515: The Elder Programmer Look
28 Dec 2022AI training and copyright, a pair of Apple-device mysteries, and the “scaled back” car project.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco has decreed today is Christmas Eve.
- Follow-up:
- Butterfly Keyboard class-action lawsuit payouts
- Artists can now opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion
- A fun Twitter → Mastodon web app (via Ted Tschopp)
- Rewind.ai is available
- Lensa AI (App Store link)
- John’s iPad Mystery
- Casey’s AirPods Pro Mystery
- Always-On Display Tweaks in iOS 16.2 (via Brandon Butch)
- Apple car project hits [yet more] road bumps
#askatp:- Post-show: Christmas Movies
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Chapters
- Manipulating time
- Butterfly-keyboard class-action
- Sponsor: Nebula
- AI training & copyright
- Sponsor: Blaze
- Mastodon Flock 🖼️
- Rewind.ai now available
- John’s iPad mystery
- Casey’s AirPods mystery
- 16.2 Always-On customization
- Car project “scaled back”
- Sponsor: Memberful
- #askatp: Own domain/blog?
- #askatp: Bit rot on Synology
- #askatp: Mouse acceleration
- Ending theme
- Christmas movies
Manipulating time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, have we ever recorded this show before noon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if John has ever recorded a podcast before noon.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’ve done a bunch of morning ones for usually people in the UK and stuff. Have you even shaved yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean? Shaved yet? What are you talking about? I don’t think you understand my shaving schedule. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you’ve completed the morning shave, but not the evening shave. Yeah, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not… I shave like once a week-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured, you know, your thick Italian hair, it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s just constant.
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It’s just I don’t feel the need to shave it off now that I’m not going into
⏹️ ▶️ John an office all the time. Even when I was going to an office, honestly, it was pretty hit or miss in the later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You slowly become like the elder programmer look. It’s just right.
⏹️ ▶️ John one or two days it’s like stubble and then people start asking you whether you’re growing a beard and then you shave and then just repeats.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, if anybody asks, today is not December 26th, it’s December 24th.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, I figure if Roman emperors were able to dictate whatever they felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the calendar doing, I feel like I can do it too. So today is really actually December
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 24th in our family and we have our own custom calendar only for this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this This has been, oh, this has been an experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we drove halfway upstate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the day before Christmas Eve, on Friday, this past Friday. The idea was to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive the rest of the way upstate to our family’s place on Saturday, Christmas Eve day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we woke up on Saturday morning and our kid had a massive fever. And we were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh no. So, you know, here we are, you know, scheduling to go up to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visit like the whole family, including, you know, his grandparents who are, you know, we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be careful with what we bring to them. And so we were like, oh, no, we got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t go up like this. We can’t bring like this very fevery kid. First
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, we can’t make him sit in a car for three hours. That’s not super great when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling sick. Second of all, we don’t want to get them six. We’re like, Oh God, what do we do? It’s Christmas Eve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we worked out this plan where we were basically going to wait until the fever broke and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, talk to a doctor and see like when safe and everything. And then so as we’re working this out, we get reports from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of his or from some of his school classmates parents. His whole class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically has flu a like it’s the whole class. Cool. It’s the real flu. Many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them got tested. It’s it’s influenza a real flu and now he’s showing flu symptoms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, crap. And it’s Christmas Eve, may I remind you, it’s not like anything’s easily accessible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or open or, you know, so we do like a telehealth thing, which thank God that even exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s, that’s an amazing thing. Like that’s, I’m so happy that that’s like, I think, you know, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the, if there is such a thing as a silver lining for the COVID era, it’s that I think we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more access to virtual services than we used to. And even though telehealth existed before COVID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a much smaller and less commonly available thing for for most insurance plans and stuff. So now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super easy. So we did telehealth, and then we had to get a prescription.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by this time, the time that we had done the telehealth and done all this, it was 6 p.m. on Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eve. So try getting a prescription filled at 6 p.m. on Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eve. So we eventually found like a 24-hour pharmacy that was open Christmas Eve, had it sent there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a whole thing, but we got it. Anyway, so we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and we’re like, all right. The good thing about Christmas is that unlike, for example, Halloween,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are sick on Halloween, you just miss everything because Halloween is a holiday that depends on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the surrounding community celebrating it at the same time you are celebrating it. Otherwise, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really go trick-or-treating. If you just show up on strangers’ doors and knock on them on November 3rd, you’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a bad time I think but Christmas it really just depends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on when your family wants to celebrate it you know it’s basically within your own household for the most part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you can kind of celebrate whenever you want so we just delayed it so yesterday we sat inside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and play video games all day big fan of project high-rise right now it’s like a modern sim tower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fantastic oh I loved sim tower yeah yeah but yeah and so we just play video games all day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I they try to teach me how to play don’t starve together and I starved and when Oh no, I died
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost instantly. Like, I think I lasted maybe 90 seconds in the game before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dying. So that might not be a strength of mine, but certainly SimTower-like games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m enjoying. So we just did all that yesterday. And this afternoon we are driving upstate and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today is fake Christmas Eve and tomorrow is fake Christmas and we’re gonna celebrate it, damn it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’m very thankful for Modern Medicine and for our flexible family in their scheduling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it’s been a time. Oh, and 24 Hour Pharmacy is also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thankful for that. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco COVID tests? Yes and no. All
⏹️ ▶️ John gotten his flu shot yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, this is the thing. So he had COVID on Halloween. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I’m such an expert in what it’s like to miss Halloween. That was awful. And because we thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we might be exposed to it, we didn’t get any boosters or anything yet we’re like all right now let’s wait two months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they say and then we’ll all get we’ll get all of our boosters and that puts us about now
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah i always remember like when they would start advertising the flu shots and they’d be advertising them and
⏹️ ▶️ John like before uh you know halloween i’d be like that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a little early
⏹️ ▶️ John for flu shots but i eventually gave in and said all right well i’ll just get it as soon as it’s available so i let this
⏹️ ▶️ John uh be a lesson to the listener even though sometimes it seems like they’re giving out the flu shots way too early and it’s not even close to
⏹️ ▶️ John flu season yet it’s a good idea to get them when you can because it’s it’s easy to forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. Last year we got them all regularly on schedule and we had a totally fine, smooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco winter. I know it’s not 100% or whatever, but at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll take any improvement in chances, even if it’s not 100%. I’ll take it.
Butterfly-keyboard class-action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up and it starts with Brad Crittenden who writes, I got a butterfly keyboard class-action lawsuit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settlement notice. It claims that they will pay 300 to 395 dollars. I have no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recollection of this flying by. I probably filled it out and just don’t remember, but I have zero recollection of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the thing. I’d never filled it out and I got one. Well, I got the notice saying I’m entitled to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or whatever, but I’m not gonna submit it because, see, I never, as far as I can recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recall, I think I only got it repaired once or even did I ever get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco repaired or did I just not? See, I can’t even remember if I actually ever got one repaired.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I’m like, you know, it’s because the class action is basically like if you got a butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard laptop repaired by Apple, depending on how many times you got it repaired, you have a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number, you have a certain, you know, payout of, you know, 100 bucks or 200, 300 bucks apparently, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a huge amount of money because like, I mean, look, the real problem with the Butterfly keyboards, well, there were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two real problems. Number one, people getting them repaired out of warranty had to pay quite a lot of money, and more than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember, the price was, I believe, like over $500 to get one repair out of warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s that issue, which this, you know, I guess partially addresses, but doesn’t fully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address. The other issue is any replacement you got would have the same problem eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so really, the whole laptop was incredibly devalued over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was the big problem. And so, you know, this is — I’m glad Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, got sued over the Butterfly keyboards, because frankly, they should have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One issuance of that keyboard was bad enough, and then to keep issuing it year after year after year after year, claiming they’d fixed it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was beyond negligent and borderline fraudulent. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should have been held liable for that. And it seems like they’ve been held a little bit liable for that. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you were an owner of a butterfly keyboard laptop, this kind of helps a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it doesn’t really address the actual value that you lost by having that laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having to eventually, you know, sell or trade it in or get it repaired out of warranty.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was excited to get my money for this and then I realized, oh wait, my butterfly keyboard that broke wasn’t mine. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John on my work’s laptop. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John though. You got your work laptop taken away and you got to have a replacement and all your stuff is on it. even more annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the work, you know, because they own the machine. So it’s not like you can just copy stuff off of it because they don’t let you attach external
⏹️ ▶️ John drives and blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I hope my old workplace gets the money they have coming
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for all the butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboards that broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I didn’t I didn’t end up getting any of these repaired. In fact, I’m trying to remember. So we still have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, Aaron, what was my adorable now Aaron’s adorable in the house and every green one like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once every few months, she’ll be like, oh, my such and such key is sticking. Yep, sure is. I bet you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. But anyways, I never got a repair. And then I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two other MacBook Pros that I had during the butterfly era were either works or have already been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold off. So yeah, I’d never had a repair. And that probably explains why I never got this notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m glad to hear that this is a thing. And I agree with you, Marco, that, you know, it’s one thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release a keyboard that’s flawed, and maybe you didn’t know it, maybe you thought, oh, it’ll work itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. and okay fine. The thing that bothered me about this whole fiasco, well one of the things that bothered me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole fiasco was the fact that they, like you said, they just kept saying no no no it’s fine, no it’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no it’s fine, no it’s fine. This time we fixed it. Oh yeah, oh we added a gasket
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it was, I don’t remember the details, we added a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gasket, that’ll fix it. Yeah because you’re right, they were also saying nothing’s wrong, keep changing it, nothing’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong, oh wait we changed it again, nothing’s wrong, it’s what are you talking about, there’s no flaw, we fixed the flaw, what are you talking about, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no flaw, oh we fixed it it again. Like, yeah, it was a rough time. Huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention the fact that it sucked even when it was working, but we’ll move beyond that for now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, what are you going to do? But, but no, it, I’m glad to see that this is finding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as late as it is. I’m glad to see it’s finding some sort of resolution for, you know, regular people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two related things to this one. I don’t, we don’t, I couldn’t find this feedback for the show, but we did get some feedback from somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John through some channel, live streams, that said They had a Mac with a butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard and it went bad and they brought it to the Apple store and they were informed that, oh, the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John repair program for the butterfly keyboards that said, hey, if you have a problem, you know, whatever it’s called, the extended repair program,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a problem, we’ll replace it. That program has ended. So this person had a butterfly keyboard, brought it
⏹️ ▶️ John in and they’re no longer eligible to get it repaired for free or for cheap because the Apple, we talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John one, Apple rolled out the program. It’s like, okay, at a certain point, Apple says, yeah, we have this repair program because to realize
⏹️ ▶️ John we put out a defective keyboard, but at a certain point, we just wanna stop paying for that, so we’re going to. And I think we’re past that
⏹️ ▶️ John point now, which is pretty crappy. So if you do want it repaired, you’re on the hook for whatever the $500 repair bill. It
⏹️ ▶️ John really just, probably wanna throw that laptop into the sea at that point. The second thing is that just
⏹️ ▶️ John from some brief Googling, I believe I still have a butterfly keyboard Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in semi-active use. The original Retina MacBook Air had it, right? The Intel one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the first one, the 2018 model. But the 2019 did not. Yeah, maybe I got the 2019 one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll have to look it up. There was an Intel MacBook Air Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that didn’t have the butterfly keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’ll double check, but I was thinking, oh, maybe if that one ever goes bad, I’ll get paid. But apparently I won’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, according to that feedback that I can’t find. So that’s pretty crappy. I understand the repair programs can’t last forever, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like, what’s the point of the repair program if you’re saying we’re sorry for putting out a defective laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we have a timer on the lifetime of your computer. So like, I mean, it’s more, it seems like the keyboard is
⏹️ ▶️ John even more likely to fail after the three or four or five or however many years after
⏹️ ▶️ John that time period is up. But they’re just saying, yeah, we can’t pay for that forever. Because we basically know, there’s probably some
⏹️ ▶️ John graph of like over time, what are the odds that a keyboard will fail? And at a certain point it becomes like ruinous, not ruinous,
⏹️ ▶️ John but very expensive for Apple to repair because the percentage of them that are going to go bad after,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 10 years is approaching like, you know, 25% or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I mean, it does make sense to have a time limit on it. I just think this time limit was probably too short.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey know, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point they have to stop manufacturing and keeping the parts and the service, you know, equipment and stuff like that. So it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sense to have an expiration date. But that expiration date should be however many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years their products are expected to be in use that that number of years after they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stop being for sale. And so maybe it’s like seven years, you know, whatever it is, like, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as they can expect a laptop to reasonably still be in use by most people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should have covered that duration. And it didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have to keep making the butterfly keyboard parts. Like that’s not the only solution available to them. They can
⏹️ ▶️ John do what they have done in the past, which is that you bring something in to get repaired. And they’re like, Oh, we don’t make parts
⏹️ ▶️ John for that anymore. And we don’t make that product anymore. But we recognize that you’ve got a broken thing. And it’s our fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here is the new version. We’ve heard lots and lots of stories of Apple doing that. Like they basically give you a new laptop or a new
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod back in the day. That’s not the the one that you had that is better than the one you had, but it’s the only option available
⏹️ ▶️ John to them because they don’t make the old one anymore. They could always do that, but of course that would cost money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that would cost way more money because like… Well, you stop shipping a defective keyboard for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but like, but you know, this was not a small number of affected products, even though they kept saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s only a tiny percentage, but we all know it’s a much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage. A tiny percentage after six months. Is it a tiny percentage after six years?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Yeah, that’s the thing. This would have been a massive number if they actually did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard of that happening, and at one time it even happened for me back in the white plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook days. But it’s not super common. I feel like you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a fairly exceptional case, and I think it has to go through some levels of approval before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just give you a new thing to replace your old broken thing. So that’s not that common of a thing.
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AI training & copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s move on and talk about stable diffusion, baby. And apparently, artists can now opt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the next version of stable diffusion. This is an article on the Technology Review.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of stable diffusion. The company behind it has announced stability.ai will work with Spawning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an organization founded by artist couple Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website called Have I Been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Trained. That’s in the spirit of Have I Been Pwned, isn’t it? That’s so good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that allows artists to search for their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train stable diffusion. Artists will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you don’t even need to read the summary or the article, just the headline, which I’ve copied and pasted directly into the notes, just
⏹️ ▶️ John the headline is enough for you. It’s kind of like the Ian Betteridge law for you to just say no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Artists can now opt no, you’re not getting it. The idea is not oh, we’ll steal all your stuff and build a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ John product off it and make money. But you can always track us down, find out we’re doing that and tell us to stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything’s fine now, right? No, it’s not. We’ll we’ll we’ll siphon money from your bank account
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly over time. But if you catch us doing that and tell us to stop, we’ll stop. Everything’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John now, right? No problem anymore. No, this is not the solution. You can’t take people’s stuff, use
⏹️ ▶️ John it and say, but we’ll stop if you ask us to. It should not be an opt out. Would you like to
⏹️ ▶️ John opt out of having your intellectual property stolen? Please offer that plan to Disney. Hey, Disney, we’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John using your intellectual property. But if you ask us to stop, we will. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hilarious that someone thought this was a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I can… I mean, look, I know this is probably unpopular, so maybe I shouldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother, but I think the issue of copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and rights in terms of whether AI can be trained on your copyrighted material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a weird, blurry situation. I don’t think it’s clear-cut. Because if you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what training is and how it might relate to real-world analogs to which we have precedent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like I am able to view a copyrighted work if it’s being shown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me in a legal way. I’m able to view it and remember it and learn from it. Artists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everywhere are able to look at other artists’ work, be inspired by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, and generate new things in their spirit. And so it is kind of a weird blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line in the sense that the AI models that are being trained in this data, they’re not making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco illegal copies and distributing illegal copies of the original works. They are, in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, viewing them. But they’re not people, so they’re not. Right. And so that’s… And I know there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently a court thing somewhere that said that they basically failed the AI stuff. The output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AI models does not qualify for copyright because it was not created by a human. And I think that’s also going to be worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out over time in the court system, because I think that’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John that that ruling is actually more questionable than in my opinion than the whether they’re allowed to take your stuff because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not created by a human thing is fuzzy in the okay. So the program is in a human, but
⏹️ ▶️ John a human runs the program and tweaks the output and so on and so forth. So you have to say this isn’t copyrightable
⏹️ ▶️ John because it wasn’t created by human. It’s like, well, the program didn’t create it on its own. It’s just sitting there waiting for humans. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, this is not copyrighted because it was created by Photoshop and Photoshop is not a human. Well, someone ran Photoshop and used
⏹️ ▶️ John it and clicked around and did stuff, right? How many tweaks to the output do you have to do for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to suddenly become a copyrightable, right? I think that is actually more fuzzy. What is not fuzzy in my opinion, and
⏹️ ▶️ John again, who knows what the law will be, but in my personal opinion, it is not fuzzy at all that you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ John take, that you can’t take works that you don’t have the rights to and use it to train an AI model, because,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I talked about this on Upgrade a while back, like, in my opinion, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no, like, I see where people think it might be fuzzy, but the difference is that it’s not a person doing. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John feeding it into a program and the value of that program is nothing without being fed
⏹️ ▶️ John input. You have to feed input into the program. If I just give you that program and say, well, it’s a program that I wrote,
⏹️ ▶️ John so anything that comes out of it is mine. Sure, okay, go ahead. But it’s like, okay, well, my program doesn’t work unless I feed
⏹️ ▶️ John it data. Okay, well, now what data, where are you getting that data from? I’ll just feed it any data I feel like.
⏹️ ▶️ John The point of the acquisition of data, you are taking that data and using it. It’s like taking a font and using
⏹️ ▶️ John it to make, you know, a sign. Like fonts, there’s, you know, this is more complicated because you can’t copyright
⏹️ ▶️ John a font. But anyway, if you want to use the official version of a font or whatever, you have to pay for it. You can use a clone of the font
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, which is good things complicated. But anyway, like, it’s, I don’t think you can take people’s copyrighted
⏹️ ▶️ John material and use to train an AI model. I just don’t like without some kind of compensation for them, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you are directly deriving value from their work. And I don’t think the analogy to people
⏹️ ▶️ John makes any sense because the program is not a person. Yes, a person can look at art and make derivative art, right? But it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John a person. It’s a person using a program, right? It’s like, well, if I use a program to copy this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t copy your art and resell it. I used the CP program. And the CP program copied your art.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then once I had it from the CP program, then I sold it. But it’s fine, because the CP program
⏹️ ▶️ John did just what a person does, looks at the art. No, it’s just a more complicated version of the CP. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John will lawyers agree? I think it really depends on, especially in our country, how rich the
⏹️ ▶️ John corporation is on each side of the case when it comes to like if Disney arrives and says, hey, we see you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John trained your AI model on all of our intellectual property, probably Disney is gonna win, because
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the precedent, and in this case, I think Disney would be right that you can’t train your model on, you know, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that made by Disney. But as I said, an upgrade, Disney can train an AI model
⏹️ ▶️ John on stuff made by Disney. Like I’m not saying AI models are useless, Disney can train all the models they want on all
⏹️ ▶️ John their own intellectual property and use it to generate stuff. And I think the stuff that Disney generates
⏹️ ▶️ John from Disney’s own intellectual property should be copyrightable because humans are running that and doing
⏹️ ▶️ John the prompts and tweaking the output and whatever. And I think that should be copyrightable. So, so far
⏹️ ▶️ John the one legal case that we’ve heard of has gone the opposite way as I expected. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is, you know, I think you’re right, Marco, that lots of people have different opinions on this. I just feel like mine is very
⏹️ ▶️ John strongly against using other people’s intellectual property. And I think the problem with this stable
⏹️ ▶️ John diffusion thing it’s kind of admitting that, hey, we probably shouldn’t be using
⏹️ ▶️ John your stuff because they will immediately stop using it if you ask them. So, you know, based on that silly
⏹️ ▶️ John policy, they’re saying, Oh, we understand that you have the right to make a stop. Or maybe they’re just trying to say we’re being
⏹️ ▶️ John nice and we’ll stop if you want. But given my opinion that it is totally wrong for them to be taking that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in the first place, I think this is a dumb policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think I think this is one of those areas where we’re gonna we’re gonna look back at whatever our opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. Now we’re gonna look back in five or ten years and be like, man, we were way off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And I don’t know which direction we’re going to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, but I think this is going to be a rapidly evolving policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what’s acceptable and what’s legal are both also going to rapidly evolve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree with you on the output being copyrightable. Because, again, it’s like, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Photoshop to flood fill an area with a pattern, does that not qualify for copyright because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program made the pattern and you didn’t. So, obviously, I think using it, I think the output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is copyrightable, but I think the input is really questionable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not clear-cut. I think one area where it could kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall legally into some kind of settlement is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you watch a movie and you get the little FBI warrant at the beginning, there are certain rights that you have and certain rights
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t. You are not, for instance, allowed to buy a copy of the movie on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Blu-ray or whatever and then show it to an audience who has paid to be there. You aren’t allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it commercially. You aren’t allowed to do public performances. And the same thing applies to most music and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that. And so you could argue, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a copyright holder, you could maybe argue, well, the use of your model viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or listening to my content is not licensed because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not personal private home use or whatever. So they could maybe get something in there. But I think overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the concept, I still currently at least, I still fall on the side of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI is just watching and learning from things in a similar, well, maybe not too similar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s in an analogous way to how humans might see something and be inspired
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you have to say about the idea that the program doesn’t have any rights? Because in our law system,
⏹️ ▶️ John computer programs don’t have rights right now, right? And I think this specific computer program definitely shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have rights because it’s not a sentient being. So yes, it is doing something similar to what humans do, broad
⏹️ ▶️ John strokes, but it doesn’t have any rights because it is not a sentient being. And all of our laws apply to sentient beings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I mean, I guess I agree with that, but I don’t see this as whether the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI has has rights itself. I see this as like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re trying to give it creative control like saying it’s saying like it created this thing. Therefore now the program has rights to it. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to say that I would say great now the program can do whatever it wants with it. You’re like well the program doesn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything with it. The human that ran the program though wants to sell it for an in and out purchase. So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John okay if you actually want to assign rights assign them to the program and then you’re like that’s done
⏹️ ▶️ John the program can’t do anything exactly. That’s why it doesn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I think it’s more complicated than that. When you dive into the technical part of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, okay, well, what about when Google indexes fact data off of pages? And then you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fact query and show one of those Google knowledge things. That’s a questionable area of copyright as well, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think that’s very, very similar to this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. But see, here’s the thing. You’re saying how this turns out. It can go a couple different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John It really depends on, in the case of the Google thing, when that case comes… I don’t remember what the resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John of the case. I think Google won that one. But when the cases come out, there are two strong forces here. One is rich
⏹️ ▶️ John corporations want something. In this case, Google is the rich corporation. It wanted to be
⏹️ ▶️ John able to take summaries of web pages and show them as its own output, which is arguably,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right, very similar to what these models do. But I’m pretty sure, and we’ll follow up on this for a moment,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure Google won that case. And did they win it because they were right or did they win it because they’re Google and they’re rich
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a lot of lawyers? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See also Disney and copyright. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, but you’re using the analogy to what Google does. I kind of agree that Google, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit fuzzier, but because Google’s whole thing is they’re, every one of their search results is
⏹️ ▶️ John arguably a summary or whatever. But Google is trying to be a venue for you to go somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by putting the summary things, they’re making you not go there.
⏹️ ▶️ John When a program is summarizing and providing like an index or whatever, if you follow that road too
⏹️ ▶️ John far down, you’re like, oh, you can’t have search engines anymore because you’re not allowed to reproduce any portion of my work, even a
⏹️ ▶️ John summary of it if it’s programmatically generated anywhere. And that gets absurd. Obviously, we think we should have search engines. So let’s not make
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco law like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t even have browser caches if you if you follow that
⏹️ ▶️ John law too closely. Right. But but then but you know, this is the kind of the technical nuance that laws aren’t great with. OK,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what about when they take my Web page and they don’t even provide a link to it and they just summarize the content and
⏹️ ▶️ John re smash it through and say, oh, here’s the answer. And it’s provided by Google and And they don’t give credit to my answer. And I’m the one
⏹️ ▶️ John who wrote that grapes are poison to dogs on my web page. And they just took my paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John and summarized it or massaged it and put it on there. And again, I think Google won that case because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John rich, not because they’re right. I would have decided that differently. But it’s a nuanced ruling in that case, very nuanced, because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John outlaw search engines or browser caches. In the case of the Disney
⏹️ ▶️ John finds someone’s been training their AI models on Marvel superheroes, which absolutely has already happened,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure, And Disney gets angry and sues. Disney’s probably going to win that because they have
⏹️ ▶️ John all the politicians in their pocket or whatever the paraphrase of the line from The Godfather is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But on the other side of that, unlike the Google case, there is another side to that that is potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John just as powerful, which is people like free stuff. And combined with
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it’s very difficult to, it’s not immediately obvious what has been used to train
⏹️ ▶️ John an AI model. And then mixed into that, these sort of academic things, like well they’re not selling anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just part of academic research and they they should have broader uh purview to do
⏹️ ▶️ John things for non-commercial purposes or whatever right but the fact that it’s just going to be like well
⏹️ ▶️ John disney can sue but they can try to make laws in the u.s but the world is bigger than the u.s and anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets on the internet is everywhere so good luck trying to stop people from making pictures of pregnant sonic right
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah pictures of pregnant sonic probably say it would not like to exist but people are going to make them
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s a derivative work and that’s probably a bad example. But anyway, these AI models are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to create images, and they’re going to go everywhere if people want them. If it is a useful thing to have, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be so hard to stop them. So the countervailing force here is at a certain point, the cases
⏹️ ▶️ John come, and they’re going to say, well, we think this should probably be illegal, but it’s just so common, and people really
⏹️ ▶️ John like it. And I know courts don’t put an opinion that says, well, everybody does it, so it’s fine. But practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, it’s very difficult. You can end up with decisions that kind of lean in that direction. I’m sure there’s some legal precedent
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, like people who squat on a piece of land and at a certain point they own it. That doesn’t make any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like, that’s doesn’t seem fair, but it’s like, but we have laws like that because it’s even more absurd to do the opposite in some
⏹️ ▶️ John cases. Well, we’ve been living on this land for a hundred years, but you know, you’re gonna kick us off because
⏹️ ▶️ John again, in this country, there’s terrible analogies for that as well. Anyway, I’m not doing well with analogies. It’s early in the
⏹️ ▶️ John morning. What can I tell you? So it depends on when these cases come out. I feel like there actually is
⏹️ ▶️ John a very, something that may be equivalent to Disney trying to say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, legally, hey, we’ve decided that this is OK. Regardless of what the law ends up being, I think it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John right to take people’s copyrighted work, train a model on it, and sell the results of that model’s output.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that model ever becomes a sentient being, which is plausible in the future, then we’ll have a different discussion.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that discussion will be, what kind of rights do sentient computer programs have? And that is a very different discussion. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be clear, none of these programs are sentient. No one is arguing that they are so
⏹️ ▶️ John we can set that aside for a sci fi future. But that’s not what we’re dealing with now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, see, I, I see where you’re coming from. I don’t agree. I still think that
⏹️ ▶️ John would you agree if you’re an artist and your work was being taken and then the results of it being sold?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are artists. So what would you think about somebody downloading all all episodes of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve ever made all the podcasts we ever made and training a model on that? Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that’s something and selling the results. I don’t think that’s something you should do. What if they took the source
⏹️ ▶️ John code for Overcast and fed it into a program that tweaked it and then started selling new copies of Overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I don’t release the source code, so that’s a little bit different, but
⏹️ ▶️ John It can reverse compile, because you release the binary and they can just generate the source code from that. You’ve all seen that. And the program doesn’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John what the variable names are all A, B, C, D and stuff, because the program doesn’t care about that. But the program
⏹️ ▶️ John decompiles it, refactors it, changes it a little bit and sells a new thing. It’s a derivative work. It just looked at it just
⏹️ ▶️ John the same way a person would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, see, that and that I think that’s why I am fairly hesitant to restrict
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the training side of things. Because in my opinion, I would rather use the systems we already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have with copyright and fair use to and trademark also, which is a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relevant in some of these things. But anyway, I’d rather use the systems we already have around copyright and fair use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage when things go wrong and when things are misused, rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, this new kind of technology that’s really exciting and has a lot of good, valid uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to make it way harder and way less practical to create. Because if somebody uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AI model that’s been trained on whatever they could find, if they use that to generate something that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too close to an existing copyrighted work or that is clearly a derivative work of a protected character
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or franchise or whatever, we already have infrastructure in place to issue takedown notices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sue for something being or not being fair use. We already have all those systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we are better off relying on that human judgment side rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kneecapping this technology in its early days in ways that are extremely impractical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you think about it, look at a similar problem that we faced when making Web 2.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything else. We had the rise of user-generated content sites, places like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, and all these places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could say, legally speaking, you could say, it should be impossible for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone to ever upload a copy of my work to these services. In practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s really impractical and limiting. And so, kind of what you said a minute ago, John, like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really the practice became, all right, well, we’re going to have the structure in place to manage when there are violations, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be perfect, and it’s not going to, you know, it’s not going to be the intellectual property ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having it be impossible to break the law, but we’re We’re going to just make a process in place so that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal with when people do things that are over the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John But their process is they have a program called Content ID that will immediately detect if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John music playing in the background that’s copyrighted, even if it’s like a next house over. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly fast and automated and defaults to rejecting.
⏹️ ▶️ John The YouTube video I wanted to see about Fusion that I think I might have mentioned on a past show is from real
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering. I think it was rejected because by copyright ID
⏹️ ▶️ John from YouTube or whatever, because the music used in the background was copyrighted. And the music used
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background was from a set of licensable music that the channel had licensed. So the copyright
⏹️ ▶️ John ID thing is so is so automated and so strict and so defaulting to rejection that
⏹️ ▶️ John it says, Oh, this is copyright. It’s like, Yeah, and I paid for it. I pay for it to use on my channel. But it’s like, no program says no.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if it becomes possible to programmatically detect if your AI training model
⏹️ ▶️ John was trained with any copyrighted data, no one will ever be able to upload any AI
⏹️ ▶️ John trained stuff to YouTube because YouTube will immediately detect it and reject it, even if you’ve paid for the rights, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the side they err on because big corporations don’t like it. It’s more like, you know, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s YouTube. But then what about the wider internet, like that it’ll be everywhere in it? Like, I think again, I think AI models
⏹️ ▶️ John are still useful and can be useful, particularly for companies that want to train it on their own intellectual
⏹️ ▶️ John property. Like it is useful to to train things on stuff that you own. And even an individual might not own enough to train
⏹️ ▶️ John a model, but there are licensable image sets that you can train on. That’s also legally valid,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I don’t think, to your point about kneecapping this order, I don’t think that we need any new laws. My interpretation of the
⏹️ ▶️ John existing laws is this is already illegal, but the existing laws also provide lots of ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s legal. You know, Getty Images can sell image training sets. There are free
⏹️ ▶️ John public domain image training sets. If you would like to license an image training set Disney. Maybe they’ll sell
⏹️ ▶️ John you one and then you can train your model on that. And then we have to have all the automated systems saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, I can tell this was trained on X, Y, and Z images, and X, Y, and Z images are from these licensable
⏹️ ▶️ John sets. And then you have to show that you licensed it just the same way the real engineering had to say, no, no, I licensed
⏹️ ▶️ John this music thing from this company. I’m allowed to use it in my video. This is how the system is supposed to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube stop rejecting my videos, right? So it is complicated and annoying, but if anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is a programmatic way to enforce existing laws on fair use and intellectual property,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be worse for creativity and innovation than humans enforcing it
⏹️ ▶️ John because computers are really, really good at doing stuff like detecting if there’s copyrighted music. And I presume eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John computers will be pretty good at figuring out if any copyrighted works from some
⏹️ ▶️ John set are part of a training set, because that’s, you know, have I been trained or whatever? And maybe they just have a
⏹️ ▶️ John database. I don’t know how it works or whatever. But once it’s programmatically possible to answer this question, it swings
⏹️ ▶️ John farther in the direction of Disney stopping you from ever training any image set on Star Wars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, and again, I think I think using content ID on YouTube as an example is that’s kind of an extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, even though it is a highly relevant one, just because content ID is so overly aggressive. But you know, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about also, like some other angle of this, you know, if Disney starts using this technology to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, scan everything that they could find uploaded to YouTube and and be like, oh, wait, that’s Elsa. Oh, stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait. And they can use the AI to detect derivative works, even. Disney could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start scanning DeviantArt and Flickr and stuff for fan-drawn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of their characters. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but under existing laws, they have to show it was taken from one of their actual drawings, not a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of Elsa, right? Although, if you do want to put Elsa on a t-shirt and sell it, you can’t say, well, I drew the
⏹️ ▶️ John Elsa myself, so it’s fine. Actually, I don’t know what the way the law is on that, depending on how derivative the work. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you would expect for the training thing and have it be trained is not just, hey, you drew a picture of an apple and there’s a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of an apple in the training set. It’s like, is it literally your picture of the apple? And that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets tricky. I don’t know how this have I been trained thing works. Maybe it is a byte provide. They know the
⏹️ ▶️ John check sums of every image that was part of the data set and you can upload one of your images. And if the checks
⏹️ ▶️ John on matches, then it’s the same. Like, is it literally byte for byte? And if you like resize your picture or change one pixel it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John match or is it fuzzier than that? This is kind of similar to the CSAM system
⏹️ ▶️ John of like perceptual hashing or whatever because that gets into what you’re saying. It’s like, okay, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not from a Disney picture of Elsa. It’s a picture that I drew of Elsa and you know, and that’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, with Disney being overly aggressive saying, oh great, we have a way to tell if anyone never trained any
⏹️ ▶️ John training set on any picture of Elsa. I’m not sure where that falls under existing laws, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that even possible? I don’t even, is it possible for them to say, we can tell that you trained your model on
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if you can reverse it, but I am assumed that people who train the models know literally every single
⏹️ ▶️ John image that’s in the image set. It’s a long list, but they probably, they have the data somewhere and they could build a database
⏹️ ▶️ John based on that data with either real content hashes, perceptual hashes, right? Like that’s how I assume
⏹️ ▶️ John have I been trained is working. Like if they know, you know, if you trained it on a dataset and then you delete the dataset and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can be like, oh, well, shrug, I don’t even know what it was trained on. I think it’s difficult to like difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John or impossible to reverse it to say, Oh, I can tell by looking at the output what it was trained on. I don’t think that’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But hopefully you keep around. This is where you might need new laws like, hey, if you want to use an AI
⏹️ ▶️ John model, you have to be able to prove something about your training set. And if you have an AI model, and you say, Oh, we deleted
⏹️ ▶️ John our training set. Oh, well, the law would say, Yeah, you can’t use any of that. Because part of whatever our laws
⏹️ ▶️ John that new laws that come out will say, Okay, here are the situations under which the output
⏹️ ▶️ John of an AI model is copyrightable can be used, you know, successfully, you
⏹️ ▶️ John probably have to be able to prove something about the training set and ignorance would not be
⏹️ ▶️ John a defensive love that we don’t even know what the training set was. So everything’s fine, right? Yeah, probably not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I’m still on the side of this is addressing it at the wrong stage of the pipeline. I mean, because it’s going to be more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated. You know, you know, many, many new models that come out are not based on nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trained from scratch. They’re based on initial models that were pre trained by somebody else.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s part of that’s part of what’s in favor of the chaos of the Internet is like now we can’t even tell what are you going to do now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like that. I think there’s going to be I think it’s going to be quickly very difficult to ever tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how something was trained in an incompletion and and I think again this is it’s I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is as unenforceable as it should be impossible to ever upload copyrighted material to your platform like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that should it’s just impossible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I mean, but that’s more of like a practical practicality, the legal thing is like, oh, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually you don’t actually own this copyright material. The law is clear. It’s just the practicalities of the enforcement of the law
⏹️ ▶️ John are not clear. And here I think the the the law is not clear yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Yeah, because I still think it’s it’s definitely a very open question about like whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco training an AI model on on a copyrighted work is itself a violation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that copyright or not. Again, because I still don’t think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ll see what the courts say. But I’m I’m pretty strongly on one side of this. but and again this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean i’m against the ai models i think they’re super useful and i think there’s lots of places where they can be used uh it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just that i think there should be some Should be some discipline about the training, that’s all. We’ll see.
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Mastodon Flock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ted Shop writes that we would probably get a kick out of a new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Twitter to Mastodon web app, and this is at mastodon-flock.vercel.app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t try it past the first screen or two, but as a former Windows user,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, the nostalgia. Oh, my word. This made me laugh quite a bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It looks like a Windows 95 installation wizard, big Nsys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Nullsoft Install System Energy. I remember I used to play with that, probably around the time that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were- No, Nsys was what replaced this. That was much better. Wasn’t Nsys not full screen? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, I think you’re right. This is that full screen blue gradient that was used a lot around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time. And now, this is, you could tell that they had installed the driver for their GPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before they ran this wizard because the background gradient is not super dithered in 16 color mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John this was really interesting because, well, two levels. One, it is just like Move to Dawn,
⏹️ ▶️ John in that it gives you follow on follow links. So ignore the whole Windows 95 look or whatever. It is another tool that
⏹️ ▶️ John is like Move to Dawn. So Move to Dawn never goes away, and you want to try something similar, this does the same thing. It authenticates
⏹️ ▶️ John with all your things, and then it gives you follow buttons for all the people who have the info. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if it does a better job of scraping or whatever. But the second thing is, part of the gag Looking like
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows 95. It’s not as far as I can tell you maybe you can
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me you’re familiar with a 95 It’s not a pixel for pixel reproduction It’s almost like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John vector like that they have the Windows 95 look, but they’ve done it with like vector pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John So it because it looks way bigger It’s scaled up, but it is it is pixel accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John if you imagine the pixels being these smooth vector II things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well if you zoom in zoom in on the next and cancel buttons on the corners you see that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a beveled edge. Now in actual Windows 95 that would have been probably a one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixel thick line and so here they have like a beveled edge in the corner so obviously it’s you know it’s like a CSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco border trick or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah and I’m on the like the final page and I’m looking at the headers of the table like and the headers
⏹️ ▶️ John have like a 3d gradient on them and you can see that there is like you know a dark
⏹️ ▶️ John line on the bottom and lighter line on the left and top and that line is made of a chunky like would
⏹️ ▶️ John have been like a Windows 95 size pixel. But then the bevel is made with pixels that are
⏹️ ▶️ John 1 8th of that size that would not exist in Windows 95, right? Because they’re on an angle. So I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very clever. It’s a little bit of an uncanny valley thing. I’m like, this looks like Windows 95. But Windows 95 didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John never look like this down to the pixel. Anyway, I thought it was a little extra fun sauce on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of a useful tool. So and you know, you can just in case it moves it on goes away. But it’s one of the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to try another one or get a little bit of a weird uncanny valley Windows 95 nostalgia. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while we’re on the subject, Mastodon continues to be great, by the way. It just continues to be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s way better than Twitter right now, in my view and for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs and for the people I follow, it’s way better than Twitter. So I’m happy there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Briefly going back to this web app, did you notice that if you click the X on the installer, it actually drops you down to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows desktop and it has a privacy policy link,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link that opens Windows Explorer, that opens Internet Explorer. And then if you click on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home page, or no, not the home page. What was it? It was one of these icons. Oh, I guess it was the bookmarks icon at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top. Then you go to what appears to be the author’s old 1999
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website, which is pretty delightful. Big like GeoCities energy on this one. It’s just there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot more here than I thought. This is really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, that’s so cool. Isn’t that neat?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other way I would have imagined doing this that would have been fun is all the ones that run older
⏹️ ▶️ John operating systems in like WebAssembly in your browser. They have ones for, there’s one for all the versions of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, it’s like Mac OS 9.app, system 7.app, Mac OS 8.app, try those URLs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those are basically running a virtual machine in JavaScript that’s running the real version of those operating systems,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? If you had done that and then wrote Move to Dawn in Windows 95
⏹️ ▶️ John and ran it inside the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Windows 95 that’s running
⏹️ ▶️ John in your browser, then you wouldn’t have to fake any of this stuff. You could literally just, you would just make, you know, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly in Windows 95. Although that might be more difficult, trying to authenticate
⏹️ ▶️ John with modern SSL stuff from Windows 95. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was gonna say, can you imagine trying to make just any network request that would work in the modern era from
⏹️ ▶️ John I think some, I saw someone who did a 68K, Motorola 68K classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, like mastodon client, and I think somehow they compiled a version of OpenSSL
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. They basically found a way to make a TLS connection from Classic Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John just support their idea of doing this funny, you know, classic Mac OS client from Astadon.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s amazing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty good stuff. Aye yi yi. All right.
Rewind.ai now available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then let’s see what else we have. Oh, that’s right. I wanted to make note. This is actually, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news is a little bit old. Uh, we spoke about rewind.ai, I don’t know, a couple of months ago. This is the live streams,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, thing that, that John apparently has always wanted. Uh, it is available to anyone at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, I believe it is 30 days free trial, but then it’s $20 a month, which I don’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begrudge, like, you know, they, they’ve written software. They deserve to be, deserve to be compensated for it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I don’t love the idea of this 30 days free, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have to come back and remember to cancel. So I have not personally tried it, especially since this is not an itch. I feel like I need scratching.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But for those that are interested, it’s available if you wanted to give it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t begrudge you anything. It’s just a question of, do you think the price is worth the value for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was into this thing. I’m like, oh, I’m gonna try it out of technical curiosity. And I actually got in early, and they sent
⏹️ ▶️ John the email and said, hey, it’s available for you to try. I’m like, great, I’ll try it. And then I saw it was one of those free trial, and then we’ll start charging
⏹️ ▶️ John you. And I knew myself well enough to know I’m probably gonna forget and then I’m gonna get charged and then I’m gonna feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. In fact, I did that with the Lenza app, speaking of AI, make money off other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. The Lenza thing, like you signed up for the, like a free trial of the $50 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription. Oh my God. And then, or it was $50, another $50 a year, I forget. But anyway, you sign up for the free
⏹️ ▶️ John trial and then once you sign up for the free trial, it gives you a discount on the in-app purchases. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I made like several $6 in-app purchases for to play with it, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John then I’m like, okay, I just gotta remember to cancel this before the $50 thing. And sure enough, I forgot
⏹️ ▶️ John because I didn’t make a reminder for myself. And I got a refund for it because I asked for a refund like the second
⏹️ ▶️ John it kicked in and Apple was nice enough to give me a refund. But anyway, that’s why I haven’t tried and rewind. I am curious
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And I’m like, I don’t wanna have to like sign up for it and set myself a reminder,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember to cancel it. It’s just like, for me, that price and that situation
⏹️ ▶️ John was enough of a barrier to not want to deal with it. And honestly, since we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, I’m like, Oh, I’ll try for technical curiosity. I’m still kind of skewed out by it. I’m like, well, I’ll try it on my laptop that’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John isolated, but not that I think they’re doing anything nasty. It’s just, I don’t know. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I probably will try it eventually as well. In terms of $20 a month, if I got a tons of value from it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would pay $20 a month if I felt like I was getting $20 a month worth of value. That’s the question of software. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you price it such that enough people will think that price is acceptable. Casey was also scared away by that
⏹️ ▶️ John price. So it’s you know, but I think none of us are in the situation where we think we would possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason we’d be looking at is a little bit of curiosity. Right. And so, you know, maybe maybe we’ll try it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can see this. Like I said, this company eventually being spun off into like an enterprise software because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think lots of companies might like something like this so they can spy on their employees. This is a rich and burgeoning market
⏹️ ▶️ John that already has existing players that are probably worse than rewind that AI because the technology is newer and better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but so far their sales pitch does not seem to be to corporations, it seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John to individual users. If you’re an individual user who’s already tried it, write in
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell us what you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, real-time follow-up, you cannot run this on your Mac Pro because it is not sufficiently powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have ARM Macs in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, well you said you would run it on your laptop, but I thought you were trying to imply that you would have otherwise run it on the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Studio is another choice. I have a couple of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because your Mac Pro is just too old and busted. It doesn’t have Apple Silicon, which is required for Rewind.ai.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got an immunity to the spyware. Wow. Ha Hank you for watching. Peace!
John’s iPad mystery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about your iPad mystery.
⏹️ ▶️ John My son got a new iPad for Christmas. He was long overdue for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one. Which one?
⏹️ ▶️ John He was using, well, that’s part of the thing. He was using a really old one. He’d been using it for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John He wanted to draw with the Apple Pencil, so I had an old, like the original 9.7-inch iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the very first one that, I think it was the first one that had pencil support. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12.9, but that was the first small one. Yeah, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s right. So anyway, I said, here, you can use this and use my old rolly Apple Pencil and
⏹️ ▶️ John laugh at how it gets charged and everything. And I’m like, well, you should just use that as your new iPad because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better than, his iPad was so old, it was older than the 9.7 inch iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John But eventually he said, like, now there’s something haunted on your iPad, which I kind of agreed with him, that 9.7 started
⏹️ ▶️ John getting weird in its later years. I don’t know if it’s a hardware thing or it just doesn’t agree with the modern OSs, but he kept using
⏹️ ▶️ John super ancient iPads. So he was due for a new one and I got him a new one. And I bought it a while ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was just, you know, sitting somewhere and then wrapped it and gave it to him. and I was setting it up for him, because that’s what dads
⏹️ ▶️ John do, I was like, I was trying to give it a name, and I wrote, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John general about it, and wrote the name of the thing, I remembered to change the name so it’s easy to find, in the device list,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I started saying, oh, wait a second, which iPad, because I like to give it the name of the thing, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, like, you know, my wife says, like, you know, Tina’s Apple Watch Series 8,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I know it’s the Series 8 one, like, that’s how I, people ask that, it’s an Ask IDB question, how do you name your devices? I name it
⏹️ ▶️ John John’s iPad 14 Pro, or iPhone 14 Pro, because otherwise I’ll never friggin’ remember what the names are, and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just reuse the same name. I give them the name that is named with the device. It’s nice too, when you down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you upgrade that device, it’s nice to be able to keep the backup straight and do the migration correctly and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It makes it very nice. Yeah, and I do rename them to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, now it’s Alex’s iPhone 14 Pro, right? But it’s still iPhone 14 Pro, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I know which device we’re talking about. And luckily in the house, we tend not to buy multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John devices of the same type just because people end up getting things at different years. But if we had like two iPhone 12 pros,
⏹️ ▶️ John that might be a little bit confusing. Maybe I would put the color in then. Anyway, I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to give this thing a name of what it was. So I named it Alex’s M2 iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John because it was like, hey, he got the I got him the fancy one. He’s you know, he deserves it. He’s been using an ancient
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad. I think he was using an original iPad Air maybe. It was like super old, right? you know, no
⏹️ ▶️ John face ID, very slow, very old, and he uses it all the time. It’s a very, you know, important
⏹️ ▶️ John machine for him. So I got him a big fancy one. But then I went to General About,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it said iPad Pro fourth generation. I’m like, is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John M2? Or did I change my mind and say the M2 is too expensive and get him a cheaper one?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do what I normally do and type in a Google query for it or whatever. And I usually go to the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John page because it’s usually straightforward. I know I have the sidebar is gonna have the name of the SoC in
⏹️ ▶️ John it and it’s gonna you know, there’s some basic information It’s kind of like why I don’t go to IMDb anymore I just go to Wikipedia because I want to just
⏹️ ▶️ John know what’s the cast of this thing I can find it on the Wikipedia page and IMDb is just a cluster
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can’t find anything on that friggin site anymore I hate it so bad So I go to Wikipedia and I go
⏹️ ▶️ John to iPad Pro fourth generation Wikipedia page and I scroll down the thing It’s a system on a chip
⏹️ ▶️ John a 12 Z bionic Like, did I get him something with an A12Z? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I was originally looking for a refurbed M1 iPad Pro, could not find one, Apple didn’t have them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could find them used at other places, but I wanted to get an official Apple refurb, and Apple was not selling
⏹️ ▶️ John refurb M1 iPad Pros for whatever reason, they just didn’t have them. All right, and so I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I had decided to get an M2. And so I’m holding the device in my hand, I’m like, how annoying is it that I can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John if this thing has an M2 in it? Just like, because Apple’s thing just says fourth generation when I Google fourth
⏹️ ▶️ John generation, it says A12Z. So I downloaded Geekbench. I’m like, look, Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what the Geekbench numbers should be for an M2. And it’s going to be very different from the A12Z. First of all, Geekbench immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John says in the sidebar, this has an M2. So I’m like, I got the right one. But there was like 20
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes where I was like, did I buy the wrong thing from, I was looking at the orders, like maybe I bought the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause the amount looked like an M2 amount. It looked like M2 iPad Pro amount. But I’m like, maybe they charged me
⏹️ ▶️ John for the M2 and shipped me a different one. So this is just a PSA to let everybody know. On the Wikipedia
⏹️ ▶️ John pages for iPad Pro, they have a list of generations that go up to sixth generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad Pro sixth generation on the Wikipedia page is what Apple calls
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Pro 11 inch fourth generation. So do not be confused. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think Wikipedia should really change this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s the fourth generation of the 11 inch. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And so if you, and they’re called like the main articles, iPad Pro, parentheses fourth generation, This
⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly what you will see in general about on your iPad, but it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John right. So anyway, when in doubt, get Geekbench. And by the way, I actually ran Geekbench to make sure the number that came out was the M2
⏹️ ▶️ John number. So he has an M2 iPad Pro. Oh, and the other thing is when I was doubting, and I’m like, oh, this is an easy way to tell because I got
⏹️ ▶️ John him an Apple pencil with it because he does a lot of drawing on his iPad. I tried to do the hover thing. I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have Procreate. Let me launch Procreate. I know Procreate has the hover and nothing would work on the hover. And so I looked at a
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube video and I saw people hovering over the icons on the home screen and it would make you know
⏹️ ▶️ John with the pencil and it would make the icons bigger and that didn’t work either and I’m like is there something I have to enable for hover
⏹️ ▶️ John and is there some preference of hover and procreate but why doesn’t it work on the home screen this is why I was like I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I got the wrong iPad it doesn’t hover it can’t possibly be an M2 did I get the wrong pencil I googled for like
⏹️ ▶️ John is there a is there a second second generation Apple pencil that does the hover I’m like no it’s all a second
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones with the flat side he’s got the one with the flat side it magnetically connects this should be be doing hover. The answer to that was
⏹️ ▶️ John you got updated to 16.2. Oh, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shit. I ship with the wrong OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it was a confusing morning where I was like, what the hell did I buy? And don’t put it past me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve bought the wrong thing before. When I ordered his MacBook Air, I ordered the wrong color and I had to cancel it and did a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or at least I caught that before it shipped. But lots of confusion on Christmas morning. But he does indeed
⏹️ ▶️ John have an M2 iPad Air, which he very richly deserves with an Apple pencil. Once updated to 16.2,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hover started working.
Casey’s AirPods mystery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so that brings up something I’ve been wondering about for a long time and I keep forgetting to bring it up So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got my first and only set of AirPods Pro a year ago for Christmas. I love them I do want the new ones, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too cheap because once I’ve got worked really well batteries fine. No rattling, etc Etc. The thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving me baddie is if you go into find mine and you go into the devices tab It shows my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPods Pro and it shows them as outside of the case, which I’m looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them I’m holding them in my hand right now I can assure you they are not outside the case. And it shows them last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having been seen on September 27, 2022. And I vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember, because again, my memory is garbage, that when I think it was 16, I was 16 first came out, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t because or maybe it was a late beta. I forget exactly what it was. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my AirPods Pro could do the homing beacon, you know, W1 or whatever it is where you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, wave your phone around and it shows you where the AirPods are, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only worked for a minute. And then they pulled that for the original AirPods Pro, and now it only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works on the AirPods Pro 2. But the stupid Find My app is stuck on September 27th.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s like it never got a clue that this feature, the homing beacon feature, whatever it’s called,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t work. And so according to this, my left Air Bud, or my left Air Bud, that’s a great movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My left AirPod Pro was last seen September 27th, 2022 at 2.38 p.m. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now, well, according to Marco, it’s December 24th, but in most of the world, it’s December 26th now. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this? Like, I don’t want to unpair the things, which I guess I could. I really do not want to sign out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud because that’s a nightmare. Is there a thing I can do to fix this? I’m asking you two and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m asking the audience. Like, what do I do about that? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John unpair, like, because unpairing is not that big a deal. And it’s definitely the first thing you try.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like, restart and do it over,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey unpair. Yeah, maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco do that. Yeah, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right move. All right, I’ll take that as a homework assignment for myself. People in the chat are saying, oh, I’m seeing some of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this as well. So I’m sorry if I’ve just made you aware of this, but I don’t know, it was really cool for the 10 minutes that it worked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the little homing beacon thing. And I really liked that, but then Apple took it away because they’re meanies.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then people are saying when you unpair it, then remove it from Find My when it’s unpaired and then, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And all right, fair enough. I’ll take that as homework
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John assignment. And
⏹️ ▶️ John do what Margo said, then you have to reset all your preferences on all your devices. So if you want auto pairing,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, the defaults are in your favor there. Yeah,
16.2 Always-On customization
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, iOS 16.2 came out a little while ago, but it has a feature that we wanted to call to everyone’s attention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was called to our attention by Brandon Butch, who writes, you can now stop your wallpaper and or notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from appearing on the iPhones always on display. This was as of beta three, which obviously now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s true for the shipping version. But yeah, there’s a switch in all or there’s several switches and always on display.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s just on off. Then there’s show wallpaper and show notifications. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can turn the the wallpaper on or off, and the notifications on or off individually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this, so when, remember when the 14, first of all, right before the 14 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, and we were speculating about the rumors about the always on display, I had said, wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be cool if they basically had this whole new aesthetic on the display where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the most of the screen is black, and you have like maybe just monochrome, you know, icons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or widgets and the clock, and have, you know, have those things glow, and have the rest of the screen be black, Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people quickly pointed out that that’s basically how Android phones with always-on displays have always been. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not a new idea in the Android world, so thank you for that. They all probably used Opera as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the 14 came out, though, the only option you really had through iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just take whatever your home screen is, just make a dim version. That’s it. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it did, and there was no customization. This led to, I think, a couple of shortcomings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest ones being obviously it wasn’t as power conservative as it could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if most of the screen was black and only some pixels were being lit if you had any kind of colored
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wallpaper. But also it became harder to tell whether your phone was awake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or asleep. And that was a huge, I think, stumbling point for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they first got the 14 Pro because iPhone users were never accustomed to having it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always on anything. And so you’d see your phone kind of like out of the corner of your eye and you kind of freak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, oh, it’s awake, like you think there was a notification on it or something or you think it was ringing or whatever, because you were conditioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to believe that a phone with the screen on is awake and trying to tell you something. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what they added with 16.2 is an option to turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wallpaper when it’s in, you know, sleeping always on mode. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could also optionally turn off notifications, which I believe do not disturb always did it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock screen but it was kind of you know custom on other ones anyway the big thing for me was the wallpaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toggle so if you turn off show wallpaper under the always on display settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you now have in sleep mode a black background that then only shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the clock and the and your widgets and whatever notifications you might have there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can turn off the notifications if you want there as well so I’ve been using this since the 16.2 betas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which were it’s been a a couple of months now, I think, and it has radically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improved my interaction with the 14 Pro’s always on screen. I can strongly recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you are a little bit put off by like, you know, it not looking too different or if you keep still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking that your phone’s awake when it’s not, try this option. Turn off show wallpaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is, I think it’s massively better. I think it looks cooler and it functions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better in the sense that it allows me to know my phone is not awake right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I definitely believe you but I did turn off the always-on display Ages ago mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John it you know for what you said It seems like my phone was always on but now that I’m you know now that I’ve gone back to the old
⏹️ ▶️ John way I I’m not anxious to Sacrifice battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John because I what I did learn after using it for a while with the always-on display on is that I didn’t derive
⏹️ ▶️ John a Lot of utility from it. There was the downside which is like, oh, I think my phone is on but setting that aside Setting aside the downside,
⏹️ ▶️ John did I find occasions where it was useful for me to have the screen always on? And I think the answer to that
⏹️ ▶️ John is no. So even though this is, I agree, a much better way of doing it, at least for my purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’d be able to tell that that’s the always on display because the background is black. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think I get any value from it the way I use my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not going to sacrifice the battery life for this. But I agree, this is a great feature. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it might even be useful to be the default, but that could just be old habits, right? Maybe new users who
⏹️ ▶️ John their first iPhone has the Always-On screen will just be used to it and not develop the habits that we all have to expect
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone with our wallpaper being displayed is on or trying to tell us something. And I think related to wallpapers,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t 16.2 also add the thing where they separated the screen that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John under your icons on springboard from the lock screen? Like it used to be whenever you made a
⏹️ ▶️ John custom one, made you make both of them as a match set,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as a pair. Yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they split that out. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that correct? I thought that was the case. I haven’t tried it either, but I thought that was the case. And it drove me nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It drove me nuts in the original version 16.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they should be split out. Because I very, you know, especially when I was first messing with it, I wanted to make
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of different fun lock screens. I did not want to make lots of different thing that goes behind my icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the thing behind my icons is 100% black and always has been. That doesn’t change for
⏹️ ▶️ John me. And so every time I had to want it to make a new lock screen It’s like oh and don’t forget you also need to make
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like just separate these it’s two different things, you know So if you want to make a million different,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess they would call what would you call you would call it? The the well, they call wallpaper the images behind stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think there should be a different name for the image that appears behind your icons on springboard and Then
⏹️ ▶️ John the image that appears on the lock screen and they call They call that image wallpaper
⏹️ ▶️ John in this setting because the option is do you on the always-on display do you want to show your wallpaper
⏹️ ▶️ John they mean do you want to show the image that shows behind the icons on your on springboard anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John confusing nomenclature but I’m glad they’re working this feature out to be more flexible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah cuz one one issue I still have with the always-on display is that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in sleep mode whatever is on screen is not tappable it looks like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tappable, but it’s not. The first tap that you do will put it into awake screen mode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you have to tap again or swipe or whatever you’re doing to interact with something on that screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so having like part of the reason why I like this this option of turning off show wallpaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it makes it more clear not only is the phone not awake, but it is not interactive right now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want this thing to be interactive I have to tap it so that it is no longer mostly black and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know oh it’s lighting up with my I still like like the the weather background, it’s lighting up with the rain that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside. Great. Now I can interact with this notification or whatever. Like so it’s, and that’s I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really, really hope in future hardware iterations, I hope they are at some point able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the sleep state more interactive. I know there’s a lot of challenges with that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of kind of practical concerns of like, well, what if it’s in your pocket, or what if you’re handling it, and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, and I think There are certain risks, and maybe it’s not possible to do that well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I would love for them to at least try to do that well, or at least make it more obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that something is not interactive in the design. And then ideally, also, hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it wake up faster. That would also help a lot. If it can go from sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state to awake state in half the time it does now, I’m sure some of that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a choice in terms of animation speed, but also I think some of that is giving the OS time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wake up and using the animation as kind of cover for that time. So whatever they can do to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more interactive when you want to interact with it, that would feel very good. And right now it still feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit clunky in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could do kind of one of the only safe way I think they should try doing this is kind of like they do for continuity camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the thing where you can take your phone and use it as like the the quote unquote webcam
⏹️ ▶️ John for your laptop. And continuity camera works by detecting that you have taken your camera and
⏹️ ▶️ John put it in a particular orientation and it is more or less stationary when you put it on those little clips or stands to be behind
⏹️ ▶️ John your display right so the feature you want it would be extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have lots of accidental input if it was just like that all the time oh the lock screen but it’s interactive because people like I said people put
⏹️ ▶️ John in their pocket it would activate my parents are constantly accidentally calling me because just because they
⏹️ ▶️ John the delay between when they’ve locked their phone and when they put it into their pocket is is too
⏹️ ▶️ John too long and they end up like touching something on their phone when they put into their pocket and they but dial me right but
⏹️ ▶️ John it could detect for example when it is laying on its back on a table for a certain period
⏹️ ▶️ John of time and say now I’ve detected that I’m on a table and I am going to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John register your taps of whatever you tap on but as soon as you pick it up and start moving it’s like nope nope I’m locked
⏹️ ▶️ John no input means anything to me right so that you you know it’s tricky to do right but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just make it active all the time people are gonna dial things like crazy like it’s just it’s it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen again if you when you lock your phone and you put it into any of your pockets the
⏹️ ▶️ John expectation is there’s nothing that can happen in that pocket that’s going to do stuff on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John right even if I accidentally hit the power button which is a physical button for now anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still not gonna unlock my phone because face ID will fail touch ID will fail it’s inside my pocket right whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John if that tap would actually activate the notification as we know from stupid iOS. Once you look at a notification, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone forever and you can never see it again. And I hate that so much. I wish there was like, here are the last 100
⏹️ ▶️ John notifications that you dismiss. Just show me them, keep them around. So anyway, tricky,
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky to add feature and but I get where you’re coming from. And I do think the 16.2 things are all improvements. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually left my always on display in all the default settings. I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say it’s been an earth shattering change for me. I will say kind of tangentially related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that battery life, when I first got the new phone and it was chugging on photos and all that and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machine learning stuff, like the battery life was garbage as expected. Then it got really, really good for a while. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if it was 16.2 or something, but sometime in the last month or two, both errands and my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones, our battery life has gone through the crapper recently. And I haven’t dug much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out what’s going on there. There was nothing obvious when I went spelunking in the battery, history
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all that in settings. But it struck me as a little odd that both of us were having similar problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know if that’s just a List family thing or if that’s broader or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s been a little bit of a bummer. And so I might be turning off the always on display if it continues to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a problem. But all told, I do like it. I have it rotating between pictures of the kids and pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Aaron. And I like that every time I pick up my phone or well, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it gets locked, there’s a new picture there. and then the next time I lock the phone, there’s a different picture and I can see it dimly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the display while it’s just sitting. And I dig that, I think that’s fun and cute. But I totally understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s not for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, even without the Always On display, like part of my problem of being distracted by it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that I would think like someone is calling because I see their face on my phone. But I also have a rotation
⏹️ ▶️ John of my family, right? So every time I pick up my phone, it’s the picture of someone in my family. But if my phone starts
⏹️ ▶️ John ringing and it’s like a spam call from just, you know, random spam number telling you about my car warranty
⏹️ ▶️ John repair or whatever. But my phone screen will light up and I’ll see a picture of my son’s
⏹️ ▶️ John face on it. And I’ll be like, oh, I’m getting a call from my son. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m not, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that was the problem with the always on display. I always thought that was being contacted by somebody. Even without the always on
⏹️ ▶️ John display, that’s just a side effect of putting people’s face as the, you know, as
⏹️ ▶️ John your wallpaper or lock screen or whatever. Because you have to actually then say, ignore the face, look
⏹️ ▶️ John up at the, you know, at the little caller ID thing that shows when you’re getting a call to see what number it’s coming from.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if my son does call, I think it still shows his face, but it’s a different picture, but it’s still him. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, possible confusion. I mean, I guess I could just do landscapes or, you know, for this is the first, this,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it is, the iPhone 14 Pro is the first phone and iOS 16 that I did
⏹️ ▶️ John not have a picture of one of my past dogs as my lock screen. That has been my lock screen
⏹️ ▶️ John since the iPod touch in 2007, right? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember this. It was at Huckleberry or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, right? Yep. But I decided, because I wanted to try the feature, I decided to try
⏹️ ▶️ John the rotating thing. And I had a bunch of nice pictures of my family that I made very tall and put room above
⏹️ ▶️ John their heads for the clock so the clock wasn’t over their face. And I do like that. I do like seeing those pictures rotate, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it continues to be a little bit confusing when I get a call.
Car project “scaled back”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a week or two ago, I think something like that. It was sometime in December We got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word through Bloomberg and I presume it was German that the Apple car project has quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scaled back Quote and is delayed and it won’t feature full self-driving capabilities. Imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that But yeah, this was a news report in some highlights that were reported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re-reported on Mac rumors Apple Inc has scaled back ambitious self-driving plans for its future electric vehicle and postpones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the postponed the car’s target launch date about a year to 2026. The car project
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been in limbo for the past several months as Apple executives grappled with the reality that its vision for a fully autonomous vehicle without a steering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wheel or pedals isn’t feasible with current technology. You don’t say, imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The car will have an Apple-designed custom processor to power AI functionality. The chip is equivalent to four of the highest-end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac chips and is nearly production-ready. That actually kind of brings us back to our discussion about the Mac Pro last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week, but that’s neither here nor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John there. Doesn’t it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though? Well, I mean, I would think. Apple will use the cloud for some AI processing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the company is considering a remote command center that could assist drivers and control the cars from afar during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emergencies. That sounds safe. I don’t know if we really need to go into the ins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and outs of the particulars of this, but it is interesting that this poop show is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a poop show from what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why are they still doing any of this? Like that’s my, you know, this project has gone through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many phases and ideas, and certainly people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and certainly money, oh my God. Like, how long do they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep fumbling around with this massive money waster before they’re like, you know what, this isn’t for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s just, you know, crap can it and move on. I don’t, I still don’t see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they even want to be in this business, let alone why they keep plowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward without seemingly able to go near any kind of outcome.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the story is interesting because it’s kind of like the line. The best line of the story is
⏹️ ▶️ John where it says that you know the grappling with their vision that blah blah blah isn’t feasible with
⏹️ ▶️ John current technologies. What it’s saying is they don’t have it. They would like to have a product that does X, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I would like something. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would like a something that lets me levitate. That would be a cool product, but we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have that. Like, so how much money are you going to spend on a project? So is this R&D?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s kind of the problem with self-driving. It’s difficult to do the R&D to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out if you can make a product without spending a lot of money. And I get that. It’s not as simple as like, oh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll have these people tooling around with multi-touch, right? And that’ll be a small team
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, a handful of people and they’ll tool away at it for years. And eventually if we get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where, you know, we could probably make a product of this. Maybe we’ll make a tablet. Then you form the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John team and then the iPad team, right? And that’s when you staff off and that’s when you spend the money. Although the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of money that was used to develop the original iPhone is comically low. And every time every company should feel bad when they
⏹️ ▶️ John read those histories of like, so how much money did Apple spend? Even if we count like everything we can think of, how much did they spend to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the iPhone? The small number I think is they spent $150 million, which is like we
⏹️ ▶️ John spent $150 million to change the color of the logo, right? That’s what big companies normally do. So
⏹️ ▶️ John they spent $150 million to make the iPhone and how much money is it made? Anyway, it is more to it if you add
⏹️ ▶️ John to that, right? But for self driving cars, it’s like, Okay, I can understand why they’re saying it would be cool
⏹️ ▶️ John if we had a self driving car. I agree, that would be cool. Right? Can we make one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s do some R&D to find out. But it has always seemed to me that this product that Apple was created as
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had already done that. It’s like, Oh, we know how to make a self driving car. Let’s just make a project to make one like that. It’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John in the phase of like, we’re designing a product. And we’re staffing a team to build that product and we’re going to contract manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John to manufacture that product. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what product are you making? Our self-driving car. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a self-driving car? No, but we’ll probably be able to figure it out, right? Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you got to be able to make the thing first before you make a product team.
⏹️ ▶️ John So again, no one knows the details of this, but to the extent that anything with product Titan has
⏹️ ▶️ John been in like, let’s make a product mode, that has been a bad idea. if the premise of
⏹️ ▶️ John the product is a car without a steering wheel or pedals. You cannot make a car, that goes without saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you cannot make a car without a steering wheel or pedals until it can drive itself. And if it can’t drive itself,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe get out of the product phase and back into the R&D phase. Don’t go to the product phase
⏹️ ▶️ John until you think you have something that works, like the multi-touch. We’ve got a multi-touch screen that we think works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s too big. Maybe it’s too clunky. Maybe it takes a lot of power. Maybe it’s connected to like a Power Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but it works. And the question is, can we make it smaller, cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. They don’t have anything that works. Nobody does. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco has this, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be cool if you could make it, but make it first. I think this is just a hilarious story that the premise is
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has decided they can’t make a product they can’t make. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John they can decide is we’re not gonna make a car without pedals or steering wheel. Make one with pedals and a steering wheel that humans can drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Lots of people do that. You can have lots of self-driving assistive functions that I think are probably a bad idea in many cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s a thing that you can make. But the idea that they keep trying to make a car without a steering
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel, you can’t do that. And so I’m sad for them and I’m sad for the story.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like the idea that their AI powered chip or whatever is, sounds so much like the Mac chip
⏹️ ▶️ John that they canceled, equivalent to four of their high-end processors. You know, I mean, you can’t afford to put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a $10,000, you know, Mac Pro, because $10,000 is too much for a Mac Pro. How much would this car cost? Again, if it actually existed and worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John My advice to Apple is if you want to make a car, add a steering wheel and pedals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I still go back and like, you know, to me, like the question you asked, you’re like, all right, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we make this thing work? And then, you know, then move on from there. I would step back again and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this even a business that we need to be in or want to be in? Like, and what would it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean if we entered this business and actually, you know, stayed in it and maybe even succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it? What would that actually mean for the rest of our business? Can you imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple selling cars? How would that even physically work? Can you imagine Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servicing cars? Can you imagine Apple going through all the regulations? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see that it’s possible for them to do all that, but why would they want to?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what they would achieve in that would be they’d be a car manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at all the car manufacturers. How happy are they? How good of a business does that seem to be?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t seem like it’s worth them entering this business even if it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know fairly easy to get into and it’s super not and so I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see why why they would even want to be in this business and that that even sets aside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the question of is Apple could Apple be good at designing cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think is a huge question mark honestly like you know Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good at designing a lot of things. I don’t know that I would want an Apple design car,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again, that’s I think that’s even that’s too far down the line of thinking of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why are they even doing this? Why do they want to be in this business? That to me makes no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it is different in many ways that we’ve discussed, but I think it is actually a better fit
⏹️ ▶️ John with their traditional strengths than some other things because it is manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John a product they sell for a profit. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John regulation stuff. Again, Apple’s not used to automotive regulation, but they are used to dealing with the FCC and the various
⏹️ ▶️ John radio regulations and heat and thermal. Like, there are different laws in different countries, and being in compliance with them with electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John devices is a thing. It is a scaled-up version of what they do. They’re good at manufacturing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have their own manufacturing plants. They outsource that, and they’re good at helping those manufacturers do a better
⏹️ ▶️ John job of manufacturing. is good at actually, quote unquote, making things, even if they’re doing it through third parties.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can squint and say, this looks like, again, a question of whether they’d be able to make a good car. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they make hardware products that are software powered, and they manufacture them and comply with a bunch of laws.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is conceivable that they could get good at this after many years, because it is like what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it reminded me of this great quote that Gruber had back on December 21. I put this
⏹️ ▶️ John in contrast to something that Apple already does that I think is not a good fit for their traditional
⏹️ ▶️ John strengths and model. This is a quote from talking about, what was it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Gruber’s not guested on a podcast, and they talked about various Apple-related things. And he put this
⏹️ ▶️ John little summary at the end of his link to the podcast he was a guest on. This is quoting Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John The App Store’s financial success is the worst thing that’s happened to Apple this century. It’s a distraction at best
⏹️ ▶️ John and a profound corruption at worst. services revenue and the app store do not
⏹️ ▶️ John fit with Apple’s traditional strengths of making a really good product and selling to people for a profit because it’s really good and they
⏹️ ▶️ John like it. It is a much more complicated model where you’re selling access to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re rent seeking, you’re you’re controlling a platform and then charging other people money to get access to the people you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially collecting information about them and advertising to them. That model does not
⏹️ ▶️ John fit with the Apple that we love in a way that the car does because if Apple made a good car
⏹️ ▶️ John Product I believe that they could figure out how to sell it how to service it in the same way They figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to sell their hardware products their phones and everything. They figured out how to service them They’ve got to how to comply
⏹️ ▶️ John with laws to figure out how to get the manufactured Figured out how to sell them all over the world with different regulations
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously a car is way different than a phone. It is a much bigger scale thing there are so many other complications
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re working with a bunch of other players, but that fits better. Like the incentives are aligned to
⏹️ ▶️ John better for the apple that I like the apple that makes its money by making a good product, not
⏹️ ▶️ John the apple that is again a distraction at best or corruption at worst for you know, paraphrasing Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John that is distracted by the idea of like yeah, but but have we considered rent seeking because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where the real money is and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like that does not align with the incentive. I want them to be incentivized to make good products. The incentives that I like is,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, if we make a bad keyboard, we have to pay people class action lawsuit. And we make good people keyboard people buy our stuff, we
⏹️ ▶️ John put ports back on our laptops, people buy more of them. If we make a really fast, low power computer, people buy it, right? If
⏹️ ▶️ John we make an amazing touchscreen phone, people buy it because it’s a cool phone like that model aligns better with
⏹️ ▶️ John my interest as a customer, make cool technology, make a profit when I buy it because you
⏹️ ▶️ John it costs you less to manufacture it than it does for me to buy it from you. That’s your profit. That’s a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John business. It’s a model I understand that I’m more comfortable with than the App Store model, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sell tons of devices that are awesome and then charge people 30% of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John money they make on them because you deserve it because you made the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The thing that, just to go back a little bit to what Marco was saying, I think the thing that makes me very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worried is maybe a little dramatic, but worried about an Apple car is that I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same problems that everyone snarks on Tesla about, like, oh, the windshield wipers don’t work because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never rains in the Bay Area, which I know is not really true, but just go with it here. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t work that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. Fair. And then the door handles would freeze constantly because it legitimately really rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does freeze in the Bay Area. This very myopic view of the world, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like is a very common problem for engineers in the Bay Area, I wonder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s going to be an affliction for an Apple car as well. And where that would manifest itself is, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surely $150,000 car is something anyone would want, right? I mean, we charge like 200% of what an average run-of-the-mill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android phone is for a new iPhone. People pay 2x for a new iPhone. Surely they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay 2 to 3x for an entire car, right? And no, people will not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t have $150,000 just laying around to buy an Apple car, to lease an Apple car at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $100,000, I don’t know, I don’t lease cars, but whatever that lease payment would be. I don’t have that just laying around. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wonderful if they think that them and their cushy worlds with their $3 million or 200 square foot houses and their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R8s and their Lamborghini Uruses and all that, yeah, $150,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car may be great in the Bay Area, but that ain’t going to work in the real world, my friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t anybody think that fits with Apple’s model? Their hardware is always more expensive than everybody else’s. And I know it’s a different matter of
⏹️ ▶️ John scale. It’s like, oh, 20% higher is an extra $200 versus 20% higher is an extra $20,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John But still, I think that it is not impossible to be the car manufacturer that sells mostly cars that
⏹️ ▶️ John are too expensive. Look at Porsche. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. I agree. But I just, I don’t know. I think the thing, and maybe it was Gruber, maybe it was you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. Somebody had once said, the great thing about Apple and about Coke is that if,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so if you want the best Coke in the world, the best Coca-Cola
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the world. And he was
⏹️ ▶️ John paraphrasing somebody else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, wasn’t this like Andy Warhol or something? Yeah, yeah. Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, if you want the best Coca-Cola in the world, I don’t care if you make $1,000 a year or $100 million a year, you’re still getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same Coca-Cola. If you want the best iPhone in the world, you know, you’re still, if you’re rich and famous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or if you’re just somebody, a regular schmo, you’re getting the same iPhone. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, I feel like Apple wants to be in that space where they are a premium product, full stop,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’re not a 10X premium product. I mean, look at how well that worked out for the Apple Watch Edition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, yeah, some were sold, some to some of the hosts on this episode, but nevertheless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Not the gold one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you get what I’m driving at. They want to be a premium product, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that a 10x premium product has ever really fit that well for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See also Mac Pro. And beyond that, we’re talking, this is what you just said, John, we’re talking about 10x,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, two, three, four, five, 10x of what’s an average car these days? anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an OK car? How much does a Civic cost, John? That’s a decent, very run-of-the-mill car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a Civic is like $15,000, $20,000, isn’t it? Easily. What planet are you on? You cannot buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a Civic for $15,000. You haven’t been able to do that for decades. OK, fine. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been a while since I bought a car. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the average selling price of a car is like $40,000 or something. Oh, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you think that they’re just going to slide in here and charge 3x, 4x, 5x? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, again, maybe that works in the Bay Area, where you folks are all getting paid absurd amounts of money and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending it all on housing. But that doesn’t work in the real world. And I’m very concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re going to strut in thinking, oh, we can totally charge 3x for our car, because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. That was one of the rumors of what one of the revisions of Project Titan, Apple’s car
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco scrapped. One of the many.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did a product design. And they said, here’s the car we want to make. And then they priced it out and said, no, it’s too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so they’ve already stopped one of their iterations, but due to cost, because they realize, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I think it is perfectly valid to be a car manufacturer that makes expensive cars. You’re just gonna sell fewer of them. The question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John where do you wanna be? Do you wanna sell as many cars as Ferrari? They actually sell a lot of cars for a car company that
⏹️ ▶️ John sells cars that start at like 200 grand or whatever, but they don’t sell as many as, you know, Porsche,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then Porsche does not sell as many as Volkswagen, and on down the line. So you have to kind of decide how many you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John sell. iPhones, they sell a heck of a lot of those. they sell them to, you know, not half the world, but a appreciable
⏹️ ▶️ John portion of the potential smartphone selling market is iPhones. I don’t know what it is worldwide. It’s like 30% or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. Like, if you wanted to sell 30% of the cars in the world, you can’t price it at 100
⏹️ ▶️ John grand. But there is a question of, you know, is our first one really expensive? And then the price
⏹️ ▶️ John comes down, especially with electric cars, which is what everyone assumes they’re building. A lot of the price
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with battery, right? That is the cost driver for your car is the battery, those electric motors
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually cost that much and building a car costs as much as it ever costs in terms of making a frame
⏹️ ▶️ John and suspension and tires and brakes or whatever. But the battery is the big cost thing. If the batteries cost nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John electric cars would be incredibly cheap. But if the batteries were expensive as they were two decades ago, they’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John less feasible, right? So that’s, and again, battery technology, something that Apple’s familiar with and, you know, has relationships
⏹️ ▶️ John with and stuff like that. So I think it is plausible that Apple could sell a car at a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John price range. But I also think they’re whatever, if they ever come out with a car, it’s definitely going to be the Apple of
⏹️ ▶️ John cars, which is going to be too expensive. Most people, especially the first one, think of the shock of the iPhone. Remember when
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone came out and it was like everyone’s making fun of it because it costs so much money because it wasn’t like carrier subsidized
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And today the iPhone, the iPhones we all have are very expensive devices. If you had told us
⏹️ ▶️ John back when we were using, you know, flip phones that someday you’re going to, uh, every year or in my case, every
⏹️ ▶️ John other year, buy a phone for $1,200, you’d be like $1,200 from a phone. I’m not going to carry that around and
⏹️ ▶️ John drop it on the pavement. That’s ridiculous. But people derive enough value from their smartphones that they’re willing to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds, sometimes up into $1000 for their phone, sometimes every year. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John of all things, I get where you’re coming from that, like, it just doesn’t seem like, you know, something that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be they’re going to be able to sell a lot of. And it also doesn’t seem like they want to be the Ferrari or
⏹️ ▶️ John the or the Porsche of phones, but they don’t have a product to sell at all right now. So it’s not really an issue. And then as for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Andy Warhol thing of like, matter who you are, a Coke is a Coke. When Gruber uses that analogy and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter who you are, a phone is a phone, I think it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit two different things. Because the idea of Coke is like
⏹️ ▶️ John Coke is not an expensive product to make. Anyone can buy it because it’s very inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s also not expensive to manufacture. The things that are in it are not rare, right? Whatever the secret formula
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is, it’s not, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John made with, with, uh, you know, platinum flakes or something, right? So everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John can get it because it is accessible to everyone and it is the same. And the whole point is because it’s basically, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John cultural hegemony of Coca-Cola because you’re all raised drinking Coke and you want something that tastes like what you were raised
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you have brand loyalty to Coke because if you try RC Cola, it doesn’t taste like what do you think a Coke could taste like? Not
⏹️ ▶️ John because Coke is fancier and more expensive than RC, but just because it’s what you used to do to the dominance
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Coca-Cola brand. Whereas the iPhone, everyone, no one can get a better iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how rich you are, because making a phone is really, really hard. Unlike Coca-Cola, which is protected
⏹️ ▶️ John by whatever or the circular form of it was, the iPhone is protected by the fact that making a smartphone with a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem around it has a huge barrier to entry. And so, yeah, no matter how rich you are, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get another iPhone because even if given, you know, $3 trillion,
⏹️ ▶️ John try making a better iPhone than an iPhone with $3 trillion. It’s a harder thing to make. Whereas if I gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you $3 trillion to try making your own Coke, you’d just buy Coca-Cola. You got your own Coke
⏹️ ▶️ John now, right? Like it’s different in that like, One is like everyone gets the same Coke, which seems
⏹️ ▶️ John weird because it’s so easy to make. And the other one, everyone gets the same, no one can make a better iPhone no matter how rich they are because it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John tremendously hard to make a smartphone. So I think, I’m not sure that analogy works out. What it is trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to say is there is a, you know, that it’s nice that, to your point, Casey, that the
⏹️ ▶️ John very best X in the world is accessible to a large number of people. And although the iPhone is very
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, it is accessible to a lot of people, especially if you’re buying a used iPhone. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what Gruber was celebrating, the idea that iPhones are so important to our life and if you want the
⏹️ ▶️ John very best one, you don’t have to be a millionaire to get it. You just have to shop for refurbs
⏹️ ▶️ John on Amazon or whatever. Whereas the very best car in the world is not accessible
⏹️ ▶️ John to most people because even if you’re shopping for a refurb, whatever you consider the best car, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to cost a lot more than a Civic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It certainly will. Do you think that they would do something, I forget the term for it, but like Volvo and and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure other manufacturers are doing this, have like a subscription service. And the way this worked when it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John first came out. You had to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go there. I’m asking because they love their services revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree with you. I think the Apple car would have a service revenue component. That’s what the thing of like the data center where they can assist
⏹️ ▶️ John drivers. I bet you pay for that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service. Oh my gosh, I hope that’s not true, but I hear you and you’re probably right. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Grubber saying that it’s a, you know, a distraction at best and a profound corruption. Whereas it is a profound corruption to
⏹️ ▶️ John every time they make a cool tech product to figure out. And now how can we make a service out of this? How can
⏹️ ▶️ John we make it a recurring payment? How can we make it so that you don’t just buy the Apple car, you buy a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Apple car. And if you want your heated seats to get, like again, the audio industry is way out ahead of Apple here, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to imagine that in Project Titan, this is discussed because the old Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John that would create a technology product without service revenue attached to it seems dead. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset, headset’s gonna be cool tech if and when they ship it. And you’re like, well, that’s not gonna have a service associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. course it will have an app store. Like that is the easy go-to of like, if we sell anything that is a platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has an associated app store where we try to make service revenue, which may or may not work, but that’s the play. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple comes out with a car, there will be service revenue associated with it because that’s what modern Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just don’t know if they’re gonna do like a care, care by Volvo, I was just looking it up, is what I believe I’m thinking of, where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get to get a car and I believe insurance as well, and maintenance and all that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just pay a monthly fee. And I think you might even be able to switch which Volvo you have from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth. I don’t know, I feel like it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how they get in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey door, is that you’re not buying a $300,000 Apple car, you’re instead paying a hilariously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive lease or subscription or what have you to have access to Apple’s Apple car
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the Apple car upgrade program.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, exactly. You get a new Apple car
⏹️ ▶️ John every year. And again, I don’t, that is more of, that’s less than the server driving I’ve been complaining about,
⏹️ ▶️ John of just like, hey, it’s kind of like a rolling lease where you get a new car at a certain interval, But you can also buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it outright, right? It’s a service revenue I’m talking about, like if your car is useless to you unless you pay X dollars a month for the service that
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t know, whatever they would charge for. You know, we’re not gonna go to the heated seats or whatever, BMW,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like this is obviously, it’s not just like, oh, Apple’s being mean, they shouldn’t do this. This is the way the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John industry and the whole world is going. And to some extent, it makes sense, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels worse when the people who are charging are not charging because the service is useful,
⏹️ ▶️ John but charging because, you know, they’ve got, you know, they’ve got you on a vice. It’s like, they can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you have no other choice, right? That it doesn’t seem like you would pay for this otherwise, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has complete control of the platform, they get to extract 30% of all the transactions. That feels worse than,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me pay, even just something simple as let me pay for Sirius XM radio or whatever. I wanna pay for ongoing access to this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you think it’s worthwhile, pay for it. If you don’t, don’t, but you’re not, it’s not like all
⏹️ ▶️ John of its competitors are forced also pay serious to be able to put audio into your car. Like that’s what starts feeling bad.
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#askatp: Own domain/blog?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do a little bit of Ask ATP and let’s start with Pitar Petrovich, who writes, in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day and age of social media all around us and with the Fediverse gaining traction, is it still worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one’s time to have a personal website or a blog residing on one’s personal domain? Yeah, I think so because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nerd and I want that control. No one can ever take away caseylist.com from me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s mine. Well, that’s not a challenge. challenge. But you know what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s mine. That’s where I live. That’s my space. My space. You know what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying? And so anyway, I control that. And my email address is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at caselist.com. So when I moved from Gmail to Fastmail,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then nobody knew it. Well, I mean, people knew it because I talked about it on the show. But like any of the people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I was going to say, everyone knew.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nobody asked. It’s caselist.com slash Fastmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But again, you take the point there, you get the point I’m trying to make here is that because it was under my control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone else that I was emailing with was completely ignorant to the fact that these emails were actually getting routed to PassMail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead of Gmail. And similarly, my website will live there and maybe it will continue to run on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my broken blog engine, maybe it’ll run on something else, but it will always be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though my hot takes and quips and whatnot I used to put on Twitter and now I’m putting on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still to me important to have a canonical place to live, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, a place that is mine and that is kind of my home base on the internet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it is absolutely worth it. Even if all you have is a single serving site,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an about page that says, hey, I’m Casey, I have these projects, you can find me at these places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still think that’s important. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that we were all on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey servers years ago. of which have crumbled, except John, who apparently was on every Mastodon server. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like Marco and me, or at least certainly me, and I thought Marco, you were in the same boat, we signed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up on servers that have since disappeared. And that could happen. Now, granted, you know, the three of us seem to be using Mastodon.social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, which seems to be the most stable, but you never know, you never know what’ll happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I absolutely stand by and think it is important. And it’s not that expensive. You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use pass sponsor hover to get a domain. You can use past sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Squarespace in order to put a website there. In fact, I think you can even get your domain through Squarespace if you so choose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Linode. Linode. Yep, that’s another past sponsor as well. Pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure those two are also current sponsors, by the way. Just not this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey episode. Well, I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s what I meant. Sorry, just not this episode is what I meant, but thank you for the correction. But yeah, I mean, we bring these services up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in part because genuinely we either use or genuinely recommend them because they really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are great. And so, So this is something that I absolutely think you should have a little corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Internet that is under your control. And I stand by that 100%. Let’s start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Marco. Where do you land on this? And I think I have a pretty strong feeling about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think we have to separate out, like, you know, is it worth having your own domain from, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Peter was asking here was, is it worth having a personal website or blog on a personal domain? That’s fair. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, whether you want to have a website or a blog, that’s up to you. I do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s worth having a domain because, as Casey was saying, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long term, on an infinite time scale, services come and go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and servers come and go, and companies come and go, and what you want to do on the website,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what your identity is, what services and functions it needs to offer or provide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of that changes over time. And so it is nice to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that is your own domain. So that way, like, you know, like when you have your email address at your own domain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of at a certain email provider, that pretty much guarantees that as long as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, like no one big email provider that does not support custom domains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever takes over and makes it impossible to use a custom domain, which seems unlikely with email, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much guarantees that like you can be service provider portable or agnostic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, for instance, if you use Gmail with your own domain, and then Gmail starts to suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they start charging money for that and you don’t want to pay or whatever you know whatever happens there gmail you if you don’t want to be on gmail anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just move what what is hosting your email but it’s to the world it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your domain you change over the MX records and that’s it you know so you can change your hosting provider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not affect your ability to be reached or found or whatever you know popularity you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built up or whatever you know if Macedon continues to be a thing and I hope it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then certainly there might become some value in having your own domain for that in the sense that again that’s a username
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can easily port between different back-end options. That being said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit less important there because they have this whole redirect mechanism in place. But you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many services the redirect procedure isn’t so simple or effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and or permanent and so it is nice to be able to have your own domain that things are pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and that you can host whatever you want there over time. Now Now whether you should have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blog, that’s a different question and that’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Personally I have had a blog for a long time. I don’t really use it much anymore, but I like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea that I can always go back to it. Many people in the collapse of Twitter, many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are going back to their own personal blogs and reviving them and writing again. I think that’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, whether you’re going to like, you know, become the next Engadget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posting, you know, 30 posts a day or whatever, that’s, you know, you don’t have to do that to make it worth having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a personal blog. And it could be like John’s, where you post once a year, or it could be like mine, and you post whenever you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco promote something or call out a particularly bad bug to Apple and hope they fix it. Like, whatever it is, you can post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once every five years and through the magic of RSS readers, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not going to lose your audience. They’ll just see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a post once every five years and that’ll be it. So whether you have a blog, that’s up to you, but I think that can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very flexible. But I do think whether you should have your own domain and some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put stuff on that domain, whether that’s your, you know, whether you’re pointing it to even like a static page on GitHub,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll host it for free, or whether you’re putting it to like an S3 bucket or having a full-blown host like Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or running a full-blown server like Linode, whatever it is, having a domain, if you are nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to even know what any of the stuff I’m talking about means, is probably valuable to you and you should probably do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, this is kind of this topic comes up a lot and I think it’s kind of a Not a happy
⏹️ ▶️ John accident, but we were we were lucky enough that the standards of the Internet
⏹️ ▶️ John that were made by you know people
⏹️ ▶️ John Who wanted to do something good for the world or doing it and do it in a kind of open way or they? The
⏹️ ▶️ John attitudes of the people who made the Internet were such that
⏹️ ▶️ John the things we got out of it, DNS, TCP, IP, the fact that it was part of a government program that became open,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that all those different systems that they sort of snowballed and gained critical
⏹️ ▶️ John mass before private or public corporations could come in and
⏹️ ▶️ John extract all the value means that we actually have a competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John market for the things we’re talking about. The reason we say it’s so important is not because like to Marcos point, not
⏹️ ▶️ John because we think you should have a blog or be a blogger, but because DNS and owning
⏹️ ▶️ John your own domain name is a way for you to control your identity
⏹️ ▶️ John and your data on the Internet. The Internet is really important and having control of your identity is important. The reason you can
⏹️ ▶️ John control it is because DNS is not owned and controlled by Google or Microsoft or Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? A TCP IP is not owned and controlled by any corporation. It wasn’t embraced and extended by Microsoft, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they own all the networking. We’re not doing all this on MSN or whatever. open standards that
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of got their foot in the door before corporations who come and ruin everything exist and you should take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. And all the technical ins and outs of why it’s portable and everything are important,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the underlying technology is what makes that possible. That’s why there is a competitive market
⏹️ ▶️ John for where you register your domain name. You can use it one of our sponsors, you can use it at different companies, there’s companies that compete
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to be the place where you register. No one controls all domain names. You can register
⏹️ ▶️ John at different places. What about hosting? I host my website, there is a competitive market for hosting
⏹️ ▶️ John your website. Once you control the domain, the hosting companies know you can put that domain anywhere you
⏹️ ▶️ John can run a server out of your closet, you can put it on Squarespace, you can put it on Linode, you can put it on like there’s a million companies that do that
⏹️ ▶️ John because nobody owns and controls all this is the one company that controls like AWS does not control web hosting,
⏹️ ▶️ John although sometimes it seems that way they don’t. You can you can host anything anywhere. Same thing with
⏹️ ▶️ John email, it happens to be an open protocol that yes, there are dominant players in the market but you can host your
⏹️ ▶️ John email at different places it’s not as easy to be receiving email which is what we talked about in past shows because of all the spam rules and all
⏹️ ▶️ John crap like that some some of that early sort of open stuff didn’t go quite so well maybe email didn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John out that well for the world but that’s why we’re always pressing on that you should have
⏹️ ▶️ John your thing not because we think you should be a blogger or not because we think you should like use one of our sponsors and have a website
⏹️ ▶️ John but because we want individuals to own and control their identity on the web that’s why we push for the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of of some username at twitter.com, you don’t own and control that, Twitter does, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Same thing with Mastodon, although Mastodon does let you use the Webfinger protocol and various other things to
⏹️ ▶️ John basically be your username at domain that you control on Mastodon, but I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John gone into the Webfinger thing to try it. It seems like it might not be as well supported in
⏹️ ▶️ John various clients and places as I expect, but that is the ideal, that’s what we’re shooting for. Open
⏹️ ▶️ John protocols, open standards, a competitive market to provide the services and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where this falls down. It’s like we’re a nerd show and we know that, if you’re listening to this, maybe you know how to make your own website. We
⏹️ ▶️ John all wish it was easier. And that’s why, in a competitive market, you have companies like Squarespace who are saying
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to try to make it as easy as possible for you to do this. It’s still more complicated than you would like.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the competition is, oh, look how easy it is to sign up for Twitter. You don’t have to pick a server, you just go to twitter.com and you create
⏹️ ▶️ John an account and it’s so easy. Private companies can make it easier because there is less competition. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John one place to go. Mass done, you have to pick a server and even then you’re sort of under the thumb of that server, even with the redirect
⏹️ ▶️ John rules and everything, right? Domain names and web hosting are the most open
⏹️ ▶️ John and that means there is the most choice and that means there is kind of a barrier to entry because like, well, where do I go? What if
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to use, where is it, what do I want to use? You know, like it’s a little bit trickier to use, but that is the beauty of it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John claim a portion of the internet for yourself because as websites come and go, as MySpace,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, rises and falls, as Facebook comes in and out of favor, as Twitter comes and goes,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Macedon comes and goes, if you own your own domain name, your place on the internet will
⏹️ ▶️ John always exist at static URLs that you control. That’s why we always send you to atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash store, because that is the URL that we control. And yes, it leads you to Cotton
⏹️ ▶️ John Bureau with various URLs, but at various times, it has led you to other places. We want to send you to the place
⏹️ ▶️ John that we control, so that if you hear something that says atp.fm store,
⏹️ ▶️ John five years in the past or five years in the future, that page will still exist. And we know that because we control
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And whether we’re hosted on Squarespace or Linode or Marco’s water closet,
⏹️ ▶️ John wherever we’re hosted, we control that URL. That’s, this is the ideal. The web
⏹️ ▶️ John happened to get out the door before corporations could totally destroy it. And yes, it is tricky or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this is why we wish everything was. We wish that our names on social were our names
⏹️ ▶️ John at a domain that we control. But that is unfortunately, it is not reasonable to expect
⏹️ ▶️ John as much as nerds would like it. Every person in the world to have their own domain name. The namespace contention alone would be horrendous,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So we recognize this is not, you know, it’s a little bit of a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John to say every person in the world is going to have their own domain name. Although with IPv6, they can have their own IP address, but that’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ John story. But for the people listening to this show, you’re not every person in the world, unfortunately for us.
⏹️ ▶️ John very tiny subset. And for the people listening to this show, I definitely recommend getting your own domain
⏹️ ▶️ John and using it and making a bunch of static URLs that never change and putting stuff on them. And if you post it
⏹️ ▶️ John once every five years, that’s fine. If the only thing on it is a link to your resume, that’s fine. Whatever you want to do. The point is that you control
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And once you have that, no one can take it away from you except probably the government. hopefully we’ll stop that from happening.
#askatp: Bit rot on Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Jeremy Nash writes, I’ve recently learned about BitRot and I am going down a rabbit hole convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all my data will be corrupted one day. Do you guys worry about this on your Synologies? Is ZFS or TrueNAS the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only answer? And related, if your Synologies died today, would you immediately replace them or would you look at a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do-it-yourself solution like Unraid or TrueNAS? I’ll start here. I am actually looking at,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we just talked about this, maybe we didn’t, but I am looking to replace my Synology probably in the first half of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this coming year, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because it’s 10 years old and I think it’s starting to feel its age and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s time to maybe get something new. But I freaking love this thing. I adore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Synology. I totally understand that if you’re patient enough and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy fiddling enough, that Unraider TrueNAS may be interesting to you, but it is not to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to BitRot, it’s something I try not to think about because I don’t want to think about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But one of the things that I want to do on a new Synology, which I don’t think my current one supports, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to move to some file system, I believe, butter, btr, whatever it is, I’ll talk to john about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it when the time comes, but I will move I would like to move to some files file system that prevents this maybe it’s maybe maybe butter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t the one I’m thinking of, but one of the ones that at least does a passable amount of effort to try to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prevent bit rot. But yeah, it’s it’s it’s a fact of life unless you’re actively avoiding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And, and I’m not actively avoiding it yet. But I hope to be soon. Let’s start with john this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so congratulations for learning about bit Yes, all your rots,
⏹️ ▶️ John your bits will be corrupted someday on an infinite timeline. And the defense against that
⏹️ ▶️ John are these systems that, well, there’s two defense of this. One is you want to detect when this
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, because if you don’t detect when this happens, all you’ll do is you’ll propagate your corrupted data to all your backups, right? So there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of different file systems and storage systems that do this. There’s two parts to that. One is detecting
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it happened, in which case you have to have some kind of like checksum to say, hey, we wrote bits like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they still like that? you need to be able to answer that question. Second is, when you get the answer says, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually when we wrote these, they look like this, but now they look like that. You know, they don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they might just know this is not what we wrote. 10 years ago, we wrote some data here and now the checksum doesn’t match, so this is bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you do about that? Well, what you want is to be notified at the very least for
⏹️ ▶️ John your device to say, hey, this file is corrupt. That doesn’t help you if you don’t have a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to fix that corruption. One way you can fix it, if you’re lucky, is, okay, well, I have a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John of that file, and I got notified promptly that the file was corrupt. So that means
⏹️ ▶️ John that my backup isn’t corrupt because it just turned corrupt. And I backed up, you know, I have like 30 days worth of
⏹️ ▶️ John backups. So I can pull that file from 30 days ago and restore it, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not corrupt anymore. That relies on timely notification and timely action and frequent backups, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The other way you can do that is the file system itself can store enough redundant information such that when
⏹️ ▶️ John it finds something is corrupt, it can just fix it itself if it has a good copy of that data somewhere. But
⏹️ ▶️ John of course that eats your storage space because now you’re not just storing all your data. Once you’re storing it 1.2 times, 1.5 times,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on how many errors you want to be able to recover from. If you want to store your data twice, three times,
⏹️ ▶️ John five times like AWS does an S3 or whatever, the more copies of your data you store, the
⏹️ ▶️ John more likely you will be able to repair it when the computer detects that it’s bad. So
⏹️ ▶️ John again, two parts detect when it’s bad, be able to fix it. And those are two different things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because you use a file system that has checks on it, you’re like, I’m protected. All it’s gonna do is tell you when you’re screwed immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I found your files corrupt and you don’t have any other copies of it. Ha ha, that doesn’t help. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a good copy of the data somewhere. So ZFS and BTRFS and a bunch of other things can
⏹️ ▶️ John let you sort of choose how much storage space do you want me to burn saving redundant data such
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can repair, you know, small errors, bigger errors or whatever. Really,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to be the best protected, you should use a file system that does that, store some amount of redundant data, and also
⏹️ ▶️ John have backups with, like, you know, not just one backup, not like you overwrite the backup of the new one every
⏹️ ▶️ John time, you wanna have multiple versions of backups, like even Backblaze has this now, where you can save like different versions
⏹️ ▶️ John for 30 days or whatever. So you have seven different versions of this file, not just one. And then pay attention
⏹️ ▶️ John when it tells you that something is corrupt, right? This is a high bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John hosting, oh, I don’t wanna have to think about all this stuff, or whatever, but if you’re looking into TrueNAS and stuff, It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re on board to dive into this. So that’s what you need. Detect the errors and be able to fix them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as for me, if my Synology died today, I would immediately replace it with a Synology. I love it. It’s been one of the best
⏹️ ▶️ John technology products I’ve had in my entire life. I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to replace it because it just works and it’s fine. But I also frequently go to the Synology
⏹️ ▶️ John site, but I had to replace it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What kind of cool Synology would I get? Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John love it. It’s like, it’s my favorite thing. It’s in the basement. It’s out of sight. It’s out of mind. It does everything that I want it to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is almost 10 years old. It is old and creaky. It will soon be
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly 10 years old, because we got them in 2013, right? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in April, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so in April, this thing will be 10 years old. I hope it doesn’t take that. I don’t want to replace it, because it would be expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace, but I kind of look forward to replacing it, because I want to shop for a new Synology. So that’s an endorsement of that
#askatp: Mouse acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edwin Guggenbichler writes, do you use native mouse acceleration?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then somebody, I don’t know if it was Edwin or somebody else, put in a link to SteerMouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know what this is about. So John,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill me in. All right, so Casey, you probably remember when you switched from Windows to Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the mouse accelerates is different between those two systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, it was so long ago. I’m sure you’re right, but I have zero recollection of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you certainly notice if you go back. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fair, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you if you happen to use PCs and Macs to get like on a regular basis, you happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use both, you will probably notice, especially if you use mice on both. Like it’s a little bit harder to notice with trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac or whatever. But you know, if you use mice on both, you will definitely notice like, oh, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move right on, you know, one or the other. So basically, yeah, the mouse acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works totally differently on Macs and Windows. So to answer Edwin’s question,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I use native mouse acceleration? Yes, because I’m mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac and with the exception of playing my weird SimTower game, I’m mostly on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac most of the time. And games are the only thing I use Windows for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And games, I feel like you kind of get used to however the mouse behaves in the game anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s always different from how it behaves on a desktop, so it kind of doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is there a setting for this? I still feel ignorant. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the reason why the steer mouse link is here, I assume john put it there, is that steer mouse is a utility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I believe allows you to change the mass acceleration curve on max to possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better match what windows PCs do.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what it’s not doesn’t match what it’d be. So yeah, so the when we talk about acceleration curve is basically saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you move the mouse, there’s, there’s multiple pieces of information coming in, there’s how far you moved
⏹️ ▶️ John in which direction over what period of time, right? And those are all factors in how the cursor moves.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new position of the cursor is a factor of all of that. It’s not just how far you move the mouse, and it’s not just how fast you
⏹️ ▶️ John move it, and it’s not just the direction. It’s all those things combined. And the equation that takes those inputs
⏹️ ▶️ John and translates them to the new position of the cursor is called, like the, they call it the mouse acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ John curve, right? And there’s lots of different kind of, you know, if you could graph, like, here’s the three inputs,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s the output, you can graph that, and it’s probably more than three inputs but like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of different ways you can do that. I’m very sensitive to mouse acceleration especially since you know I was basically
⏹️ ▶️ John born on the Mac and used to the Mac’s mouse acceleration which was just
⏹️ ▶️ John phenomenally better than mouse acceleration on other platforms from day one. Like if you use a mouse on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John IIgs and use it on the Mac did not feel the same like even that’s from the same company was not the same at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was so sensitive to it I remember when I got my SE30 there was some kind of bug
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t if it was a bug in the OS, a bug in Mac Paint. I think it was probably a bug in the OS that would cause the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse cursor to jump in a little L-shaped right angle
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where instead of going from one point to another point that’s on an angle from it, it would go up
⏹️ ▶️ John and then over to the right. Like, you know, up three pixels and to the right three pixels instead of going like the hypotenuse,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that would manifest if you tried to draw with the mouse in Mac Paint.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would see these little stair steps and not just stair steps pixels, but stair steps like three pixels high, three pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And it’s like, no, I wanted you to do, you know, five pixels on an angle on the hypotenuse. I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John brought it to the, that was such a complaining kid, brought to the like authorized. You something’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I got a new computer. This is my new fancy computer. And the mouse doesn’t work right. Like I can’t draw on Mac paint.
⏹️ ▶️ John I brought it to, we brought it to the authorized Apple dealer because there was no Apple stores in those days and said, Hey, we just got this
⏹️ ▶️ John new computer and the mouse don’t work right. And I showed them and and they’re like, how much are you talking about, kid? Go away. Like they just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, there’s nothing they could do about it. I don’t know if it ever got fixed or if it was just like, I got a new computer after that. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m very sensitive to the mouse curve. The reason I use Steer Mouse, which is what I put Link in here
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and this is sometimes the case for people, when you go to the like
⏹️ ▶️ John system settings or whatever and see the little slider for mouse acceleration, what is it called now? It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speed or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, mouse, tracking speed. Yeah, it’s a slider. and it goes from slow in the
⏹️ ▶️ John left end to fast at the right. Those are literally the labels. There are no labels in the tick marks. The left edge is labeled slow
⏹️ ▶️ John and the right edge is labeled fast. That’s basically saying, do you want the mouse cursor to move a lot when
⏹️ ▶️ John you move the mouse a little or do you want it to move a little when you move the mouse a little, right? And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a setting for this under the covers. I think it’s just a floating point value or something. Just a single floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point value, which obviously, you know, given what I said about the inputs, it’s more complicated than that, but the OS gives you
⏹️ ▶️ John this one setting, slow and fast. If you like me, you have a very large monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fastest setting might
⏹️ ▶️ John feel too slow. Like it might feel like it takes, you have to like move the mouse, then pick it up
⏹️ ▶️ John and move it back to the middle and move it again just to get from one side of the other thing to, or you have to move the mouse unreasonably fast
⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t feel accurate to do it or whatever. So if you’re on the heart, the highest setting
⏹️ ▶️ John and it still doesn’t feel fast enough, one thing you can do is just like defaults, right? Whatever that thing is and
⏹️ ▶️ John set the value of that, that thing to a higher value than the slider lets you go. I don’t know what the values
⏹️ ▶️ John are, but let’s pretend the left side of the thing is like zero and the right side is 1.0. You can from
⏹️ ▶️ John the command line and set it to 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, like basically set values that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not settable with the GUI. So that’s one way to influence the mouse tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ John On my big monitors, I have found that no matter what value I put into the one value that Apple lets you pick,
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse doesn’t feel right to me. It feels slow but also inaccurate. So for a while
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve used a third-party utility, a steer mouse, that lets you more
⏹️ ▶️ John concisely tweak the acceleration curves for individual input devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another factor that’s not I didn’t mention. The actual mouse influences this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I’m using my Microsoft mouse connected through USB versus using an Apple mouse connected through USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John they behave wildly differently. This may seem strange to you, but they absolutely do. Different mice
⏹️ ▶️ John will behave differently with the same tracking setting. So to make this Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse not drive me insane, I needed to be able to tweak the acceleration
⏹️ ▶️ John curves, you know, in a more accurate way. And so Steer Mouse gives you two numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you type in the values. I don’t know what these numbers mean. They call them acceleration and sensitivity.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows what they’re doing under the covers. But the point is, I can fiddle with these sliders and type in exact values and save
⏹️ ▶️ John my settings and associate them with this specific input device. So if I plug in an Apple mouse, it will feel Apple mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John normal. And I can make this Microsoft mouse feel the way I want. So do I use the native mouse acceleration?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I don’t not with my Microsoft mouse. If I had an Apple mouse, I think I probably would use the native one because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple mice, when you crank up the the like the built in setting still
⏹️ ▶️ John feel right to me. But when I went on the big mouse journey buying all these different mice, I was amazed at
⏹️ ▶️ John how different they feel. Logitech mouse, a Logitech gaming mouse feels different from Logitech regular mouse, versus from
⏹️ ▶️ John a Microsoft mouse feels different from an Apple mouse. That’s why it’s great to have third party utilities to let you tweak this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, associate that tweak specifically with the device. So once you get every device set up the way you want,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can even have different curves for Bluetooth versus USB connection of the same mouse. Then it just remembers them and when you plug in
⏹️ ▶️ John the device, it feels normal. One of the fun things StairMouse has is like a social networking
⏹️ ▶️ John other people’s popular save settings for your mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there like achievements that like, you know, oh, you’ve mapped, you’ve moused 100 miles, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there should be. But no, it’s just I think it’s just like save settings for your mouse because you’re like, I don’t know what to set these numbers to
⏹️ ▶️ John every time of these flyers around still feels weird. Can I find a setting that lots of other people use for this mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can just use one of the safe settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, memberful nebula and blaze. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atv.fm slash join and we will talk to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week. Happy New Year everyone!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey begin Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, 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,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Christmas movies
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you watch anybody watch any Christmas movies even Marco when he thought his Christmas was gonna be a normal
⏹️ ▶️ John time Did did any of you watch a movie that you always watch during Christmas?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. Absolutely You have to watch several movies So there’s a there’s a litany of movies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you you are compelled to watch John you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John every year though Like
⏹️ ▶️ John tradition how much room is there for multiple? I feel like maybe you can have one or two movies, but you can’t like 17 movies
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to watch on Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you absolutely can do Christmas for most of us. It’s the 25th, man you got plenty of time. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were intending to mean on the day of and that’s a different conversation. But…
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, not on the day of. Just sort of like I always have to watch these in the Christmas season. What is your
⏹️ ▶️ John list of terrible 90s movies that you like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch? Since we haven’t actually gotten to like the rest of the family where we would normally watch like Christmas Vacation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve only watched kind of second tier movies. And in fact, we’ve actually watched, no joke,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only bad sequels to second tier movies so far. So the Christmas movies we’ve seen so far this year are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Die Hard 2 and Home Alone 2. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Die Hard 2 is not that bad. It’s not as good as the first, but it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. It’s not as bad as Home Alone 2, I’ll give you that, but neither are good, I would say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. I mean, for us, the Christmas season in terms of movies starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really anytime after Thanksgiving, the very latest on December 1st. And for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, we have to watch Elf. I’ve always enjoyed Elf, and it is becoming possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my favorite Christmas movie over time. Aaron is a big fan of Love Actually. I know that’s very polarizing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never had seen or even heard of Love Actually before we had met. And I actually have come to really, really like Love Actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. This is where John rolls his eyes and tells me the litany of ways in which it’s wrong or bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I was rolling my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, me too. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, how can you not like Elf? Oh, God, you
⏹️ ▶️ John monster. I don’t dislike it, but it is not, like, it’s what, here’s the thing with classic Christmas things. It’s whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you get used to at a certain point. it has really no connection to quality. We all just have to admit that. Like, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the things, the Christmas movies that we like is unrelated to the quality of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, with that in mind, uh, for me, the thing that imprinted on me when I was a wee lad, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many moons ago was Claymation Christmas. Oh, yeah. Which almost nobody has heard of, but Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the prime age, it’s because we’re basically the same age, is the prime age to have heard of Claymation Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is not the Christmas season. If you have not watched Claymation Christmas at least once, preferably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thrice, two, ten times. So that is definitely on the list. I’m trying to think of what else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just watched for the very first time, I watched Christmas Vacation. I’d never seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is funny because my parents’ license plate growing up was Griswold. But I’d never seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and I went into it expecting it to be garbage, kind of like a Christmas story. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually thought it was pretty good. You know, there are some jokes that didn’t age well. But for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you come to something something that’s 30 years old, 40 years old, whatever it is today, usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s bad. It’s real bad. And I actually enjoyed Christmas Vacation. It was pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m actually kind of surprised that as a newcomer to it in 2022, I’m surprised that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have liked it, honestly, because yeah, you’re right. Most 80s and 90s movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do not hold up well to modern eyes, especially comedies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially Chevy Chase movie like, oh god, there’s so much like the odds are poor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that anything you see from that time period is going to hold up today and even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you even be able to get through it, let alone think it’s funny and not be horribly offended by it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, it actually as that goes, you know, again, the bar is low, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey as that goes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s good. But it’s all relative.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, so John, what are you, what are your John Syracuse approved movies? And is there, are there any, or is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there at least one?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I used to watch things like every year just because they were on like the Rudolph thing. Cause that’s how old
⏹️ ▶️ John I am. Right. Right. Because that was just on TV and I’d watch it every year. But as I got older, surprise, surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John to everyone, uh, like the, what, when things were of bad quality, but they were still like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you watch us every year. The bad quality eventually went out. I, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I stopped watching things that I don’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s like, yes, it was traditional. I watch this all the time, but it’s not like if the Rudolph thing like it’s for kids, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in it. I don’t feel compelled to watch the Rankin Bass Rudolph thing every year because
⏹️ ▶️ John I it’s not something that I enjoy. So I haven’t haven’t seen that in ages, right? That’s true of most
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I remember watching Christmas vacation when I first came out and enjoying it when I was, you know, however old it was when that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to teenager or something, but I don’t think it would hold up on repeat viewing. And so I don’t watch it
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it’s like, oh, it’s traditional. I’ve seen it all the time. it’s part of my Christmas memories. It is, but it’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John movie that I enjoy, so I don’t watch it. Um, the one thing that I would probably be willing to watch
⏹️ ▶️ John again, uh, is a Christmas story, which I think is actually good. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as opposed to the other ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I know people are bored by it. It may require, I think it is a well executed version of
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is, but it is a nostalgia trip for people of a certain age. It is a nostalgic for a time that is before my time,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is my parents time. So I can, I can relate to it and kind the same way I can relate to Goodfellas.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t a mobster in the 70s, but some of my relatives probably were. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at Goodfellas, I see people who I remember from my childhood. Like my uncle was like
⏹️ ▶️ John that. My cousin was like that. I can connect to it in that way. So in the same way, Christmas Story
⏹️ ▶️ John connects with me because it is a fantasy nostalgia version
⏹️ ▶️ John of a world I never experienced and probably never really existed, but that I feel like I have a connection to. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s actually kind of funny and a fun But I understand it’s kind of like the same way that I’m never gonna like elf the way that 90s
⏹️ ▶️ John kids like it But I thought elf was fine, but it doesn’t have that connection to me So if I had if we was forced at
⏹️ ▶️ John gunpoint says you must watch a movie every Christmas From now on as a Christmas tradition
⏹️ ▶️ John a I wouldn’t like it because that’s not how I rolled the B if I had to pick Oh, it’s a Christmas story.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I I mean obviously whatever makes you happy makes you happy But for me, I came to Christmas story just like five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ish years ago, and I did not care for it at all There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John Claymation Christmas, right Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, it is not a Claymation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so much better. Frankly, that’d be my one. If I had to pick one, it’d be Claymation Christmas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, amen, brother. I am right there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John with you. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John my goodness. No, you are right. It’s through rose-colored glasses. Oh, 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, honorable mention for the Garfield Christmas as well. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think I’ve ever seen that one. Claymation Christmas, I absolutely will concede
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it is probably garbage if you look at it with any sort of, you know, reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point of view, but as someone who is of the correct age, like Marco, who’s of the correct age for Clayton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mason Christmas, if I had to choose just one, it’s that one, but if I got to, I think Elf would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my second. I really freaking love Elf. That being said, Aaron and I watched Die Hard last night, because that’s what you do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, Die Hard is more of a recent internet phenomenon, people like getting, what is it, like a decade ago, like, oh, Die Hard’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a Christmas movie, right? I love Die Hard and I’ll watch it any time. It’s a fun movie, but it’s not something I ever
⏹️ ▶️ John watched at Christmas. I never went in on that fan. I guess the one Christmas tradition thing that I do have that I actually do
⏹️ ▶️ John do every Christmas season is not a movie, but music. When I was a kid, we had
⏹️ ▶️ John a record, Casey, of the Muppets and John Denver Christmas album.
⏹️ ▶️ John We were a big John Denver family. We had John Denver records, and I loved the Muppet show when I was a kid, watched
⏹️ ▶️ John it every single night or whatever time it was on, 7.30 or whatever. Loved the Muppet show, I loved the Muppets, I loved the Muppet movie,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m of that age. And because we had that Christmas records of the Muppets singing
⏹️ ▶️ John Christmas carols with John Denver. We heard it all the time during my childhood. And for whatever reason, unlike,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, here, I’m probably, unlike the movies, which are crap movies and I stopped watching, if this is crap
⏹️ ▶️ John music, I can’t tell because I still enjoy listening to the Muppets and John Denver
⏹️ ▶️ John sing Christmas carols. So when we put on Christmas music, when we’re decorating the tree, and it’s my random playlist of holiday music,
⏹️ ▶️ John a huge swath of that is John Denver and the Muppets. I love that album. It reminds me of my childhood.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think they do a good job. I mean, they’re singing Christmas carols. It’s like, you know, it’s not, it’s Rudolph the Red Nose
⏹️ ▶️ John Reindeer, Silent Night, like it’s Christmas songs sung by the Muppets and John Denver.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I still give that a thumbs up. I think some of the songs are funny and good for kids. And you know, especially if you’re a kid
⏹️ ▶️ John and you like Muppets, but some of them are just good renditions of a song. I guess it helps if you like John Denver, which I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, that’s the one thing I actually still do every year that not a single Christmas has gone by where I have not listened to
⏹️ ▶️ John John Denver and the Muppets sing Christmas carols at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is from a TV special, apparently? I’ve never heard of this. I’m digging on Wikipedia now, but apparently it’s a soundtrack album
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was on TV, but I have the record and now I have it in MP3s. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Also on the list, it will surprise nobody that I am a bit of a pack rat about certain things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I really enjoy the Pentatonix Christmas specials from the years and the Disney Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specials through the years, and I’ll put those on as like background noise and whatnot. All of these, of course, are living in plex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they are wont to do. But no, I freaking love Claymation Christmas and Elf,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I think I’m of the right age, that Elf just absolutely clicked for me. Even though it came out when Marco and I were like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost graduated from college, if I remember right, I think it was like 2003 or thereabouts. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were a bit old for it. I think if I liked Will Ferrell, I would like it, but I don’t, so I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, see, I love Will Ferrell, so I’m all in. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any real problems with any of these, not that it really matters, you do you, but I don’t know, Christmas story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just never clicked for me. I’ve never seen It’s a Wonderful Life, so I don’t know if that’s good or bad or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously The Grinch. I’m okay with the Jim Carrey version, the original version I love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of you, I think John had mentioned Rudolph and all the Rankin-Bass stuff and Frosty, that always happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, Elf and Claymation are my two winners.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzko, Jr. Speaking of owning your place on the web and having permanent links to live on, this is a difficult problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s because I put a link in the show notes. I said, I want a link in the show notes to the John Dunn and Rhythm Up It albums.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of someone in the chat room put an Apple Music link, but then you’re like, oh, but what if people don’t use Apple Music? Should I have a Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John link? Maybe it’s on YouTube, blah, blah, blah. So there’s these services that have grown up over
⏹️ ▶️ John the past few years that try to provide a canonical link to a song and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, hey, if that song is available on Apple Music, here’s how you get to it. If it’s song on Spotify, here’s how you get to it there, and so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. But of course, those services themselves are just another thing that might disappear. So album.link is the song.link.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see I use song whip, but it’s the same idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so but that’s the problem. None of those things are any more permanent than the individual services. So I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John an album dot link thing in the show notes. But five years from now, when an album dot link is a spam site that tries to give
⏹️ ▶️ John you a virus, I feel bad. But there just isn’t a canonical place for this. Like you can’t rely on the
⏹️ ▶️ John record label to have a canonical link because they change the URLs every day, they probably don’t have it up anymore. So we’re going to put an album dot
⏹️ ▶️ John link here. But this just shows the problem of like if the people who own this media really cared about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, they would provide canonical links for all the media in their catalog that then sublinked
⏹️ ▶️ John out to its availability on services but that’s a lot of work and they just seem like they’re not going to ever do So