catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

514: My Immense Softness

Alternative browser engines on iOS, the latest Mac Pro rumors, and — at long last — the solution to Marco’s biggest winter problem.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Invalid preflight
  2. Modem sounds
  3. Sponsor: Nebula
  4. Follow-up: Docker
  5. Non-WebKit engines on iOS?
  6. SR-71 navigation system
  7. Follow-up: Moisturizer
  8. Sponsor: Memberful
  9. Mac Pro rumors
  10. Sponsor: MasterClass
  11. #askatp: Journaling?
  12. #askatp: Folders under ~
  13. #askatp: Lost in Spaces
  14. Ending theme
  15. Ending theme?

Invalid preflight

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I added some brief follow-up that should only take a moment. The

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple dropping web kit. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John worth doing. Are

⏹️ ▶️ John you trying to do the pre-flight? Is that what’s happening here? Yes. What are you doing?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s a power move.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m putting a stop to that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ John dad. I do the pre-flight. What’s next? Marco writing the show notes?

⏹️ ▶️ John Lunacy, I tell you. Yes. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco official

⏹️ ▶️ John pre-flight will begin. Yes, now the official the appraisal pre-flight will begin.

Modem sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Get the bad feeling all of our good content happened before we went live.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t worry, I’m using some of that for the pre-show in the released version.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey All right, good deal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, bootleg people, go listen to the released version for like the first, you know, five minutes and you’ll hear everything that just happened. Not even. 45 seconds.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, listen to the modem sound.

⏹️ ▶️ John How many people, I guess in our audience it’s fine, but we always refer to it as the modem sound. Just the number

⏹️ ▶️ John of people who know what that is or will recognize it when they hear it or know what we’re talking about just shrinks every day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. But I think among our, I think it’s shrinking in the world, but I think in our audience it’s staying about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same, possibly even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John growing.

⏹️ ▶️ John We need some more period piece movies that capture that little slice of time

⏹️ ▶️ John when the internet was a thing, but most people were getting onto it with modems. Like that was not

⏹️ ▶️ John a very long period of time, but for the people who lived through it, it was significant and no one has really done like a period piece.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, setting aside like War Games and the acoustic coupler and all that, I’m talking about the like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John 2400 bought and on normal people are on the internet, but they’re using modems to do it era

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is when you make a movie about some time, you know three or four decades ago whatever like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it first of all, like, you know You got to figure like are the are the mid 90s or early 90s when this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really like becoming a big thing Or is that time you’ve been cool enough to make a movie about yet and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point it might be right Oh for

⏹️ ▶️ John sure It’s definitely because I feel like the 80s are fading as we 80s kids get too

⏹️ ▶️ John old to care anymore And I feel like 90s is very in probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco however the part of culture that is represented when you do like you know a look Back movie by a few decades

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like what the cool kids were doing at that time And I assure you no one hearing that sound was a cool kid because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was that person and there is no way I was A cool kid

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have to be a cool kids thing again I’ll point to war games sometimes you make a movie intentionally about the nerds or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah But they’re never the nerds. They’re never that it’s always like oh you take the kids glasses off and all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a sudden He’s hot like it’s you know it’s never It’s never the nerds. What

⏹️ ▶️ John movies are you watching?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey She’s All That. Actually, isn’t there a He’s All That now? But that’s brand new. You know, I just read, and I’m never going to be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to find it, but I just read in the last like 48 hours, Life Streams, John, Life Streams, something about how,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m going to butcher it, but it was, the premise was like the movie Superbad, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably does not hold up at all, but my recollection of it is very fond. Superbad

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the brief window of time right before just everyone was carrying phones and text

⏹️ ▶️ Casey messaging and so on and so forth. And the thought was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this was the last movie of its ilk, right? The last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey time you can have a movie where not being able to communicate is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the crux of the movie.

⏹️ ▶️ John And— Oh, no, they do that all the time now. They just have increasingly ridiculous contrivances to make that the case. Oh, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John got no signal. My phone is gone. Or there’s an EMP or whatever. It’s always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason. Yeah, now it’s just all zombies. The zombies took out the cell towers first for some reason.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. But you know what I’m saying, that alleges this person on like Twitter, Mastodon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John I was watching some 80s anime with my son over his break and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a movie set in, I mean, the future of the 80s, so like I think it starts, I don’t know, in the 2000s

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but anyway, everything’s all futuristic, right? There’s giant robots, you know, the whole nine yards,

⏹️ ▶️ John and they have really cool futuristic looking phones, but they are

⏹️ ▶️ John in phone booths. So whenever people need to communicate, they go to a phone booth and use this amazing futuristic

⏹️ ▶️ John phone that like, you know, scans their retina or responds to voice commands, but it’s in a booth and it’s, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John huge. Like at their desk, they have a really cool looking space future-y kind of phone. And it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John the size of a shoebox on their desk with a cord connected to it, right? Because they can imagine the future.

⏹️ ▶️ John They can imagine the future with giant robots, right? and amazing technology and space travel and all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of things and aliens, but everyone having a phone, no. So there are plots that involve

⏹️ ▶️ John someone trying to call someone and they can’t get them because they’re not by a payphone or at their desk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, those were the days. I just want an entire documentary on the battle between X2 and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey K56 Flex. That’s what I want.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There wasn’t much of a battle. Like X2 kicked their butts. Like that was the battle. Like X2 won

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ John And also the people have the K56 Flex things. It’s not like they couldn’t, like ISP supported

⏹️ ▶️ John that enough. Like, you know, if you bought it and you could use it, it’s not like it was a bad purchase. It wasn’t like you got a, what was

⏹️ ▶️ John it called? Like DivX drive or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, it was a bad purchase after a while. Initially, cause the thing is like the, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the receiving end, until there was that like V92 that unified them, on the receiving end,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had to choose like certain phone lines would be X2 and the other phone lines would be K56Flex,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’d have to call the right one that matched the format of your modem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X2 was way more popular from the get-go, what ended up happening was the ISPs and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco BBSs would have way more X2 lines than K56Flex lines.

⏹️ ▶️ John By then, your modem probably broke anyway, So get a new one. Don’t worry about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Nebula, a streaming service created

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Follow-up: Docker

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a little bit of follow-up with regard to my Docker adventures. If you recall, last episode in the after

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, I was talking about how I couldn’t get Docker working properly on my Mac mini. A lot of people reached out to say,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, it works on my desk. And I’m glad I really am, but it doesn’t work on my desk. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a handful of people, and I don’t have names in front of me, I’m sorry, but a handful of people recommended Kolema, which which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is short for containers on Linux on Mac. And so the idea is it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what John was suggesting. It’s like a Linux VM in which you run Docker. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as far as Docker is concerned,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right. I mean, that’s what Docker Desktop is too, right? I was suggesting you use VMware, like just run something that doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know anything about Docker but just says, hey, I’m going to run Linux on your Mac and then within that Linux VM,

⏹️ ▶️ John run Docker.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s fair. But one way, honestly, I don’t care enough to understand the hyper specifics about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But suffice to say, it’s an alternate way of running Docker. And I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of problems with that with regard to network shares that are unimportant. But as of just a couple of hours ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I have that all squared away now. And that seems to be working. So now I have temporarily

⏹️ ▶️ Casey powered off my Docker containers on my Raspberry Pi. I have migrated everything to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac mini. And I’m going to see how that goes for the next few days. And I think and hope it’s working. And hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’ll go pretty well. Now the motivation for doing this is, even though the Raspberry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pi seems to be handling all four of the containers, no problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m quite surprised by that because I think it’s a 2 gig RAM Raspberry Pi. And I was saying, you know, I really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want an 8 gig Raspberry Pi. I don’t think I need it. I really don’t. But nevertheless, there’s not a lot of space

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that Raspberry Pi. I don’t want to like thrash the SD card if one of these containers is downloading something.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I wanted to move it to the Mac Mini. And in my initial tests on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mini, if I have one of these containers download something on the Raspberry Pi, it goes at like 15, maybe 20 megabytes a second. On the Mac Mini,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was kissing 90 megabytes a second. That’s bytes, not bits, mind you. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was basically maxing out my gigabit Ethernet line,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is pretty freaking cool. So that’s part of the reason I wanted to go to the Mac Mini. And so far,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey knock on wood, everything seems to be working now. So if you’re in a similar boat, I’m so sorry, but Koleman.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Non-WebKit engines on iOS?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me John, Apple’s considering not requiring all of us to use WebKit?

⏹️ ▶️ John Whaaaaat? Anytime Apple considers anything like that, it’s probably because the government is making

⏹️ ▶️ John them. So this was part of the German story about the Digital Markets Act,

⏹️ ▶️ John and he claims that that’s one of the things that’s on the table to comply with the DMA

⏹️ ▶️ John is stopping the requirement that every web browser that is on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John must use Apple’s WebKit engine. If people don’t know, you can get Chrome for your phone,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Chrome is running WebKit under the covers, not Google’s fork of WebKit that is

⏹️ ▶️ John called Blink. It used to be that both Chrome and Safari were built on WebKit, but those

⏹️ ▶️ John days are gone now and Google went off and forked it. Anyway, this is, you know, this is something

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m sure browser makers have wanted for a while. We’ve talked in the past about all the various security

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons why Apple wouldn’t want this, but there are other reasons why Apple wouldn’t want this. aside

⏹️ ▶️ John anything having to do with security and just-in-time compilers and all sorts of exploits that can happen in

⏹️ ▶️ John web browsers. This is sort of the thing that a lot of developers who are

⏹️ ▶️ John angry about, web developers are angry about when Apple was too slow in their opinion

⏹️ ▶️ John in supporting various web standards on iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, by the way, that was always like a really BSE classification of what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was actually happening, which is basically it’s like, you know, the web people who didn’t like the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takeoff of apps would propose a quote standard saying, all right, now all web browsers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have, you know, insert app capability X notifications, background execution,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco workers, like all this, you know, stuff that Apple was like, uh, we don’t agree that’s what everybody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have because that’s going to make everything worse on our phones. And, and so it was, it was way more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated than Apple being quote slow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s something that we’re slow, like even just simple stuff like features they did support, but they weren’t up to date with the latest changes

⏹️ ▶️ John in them. It wasn’t always like a feature that Apple disagree with, but that’s changed a lot lately. I think Safari is

⏹️ ▶️ John and the web contingent is really picked up in web standards. But the reason it’s relevant is that

⏹️ ▶️ John what you were getting at that if you are dissatisfied with the one and only app store that exists

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone, Apple has always had a way for you to sort of, oh, why don’t you just ship it as

⏹️ ▶️ John a web app, make it a web page. You can even put web apps on your home screen. That’s a feature that Apple introduced.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was, was it part of the suite solution or did it come later? I

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco forget. Yeah, it was really early

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. I think that was iOS 2.0, wasn’t it? Even before 2.0. It’s one of

⏹️ ▶️ John those features that people don’t even know exists and may even be using without knowing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s kind of, you know, it’s almost like a different Apple made this like, oh, you mean I can have an icon on my home screen that

⏹️ ▶️ John really just launches a webpage, but I don’t know that cause it just looks, anyway. That feature still exists. Apple could

⏹️ ▶️ John take that away at any time if they wanted. But anyway, if you’re dissatisfied with the App Store, but there’s some

⏹️ ▶️ John feature that you would like to have that you can’t implement in WebKit essentially, you’re like,

⏹️ ▶️ John man, if only I had Chrome, the actual Chrome, you know, Blink-based Chrome on

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, I could do this other thing with my app. And setting aside things that integrate with the OS, like, oh, I wanna have, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, push notifications, stuff like that, just stuff that happens just in that web page, something having to do with

⏹️ ▶️ John service workers, or, I mean, I guess this impacts the OS as well, like our index DB

⏹️ ▶️ John or just there’s some feature, web feature that Apple doesn’t have yet. Do you think if I had this, I could make

⏹️ ▶️ John a web-based app that would be really great. If Apple lifts this restriction and says,

⏹️ ▶️ John browser engines out of the web could are allowed, it is plausible that a motivated group could decide,

⏹️ ▶️ John okay, we don’t have to wait for Apple to implement these new features, these new WebGL

⏹️ ▶️ John features or something that we really need for our cool web-based application, because Blink has already implemented it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll use the Blink-based Google Chrome on iOS to run our cool application.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s kind of a, it’s not a backdoor, it’s not even a side door, it’s just sort of like a side show.

⏹️ ▶️ John And being divorced from WebKit, saying we’re not dependent on Apple implementing

⏹️ ▶️ John these features, we’re dependent on Google now instead, right? But say you are Google, for instance, it really would

⏹️ ▶️ John help them if they had a web-based application that they wanted to do cooler stuff with.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know if this will happen, but I think it’s probably a good thing. And I think it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John long since past the time that Apple can say, nope, it’s just too unsafe. We can’t handle it. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John find a way, Apple. You found a way to do third-party keyboards for crying out loud. Talk about things that are potentially unsafe. It’s how many

⏹️ ▶️ John years into the iPhone. We’re not asking on year two of the iPhone to allow third-party browser engines, but 15

⏹️ ▶️ John years in or wherever we are now, I think it’s the technical reasons that that is difficult to remain,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not, there shouldn’t be barriers. I think it is time for third-party browsing engines to be available

⏹️ ▶️ John and I actually hope it does happen. Because that’s a pretty clean thing to happen. It’s like a yes, no, it’s a policy decision.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have to do anything. They don’t have to waste any time on this other than sort of making sure everything is secured.

⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, frankly speaking, it’s not like there are a million web browser engines

⏹️ ▶️ John out there waiting to burst through the door. There’s a small number. There’s Firefox, which whatever their engine is called these days, and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John Blink, which is a WebKit fork. And then there’s little hobby projects. So it would be nice to see those

⏹️ ▶️ John other engines on your iPads and iPhones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but there is one complex part of it, though, that I think is a significantly complex part,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that this is not just a policy decision. There’s a technical side of this, which is that WebKit has

⏹️ ▶️ Marco privileged execution abilities that other apps on iOS don’t have, where it can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things like just-in-time compilation of JavaScript and then execute that at full speed. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget the details of exactly how all this works, but basically, other apps can’t do that. Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it. UI WebView and WKWebView, or UI WebView does not do it, WKWebView

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think does, because it can be out of process, anyway, whole thing, but the Safari rendering engine on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS has lower level access to how it can compile and execute

⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript. So JavaScript will run faster on that than it would run on any third-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that doesn’t have that ability, which is all third-party apps. So even if they change the policy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that says you can’t have other web browser engines, if they actually allow, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blink or whatever else in an app, but don’t grant it this ability, and there’s lots of reasons why they wouldn’t,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, because I can’t imagine Apple wanting to open up that security can of worms with just, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, letting Google’s code do it on their devices. There’s no way in heck they’re gonna allow that. So, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco result we’re gonna get if they do this is browsers and other products that are based on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those other browsing engines will have slower JavaScript speeds than Safari, and then people will

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that’s unfair. but there actually is this pretty significant security reason why not to do that. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it wouldn’t surprise me if this doesn’t go as well as people plan. And there’s a good reason

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that, that I think Apple’s going to take a lot of hits for because people won’t fully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand the reason, but there is a good reason why they wouldn’t want to let

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other browser engines perform as quickly as Safari does on the backend.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I understand the reason. That’s what I was getting at with the security concerns, but I think at this point, you can’t just keep saying, it’s impossible

⏹️ ▶️ John to allow third parties to have fast JavaScript credentials. Like, fine, it’s impossible for the first decade and a half. Eventually you gotta figure

⏹️ ▶️ John it out, right? It’s like, no, it’ll never be safe. Look, if it’s safe enough for Apple to do it, Apple can find

⏹️ ▶️ John a way to allow the two third parties I’m talking about that have endurance figure out a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco way to do

⏹️ ▶️ John it safely. Even if it is simply like, hey, it’s safe for us to do it and occasionally we have exploits, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to carefully vet what you submit and you’re gonna have exploits occasionally too and you’ll patch them and that’ll be that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s what I’m saying. Like same thing with third party keyboards. Incredibly dangerous to allow that the Apple found a way to

⏹️ ▶️ John do it safely I think there is a way to do this safely and it doesn’t involve, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ John allowing anyone else to use a JIT Although I’ve seen some stuff recently Maybe it was in gecko saying it they found

⏹️ ▶️ John a way to make the JavaScript engine fast without doing JIT. I don’t know anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they can find a way to make this work because it’s not like They have to let a million different things like they don’t have to make a blanket

⏹️ ▶️ John policy is like now just-in-time Compilation of anything is free-for-all anyone can do it put it in your you know casino

⏹️ ▶️ John games for children We don’t care. It’s like, no, you know who you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with Firefox and you’re dealing with Google.

⏹️ ▶️ John And those submissions can get some extra attention. And you can figure out a way to allow them

⏹️ ▶️ John to have alternate browser engines with this extra, you know, either they can decide to do it without just-in-time

⏹️ ▶️ John compilation. And again, I think there are ways to make that reasonably fast.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or if they really want to do a JIT, find a way to make yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John OK with that in the same way that you’re OK with Safari doing it. Because it’s not like Apple’s humans are magic and don’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John bugs that cause security problems in WebKit. And Google’s just can’t do that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John make it work.

SR-71 navigation system

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We got some absolutely phenomenal feedback like a month

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. I don’t know, it was a while ago. And I loved it, but we didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a chance to talk about it for a few weeks because other things were going on. And I’d like to talk about it now.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little bit on the longer side, but I think it’s worth it. So Chris writes, so I guess it’s my turn to add credence

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the theory that there is someone in the ATP audience with specialized knowledge about any niche topic that you stumble into.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco example,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey inertial celestial navigation, or more generally, GPS-free navigation for military applications.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris says, I was a U.S. Navy submarine warfare officer and have worked extensively with submarine launched weapons,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey including the Trident II D5 missile system. The SR-71, which is I think where this all came from, as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marko was saying. Yeah, from Blackbird.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. Your thing was the Blackbird. The SR-71 has an astro-inertial navigation system.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey In other words, it had a celestial navigation system, but it didn’t work independently from the inertial navigation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey system of the INS. Many platforms, like planes, submarines, ships, land vehicles, etc. use INSs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey These systems measure acceleration over time and integrate acceleration to calculate velocity, changes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in position, attitude, heading, and other navigational properties. As John alluded, integration in the calculus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense of acceleration also means the integration of errors associated with acceleration measurements due to things like ocean currents,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey atmospheric prevailing winds, and measurement errors. The rate that errors accumulate depend on a large

⏹️ ▶️ Casey number of factors and are probably beyond the limits of this email. But as an example, total error includes not only the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey acceleration sensing error, but errors caused by moving across the curvature of the Earth, either underwater or in near space,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the so-called Schuyler oscillations. Over time, inertial systems

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to be told where they are because position uncertainty tends to grow. So the Position, Navigation,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Timing, PNT, game is about reducing position error through better inertial measurement

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or limiting and correcting the error that grows from the INS you’re using. Engineers have lots of clever schemes to do this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such as looking at the stars. The SR-71 used stars to estimate position to correct or limit the errors of the INS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Together they were better than either component. According to the Aviation Geek Club, their position

⏹️ ▶️ Casey error had about a 300-foot radius. That’s pretty good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a link that Chris provided to the Aviation Geek Club, which explains a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, and I thought an interesting segment of that link. The ANS works, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the navigation system, works by tracking at least two stars at a time listed in an onboard catalog. And with the aid of a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey chronometer, it calculates a fix of the SR-71 over the ground. It was programmed before each flight in the aircraft’s primary alignment

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the flight plan was recorded on a punch tape that told the aircraft where to go, when to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn, and when to turn the sensors on and off. The stars are sighted through a special quartz window located behind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cockpit, and there was a special star tracker that could see stars even in the daylight.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How freaking cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an interesting story about this, referencing the punch tape or whatever. I don’t know if

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s in one of the links we’ll put in the show notes. Again, live streams, I don’t know where I saw it. Maybe it was in a podcast.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they had two catalogs of star position information, one for the northern hemisphere

⏹️ ▶️ John and one for the southern, presumably due to memory limitations and whatever ancient computer from the 60s

⏹️ ▶️ John is in this thing. But they couldn’t fit the whole world. And one of the SR-71 pilots, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think it was a podcast, was telling a story about a mission he had that flew from the northern hemisphere into the

⏹️ ▶️ John southern. And he was just like landing just over the equator in the southern. But they hadn’t loaded

⏹️ ▶️ John the southern hemisphere stars in the thing. He just had the northern one. So as soon as he crossed

⏹️ ▶️ John over the equator, the plane didn’t know where it was anymore. And it was a little bit of a freak out.

⏹️ ▶️ John Some technology man. We can’t we can’t fit all those stars and you just get one hemisphere. And if you fly over it, oh, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John he said that he managed to land final anyway, because the plain old like

⏹️ ▶️ John radio radar type stuff that leads you to the airport he was landing in. When you’re flying at

⏹️ ▶️ John like 80,000 feet, you get really good range on that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco radar. You can see long distances.

⏹️ ▶️ John So as soon as he crossed over the equator, he basically had line of sight practically

⏹️ ▶️ John on to the place where he was landing because he was flying so high. Soterios

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johnson That’s awesome. Steve McLaughlin That is absolutely bananas. And then building on this, I don’t remember where this link came from,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it turns out that Turnabout is fair play. So this Twitter user, John McElhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a short thread up and it describes, there’s apparently a new US

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air Force stealth aircraft, and the US government took a picture of it at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey night with stars in the background and posted it on, I don’t know, like social media or official forums.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure exactly what the genesis of this image was or where it was posted. But John McElhone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey took, via this Twitter thread, took us through figuring out exactly when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where that picture was taken based on the stars in the background of the picture, which I think is the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coolest thing. So here the United States government, you know, rolls out this top-secret, well I guess

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not top-secret since they’re posting a picture about it, but you know what I mean. Like they’re announcing this new aircraft, they take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a picture of it at night, they have the stars in the background. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, they didn’t think anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it, and John McElhone was able to pinpoint within I think a couple of hours and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically which Air Force Base this thing had its picture taken on. This is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 10 tweet thread and it is well worth the two minutes of your time to read it. It is so cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John It reminds me of those stalkers threads where someone will post a photo and then the rest of the internet will figure out where

⏹️ ▶️ John on earth

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that photo was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey taken. Oh yeah. There’s a subreddit for that, but I forget what it’s called.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just called Reddit. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ John fair, fair. Based on like the, like the, the background sidewalk or the house or like, it’s not even as like

⏹️ ▶️ John road signs. They can just tell like, you know, where that is just because either someone is familiar with that area or has

⏹️ ▶️ John seen it before or they’ll narrow down based on Google earth stuff. If we lived

⏹️ ▶️ John in the fantasy world of the movies where all large institutions are smarter than individual

⏹️ ▶️ John people, which we don’t, the government would have put in

⏹️ ▶️ John that star field in the background with entirely fake stars to make people think it was on an Air Force base in Arizona

⏹️ ▶️ John or wherever when really it was in a secret Air Force base that we don’t know about.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right,

⏹️ ▶️ John right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I just thought that was super cool.

Follow-up: Moisturizer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we also got, and Marco, I think you’re best equipped to summarize it, but we got a lot of feedback about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey moisturizers, including several people who are like either doctors or residents

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are in dermatology. So apparently there is nothing that our show cannot reach, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very proud of this, probably unreasonably proud of this. Yeah, so last week’s pre-show,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was talking about my dry hands, and especially around the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco skin around my fingernails, I always get all cracked and cut, and I’d get to wear Band-Aids, and it sucks. And so we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard from so many people, many of whom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either were dermatologists themselves or they were married to a dermatologist or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they knew a dermatologist or they went to a dermatologist or they saw a dermatologist once from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco across the room. Like there were so many people with so many connections

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to various parts of dermatology expertise. And everyone kind of agreed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, okay, to answer my question, Are moisturizers real and do they work? Turns out, yes. In my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco defense, a lot of medicine, especially over-the-counter stuff, is not super real and doesn’t super work.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, I think that was a valid question to ask. Far and away, there were a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco consistently recommended items. The first most recommended one, by far, is something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco called either O’Keeffe’s or O’Keffee’s, I don’t know how this is pronounced. Anyway, O’Keeffe’s Working

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hands. Now, go search Amazon for O’Keeffe’s Working Hands.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have never in all of my life searching Amazon seen a product with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco such incredibly high reviews and so many reviews. Oh wow, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 80,000 reviews, 4.7. 34,000 reviews, 4.7. 5,000 reviews, 4.8. 5,000 reviews, 4.7.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the most highly rated product I think I’ve ever seen on Amazon that I’ve ever searched for.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I thought, all right, I’ll give this a shot. So I got some of that. I also,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dermatologists and various dermatology friends also frequently said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey was right, that Cetaphil is a really good all-arounder. For

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more kind of advanced needs, like what I was having with my hands in the winter, it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite strong enough. And what they recommended was either the high-end creams

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from CeraVe and from Userin. And I got all three. So I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco O’Keeffe’s Working Hands, Userin Advanced Repair Hand Cream, and CeraVe Moisturizing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cream. And I have to say, I have had significant progress in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, not even one week, like in five days since I’ve had these. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta say, y’all were right. Thank you. And so far,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the O’Keeffe’s Working Hands seems to be the strongest in terms of forming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a barrier. It’s almost like wax, like it dries, it’s very waxy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it works pretty well. I think the one that makes me the softest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling afterwards, which I think is better for daytime use maybe because then I get to enjoy my immense softness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the CeraVe moisturizing cream. Somebody, a few people said there’s a difference between cream and lotion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody was clear on what that difference is or how much it matters. So I got cream for the CeraVe. It’s great. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridiculously soft and it’s amazing. And finally, many people wrote in to suggest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the technique, because I was complaining about getting it and my hands all greasy and then being able to, you know, being unable to operate

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doorknobs. Many people wrote in to suggest that what you’re supposed to do really is apply the cream

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the back of one of your hands and then rub the two backs of your hands together

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it all over the back and like the top of your fingers. That way you never actually get it on your palms.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very good advice, I’ve been doing that as well. I do want to get it kind of around the fingernails because like the little cuticle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas always get all messed up too. So I’m trying to get it all around there too. So I get it a little bit on my hands, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly I’m not getting on the palms anymore. So anyway, that’s good. Strongly recommend the O’Keeffe’s Working Hands

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the CeraVe Moisturizing Cream. And I’ll put links in the show notes to those products on Amazon. But it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s incredible. Like I’ve never seen reviews this good for the O’Keeffe’s.

⏹️ ▶️ John Seeing all those people suggesting with the rubbing the back of the hands together, it makes me think about like rubbing my two kneecaps

⏹️ ▶️ John together. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the back of my

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hands are bony.

⏹️ ▶️ John How do you, rubbing two bony parts of my body together, I feel like I wouldn’t get the moisturizer in all the spots.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t form a fist, like you just keep your hands flat. No, I understand, I guess I don’t have enough back of hand

⏹️ ▶️ John fat or something.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, you gotta work on that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, I got bony hands, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah. Give your

⏹️ ▶️ John hands some pizza and beer, I don’t know what else I’m doing. And the other suggestion I saw

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people had was not just wearing it at nighttime, but wearing gloves. In fact, when I did the search for the O’Keefe’s working

⏹️ ▶️ John hands on Amazon, there were also glove results.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as well. So

⏹️ ▶️ John basically said, put the moisturizer on and then put lots of people with different suggestions for gloves. Put gloves on top of your moisturized

⏹️ ▶️ John hands and then go to sleep to sort of lock in the moisture at nighttime so it doesn’t evaporate

⏹️ ▶️ John out of your hands or whatever. And it just, I don’t know, I like it for someone who gets so bundled up when I go to sleep, it still seems

⏹️ ▶️ John weird to me to wear gloves into bed. Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If any of us would, it’s you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s also true.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re basically wearing it like an entire snowsuit.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I know,

⏹️ ▶️ John but not gloves. That’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. And then The thing is like underneath the gloves is your like slimy lotion pans not

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might I might try that if I like you can look on Amazon There’s like packs of basic cotton gloves that are made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically for this purpose where they’re you know It’s kind of they’re kind of semi disposable and

⏹️ ▶️ John or other people suggested socks too, which is even funnier You can do a little sock

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and people also suggested like, you know, I’m wear like wearing rubber gloves if you have to wash dishes and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t quite gone that far yet, but I have like it’s been kind of crushing my soul. I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ Marco delaying doing dishes throughout the day, so instead of washing dishes constantly as they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco being used to keep a clean kitchen, now I like will let them accumulate for a couple hours and then do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and it’s killing me. I am not good at leaving dishes behind in the kitchen. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always have to have a clean kitchen and it’s that’s very difficult for me. That that’s the hardest part. I’d rather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have greasy hands all day than have dirty dishes in the kitchen. But it’s been crushing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, but that also has been helping to reduce the frequency of that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ever see the palmolive ads that Merlin and I talk about? I don’t think so. Softens your hands while you

⏹️ ▶️ John do dishes. That was the pitch.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It

⏹️ ▶️ John was an ad campaign where they’d show various people dipping their hands into it. And it’s like, oh, you know. Like, they’re at a spa. Remember

⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this in Red Dips? The commercials, like, they’re getting their nails done or something, and their hands are soaking in a bowl

⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff, which is apparently a thing that you do when you get a manicure. I don’t know, because I’ve never gotten one. And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John talking about dish soap. And the big surprise is they talk about Paul Offs as you’re soaking in it. You didn’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but your hands are in dish soap because the dish soap is so therapeutic and softening to your hands that you

⏹️ ▶️ John could, anyway. Their slogan was softens your hands while you do dishes. I bet it

⏹️ ▶️ John probably doesn’t because it’s probably soap, but yeah, wear gloves. Yeah, that doesn’t seem like it could possibly work at all. I mean, it

⏹️ ▶️ John was the 70s. Yeah.

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Mac Pro rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Do you need me for this or should I just bugger off?

⏹️ ▶️ John You need to know about the Mac Pro and so does the rest of the world. Do I? You’ve had such a reprieve

⏹️ ▶️ John here because it was like the two year transition and we did that item a couple of shows ago.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s entering year three of its two year transition to ARM. In a way that no one cares about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And the Mac Mini, they still sell the Intel Mac Mini and the Mac Pro that no one cares about is still

⏹️ ▶️ John Intel, right? As far as the world is concerned, Apple transitioned and it’s fine. That’s why nobody really cares. Cause like,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, they transitioned the Macs that actually matter, but there are these odd holes. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ John the latest news story, latest rumors from Bloomberg, I’m assuming German,

⏹️ ▶️ John about the new Mac Pro. And the story here is that, well, it goes through

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of the history of like, oh, originally they planned to do basically like two M1

⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra stuck together. We talked about this in the show many times in the past. they need to get like four

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 Maxes stuck together into this gigantic chip with like 40 cores. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was Jade 4C, right? Yeah. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it seems like that just didn’t happen and isn’t going to happen because they’re onto the M2 ones. And, you know, I mean, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John it could have come out like, you know, could have come out towards the end of this year, but it didn’t. So it seems like that’s all off

⏹️ ▶️ John the table, right? So now it’s like Apple changed their mind and now the Mac Pro is going to be M2 based.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so the obvious expectation was, it would be like

⏹️ ▶️ John four M2 Max’s stuck together in a big square thing. So it’d be even better, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And the rumor is now that the big giant four M2 things stuck together,

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro was scrapped. And the only thing you’re gonna get in the Mac Pro is gonna be kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John like an M2 Ultra, right? So it’s two M2 Max-ish things stuck together.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not doing the big four one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which to be clear is basically the same class of chip that’s available in the Mac Studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly, and presumably they would put this in the Mac Studio, right? If they, when they upgrade the Mac Studio to M2, it would get

⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra and so would the Mac Pro. And so this would be 24 CPU cores, 76 graphic

⏹️ ▶️ John cores and the rumor is up to 192 gigs of memory, right? So, you know, a good chip, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But the M2 Extreme, like there would have been four of them, is just double all that. It would have had 48 CPU cores, 152

⏹️ ▶️ John graphics cores. And they didn’t say anything about the RAM. And so the

⏹️ ▶️ John story is that, this is a quoting directly from the story, not a surprise. The company made the decision because of both the complexity and

⏹️ ▶️ John cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It will also

⏹️ ▶️ John help Apple and partner Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company save chip production resources for higher volume

⏹️ ▶️ John machines. Basically the idea is, if this thing costs too much money, it takes up valuable

⏹️ ▶️ John fab space and wafers, and we’re not gonna sell a lot of them anyway. The rumor, the

⏹️ ▶️ John suggested rumored price is $10,000 without any other upgrades for that big giant chip, which

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of makes some sense, but not that much sense, because it’s kind of, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ John weird that it would be more expensive than the 2019 Mac Pro. You could say, yeah, that’s because

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a system on a chip and it’s got everything on one big chip, and that chip is expensive, but that hasn’t been the

⏹️ ▶️ John case with the other computers they’ve made. But, you know, combining the GPU and the CPU into

⏹️ ▶️ John a single SoC did not make the Mac Studio tremendously more expensive. And actually there are economies there

⏹️ ▶️ John of not having separate components, not having to give a profit margin to AMD or whoever you’re buying your GPUs from.

⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, the idea that this is too expensive, uh, too hard to

⏹️ ▶️ John make and not a lot of people buy it. I see where they’re coming from with that. Uh, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I have some issues with it. The issues I’ve always had with this discussion that the open question, which we won’t know

⏹️ ▶️ John the answer to, and it seems increasingly likely the answer is going to be disappointing. If Apple does not allow

⏹️ ▶️ John third-party GPUs, how many times have we just talked about this? Apple just freaking releases computers so we know what you’re gonna do.

⏹️ ▶️ John If they don’t allow third-party GPUs, the discussion has always been, okay, but given the rumors of

⏹️ ▶️ John this Jade 4C thing or whatever, they can put enough GPU on the SoC

⏹️ ▶️ John to be equivalent to a current highest of high-end single

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU from a third party. And that was true back when the Jade 4C rumors were out. And if you look at the current stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems plausible, right? But if that was assuming they would do the

⏹️ ▶️ John 4X thing, but if they only do the 2X thing, it starts looking a little bit more grim. So I’d ran a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ John of numbers. This is using Geekbench’s metal performance score, which again,

⏹️ ▶️ John like benchmarks are silly, but I didn’t do like a gaming benchmark because I’m saying like, let’s treat

⏹️ ▶️ John this the way Apple treats it. Like Apple cares about metal, they use it in their stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and so the metal score is a reflection of how well could Apple use these GPU resources using its

⏹️ ▶️ John own API, whatever. And you know, again, how much, how much greens you give to Geekbench. It gives a good, you know, back

⏹️ ▶️ John of the envelope estimate, right? So let’s take

⏹️ ▶️ John for starters, the AMD Radeon W6900X,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is like the best single GPU you can get in a 2019 Mac Pro from Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John that score is 166,000 on the Metal Geekbench score.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you had two of them, so if you bought a fancy new Mac Pro in 2019, 2019 Mac Pro and put two of those cards in

⏹️ ▶️ John it, easy double, you got about 335,000 on your Metal score, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John AMD has just come out with their next line of cards, which just increased the first number. So instead of 6,900, it’s 7,900. So the AMD Radeon

⏹️ ▶️ John RX 7900 XTX,

⏹️ ▶️ John Gotta love that because it’s different than the XT, which is not the good one. XTX is the good one. Anyway, the XTX

⏹️ ▶️ John is more than double the speed of the 6900. So it gets around maybe 350,000. I couldn’t get an actual metal score for this, but looking at game

⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks and stuff, it very easily doubles

⏹️ ▶️ John the frame rate of the previous card, which is very impressive. It’s very close to matching Nvidia’s best card. So it’s 350,000 for a single

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those. And if you got two of those, that would be 700,000. These are the numbers we’re talking about for the

⏹️ ▶️ John metal scores, right? Let’s look at what the M1 Ultra does with 64 GPU cores today.

⏹️ ▶️ John So again, the best single card you could get on the market today is about 350,000.

⏹️ ▶️ John The best one you can get from Apple is 166. The M1 Ultra is 94. So not

⏹️ ▶️ John really in the ballpark of even of the previous generation high-end card.

⏹️ ▶️ John Certainly nowhere near the current generation high-end cards. Again, setting aside NVIDIA entirely, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John The rumored M2 Ultra, which is just a 2X M2 thing, has 76 GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John cores and assuming they scale linearly, which they probably won’t, that’d probably be better than that, but assuming they scale linearly, that’s like 112,000.

⏹️ ▶️ John Still not in the ballpark of a 6900, let alone a 7900 from AMD.

⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s look at the M2 Extreme, the one that would have been

⏹️ ▶️ John like four M2 Maxes stuck together. That is 225-ish thousand.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s in shooting distance, spitting distance, whatever the saying

⏹️ ▶️ John is. That’s close to 350,000, but still nothing to really write home about.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I ran these numbers on my own Mac Pro just for the heck of it. I have this hodgepodge of

⏹️ ▶️ John old video cards in here. I’ve got my W57X,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve got a Pro Vega 2, and those two combined give me 170,000

⏹️ ▶️ John on MetalScore. So my two GPUs combined

⏹️ ▶️ John do about as much is one of the best GPUs you can get from Apple. And still

⏹️ ▶️ John considerably more than the rumored M2 Ultra. The rumored M2 Ultra we get 112, my Mac Pro gets 170.

⏹️ ▶️ John That leads to the question I always say, how are you going to sell a Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John to people who bought your previous Mac Pro when the previous one could just be filled with so

⏹️ ▶️ John much more GPU power, unless you also provide a way to add third-party GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you don’t have this problem. If this is true, if these rumors are true and they’re not sending the

⏹️ ▶️ John 4X thing, I think that’s a reasonable thing to do as long as

⏹️ ▶️ John you are not constrained on GPU by what they decide to put in the SOCs.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s always kind of been the worry about this. It’s like, all right, well, if I want a little GPU, I have to get all

⏹️ ▶️ John that CPU because it just comes with it because they come in these little units. You get the GPU cores, the CPU cores, the

⏹️ ▶️ John neural engine, the, you know, it’s a system on a chip, you get all of it. and they’ve been doing it with little building blocks.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you just want a machine with a reasonable CPU and then a huge amount of GPU, you can’t get it.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve got, every time you want more GPU, it comes with a whole bunch of other stuff that you may not be able to use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And vice versa, by the way. Like, you know, I love having a whole bunch of CPU power. I barely need GPU

⏹️ ▶️ Marco power, but those things are tied together now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so for a modular Mac Pro system, that poses some

⏹️ ▶️ John of a problem if you’re also not going to offer slots. And so that has been the question we’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ John working, like how are you going to offer an expandable machine when you’re putting so much more on the SoC? And I really do

⏹️ ▶️ John think that in the, you know, especially for the top end Mac Pro, if they had gone with the quad arrangement, you could just say,

⏹️ ▶️ John look, I know it’s not as flexible as you want it to be, but this machine is so expensive anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John tough luck, if you don’t want all that GPU, you’re getting it whether you want it or not. If you don’t want all the CPU, you’re getting it whether

⏹️ ▶️ John you want it or not. And by the way, you’re paying for it in both cases. And if there’s any market that is able to eat this and be

⏹️ ▶️ John like, all right, we’ll just deal with it. It’s the Mac Pro, because it costs so much money to begin with, and money is less of

⏹️ ▶️ John an object to these people. It is quote unquote inefficient for them to be buying stuff they don’t need,

⏹️ ▶️ John but oh well. I think it hurts more in your case, Marco, where you’re like, look, this is supposed to be your mainstream product. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want to have to buy a bunch of GPU cores I don’t need to make my compilers go faster, but the prices are low enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not talking tens of thousands of dollars that it seems reasonable. But it will be disappointing

⏹️ ▶️ John if they ship a Mac Pro and it’s basically a Mac Studio that holds more RAM and bigger SSDs

⏹️ ▶️ John that can’t have as much GPU power as my 2019 Mac Pro has. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is why I still am really, really curious to see what the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heck they do to the Mac Pro. Because it seems like, you know, if you look at what I think is most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to happen, it’s basically the Mac Studio. Like that’s like, you know, what I had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco been guessing for a while, like once we saw the direction of Apple Silicon, I’d been guessing for a long time, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna be done with card slots, more card slots, definitely no more third-party GPUs, and they’re just gonna multiply this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip until they have enough GPU power to be competitive. But that leaves so many open questions like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’re saying, like they’re just, they’re not in the ballpark of GPU performance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you are competing with multiple slots, each of which can hold the highest end NVIDIA or ATI or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco excuse me, AMD GPUs. That isn’t because Apple’s GPUs are bad, it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re dealing with massively different power envelopes. Hugely different.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s the reason why Apple’s GPUs are so good for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile devices and laptops and small desktops is because they’re so incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco low power consumption for the amount of computational power they offer. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very efficient. But when you’re looking at, you know, these big beefy cards from Nvidia and AMD,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like themselves consuming hundreds of watts and have their own tremendous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat sinks and fans and power supply, you know, just to power these giant things because they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, for many people, that is the most important component of their computer. So they’re willing to spend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that power and heat and space and everything else. But the way Apple designs their GPUs, they just are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not made for that kind of power consumption and performance class

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that high end. And because they have this unified memory architecture where everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is together as one big thing, I don’t see them ever making anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is going to be in that class unless they go for something radically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different than what they’ve made so far with the M line which would be for instance like a a slotted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU that has its own memory and is not part of the unified memory architecture of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rest of the system and everything else and and they can do that if they want to like that there’s nothing saying they can’t do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that but I I really decreasingly see the likelihood of them doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for one product, the Mac Pro. And that’s why my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco theory from the beginning here has been there isn’t going to be an M series Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro that uses third party GPUs or even has slots for other GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and possibly has slots for anything. But we’ll see about that. But yeah, I just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I wonder too, like maybe what they’re seeing in the market is that maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually finally don’t have enough reason to address this market. You know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re okay saying, you know what, the performance level that we offer in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Studio is enough for our highest end users and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. Like, I don’t necessarily agree with that, but maybe that’s what they’re seeing, I don’t know. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly as Apple Silicon has gotten so, so good and these new Macs that use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it are so good and so fast and so powerful, You know, many people, myself included, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just me seeing my own needs and overestimating other people’s resemblance to them, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people have been able to go down a level in product line in terms of what kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of power they quote, need for their work. You know, I used to get the most powerful desktops.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I was okay with iMacs. Then I was okay, now I’m okay with a laptop that happens to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M1 Macs and all this crazy RAM and ridiculous SSD speeds and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge CPU power, it’s all on a laptop, and that’s enough for my needs right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe enough people have had their needs shift down the lineup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of being able to get away with, or even be very happy with something like a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio that maybe this high-end market is not enough

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them anymore to justify this. And maybe, at the same time, I think a lot of high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco video users have moved away from Apple in general, like over the last decade or so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s shifts in the marketplace there as well. So I don’t know. It seems like most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the demand these days for all that massive GPU grunt is in doing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like AI training, where you actually are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of not really, you’re not really doing that on a Mac full of Mac video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cards necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ John They have dedicated hardware for that. That’s where that, if you needed the big power and that you’d use one of those TPU

⏹️ ▶️ John things or whatever, like actual silicon made for that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, there’s never been like a CUDA story in the Mac and stuff like that. So like there’s all these areas of high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing that the Mac either has kind of lost over time or was never really in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin with. And so I just, I wonder like, look, they’ve been getting away just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for the last couple of years, not having a new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end Mac Pro, not having a Mac Pro that used the modern processors,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and it’s been pretty much fine. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people who are clamoring for an Apple Silicon-based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro that also has a bunch of GPU card slots. I’m sure there are those people,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but are there enough to justify this hugely different architecture from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the rest of their Macs that use the same chip? Probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this story is saying that they can’t even justify making a 4X cookie, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s easy as cookie cutter, but like the whole idea of the double

⏹️ ▶️ John and quad is let’s reuse our investment in the computers that actually sell, like the notebooks. They

⏹️ ▶️ John were never making a custom custom thing. And we said, we can’t just, you know, clean sheet, make a Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ John processor, right? We have to start with processors we use in our laptops. Can we do a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John work to weave them together to make a big one? saying we can’t even justify that in the Forex

⏹️ ▶️ John case. And that’s not a custom one, right? Because they’re like, it’s just too expensive, too big or whatever. And by the

⏹️ ▶️ John way, what you said before about like the GPUs, high-end GPUs using hundreds of watts by themselves. If

⏹️ ▶️ John you put four of these things together like this, that whole arrangement will take hundreds of watts. Like they

⏹️ ▶️ John can, they are within the same power envelope as a single top-end

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU plus CPU combination, right? So it’s not like the architecture can’t like scale up to

⏹️ ▶️ John that level. It can, and it would, if they put four of them together, it would take hundreds of watts. It would be,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d crank it up and it would be a heck of a thing, right? And it would require very fancy

⏹️ ▶️ John custom cooling and the interconnect would be very impressive or whatever. But they’re saying, no, we can’t even

⏹️ ▶️ John justify the investment in that because we don’t think it’s worthwhile and we don’t have enough people who are gonna buy it

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s gonna take up, because you can imagine how big that would be. Like the advantage of having like, even like

⏹️ ▶️ John a Xeon CPU plus a separate GPU is you don’t have to put it all in one

⏹️ ▶️ John package, right? It’s not one die, but one package, right? This would be what, four dies, four M2

⏹️ ▶️ John Maxes in one massive package arrangement? That is a complicated beast to make,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Much more complicated than getting an Intel CPU and then an NVIDIA

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU and a PCI bus between them. And so they can’t justify the investment in that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think like an M2 Ultra, put the same thing in the studio

⏹️ ▶️ John and basically make the Mac Pro be a Mac studio, but with more expandability. That will cover

⏹️ ▶️ John most of their needs. But, you know, even for something as simple as

⏹️ ▶️ John the three games that are optimized per year for metal, like whatever it was recently, they did like a Resident

⏹️ ▶️ John Evil port, the latest Resident Evil, two years after it comes out on every other platform, they had a Mac port of it. And by all

⏹️ ▶️ John reports, the Mac port is amazing. Takes amazing advantage of Apple’s, you know, metal architecture, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it runs at really good frame rates at very low temperatures and without

⏹️ ▶️ John a huge amount of fan noise is it is an impressive game, right? It’s not like those use cases

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t exist, but it seems like the balance that Apple has struck, like when they make

⏹️ ▶️ John these system-mounted chips, they say how many CPU cores, how many neural engines, how many, you know, H.264

⏹️ ▶️ John and H.265 decoder encoders, how many ProRes encoders, like sort of the recipe for the SoC,

⏹️ ▶️ John their recipes have been very sort of balanced. Not too much CPU, Not too much

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU just kind of a nice arrangement of stuff that really hits the sweet spot for let’s say high-end

⏹️ ▶️ John notebook, right? It has most your use case a side marker where you’re like, I don’t need all the

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU cores It’s a pretty good balance for most things that most people want to do

⏹️ ▶️ John If they can never move out of that sweet spot they’re never going to get like

⏹️ ▶️ John The low-end thing that changes the balance heavily in favor of CPU or runs headless or something, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John with not a lot of GPU grant or the high-end one where you take a small number of CPU cores and

⏹️ ▶️ John much, much more GPU, right? They don’t seem so far willing to go in those directions.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if they don’t go in those directions and they’re not willing to even take for their sort of well-balanced little

⏹️ ▶️ John things and put them together, they’re kind of boxing themselves out of sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of top-end GPU performance, not even top-end, but sort of just high-end, right? And it’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very often in their demonstrations, they will show a piece of software or even just simple 3D stuff where,

⏹️ ▶️ John especially with like 6K screens and stuff, you can get some fairly trivial, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John scene kit demo application that can pull down, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John pull the frame rates down on a powerful Mac because you don’t have enough GPU grunt to do all those pixel shaders

⏹️ ▶️ John on a 6K screen. And that seems like, it kind of seems like, you know, I’m just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John try to use a car analogy, but I can’t think of a more recent one, but it’s like, I’ll use an even more obscure analogy. When the

⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G4 had a front side bus that was hilariously slower than the CPU,

⏹️ ▶️ John I forget what it was, but the CPU was like at four or 500 megahertz and the front side bus is like at a hundred megahertz and it was

⏹️ ▶️ John just so RAM starved and so unbalanced. If you’re shipping a screen with 6K

⏹️ ▶️ John pixels, but you can’t drive a fancy looking 3D scene that

⏹️ ▶️ John uses all those pixels, even on your most expensive Mac because you just don’t have enough GPU cores and

⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, you no longer have slots, that’s not a good look. So it’s like, I feel like if you’re going to like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re going to extend the Mac line up to a high end and you should, you can have something,

⏹️ ▶️ John even if it’s really expensive and nobody buys it, there has to be some kind of offering there because right now there still

⏹️ ▶️ John are some customers and some applications that use it. I forget what the, the app that was being demoed when

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac pro was introduced, but you remember there was like a Pixar thing showing like a big 3d scene. Yeah. It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed when we went, when we were at WWDC and we were able to go to that, like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really hands-on, but kind of hands-on area. there was somebody from Pixar showing the Mac Pro and they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed the entirety of the town that most of Toy Story 4 took place

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, like the fair and everything. And you could zoom in and out, pan around, and it was the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire fair, like that entire fair and the town and everything associated with it was being rendered

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in real time. And it wasn’t perfect cinematic quality, but it was stunningly good. And you could

⏹️ ▶️ Casey zip around that thing like it was nothing. It was amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, my recollection of that is you could still make the thing chug if you looked at the right thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the frame rates weren’t, you know, they weren’t even up to 60 frames per second all the time, let alone higher

⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rates that presumably future Macs will have, right? So I don’t think it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John end of the world if they just make an M2 Ultra. And in fact, if they made that extreme quad

⏹️ ▶️ John one, it’s not like I would buy it because I think it would just be too expensive. But it’s a shame that if

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have any other GPU answer that the 2019

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro will still be the GPU king simply because you can shove

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey more

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU in it, right? And it’ll be super sad if, like I said, the M2 Extreme,

⏹️ ▶️ John they rumored, has a similar amount of, or not the M2 Extreme,

⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra, like the 2X one, has a lower Metal score

⏹️ ▶️ John than my current Mac Pro, my current one. And granted, Metal score is like when you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John combining both the GPUs, so it’s not like I’d be able to run a game at higher frame rates, but I could buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a Radeon Pro 6900 from Apple for a hugely

⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous price that would also be faster than the rumored M2 Ultra, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not great. That’s like last generation card and I can put it in my Mac, just one of them and be faster

⏹️ ▶️ John than the M2 Ultra. So I don’t know what their pitch would be. It would be like, oh, we’ve got the M2 Mac Studio

⏹️ ▶️ John which is great and it’s small and blah, blah, blah. And we’ve got the Mac Pro which is just like

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio but it holds more RAM? Like I don’t know what the pitch

⏹️ ▶️ John is, if it just holds more RAM and more CPU. Like those are the two, like and those are good and people might need those,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know. The mystery deepens here. I really feel like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John could solve their problems by supporting third-party GPUs in card slots, which is what everybody else does.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, you could still ship a really good one on the SoC, but for the people who want the third-party ones, it

⏹️ ▶️ John would be nice if they’re there. But we’ve talked to this to death in the past shows, it just doesn’t make sense from the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco unified

⏹️ ▶️ John memory architecture thing, right? to just, like, that’s why we keep going around in this circle, because it doesn’t make any

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. It doesn’t make any sense to offer card slots, and now with this rumor,

⏹️ ▶️ John it almost doesn’t make sense not to offer card slots.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I want to pull on that a little bit. I am talking well outside my depth,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t particularly care about the Mac Pro in the grand scheme of things, but in my recollection, when we were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey initially pitched on the M1, which was what, WWDC 2020, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like that?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were told that, hey, the thing that makes this amazing is the unified memory architecture and the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that the standard vanilla RAM is shared with the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video card. So a lot of the time that you would be waiting for things to be copied about and moved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey around and whatnot, that there is no waiting because it’s all the same batch. It’s all the same batch of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM. It’s a unified memory architecture.

⏹️ ▶️ John And also that memory happens to be really fast because it’s also really, really close to the CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So if, if a lot, probably not all, because I know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the SSDs are also extremely fast in these things, there’s a lot of other stuff around this. But I thought that one of the big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about the M1 architecture and M2 now, and so on and so forth, is that the unified memory architecture

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a very kind of wild way of making a CPU GPU combination

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that not a lot of people are doing and Apple did it so well. And it is so damn fast that that’s where so much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the speed comes from and efficiency, but particularly speed. So, and you’ve kind of alluded to this, John, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to ask you directly, you know, doesn’t having a card with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a GPU, doesn’t that take away a lot of the benefit, all of the benefit of a unified memory architecture? Because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it ain’t unified anymore. So like, would it even be worthwhile? Is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we really want? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it depends on the workload to some degree. Like, you know, if you think about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this kind of system would be built, if there is a theoretical new Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has card slots that can support GPUs. I think all three of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are questionable, like whether there even will be a Mac Pro and whether it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have card slots and whether those card slots will support GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume we have all three of those, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, Apple said we have Mac Pro. They just remember they said, we’ll talk about that another day like they publicly

⏹️ ▶️ John announced it. So I really feel like they there’s it’s still coming.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Something probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have one, I have two, maybe one word for you. Air power, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Air power.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I know. We’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so if you look at like, already we can make some assumptions. Like there would be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco presumably, some kind of M2 or M3, Ultra, Max, Extreme,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it would be, a whole bunch of M CPUs glued together as like the main processors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the whole thing. If they’re gonna have socketed memory, then maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chip would have some kind of massive like L2 or L3 cache, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for the most part, I think main memory would just be its own bank of stuff. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, you know, otherwise they’re never gonna hit the 1.5 terabytes that the current 2019 Mac Pro offers.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just, yeah, they’re just not gonna hit that on the SoC. And I feel like they’re,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s easier for them to give up on the 1.5 terabytes of RAM, which was mostly just like a silly bragging

⏹️ ▶️ John point than it is for them to give up on the GPUs, because, you know, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John a top-end GPU, you can just buy it, and it gives you a metal score that’s higher than the

⏹️ ▶️ John rumored M2 Ultra thing. So, but how many people ever buy it with 1.5 terabytes of RAM? So the tiered

⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, and there were rumors of that, seems less likely to me than slotted

⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also, you know, you look at the way that PCs are structured now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the architecture already supports GPUs having not only access

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to system RAM through various like fast methods and dedicated buses and things like that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also they have access to their own giant pool of RAM each and workloads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and schedulers and everything are already designed to distribute work to multiple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPUs, each of which has its own pool of RAM. And you know, that, that’s what John’s Mac pro is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing. That’s how it can achieve these high scores. So like it’s, it is possible to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that with the with the you know, Apple’s Apple Silicon architecture, I’m sure like it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would take work and and there would be different trade offs like having it unified,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you probably have lower latencies in certain ways you might have higher bandwidths in certain areas, almost certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know, so chances are if you you know, if there was such a Mac Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that had like only slotted GPUs and only socketed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM, maybe they would actually be slower in certain like micro benchmarks, you know, because they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t, their RAM would be a little bit higher latency or a little bit lower bandwidth or whatever it would be, but that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when doing these massive jobs that people would buy these machines for, overall, they would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to outperform the Mac studio and the MacBook pro and things like that because they would be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to dispatch all this work around and the, the increased latency

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be made up for by just the massive amount of parallel power and total resources you’d have it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at your disposal. So it doesn’t necessarily to say that it would be guaranteed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slower or worse, it would just be a different trade-off.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like mostly what you’re getting with the unified memory architecture, like it’s an efficiency choice. And I don’t mean efficiency in terms of power

⏹️ ▶️ John usage, oh, that is definitely there as well. I mean in terms of how much stuff do you have to

⏹️ ▶️ John spend money on to put into your computer. So with separate GPU slots, like these GPUs come with

⏹️ ▶️ John like 32 gigs of RAM. That used to be the maximum you could even put an entire machine with an

⏹️ ▶️ John M1 SoC before the Mac Studio or whatever broke through that barrier was.

⏹️ ▶️ John So you have to get so much more stuff. So you get this top end video card which has

⏹️ ▶️ John huge numbers of GPU cores on it. Just a massive chip just filled with GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it has its own 32 gigs of RAM that is special, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ John high bandwidth RAM, really, really close to that GPU. That’s just like a complete duplication

⏹️ ▶️ John of effort of the stuff that’s in the main SoC because the SoC has already got the GPU cores and RAM real

⏹️ ▶️ John close to it that’s really high speed and special. Now you’ve got a second copy of that only without as many CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John cores, although they do have CPU cores there, of course, on an entire card. And they communicate over

⏹️ ▶️ John the PCI bus, right? And then you could have multiples of those cards. You could have multiple GPUs on a single card. It is inefficient

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of money. You have to pay for all that stuff. And then power,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just to power the card and everything, it’s a duplication of effort. And yes, there is a runtime

⏹️ ▶️ John cost to that sometimes in terms of transferring data back and forth, but you can solve that problem by just adding more

⏹️ ▶️ John resources most of the time. If you have enough VRAM on your dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, most things that you do with GPUs don’t require

⏹️ ▶️ John constant shuttling of data back and forth to the point where you’re saturating the bandwidth and that is your limiting factor.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they have so much RAM in both of these places. There are some situations that are like that where Apple’s SOCs

⏹️ ▶️ John excel because they don’t have to copy the data. That’s what, of course, they’re going to brag about. And definitely on situations

⏹️ ▶️ John where you actually have a power budget or a battery, you do not want to have a complete duplication of resources elsewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John But again, in looking at the line, I think I say what machine should spend money,

⏹️ ▶️ John resources, space, heat, power, dollars, you know, everything

⏹️ ▶️ John on a duplication of resources just to get that top end maximum power? It would be the Mac Pro, right? It’s the reason

⏹️ ▶️ John they sold it with that dual, whatever the, Apple itself sold dual GPU cards

⏹️ ▶️ John and you can get two dual GPU cards and so you would have four high-end GPUs shoved into

⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac Pro. And it only seems less ridiculous because we don’t think of the Xeon CPU as

⏹️ ▶️ John having any kind of integrated graphics. I think it has none. I asked that question last time. I don’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what the

⏹️ ▶️ John answer was, right? But having something with a huge amount of GPU, a

⏹️ ▶️ John huge amount of really fast GPU on the SoC and then also third-party GPUs,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’d only do that if you feel like, Well, I got to pay for this GPU on the SoC, but I

⏹️ ▶️ John actually need more than that. I need more GPU cores. I can, you know, I can do my work twice as fast

⏹️ ▶️ John if I have twice as many GPU cores and I’m willing to pay for them. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John should, I think, be willing to sell you that and say, well, you’re kind of wasting the GPU cores on here unless the software is

⏹️ ▶️ John written well enough to be able to use them all at once. And it could be because Apple’s frameworks lets you sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John use the computing resources wherever they are, But lots of workloads are written with the expectation

⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re not going to have a unified memory architecture. You will have to transfer stuff from regular RAM

⏹️ ▶️ John to VRAM, and that’s OK. And the programs account for it. And what some customers

⏹️ ▶️ John really need is, I just need as many of those GPU cores as possible. I’m willing to spend 800 watts on it. Just give

⏹️ ▶️ John them to me. Apple should, I think, offer that. And that’s why I’m still holding out

⏹️ ▶️ John hope for GPU card slots. but I would be, I think I would actually be

⏹️ ▶️ John happier if they found some way to put enough GPUs to be

⏹️ ▶️ John competitive, not the best, but competitive. Because if they’re competitive in their overall medal score

⏹️ ▶️ John on an SoC, they’re gonna crush it in anything that is bottlenecked on

⏹️ ▶️ John bandwidth back and forth to the VRAM, because they don’t have to do that, right? And so I think that

⏹️ ▶️ John solution, Apple can brag about it and say, oh, they’ll put up one of those graphs, Say, look how much faster we are than

⏹️ ▶️ John even the top in NVIDIA card. And they’d pick some particular benchmark that really benefits from, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John the SOC and unified memory architecture. And they would show them crushing NVIDIA and just ignore all the ones where NVIDIA crushes them

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? That’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the Apple way to do it. Like have something, that’s a unique selling proposition. We make a different performance

⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs than NVIDIA. That’s why you might consider us instead of NVIDIA. We’re not just, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John our own CPU plus an NVIDIA card because we don’t like them or whatever. But this situation where

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, we’re not competitive at all, and we don’t offer card slots, but if you need

⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit more than a Mac Studio, the Mac Pro is for you. That’s not as exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so I really hope, I mean, I hope they keep making Mac Pros forever. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so they get another shot at this with the M3, they can make different choices. They have lots of great building blocks. Their GPU

⏹️ ▶️ John cores look like they’re really good, like in terms of what they do for the power they’re given and the space and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Their CPU cores are phenomenal, right? It’s just a question of how do we divide up these

⏹️ ▶️ John components? What kind of ratios do we choose? Maybe they’ll make some interesting choices in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of arrangement of stuff for the headset, or who knows, maybe they’ll just use watch CPUs, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the headset might end up needing a little bit more GPU grunt and a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John less CPU grunt, so maybe they’ll make a different arrangement than that. I continue to have confidence

⏹️ ▶️ John in their overall architecture because I think they have all the building blocks. It’s just a question of how do they dole

⏹️ ▶️ John them out to their individual machines? And this rumor is essentially a story of them

⏹️ ▶️ John changing their mind and making different trade-offs. And you know, when they ship a product, we’ll see how it goes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you sad? I mean this genuinely, like I’m not trying to poke the bear here, but are you sad reading this?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John not really. Cause like I said, I don’t think I would ever buy the 4X one. Cause it would just be so expensive. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John I, I mean, I selfishly hope they do have GPU card slots cause that’s my most efficient

⏹️ ▶️ John money-wise path to get good GPU power. Mostly at this point, what

⏹️ ▶️ John I care about is a case design with a better cooling solution than the Mac Studio.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Cause I like the cooling solution on my Mac Pro. It’s a really big case and with really big,

⏹️ ▶️ John slow moving fans. The Mac Studio is not that, it’s not as good. So

⏹️ ▶️ John if, you know, if, if, if they introduce a new Mac Pro, obviously whatever Mac Pro they introduce is going to be so much faster than this

⏹️ ▶️ John except maybe in GPU but assuming it is within the ballpark and I eventually replace this

⏹️ ▶️ John machine I would like it to be with something that I don’t have to bolt to the bottom of my desk because it’s too noisy.

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#askatp: Journaling?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Arthur Dickerson writes, do any of you journal? Handwritten or in an app?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, I will start and I will tell you that I am a devout day one user. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think they’ve sponsored the show. They may have a long time ago, but I don’t think they have. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey day one is a journaling app that actually come to think of it. I think I stumbled upon day one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when Marco and Tiff and Aaron and I went to Germany because I wanted to have a way to take note of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the things that the four of us did, but do that not on Foursquare and not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Twitter, not on Instagram, but just somewhere that was private for just me. And I’m pretty sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the Germany trip that started me down this path. And day one does let you say, you know, I’ve been, I’m here

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it lets you geotag things and so on and so forth. But, um, I had been using it on and off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever since then in 2013, but I got really, really serious about it, um, around the time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the pandemic because I thought, Oh, what a fun chronicle this will be of the two weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the pandemic. Right? Right. Right. Right. So I was,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I began the pandemic on March 13th of 2020. Not that I remember, uh, trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make sure that at least once a day, I take note of something that happened that day, typically with a picture if I can,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if I don’t, you know, I’ll write something down and I’ve been going, I think every single day

⏹️ ▶️ Casey since the 13th of March, 2020. And I really like day one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, you know, I don’t think they’ve sponsored in the past. They’re certainly not sponsoring now, but I really like day one because it’s private.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very reliable in my use and it does basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything I want it to do. And not too much more. And I mean that in a complimentary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. It lets you make, you know, audio recordings if that’s your thing. You can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey put videos on there. It all syncs with their own proprietary system. And it’s pretty darn reliable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s very quick. You know, it’s easy to get in and out. It has a really great feature that shows you, you know, what happened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this day in years past. I really, really, really like it a lot. And I use it mostly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for just, you know, taking note of things that we did during the day that are even mildly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey noteworthy, I try to be very, very religious with it when I’m traveling, because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so easy to forget the ins and outs of a WWDC trip as an example. And my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey family’s actually going on our first plane vacation since 2019 in just a couple of weeks, and I’ll be using it a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot then as well. And it’s such a great way to say, oh, we ate at such and such a restaurant. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey while you’re there, you can just create an entry, and it’ll geotag where you are, and you could go back at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the day and add in notes about what you did or thoughts or what have you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really like day one. If you have any interest in this whatsoever, I can’t suggest it enough.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You should definitely try it out. Marco, do you do any sort of journaling in any way, shape, or form?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Good talk.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s one of those things, it’s like playing guitar. I would love

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an expert in playing guitar, but I am never willing to put in the effort to go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from nothing to expert.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you and me both, brother. Seriously. I really agree with you. I really do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In this case, there are some times in which I look back and say, boy, I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco love to to have journaled for that time. But I never actually do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I love the idea of it, but I never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do it so badly that I actually do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John John, I have a question about your journaling first. The whole idea of this question of

⏹️ ▶️ John calling it journaling makes me think that it’s like a different framing

⏹️ ▶️ John of writing. Because writing something every day, or writing about your day

⏹️ ▶️ John or what happened in your life, take lots of different forms. And I feel like journaling comes with like a, an expectation

⏹️ ▶️ John of a sort of context, a frame of reference. What I’m occurring to do is like having

⏹️ ▶️ John a diary, right? Which is a different way of saying the same thing. I write something down every day. All right, but if it’s a diary,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, dear diary, here are my deepest thoughts, right? You know, my deepest feelings that I would

⏹️ ▶️ John never want anyone to know. And like, I’m writing them down, right? Whereas journaling is more like,

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you mentioned you’re doing it someplace private, but when I see journaling, I feel like it’s, I always

⏹️ ▶️ John think of it as like, how would you feel if this got into the wrong hands and was published,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? And I feel like a journal is written with the notion that it is slightly

⏹️ ▶️ John less bad than having your diary go public because your diary, it’s like, this is it. This is the base

⏹️ ▶️ John level. There is nothing that I won’t write here, no matter how embarrassing, no matter like I’m just going to write

⏹️ ▶️ John all my thoughts and feelings. It is just for me. And it’s my deepest inner thoughts with no filter.

⏹️ ▶️ John And journal is not that. is I’m going to put my feelings and thoughts about the day here.

⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s kind of like something I think we’re all familiar with. It’s like writing not for

⏹️ ▶️ John an external audience, but also thinking about if someone did see this, how dire

⏹️ ▶️ John would it be for me? And that may seem like a weird thing to think about. But I have to tell you that a lot of the things I do in my

⏹️ ▶️ John life, like in the Internet age, I have that mindset of like this. I

⏹️ ▶️ John never intend this to go elsewhere or be seen outside of the context where, you know, where it

⏹️ ▶️ John was supposed to be, but it could. So let me make sure if that happens,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not entirely awful, like always sort of holding something back. So my question for Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John is, are your journal entries like diary entries or like a historian

⏹️ ▶️ John cataloging what your family did in a day or somewhere in between, like how, how do you move along that spectrum?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, it’s a good question. I would say mine is more of a captain’s log

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it is a diary. Like there are occasions that I will put, I mean, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even think of an example off the top of my head. Like, it’s not that I’m trying to filter myself. I just, I can’t even think of an example of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that is really and truly private. Like I’ll talk about, um, you know, oh, we had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such and such a medical issue that, that we needed to take care of. Like that’ll get noted, but it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not the end of the earth. If that sort of thing escaped, you know, it’s one of those things where I wouldn’t want my day

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one journal to be public, but I don’t think it would be ruinous if it was, you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know that I would be canceled on account of my day one journal. I’m much more likely to get canceled because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dumb hot takes on this show or massed on or Twitter or something like

⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s not about canceling. It’s not like we’re saying you’re planning a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey murder and you’re writing it. Sure. Sure. No, no, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, just like writing about your feelings. Like if you, I mean, uh, the journal as you describe it could, could be

⏹️ ▶️ John useful in this context, but I’m saying like, something you would bring to your therapist, like you could bring your therapist out on this day I did this.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so it helps me understand, you know, uh, what my feelings might’ve been versus literally writing down

⏹️ ▶️ John your feelings, bringing that to your therapist and said, here’s how I felt on this day and here’s what I wrote about it, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey more,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I feel like is the word journaling implies like a one step remove where you’re sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of like, like you said, a captain’s log, which has a particular context and you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John Picard writes stuff in his captain’s log about his feelings, but there’s still, it’s written, a captain’s

⏹️ ▶️ John log in particular is written with the expectation that it will have an audience of people who want to look at the captain’s log to see what happened on

⏹️ ▶️ John the events of the journey. And it’s not like the captain doesn’t write about their feelings, like I fear we’ll never find land

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but he’s not writing about his, you know, secret love of the first mate or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I, um, my, my, uh, thoughts about how much I love the two of you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep just for me. Uh, no, I mean, all kidding aside, it really is more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey along the lines of a captain’s log. And I think to back up a, a step, what day

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one does for me is, is fix a problem that I have. I have, and I don’t mean that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a sarcastic way or to be flippant. Like I genuinely have a terrible memory and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not proud of that. I wish I had a much better memory, but my memory is garbage. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can remember certain things and I can remember broad strokes of like Declan’s fifth birthday trip to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Disney world in late 2019, but I really enjoy, if I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time and the presence of mind to do it, I really enjoy taking note of this is where we had lunch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the, you know, the first day that we were at Disney, this is where we eat dinner. And even to the degree of this is what

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ate and maybe I liked it, maybe I didn’t, but I’m not going to go into like the, the, how it made me emotionally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel that dinner or anything like that. It’s really solving the problem of, I have no memory. This

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my external outboard memory that helps me to relive events in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my life. Usually good ones, sometimes mundane, but just events in my life. And,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and day one is really good for me for capturing that. Now you can write long form stuff in it for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not a need that I typically have, or it’s not something that I do particularly often at all.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you could do that there if you so desire. But yeah, if I were to summarize,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would say more Captain’s Log than anything else. My typical day one entry is a title,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often but not always a picture, and typically one paragraph or less, if any. Sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just the title and the picture, nothing else.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and to answer my question, I don’t do any journaling. Although my wife has day one installed, and I hate it because it takes

⏹️ ▶️ John Command Shift D. I’m in the Finder, I hit Command Shift D to open the desktop

⏹️ ▶️ John folder so I can sort by stuff or whatever so I don’t have to look through an incredibly messy desktop full of icons everywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John and I can just get a list view and find things sorted by date or whatever. And Command Shift D does not

⏹️ ▶️ John open a stupid Finder window of the desktop, instead it opens day one.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have day one installed and Command Shift D definitely does the desktop.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m thinking of day one. It’s like a teal icon,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey teal thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like a light blue, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Maybe they changed that. It looks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a book. But also today I learned that Command-Shift-D brings you to the desktop. So that’s extremely useful. Thanks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John. It’s in

⏹️ ▶️ John the Go menu. It’s not a secret command. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just never paid attention. You know, Command-D in a save dialog also does that. Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fine, fine.

#askatp: Folders under ~

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matt Tui writes, what folders do you add to the top level of your home directory? For example, I have one for my code,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey another for things that might be falling off the back of a truck. Does this feel like a sacred place in your computer saved only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for special cases? P.S. I just installed Postman and it created tilde slash Postman,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yuck. I went first last time, so I’ll save myself for last. I think Marco,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s start with you, please.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I generally don’t add stuff to my home folder directly. And it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a similar problem as the Dropbox folder in the sense that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many apps will add their own top level folders there that I don’t necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want there and don’t need to deal with myself and don’t want to deal with myself, but they need to put their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data there because they’re hard-coded to do it or whatever. And so it ends up making the home folder not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco particularly useful to me as a place that I want to look very often because it’s cluttered up with items

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t need to be there that some app or the system decide need to be there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t look that often. What I do have there, of course, I’ll use the subfolders like documents and photos and things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But I do have in that top

⏹️ ▶️ Marco level folder all of my Git checkouts. So it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of projects. It’s like overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John In your home

⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Home slash overcast, home slash neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey find that to be madness as well. But you do you?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, hey, that’s it makes all my paths really easy to type, you know, tilde slash whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s, that’s, that’s what I do. So it’s full of checkouts of all my projects.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and you know, a handful of folders that I’d never need to never look at. And then of course, my,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my fake Dropbox folder, which is actually the maestro Dropbox folder. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for path compatibility, it’s still called Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t put things in the top level of my home folder. Other apps do, and I find it incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ John rude. Yes. So Creative Cloud Files, I don’t like you. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want you to be there. Why are you in the top level of my home directory? Dropbox does, and I

⏹️ ▶️ John have to say, Dropbox is one of the only ones that if I had a choice, and you do have a choice, I think, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John okay with that being top level because of what it is, but I always wanna have a choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John There are other apps that try to put things in there. Sometimes if they insist on being there, I make them invisible just so I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John to see them in the finder. I tend not to go to that folder. But although if you think about that folder, there’s a good history to

⏹️ ▶️ John be had here going all the way back to the next days of like someone somewhere back in the day

⏹️ ▶️ John decided they were going to pick a reasonable top level arrangement for people’s

⏹️ ▶️ John home directories. And so they decided you’re gonna, you know, the folders that you see there when

⏹️ ▶️ John you get a Mac, documents, movies, pictures, Not photos, pictures, because some of them might not be photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Then there’s the dreaded library folder, which people don’t understand, and it’s got the little pillars on

⏹️ ▶️ John the icon or whatever. We as developers know what’s in there, but it’s, you know, it’s, you know, computer

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, right? Downloads, kind of makes sense as a top level thing. Public, nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John freaking knows what that is, because the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco web browsers that

⏹️ ▶️ John used to ship with Macs, like it used to have a GUI, and then it didn’t have a GUI. It’s still, you know, Apache, I think still comes with

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, but anyway. If you run a web server on your Mac out of people’s home directory stuff, it comes out of public, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also, I think, the file sharing public directory or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And inside, don’t forget, inside of public is a folder called DropSpaceBox,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is different from Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s right, no, Sites is the web browser one, public is like the public file sharing one, and then a top-level

⏹️ ▶️ John folder for music, not audio, but music, so you’ve got movies, not video, pictures, not

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John music, not audio. It’s such a, and of course, applications. I do have

⏹️ ▶️ John a applications folder in my home directory, and that is a supported thing, and the OS will give it an icon. And I do have

⏹️ ▶️ John applications in there. They’re applications that only I wanna use that I know no one else in the system wants to use. It’s sort

⏹️ ▶️ John of like a, like you don’t graduate to slash applications until you reach a certain level of usefulness.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’ve got a

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John crap in tilde slash applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There are

⏹️ ▶️ John other folders that you can put in there that the OS understands, but this sort of arrangement of stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John chosen a really long time ago, it makes some sense. It’s not a ridiculous arrangement of things,

⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple in typical fashion on Mac OS has not really revisited

⏹️ ▶️ John that structure to revise it much. And it’s kind of strange, like when they make features in

⏹️ ▶️ John the future, for example, iCloud Drive, where they say, what is it, desktops

⏹️ ▶️ John and documents, right? The desktop folder, which is invisible, but is in the top level of your

⏹️ ▶️ John home directory, and documents. Those are the ones that sync, is desktop documents,

⏹️ ▶️ John is that it, is it downloads as well? I forget.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called documents and desktop and that’s literally those two folders.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so those two folders sync in iCloud and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hmm,

⏹️ ▶️ John all right, so I kind of understand why library doesn’t sync, you know, because we understand

⏹️ ▶️ John like you might have one of per machine preferences or whatever, but like not syncing downloads

⏹️ ▶️ John makes a little bit of sense, but pictures, well, you’ve got iCloud photos, but what if you have other pictures there

⏹️ ▶️ John and should I put pictures in the pictures folder, not in documents folder? Well, then they’re not gonna sync And it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear that current day Apple doesn’t consider all of these top level, it’s not on board

⏹️ ▶️ John with the top level arrangement. Otherwise it would sink more of them, right? And like

⏹️ ▶️ John documents is so generic. Isn’t a movie a document? Isn’t a picture a document, right? Aren’t downloads documents?

⏹️ ▶️ John What the hell is a document? Documents is the thing that they sink, but they’re like, okay, we don’t wanna sink

⏹️ ▶️ John people’s libraries because we have iCloud photo library for that. And if they actually legitimately have pictures that are not photos,

⏹️ ▶️ John they should put them in documents because that will sink. Same thing with movies, it’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ John it suffers from a little bit of sort of, someone had a grand plan many, many

⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, probably back in the next days, and that grand plan has, the people who care about or know about

⏹️ ▶️ John their grand plan are long since gone, and then people just don’t wanna change things, but they’re happy to ignore stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was also, by the way, back in the next days, in the early Mac OS X days, the idea of slash network. So

⏹️ ▶️ John there was slash system, slash network, there was slash local, and then your home directory, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and all those things had a library directory and applications directory under them, right? That they

⏹️ ▶️ John were sort of the same arrangement of top level stuff, repeated many times depending

⏹️ ▶️ John on the scope, just this user stuff, just this machine stuff, the quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John network stuff. And that is also fallen by the wayside as the internet has taken over as the dominant network metaphor, as opposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to file sharing across local computers and a LAN and all that other stuff. So lots of historical

⏹️ ▶️ John baggage here, but that’s part of the reason why I just try to stay the heck out of my top

⏹️ ▶️ John level home directory and do everything. I don’t do documents

⏹️ ▶️ John and whatever, syncing or whatever, but I try to do everything under the thing they have. So my movies

⏹️ ▶️ John are in movies. My pictures are in pictures. Everything else is in documents. My downloads are in downloads.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t touch sites. I don’t touch public. My music used to be in music, but I had this notion

⏹️ ▶️ John back in the iTunes days that I wanted to share my music library between multiple users on the system

⏹️ ▶️ John because it was the biggest thing on my computer. we’ve talked about this before. And so my music was in user shared, which still exists by

⏹️ ▶️ John the way. User shares music, my music is still

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in user. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t just have like the built-in iTunes share feature

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John enabled? Yeah, seriously.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, like back in the day, if you put your music in user shared music, it would

⏹️ ▶️ John literally use the same iTunes library for multiple users. I don’t think it was ever robust, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John ever robust enough to have both users using it at the same time, but it might have been. But anyway, it worked well for years. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ John my music is still in user shared music, even though I’m the only one using it there. So I really should move it back. But

⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, my music is so small compared to my photos library now, it doesn’t even matter. It’s like, I’m not like Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John with his fish stuff, but yeah, thanks for the question. No, no top level stuff. And GitHub,

⏹️ ▶️ John check out to the top level of your home directory. I say this is madness, but I have to tell you that I

⏹️ ▶️ John am, in my Unix days, the top level of my home directory had way too

⏹️ ▶️ John much stuff in it. I tried to arrange things nicely on top of my home directory, and I failed miserably.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like over the course of years in college, my grand plans of arranging the top level

⏹️ ▶️ John of my Unix home directory just were shattered. And then at my jobby jobs, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you looked at my home directory of my last jobby job on my last day of work, you would be horrified more than at

⏹️ ▶️ John Parker’s thing. I had so much crap at the top level of my home directory, like my network shared home directory

⏹️ ▶️ John that was mounted every time I SSH’d any machine anywhere inside the company. So much so, I should

⏹️ ▶️ John have saved an LS output just like mind boggling amount of crap in my home

⏹️ ▶️ John directory. That’s what happens if you give people discorders that are too big.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, I generally don’t have much in there and I consider it semi-sacred.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I do have applications there, although there’s nothing in it. You know, desktop of course, downloads of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey documents, movies, music, pictures, public, all that jazz. The only

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other stuff that I also have in there is I do have, I don’t know, maybe 10 or 15 shell scripts that I use a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole lot. I should probably find a different place for them, but they’re all living

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m in your bin directory, dude. What are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you doing? My bad,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sorry. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re all living there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mention that, by the way, but I do have top level Unix directories that I made invisible. So I have tilde slash bin

⏹️ ▶️ John where all my executables and scripts go that’s in my shell path. Like the Unixy stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John is there, but I don’t see it in the finder.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s fair. I should probably do that. But leaving aside those like 10 shell scripts, I also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a folder. This is thought technology that I came up with. I think it was an original invention,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a year ago, maybe two years ago. I have a folder called Detritus, and that’s in my top level

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco folder.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in there is like all the crap that I don’t care if it disappears.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Audio Hijack dumps all of its files there. Obviously I care if those disappear, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey handle all of these files immediately when I’m done recording. So, Audio Hijack dumps its stuff there.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Caliber has folders in there. Final Cut Pro because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not anymore doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John things. What

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got there is a temp directory.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, kind of, you’re right. But

⏹️ ▶️ John you wanted to be snooty and say Detritus instead of TMP.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I guess, I don’t know. But Geotag, which is a thing I use to geotag photos from my big camera,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Zoom insists on having a download directory for reasons unknown. All of that is in Detritus, and Detritus is in my home

⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder. But other than that, and some shell scripts that apparently I need to move. Oh, and my equivalent of Dropbox,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is Synology Drive, that’s the only real custom additions to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my home folder.

#askatp: Lost in Spaces

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Kai asks, ‘‘Hey Casey, you have sometimes said that you use spaces a lot as a part of your window management workflow

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mac OS. I use spaces a lot in the days of the 2D grid, but lately with self-rearranging list of variable length

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with intermix full screen apps, I found myself getting lost and feel I’m not using multiple desktops to their potential. Could you elaborate on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you use spaces?’’ Yeah, there’s not a lot to say to be honest with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Typically, what I’ll do is I’ll dedicate a space to development work

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that typically, if I’m on a larger screen and not just the laptop. Typically, that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey means I’m running Xcode as big as I can while still having a full-size

⏹️ ▶️ Casey simulator on the right-hand side. So I’ve got a full-size like iPhone 14 Pro simulator on the right-hand side

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen, and then Xcode takes up the entire rest of the screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll have a space dedicated to that. I’ll have a space dedicated to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real-time communication, and so that is like two-thirds Slack and one-third

⏹️ ▶️ Casey messages. So they’re both full-screen tiled using the semi-new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac OS affordances to do so. Then I typically have a space for web browsing, e-mail,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter, just my junk drawer space, if you will. The only reason that this works in my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey brain is because, I have no idea where it is in system settings, but in system preferences, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a way to say to Mac OS, Do not rearrange my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spaces. It tried to get all smart about, you know, Oh, the two things that you use the most, let’s shimmy them next to each

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other, which I get. But because of, I think of this as like this whole, like, like space, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think of it as a, an array of spaces, you know, and it’s a lateral list of screens

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they get rearranged, it breaks my brain and somewhere in system preferences, and I got to assume in system settings, there’s a place

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, don’t rearrange them, leave them be. Um, I don’t recall there ever being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two by two grid there. I’m not saying there wasn’t, but I don’t remember that being a thing, except on Linux, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or like X.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, we’ve talked about this on the show before. The spaces used to be two dimensional, not just left and right, but

⏹️ ▶️ John also up and down.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man, I do not, I believe you, I do not remember that at all. But one way or another, so,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, as they’re all a list, a lateral list, once I turned off rearranging,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it got much better. And like I said, it’s basically like junk drawer, development work, communication,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s about it. science to it. Do you guys, both of you swear that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spaces are pretty much evil, is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t think they’re evil. I’m just super not into them. I wasn’t into the other spaces with 2D

⏹️ ▶️ John either.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, same story?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ve never really gotten into like virtual desktop kind of like, you know, sets like that. I just, just never,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s never been my thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s totally fair. I feel like I couldn’t live without it, but I know that makes me a bit of a weirdo. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s it. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Masterclass,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Nebula. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will talk to you next week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accidental, accidental, tech podcast so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long.

Ending theme?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have potentially a problem. What are we going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do about our theme song?

⏹️ ▶️ John Many weeks. Many, many weeks, and people have been making the same joke and asking the same question, which I don’t blame them

⏹️ ▶️ John for. It makes perfect sense. In our theme song that you just heard, there is a section where

⏹️ ▶️ John our Twitter handles are read out without the at signs, just with the letters

⏹️ ▶️ John so people can figure it out. And everyone’s going, oh, you know, Twitter’s going downhill, and you’re all on Mastodon.

⏹️ ▶️ John and Marco recently is off of Twitter and he took the overcasting on Twitter. So you’re gonna have to change the theme

⏹️ ▶️ John song, aren’t you? Here’s my, was and is still my opinion on this. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John sure it’s not going to be a particular popular one, but it is what it is. The song lyrics

⏹️ ▶️ John are, luckily, if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now, the qualifier is important because

⏹️ ▶️ John you say Twitter goes away or Twitter gets evil. you can say, well, I’m just not into Twitter. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna follow them, right? The other possibility is if you’re in Twitter, you can follow them. What if Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John deletes his account? That would mean that even if you are into Twitter, you can’t follow him because

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not there. But so far we’re still in the good. His account still exists and you could attempt

⏹️ ▶️ John to follow him there. I think his account is private now. It is. Your request to follow may

⏹️ ▶️ John not be approved.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know where to look to approve those requests. I’m not approving any more. Like I locked the accounts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part to, you know, just see like, you know, I’m just going to put a cap on this. Preserve the name,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. I’m preserving the name, but, but yeah, I’m just kind of putting a cap on my usage of this. Like, all right, no more,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and look, I’m not saying I’m going to be gone forever. Definitely.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Twitter, Twitter could rise again. Many things could happen to Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But, but yeah, I, frankly, I’m not super optimistic,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John the theme song has always had that out. If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them now.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the other angle is, again, and say Twitter goes away, it goes bankrupt, it goes out of business, no one buys

⏹️ ▶️ John the assets, it gets sold for parts, Twitter no longer exists. Do we still have this theme song that has Twitter in? I, being

⏹️ ▶️ John a nostalgic person, would say yes. This theme song was written back when Twitter existed. Remember those days? Wasn’t that fun? And

⏹️ ▶️ John we had Twitter handles or whatever. So I would be perfectly fine not ever changing the song,

⏹️ ▶️ John just saying the song is a historical artifact. It always had a qualifier on it. Even if Twitter becomes

⏹️ ▶️ John entirely evil, the song is not endorsing Twitter. It has always been noncommittal. and say, hey, if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them. And then it reads our handles. But the rest of the world does not agree with me. The rest of the world thinks Twitter should

⏹️ ▶️ John not be mentioned in the theme song if we are not actively on Twitter. I’m still on Twitter, by the way. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if we’re not into Twitter anymore, we shouldn’t tell people to try to follow us there. Luckily, our

⏹️ ▶️ John handles are all the same on Mastodon. Not the other part after the ad,

⏹️ ▶️ John but if you type in C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, that’s Casey Liss.

⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t type that’s Casey Liss. You will

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco find him.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you type my last name, you’ll find me. If you type Mark Armit, you’ll probably find him. Like, we are findable.

⏹️ ▶️ John So my second level of bargaining is, okay, you demand that we change this song.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still kind of like the reading of the handles. I don’t think you need to put the whole big thing in mastodon.social,

⏹️ ▶️ John because then what about when we move mastodon servers? Because the whole point is you can move servers really easily and it’s a Fediverse and blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. So I’m like, let’s not go overboard here and just totally change everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Plus the rhythm of that part of the song works well, reading the handles, it teaches people how to spell my name, which I appreciate.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it doesn’t, you know, it does mention Twitter, but it doesn’t say anything on a particular surface. Let’s just leave that. Let’s just change the, if

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter line to something else. Maybe you will do that. So if I, if the

⏹️ ▶️ John world says we must change the song, I would hope that we will change it in a minimal way.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right now we have done nothing, which you will be aware of when you hear this song that hasn’t changed most likely on this thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John but we are

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco considering

⏹️ ▶️ John things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I too would… I see the… because look, here’s the thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco People love our song. I love our song. We love our song. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to rewrite the whole theme song without that line in it or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever else or have to spell out at MarcoArmand at Mastodon.social.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not going to happen. So I’d be inclined to take advantage of the situation

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re in as John mentioned, where our usernames are the same, and just change it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to something like if you’re into social, or on your social network, or something that has the same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of syllables that is network agnostic.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we wouldn’t want to put mastodon because that’d be making the same mistake again. Like Twitter, we had a good run here, but

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter’s been around for a long time, it will mastodon. But what if we put app.net into the song? Not mentioning

⏹️ ▶️ John a company that could go out of business or become evil is probably a good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan. Right. like whenever a new social service

⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes off, we usually have these exact same usernames on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at least we can make it happen. We try to. But the other thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I talked to Jonathan Mann, the composer and performer of our theme song

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like, hey, would you be willing to do something new here or modify this? And he said yes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we just basically have to figure out what to do. And you know, the thing is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this song is almost 10 years old,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever we do now, even if we have him record one line and try to drop it in, it’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound different.

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe in our ability to make that work. Computers, audio processing,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jonathan

⏹️ ▶️ John Mann pitching up his voice and not sounding, I think we can pull it off. But anyway, we’ll try. But

⏹️ ▶️ John we have a similar situation with, because the theme song is so old, people were making the joke when I quit my job saying

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, John didn’t do any research. Like people don’t even know what that line is about. It’s so long ago that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John on the show. But the people who do know say, oh, now that John doesn’t have a job, you have to change the theme. No, we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to. It’s fine as a historical artifact. Like when this song was written, that was a gag in the show,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So many things

⏹️ ▶️ John in the song are from like, when was it written? Like pretty early in the run of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John show. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it had to be like mid 2013, maybe. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John we can go back and find the first show with the theme song. but like they’re all like references

⏹️ ▶️ John and gags that could only have happened in the very, very beginning of the show because that’s when the song was written. And I enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it exists as a historical artifact. The same reason I have my wedding photo on the wall. Like we

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t look like that any longer, but that’s when we were married. So the photo is still hanging. We don’t say, oh, we should update your wedding photo

⏹️ ▶️ John to have pictures of you being old and wrinkly. Like, no thanks. 26th of March, 2013.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that was real early in the run of the show. That must, it was-

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was what like a month in?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Maybe. If

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that.

⏹️ ▶️ John What episode number was it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know I’m just looking at the YouTube video he posted it was March 26 2013. That’s awesome.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode 7. Golly. Oh my god that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John amazing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco episode 7

⏹️ ▶️ John I would say is pretty early. We had enough gags by episode 7 for a theme

⏹️ ▶️ John song to be written that lasted us until episode whatever the heck we’re on 400 and something? 500? Whatever, I can keep track.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How old am I?

⏹️ ▶️ John What’s 100 episodes here and there?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco 500, this is, we’re recording 514

⏹️ ▶️ John and this theme

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco song

⏹️ ▶️ John was written in episode seven. That’s why I’m a proponent of, we’ll just never change the theme song and it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John just be a historical artifact, but we are exploring possible changes. So if you

⏹️ ▶️ John see some changes, and we do have alternate versions of the theme song, we do. There was the bleeps and boops version

⏹️ ▶️ John that I was a fan of that we never actually put into the show.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Go back and see. It was terrible. It wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John terrible, it was awesome. It just was incomplete.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, it wasn’t terrible. It was just nowhere near as good as the regular.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It

⏹️ ▶️ John was good in a different way.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It wasn’t, though. It was good in

⏹️ ▶️ John a bad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, it was

⏹️ ▶️ John good in a more narrow, it was good in a more narrow, Marco should appreciate this, just like fish,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good in a way that is of interest to a narrower slice of the population, let’s say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, let’s go with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so we’ll figure something out. And yeah, and I think there I think odds are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would say odds are even between changing nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and changing like that one line and trying to make it sound natural

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the rest of the song. Staying the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John same

⏹️ ▶️ John relies on Jonathan having the individual tracks, which given that he writes a song every single day, does he keep

⏹️ ▶️ John the individual tracks? I know Marco being a pack rat does keep like the keeps like the logic files

⏹️ ▶️ John from all the ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco episode. I

⏹️ ▶️ John keep everything right. I’m not sure if Jonathan Mann has the hard drive space to be keeping individual track files

⏹️ ▶️ John for every song that he’s ever written. So I’m just crossing my fingers that he somehow, you know, stashed

⏹️ ▶️ John away the individual tracks for this one song.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if, I wonder if we could train an AI model, just feed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all of Jonathan Mann’s songs.

⏹️ ▶️ John And just have, you can put it into Descript. I’m sure Merlin is doing this right now. I know. You know how much he loves it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Descript is a audio, I’m saying it like him now. He says de-script.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is it a descript? The

⏹️ ▶️ John word is descript. I don’t, anyway. It’s like description, anyway. It’s an audio editor that’s really cool. It lets you

⏹️ ▶️ John edit text by looking at, edit audio by looking at text. So it does a transcription and then you just move the words

⏹️ ▶️ John around. And when you move the words around in the text, it moves the audio around. And it has a feature where you can feed it samples

⏹️ ▶️ John of someone’s speech. And then you can just type something you want them to say and it will say it in the voice of that person.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s amazingly good.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Creepiest. But I don’t think it does singing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah. I doubt it. But hey, I mean, look, with all the things the AI can do these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, we’re very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John close. Oh, no, I’m sure this is

⏹️ ▶️ John within, someone could do this. It’s just that Descript, as Marilyn would say, does not

⏹️ ▶️ John have this capability

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yet, as far as I know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be clear, that’s mostly a joke. Like, we actually are gonna have Jonathan do something for us, but yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying this could be what Jonathan does for us. We don’t know, we just wanna see the finished product.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I guess it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever tools he wants to get it done. It’s his own voice. Oh, my word.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. Sitting here now, I think, John, you have convinced me that it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to be modified. I can’t tell when people are commenting on it if they’re snarking for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fun of it or if they’re like legitimately kind of whining about it. I don’t think that’s the case, generally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey speaking.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just making the joke. But the thing is, we have to understand is if we don’t change it, how many years do we have to hear them?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’ll probably die down after about a year. But I’m,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m willing to look into changing it for the purpose of future proofing. But I’m also was super okay with it being the same.

⏹️ ▶️ John And whenever anyone asks about it, now I’ll be able to give them a timestamp linked to this after show to explain why

⏹️ ▶️ John we haven’t changed the theme song if we haven’t changed it, or why we did change it if we did. Beep, beep,

⏹️ ▶️ John beep.