510: It's Occupied by Bears
22 Nov 2022Mastodon, date formats, testing, and what we’re thankful for.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco makes Casey’s day
- Follow-up:
- Using network locations in macOS Ventura
- John’s iPhone Cases
- Bullstrap $85 → $68
- Ryan London $54
- Mastodon
- The Real Slim Shady
- ActivityPub
- Scalability
- Moderation
- Burnout
- On evaluating new platforms
- Running an instance is… not easy
- Founder in Time
- Client app reviews by Anna Nicholson
- Client app feature comparison Google Sheet
- Client Apps
- FedFinder to find the right instance for you
- Hive
- Twitter Updates
#askatp:- Why bother with an Apple TV when modern TVs can do all the same stuff? (via Dominic Lemire)
- Is using an Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot ethical? (via nougatmachine)
- Will data storage ever become scarce? (via Chris Wright)
- Post-show: Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃
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Chapters
- Test Completed 🖼️
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Network Locations in Ventura
- M/D/Y vs. D/M/Y vs. Y/M/D
- Sponsor: Memberful
- man pages in Preview
- iPhone case follow-up
- Mastodon
- Quick Twitter updates
- Sponsor: Kolide
- #askatp: Apps on smart TVs
- #askatp: Use “public” Xfinity Wi-Fi?
- #askatp: Will data storage run out?
- Ending theme
- Thanks
Test Completed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I have something to show the two of you. Oh, this is always ominous. Check our slack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, I’m so happy. I’m so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m looking at a screenshot, a very, very small, very heavily cropped screenshot from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Xcode. On the right-hand side, it’s a bunch of green diamonds that have check marks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in them. And on the left, test value conversions, a function, testOpenDB, function,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testqueries, function, testHeavyWorkload, function, etc., etc. Oh my god, I’m so proud of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, I don’t know anything really about writing tests in Xcode, but that makes
⏹️ ▶️ John two of us. Are they supposed to all begin with the word test? I think they have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember if it’s required or not, but it is certainly the convention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It certainly makes your life easier if they do, because you get wonderful UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration where you can just click and run one of them and stuff like that. it’s a little green checkmark. It’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this is extremely exciting. So this is the FC model replacement that does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have a name or does have a name? Oh, it does. Okay. Are we sharing that name or no? Not yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t really matter. That’s fine. It’s ButtDB. I’m calling it ButtDB. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like I don’t like when components that I have to write just have really generic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names like model or database. This is kind of the convention now with Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or with Swift UI, where you’ll have something just called like view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list. And I find it’s very difficult to search for that both in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and for like, you know, if you’re searching for Stack Overflow answers on how to do something or, you know, whatever. I prefer having names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not just generic words that actually mean something, whether it’s whether they’re prefixed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FC model or whether it’s like some kind of other unique name. It’s like something where like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can easily search for it in your own code or or on Google or whatever, and you can find answers. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not gonna, like there’s a bunch of SQLite wrappers for Swift that are just called things like SQLite. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, that’s gonna be hard to
⏹️ ▶️ John search for. In my app, you know, because Switch Class is an
⏹️ ▶️ John application switcher and I have a class that represents an application and I call the class App. And the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I get away with that is because all of Apple’s classes have NS. You know, it’s NS
⏹️ ▶️ John application or NS app or whatever, right? So I get to use that because of like the legacy of Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John and the way the namespacing worked there. But I’m reminded of one of the accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John booby trap, bear trap, accidental pitfalls that lies lurking in the Perl programming
⏹️ ▶️ John language. I know everyone is saying, yeah, among the many. If you’re writing like a little
⏹️ ▶️ John test thing where you’re like, oh, I just want to try something out and you just make up class names, or
⏹️ ▶️ John if you call your classes foo and bar and whatever, you’re fine. But if you have the misfortune
⏹️ ▶️ John to decide, I’m gonna name a class A, B, C, and D, you know what I mean? There already is a
⏹️ ▶️ John B class, and it’s kind of important to the way Perl works.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And so you’re like, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John this working right? And what is it doing? Because of course, Perl will let you put whatever you want into the B namespace. But guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John The B namespace is occupied, and it’s occupied by bears. B does not stand
⏹️ ▶️ John for bear. Oh, that’s too bad. I don’t even know enough about how swift namespacing
⏹️ ▶️ John works to know how they get away with this. I’m assuming like all the names just scope to the module or some crap like that. But, uh, but yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John just go with the, the Swift convention. They’re going to call their things in Swift UI view and stuff like that. Well, I’m calling my thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there is a possibility since this is the week of Thanksgiving here in America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a possibility that, that this show will be presented to unwilling and uninterested family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey members. And so I think we should try to keep the contents stuff that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think anyone could at least understand, if not appreciate. So with that in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me more about these unit tests. Are you excited you wrote them? Did you enjoy it? Do you think it’s a waste of time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we throwing them away? Do you feel gross? What are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the only other time I’ve ever written unit tests was for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco FCModel, my outgoing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the perfect case for unit tests, because it is a— It absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small component that is very important, very low level in the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also very easily testable. And it doesn’t take a lot of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to test this because you don’t have to wait on things like user input. There’s no UI to speak of. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no weird time-based anything. Nothing’s based on external content. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the easiest thing in the world to test relative to what you could be testing. So that being said, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also done a fairly, The new version of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually even smaller and simpler than FC Model because a lot of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no longer necessary. A lot of it, I’ve made different design choices because I made FC Model 8, 9
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, something like that. Things are different now, we have more knowledge, I’m a better programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a different world, different things are in fashion with coding. I’ve made different choices so it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller and simpler and I’m also able to rely on a lot of Swift stuff. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the serialization of the model classes is all just done with Codable. Like it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built-in Codable stuff. The protection of the database, because you can’t share SQLite handles concurrently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the protection of that is all just done with an actor, a Swift actor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, that’s super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s all accessed via async, unless you’re on the actor. So it’s just, you know, it’s using a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern Swift stuff to make things quite simple. So I actually, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing these tests over the last few days, I actually have found a couple of small bugs that I made.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that! I’m so proud of you. That’s exciting. I think I sound sarcastic, but I genuinely mean it. That’s so exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And this is the point of making tests. And again, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most of my own development time, when things are much harder to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test, whether it’s worth it has a different calculus. But this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s worth it, is a low bar because it’s so easy to test. I think what I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the most trouble with is just making sure I come up with good tests, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not good at this. And a lot of the tests I’ve made so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually are testing multiple things. In this one, I’ll use a column that can be nil. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I’ll use a column that can’t be null. And it’s like, that could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate test, but I don’t want to be that verbose if I don’t have to be. well, if I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have this use this table type and have this use this table type in two different tests, then I’m kind of covering that as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. That’s probably not best practice. Whether that matters remains to be argued, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are areas like that where it’s like, I probably should be making a much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco larger number of much smaller tests. But I guess I’ll get to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think what you’re doing makes sense. Like, actually, the unfortunate answer is that you
⏹️ ▶️ John actually need to do both. You need to make the small number of individual very, very isolated, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pure unit tests. But then you also need a bunch of like higher level tests,
⏹️ ▶️ John like what you’re kind of would naturally make. Now you can make your life a little bit easier by sort of programmatically generating the
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these things, sort of make it a data driven approach. Oh gosh. I’m not sure how easy Swift makes that, but like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, John, you’re scaring them off. You’re scaring them off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, but it’s like, like, so what you’re doing is like, oh, I’m going to make a class for like, you know, like a store
⏹️ ▶️ John and a product and like, you just make dummy things to like test your database thing or whatever. You make dummy
⏹️ ▶️ John tables, right? And you make simple dummy tables to do stuff. And you’re like, well, I’ll make sure I have some tables with numbers and some tables with strings
⏹️ ▶️ John and blobs and I’ll cover all my bases, right? But that’s kind of the artisanal hand rolled
⏹️ ▶️ John test where you’re making up these little, you know, test tables and columns and stuff like that, hoping you cover all
⏹️ ▶️ John the bases. And then the little tiny tests would be like, oh, instead of doing that, I’m just going to test every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. Quick, make table A1 that has a column but it’s an integer that has a complement of this. No, has
⏹️ ▶️ John a complement of the default value, has a column with an integer. And you just, you know, like sort of programmatically loop over
⏹️ ▶️ John all those things, making, you know, table T1, column A1, blah, blah, blah. And then the final
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is programmatically generating a bunch of tables that cover all the bases that
⏹️ ▶️ John are more complicated, right? Like essentially the equivalent of your store product, blah, blah, blah. Big
⏹️ ▶️ John tables, lots of columns, foreign keys, representative of all the stuff you want to test, but also programmatically
⏹️ ▶️ John generated. but for your library that you’re using, it just in your app, it’s not an open source project. What you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing now is I think the correct middle path of like, ah, just cover the functionality I
⏹️ ▶️ John need. Because in the end, since it’s not a big open source project and you’re gonna stop once you hit
⏹️ ▶️ John all the features that you need for your product, you’ll probably cover everything with just the tests that you make.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they will continue to serve the function of like, later on when you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John do some performance optimization and you run your tests, you’ll be like, oh, I broke something because now my test fails and
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t have known that because I thought I was just doing something clever but now when I run my tests it breaks and so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re getting like 90% of the value just from doing what you’re doing right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Yep, I agree wholeheartedly. And I think this is, whether or not you choose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do this in the future for most things because you already made the great point that it’s not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy for a lot of general iOS development, but for this sort of stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s utterly perfect as you said. And I would hope that as you continue to do this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even just for FC model two, then I hope you stick with it. And as you find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bugs, you know, as you’re moving up the stack and using this in Overcast or whatever, as you find bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, in the interaction between Overcast and FC model two, then I would hope that you would write a unit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test that covers that bug. So this way, you know, you will never have a regression on this because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this unit test is there as your parachute. And as long as you occasionally remember run the unit test,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it will always tell you, oh, hold on, you just screwed this other thing up from six
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago that you really didn’t want to screw up again, that’s why you wrote another test for it. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a really powerful feeling, and even though I actually very rarely write unit tests as much as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to speak the gospel, but when I do, I’m always happy for it because it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infrequent that I’ll make a change, you know, over here on my right-hand side, so to speak, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something way the hell over on my left-hand side says, excuse me, excuse me, I just broke. Do you want to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me too, please? And it’s a really, really nice comforting feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing that you have that parachute of awareness that will tell you that, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is still on the up and up to the best that we can tell. And I really care for it for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Writing tests is not glamorous. It’s not terribly fun. It’s kind of busy work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for me, for this sort of a thing particularly, I find the juice is worth the squeeze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I hope that you do even just for these sorts of projects,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if not overcast proper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So one thing I’m also doing with this, which I think will help me remember to run the tests,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using this opportunity to also learn Swift Package Manager. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already made it a Swift package. I don’t quite know how to use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m no longer editing a test project. I’m actually directly editing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the package itself and just running the test, modifying the files within the package and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s all built in there. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked on a Swift package. It’s actually pretty nice in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s one of those things where there’s no real manual. So you just, you know, you do what we always do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all Apple modern developer stuff. It’s like you search the web and you find a Hacking with Swift article or something. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you find some article on how to use Swift Package Manager and it tells you all the init commands and what all the different lines do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And eventually I’m like, hey, I wonder if I can just, can I open this.swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this package of.swift file, if I open this in Xcode, does it do anything cool? And it turns out, yes, it does everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess that’s how you’re supposed to be doing it. So anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been interesting. You know, I’m using this as an opportunity to learn lots of new stuff and hopefully, you know, bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my skills and then after that, my app forward from having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been stuck in the past for a very long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you plan to use this as the girders, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underpinnings, of the Fire Island app? Or is this strictly for Overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, the Fire Island app doesn’t really need a database locally. It’s just pulling stuff off a website and showing it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t need it. But this is for Overcast and whatever I do in the future. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope my intention with this is for this library to last me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my entire Swift programming career, however long that is. it’s actually like foundational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building block of like your your local database layer. Like I have my web version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this that I that powers all of my back ends and PHP. I’ve been doing, I’ve been using that same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing for over a decade. As long as I use PHP to make a web backend, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no reason not to use that library. This is, this is hopefully my swift version of that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as it makes sense for me to be writing, you know, local SQL light databases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with swift, I hope to be doing it with this library. So I’m taking the time to really get things right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, I’m really happy with it so far. Like I haven’t, the only thing is I haven’t used it at the application level yet. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will be annoying sometimes to have to do everything through an actor and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do everything in an async context. That will be annoying. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be. I think it was the right call, what you’ve done, but it will be annoying because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with Rx before it or in combined after, once you start going async
⏹️ ▶️ Casey await, and especially once you start really embracing actors, it has this tendency to like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spread like a virus throughout all your code. And, and after a while you get mostly used to it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it is a little gross in that regard. That being said, I think that all the, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other things that, that come with it, all the protections, all the safety, et cetera, and, and how it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably straightforward to make sure that, you know, you’re not doing anything dumb, I think all that’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But you’re right. it does tend to kind of infect everything, which is a little bit of a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to make a feature pitch for you while you’re in there working on this library
⏹️ ▶️ John ad. Throw in some kind of metrics or telemetry for your debug
⏹️ ▶️ John mode where you can basically like log in time every single query you run. All right. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to run that in the release version of your app most likely, but since you’re down
⏹️ ▶️ John there in the library now and it knows when it runs any query and and no one else is running queries except for this library,
⏹️ ▶️ John make a way to track literally every single one of them with all the timing and stat information you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that will probably help you when your app feels slow and you can’t figure out why, or especially with the actor stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t figure out is there a log jam of like backup of requests, or is one request take a long time
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was hogging the actor, you know, with the database handle not being able to be used concurrently,
⏹️ ▶️ John you do potentially have a bottleneck there, and being able to sort of trace that back to the origin of like who put this query in and which
⏹️ ▶️ John query is slow, it will probably be really useful. And it’s not, you know, you can do it in a janky way because
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares, whatever, it’s just your library. But you know, you’re right at that
⏹️ ▶️ John focal point of all of the database activity right now. You’re in that code right now. So I suggest
⏹️ ▶️ John adding it because it can be handy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, smart. Yeah, I already have a thing where it can just log every query, which has been very helpful during development. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, that actually timing is a good idea as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, this is awesome. This is a Thanksgiving gift from you to me. just telling me
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve been- It’s the gift he gives himself. Unit tests are the gift you give yourself. Yep, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only downside is that I still have to also figure out how can this be accessed from Objective-C?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yikes. It’s gonna be ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you need it to? How much of Overcast still remains in Objective-C?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Almost the entire bottom of it. Almost the entire data layer. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different subsystems of Overcast that are written in Objective-C that need to access the database. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of them is my full text search engine. I wrote all that also using based on SQLite, but I wrote all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in Objective-C. Now, I could rewrite that. It would be a lot less code if I rewrote it in Swift with modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And with this, like I could save a bunch of code. But again, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how much how much is it worth writing, rewriting something that already works?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hopefully eventually will do that. But you know, I don’t want to have to do that before I start using this as my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main data store. So, you know, there are ways around it. Like I could theoretically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s actually compatible FC model and the new engine both use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SQLite update hook function to detect if the table is changed through some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other means that is not them and fire off the like something has changed listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I could theoretically maybe have FC model and this new engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and both accessing the same database.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yikes. I shouldn’t be doing that. I hope not to need to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, why? Why is that not bad? That’s the whole point of a database. It’s OK
⏹️ ▶️ John to have multiple interfaces to the same tables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, it’s not great. If you can avoid that with SQLite, it’s not great to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like it’s a bit of a code smell to have multiple things accessing. You’re right, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inextricably wrong. It’s just not wrong, but it’s just, I don’t know, smells
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I’m probably going to do is I’m probably going to make a like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, a separate file that is only the Objective-C interface that is its own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire like set of separate classes to access this stuff and you know, it’ll have completion handlers, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that kind of stuff and and just, you know, have that be this this own separate file off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the side that when the time comes, I don’t need it anymore. I can get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d be very curious to hear an update. Um, if you do go to the route of at least trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get the old objective C stuff to, to talk with FC model two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s all async await and all that. And actors like, I don’t know off the top of my head what the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model or that’s a loaded term. I don’t know what the like best operating procedures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are for doing that sort of thing. I don’t know if there’s even a story about it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there is. I remember seeing on Twitter recently, there was some people were discussing And there was some person who I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John works at Apple was mentioning that they were talking about Swift calling Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the person was saying that actually basically putting Objective-C wrappers
⏹️ ▶️ John around what is Swift under the covers has become common practice at Apple in terms of like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I think it was an argument about is Apple writing Objective-C APIs versus Swift APIs. And this person was like, a surprising amount of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John we write the functionality in Swift, and then we wrap it in a candy coating of Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you think you’ve got this Objective-C API, but really it’s just a thin wrap around the Swift code that we actually wrote. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow. Totally, but when you start talking async await or combine, which isn’t relevant in this case, it gets.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he was just going to do it with completion handlers. He’s doing stuff under the covers to hide
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it is doing all of that async stuff and just presenting it to the Objective-C world as the
⏹️ ▶️ John old style, like, you’re going to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco callback when I’m done. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fair. Yeah, I could theoretically block the actor waiting for it, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really don’t want to have to. I mean, chances are, unfortunately, chances are I probably will at some point have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that, where I will need to fetch something synchronously, or I’ll need to fetch something outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an async context, just for some API or some functionality. This is why, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no small feat to switch over to this. This is gonna be a long process that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to involve significant rewrites of significant parts of the app and the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is why this has been such a long time coming, that I know how big of a project this is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna be done anytime soon. So what I’m gonna start doing is using this library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for certain subsystems of the app that are totally separate from the main database. So for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the app I have the ability to track what your data usage is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by podcast and by episode. If you go into the settings screen, there’s a data usage area. And that’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just its own little SQLite database. And that whole thing is, I think it’s already in Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least, if not, it’s close. That would be fairly easy to move forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, it’s not necessarily Swift UI. And it’s just, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all intertwined. It’s like, I’m making this whole thing to make Swift UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that whole era of the app better and more modern and easier and faster and everything else. Make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things more responsive, having fewer scroll hooks and stuff like that. Like, there’s all sorts of reasons I’m doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s so much easier to write a new app around this new way of doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to adapt an old app to it. So it’s going to be a while, and it’s going to involve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant rewrites before I can actually have this thing be my only data store.
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Network Locations in Ventura
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, a lot of people were really upset that in Ventura,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network locations went away. And I was vaguely familiar with this being a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I never used it and I don’t know much about it. So I guess, John, could you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me the two second overview of what this was and then tell me about some new news we’ve gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t use this feature much, but it reminded me of, I think it was called Location Manager back in classic Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS. Basically, the idea is when I have my computer, think of it as a laptop, right? When I have my computer in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John location, I want the networking setup to be different. So when I’m in the office, I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be on the VPN and have this thing set up this way. When I’m at home, I want to be on my home Wi-Fi and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of other stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, there’s a great app called Control Plane that did this years and years and years ago. it was better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse, or different. But it was a similar idea. Like you could set default printers, and I think you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set Wi-Fi networks and all sorts of random stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just for networking, though. But anyway, in Ventura, like a couple of things that we have talked about in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John it disappeared from system settings. It used to be in system preferences in the network pane, and then it was no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John in system settings. So this story on the Rob’s Observatory says that,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, two things. One, if you had network locations and you run Ventura, you can still find them. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple menu, if you go to location, you’ll see the locations
⏹️ ▶️ John that you entered back before Ventura still listed there, right? But two, if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John add, delete, or modify locations, even though there’s no GUI to do it, kind of like what
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking about before, there was no GUI and there was a command line. It was, oh, the scheduled startup and shutdown
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Just like that, there is a command line thing you can use from the terminal to mess
⏹️ ▶️ John with this. The command is called network setup. I tried to find a URL to like an online man
⏹️ ▶️ John page of network setup and there’s a bunch of them From sites that are not Apple. Apparently Apple no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John has You know web page versions of all the man pages that are part of like Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John slash Darwin or whatever But anyway, we’ll link you to the article it shows the relevant
⏹️ ▶️ John Options to the command where you can list locations create a location delete a location so on and so forth So I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John so sure but but since they left all the functionality in there Is it just they didn’t get time to implement this in the GUI?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they decided it’s not important enough to have a GUI and the people who really care about it We’ll just use the command line
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this is the second feature that’s like that in Ventura and I’m not sure what Apple is trying to say with this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not just those two. First of all, I could have sworn and
⏹️ ▶️ John the date format to your thing You should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly that’s exactly I was gonna bring up but but before we get there I thought that snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had gotten something from Apple saying like yes or no whether it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivered or not, but I don’t remember what the answer was and I might be making this up entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that might have been about Ventura 13.0, like Apple just saying like no we didn’t forget to put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in 13.0, we intentionally didn’t, but that really doesn’t say anything about like all right but what about for the future? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John is this the fact that the functionality is there where the command line tool in 14.0, does it
⏹️ ▶️ John stay the same as it is like now or do they make a GUI for it or do they remove the command line tool? That’s That’s the mystery
M/D/Y vs. D/M/Y vs. Y/M/D
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then you had brought up, and I was about to do the same. So I’m known as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the petulant Fahrenheit guy because Fahrenheit’s better than Celsius. But what people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t seem to understand is that I don’t have any particular love for any other imperial measure. Like all of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are garbage. Feet, dumb, pounds, stupid. They’re all terrible. Every single one of them is terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My perfect world, when I am king, I will say metric all the things except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ambient air temperature. If you want to put the oven in Celsius, that’s fine. I don’t care. But outside temperatures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Fahrenheit, damn it, that’s what makes the most sense. Anyway, one of the things that Americans get completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong is that we do month-day-year, not day-month-year. So, what’s today, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 21st, 20th, something like that? I don’t even know. It’s all a blur. It’s the 21st. So Americans would write 11 slash 21 slash 22, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb. It should be 21 slash 11 slash 22.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? most specific thing first, which is the day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the slightly less specific thing next, that’s the month, and the least specific thing last, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the year. At this point, all the nerds are getting very upset at me. Oh, you have to 8601 or 18 or whatever. No, it’s 8601.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You have to 8601 everything. That’s the only true formula. Okay, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re storing file names, then yes, go year first. But for anything else, when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in like a database or if you’re not, if not a file name. The year is almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contextually obvious. So start with the day, man. Day, month, year. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Disagree. Year, month, day. Well, we’ve talked about this before. And like, regardless of the
⏹️ ▶️ John logic of Casey’s argument, whether you agree with it, the fact is that he lives in America. And by
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, he’s essentially speaking of booby traps, like the B package in Pearl. It’s like people who
⏹️ ▶️ John who have a QWERTY keyboard, but they use Dvorak key layout, their computer
⏹️ ▶️ John booby trapped. So Casey’s computer and life are booby trapped because any other
⏹️ ▶️ John person who lives in the same country or was raised in the same culture as him sits down at his computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be bamboozled
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey by any ambiguous date because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all going to think it’s month, day, year, because why wouldn’t it be? We’re in America, but
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s a trap. And unless the day is over 12, you’re not gonna be able to figure it out from context.
⏹️ ▶️ John So his whole computer is screwed up and he should not do this. Even if I agree with him, which I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, that it’s the better system, he should move to a country where everybody does it so his life isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god. I see. I see. I’m getting kicked out of the country of my birth simply because you don’t like my date format.
⏹️ ▶️ John right because it’s like driving on the other side of the road. It’s like, I think everyone should drive on the left side
⏹️ ▶️ John of the road. Well you have to go to another country for that. Don’t do it here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well no, that’s also wrong. That’s demonstrably wrong. You should be on the right side
⏹️ ▶️ John road. I’m setting aside whether it’s right or wrong, you like it or you don’t, you have to go with the
⏹️ ▶️ John flow in terms of conventions. That’s why they’re conventions. Anyway, go on.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the point of the story. The point of the story is that macOS ill-advisedly gave you a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to booby trap your life in this manner.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, so it used to be that you could dig into, I forget exactly where it was in systems preferences, almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at settings, but in system preferences, you could dig into somewhere in region settings, and they had these little pills
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could drag around and format things in whatever bananas way you wanted, including putting year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why would you put year first for regular use? For files, sure, for databases, sure, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, what you’re doing is you’re just, you’re telling Mac OS, hey, when you display a date, how
⏹️ ▶️ John should you display it? Correct. And it was like a little construction kit where you could, you had each element and you could make a
⏹️ ▶️ John little GUI for saying, I want to have the year, then the day, then the month. I want to have the month, then the day, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John way you wanted to do it. I think you’d even put whatever characters you wanted between it, like slashes or hyphens, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s what you’re talking about. This is a GUI that was in Mac OS X since pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John early on and disappeared in Ventura.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, and also your folklore.org reference is acknowledged. Anyway, so it used to be that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could drag these pills around, do what you wanted, and then I went, I actually was about to write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bug report for, I believe they were past sponsor, Banktivity, which is my financial management software,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and because I realized all of a sudden in the last couple of months, it’s no longer honoring
⏹️ ▶️ John But you only realized that after the 12th day of the month, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just hadn’t really paid close attention to it. And then I heard, well, this ain’t right. And it happened a couple months ago. They must have made some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, wait a second. Where else can I look and see? Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, the whole system’s wrong. Oh, no, this must be something with insurance. I went to go into system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings and look at what the situation was. And sure enough, I couldn’t find it. And what do you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until a week ago? What do you do when you have these sorts of problems? Well, you ask about it on Twitter. And some very helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people on Twitter said, yes, you’re right, it’s gone. But a handful of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pointed me to a handful of different places, and lo and behold, there are some defaults, write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey commands that you can do in order to set Apple ICU date format strings.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you set a, what do you see? If you set four of them, then you can get things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the way you want them, which is the correct way, which is day, month, year, despite what these heathens say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can check that out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And same question about this one. Is that, are those, you know, P-list keys gonna go away in, you
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be there forever? We’ll see.
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man pages in Preview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me about man pages and preview, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John This just came up because I was trying to find a link for the show notes of like, you know, a nice apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ John URL for the man page for network setup. And I came across, you know, another
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that was related in my travels, which was people complaining about another regression
⏹️ ▶️ John adventure where preview no longer renders PostScript files, which you might not
⏹️ ▶️ John care about, because like, when do I encounter a PostScript file? a lot of people like the man command that shows manual
⏹️ ▶️ John pages can spit out PostScript and you can just pipe it to the preview thing and people had aliases set up
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just like I don’t want to read a man page in the terminal in a monospace font I want to read it in proportional font and rich text
⏹️ ▶️ John so I have this thing that you know does runs the man runs command on man pages
⏹️ ▶️ John and then spits out PostScript and then I just pipe it to you know an open command and open
⏹️ ▶️ John the preview app and that stopped working because preview can’t render PostScript in Ventura which is kind of cruddy But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway time marches on well you could also generate manual pages as
⏹️ ▶️ John PDFs in Ventura So you just need to change your alias so people who have never done this are interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in trying it out We’ll put a link to this post at scripting OS 10.com
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunate domain name there, but Scripting OS 10.com where it shows you how to
⏹️ ▶️ John set up an alias Like everything else it just assumes that you run bash or something similar
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re weird like me you can adapt it to whatever shell you happen to run. And then you And you too can
⏹️ ▶️ John run man commands from the terminal and have them open in preview as PDFs.
iPhone case follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell me about your iPhone cases. Finally got my second, I ordered two iPhone cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and the second one finally arrived. I got the Ryan London case a while ago
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s been on my phone ever since and I also ordered around the same time the Bullstrap case. These are both
⏹️ ▶️ John black leather iPhone 14 Pro cases with an open bottom, which is the way
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it. And the Ryan London one was cheaper. The Ryan London one, I forget, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think when I ordered it maybe it was around 50 bucks. is currently $54. The Bullstrap case,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I ordered it, was $85. And I didn’t order a Bullstrap case for my last phone, but a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John had said that, oh, they make really high quality leather cases, you should check it out, blah, blah, blah. The reason I avoided it last time is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I had found my Olexar case that had the buttons that didn’t stick out so far,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was like, you know, 20 bucks or whatever, since reduced to $5.50. And I love that case.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this time I couldn’t find anything like that, so I’m just gonna have to deal with the bulging buttons. I bought I ordered two cases that both look
⏹️ ▶️ John like they had bulging buttons, but they were both leather cases with bare bottoms, right? Bullstrap
⏹️ ▶️ John case finally came I’ve had the Ryan London case on my phone for I don’t know a month or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John now Since I got it and I was like when the bullstrap case comes Am I gonna swap it
⏹️ ▶️ John or am I just like maybe I’ll just look at it and see if it’s see if I think it’s Any better than the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ryan London case? And when I got it and unpacked it and held it next to my phone, which
⏹️ ▶️ John has the Ryan London case on it, I’m pretty sure that these are literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the same case. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whoever manufactures these,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s like one factory is making these things. The only difference
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the Bullstrap case had like an embossed bull on the back of it. And the Ryan
⏹️ ▶️ John London case has a little embossed, like, I don’t know if it’s an R symbol, little embossed
⏹️ ▶️ John circle on the edge, the side near the bottom. But like the
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons were the same, everything was in the same position, the folds and creases in the leather looked
⏹️ ▶️ John the same, they smelled the same, they feel the same. I think these are the same
⏹️ ▶️ John case. I don’t know why the Bullstrap one took forever to come, I don’t know why the Bullstrap one was so much more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, but I didn’t put it on. It’s just, I’d put it upstairs as a backup case because in the end,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Ryan Lennon one doesn’t have anything on the back I’m much more likely to feel something on the back than I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be to feel the Ryan London thing That’s like on the lower left corner of the thing So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re interested, we’ll put links to both in the show notes by the way The bull strap case has been price reused to sixty eight dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would say if you want a leather case with an open bottom and you don’t mind the bulging buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John Ryan London case number one choice. The bull strap case is identical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I don’t get that reference, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m sure it is. That’s from
⏹️ ▶️ John my cousin Vinny on the… It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identical. You got a clap in
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen it as many times as you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And hey, I’ll use this as an opportunity to tell you if you haven’t heard what we’re talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can go to atp.fm slash join and you can hear our ATP Movie Club episodes, club episodes, including the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we discussed my cousin, Vinny.
Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk Mastodon for a little bit, because that is where all the cool kids are going,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe you’re referring to the Fediverse. I think we’re supposed to call it that now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? Are you being serious or are you trolling me? Or both?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s the universe of Kevin Federline. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no. Oh wow, deep cut, deep cut. The Fediverse, yeah. Wow, all right, anyway. Did I get
⏹️ ▶️ John his first name right? I don’t know, that just popped out of my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s Britney Spears’
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ex, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought. All right, anyway. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you, I’m right there with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 90s kids will know. Yep, yep, yep. So anyway, so I do have an account. I think I had just made
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it last week when we had spoken, which actually, as we record this, was just like four or five days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. But anyway, I haven’t yet tooted on Mastodon, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard rumblings of changing the name, but whatever, that doesn’t really bother
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, that’s really what we’re supposed to say, tooted? Yes. Isn’t that like farting? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why, oh God. They use a trumpet symbol, not a butt to get around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, okay, everyone knows what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, this is the perfect exemplar of why I just don’t think that anything here has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey properly considered. But-
⏹️ ▶️ John Tweeting is fine. Is it any more or
⏹️ ▶️ John less silly than tweeting, which Twitter didn’t even come up with on its own?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little- I mean, I suppose that, you know, in time, if Mastodon, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sticks around as the thing that we’re all talking about, we will forget about how dumb it sounds, these words.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at the moment, look, if something is going to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter for a bunch of people, it has to have a little bit of coolness to it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is a massive challenge for Mastodon in general, because for all of its advantages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not cool. And I think that doesn’t help.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is fun. Is it? Yeah, the little elephant thing is fun. The word toot
⏹️ ▶️ John is fun. Like the branding and the sort of like the look and feel
⏹️ ▶️ John of the UI and all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party apps, which we’ll get to in a little bit, lots of them have variations in the word toot because it’s fun. Just like lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter apps had variations on bird stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure. Well, OK. So we’re already getting off in the weeds. I’m going to try to bring us back. And I think this was my fault. But nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have an account on mastodon.social. I have not yet tweeted, posted, tooted, what have you. A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of the reason I haven’t done anything yet is because mastodon.social is constantly not working, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my experience over the last week, damn near any time I tried to look at what was going on on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Fediverse, whatever, almost every time it was impossibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult to get a response from Mastodon.social. Now I sympathize that this is a very thankless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job. They probably weren’t prepared for the load that they are receiving. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a moment, but I don’t know. My, my opening experience to Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, okay, the first thing you need to do is to decide which server to join, which we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week. And that is fraught to begin with, but leaving that aside, then you get there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the server is often broken, which is fraught, and then you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, then you have these really, really clunky usernames with at Casey lists at Mastodon dot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey social, which are just aesthetically kind of yucky. I don’t know. And I don’t know. I agree with what you’re saying, Marco. like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, the branding is kind of cool, I guess, and different, but the experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me is just so deeply uncool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll be the first to tell you, maybe it’s my own ignorance. Maybe I just haven’t seen the light and haven’t seen what makes this so much better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter. And I was looking at some feedback we got from the last episode and a lot of people were like, well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nothing like Twitter. It’s totally different than Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in what way is that true? Because I clearly don’t understand. And if it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by federation, like, okay, that’s an implementation detail. I don’t really consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to be very, very different. And I don’t know, it’s one of those situations where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking at the sky and these grumbly mastodon monkeys are like, oh, no, the sky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is green, baby. And I’m looking at the sky and like, well, it looks pretty blue to me. And I don’t know if I’m right or wrong. Like, I might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the wrong one. Who knows? But I don’t know. John, can you explain this to me? Can you do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make Mastodon make more sense in my head?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the multiple accounts thing, I talked about this last week that I had, you know, five or six accounts that I had created
⏹️ ▶️ John in 2017, Mastodon accounts on different servers. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, I mean, it kind of presented a problem with me for my experience on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, well, I should probably pick one of these, right, to actually use.
⏹️ ▶️ John But which, because the problem is other people had found them because they do have a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John federated search feature where if you type in my last name you’ll get a bunch of hits you’ll get more hits
⏹️ ▶️ John than are me because there are other accounts that are like I don’t know what they are like I think somebody set
⏹️ ▶️ John up in a heroku instance that had a bunch of like proxy accounts that represent other people who tons of people come up in that search
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and there are other people who are just like Have the same name as me or have like old fake impersonation accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John But some of them are most of them are legitimate accounts that I set up for myself and they were accumulating followers
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t want people following an account that I’m not using because they’re just gonna be disappointed because nothing’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna happen there So I had to figure out how to solve that problem Sort of first and foremost and by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way since last week. I did get Syracuse at Mastodon dot social So if you’re running which one is the quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John real me there are like six or seven real means But the one I’m currently as of the recording
⏹️ ▶️ John of this episode intending to use is Syracuse at Mastodon dot social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s you’re the you’re the agent Smith of Mastodon. I swear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah know. So I had to pick which one I was going to use, right? The reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I picked mastodon.social is because my scant knowledge that I had at the time, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is currently true, is that mastodon.social is run by the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who make mastodon or are responsible for mastodon or whatever. So I figure
⏹️ ▶️ John of all the sites that exist that are mastodon things, they have the most
⏹️ ▶️ John skin in the game because any one of those other sites could be like, ah, I’m sick of this, I don’t want to do it. But the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who started and run and created Mastodon are the most motivated to not go,
⏹️ ▶️ John ah, forget it. Like I’m sick of running a server, it’s too much, I can’t handle the moderation or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have the most skin in the game. Does that mean mastodon.social is the right server for me? Does that mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John agree with or even know anything about the moderation policies or whatever beyond what they say on the website
⏹️ ▶️ John and their conduct, you know, their policy thing, and we’ll get to all that detail in a little bit. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I made the right choice, which is why I am not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things that it is possible to do, which is, oh, you can just say all those other accounts, you can just migrate them all and point
⏹️ ▶️ John them to the one that you care about. But by doing that, you essentially shut them down and put them into kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like a locked mode, those other ones. And I don’t wanna do that because they’re all my hedges against
⏹️ ▶️ John me having made the wrong choice about what server. And obviously I’m weird and paranoid and about backups or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and other people will face the confusion what you know server they should choose
⏹️ ▶️ John friends where they think they should go or whatever but they’re probably not as paranoid as I am in terms of like having backups
⏹️ ▶️ John of like well what if I made the wrong choice I want to have I want to basically I want to reserve my name in other places as well
⏹️ ▶️ John so if I made the wrong choice of a server I don’t have to get you know my last name one two three four five
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s some other server so I’m keeping all those other accounts the best thing I could
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with to try to indicate that
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to want to indicate two things one which one of these accounts that come up when you search for me are really me
⏹️ ▶️ John right like that I actually own and control and to which one is the one that I’m actually using right
⏹️ ▶️ John so on the first problem I think mastodon does something smart here if if
⏹️ ▶️ John the people currently or previously running Twitter had a clue they would have done this ages ago because it is
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly straightforward thing to do when you set up your mastodon account you have arbitrary name-value pairs
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can put that’s like information about you, right? So the one I chose to put his website is the name and the
⏹️ ▶️ John value is the URL of my website. Cause I have a website. It’s not, it’s not hard to have on
⏹️ ▶️ John frequent sponsors of our program will allow you to make a website for yourself under a domain name that you control. You should do that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re listening to a tech podcast, it’s a reasonable thing to do. And I have a website, right? When you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, they say, Oh, and by the way, if you shove this snippet of HTML on your website, we will crawl
⏹️ ▶️ John your website, find the snippet of HTML and say, aha, you must own and control that site,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you didn’t, there’s no way you could have put this snippet of HTML on your site, setting aside injection attacks
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, right? And if you do that, when someone goes to your profile on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll see a little green check mark next to the URL that says, this person isn’t just listing this website,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have enough control over this website that they can influence the content of it, so we’re pretty sure that is that person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John website, right? So because you know me and you know hypercritical.co is my website, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John see a mastodon account with hypercritical.co is the website and a green checkbox. In theory, unless someone
⏹️ ▶️ John hacked me, I’m the only person who could have put that checkmark there. So any mastodon account where you see
⏹️ ▶️ John website hypercritical.co green checkmark, that’s me. So I basically self verified,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? This is something that lots of services do speaking of DNS last week or whatever. When you do a lot of DNS
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, you can put a DNX text record or you put something on your website so they can validate when you’re setting
⏹️ ▶️ John up an SSL certificate, they want you to prove that you own the domain that you get in the SSL certificate for
⏹️ ▶️ John this technique is used frequently, is it is thorough as, you know, showing
⏹️ ▶️ John a government ID to a department in Twitter? Probably not. But boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it better than nothing. And the best thing about it is it’s self service. Now it’s self
⏹️ ▶️ John service for nerds, because most people don’t have their own websites. But hey, you’re listening to ATP, you should do this. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a good system for tech nerds to moderately self
⏹️ ▶️ John verify. And it helps me solve that first problem of which one of these are really me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But can we let me just interrupt you there. I stumbled upon this when I was setting up my mastodon profile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I could not agree more that I think this is extremely smart. And yeah, maybe it won’t work for like celebrities
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. But for the purposes of nerds, like you said, I think this is very clever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very simple, and does a pretty good job of accomplishing what a blue tick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does on Twitter, with some amount of certainty and confidence. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really dig this. And I really think that this is an extremely clever and easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to show some form of validation that an account is who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they say they are. And I really, really think this was smart.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And if it’s good enough for SSL certificates, which you know, people trust, like, oh, this is really apple.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is because it’s a real SSL certificate owned by Apple, blah, blah. Like that’s basically how TLS verification, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John are higher levels of verification that you pay more money for that are more thorough. But in the end, controlling
⏹️ ▶️ John your DNS records and controlling your actual website enough to put like
⏹️ ▶️ John random codes or values in there is how the things,
⏹️ ▶️ John automated systems validate ownerships of domains. Second problem is, okay, I’ve got five accounts. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can see they’re all me because they got the green check mark against my URL. one I’m actually using. And my solution for that
⏹️ ▶️ John was to change my avatar image on all the accounts I’m not using to be my face
⏹️ ▶️ John with a big red buster through it like red circle with a line through it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John now cash propagation and federation being what it is, it might take a while for that to propagate. But now if you search for Syracuse, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John see one of my smiling faces with nothing over it and then a bunch of other my smiling faces with a
⏹️ ▶️ John big red circle and a line through it, which doesn’t mean they’re not me. It just means not this one. Don’t fall on this
⏹️ ▶️ John one because I’m not using that one. I’m not shutting it down. I’m not forwarding it to the other one yet because it’s my hedge against me
⏹️ ▶️ John having made a terrible choice about what server I’m going to be on. But anyway, and that if this all sounds
⏹️ ▶️ John involved, overly involved, this is part of the problem, part of the problem and also
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the advantage of Mastodon. The problem is I don’t know where to set up my thing. The advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you make the wrong choice, in theory, you can just make another choice in the future. And, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, I don’t have advice on what people should do. Again, my choice of Mass Enacted
⏹️ ▶️ John Social based on them having the most skin in the game may not be what you would use to choose.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be like the in theory that you can make a choice based on which place you
⏹️ ▶️ John think you will find the most pleasant, right? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John the do the moderators and the rules that are set up in this instance, fit with what I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to give the example that people are passing around because it was such a horror story. Did you know some instances don’t allow cursing right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want to be in a on an instance where they don’t allow cursing, that one might be for you,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But maybe you should know a little bit more about the people who are running it because they might have other opinions that you don’t agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with. And if you want one where you can post porn like that, you probably have to find one that allows that and
⏹️ ▶️ John be aware whether they don’t write it’s just it’s just like anything else. But it is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John at the young state we’re out now, before the Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmails
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mastodon world have come into being, it’s just kind of a bunch of people guessing or going where their
⏹️ ▶️ John friends are. So that’s kind of how I ended up where I am. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So I did a search for Syracuse, I looked for people, and I see one, two, three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four, five, six accounts, only one of which has a buster through it, which is, by the way, I never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew that was what that was called. So thank you for that. Paul Shookman
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if that’s what it’s called, but it might have just been from Ghostbusters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Oh, gotcha. Right, right, right. Well, I only see one of them with the circle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a slash every other one. Well, of the others, uh, one of them is the same picture with a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with gray, like a completely grayscale background. One of them is the default avatar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of them looks identical to your real one. And then one of them is, is also the, the avatar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. What I found when changing these avatars is the, the propagation of the new
⏹️ ▶️ John avatar across apps and whatever is slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s you know, whatever. I don’t know if the apps are caching it, if there’s something in between this caching, the instances are caching.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, someone in the chat room said I’m not in Mastodon.social. I am. That’s what I’m saying. The one I’m using, we’ll put a link in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. Syracuse and Mastodon.social. That one, as of the recording right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one I am actually using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is what I mean this the Federation thing here so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What gives me hope with all of this is not? Mastodon itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being massively Successful in the future. I think that might happen. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t happen. I think they’re they’re having a great influx now I still have some doubts like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, you know app.net really really burned me In the sense that like that was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when we thought we were gonna really move a lot of people off Twitter and we moved some people off Twitter for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it just kind of all fell apart. It wasn’t enough. This I think we have a much better chance this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of actually doing something meaningful and pulling people off of Twitter like permanently and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something much bigger than App.net ever was. Like I think we we have a good chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here but it’s just so hard to say like okay well hey let’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move to Mastodon and the first question is which Mastodon and it’s just that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throws a huge wall up in everyone’s faces that makes it very difficult to get into very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a large community to form and and look Mastodon is not brand-new it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just launch it’s been around for a few years and it seems to have had some success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing like smaller groups of people talking with each other having like you know small like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco special interest servers or or you know certain groups of friends or certain groups of people, whatever it is, creating a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small places. And that’s fine, that’s a useful feature to have, it’s a useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role to serve. But if you’re gonna try to create what Twitter is and was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the one big place where lots of people are, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all micro chat together in this real time, short text way, Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the place where everyone was. I don’t see Mastodon reaching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that point because it isn’t just one place. And to them, that’s a feature. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand why it’s a feature, but I don’t see it happening. What does give me hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that area is this whole activity pub thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Mastodon is one piece of software that communicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over activity pub, which is the standard that kind of is the backbone of federated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social microblogging. Well, they aren’t the only way to do activity pub. So micro.blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports it, which I believe you mentioned last week. And so you can actually use micro.blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa. There was a message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier today on Twitter from Matt Mullenweg of Automatic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who owns Tumblr, saying that they’re trying to get that done really soon on Tumblr, where Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would itself also be an activity pub, I assume host and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supplier, I guess, publisher. So if they do that, then Tumblr could also publish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out of this world, like this network. So the concept of ActivityPub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be bigger than Mastodon. You know, it could be like the difference between like WordPress and RSS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where like, you can publish a blog using WordPress, you can also publish a blog using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything else and just publish an RSS feed, and people can consume and subscribe to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that publishes an RSS feed, whether it’s a WordPress blog or any other engine, ActivityPub seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be that for social networks. Now, I think there’s a lot of challenges to getting that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing to meaningful scale. A lot of challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not easy and might never be solved, but I think that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more promising to me than Mastodon itself being the one thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that takes off. I don’t think that’s super likely. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Mastodon will be great the way it is now. I don’t see it scaling bigger, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, I could be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John So just to make it clear to the people when you were complaining about the instances, when you pick your instance, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John still see things and follow people who are on other instances. That’s what makes it federated, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are consequences to you choosing the instance because you’re sort of putting yourself under the control of the people who administer that instance,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are different rules on that instance, and instances can de-federate other instances, but in general, the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John is you’re not just seeing things from that instance. You’re seeing things. And, you know, with the activity pub, you can see things from
⏹️ ▶️ John Tumblr or whatever. On the subject of scalability, like activity pub, kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS, is just a tiny part of that equation. When it comes to scaling,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need something to implement the federation,
⏹️ ▶️ John as in, okay, so a bunch of people are posting, or, you know, publishing activity pub. I follow
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of different people who are spread all over the internet, And how do I
⏹️ ▶️ John see all their stuff in a timely manner? And how does my stuff get to them? That’s what Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John does as a piece of software. Whether it’s just talking to itself or other instances or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it implements that. And related to scalability,
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at, this is a post on Nora.codes, which is a cool URL. Someone took
⏹️ ▶️ John a look at a Mastodon instance they were running that was having problems and having a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John experience scaling web applications. When I look at this, it tells me a lot about how Mastodon is currently
⏹️ ▶️ John architected and what the potential scalability of this arrangement is. And I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you they are very similar to where Twitter was in the
⏹️ ▶️ John very, very early, bad old days of the fail. This is not an
⏹️ ▶️ John architecture that can scale to Twitter’s size. And you may be saying, well, that’s the whole point. It doesn’t need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll have millions and millions of tiny Mastodon instances that each only need to be able to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with just a small number of people that are on them. And so scaling isn’t a problem. First, I would say that’s not true because
⏹️ ▶️ John once the activity on activity pub reaches a certain level, no matter how few people you have on an instance,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they all follow a bunch of celebrities, you got a big problem there in terms of the explosion of the number of
⏹️ ▶️ John messages and follows and followers and all that other stuff, or if they host each host, one celebrity, I would say. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John but two, like just architecturally, if you look how they’re, you know, it may not be
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious by looking at this big techno thing here or whatever, but There’s a reason Twitter totally rearchitected
⏹️ ▶️ John from what it was in the early days to what it is today, because you can’t scale to Twitter size without doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as I said last week, I think it is inevitable that people will congregate on
⏹️ ▶️ John larger instances. You will not get a million instances with 10 people. You’ll get one instance with 5
⏹️ ▶️ John million people, one instance with 3 million people, and then a long tail, right? Like it’s not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s not gonna be 100% centralized because that’s the whole point of this, but people will congregate. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just no avoiding it, which leads to a bunch of other problems. So anyway, this is not the fault of Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ve come a long way in what they’ve done, but looking at this, looking at the way they have this set up and the different
⏹️ ▶️ John queues and the tweaking of database connections, every number in this post is
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny, right? Tiny and the parts of it that seem not to be able to be
⏹️ ▶️ John broken down any further or to be parallelized any further, it’s bad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, this is, yeah. This is not going to scale to millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of people in any one Mastodon instance unless they really, really change the way they’re doing the software. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as bad as it’s probably not as bad as early Twitter, because I think early Twitter didn’t even have queues for stuff or whatever. So to the credit
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mastodon, they’re they’re ahead of that. But yeah, so, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that’s you mentioned Mastodon as Socials feeling slow. Well, they’ve had a huge influx of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so they need to deploy more hardware. But the Mastodon as an application
⏹️ ▶️ John is not easily horizontally scalable. So they might have to get bigger instances and start scaling
⏹️ ▶️ John vertically. And it’s a bit of a problem. I think they will weather the current storm, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if growth continues, they will hit a limit and it will be similar to the limit that
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter hit where, you know, fail whales are falling from the sky and they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to really just say we’re going to do our stuff in a different way. And Twitter was able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that because they had tons of money from I’m assuming venture capital, but eventually advertisers
⏹️ ▶️ John as well to pay good developers to come and make the Twitter that
⏹️ ▶️ John exists today, which is way, way more scalable than the old one was. Where does that money come from
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mastodon? They have a Patreon, but it’s peanuts compared to the amount of money that Twitter put into
⏹️ ▶️ John re-architecting Twitter. Um, so it’s difficult. Same thing with Tumblr. Tumblr wants to do activity pub.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of easy to publish that. But if you want to be part of the Fediverse and follow things, you know, your Tumblr
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, you want to follow people in various Mastodon instances and other people on Tumblr, they are signing up for the same problem. Presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John is Tumblr is better positioned because they are much bigger scale than Mastodon has ever been.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s still a hard problem. It’s still non-trivial. You know, and I guess Tumblr has money somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John through automatic or whatever, where they can pay for this. But, um, I’m, I’m not saying these are insurmountable
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. They’re surmountable. Twitter surmounted them, but I, they, they give me concern. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the other side of scalability aside from technical is human scalability. This is what I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at last week was saying that any mass set on instance that continues to grow, we’ll have all the same problems as tumbler
⏹️ ▶️ John as Twitter, I don’t know. I keep saying Tumblr. Some examples of that. Uh, this is back from 2018. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think I remember the story when it happened, but I had forgotten and it came back up again. Uh, Will Wheaton, a Star Trek
⏹️ ▶️ John person, um, an actor apparently got sort of, uh chased off a mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John instance in 2018 because his account kept getting reported by people who didn’t like him and the
⏹️ ▶️ John admin basically said you know i don’t you know i don’t really blame you but i’m going to shut down
⏹️ ▶️ John your account just because it’s too much of a hassle just people are constantly yelling at me to get rid of your account another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John mastodon technology a place where i had a mastodon account since 2017 is shutting down because the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who is running it just can’t handle running it anymore because life goes on and they were doing it themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John and putting their time and energy into it, and it’s a pretty thankless job. I’ll put a link to that post
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can read about that person’s reasoning. And then finally, co-founder of
⏹️ ▶️ John dreamwith.org, dream, W-I-D-T-H, and the former head of trust
⏹️ ▶️ John and safety at LiveJournal from around 2002, if people remember LiveJournal, posted an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter thread that includes the bare minimum for
⏹️ ▶️ John evaluating when a new service, whether or not to sign up for a new service. It’s seven items.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if this person who has vast experience in trust and safety with an actual large growing
⏹️ ▶️ John community says, how do I know whether I should even look at signing up for this account? They need to have these seven
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And we’ll put a link to the thread that you can read in more detail, but I’ll just hit the bullet points. One, the terms of service
⏹️ ▶️ John and policy are publicly available and prominently linked. And you can look at them without having to have a login. Two, the
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of service does not contain any binding arbitration clause or a class action preclusion clause.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of nasty stuff you can put in the terms of service. You want to at least look for the obvious things that we know are bad and that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not there. Three, that the ownership is clearly and easily identifiable. Who runs this thing? Who owns it?
⏹️ ▶️ John How, you know, how, how are they organized? Like, you know, who are these people that I’m giving
⏹️ ▶️ John my information to? For the people who run the place don’t believe in the real name policies,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they, you know, they don’t have the mistaken notion that the real name and policies for end of use, that’s not true, they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Five, that the team that runs the thing is public about where their funding came from, what their business plan is, and
⏹️ ▶️ John what form of corporate structure they’ve chosen and why. Six, that they have a registered DMCA
⏹️ ▶️ John designated agent in the US or the equivalent in the EU to deal with copyright stuff. And seven,
⏹️ ▶️ John the information available pre-signup doesn’t indicate that they believe abuse prevention can be achieved with one or two simple tricks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically just saying like, do these people look like they have done the minimum amount to sort of understand
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re signing up for. Most mass addon instances probably don’t clear this hurdle. And what I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say is, this is from the perspective of somebody who ran Trust and Safety Live Journal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you run a tiny instance with 70 of your friends, you don’t need to worry about any of this, who cares, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you run an instance that you have any notion of growing beyond a small handful of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John and communities tend to do that if they gain in popularity, you’re signing up for dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff. and you can read the thread, you could read this person’s other thread where they describe what it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like to learn all this on the job at LiveJournal and how harrowing it was. I would
⏹️ ▶️ John warn you that you probably don’t wanna read that thread if you’re upset by
⏹️ ▶️ John the horrors that other humans can inflict on each other on the internet. But that’s what’s waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for you at the end of anything even approaching Twitter-like scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when there’s a commercial company doing it, They have a profit motive, they can hire people. And even then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult because the people who have to do all the trust and safety stuff is a hard job. Content moderation just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John grinds people up. But if you make a site on the internet where millions of people can come and post
⏹️ ▶️ John content like their own, what they call user generated content, you’re signing up for a whole host
⏹️ ▶️ John of problems that you cannot even imagine. And so it’s almost like, if you wanna run a little mass on an instance
⏹️ ▶️ John for you and your friends, you better not let anybody else in. And even one of your friends might end up being a jerk about it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or one of your friends posts a screenshot from Major League Baseball and then you get a lawyer sending you a letter
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you you need to shut down your Mastodon instance and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it was just 10 people, what the heck is going on? Hmm, not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s scalability in terms of tech stack, but then there’s scalability in terms of I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John run an establishment where humans gather and communicate on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John and both of those are really difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wrangle. And that I think that’s what has me most concerned about Mastodon that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly I don’t think they’re bringing in enough money to make it possible to pay a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large enough trust and safety team to deal with that correctly. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t. But when you said this a couple times you keep saying Mastodon. There is a company that makes the software
⏹️ ▶️ John and runs Mastodon.social but every other Mastodon instance that is not run by them
⏹️ ▶️ John are their own is their own entity. Who knows what their do they have a business model? Where does their money come from?
⏹️ ▶️ John Who’s running that server? Like it’s a piece of software that anybody can take and run, which is again, the beauty and the promise
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, but also means that you have to make these judgments about every single one of those things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon has some responsibility because they’re sort of running the biggest instance and making the software,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they have no responsibility or control over those other instances that are out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. Yeah, and that’s its own set of issues, but that’s largely the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Federation goal. But yeah, any of these mass-downed instances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that get significantly sized, I think they’re gonna have the significant challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, it was one thing when it was mostly a bunch of nerds from Germany using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who I’m sure were all very polite. Now it’s another thing when a whole bunch of Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refugees are looking for a place to go, many of whom you don’t really want on your service.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s only going to be harder and harder. Like if Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco succeeds, which it seems to be already succeeding, in capturing a bunch of Twitter refugees,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s almost like getting a bunch of toxic waste to be installed on your property. It’s like, well, I don’t really want this burden,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks. Like in many ways, it’s not what you want. And most Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instances are not going to have either the money or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person hours or the willpower to be able to deal with the amount of crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will rain down upon them from running a social site that big.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the end of this thread here, the statement from the person who was posting it from
⏹️ ▶️ John LiveJournal, say, failing any one of these seven issues is a proxy for governance, knowledge, and judgment issues
⏹️ ▶️ John that, in my opinion, are highly unlikely to be resolved before someone gets hurt. And so again, this is based on the premise
⏹️ ▶️ John that your instance grows. And the person is saying, if your instance keeps growing,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, whether you know it or not, you will be partially responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for somebody getting hurt because someone is on there and their abusive ex finds them and they get doxed
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t deal with it fast enough and then someone goes to someone’s house and kills them and it’s like, you feel
⏹️ ▶️ John guilty about that. And it’s like, I didn’t sign up for this. I just wanted to have a place to talk about baseball with my friends or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, my baseball master. And like, this is not the fault of Mastodon. This is true
⏹️ ▶️ John of an IRC server, of a Slack you make, of a Discord you make, of like, of anything that you can think of,
⏹️ ▶️ John of a web bulletin board that you make, like just any kind of place online that you sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John create and run where humans can communicate with each other, these problems are, you know, tale
⏹️ ▶️ John as old as time, right? It is not new and it is not the fault of Mastodon that’s doing this, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the challenge that Mastodon, through the popularity of it as a destination for Twitter refugees,
⏹️ ▶️ John each one of those instances is signing up to a varying degrees to these type of challenges. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult challenges, And usually to tackle them in any way, there needs to be
⏹️ ▶️ John like a countervailing factor live journal the people running that wanted to run a service where
⏹️ ▶️ John people could be online a business where people could be online and talk to each other and have their live journals
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So the countervailing factor is there we’re running a business. And one of the difficult parts of the
⏹️ ▶️ John business is content moderation and dealing with abuse and so on and so forth. But in the end, we’re trying to build a business here
⏹️ ▶️ John we we collect money we get paid this is our living. thing with Twitter, whether it fell backwards
⏹️ ▶️ John into it or whatever from ODO and making podcast stuff. They decided they’re going to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a business called Twitter, it’s going to eventually be a public company, and they’re going to make money from
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And they’re going to use that money to pay content moderate, like, that’s the countervailing factor. And then there are the hobby
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, oh, it’s just going to be 10 people, it’s not a big deal. It’s never going to be a big deal. We’re never going to let more than 10 people,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just going to do this. And we can participate just as equally in the Fediverse as anyone else,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can follow all our celebrities on the big famous servers, but we have our own server with our own domain
⏹️ ▶️ John name, and it’s just literally gonna be me and my 10 friends, or my family server, or whatever, right? Or if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to go down to the individual level, you could have individual servers, right? That I feel like is the promise
⏹️ ▶️ John of federation, that you can avoid all of this by keeping your little area
⏹️ ▶️ John owned and controlled by you or someone that you know closely, but still participate in the larger thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s gotta run the larger thing, And if it’s not gonna be you with your little family instance or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John where are the celebrities gonna be? What instance are they gonna be on? Who’s gonna run that? And how are they gonna fund that?
⏹️ ▶️ John And a Patreon, which it looks well-funded for a Patreon for an open source project, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is not well-funded for something that is ever going to have a fraction of the traffic of Twitter. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a challenge that remains. This is not a condemnation I’m asking on, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to kind of lay the groundwork for the people who are enthusiastic about it to say, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John where things will inevitably, these are the problems that will have to be tackled for this to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t continue to grow and it stays the same it is, the size it is, then we’ll just have the current problems, which already
⏹️ ▶️ John we have instances where the moderators make a decision that’s a mistake and then people get angry about it
⏹️ ▶️ John and then they threaten to defederate from each other. Lots of sites were threatening to defederate the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John site, Macedon.social, because they didn’t agree with some moderation decisions and warring
⏹️ ▶️ John factions like that, it’s that’s again, not new on the internet, warring BBS
⏹️ ▶️ John is warring IRC servers, warring IRC channels. You know, I’m going to block you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to block me, I’m not going to accept your thing, you’re not going to accept my like, this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s that’s at the current scale, then the current Smith scale is small, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if making it saying all this is probably not making people want to set up a Macedon instance
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, because it just sounds like a headache and it kind of is. That’s why I’m saying there has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a counterbalance, something on the other side of it to balance that out to make it worthwhile. Another
⏹️ ▶️ John example, this is a New York Times story today. The headline is chaos on Twitter leads a group of journalists who started
⏹️ ▶️ John an alternative. So a bunch of journalists made like a mass and on instance, I think it was, I know maybe it was cohost. I forget. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was either mass and our coast. Anyway, they made an instance and they’re like, boy, running instances of pain
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying to verify
⏹️ ▶️ John dealing with moderate issue. It’s just a bunch of journalists. And it’s like, we don’t have time for this. We should
⏹️ ▶️ John just be doing our journalism job, right? The service that Twitter was providing was being the big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John company that you can get mad at that somehow found a way to fund itself with venture capital and or advertisements while
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just get mad at their dumb decisions, but at least you didn’t have to run the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s like nobody wants to run this. Like it is such a can of worms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is such a burden to try to run a social network. Like it’s funny, like a friend earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a Slack group, uh, kind of joke, like, would I ever go to go back to Tumblr, like to work there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because like, you know, I mean, I haven’t worked there since 2010,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s been quite a long time. But even at the scale we were at back then, we were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, having, we were getting calls from like high school principals, occasional police departments,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, with disputes or posts that they wanted to be taken down or whatever. And that was back then at like basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no scale compared to where social networks have gone since then. it was disheartening to have to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most of it didn’t even make it to a place where I would even see it. Like we had a whole support staff handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it when I left, but I would occasionally, like, you know, one would pass over my desk, I’d have to like go delete something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was like, it was just so disheartening. The actual reality of running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a social network today is so much more involved. There are different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legal requirements, there are different cultural expectations, there are different governments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and law enforcement groups that demand some kind of channel to reach you and to deal with things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is so complicated. It is so hairy and fraught. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no good option on many of the decisions you have to make, as the new Twitter owner is finding out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just such a mess. Nobody wants to do that, unless there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is some massive upside, like you are a giant social company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funded by giant venture capitalists, and you’re gonna have some kind of big ad play down the road. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes it worth these companies doing it and not even always then. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I worry like if any of these smaller ones actually get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco meaningful like traction and get a whole bunch of people using them and you know they start getting the celebrities and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just causes so many problems for them and I really worry about their
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and the the attacks the the attack vectors and the powers that are working against you are way more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John than they were, because now it has been proven to be a valuable thing to leverage these networks
⏹️ ▶️ John for nefarious ends. Even just the you know, the sort of harassment campaigns and
⏹️ ▶️ John the post Gamergate playbook of how, you know, bad actors come in
⏹️ ▶️ John and mess people up, right? That’s way more, way more sophisticated and way, way easier to just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, pick up that playbook and run it. And on the flip side, trust and safety as a profession
⏹️ ▶️ John has become more sophisticated as well to combat that. Those are a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people that Elon fired from Twitter, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then, again, you have to have a, you have to, if you’re going to sign up for this, you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John recruit those people, hire them, and try to make the right decisions. And I always
⏹️ ▶️ John keep saying this every time I talk about this, this is the promise of federation, that individual companies
⏹️ ▶️ John will have the opportunity to do this differently and better. that we’re not stuck with just the
⏹️ ▶️ John billionaire and his whims, or previously the board of directors of Twitter and their whims, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That we have multiple chances to get this right. But law of averages, most of
⏹️ ▶️ John them are going to get it wrong in increasingly spectacular ways, albeit on smaller scale. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is difficult. There is a interview in Time magazine with the creator of Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John Eugene Rocco? I don’t know how to pronounce his name.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s short. There’s not much there, but you can take a look at it. It’s just somebody who was dissatisfied with Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John and wanted to do something better and started this project around 2016-ish. And it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John big open source success story. Like I said, it’s come a long way since I signed up for all those accounts in 2017.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the scale problems remain and the human problems are
⏹️ ▶️ John just lurking around the corner and waiting to mess people up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then you did a tour of about 305 client apps. So do you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to tell me what the winner is?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so first, I’ll put a link to a very long post by Anna Nicholson
⏹️ ▶️ John that reviews a bunch of Mastodon clients. It’s a blog post, we’ll put links
⏹️ ▶️ John to the clients as well. There’s also someone made a Google Sheet, I’m not sure who created this, there’s a Google Sheet that has a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John comparison with just a little, you know, checkbox like, do you have this feature yes, no of like a whole bunch of different clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I tried to find as many, uh, mastodon clients as I could and tried them out
⏹️ ▶️ John since we last recorded, uh, had the interesting experience of like, I’d someone would suggest a client
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. Uh, and I would go look for it in the app store. And, uh, instead of the button saying buy
⏹️ ▶️ John or get, it would say open because it was already installed on my phone. Right. Or the other alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John is I just got the cloud icon with a downward pointing arrow, which is like, you already own this app. You just need to download it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone suggested a Mac app and I went to them. Same thing happened in the Mac App Store. I’m like, wait a second, I hit Command
⏹️ ▶️ John Space. I just launched it, it was already installed. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s how I found some of my accounts. I
⏹️ ▶️ John found some of those accounts that I’d forgotten about. I launched the Mac app that I was trying out and I already had registered accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I missed that one. It was like msdn.io, whatever it is. Anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps have all gotten better since then. So first there’s the official client, just called Mastodon, it’s on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John The official client, it’s pretty okay, right? I like the idea of the official client at least I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of know again, the people who make it are motivated to have mass it on succeed and they
⏹️ ▶️ John probably aren’t using it to Bitcoin mine on my phone, right? Probably yeah, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John highly recommended. They remind me a lot of Twitter apps because these are apps that like a single developer can make and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an API for it and each one does stuff a little bit differently. Mammoth
⏹️ ▶️ John which is currently in beta shows a lot of promise but it’s just not feature complete yet like the preference screen 90% of the
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t do anything there yet, but I do like the look of it so far. Tusker is also in TestFlight
⏹️ ▶️ John beta. I like some stuff about that app. There’s Toot, T-O-O-T with an exclamation point. There’s Toodle.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also Toot with three O’s, Toot, which is open source
⏹️ ▶️ John and cross platform. I looked at the source code for Toot, by the way. I think it’s React Native because it’s like basically the whole app is written
⏹️ ▶️ John in TypeScript kind of, or maybe it’s not React Native. Maybe it’s just literally React in a web view. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It’s like Objective
⏹️ ▶️ John C and then And then there’s like this React thing that runs inside it. There’s Mast, M-A-S-T,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mercury, and something called Feddy, which is a Macedon client,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also a Pleroma, P-L-E-R-O-M-A. I didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up what that is, but I’m assuming it’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John federated thingy. And then Mac apps, I could only find two, which is typical. There’s Mastonaut,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the one I already had installed. And then there’s Hyperspace Desktop, which looks
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of web view-y. So all these applications, they all kind of look like what Twitter clients look like
⏹️ ▶️ John in the early days before like the more mature competitors kind of like settled in.
⏹️ ▶️ John They all feel like web views. Well, some of them do, but I think they’ve learned a lot from Twitter clients.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are somewhat constrained by the API. Most of them aren’t doing things that the API don’t allow you to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do have widely varying performance based on like, you know, some of it is, yeah, is your server slow, but some of it is
⏹️ ▶️ John also like how skilled are you as an iOS developer of making the app feel snappy, making me feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I don’t have to constantly pull to refresh, like preemptively getting things when you know I’m gonna read the next one,
⏹️ ▶️ John how well do they all handle threading and all that stuff. People ask,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one do you like, which is your favorite? I don’t have a favorite. I’ve honestly been using all, like every single app that I listed there,
⏹️ ▶️ John I used each one of those at least once per day since we last recorded. I just jumped from
⏹️ ▶️ John one to the other and I honestly can’t decide. None of them do everything that I want, but each one of them
⏹️ ▶️ John does something vaguely interesting. The only one that I really can’t use is unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastanaut because they don’t, as far as I can tell in Mastanaut, there’s no way to show in notifications just my mentions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t wanna see a list of like follows and fades. I just wanna see mentions. And I don’t think there’s a way to do that in Mastanaut.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s a big gap. But mostly other ones I can get the job done. And then of course there’s the web client, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty flexible and reasonable if you wanna go that route.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Can we, as a member perk, Can we have a isolated recording of John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, “‘Toots!” as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John he uses like a text message alert?
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is not all of them, by the way. I’m sure there are more. Like if you just search for Toot Toodle Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on the App Store, there’s more. There’s more all the time, right? It’s just, it is fun to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John go through a bunch of apps and try them out again. You know, one of my favorites, I think it’s, which one is it? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s either Toot or Toodle. One of them decided that the way it’s gonna do like, account
⏹️ ▶️ John switching, you know, cause you have more than one account, is they put a little sort of quarter circle
⏹️ ▶️ John in the lower right corner of the screen and you rotate that quarter circle and the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle of your phone screen rotates with it. Like it’s like a fan. Oh, that’s kind of cool. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know where they came up with that. I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea, but it’s fun. Oh, I think that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John mean, having not used it, it sounds neat.
⏹️ ▶️ John It feels good to do. It looks stupid and I don’t think it’s the right thing to do but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fun to try an app does something a little bit different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What was it? Was it path that had that really clever menu and like the bottom right where it would like explode out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a radial menu, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really liked path for the 15 minutes it existed. So, you know, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right, that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be your day social network and you have your night social. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reference acknowledged. Yeah, because that was the path guy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. I forget which one it is. Maybe it’s Tusker. Maybe. Oh, God, I need to launch that. They all have icons
⏹️ ▶️ John with elephants on them. So you can’t even tell the difference. But something do interesting stuff with threading where on the avatar icon, it’ll show like dots
⏹️ ▶️ John to be like nodes in a graph, you could tell like a programmer was making this UI of like, I think of it as a graph with nodes. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to show it that way. Not sure that one works either. But it’s it’s interesting. Alright, and
⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s the kicker to all of this. While this is going on, and I’m here trying mastodon and going all these instances
⏹️ ▶️ John and messing with stuff. And by the way, I’m also participating in mastodon replying to people posting things reading things that other people
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Oh, I forgot to mention one final thing. If you would like to become a Twitter a refugee
⏹️ ▶️ John and find a mastodon server somewhere, but you’re like, but how do I know where all of my, the people I used
⏹️ ▶️ John to follow on Twitter, how do I know where they are so I can find them again? The convention that is developed
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the people who leave Twitter, or not leave Twitter, but like, become
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter refugees are trying to go to mass on, they put somewhere in their bio or somewhere in their like
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter information, they put their mastodon address either in the at whatever at mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John dot social form or in just a URL form. And then There are a bunch of free
⏹️ ▶️ John online tools that will, using the Twitter API, find the list of people you follow,
⏹️ ▶️ John scrape all their bios, look for something that looks like a Mastodon address and find them and present them
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. So we’ll put a link to one in the show notes. It’s fettyfinder.glitch.me. There’s a bunch of other ones that it links to in the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John page. And you just enter your Twitter info and authorize it, and it will show you,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s all the people we could find and where they are. And you’ll see that 90% of them are on mastodon.social, 7
⏹️ ▶️ John of them are on this one, 5 of them are on on this one and one person is on this one and you can then follow them if you’re logged into your Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John account. That’s how I’ve been building up my Mastodon follows, try to make my Mastodon timeline like my Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John one by following people, the same people who I followed on Twitter essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve been trying that same thing because I mean, here’s the thing too, it’s like this is another challenge I’ve been having with Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, okay, suppose I get into it. Suppose people are moving there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in reasonable numbers. Suppose I figure out the app situation. Those are all big supposes, but we’ll move on for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do I find people? Because here’s the thing, I mean look, I’ve created so many new accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on so many new social networks and old social networks over the last week or two, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s like, all right, now what? The next step is, all right, find people to follow. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to start a whole new social network from scratch, I want to follow people that I already follow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been curating my list of 197 people I follow on Twitter for years. I want to follow most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them. And yeah, so I do these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools and it finds, I mean, I think I found, I ran the FedFinder thing last night, I think I found like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people out of my 200 people following. So it’s not zero,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is good, but it’s not a lot. And it’s hard to know like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just how to balance multiple social networks. How like, what am I supposed to post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where? Nobody likes a cross-poster, so I’m not gonna just auto cross post everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you do these things? How do you find people? And it’s really hard to start over, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start from scratch. When a major social network of this style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not launched in quite a while, so most of us have never had to make this kind of move,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or have not had to make this kind of move recently. Like we’re out of practice, we don’t know how to find each other, we don’t know how to communicate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If Twitter goes offline tomorrow, I mean, and at this point, nothing would surprise me in that department, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they went offline tomorrow, we would be so confused. We would have no idea where to find anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a very hard thing to bootstrap. So I don’t know, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many challenges to moving this. And I am a little encouraged by just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much momentum there is behind this now. Like there is so much momentum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind people leaving Twitter now. And frankly, I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spreading a lot of bets around with these, I signed up on whatever that new one was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that new network is that everyone’s trying out, like today I
⏹️ ▶️ John up for that. That’s what I was getting at before, speaking of momentum. So I mean, I just was talking about all this Mastodon stuff, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then kind of out of nowhere, starting like a day or two ago, what I
⏹️ ▶️ John started to see in my Twitter timeline mostly was tons of people I follow saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, everybody, come over here. And where they were going over to was
⏹️ ▶️ John HiveSocial.app, The Hive app is an iPhone app called Hive. They don’t have a website
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that. I don’t know if it’s Android, but it’s certainly on iOS. It’s called Hive. And tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of people, mostly in the gaming quadrant of the people that I follow on Twitter, they were all like, hey
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, come over to Hive. Everyone’s going over to Hive. It was gamers and game adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ John artists, right? I’m out. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And what does
⏹️ ▶️ John Hive look like? It looks kind of like Twitter. It’s like an app and you follow people and whatever, right? But what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John is Hive? All right, and it was so sudden and such a like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not just like the few random weird people that I follow, but like big famous people in the gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John industry were like, here’s my new Hive, come over to Hive, see me on Hive. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John where did this come from? I don’t have an answer to this as of Monday, November
⏹️ ▶️ John 21st when we were recording this. I don’t know how Hive came out of nowhere. The explanation, the only explanation I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John is one Destiny YouTuber I follow did a video about it And his explanation was,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, they, you know, there used to be like a gaming department at Twitter. They would
⏹️ ▶️ John like do promotional stuff with like, with people in the games industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I don’t know. They were like a liaison for Twitter for the gaming industry. So if you wanted to do something gaming related on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John or have a Twitter space or promote a tweet or whatever, you would work with them, right? And Elon, of course, fired
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody. That whole department is gone, right? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, and so the people who used to communicate with them and we’re like, well, it seems like we don’t, there’s no more
⏹️ ▶️ John support for gaming at Twitter. Therefore, let’s go over to Hive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hive, as far as I’ve been able to determine, is a perfectly pleasant,
⏹️ ▶️ John although a little bit janky iOS app written by two people. Oh, wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m like, okay, that’s fine. I don’t have anything else in app written by two people. We make a bunch of apps written by one person, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But how in the world, like, I almost feel bad for them. How in the world did this giant critical
⏹️ ▶️ John mass everyone go over to Hive happen for an app that is run by two people. If you think mastodon.social
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to have scaling problems, at least they have like a team of people and like, you know, people doing content moderation.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is two people for the entire service and the app. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not it’s not federated. It’s not in the Fediverse. It’s not activity pub. It’s not related to mastodon. It is literally
⏹️ ▶️ John just like kind of like a Twitter clone, but like a slightly different idea in the app. And
⏹️ ▶️ John my first impression of the app was, you know, I did what I always do, which is I got to go get my username, right? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John rush, I get the hive app, which I didn’t have installed, I install it, I try to sign up with it
⏹️ ▶️ John says you can sign up with Apple ID, maybe with Google. And also you can sign up with email and I always sign up with email.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I tried to sign up with email for like 10 minutes could not do it. First, it wouldn’t accept my password.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then I had to like manually tweak the password because I had a bunch of different password rules. So I couldn’t like, like, you know, use
⏹️ ▶️ John a password manager to do it. So I had to make up a garbage password. And it just never,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would never highlight the button that would let me hit next. Some people were saying there’s a secret rule that wasn’t listed,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you had to have some special character that they didn’t tell you that you had to have to get in. But I think their server was just so. So I signed up with
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. So anyway, I got my username signed up with Apple ID. And then I went there and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of people that I knew and I followed them and they started following me. And that’s when I started to look into this. I was like, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John this? I have no idea. Like, is there some venture capitalist that is behind Hive
⏹️ ▶️ John that like paid a bunch of people to get the ball rolling on it? But like, and I think I just saw them post that they had a million people.
⏹️ ▶️ John A two person company for an app and a service has a million people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway, I mean, in all fairness, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that was Tumblr for a while, but we very quickly needed to hire a third person who was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. And support became community management as well. And that department expanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way faster. Like it was for a long time. It was me and David and then our support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco staff and that that’s how it stayed for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t even have an ios app though. You just had the service which I guess you had the website too But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they they have at that time ios apps didn’t exist yet. This was like 2007 So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, so hive has an ios app that someone had to write but then there’s there’s a service
⏹️ ▶️ John behind it somewhere that the ios app Talks to that runs this thing with the million people like
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe you know, I mean that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s very possible Like that’s, I can tell you like, I mean, I kind of do that for overcast. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that’s a very possible. Obviously, it’s a very different problem. That’s that’s a possible thing to do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where that will fall down scaling wise is not the you know, the servers for a million
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. That’s fine. Where it will fall on scaling wise is the people side, the community
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trust and safety, abuse, copyright stuff. That’s where it’s tough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the two people are just needed to do the iOS app and the service. So who is handling
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s who’s watching the zoo, right? Who is gonna handle the content that is gonna flow
⏹️ ▶️ John into your service from a million people? That is a non-trivial problem. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of interesting that like, you know, this is an opportunity, like Twitter is,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is uncertainty surrounding Twitter, let’s say. Right? So that’s an opportunity for
⏹️ ▶️ John competitive services to potentially find their market, find their niche, right? Like maybe Hive
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes the place that the gaming industry hangs out, right? and maybe some other
⏹️ ▶️ John app, and it doesn’t have to be part of the Fediverse or part of Mastodon or whatever. Maybe they’re just happy to
⏹️ ▶️ John have their one little place in the same way that like DeviantArt was a place like a website where artists hang out and there’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of, I mean LiveJournal I think still exists, but all sorts of websites and communities that exist on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John for smaller subsets of sort of self-selected communities or
⏹️ ▶️ John interest groups or whatever. Even as down to something as simple as like the MacRumors forums or the Ars Technica web forum,
⏹️ ▶️ John back when every website had to have a web forum, which was its own headache to deal with it at a much smaller scale, but it
⏹️ ▶️ John would select for people, you know, the Ars Technica forum was filled with people who read Ars Technica, including me.
⏹️ ▶️ John A very self-selected group, narrow interests, small number of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John headache to manage, right? And Hive could end up being like that. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was just surprised that the Hive sort of came out of nowhere and had such incredible momentum
⏹️ ▶️ John from a source that I have not yet determined, but it got me roped into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does have some interesting features like this. You can set yourself up to say I’m available to answer questions and people can ask you questions
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you respond. That’s just, you know, fancy dressing around the ability to tweet and reply
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially, right? We do if in Twitter terms, but it’s a clever, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John affordance for doing that within the app. And, you know, and it’s filled with the kind of like mass and on it’s filled with new
⏹️ ▶️ John people and new people are, it’s fun when new people are arriving and they want to introduce themselves and people
⏹️ ▶️ John say hi and you know, it’s kind of all in that phrase. So I feel like that’s a fun time, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John before the Nazis arrive.
Quick Twitter updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should very briefly talk specifically about Twitter, hopefully very, very briefly. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to point everyone to a couple of different websites which I thought were very funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interesting. The first was a post called The Fraudulent King by Ed Z. I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read some snippets from it, but I’ll just leave it as an exercise for the listener to go read that. But it is a absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delightful takedown of King Elon and to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his disciples. But it was very, very well done, and I thought it was funny. And then in the spirit of Web 3 is going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great, we also have Twitter is going great, which is a running list of all the different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disasters that are happening over at Twitter these days, which is both hilarious and sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then some people have gotten really, really concerned that Twitter is about to get into a big fight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple. What’s going on with that, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah. So this is something that people who were inside Twitter and are now outside Twitter have been saying is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you might not realize this from the outside, but we were constantly wrangling with app review, surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John surprise, because Apple would complain to us about stuff that’s on Twitter. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John does have policies about what can be an apps that you sell on the App Store. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s those policies have always been tricky. If your app is essentially a front end
⏹️ ▶️ John to a community where users post arbitrary content, because you’re like, look, we just make the app, Or
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not like when we give you the app to review, like we don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you just review the app and not review what people post? And like, well, if you made an app but everybody posts porn there,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna tell you you can’t have your app because we don’t allow porn apps on the App Store. And like, well, but we don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not, we don’t want porn, just sometimes people sneak porn in before we can remove it and Apple’s like, well, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do better on that. And there’s been lots of runarounds with various applications saying like, that Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ John happy with the content moderation policies mechanisms this app influence. Therefore, you can’t go on the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Twitter itself over the years has apparently had lots of run ins with Apple or some were
⏹️ ▶️ John either Apple itself, big wigs writ large, or some random reviewer, just like the rest of us. So they get
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in a map reviewer that says, your app is rejected because I launched Twitter and I saw, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John porn and I always have porn, but whatever, whatever the complaint is, I saw like hate speech or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, something soliciting money for gambling, whatever Whatever the policies of the day are on the app store, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then Twitter would have to work through that to say, okay, we’ll we’ll work with you, Apple, because we’re another big company, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John actually get humans to communicate about app review.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s even worse than I saw it. It’s I searched for this, and therefore was able to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like the app reviewers will search for things like you know, porn or whatever. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will dig in the app to say I searched for this and was able to find it. I shouldn’t even be able to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, and obviously, porn is on Twitter, like where people don’t know it’s not it, Twitter allows it. And so obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John they worked out something with Apple, but that whole that whole relationship, it is a relationship between two big companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that has allowed Twitter to remain on the App Store and allowed Twitter to ship updates.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there is another run in like that, I have a feeling that Elon Musk will not be as politically
⏹️ ▶️ John adept as the previous as the previous Twitter management when it comes to negotiating with Apple about
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple wants to allow on the App Store. So nothing has happened related to this as far as I know. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just people leaving Twitter saying, Hey, we did this over the years. I’m kind of wondering how
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s going to go down now that Elon is in charge because one, he’s pretty much gutted content moderation
⏹️ ▶️ John to even if he hadn’t done that, he’s got a different idea about the rules. And three, his ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John negotiate with people is not proven to be particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John robust, let’s say, you know, because Apple is Apple is big,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they want to have their way. And Elon wants to have way and they both have lots of money and they’re both pretty stubborn
⏹️ ▶️ John and so if that if that happens it’ll be interesting and related to you on there was another story I don’t know if we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a link for the show notes I think it was on the verge he had an all hands meeting reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ John and basically said hey the layoffs are done we’re not firing any more people and in fact we’re even hiring and I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought that was you know a perfect capper for his fairly ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John personnel decisions over his first month or so running Twitter now Now they want they want to hire
⏹️ ▶️ John people because they probably fired some people they shouldn’t have so they need to get uh good people and he really wants people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are good at writing code because as I think our Discussion today has established the biggest problem twitter faces is
⏹️ ▶️ John the ability to write good code. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just did you see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently he’s also demanding that everyone send him status reports every friday afternoon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like eat like so he’s asking every employee to email him Every friday afternoon with what they’ve done for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the it’s like so he wants like 2700 emails a week to arrive on a Friday that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna somehow go through?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is… I mean, this is where, like, when I was talking about, like, the companies that he has that must be filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John people who understood how to sort of navigate his management style, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and I feel like the move, if I
⏹️ ▶️ John was there, the move would totally be just send them a funny meme. That’s all he wants to see.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’d see it and he’d laugh and he’d be like, I like this guy. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the move. No, see I’d be worried a bit like you don’t want to you don’t want to stand out to him though in any way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want for some reason if you’re stuck working for this jerk you want to probably be under the radar a bit like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to be able to show him if he ever asks here’s what I do but you never want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be noticeable to him.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I feel like he wants to notice you I feel like he is gonna go through all 2700 on the first day and like complain
⏹️ ▶️ John if your status support isn’t good whereas you send him a funny meme he’ll just chuckle and move to the next one I think that’s a cool dude. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know. I think John’s right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s a risk and it’s a risk I wouldn’t take if I wanted that job.
⏹️ ▶️ John just look at how he interacts with the worst people on Twitter, many of whom
⏹️ ▶️ John he has reinstated after being kicked off for good reasons. He loves talking to those guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John he just eats it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s unbelievable to me. I really shouldn’t be encouraging us to talk about this anymore, but here we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. unbelievable to me how quickly and how readily apparent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is that he is just. Not a good dude. Like not, I know we kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of knew this already, but I don’t know, maybe, maybe it’s because I should only speak for myself, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked at, I looked at Tesla and I looked at SpaceX and I looked at Starlink and, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, all these different things with the, except from the boring company that he had done that like, it looks like he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing good work. Like he, he, Tesla as a company certainly has pushed the world forward. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s without question. SpaceX, from what little I understand, has pushed the world forward. And yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the more time he spends at Twitter, the more I think that A, he’s a garbage human,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and B, all these companies succeeded in spite, not because of him. And it’s so hard to tell from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the outside, like, who really knows? Maybe I have this dead wrong, but…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, he’s showing us. Like, before we could say, like, you know, if we heard, like before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was all over Twitter. If we would have heard from someone, oh, this guy is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, really hard to work for. Think about, and I know this is a tire comparison and not apt for so many reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but think about, you know, what we think of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was never on Twitter. So what we think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Jobs is informed solely by his public events and the stories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we heard from people who worked with him. And that’s a much smaller like exposure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surface. Now we have all these idiot billionaires and celebrities and politicians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making fools of themselves on Twitter all the time for us to see right there in the open. And it reveals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to be, you know, jerks slash idiots in various ways that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ruins the mystique of who they were. Before Twitter we would never have known that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Before social networking was a major thing, they weren’t exposing their personalities in all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these ways. So with him, had it not been for him being so hooked on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and promoting himself there and being a kind of a crap poster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, if not for that, we would never have known that this guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was this jerk. We would just think, oh yeah, we heard he’s a little hard to work for, sometimes he does weird things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the press, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there’s also, we would have heard the stories that are, you know, stories that we tend to, that are
⏹️ ▶️ John above and beyond anything we ever heard about Steve Jobs. I think it wasn’t a story where he was trying to solicit sexual
⏹️ ▶️ John favors from someone on a private jet and promised to buy them a horse if they did it. Like, I think that was Elon Musk. Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John if I’m getting it wrong, but like there there he’s even just the stories that have leaked out of
⏹️ ▶️ John private things have put him in a category beyond even the worst of Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs, which is, you know, denying his paternity of his daughter and being a terrible boss and being
⏹️ ▶️ John super terrible to some people who work for him. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But still, I feel like in this era of all these celebrities and politicians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and billionaires being on Twitter, they are just constantly making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asses of themselves and he is at the top of the list. If he was never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter, I think he would be so much better off. He would have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better reputation, he would have far less drama to deal with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he wouldn’t constantly step in it the way he does. was like, I think Twitter has has done a great disservice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for him and vice versa because, you know, he just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, he’s the kind of person who like having having less access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between the public and him is good for him. And instead, he just is ramping it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s just unbelievable how quickly and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how effectively and adeptly he has ruined his own reputation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here again, like, I just don’t understand the people that are still clinging to him like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of messiah or something that like, oh, he’s playing, you know, 7D chess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ll see. You’ll see. Maybe, possibly, but golly, I would be flabbergasted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if he really is playing 4D chess.
⏹️ ▶️ John TABOR UZRIEHI I have a link from The Verge around this story. It’s from, well, it’s from May of this year. SpaceX reportedly
⏹️ ▶️ John paid $250,000 to cover up Elon Musk’s sexual misconduct. The flight attendant claimed he touched her inappropriately an
⏹️ ▶️ John S for erotic massage.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Those type of stories,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you don’t need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good guy. Good guy. Yeah. And it’s kind of like, this is part of the entire problem of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John every powerful male sexually assaults people from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and we just ignore it.
⏹️ ▶️ John No big deal. Right, exactly. I mean, even if you 100% admit to it, we’ll still elect you president. It’s fine. No
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one cares about sexual
⏹️ ▶️ John assault. And sadly, enough people have that attitude that it continues to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a thing that we don’t even talk about and just goes beneath our notice and we spend our time talking about, yeah, but is he good for the company?
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#askatp: Apps on smart TVs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move along and let’s just go straight to some Ask ATP. Starting with Dominic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LeMire, Dominic writes, I’ve been using the built-in Apple apps, especially AirPlay on my TV for the last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few years, and I’m wondering why this is not something most people want or demand from their TV manufacturers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Working in the set-top box industry, I know firsthand how HDMI CEC is an interoperability nightmare. I prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having everything built into the TV for simplicity and tighter integration. For example, I don’t have to mess around with matching frame
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rates. I decided to try the Apple TV 4k to see what I’m missing. It is snappier But other than that, I didn’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was worth the extra clutter and complexity I’d be curious to hear what you two have to say about this but to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do have a semi modern LG TV we bought at the end of 2019 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For a little while when I was when I still had the 1080 Apple TV connected to it. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often using the the TV apps because especially for like Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus, I had no 4K input into my TV. But eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got the 4K Apple TV, the prior generation, the one that brought the new remote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like, oh, this is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better because it’s exactly that. Everything is snappier, it’s consistent, way more consistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just works better. My TV, I don’t have connected to ethernet, although I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have, and the Apple TV is connected to ethernet, so it’s more responsive in that regard. Just everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is better. And I also really, really like that the Apple TV has become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically the entire television to me. I don’t have a TiVo. I no longer have any sort of DVR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not run through the Apple TV because I use former sponsor channels. The Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV is the TV unless we’re playing the Switch or the Wii. And HDMI CEC, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been and continue to be a HDMI CEC unicorn, probably because I only really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the Apple TV connected to my TV. And so I think for my money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially now that it’s gotten cheaper, it’s so much better than the TV apps and so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey peppier and snappier and so much, just so much better in every measurable way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I would much prefer that over using the TV. I could live with just the TV apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would very much prefer not to. Let’s start with Marco, who I think will probably have a similar answer to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then John, you can correct the two of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I’ve like my, my stupid Samsung frame TV has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, fairly modern apps in it. My old LG OLED does not really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s modern-ish, but not enough. But you know, the Samsung frame TV is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine with all of the apps, but I just don’t want to use them. Like, I could if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to, if there was no Apple product in this category, I would use the apps on my TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same way I used to use cable boxes. Like, yeah, I can use these things, but I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer the way the Apple product works. I think it is nicer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it fits my preferences and expectations better. I even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate to say this, I even like the remote better because the Samsung
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John remote is just that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. But like, you know, I just like it better. And yeah, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if these products didn’t exist, I’d be fine. I would live with the TV the same way I did before the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existed. But fortunately, I don’t have to make that choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what’s the right answer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so a couple of things here. One, obviously, is modularity. You’re probably gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ John a TV for a while, but technology marches on, and you can, if you’re a sucker like us, keep replacing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV puck to get better and better performance. So just having it as a separate concern and not welded together,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in the beginning when you first get your TV, you don’t care that much about it, but over time, it pays dividends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two, TV manufacturers, Most of them are heavily incentivized to spy on you like crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t like having your television report back to somebody exactly what you’re watching for how long
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly as part of the way they make money off of the television that they sold you for just barely over how much it cost them to
⏹️ ▶️ John make it, you might wanna use a box attached to your TV and not let your TV onto the network. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned at all about privacy, Apple in particular, but in general, anything that is outside your TV that has a
⏹️ ▶️ John understandable way to make money besides spying on you, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John a better move. And finally, especially with the Apple TV, the most recent one, the
⏹️ ▶️ John grunt, the CPU and GPU power inside an Apple TV is head and shoulders above
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is inside any television. Televisions have dedicated chips to deal with the video signal processing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the thing they have left over to run your apps is so much wimpier than
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware that’s in an Apple TV. And, you know, probably has less RAM available to it and slower
⏹️ ▶️ John storage, and it shows in the apps, right? From the day you get them, if you, no matter how much
⏹️ ▶️ John money you pay for a TV, and I just paid a lot of money for a TV, there is no built-in
⏹️ ▶️ John television that has an interface as snappy as the Apple TV, because the hardware is just not as powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s on day one of me buying like an extremely expensive television.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just gonna get worse over time, right? Not that I think the Apple TV is slow by any means, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, the Apple TVs will keep getting faster, my TV is gonna stay exactly the same, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And as for HDMI CEC, it continues to be my enemy. My most recent thing is I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John watch a movie for a podcast I was doing. We did an episode of the Incomparable. I’m watching the movie, I have it on Blu-ray.
⏹️ ▶️ John I finally get to use my fancy Blu-ray player. And something about the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV, like if you have an Apple TV and you have a position where you can see its little white light on the front of
⏹️ ▶️ John it, you’ll see that the white light goes off. Like it goes to sleep when you’re not using it, right? But sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John the white light comes on and it wakes up to do something. Is it doing app updates? Why is it waking
⏹️ ▶️ John up? I don’t know. But through the magic of HDMI CEC, when it wakes up, my TV
⏹️ ▶️ John slash receiver slash who knows what in my giant setup says, oh, it looks like you just powered on your Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. You probably want me to change inputs to Apple TV because you wanna watch that now. It did that while
⏹️ ▶️ John I was watching my Blu-ray. I’m watching my Blu-ray and then the Apple TV wakes up and my TV goes, oh, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna change it, but back to the Apple TV. But then as it’s changing input, the Blu-ray player says, no, I’m playing
⏹️ ▶️ John a movie. And then it switches back and then they fight each other. And then I have to, I was so close to just unplugging the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV. In the end, I just had to manually put the Apple TV to sleep so it would stop leaving me alone. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike what this was called back in the day on my Panasonic Plasma, it was like SmartBear or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John something or other. I don’t even think I can turn HDMI CEC off now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I think it’s just on everywhere and I
⏹️ ▶️ John just have to deal with it. Not a good standard. Don’t like it. Works for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It works here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, never connect more than one thing to your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey television. Yeah, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great. That’s exactly, that’s the secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even then, I think it doesn’t work reliable all the time because you have some people who literally only have one thing connected to their
⏹️ ▶️ John TV and it’s still sometimes, that’s wonky stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, buy better TVs, John.
#askatp: Use “public” Xfinity Wi-Fi?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NuGet Machine writes, what are the ethics of using an Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot out in public, given the very high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chances of being served up to you by another customer leasing an Xfinity-powered cable modem and using up their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey precious resources without their knowledge? If you’re a customer with your own modem or you lease theirs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but have done the magic incantation to opt out of this quote-unquote feature, does that affect the moral
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calculus? I don’t know. if this is, if this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a perk of being an Xfinity customer, it might be the only perk of being an Xfinity customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I guess run with it, man. I don’t know. What do you think, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m saying like, this is the way the Xfinity thing works. Everyone who’s paying for it understands that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you’re not, you’re not doing anything for anybody by not using
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature. If you need to use it, use it. Uh, like, and other people are just certainly going to use yours because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s part of what they’re paying for. It’s you are a collective of Xfinity people who are all providing free
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi hotspots to all the other Xfinity customers. That’s what you’re paying for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Use what you paid for. I mean, I think it’s a crappy experience all around. It’s a crappy experience letting other people
⏹️ ▶️ John use your Wi-Fi and it’s crappy experience using other people’s because it tends to be slow. But that’s the system you’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re stuck with it because you can’t get any better cable provider, that’s another problem with
⏹️ ▶️ John the competitive landscape of telecom in America or lack thereof.
#askatp: Will data storage run out?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Wright asks, as we’re generating increasingly more digital media every single day, do you think that data storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could become a scarce resource? How could this problem be avoided and what is the endgame for digital
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hoarding? For me, the endgame is I run out of space on my Synology. And my Synology—I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I mentioned this on the show—our Synologies will no longer be getting software updates starting very soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget exactly when. I think I am staring down the barrel of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finally after nine years and having this thing running pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 24-7 for nine years, I think I’m finally staring down the barrel of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to replace it. So that’s going to probably happen at some point next year. Or maybe Santa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will bring me something great. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does Santa bring sonologies?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It depends on if you ask very nicely and whether you’ve been a good boy or not this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, Marco, maybe Santa isn’t bringing you Synology, but do you think data storage problems will, or data storage will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever become scarce?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t been following the developments enough recently in like hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive density and flash density and everything, like how fast we’re progressing there. But it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hard drives are pretty giant. Like as long, and it seems like as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t care about speed, then you can get effectively infinite storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for not that much money. Now, there are certain things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Chris asked, we are generating more stuff over time. Per person, the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco footprint is getting larger, and that’s largely due to mobile phone cameras. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to continue to get better over time. It’s a highly competitive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco highly fast-moving industry where phone cameras are gonna keep shooting bigger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher resolution pictures. We’re gonna keep shooting more and more video clips and things like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are gonna keep generating more data, but I think storage is so vast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re gonna run out of it anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, on an infinite time scale, will we ever run out of storage? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so storage, like, so Moore’s law will eventually run out. Moore’s law is the doubling
⏹️ ▶️ John of transistor density every 18 months, whatever, yada, yada. But it’s talking about transistors,
⏹️ ▶️ John But lots of people look at Moore’s law and say, well, you know, transistor
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, we can’t keep making things smaller forever. Like there is a limit to the smallest size of a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that we are aware of that can be manipulated, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the limit lurking out somewhere in the distance. Storage mostly follows that
⏹️ ▶️ John same path. The difference is that I feel like storage is, it’s easier to
⏹️ ▶️ John move down that path, slightly easier to move down that path in storage, right? because for transistors
⏹️ ▶️ John in like CPUs and stuff, and you may be thinking, oh, transistors are used in memory too,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just hear me out. Transistors for CPUs and stuff, those are delicate little
⏹️ ▶️ John things that have to be arranged just so, so they can switch correctly and avoiding leakage current
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other things, right? So it’s not so easy to keep making those smaller. It’s very difficult to keep making those things
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller and smaller. We’ve had to come up with new arrangements of the little parts in them, so they’re not even shaped like they were
⏹️ ▶️ John back when they were a little bit bigger. And that’s a really hard problem. For storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John you do have the problem of like how small of a particle we can get, but we’re not even close to that, right? But instead it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the easier problem of, I just need something to store something. And so far we’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John similar technology to CPU stuff, as transistors and various things like that. But there are lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, there’s lots of research and studies of how to store things
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially without using transistors. I think you’ve probably seen the stories in science journals
⏹️ ▶️ John or news articles over the past couple of decades of using DNA to store data, using
⏹️ ▶️ John bacteria, using all sorts of organic things, because they have, it’s always a big headline story. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look how much data we stored in this tiny little bit of organic matter, right? It’s incredibly efficient. It’s way
⏹️ ▶️ John more efficient than transistors. And the molecules that make up DNA are not the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of subatomic particles. You can see them in a microscope, right? But they’re pretty darn
⏹️ ▶️ John small and they’re actually very densely packed, right? So I feel like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be harder to travel down the Moore’s law path of CPU than it will
⏹️ ▶️ John be to travel down that path in storage, just because I think when storage hits the wall of the transistors,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has another route. It can say, well, I don’t really need transistors to store stuff. If we could figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ John to store things in DNA or whatever, bacteria or whatever other thing like that, maybe that is a
⏹️ ▶️ John viable route where logic will get hung up on figuring out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the next shrink and storage will continue to progress. So I’m I’m pretty optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John that storage will continue to progress and progress. And as I’ve said in many shows in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John if most of the things we put in storage are things that are absorbed by our senses, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we will reach the point of diminishing returns with with at least two dimensional video. And we
⏹️ ▶️ John just like we already have with audio. And so our storage needs actually will not that they’ll cap out because we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John always need more and more storage, but I think the curve will bend a little bit as we start saturating
⏹️ ▶️ John human sensory resolution, so to speak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Collide, and Backblaze. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at https://www.hpt.fm.com. We will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to
Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it is, as previously mentioned, Thanksgiving week here in America. And, you know, we should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably share some things that we’re thankful for. And if one of you would like to start, you certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can, but I figured I would start to give you two some time to think about it since I’m springing this on you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You totally are. You’re springing this on there. Like, like someone’s mom at a Thanksgiving dinner. Once everyone who’s at
⏹️ ▶️ John the dinner, you, it’s not even, it’s not even your house. You’re over your
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey friend’s house in the mountains. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all going to go around the table and say what we’re thankful for. That’s you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s me right now. So what am I thankful for? Obviously, I need to pander, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also mean it. I am very incredibly thankful for our listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and doubly so for our members, but even if you can’t be a member, I still love you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am extremely thankful for all of you. As I get ever older, it’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and more clear to me, or I always knew it, but it becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more and more obvious and apparent that time is everyone’s most precious resource,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And especially as we’ve all kind of reset our priorities over the last couple of years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a big ask for us to, to ask of all of you to spend, you know, two to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three hours of your time with us each week. Or if you’re using a great podcast like Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe, you know, an hour and a half to two hours, I don’t know. It depends on how fast and how fast you listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how, how, how great the, uh, you know, the smart speed is, but nevertheless, it is, it is, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot to ask of you to spend two to three hours with us every week. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really means a lot to all three of us that you do that. And this is whether or not you’re a member or anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for anyone who has pitched the show to a friend of theirs, well, it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerdy stuff. But they’re fun nerds. I don’t know how you would pitch our show. But nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I deeply appreciate it. All of us deeply appreciate that. And if you are a member, we deeply appreciate that as well. If you’ve ever bought merch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you bought merch almost 10 years ago now now and never again, I still appreciate you. So thank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you for that. And selfishly, I’m extremely thankful for myself and my family’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey health. Somehow we still have not yet had COVID enter the house. I’m sure it is imminent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It could be any day now. Declan actually had a little bit of a fever today and so far he has tested negative, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all I know, he might be afflicted with it as we speak, but so far so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But on the grand scheme of things, we are healthy, we are all as vaccinated and as maxinated as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can possibly be at this time. So I’m super thankful for that. But since this is a nerdy show, let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some nerdy stuff that I’m thankful for, and then I’ll shut up and move on to one of you two. I’m really thankful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for when stuff actually does just work. And I’m gonna be thankful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in a thankful mood, so I’m not gonna talk about things that used to just work and don’t anymore, but the things that really do just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. And just some random smattering of things. WireGuard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the VPN that I use, really does just work. Tailscale is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very, very good former sponsor of us. It’s the less fiddly version of WireGuard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and is also excellent. I use Docker for a bunch of stuff I’ve spoken about on the show and for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some things that I haven’t spoken about on the show. If you know, you know. Docker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely good and very useful. Obviously my Sonos system, I’m still utterly in love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with. I brought up the Synology earlier. I couldn’t go through this segment without mentioning Plex,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so here it is. And of course, I’m super thankful for that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I mentioned earlier, channels, especially once I went to the cable card version, which I know did not win John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over, but losing the DVR and go, or the physical DVR and going to a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card-based channel setup has really made watching TV a lot better in my house, in my world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I know those are mostly, with the exception of the listeners, mostly, and I guess health, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inconsequential, but I’m still thankful for them and they’re fun, nerdy things. So I don’t know which one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If one of you wants to volunteer, feel free. Otherwise, I will put someone on the hot seat. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matz I can go first. John O’Reilly Second. Paul Matz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Sorry, John, do you want to? John O’Reilly You beat me to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re up. Paul Matz All right. So setting aside everything that Casey said about how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome all of our members and listeners are, because that is true, and we’ve covered that recently too. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I appreciate all of you, and you’re awesome. And thank you for letting us do this ridiculous thing that people pay us money for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s That’s amazing. In the tech world, I’ll keep it fairly short,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am really thankful for the frickin’ Mac. The Mac is back. The Mac had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some really bad years, and they appear to be over. And right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, the Mac is in a really good place where there’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different options available on the Mac. Different sizes, different physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco characteristics, different performance characteristics. And they’re all really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are great options for pretty much any needs that you could have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the number of trade-offs to get them is lower than ever. Like that’s, again, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I’m still using a laptop as my desktop, even though a technically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better desktop exists that I could buy, I don’t even want it. My laptop is great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just like, there’s so many, like every Mac they sell right now is great. And Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS is, you know, I have my design qualms with Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there, but for the most part, most of the most egregious bugs and bad behaviors have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been fixed. So I’m just very happy with the Mac, and I’m so happy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s been getting a lot of investment on Apple’s side recently. And again, even,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, design quibbles aside, it’s really in a much better place than it was. And that matters a lot to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me because this is where I do the vast majority of my computing, both for work and pleasure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just, I love the Mac, and I’m really happy. It’s in a good place. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve stolen all the answers. I’ll give the short first. And I have one, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll echo what you both said, one heartfelt thing and one silly thing. So the heartfelt thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously, you know, I left my job this year. I left my jobby job to do this full time.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been about seven and a half months. I’ll probably mention this again when I come to a full year, but seven and a half months so
⏹️ ▶️ John far so good. And why? It’s because of all you people who are listening. Again, listening members are not
⏹️ ▶️ John buying my stupid chicken hat. Whatever it is that you’re doing to make this life possible for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So far so good, seven and a half months in. You know, I will see how everything goes at tax time because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still the end of the year accounting to see how everything’s going. But fingers crossed,
⏹️ ▶️ John thank you very much for making this possible for me to do. Because it’s been,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s been a big change in my life and it’s been very scary and so far it’s going okay. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John second much more frivolous thing is, I’m thankful for my fancy TV, even though the price has been reduced $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ John since I bought it. Oh, that’s so brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was happy to spend that money to get the TV when I did because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John very happy with it, fighting with HDMI CEC aside, everything I watch in it I love,
⏹️ ▶️ John my family doesn’t care, but I think my TV is great. And I think I made the right
⏹️ ▶️ John choice and I think all that waiting was right, kind of like my Mac Pro here.
⏹️ ▶️ John other people look at this purchase and it doesn’t make any sense to them, it makes sense to me. And so I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I have, you know, things continue to go well with this TV. It will be like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, maybe not like this Mac, but like my 2008 Mac Pro, my Plasma before it, I bought the right
⏹️ ▶️ John TV at the right time for me. I almost thought about putting it on my good products page, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a page on my website where like, I think there’s a product that really, you know, people deserve to know about. But
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, it’s more like my Mac Pro. I shouldn’t really put it on that page because most people probably shouldn’t buy it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, if you want a really nice TV, the Sony A95K is a really nice TV. It does all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things I thought it would do and it looks amazing. I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Despite the fact that it doesn’t work for beans with HDMI CEC. Well, that’s just HDMI CEC.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, it’s not the television’s fault. It’s not the television’s fault that
⏹️ ▶️ John my fricking Apple TV keeps waking up and saying, hey everybody, I’m here. I don’t know why I’m waking up, but I’m up again.