471: My Fiber Situation Is Fine
24 Feb 2022Spring cleaning, music apps, package managers, and coffee gear.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Casey messes with Marco during his very difficult day
- Celiac
- Important follow-up: in short, actual celiac disease cannot be cured, so the people in question most likely had other forms of gluten intolerance
- Colostrum (the pills Marco got — ask a doctor, YMMV)
- Thera Cane
- Reconcilable Differences #176: The Curse of Convenience
- It’s All Too Much
- NIMBY
- Celiac
- Follow-up:
- Getting an older car to always play Maps’ directions over Bluetooth (via Paul Violante)
Settings→Maps→Spoken Directions→Directions on Radio
- Some interesting feedback on brake-by-wire systems
- Marc Barrowclift’s Fourth Annual iOS Music Player Showcase (via Aidan Trager)
- Casey attempts a victory lap around John
- Reconcilable Differences #176: The Curse of Convenience
Note the relevant section was in the members’ only after-show
- Reconcilable Differences #176: The Curse of Convenience
- Feedback received on John’s Streaming App Spec
- Getting an older car to always play Maps’ directions over Bluetooth (via Paul Violante)
- The NVIDIA/Arm deal has been scuttled
- Previously: Doubts about the NVIDIA/Arm deal
- Announced 20 September 2020 (!)
- Apparently .NET Core can trace its roots to Silverlight (!)
- Developer deliberately corrupts popular open-source packages
#askatp:- Two-fer from Omri Arbiv:
- What’s Marco’s current coffee setup?
- Is John still subscribed to cable?
- Do we have a good system for maintaining family contacts? (via Paul Walker)
- Two-fer from Omri Arbiv:
- Post-show Robot or Not:
- Bonus
#askatp: Do we say we’re “in front of” or “behind” the computer? (via Niek van de Pas)
- Bonus
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Chapters
- 🍌
- Follow-up: Car Bluetooth
- Brake-by-wire
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Third-party Music apps
- Sponsor: Lutron Caséta
- One of us is geotagging!
- Follow-up: Streaming apps
- NVIDIA (not) buying ARM
- node breakage manager
- Sponsor: Jumpcloud
- #askatp: Coffee setup
- #askatp: Cable TV
- #askatp: Family contact sharing
- Ending theme
- After-show
🍌
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In general, I’m very happy right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, this sounds like me. What was it, last week or the week before? Oh God, all right, lay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so first of all, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned on the show much, if at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for about 15 years, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve had a weird stomach allergy to bananas and avocados.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, you’ve mentioned that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the weirdest thing. If I eat them, I just get this massive stomach
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ache, like as if I ate a saw blade or one of those like spiky, crusty O’s from the Simpsons, you know, like it’s like that kind of thing, like just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just hugely, just, just pain. And you know, nothing, you know, nothing, not too much detail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like nothing can come out of your direction to fix this problem. It’s just pain. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, in my life I’ve known a couple of celiacs. One of them told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the others, you should try taking colostrum because I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once a celiac and it fixed me. And so far all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of them have been fixed by taking colostrum. So hey, anyone out there who’s celiac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might want to look into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With your doctor? Yeah. Don’t just blindly listen to us idiots. Let’s talk to your doctor. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John this a medical thing or is this a non-medical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing? I don’t know the details. So colostrum is like the first milk from a cow, like right when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calf is first born. I don’t know the details. I’m probably butchering it, but the idea is, so you know, you can get these pills on Amazon. It’s like this weird New
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John makes them very… You
⏹️ ▶️ John can get these pills on Amazon as leading me in the direction of non-medical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, well, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the theory is that it stimulates the, I think it stimulates the cilia in your small intestine to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regrow or fix itself somehow, I don’t know. Anyway, I apologize to anybody medical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there who I’m butchering this, but… Yeah, don’t forget the magnetic bracelet. I’m just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m just saying, I’ve known multiple celiacs who have tried this and it has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solved their issues. people who were celiacs for years. And like you take it and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just like fixes it and then you can stop taking it and you stay fixed. Anyway, so I thought maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might help this issue because this seems like some kind of weird small intestine issue. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been taking colostrum pills for like about a month and a half or so. And I decided let me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start testing this allergy again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, did you do this today on a day that you’re recording? I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it gradually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, bananas, you know, they’re not that hard to get or not that expensive. What could one cost, $10?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple of bananas and sliced them up into little disks and I froze them. And so that way I had like, you know, intervals,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like fixed intervals that I had constant access to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what, I guess the freezing is preservation. Like what function is the freezing serving here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because when you only go shopping like every two weeks it’s kind of hard to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fresh bananas in stock.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would just like, I would, you know, Every day I would try one, like one slice, and just see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happens. And the first time I tried it, I kind of had a nervous stomach afterwards, but I’m like, I think that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be psychological, because I’m, you know. So I just kept doing it. Every day I would just take one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it got to the point where I would forget. Like I would just throw it in my mouth, and then I’d move on, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t think about it, and I’d feel fine. And I would increase it to, look, let’s try two today. And then let’s try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three today. And slowly increased it, and now I’m up to being able to eat a full banana by itself, fresh, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t feel anything. It’s fantastic. So, for the first time in 15 years, I can eat bananas. Now, I haven’t tested it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in avocados yet. I’m gonna start that test next. Again, same thing, controlling. I didn’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try them both at once. Controlling for the factors, like, let me try one first, get that fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which seems to be the case. And now I can, oh my God, I can get a smoothie that doesn’t suck now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s true. Yeah, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, what is the banana item that you are most excited to eat? Smoothies, yeah. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John smoothies are excellent. Not peanut butter and banana
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sandwich? Or banana bread, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, banana bread too. That should be fine. I haven’t had that in 10 years either, or 15 years. But anyway, so. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no way to live.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s reason number one that I’m happy, that I had a banana earlier today, and I had one yesterday, and I had one the day before that, and it’s been fine. And now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have 15 years of bananas to make up for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Be careful, too many bananas give you hard poops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I’ve heard. But I eat a lot of vegetables. Believe me, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fiber situation is fine. Thanks, John. Sorry. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second reason I’m very happy is that I have been incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco busy with doing some stuff in real life. It’s good stuff, it’s fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has resulted in me not paying any attention whatsoever to the news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or any flare-ups between people on Twitter or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. I haven’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checked Instagram like almost at all in about a week. I’ve just been so busy. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always thinks like, oh my god, the world is so bad now. Like now this is extra bad. Now I really got to pay attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reality is I salute everyone out there who pays attention for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in a much better mental state by keeping a lot of distance from a lot of that stuff. And so anyway, reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number three I’m happy is that is same reason why every muscle in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco body hurts right now. It’s more of a mixed happiness in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got here, I got my, here I’m knocking the mic here, my Theracane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right here, massaging my neck and shoulders here and there tonight because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is sore. Because my task this week that has been keeping me so busy is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve had this house for a while and we never really did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major clean outs. we would clean here and there, but we just have 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years worth of stuff accumulation. And we decided this week, there was no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco school, Adam was visiting his grandparents upstate for a week, and we thought, we are gonna spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, we’re gonna rent a dumpster and actually really clean out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as we can, like massive early spring cleaning.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is what sex is for married people, by the way. way. That’s where the dumpster
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yes, the kids away finally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s amazing. I’ve never run to the before it turns out. You just call you know like it literally the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is recommended here is called like you know a a a a a deal carding or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those yellow pages names and like you just call them up and some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know fairly curt person. The other end is like how big you want it. You know when do you want it? Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll drop it off today. Like you know it’s that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it helps if you’re in New York. If you want to get that full experience, that’s true. They sound different. If you if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I bet they don’t sound that different anyway. So it wouldn’t be funny if every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carting company was all run by people from Brooklyn. Just just there all over the country just running carting companies. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in construction to yeah so anyway yeah. So you know some guy in a truck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows up and dumps off his dumpster in the street front of our house and uh… Wait, they put the dumpster in the street?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t want them tearing up our papers in our driveway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I believe you’re allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John do that. You can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just takes a quick permit from the village, but it’s a wide street, like there’s room to go around it
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. I’ve never seen that in the Boston area. It’s always gotta go on your
⏹️ ▶️ John driveway or on your lawn. And yes, it does destroy it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t have streets made for the modern era. Your streets are preposterously tiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo’s street isn’t that wide. My street’s like 100 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pretty wide. And that’s actually, that’s a good point. Your street is, I don’t know what your excuse
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as wide as yours, Casey. Yours is like a football field.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not. My street is wide enough that like, a car can be parked on both sides of the street, parallel parking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can still drive through the middle. Yeah, but with one car. One car could drive through, so yeah. So it’s like three cars wide, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, my street, I would say, is four cars wide. You could
⏹️ ▶️ John have a, yeah, Casey, you could have a bus on either side. And then you could drive two buses past each other between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, parallel parked on either side in
⏹️ ▶️ John tape measure and measure your street. That’s huge. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Anyway, we digress.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so we knew we were in the dumpster, but over the weekend before it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrived on Monday, over the weekend before it arrived, we basically spent that time just staging a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of trash bags in the garage. By the way, this was a good time to have listened to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rectifs. It was all about space. And I’ve heard Merlin over the years talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s All Too Much, this wonderful book. And literally, so we were driving up to drop Adam off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upstate, we on the way up there, we listened to Rectives, did the drop off, had some lunch. Right before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we got in the car, I downloaded the audio book for It’s All Too Much, and we listened to that on the way home. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we listened to it as we were cleaning everything out for the first couple of days, we’re almost done with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just make sure you don’t throw out your rock concert t-shirts. Yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco One thing that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John learned is you got these books, you clean everything out, but don’t make Marone’s mistake and get so enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ John that you throw out the one irreplaceable thing that you’re gonna regret losing for the rest of your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, honestly, I don’t think I have anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the equivalent is. Maybe like save your, well, if you had a Sega Saturn, you should save that, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. No, and I have all the video game systems I’m saving, of course, but I’m just, you know, I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so fortunately, you know, it was a really nice day. So first we put everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on the curb for people to take, and then anything that was still there, like 24 hours later, we’d toss in the dumpster. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put out like tech stuff, you know, like old networking gear and stuff like that. I even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might come up later, I even got rid of my coffee roaster. I gave it away. Somebody took it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? Yeah, I’m not roasting anymore. Are you okay? Yeah, so anyway, we’ll get to that later. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still drinking coffee. I’m just not roasting it anymore. But yeah, so like a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was taken, stuff that was, you know, basically trash we threw away, which I mean, this included like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally every bit of food in the house. Like we, it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have a lot of expired food. I found a jar of couscous from 2011. Excuse me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That expired in 2011. So it’s actually probably from 2009. I think I could beat that stuff in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we have a salad dressing in the refrigerator that beats that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just, and we threw big black garbage bags, a lot of which was full of expired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco food or trash from the basement. We threw away so much stuff. And when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the doctor was first delivered and I started throwing these bags in, I thought it’s a ten ten cubic yard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumpster. That’s the smallest one they have and I thought oh, this is too big. We’re never going to fill this up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, guess what it’s full. It took us forty eight hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John full. You could squish that down a lot. There’s a lot of air in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s some, but not as much as you would because you know it a lot of the space was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there were a of like old broken pieces of furniture that like we tried having people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take and nobody wanted them so we had to throw those out. A lot of you know stuff from the basement like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens for windows that we don’t even have those windows anymore. Like we changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the windows years ago like ten years ago we got new windows we and we have the screens for the old ones for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason that we can’t even use like stuff like that tons and tons of stuff that was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trash just taking up space and so my god it feels good and and so So the crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is, so we have this dumpster full of trash in front of our house. The house,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re inside of it, does not look that different. It doesn’t look like we’re moving out. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like we just tidied up a little bit. All that trash was hidden. Yes, like my office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closet, the basement, the attic. Where do we get 10 cubic yards of trash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our house and have it disappear and have nothing look different? Anyway, it feels very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is something that I strongly recommend if you have a house with too much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it, listen to rectifs, then listen to it’s all too much, then rent a dumpster, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a good time, except that I am now extraordinarily sore from just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge amounts of hauling that’s gone into this. You know, things like in the basement we had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, from a renovation we did 12 years ago or 10 years ago, we had an old door that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the door, it was a custom-sized door, and the door frame that it goes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t exist anymore. And so, why do we have this door in the basement? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey size. Because it’s bespoke, that’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so that’s sitting outside now. I hope somebody takes it who wants like a reclaimed door and they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reclaim it from next to our dumpster. Hopefully I don’t have to put it in the dumpster because my God, doors are heavy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, oh man, everything on my body hurts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure people are listening to this and saying, oh, Marco, you’re being so wasteful throwing all these things in the garbage. You should have given them away.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have free cycled them. you should have put them up for sale, you should have found someone who needed them, or so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There actually was like a free cycle type of group, like our neighbor was a member of this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Facebook buy nothing, this is apparently a thing, I didn’t know about it, but I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good at that. But they posted it there, and a lot of people came and took stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I was saying, part of the, I don’t know if I talk about this, and it’s all too much, but we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, Merlin talks about it, and we talk about it in Rectifs when I talked to him on the topic. sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use that as an excuse to never do this. You can say, oh, well, I don’t wanna throw all this stuff out. I really should
⏹️ ▶️ John give it away. And you should, but if you never actually do find someone to give it to, then
⏹️ ▶️ John it just stays in your house, right? And so you’re like getting the notion that we should
⏹️ ▶️ John get a dumpster and just chuck it all away and then stopping yourself and saying, no, I should find something to give it away. But then not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that either doesn’t help anybody. It keeps the junk in your house. And it also doesn’t help the people
⏹️ ▶️ John that you were supposedly going to give it to. So though putting it all in a dumpster and having it go to a landfill seems
⏹️ ▶️ John wasteful and it should be reused and so on and so forth, yes, that’s true, but when you have to choose
⏹️ ▶️ John the lesser of multiple evils, the one that gets the stuff out of your house will probably make your life better more
⏹️ ▶️ John than the one where you just keep it in your house and feel guilty about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and there are, you know, certain things are easier to find better uses for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than others, you know, things like clothing that’s in decent shape, usually you can find some place that will accept clothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco donations, or things that might have some value, you can often donate to thrift shops or something like
⏹️ ▶️ John And sometimes they have big just places where you can shove them. You don’t even have to talk to a person. They’ll just have like, hey, take your old clothes
⏹️ ▶️ John and put them in this thing that looks like a dumpster, but it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem though is that, like a lot of things in our modern world, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of this stuff ends up getting thrown away behind the scenes than we realize, or that many people assume.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re worried like, oh no, what if I just throw this away? I can donate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to somebody. well, depending on what it is and where you are, there’s actually a good chance it’s gonna get thrown away by them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, it’s kind of, it’s not, this is not a good thing, but it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowing in the sense that it’s a good counter-argument against yourself that, you know, you don’t have to necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not clean out your house, because it might go to waste, because like, A, it’s gonna go to waste anyway. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to waste now if it’s in your house not being used and not being useful. But B, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost any way you could get rid of it, there’s a high chance of a lot of it being wasted. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that kind of, it’s crappy, it’s kind of a negative way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it, but in a way it’s like, well, then I might as well, at least, I might as well get rid of it and improve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my life and just try to not be so wasteful in the future when accumulating things in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first place, as opposed to like, I have to keep this, these 10 bags
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of junk forever because otherwise they’ll go in a landfill. Like, well, that’s, then your house is just becoming a landfill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point. Like that’s not really helping anybody either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so you’ve had a fun vacation then, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, this is not a vacation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s a break from school.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not a vacation.
⏹️ ▶️ John How’s the dog poop situation like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, he poops outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, in the dumpster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there’s one bag for me. I think that’s all so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? Interesting, if there’s ever a dumpster in our neighborhood, it slowly fills with bags of dog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poop. Yeah, I mean, and I’ve been that guy. Because, I mean, because look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand, I’m sure people have reasons, but it’s stupid that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m like walking my dog around these suburbs, there’s no trash cans anywhere. You have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to escort the poop back to your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like there is not like a town trash can anywhere. You can go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can walk a mile and a half and see zero trash cans. And that to me, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. we do see a lot of litter that happens as a result. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think overall, it’s probably more responsible city planning to put trash cans periodically somewhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also, who wants to have a trash can in front of their house? I understand why they’re not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s definitely a bit of a NIMBY problem, but it is kind of annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I’ve totally been that guy. I’ve, if there’s nobody around and I’m walking past this dumpster, I’ll just whoop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flick it in there. But I figure now, all the years I’ve been doing that, If somebody walked by my dumpster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and throw their poop in there, that’s fine. I know they owe it to me. It’s a circle of poop.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will get everyone writing and telling us how harmful it is to have animal waste in with garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, where else are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we supposed to put it? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s wrong. Probably. I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe me, there’s going to be a lot of people who think half of what I just said was wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that’s why I wanted to call it out to say like, it’s not ideal. Ideally, you you would carefully find good new homes
⏹️ ▶️ John for all this extra stuff, but in reality it would mean that you would just never do it and it would just fill your house until you died
⏹️ ▶️ John and then someone would have an estate sale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or that person would hire a dumpster and just dump, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how a lot of these stories end unfortunately. You keep it until you die and then someone else throws it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away for you. And that’s no way to live. So, I mean, keep in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of this, this is the thing, so much stuff that you don’t realize gets thrown away, like store returns.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there was a couple of articles recently about online shopping returns and everything. Yeah, most returns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stores get thrown away. There are very few items that stores will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resell if they’ve been returned. Like there’s so much, recycling obviously is a big one, like so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic recycling gets thrown away. We should be conscious about our waste for sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our consumption for sure. There’s lots of reasons to be conscious about that and to do that. But there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why the whole reduce, recycle thing, reduce is first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because once you have the stuff, at that point, most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, at some point, its useful life is going to end and it’s going to have to be sent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere. And sometimes you can find a good use for it with somebody else or somebody wants to take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of times you can’t. And so if you want to be environmentally conscious about this or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more ecologically responsible, The better place to do that is the front part of this equation of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, you know what? Buy less stuff, use less stuff. That’s the better part of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get too high and mighty about what’s gonna happen after you’re done with it because chances are it’s gonna end up in a landfill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fun. Yeah. All right, well, I’m glad you’re making progress even though nobody can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see it except outside in the dumpster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am recycling an absurd amount of cardboard. That’s good. So one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did was we upgraded to a larger bed. And so we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this tremendous Casper box. So that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I also pulled out of the basement two boxes for floor standing speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we use next to our TV. So pretty, you know, tall speaking of probably three and a half feet tall. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, two, a pair of speakers, each one had its own individual box that was almost the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a coffin, like a coffin for a short person. And so I had two of those, plus the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casper king-size box, which itself is probably about coffin-sized as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a short person. And so I filled all three of those with other cardboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had been flattened and packed and everything. Goodness. Oh my, it’s so heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, the hauling. But I would say I could probably fill half a dumpster just with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paper and cardboard. My word. So yeah, that’s sitting next to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my dumpster. It’s a fun night. Oh, wow. So whatever’s going on in the world of tech, I have no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have missed all of it. Is anything going on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you hear Apple bought Nintendo?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, that finally happened.
Follow-up: Car Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. With regard to greedy Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Ask ATP, we got some feedback from Paul Violante, who wrote, regarding Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Maps Bluetooth predicament, there is a setting to have maps speak driving directions through the car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as phone call audio. So if you go to Settings, Maps, Spoken Directions, and then toggle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Directions on Radio On, then that will act as though a brief phone call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has just came in, and that will make sure that your car radio treats that as an, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my goodness, you need to listen to this sort of scenario. So Paul writes, this works in my 2017 Toyota 4Runner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if I am playing no audio, the phone will connect as if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a phone call to speak the directions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is interesting. Yeah, because this is like about my FJ. You have to be playing music or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast in order to hear any spoken map directions because it has to be logically thinking it’s playing something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I never thought about this. This is a good idea. I’m gonna try it. but it is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of annoying that like I would have to, like this would have to be how it works over any Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like not just that car radio. But it’s interesting, like a lot of people forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or never knew these old Bluetooth modes where like, you know, phone calls were treated differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than audio. And this was for lots of legacy technology reasons, it’s like a whole different Bluetooth profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all these different codecs that were lower bandwidth so they could have, you know, bi-directional communication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the very, very, very crappy latency or very crappy bandwidth of early Bluetooth versions. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff, but yeah, it’s interesting. Like Bluetooth, you know, it’s, it’s, has a lot of crappy legacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, but in this case that actually will be helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel for the president who had to come up with a copy for this option, it’s called directions
⏹️ ▶️ John on radio. Like it’s got to communicate this very, you know, the thing that Casey just said. So
⏹️ ▶️ John say you’re in your car and you want to hear directions from the map, but you don’t want to have audio playing. We’ll turn this thing on and it’ll do that
⏹️ ▶️ John for reasons that are even more complicated than this. But instead it’s just a toggle that says directions on radio.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if people, I do wonder like, how young do you have to be to not recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John radio as the thing in your car that makes noise, right? Because does anyone listen to, I suppose tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of people do listen to radio, but at least in my household, I can’t remember the last time we had
⏹️ ▶️ John AM or FM radio turned on in any of our cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and this is actually like, I was first making Overcast back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2013 or so, and I actually briefly considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this kind of feature that would route the podcast audio through the phone call profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of the audio profile for this reason that some people actually had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth situations in their cars usually that supported the phone call mode, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this, and this was a, thank God, a very short lived period in Bluetooth evolution, where you would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, only have the phone and not have the music. But there are cars out there that have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situation. So I briefly thought about like a feature that would just do this. I even once looked into like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if I run one of those like, you know, phone IP APIs, like Twilio or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then. Like, what if I actually have a premium feature where you can call a phone number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it just play your podcasts, like over an actual phone call for other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of integrations. But fortunately, by the time I would have actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotten to that on my to-do list, The need for all of this stuff had vanished.
Brake-by-wire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of cars, we have, it’s a little bit of a longer feedback, but I found it absolutely fascinating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So an anonymous person wrote in with regard to brake-by-wire systems. So this means, you know, there’s no physical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection between the brake pedal and the brakes. It’s all electronically controlled. That’s brake-by-wire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anonymous writes, I’ve spent most of the last decade working on brakes and brake-by-wire brakes are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually stranger than how you portrayed them. When a car company calls brake-by-wire, they’re primarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey referring to a certain kind of electrically-boosted brake system. Marcos Tesla has a Bosch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iBooster, which is electrically-boosted, similarly to how electric power steering is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boosted. It senses torque at a motor attached to the input rod and provides additional torque to aid the driver. These
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote-unquote bi-wire systems have the input rod connected to a master cylinder just as it would be in a car without power
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brakes. The master cylinder is sealed off from the rest of the system by a valve that is held closed during normal operation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The brake controller reads the master cylinder pressure and pedal stroke to determine the the driver intent, and then uses a separate electrically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actuated boost cylinder to generate the brake system pressure. So it is technically by wire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey During normal operation, there’s no fluid connection to the wheels. But there is fluid involved on the input side, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this actuation takes place in one piece of hardware. Some manufacturers, particularly Japanese automakers, use high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pressure accumulators in place of the boost cylinder, but the principle of operation is similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is done because only generating the pressure needed for a situation is more efficient,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and subjective metrics are improved by isolating the driver from wheel behavior. Additionally, this provides a built-in fail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safe where if the brake unit fails, the isolation valve will open itself or be opened by the ECU and provide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the driver with a direct connection to the wheels. And then John, I guess you were having an email conversation with this person, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was my response to that. So this is actually stuff that I had seen
⏹️ ▶️ John when the first brake by wire system came out and we didn’t go into the past show, but how do they deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with a situation where what if the electronics fail? Like when the very first break by wire things
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, lots of people were nervous about that. So they had all these fail safes where it’s like, it’s like a regular braking system,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that part of it is shut off normally. But if anything goes wrong, this valve opens up and then it just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sort of default fails into being normal-ish brakes, right? That was to
⏹️ ▶️ John make people feel more comfortable. So my response to this was to ask this person,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I was just basically amusing. I said, I wonder if the other go to the jet fighter route. jet
⏹️ ▶️ John fighter planes for many, many years, decades, have also had fly by wire and the same deal. The first
⏹️ ▶️ John plane that was fly by wire, all of the pilots and the engineers were all scared. It’s like, how, you know, I, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if the electronics fail, electronics fail all the time. I want the pedals and
⏹️ ▶️ John the stick in my plane to be connected to the control surfaces. I don’t want to rely on the electronics.
⏹️ ▶️ John If the electronics go out, I’m just, I’m just going to fall out of the sky like a rock because I can’t control anything anymore. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the way they eventually dealt with that in jet fighters and other sort of fly-by-wire airplanes
⏹️ ▶️ John is not by doing the thing that you just read where it’s like, well, it’s like a regular hydraulic system, but we shut
⏹️ ▶️ John that off normally and do this by wire thing, but then it fails, it opens back up. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way they deal with it, and not all planes, but a lot of them, I mean, it’s the same way they
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with a lot of things in aviation, massive redundancy. So there’s not one electronic system, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not two electronic systems, like three completely independent, redundant, fully functioning
⏹️ ▶️ John systems routed through different parts of the plane using different technologies. And it’s like, if one of them fails,
⏹️ ▶️ John you switch to the backup on the backbone fails, you switch to the backup backup on. And that,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, it may makes people comfortable enough that they’re okay flying by nevermind the fact that a lot of fighter planes are
⏹️ ▶️ John so unstable, under normal operation that without the computers constantly adjusting the control surfaces, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John tumble out of the sky like a, you you know, a rock thrown by a toddler. But we’ll set that aside
⏹️ ▶️ John for now. So that was my question. All right, so you just described the way this works. Now, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think cars will ever go to full by wire with no physical backup and
⏹️ ▶️ John deal with it by saying, okay, we’re really gonna separate your pedals entirely from the hydraulic
⏹️ ▶️ John system, but to make it so you all don’t die, we’re gonna double or triple or
⏹️ ▶️ John quadruple redundant, make the system redundant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the person wrote, publicly available information would say yes, all the suppliers are preparing for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Especially as cars gain more and more advanced ADAS, which is advanced driver assistance systems, some redundancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey becomes necessary. And there are lots of benefits that can come from separating the driver controls from the actuator that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just might be able to imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of one of those, like the person here is working on brake by wire systems. And you know, I asked a question, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wonder if they’re gonna do X. And the person said, publicly available information would say yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s their way of saying, I’m not going to tell you we’re doing that, but were you to look at publicly available information, you
⏹️ ▶️ John would see it leaning in that direction. So, let’s say confirmation without confirmation.
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Third-party Music apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aidan Traeger writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you acknowledge the existence of third party Apple music apps on the show, but I wanted to pass along Mark Barrowcliff’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fourth annual iOS music player showcase from just last month. So you know, we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in God bless if the, does anyone at Apple actually use the Apple music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app? I feel like we say this about a lot of things. This is becoming like the new, if Steve were alive, does anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple actually?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can tell you one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they definitely don’t use the Mac version and if they do, they definitely don’t use the songs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like every corner of the music app on every platform is straight trash. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why I haven’t divorced myself of Spotify despite being cheap enough to want to is because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all garbage. I can’t play something until I can and then I’m in the midst of playing something, it’s playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. Like actually just earlier today, I had an instance where I was not authorized to play something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Earlier in the day, I had an instance where I was playing an album. I think I was playing Thriller by Michael Jackson. I was playing the album,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went through the first three or four songs, no problem, just stopped. It knows it’s ready to play the next song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t stop it. I swear to you, I didn’t stop it because this happens a lot. It’s ready to play the next song, but it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey froze. Like the app is functional, but it just froze. It got sleepy, I guess. I don’t know. I was asking too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. I guess I just don’t have enough empathy for the machine. Am I right? Anyway, so with regard to, hey, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could you do to fix this problem? Well, you could potentially just get a different music app entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so Aiden reminded us of this list by Mark Barrowcliff. It’s actually more than a list. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comprehensive review. And I started paging through this this morning, and there is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. So if you are interested, Mark does an amazing job of laying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out the landscape and showing what each of these things looks like and how they behave and what they’re good at, what they’re bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, et cetera. But it’s a really, really interesting roundup and I strongly encourage you, if you’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me and hate everything about your music situation, check it out, you might like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re just iOS apps, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS and iPadOS, yes. I do not believe there was anything on macOS, that’s correct. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s 16 apps, three of them are new this year. I know there are similar clients available
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac, but I doubt there are 16 of them in total.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That is true. Yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so often the problem. Like, I’ve looked at a lot of these possible alternative apps over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually there is not an app that is Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS. There are some that are Mac only. There’s a lot that are iOS only. But usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to give up one of those platforms to use one of these apps. Or you can just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it use your Apple Music Library, which a lot of these apps do anyway. and then you can kind of just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the Apple version of music on the Mac, but that’s the worst one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s the one I don’t wanna keep using, that’s the one I wanna replace.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. It’s so bad. I mean, I hate to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rag on these apps because you don’t know what constraints they’re dealing with, you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they’re up against.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, they’re dealing with not caring. That’s it. If they care, look, Apple has shown when they care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, They put a lot of resources behind it. They put good talent on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They incentivize the people in the company to work on it. And it’s very, very clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they do not value this. Because if they valued it, they would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the resources behind it to make it happen. And they just don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you say they, to be clear, you’re not talking about the developers who make the application because they don’t set those type of priorities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers make the applications?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone’s making it. A lot of times, what happens in Apple, a lot of times is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain apps or features actually go for a long span having a full-time staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of zero people. The impression I’ve gotten over many, many people over many years is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people get moved around to different projects, or they move themselves around to different projects, and for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your career to progress, you typically have to be moved around to whatever the hot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new thing is. I’ve heard time and time again that it’s hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your career to advance and progress if you’re doing the more boring stuff. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what engineer or product manager wants to spend their time on the music app for the Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I understand why it is this way, but that is ultimately a failure of management and structure. Like, that is something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like, the company has always had problems, like multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keeping their interest in working on the things they’ve already started, rather than going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and starting something new constantly. And ideally, as they grow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should be able to balance more things over time. In practice, that hasn’t really happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nearly as much as you would think based on their size.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is not a unique to Apple problem. Every company I’ve ever worked for experiences this. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is one of the most annoying to people like us who, you know, really appreciate good software to see
⏹️ ▶️ John resources not be put into something that is quote unquote done or isn’t the new new
⏹️ ▶️ John hotness or doesn’t drive revenue or isn’t driving growth or whatever. And that’s just the natural inclination
⏹️ ▶️ John of any company, the people who are managing it. Why am I going to dump all my money into a thing that I know is not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to produce any growth, is not, uh, does not have any big potential upside, exists the way it is
⏹️ ▶️ John now, has a dwindling number of users. Uh, if I made it a thousand percent better, I wouldn’t make 0.01%
⏹️ ▶️ John more money and it wouldn’t make anybody choose the, you know, the, the Mac or the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John or, you know, like you can list off all these reasons why, here’s why we’re not investing in that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the most part, that’s right, except for where things just slowly start to decay,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That people think, well, once it’s done, it’s done. And even though everyone knows intellectually, even
⏹️ ▶️ John at the highest levels of management, well, software is never done. You have to at the very least maintain it. And it’s important to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep up with the times and every few years you really need to overhaul it. And Apple would say that they do that, it’s just that they
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, like every company, way too slowly. They wait too long. They wait for something to become a
⏹️ ▶️ John festering sore to say, okay, well, we’re never going to make any money off of this, but really,
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be better because it’s an embarrassment now or it’s actually hurting us reputation wise or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and then someone seizes on that opportunity within the company say, ah, I’ve wanted to fix this app forever. And finally, I get
⏹️ ▶️ John to bring a team up and we’ll get a bunch of people who are enthusiastic and they’ll fix it all. And that’s not a cycle
⏹️ ▶️ John that we enjoy as users. We don’t enjoy the app that we use every day slowly crumbling to dust
⏹️ ▶️ John till it becomes such a big crisis that Apple turns its gaze briefly to it and and throw some people and money at it
⏹️ ▶️ John and resurrects it and then we would begin the cycle again. It would be better if everything was maintained
⏹️ ▶️ John evenly. But that’s not just, it’s very difficult in my experience working for several different companies
⏹️ ▶️ John over my career. It’s very difficult for companies to have that discipline to say
⏹️ ▶️ John we are going to keep a team of people on let’s say terminal for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, right? And we are never gonna have zero people on it. We’re never gonna have, I mean, I think terminal,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, has had fractional people. Like it would have one person who’s responsible for terminal and five other apps, right? So it’s got,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 20% of a person on it for five years, you know, it’s like, but we’re gonna have,
⏹️ ▶️ John what I always call it in my pitches inside companies, cause I’m always complaining about this, is you need to have a standing army, which is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad analogy for militaristic reasons or whatever, but a standing army for everything that you care about, that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John never disband them. You can never say terminal’s done, don’t need any people on it. There always needs to be a terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John team. Doesn’t need to be a big team, but it literally needs to be there forever. Like forever? What do you mean forever? If you
⏹️ ▶️ John ship terminal on the Mac and you still sell Macs and terminal still comes with them, you always have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John some at least some small team whose only job is to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to maintain and improve terminal. And there are anti patterns there as well, because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have that team, eventually the team gets bored and decide the terminal is going to become like a, you know, an text based MMO
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like rewrite itis, you know, like, Oh, we’re going to rewrite this all in Swift UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s part of the discipline as well. But we’re so far at the other end of the spectrum where it just gets abandoned,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, that I feel like we could swing back in the other direction. And what you mentioned about career is also true. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do that and have a standing army who are on these applications, you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John not punish them for being on the boring project. If they’re doing an awesome job, and every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Terminal is the most beloved application on the Mac, and it’s so good
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, third-party Terminal apps have trouble competing, And you know, again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this particular thing where we’re talking about Apple, it’s a little bit weird because they’re also the platform owner. And you know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John another thing that this discipline will get you is you have the conversation, should we be shipping insert
⏹️ ▶️ John application here with the Mac? Or should we allow third parties to handle this entirely? In fact, there’s a topic about
⏹️ ▶️ John that that we’ll get to in some future episode of ATP. And by being forced to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a standing army, a team assigned to every single thing, it makes you think, do we really need to
⏹️ ▶️ John be shipping graph and calculator? Or do we care about graph and calculator anymore? Or should we
⏹️ ▶️ John let that be a third party opportunity because we don’t want to fund a team that for the next 20
⏹️ ▶️ John years with even just one or two people, all they do is make sure graph and calculator is improving every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Be honest with yourself. Do we care about graph and calculator or is it just there because someone wrote it once and it still works?
⏹️ ▶️ John So those are all things that should happen inside Apple and should happen inside every company, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not easy. It’s not easy. From the outside, it just seems like just make all the apps better. You have unlimited money. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s never really true. And money doesn’t translate directly into developer effort. So it’s tricky. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree that Apple, particularly in the case of the music app, and particularly in the case of the music
⏹️ ▶️ John app on the Mac, is not doing well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in some ways, you know how over the last couple of decades, some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the more enlightened and some of the big tech companies have intentionally created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco career paths because the original problem was like programmers would get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elevated to management as they advance in their careers, but not all programmers can or want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco managers. And so a lot of places have developed career tracks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for programmers to advance their careers while still just being programmers, not like directing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole team of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re called ICs, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, sorry. Yes, you can tell how much experience I have. individual contributors. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see how, in a way, it was like the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to develop and stabilize and mature to some degree before it had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the introspection. You know, actually, we need to kind of create a structure here that creates better results in this area,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And I think this is one of those areas of the industry now is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big and so developed and mature.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we just kind of need to keep working. And they’re never going to be exciting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on anymore, or probably, or at least rarely going to be exciting to work on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t have, you know, these big tech companies that have these big, old developed platforms, all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and parts of them, they have to incentivize and reward
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the maintenance of boring things over time. We have so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now that we’ve built as an industry over the last 20, 30 years that we still need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We need all of this to keep working. Ideally, it would slowly even get better and have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff of more than zero working on it at some point. But this isn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you mentioned, this isn’t exclusive to Apple, but Apple still does a pretty bad job of this. We need those things to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have somebody looking out for them. And if the incentives in the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like career promotion and excitement and reward are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to reward that, we need to start creating paths for that to be rewarded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like inside these companies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and they exist. Like in Apple, there is a title, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Distinguished Engineer Scientist and Technologist is a title at Apple. And my understanding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very limited, and I might have this wrong, but my limited understanding is that’s basically a nerds nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that has just been a super nerd for their entire lives, and is still writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code even though they are in the perhaps twilight of their career.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not because they’re no good. It’s the opposite, because they’re extremely good. And I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen in many companies these sorts of things. Because what you said is right, that oftentimes, especially up until 10, 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago, there would be a fork in the road, or really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there wasn’t even a fork, I should say. There was just a really right-angled turn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where even if you really love coding, well, you’re old enough and wise enough that, well, you’re going to be a manager now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s that. So, you know, kiss Xcode, Visual Studio, whatever, goodbye. You’re just going to live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, you know, Excel and PowerPoint for the rest of your career. Have fun. And it’s gotten better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s still not great. And I don’t know, it’s Apple music is just so frustrating because I, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got exposed to Apple, you know, which by John’s metric was yesterday, but in reality was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the mid aughts, they were the music company, like more than almost anything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were the music company, they were the iPod company, they were the iTunes company. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes me sad, perhaps more than most, because that’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my intrinsic and default view of Apple, is that they’re so good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at music, among other things. In the same way that, like, I guess in the 80s, and John, correct me when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re ready, but in the 80s they were the publishing company, among other things. And they were so good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at publishing, and in the OTS, they were so good at music and, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see Apple trying in some regard, you know, with Apple music,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to be modern and trying to be forward thinking and getting big into streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and yet the client applications, which is the thing that you would think would be their bread and butter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just such. It really is. I, I, I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate making poking fun at other people’s work, but it’s just so I’m so bad, you guys. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John frustrating. It’s nobody’s work. That’s the problem. Well, maybe that’s it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple Music, especially on iOS, has a lot of people working on it. I mean, I think it is somewhat, we’ve talked about this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably hampered by the back end, which seems like it’s old and creaky, not particularly responsive. And I bet the front end team has very limited
⏹️ ▶️ John control over what the back end does. And part of the reason it’s so creaky and crumbling is because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John from when Casey started getting into Apple. It’s old, like in the grand scheme of things. Really does need
⏹️ ▶️ John to be torn down and rebuilt. In particular, on the Mac, splitting out the music app was not really the rebuild
⏹️ ▶️ John we were looking for. On iOS, I think it’s definitely doing better than the Mac version, but it’s still weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John buggy. I tend to blame a lot of the server side stuff for that. But getting back to the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, having to have sort of a team on every project, a standing army on all your things forces you
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, I think if you had that conversation about music, they would agree with Casey. They would say, well, no, music
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing that Apple needs to do. Not just because we used to be the music company when we made the iPod, but just because
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a core activity that our customers do with our products. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ John graphing calculator, right? It is one of the big pillars of things people
⏹️ ▶️ John do with their phones and their Macs and their iPads and the things that we sell. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a quick conversation. Should music be better? Yes. Should we stop doing
⏹️ ▶️ John music? No. And you know, it’s a service behind it too. So you’ve got service, like everything says,
⏹️ ▶️ John please fix music. I’m not sure what’s taking them so long. I think they have made some improvements in
⏹️ ▶️ John recent years, but it is definitely in need of a freshening and an overhaul. And maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just so complicated now because they have the legacy of people like Marco who are still using it like iTunes. So they’ve got to support all
⏹️ ▶️ John those features, otherwise Marco will be sad, but then they’re trying to also be Spotify, but Spotify doesn’t have that legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have to deal with. And you know, it’s a difficult situation, but this is definitely an area that needs improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if they ask me, I’m going to say do photos for families first.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I would agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco with that. That’s probably in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse shape. But yeah, no, I mean, it’s just, that’s the thing. Like, I don’t think, this is one of the situations where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like any one person trying to do a bad job. It’s that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structure of the incentives and the way things work, the way people move around, like, it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of stuff that has to be addressed through like, you know, structural changes and management.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that’s, it’s that kind of thing. It’s not like, you know, there’s some villain keeping music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. You know, it’s just, but you know, it’s like, when you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify’s crappy app, like Spotify’s app should not be a breath
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fresh air in any way to any Apple customer. Because Spotify’s app is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we are accustomed as Apple users, at least we used to be, to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher standard of how good our first party apps, or the apps that we’re accustomed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to seeing from our community, to how good those are. Like that’s kind of where we came from. Now, yes, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone is much bigger than everything else, but we are accustomed to culturally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a high bar. Our apps should be really good, and apps on the Mac and first-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps from Apple should be really good, because historically, they usually were. And we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at a point now where in a lot of areas, including this, they’re not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s on them to create the conditions to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turn that around. Because again, we should never, none of us, should ever look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Spotify and say, ooh, this part’s nice, because no part of Spotify is nice. It’s garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas, it’s just less garbage-y than Apple’s current music app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, but that’s the thing. One of the areas where it’s less garbage than Apple Music is it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plays music reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That’s an area where it’s less garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed, and that’s why, because it is a terrible app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Otherwise, yes, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. It is a web view and it’s a bad web view at that. It’s an even worse web view than the old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music Store things were. And we shouldn’t be looking at that and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ooh, this is better than ours in any way. Because Spotify’s app is garbage and Apple can very much do better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I wish they would in this area because I don’t want to use Spotify for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of reasons. You know, many of which are political. But certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I don’t want to be tempted by any part of their app being better.
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One of us is geotagging!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to do the thing that I do every once in a while, which is I attempt to take a victory lap on something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then I’m shot down. So here we go, everyone. I would like to tell you that I was listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the aforementioned Reconcilable Differences episode 176, The Curse of Convenience. And first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do love that show so darn much. It is so good. But beyond that, I was listening and John was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describing how you are going through old photographs, like, you know, printed photographs and scanning them and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so on and so forth, which, as with everything John talks about, is somehow riveting, even though it shouldn’t be. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s where the Victory Lap comes in. You were geotagging these photos, and I was lamenting to you just a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago that I think it’s preposterous that Mr. Metadata himself didn’t want to put geotags in any of his pictures,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I said, you should do that, you never know when you might want it, and listen to that. Apparently, John, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geotagging your photos, and I am doing my Victory Lap as we speak.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think you are aided there by the incredibly slow scanner I have.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Part of the problem, I mean, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you listen to the episode, unfortunately this part is in the members only after shows, you’d have to go to relay.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John I think. I’m just going off the top of my head there, to hear the member thing. But yeah, the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is doing something like this, scanning photos, there’s a lot of downtime where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the scanner. And so you’re looking for other things to do. And part of
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m doing with that time is taking the previous batch and retouching them and rotating them and fixing them. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John while I’m in there, I’m like, okay, well, I’ve done, I’ve got them all looking nice and the scanner is only halfway through.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do I do now? Well, might as well geotag them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like I said on the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John like part of what I’m doing with geotagging is because how can you geotag photos from a long time ago?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, if they’re like in my childhood home, I know the address. Like, so I just do that. And as
⏹️ ▶️ John I said on the show, Some of them that are beach photos. I know the spot on the beach, so I just drop the pin, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John on Google Maps, like with the satellite view, and just get the latitude and longitude, because I literally know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, down to, you know, 10 feet where it was taken from. And that’s a fun thing to do while I wait for the scanner
⏹️ ▶️ John to finish, yeah. So I don’t do it with all of them. I can’t do it with all of them, but it’s something for me to do while I wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the scanner to slowly grind. And here’s the thing I don’t understand about the scanner. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m putting multiple photographs on a flatbed scanner at the same time, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because, you know, I figured that’s more efficient, but I put a bunch down there. And flatbed scanner, it’s got like a
⏹️ ▶️ John little bar, I think, that like kind of like shines light and moves across and scans, right? And the bar goes across,
⏹️ ▶️ John the width of the thing goes, and you know, and I imagine it just lighting up a row at a time of the
⏹️ ▶️ John image and recording the pixel values in that little, I’m assuming that’s how it works. I don’t know the details, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I expect to happen is I line up all the photos on the flatbed scanner and the little bar goes
⏹️ ▶️ John and just goes from one end of the flatbed to the other and scans all the pictures. Cause if I had put a flat piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of paper there, like the scanning bed is, I don’t know, it’s like 11 inches by 14 inches, whatever it is. If I put a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of paper filling like the whole area, it would scan that, it would just go and scan the whole page, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I put five photos there in the image capture app and I like show, and I say, I want
⏹️ ▶️ John this to come out as multiple files, it does one pass for each photo. So it goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John first photo. And then it goes back to the beginning, scans the second one. It goes back to the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John scans. And that’s why it takes for freaking ever. And I think that’s incredibly inefficient and I don’t understand why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that. So anyway, that’s why I’m geotagging photos now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, I don’t care how you got there. I just care that you got there. I’m excited. And then…
Follow-up: Streaming apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since we’re in apparently the John Power Hour, would you like to tell us about the feedback to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely delightful streaming app spec?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so making up for the fact that I didn’t post any blog posts last year, so now I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done two this year, so I’m maintaining my one per year average.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, wait, if one blog post is a follow-up to one that came shortly before, does that count
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like a whole separate one, or is it more like a 1.5 situation? No, it’s a whole separate one. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got a different URL. It’s got a title. It’s the whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the last one where we talked about streaming apps and my spec for the bare bones features
⏹️ ▶️ John that they should all have. And then I said I wanted to do a post about the feedback I was getting, and I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put a link in the show notes. The title is very similar to the other one, so some people might think, oh, I already read this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is just about the feedback. I’m not gonna go through it all here. Again, I talked about it more in rectives.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m just gonna tell you that the upshot is the overwhelming feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John like 80% of all the feedback I got from people was people saying, I hate it when I launch a video
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming app and I can’t continue watching the thing I was previously watching. Everybody complains, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like the number one complaint, not even close. So much so
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, it just, I was in the car with my daughter and I was saying, I was gonna talk about it on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John She doesn’t care about technology or, you know, she watches streaming stuff all the time and we have all these streaming
⏹️ ▶️ John services, but she doesn’t care about apps or whatever. So I said, what do you think about streaming apps? I’m going to be talking about on a podcast. She’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to sort of explain what the heck a streaming app is. You know, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like not the shows that are on them, but like the actual thing you’re using to watch the shows. What do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John about those? And you can tell she really hadn’t given them much thought because you know, kids just take things for granted.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just how the world works. You can watch TV shows on your magical little device. I was like, yeah, but if you think about the apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John like do you have anything to say about them? Any kind of opinion? And she said, I find it kind of annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John when I go to the app and I can’t find the show I was watching. It was literally the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco she said, totally unprompted.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mention anything about it. I’m like, this is just like the original sin
⏹️ ▶️ John of streaming apps. And I go into this post, a further explanation of like why
⏹️ ▶️ John that is. Someone from Hulu is saying that we actually did A-B testing and determined that it drove engagement. And so like
⏹️ ▶️ John the theory that it drives more engagement is not just a theory, it’s a real thing that happened and then it caused them to change their apps to make them worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John For people who won’t read it, I will just throw in the money sentence that I almost bolded but didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea that you have some kind of engagement-based metric where like, well, if we make it harder for you to find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show you’re watching, you’ll try more new stuff, and if that’s actually good for you because you’ll discover new shows and
⏹️ ▶️ John do all these other things, you can convince yourself that this is better because it will make the company more money, or
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you can convince yourself that it’s better for the customer because it will help them discover new shows and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be happier in the end because they discovered that amazing show that they wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you agree with all that, which I don’t, but even if you stipulate that for the sake of argument,
⏹️ ▶️ John sure, that’s all true, people hate it. They hate not
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to find that thing they were watching. And the adaptation of this old saying, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I could not find the source of, so I just linked the quote investigator, was people won’t remember what you
⏹️ ▶️ John said, but they will remember how you made them feel. And that applies to applications
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. People will not remember that your app helped them find
⏹️ ▶️ John their new favorite television show. They’ll remember that your app was frustrating and they will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John associate that frustration with your brand. And so even if it is better, which I don’t think it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John to intentionally make it harder to find what people were watching, everyone hates
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Please don’t do it. Yeah, we’ll see if anything changes, But
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing the incentives so clearly outlined like this, it seems like nothing will change, because as far as these companies are concerned,
⏹️ ▶️ John the applications are working as designed. And in the end, as has
⏹️ ▶️ John been discussed, really, the TV shows matter. And we will suffer through almost any application to get to the Play button to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. So probably not a lot of incentive for this to change, but boy, it’s kind of a shame.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been loving your posts about this. And I’m sad that I’m not gonna get another post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about anything until 2023. So it’s been a fun ride. Well, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Stranger things have happened.
NVIDIA (not) buying ARM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a few things to clear out in the main show. I don’t know how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time we’ll have for it, but we wanted to start tonight with the actually fairly old news at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about NVIDIA Intel in ARM or most especially NVIDIA in ARM. So we talked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I guess it was like a year or two back, when was that? It was September of 2020, which I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it was yesterday, but time is flat circle. We talked about how NVIDIA was trying to acquire ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ARM being, how would you describe ARM? I don’t know, I feel like I’m gonna butcher this if I make an attempt
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The company that came up with the instruction set and CPU, many of the CPU designs
⏹️ ▶️ John that are used in cell phones and many other things. There are small, low-power chips, and when people started
⏹️ ▶️ John making smartphones, ARM chips were ideally suited to it because they were small and low-power.
⏹️ ▶️ John And eventually, Apple decided to put ARM chips in the iPhone, and then it started making its
⏹️ ▶️ John own chips based on the ARM instruction set, and the rest is history.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, thank you. So early, I think it was late January, early February,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were some rumblings that, oh, this acquisition may not go through because a lot of regulators
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were really unhappy about it across the entire world. And then sure enough, it was looks like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey February 8, the deal collapsed. Quoting from Daring Fireball,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SoftBank Media Group Corp. has shelved its blockbuster sale of ARM limited to US chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maker Nvidia Corp. valued at up to $80 billion, citing regulatory hurdles that will instead seek to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list the company. Britain’s ARM, which named a new CEO on whatever Tuesday that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said it would go public before March, 2023 and SoftBank CEO, which owns most, if not all of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicated that it would be in the United States and most likely on the NASDAQ. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to be its own thing sooner rather than later.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and for people who don’t know, ARM is not unique, but
⏹️ ▶️ John part of what makes ARM different than other CPU makers is that
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t actually have to manufacture the chips themselves. They will license the instruction
⏹️ ▶️ John set, and they will license CPU designs to people. And they will license to Apple the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to make their own chips that are compatible. So if you want to make a chip, ARM will license
⏹️ ▶️ John you, here’s a design for a chip. Tell me how big you want it or whatever. But you can also get, what is it called, architecture license,
⏹️ ▶️ John where ARM just says, OK, well, you just make your own chips. We’ll tell you how the instructions are supposed to work, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you go ahead and you any way you want. Um, and so when anybody wanted to buy them, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not entirely clear what people are scared about from antitrust other than just like, you know, two big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that are really important to the world combining together. It doesn’t seem like it would be good for competition.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? So, but then anyway, the deal looks like it’s not going to go through. And the reason I think this is relevant is
⏹️ ▶️ John a topic that has come up a lot in the show, especially before the arm based max
⏹️ ▶️ John came out. We were talking about the possibilities like what will that be like uh they’ll lose
⏹️ ▶️ John you know apple lose compatibility with windows uh all the people who are you who enjoy doing development
⏹️ ▶️ John on x86 because they’re going to deploy on an x86 server somewhere will lose that uniformity
⏹️ ▶️ John between having the same instruction set in both places and really we’re talking about x86 64 here not
⏹️ ▶️ John plain old x86 but anyway um and the nvidia deal
⏹️ ▶️ John if nvidia had purchased them a lot of people thought that it would be the kick
⏹️ ▶️ John in the pants that ARM needs to finally sort of fulfill its destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, strike down Intel and do what, you know, what I was painting
⏹️ ▶️ John as the optimistic scenario, sort of sweep through the whole industry
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple’s move to ARM wouldn’t end up being something that hurts it in the long run because eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John everything would be ARM. PCs would be ARM, servers would be ARM, phones, iPads and
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs would be ARM and then we’d be back to where we were when everything was x86, where you know, you get a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John this x86 and you deploy on your servers x86, you can run windows natively at x86, right, that we would get
⏹️ ▶️ John back to that state. So that we would just be kind of like a bump in the road where for a while Apple moved to arm
⏹️ ▶️ John before the rest of the world did. But eventually, Windows and the server also moved to
⏹️ ▶️ John arm and in fact, the phones and iPads were already on arm and we have this beautiful future where
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody uses ARM processors, and they licensed the ARM instruction set from this one company.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not great that one company controls it all, but really, since everyone can license it and Apple makes its own chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone can make their own chips if they want to, it is actually a more competitive landscape than when x86 dominated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the argument is the reason that hasn’t been happening is because ARM, this relatively
⏹️ ▶️ John little company that doesn’t even make its own chips and just licenses the instruction set
⏹️ ▶️ John and chip designs that it makes to other people, it’s not in a position, It doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John the people, the skills, or maybe even the desire to do what it would take to displace x86.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what it would take is all of the sort of tool chain stuff, compilers,
⏹️ ▶️ John software support. Like there’s a big software component to sort of, that Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John has with x86 now that ARM doesn’t yet have that has been slowing
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM’s raw. Even things like the server, where it seems like such a clear win, like Amazon’s been rolling out ARM servers
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re like, they’re faster, they’re cheaper, they’re lower power. It’s like, what’s the holdup? Like, why isn’t everybody deploying
⏹️ ▶️ John an arm and AWS? It’s so much better than x86. What’s the downside? And the downside
⏹️ ▶️ John is, well, there’s a whole ecosystem around x86. It’s been there for decades that is very mature and it’s been built
⏹️ ▶️ John up and it’s taking a long time to go through that. So the NVIDIA, if NVIDIA bought them, it’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, NVIDIA has got tons of money. NVIDIA has the software expertise. They know how to make an ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the whole reason everyone’s using NVIDIA stuff for like Bitcoin mining and crap. and you know, before that CUDA
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the NVIDIA performance with game drivers, NVIDIA understands that there’s a market they care about, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you like the full stack, including all the software support and the tooling and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they can, you know, get that going. Now, this deal has been, you know, shelved.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I think it’s good that the deal didn’t go through because I don’t like these big companies combining. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of was looking forward to a silver lining of this deal being
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe it would accelerate ARM because I do want ARM to replace x86 everywhere because I don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple being the odd one out with the Mac on ARM and PC still on x86. I see no reason why
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole world couldn’t be one big happy family all on ARM at the same time. There already is Windows for
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM, but is it more popular than x86 Windows? No. There already is ARM in the server,
⏹️ ▶️ John but is it more popular on the server side than x86? Not yet, right? So maybe we’ll just get there more slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but I thought this was worth noting that potentially a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John could have accelerated this has been canceled. Again, I think this is the right decision. I don’t like it when
⏹️ ▶️ John very big, very powerful companies combine into one company. I feel like that’s bad for everybody involved, but I was
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of looking forward to that silver lining.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I hear you. You know what’s funny? This is tangentially related. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t recall having heard a lot of moaning or complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who were previously like virtualizing Windows and are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now in the Apple Silicon world and can’t do that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would have been me several years ago because I was living in VMware Fusion every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day to do my work in Visual Studio. I think a lot of that is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the environment landscape keeps changing. My limited understanding of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on in C-Sharp these days is that a lot of work is done on, was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Visual Studio Core, excuse me,.NET Core or something like that, which is a cross-platform thing. That apparently,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw a tweet recently, I won’t be able to find it, but apparently, it came from Silverlight of all places,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really weird and funky. But anyways, it’s fascinating to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, when I went to using a Mac in the late aughts, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a relatively crazy thing to do at the time, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John especially living in a Windows world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, for me, because I was living in this Windows world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for like work and stuff. You’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows developer. You wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey be a Windows developer on a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, exactly. And so, sorry, that was ambiguous, though. I apologize. So, anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so yeah, so it was a little bit bananas at the time, but now it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are very few people, I mean, I personally haven’t heard of anyone who is really burned or is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lingering on Intel on account of these sorts of problems. problems. Now, maybe you spent $15,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to $20,000 on your computer setup, and that’s why you’re lingering on Intel, hi, John. But for people with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal computers, I haven’t heard any real problems with it, which is really fascinating and really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, speaking of companies that have the skills and the experience building ecosystems,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft in theory has all the tools. It’s got plenty of money. They know how to build an ecosystem with
⏹️ ▶️ John software tooling, all the way from the compilers and the IDEs to the libraries
⏹️ ▶️ John that go with it, like there should in theory be no reason that Intel can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John shift the entire Windows PC market over to ARM. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been, you know, Apple has gone through multiple processor transitions and has done all each one better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the last and Microsoft has never done it. I don’t know if Microsoft is institutionally
⏹️ ▶️ John unwilling to do a processor transition or incapable. Windows on ARM shows
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not unwilling because why Why would they have even tried to do Windows on ARM? But they have not done a good
⏹️ ▶️ John job. It’s been this weird product that was kind of separate from the regular Windows because you don’t want to screw with the regular Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like their market is different than Apple’s market. It is much bigger. It involves more people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John resistant to change. I understand their task is different than Apple’s. Apple is, you know, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac in particular is small, still small enough that Apple can kind of do what they want and have all these users who are very
⏹️ ▶️ John dedicated to it or whatever. But I feel like I got a long enough timeline. Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to pull this off. So they’ve had a couple of false starts with Windows on ARMS. I’m hoping there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason that Microsoft can’t do it eventually. And even if the server battle goes differently
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reason, Intel starts manufacturing on TSMC 3 nanometer and come roaring back and
⏹️ ▶️ John fight back against the ARM chips that are outperforming them on the server, at the very least, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John should be somewhat motivated to not be tied to
⏹️ ▶️ John x86. I mean, you know, Microsoft has had it good because, you know, they’ve got Intel and AMD, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they have two possible choices, and they’re always fighting each other or whatever. But Microsoft’s ambitions
⏹️ ▶️ John with Surface really lend themselves in the same way that Apple’s do to not only using ARM chips, but making
⏹️ ▶️ John their own ARM chips for their own hardware. And, you know, it seems like for a
⏹️ ▶️ John decade or more now, Microsoft has really wished that it could be Apple. Like, the hardware that it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple-ish, and not in the sense of, like, what the hardware looks like, although sometimes it is that, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ John sense that Microsoft likes the idea that they can control the whole stack and give an experience that PC
⏹️ ▶️ John vendors were not giving. And they can do that even better with ARM. So I really hope they pull
⏹️ ▶️ John it off because I don’t like, you know, the honeymoon period when I had my cheese grater,
⏹️ ▶️ John or cheese grater as I guess, well, my one cheese. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just one, right? Wait, now we’re talking about the Macs again though, right? Not the Parmesan
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Power Mac G5 was in the same case, but that was PowerPC. Anyway, that honeymoon decade
⏹️ ▶️ John where everyone was on x86 and was all one big happy family, except we had the good OS and the nicer hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope we can get back to that again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is anybody making like PC ARM processors outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the server space? Are there any consumer facing PC ARM CPUs that Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could even sell ARM Windows for?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they do. They sell ARM based hardware with, I think it’s like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the names or numbers are of them, but actual ARM CPU designs that are
⏹️ ▶️ John PC or laptop caliber chips, and they put them in their Surface, are they in the Surface products? Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they sell with the ARM chips in them. There are ones that are there. I don’t think there’s anything around that would rival like a Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Apple doesn’t even have one of those yet, but there are options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there anything even rivaling a MacBook Air?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yeah, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the M1 is so good. Like is there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anything that-
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, rivaling in terms of it’s in the same power envelope and it runs Windows okay. But no, they’re not as good as the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John because, you know, Apple is on top of the game in terms of desktop caliber
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM chips for sure. But I mean, there was some other stories down in the topics thing about other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John getting in on this. Was it Google at the very least? A bunch of other companies are like, we should do
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple did. We shouldn’t buy the CPU designs from ARM or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John who else makes them?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Qualcomm or whatever. Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John of them, I think. Yeah, yeah. Like we shouldn’t get those because then you just have a choice of what they offer to sell. If we make our own
⏹️ ▶️ John chips, we can make them exactly the way we want the same way that Apple made their chips. So they perform well with Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. They do what Apple needs it to do. We should all do that, shouldn’t we? But you know, if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at how long it took Apple to execute that plan, it is not something you turn around in a year. That is a multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John many year, five year, six year, 10 year project that some people are only embarked
⏹️ ▶️ John on maybe a few years ago. So it’s going to take a while for the fruits of that labor to appear. But I hope Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has shown them the way to say if you want really good chips that are well suited to your products,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to do it yourself.
node breakage manager
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so this also happened a little while ago. We are, what is the line from Godfather? We’re handling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the family business or whatever. That’s it. We’re trying to clean everything out. So a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while ago, a developer corrupted sort of an NPM library, or two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NPM libraries, Colors and Faker, which broke thousands of apps. So what the crap did I just say? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NPM is Node Package Manager. It’s a way to get other people’s code into your apps in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certain contexts. And there were two super popular ones, one called Colors, one called Faker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the developer of these broke those deliberately. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that caused quite a kerfuffle. So let me read from bleepingcomputer.com. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The developer behind popular open source NPM libraries Colors, aka colors.js on GitHub, and Faker,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aka Faker.js on GitHub, intentionally introduced mischievous commits in them that are impacting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at this, you know, when this was written, impacting thousands of applications relying on these Yesterday, users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of popular open source projects such as Amazon’s cloud development kit, AWS CDK, were left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned on seeing their application print gibberish messages in their console. GitHub has reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suspended the developer’s account, and that too has caused mixed reactions. Quote, removing your own code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from GitHub is a violation of their terms of service, WTF. This is a kidnapping, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey responded software engineer Sergio Gomez. Quote, the responses to the colors slash faker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey author sabotaging their own packages are really telling about how many corporate developers think they are morally entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to other source developers unpaid labor without contributing anything back, wrote one Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey user. So this is a really interesting case study in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how open source affects the world or the corporate world, if not the world. Insofar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as here’s a library that was written by some person, presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with little to no compensation by darn near anyone, it gets used darn near everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this person, kind of justifiably, is a little perturbed that they haven’t gotten compensated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for any of this. So they take matters into their own hands and kind of ruin it, which is perhaps not the most mature approach,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but is, I suppose, within their rights, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think? Well, I mean, you can’t say, okay, I’m gonna do this work for free and anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can use it. And then when a bunch of people use it, say, wait, now I want money. Like, you know, that’s kind of on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you at that point. So, you know, obviously, like, I think that’s a huge jerk move to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do something like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s also a quick way to, you know, probably harm your chances of working in the industry again in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for anybody else ever again. So that’s also, you know, not, it’s on, it’s both a jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move and also a stupid move. like you shouldn’t do it. But, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being said, like there are a lot of underlying issues here. I mean, first of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, this is admittedly, like if you want, you know, next to the entry of not invented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here syndrome in the dictionary is a picture of me. So from that point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent self-awareness, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like from with that adequately disclaimed, you know, I try to use as little third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco party code in my apps as possible, which is often like damn near zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I, the idea that I would have any kind of deployment of an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where not only am I using third-party code but that it is auto updating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that third party’s code without my like first downloading it manually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and testing it. What? I mean I know that you can use a package
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manager to pin to a certain version. I know that, but I bet a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this problem is that a lot of people aren’t doing that. Possibly even the majority of people aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that. And that to me, that is just incredibly irresponsible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco programming practices. And whatever you want to say about third-party code, I’m sure everybody likes it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than I do. But if you’re going to use third-party code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you download early, you use one version of that code. And if you want to have some process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can check for updates and test them, great. But to have it auto update in any of your deployments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s nuts to me. That isn’t just like, you know, living on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge. That’s negligence. And you should not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like a mark of advocating testing. You did it twice. Oh, you’re going to get the new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. How can you tell whether the new version works? Well, you’ll test. I know you meant manually
⏹️ ▶️ John testing it, I guess. Anyway, yeah, so you can definitely pin versions. I mean, part of the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that version pinning, that it is a more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John topic for NPM in particular. We’ve talked about this in the past, that the way Node has grown up, the culture
⏹️ ▶️ John and the environment, is that there are tons and tons of tiny little libraries. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dependencies
⏹️ ▶️ John for even a trivial, like, hello world website using a common web framework. They’re just, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very small. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we give people too many hardware resources? Is that the problem? they don’t know what to do with it, so they wanna burn it all
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it. No, it’s more of a cultural issue, because it’s not like they’re, it’s still just two lines of code,
⏹️ ▶️ John and two lines of code performs the same, whether it’s in one file or another one. Like it’s not, especially for a server to resident application,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that big of a deal performance wise. But you could argue the granularity is stupid, but it is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But what that means is, if you pin things, then you fall subject to
⏹️ ▶️ John another one of the things that ails the Node.js culture community,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is security problems, right? If you have so many dependencies, people are constantly finding
⏹️ ▶️ John security problems in them. And if you pin your versions,
⏹️ ▶️ John like wait two weeks, and now suddenly your application is vulnerable to 50 different things, right? And so you
⏹️ ▶️ John can say, well, then you should do that manual process where you test everything or whatever. It is a force
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling you back in the direction of saying, I’m going to honor the semantic
⏹️ ▶️ John versioning and I’m going to pin to, I’ll take any patch version or I’ll take any minor version,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because as long as it’s not a major version upgrade, I’ll auto take that one because I will assume those are security
⏹️ ▶️ John patches or performance fixes or whatever. You know, I won’t pin it all the way down.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll pin it part of the way down. Uh, you know, and the reason this comes up in this particular story is like, Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. That probably works. That’s probably a reasonable compromise between pinning it completely down
⏹️ ▶️ John and being vulnerable to a thousand security exploits within a month or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John letting it be a free for all. find something in the middle. But this story is about a developer maliciously
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something. If you’re doing something maliciously, you just make it a patch version, right? See, oh, yeah, no, this is just a
⏹️ ▶️ John minor change. I didn’t totally replace all my code with a funny message, right? You know, you can use
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just individual developers, right? And, you know, Arco called this a jerk move, right? This
⏹️ ▶️ John gets at, like, this particular story in the person, I’m not too interested in why they
⏹️ ▶️ John were angry or, you know, whatever, I don’t think there’s there’s any justification for them. I think they were just a jerk. They did a mean thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the thing that I’m much more interested in is how many
⏹️ ▶️ John big important companies with lots of money are at the mercy of jerks.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, I mean, not inside the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, they’re all at the mercy of jerks inside the company. We’ve talked about this issue in the past, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But externally, right? That is setting aside the jerks who are being jerks and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing mean things, they’re doing whatever. Why is it that you with all your money and all your people and all your smart big brains
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever are essentially building your business on top of work
⏹️ ▶️ John that other people are contributing to you out of the goodness of their heart. And you have no defense
⏹️ ▶️ John against any of them turning bad, especially again, in a node where it’s not just, you know, one or two or three people that
⏹️ ▶️ John you could name, but literally tens, hundreds, thousands of people are contributing to the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, like Marco said, if you make something for free and put it out in the world and put it in a license that anybody can
⏹️ ▶️ John use this for free, you know, that’s, that’s a choice that you’ve made. If you later come
⏹️ ▶️ John to regret that choice, because suddenly it’s used by everybody, you’re like, man, if I had a nickel for everybody to use my library, I’d be rich now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, you didn’t make that choice, right? But also, if you want to take your ball and go
⏹️ ▶️ John home, you can also do that, right? Because it’s your ball, right? You can just stop developing it,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you can maliciously develop it, or you could, you know, intentionally introduce bugs. That makes you a jerk, but it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do. And there’s always going to be weird stuff like that. And the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, we should yell at those people because by yelling, we’ll somehow stop jerks from being
⏹️ ▶️ John jerks. Someone is always gonna get mad and do a thing and take their ball and go home or screw things up or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like it’s on the multi-billion dollar corporations or even the individual small companies to
⏹️ ▶️ John be thoughtful about the third party code that they use and game
⏹️ ▶️ John this out and say, if something goes wrong with the third party code, how do we handle that? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John we do it by pinning our versions all the way down? then how do we handle security problems? Do we have an automated
⏹️ ▶️ John test suite? Like there are ways to deal with this and you should talk about them at your company. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think the solution is don’t use third-party software and I don’t think the solution is just don’t worry about it. I forget if this story
⏹️ ▶️ John was before or after the Log4J thing came out.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know if it
⏹️ ▶️ John was after. It was after? I’m pretty sure. But the Log4J thing is another example, right? This is a widely
⏹️ ▶️ John used piece of software that just had a bug, like, you know, no one was doing anything malicious, it’s just like, oh, software has bugs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John but so many people use this software. It was, and probably still is, a fire
⏹️ ▶️ John drill across the entire world of software, saying, if you have anything that uses Java, chances
⏹️ ▶️ John are it uses Log4J, and now you are vulnerable to this exploit. Patch all your software.
⏹️ ▶️ John And who develops Log4J? Oh, a bunch of volunteers. Oh, and the whole world runs on it? Yeah, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John much. So what is your, you know, this is a situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not defending against someone malicious, you know, they just happen to be a bug human error, it happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But suddenly, this is like the security problem that I mentioned with node suddenly, without
⏹️ ▶️ John you knowing it, you and all your software are vulnerable to this exploit, because it’s already in there. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to do a thing to get it fixed. And a lot of people were like, when are you going to fix this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug, we need to fix ASAP. It’s like, they’re not your employee, the log for J team doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Do you pay them? Are they your employee, you can’t make them fix things faster, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could just decide we’re never going to fix this. They’re not, they didn’t do that. They’re not a bunch of jerks. They’re nice people. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel for them because the whole world is looking at them and say, Hey, we’ve been using your software for free for
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade now, but it’s really important that you not sleep the next 48 to 96 hours and fix this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug for us. Because our big, important company from which you profit zero amount,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, is in really in a bind here. So you really need to fix that. And that is the other part of this problem, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to use open source software, you don’t, and you’re not going to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John to help support it. You’re not gonna have a standing army on staff who understands
⏹️ ▶️ John the source code for log4j and can fix their own bugs in it and contribute them back to the source or not, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s open source, depending on the license, you can do whatever you have. But if you’re not gonna do that, if you’re just gonna assume all that third party
⏹️ ▶️ John open source software we have, it’s someone else’s problem to make sure it’s good and fit for purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it ever isn’t good, you know, even just something as simple as a bug, it’s someone else’s problem to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it and we’re gonna get really mad and pound the table and say, someone needs to fix this software that our company is built on. Well, why don’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it? But it’s not our software, it’s third party software, they should fix it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they probably eventually will because they’re not jerks, but in the meantime, can’t you have anyone who works
⏹️ ▶️ John for your company that can help fix it faster or fix it yourself? Well, no, that’s how we save
⏹️ ▶️ John money by not paying anyone to do that and we just use third party code. And it gets to, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the XKCD comic, It’s 2347, we’ll put a link in the show notes. It
⏹️ ▶️ John shows like a block structure being built, this big elaborate block structure, it looks all fancy, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one side of it that’s held up by this tiny little skinny block, and it said, the big structure
⏹️ ▶️ John is all modern digital infrastructure, and the tiny little block, the caption says, a project some random
⏹️ ▶️ John person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So much of it
⏹️ ▶️ John that we build on is like at the mercy of a small
⏹️ ▶️ John number of nice people continuing to be not only nice, but essentially infallible. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second they are not both nice and infallible, these big corporations turn their sore on like
⏹️ ▶️ John eye and say, fix this bug, it’s going to destroy our multi-billion dollar business. And you’re like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just in my basement in Nebraska and I’ve been maintaining this open source thing that you’ve been using. And yeah, we let you use it
⏹️ ▶️ John for free, but it’s not my problem that your company is gonna burn down. If you care that much about this, maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have, let’s say, you know, bought a support contract for this for some company that can do that or hired
⏹️ ▶️ John people who know enough about the source code to fix it or essentially not, you know, not take
⏹️ ▶️ John the software, but then not be it’s not like giving back. It’s like, Oh, you took it, you have to get back, you don’t have to get back, or license
⏹️ ▶️ John says you don’t have to get back, you don’t have to give back. But the second you get into a bind, that’s on you to say we never
⏹️ ▶️ John prepared for this scenario, we are not prepared to support ourselves, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not a case of like I took and didn’t give back, which, you know, they did, but you’re allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to and according to these licenses, it’s a case of we did not plan properly. We thought that
⏹️ ▶️ John this nice person would always be nice and also that they would never make a mistake. And that is a poor assumption.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of hilarious to see like in response to the Log4J thing, like the US government
⏹️ ▶️ John made this panel and this committee or whatever to say, this is because it’s a national security concern. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the government and military uses software that uses Log4J and suddenly we’re vulnerable to these exploits.
⏹️ ▶️ John How could it be? suddenly we’re vulnerable to cyber espionage and the government
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t fix it because we’re relying on, what is open source software? What do you mean someone else wrote it and they don’t work? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John having a committee where they have to sort of come to terms with the reality that we’ve all been living in because suddenly there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a flashpoint event that makes everybody realize just how precarious everything is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is actually a useful, I mean, I think the government committee, especially in the US is gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John pointless and terrible because government stuff that has to do with computers is never good. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s good for everyone to have like a moment of reckoning and saying, this is not new. This is the way
⏹️ ▶️ John it always has been and will continue to be. And I hope this helps people inside companies
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. Perhaps sees this, you know, every, every crisis is an opportunity inside a company
⏹️ ▶️ John sees this crisis slash opportunity to say, Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you like how this feels? If you don’t, maybe we should put some small amount of money towards
⏹️ ▶️ John staffing somebody either in this company or a contractor or giving directly to the open source maintainers,
⏹️ ▶️ John or having more commercial companies spring up that will offer commercial support contracts,
⏹️ ▶️ John do something that involves money to make it so that we are not vulnerable to this type of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And it doesn’t mean giving them money, necessarily giving money to people that wrote software, there are tons of other things you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do. That’s why there’s so many companies built on open source products, where, why would I pay this company for this product,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can just get the source code for free. Well, you’re paying them for a support contract, which they charge you through
⏹️ ▶️ John the nose for. So you do have someone who you can yell out when it breaks because you’re paying them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re not gonna pay any, and again, with Node, it gets complicated because like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have 100,000 dependencies. You’re telling me there’s some company that’s gonna support all 100,000 of these? Do I have to give $10 checks to 100,000 people?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but maybe if you hired like a team of 10 Node.js
⏹️ ▶️ John experts and gave them a salary and kept them full-time employees of your company, the next time something went wrong with some library, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could parachute in and fix it themselves in your own local copy. So I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John this story probably hits closer to home. I guess if you’re an open source author, maybe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John rooting for the guy to, you know, be mad that he didn’t get paid or whatever, but I’m not in that camp. I’m definitely in
⏹️ ▶️ John the camp of rooting for the people who run these big companies to get a clue
⏹️ ▶️ John that they actually need to do something to protect themselves, their company and their customers
⏹️ ▶️ John from things like this. And it’s not the fault of the open source people. And it’s not the fault of, you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, mean people doing mean things like this guy with colors like that’s, that’s the, you know, not the common case. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to think about that, because that’s kind of the worst case scenario. If the log for j people turned evil, they could have done much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the funny thing is, you know, you talked about ways that corporate America can help and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discourse did a victory lap about this after it happened. And, and when I first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read I was like, yeah, go ahead, you guys, great work. And now reading it again with a little distance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between, you know, when it was posted now. So it, it, the post is discourse gives back 2021 edition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Discourse had a great year. We raised 20 million, a $20 million series A investment, yada, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they talk about how they should give back, blah, blah, blah. And they enumerate, I don’t know, maybe 10 different donations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they made to different open source or community projects. And at first I was like, yeah, great work folks. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, This is the way it should be. But it occurred to me the sum total of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, 10 of these donations was like less than a hundred grand in the same post. They just said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discourse had a great year. We raised a $20 million investment. Like so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that $20 million, they, they, they were able to shave off less than a hundred grand. Well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you’re not going to get like that kind of feel good stuff where you chuck a couple of bucks over the thing. It’s better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you have to think about is what is the value, the future value of our company?
⏹️ ▶️ John Discourse is going to be this big product. The future value of discourse in some degree depends
⏹️ ▶️ John on discourse not breaking and being terrible and having security problems. How much is it worth to you to make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure discourse continues to function correctly? And it should be worth a lot more than a one-time, feel-good,
⏹️ ▶️ John random investment to develop. Because honestly, that’s probably, those developers, they don’t wanna work for discourse. They can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get $10 from every company and be like a $10 employee of every company in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they don’t wanna start a company that sells commercial support for their open source library. And again, with the Node.js
⏹️ ▶️ John case, there’s thousands of those people. So how are you gonna work that? What it
⏹️ ▶️ John calls into question is how much are we building our business on software that we didn’t write that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John no way to support? That’s a risk factor in your company. Sometimes it’s a risk worth taking, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John get lucky and everything works out, and eventually you get so big that you’re too big to fail or whatever, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like that you can deal with these bumps in the road. But when you’re just starting out, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a huge boost from building on open source software. If you get unlucky, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the skills to fix it. You can’t pay people to help you fix it. And it breaks and
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes down your company. But Discourse is probably big enough now where they should be thinking about how do we do this in-house?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it’s good to give money to the people who make the software. Hell, if you, you know, if Discourse were smart and they really care
⏹️ ▶️ John about some particular library that’s really important to their product, See if you can hire that person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, maybe they don’t wanna be hired, but then maybe you can hire someone and say your only job is to be
⏹️ ▶️ John the in-house guru for these two libraries. So learn the source, start contributing to it, make
⏹️ ▶️ John a local fork of it if needed or whatever, but we need that library to always work and if it ever breaks, we need
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be fixed ASAP, so now that’s your job. And that’s gonna take a lot more than a one-time $100,000 donation. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get a single programmer to do anything for that amount of money once you factor in healthcare and all the other stuff. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think it’s, it is definitely better than just ignoring the problem and doing nothing. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think discourse is, you know, it’s good for them to be proud that they are essentially, we’re giving away money,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, for free. We’re just throwing at these people because they made some software we use, but they’re not actually solving
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem because that money doesn’t entitle them three years from now when something breaks in some obscure library
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, hey, remember we gave you $5,000 three years ago? Well, it’s time for you to get up out of bed at 3 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John and fix this problem for us. and they would say, who is this?
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco today. Help your organization move to a more modern, secure, hybrid work model.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to JumpCloud for sponsoring our show.
#askatp: Coffee setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we have a twofer from Amri Arbive. First of all, what’s Marco’s current coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup? Has Marco tried James Hoffman’s excellent AeroPress technique? And also, why aren’t you roasting your own
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coffee, man? What’s going on there? This is
⏹️ ▶️ John amazingly topical. I didn’t know about the roasting stuff. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current coffee setup is AeroPress still for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m making only one cup, and if I’m I’m making more than one, which is the case most mornings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using my Ratio 8. It’s a fancy hipster coffee maker that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very nice. It is an automatic drip machine. It’s just a good automatic drip machine. And it’s not as good as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AeroPress coffee, but it is less work in my morning routine when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making two cups. Because now that I’m doing my big, like fake eggs with vegetables,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stirred into them and cooked up, you know, my breakfast is a lot of work these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through my own choice and I appreciate that, you know, but the time spent on the coffee needed to go down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and with the ratio eight being a drip machine, I could kind of like batch it and set it all up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then just hit go and then walk away and do my other stuff and then come back right before, you know, I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m serving breakfast. Everything’s hot, ready to go, pour the coffee and it’s done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for people who don’t know, the ratio eight machine has wood on it. Of
⏹️ ▶️ John when he says the hipster coffee maker, it’s got wood on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was turned on to it years ago by Chase Reeves when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I met him in Portland. He showed it to me and it looked really cool and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picked it out for, you know, mostly aesthetic reasons if I’m honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s got wood on it!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, it’s really nice, but it’s a really great coffee maker also. Anyway, so yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the coffee setup. And I stopped roasting because Two things changed. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, my tastes shifted a little bit lighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than they were at first. That made it harder for me to do my own roast because making a light roast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a home roaster is actually pretty difficult to really nail it. And certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have the skill to really do that well. And secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mail order things all got better over the last X years. and I started roasting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, 10 years ago? It’s been a long time. Well, in the meantime, we’ve had a lot more really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail-order options, and I’ve been really happy with those. And so my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taste shifted towards a type of coffee that I’m not very good at roasting, and also the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco available options for me to just buy someone else’s expertly roasted version of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increased and got better. So that’s what happened. Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal. So have you tried this AeroPress technique? I have not watched this video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I watched that entire series of videos and I still haven’t done it. Because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my technique, which I do the inverted method, and I just, I kinda, you know, I grind 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grams into like a full AeroPress inverted. So I pull it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out to the four line, upside down, and I just pour in water and stir
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, wait a few seconds and I slowly press it out. And it’s fine. I’m sure I could perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that more, you know, if I actually tried this better method, but this better method is also more time consuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my method is fine, it works fine for me. This is an area where, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to care a lot about all these details and now I care less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about these details. Like I’ve been focusing my energies, you know, more intensely in areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I wanna care a lot more about and certain things had to fall by the wayside. You know, this is why, for instance, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care less about cars than I used to. that had to kind of make room for other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, you stopped caring about cars when you bought a Tesla. Hey-o!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, similarly, you know, I care a lot less about the fine details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the coffee process now, because I get results that I consider very good with very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little effort. And to answer some other questions, I am still using my Barraza Virtuoso
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grinder. I’m using the technique that I think I might’ve first saw in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a James Hopman video, where you spritz the beans with a little bit of water before you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them in the grinder and that eliminates all static clean. This is amazing. Look, if anybody out there, if you grind your own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee and you’re not doing this, I’m telling you this is this is like a life changer if you grind your own coffee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it makes a mess when you take out the little hopper because of static electricity, like making the grounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cling to everything. So you you take a little spritzer any you know any little water spritzer. I got a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on Amazon. It was like it’s made for perfume or something. I got like you know a four pack for ten bucks and you just put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plain water and and nothing special, and you just spritz the beans right before you put them in the coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grinder, that gives it just enough moisture that static electricity doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco factor in. It doesn’t have a chance to do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John People with hair will be familiar with this phenomenon from hair and combing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There you go, yeah. And so the beans come out, and it’s like they come out perfectly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s no dust flying everywhere. It’s a game changer for how messy your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coffee counter gets when you’re making coffee. Anyway, so yeah, I’m still using my Braco Virtuoso from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably 10 or 12 years old now. It’s still working great, because they build those things with pretty good quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, and then Aeropress or the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brachio8. Do you have any particular beans that you can throw your weight behind?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I go between a few. So former sponsor and possibly future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor, Yes Please, that is my like standard, like I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall back to that one. So that’s always in the rotation. Usually I get that one every two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bags that I get. And then the one that I’m mixing in with it, I will either do something from trade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’ll go between different roasters there, or I’ll go to Intelligentsia. All three of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those options are great. They all have different things going for them and everything. All three of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them are great. I strongly recommend all three of them, honestly. So yeah, Intelligentsia, yes please, and Trade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trade, former and future sponsor, yes please, former sponsor and Intelligentsia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been none of the above.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but yeah, they all do. They all do things great. Intelligentsia’s roasts are a little bit darker,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they tend to have really nice single origins. So if I’m going for something like a really nice Costa Rica
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if when they do have Kenya, which is not that often, but you know, I’m Kenya, still my favorite, but I can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but it’s, it’s not super easy to get all year round. Uh, trade has, I mean, there’s a million options of trade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I don’t really recommend any, any particular blend or roaster, just go there if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want a million options because the whole thing, they tailor it to you and everything, that’s a good thing. And then what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great about Yes Please is that Yes Please is extremely consistent. Everything I’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, when I’ve ordered coffee from other places, I get mostly stuff I like, occasionally I get something I don’t like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes Please is like, it’s my rock of consistency. They produce something I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco liked every single time. Like that’s what’s great about it. It doesn’t always blow me away. Sometimes it’s really nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but usually it’s not like, oh my God, this is incredible. Usually it’s like, this is something I can depend on being great every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Like it’s always good. It’s definitely a crowd pleaser too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you have anybody who like is very sensitive to any more bitter roasts, you’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offend them with anything from Yes Please. So that’s why like, that’s my default. If I have to recommend something to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody who doesn’t know what they like and want something that’s like the same consistency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single time, That’s yes, please.
#askatp: Cable TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then also from Omri, is John still subscribed to cable? At what point is paying for cable no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, now I pay for cable and also tons of streaming services. It’s the future we were promised. I can
⏹️ ▶️ John pay even more money for even more things. I think cable
⏹️ ▶️ John for me is tied to my TiVo, right? So if my TiVos break
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t buy new ones, that will probably be the end of cable because
⏹️ ▶️ John cable without, well, I would say cable without TiVo is probably not going to work for me, but of course
⏹️ ▶️ John every cable company has their own, you know, server side DVR solution that they’ll try to sell you as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I would try that. But I mean, the main reason I still subscribe to it is it’s part of some big package thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and I get all the fancy channels. And there are still some things that are on
⏹️ ▶️ John television, either before or only on television,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, before on the streaming service or they’re, they’re not on the streaming service at all or they’re on the streaming service much
⏹️ ▶️ John later. And I’m not even talking about things like sports with blackout or whatever. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John every streaming service is a complete reflection, like no matter how much you pay them is a complete accurate reflection
⏹️ ▶️ John of everything that’s on all the channels that are on the large cable subscription. So it is, you know, good to
⏹️ ▶️ John have it. And it depends on what we’re doing. Like the Olympics is one example, you know, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John recording Olympics on the Tivo, but then we also subscribe to the Peacock streaming service to get even more
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I do have to say, related to streaming video apps, given that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John using an older TiVo, it’s the interface of using a TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John to jump around video on your TV is still so much better than every one of the fancy streaming apps
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s available on all these high-powered platforms, like the phone and iPad and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and websites or whatever, TiVo is still superior for that, just because it’s responsive and
⏹️ ▶️ John works and is very reliable. So yeah, I think, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’m pretty close to being able to get away without cable, but I see no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John make my, to give up what I have now, other than saving,
⏹️ ▶️ John saving the money I suppose. So I’m just going to stay with it until all my Tivos die and replacing them
⏹️ ▶️ John like Tivo still exists and will sell you a device. But I always look because they always have these come ons like
⏹️ ▶️ John save X number of hundred dollars on this Tivo, blah, blah, blah. I always look, but as far as I can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ John they do not sell a TiVo with as much storage as the one I currently have. The closest one they have, I think, they sell
⏹️ ▶️ John you is like half the storage. It’s like, why would I ever buy a TiVo that’s worse than the one I have now? Why would I, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you can replace the hard drive and blah, blah, blah, but I’m not gonna go down that road. Like, why would I buy one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John either fewer tuners or less hard drive space or both? That just seems like pointless to me. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John when my thing breaks, maybe I’ll buy the smaller one or maybe I just won’t buy one at all or maybe I’ll try the
⏹️ ▶️ John cable companies, the cable companies. I’ll try the Fios DVR, or maybe I’ll just cut
⏹️ ▶️ John the cord then. It hasn’t happened yet.
#askatp: Family contact sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Paul Walker writes, do you have a good system for managing family contacts, especially kids, friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and their parents across your multiple devices? Yeah, you tell each other, oh, so and so’s numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero. That’s what we do. I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You airdrop them the contact card.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or they are, yeah, that’s actually another good example. Yeah, but I certainly do not have a good answer for this question.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just like the photos thing. This is what I always bring up when we talk about photos is like, hey, Apple, if you think this is really hard, start with
⏹️ ▶️ John something small like contacts, because it’s a small amount of data. Photos are large and extremely numerous, but
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts are small and not that numerous. It’s a small data set. This is a great place to try
⏹️ ▶️ John out your ideas about how it can work. And the thing that it is replacing for
⏹️ ▶️ John my youth was an address book. And every member of the family in
⏹️ ▶️ John general did not have their own little address book with grandma’s phone number in it. There
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was one address
⏹️ ▶️ John book by the phone, which was attached to the wall with a wire. And in the address book
⏹️ ▶️ John was grandma’s phone number and address. grandma moved or changed their phone number,
⏹️ ▶️ John we changed it in that address book. Some people did have their own individual address books, maybe, oh you got
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone numbers of all your friends in your little address book, but you wouldn’t also probably put all of your relatives’
⏹️ ▶️ John addresses in there because those can be in the family address book. This is a model that existed for a long
⏹️ ▶️ John time before computers existed. And when computers came along, it was more convenient implementation-wise
⏹️ ▶️ John to just have their own contacts and oh, we made a great way for you to just share contacts. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else to copy. It’s like, that’s not sharing. Then now when grandma’s phone number change, everybody has to change
⏹️ ▶️ John it in all their books. That’s, you know, we have the technology, we can do better than this. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, Paul, uh, I do not have a good system
⏹️ ▶️ John family magic, family contacts. In fact, this just happened recently. Uh, my wife asked me,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s, uh, you know, what’s your brother’s address? And I said, Oh, I don’t even think I have
⏹️ ▶️ John my brother’s address in my thing. And if I do, it might be his previous house because in In our family, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John basically just decided that my wife has the canonical address book as she does the addressing of the Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ John cards. And that’s where it has to count. And I do have lots of addresses and names of people
⏹️ ▶️ John in my personal contacts. That’s Aaron. But I’m not confident they’re up to date because
⏹️ ▶️ John if something changes, we change it in her address book, which is the quote unquote real address book.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I still wanna have contacts in my thing. At the very least, I’d have like the iMessage ID of my brother so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John text with him or whatever. but I’m not confident that I have his current house address.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a terrible situation. It’s like the photo situation, but at a smaller scale. So I really hope Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this. And there are probably third-party applications that do way better. I just don’t know of them. So I don’t personally
⏹️ ▶️ John have a good system for managing family contacts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t either. I feel like maybe a decent way to do this would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of similar to how, I don’t know, for anybody who’s used 1Password for families, The idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have your own private one password items and anything you add by default is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco private, but you can then either, you have the option to move or copy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any one password item into the shared family vault. And then that’s accessible and editable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by anybody in the family. And I think that might be a good way to do contacts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you still have by default, maybe everything is still private to you because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t necessarily need the contacts everybody else in your family. But you probably have, as John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, family members or close family friends, whatever, you probably have certain ones that you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone to have access to. But that, again, you want a centralized, only one source of truth to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edit when that changes. And so maybe that could be a thing where there’s family contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you can move a contact into the family and then everyone gets it and everyone can
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, because the data is so small, there’s lots of, it’s easier to think about it here and easier to implement. In
⏹️ ▶️ John fact, Apple does something not similar, but I believe they have
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of solution to sharing for reminders, for example, because we have reminders that we share amongst the family,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think those work on an individual basis. Like when I share a reminder, it doesn’t just give a copy
⏹️ ▶️ John of it to someone else. It is both of us adding, same thing with notes. Notes, you can do a shared note, which for sure is both of us seeing the same
⏹️ ▶️ John note, and reminders, we’re both seeing the same reminder, and if I added the reminder, it updates on my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ John phone as well. That is not as convenient as what Marco was just saying, which is like, well, how about if there
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, a, you know, you could collect reminders into the family reminder library. I think you might be able to do that with reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John too. But like the point is, this is not a completely foreign concept to Apple. They have just not
⏹️ ▶️ John extended it to contacts and they certainly haven’t extended it to photos. And it is a common problem that’s going to come up
⏹️ ▶️ John in any family situation where there’s going to be some data that is private to the individuals and some data that wants to be shared.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope Apple gets around to tackling it on all of their, all the things that they collect data for eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, JumpCloud, and Lutron Caseta. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, accidental, tech podcasts so
After-show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You skipped our bonus Ask ATP, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, there’s a bonus Ask ATP, man?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s on the after show. Although before that, someone pointed out that you do, obviously, calendar sharing as well. I use Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Calendar for that, but I think Apple does it the same way. They don’t give you a copy of the calendar, it is actually a shared calendar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s a family calendar that you can make,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah, and apparently Apple will make one by default that is shared with all the people in your family. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John traveling down this road just extremely slowly. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the bonus Ask ATP very quickly was from Nick Van Du Pas, who writes, do you say you’re in front
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the computer or behind the computer? You absolutely say you’re in front of the computer. Who,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said behind? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could have a colorful turn of phrase where you could say all the people lined up behind
⏹️ ▶️ John their computers or something like that, but no, you know, I’m sitting in front of the computer. Yeah, I mean, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it varies in different English-speaking countries or maybe it varies in non-English-speaking countries, but I have
⏹️ ▶️ John always said I’m in front of the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John you doing in front of the computer all day?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sitting in front of the TV all day. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There it is. Well, if you think about the computer as having a face, what is the front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a computer and the back of a computer? I think it’s obvious that the front of the computer is the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly the keyboard. And the back of the computer is the back of the screen lit if it’s a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. Where the wires come out. Right, yeah. And so I think any way that you would try to define
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the front or back of a computer, I think people would pretty much agree on that. And where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you sit is facing its front. And your front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is facing its front as well, unless you’re doing something really weird. So I would imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I have a hard time thinking of any way somebody would perceive this as you being behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer if your front is facing the computer’s front any time you’re using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, but the thing is that phrases and language phrases don’t logically
⏹️ ▶️ John follow from, You can reverse reason it logically, but that’s not how language works.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, as someone in the chat room pointed out, in English in particular, we say you get behind the wheel of a car. And you’re not behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the wheel, you’re in front of it. But language does not follow the logic that you have just outlined. It just
⏹️ ▶️ John is what it is. And it is an idiom, a saying. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John the language that developed around computers, and televisions for that matter. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, the computer language probably just inherited from television, because we’re all sitting in front of the TV. And as soon as we got computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the first computers you were actually literally hooked up to your TV in your home. So that probably, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of explains the path that we traveled, but logic has nothing to do with it. It’s just the way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is. Well, I can see two different ways to get to, okay. So first of all, the behind the wheel of a car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about behind in the form of motion, then when the car is in motion, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going in reverse, but normally in forward motion of the car, you are behind the wheel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting point, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But where’s the front of the wheel and where’s the front of you? the same logic as before. You know what I mean? Where’s the back of the steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel? The paddles are on the back of the steering wheel. The logo is on the front. The front of you is the part where your nose is.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fronts are tasting each other. It’s the same situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but so there’s the question of like, you know, for two stationary objects,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I think you’re saying if you’re saying what special relativity, you’re really
⏹️ ▶️ John working hard to backstop for this one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re talking about objects that are stationary, if you’re saying, you know, are you in front of it or behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? Then I think that then I think the question is like what direction of of these objects facing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, so if you’re on a train, but you’re facing backwards. Right, yes. Oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so if you’re stationary, it’s a matter of which direction the objects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are facing. And if you are in motion, then it’s a matter of like, what’s the direction of motion and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which object is more in front of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re on a train, are you behind the computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But if you’re sitting backwards on
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing and you’re in front of it again, if you’re on a train going close to the speed of light When
⏹️ ▶️ John you open a laptop screen, the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How fast does
⏹️ ▶️ John come out of the laptop screen? This is going nowhere good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do we end up in Robot or Not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John This is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is kind of, yeah, what I’m saying, like, it’s just language phrases, they seem normal to
⏹️ ▶️ John you because you’re used to them, but a lot of them, if you try to, you know, explain them logically, they don’t make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just like, we all know what this means. It’s the phrase we’ve all agreed upon. It is a cultural thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why it can vary from language. What did we talk about, you know, foreign language expressions? I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t wish I could remember one of them, but like how widely they vary from country to country and language
⏹️ ▶️ John to language, all saying basically the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, one more theory. All right, so what if, so from the perspective of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what we as broadcasters would describe the position
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the audience, like if you’re a TV broadcaster, you might think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re looking through the camera, through someone’s TV screen and they are behind the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. from your perspective as a TV broadcaster, right? I can kind of understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When we talk about people’s online communication, suppose we are talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some jerk commenter on a website, we might think of that person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as being behind their computer, from our perspective, of seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them on the internet. So there is kind, like I can kind of see, I’ve heard that phrasing before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh, this is a stranger behind a screen or behind a computer. Like I have heard that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re hiding behind their computer. Right, exactly. And so, from certain perspectives.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re sitting in front of their computer while they hide behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are sitting in front of their computer, but from our perspective, maybe they are behind their computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, from our inertial frame of reference. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all totally irrelevant. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that I started this podcast being a health doctor, and now we’re ending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up being physics professors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our talents are broad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, they’re not. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John This is related to the thing. Remember this question ages ago, like, what are the relative positions
⏹️ ▶️ John of us in your mind when you listen to the podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Are we sitting in a row? Are we sitting in a
⏹️ ▶️ John circle? Are we stacked vertically? Because Marco doesn’t, correct me if I’m wrong, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like do any panning in the mix or anything, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. And by the way, anybody who produces a podcast, don’t do that. People hate it. it, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very common feature request that podcast app makers get is a down mixed to mono feature, which I’m going to add soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry. But it’s all there on the code. I just have no interface for it yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because people who hear podcasts where people are not mixed in the absolute center,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners hate it. In many ways, it makes it extremely difficult for certain people to listen to it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, don’t do that. But yes, everyone’s always dead center.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, even with us dead center is the question remains. And that was the question we talked about how do you picture the people and
⏹️ ▶️ John you were doing the reverse. It was like, how do we picture ourselves? Like, we’re not on television looking into a camera, seeing the audience
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the camera, we’re just talking to a microphone. So where do we picture the audience? And to that, I would say, I’m a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little person inside your ear canal. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should do remember, I don’t know, a couple months ago, upgrade did the like low bitrate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release where they had released like a couple of extra copies that like, ridiculously, hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad bit rates, you should do one where you’re in the center and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on the left and I’m on the right or something like that just to mess with people and just so they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John could hear. No, we should
⏹️ ▶️ John change positions every sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left, hard pan right. I have to use the crappy automation thing in logic. Oh, it sucks your pain.
⏹️ ▶️ John should be like a rotation where it’s just a constantly spinning thing. we speak,
⏹️ ▶️ John we just hop onto that train and then it, you know, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, Marco, if you were a really good editor, you would really embrace spatial audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Exactly. Yeah, we could be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am such a good editor that I know not to do this because us joking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John about it is funny right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, but if I actually did this, people would hate it so much. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t understand how much they would hate it. Trust me, it is very hated.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should make it sound like I’m a tiny person in the ear canal, but I’m so so small that the ear canal is like a cathedral
⏹️ ▶️ John and my voice echoes in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spatial audio. That I can do! Reverb is fine because that doesn’t mess people up too badly.
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. You can do spatial audio with that because Casey could be at the other end of the ear canal and we could yell