an idea in my head like oh what if I what if I do it this way take two showers tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, shower is the ultimate idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. Nice. Yeah, I think I might do a reverse buffer for the multiplier.
⏹️ ▶️ John better. I continue to think that they’re probably libraries in straight C that do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing is, like to do it right, it’s probably only like 50 lines of code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like, like doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a very simple limiter without look ahead is like 10 lines of code. Like this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difficult stuff. It isn’t. Uh, it isn’t complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just really tricky. If that makes sense, there’s a difference between the tricky it’s not complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John The solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solutions are very simple once you get them, but to figure out exactly what to do with these crazy numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how to do it is very tricky. It’s the kind of thing that like like I start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out with a few lines of code doesn’t work right. Then I like slowly bloated up with a whole bunch of crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap and then eventually I figure something that works and then I end up then pruning that back down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deleting all stuff I didn’t actually need. It’s crazy. And none of it would be helped
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, a lot of it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you really would. Don’t, don’t even try to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stuff you don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John You break the problem down, you’d break the problem down to into easily testable functions, and you’d get each of those
⏹️ ▶️ John working. So you don’t have to worry about them anymore. And then you’d build up, you know, like, it may not be your way
⏹️ ▶️ John of working. But rest assured, it is a way of working that does work for this specific
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. What I am doing is one of those functions. Like that’s all it is. Like it’s a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But if you know what the output’s supposed to look like, like making tests to show what the output is
⏹️ ▶️ John and like your aspirational state as you’re failing tests, we’re not going to pitch you a new test.
⏹️ ▶️ John okay for this. It’s just not how you’re working. It’s fine. But the debugger works too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use the debugger in the test. Because, oh, forget
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it. This is killing me. I can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I need to, if we’re going to have this conversation, If we’re going to have this f***ing conversation, I’m going downstairs and pouring a drink. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot have this conversation sober.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve covered these bases before. I’m not trying to convert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. You set a breakpoint and you can see what all the values are. Oh my god.