429: Digital Speedo
06 May 2021Basecamp, AirTag impressions, notes apps, and a scientific balloon situation.
Episode Description:
THE ATP STORE IS BACK!! Make your purchases until Friday, May 14. (Don’t forget, members get 15% off!)
- Pre-show: ⅓ of ATP is “maxinated”! The vaccination train keeps a’chuggin’! Toot toot! 🚂💉
- Follow-up:
- Some notes about the ATP store
- Casey’s fans (the spinny kind)
- Purchases last week
- FileVault performance
- FileVault and remote management
- John’s macOS 11.3 woes
- FB9095615
- Jason Snell on 12.9” iPad and the old Magic Keyboard
- Jason Snell on driving a Model 3
- Sam Abuelsamid on vehicle-to-load
- The Basecamp fiasco
- Casey Newton’s summary posts
- Basecamp’s posts
- Ruby on Rails
- Woke
- Anti Defamation League’s Pyramid of Hate
#askatp- What do we use to take notes? (via David Barber)
- Would we prefer writing against an abandoned API or the new hotness? (via Xarph)
- ColdFusion
- Berkshire Hathaway shares
- Marco’s .WAV-parsing bug: FB9097026
- Where are the APFS de-duping space-saving scripts? (via whophd)
diskDedupe(App Store link)
Sponsored by:
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Become a member for ad-free episodes, our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed, and 15% off our current merchandise!
Chapters
- 💉😷🐝
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Casey’s Fans
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- AppleTV purchases
- AirTag first impression
- FileVault follow-up
- John’s screen bug
- 12.9 keyboard-case update
- Tesla screen follow-up
- Sponsor: ExpressVPN
- Basecamp
- Sponsor: Linode
- #askatp: Notes apps
- #askatp: Ancient API or modern?
- #askatp: APFS de-dupe app
- Ending theme
- Post-show
💉😷🐝
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Today is a very big day for me because I am as of what six o’clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this evening I am officially maxinated because two weeks ago at about 6 6 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was when I got my second shot of Moderna and so I am Ready to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party except not really. I haven’t changed anything and don’t really plan on changing much But nevertheless at least I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walk around without fear of catching something that will make me dead. So I’m very excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, congratulations It’ll be interesting to see how we all slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco warm back up to things. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey some people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, some people never stop doing anything. Some people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right into it the second they’re allowed to. I think a lot of people are gonna have a much slower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramp back to quote normal or at least quote unrestricted behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s weird, so today, literally just today, I was waiting outside my school to pick up my kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I heard from one of the other residents that the town has officially dropped the outdoor mask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mandate. And I mean, first of all, I don’t know if I should verify that, I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should, but also like, I thought, okay, well, should I take my mask off?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I, in theory, I’d want to, but like, how many people around town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know that they’ve dropped the mask mandate? Like, am I gonna appear like a jerk if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, and even though, you know, there’s, I mean, the president, and that’s a phrase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can now respect again, said basically that we don’t need to really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be wearing masks outside as much anymore, except in certain circumstances, but for the most part, like in most circumstances,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really need to be doing that. But it still seems like, I don’t know if I’m comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m comfortable that I’m no longer at risk, even though I still have one more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week before my two-week notice after my vaccine is up. But I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident that the risk of outdoor transmission that we now know, especially in a place full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of windy, fresh air like here, is extremely low. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will I feel comfortable feeling okay being seen not wearing a mask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by other people? That’s a tricky thing. And I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco judge anyone else for their choice now, because now that it’s pretty much truly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optional for most conditions outside, I’m saying. I don’t care if somebody wears it or not anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I wouldn’t want to appear like one of those like anti-masker people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The problem you’re having is your red computer’s hat all over again, because by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not putting a mask on, depending on where you are and what you’re doing and who you’re around, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of implies a certain set of politics that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty darn confident
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t want to imply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco A degree of redness, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you say? A degree of redness, mm-hmm. So yeah, so I totally understand. I don’t know. For me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I think I might have said on the show, and certainly I’ve said on analog, the math is a little weird for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because what with the kids being so young, they’re not going to be offered a vaccine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime soon. There was actually rumblings that I saw in the last 24 hours that Pfizer may ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for two through 12 years old in September or something like that. I think that’s right. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wow. which would be great for my family, but because we have such small kids and because I haven’t seen enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey evidence that once you’re vaccinated, you really don’t emit the virus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough to worry about it. I think that is what people are guessing, but I haven’t seen real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good evidence from it. So anyway, so because of that, I don’t think my world is going to change that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. I perhaps won’t be allergic to the indoors, as I like to joke anymore, but I certainly don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plan on loitering indoors. As a silly example, I used to love going to the library to do work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t plan on picking that up again anytime soon. Like I might go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey outdoors somewhere to do work, but I don’t plan on going indoors to just sit for hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and do work like I used to in the before times. But everyone has their own thresholds, right? And at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what gives me incredible joy, no sarcasm intended, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for the three of us and our families, we are very, very close to being at the point that we get to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these decisions again, rather than feeling like those decisions were made for us. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s, that’s super great. And Marco, you said you got yours what a week ago, Tuesday, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Your second shot?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So by the time we record next, you will be vaccinated. And John, I know you got your first, but I don’t recall you haven’t gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John I got my second this morning.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the grand tradition of all ATP hosts, apparently deciding to get vaccinated on the night we record. Here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Delightful. All right, how you feeling?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my arm hurts. My muscles in the back of my neck are a little stiff. I have a mild
⏹️ ▶️ John headache, but I can’t complain. It’s like nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe it’ll get worse tonight or something, but so far, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I feel like I had it pretty easy. The hive issue predated the shot. By the way, I fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hives. Well, they fixed themselves. I’ll get to that in a second. But yeah, my my you know, we had the Pfizer here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and I basically had Tiff and I both had the day after we were Just very tired,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but after that then it was fine Yeah, and the hives turned out so I’ll never actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know because it could have been my illegal cold that I mentioned last time Because the cold symptoms went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away like at the same time that the hive stopped ended up having like four or five nights of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it also the the onset and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offset of the highs. What’s the corresponding word for when the symptoms go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away? Anyway, it corresponded very strongly to when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had Adam’s birthday balloons in the house. Now normally, I don’t have issues
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with latex or anything like that that might cause, that might be related to balloons, but these balloons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were two things about them. Number one, I blew up like half of them. Like Tiff and I set up one night, blew up the balloons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ourselves, and there were probably 50 or 100 balloons in here. There were a lot. And they were really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheap Amazon balloons and they kind of smelled a little funny. So I’m wondering if there might’ve been some weird chemical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in or on them that I was reacting to. And the hives started that night that we blew them all up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they went away after we popped them all and threw them away.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s wild. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s very like- As I said when
⏹️ ▶️ John you discussed this earlier, that I know you don’t want to do this, but you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer. just get the balloons again, like for science.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because now you’re just like, maybe it was the balloons, maybe it wasn’t, oh, they smelled funny. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. We can know, this is knowable. You can’t catch the cold again, but you can get the balloons
⏹️ ▶️ John know for sure. Just get one balloon. Just like rub it on your arm, I don’t know. Well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one balloon would do it. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then you’re just gonna have to blow up 50 balloons again, but just think of how the frontiers of science,
⏹️ ▶️ John personal science that you would be probing. Because for now, this is going to be a mystery. It’s like, maybe all
⏹️ ▶️ John balloons are a threat to me. But you can know this answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, we are a balloon family. We have balloons in the house very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently, and often in large numbers. Any birthday, any occasion, there’s balloons in our house. I’ve never had a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I don’t think it’s all latex or something like that. It’s probably something that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific to these balloons that that was a problem. or maybe just how much that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get these balloons again. Can I? I mean, who knows, like on Amazon stuff, you never know. Can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get the same thing twice? Sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ John about your bell? Yeah, right. Yeah, that’s the whole mystery of Amazon. When you order ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same product, maybe they’re shelves altogether and you have no idea which one you’re getting. But if they look the same and
⏹️ ▶️ John they had that same funny smell, then you would know. And knowing is half the battle.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other half is getting to the emergency room fast enough if it turns out you’re allergic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Thanks a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. Yeah. That’s why they do those challenges like the doctor’s office is like it, you should know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re allergic to. But so you go to the doctor and they give the little pinprick with like, you know, three molecules of
⏹️ ▶️ John shrimp or something to find out if you’re allergic. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they don’t do it when you live on an island with no hospitals on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I know you can bring the balloons to the doctor and say, Hey, Doc, Am I allergic to these?
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So moving right along, we should make a few notes about the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, what store you ask? Well, guess what? It’s the ATP store, which is back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’ll be here through the weekend after this episode comes out and up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following weekend. So until May 14th, that is when the store closes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To recap, we have all sorts of fun stuff for you this year. We don’t have a a flamethrower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet, we’re working on it. But we do have the new M1 shirt in both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey colorful and monochrome editions. To reiterate, the colorful one is darned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, but I assure you, believe it or not, we’re making like no money on it because it’s just expensive to print
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on both sides in a million colors. The monochrome one is a little less expensive and also a little less colorful. We also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the ATP performance shirt, which is a moisture wicking exercise kind of shirt. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP pint glass, which we’re going to talk about a little more in a second. And of course, the classic ATP logo shirt and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pin. All of these are available at a store near your nearest web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the ATP pint glass is dishwasher safe because it is engraved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or etched. What’s the word I’m looking for? Is it etched? Etched. Okay. Thank you. It is dishwasher safe. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlike the mugs where it was paint on the outside of the mugs, this is etched, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also we need to talk a little bit about a little wonkiness that happened, especially in the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day or so of the store. And then some of that wonkiness is actually persisting. So here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cotton Bureau does all of our, you know, fulfillment and all that, and they print the shirts for us and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they do fulfillment for the glasses and the pins and everything. We love them. They’re very reliable, very easy to work with. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great over there. The shipping costs, however, might be a little wonky. So COVID
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has made international shipping in particular a mess. Now, those of you who have have ordered from us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past internationally, I say without hyperbole and without sarcasm, like I know it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, like really expensive. And I’m genuinely, honestly sorry for that. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s not a lot we can do about it. We’ve used other printers in the past that have had like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offices or manufacturing plants in Europe. And it’s been a real mess, like a real mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it stinks that these are so expensive to ship. I totally get that. And if it’s too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much money for you you just don’t think it’s worth it. Totally understand. You can still throw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us money by going to atp.fm.com. But you don’t have to do that either. There’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipping program that Cotton Bureau is using for overseas stuff. It is faster and more reliable, but hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess what? That means it’s more expensive. So again, I totally understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is expensive and it’s tough. And I am genuinely, we are genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, just you. Just kidding. It’s all of us. Yeah, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m the only one that’s sorry. The other two don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all your fault, first of all. The entire world of global shipping and customs and VAT and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is all Casey’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he exclusively is very sorry for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, there was some wonkiness early on, particularly with the performance T. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess some metadata was a little askew within Cotton Bureau’s own systems, and so the shipping was way more expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly with the performance T than it was intended to be. If you ordered the performance T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already and you feel like, yeah, my shipping was too much money, well, either that’s how much it costs or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you were afflicted by this particular wonkiness, when the sale actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes through, because remember that that’s Kickstarter style, when the sale actually goes through, you will get the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct pricing when your credit card is charged. And then if you are seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous shipping, even for domestic addresses, so there’s a couple of things that could be going on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. First of all, the pint glasses ship priority mail. So you might want to think about putting the pint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glasses in a separate order or at least trying and seeing if that makes a difference. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then if you’re seeing something wherein the shipping is still bananas, go ahead and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give Cotton Bureau a holler. They’re really responsive on Twitter or even better support at cottonbureau.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll have a link to that in the show notes. They’re really, really great. We love Cotton Bureau, despite what it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may sound. We love Cotton Bureau. They’ve been great to us over the years. So much better than other people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve used. So again, on behalf of all three of us, I apologize for my role in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blocking the Suez Canal and for escalating the cost of international shipping everywhere, but we are all
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I’ll add is sometimes people try to order and like the website tells them, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can’t ship it to you because it can’t make sense of your address in some way. Sometimes that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John Combu doesn’t ship to your country, which is a bummer. But oh, well, but sometimes it’s because it does
⏹️ ▶️ John ship like you live in like Canada or something, and it’s like, oh, we can’t ship to you. And that’s not right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s you contact Cotton Bureau and say, hey, here’s what my actual address is. What do I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John to make to make it so that this is understood by your system? And so most of the time you can
⏹️ ▶️ John get through that. So keep trying. And then the other product bit of follow up I have is,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey ran through all the products and he mentioned the last one, the pins, which are basically I guess our version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the HomePod, where we manufactured them, well we manufactured them twice. We manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ John the pins once and we sold out of all of them like the pins are different, we have to buy them all
⏹️ ▶️ John up front, it’s not like the print on demand shirts, the pins are, some things in Cotton Bureau are stock and some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are print on demand, but the pins were like, hey tell us how much you want to order, pay for them all up front and then we sell them. So we did
⏹️ ▶️ John that, we bought a bunch of pins, we sold them, and we’re like, great, let’s do that again. And we bought a bunch of pins, and we’ve been selling
⏹️ ▶️ John that same batch of pins for what, two and a half years,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey three? It might even be more than that, yeah. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, we cannot get rid of these pins. And it’s fine, like, it’s not a big deal. They’re tiny,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t take up a lot of room in the warehouse or whatever, right? But I think, in this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John sale, we will probably run out of pins. So if for
⏹️ ▶️ John some reason for the past three years, you’ve been like, I’d like a pin, but not that much. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you should buy one now because the odds of us ordering more of these pins is very low. Yes. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants them anymore. In fact, I had to, I emailed Cotton Beer and
⏹️ ▶️ John said, how many pins do we have? Because I thought like when the numbers ticked over, I’m like, that’s all the pins,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But then it kept going up. I’m like, is this like a bottomless pit of pins? How many pins are actually left? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they told me, and there was like, I think we were down to like 10 pins or something like that. I forget how many
⏹️ ▶️ John it was, but they’re like, because they reserve extras too for like, if your pin gets damaged, they want to replace
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. So there is a tiny amount of extras they reserve. But I think it is conceivable
⏹️ ▶️ John that we could run out of pins. If we don’t run out of pins in this sale, next sale, the first three people to buy pins
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to sell it out. So if you want a pin, buy a pin. If not,
⏹️ ▶️ John good riddance to pins. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I like the pins.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a cool pin. I don’t understand why we didn’t sell them. But anyway, this is probably the last you’re going to be seeing of pins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least for a while. That’s right. All right, so again, atp.fm.com. Don’t be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person tweeting me on the day after the sale ends, sometimes literally minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the sale ends. Of course, a lot of people queue it up now because I make such a big deal out of it. But then there’s that person that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell they ain’t messing around. They genuinely missed it. So if you’re driving, pull over. If you’re walking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull to the side, do what you need to do. Atp.fm.com or alternatively atp.fm.com. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just tell someone you love about how much you love the show. That works too. Bye.
Casey’s Fans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, my fans. I had talked, this is not the people, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the spinning kind of fan. The last week we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these RF-controlled fans that I have and I didn’t know how to make them work with HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall where I was in the journey specifically with hacks for ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this, but a lot of people recommended Bond and I’ll find a link and put it in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. James Bond? Bond, James Bond, shaken not stirred. Bond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home or something like that, which is a box that basically will interface with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either RF or IR, so you could say control a TV or something like that. And you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Homebridge plugin that works with that. I do plan to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if, if my new alternative plan doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we had to take the fans down that were in the screen didn’t porch for reasons that are mostly uninteresting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we had to take them down for a little bit. And I noticed that there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the RF controller that’s in the wall, you know, where any standard light switch or fan switch would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s an RF like receiver, not literally in the fan, but like, you know, sitting where the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan is mounted. And basically the wires go from the wall unit to the receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then from the receiver to the fan. Well, as it turns out, I’m almost positive that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wires within the wall, which I haven’t opened up yet, or behind the plate, I mean. Those wires,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, match the wires going into the fan. So my theory and my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hope is that if I just take out this RF box, which is, that’s by design, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not permanently attached or anything like that. It’s, in fact, it comes detached. If I take away that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RF box and then put in my Lutron Caseta fan switches, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that might work. So that’s what I’m gonna try. I probably won’t be able to for another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, maybe two, for, again, uninteresting reasons. But that’s the theory. And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to try this Bond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home. I forget, James Bond, whatever it’s called. I’ll put a link in the show notes.
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AppleTV purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of spending money, ATP purchases. So we talked about air tags and we’re going to talk a little more about that later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ordered my Apple TV and after all my kvetching, I actually got the big boy. I got the 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gig and mostly because people said, well, what about the screensavers? And I’m a sucker for the screensavers. So I did get the big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boy and it will be delivered at the end of the month. And oh man, am I excited for it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I am super stoked. Marco, I suspect you did not buy any TVs, but did you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sad to say that I bought both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You bought a TV too? Yeah. Oh, you sucker. You’re as bad as I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I even bought the big one for the exact same damn reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John I infected both of you with this virus of when else can you double the storage of an Apple product for $20? You did.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said, you can’t afford not to buy the big one. one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I did. So, so yeah, so my plan was like, you know, but right now in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my house, I have a 4k on the upstairs TV and I have the old HD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model on the downstairs TV. Both TVs are actually 4k TVs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got one new Apple TV. I will demo the previous Apple TV 4k to the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV that had the HD model previously. Um, so I’m basically, you know, moving it down the line. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the new one, I did indeed get the stupid 64 gig for $20 more because the stupid screensavers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually like one of my favorite things about the Apple TV. And if that increases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the space to cache screensavers and therefore, you know, maybe includes more of them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my regular rotation than otherwise would have, that alone
⏹️ ▶️ John is worth it to me. But it doesn’t. I mean, we were joking about this yesterday, but we did joke, like we all have
⏹️ ▶️ John gigabit connections to our house. Like the extra storage space is not, I’m going to say right now
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to let you access more screen savers. It’s not going to increase things in the rotation. They just, they can just stream.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have a gigabit connection, but you do have more space. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So just in case it ever becomes useful. Yeah. Stupid 20 bucks. All right, fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, and I also I got a additional remote of the new remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type for the downstairs TV, so even though I’m not I’m not giving it the new model, I’m gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that good remote on both TVs, allegedly. I hope it’s actually good. I mean, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing, like none of us have actually tried it yet. Like no one’s reviewed the remote yet. We don’t actually know if it actually is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John it be worse though,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really, really hard to make it worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fair. Like there are certain aspects of it that we know immediately are better. Hey, it’s not symmetrical. It’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John know which way is up without looking at it or with looking at it for that matter. And it is thicker and it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a curved bottom and the entire top of it isn’t a touch surface. And these are the type of things that are certainly improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now above and beyond that, maybe it also has its own problems or whatever, you’re right, that we don’t know, but I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty safe bet that if you really, really hate the current remote, this one is almost certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be somewhat of an upgrade. Yeah.
AirTag first impression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I did also buy air tags. Excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I bought a four pack of air tag. That is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John how it is labeled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are interesting. As I, so I bought them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, I had this four pack, so I was like, great, let me open this up, activate the tag,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, I thought, okay, I’ll put one in my backpack, maybe that sounds good. But the main thing I wanted to put it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were our primary bikes in the family and the wagon that we bring to and from the boat for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like freight hauling. Because these are things that we will often leave unattended in town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while and unlocked to things. And so I figured it could be, you know, a measure of kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual theft prevention or whatever. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nice to know like, you know, did my kid ride his bike, you know, from the playground to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nearby friend’s house? That way I can locate my kid if he doesn’t have an Apple Watch on. So I figured, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we should all have them on our bikes. And that’s three bikes and one wagon, perfect, okay. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get my AirTag four pack. And great, these nice little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco round, beautiful little objects. How do I attach these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anything? Have you considered a $450 piece of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The air tags are yet another like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful example of Apple’s design failure actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like designing an object to be beautiful at the significant expense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of actual usability because what you need with an air tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and this might be intentional you need to attach this to something in almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every case. Like I could tuck one into a pocket in my backpack without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modifying anything. Okay great. But literally anything else I would use it for I need to attach it somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now you know I could just use a roll of electrical tape. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one option. That doesn’t work for certain things like you know we had friends ask like you know could I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put one on my dog collar in case my dog gets lost or something that well well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t actually, unless you go buy something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is where they get you. So if you’ll notice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you go to Apple’s site, or, you know, we’ll stick with Apple for now, we’ll cover Amazon in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, you go to Apple’s site, great, you can buy the AirTag for $25 to $30,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re gonna need something else with almost every single AirTag you buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the options that Apple sells to hold your AirTag are all A.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty bulky and B. you know they’re all like $15 and up more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know a lot of them are closer to $20, $30, $40. So it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple designed these in order to sell more accessories besides just them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I think this is just like accessory revenue generation here and if they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have designed it with a simple keyring hole in on one side which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how like tile and everything else those are all designed that way. Then many of us could just stick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cheap hardware store you know keyring thing through it and attach it to lots of different things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if we wanted to use some other kind of you know silicone holder we still could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because they designed them the way they did prioritizing like basically visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purity and possibly in an effort to increase accessory sales, both of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think are likely contributors to this design, they end up being like kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of useless if you just get the AirTags. Now you can go to, you know, lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have announced things like there’s of course like a Belkin kit that Apple sells that’s basically like a key ring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attached to a big plastic case that goes around the AirTag. Okay, that’s nice. You know, if you’re putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it like on a big dog’s collar, that’s probably the way to go, something like that. Our friends over at, I think it was Elevation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lab announced a very similar kind of thing. None of these things are shipping until like June. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s products like that. You can go on Amazon now and there’s a million cheap no-name things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are eight to 12 dollars, most of which appear that no one has actually gotten them and used them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, because they don’t seem to have legitimate reviews, because it just hasn’t been enough time. AirTags just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped a few days ago to the first buyers. So, uh, so I don’t know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, I’m kind of lukewarm on this. Like, okay, this is great. This will be fun if I, or this will be useful if I ever need it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine like a, a, a, more like obtuse design than what they went with because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t attach to anything. Like it’s, it’s like a, you know, a UFO shaped disc with curved edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t strap it down like with a cable tie, like with Velcro, you can’t like, cause it just slides out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You obviously can’t put a ring around it. You can’t mount it into or onto anything very securely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’ll just slip out, because of its shape. And so they literally did nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accommodate the idea to actually attach this to something. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the very first iPad, the first generation iPad. And the only case that you could get for it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s awful, that big black rubbery one that kind of just clamped around it on all sides, because the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad made no accommodation for cases. And that’s one of the things they changed with the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. they added the magnetic mounts on the side so you could have the smart case. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this has like no affordances for attachment whatsoever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re gonna end up having all these like big, expensive, little custom mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and key ring straps and all these little things and Apple sells a bunch of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m sure they will. But then the result is you put this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanna like put this on a key chain on a dog collar or whatever it is, it’s just gonna be, not only is it gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be bulkier and more expensive, but it’s just like, it’s less elegant. So you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger object than it could have been if it was just a key ring. The real price of it is gonna be more like $50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each, depending on how you mount it and what product are actually available and good. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, it kinda leaves a sour taste in my mouth that this is kind of, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those things that it looks good in pictures, but it’s actually, I think, a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John I think people will yell at us if we don’t bring this up because we haven’t mentioned the umpteen other times that it’ll come up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but people keep thinking that the AirPods are an example of my naked robotic core concept that we talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about with the iPhone. And to review the idea behind that with the iPhone is make the iPhone as small as possible
⏹️ ▶️ John so that you give the consumer the most options in terms of how they wanna deal with it. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John want the smallest phone possible, then they’ve got it. But if they wanna put a case on it, you’ve made the inside
⏹️ ▶️ John part as small as possible so that when you do put a case on it doesn’t get that much bigger. And so you might
⏹️ ▶️ John think that given what you just said about the AirTags, oh, they’re the same thing. We don’t even give you any case.
⏹️ ▶️ John We give you the Naked Robotic Core and you have to dress it up in these accessories. Like we don’t do it, you know, it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no holes in it, it’s not supposed to be attached. It is literally the Naked Robotic Core and you have to wrap it in something,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you could just have it be the way it is and loosen your bag. The problem with that, and the reason I think the AirTags are
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good example of Naked Robotic Core, is that as far as I can tell from seeing the teardowns, I don’t have these in person because I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy any air tags, but as far as I’ve seen from like the I fix it teardowns and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John air tags are not as small as they can possibly be. They’re much more
⏹️ ▶️ John like sort of before the iPhone went naked robotic or like the iPhone three G or iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John three GS any they’re both the same shape where there’s a curve to the plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John so that there’s basically airspace inside it so that it can look like a you know, like I don’t know what it’s like What candy
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like this like a lozenge kind of like it has a curve to it like a spree a very big spree
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, I don’t know that candy, but I’ll take your word for it But but like if this was gonna be a naked
⏹️ ▶️ John robotic core It would not that it would look more like tile But tile and my impression is
⏹️ ▶️ John they tend to pull in the edges as tight as they can So there’s no unnecessary curves or bulges
⏹️ ▶️ John for the sake of aesthetics or a particular design principle You know, it’s just it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just rat It’s much more like the iPhone 4, let’s say, where the outsides are sucked in,
⏹️ ▶️ John or the last good-looking Mazda RX-7, where the outsides are sucked in
⏹️ ▶️ John as tightly as they can possibly be to the insides to give you maximum space
⏹️ ▶️ John to adorn it if that’s what you wanna do. If you want it to be as small as possible, hey, we’ve sucked it all in for
⏹️ ▶️ John you as you make a robotic core, but if you wanna put something in it, we’ve really compacted the core as much as we can so that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you do put a case on it, it doesn’t get too bulky. And I don’t think that’s what they’ve done with this, far as I
⏹️ ▶️ John can tell. I may be wrong. Maybe that’s not as much airspace in there as I think. But every time I see the curves and the things you were talking about that
⏹️ ▶️ John make it essentially hard to even, let’s say, electrical tape something because there’s no flat side, really.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although you can tell me, is there one side of it kind of flat or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s it’s the whole thing is like bulbous. It’s all rounded. It’s like they’re it’s all basically convex. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So that’s what I’m saying. Like, I think this is not this is not a a
⏹️ ▶️ John an ideal implementation of the naked robotic court has some aspects of it in that it’s clear that they want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John put accessories on it or whatever. But yeah, and so people are drilling holes in them, which is a thing that you can do. But obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John there goes your waterproofing because you just drill the hole for the water to get in. And I wouldn’t trust that hole
⏹️ ▶️ John to stand up over stress because, you know, it’s not it’s not a design in molded and whole.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just basically, you know, ruptured the structural integrity of the air pod. And now you’re going to have like stress cracks and
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. So I don’t recommend that. It makes me think, though, of all the things that
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple made that don’t actually have of any kind of convenient attach point. I was thinking of
⏹️ ▶️ John when they made a series of iPod touches that had the little pop out anchor point for
⏹️ ▶️ John a strap. Maybe you don’t remember that because you weren’t big into
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco iPod touch. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John was getting iPod touches and they had, it was like a, it was flush, but if you pressed
⏹️ ▶️ John it in, it would go in a little bit and then pop out. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ John grommet. Like it was basically just like a, I don’t know how to describe it, like a cylinder with a
⏹️ ▶️ John big disc on top of it. And it would pop up and you would loop a strap around that, right? Even something like that
⏹️ ▶️ John as sort of an anchor point, not necessarily just, oh, tile has a hole in theirs, therefore Apple should have a hole in theirs. Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John have done something more Apple-y to give an attachment point that is more minimal
⏹️ ▶️ John than what they have. So I feel your pain in attaching things. Lots of people are posting Twitter threads of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy the expensive Apple case, here’s where it falls down because the key ring it comes with
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of those flat key rings, you know, like the, there’s lots of different ways you can do key rings, but one way you can do it is to have
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like flattened snake that goes around in a ring and it makes it wide and wider in one
⏹️ ▶️ John dimension than it is in the other and Lots of keys and other things don’t fit around that
⏹️ ▶️ John or only fit around it one way, but then can’t rotate. Yeah Yeah, right And so it makes for
⏹️ ▶️ John absurd scenarios and also if you look at the Apple cases if you’re looking at the air tag
⏹️ ▶️ John head-on The ring you’d be looking at the ring like head-on as
⏹️ ▶️ John well So you’d see the air tag and Apple logo and you’d see the key ring so you could look straight through the hole but keys,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of keys go onto key rings the other way where the key is rotated sideways so you’re looking at the side
⏹️ ▶️ John of the key and then looking through the key ring hole I’m not describing this well but like look at your ring of keys
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just hold your finger with the ring and let the keys dangle usually the keys aren’t facing you they
⏹️ ▶️ John are side sideways to you but the air tag is exactly the opposite so it doesn’t even like sort of lay flat next
⏹️ ▶️ John to your other keys because it insists on being you know in the same plane as the key
⏹️ ▶️ John ring and it’s the way it attaches with that big strap doesn’t let it twist at all. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John really not particularly well thought out or particularly compact and it’s also not a very good Naked
⏹️ ▶️ John Robotic Core. So maybe they’ll revise it, maybe the next one will be smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, they have they have some time to iterate on this. It definitely looks very much like the ideal use case
⏹️ ▶️ John is putting in a pocket of a backpack because then you don’t need anything else. You don’t care that it’s a little bit bulky
⏹️ ▶️ John and it works fine. And you mentioned people putting it on their pets. I would encourage people
⏹️ ▶️ John to consider a different option if they really want something they can find their pets because in my experience, when pets
⏹️ ▶️ John run away, they don’t run away to an area where people have iPhones. They run into the woods and there’s no one with
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones in there. And it’s way out of U1 range. So if you’re trying to, oh, my dog is lost. Hey, I’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John it with the Find My Network. No, you won’t, unless it ran into a mall. Like it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where is your dog running? Does your dog just run into crowds full of people with phones? No, they always run off into the woods.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re chasing a bird. They’re like, you have no idea where they are. It’s not the ideal thing. Even Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John says, AirTag is meant to track things, not people or pets. If you want to track your
⏹️ ▶️ John pet, because I have a pet that is a flight risk, let’s say, because
⏹️ ▶️ John she really loves birds and squirrels and other things and has no idea that anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else exists when she sees them, a strong prey drive, they call it. Anyway, the
⏹️ ▶️ John company I use is Whistle.com. They’re not a sponsor. but I’ve used their
⏹️ ▶️ John dog GPS products for a long time. The first revision was a little bit, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life wasn’t that great, but the second one, the battery life is amazing. It’s kind of big and bulky. It’s way bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John an AirTag, but the battery lasts weeks and it is literal GPS. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter where your dog goes, you can, it sends a signal
⏹️ ▶️ John up to wherever, like, you can find your dog basically anywhere. It’s not super duper great real
⏹️ ▶️ John time tracking, but you don’t have to rely on your dog running near people with iPhones, which is a big plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To come back around, John, I don’t think you told us if you bought any Apple TVs or remotes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a new Apple TV, yes of course, the big one, to replace my
⏹️ ▶️ John existing Apple TV 4K downstairs, and the existing Apple TV 4K will bump up to the bedroom,
⏹️ ▶️ John kicking out our old Apple TV HD, and then I got a spare remote, so I don’t ever have to use that stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri remote ever again. So I got exactly the same stuff as Marco, and basically following the same plan.
FileVault follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we need to talk about file vault performance and Some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had pointed out that the SSD in computers that have the Apple t2 security chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is encrypted So you can turn on file vault so that your Mac requires a password to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decrypt your data But it’s going to be encrypted no matter what
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, we mentioned on the last show But it’s just good will link to the tech support article You know rather than just going by what
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’ve heard in our reckons last time I think there’s things with t2 or the m1 do this or whatever. Here’s an Apple support
⏹️ ▶️ John document that spells it out. You know iPhones and iOS devices have
⏹️ ▶️ John been encrypted Maybe since the beginning but certainly for many many many years, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so the m1 max and the max based on the arm chips and the you know
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone ish architecture, of course do the same thing, but even before that once the
⏹️ ▶️ John Max got the t2 chip. They would basically just encrypt everything by default now Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it being encrypted on the SSD is one thing. And you maybe think, well, then what is turning FileVault
⏹️ ▶️ John on and off do? And as this article says, what it does is it means that to decrypt it,
⏹️ ▶️ John now you have to enter a password for one of your user accounts to decrypt it. Whereas before,
⏹️ ▶️ John the decryption keys presumably are in the secure enclave, and it didn’t demand anything of you. You could just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it was encrypted, but it didn’t say, hey, before I can even boot, please enter
⏹️ ▶️ John your password. would just pull its own password out of the secure enclave and go to town. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this was with respect to worrying about performance. You have no choice if you have a T2 or an M1
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac. Whatever the performance hit is or isn’t, and I think there is basically none because it’s all just done transparently
⏹️ ▶️ John in hardware at full speed, you’re paying that price no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ John So your only choice is, hey, do I want it to require me to enter one of my passwords before it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Then related, Michael Bertel wrote that, I have two Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minis in remote locations running headless. I access them via VNC over an SSH tunnel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In this setup, I need to have FileVault disabled. If I perform an OS update remotely, that requires a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restart and FileVault requires the input of a password before I’m able to connect via VNC. Just something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to consider if you ever plan on servicing a Mac remotely without access to a physical keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John A bunch of people brought this in. I have this vague notion that there is some way this somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t actually know what it is but it seems like a lot of people have run into this problem that yeah if you
⏹️ ▶️ John do make it require your password and then you reboot and you’re not there to enter your password at the
⏹️ ▶️ John point that it demands your password it’s like it needs it to get to the disk so it can boot so if you’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just gonna VNC in and enter my password no you’re not because the thing isn’t even booted yet like I said I
⏹️ ▶️ John think there might be some workarounds for this somehow but just keep it in mind if you if you don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John workarounds like I don’t and you enable file vault and you want to remotely control your computer through
⏹️ ▶️ John a reboot you may have a problem.
John’s screen bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now we turn into please Apple, please fix my particular bug corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this time I’m not the winner. John, what’s going on with your MacBuddy?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that I’m not really asking them to, I mean, they should fix it if it’s a thing. But this is, I just thought I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John bring this up because it’s interesting. It’s one of the aspects of owning a computer that
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people don’t own that people maybe don’t think about. And I’ve always had these really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird computers that are expensive and obscure, that most people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t buy and probably shouldn’t buy. And so I have experience with this. So recently, Mac OS 11.3
⏹️ ▶️ John came out. And as soon as I did the update, I started experiencing a bug on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the bug was that the display would not wake from sleep. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that the computer wouldn’t wake from sleep. The display wouldn’t. So I have my thing, some energy saver set up. is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John screen saver goes on after five minutes and then after 15 minutes, the display goes to sleep. And so when the display goes to sleep, you are
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing your screen saver, then all of a sudden the display turns black, right? The way it’s supposed to work is you come up to your computer and you whack the space
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, click the mouse button or something, and the display springs back to life, right? During this time,
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer hasn’t yet fallen asleep because the computer sleep timer is different and much longer. And you can confirm
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you know, by just going to another Mac and SSHing in and say, yep, here I am, I’m on this Mac. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is totally awake, it’s running. I’m SSHed into it, I can do stuff, but no matter what I
⏹️ ▶️ John do, the display won’t wake. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco type as much as I
⏹️ ▶️ John want on the keyboard, I can click the mouse button, I can tap the power button on the computer, the display
⏹️ ▶️ John just stays asleep. And so when something like this happens, and it started happening immediately after 11.3 and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s happened multiple times since, so I’m pretty sure it’s the 11.3 update, you think, oh, this is a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you might be thinking, well, this happened so immediately, and so many people’s Macs go to sleep,
⏹️ ▶️ John surely this has been reported a thousand times already, and this will be fixed quickly. But then you remember, nobody to a
⏹️ ▶️ John first approximation has my computer set up. Who has a Mac Pro with a Pro Display
⏹️ ▶️ John XDR? Probably nobody is reporting this. In fact, for all I know, the other eight people in the
⏹️ ▶️ John world who have a Mac Pro and a Pro Display XDR have their display set to never sleep because it’s some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John professional lab situation where it’s just always being used or something, or who knows, right? But I did
⏹️ ▶️ John my duty as a good Apple reporter and I filed the feedback. And what I did was like one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the times that it happened, I SSH into the computer from elsewhere, and I ran a sysdiagnose, and I ran a
⏹️ ▶️ John spindump, and I saved the files, and then I made a feedback. Number will be in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes, FB9095615. And I said, here’s what’s happening. I have no idea how to
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduce it. It doesn’t happen every single time, but it’s happened a bunch of times. I’m pretty sure it’s 11.3.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s a spindump, here’s a sysdiagnose, fingers crossed. But all of this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just to say, if you dream of having, let’s say, an exotic car or a fancy computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John Be aware that when you have problems, A, nobody cares, and B, you and only like five
⏹️ ▶️ John other people in the world have even a chance of having that problem. So if you buy one of the new iMacs and something
⏹️ ▶️ John like this comes out, thousands of other people are gonna report it and it will probably get fixed. But all
⏹️ ▶️ John I can do is just hope that it somehow magically goes away in a future update. I have updated
⏹️ ▶️ John to 11.3.1 and haven’t seen it happen since, but I updated like two hours ago, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Anyway, that’s it.
12.9 keyboard-case update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there’s been an update with regard to the new 13-inch iPad and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old Magic Keyboard Jason Snell had speculated on upgrade this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This week or last that the new iPad Pro would probably fit in the old Magic Keyboard case It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might just be a bit too snug by Apple standards and turns out that was that he was right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, you can use the new 12.9 inch iPad Pro in the old Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just that the tolerances are a little tight and it’s not gonna be flawless and Apple isn’t keen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that, but it will work
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like when you try to put on your skinny jeans after a long winter of fattening up You can pretty much get them on and snap them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can kind of tell it’s not fitting the way it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know about this John? Is this something you have experience with?
⏹️ ▶️ John my god. How skinny are your jeans? Yeah, just wait. What is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John After a certain age is that you gain a pound a year for the rest of your life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me introduce you to the world of stretch jeans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those yet oh you’re missing out
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean not that I wear
⏹️ ▶️ John jeans anymore anyway I just wear sweatpants all the time so it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you I’ve been fully converted to stretch jeans I’ll tell you what that’s not a sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the better public traveler line oh my god so good
⏹️ ▶️ John oh my word the middle-aged men podcast get some stretch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jeans I’m telling you it’s you feel like you’re getting away with something cuz like they look normal they look totally normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re like I can’t believe how incredibly comfortable this is and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like because they feel almost like sweatpants but with much more functional pockets because you don’t have like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone sliding out problem that you do with sweatpants and you can go outside and like go out places and stuff and you look
Tesla screen follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of Jason Snell, and speaking of being a middle-aged man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re interested in the Tesla Model 3, then Snell borrowed one, and I thought it was worth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re willing and interested, listening to this review that Jason did on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Upgrade Plus, which is there for pay-only aftershows. So you will have to be a member to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But on episode 351, Jason had recounted a trip from San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Arizona, I think, of Model 3 and yeah, it was really, really interesting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear someone who is not that into cars but very into technology talk about it. One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the most striking things that he said was that he felt like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was more aware of his speed in terms of like miles per hour in the Tesla, that’s the Model 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with only the center mounted display, no gauge cluster of any sort than he is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in his old traditional minivan. And I thought that was fascinating. He was saying that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because on the minivan, you have to look at where the needle is and find what the nearest number is and then figure out exactly where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between the two nearest numbers are, you know, to get your exact miles per hour, that it was more effort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for him to figure out his speed in the minivan than just looking at this screen that’s a little bit out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your direct line of sight and looking in the corner to see the numeral. I’ve driven a Model 3 and I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not personally get this experience, but I also only have driven Model 3s for like 10, 15 miles at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not 2000 or whatever it was that he did. So if you’re a member of Upgrade Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever they call their membership, I definitely suggest you try out or take a listen to episode 351
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the after show from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like he just wants a digital Speedo. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John those coming out when I was a kid on like Cadillacs and stuff like, yeah, if you want to read a digital watch instead of an analog one, we can
⏹️ ▶️ John put that number in front of you and it’ll be much bigger than it is on the corner of the Model 3 screen. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it took me a second to realize what a digital speedo meant. I got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also thought it was fascinating. He was saying that his wife Lauren wears reading glasses and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no or according as far as he knew, there was no affordance for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increasing the size of the font and any of the display stuff on the Tesla, which was not that surprising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but also deeply disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they actually they did a software update last fall. I think it was where they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the font size way too small. Like, and it was just like one day, like I went to my car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like the PRND indicator, like a bunch of other stuff was just really tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seemed like they had designed the UI for the model three and just kind of shoved it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the S screen. But it was really bad and they had to revert that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, a couple of weeks later maybe, but it was, it kind of gave me a bad, a bad taste in my mouth. Like, wow, Tesla
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can at any time make my car significantly worse if they want to, or if they accidentally do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s not really anything I can do about that.
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Basecamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I think it was right before we released or really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recorded last episode, there was quite the brouhaha about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basecamp. And oh man, there’s so much here and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to try to figure out a way to summarize it very quickly, but to establish a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of like basic foundation. First of all, Basecamp has sponsored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the past. They haven’t sponsored terribly recently and they are not currently booked to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor in the future. They definitely have sponsored in the past. But Basecamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the company behind Basecamp software as well as Hey!, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new-ish email service. About a week ago or maybe a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more, I think it was Jason Fried wrote a post on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their kind of blogging platform that’s powered off of Hay, saying that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be a new company’s policy, Jason Freed being their CEO, there’s a new company’s policy saying that it will be no more societal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. It’s probably worth noting here that that is not the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verbiage, but that’s where it got changed to. And a lot of people got really up in arms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, which is somewhat interesting because Basecamp is not a big company. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only about 60 people. But the internet needed a main character, and Basecamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Jason Freed and David Hanemauer-Hansen, they became the main characters for last week. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of people got really upset, and it seemed like there was more to this than meets the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eye. And there is so much more to this than I think we can reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cover or even really reasonably summarize during the course of the show. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it made all of us kind of wonder, what are the bigger implications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what went on? And to build a little more about what went on, a lot of people got really upset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, oh, no more politics at work. And I think a lot of the employees at Basecamp said, well, hold on,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not really fair. And then it came to light that a lot of the genesis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this was from a list that had been started many, many years back about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny sounding names of clients of theirs. And it’s not terribly clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much of that was something like see more butts or how much of that was something that was kind of racially motivated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But a lot of people at Basecamp got really uncomfortable about it. This at the same time as while they’re doing a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, a diversity equality, what’s DEI? I’m drawing a blank now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Diversity, equity, inclusion? I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey go with. There you go. Thank you. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s close though. There was like a third of the company was in a DEI committee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to make things better. As this is all going on, and I think that might have been the genesis of discovering this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list. And the list was brought to the attention of Jason and David
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, you know, it’s hard to say what exactly happened, but basically they kind of shrugged it off at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that just escalated things even more. And I don’t know, I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly encourage you, if you have the time and the willingness to read a little bit, To read the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two pieces by Casey Newton, I believe both of them were at The Verge, we’ll put them in the show notes. It’s also worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading the actual stuff that David and Jason said on their various,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, kind of sort of blogs. There’s so much here, and I’m gonna give you two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a chance to add any other relevant summary if you’d like, but truly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re hearing me, the Chief Summarizer and Chief, doing at best a passable job of summarizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. And I am deliberately leaving out a lot, because we would be here for an hour if I don’t. So that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of where things started. And again, please read Casey’s, the other Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey articles, and feel free to pause the show now to do so. But like I was saying earlier, it really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes people wonder, what is the role of politics in the workforce? What is the role of executives
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to setting rules and culture? Was this right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was this wrong? Was it that their edict of no politics in the workplace was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, but the way they handled it was wrong? Who really knows? And we’re certainly going to talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here in a second. But what we do know is by the end of last week, or perhaps the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this week, Basecamp had said in a very Basecamp-y way, look, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to leave Basecamp, if you’re an employee and you would like to leave, we’ll give you something to the order of six months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey severance and no questions asked. You can walk. We’ll give you six months pay. and we’ll do what we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to help you land another job, which is cool. And supposedly about a third of the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did that. They walked away, including from what I understand, the entire iOS team, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a lot here. I don’t know which of you would like to start. Maybe Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are there any other points that I’m skipping that are salient with regard to the summary and then feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free to dig in if not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I have not followed the story that closely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a bunch of stuff happening in real life, nothing bad, just a very busy couple of weeks, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I missed most of this. I have read some of the summary articles, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for me to speak about this because not only is it a little uncomfortable because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offend people or say the wrong thing or say something that I don’t mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just out of my clumsiness with using the language speaking that I’m not particularly solid at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there’s all that all that factoring in here but on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic question of you know whether political speech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at work should be allowed and again with the massive disclaimer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve never managed people I should never manage people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I and I don’t know what it’s It’s like two managed people. But with that all said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the idea that you shouldn’t allow, quote, political speech in a workplace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however you define that, which is its own massive can of worms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that you shouldn’t allow that only makes sense in a perfect world that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not our world that we live in. The idea that you would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not allow quote political speech presumes a lot about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the equality of the world you’re in, whether anybody is oppressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or – there’s so many presumptions of privilege
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of equality in that kind of point of view. In reality, the world is messier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that and in reality, you have to talk politics sometimes because the world is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Not talking about it really just enables the status quo to continue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the status quo has to be really damn good for everybody for that to make sense. And that’s never really the case anywhere in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world ever. So I think it’s one of those ideas that, you know, a lot of tech people have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like kind of simplistic systematic views of the world of like, here’s how things should work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause this is how they work logically in my head and in my computer programs. And the world is messier than that. The world is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way messier than that. And I don’t think we’re ever going to be at a point where equality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so great and widespread and universal that we will be able to have the privilege
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say we don’t need to talk about politics in the workplace. That’s not reality. That will never happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as long as the world has any inequality whatsoever, the idea of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to limit speech in a workplace to not include, quote, politics, again, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that means, I think it’s a fantasy. And the real world is not like that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by enabling – or rather by forcing silence on certain topics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a policy, what you really do is enable the current ruling class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that is, and you significantly disadvantage any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of marginalized group or any kind of marginalized cause. And that’s again, that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that’s never it’s never gonna work. That’s never gonna be a like right and just and justified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outcome I don’t think I mean, I don’t I don’t know the people who run this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company. I Have no idea what their motivations are or aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t believe that these are like fundamentally Evil people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I can maybe I haven’t read up on it. I don’t know. I don’t think they are I think this was just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really badly made decision and a series of very badly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handled problems from what I’ve read But again, that’s very little So I’ll let John talk about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the more the details much better than I could and and the issue much rather than I could But yeah, my my point of view on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this basically is again from my very limited reading of it That the the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of politics at work Of trying to trying to pretend like you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not talk about that and everything will be fine line. That’s a fantasy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when these things blow up on Twitter, like I mean, we were all kind of probably
⏹️ ▶️ John have some form of trauma from the past four years, at least in the US anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, for these for the Twitter dramas that are essentially lower
⏹️ ▶️ John stakes like this is one small tech company. It looms large in our particular nerd world, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet most people have never heard of it. When there’s lower stakes like that and and
⏹️ ▶️ John you are more distant from it, maybe your inclination is like, oh, then I don’t have to pay attention to it. It’s not a big deal, like, or whatever. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s useful when something blows up like this that
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have distance from, but it’s not really about you. It’s not really about anyone you know, and it’s not really about anything of
⏹️ ▶️ John consequence. It’s just, you know, one little company. There’s always something, in every one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John controversies, there’s always something to be learned. And the more you’re able to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at it from a distance, the more you’re able to incorporate that new
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge into yourself without any kind of like personal thread or identity thread or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because I bet most people listening to
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any particular stake in Basecamp. And it’s, you know, like I said, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not Facebook or Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a 60 person company or was a 60 person company, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the first thing I’ll say about this is, take the opportunity, if you are a person who
⏹️ ▶️ John follows Twitter or follows any kind of tech news, that when some of these things happen, and when it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of like, strife and drama about some decision, take
⏹️ ▶️ John that opportunity to see, is there anything I, as a basically detached observer,
⏹️ ▶️ John can learn from what has happened here? And there almost always is. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s multiple things learned from different angles. Like, you know, it depends on the controversy, but sometimes in a controversy,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when it’s like super low stakes where people like arguing about superheroes or something, It’s like, who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can put yourself in the position of all sides of the debate and say, OK, well, if I was in this position, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I would have learned from this thing. And if I was in this position, here’s what I would have learned. If I was in this position, here’s what can be learned.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a great example of that in all measures. It’s not as low stakes as superheroes,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco grand scheme of things,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of us were not Basecamp employees. To just give a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of background, if you haven’t even heard of Basecamp, The company in our, you know, sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of not Mac nerd circles, but sort of tech enthusiasts with tastes kind of circles.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re known for making products, making sort of products that appeal to
⏹️ ▶️ John the nerds. They have nice user interface, they look nice. And they’re also known for
⏹️ ▶️ John creating a company, Basecamp, it was really originally called 37 Signals,
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom about how companies should be run in a
⏹️ ▶️ John way that is appealing to, that would be appealing to the founders. Like they made a company,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the type of place that they would want to work. Um, they wrote a lot of books about it. I think at least one was like a New York times bestseller
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, look, you can run a company like this and it’s better things like, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to grow at the maximum possible rate. It’s okay to get a company that is merely
⏹️ ▶️ John sustainably profitable. You don’t have to run your employees ragged. You don’t have to accept VC money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people would run at them and say, look, what you have, you’ve left millions of
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars of value on the table by not pursuing growth at all costs. And they would say, that’s just not what we want to do. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a perfectly valid choice. You can have a company that treats its employees
⏹️ ▶️ John with more respect than your typical company. You can give them perks that most companies wouldn’t give them, even though you lose
⏹️ ▶️ John money on them. And you don’t have to require your employees to answer your emails on weekends.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s all sort of stuff that feels good to you if again, if you look at the founders and where they’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from, they say, it seems to me that they tried to make a company that is a place that they
⏹️ ▶️ John would want to work. And that’s one of the things that they’re famous for. In addition to their products, which are,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, well, well made and appealing. And of course, David Hennemeyer Hanson created Ruby on rails. So there’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John other technical side of things where the technology stack they work on is itself famous and also
⏹️ ▶️ John famous for reasons that are related to the stuff that I just said. Ruby on rails is convention over configuration and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetically nice and and it’s simple and it’s user friendly and it has lots of affordances for getting set up and
⏹️ ▶️ John running. It all kind of fits together in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you look at their products, their books, the technology, it makes sense together, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And everything about it sounds good. And a lot of people are having a lot of, making fun of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, these are the people who are writing books about telling us how we’re supposed to run a company for the past 17
⏹️ ▶️ John years, and they just lost a third of their employees. So ha ha, I guess all those ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John you had must have been terrible, because you obviously have no idea what you’re doing. And I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s necessarily the case. But I think this particular controversy
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to show what they’ve been able to do with their products, with their books,
⏹️ ▶️ John even with their technology stack. They’ve been able to do, because of their decisions to
⏹️ ▶️ John not accept VC, to maintain control over the company, to not have a big hierarchy to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John the company small. And that means that the two people, the co-founders
⏹️ ▶️ John are able to essentially do whatever they want. Like it’s their company. They control it. They don’t have to answer to a board of directors.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have to run their decisions by a committee. If they think something is a good idea, they can just do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That kind of individual control produces many great things. Lots of great works of art, great video games, small
⏹️ ▶️ John companies, startups that are powered and driven by the decision
⏹️ ▶️ John of a small number of individuals, and that allows them to do things that the big companies can’t do,
⏹️ ▶️ John or won’t do, or are against conventional wisdom. What that also means is whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John foibles, flaws, or blind spots those two individual people who are in control
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything have, those also get a chance to be executed
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately, unequivocally, and if it turned out to be the wrong decision,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the downside of having the control embodied in a very small number of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who answer to nobody. And it seems kind of amazing to me that 37signal slash
⏹️ ▶️ John Basecamp has gone on this long without the blind spots of the
⏹️ ▶️ John founders manifesting in the way they just did. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is an important lesson of like, oh, if only it was just me in charge of everything and I didn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John run everything through this and everything would be great and I would make all the right decisions. Like there is a buffering
⏹️ ▶️ John effect of having more opinions and having not having absolute control.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t, you know, promote the idea of giving VCs control. But, you know, like that’s one lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John that I take away from this. The next thing is what so what was what was the
⏹️ ▶️ John problem? What’s their blind spot? Like what did they do wrong? Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and part of one of the things you can learn from this controversy is, you know, from
⏹️ ▶️ John the outside, we didn’t know anything initially. We just we just said this policy land. Here’s our new policy. It had a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of other stuff in the policy, which is other other new policies that are you look at and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can kind of understand that. That seems weird. Like, you know, instead of giving you benefits, they were
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to give you the cash for those benefits so you can decide what you want. But it was like, well, but maybe what if they get a group
⏹️ ▶️ John discount? And will they always give us the cash? And is the cash really equivalent to what they’re taking away? and what’s the point of this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Getting rid of committees, which sounds like, oh, well, I mean, committees, like, who likes committees? But on the other
⏹️ ▶️ John hand, does that mean just like it’s just, you know, the committees we were doing useful things, so why are the committees,
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of the committees they’re getting rid of was the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. So that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not great, but the one that everyone focused on was the one we just read, no more societal and political
⏹️ ▶️ John discussions on our company base camp account, which I think said no more societal or political discussions at work originally, or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. And as soon as that particular
⏹️ ▶️ John point is what, when it landed on Twitter, one particular group of people saw that and immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John said, warning, warning, danger. This is not good. This is not a good decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a much larger, probably, group of people said, what’s the big deal? It sounds fine to
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Like, you don’t want people arguing about politics all day at your work. This is a perfectly rational decision, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing you can learn from this controversy is why did those two groups of people have such
⏹️ ▶️ John different reactions to this rule? One group thought it was like, eh, whatever. I can understand where they’re coming
⏹️ ▶️ John from. Seems kind of weird, but who cares? And the other group was like, this is the wrongest thing you could possibly say.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have totally lost track of what you’re doing. Do not
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. Understanding both of those positions is important to understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John what they did wrong. I was in the camp when I saw this and I said, oh, no. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, you’ve done something very bad here. And what I
⏹️ ▶️ John meant, the initial thing was like, they’ve done something so bad that they’re gonna have to walk this back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Like they’re just going to have to. It turns out that they stuck with it
⏹️ ▶️ John long enough for a third of their company to quit and then posted a thing which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it looks like we made a mistake. I was like, you think? Do you think you made a mistake? And
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t spell out the mistake they made, So it’s not entirely clear they understand it fully yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think all observers would agree, unless that third of
⏹️ ▶️ John the employees that left your company were employees that you wanted to leave your company, which it doesn’t seem like it was, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was super senior people, and a lot of them had been there for a long time, and I have a feeling that Basecamp did
⏹️ ▶️ John not hire a lot of people who were terrible employees and didn’t retain people who were terrible employees. So probably
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t want those people to leave. So you can’t even say, oh, well, people left, but only the bad ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you can kind of say, whatever you did, it didn’t work the way you thought it was gonna work,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s bad, and then you gotta figure out what it was. And again, all the people who said this is a bad idea and this
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible, understood something that the founders didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And without digging into it too much, and Marco more or less landed on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like as the details came out, I don’t wanna dig more into the details, we’ll put tons and tons of links so you can read about
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. But the founders who have complete control of policy don’t set a policy like this
⏹️ ▶️ John unless something has happened and they’re like, OK, well, I don’t know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with this. So I’m just going to make a blanket rule so that we never have to deal with this again. Just let’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it up again. Let’s just not talk about it, which anyone who’s ever been in a relationship knows is not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the solution to
⏹️ ▶️ John any kind of serious problem that you’re having. And these problems are hard, but it’s essentially a failure of leadership
⏹️ ▶️ John of saying, we don’t know what to do. It seems like whatever we do, nobody is happy. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just not going to talk about it anymore. And as Marco points out, you’ve essentially made a decision and picked a
⏹️ ▶️ John side at that point, whether you know it or not, because not talking about it is a tacit
⏹️ ▶️ John endorsement of the status quo and yada yada. And then people will be asking themselves, well, so what the hell is wrong with the status quo? And why should people
⏹️ ▶️ John be arguing about stuff at work? And I still don’t understand. And that brings me to another thing that you can learn by blocking
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these controversies is like, inevitably someone will bring up the word woke, which
⏹️ ▶️ John gets thrown around as kind of an insult these days. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one of the more recent sort of, you know, in the past what decade or so of vocabulary words
⏹️ ▶️ John that has come into use that is actually extremely appropriate because
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason people had such differing views of this, this rule has
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with how awakened certain people are to things that
⏹️ ▶️ John other people are not yet awakened to and that sounds profound. It’s like, oh, we know the truth and you don’t and blah blah. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John that at all. Right? all right it’s just that like i’m sure as as you live longer you will experience
⏹️ ▶️ John uh this eventually of like becoming aware of something that you hadn’t really thought much about before right
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is something that i can personally i think all three of us can personally speak to as an experience
⏹️ ▶️ John of awakening to issues that previously were not on your radar at all if i think
⏹️ ▶️ John back to my teenage self and how aware i was of many many
⏹️ ▶️ John of the issues that fall into the umbrella of like current modern day wokeness, I had
⏹️ ▶️ John no awareness of them whatsoever. Or the awareness I had was so surface level and I was on the complete opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John side of it that I might as well not have understood its existence, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Think of something simple like does sexism exist? How are girls treated differently than
⏹️ ▶️ John boys in school? How are men treated differently than women in society? Maybe intellectually, I could have
⏹️ ▶️ John given lip service or something or other, but I had no idea. I had not yet awakened to that profound
⏹️ ▶️ John reality and it took years, embarrassingly long, years and years and years of my age to eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John awaken the fact that, oh, life is actually different if you’re a woman in America than if you’re a man.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not just different in like a way that we fixed in the 60s and we never have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John again, but like profoundly different, right? I don’t know what it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John to experience that, but I do know what it’s like to be awakened to the idea that there
⏹️ ▶️ John is something that you didn’t understand before that you do now. that by a million different
⏹️ ▶️ John issues that we all potentially are unaware of now, but could through experience
⏹️ ▶️ John or hearing other people talk about it or just, you know, the passage of time and through our thick skulls
⏹️ ▶️ John become awakened to things. And it’s difficult. It’s a difficult thing to express
⏹️ ▶️ John because if I could go back in time and talk to my teenage self and try to explain it, my teenage self would dismiss me
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, you’re an idiot. Go away. I already understand this. You’re stupid. Everything you’re saying is dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John and that doesn’t make any sense and that’s not actually true. I mean, isn’t that everyone’s teenage selves? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s the difficulty we face here, right? So anytime there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything like this, where the, quote unquote, woke people see this and understand the underlying issues
⏹️ ▶️ John of marginalization and oppression in the workplace,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the subtle modern incarnation where there is no one trying to do anything particularly evil,
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone is trying to do the right thing, But because let’s say, I mean, this is the hypothetical. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know the founders, whatever. But let’s say the founders of this company tried to make a company that they would want to work out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they did. Maybe they successfully made a company that they would want to work at. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John are two rich white dudes and making company that they want to work at isn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John the same company that someone who doesn’t share their life experiences would also want to work at. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, I don’t want to dig too far. I don’t I don’t know the details of the base camp thing or immaterial, But it’s clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that the founders, I’m not gonna say they didn’t fully understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the perspective of the employees who were on, you know, who were trying to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John who were on the DEI committee and who were railing against the list of names and
⏹️ ▶️ John had specific grievances. And, you know, so here’s the thing about this, one more thing to learn, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The founders all agreed that the list was bad. Everyone agreed the list was bad, we’re gonna get rid of it, it’s bad that we have this
⏹️ ▶️ John list. It’s not like they were saying the list is fine. I don’t know what you’re worried about. They weren’t saying that at all. They were like, yes, we should never have done
⏹️ ▶️ John this. You know, the founders didn’t make the list that, you know, they became aware of it. And they said, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John how we do things here at Basecamp. We’re not gonna, you know, we’re not gonna have a list making fun of our customers’
⏹️ ▶️ John names. It’s bad for multiple reasons. We’re getting rid of it. It’s not like there was a debate about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by when, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, when Preston saying, okay, And not only is this list bad, but also, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re, you know, I don’t know the details here, but let’s say they had an employee who
⏹️ ▶️ John was an Asian American and said, there’s no Asian American probably alive today who’s an adult
⏹️ ▶️ John who did not have their name made fun of or their imagined name made fun of when they were a kid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And maybe that’s the thing, you know, you know, intellectually,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you haven’t grown up having sort of people make fun of your name in that way that they can
⏹️ ▶️ John make fun of Asian names or are calling you things that aren’t your actual name, but it’s fun to
⏹️ ▶️ John call you when you’re in elementary school. Having a list of names at work that people are making fun
⏹️ ▶️ John of has a different effect on you as making the workplace feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like a safe place where you belong and where, you know, you don’t have to worry about things
⏹️ ▶️ John like that coming up. And you might say, well, that’s not a big deal. Who cares? Let’s put your names not on the list. What are you
⏹️ ▶️ John even worried about? Right? Not understanding the sort of continuum of like, okay, well making fun of
⏹️ ▶️ John my name That’s not a big deal all the way up to like, you know People attacking Asian Americans
⏹️ ▶️ John with cinder blocks in San Francisco the latest story I read or whatever, right? Those two things aren’t connected
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, which is something that some of the founders actually said It’s like I can see where you come from. This is bad We should get rid of the list,
⏹️ ▶️ John but come on like it’s not the same thing as like attacking Asian Americans on the street like
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not that’s there’s no connection between those two things and the thing is Because there is a
⏹️ ▶️ John connection. It is a long circuitous connection, but you can travel it and you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John it and they do eventually connect and like the founders push
⏹️ ▶️ John back on trying to sort of draw the bigger picture. Someone who is aware of the bigger picture
⏹️ ▶️ John because they live it trying to show that bigger picture to the founders cause the founders to push
⏹️ ▶️ John back against that again, even though everyone agrees list is bad. We’re getting a little bit. It’s not a thing that we
⏹️ ▶️ John do with this company. They disagreed about particularly why we don’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ John and what it means in the bigger picture. And so their reaction was, you know what? We tried
⏹️ ▶️ John this and no one’s happy. We told you we’re getting rid of the list. Some people think that getting a list is bad and we said we’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John the list and the people who agree with us said, well, but you don’t understand why you don’t. You’re not getting rid of the list
⏹️ ▶️ John for the reasons that are the exact same reasons that we think you should and you don’t understand the bigger picture. So now we’re angry at you. So you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John No politics at work. Problem solved. And that was not the right decision
⏹️ ▶️ John to make. But it stems from the collective blind spot that the founders had to like, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really know what they were dealing with. And I’m not saying these issues are easy to deal with, like, I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John few people are equipped to deal with this on their own, which is part of why you get
⏹️ ▶️ John a DEI committee, which is part of why you diversify your workforce. In fact, I feel like I again, I’m speculating here, but it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like Basecamp has made an effort over the past few years to try to diversify its workforce.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s kind of like, you know, the pipeline problem with like women in tech or whatever. Oh, the solution is let’s just hire more women.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the solution if you’re hiring women into an environment that is hostile to women. All you’re doing is like throwing them into a threshing
⏹️ ▶️ John machine and saying, we hired you, the problem is solved. And they’re like, well, but here we are. And there’s some things we
⏹️ ▶️ John should change about your company because now that we’re here, we see it’s not particularly great to be a woman here. So let’s change some stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it is plausible, I don’t know if this to be true, but it is plausible that Basecamp made an effort
⏹️ ▶️ John to diversify its hiring because its founders are good people and want to do that. And they successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John diversify their hiring. And those diverse employees said, we think we should make some changes
⏹️ ▶️ John around here. And let’s form a committee to, you know, like once you get employees with different perspectives
⏹️ ▶️ John and different points of view, they necessarily will have things that they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve to make the working environment better for everybody, not just for the people who are already there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when that happens, there is going to be I’m not going to say a power struggle but like the the
⏹️ ▶️ John phrase they use these days is renegotiating the social contract and that happens on levels very small and very
⏹️ ▶️ John large. And even just at the level of an individual company, if you hire a bunch of employees
⏹️ ▶️ John from diverse backgrounds, they’re the ones who are going to find that list and say, you know what, it’s not great that this list exists
⏹️ ▶️ John making fun of people’s names, whereas it had existed for years. And apparently it wasn’t a big deal, but now you hire some
⏹️ ▶️ John new employees and they say, Hey, um, we probably shouldn’t do this. And to the founders credit, they say, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what, now that you’ve shown us this list, we agree this is crappy, we shouldn’t do this. But then the debate that ensues
⏹️ ▶️ John about why it’s crappy reveals that the founders don’t really have the bigger picture that these other employees do because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have the life experiences. And they’re also not experienced enough to know how to navigate this very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult issue. And they don’t have a bunch of committees or a board helping
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of buffer their decisions to try to figure out how we can navigate this. They just try
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the best they can as two individuals. They they are not equipped to deal with this. They make the wrong decision
⏹️ ▶️ John and a third of the company leaves and you look at the third of the company leaving it like all these people all overreacting. What were they you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what are they so mad about? What actually happened isn’t that big of a deal and the founders agreed
⏹️ ▶️ John the list was bad and they’re just because they’re not because they’re not woke enough. You have to leave the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John One final thing you can learn here is, ask the people. Ask someone who left, why did you
⏹️ ▶️ John leave? Why was it important enough for you to leave the company? Look at what they have to say on Twitter, read their blog
⏹️ ▶️ John posts, see where they’re coming from, try to understand their perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that can help you maybe not file people away as these
⏹️ ▶️ John are the villains and these are the heroes and these are the overreactors and these are the people who are doing the, you know, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the right thing or the smart thing or whatever, from all sides of this, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is something to learn about, you know, how people can make mistakes, how people can be blind
⏹️ ▶️ John to their mistakes, uh, how something that’s small to one person can be big to another
⏹️ ▶️ John and how, uh, doing anything to upset the status quo, whether it is diversifying
⏹️ ▶️ John hiring practices or forming a DEI committee or,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, changing something about a workplace as simple as a list of customer names that we
⏹️ ▶️ John all agree is bad, that we shouldn’t be laughing at at work, that we all agree we should get rid of how that
⏹️ ▶️ John can turn into something that destroys a third of the company, right? Lots, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots to learn here. Um, and none of it has to, you know, none of it is about
⏹️ ▶️ John like demonizing people or taking revenge against people or being thrilled
⏹️ ▶️ John that the people who wrote a bunch of management books about how to run a company have gotten their comeuppance because now it shows how they didn’t know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John run a company after all. I think they know a lot about running a great company, but we found
⏹️ ▶️ John a blind spot, and they made the wrong call, and they are suffering the consequences from it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think and hope that they will learn something from this. I think everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John involved is learning a hard lesson, and I hope observers will learn something from this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Though this may be your first instinct, and though it may be your instinct to stick to your guns, this is not actually
⏹️ ▶️ John the solution to the problems that were identified. You know, the details are going to be different in every single situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the idea that we are going to, you know, change the status quo in
⏹️ ▶️ John any way to make marginalized people ever so slightly less marginalized in ever so
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowly defined situations, that will necessarily have ramifications for everybody, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just for the marginalized people, right? If you want to make room for people at the table, it means you
⏹️ ▶️ John just can’t continue to sit exactly where you are and do the same thing all the time. room means making room.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s always difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think the thing that really bothered me about it is, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the thing, but one of the things that bothered me about it was that, you know, this whole no politics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the workplace thing was obviously not a great idea. And people very quickly jumped on it and tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, Hey, you know, this is not a great idea. And it’s not quite that cut and dry. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you look at, and we have all these links and show notes, that was announced in a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Jason Fried wrote called, Changes at Basecamp. And everyone pretty quickly was like, Whoa, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not so great. Not loving that. There were one, two, three, four, five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posts that followed. The fifth was a kind of mealy-mouthed half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apology-ish, maybe? It was
⏹️ ▶️ John more of- It wasn’t an apology. It was an acknowledgement that they had made a mistake. They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go into explaining, here’s the mistake that we made, So it’s not clear whether they fully understand it yet, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re part of their MO. Like a lot of people ask why they do this publicly. Part of the way
⏹️ ▶️ John this company has always worked is they do things boldly and in public and whenever they
⏹️ ▶️ John come to mind. So their last post of saying, you know, we made a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve got a lot of learning to do, didn’t go into more detail, but I’m sure this won’t be the
⏹️ ▶️ John last post on this topic. Right? So I do hope that they are talking to people
⏹️ ▶️ John soul searching and figuring out exactly what happened. But to expect them to to expect them to suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John figure it all out immediately is asking a lot. And I think you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have I think they have a road to continue to travel to truly, truly understand exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what just happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. And I think the thing that that I find so grow one of the things I find so gross about it is, you know, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from all the reporting, particularly the Casey Newton is done, when they were called out internally, like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, this ain’t this ain’t right, the list ain’t right, this ain’t right. Um, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were times they agreed, but then when they were still challenged, they didn’t seem to have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular appetite to understand why. And it was like you said, John, they said, Oh, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody seems to be happy. Well, screw it. No politics. Problem solved. All right, let’s move on to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John next. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they understood what, what they, they understood some things that were wrong with it. Things that were within
⏹️ ▶️ John the realm of their understanding were, Hey, It’s not good to make fun of your customers because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rude and it’s private customer information that we shouldn’t be passing around anyway So it’s an invasion
⏹️ ▶️ John of privacy, right? Those two reasons they got which are both true, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was particular Hennemeyer Hanson like when when pressed on like oh and by the way There’s also a racial
⏹️ ▶️ John and oppression aspect of this said get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? That’s not that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that’s not a bit. That’s not a big deal That’s not a big, you know, because that was outside their experience and understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John that they didn’t they hadn’t yet awoken to that What that reality is like for some people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are not them and hadn’t internalized it again It seemed the way that I had not internalized sexism
⏹️ ▶️ John when I was a teenager, even though intellectually I could say something about it But but if pressed on a specific issue, they’ve all that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John sexist and that’s just that’s something else There’s no connection, you know, right? I’ve been there we’ve all been there before
⏹️ ▶️ John we have understood whatever the issue may be and And the fact that they couldn’t make that connection, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, you know, who knows what else went on? I don’t want to speculate. This could have been one of 17 different incidents
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Whatever was going on internally again I defer to ask the people who left why they left and they’ll explain it to you in their
⏹️ ▶️ John own words they’re in a much better position than I do but That’s why this looks so weird from the outside, but it’s like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that was just The straw that broke the camel’s back maybe that was just revelatory to enough
⏹️ ▶️ John people to say look like when the rule came down like Like we give up. We can’t seem to make these founders
⏹️ ▶️ John understand what we’re trying to tell them. And they disbanded the DEI committee and they say we can’t talk about politics at work. So
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever hope we had for them figuring out is lost. And it’s not so much about this one particular incident in
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange. It’s just the accumulation of offense because, you know, in the end, something
⏹️ ▶️ John more profound has to happen than this one instance for a third of your company to leave. Right. Especially people
⏹️ ▶️ John who’ve been there for years and years, senior people, entire teams like This is obviously a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John issue than the details that we have access to now. But it only takes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, everyone has their, their sort of breaking point or their giving up point of saying, well, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see this going any better. And as someone put it on the chat, in the update post, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say yet as far as I can tell that they’re changing the policy. They just are recognizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they made a mistake. And it’s not clear to me that they understand what that mistake was yet or
⏹️ ▶️ John how it connects to the rule they made or anything like that. but I’m hoping they will
⏹️ ▶️ John come around to it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s worth reading this first paragraph in an update, which as we record was posted yesterday. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Jason Freed, and again, I will read this verbatim, the first paragraph. Last week was terrible. We started with policy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up internally in ways we never anticipated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David and I completely own the consequences and we’re sorry. We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new policies stand, but we have some refining and clarifying to do. That is the entirety of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so they’re saying the policies stand, but they’re refining and clarifying. Hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John their learning and reflecting will lead them to understand that refining and clarifying is not gonna solve this problem, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, put another way, this is not the ideal learning environment
⏹️ ▶️ John for you as a company founder and CEO. Like this is not the way you want to learn these lessons in public,
⏹️ ▶️ John in incredibly dramatic fashion, in a way that is very bad for your established self-image as
⏹️ ▶️ John people who tell other people how to run a company, right? It’s not the ideal scenario for you to learn.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s probably harder for them to be receptive to these broader ideas. And
⏹️ ▶️ John from my personal experience, I’ve had to be exposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John information experiences, the experiences of others, personal stories, reading on it
⏹️ ▶️ John for years and years for it to finally sink through my thick skull about insert whatever issue you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John put here, whether it’s sexism, racism, any kind of thing that I’ve felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’ve become awoken to in the latter part of my adult life, way embarrassingly
⏹️ ▶️ John late in my white male adult life. And when I think about, OK, how would you cause that
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen in someone else? Like, oh, jeez, I don’t know. Can you give me 10 years?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s not the type of thing that you can argue at Twitter and like, oh, I’m convinced. Now I understand racism
⏹️ ▶️ John is real. Yay. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t know what the solution is. And
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, the lesson here is not like, oh, company must be a battleground for changing each other’s minds.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what it is at all. I think one of the things that they should be thinking about is what kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of environment were we trying to make it work and what kind of environment actually existed at work for all
⏹️ ▶️ John the different people who came to work for us? What has the experience of working at Basecamp been like
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who are not me and who are not exactly like me? And what is the ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John working environment that we want to create? There’s always gonna be conflict at work. There’s always gonna be multiple views.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the job of the CEO to change the mind of all the employees. It’s not the employees to change the mind of the CEO.
⏹️ ▶️ John People can leave and get a different job if they want. Like that’s not what we’re talking about here. All we’re talking about is if you are a leader and you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a place where people can work, you have to decide as a leader, what kind of place do I want to make?
⏹️ ▶️ John And am I succeeding in making it be like that for everybody who works for me? And that’s a super hard job.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s much harder now than it was. We can just say, well, everyone stays at home except for the white men.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re all going to be like me. And we’re all going to have the same thoughts and ideas and the same religion and come from the same place and speak the same language.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re going to make an environment that we like. That’s way easier if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re one of those people in charge than trying to make a good place to work for
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone. And to the credit of the founders, it seems to me that they were trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John Basecamp more inclusive than it had been. It’s just that they were not prepared. They were not prepared
⏹️ ▶️ John to understand what it takes to do that. It’s not as simple as, well just hire more different kinds of people and problem
⏹️ ▶️ John solved. And that’s like, that’s step zero, right? All you’re gonna do now is reveal all the problems you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t know you had. One more thing I’ll throw in here from the creativity ink thing. Success hides problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Basecamp has been very successful. The founders have been very successful. It’s easy to think that everything is going
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome when everyone’s raking in the money and people are buying your book about how to run companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And every time you put an opening, tons of people apply and you get to pick really great employees.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it seems like you have an awesome little company. And
⏹️ ▶️ John being on that path for a long time can convince you that things really are going as well as you think
⏹️ ▶️ John they are, because how could you be so successful if they weren’t? And having it slowly revealed to you that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually everything isn’t as rosy as you think is counter to your notion that everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is, What do you mean? We’re doing great. Like, everything’s awesome. I’m rich. We have a New York Times
⏹️ ▶️ John bestselling book. We have awesome products. Everybody loves us. What’s the problem? And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that success exists. That success is helping hide problems from you. But it’s not hiding them from us who
⏹️ ▶️ John are down here working with them, but it’s hiding them from you, and that itself is a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think an overwhelming impression I got for, again, the little bit of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual direct quotes and stuff that I did read, is that these people running this company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t seem like they’re wrong a lot, or at least they don’t think they’re wrong a lot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the jump to defensiveness as a reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is almost always a bad thing, especially when dealing with issues like this. And it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s their primary mode, is like jump first to defensiveness because they can’t—I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they’re not accustomed to being wrong in their own minds or the possibility that they might be wrong in their own minds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that’s why you see this huge amount of defensiveness that is quite
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re used to being wrong in ways that they understand. Because that’s a big part of how you run a company. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do things, you’re gonna do bold things, you’re gonna make a mistake, you’re gonna learn from them, but they’re used to being wrong in terms that make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to them, right? That we tried to make a decision, and now that I see that it didn’t work, I now understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why it didn’t work. Like, it is all tractable, it is within their worldview. And here is
⏹️ ▶️ John a case where they’re wrong in a way that they didn’t even know what they were wrong about, right? That it was
⏹️ ▶️ John just so, and instead of themselves figuring out that they were wrong based on, I expected
⏹️ ▶️ John this to happen, but that happened, and here’s the explanation, it seems like at this point, they don’t even yet have an
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation. They don’t know what just happened. And it’s much more uncomfortable to be wrong in that situation than
⏹️ ▶️ John in all the other situations where they were wrong, because I bet half their business books are filled with, like, oh, we did this, we thought people would do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we put this product out at this, at this price point, and it turned out people didn’t wanna do that, but they wanted to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this price was wrong, we should have made this free. Or we decided to charge people a lot even though we weren’t sure how it worked out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are decisions they’re comfortably wrong about. They’ll tell you, that’s what business books are about. Here’s what I learned from the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that I did. And this is the case where not only did they not realize they were wrong, they don’t understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John or what they were wrong about and still don’t. They saw the bad consequence. They know something went wrong here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it seems like they just don’t quite get it yet. I mean, I feel like they should really just
⏹️ ▶️ John sit through every single exit interview every single employee is leaving the company and just let them talk to
⏹️ ▶️ John them for an hour each. And maybe that will sort of hammer home like when these people tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John why they’re leaving, believe them, right? Because they’re like, and understand how
⏹️ ▶️ John that came about based on your policies and actions to the company, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I get what you’re saying about them getting defensive, and certainly they are. But I think part of it is like
⏹️ ▶️ John defense out of like, Like, fear of the unknown. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John what, what is, what even is going on? What even is going on here? This is something bad is happening
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t quite understand it. And what people are telling me doesn’t make sense to me. So they must be the ones who are wrong and
⏹️ ▶️ John we just stick to our guns and it’ll be fine because it’s always been fine.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so much more at Linode. If you don’t need like, you know, certain resources, you need more resources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than in one area than others, they have specialty plans. So in addition to like, their regular compute plans,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have things like GPU compute plans and high memory plans, dedicated CPU plans, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have amazing support if you ever need it. And all of that is brought to you at a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value. They are the best value I’ve consistently seen in the hosting business. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to linode.com slash ATP and you can get $100 in free credit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Linode or text ATP to 474747 to get instant access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that $100 in free credit. Once again, linode.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or text ATP to 474747. Get started on Linode today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Notes apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Barber writes, I’m curious to know what if any note taking apps are used by the ATP hosts, Obsidian,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roam, Evernote, OneNote, Just Folders. How do you track notes, plans or ideas? I personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not a productivity person and I don’t switch note taking apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time. I use Apple Mail, which I know is extremely not trendy. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care that much. I don’t really have a to-do list manager other than the app DUE, which is basically just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a glorified nagging machine. But I use Apple Notes for these sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do I did use Evernote way long ago, and there’s still some things in there, I suppose, but I haven’t looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at it forever. I just use Apple Notes. It’s fine for the sorts of things I want to capture. And it’s good enough for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. John, what are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using Apple Notes ever since they revised it so that syncing works and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, exactly right.
⏹️ ▶️ John My needs are low. Like the only things I really need are a note taking
⏹️ ▶️ John app that can do basic lists of things, supports links, synced everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can share notes. That’s, and those features are all within Notes and seem to be pretty reliable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit wary of like someday losing all of my data there. So I tend to not, like if there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like serious and important, I kind of feel more comfortable having it in a text file that lands in my backup Vortex somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because at any second all my
⏹️ ▶️ John notes could disappear. But most of the stuff that’s in notes is just like notes. Shopping lists,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of snippets of text that I want to deal with. Like if they all went away, it wouldn’t be that bad. I think the only
⏹️ ▶️ John really important thing I have in notes is my squirrel list. I talked about that in rectifs, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just talked about it
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Yes, on rectifs. Yeah, it’s a list of where I squirrel stuff away in the house so I don’t forget where it is because I’m old now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess if I lost that it would be bad, but in the end it’s all in the house, I’ll find it eventually. or my kids will with the estate
⏹️ ▶️ John sale, whatever. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What about you, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty similar. I mean, I’ve never been that much of a note taker in any form, analog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or digital, but certainly in the digital world, my needs are also pretty light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, I’ve just been using Apple Notes for a few years now. I used to use Clear for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my shopping. Like when I’d be grocery shopping, I would use Clear because it was easy to swipe through in the grocery store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even do that anymore. Like I just use Apple notes. I make, you know, so I have a grocery list that’s just like a checklist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because everything that are the checklist items, uh, and some, some more of the like virtual formatting stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love being able to just like paste in images and stuff. I love how quick and easy it is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it. And it mostly syncs. Okay. Most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, although that, that being said, I’ve had actually recent sync issues where like I’ll edit on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one device and and I’ll go to my phone and the title will be incomplete and the content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not sync until the next edit I make on the source device and then it’ll pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over. But that’s been only a very recent thing, I assume, and I hope it’s a temporary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug. Before that, everything was working fine for years. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Apple Notes app is where it’s at. I share the same anxiety about it as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the data format to it is completely opaque And there is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a few different ways to export data from Notes, few different apps try to fill that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role, but there’s no way to then import it back in as far as I’m concerned.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s not particularly useful as a backup method.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do wish that Apple would solve this. And I understand why they might not wanna cram that into the iOS app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should at least cram it into the Mac app. But yeah, otherwise, I like Apple Notes. It is simple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is deceptively powerful for how simple it is. And I don’t like everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. It’s not perfect, no app ever is, but it’s close enough to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need and provides enough advantages, enough integration, enough convenience everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and frankly enough functionality that I’m not really looking elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would say people who don’t know about the document scanning feature in Notes, which I forget about for months at a time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then I remember exists, it’s nice. It’s this little camera icon in the app and it will basically scan a document and like
⏹️ ▶️ John straighten it for you, you know, if you’re, if you’re a scan it at a slight angle or it’s twisted or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a, you know, there are plenty of apps that do a better job of this, I’m sure, but for a built-in app,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t forget that, hey, if you have a piece of paper that you want to save a picture of, instead of just bringing
⏹️ ▶️ John up the camera app and taking a picture of it and putting it in your camera roll, you can bring up a notes document
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, attach, you know, use the document scanner and attach a nice straightened cropped
⏹️ ▶️ John in one button press view of a page and then just do that for multiple pages and they can be part of a note because
⏹️ ▶️ John notes can support, and you can export them as PDFs and put them into, you know, put them wherever you want, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it much more convenient than littering my camera roll with a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly off-center skewed pictures that I then have to manually crop and fix, you know, and never do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, if your desired output format is a PDF, like a scanned PDF
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of real life paper, I don’t think I mentioned this in the show, but I very recently learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can do that in the files app on iOS. And it can scan directly to a PDF there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a way, like you can do it from a Mac, you can do it with preview, where it’ll use like the continuity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera thing to use your phone’s camera from your Mac’s preview app to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture the document, but it’s clunky and a little unreliable and just kind of, it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like manual, weird back and forth. So if you are trying to use your phone as a document scanner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scan to a PDF, definitely do the built-in scanner thing in the Files app for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic needs. Again, as John said, there are a million other apps that do better, more professional,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more option-filled versions of document scanning. But if your needs are basic like me, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in one in the Files app is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why wouldn’t you just do the scanning in the Notes app and then go to print it, and then you can make a PDF that way? Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know that trick? I assume you knew that trick. I’m serious. really think to go to the files app. Yeah. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go to print anything in iOS, and then it’s some completely obtuse gesture, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to like, pinch out, you know, so I guess the opposite of pinch, you need to expand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get like a full screen preview. And then once you’re in that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the print dialogue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, yes, I really I’m not messing with you. I am not trolling you at all. So hold on, now I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to try this live. It’s gonna be fun for you to edit. So I’m in Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had no idea there was a PDF export in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I’m in Safari and I go and I use the share sheet and I go to print. Okay, so then I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at just so happen I had ATP up. So I have to do the opposite pinch. So not bring in but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally doing this. Hold on. And then you see a PDF version and then it has a share sheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a share icon in the upper right. Wait, I don’t… Okay, so go to print.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the best programming ever. All right, so do you see… You see there’s like a print preview at the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just tried to print a web page and it totally didn’t work. so I’m gonna try like an email just I don’t know I don’t know what else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna hold on so actually wait how do you do an action from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to do the reply thing don’t you all right well let me follow around alone in mail then just make sure we’re seeing the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m zooming out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay so you do where is it print yep and then you see the print preview and you pinch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to zoom into it I’m sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah it’s how do you describe the opposite the anti-pinch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Save to files.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you can do all number of things. But if you look, it says…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to go to the second action sheet nested inside the first action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheet that got you to the print dialog. Correct. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco ridiculous. Do an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anti-pinch. Oh, it’s totally ridiculous, but it does work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then zoom in with the page on the previewed pages that I guess… Correct. Make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them open logically, open up a PDF. I mean, honestly, This kind of seems like an accidental feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But wow, that’s, this is like the epitome of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst of touch design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely undiscoverable. And even when you told me to do it, I still couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure it out for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you scan documents in Notes, they end up as PDFs too, I think. I mean, certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when I- They do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just inside a note. So like-
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can get them out very easily by just holding down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you are scanning a document with your phone camera for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose of getting a PDF, you’re better off doing it directly in the Files app and save you a couple steps, rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than scanning it into a note for no other reason other than that you knew notes did this, and then deleting the note or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. Like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John good. You’re normally, it’s like attached to a note where you want to sort of have annotations. Like, I’m usually like, let’s say I’m shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John for couches, and we’re seeing a bunch of different couches, and I want to like basically save like the little tag
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s on it to say, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco saw this couch, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the information about it, the serial number, the blah, blah, blah. In the notes document, we’re keeping track of
⏹️ ▶️ John the couches we’re looking at, scan document. Yep, there’s the little tag. And then we’ll move on to the next one. So it’s a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of notes about couches, pictures of the tag, and then photos of the actual couches. All, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s a rich text document.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knew? Just a couple of quick shout-outs, actually, before we move on. For grocery shopping,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think reminders, or excuse me, notes is perfectly fine, but I really, really like any list. I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brought it up before. We’ll put a link in the show notes. They do shared shopping lists really well, including with photo annotations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and quantities and things. And, uh, I, this isn’t exactly note-taking, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should mention day one. I don’t recall if they’ve ever sponsored the show before, but I really loved day one, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any list may have sponsored many, many years ago, but anyway, both of those, uh, whether or not they’ve ever sponsored really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really love both those apps, uh, day one is a journaling app. And that’s where I keep memories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from like the family, because I have the world’s worst memory and things that I want to remember I keep than day one, so.
#askatp: Ancient API or modern?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, Zarf Sharf writes, what do you prefer developing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against? An agent API or technology that’s basically abandoned, but the bug workarounds are well-known, or modern
⏹️ ▶️ Casey API or technology that’s constantly being updated and changed? This is a really good question, and I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I don’t have one consistent answer. I mean, I look at what I’m working on right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, and I’m using SwiftUI exclusively and combined, and that has its fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share of problems. So I’m enjoying it, except when I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know. I think I am too distractible by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new shiny that I probably would prefer something modern and new,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though intellectually and the mature developer in me knows that that’s the incorrect answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the way this is phrased, I have to go with the modern one just because like the ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s basically abandoned, yeah, the bug workarounds are known, but
⏹️ ▶️ John working on any tech that is sort of basically no longer supported, but abandoned, gets real bad real fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like you don’t wanna be the last one using a particular technology for any purpose, right? Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John working on the new thing that’s constantly being updated and changed, that means it’s constantly improving
⏹️ ▶️ John too. And that means that’s where the action is. That means you probably don’t have to be the one to fix every single bug that you ever
⏹️ ▶️ John find because so many other people are fixing and updating or whatever. So in practice, I think that’s what everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John does. Yes, even Marco, like you don’t wanna be on something that nobody is supporting
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Now, PHP doesn’t qualify for that because it’s not like PHP is abandoned. People are working on it all the time. They’re making new
⏹️ ▶️ John versions, they’re fixing bugs. Like it’s still used by tons of people, right? An actual technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that is quote unquote basically abandoned means like you’re out there using it and nobody else
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Like it won’t even build on your machine eventually. Like it’s just, you know, everyone moves to arm and it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 and you have to figure out how to compile it for arm if you want to keep using it. You got to go with the one that’s constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John being updated and changed because that means people are working on it and that means it’s improving.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you think, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m kind of torn on this actually because, you know, John brings up a good point. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are the last one using something that, you know, it might get abandoned or it might get discontinued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or broken. That being said, you never want to be building on quicksand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s one of those things where the answer is, it depends. In an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideal world, you build something once, and then you never need to revisit it unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to. That’s not always what you get though. You know? And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the real world, sometimes old technologies break because no one’s minding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. You know, no one’s maintaining them, no one’s minding the store, no one is testing against them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, that’s, that’s not great to be relying on. On the other side of the coin though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, when I build against an API, I’m trying to build something else. I’m trying to build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something on top of it. I’m trying to like, the whole thing is I want to do this work and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never have the API cause problems for me or surprise me or require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more time from me unnecessarily. So obviously it’s not great if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still very much in flux. flux. And so like if abandoned means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inactive, like if it’s not being actively improved upon, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like around and working and that doesn’t seem to be changing, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, that’s fine with me. And that’s, that’s usually a safe bet for me. But if it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not even going to be supported in the near future, that that’s when I bail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Abandoned is not the same as boring.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the way the way this question is phrased, it’s like it’s not PHP versus Swift UI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s cold fusion versus Swift UI. And
⏹️ ▶️ John a choice between cold fusion Swift UI, Marco chooses Swift UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I’ll tell you what, so one of the way I spent yesterday was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I there was this bug where forecast my app, my mp3 encoder app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was outputting weird things or crashing with certain types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wave file inputs. Like if there was a wave file that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was above 2 to the 31 bytes, like 2.2 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever that is, 2.1 whatever it is, if it was above that, but less than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4 gigs, so in the unsigned 32-bit integer size range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but not the signed range. So between and 4 gigs if it was a WAV file exported from Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Audition, then the system audio libraries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically the ext audio file API, but I think pretty much any of these any of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform audio libraries, would misread the end of the WAV file and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would basically blow right past where the audio sample data ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and read whatever metadata happened to be after it as if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it were audio data. And so it would output like garbage audio and that would, you know, in forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would result in either garbage audio at the end of a file or in some cases the forecast would crash because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a function deep inside the MP3 encoder would try to read that as audio and some assumptions about the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio flows would not be met and it would crash. So it was a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug and I spent the whole day like looking at the specs of this ancient file format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the WAV file, which is the RIF WAV file format from forever ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and looking up, like, OK, how is this being read? How should this be being read? Is the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the chunk supposed to be a signed integer or an unsigned integer? Whose bug is this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically? Is it mine? Is it Apple’s? Is it Adobe Audition’s bug? Who knows? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out, yeah, it turns out it’s Apple’s. So I had to file the bug report and everything. But so I was dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these old formats, which one of the things I thought about those, but the reason I brought this up now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually went through and I did the stupid cyst diagnose and everything they wanted for me to follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bug report and I made a sample project. So I kept adjusting things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between my sample project and forecast to try to like, you know, isolate the bug. And it turns out it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily isolatable. And I made the entire sample project in Objective-C because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was easiest and fastest to do the thing I had to prove. And Forecast is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all Objective-C. And as much as I’m enjoying using Swift for Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My God, Objective-C apps build so fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John like. You and your compile times, and a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco toy app like that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference of seconds. Who cares? No, it’s not seconds. It’s like. For
⏹️ ▶️ John though, for your sample project, right? Of course it’s building fast, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco has like 10 lines of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For forecast too, because forecast is a medium sized app, it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large app, but it’s medium, and it builds instantly. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other simple stuff like the code auto-completion was so fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much of it was fast. Debugging was amazing, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it not only worked, but was fast, and there were so many weird debugging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco type system error messages and fights that Swift would pick with me that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have to deal with. And just everything about working with Objective-C, besides writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, everything else was so
⏹️ ▶️ John fast. You got something else to write it and you’ll just hit the compile button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but the compilation, the debug and run loop, actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco debugging, the build, the archive, everything. Oh my God, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much faster than Swift. It really spooked me and I realized like, oh man, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift has a long, long way to go before it’s anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near as responsive to edit and work with as Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John It reminds me of rebooting back into Mac OS 9 on my Power Mac, blue and white Power Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John G3 after using the early versions of OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for a while. You
⏹️ ▶️ John reboot into Mac OS 9, like wow, my computer’s fast. Look how fast these menus pull down.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is amazing. Yeah, technology marches on. Speaking of your
⏹️ ▶️ John signed 32-bit Apple framework bug, I saw you tweet about that, and then like not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 50 tweets later, there was another one on a similar, I don’t know if this has been proved. You figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out that that’s actually the case with your thing, but this was someone saying that Berkshire Hathaway,
⏹️ ▶️ John Warren Buffett’s company, the shares of Berkshire Hathaway are so expensive now
⏹️ ▶️ John that they rolled over the apparent signed 32-bit integer. They’re like $400,000 each or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do like five decimal places of cents after it or something like that. So it was, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John said was that apparently it’s some kind of signed 32-bit thing and they got like delisted due to
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer error and they’re gonna fix it. I find that somewhat hard to believe, but it is coincidental that the number really got
⏹️ ▶️ John up to around the 32-bit value before it screwed up. That’s pretty funny. Yeah, I guess if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re treating it as an integer that just is like, you know, multiplied by 10,000 or whatever, yeah. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, maybe it wasn’t signed. Maybe it was just it was 32-bit and then we need to go to 64. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like not supported by the facts because I can’t imagine that that’s really true, but. Oh yeah, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 424840, it’s real close. If you would multiply it, because it’s 429496, you know, that’s the 32-bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that there are 424840, like they’re very close to that. So if, yeah, that makes total sense. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it’s like a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John assumption. Whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John this system was designed in the 80s or something, someone saying, okay, this is where we’re gonna start the share
⏹️ ▶️ John price. What’s a big enough, how many digits is enough for the share price of
⏹️ ▶️ John a company? No one thinks any company’s gonna have a single share that’s gonna be worth $400,000 or something. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seems ridiculous in 1980, and here
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s amazing. Whew!
#askatp: APFS de-dupe app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PhD writes, I’ve been waiting for an APFS deduping space saver script to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move from alpha quality to beta quality or quote, reliable enough for my less important data that suck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up space. Have you heard of disk dedup on the app store? I have not. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think you’re asking me anyway. John, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a interesting technology enabled by our wonderful modern new file system that we have here on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac. It’s been around for a long time in the enterprise. The idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is that on every one of our disks, but especially on lots of enterprise disks, there’s some data that’s duplicated,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You might think you don’t have a lot of like literal duplicate documents, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s sort of the enterprise level. A lot of devices do block level deduping,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if they can find any part of a file that’s exactly the same as some part of another file, there’s no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John store that block of data twice. You can just store it once and point to it from both files.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this saves you space, right? So like say you have a bunch of JPEG images and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of metadata inside them and the metadata for a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of them is similar or the same, like a bunch of pictures taken
⏹️ ▶️ John at your home and the GPS coordinates are always the same. And I mean, obviously it’s not down to the byte level that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John deduping or whatever, but the more granular you can get with your deduping, the higher chance you have to find redundancies
⏹️ ▶️ John and the more space you can save, right? Even just deduping at a file level though, sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have complete duplicates of files in multiple locations. Sometimes maybe the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John has them, maybe some resources or assets are in multiple places. Maybe you have two of the same file somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ John like one in your account and one elsewhere. If you have music libraries that are, you know, if you have multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts on your computer and the music library is not shared among them with a single app ID, you could have
⏹️ ▶️ John the same songs in multiple places because you and your spouse both have the
⏹️ ▶️ John complete works of Taylor Swift separately in your own music libraries on your Mac that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John shared between the two of you. Now you’re storing all that data twice. Wouldn’t it be great if you could store it once?
⏹️ ▶️ John What APFS has for you here is that APFS can do the, this
⏹️ ▶️ John was brought up a couple of WWDCs ago, can do the sort of like instantaneous clone of a file.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see this in the Finder. If you make a copy of like a gigantic file and it looks like it and completes instantly, Wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second, how did it just duplicate that four gig file instantly? Well, it didn’t use the, you know, I forget what it’s called, like
⏹️ ▶️ John smart cloning or whatever. APFS just says, okay, I will just make a second pointer to that
⏹️ ▶️ John file. Now it’s not the same thing as hard links in Unix because hard links in Unix, you can make an, quote unquote, instant copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of a file, but they both point to the same data. So if you make a four gig file and then you make a hard link
⏹️ ▶️ John to it and you edit either one, the original file or the hard link, you will change the other,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But with APFS, smart cloning, instant, whatever the hell it’s called thing. When
⏹️ ▶️ John you make a copy, you don’t have to worry that now when I edit one, the other one will edit. They are independent
⏹️ ▶️ John as soon as you make a change. So they’re copy on write, right? So you instantly get a copy without actually taking up any more
⏹️ ▶️ John disk space. But if you change some part of the copy, they will start to diverge from
⏹️ ▶️ John each other, right? So it’s a safe way to make an instant copy. So the way the deduping things work is they go through,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, they go through your entire hard drive or whatever, they find two files that are
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. This is like sort of like the transporter in Star Trek, I guess, or cloning or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John They find two files that are the same, they delete one, and then they make a smart
⏹️ ▶️ John clone of the original to the second location, right? So now, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s complicated by the fact that when they deleted that one, it probably didn’t actually go away because it probably exists in a snapshot,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so it didn’t actually, but pretend snapshots don’t exist for a second. So you’ve got two
⏹️ ▶️ John four gig files that are identical. It’s taken up eight gigs of space. Again, ignoring snapshots, right? you delete
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the four gig files. Now you’ve saved four gigs of this space, not really, but in theory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you clone the original four gig file, and that takes up no more space except for a tiny little bit for the
⏹️ ▶️ John metadata, right? So now you’ve, you previously, those two four gig files were taking eight gigs and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make it so those two four gig files are only taking up four gigs. And you don’t have to worry about any weird side effects because you can
⏹️ ▶️ John edit one or the other and they will be completely independent files. They won’t be linked to each other in any way,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the fact that they were originally cloned from each other. So in theory, you could save a ton of disk
⏹️ ▶️ John space that way. In practice, apps like this, especially the one that come from a third party
⏹️ ▶️ John and not Apple scare me because what I just described, and the reason I’m comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Star Trek Transporter is the idea that it destroys all your molecules in the original location and then sends the information
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere in the reconstitute system so the transporter essentially kills you. There’s a million YouTube videos on this if you wanna watch it. It kills
⏹️ ▶️ John you and then reconstructs you elsewhere. Aside. In this case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to delete one of the files and then it has to do the smart cloning thing to make and
⏹️ ▶️ John make reconstitute that file from a clone in exactly the way that it was before,
⏹️ ▶️ John including all the dates, all the permissions, all the metadata, the labels, all this other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that scares me a little bit because it is not a non-destructive operation. You must necessarily destroy
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the files and try to recreate it, quote unquote, exactly the way it was. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple came out with a utility that did this, I might trust it. But 30 party ones, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I did actually buy this one here, I am very wary of. I’d be wary of trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do it myself. Now maybe you can make like a command line tool that does, it’s not complicated, this API for the smart cloning,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can just look it up and run it, right? Maybe if there’s files that are just, oh, these are just data files, there’s no metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about them, like they’re Taylor Swift songs, right? If I screw them up, worst case, I can just delete them all and redownload them
⏹️ ▶️ John from iTunes, like it’s not a big deal. Maybe I would trust it in that scenario, but for
⏹️ ▶️ John now I would say use caution when considering tools like this. The best thing you
⏹️ ▶️ John can say for tools like this is if you can run them in kind of a read-only mode and say, look, I’m not gonna do any deduping,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just please tell me how many duplicate files do I have? And if they could all be deduped,
⏹️ ▶️ John how much space would I save? Again, setting aside snapshots, which are a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Linode. And thanks to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members who support us directly. you can join at atp.fm slash join. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ 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-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental. Tech Podcasts. I’ve been casting so
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of members, I’m glad to see, apparently, customers finally taking advantage of what
⏹️ ▶️ John I urged them to do last time, which is, hey, sign up to become a member, get the discount, buy crap from the store, and then cancel.
⏹️ ▶️ John cancel. We don’t encourage you to cancel, but like, last year, it seemed like nobody was taking — like, people were buying from the store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there was like no increase in members. It’s like, why are you not taking advantage of the free money that we’re offering you
⏹️ ▶️ John here? Become a member, get the discount, buy stuff with it, and then cancel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John around if you want to. Or not cancel. Because you love us.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Can we stop? Like part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, we know that some percentage of people will forget to cancel. Like that’s part of the subscription thing. We make it super easy to cancel,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you forget to cancel, that’s on you. Because we make it so easy to cancel.