337: Sea Conditions Are Calm
02 Aug 2019Car ferries, Dropbox alternatives, algorithmic challenges in our apps, and the Great 2019 Beach-Camera Report.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: John's vacation wrap-up
- Follow-up:
- John's Apple sticker on his Civic
- Shallow water blackout
- Dropbox alternatives
- Synology Drive
- Resilio
- Growl
- Port forwarding information
- The Talk Show #258 with discussion about iCloud Drive wonkiness
- The Talk Show #259 with Marco
- How does the Overcast recommendation algorithm avoid promoting awful people, unlike YouTube's algorithm? (via Justin Cardinal)
- Casey needs some advice about Vignette duplicate-photo detection
- Apple acquires most of Intel's smartphone modem business
- Apple Employees/Contractors Listen to Siri Audio Samples
- Update after recording: Apple temporarily suspending "Siri grading", and will provide an opt-out
#askatp:- Testing headphones & iOS 13's politeness (via Prone to Bits)
- Making suggestions as part of the Pro Workflow Team (via Aaron Bushnell)
- Siracusa ranks Tennists (via Anthony Roberts)
- Post-show: Endangered Camera Species
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Destiny news
- ⛴🚗🌊
- Important follow-up
- Shallow-water blackout
- Sponsor: Molekule (code ATP)
- Dropbox alternatives
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- Algorithmic radicalization
- Vignette duplicate detection
- Apple buying Intel modem business
- Siri privacy 🖼️
- Sponsor: Away (code atp20)
- #askatp: Audio-test tracks
- #askatp: Ejecting disks on iOS
- #askatp: Overhauling OSes
- #askatp: Tennis players
- Ending theme
- Beach camera report
Destiny news
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny’s Shadowkeep moved to October 1st, but I’m not gonna move ATP for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is. They delayed it. It was supposed to be September 17th. They sent out… Boy. When game companies, like, you know when Apple, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John tells you the, like, the thing that they don’t even tell you. They’re like, it’s going to be in the fall and it ends up being like the last day of fall or whatever. Like, game companies announce a launch date and they have to announce, like, a specific day, like months and months and months in advance. And then if they
⏹️ ▶️ John miss that day, like they’re moving it from September 17th to October 1st. And then they’re like, oh, well, I’m not gonna move it. I’m not gonna move it. I’m not gonna move it.
⏹️ ▶️ John announced a launch date and they have to announce like a specific day like months and months and months in advance and then if they miss
⏹️ ▶️ John that day like they’re moving it from the September 17th to October 1st which is like nothing in computer land
⏹️ ▶️ John like so what who cares they end up writing like a two-page apology letter and explaining in detail
⏹️ ▶️ John because like game fans are so rabid and insane that they’d be like you’re delaying my thing you said September
⏹️ ▶️ John 17th six months ago I planned my entire life around it now you tell me October 1st where It’s in computer land.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, October 1st, September 17th, whatever. Like, who cares? Ship it when it’s done. Fix
⏹️ ▶️ John the bugs. Gamers are the worst. They are. They’re absolutely the worst. Like, because I read these letters, and I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel these companies. I’m like, and then I think, they have to do that. They have to be, you know, prostrate themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and be like, we’re so sorry that six months ago, we didn’t know the exact date, time, and hour
⏹️ ▶️ John that we were going to launch a thing that we’re working on that is basically software. Please forgive
⏹️ ▶️ John us. We just want to make sure it’s OK. But it’s like, it’s fine. It’s like two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ John not even two weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So wait, but you said October 1, that’s a Tuesday. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John bother us. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. It’s not like I’m taking the day off of work and-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t put it past you.
⏹️ ▶️ John People take weeks off of work for these launches. They take an entire week off.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a way of life.
⛴🚗🌊
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vacation is over for at least one of us. Summer of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. For some of us. Hey, we work. Occasionally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m working right now on my vacation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How was your time in Long Island, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On Long Island, Casey. On Long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever. Oh my god, you two are… You know, I expect this from John, Marco, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to have fallen this far this fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s okay. It’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s okay. Marco has nearly adopted the island. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, Bain. So how was your time on Long Island?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. I’m glad you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John so enthusiastic. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all we’re going to get? It’s like talking to a teenager.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the same vacation I have every year, and I enjoy it, and it’s good. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound like you really enjoy it. It was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, in John’s defense in John’s defense, not only was I’m sure it was very hot here, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey imagine it was very hot there. But what you woke up this morning, I almost said in again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Long Island, and then you drove some amounts of time, is that right to a ferry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then drove many amounts of time to home?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s easy, easy trip. Not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How long does it take with
⏹️ ▶️ John magnitude? Like an hour to the ferry, an hour and a half on the ferry and another hour and 40 minutes in the the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have never been, to my recollection, I’ve never driven onto a car carrying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually anything. I’ve been on things that carry cars, like I’ve been on the Chunnel, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I believe that carries cars, but I’ve never driven onto anything. There’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibly the only car carrying train that I’m aware of anyway. I think the only one that Amtrak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has is a train that goes, I think they call it the auto train, and it runs from the DC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area to the Orlando area. And don’t tell Declan, but we’re going to Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a few months for his fifth birthday. And I had kicked around the idea of taking the train, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a 24-hour journey or something like that. I forget how long it takes, but it’s long. And long enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to sleep overnight on the train, which to some degree is part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun, but I don’t know. I’m not sure Michaela, a year and a half, almost too at that point, we’ll really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see the fun in riding on a train for 24 hours straight. But that’s right. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that’s to say that I’m jealous of going on the ferry. It sounds fun. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John Matzko, Jr.: Yeah, you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to take your stick shift car with no hill hold up a
⏹️ ▶️ John wet 45 degree angle, slick
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ramp with metal inches from either side of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jr.: That sounds absolutely delightful. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John Matzko, Jr.: Yeah. My modern cars have no holds, but I still remember back in the when they didn’t and you’d get unlucky and you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of the side ramps and they’d be like guiding you. Like there’s no room. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John alternate the cars so that they’re staggered so that the doors can open because
⏹️ ▶️ John you need like the door to open into the gap between the cars. Because there’s literally like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you couldn’t get out of your car if you have the cars just all lined up right next to each other. Like you couldn’t open the door
⏹️ ▶️ John humans to fit out of it. So maybe you come out the window, Duke’s Hazard style. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve cut it close. A couple of times I’ve had to go out a different door than the one that I’m sitting in
⏹️ ▶️ John because it turns out it can’t open the driver’s door. But they really they really wedge them in there today on the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Back though I had they offer like priority boarding or whatever. It’s not always available like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they sell out. Anyway, I had priority boarding on the way back so I was dead
⏹️ ▶️ John center first one off the thing, which means that my car was like three inches from falling
⏹️ ▶️ John into the sound the entire time. I’m sure that made just one one block under one front wheels
⏹️ ▶️ John between me and watery grave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, all kidding aside, there’s the ramp doesn’t like fold up to block the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John from falling.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that was keeping me there is the block under my driver’s side front wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ John and a couple of metal poles about the the diameter of a golf
⏹️ ▶️ John ball with chain strung between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s no, there’s no, well, how do, what do they do for a ramp to get the car
⏹️ ▶️ John off of the boat? So when I boarded, I’m boarding through the front of the boat. So my car ends up at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John back of the boat facing backwards. And then the boat backs into new London and
⏹️ ▶️ John the flat deck of the boat backs right up to the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John then they pull, they pull those little metal poles out the little metal pole. I described those poles and chain, like the pole just goes
⏹️ ▶️ John in like four inches into a little hole in the deck. They just pull those poles out, undo the chains and I just drive right
⏹️ ▶️ John off. So really, there was nothing stopping my car from going into the sound except for that pole
⏹️ ▶️ John that just manually shoved into a hole in the deck. It sounds super secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those blocks, they do the job. As they say on the Long Island Sound Ferry,
⏹️ ▶️ John sea conditions are calm, and that’s what I like to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you get real bad motion sickness during this hour and a half journey?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, because sea conditions are calm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on not so calm sea conditions, have
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re always calm when we go. And I always pick the biggest boats. You can see which boat is going to be your boat. So I don’t pick the
⏹️ ▶️ John dinky boats. I pick the really big ones. So the odds of them being rocky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you pre-reserve this spot? Or do you just kind of pitch up at the last second and say, here I am?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I get them a reservation. That’s why you go for the priority. The priority boarding is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, hopefully they don’t learn anything in the airline industry. Priority boarding is like $10 extra. It’s the most no-brainer purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John in your entire life. It’s not like an extra 300 bucks for two inches of leg room on an airline or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they do sell out. So depending on what boat you’re going for, and what time, and what day, you might not be able to get priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it earn your car extra room in any dimension?
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, this time. Because I was, first of all, you want to be in the center. You don’t want to be off to the sides, because then
⏹️ ▶️ John you just have to drive straight on. So you don’t have to maneuver into any of those little alleys. In the center, the aisle
⏹️ ▶️ John is usually wider. That’s where they put the big trucks and stuff. And yeah, so I was straight
⏹️ ▶️ John right back to the back of the boat and we had plenty of room on either side. It was very nice. The
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is that means your car is out in the sun. So it gets super hot on the journey over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, the struggle. Does your car have an electronic or a hand parking brake?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so are you wrenching up even harder than normal in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John particular circumstance? I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John not to brake. I had the whole thing with the parking brake thing seizing up, so I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John get the whole rear brake caliper replaced at tremendous expense. And so I’m trying to be gentle on my,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I think I do, I tend to like pull up on the parking brake too hard just from a lifetime of
⏹️ ▶️ John older cars that were, you needed to do that. And I think in modern cars, you don’t need to pull up quite as hard. So I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John not to, I’m trying to lengthen the lifetime of my parking brake by not yanking on it. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John my 1983 Volvo. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we didn’t ask you, I forgot. How was the refurbished, re renovated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever beach house this year?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean they didn’t do much like they they show they they had ripped up a bunch of carpeting
⏹️ ▶️ John Which was good and then they ripped up a bunch of like very large linoleum tile Which was like
⏹️ ▶️ John neutral because the old tile is like fine And they what they did was they put this wooden
⏹️ ▶️ John laminate flooring over top of all of it and you can tell it’s over top because it’s like another half inch higher than the Rest of
⏹️ ▶️ John the floor in the house now. No, no, it was not a good like first of all, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like real wood it’s like particle board or something and it’s like It’s just, it’s squeaky
⏹️ ▶️ John and I mean, it looks okay and it’s better than the carpet, but, and then they, what they did is they had like these nice
⏹️ ▶️ John wood grain cabinets. They had them all painted white, like just spray painted white.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s like, instead of getting new cabinets and then they replaced the countertops with like some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John stone countertops. It’s like, they spent a bunch of money to quote unquote fix things that did not
⏹️ ▶️ John need fixing and things that did need fixing, like every appliance in the house remains the same. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they replaced a really old 80s couch with a newer couch. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John an upgrade, but the room they have it in is still a little bit ridiculous. I’m saying is I could have brought my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey have to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not allowed to bring the dog because the house is all remodeled. I’m like, yeah, it would have been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. Have you picked Daisy up yet or is that tomorrow? What
⏹️ ▶️ John are you talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming she’s at like a kennel or something
⏹️ ▶️ John A kennel, yes. We sent her to the orphanage.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John Daisy gets picked up immediately upon returning. You’re going to leave the dog stranded while you’re, oh, I’ll just get
⏹️ ▶️ John my dog tomorrow. You’re going to get the dog immediately. And second of all, Tina came home before I did, so she got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s right. I knew that. I’m sorry. I thought you had come home before her, but in retrospect, I don’t know why I thought that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, so where is the dog?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Where was Daisy when you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were both gone? She
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to a doggy play date four days a week, where she just, in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the day, she goes and hangs out with a bunch of other dogs and runs around. And the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who does those doggy play groups also does boarding. And so that’s where she was. So
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s boarded there several times. It’s just a person at their house. And there’s a bunch of other dogs that she knows already there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great fun for her as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everyone’s on vacation. Always on vacation in New York and Massachusetts.
Important follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, to go back a half step, I think we should start the follow up with the most important follow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. I know that I am on pins and needles to find out the one true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the story of the Apple sticker on your Civic from 20 years ago. Please, John, fill me in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was the story with your sticker on your Civic?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually related to a topic farther down in the notes we may or may not
⏹️ ▶️ John get to. I forgot. Oh, it was some Ask ATP question a week or
⏹️ ▶️ John two ago. I was like, do you put stickers on your cars or your iPads or something like that? And I said, I had one sticker on my first
⏹️ ▶️ John car, which is a Honda Civic. And first of all, I’m surprised my wife didn’t call me on this, maybe she
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t hear the episode yet. But when I was listening back to it, I heard myself say that I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a Apple logo sticker on the back window of my Honda
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic. And I said it was a white Apple logo sticker, but by the timelines,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this might’ve been before Apple had dropped the rainbow logo. Like this was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a 92 Civic, but I didn’t get it new, right? So maybe this is like 98. When
⏹️ ▶️ John did they drop the rainbow? Maybe around the iMac. Anyway, bottom line is, a good thing I have photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I went into my photo collection, looked it up, because as soon as I heard that, I’m like, wait, it wasn’t white, was it? It was a rainbow sticker.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rainbow logo Apple sticker, which is what used to come with all your Macs before they started to go to the solid
⏹️ ▶️ John color thing. And the story that it’s related to is the potential return of the rainbow. Apple logo, we’ll see if we get to that this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel better for having known that piece of information. And your old man Mac user cred has been restored,
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, it wasn’t on the rear quarter window, because the 92 Civic did not have a rear quarter
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco window. It just had a little piece of
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic there. You know how there’s the part that goes up and down that has straight sides, right? And sometimes they have that
⏹️ ▶️ John little tiny bit. First of all, the little bit of window would have been tiny. But second, it’s a very inexpensive car. So it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you feel better knowing this? Because I know I do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not even sure I know it now. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John send you pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve seen the picture of me with my cool white Civic, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really want to see this picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John now. Yeah, I really want to. When I show it to you, it
⏹️ ▶️ John will look familiar. I got this in front of me now because it’s my wife’s photo library, which I have no access
Shallow-water blackout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on with the other beach-related follow-up. Michael T. Raymond has some information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us about underwater swimming. So this was with regard to Marco learning how to swim,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically in the ocean, and Michael had some feedback for us. Would you like to take it away, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is about my suggestion that Marco spends time in his pool, like, being comfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John holding his breath. And you can build up your lung capacity by holding your breath and swimming underwater back and forth. Fun thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do in a pool. And Michael T. Raymond had this long harrowing email explaining
⏹️ ▶️ John how you could die instantly without knowing it, even if you’re like a lifeguard, because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I’m saying. The problem is that people, almost invariably young males, which I guess excludes Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out that you can extend the distance that you swim underwater by hyperventilating right before.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’ve seen the movie sometimes when like a boat is capsizing and everyone’s stuck in a cruise ship, like a Poseidon adventure
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, and they have to like hold their breath and go under a thing they breathe in and out real fast before diving under the water.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you seen that in a movie?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I have not seen this in a movie and I am really going to regret sharing this out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco As usual, I haven’t seen it. As usual.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, as usual, I’m going to regret saying this out loud. There was a TV show, I don’t remember the name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, I will put a link in the show notes for it. But there was a TV show way back in the day that starred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hulk Hogan, of all people. And it was like dudes with this like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cigarette boat who went and solved crimes or something like that. And I can’t remember the name of the show, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will never forget watching one episode where they needed to, I don’t know if like the boat capsized or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something happened where they needed to be underwater for a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s exactly what they did. They, you know, and then dove in and I was like, what in tarnation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just happened? And at some point they explained, maybe beforehand, they explained what they were about to do. I was like, does that make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense? Well, apparently, apparently it’s real, but unwise. So continue, please, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s not just one particular movie or TV. It’s a way to be able to stand a little longer, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it lends itself to what’s known as shallow water blackout or shallow water drowning, where it upsets
⏹️ ▶️ John the balance of stuff that normally forces you to a service and take a breath so that you can stay underwater longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John which allows you to deprive your brain of oxygen in for longer than you would expect, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you just basically black out while you’re underwater, which is bad, because as soon as you become
⏹️ ▶️ John unconscious underwater, then your body will take a deep breath, and then you’ll inhale water, and you will basically drown,
⏹️ ▶️ John and at that point, your brain will have been without oxygen for a long time anyway, because that’s what you were doing by extending the time you were
⏹️ ▶️ John underwater. It was a very long inhale. Bottom line is, do not hyperventilate before going under as
⏹️ ▶️ John a way to try to let yourself break your record of going back and forth. Just do it the old-fashioned, straight-up
⏹️ ▶️ John way. No pre-hyperventilating. Apparently it’s very dangerous. And I’ll just add to this, this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John a specific case of the general idea of the buddy system. Don’t swim anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John ever by yourself if you can’t help it. It’s always good to have someone else there with you because
⏹️ ▶️ John water is dangerous and even if you are an experienced swimmer, you can get tired, you can knock your head on something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can have low blood sugar and faint. Any of those things happen while you’re in water, it’s very bad. Always have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The television show that I was thinking of is Thunder in Paradise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. And apparently, now that I’m reading the Wikipedia page, it was I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess Knight Rider on the Water to some degree. Thunder in Paradise follows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the adventures of two ex-Navy SEALs who work as mercenaries out of their tropical resort headquarters
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey various criminals and villains. I know you feel better for having known that particular piece
⏹️ ▶️ John Unrelated to Hydro Thunder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, which is a fantastic video game.
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Dropbox alternatives
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had asked last episode, which feels like it was 17 years ago that we recorded it, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an idea for what to do about ditching Dropbox because I was very upset with Dropbox and And I kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tires very briefly on Synology Drive as a replacement for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Dropbox. And my initial impression after having spent 30 seconds with it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s too much like Google Apps with documents and spreadsheets and all sorts of things I don’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, many people very gracefully wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, no, no, no, really, it’s not bad. You should try it. And it turns out it’s not bad, and I’m glad I tried it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good news, it does seem like it is very similar to a hosted Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s on my Synology. And so it seems to work pretty much instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It works inside or outside of my home network. In that sense, everything seems good. It operates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like Dropbox would. It has a native app for the Mac. Thankfully, one of the few good options, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are almost no options in this app, but one of the few options that it does have is to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grayscale menu, what do we call these menu bar items on the upper right. I don’t know, whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called. You can do a grayscale, one of those, which is great because otherwise it was going to be the only colored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey icon in my little, I don’t want to call it a tray lest John yell at me, but we’ll call it a tray.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, so on the surface, seems good. Bad news, however, the client is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very crashplanny, very Java-y. It is not very native at all. And in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the notifications, which can get very chatty. Don’t use the Notification Center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that is native to macOS. It looks very much like, what was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey growl that was around before Notification Center was a thing. I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may be a mechanism to get like a synced folder to someone that does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an account on your Synology, but it does not seem clear to me the mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which one does that. so I’m 50-50 on that. Additionally, when I tried to set it up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey port forwarding requirements were extremely ambiguous. It seemed like it wanted other ports besides the ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I already had exposed to be forwarded, but I couldn’t find any documentation about what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they wanted forwarded specifically. So I had to use Synology’s Quick Connect, which is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a dynamic DNS sort of thing for your Synology, where your Synology phones home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and says, Casey Synology is at IP address 192.168.1.1. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course, that would be an externally accessible one. You get the idea. Anyway, so I did have to use Quick Connect for the first time and then it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no sweat. So it is not flawless by any means. I don’t think it would solve the problem for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us of passing our microphone recordings around. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re just doing stuff within your own family, for example, or people who may have an account on your Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that sense, it seems to work really well. So I have stopped using the Dropbox client on all of my computers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for now. When I do need to share files with somebody, I’ll just go to the web interface and upload
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. And so far, so good. Synology Drive seems good. The other thing that was offered as probably the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most popular contender was I think Resilio. I might have that name wrong, but it was the BitTorrent-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that has recently changed its name to something else. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the other thing that people said worked really well. I have not tried that. So Synology Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t fall trap like I did to it looking like enterprise garbage. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually seems pretty good. Have you guys explored any of this or don’t care?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These things have social components. They have network effect components. Like if you only need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share something with yourself and your other computers and you have no need for shared folders. Well, I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iCloud Drive. That’s everywhere. It’s built into all my computers. I’m already paying for the space. Uh, so I might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well just use that. The whole reason why so many of us feel like we’re stuck to some degree on Dropbox is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has social network lock-in. Like, there are files that we have to share with people, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folders we have to share with people for various workflows, or things we like to do, or things we need to do for work, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. And so there is this degree of lock-in. And so, for anything to come along
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it, it has to be something that has a really large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social network already, already or like a really large install base already among people who we would need to trade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files with or sync files with. And so that’s why I think ultimately, nothing is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stand a chance against Dropbox in that way, except maybe iCloud Drive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have like an Apple-centric work group like we do, then we can very easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when all this Catalina and everything ships in a few months, chances are the three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, John can’t because Mac Pro can’t run it, but chances are two of us can switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this new iCloud Drive based system and have shared folders that way and we can get rid of Dropbox. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the other solutions that are like, well, yeah, this is great if you’re the only person who’s using it. But if you’re the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person who’s using it, you probably don’t even need something like this, or at least you need it a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and, or iCloud Drive can be fine for you. So ultimately I’m not really interested in trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of these other solutions. I think I’m just going to hang out with Dropbox until iCloud Drive is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, you know, launches with a shared folder support, hope it works, and switch to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t disagree with you. The one nice thing about using something on your own private
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud or hardware or whatever, is that I have no space quota of any kind. Like if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to put 15 terabytes in this, you know, quote unquote, Dropbox, I could. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see myself doing that. And in fact, I removed a lot of old cruft when I pulled pretty much everything out of my Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and put it onto this thing. But I think I’m going to stick with it for my own personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. As you had said, Marco, I completely concur that if you do any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of social thing with this, as the three of us do, this is probably not a good solution. And if there is a good solution
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that, for having people who are not on my Synology have access
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to some sort of shared folder, I will put out a call for help for that, please, since you, fine ladies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and gentlemen, were so great to provide such good help on this. If you have an answer for that with regard to Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive, I’d love to hear it. But one way or another, I suspect you’re right, Marco, that iCloud Drive is going to take up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this spot for most of us, including probably you and me, if not John as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one aspect that I like of the original Dropbox and the version that I continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John use is that it has complete copies of everything, plus
⏹️ ▶️ John or minus SelectiveSync, but complete copies of everything on the Macs that that are connected to Dropbox, no weirdness,
⏹️ ▶️ John no user space file system, no magic automatically downloading files. Like they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John there, right? And it’s a cloud service where all of my files are kept in
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody else’s computer far away that will survive if my house burns down.
⏹️ ▶️ John also that cloud thing keeps version history for some period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of those things are not true of Synology. It’s not in a cloud anywhere unless I use like B2 to
⏹️ ▶️ John back it up to the cloud. It doesn’t have a versioning and-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Synology drive, I believe, has versioning for possibly infinite amounts of time. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident I’m right about that, but I have seen mention of versioning somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, and then like it’s the, your description of the client interface is
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly reassuring. Like not that I love the Dropbox client, but a weird, you know, and same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud drive, like despite our complaints about the Dropbox client, mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John the last show I think you can just completely uninstall the Dropbox client and either use the web interface
⏹️ ▶️ John or use transmit both of those interfaces do not muck up your computer with anything and
⏹️ ▶️ John still allow you to participate in the network effect like we’re all using Dropbox type of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing whereas if we switch to iCloud Drive I think there’s a web interface but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure if there are any other interfaces to iCloud Drive that are more sensible,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say, or more trustworthy as far as I’m concerned, then the thing that the Finder exposes for iCloud Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I have found to be terrifying in so many ways. And I’m not sure, does iCloud Drive have versioning?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so. But again, I’m not terribly confident. The chat room is saying that I am right, at least in part. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you trust it if it did? I wouldn’t trust it either if it did. That’s true. The chat room is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that Synology Drive does have at least some amount of versioning, but it doesn’t sound like anyone’s really played with it heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John at this time. So I continue to prefer the actual cloud solutions that have, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, uh, options for interface, even Google drive. Like you can, I think, uh, transmit does Google drive
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. And then of course there’s the web interface and then there’s the Mac interface, which is not great. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I like the idea of it being a cloud service far away from my computer and then me having options of how I
⏹️ ▶️ John have some kind of interface to it. And of course, Google drive sharing thing requires people to have a Google account. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think every time I try to share with somebody I think they all end up having to have a Google account but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure if that’s true but anyway bottom line is I have successfully shared many many files using Google Drive where I have tons of space
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because the people I share with all have Google accounts and I continue to like the
⏹️ ▶️ John network effects of Dropbox and my many options for using the clients
⏹️ ▶️ John if the Mac client becomes unusable then obviously I’ll look elsewhere but elsewhere might be okay
⏹️ ▶️ John uninstall the Mac client and just use transmit like that may be an acceptable solution for certain limited
⏹️ ▶️ John uses of Dropbox. Mainly I’m just still scared of iCloud Drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because I’ve not had successful experiences with it, so I’ll let somebody else go first and tell me if it’s safe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably going to be Marco and me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m wondering, so I had this idea that I haven’t had time to try yet, and I’m a little scared to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, tell me how this could fail and why. So I did for, last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I tried to give up Dropbox, I basically gave up Dropbox for like a month or something like that, like about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago, because I got mad at them then again. Problem number one is that the iCloud Drive folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is some weird file path, like buried deep in like library mobile documents, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Like it’s some big like folder path that you’re not really supposed to ever use the folder path, it’s like, you know, totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obfuscated. And then inside of it, and this is something that actually John Gruber brought up on last week’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk show. By the way, I was on the talk show this past week. You should go listen if you want to hear more of me talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so one thing you brought up the week before was that with iCloud Drive, like it has, it creates all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folders for all these different apps that you have. So like you, you are not really creating the folder hierarchy. Like you can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you create a folder in there, it’s buried between like 17 other folders that you didn’t create. So it’s kind of annoying. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing I did like a year ago when I was doing my Dropbox diet back then, I just created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a folder inside iCloud Drive called Dropbox. And I sim-linked home slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Dropbox to that. And I just moved everything to that from my Dropbox that that was actually mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I was able to use my command line utilities and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call into various scripts I have in Dropbox. That all just, it all just worked because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file path was the same. The only downside to it was that I didn’t have shared folders, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully about to get fixed, and that every time I would type in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to home slash or home slash dropbox as a as a folder path, it wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto complete the slash at the end, because it was a sim link. I would have to type in the slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before we’re the autocomplete to the stuff below it. So the idea I had earlier today is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I hard link a folder from my cloud drive to home slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dropbox or or the other way around? Uh And then wouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so first of all, would Time Machine back that up as a normal folder?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then would anything weird happen if I had a hard link into or out of iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John What shell are you using that it wouldn’t tab complete with the slash?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bash, the built-in one. I mean, I don’t know, does Zish
⏹️ ▶️ John change that for? Oh yeah, well just hit tab a second time. TCSH does it on the single tab, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for Bash just hit tab a second time and you’ll get the slash.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ruins too much muscle memory. So anyway. Paul Matzkoff Change the TCSH and you’ll get it. All right. So but- I’m not going to change my entire shell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m not willing to hit tab twice. That’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John some setting in Bash that lets you control that. So I would not do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Why not? Either one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things. Don’t mix cloud file system thingies.
⏹️ ▶️ John I understand that it’s possible that it worked, and that’s fine, but you’re relying on
⏹️ ▶️ John unintended cooperative behavior. have some
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism of monitoring the local file system and some mechanism of syncing those changes up and if you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do what you’re doing where there’s basically a single directory that two cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John file thingies think they own?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, to be clear, I would not be, I would not have Dropbox installed anymore. That like the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be called home slash Dropbox is for is for all my file paths for all my scripts
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, well, so my my second concern then is if you If you don’t have Dropbox installed and you’re just doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it with iCloud Drive, I would be worried that iCloud Drive really, really expects
⏹️ ▶️ John its stuff to be where it expects it to be. Symblink is not the same thing. Hardlink
⏹️ ▶️ John to directory could be done. You could also use firmlinks if you can find the private API that creates
⏹️ ▶️ John them, but all of those things are not the same as directories. And I don’t know how well the various
⏹️ ▶️ John demons that run iCloud Drive handle those things because they would have to be designed to explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ John handle them, I believe. Even in the case of firm links, I’m not sure about that. But in
⏹️ ▶️ John hard links directories might work, because we don’t have the source code to these
⏹️ ▶️ John daemons, it’s not clear how well they’ll handle it. Now, if it worked with symlinks, you’d be like, oh, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re relying on an implementation that, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may work now, but they may make some change to it in the future, all of a sudden it stops working or it hoses all your files or deletes them all
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that. Like I don’t feel like this is a supported scenario, despite the fact like we all do
⏹️ ▶️ John things like this. To give an example, I had a bunch of my BBEdit directories symlinked
⏹️ ▶️ John to Dropbox for a really long time. I think at one point it was actually recommended, oh, if you want
⏹️ ▶️ John all your BBEdit settings to sync between your computers, just put them in Dropbox and then go to like, you know, library
⏹️ ▶️ John application support, BBEdit, blah, blah, make a bunch of symlinks that point to your Dropbox. And it worked fine for years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years until it didn’t. And when it didn’t is when BBEdit decided we’re going to have official support
⏹️ ▶️ John for having your stuff in Dropbox and their official support stopped like
⏹️ ▶️ John working with the SIM link thing and said, we will look in your Dropbox and see if the files are there and they have to be in a particular location,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we will totally ignore your SIM links. And there was, you know, I really released notes and I’m on the list, so I was able
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix things, but everything just would have stopped working. I would have had fresh preferences. I would have hosed my preferences.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t write them with fresh versions if I didn’t, you know, keep track of that. And that was a more or less supported configuration
⏹️ ▶️ John recommended by the the application developer at one point. But yeah, for Cloud Drive, stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I would like, give iCloud Drive the best possible chance at success.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use it in the default mode. Then you can say, look, if it messes up, it’s not because I was doing some weird
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff behind its back. If you really want to keep your muscle memory the same
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, maybe like do it in the opposite direction. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John as everyone who seems to be confused about the order of arguments to the ln command.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had the verbal equivalent where what you described wasn’t clear to me whether you were sim linking
⏹️ ▶️ John from the Dropbox location into iCloud thing or vice versa. But if you sim
⏹️ ▶️ John link into the iCloud location, then iCloud should be none the wiser because all the sim links are in the old
⏹️ ▶️ John locations where Dropbox was. It just means you can’t go in the reverse direction. So if you’re just sim linking into
⏹️ ▶️ John it, like Dropbox is sim link into the iCloud drive, then that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John and like out of iCloud Drive into the actual Dropbox directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it preserves your muscle memory like in all your commands and stuff, right? Yeah, I guess. Because they’re doing tilde
⏹️ ▶️ John slash Dropbox slash whatever and that will work. Although who knows how many commands and scripts
⏹️ ▶️ John you have that might be confused by that. If someone like runs a real path or whatever on
⏹️ ▶️ John a path and resolves it. I mean, you have some regular expression running against the path that’s no longer gonna match because it’s not where it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t. Let’s give iCloud Drive a chance here.
⏹️ ▶️ John All we are saying is give iCloud a chance. Aww, I can’t believe Bash makes you tab a second time
⏹️ ▶️ John for that slash. Barbaric.
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Algorithmic radicalization
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, then we had something that was kind of intended to be an Ask ATP, but it’s also sort of follow up. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, it was a really good question. So I’m going to ask it on behalf of Justin Cardinal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what steps are you taking in overcast recommendation algorithm to avoid the radicalization issues that have resulted from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube’s similar approach? I thought that was a really good question, and I commend Justin—no snark—for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking it in a way that wasn’t snarky. There’s a way to ask this question like a jerk, and that is not what Justin did. So well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done. So, Marco, what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, before you answer this one, can you briefly explain what the radicalization
⏹️ ▶️ John issues are? What is he talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about? Basically, so you know, Overcast has a new recommendation algorithm we discussed last week or the week before, I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And basically, I’m looking at people who subscribe to this also subscribe to this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can provide recommendations based on what other people subscribe to, who listen to the shows you listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem that happens with YouTube, and I think Facebook has a similar problem, I don’t know enough about Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, YouTube’s algorithm will eventually make you, like if you just keep clicking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on like recommended videos in the sidebar from what you’re looking at, you will very quickly eventually get to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really radical conspiracy theory content or stuff like that, or hate content or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the algorithms on these big social networks that are very advanced, optimized for engagement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what that means on YouTube, on Facebook, that means like clicks and time looking at stuff and sharing stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On YouTube, it means watch time and clicks. So whatever you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up watching the most, spending the most time watching or clicking on at least, YouTube then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeds that into the algorithm to recommend that content more to other people. And what tends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get clicked on and watched the most is stuff that makes people angry. There’s actually a really good CGP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grey video on this, like the mental virus thing or whatever that was, I will link to it. Anger is a very powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emotion. Making people angry is a quick way to have something spread very quickly, virally online and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what ends up happening is, because the algorithms are optimizing for whatever engagement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens, good or bad, it still counts for engagement, then all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that makes people angry ends up bubbling to the top and being recommended. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why I, so there’s a number of layers to Overcast’s engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think won’t let this be a problem. I mean, obviously time will tell and I’m happy to adjust it if it needs to be, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really out there stuff in podcasts tends not to be found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easily because all podcasts that are in the Apple podcast directory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are reviewed by humans at Apple at submission time. Now they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to every episode. They’re not, you know, like it’s possible for a podcast to get submitted, get reviewed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a human, and then get, you know, get crazy afterwards. And, you know, that can happen. And podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get delisted later, but it’s more like only in response to complaints and stuff like that. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Apple does have humans screening things for initial submission. So that initially cuts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out tons of stuff from getting into the Apple podcast directory. And there is this process for things to get removed. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all podcast apps that are on iOS, including Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the Apple Podcast Directory somehow. The way I use it is I use it as a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filter. If something is not in the Apple Podcast Directory, I don’t show it in search results,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t show it in any kind of editorial recommendation context, like these recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I basically, anything that is not listed in Apple Podcasts, I basically treat as private. So, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter the URL for it, you can subscribe to it. Like, if you know the feed URL, fine, I don’t care. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna promote anything that’s not in Apple’s directory. So that right there filters out a whole lot of the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extreme and harmful content. I do have like a switch that I can press on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a podcast that even if it is something that is in the Apple directory, I can say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not appropriate to be recommended to people. I don’t know if that’s currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco active for anything. I had to look it up. It’s not a switch I use more than like twice a year or something. Sometimes I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it like if some podcaster writes to me and doesn’t like that their podcast shows up in Overcast, I can hit that switch for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, but that’s very rare. The other thing is that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast subscription activity is very different from clicking a link once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a web browser. If you click something and it makes you angry, and even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it takes you like two or three minutes of watch time to realize this is making you angry, and you back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of it, YouTube doesn’t know that that just made you angry. All they know is you just clicked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that and watch it for two or three minutes. So they’re gonna show you more stuff like that. In a podcast app, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you subscribe to a podcast, first of all, that’s kind of a bigger action, if you’re gonna subscribe to a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then it ends with this podcast is not for you, and you delete that subscription if you unsubscribe from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That data’s gone out of my database. That’s a hard delete. If you subscribe to a podcast and delete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, I have no record that you ever did subscribe to it. The subscription is a row in a table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gets deleted. It’s not marked as deleted. It’s not soft deleted, it’s an actual SQL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DELETE statement. So once somebody unsubscribes from a podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time that podcast’s recommendations are refreshed, which is every time the feed is crawled,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather every time it has updated contents, that data’s gonna be gone then. So it’s not gonna keep contributing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only way to have my algorithm recommend stuff to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if people are subscribed to it currently. So while it is possible for something and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you get a whole bunch of rolling like one-time subscriptions every time it happens to update itself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not gonna be the common case. So ultimately, I don’t think my algorithm is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to fall prey to the same types of dysfunction that the big guys’ algorithms do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could potentially make me promote weird, radical content
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the incentives are, the alignment of incentives are different too because
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco is not incentivized to, and none of the, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco as the player maker is not incentivized to try to get people to subscribe to more
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts or listen to more podcasts or whatever, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s no- No, technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am, I have ads in the podcast player. So like, you know, the more time you spend- I
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but like, but if someone is subscribed to a single podcast, they listen to 24 hours a day,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is better to you than someone who’s subscribed to a thousand podcasts that listen for two minutes each. Right? So you’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not incentivized to try to get them. Like there’s not, the advertising is not as associated
⏹️ ▶️ John like it is with videos. Cause if you, if you see ads in YouTube, you’ll see an ad at like the start of
⏹️ ▶️ John a video. So watching one video for 20 minutes that has a single ad at the beginning is worse
⏹️ ▶️ John for YouTube or worse for the creators than watching 20 videos that are a minute long, each of which shows ahead in
⏹️ ▶️ John front of it. I know YouTube doesn’t work exactly that way, but the incentives are different. Like you just want people to
⏹️ ▶️ John be in your application. You don’t necessarily need them to be hopping from thing to thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts, in general, are longer than YouTube videos. There’s not many
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three minute podcasts. There’s tons of two or three minute YouTube videos. So I just feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a different incentive structure for both the podcast makers, who
⏹️ ▶️ John generally don’t want to put out hundreds of two to three minute podcasts per day, but rather
⏹️ ▶️ John one 30 minute podcast a week or every day. It’s just, it’s like long format
⏹️ ▶️ John versus short format. You know, the advertising model is different. The advertising inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast is different than it is on YouTube videos. The advertising in the client is different than it is. It’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue sharing with like YouTube selling the ads that run in front of other people’s things and then YouTube shares the
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue. That’s not how Overcast works. Like it’s different enough that I feel like there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John enough in common to end up in a similar situation. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John being audio only eliminates a large category of
⏹️ ▶️ John toxic engagement or whatever you want to call it. Like the example I kept thinking of are those, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re called. I knew at one point, I’m glad I don’t remember. Please don’t tell me. Those clusters of images that you
⏹️ ▶️ John see at the bottom of websites that make you lower your opinion of the website,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know what I’m talking about? Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those, like, right? Yeah, like celebrity, look at them. Look, buy these cheap shoes. and 11 ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can turbocharge your blog or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Yeah, it’s like six pictures, and they’re all appealing to
⏹️ ▶️ John base emotions. There’s going to be a sexy lady. There’s going to be something
⏹️ ▶️ John really gross. There’s going to be a thing that appeals to your
⏹️ ▶️ John sense of gossip or knowing what people happen. There will be some kind of celebrity
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. There’ll be some kind of thing that appeals to your sense of insecurity
⏹️ ▶️ John about your personal relationships or your health. And there’s like six
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes, and each one does a thing. And they’re all gross, and they’re all like trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get you to engage with them in some way. And
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of those things relies on the fact that when you’re scrolling some article on a website
⏹️ ▶️ John whose opinion is about to, your opinion of which is about to go down
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get to the bottom, These images scroll up and you’re confronted
⏹️ ▶️ John with all of them essentially at once because there’s visual information. They have text in them, yes, and they have pictures, but there they
⏹️ ▶️ John are. There is no equivalent of suddenly being assaulted with six different
⏹️ ▶️ John one-sentence come-ons in a podcast player, because you can’t hear six snippets of audio at a time, and you’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to engage with it in that way. Because it’s visual, and because they can put text in visuals as well as regular visuals,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a lot easier to, and that’s how the YouTube algorithm works too, it’s a lot easier to appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ John all the base instincts in a person, you know, whether it’s, you know, sex appeal or insecurity,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are the main ones, sex appeal and insecurity. And I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that’s it. I’m not trying to think of if there’s a third pillar there, I feel like it can all be reduced to like
⏹️ ▶️ John lust and insecurity in one form or another. Immediately poking your lizard brain in those
⏹️ ▶️ John places, not sort of against your will, but like by looking at that section
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen, it’s like poke, poke, poke. And that’s what leads to the radicalization in YouTube. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what will cause people to go and click on that thing? All right, something sexy,
⏹️ ▶️ John or something that appeals to your sense of insecurity about something. And the more
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of gross and period, you can like, the more extreme,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more likely someone is to click on it. So that just drives the cycle. It’s like, okay, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you clicked on something on this sidebar, Now what’s gonna, what is it gonna take to get you to click? You’re mad about the last video.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it gonna take to get you to click now? And you end up in Nazis in like three clicks, right? I don’t think,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you can’t generally just have someone scroll to the bottom of a screen in Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John and have six audio snippets play in their ears and have some way for them to engage with those, that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not the same, right? And I think it’s just because it’s audio and it’s a more deliberate
⏹️ ▶️ John medium. You have to actually choose to listen to a thing. Listening takes longer than looking,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s harder to get at those insecurities
⏹️ ▶️ John in such a sort of broad bandwidth way. You can still say things like, do you think you’re too fat? But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s just not the same as showing like someone pinching some fat and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, magic, lose weight, whatever. It’s just different. So I haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ John any, forget about Overcast, I haven’t seen any podcast clients that suffer from this
⏹️ ▶️ John cycle of radicalization that lots of these visual mediums do. I’m not saying it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. It totally is possible. You can add a visual component to podcasts. You can add thumbnails to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John that are come-ons for the things. Like, this is all technically possible to be done. I just haven’t seen it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ve been blessedly spared this particular disease
Vignette duplicate detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I need help. I have shipped to beta testers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that I have called duplicate detection in vignette. And in discussing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Mike this very feature on a forthcoming episode of Analog, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was made very clear to me that duplicate detection is a terrible freaking name for it because it makes people think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s doing something it isn’t. So, what am I talking about? So, what I have shipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to beta testers and hope to ship very, very soon to the greater public is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanism by which Vignette will detect if it’s offering up the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image to replace one that you already have. So let’s run through like an example use case. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have my phone number in your contacts list. You have an entry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. You know, 867-5309 is sitting right there. That’s a reference drawn. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually put in my Twitter handle and Vignette offers an image. And as we record this, that image would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be me looking down to the left, bearded. In fact, I think, John, you took that picture, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, you see that picture of me looking down to the left. And you have Vignette update my picture, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now my picture in your contact card is me looking down to the left. Then fast forward a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you go back to Vignette, and it’s looking at all these different things. And today, as it exists in the App Store, it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offer you, hey, here’s Casey’s Twitter avatar. Would you like to use that to replace what you’ve already got? Well, what you’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got is Casey looking down the left, and here’s the Twitter avatar, which is Casey looking down to the left. That’s not very helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what I’ve been calling this internally, and by that I mean what I’ve been referring to it for myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is duplicate detection because I’m detecting a duplicate image. Now, what Mike thought I was talking about, and I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely reasonable, is, oh, you have two entries for Casey in your contact list, that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is not at all what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is detecting when an image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m suggesting matches the image that is already there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of my questions is, what should I call this? But we’ll get to that in a minute. But my bigger question is, and I need what I need advice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on is, okay, let’s say my contact card has my Instagram account, my Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey account, my Facebook account, my GitHub account, and my Gravatar. And so in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Vignette will find, what is that? Five? It doesn’t matter. Some number of images and they may or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may not match. So what if my Instagram avatar, which I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different than my Twitter avatar, and what if my GitHub avatar is different than my Twitter avatar, and so on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what should happen if Vignette sees that the Twitter avatar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matches the contact card, but maybe other networks do not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So my two choices here are, I could eliminate only the things that are found to be matched. So in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, Vignette would not offer Twitter as a way, as a thing to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the existing image, because it is the same image, but, but it would offer Instagram and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Gravatar and so on and so forth. Or do I just throw away that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contact the moment I find any matches? So in that case, it says, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though the Instagram thing, image doesn’t look the same as what what’s in his contact card, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter image does match what’s in his contact card. So screw it. we’re gonna throw, you know, we’re not even gonna offer KC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for updates. Am I making any sense at all? Let’s start there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, first of all, the name for this feature should be nothing. There should just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that some logic that you do behind the scenes. And this is not a marketing feature. This is not a marketable feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is just like the way people expect these things to work. They expect you to just figure it out. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right? Like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna, you’re not gonna get much recognition for this feature. Okay. you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release it and talk about it as an update note, you can describe it there, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really need a name. And I think duplicate detection is a totally fine name. I would maybe say duplicate photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John clarify that it’s the photo, not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco contact. But anyway, it doesn’t really need, this is not a marketing or public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name as a marketable feature. You don’t currently have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, hold on, maybe you do. So I was gonna say you don’t currently have the concept of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have multiple image choices, like which ones are like the best ones? But you do, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you choose which ones to show as like the one, you know, when you have like little stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface, like you have whatever you show as like the suggested replacement. So you are, you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have logic there to somehow rank the images in order of what’s, what do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one? That’s adorable. But that logic is just what’s the first one. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate your vote of confidence, but it is undeserved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, well, so I think this might be how you can potentially solve this, is develop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stable ranking algorithm so that given a set of possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco avatars on a contact, somehow, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to rank, like, which of these avatars are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, the best ones, which to show people. And so some obvious examples of this, I would think, would be, be like which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the largest one, like image size wise, like which is the biggest image. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any way to get modification dates on any of these, I know that for most of the services you probably don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you have any way to get modification dates, you could say what’s the most recently changed one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you could do something more complex that you probably shouldn’t engage the engineering effort in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such as like which of these social networks have they posted on most recently. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably not worth the trouble.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It isn’t, but that is a clever solution to the problem. I do like where your head’s at, but I agree that it is a big waste
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, or you could, you know, if you’re doing, you know, like similar photo detection, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like, if they have three photos and two of them are the same and one of them’s different, probably the two that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the same, that’s like the right one, right? So then you could just pick like the larger file size out of those two or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s a couple of heuristics you can use, but somehow develop like a stable sort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use that to like basically compare like does whatever you have in the contact now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does that photo match using the similarity algorithm? Does it match the current like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that you would show at the top in this sort? And if it does, then it’s considered a duplicate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in that case, you would just move to the next highest scoring image or you would throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that entire row. So if I’ve decided that what you’ve got for my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image matches Twitter, would you throw Casey out entirely or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you just re-rank or would you eliminate Twitter as an option to overwrite what you’ve already got?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you have, right now, do you store in any kind of metadata whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have modified the image for a contact?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. And I am resistant to doing it because I don’t feel like I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to, but it absolutely would solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously then, when someone has changed something, you basically force
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whatever they picked, you force that to be the top element in that ranking algorithm.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I don’t know. Obviously this would require you to first start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco writing metadata, if there is even a way to do that, without some garbage, like putting stuff in the notes field.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Which you probably shouldn’t do. I mean, you could even keep a local database in the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind of like, is there like some kind of unique ID on a contact, you can just like, keep like a list of them that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know if it’s if it’s consistent, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different runs, and I could do it by you know, first last name or something like that. I again, I’m with you. I’m with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. I understand where your head is. And it does make sense. I don’t think I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to and I don’t think I want to go that deep on it. I think what I’d rather do is just make a best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess with the information I have at either was the two original options were either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey throwing out that one or more images that match, or throwing out that entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contact, or this third option which you brought up, which I do like, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re-rank the options that I have to perhaps move something that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe to be a duplicate further back in the stack, so to speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one thing also, like, I don’t know, do you have any kind of analytics to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what percentage of your users are running the app multiple times?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t. I do get enough feedback about this that I know it bothers people, and it should. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of bull, the way it works right now, because it’s, you know, let’s say you run it and you decide to run it again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever reason, like immediately. It’s going to show you a whole, like, it’s going to show you everything and all of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left and right images are going to look identical, maybe not all of them, but you take my point that almost all of them will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look identical if everything goes according to plan. And that’s not good. Like that’s not a good runtime experience for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users. So I feel like this is something that in a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world would have been in the launch version of the app, but I just couldn’t get it in time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now I’ve got it basically right, I’m just not sure how to design for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John My thoughts probably require more work than you want to put into this, but I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John bring back my old favorite from the beta period, which is that I still, again, kind of like the LN
⏹️ ▶️ John command for some people, but not me for some strange reason. I still look at your interface
⏹️ ▶️ John and have to remind myself forcibly what the arrow
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to tell me. It is not telling me that the left image is going to go and overwrite
⏹️ ▶️ John the right image, or is it telling me that? Or is it telling me that the left image is the current image and the right image is
⏹️ ▶️ John the image that it will become? The visual metaphor of these two images next to each other with an arrow between them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I always find myself wondering, which one is the current picture and which one is the one that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John offering to put on it for me? Which makes me think, this is related to your question, that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, backing up a bit, utility-wise, the whole point of this program is to do a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff for me that would be tedious for me to do myself. And that utility
⏹️ ▶️ John is strengthened by saying, like, I found a bunch of images, right? And maybe you picked
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them last time, but maybe you change your mind in the future. or maybe someone updates one of their things and before
⏹️ ▶️ John you chose their Gravatar, but then they updated the Twitter, I kind of turns out the Twitter one is better. Like I basically wanna see, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the work I did. I’m the application, I did a bunch of work, I got a bunch of images. And I would like to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here is the current image, here are all the other options that are available for me. Maybe one of which you’ve already picked
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ll like gray it out or indicate that, which basically means a much more complicated interface than the current
⏹️ ▶️ John two circles with an arrow between them, right? Which is not ideal and it’s going to be difficult to design,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that gives the most utility. Like if I was to care about like, what is the power user tool for dealing with my contacts
⏹️ ▶️ John and not something simple and straightforward. And that’s what you’re getting into with this whole like, well, I’ve got multiple options and you
⏹️ ▶️ John picked one of them before and I have to detect whether it’s a duplicate. Like you’re starting to get into that realm anyway, but it is like
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger rows, different interface, sort of, you know, the GameCube controller style
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing. Like one button is more prominent the other, like the current image should not be the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size and prominence as the options available to change that image to. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine that if you picked one of the images, there’d be some animation showing that you’ve selected one of them so that it’s clear
⏹️ ▶️ John and that some resting state display. So that’s clear. If you scroll down the list, you can see which ones am I changing at all? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe get rid of the checkboxes and maybe have the selection of the image cause a animation
⏹️ ▶️ John and translation and overlay and graying out. So it’s clear which ones you’re going to change at all, which ones you’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to change. You know what I’m saying? Like a different interface. Like this is not a minor issue of like, oh, I just which one do I
⏹️ ▶️ John pick or do I show this or do not show it like I’m getting into more bigger changes, which may not
⏹️ ▶️ John be worth your time. But to solve this problem in a more comprehensive way,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you need that kind of interface. And on going
⏹️ ▶️ John in the far opposite direction from large-scale changes that you probably don’t want to make to small-scale changes
⏹️ ▶️ John that you should make, I’m using the beta with supposed duplicate detection. And I posted a bunch of images to our Slack channel
⏹️ ▶️ John that show a bunch of things where it has not successfully detected duplicates. So you might want to look into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so the way this works was a suggestion from Craig Hockenberry, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had never heard of something called a Hamming distance, and I probably will do a terrible job
⏹️ ▶️ John it. How did you graduate from CS without hearing about Hamming distance?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not go through a CS program. I went through a CPE program, just like you did, but be that as it may.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, am I the only one here with a CS degree? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. That’s incredible. Yeah, we’re both engineers, which is much harder. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t learn this, just for the record.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so the basic, I’m going to hugely oversimplify it, and then we’ll see if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get away with it. So the basic idea is… I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You kind of get a hash for each of the two images, and then figure out, okay, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey far away from each other are the bits of these two hashes? And if they’re not far away from each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other, eh, they’re probably the same. And if they’re pretty far away from each other, ooh, then they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably not the same. And one of the nice things is by just changing what the threshold is between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I consider to be far and what I consider to be close, then I can crank up or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down the sensitivity. And I haven’t had the chance to look at these screenshots because you just sent them to me moments ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it’s really a whole ton of duplicates, then maybe I need to make it so that it needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closer together than I already need it to be in order for them to count as the same. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other words, the distance really needs to be almost nothing for them to be considered.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did I get that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John backwards? You get the idea. The opposite,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. Yeah, sorry. But anyway, you get the idea, is that I can crank up or down the sensitivity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Take a look at the screenshots. It’s like two seconds to see. Look at Will Shipley,
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly. That’s a duplicate. Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jeff Atwood. Yeah. I mean, if you look really close at the pixels, you can see how they aren’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John identical, just like JPEG compression differences. But they are literally the same picture, just with different levels of compression. So you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust that. Oh, and I also threw a screenshot down in the bottom where this, yeah, getting back to the big,
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger changes thing. I thought of this when I saw this, like I run the app all the time, obviously, because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John running the betas and trying it out and stuff like that. And after you do
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of updates, like I select a bunch of ones I want to change, it updates them, it leaves the button
⏹️ ▶️ John for updating, but it changes the number to update zero contacts. I don’t want to see that button anymore. I don’t want to grade out buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey zero context. It
⏹️ ▶️ John make any sense. That’s fine. And then it says search again. And to Marco’s question of who is running the application more than once,
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual non-beta tester users who are legitimately running the application more than once, what
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to make their experience better, I would say the number one thing before
⏹️ ▶️ John the things we’re talking about with duplicates and maybe their other options is for it to remember what it did
⏹️ ▶️ John last time and to just see if anything has changed since then, for it not to take as long, basically. Because every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John run it, I got to wait for that progress bar to go through. And even with multi-threading, it takes a really, really long time and makes a lot of requests. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you just did a bunch of this. Like, remember what you did last time and just show me anything that’s different. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John in other words, have in the UI to say, I found all these last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can consider them again if you want. Like, I’m not gonna hide them from you. But here’s what’s changed since the last
⏹️ ▶️ John time you did this search. Here’s some new stuff that you might wanna consider. And you can also go and consider stuff that you didn’t make decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John on last time. But that differentiation and the acceleration of like doing the new stuff first, I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John how easy that is to do, given all the APIs or whatever, but that’s the experience you want. We don’t want it to be a Frosty
⏹️ ▶️ John the Snowman, happy birthday, every time we launch the application, there’s no idea that you’ve ever run it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Do all the work
⏹️ ▶️ John up front, because I have a lot of contacts and it’s a long wait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think that what you’re asking for will empirically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change the amount of time it takes to process things, unless I just blatantly refuse to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look for updates on anything that has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John updated in the last X days.
⏹️ ▶️ John services don’t have like if modified since header support or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not, not to the best of my knowledge, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Aren’t really all these images are probably being sort of CDNs. They probably all support that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’ll have to look again. I hadn’t really looked in the past, but I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the best of my knowledge, they don’t, but I am not confident I am correct about that. So I can certainly look again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I take all of your points and they are all genuinely very good. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a tough nut to crack, right? Because I think to get to the app that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, John, is a considerable amount of effort. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disagree with any of your desires. I just don’t know if I want this app to solve those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems or to solve them in exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John want. John Greenewald You do, but it’s just a question of how much development effort do you want to put into it? Like, you do want your app to solve all
⏹️ ▶️ John of these problems. But like, it’s a question of, do I want to put in the amount of work that it would take to do that. Because what
⏹️ ▶️ John is the marginal value? It’s the point of diminishing returns. The app basically solves the problem for 80%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people now. Now you’re getting to, well, what if I run the app multiple times? Or what if I have lots of different options? And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John diminishing returns really fast. So it’s up to you to decide whether you want to invest any time in this. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the duplicate detection thing, if you’re going to have it at all, you definitely need to tune it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it doesn’t. Because despite this not being a marketing feature, and I agree,
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to even say you have the feature, can’t have results that are clearly a bunch of duplicates that people can see with their eyeballs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just, it’s going to be, there’s only so much I can do, right? Because if, if the JPEG, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, compression is utterly mangled one version and not, not at all mangled another, it’s going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to be relatively hard for me to really be at, well, no, it shouldn’t be though.
⏹️ ▶️ John there might be core ML stuff that you can do some kind of like, I, we discussed this before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured there’s got to be some kind of API for image similarity that will give you something close.
⏹️ ▶️ John how much time do you want to invest in just searching for that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Fair. Yeah, I think it can, it certainly can be tweaked. I’m not debating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that at all. The question is, you know, where do I land? And inevitably, it’s going to be wrong for some people, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, when I initially tested, it looked pretty darn good to me. But I cannot sit here and argue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with what the screenshots that you’ve shown me that clearly are offering duplicates in some cases. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it’s a tough It’s tough not to crack. I feel like now I’m left with more questions than answers, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s okay. It gives me a lot to think about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco You can always count on us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, maybe we can revisit this in a little while. But no, I appreciate the talk-throughs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thank you, gentlemen, for the time.
Apple buying Intel modem business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Apple is buying the corpse of Intel’s modem business,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think all of us expected. Not just the three of us, like all of us expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when all the brouhaha happened with Intel basically shutting all this down. But it is officially a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s getting something to the order of 2,200 or thereabouts more employees. And hopefully, they will not need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to rely on Qualcomm much longer. So I think this is good, right? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see why this is anything but a good thing. but maybe I’m missing something. Marco, how do we feel about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel great about it. I mean, like I remember like back when Intel kind of, or when the news came out that Intel’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modem business was for sale, I believe there was some initial reporting that like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had been in early talks and then basically bailed out. And I found that very surprising because it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of seem like they would be, you know, the best buyer. And I thought, well, that’s weird. Why would they bail out? Why didn’t they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it? And now it seems like that was, you know, probably just part of some negotiation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process or who knows what, these things are complicated. So I’m glad to see that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was wrong and that that report was wrong and that they actually are buying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t know how you possibly absorb 2,200 new employees, that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a big job, but I’m sure they’re a big company, they can figure it out. And so I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is great. I think it’s been kind of an obvious prediction for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that of course Apple wants to make its own cellular modems if it can. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the impression they already were, but hey, whatever. This is great. I look forward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the results of this, which I don’t think you’re gonna start seeing the results of this, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not this year and probably not even next year, but maybe in iPhones that come out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and iPads that come out like two or three years from now, you might start seeing Apple branded modems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Apple made modems, or they might just become integrated into the A series systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a chip, which would be a bunch of wins in a number of ways. So I think that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes a lot of sense. It’s probably gonna work out about as well as their acquisition of PA-Semi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did, and that’s how we had A-chips in the first place. So yeah, I think this is great. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner, but here we are, and I’m looking forward to the results.
⏹️ ▶️ John John. I don’t think it’s gonna be as good as PA-Semi because it’s so many
⏹️ ▶️ John more people, it’s such a larger group. It’s not like a small group of super duper experts. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John much larger group of super duper experts, plus every other kind of employee that you need. But the biggest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John it has going for it is, like there are very few companies in the world
⏹️ ▶️ John that have any experience building and selling, sell radio
⏹️ ▶️ John chips for smartphones on the scale that Apple needs with the quality that Apple needs. Like we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about them all in the show. There’s Qualcomm, there’s Intel, there’s Apple’s team that they’ve been, have working on it internally. but Apple’s team
⏹️ ▶️ John has never actually shipped a cell modem chip. Intel’s has, again, as we mentioned in past shows, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John using them right now in our iPhone XS, right? And how many teams
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world can say, yeah, no, we totally have made the cell radio chip for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s top tier smartphone. Not only do we know how to do it, but all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the legal hurdles and all of the regulatory hurdles and all the intellectual property
⏹️ ▶️ John issues, We have overcome all of those to get to the point where we sell them, they put them in the phones,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you buy them and they work. Now 5G is a different ball of wax. It’s not just because they did it with their current things doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean 5G is gonna be more difficult, but that kind of experience is just
⏹️ ▶️ John invaluable. That and the IP, if any, that’s coming with this, to say they
⏹️ ▶️ John have overcome all those things and they have actually shipped. That’s who you want. Because PXME,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it was a smaller team and easier to integrate, They hadn’t made all these great A-series chips yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John We just thought they were very talented people and they probably can, but the Intel folks that they’re getting have done it at least
⏹️ ▶️ John once or twice, right? And they’re, you know, to varying degrees of success, but
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently they were good enough. So them combined with Apple’s in-house team that has presumably been working
⏹️ ▶️ John on this for years, like I’m a little bit worried about integrating those thousands of employees and what kind of redundancies
⏹️ ▶️ John there are and how to merge the efforts of those teams, because I don’t think, as we’ve discussed in many past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s strategy was not, let’s twiddle our thumbs for years and then hope we can buy someone else’s cell
⏹️ ▶️ John modem business. They had their own team working on this. And now they have these Intel people who
⏹️ ▶️ John have also been working on this. They need to merge those two things together. And it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller team in Apple and a much larger team at Intel with two totally different projects that had no relation to each other whatsoever
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly smooshed together. And we wanna get something out of that. Now that could accelerate
⏹️ ▶️ John things if the Intel project is really close to being done and the Apple one just kind of waits on the sidelines and the Apple one becomes
⏹️ ▶️ John the 2022 chip and the Intel one becomes the 2021. Or I could delay things even farther to say like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John need to rationalize these and come up with a single project and that single project is gonna be 2022 instead of 2021. In
⏹️ ▶️ John the meantime, we’ll buy from Qualcomm or whatever. Either way, we continue down the long path that we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John discussed many times in the past, which is that Apple wants to be masters of their own destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John here and just like they make their own system-on-a-chip, they wanna make their own cell radios. So far, they’re not making their own
⏹️ ▶️ John flash or, you know, well, they are making their own Taptic Engine. Like, we should
⏹️ ▶️ John start looking at the chip breakdown from iFixit and see how many chips on the iPhone’s board
⏹️ ▶️ John are made by Apple and how many aren’t. And I feel like Apple is sort of going by area.
⏹️ ▶️ John The system on the chip is Apple’s. It’s usually the biggest, or one of the biggest chips on there. The cell radio may not be the biggest, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the most important. I guess the flash storage, probably Apple’s not gonna be into that because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more of a commodity It takes a lot of space. But we’re getting to the point of diminishing returns,
⏹️ ▶️ John where all of the major important components are made by Apple. And that’s kind of where they like to be. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John having to deal with third-party vendors is a pain, especially since Apple usually wants to have two of them. And that becomes increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult for components that are difficult or highly differentiated, like the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John or the cell modems. So I think this is good news for Apple. Probably good news for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Intel teams, that their alternative is to be laid off by Intel. And now they have a slightly less chance of being
⏹️ ▶️ John laid off by Apple. I’m sure there will be some layoffs. But hey, now you’re an Apple employee instead of an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John employee. And that may be a good thing, depending on whether you get to move to Apple Park or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco eat the fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John food or whatever. I don’t think they’re on a totally different campus, right? I forget where they are. Is it San Diego or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco honestly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Which I think is also where Apple’s team was. They did a good job of setting
⏹️ ▶️ John things up for this. I think they’re geographically co-located so that acquiring doesn’t require everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John to move in either the Apple side or the Intel side. Anyway, things are looking up. This is a good
⏹️ ▶️ John move. I still think we’ll be waiting a year or two to see the fruits of that labor, but when we do it should
Siri privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I think finally for today before I ask ATP, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple has employees or contractors listening to Siri audio? What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this was a report from The Guardian from a few days ago as we record saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple employees and or contractors are occasionally listening to Siri audio to help improve Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which on the surface makes a lot of sense, but what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is the self-proclaimed, you know, top of the mountain, you know, the, the king
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the hill, if you will, on privacy. And this doesn’t feel very private
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. So what’s going on here? And should I start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting on my tinfoil hat?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think, I don’t know the details of whether they’re just doing it for transcription. They’re also doing it for commands, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple often touts the things they do on your device. But there are many things that Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John does that require contact with a server. But all of that is separate from the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of you say something and Siri turns it into text,
⏹️ ▶️ John which then sort of drives the rest of the system, right? So that could all be happening
⏹️ ▶️ John in device. You say something, Siri translates it into text, the text gets sent to a server, the server doesn’t know how to work, gives you a response,
⏹️ ▶️ John something like that. Or it could happen on device. but the bottom line is that you’re this usually
⏹️ ▶️ John with Siri architecture, as I understand it, no reason for your audio to leave
⏹️ ▶️ John the device. Except of course, this reason, which I have to say I’m not surprised this
⏹️ ▶️ John is happening, but I can understand why people would be surprised that it’s happening given
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s privacy stance, which is Apple wants to make its thing better. And if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says something and Siri interprets it terribly badly, That’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple wants to know. And if you picture yourself as tasked with making this better,
⏹️ ▶️ John making Siri better, you’re like, well, some user said, you know, set a timer for 10 minutes, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it totally interpreted it in some bizarre way. And even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John give them the bizarre way, you’re like, if you’re the developer working in Siri, you’re like, well, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John actionable. How do I fix this? I have to know what they said. I have to know what it sounded like. I have to know where the problem happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Was there lots of background noise? Did they have an accent? Was there a certain cadence? Like what part of our system is failing?
⏹️ ▶️ John I need the audio to be able to debug this. The part where I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people are, you know, as a developer, that’s not surprised. Like you can’t improve it without
⏹️ ▶️ John this audio. The part of the people that are surprising is that sometimes that
⏹️ ▶️ John audio will just be taken and fed into the machine to make it better without any kind of consent
⏹️ ▶️ John or notification or anything like that. And that is off-putting and not
⏹️ ▶️ John in keeping with Apple’s privacy stance in general, despite the fact that Apple says, oh, it’s not identifiable as you, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not associated with your Apple ID, like, it’s your voice. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s voices may sound similar, but like, it’s your voice and you’re saying words, it’s your voice and your content.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because it’s not associated with your Apple ID, if Morgan Freeman says something to his thing to remind
⏹️ ▶️ John him to set up a meeting with Steven Spielberg about the whatever movie, you’re gonna know that it’s Morgan Freeman,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know who Steven Spielberg is, It’s information that someone should, and some random contractor
⏹️ ▶️ John gets to hear that and now can like sell the story to the Hollywood reporter. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, but don’t worry. They don’t know Morgan Freeman’s Apple ID. So everything is completely anonymous.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like, and the fact that that’s happening behind the scenes statistically, you know, not all the time, just once
⏹️ ▶️ John in a while or whatever. Like it seems like Apple has sort of snatched a feat from the jaws of victory
⏹️ ▶️ John here, because what do we all think every time we try to tell Siri to do something and hilariously screws it
⏹️ ▶️ John up. If there was a giant button somewhere that said, do you want to send
⏹️ ▶️ John this audio, the audio of this interaction to Apple so that they can try to fix it? Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time we would say yes, because we just had something totally innocuous. Like we sold them to set a timer and it did something bizarre,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We would say send, but Morgan Freeman would not hit that button after he tried to remind himself about the Steven Spielberg
⏹️ ▶️ John meeting about the new movie. Right? Because he would know, like I’m not sending that audio to Apple, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or he wouldn’t even see that button. wouldn’t even hit it, it would just turn off the phone or whatever. Like, it has to be informed,
⏹️ ▶️ John and opt-in. And there’s a benefit for being opt-in, because like, it provides satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, when my series grows up now, there’s no satisfaction. You just get angry at it, and it just sits
⏹️ ▶️ John there mocking you with its ridiculous answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John recently, oh, did I save a screenshot of it? I think it was like… what the hell did I
⏹️ ▶️ John ask it? Oh, I asked it, uh, to change the volume? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I asked it what the weather and it told me the volume level or something. Like it was totally bizarre. And of course I screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John it because you screenshot all these ridiculous Siri interactions. If there had been a big button that said, send this
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple right now because it’s ridiculous, I would have sent it. Because I would, and it would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m about to send this, and it would play the audio back to me. And it says to confirm that you want to send this to Apple. I would say yes. That would have made
⏹️ ▶️ John me more satisfied as a customer. That I was actually, because you know, I’m not filing a radar,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not creating an Apple developer account. Like it’s just happening on the device right then. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I get to say, hey, Apple, your thing is broken. Here’s exactly how it’s broken. Yes, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have this audio that I just heard. It’s fine with me, fix your stuff. That would make me happy
⏹️ ▶️ John customer. Whereas if you tell me every once in a while, unbeknownst to you, and this may never have happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to you but you really have no way of knowing, some of your audio may have been sent to someone at Apple so they can try to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John some sort of problem. A, you’re mad that like, they may be getting my audio or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John B, you’re probably mad that like maybe they picked up something where there was just lots of background noise. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the one you need to fix. You need to fix the one where it was a quiet room and you correctly interpreted what I said but still told
⏹️ ▶️ John me about the volume level instead of the weather. That’s the one you need to fix. And I don’t know if you sent that one because it’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John random sampling of stuff that you send. So I really hope Apple fixes this. There are lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of ways to fix this to make everybody happy. And I feel like to give Apple more better
⏹️ ▶️ John data because Apple doesn’t just care about making Siri better. They care about making it better in ways that make
⏹️ ▶️ John customers more satisfied. So the more angry and confused the customer is, the more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John they are to opt into the system, and the more valuable those are to be the ones that get fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the randomly selected ones that fail for some reason. So this is all just disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John all around, easy for Apple to fix, and I hope they take some action on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I talked about this on the talk show this week, so listen to that also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco please. So I won’t repeat myself too much, because we have a lot of audience overlap. But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is as egregious of a problem unless you consider two things. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, there is no way to opt out of this and still use Siri at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no, like, don’t share this with Apple. It’s, if you use Siri at all, it, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, your audio is transmitted to Apple. And, and John, by the way, you said earlier that you think it’s transcribed on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sent. That’s not the case. It is, that can be the case sometimes, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe still, by default, the audio is transcribed remotely. And so it is sending the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio. And that’s going to probably still be the case for the foreseeable future. So that’s, you know, problem number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Problem number two is that there’s a lot of accidental invocation. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing if you hold down the Siri button and you say, hey, do this thing, and it gives you some bad response, and you say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, hopefully, you know, hopefully someone on Apple is going to see stuff like this and try to fix them. It’s a whole other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing when the HomePod in the corner of your room says, Hmm? When you weren’t asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it something. And it all of a sudden you realize, like, Oh, wait a minute, uh, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was listening to what did we just say? And it’s, you know, what if, what if you were saying something sensitive? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like, all the time I have the HomePod or any HeyDingus enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices very frequently will butt into conversations where I didn’t say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, you, you know, wake up. I didn’t even say anything that even remotely sounded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it. And oftentimes we’ll think back and we realize, wait, it thought that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, whatever? Like wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a sound alike problem that related to last week’s link to the look right into the eyes of your sweetie,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what I call my sweetie. And sweetie, when I mumble it or yell it across the house, sounds a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So I get a lot of accidental activations
⏹️ ▶️ John with incredibly bizarre results that follow the word sweetie because it tries to transcribe what I’m telling it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, Siri has a pretty significant problem with accidental invocation by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally recognizing those words, especially on HomePods. And so, not only is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sending recordings to humans, potentially, when you intentionally invoke Siri, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s sending recordings to Apple for humans to review when you didn’t even realize you were invoking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri and didn’t intend to be invoking Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe it’s sending them, you don’t know. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know which ones it’s sending Because it’s not sending 100% of them. That’s too much. It’s sending some amount of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t know which ones it’s sending.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So to me, because there is accidental capture happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there must be clear communication. There must be an opt-out that allows you to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having Siri enabled as a service, but that you can say, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use recordings of me. Don’t let humans review those. That needs to be an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and I found my screenshot that I took of the ridiculous Siri thing. This was actually a legit thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we were trying to do with various iOS devices of my family on vacation. The question, like we were trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, what version of iOS devices running without having to go to settings, general, about, blah, blah, blah, and then scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John and look for the thing. So it just asked Siri. And so Siri shows you
⏹️ ▶️ John what it transcribed of what you said. So it correctly transcribed my question, which was what version
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS am I running? Correctly capitalized iOS, like that’s, you know, it got the question.
⏹️ ▶️ John And its answer was, the current volume is 13%. Oh my god.
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting answer to the question that it correctly transcribed. And you may think, I think it just
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t tell the answer to that question. Not true. Because if you do it again, and it re-transcribes it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it tells you the version. It’s in typical bizarre Siri fashion, why does the same question
⏹️ ▶️ John result in different answers in the same device seconds apart? So I did take
⏹️ ▶️ John a screenshot of this. There was no button to submit it to Apple, but I submitted
⏹️ ▶️ John it through other channels. Whether anything comes of it, who knows?
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#askatp: Audio-test tracks
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP. And we start tonight with Prone to Bits,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who asked for a twofer, which is usually against the rules, but they were both pretty good and hopefully quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Number one, does Marco have any favorite tracks for testing speakers or headphones?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a whole playlist called Audio Quality Tests, and there’s a few go-to’s in there that’s, I shared it at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, I blogged about it, I think, or I showed a screenshot of it. Right now there’s 31 songs on it, and the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to span a wide variety of musical genres, at least within what I know and what I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to include songs that are very well recorded, and songs that I just know really well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that way I can, I kind of have a very quick benchmark. One of my favorite ones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the ones that I go to fastest and most often is the Once and Future Carpenter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the Avid Brothers. That is usually the very first song I will test on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any new pair of headphones. And then I will go on from there. I have songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from… I have old songs, I have a couple of Cat Stevens songs, I have new songs, I have like, you know, 90s songs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Counting Crows, I have Decemberist, Dispatch, Foo Fighters, Green Day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maroon 5, Milk Carton Kids, obviously some Fish,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some Social Distortion, yeah, stuff like that. It’s songs I know very well, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially some songs that are very, very well recorded, so that when I’m listening to something that has very high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality potential, I’m feeding it really good input, so I know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have really good headphones, that I have something that can sound really good on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody asked me, but I really like two Kevin Gilbert tracks. One is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thud—or excuse me, the album is Thud Live. The track is Kashmir, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cover of Zeppelin. I forget. Everyone’s going to be angry at me. I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, it’s a really good cover of Kashmir. And then Last Plane Out, which is also Kevin Gilbert, but as part of the band Toy Matinee.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both of those I really enjoy using for similar circumstances. back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ask ATP. Well, actually, let me give John a chance. John, do you care and ever have any favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracks for these sorts of things?
⏹️ ▶️ John Audio quality testing. I don’t think I’ve ever been faced with this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know what I would pick. So no.
#askatp: Ejecting disks on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How is it, this is back to prone to bits, how is it Mac OS chides you for disconnecting external drives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before ejecting, but iOS 13 doesn’t? Isn’t that because file system went to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user space or like mounting USB stuff went to user space in iOS 13 or in iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS doesn’t care about your data, that’s why. Wow. So this is an eternal question
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, these PC users say, I hate on Macs, you have to unmount volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John before ejecting floppy disks. or disconnecting drives or stuff like that. And the Mac users
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, like, well, then how do you know all of the various buffers have been flushed to disk?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the Unix people say, just type sync and hit return, then type sync again, and then hit return and everything will be surely
⏹️ ▶️ John on disk. And we go around and around. And then the PC users, I just wait for the light to stop blinking and then you can yank it out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a complicated issue. I was complicated. Very often there is buffering involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are various mechanisms in operating systems that are supposed to ensure that all bits
⏹️ ▶️ John have been successfully transferred to the persistent storage media so that it is now safe to remove things.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac OS way, the Mac way of unmounting, is always going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the safest because it allows the operating system to decide that everything truly has been written
⏹️ ▶️ John in disk and to give a visual indication in the interface that says, now it’s okay for you to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John your disk out or disconnect your thing because as far as the operating is concerned everything has been flushed to it and we have unmounted
⏹️ ▶️ John the device and it’s gone from the operating system so if it didn’t make it to your disk now or your storage now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s never gonna make it there but either way it’s safe to pull it out. But practically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John given modern IO stacks and modern storage mechanisms
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know the experience of all PC users are just staring at the little blinking light and yanking it out when the light is done blinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that technique also works if you always wait for the light to be done blinking as long as you’re not sure it wasn’t about to blink one more time right
⏹️ ▶️ John before you yanked it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, like it’s no different than any other operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system. It’s trying to get everything flush to storage as fast as possible. It’s trying to handle cases
⏹️ ▶️ John where there were things in flight. If you yank it out while it’s in the middle of a transfer and put it back in, maybe it can resume where
⏹️ ▶️ John it left off. Like, I don’t know what things it’s doing, but the bottom line is it is always safest to let the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system unmount and be completely done with the thing. That is, there’s never going to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, it’s never going to be as safe to do it the other way because you can yank it out at any time and the OS may not be
⏹️ ▶️ John ready for it. The fact that lots of operating systems let you yank it out is a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John in that it’s more convenient and you don’t have to deal with unmounting. But I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to believe that it’s there’s no possible way that you can allow the user to yank
⏹️ ▶️ John it out in the meantime and never suffer any data loss if they don’t plug it back in ever. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if I yank it out and it’s in the middle of a transfer and I never plug that thing back in, I’m not getting those bits there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re on the device. They’re not on the thing that I yanked out. And there’s nothing you know it’s just that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the arrow of time right so I’m I don’t like systems like this where it says just pull it out at
⏹️ ▶️ John any time I’m sure it will be fine because the answer is no it won’t always be fine almost always it’ll be fine
⏹️ ▶️ John but I would rather it be closer to always fine. We need more
⏹️ ▶️ John nines. You get a lot more nines with unmounting.
#askatp: Overhauling OSes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thank goodness. All right. Aaron Bushnell writes, you wake up to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an email from Phil Scheller that you’re on the new Pro Workflow team for complete overhaul
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. What suggestions would you provide for the next generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Apple operating systems? So I did not spend enough time thinking about this, but I thought about this briefly before we recorded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I came up with…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a big question. Yeah. I came up with some ideas. I don’t think they’re revolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough, but let me just throw some ideas at you. For Mac OS, I first of all think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we should get cellular radios, and particularly Marco and I have been barking up this tree for a while now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For portable Macs, I think they should have cellular radios. I think I’m also on board with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch support, which makes me sick to say out loud, but I think I’m on board with at least giving it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For iPad OS, the best I could come up with was increased system access,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very nebulous, but I’m thinking of things like, why can’t you sideload an iPad app? Like if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is really a professional device, let us maybe get something from places other than the app store. And yes, I know the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million and six reasons why that’s a bad idea, but maybe let us anyway. And also like audio subsystem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access. Like, can we please be able to, I would like to be able to record a podcast on my iPad. I would never do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to be able to, that would be kind of cool. And then finally with iOS, picture in picture, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I feel like there may be something better we can do with the home screen. I’m not sure what, but I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Springboard, which has gone through a zillion changes over the last 10 years, but I feel like we could get something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little more interesting on the home screen. So again, most of those not terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey revolutionary, but just some ideas I thought about. I feel like I’ve been picking on Marco first a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot recently. So John, what do you have for us?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is too big a question to be answered in any kind of comprehensive way, especially in an SATP. So I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John just give one tiny thing that occurs to me, aside from the fact that I probably I probably
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be on the Pro Workflow team, because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t have any Pro Workflows, so I don’t understand why I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be on the team, but this is a hypothetical. Paul Fritzell John, you are a developer. They said developers are their largest segment of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro users. John Greenewald Yeah, the most important Pros. That’s right. Paul Fritzell Not the most important, clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not, but they are the largest segment. John Greenewald Right, those same developers seem to have $7,000
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco monitors so they can view text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, right? Paul Fritzell Yes, well, obviously the most important members
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Pro Workflow team are video editors. All right, but yeah, my one quick, tiny answer
⏹️ ▶️ John OSS would have to do with responsiveness. They did a lot of this in iOS 12 with
⏹️ ▶️ John enhancing it, but I feel like it’s something that needs to be done across the board. To give an example of what I’m talking about, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the larger issue is like today we’re using computers and phones and iPads and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that are fantastically more powerful than the ones I started out using when I was a kid. They’re just tremendous. They have so
⏹️ ▶️ John much faster CPUs and more RAM and just like there’s so many more computing resources. And yet the
⏹️ ▶️ John second by second, moment by moment interactive experience of using the computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster than it was, but not by the same amount that the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John resources have increased because we’re using the resources to do fancier things, obviously, right? So we’re not just because your
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU is a million times faster, you don’t expect everything to be a million times faster because you’re doing stuff with that. I get that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there are many corners of the various operating systems that are less responsive than they should be. To give a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John example, if you’re in list view window in the finder and you hit command and to make a new folder because you’ve remapped
⏹️ ▶️ John that command because you’ve spent 16 years typing command and then you refuse to command shift
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, set that aside. You
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the keyboard shortcut to create a new folder, right? And because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John used to doing this frequently, you immediately start typing the name of that new folder because you know the
⏹️ ▶️ John untitled folder text will automatically be selected. So you know as you command n and you start typing the name of the folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will miss the first few keystrokes or maybe just the first one keystroke of what you you typed. What you have to do is
⏹️ ▶️ John hit your keystroke for a new folder, wait a moment for the computer to catch up to
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ve done, then start typing the name of the folder. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this seems like a tiny thing. It’s like, just wait a fraction of a second. What’s the big deal? The big deal is on a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John with like an 8 megahertz CPU or whatever the hell it was, you’d be able to type command N and immediately start typing the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ John folder and it would get all the characters every single time. On a computer that was so much slower
⏹️ ▶️ John than any other computing device I have in my life. That’s an example where responsiveness has not been
⏹️ ▶️ John prioritized. And by the way, it’s only lists you like calm, you doesn’t have a problem. I think I can view doesn’t have a problem. It just lists
⏹️ ▶️ John view. There are all sorts of weird corners of the operating system of all operating systems where there are delays
⏹️ ▶️ John where I have to wait for the computer iOS and iPad iOS have tons of delays that are built into the interaction model,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it is because you have to hold down a certain period of time, or you have to check whether I’m double tapping like
⏹️ ▶️ John all those kind of delays, it’s harder in iOS and iPad iOS, find a way for me not to have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the computer. I think a lot of the stuff where they eliminated the loop for the like the cursor insertion point and everything in iOS 13, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I still haven’t tried because I’ve still been afraid to install it. But those are steps in the right direction. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I want. I don’t want to be waiting for the computer for things that I shouldn’t have to be waiting for the computer for
⏹️ ▶️ John for small interactive things that involves like it’s not saying that all you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to eliminate animations to take too long. I just want everything to be interactive the time. I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to be responsive to my input. Um, and this occurs to
⏹️ ▶️ John me because I just have gone through, you know, many hundreds, multiple thousands.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably multiple thousands of photos of the course of my vacation. So I spent another
⏹️ ▶️ John many, many arrows in the apple photos application on my Mac and boy is
⏹️ ▶️ John that program not responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like you’ll hit
⏹️ ▶️ John the right arrow key to go to the next photo. And not only will it not go to the next photo, often it will show you a
⏹️ ▶️ John beach ball. I was starting to do counts. One, two, three, four,
⏹️ ▶️ John five. Oh, you went to the next picture. Great. Sometimes it will just never advance to the next picture and you have to hit the right arrow key again.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not an example of a responsive program. I’m not asking for the moon here. I’m asking to go to the next
⏹️ ▶️ John completely unedited picture as I go through imports.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things need to be more responsive. And it’s not just something that benefits people who are in a super duper hurry. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you’re in such a hurry. You hit command N, you want to type the name, or whatever. You just wait a second. Nobody’s in that big a hurry. It’s not a big deal, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Responsiveness benefits everybody. Even if you think for 15 seconds between what you do, everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John likes it that when you finally, after thinking for 15 seconds, go to do what you want, you immediately see the result
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen. That’s what people want. It makes a satisfying user experience. It feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John you are directly interacting with the thing. It feels less like you are sending a letter in the mail to the
⏹️ ▶️ John computer for it to do something at some point in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my words. How do you really feel John? Don’t hold back. Marco, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so I picked just a few things. I spent, you know, maybe 15 minutes on this earlier so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, forgive me this is not comprehensive as John said. On macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would, I had forgotten until John just mentioned it that like the Photos app is kind of considered part of the OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would completely throw away the Photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything about it except the syncing engine. Throw away the entire browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and editing interface on the Mac. It’s terrible. It is, it seems designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who don’t actually use it. It seems programmed by people who have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used it. And I don’t know how anybody could be expected to do anything in the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photos app for Mac on more than like one photo at a time ever without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throwing it out the window. It’s still baffling how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic stuff like going through a bunch of photos and trying to delete the bad ones to keep the good ones is so clumsy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bug prone and slow and unintuitive. Simple things about editing, as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, are unresponsive, slow, confusing. It just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people who make this app don’t use it. Or maybe they’re not empowered. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem is, but whatever it is, it seems like the Mac Photos app is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just bad. Simple things, very, very common things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to do with such an app are bad or unintuitive or slow or buggy or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clumsy. So that app needs to be totally thrown out. But moving on to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger themes for macOS, I would say, again, I echo Casey on cellular support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually I’m not convinced yet on touch I go back and forth on touch. Agreed. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say at kind of a big user experience level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think time has proven that the lion document model was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong choice. It is still all these years later still confusing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people frequently still do unintended things make unintended changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people know how to do things like file save as. We’ve been doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for decades on our computers. We have, like, people know that. They learned that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is how all computers worked for so long, and by trying to make the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac work more like iOS, and getting rid of save as, and making everything autosave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by default, and having these weird, like, duplicate commands instead. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what they were going for. It didn’t work. It’s very confusing. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to see that totally rolled back honestly or at least an option to enable it. Because right now you can like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold down the option button and you get like a save as command for real. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is users I don’t think ever caught on with the system. Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps mostly didn’t adopt this system. So now you have a situation where a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of apps on your computer don’t work this way, but then all the built-in ones from Apple do work this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, so you have an incredible inconsistency now. The Lion document model failed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, it was a good idea to try something like that. They failed, it didn’t work, get rid of it. Architecturally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, if we didn’t, you know, if this is like a total overhaul, as it was kind of, you know, stated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to see an iOS-style container folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structure for each app. Like, on the Mac, you have, like, the library folder and inside the library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder you have all these different folders so like if you install an app on the Mac if you run an app on the Mac it’s a it’s expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write files in in standard locations they’re kind of all over the place you know you it has like it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write documents in your documents directory it’s supposed to write its temp files in a certain folder under library it’s supposed to write its preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a different folder under library and if you delete the app all those files are still there and or even if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just install a new version of the app it might start writing them in new locations and so you have all this garbage accumulating all the file system and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why you have you know all these like app cleaner app uninstaller apps that are supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help you out but like on iOS you delete an app and you know it’s gone you know it can’t possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have left anything behind like zoom stupid web server like you just know it’s gone because the container
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structure of the app is such that you install an app it gets its own little folder with its own little library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder inside of it and that library folder has all of its temp files and everything else and when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete the app, that whole container gets deleted. Now, there would have to be some concessions about where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documents go, for example, because the Mac works differently about documents than iOS does. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think having that kind of structure come to the Mac would be great and would solve a lot of problems. And yes, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a lot of work and a big change and a lot of things would break, but this is in a re-architecting kind of scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say I would like to see more background app services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come to the Mac from iOS things like background refresh, content available, push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background downloads of URLs and stuff like that. I don’t know how much of that is there yet. I don’t think much of it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Moving on to iPad OS, I would like to see this become a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit more Mac-like in a few ways that I don’t think are popular but that I would like to see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, and this is going to be controversial, a desktop for files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad. People want to work this way. I know it is not what nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to have a desktop covered in files, but this is how I work. I’ll admit it. I’m a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file clutterer. I have crap all over my desktop. My folders are all over there. That’s like all my active working files are on my desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then once they’re done, I move them somewhere else maybe. But like the desktop is my home base for my files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how most people use their desktops. That’s why Apple made a feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two Mac versions ago that will optionally sync your documents and desktop folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and none of your other folders because no one uses any other folders. It will optionally sync your documents, desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder folders between your Macs. I would like to see that feature extended to also include iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to potentially optionally sync your desktop and documents folders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between your Macs and your iPads. So the iPad would have a desktop that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have files and folders on it. That is what I would like to see. Additionally, a few other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of Mac niceties come to the iPad. I would like to see a standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window chrome for the iPad. Right now, the iPad can do things that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of window-like, but they’re all with only hidden gestures. not a lot of on-screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls to control them or to invoke them and everything. I would like to see some kind of like standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco title bar with standard buttons to like, you know, shrink it to the various window sizes that let you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various split configurations that can exist on the iPad. And not every app would have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show window chrome. Those apps that, you know, benefit from full screen edge to edge content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could opt into it the same way right now we have the home indicator and apps can opt to hide it by default.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So some kind of standard title bar with window chrome. Going along with this to make multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less slow and horrible and painful like it is now, a fast mode for multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that skips all the animations of moving and resizing apps on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and instantly snaps apps into place. So you drag that thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over, it doesn’t have to go whoop and slide it over, you don’t have to set it down and wait for it, it just goes bam,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco snaps right into place. You want to resize it, drag the handle, bam, snaps again. Instant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Finally, much more responsive and much more reliable keyboard shortcuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad is slowly gaining keyboard navigability, but it’s pretty slow. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still pretty few and far between, and it’s unreliable and it’s not very responsive at times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to see, just again, kind of what John said about responsiveness, get faster. Because if the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re trying to push the iPad into a lot of Mac-like uses, Mac-like territory. It needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be fast and responsive and multitasking has to be immediate. We can’t be waiting around for things to like swoop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around and slide around and get pushed around. It’s just too slow. That’s not how that is how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pros work. You need things to be faster. Broadly moving back moving on to the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including iOS. I would like to you know for iOS generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s time we want user set default apps for HTTP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mailto and the camera at least and any other buttons that appear on the lock screen by default.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have this in the Mac, it’s been fine. It hasn’t like, you know, prevented them from shipping a web browser on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or having awesome user features on the Mac that involve integration between the system and Safari or Mail or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else. Two little things. Phone calls to show as notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as full screen takeovers as an option. Multiple named timers to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be supported. I would to see the ability to integrate widgets into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the home screen alongside icons if we see fit, and to let those widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update much more frequently. Right now, widgets seem to update basically only when you navigate to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when you swipe over to see your widgets, which itself is kind of varied, you first see old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stale data for a second as they update to fresh data. And that’s how dashboard on macOS always worked,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco may it rest in peace. And that sucks. We have computers, they have background refresh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have enough power now enough ram. Now we can have those widgets update more often, maybe like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of minutes, every 10 minutes, that would that would be great. And finally, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see complications like watch OSS complications, although better because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re terrible from a programming point of view. So a complication API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco customizable for the lock screen on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, what you’re saying is you want tiles on Springboard that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like alive. So, you want these like alive tiles on Springboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you want to have a whole bunch of little things hanging out across the top of your screen on the lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically I want the iPhone lock screen to become watchOS. I want the iPad to become the Mac and I want the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Mac to become the older Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You want Springboard to become, what is it, Windows Metro? What was the
⏹️ ▶️ John visual? Yeah, lifetiles are dead now. I’m not sure that’s what he’s asking for. I think he just wants to ugly up his
⏹️ ▶️ John lock screen like an Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. That’s the other thing I was going to say is what you want. Every time I see any family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey members or friends’ Android phone, the amount of ** that is across the top of their screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the status bar. He wants complications. There’s a lot of, quote unquote, wasted space on the lock
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. I know there’s notifications and stuff that can potentially fill up that space, but there is space you
⏹️ ▶️ John could carve out on the lock screen for watch size complications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, why not? What is it for? Right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically a giant billboard. Why? Why can we not use this space? iOS uses it sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have a timer running, it’ll show it on the lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s great, very useful. And notifications, if you have notifications set to show on the lock screen, you could fill that entire lock
⏹️ ▶️ John screen just with notifications. That’s what that space is reserved for, essentially. Like, it’ll fill your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but what if, look, look, the Apple Watch. Look at how many Apple Watch screens could fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your iPhone screen. Like, the Apple Watch, like, most of the complication face things on the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, most faces have support for between three and six complications. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could fit, like, five or six complications in the space of one notification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That could just be, like, pinned to the top of the notification area. You could have, like, a little, like, complication zone, like right below where the clock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and date are, that if you wanted to, you could have a little row of like five or six little square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complications. Like there’s so much potential there. Like weather, temperature, timers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flight status, whatever, what everyone uses the watch complications for. Why isn’t that on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone, which would also, by the way, have the battery resources to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to update those more frequently? Like that’s, to me, it’s like the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock screen a huge amount of wasted potential and it’s just empty space right now and I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to see us be able to use that more and to be to have apps be able to use that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Certainly an interesting point. Do you envision this phantom desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iPad to be like an app that you open or is this in replacement of Springboard? Like what is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there? Right now like in iOS 13 you have the option to optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put like basically your widget zone as like the left side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your springboard? What if this is just another option for that? What if you could put, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of having like, you know, half of it be your widget zone and half of it be your app icons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if half of it is your desktop files? Like, you know, like so you could do left, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left pane could be widgets or desktop. Who knows? What if, what if app launch moved?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if it really became Mac-like and what if the apps all moved into the dock and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole desktop was there for your files? It works on the Mac. We’ve done it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac for a very long time and this is how people are accustomed to working and if you’re trying to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad is more and more appropriate to replace the Mac, hey, maybe it would make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little more sense to be more Mac-like in this way that everyone’s familiar with as well. I don’t know, I mean, maybe part of the reason why the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why iPad people like it so much is that it isn’t like the Mac in some ways. But certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we’ve given the iPad more Mac like functionality in some of these like basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like kind of workflow ways or the way the way multitasking our window and work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the more Mac like it gets in a lot of ways the more Mac the more iPad power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users like it. But I think right now we still have these major problems of a lot of clumsiness around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file access, a lot of clumsiness around multitasking discoverability and performance and everything else. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like if we improve that by bringing over more helpful things from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac, I feel like it wouldn’t just make it a little Mac, but there are more ideas we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco borrow that I think that it would benefit from.
⏹️ ▶️ John You two are too new to the Mac to remember this, but there was a time when applications cared way,
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way less where they were, and people did indeed put applications on the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco desktop. I know you just said like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, applications in the dock and files on the desktop. Nope, you could put anything on the desktop, including
⏹️ ▶️ John all your applications if you wanted, and people did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can still do that with a lot of apps, who cares? Like, look, who cares where people put their apps?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apps these days, though, are super cranky about it. Like, so many of them detect whether they’re running from slash applications and if they’re not,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re like, hey, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John running a slash applications. Do you wanna move me in there? I might be running on a read-only disk image, that might screw me up because I’m not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t created in an age of sandboxing. It’s, things are more complicated than they have been.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, Marco loves desktop, everybody loves desktop, as I’ve been pointing out for, I was gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple decades now, it is the one, the most reliably, spatially consistent part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac operating system that remains now that the Spatial Finder is gone, and so it’s the one place people always know that they can find,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s why they put all their stuff there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, well, and like, I feel like, kind of like raging against people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping all their files on their desktop, it’s like raging against people taking photos on iPads or taking portrait video. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fights are lost. People do what they do, And the fact is, everyone keeps
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop. But it’s not you’re fighting against them doing that, though. It’s not like saying, oh, you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be doing it. It’s a bad thing. The reason I rage against it is not because people are doing it, but because it shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that what people want is a spatially consistent place to put their stuff. That’s why people put it on the desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that there’s only a single one of those places left is a problem that
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system needs to address. It’s not the people’s fault. They’re using the best that is offered to them. The best that’s offered to them is like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one place where I can put stuff where I know it will not move someplace else.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I won’t have multiple places where I can see it. It’s just this one place, right? And,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, they’re putting everything there because there is no other place like that. And so I’m what I’m not raging against is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, people having messy desktops, I’m raging against the operating system for not providing
⏹️ ▶️ John more places that feel as secure as the desktop. They don’t have to be exactly like the desktop. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s obvious that that That is, the characteristics that make the desktop so attractive
⏹️ ▶️ John should be duplicated elsewhere. Like, you should make other places that also feel as secure
⏹️ ▶️ John and as easily findable as the desktop or close to it or try to do that. And it’s like, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even try. It’s like, no, there is the desktop and then there’s just a series of a million different windows that are all
⏹️ ▶️ John a million different views on things and no one can find anything. So continue putting stuff on the desktop.
#askatp: Tennis players
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and finally from Ask ATP this week, Anthony Roberts writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the last episode reminded Anthony that John is a tennis fan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, how would you rank the following players, not taking into consideration their competition record but using some other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey criterion such as style of play? And the options are as follows. Thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brutal. Brutal. The options are Andre Agassi, Michael
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chang, Jim Courier, and Pete Sampras. I don’t know why Johnny Mack isn’t there, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John win them all. Oh, you’re not a tennis fan. These are a more or less a particular class
⏹️ ▶️ John of tennis players, as in like high school class, like they’re they all came up around the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So and these are American players. So this this grouping does make some kind of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, I’ll make the short. I’m glad that the question was not about rank
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, because you can easily rank them by number of grand slam wins or whatever you want to pick,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s boring. So I’m going to pick based on my amalgam,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, it’s not just my favorite players, but their favorite for a reason. Anyway, Andre Agassi is my number one. He’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ John my favorite player. Uh, even though his record is not as good as some other
⏹️ ▶️ John people, I’ve always loved his style of play. I’ve always loved his personality. I’ve loved his personal struggle, yada, yada,
⏹️ ▶️ John yada. He’s my favorite player. Really like him. He’s number one. Pete Santos is number two. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pete Santos is probably a better player, has a better record. Uh, But whenever Andre played Pete,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was always rooting for Andre because he was the underdog, right? So Pete is a better player probably in
⏹️ ▶️ John most regards except probably return of serve. Anyway So Pete’s never number two.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is where it gets hard and Michael Chang versus Jim Currier I’m gonna have to give it to Currier just because he’s so much more accomplished
⏹️ ▶️ John Michael Chang had a lot of potential but could only break through a Very small number of times and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John rooting always rooting for him But Jim Currier made it happen more often despite the fact Jim Currier took
⏹️ ▶️ John advantage of one of Andre Agassi’s big chokes books and defeated my favorite. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s your ranking. It’s Agassiz, Sampras, Currier, Chang, which I think is a ranking that most people would
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with except people would probably have Sampras above Agassiz. Trey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lockerbie You know, I do like that as I’m looking up who Jim Currier is because I have no idea who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was, one of the items in the contents for his Wikipedia page is item number four,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP career finals. Michael
⏹️ ▶️ John O’Hanlon You’re excited by the fact that ATP stands for Association of Tennis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Professionals? Trey Lockerbie Well, they stole it from us, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Away, and Molecule. and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Beach camera report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, how was your camera stuff for your vacation this
⏹️ ▶️ John year? Did not drop it in the ocean. Did get one very big splash
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sort of over the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John my entire head and camera. So like it’s not like the camera went in the water, but I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John how the camera could have gotten any more
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wet based on the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of water that fell over both of us. So it was, you know, just water. Just imagine dumping
⏹️ ▶️ John a buck of water on top of your camera and then just letting it fall over it. Right. dried
⏹️ ▶️ John it off and it seems like it’s okay, but I guess we should now accelerate the salt corrosion
⏹️ ▶️ John countdown clock on the innards of my camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is absolutely astonishing to me that a man who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a phone condom for putting his phone in his pocket will take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a probably far more expensive camera and lens combination into salt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey water for it to get splashed
⏹️ ▶️ John on. I’m not taking it underwater. I’m I’m very see, I think it should not be too incongruous
⏹️ ▶️ John because the little my little sleeve is to is a way of taking care
⏹️ ▶️ John of my phone. And I because I’m trying to be careful and take care of my things. I’m also trying to be very
⏹️ ▶️ John careful and take care of my camera as I use it standing knee deep in
⏹️ ▶️ John ocean waves. Right. It’s a dangerous thing that I’m doing with my camera, but I’m very careful
⏹️ ▶️ John during that process, which is why it survived as long as that. So it’s all just me being careful, but the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John line is this is what my camera is for To be used so I’m using it
⏹️ ▶️ John and this camera has long since outlived its expected lifetime of being taken into the ocean like this
⏹️ ▶️ John I did have success success with I think I mentioned the show someone suggested When I was having some walking
⏹️ ▶️ John ease with the camera to use this deoxit stuff the electrical contact cleaner. I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John Terrible chemical is in this spray bottle, but it really did help I had an issue that is apparently common
⏹️ ▶️ John with my model of camera even if you don’t take it in the ocean Which is that the little the main shutter switch Gets
⏹️ ▶️ John a little wonky and the camera thinks that it is half pressed down when it’s not half pressed down and that locks out a bunch Of functions
⏹️ ▶️ John and so you’ll try to use controls in the back of the camera and it would just be totally unresponsive And it’s because the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks that like the shutter Button is like quarter pressed or half pressed or some other thing that locks out the UI a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit of actual contact cleaner About a year ago solved that problem completely I brought the contact cleaner
⏹️ ▶️ John with me on vacation just in case it came back and it hasn’t so Camera still going like
⏹️ ▶️ John a champ. I am really Kind of feeling frustrated with both limits of my lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John and the limits of my camera now that i’m more intimately familiar with those limits like I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John like boy, this the zoom lens that I use at the ocean is Not a great lens. I knew it was not
⏹️ ▶️ John a great lens. It’s cheap. It’s not a good one It’s doesn’t you know zoom lenses are compromised. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about this many times like and so and you know resolution wise, sometimes I can’t get the crop
⏹️ ▶️ John I want, right? Sometimes the dynamic range isn’t there. And so I do think about getting a bigger, fancier camera. The
⏹️ ▶️ John new, uh, uh, a 11 R4 is out now. So I was looking at that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then I look at the prices of all those things. And I look at the fact that I want to get a new TV and then look at the Mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ John prices. So I’m just continuing to have a lot of things that I want to buy, but that’s all just
⏹️ ▶️ John pushed off into the future. But I may consider next year getting myself a better
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom lens because my zoom zoom lens is really cheap. It’s like the cheapest, longest zoom I could get
⏹️ ▶️ John and I take so many pictures with that lens, like half my pictures are with this cruddy lens that I
⏹️ ▶️ John should probably like get one that is twice as good for twice the price
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. I should just get one for twice the price basically because twice the price would only be a couple hundred bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s not insane for a zoom lens. I’m not going to be able to get a good one, but I can get a better one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I try to take most of my pictures with like my prime lens that most of my non ocean pictures, my prime lens, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than my zoom and takes way better pictures, obviously, because it’s not a zoom.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then I look at all those pictures taken with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey zoom and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I could do better there. So I don’t know. I’m I’m thinking about cameras. I am definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be reading the reviews of the new the new a11 to see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what is that? A7R4, 7, 7, it’s 7. Anyway, a7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, 7-11, got it. A7R4, but it’s IV
⏹️ ▶️ John for the four. Yeah, right, it’s pronounced IV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m curious, what’s the 35 millimeter full frame equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focal range of your telephoto right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea. Maybe, no, actually I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John math on that. I do everything in APS-C, so I think what I think of is like my 50
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter. I know it’s not what everyone else thinks is 50 millimeter is 50 millimeter and APS-C, but that’s the, this is my
⏹️ ▶️ John first interchangeable lens
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco camera. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea what the
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalents are. I just know what the E class mount APS-C.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what is it? What is it, like a 200 at
⏹️ ▶️ John the end? What is my zoom lens? My zoom lens is 200 millimeter. Okay, so you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at like a 300 millimeter. So here’s what I would suggest. Spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money on zoom lenses to get good ones is not money well spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. because as we’ve discussed, it’s pretty much impossible to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoom lens that gets really good quality over a very wide zoom range. Typically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest kind of range that you can get good quality at is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 24 to 70 or 70 to 200, which is why those are such popular ranges. It may be 100 to 300,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re not getting massive zoom ranges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally speaking, that have good
⏹️ ▶️ John quality at any price. I mean, that’s what I was, my 200 is like a 70 to 200, no, or 50 to 200, it’s not a huge range. Good, okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially since you only use this lens like once a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get a better camera and use the money, instead of buying a new zoom lens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use that money to just rent a nice 70 to 200 that mounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a good full frame camera. and that will, you know, it won’t give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you the kind of reach you have now, because what you have now is literally the cropped-in version of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, any new camera that you get will have so many ridiculous megapixels that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can crop it, if you need to, to get what you have now. And even, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you take the a7R IV and just take a, take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a, you know, APS-C size crop out of the middle with a nice 200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeter lens that you’ve rented, because they’re big and heavy and like $2,000 or something, you don’t want to buy those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily, but for your kind of use, that’s going to result in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better quality than the entire output of the entire frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your current camera shooting through your lens that’s made of like a plastic cup basically.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there are other factors that you mentioned, one of them like the size and the weight and the fact that this won’t be my lens is when I drop it in the
⏹️ ▶️ John ocean, I actually have to pay someone a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money. No, no, no, you’ll buy the insurance. Every lens renting place has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of like all risk insurance that you could pay like 30% more and you literally can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drop it in the ocean as long as it’s an accident and you’re okay. That’s actually probably a better idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than actually buying it yourself and taking on the risk yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John No buying a new camera thing like that stalls out too because that’s like $3,500 or whatever they are for.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the fact that they fixed a lot of the problems with the Sonys. They have the batteries twice as big now,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a bunch of nice new features, and they made the handle bigger, but it’s still, I don’t know, I’m still,
⏹️ ▶️ John my order of operations is obviously Mac Pro first.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I think- Well, then you’re done. You can’t afford anything
⏹️ ▶️ John after that. Right, yeah. Then I go back into saving money. But then television is next in line, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John more or less know what I want, and we’re getting close to the thing I want to get on the camera is a distant third. It’s like, do I even
⏹️ ▶️ John want a bigger one? Do I want bigger, heavier lenses? Like, I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John really like my current camera. I like how small it is. I really hope that the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the R4 treatment, like they did a, they have their new, what is it called? The backside
⏹️ ▶️ John illuminated sensor that they did and like the RX100 and same thing with this and the
⏹️ ▶️ John R4. I hope that this size camera, the A6000, 6300, 6500, I hope this size
⏹️ ▶️ John camera gets that same treatment and gets all updated internals, because I might buy that, because I really do like this size, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the size of the lenses. I don’t like the full frame lenses, and
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, I don’t think I need more pixels for what I’m doing. If they were just better pixels, I would be fine. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Obviously, I’m still waffling. Like, I’ll definitely consider
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s not like I’m gonna run out and buy a new zoom lens. Honestly, I don’t know what the options are. If
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to spend twice as much money as my cheap lens to get a slightly less cheap lens, Is there anything on the market
⏹️ ▶️ John that is better than what I have for that amount of money or do I have to jump immediately to gigantic expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John lens in which point I should probably do what you suggest and not buy that but just rent it. So I don’t know, I’ll think about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I should just spend some money and buy a different prime lens instead, I don’t know. What I really
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna do is, I think of this every time I’m on vacation, I’m gonna be like one of those real pro
⏹️ ▶️ John photographers. The ultimate luxury is not having to change lenses on the beach, let me tell you. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I want to have multiple bodies with different lenses on them, so I can just reach into the bag and pull out the other camera with the
⏹️ ▶️ John other lens on it. You know what I mean? There you go. Then you can drop two cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, or just drop one at a time, right? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s very, I have to plan what I want to do. And when I change lens, I try to make a little
⏹️ ▶️ John microclimate clean room involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Somehow, like this little area where I can just, I told this story in the
⏹️ ▶️ John pockets before Well, I went on vacation through Europe and brought my then fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John new fancy camera with her to take pictures and had a hair stuck inside
⏹️ ▶️ John like the shutter thing for the entire trip. Yeah. And so you could just see it in all the shots
⏹️ ▶️ John of this line going through at various levels of blurring and it was just tragic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this trip, in a couple of shots, I’m like, oh my God, do I have dust on the sensor or something? And I’m not sure what it was. It might’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just been like a water spot on the lens or something. but I immediately, you know, as soon as I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw one shot with a little smudge in it, I, you know, took it up and took a bunch of shots of the sky and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, check the sensor and like, I don’t know what it was, but it was, it was not persistent and I don’t think it was on the
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor it might’ve actually been on the lens. It’s really hard to get something on the lens that actually shows up on the picture, so I’m still not entirely sure, but
⏹️ ▶️ John many pictures of clear blue sky later convinced me that there, that is, my thing is entirely clear. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t muck up any of my pictures, but, but yeah, I would love to have multiple cameras with multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John like a 6300, you know, and let me invent a camera, the a6700, which is like this camera
⏹️ ▶️ John in size and shape, it has better battery life and is faster in all regards and takes better pictures, but is the same, you know, same
⏹️ ▶️ John size and everything. I want two of those, one of them with a QWERTY zoom lens and one of them with a good prime lens, and I just wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John have them in a bag. That would be sweet. It would probably cost less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money. Yeah, that actually might not be that ridiculous of a solution because you already own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. You could keep the one you have and keep the prime lens on it or whichever lens you use less often,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep that lens on that one, and then have a nice 70 to 200 kind of thing on a new one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whatever the crop equivalent would be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well I have three main lenses that I use. I have four total lenses, but three that I actually use. I have my prime, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John my sort of expensive zoom, which is a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John range, what is it, 16 to 70? But it is a very expensive lens, so it does the best
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do for 16 to 70, which is not great, but it’s really versatile. Like it’s a good vacation
⏹️ ▶️ John lens, it’s small-ish, it can do a reasonable zoom range, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I have a big zoom. So those are the three I go between. So the prime I’m mostly using when I know, when
⏹️ ▶️ John I know all the ranges involved. I wouldn’t go out into a city to do touristy things with just
⏹️ ▶️ John the prime, because I feel like I would be in scenarios where I wish I could go a little bit wider. But you know, because I’m on APS-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John a 50-something millimeter on APS-C, that’s zoomed in more than you think it is. Yeah, 85 millimeter on. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that like you might want to get some landscape and you’re just not going to do it. So I need, you know, I need that in between zoom and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John big zoom is all for when people are super far away from me. Anyway, I got a lot of good shots this year.