528: My Favorite Slap in the Face
30 Mar 2023A distinctive sandwich containing the delicious WWDC announcement and some other items.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Samoas vs. Caramel DeLites
- Casey found 🎉 More Occasions! 🎉
- ATP Movie Club returns! We watched My Neighbor Totoro
- Follow-up:
- HDMI Quick Media Switching (QMS) in action
- Threaded rod suggestions
- McMaster-Carr
- Tool lending libraries are a thing (via Sean Cameron & Chris Chelberg)
- The 🔩 trick
- Camrote for geotagging & control (via Josh Calvetti)
- Baby needs a new set of 🦷
- Nairobi’s true Siri experience
- ChatGPT + iOS Shortcut = Smart Siri‽
- Microsoft vs. Bloomberg News
- WWDC 2023 Announced
- Let’s attempt another intervention about Radar
- Marco’s recent radar (FB12026558)
- Developer Technical Support
- John’s recent radars (FB11772168 & FB12057505)
- Casey’s thoughts from June 2022
- Jeff Johnson’s thoughts
#askatp:- What does “federation” even mean, anyway? (via Stephen Gozza)
- Is software getting worse? (via Eric Smith)
- Why does John need lots of GPU in an ARM Mac? (via Thomas Alvarez)
- Post-show:
- Please give us members special ideas!
- …particularly in the spirit of Top Four!
- And, if you’re near Boston, buy John’s camera
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- Kolide: Cross-platform endpoint security for teams that value privacy and transparency.
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Chapters
- The Samoa Zone
- Two new anniversaries
- Member special: Totoro
- HDMI Quick Media Switching
- Threaded-rod follow-up
- Camrote
- More Samsung camera tricks
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Siri shortcut conflict
- Making Siri better
- Bing AI licensing
- WWDC announced
- ATP Membership
- Radar/Feedback Assistant
- #askatp: Defederation
- #askatp: Software getting worse?
- #askatp: John’s ARM GPU needs
- Ending theme
- Member-special ideas?
The Samoa Zone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mmm, good cookies. Oh, what are you eating? Girl Scout s’mores?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I am I am not the world’s biggest fan of all of the Girl Scout cookies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the world loves. Like the peanut buttery ones are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Which ones? The chocolate covered ones or these sandwich ones? The former
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chocolate covered ones. Yeah, those are good. Tagalog. I mean, they’re not they’re not amazing in my personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey estimation, but they’re good. Thin mints aren’t really for me, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the key for me, and we’ve probably talked about this at some point, is the shortbread, the trefoils, how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pronounce it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could go through a box of those in a sitting, wouldn’t even blink an eye. Are you in
⏹️ ▶️ John the Samoa zone, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly don’t know. Is there any way to find out?
⏹️ ▶️ John do not know. That is the best Girl Scout cookie, and the only one you should even bother getting. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco circle with caramel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. That is two things that I am convinced that I don’t enjoy, but Aaron will regularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point out to me that any time I consume caramel or coconut, I always say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t like blank, but this is actually pretty good. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s every- Which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco suggests that you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like it. Which suggests
⏹️ ▶️ John was asking, is the two different bakers who do the Girl Scout cookies, and one of them, the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John version of that is called Caramel Delights, and I am unfortunately in the Caramel Delights zone, so I have to get illicit imported
Two new anniversaries
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have not one, but two new anniversaries to celebrate. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am not even kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I saw that on the email. Now I’ve decoded the notes here.
⏹️ ▶️ John think I replied to that and shamed him for having another anniversary, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey go ahead, Casey. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course you did. All right, well, actually, so the first one is for a Mr. Let me check my notes, John Syracusa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who a year ago, tomorrow as we record this, but by the time you hear this, A year ago today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all likelihood, had announced that he was going independent. So John, how’s the last
⏹️ ▶️ John I could swear I put that in my calendar to remind myself to talk about it. Are you off
⏹️ ▶️ John by the day or something?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hypercritical.co slash 2022 slash 03 slash 30 slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey independence hyphen day. Maybe I just missed it. We don’t need to belabor this, but how’s the last year been,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fine. I did, I did put, like I said, I did put a, I thought I put
⏹️ ▶️ John something in my calendar to say, hey, it’s been a year or whatever, but really realistically setting aside that thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John probably put in my calendar like a year ago, the main thing I’m thinking about is that 2023 will
⏹️ ▶️ John be the first full year. And this is in front of my mind because we’re doing like tax stuff now, will be my
⏹️ ▶️ John first full year without jobby job income. So like, I feel like it just doesn’t count because last year it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a jobby job and then I didn’t this year. And you know, if everything works out, Let me know jobby job
⏹️ ▶️ John income. And so this will be the first full year. So if you’re excused to have another anniversary, which is basically
⏹️ ▶️ John next year around tax time, you can ask me,
⏹️ ▶️ John having an entire year without a jobby job? And I’m going to say, well, with the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John ad market the way it is, it was pretty rough. But anyway. Right. I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, you picked a hell of a year. It’s like the worst ads we’ve seen in
⏹️ ▶️ John years. It’s kind of like when my son was born, my first child, my
⏹️ ▶️ John oldest was born. and then I got laid off like a week later. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s just kind of the way I roll.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I know that? I don’t feel like I knew that. It was like, it was when the e-book company got bought out and they said, hey everybody, you could either
⏹️ ▶️ John pick up your family and move to like North Carolina or whatever, or you’re all out of a job tomorrow. Let us know, you get 24 hours. Nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we all know you wouldn’t set foot anywhere south of Long Island. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if it was a job that I love for people that I thought were, you know, the people who bought the company, if I didn’t think they were
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of tools, I might’ve considered moving, but no, they were terrible people and
⏹️ ▶️ John none of us like them and we all just left. But yeah, I know Alex, I remember bringing Alex to
⏹️ ▶️ John the office in his little like infant carrier
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John here I am. I’m still hanging in there, atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, please, we’re gonna talk about that more in a minute, but I am glad that you’re still hanging in and congratulations, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snark aside, congratulations on a year of independence. You’ve made it at least one, so that’s a good start. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we alluded to this moments ago, but it was brought to our attention via email that we have another anniversary to celebrate,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the 10 year anniversary of friend of the show, Jonathan Mann’s ATP theme,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excuse me, ATP ending theme. I almost said theme song, but it was actually entitled on YouTube, ATP ending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theme. And so it was released 10 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of days back, was it the 26th of March, 2023. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey started using it every day. I don’t know, Marco, what was it like the 27th basically? It was like immediate. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was pretty soon afterwards, yeah. So thank you to Jonathan Mann. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check out all of his work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That song, I remember we were talking, at the time, we were talking to Merlin Mann,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just casually like, hey, are you interested in maybe writing us a theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey song? Yeah, I forgot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then Jonathan wrote this song, unbeknownst to us, he kinda came out of nowhere with this song.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget exactly the timeline of it, but after some brief amount of time, this song was still in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heads. and it was so much in our heads, and I’m like, first of all, I like this song
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, and it stuck in my head. Second of all, if I like it and it stuck in my head, other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will probably like it as well, and it’ll probably stick in their heads, and that’s probably good for our podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we basically went to Merlin, like, you know what, since you haven’t started yet, nevermind, we got something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John else, thanks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, and we started putting this song in every show, and it’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the song so much, just so thankful to Jonathan for writing it and letting us use it all this time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Merlin did do the theme song for Reconcilable Differences, so he got to do a podcast theme.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh, that’s true, there you go. So yeah, we’ll have some links and show notes to Jonathan’s stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the actual YouTube video, to John’s announcement post and the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherein we discussed all this. And it was one of my favorite, bar none, one of my favorite moments of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when John just dropped this on us. And I certainly had no idea, and I think Marco, you also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had no idea, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John What were your guesses? I made you guess. What were your guesses?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it was terrible. It was truly terrible. I know what you’re thinking of, and I can’t remember what we guessed. I think Marco was closer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but both of us were pretty far off. Well, anyway, so congratulations. More anniversaries to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come. I just got to figure out what excuse I can come up with to figure some out, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe Maybe we’ll let the occasion of inflation rest for now.
Member special: Totoro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we also need to talk about speaking of ATP members and ATP. FM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash join. We have recorded another ATP member special. John, would you like to tell us about it?
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked a lot about it on the actual episode, so I won’t go too far into it, but it’s another another ATP movie
⏹️ ▶️ John club episode. This time I picked the movie, but I picked it kind of at the request
⏹️ ▶️ John of Marco and Casey because they expected me to
⏹️ ▶️ John Make them watch a studio Ghibli movie or something or the Godfather or something like that And
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t I may them watch edge of tomorrow and so they said well, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John if we do that? What have you what if you pick out a studio Ghibli movie first watch and then I had a big debate Oh, which one I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna pick which I talked about on the show I ended up picking my neighbor Totoro which is kind of straight up the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle for a first studio Ghibli movie But it’s not straight up the middle when the people watching it for the
⏹️ ▶️ John first time are Marco and Casey. So An ATP member, please
⏹️ ▶️ John check out this episode May not be exactly what you expect, but I think we
⏹️ ▶️ John we delve into the movie In a way that you probably haven’t heard before because
⏹️ ▶️ John the other two people on the show are first-timers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm I think it was quite interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was it was something so yeah, so please feel free to check that out atp.fm.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can join for a month, you can join for a year, you can join for a month just to get this one episode and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget to cancel. Oopsie doopsies, no problem there. So do what you got to do, but we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encourage you, especially in this genuinely trying time when it comes to podcast advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be lovely if you had a few bucks to send our way. We would appreciate it. We try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do good stuff for you. I don’t want to make any any promises about future HP member episodes. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do intend to do them maybe once every month or two is our goal. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t mean we’ll succeed, but that’s the goal. We’ve been kicking around some other ideas that are not Movie Club. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will return to the Movie Club well. But we are trying to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inventive and creative, even though that’s not necessarily in our wheelhouse. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will actually be talking a little bit more about this probably in the post-show. But anyways, hp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can join us in watching or discussing at least My Neighbor Totoro.
⏹️ ▶️ John And keep in mind that if you join up, even if you’re just joining up to hear this one episode, like it’s a monthly membership
⏹️ ▶️ John at minimum. You can listen to all of the member special episodes in that time. There’s only like what, four or five of them at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. So you’re not that far behind and you’d be getting your money’s worth even if you just pay for one month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you have access to everything that we’ve ever done as a member of anything. The full feed, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t just from the time you sign up forward. You have access to everything that we’ve done in the past. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, feel free, help yourself, and then just, yeah, kind of forget to cancel. You’d be shocked how bad the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad market has been so far this year. So you know, we’re fine. Don’t worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about us. But if you’ve been on the fence about becoming a member, this is the great time to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, selfishly, it would be lovely. There are six episodes. There are five movie club episodes, the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trilogy, if you will. And then the oopsie doopsie, we never watched Hunt for October
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and oopsie doopsie, we never watched a Ghibli movie. and then the frozen dinner fiasco, which we may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never live down. So there’s plenty of good stuff for you to check out if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re interested. Moving on. Let’s go.
HDMI Quick Media Switching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some follow up. And John, there’s maybe good news, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not about HDMI quick media switching in action on an Apple TV 4K. Tell me about this, please. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we talked about it when the new Apple TV 4K came out and had support for this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we discussed the technology involved a little bit. And then the capper was, unfortunately no
⏹️ ▶️ John television support this feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got it on your Apple TV box, but it’s pointless. Well, now it’s 2023. the 2023
⏹️ ▶️ John crop of televisions have come out, and several of them do support quick media switching.
⏹️ ▶️ John What this is supposed to do for you is make it so that when the television switches something
⏹️ ▶️ John about the picture it displays, it switches from 1080 to 4K, it switches from 60
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second to 24, it switches from SDR to HDR, if it does any of those things,
⏹️ ▶️ John most modern televisions will black out the screen, kind of like it’s an old CRT or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it go all black, and then it waits a couple seconds, maybe a couple three, a couple four seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then it will come back on with whatever the new settings are. This is relevant because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you use my recommended settings on the Apple TV that tell you to match frame rate and
⏹️ ▶️ John match, what is it called, match dynamic range or whatever, that means any time you switch
⏹️ ▶️ John between one mode and another, you will get that black screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that happens surprisingly often because probably when you’re using the Apple TV initially, you’re just on the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re going through the menus and you can pick what you want the menus to be displayed in, you know, like the little grid of all the icons,
⏹️ ▶️ John all your different apps on your Apple TV. You can pick if you want that to be in 1080 and 4K and SDR and HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But it doesn’t matter what you pick because chances are good that when you launch an app and start
⏹️ ▶️ John watching something in the app, it will be different than what you picked because I think, actually, I think your
⏹️ ▶️ John only choice, well, I guess it’s not your only choice, but the default choice that most people do, for example, 60 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second for the thing where you see the apps and stuff like why would you put that in 24 frames per second?
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be weird, but again no matter what you pick if you watch a TV show That’s probably not gonna be 24
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second if you watch a movie It probably will be 24 frames per second is the show you’re watching HDR is the show you’re watching
⏹️ ▶️ John SDR there’s gonna be a mode switch somewhere in your future and that induces a
⏹️ ▶️ John Black black screen and a couple seconds of wait and that is annoying And the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John recommend that having that feature on even though that You know black screen is annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John is because to do otherwise would be to pick a mode and you know A dynamic range thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and just watch everything in that so you say 60 frames per second HDR Everything’s gonna be like that Well, everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not 60 frames per second HDR And if you ask your television or your Apple TV to convert
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to 60 frames per second HDR It’ll do it and it will look awful. All right, no
⏹️ ▶️ John matter what you pick pick 24 SDR Pick it like it’s going to be incorrect for some show
⏹️ ▶️ John So you do want it to switch but you don’t want to wait Quick media switching was
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory some part of the HDMI spec that was supposed to help with this But as we said the last time we discussed it, the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing it helps with is when you change Framerate, that’s it
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you change any other aspects of the thing if you change from 1080 to 4k or back if you change from SDR
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR, you still get a black screen. So I was kind of disappointed in that standard, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, let’s wait to see it comes out when it comes out on TV, what it’s like. So now it’s out in a TV, we’ll put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes to a YouTube video so you can see it in action with an Apple TV 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John on a new 2023 LG television. And when you
⏹️ ▶️ John switch only resolution, no black screen, thumbs up, you know, it still does like a crossfade
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but at least the screen doesn’t go completely black and you have to wait right when you do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else black screen but and i don’t understand this but you can see the results
⏹️ ▶️ John in the video for yourself if you have quick media switching enabled on this particular LG television
⏹️ ▶️ John and it goes to the black screen to switch modes the black screen is up for less
⏹️ ▶️ John time than if you don’t have quick media switching on that makes no sense to me because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you change something other than uh what do you call it, frame rate, quick media switching shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John involved, and yet it is. So you can see the results. It also puts up a big, this LG television puts
⏹️ ▶️ John up a big gray banner that says quick media switching or something. It’s like, and it defeats the purpose. I don’t need to see a banner.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just do it. Don’t, anyway. So the struggle continues
⏹️ ▶️ John for actual timely, fast switching. And I guess we kind of just
⏹️ ▶️ John got that with the ARM-based Macs. Remember we were talking about when the M1 Macs first came out, how
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly they change resolution and how we were used to the idea that on the Intel Max, of course, your screen’s gonna blank
⏹️ ▶️ John out for a second. And when they didn’t do that and it was like instant, we’re like, wow, this is great. We’re still waiting for the
⏹️ ▶️ John day that TVs do that. But in the meantime, it seems like quick media switching is
⏹️ ▶️ John a slight, very slight upgrade from not having it. So if you happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a fancy new Apple TV 4K, you happen to be in the market to buy a new television 2023,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess look for one with quick media switching and then just wait with the rest of us for the next five to 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John when HDMI standards catch up with what we want them to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’ll see what happens. But I was, like you said, I was super disappointed that it was only for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was it, frame rate, you said? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was. And everything else, it was the exact same thing that we-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But not the exact same,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s faster black screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s what’s so weird. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right. And the other thing, the reason it’s only frame rate is because it’s built on VRR, variable refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate, which is a feature of HDMI where with it’s mostly for gaming like when you’re doing when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re playing a game instead of having the game demanding that the game produce 60 frames every second
⏹️ ▶️ John you can and uh and refreshing the screen at 60 frames per second um instead you can
⏹️ ▶️ John the television or the screen or whatever says to the game just give me a frame when it’s ready right you know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you if you don’t have a frame ready when you’re supposed to don’t worry i won’t refresh the screen i’ll just wait for you to give me the frame that’s variable
⏹️ ▶️ John refresh rate so uh since they already had that feature implemented, it’s a many, many years old feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John They already had that implemented. You can think of changing from 24 frames per second to 60 as
⏹️ ▶️ John a weird kind of variable refresh rate, where it’s like 24, 20, 20, 24, and then 60. And so the hardware and software to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John was already built in, so they could build this on top of it, which basically makes quick media switching.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like they didn’t really do any work. They’re like, well, we’ve already got VRR. Can we just do something with that? Sure, we’ll call it quick media
⏹️ ▶️ John switching. It’s basically VR,
⏹️ ▶️ John for your television. Anyway, disappointing, but you know, it’s HDMI, what do you expect?
Threaded-rod follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you have all sorts of new figurative and potentially literal tools
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your tool chest with regard to destroying and recreating your own custom furniture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, my little story about cutting some threaded rod to shrink some furniture that I bought
⏹️ ▶️ John resonated with a lot of people. The most common suggestion I got was a better place
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy threaded rod and other things. I bought mine from like Grainger.com or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John recommended McMaster-Car. It’s McMaster.com. M-C-M-A-S-T-E-R.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John They sell stuff like that. Threaded rod, fasteners, or whatever. Very popular company. Everybody who wrote in about them
⏹️ ▶️ John loves them, says this is where you should get the stuff. I did look, and they did have threaded rod. The price
⏹️ ▶️ John was similar to what I paid. They didn’t have stainless steel though, which is kind of what I preferred as opposed to like
⏹️ ▶️ John zinc coated whatever. But anyway, that’s the website people recommended. Sean
⏹️ ▶️ John Cameron was one of many people to recommend Tool lending services.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody said this was well expressed. As a fellow technologist who is tool inclined
⏹️ ▶️ John and having a lot of the same predilections as John about how things should be around the house, I also find myself holding back on buying all
⏹️ ▶️ John sorts of tools, including vices, as in things that squish things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to mention that many communities have either workshop spaces or tool lending libraries through
⏹️ ▶️ John which you can get access to specific tools for a specific job. This is a much better approach than spending money your own version of
⏹️ ▶️ John a tool that you only need once or twice. And then, what’s this? CC Helberg
⏹️ ▶️ John tooted to say, I couldn’t find one near you, but tool ending libraries are a thing for both woodworking and more,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also for things like specialized shaped baking dishes or even fly fishing kits. I’ve seen everything from apparel tools,
⏹️ ▶️ John drill bits, ladders, garden tools, and even a cement mixer in them. And the website, which we’ll link in the show notes, is localtools.org
⏹️ ▶️ John slash find. Many people sent me this URL while also noting that they could not find any near me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco guess it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere, but check around you, it may be nearby. That would be a good idea if
⏹️ ▶️ John I cared a lot more about cutting some threaded rod. You know, again, I got
⏹️ ▶️ John the job done. It would have taken me more than a day to find this place, drive to it, and see if they had something for me, and then return it, and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. So probably not appropriate for what I was doing, but very handy for other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does save you from having to buy a tool. And finally, lots of people suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I already knew about but did not employ, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is when cutting threaded rod and you don’t want to screw up the threads with your hacksaw or whatever, one trick is to
⏹️ ▶️ John thread one or two nuts onto the threaded rod, either having two nuts tightened against each
⏹️ ▶️ John other or two nuts with a gap between them so that you’re basically protecting the threaded rod with a metal
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is fixed in place and also after you finish cutting through it with your
⏹️ ▶️ John hacksaw pressed against one of the nuts, then you back the nut off of the threaded rod and
⏹️ ▶️ John that will, you know, smooth out any burrs that are on the threaded rod, you know, to get it, you know, so the thing goes
⏹️ ▶️ John on and off. All good ideas. I did not have any nuts to put on the threaded rod. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can just buy one of those at McMaster. Yeah, I could have, but now I’m ordering another thing, waiting for it to come, or I’m going to another home
⏹️ ▶️ John store and looking for an M6 1.0 nut and buying a bag of them for for $5 and that I’m never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna use again, and yada, yada, yada. Anyway, I cut it by hand and I survived. So thank
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you for the suggestions, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to cut more than one piece of threaded rod, get a vise. Get a vise, get some nuts to
⏹️ ▶️ John fit on it, get a new hacksaw blade. I guess don’t do what I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only on this show do we have threaded rod follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Indeed. And everybody wanted me to buy a hacksaw blade. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a hacksaw blade, they’re $2. They’re $6, you know, they’re not $2, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a tough ad market. We can’t be buying hacksaw blades every week.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Yeah, no, they’re not. Yeah, you can buy a new one all the time. I should probably get a new one, but you know, again, I was
⏹️ ▶️ John just at the home store for ThreadRod. I didn’t think to look for hacksaw blades. Then you got to take the old one off and blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah. Next time I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use my hacksaw, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely do it. But truthfully, I thought the hacksaw blade was not as in rough shape
⏹️ ▶️ John as it was because like, how often do I use it, but I had forgotten that this, I think this hacksaw was like
⏹️ ▶️ John from my father-in-law’s tool collection, so it had seen a lot of use before it even got to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now I was under the impression that it was actually a newish hacksaw with a newish blade, and I was wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad we have that resolved.
Camrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Josh Calvetti writes with regard to camera apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as in, you know, for physical cameras and geotagging and things. Josh writes, when I was shooting Sony about a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year ago, I was using CamRote, I’m assuming that’s like camera mode or something, anyway, for geotagging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and control of my A6600, much more user-friendly and stable than the official Sony app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it doesn’t require you to sign up for anything. And that’s C-A-M-R-O-T-E.app on the web. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a lot of third-party apps as we were complaining about first-party apps, like the apps from Fuji or Sony or whatever and how terrible they
⏹️ ▶️ John are. There are actually a lot of third party apps that will work with various brands of camera and as you would imagine, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all, you know, much, much better than the first party ones. I actually did try this camera thing. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John occasion to use my big camera in geotagging. Like I’m just using it around the house. I guess I could still geotag
⏹️ ▶️ John those, but I can geotag those manually too because I’m literally in my house. But next time I go, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John on my next outing, I’m definitely gonna use that because I said before, I can’t actually sync both of my Sony cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John with my phone because the stupid Sony app only lets you sync one camera at a time. So I will try the third party one and we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how it goes.
More Samsung camera tricks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then speaking of cameras, but this time ones within phones, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Samsung fun hasn’t ended yet. You can opt into, so this is different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the moon discussion we had a couple of weeks back. The moon thing was happening just kind of automagically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can also opt into quote-unquote remastering photos. And according
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to one person, and the Verge picked this up, and they said that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they weren’t able to recreate it themselves. But nevertheless, according to this one person, they took pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their baby and then tried this remaster thing. And this very gummy baby suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had teeth because the remaster thing kind of just thought, Oh, that, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that human should have teeth there. And, uh, it’s, it’s a little creepy. I think it’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not as a dramatic problem or difference, perhaps is a better word for it as the whole moon thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s definitely a little weird and kind of funny. So there’s a link in the show notes to the verge that covers all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this has some gifts that you can look at It’s it’s it’s something else.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the moon feature is on by default I’m not sure if this one is but this is definitely the type of thing where if you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John notice it and Then went back years later, especially if it like burns it into your picture, you know Like if you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to the original
⏹️ ▶️ John captured by the camera or whatever you’re like, how does this you know? Three week old baby have teeth.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the magic of Samsung Tom.
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Siri shortcut conflict
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And then we have some information. Did we cover the true Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience? I didn’t think we covered this on the show. Did we?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was the title of the last episode and we covered this exact thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco couldn’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the details, but then I revisited it or whatever. It was the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey person asking Siri for the weather.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just got a HomePod and they said, I just tried to ask it the weather and all it said was done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. My mistake. So anyway, so with regard to that, Benjamin Mayo wrote and had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really good point. Benjamin wrote, Siri having just said done implies that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s running a shortcut. Do you happen to have a Siri shortcut in your library? Benjamin was talking to the person who originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey posted this. Do you happen to have a shortcut in your library that has a name similar to weather? It might be getting confused and running the shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead of actually looking at the weather. And the original poster Nairobi wrote back and said, I sure did. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two that seemed to have no real purpose. I deleted them and Siri seems to be able to answer me now consistently even,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is good news. So as much as I love crapping on Siri, it turns out this one was a legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ John But that’s not a situation where you’re like, yeah, there is a problem, but how would anyone figure that
⏹️ ▶️ John out? You know, like you just, you ask, you know that you’re able to ask the HomePod what the weather
⏹️ ▶️ John is. You do that and it does something different. Like what’s your next debugging step? Are you gonna know that you have some
⏹️ ▶️ John random shortcut that happens to have, you know, it’s called check the weather or something because you clicked on some
⏹️ ▶️ John link that you forgot about a year ago. It’s the debug ability of voice assistant, the discoverability we’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John before of like, what can I actually say to you is not great. And then when something goes
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong, like what do you do to figure out what the problem is? Cause there’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the interface is talking and uh, you know, if it doesn’t understand what’s the weather, the idea that it’s going to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John you conversing to it about what went wrong is, you know, probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly likely. although this next item has more on that topic.
Making Siri better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So somebody put together basically chat GPT inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an iOS shortcut, which is kind of bananas. And there’s a really interesting, unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s on Medium, but there’s a really interesting post about this and there’s a video included as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is fascinating. And from the way the video was edited, and I think there was a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complimentary or aggressive editing on this video, I think, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way the video is edited, It is darn impressive. So the person whose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name I don’t have in front of me wrote, I explained everything in plain English. Oh, I’m sorry. So this is with regard to how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did they put or hang all this together? And so apparently what this person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to do was have chat GPT basically interpret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their verbal commands and turn it into a JSON payload that could be sent on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to other things. And so how did they convince chat GPT to do this? Well, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally explained it to them. So now, quoting from this post, I explained everything in plain English. I described the types of requests,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exact structure of the response, and asked it to behave like a sentient AI, giving advice even for personal questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also provided a few details about time, location, and the devices in rooms in the house. From this, we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receive a perfectly structured message, and that’s all there is to programming it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was no direct specification of, here’s an example, JSON. It was just build a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JSON object that has keys and values and so on and so forth. It’s nuts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s an example here, an example command, quote, I sent my son to bed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read for another 20 minutes. Can you switch off the lights in his room when it’s time to sleep? And sure enough, this works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so in this case, GPT-3 understood that it is probably the bedroom that needs switching off. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey added the correct timestamp, which is 20 minutes after the time we pass the request. And you can see a little sample JSON there. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this done without actually writing any code, at least on the chat GPT side.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I guess the other end of this was like some bananas, just bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complex shortcut, iOS shortcut that processes this JSON and takes action
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s like sending it to Home Assistant or something. So the reason I put this in here, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason everyone was sending this to me is because it’s exactly what I described in the last episode when I talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John how useful is chat GPT to making Siri better, essentially. And I said, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John one thing you could do with it is have it interpret what the person
⏹️ ▶️ John is saying and then translate it to the very, very limited and rigid structured vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ John of Siri. Because that seems to be the stumbling point. Like you have to phrase things in a certain way for them to work with Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this with like, you know, adding new words, taking six weeks to rebuild the database and everything. Siri can understand
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of things that you say, but every single one of those had to be thought of and explicitly put into Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John by a person. You know, the number of variations are not infinite. You could never say something to Siri like,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, Dingus, I sent my son to bed to read for 20 minutes. Can you switch off the lights in his room when it’s time to sleep?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, Siri will not make heads or tails of that. It’d be like, that’s not one of the forms that I know how to parse.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no idea what you’re talking about. Or it’ll make a bad guess or terrible things will go wrong, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that you have one of these large language models sitting in front of Siri, listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to what you say, figuring out, and in this case, once it figures out what you want, also formulating a JSON
⏹️ ▶️ John message that it then sends to like Home Assistant or some other thing, or translates into the form
⏹️ ▶️ John that Siri understands it. Because the chat GPT thing, like the large language model figured
⏹️ ▶️ John out, you probably mean the kid’s bedroom, 20 minutes from now means that’s when it should happen and you want the lights to go off.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it figured all of that out. And then it can issue a command, hey dingus in 20 minutes turn the lights off
⏹️ ▶️ John in the bedroom and that Siri can understand that. I don’t necessarily think layering things
⏹️ ▶️ John in that way is the best approach for Apple, but at the very least it is a way to take two things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have now, Siri, that can do a bunch of things as long as you phrase it in
⏹️ ▶️ John one of a very long list of ways, and large language models that can
⏹️ ▶️ John take a bunch of input text and figure out the most likely output text for it
⏹️ ▶️ John that fits, you know, the prompt and everything, and sew those two things together.
⏹️ ▶️ John The video is a little bit janky because obviously having to run a shortcut is not the same as being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to say, hey, dingus, and shortcuts take time to run. You can see the edit points in the thing where it’s not as seamless
⏹️ ▶️ John as you could imagine. But of course, if Apple implemented this, they wouldn’t make you run a shortcut to do it. They would fuse this into
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri and they say, oh, Siri 2 now powered by quote unquote AI. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be better, right? Cause we don’t care what’s happening. We don’t care that under the covers, it’s a language model translating
⏹️ ▶️ John it into a very text adventure style thing. All we know is that now
⏹️ ▶️ John we are able to say more things and actually get what we want from them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I mean, it was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impressive. Honestly, I would even take just simpler things. Make Siri work every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just, it fails in such weird, stupid ways so often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, this is, you know, I go on a roller coaster up and down with what I currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about my HomePods, as I have for the entire lifetime of these products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And I’m currently at a bit of a down phase in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the functionality of Siri and Apple music. Like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, it’s so buggy. It’s so unreliable. These are brand new products. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, they’re so buggy. Like now they’re faster in their bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they behave buggy faster, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still, and it’s, Can somebody like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow, somehow make sure that Tim Cook listens to music every single day using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stereo pair of HomePods and operating them via Siri? Like somehow, someone make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happen. Like somehow, in some non-creepy way, replace all the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing equipment in Tim Cook’s home and office, again in a non-creepy way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with stereo pairs of HomePods. And just make sure that he has to operate them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single day. And let’s see if maybe this product can’t get a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That or use Apple Music in any platform for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any reason. Well, because that’s using Apple Music. Like I seriously doubt he’s a Spotify user. So you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s going to be using Apple Music via Siri. This will be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure. I’m not sure if his main motivational driver is how frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John he finds the products. Steve Jobs, sure, if something went wrong for him,
⏹️ ▶️ John make it his mission in life to make sure that that gets fixed because he is embarrassed to be shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would burn the world down until it was fixed. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John at least he would try until he gets bored and moves on to something else. But anyway, I feel like Tim Cook’s reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John would be to look at how the HomePod is selling. And if sales seem in line with projections,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I guess everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but see, and again, the HomePod’s one part of this. This is why we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep harping on, hey, Siri has to be better. And not only in these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cleverness ways, like as we are seemingly in full swing now of the AI revolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, the expectations people have are gonna keep going up for how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart they expect it to be. But also, it still doesn’t get the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. It still is unreliable and slow and does stupid things with basic requests very frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And inconsistent is another big problem that it has. It’s very inconsistent. You know, Apple is not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna fall behind in competitive expectations of assistants as they all move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more into AI stuff, but also, Apple is about to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch a brand new product that seems like it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big bet the company is making, that also by all accounts seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it might be pretty heavily relying on Siri for certain functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How are they gonna do that if Siri continues to have the reputation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of seeming to work a lot better in Apple executives’ homes than in any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house in the world? I don’t know anybody for whom Siri works as well as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to think it works. And this is gonna hold them back. It’s gonna keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding them back. Imagine the products that they envision. I mean, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously I’m talking about VR headset thing, but you know, also look at things like AirPods, or the Apple Watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the phone, or the HomePod. All of their products now involve Siri in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to varying extents, some more reliant on it than others. If they try to launch a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that depends heavily on Siri, they’re going to present it one way, and you know, that’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, and it’ll seem like everything is awesome and works, but then when we actually get the product, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have all these weird inconsistencies and shortcomings and that’s going to make the product itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look and work badly. Siri is such a fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technology to Apple’s modern product line and they keep only leaning more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that over time and for the amount that they are relying on Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the operation and success of their products they seem to be allowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be a very poor performer in quality. They care so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about so many of the details and the fundamental technologies their products depend on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then Siri is just miserable. Like and I don’t understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t seem to put a higher priority on making that fundamental technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as good as it can be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I almost wonder if it’s because when you’re on the inside you see how the sausage is made or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not depending on how you want to look at it and you know, maybe they all know it’s trash,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they can explain it away. Well, it’s garbage because blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, it’s garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because politics it’s garbage because, you know, servers it’s garbage, garbage because any number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of reasons. And I mean, it, I’ve been told from anyone I know that works
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or has worked at Apple that they are their own biggest critic, which I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe, but golly, from an outsider’s point of view, and we’re going to be talking about this a lot later from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an outsider’s point of view, we sure can’t tell because Siri sure ain’t getting better. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keyboard on my phone still wants to change W E L L to W E apostrophe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey L L and vice versa. No matter what I do, it’s always choosing the wrong one. Like it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure doesn’t look like anyone cares from the outside. And at some point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, everyone has a different line, but at some point people are going to stop being like, well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s okay. At some point, it’s just going to be so frustrating that people are going to stop using these products. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have HomePods or any other voice cylinder in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the Amazon one got way too chatty and all it wants to do is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have me talk to it and advertise things to me and so on and so forth. By the way. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I never wanted a HomePod originally because they were too expensive. And then later,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just didn’t feel like it was solving a need I have. And now I certainly don’t want any because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a Sonos fan boy, nobody even wants to hear me talk about it anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the HomePod, to your point, Margo, if the HomePod and Siri were amazing, if they were really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and truly great, I would probably have one in the house. I haven’t tried the Google stuff and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t feel like this is a need I need to fill. And maybe the Google stuff is great and I’m waiting for John to pipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in as soon as I’ve stopped talking. If Siri was amazing, I would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a HomePod by now, but why would I spend a pile of money for a HomePod, even leaving aside the Sonos stuff? Why would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I spend a pile of money on a HomePod when one of the marquee features never frigging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey works from everything I’ve ever heard? Like, why would I do that? It just seems bananas. I know, John, tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m a dummy and that I should get some Google stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this last week, like with the difficulty of Siri. It’s one of the downsides of being early
⏹️ ▶️ John in the market. Like, Apple was pretty early with a voice assistant heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated into its product family that does voice assistancy things, right? Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John was 2011 or whatever, as we discussed. And people who come later with
⏹️ ▶️ John using different, entirely different approaches to solving this problem, like the large language models, which,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, give you capabilities that Siri does not have, although there are, like we said, there are still gaps that a
⏹️ ▶️ John large language model can’t do that Siri can do. So, you know, but anyway, using more modern technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re later to the market and you missed out on all those years of having products with these features. But you get to
⏹️ ▶️ John start with a newer, better technology that’s on a faster, you know, trajectory. Like it could
⏹️ ▶️ John be that whatever, however series made is like sort of an evolutionary dead end in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of how it’s structured and programmed. And there are a bunch of new branches going off in other directions. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and for Apple to say, okay, well, Apple was early and they had this other thing, but now
⏹️ ▶️ John they can just use the new thing. Well, the problem for Apple is they can’t replace Siri with something built on new technology
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it can pretty much do everything that Siri does because you don’t want to have a regression where it’s like, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be able to use Siri to do these hundred things, but now we have a new quote unquote AI powered
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, but it can do one fifth of the stuff. So they’ve kind of, you know, again, it’s the curse of being early. You
⏹️ ▶️ John build up all this functionality, Siri, for all we can plan about it, is integrated into so many products and
⏹️ ▶️ John it can do so many different things. And even though we don’t use all those things, someone out there is relying on the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, you know, ask Syria to predict the temperature in a different country,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a month from now or something. And then if you come out with a new one that’s powered by AI and it can’t do that, they’ve lost
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality. So Apple has a difficult kind of like it was with the operating system. If you build
⏹️ ▶️ John an operating system before, like memory protection and preemptive multitasking are common. You build this huge customer base and all these
⏹️ ▶️ John apps built on it. Yeah, you got all those years of good money. But now when it comes time to have a modern operating system,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone who starts from scratch right now can build an operating system with all those features from
⏹️ ▶️ John day one, whereas you have to kind of retrofit it and it’s a more difficult task. So it’s not that bad with Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it is actually a challenge to use better, more modern technologies to make a better
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri while also sort of replacing all the functionalities. You have to kind of do a piecemeal
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, well, excuse me. Well, unbeknownst to you, when you ask this,
⏹️ ▶️ John we take this path in the code and we all go off into the new like large language from all things, but when you ask anything else, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Siri path and they slowly replace it from the inside. Like this is just basic, you know, software engineering, product
⏹️ ▶️ John management stuff, but it is difficult. And I hope something like that is happening
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple. Like there is lots of motion in the sort of AI section of the company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Granted, a lot of it has been related to ML, which was the other buzzword before AI, you know, machine learning.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve seen lots of ML powered features being built into Apple’s applications and
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, particularly around the camera and, you know, or any of this stuff, even the keyboard auto-compute that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining about was quote unquote ML powered, you know, and it doesn’t seem to be working out that well, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been doing things. It just seems like the things they’ve been doing have not been Siri. Siri’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been sitting there being what it is, taking six weeks to rebuild its database in 2014, hopefully that’s better now,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not really getting better, better. So, I mean, maybe this is the new thing that will be, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have all these like five to 10 year projects that we talk about in this program of like, when is Apple gonna do X? And eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John they do do it. And every time that happens, someone says like, well, now what are you gonna complain about? Now that you’ve got the Mac Pro, now what are you
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna complain about? And you got
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this, when you got that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s always something. And Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of bubbling up to the top as the long-term thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple needs to deal with. They got a new file system, the Mac Pro that they build a new one, but then they forget about it for five years
⏹️ ▶️ John and we freak out again. So that’ll be evergreen. But like, they have a laptop CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t overheat that are really fast, low power. Like they did a lot of the things, they fixed the keyboard, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They knocked out a lot of these things. They got a new operating system with memory detection and preemptive multitasking, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s always something else. And it seems like Siri, it might be the long pole, at least until
⏹️ ▶️ John the headset arrives and we have a whole new thing to complain about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which apparently is going to be in early June, but we’re gonna talk about that. Aye yi yi. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where are we? I feel like we got, oh, the chat GPT thing, right. So anything else on that before we move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey along? I think we’ve covered it. All right.
Bing AI licensing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft has threatened to restrict data from rival AI search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools, according to Bloomberg. Bloomberg writes, Microsoft has threatened to cut off access to its internet search
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products. The company has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index to feed their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Whoopsies. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this before in the context of like artists having their artwork used
⏹️ ▶️ John as training data, you know, and whether that whether that is legal, whether it should be legal, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it is ethical. And you know, how these things are going to work themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John out in court cases depends largely on who the litigants are. And in this case, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of big companies, Microsoft and the other companies that is licensing stuff to. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John surprisingly, a big company thinks it’s perfectly fine for them to trade their large language
⏹️ ▶️ John models on every single thing they can find on the internet, but not fine for somebody else to
⏹️ ▶️ John use their search index stuff to train their models. So everyone wants, I, you know, I, big
⏹️ ▶️ John corporation should be able to get any data I want and use it to train my thing. But once I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done that, nobody can use what I’ve generated to train
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco their thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve created value. See what I’ve done there? can’t use mine to train your thing. And it kind of gets into the whole thing
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, you know, the, you know, the, uh, what do you call it? Argument added serum or whatever it is where you extend
⏹️ ▶️ John something to an absurd degree. Like, well, if there’s no humans create anything, it’s just AI’s creating things and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not allowed to train off each other’s data. Eventually they all just shrivel and die in place because no one wants to share their data
⏹️ ▶️ John and no one is producing any new data and you’ve already trained on everything else. And they just sort of like, I don’t know, it’s like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, uh, you know, AI inbreeding where they just shrivel up and become little
⏹️ ▶️ John shells of themselves. So yeah, this there was one of the story that I actually didn’t put out like the US copyright
⏹️ ▶️ John offices forming a committee to discuss forming a committee to discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John researching whatever they’re doing something about like the the legality of copyright and
⏹️ ▶️ John AI training or whatever but unsurprisingly big companies think that
⏹️ ▶️ John they should get everything and nobody should get what they do and Microsoft is trying to enforce that in their contracts and we’ll see how this
⏹️ ▶️ John all plays out but yeah it’s it’s great when this stuff is up and coming and it’s like a free for all and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, nobody minds. It’s just an academic project. Oh, this is new and exciting. Nobody really cares. But then all of a sudden when
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s real money to be made and people are making products are like, wait a second, these, as I said before, these products
⏹️ ▶️ John have no value without good data to train them on. Where does that good data come from?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what relationship is there between the data that you’re training on and the product that you make from it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Microsoft, you know, is saying like, if we train on a bunch of this data, you can’t take the stuff that we’ve trained
⏹️ ▶️ John to train your training. It’s like, you know, because people are putting AI generated
⏹️ ▶️ John images on the web and like in tweets and stuff like that. And then other, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John image generation AIs are trained, are being trained on images generated from other AI things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But they say, whoa, whoa, you can’t train on those. There’s the product of our machine learning. You can only train on things
⏹️ ▶️ John from actual human artists. You can steal that, no one cares about them. But once Microsoft uses our
⏹️ ▶️ John technology to generate some of that, you can’t train on that. It’s in our contract. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a bunch of court cases surrounding this or whatever. So it is rapidly heading towards what will
⏹️ ▶️ John surely be a series of terrible court decisions that we will complain about on the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John not. I just love the idea of like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon all like legally barring each
⏹️ ▶️ John other from looking at any of each other. Don’t let your larger language models look at any of my data. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, your data is tainted and we own your whole company. It’s like, hey, no, that’s not fair. And then they’ll probably do what
⏹️ ▶️ John they do with patents and everything is they just have these cross-license agreements, which are like, look, this is annoying. We all hate it. Let’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, have a giant patent cross-licensing agreement that says we all agree we can use each other’s patents because the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John patent system is incredibly dumb and would destroy the entire industry if it was, you know, if it was allowed to play
⏹️ ▶️ John out. So instead we’ll just say, we giant companies agree to ignore the patents. We’ll only use them to crush small
⏹️ ▶️ John companies. America.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yay. Oh my word. You are so right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have been.
WWDC announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey semi-breaking news WWDC has been announced. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be a week long Asterisk it is going to be as we all foretold June 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through 9 It will be in Cupertino in it. Well sort of but mostly online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in in the same vein as last year and again as foretold there will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a special event the Monday June 5th at Apple Park where you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can sign up to get, I believe it’s a free ticket if you leave aside the fact you have to travel there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can request to attend. They will accept requests until April 4th at 9 o’clock in the morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pacific or noon Eastern time. And they’re gonna do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presumably similar to what they did last year. And I put my name in the hat, we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely don’t know whether the three of us are gonna be there or not and we don’t necessarily need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about that right today. But I’m hopeful that all three of us would be there because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen you two at all, literally not once since WWDC 2019, and that is too damn long. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll figure that out amongst ourselves. But I am excited that there are dates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited that there’s a pretty good chance that I think all three of us will be there. So I’m just excited. This is good news.
⏹️ ▶️ John You think there’s a pretty good chance? Well, so we just got done complaining about Apple and Siri, and we are about to complain
⏹️ ▶️ John even more about Apple. But in between, This is like the reverse of a sh** sandwich. It’s like…
⏹️ ▶️ John In this scenario, the sh** is the bread instead of the meat. In
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle, what I’m going to say is, Hey, Apple, send us press passes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because otherwise it’s a lottery. Like as Apple says, invitations will be allocated by a random selection process.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. And so we’ll find out by April 5th, whether we got the random. I put my name in the hat as well. But like the odds
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t great because it’s not like WWDC. It seems like it’s a smaller number of people. It’s not 5000 people they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John getting invitations to, I don’t think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it seems like it’s exactly like last year. The one day in person at Apple’s campus with the in-person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of keynote presentation and then everything else is online. Basically, the in-person thing, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old conference when everyone was like in the conference center held about 5000 attendees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last year at Apple’s, it seemed to be about 1000, maybe 1500,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like something in that ballpark. I would expect about that same number this year, Maybe a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit more if they could fit it seemed that they might be able to fit a few more people maybe 2000 at most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s probably about as high as you could expect. So, you know, it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same deal as last year, basically, some people will get there for that one day thing. If you can’t get there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really need to worry about missing much of anything because all the content will be online,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’m very happy with that, honestly, because I you know, I think this new format that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know COVID kind of forced them into this new format. But we were kind of heading in this direction for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and COVID just forced them to make it like the premium like primary experience. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so much better, honestly, than the old conference sessions like that were that were performed in person,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just by the nature of what they can do with this new format. Like it’s it’s so much better as a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource. And so I am very, very happy that they are continuing to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, you you know, downtown San Jose, most of the stores you liked are closed. And there weren’t that many to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were only like three or four as it was and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like the sausage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey place isn’t a sausage place anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They brought the sausage back, I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there’s like a sausage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s more of like a burger place now. At least the vegan Indian place is still there and it’s still amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at least it was last summer. I don’t know if it’s still there now. I hope so. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John might take a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinner trip there this year if I can. But anyway, I’m very happy they’re doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format again because it worked really well last year. And even though it’s not the same as the old conference in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like there, there are, there’s way less reason for a lot of people to gather there in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person. And because it’s held at Apple’s campus, which is not even itself downtown San
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jose, like it’s close, but it’s not in downtown San Jose. And there is almost nothing around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s campus besides like houses and other office buildings. There’s not really like a downtown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area to congregate. only a couple a handful of small hotels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know so there’s not much of like a community gathering really going on there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s a much smaller events for the in-person people that being said as I said under the radar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week if you have the opportunity to go and if you can swing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost and logistics of going I would suggest it just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of a cool pilgrimage for Apple fans like it’s it’s cool to go there It’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing to actually walk into Apple Park and to see the actual,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the big circle building to be in that, you know, tremendous cafeteria, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auditorium atrium kind of thing. Like it’s a it’s an amazing experience to see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. It’s a beautiful building. It’s a beautiful environment they built around it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just a really cool feeling to be there with everybody, even though you’re just watching the video in all likelihood, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what it was last year. Even if you’re just watching a video and sitting there getting a slow sunburn because you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot to put on the sunscreen that they literally gave you in the bag, please put on the sunscreen. It’s in your bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s in your goodie bag, just put it on. But anyway, it’s cool to be there with everybody. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool to be in the crowd as everyone is seeing stuff for the first time and you get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel the crowd reaction like being at a live event, you know, because it is one. I also find it very helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer, I feel like it actually motivates me a lot. Like when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m there in that environment, it’s like a theme park
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a pilgrimage, as I said earlier, for Apple stuff. And so that actually really motivates me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come home and work really hard on all the stuff they just announced. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout the rest of the summer, the excitement fades. You actually get the beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you realize, wow, the stuff they announced really doesn’t work yet. Or it doesn’t do what I hoped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would do, or it’s missing some functionality that I hope it will have later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or wow, this is a real pain in the butt having to deal with all these deprecations that just happened, and wow, and now I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change this whole API I’ve been using back here for the last 10 years because they just changed it or killed it or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there’s all this kind of like grind or pain in the butt stuff that you have to deal with later in the summer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at that point, at the very first day that everything’s unveiled, when you’re there that week or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that day, it’s all fun. It’s all like, wow, look at this, it’s so amazing, Everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited and everything’s positive because no one’s found all the crap yet. And it’s just a really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience to be there. And it is very motivating as a developer to go there. So I do strongly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommend, I mean, look, if you don’t live anywhere near California, that’s gonna be a lot of expense and time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s probably not worth it to you for objective reasons. But if you win
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ticket lottery thing, and if you get the opportunity to go, and if you can handle the cost and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to get there, It’s a fun pilgrimage and a fun event. It’s not anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can put a monetary value on. It’s just fun and motivating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s really great for that. And so it’s recommended if you can swing it. And I’m gonna do my best to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the only reason I’m considering going this year is just to have the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Park experience that everyone had the other year. Because I still don’t really want to be traveling.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t relish being on a plane, breathing other people’s air. I don’t relish doing all that stuff. I don’t relish
⏹️ ▶️ John getting COVID again, many, many reasons that I would be very unlikely to go. But considering
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw everybody go all last year and how much fun they had, I think it’s worth it for me to do as an experience. Because who knows
⏹️ ▶️ John how many more times they’ll do it in this exact format. And who knows how long Apple Park will be the way it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. So I want to visit Apple Park. Of course, I fully expect that if I do end up
⏹️ ▶️ John going, I will be very annoyed by the fact that apparently you’re not allowed to bring real cameras into Apple Park. And I’ll have to
⏹️ ▶️ John take pictures with my iPhone the whole time I’m there. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know, what can you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do? I’m so sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just think of how good those pictures would be. It’s so many beautiful things and I could take cool pictures of peoples and crowds, but
⏹️ ▶️ John nope, not allowed, just iPhone only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it actually say that or is it one of those things where it’s like no detachable lenses? Like there’s a couple of- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically no real cameras. You can use iPhones to take pictures within limited
⏹️ ▶️ John context, but I think the thing last year was no, maybe they did say it as no interchangeable lens
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras, but I feel like they would just basically like no cameras except iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John or no cameras except phones, I guess. That’s probably what they mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember that. I mean, I believe you. I just, I do not remember that being a
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’m misremembering. Someone from Apple can tell me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway, this all- No, I remember it being kind of vague, like because what they basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intend for the rule to be is no professional photography, but that’s hard to codify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so usually it ends up being like no professional cameras and that’s also hard
⏹️ ▶️ John codify. I think they also don’t want you to have zoom lenses because all the walls are glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you have like a big zoom lens, you could like read things off whiteboards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder like, you know, if the rule ends up being like the detachable lens is like, well, could you bring in like the Nikon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco P1000? And like, it’s basically a
⏹️ ▶️ John telescope. Yeah, I know. You bring in a super zoom with an 800 millimeter lens, it’s like, hey, it doesn’t detach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, it’s a 3000 millimeter, but it doesn’t detach.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just bring a Samsung phone, it’ll just make up things on Apple’s whiteboards that seem plausible. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just bring a drone, fly it right up to the edge. I’m sure they won’t mind that or notice that at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure they would love that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you go as press last year, Marco? Or just regular? So I think if you go as press, you get
⏹️ ▶️ John to do and see more stuff. Didn’t they have a day before thing where they showed you the developer center and stuff like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. There was a developer center tour. They were doing various groups for that. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hands-on area after the keynote where we got to see the new MacBook Air. And I got to be in the way of Johnny Ives shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Tim Cook shot, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another reason that Apple should give us press passes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because then all three of us could be in the way for Tim Cook trying to handle the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for the camera shots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ll be too busy talking about all the stuff we did in the hands-on room. We won’t even have time to complain about
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple like we’re about to do. Yes, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I mean, it actually is true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That actually happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word. I don’t know. I mean, WWDC, granted, I haven’t been since 2019, and I miss the event.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Golly, do I miss seeing you two and all of our other mutual friends. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC, least the way I remember it. And granted it is different now, but it is exactly what Marco was describing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a really great event to get you really excited about your work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or about Apple, even if it’s not your work, or if you hope for it to one day become your work. It’s just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super fun. And, and I really hope that all three of us end up there and, and, and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, whether we get press passes or just get very lucky with the lottery or just choose to go because we haven’t seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each other in a long frigging time, one way or another. I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works out. But I don’t know if there’s that much more to say about this now, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excited that they’ve announced it. I’m excited that I have a specific thing to look forward to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m excited that if I fly on Sunday, apparently Richmond has some airline, I forget, like Breeze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something that does direct from Richmond, Virginia to SFO, which is stunning. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unfortunately, I think the return trip is like every other day or something like that. It’s not the day I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take back, but that’s neither here nor there. Um, anyway, I’m just, I’m just excited and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really hope it works out for the three of us. So any, anything else about WWDC? We’ll, we’ll do more about, you know, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things we expect to see when we get closer to time. Uh, we don’t have a merchandise story for ATP for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC yet. We are working on that. Um, no promises, but, uh, anything else about dub dub?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would just say it’s almost, I know this is rich coming from me, it’s almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like seeing a live sports event versus watching it on TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is rich coming from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I can’t even tell you which sport. But no, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the feeling of being there, of actually like actually seeing the building and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being right there with everyone else and, you know, everyone’s cheering together when something good is announced,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the feeling of being there is really cool and really energizing and it’s a great experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And And again, and what you’re paying for, with all the travel logistics and everything, what you’re paying for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that experience. You’re not paying for the developer content, that’s free. But you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying for the coolness of seeing it in person live. That I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the main selling point. And if you can, so that’s why like, if you get in and if you can swing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the travel logistics, it’s pretty cool and you should do it. You don’t have to do it every year, but you should do it at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree. And actually I should point out, as part of the meat in this poo-poo sandwich.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, every Apple employee that I’ve met is awesome. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey individually, Apple people are super great. We may strongly disagree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the decisions and policies of the organization, but pretty much all the rank and, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rank and file people are pretty awesome. I mean, and I can’t think of any examples that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disprove the rule. Like, pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to, both people that I kind of know, people that I do know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even just strangers that I find out, Oh, you work at Apple. They’re all super chill and super cool. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, that, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’d meet any while you’re there, but just being in the proximity gives you a chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, uh, we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, frankly, like, you know, I know we’re not doing like a hiring ad for them really, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all the. Kind of Bay area tech company or any,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the big tech company, I guess, candidates that one could possibly go to work for over on the West
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coast somewhere. I would go to Apple before going to anyone else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s such a cool place and it attracts really good people for a reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a really great place to work and it’s a really cool thing to see. It’s a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team that you work with there. So when you go there, you see. You’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walking through the offices or anything. You don’t see a single desk that somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is working at. Like you’re escorted in with event staff to the lunch area and you sit in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are set up and everything. Like you’re not walking through the design lab or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. But any person you run into there, because you will see a lot of Apple employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, and anybody you can talk to, talk to. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a company that attracts really good people for lots of good reasons. And yeah, it’s again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a heck of an event. I strongly encourage you to go if you can. I understand if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t because it is a huge expense to get most people to California and stay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a hotel for a few days or whatever. I get that, but if you can do it, it’s really cool.
ATP Membership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Consider becoming an ATP member. Members get all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of fun little goodies, number one of which is an ad-free version of the show. You get your own
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bonus things here and there as well as any kind of, you know, mistimed jokes that
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you for just eight bucks a month. Mainly you get the ad free feed and the bootleg feed. Those are the big things.
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Radar/Feedback Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So if you are an Apple person, I need you to tune out and come back to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode after WWDC because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s that time again, fellas. Let’s have a chat about radar because it’s time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just to very, very briefly recap, radar is Apple’s internal tool. It used to be also to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some degree externally visible. Now it’s been replaced from an external perspective by feedback assistant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Radar is their internal tool. It’s their bug tracker or issue tracker, what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is basically the only way that we have as external people to communicate with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is to just throw a radar or really a feedback. We’ll probably use the terms interchangeably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Throw a feedback over the wall where I guess it gets internally turned into a radar and just hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a human eventually looks at it and does something with it. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a deeply hostile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and awful approach to developer relations because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, I can only speak for myself. I presume that Marco, you probably have, and you don’t have to say one way or the other, you probably have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least a couple of contacts in developer relations because you are on the bigger side, especially as an indie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, in terms of, you know, your reach and your company size and so on. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t have anyone- You’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be surprised. Oh, OK. Fair enough. I can tell you, I certainly don’t have any sort of contact in developer relations that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have a question, I can ask them. I have a bunch of contacts that I’ve made completely personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are outside developer relations, just rank and file engineers, that are friends of mine that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made friends with not because I’m trying to use them for any particular reason, just because they’re good people, like we were talking about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I enjoy them. And hopefully, they enjoy me too. But I don’t have any formal contacts within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple for any sort of bugs or questions or anything like that. And if I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, the easiest and best way for me to get an answer is to tweet slash toot about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And most times I’ll get something that’ll either push me in the right direction or maybe even solve my problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if I have a problem, if I have a demonstrated problem with an Apple API,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can put together a feedback, which will almost certainly not get looked at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If it is, I will get asked for sample code. OK, fine. which sometimes though takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours to put together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco This is uncompensated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time by the way. I don’t know what an iOS developer contracts for, but years ago it was like $150 an hour. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure it’s like up around 175, $200 by now. So, many hours of work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to create a sample project for them, which I understand why they ask for it. But we’re talking about an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effective investment if I was going to spend that time contracting myself out of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thousand dollars of my time that could be used putting together a sample project for them to promptly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ignore. You oftentimes get asked for a CIS diagnose, which is basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of diagnostic information. Again, in and of itself, that’s fair, but 90% of the time, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not even necessary or useful. It’s just fricking broken. And you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an experience recently, and I think you were talking about it here on ATP. I don’t think it was under the radar, where you had said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I filed a radar, and it’s something that’s really broken with audio stuff, and if memory serves,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you sent that across the wire and threw it over the fence and you didn’t hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey squat. And this is kind of a big deal, particularly for you, but arguably for Apple in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general. In fact, why don’t I let you interrupt me and can you remind me what that bug was, if you recall?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll dig up the number and put it in the show notes, but effectively it was the 16.4 betas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were having the audio services were reset notification, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a background demon crash. They were having that crash and reset audio services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot whenever I would begin playback and overcast. It was quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a common thing, way more than ever before. It was causing problems like you’d hit play on 16.4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco betas and just it wouldn’t play. And then if you go and check the overcast lock, you’d see, oh, this thing crashed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three times in a row. Cool. And yeah, so it was a big problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I attached sys diagnosis and the reproduction step to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, which was pretty easy. It’s like, play something on Overcast and you’ll see this in the log. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did everything I was supposed to do. And as far as I know, that bug is still open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never heard anything. I think it might be fixed in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last couple of betas and 16.4 is now out, just like as of this week. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is fixed in the release version of 16.4. But it was not fixed even as recently as like two weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. And so I was getting a little nervous it was gonna get shipped to everybody. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s fixed now. But the bug is still sitting there open. I never heard a thing about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so here’s the thing is that I was talking with a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend at Apple and asked just out of curiosity, hey, can you look at feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll put it in the show notes. Just tell, I don’t need to know specifics, but just has a human being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked at this feedback? Yes or no? And it turns out that yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a human had looked at it. And in fact, apparently there was internal activity on it within 24
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of you filing it, which no bullsh**. No one told me. That is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is exactly what we want to see. I am not lying. I’m not being facetious. Truly, that is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you want to see. That’s, yeah, that’s amazing. But the problem is what you just said, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How, did you know this? Were you aware of this? No. No. get back from Apple, Marco, would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remind me real quick?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, nothing. Exactly. I just loaded up the bug now and feedback system. It says recent similar reports,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none resolution open, no comments.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not really tenable. It’s not really fair. Maybe I, I know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that a lot. I’m trying to get better about it, but it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And it’s just, it, that’s not a way for a company who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly cares about developers and what is, what is the triad? it’s Apple first, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users, and then somewhere below that as developers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It’s not an equilateral triangle either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If Apple cares about developers at all, can we have some sort of communication the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey direction? And it’s just, I’m not even getting into documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all the other problems with Apple’s whole developer story. But this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not OK. This is something that could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really frigging big deal for Overcast, like a colossally big deal. Yeah. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really worried about this one. Right. And what are you supposed to do about this? And, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. Okay. Let’s leave aside. What is it? Uh, the something incident, uh, what’s the formal name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for it? I always forget the DTS or something like that. What am I thinking of?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the DTS tickets. So yeah, so they, they had our DTS incident or whatever they call it. Um, yeah. So with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your member, your developer membership, the $100 a year developer membership comes with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two DTS developer tech support instances or tickets or whatever, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raise one of these two tickets a year. And they don’t build up like if you know if you don’t use them within the year, they just expire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you run out, you can buy one for 50 bucks each, I think you can buy extra ones. This actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets you like an actual DTS engineer to look at your problem. And they will they literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco provide like code level support, you You can include code and they will look at it and they will try it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will try to figure out what the problem is. And I think, I don’t know, this has probably changed over the years, but I think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some exception where like, if you have stumbled upon an actual bug that’s their fault, then they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge you for the ticket or something like that. The problem with this system, first of all, is that most developers never use it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t even know about it. I’ve known about the system for years. I’ve been an Apple developer for, oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, how many developer memberships have I bought? 12, at least? 15, whatever it’s been. yeah, like 15 years, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. I’ve never used one. Mostly because when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first heard about them, and I heard that you only get two a year, I thought, well, I better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save that up for when I really need one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even after I learned that you can buy one for 50 bucks if you really need to, like if you run out, even after that, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still consider it like, this like, you know, only in an emergency would I ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this kind of thing. And so, I never even think to do it. I forget about it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never consider it as an option. And I probably shouldn’t, I really should just use it, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so limited, I just, I completely forget that it’s an option at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, same. And I mean, some of this is on us to be fair, like we should be employing and I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at, I’m looking at Marco, I’m looking in the mirror, we should be employing these and seeing if it’s any better,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s just so frustrating, especially in the cases where one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puts together and I don’t know if this was the case with Marco’s most recent one, but when one puts together a sample project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m about to give John the floor, and you did this, John, when you put together a sample project and you explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what’s going on, here’s a very simple sample project that demonstrates the problem, and you throw that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the wall, and then crickets, and crickets, and crickets. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the defense of Apple, I understand that they get just an inconceivable amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of issues. I get that. But what I also get is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the current system does not work. It doesn’t work for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey external people. And from everything I’ve heard from the internal people, it doesn’t f***ing work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for them either. So who is this in service of? Yes, I know that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big company. Yes, I know that radars go back to like literally the early 90s. I get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at some point, what is this in service of? And don’t even get me f***ing started about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fact that the way in which you say that you really care about something is duplicating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a radar. It’s just, oh, if Marco and I agree that this is a problem, well then both of you file it and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your de facto way of voting. Are you kidding me with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? Just no! That is not okay! That is not a mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which you vote. It’s by throwing a radar across the wall that inevitably will come back with an F you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give me a cyst diagnosis anyway. This is just, this is not okay. And the fact that this is still a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing blows my mind. And yes, Feedback Assistant, the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a lot better than, than Radar, the web app was, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. It’s the whole frigging system is broken. It’s awful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to, I’m going to really lose my cool, believe it or not. I haven’t yet. So instead I’m going to say, John, tell me your recent story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about your Radars and how swimmingly they went.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you two are going to make me be the big company representative again because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have spent more time in big companies than both of you. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re the closest we got right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I’ve spent some time, don’t get me wrong, but you have certainly spent a lot more.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I do understand a lot of how things work here. A couple of reactions to
⏹️ ▶️ John things you two have said. When, you know, like the time we spend to
⏹️ ▶️ John file a feedback, right? I would imagine that in a lot of cases,
⏹️ ▶️ John the vast majority of that time, at least I would hope the vast majority of that time is the
⏹️ ▶️ John time figuring out whose bug it is. Because all our programs are filled with bugs, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to figure out why doesn’t this work. And that takes a long time, depending on how thorny the bug is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the only point where we’re gonna hopefully file something with Apple is we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done all the debugging and we have determined to the best of our ability that no, I am using that API
⏹️ ▶️ John right. It just doesn’t work, right? And it’s hard to determine that because applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are complicated, APIs are complicated. We don’t have the source code to the frameworks, which also complicates
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s the thing that I’m used to as a web developer, having the source code to all the third-party code really helps you determine,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this my bug? Am I doing something wrong? Or is this a bug with
⏹️ ▶️ John the third-party thing? And it’s kind of like the beginning programmer thing, saying, I think I found a bug in the compiler. You’ve almost
⏹️ ▶️ John never found a bug in the compiler. Yeah, it’s a typical beginner programmer thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John your program does something unexpected and you think you understand how it should work, but you really don’t, right? And that’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ John learn and grow as a programmer. So I think in my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John getting to the point where you’re ready to file a feedback, that’s on us,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John charge Apple for the time you spend debugging your program, right? Totally. And it’s hard to get to that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why it feels frustrating because you spend hours, days, weeks, however long,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to figure something out. And eventually you figured out, I think this is not even my fault. And it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John such an injustice, because normally, it’s your fault, like 99.9% of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John fault, right? You did something dumb in your program. But you’re like, No, I think this is a bug in one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks, which does happen, right? Then we go into the time if you are a conscientious bug reporter,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I tried to be when I when I actually think I have a legit bug, I’m not just complaining about a feature suggestion or some crap like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, which also goes into, you know, feedback, which is why there’s so many of them, right? So I think I’ve I’ve got a legit
⏹️ ▶️ John issue, I will go the extra mile to make a sample application. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John after I’ve determined and probably probably part of the way I determine that it’s actually a bug
⏹️ ▶️ John in a framework is by making that sample application. So some of that time is attributable to me really
⏹️ ▶️ John because you get frustrated like wait a second. I think you know forget about my app forget about all
⏹️ ▶️ John my code forget about stuff. I’m doing fresh clean sheet of paper new project X code. Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John see if I can reproduce this. So I got my real code here and I got my toy one and they kind of like meet in the middle until I can
⏹️ ▶️ John get the toy one to reproduce the problem with the minimum number of code and that’s your sample project, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John some of that time building that is, you know, is you figuring out where the bug is. Because very often,
⏹️ ▶️ John this happens to me plenty, I make the trivial sample project or more often these days I use Playgrounds, which
⏹️ ▶️ John has its own set of bugs, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use Playgrounds to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something. And if it works right in Playgrounds or it works right in your toy example, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work right in your real app, that’s still probably your bug, right? That happens all the time. But sometimes it goes the other way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when it goes the other way, you’re like, all right, I’m gonna polish up this sample project, I’m gonna file the bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John At this point in your head, you understand the issue because you have boiled it down, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have debugged it, you have figured out when you do X and Y and Z, Q should
⏹️ ▶️ John happen, P happens instead. You’ve already figured that out. And you’re like, I’m serving this up to you, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John on a silver platter. I’ve got a sample project, the source code to the sample project and a public
⏹️ ▶️ John GitHub URL, a zip of it is included. There’s a sysdiagnosis that the feedback app already ran.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can describe in five sentences, here’s the problem, expected results, actual results. It fits on a page.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could print this on an index card. Here it is. A bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of things could happen at that point. One is that you may be perhaps one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John best, but one of a thousand people who sent that bugged Apple and they already know about it. Right, and we would hope
⏹️ ▶️ John in a sane system that there’d be some communication that says, yeah, no, we know about that one. It’s been 50 people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John filed it, right? One would think. Right, but anyway, that could happen. The other thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that could happen is that could just never get looked at because it’s the bottom of a big pile and you would never know.
⏹️ ▶️ John But usually, especially if you have a tech podcast that Apple people listen to or you toot
⏹️ ▶️ John about it or whatever, someone will listen to the program and look at the bug or whatever and then get to us
⏹️ ▶️ John through back channels that X, Y, and Z is happening, right? But you know, there’s a lot of these bugs and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to, you know, get to all of them in a timely manner. You can’t expect, and
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, like bugs that I file for my stupid apps, Apple should not look at,
⏹️ ▶️ John like for the purposes of my app, because like, who cares about my app? The only time they should look at them
⏹️ ▶️ John is because, oh, all right, we don’t care about, you know, John’s apps because whatever, who
⏹️ ▶️ John cares, right? But if this is actually a bug in our framework, this could affect, you know, Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a real app that people care about, right? If it’s a legit bug in the framework, especially if it’s a new bug, it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exist in the last version of the OS and it does exist in this one, it’s a regression as they say. That’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ John lurking at, not because of my apps, but because tons of apps use these frameworks. I’m not using super
⏹️ ▶️ John obscure frameworks. So if I have found a legit bug or a legit change in behavior,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone should look at that. How do you determine that? It’s a big pile of bugs. How many of them are people saying, I think the color
⏹️ ▶️ John of this button should be purple and how many of them are a carefully reproduced
⏹️ ▶️ John bug with a minimal sample project, right? That’s a legit bug that affects Microsoft Office. You need
⏹️ ▶️ John people to sort through all those things, triage them and figure out which is which. And Apple doesn’t seem to be
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly good at doing that either. Forget about the communication part of it, right? So the most recent one I had,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do this, you know, I found a handful of bugs and I made a little sample project. The most recent one I found
⏹️ ▶️ John was interesting, or the one I’m gonna talk about here, was interesting in that it was a straight regression. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that, you know, worked in my app in Monterey and didn’t work in Ventura. which right away makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John think this might be some kind of behavior change. And then I go look at the release notes because when the new versions of the OS come
⏹️ ▶️ John out, they have like a framework level release notes. Hey, if you use this framework, here’s what’s changed in this thing, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John they change things. So this used to do that, this is deprecated, you know, we added these function, we remove those,
⏹️ ▶️ John we change this, like nothing about this in any of the release notes. I look at the documentation and I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John documentation doesn’t say anything about this. This was specifically, this bug was like, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing in AppKit that you can put on a view that tracks when the cursor enters it
⏹️ ▶️ John and like tracks where the cursor is or whatever. It’s called NSTrackingArea. And I use
⏹️ ▶️ John it to track when the cursor enters.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m using it for
⏹️ ▶️ John its intended purpose, right? In Monterey, it worked as I expected. In Ventura, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John track the cursor normally, except if you were dragging something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you were dragging something and it’s tracking area, it’d be like, I don’t see any cursor. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It would not track at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John that broke a feature of my application because I needed to track it when things are being dragged, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was debugging it for a while. I’m like, why does this not, anyway, found the bug, isolated it, made a minimal
⏹️ ▶️ John reproduction sample application. You don’t need to, you don’t even need to read anything. I always put all the text
⏹️ ▶️ John in the app. Like when you launch the app, it has text that says, here, you do this, do that. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I expect this to happen and that happens, right? You don’t even need to read the readme, right? Made the sample app, submitted it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, the fact that my app broke in Ventura, Not a big deal. But if this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John legit change in behavior for NSTrackingArray, that is a commonly used thing in applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a, you know, it’s from AppKit. Lots of applications use AppKit, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a significant piece of functionality that just doesn’t work anymore. And you know, I didn’t get any response or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually, I added a comment to the thing. Someone did respond to it because I probably
⏹️ ▶️ John complained about it on probably back then Twitter or whatever. And said, oh, you should,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what is it? they asked me what is your application or whatever. And they said, actually, you should be using the drag handling
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to handle drag, so on and so forth. There was actually some feedback. I’m like, okay, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so I understand that I could use the drag thing, but it worked in Monterey and doesn’t work in Ventura. Is NSTrackingArea
⏹️ ▶️ John just not gonna track drags anymore? Because if that’s the case, I was trying to get,
⏹️ ▶️ John was this an intentional change or are you just telling me, hey, there’s a bug, but you can work around it in this way? Or are you telling
⏹️ ▶️ John me from now on, NSTrackingArea will not do this, so just get used to it. And if that’s true, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should probably update the documentation and release notes and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John for now on NSTrackingArea won’t do this or whatever. So I added a comment to the task that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John or to the feedback that said, you know, my application is whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I’ve since added a workaround to, you know, using the drag handling to
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. Like I said, if you’re on Ventura, use the drag handling, you know, whatever. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John next response I got in feedback was, Great, we’ve closed your bug. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it basically said, I’ll read you the text, which is not great, right? Let’s see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thank you for letting us know that your issue has been resolved. You can close this feedback by selecting close feedback by
⏹️ ▶️ John the actions button found above. As you indicated this issue is resolved, this feedback will no longer be monitored and incoming
⏹️ ▶️ John messages will not be reviewed. Should you find that the issue is still present, please file a new feedback report.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is like double whammy, because like one, I wasn’t saying it’s resolved. I was saying I found a workaround,
⏹️ ▶️ John which programmers do all the time, like, oh, there’s a bug or a change in behavior, you can code
⏹️ ▶️ John around it or whatever, right? And two, saying, oh, and by the way, don’t even bother responding to this because even though we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t close this issue for you and we want you to close it yourself, we’re just never gonna look at it again. And if you think this issue is
⏹️ ▶️ John still there, file a new bug. So I did file a new bug and said, I think it’s still there
⏹️ ▶️ John because basically, I don’t know what you’re telling me here. Again, my question was,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this like intentional new behavior Or is it a bug that you’re going to eventually fix? Not that I
⏹️ ▶️ John care that much, but it is basic functionality. And I complained about it on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple people saw it. And so eventually, I got someone to respond to the task and explain the
⏹️ ▶️ John situation. But John, running to the press never helps. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah. Explain
⏹️ ▶️ John the situation in English, basically saying, this is an intentional change. We think this is the way it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to work. It’s not going to work the other way. Yes, we know we haven’t updated the documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John or put anything in release notes, And we’ve already filed separate internal radars to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with that or whatever. Here’s what I’m gonna say about this particular experience. I’m not gonna say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, why didn’t my bug get fixed and why did it take too long and all this other stuff because honestly, who cares, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What I am gonna say is that from a policy perspective, one of the things that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should really work on, setting aside all the things we’ve already talked about, like, oh, be
⏹️ ▶️ John better, right? is when you get to a point
⏹️ ▶️ John where a human being has somehow found their way to my feedback, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have a podcast and post it on Master and Honor, or it’s just random luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John At some point, hey, you come up in the rotation. Your feedback is being triaged. A
⏹️ ▶️ John human being has now got 37 seconds to look at your feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John and do something with it. I think one of the worst things that they do now that they can fix without
⏹️ ▶️ John really spending any more money or time or whatever is when a human does that,
⏹️ ▶️ John make sure you spend that time doing something useful because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s not going to come back again. I’m going to have to wait. Like the gap, the time gap between some of these things sometimes is like
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks or months between any response. Right. So in that moment, when the human is looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at it for 37 seconds, please, human Like, spend the extra
⏹️ ▶️ John five seconds to write a coherent sentence, because we know no one is going to look at that again for three
⏹️ ▶️ John months. This is the one chance I get from my bug to have its time in the sunshine,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all I wanted is a human with reading comprehension skills to say to me, this is intended
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior, we’re sorry that it’s not documented, but just FYI, it’s going to work this
⏹️ ▶️ John way from now on. That’s it. And that wouldn’t take any more time
⏹️ ▶️ John than the sentence that I just read you, or the feedback that was in there. It’s actually a shorter sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ John Spend the time that you have, which is small and not enough, spend that time
⏹️ ▶️ John wisely because it wastes all of our time to get a response
⏹️ ▶️ John which we have all gotten, every developer has gotten this, a response that makes you think the person writing it either
⏹️ ▶️ John A, isn’t a person and is a bot, or B, did not read anything in your feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John If a response like that is put in ostensibly, I’m told these are all done by humans. If a
⏹️ ▶️ John human spends their 37 seconds to give a response that makes the person who posted it think that they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t read the feedback, either A, they didn’t read the feedback, which is bad, or B,
⏹️ ▶️ John they wasted that time. So my one, in this particular round of being mad about radar
⏹️ ▶️ John and feedback, my one plea for Apple is in the tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John slice of time, humans time that we get in the too small slice of of human time as we get, please
⏹️ ▶️ John let them do a reasonable job of feedback because it will save
⏹️ ▶️ John all of us so much time. It wastes so much more time to have three rounds of back
⏹️ ▶️ John and forth with a month between each round than to just have the person write a coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John sentence on the first one that sounds like a human, not like a PR machine, and that reflects the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that they saw the bug. That, I mean, that’s what really bothers me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Secondarily, if anyone is listening or whatever, I think it is insane that NSTrackingArea,
⏹️ ▶️ John which has an option called enabled during mouse drag, now does not work during
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse drag. And I await anxiously the updated documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John How are they gonna document the enabled during mouse drag option? They’re gonna say, this used to enable during
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse drag, but it totally doesn’t anymore, sorry about that. I think that’s dumb. But that’s the type
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing, like if it was an open source project, I’d be in the issue arguing like, I think this is a bad
⏹️ ▶️ John change in its tracking error, you’re breaking apps for no reason, there’s an option called enable during mouse drag, what the hell, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t have that argument with Apple because it would be three months between replies. And by the way, they already said they’re not monitoring
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug, so you’d have to be refiling it every single time. Like that’s pointless. That’s the time wasting open source
⏹️ ▶️ John arguing over bugs that Apple actually, you know, as a happy accident of their terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback system, avoids or whatever. But setting that aside, I’m willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, just tell me Apple, just tell me this is the new way it is, communicate that successfully,
⏹️ ▶️ John communicate that you know that you haven’t documented it. And by the way, on this particular issue,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I can tell, I mean, I don’t know, because obviously we don’t know what happens on Apple and we just talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about how there’s no communication, but it seems like what happened is whatever team is responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for NS tracking area or that whole framework or whatever, decided they were gonna make this change, probably for some efficiency
⏹️ ▶️ John reason or it’s like someone thought it would be a good idea. This happens all the time. We’ve decided that the
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior of this needs to change. Even though it’s gonna be annoying for some people, it’ll have fewer bugs, it’ll have better
⏹️ ▶️ John performance. Like I get it, right? So they thought they were gonna do this, setting aside the fact that there’s an enable during mouse drag
⏹️ ▶️ John abduction, whatever. But they were gonna do this, but it seemed like they were gonna do it and they knew
⏹️ ▶️ John it might break some applications, but they didn’t wanna mention it and the release notes are documented
⏹️ ▶️ John because they were like, fingers crossed, maybe this won’t break anyone’s app and I hope no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one notices. Don’t tell anyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t like, yeah, which is, which totally happens. You’re like Apple, the big company, whenever you
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, trust me, this absolutely happens because the incentives are structured for you not
⏹️ ▶️ John to go, oh, this has to be in the release notes. And then we have to make, you know, we have some policy that was
⏹️ ▶️ John made 10 years ago that says if you do any breaking change to AppKit, you have to clear it with Microsoft explicitly to make sure it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John break office. Can we just make the change and put it in the betas and maybe just no one will notice. And here I am
⏹️ ▶️ John with my dinky little app five people run saying, excuse me, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John and they must be like, damn it, somebody noticed and it’s an app that doesn’t matter. So who cares? But it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid guy with a podcast, right? And, you know, I don’t fault those engineers
⏹️ ▶️ John for trying to slip on under I have 100% done this so many times, and I’ve been caught doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve also snuck a bunch through and it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really good. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna change the behavior. And I bet nothing’s gonna break. And if I just don’t say anything, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m gonna say that’s also probably not the best way to do things. So whatever incentives are structured to make engineers
⏹️ ▶️ John want to sneak this out without putting any release notes, change those incentives because
⏹️ ▶️ John engineers should be incentivized to do the right thing, which is, hey, we’re changing the behavior of this. It’s in the release notes, we
⏹️ ▶️ John updated the docs, sorry for breaks your app. And if it breaks too many apps, we’ll roll it back. But just wanted to know this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a change because that would have saved me a little bit of my time in my app. And who knows, maybe it did break, you know, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Office or something. And there’s some other feedback about that. But yeah, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, that’s today, this year’s this month’s whatever advice for Apple is spend the tiny slice
⏹️ ▶️ John of time you have wisely because it weighs most of our time if you don’t and I don’t think it actually requires
⏹️ ▶️ John any more time. It just requires slightly differently spent time. Above and beyond that, not
⏹️ ▶️ John to go over all the things we’ve talked about a million times before, but I do feel like there is a big
⏹️ ▶️ John difference between a bug report, a concise bug report with a minimal sample
⏹️ ▶️ John project that’s on GitHub from a known good developer and a random feedback about the color of a button
⏹️ ▶️ John from someone you never heard of before. And it’s the same thing with the app store that is frustrating when like a company like panic
⏹️ ▶️ John that should be like triple a white glove gold tier status in Apple developer
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get their game through to the app store. Their famous well-reviewed game that’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John a million other platforms from the company panic while, while scam apps sail through, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, The goal of these system, these faceless bureaucracies, is not to be a roulette wheel for
⏹️ ▶️ John outcomes. There should be some, when you’re triaging things, you should take into
⏹️ ▶️ John account the quality of the report, who it’s coming from. They certainly do for Adobe, Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like that. Oh, funny how that
⏹️ ▶️ John is. But they should also triage based on like, is there
⏹️ ▶️ John a sample project? Historically, it’s like Uber drivers and ratings, give the developers a
⏹️ ▶️ John rating. This person, Daniel Jalkut, five stars, gives amazing bug reports, always very
⏹️ ▶️ John concise, always technically accurate, hardly ever makes a mistake, hardly ever blames the compiler, comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a sample project, is smart, is responsive. Like, look at those first. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re triaging, you can’t look at them all, there’s too many. When you triage, bubble up the good ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John have a system of like rating them. And then getting to Casey’s point, about, you know, I have to file a second
⏹️ ▶️ John one, what can I do? But public issue tracking systems have this solved, We all know that. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John usual response is, well, we can’t use public issue tracking because Adobe sends the source code to Photoshop or you can’t have them up
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And the answer to that from us has always been, let people opt into it. Let developers
⏹️ ▶️ John say, I agree that anyone can see this bug report. You know what, it’s on me. I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John market is public. I’m not gonna put Photoshop source code in here. What I am gonna put is my little sample project that I made and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna say, everybody can see this because then they can send the link to all their friends who will go to that URL and
⏹️ ▶️ John hit the Me Too Vote Up button on the thing instead of having to file something themselves. These are all
⏹️ ▶️ John imminently solvable problems without hiring more people, except for to improve the system, which they already did
⏹️ ▶️ John once with the feedback thing, without staffing up someone and so forth. And then I guess the final thing I’ll say is,
⏹️ ▶️ John app review used to be, believe it or not, way worse than it is in terms of how long things would go through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, so much worse. And then at some point, something happened inside Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ John app review got faster. Did they do that by cutting corners and getting worse quality? Maybe, but the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I think they actually did it by firing somebody.
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever had to happen. I’m not saying, there’s easy solutions. Oh, we’ll just spend less time and do
⏹️ ▶️ John a worse job and we can do more of them. And I’m not even sure if that’s the right term. But the point is, it is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John for big things to change inside Apple. It’s happened before with AppReview.
⏹️ ▶️ John It can happen with feedback and radar. It is not a intractable problem. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll probably have to spend more money and hire more staff or whatever, but whatever it is that they did to make AppReview way,
⏹️ ▶️ John way, way faster, and I think we would all agree that that’s a net win. Like the quality still sucks and they still do
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible things like rejecting Panic’s Games, you know, and this is all the horror stories. That all is still there, but I feel like that’s about been
⏹️ ▶️ John a constant, but the time has gone way down. So if the time between me getting
⏹️ ▶️ John useless, you know, incoherent feedback responses was three days instead of three
⏹️ ▶️ John weeks or three months, I would feel a lot better about it. So I feel like it is possible for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John to change and improve feedback. I don’t know what has to happen for that to happen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s possible. I know you can do it, Apple, right? There are basic suggestions
⏹️ ▶️ John that you ask any developer, you pull someone off, develop Apple developer off the street and say, what can we do to improve feedback? They have
⏹️ ▶️ John seven ideas for you. They’re all good. Just take them. Like, they’re so obvious. Everybody knows what they are. It doesn’t mean they’re easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t mean that you can do them overnight. Doesn’t mean you don’t have to hire new people. Like I understand, But
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an important part of the company, kind of like AppReview, an important part of the developer ecosystem that
⏹️ ▶️ John was really, really, really bad making improvements and it pays dividends. Please do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, we love, the three of us in particular, love to whine about, well, why isn’t such and such better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why isn’t it better? And I think one of the things that we can do is talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you know, well, how would this, how could this become better? And I think what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re saying, John, is excellent. You know, if a, if a reviewer is looking at it, like really properly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at it. If it’s, if it’s a, if it’s more than just a, this is broken.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do something about that. If there’s a sample app, run the sample app, you know, acknowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this reviewer or this submitter has done good work in, like you said, have a rating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system or something like that. Oh, you know, Daniel Jalkin always writes amazing bug reports. We should pay attention to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him. Maybe even, and this is going to be weird Apple, but maybe even. reply
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that be amazing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, right? Isn’t that, this is some real new thought technology. And Casey, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he does is fuss and moan. He never includes a sample app. That’s not true, but for the sake of discussion, he never includes a sample
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. Oh, he doesn’t deserve a reply. Well, you know what? Okay. That’s kind of deserved. But another thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been thinking about is you’re never going, Apple will never ever tell us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what they’re doing internally, which I don’t think that has to be the case, you know, it’s Apple, I understand it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine. But what if, what, what if there was like some sort of indication
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the public facing feedback, the last time that anyone within Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has touched this, we don’t know what they’ve done. We don’t know if they just opened it and closed it immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but somebody touched this a week ago, a day ago, two days ago, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fast forward a week. And that says today, then you don’t have to tell me a damn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. I at least know, assuming this isn’t just, you know, fakery, I at least know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that some frigging human being has looked at this in the last six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would make me feel at least a little bit better, probably even so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better because at least I know things are ha- I don’t know what’s happening. Maybe I won’t see the results of it for a year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at least I know somebody cares enough to have looked at it in the last week. And now, of course I could argue on the flip side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that is, well, most of these are probably going to get looked at once, never again. And well, we already know that! You’re not telling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us anything we don’t already know! Like, who cares? Put in writing! Maybe somebody who actually gives a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shit up high will be able to do something about it. Like, there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, like John said, there’s so many ways to fix this. And it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s so many ways to fix this. And if any one of them, I would like, I am in hell and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would love a cold glass of water. Please, anything. Anything, Apple, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my favorite, by the way, my favorite slap in the face, and I think John, you just had this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen recently, is, oh, here’s something you reported years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, which kudos to Apple for keeping it around and having looked at it years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later. But nevertheless, here’s something that happened years ago, and we think we fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Hey, you want to do me a solid and go check? Well, okay, fair enough. But John, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens if you don’t check immediately?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, actually, it wasn’t a years ago one. It was a thing where they said, and this is, we’ll link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes to, who’s LabCat Software, who’s that guy?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jeff Johnson, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, Jeff Johnson. Had a similar complaint to mine, but yeah. Filed the thing, they fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John it, or they said it was fixed, and they do the thing which I think is good, which is, hey, don’t just close the bug
⏹️ ▶️ John when you fixed it. Actually get the person who opened the bug to agree with you, that yes, I agree,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have fixed it, so we can close the report. And that would be a good system if we weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sending messages to each other by carrier pigeon, right? Because it takes three months for anything to get back and forth. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of makes it dumb. But anyway, I’d filed something. They said, we think this is fixed. And Apple’s thing that they’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John lately, as in the past few years is, they’ll send you the, we think it’s fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John message, incoherently written in a way that you have to read seven times to figure out what the heck they’re even talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, as you’ll see, like, we think this is fixed and they’ll give like a build number. And you’re like, wait, what OS is that? What beta is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do I get that? How do I install that? they’ll tell you basically we think it’s fixed in a beta. And what they want you
⏹️ ▶️ John to do is, oh, just try your app or your sample program
⏹️ ▶️ John in this beta of the operating system and let us know whether it’s fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of mine was,
⏹️ ▶️ John they sent this bug and it wasn’t one of my good bug reports. It was one of my bad ones. It was from a user’s perspective. It was related to my
⏹️ ▶️ John programmer. There’s like a thing is happening in system settings that I don’t think should be happening based on what my program
⏹️ ▶️ John does. And they’re like, oh, you know, it wasn’t a great bug report. So they said, we think we’ve got it fixed. Can you confirm it in
⏹️ ▶️ John a beta? And my answer, I didn’t say anything, but like my reading it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t have a good way to install a Mac OS beta. I’m not gonna install it on my main machine. I don’t have a drive available.
⏹️ ▶️ John All my laptops have been lent out to like kids. My son had to take two laptops to college for,
⏹️ ▶️ John so he had to run a VM on an Intel Mac, but he has an ARM Mac. And anyway, it wasn’t convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to install a beta anymore. So I just had the Casey style childlike satisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John of them saying, please let us know if this is fixed in less beta. And then I just ignored it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I could have responded and said, oh, I don’t have time to install a beta, but like bottom line is,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about I let your thing sit there unresponded for six months, see how you like that. How about
⏹️ ▶️ John I leave your thing? I know Apple, suddenly you want my feedback and you’re sending me emails every week saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so you know, your feedback, we asked for, you know, we need a response from you. we need some feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering needs you to confirm this. They would send you emails every week or two saying, you know, letting you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re supposed to respond. And I would just ignore them and be like, I don’t have, like, not because I’m being
⏹️ ▶️ John mean and spiteful, but I literally don’t have time to install a beta to figure that out. And what I figured was,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the new public version of Mac OS will come out and then I’ll be able to see if it’s fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s what I figured would happen, right? Instead, what happened is
⏹️ ▶️ John after, in my case, 35 days, Apple said, oh, we’re just gonna close your bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We didn’t hear from you, so later. Right, and basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the tolerance of Apple, I thought it was like on a fixed timer, but apparently not, because Jeff Johnson
⏹️ ▶️ John had only waited like 16 days. Like when they ask you, hey, confirm that this is fixed,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t respond on their timetable, they’ll just say, well, we waited a while
⏹️ ▶️ John and we didn’t hear from you, so we’ll just assume it’s fixed. Done, bye. Which is not the way it should
⏹️ ▶️ John work. If you’re gonna have this system where we don’t close it until the developer confirms that it’s fixed, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for them to confirm. And if basically no response, you will assume
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fixed. Why would you assume it’s fixed? Maybe I’m dead. That’s why I didn’t respond. You don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what’s going on over here. I didn’t respond to your
⏹️ ▶️ John confirmation thing. You can’t be like, that must mean it’s fixed. I’m closing it out, right? At least let
⏹️ ▶️ John the release version of the OS come out because I’ll update. I’ll update
⏹️ ▶️ John to the latest version and then I’ll be able to tell, and by the way, it’s not fixed. but I’ll update
⏹️ ▶️ John to the latest version because 13.3 is out, it’s totally not fixed. It’s a bad bug report, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna get into it. Like I don’t blame Apple, this is a really complicated issue, I don’t even know how to fully report this, but it’s doing something that
⏹️ ▶️ John it shouldn’t be doing or maybe it should be, it’s hard to tell without talking to a human, but it’s a minor issue, I don’t really care that much
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. But like, and Jeff Johnson has a similar story, his was closed after 16 days. For the same reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s like, I don’t have a good way to install a beta, I’ll just wait for the release, oh, nevermind, they closed it before the release
⏹️ ▶️ John came out. Apple, like Apple’s internal system patience for lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of response from developers seems very low. Whereas we file things
⏹️ ▶️ John and months, weeks, years go by and we hear nothing. We’re expected to just tolerate that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is a very asymmetrical relationship. And I think the Apple’s policy surrounding this is not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would actually argue for inside Apple. If you think you fix the issue, to save
⏹️ ▶️ John us all time, close the bug, say closed, we think it’s fixed as whatever. And I know they have this weird thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t reopen bugs, which just seems like a real problem with their system. But like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wait for all developers to confirm, it’s gonna take you forever. And they don’t actually wait for you to confirm,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll auto close it after N days anyway. So it’s like, just be honest and say, when you think you fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it, just close it as resolved. Say, resolved, fixed in Mac OS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because then there’s a known resolution. And if I come back to it, I’m on vacation, I come back from vacation, I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like my bug was closed. I said it was fixed in Mac OS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can confirm that at any time at my
⏹️ ▶️ John leisure. If I care about that bug, presumably Mac OS has rolled on since then and I’ll try
⏹️ ▶️ John to reproduce it. And if it’s not fixed, in a sane world, I would reopen the bug. But in this world, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can refile it, right? You don’t have to wait for me to confirm and send me nagging emails and then just close it anyway when I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John respond for two weeks. All right, that was just a little bonus content there. So I can link to the Jeff Johnson
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But that policy also seems counterproductive, let’s say, because it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretending that a relationship exists that doesn’t actually exist, which is like, we’re talking back and forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re working together on this bug, no, we’re not. We’re throwing things over the wall and you are occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ John popping up every few months to ask us to do something which may be inconvenient for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And as a final note on this, in the same vein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as what I was saying about Siri, like I think that there’s a lot of people within Apple that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree that radar is perhaps not optimal, but I don’t think that most people, even potentially the rank
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and file, really understand how aggressively awful it is for third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers. And here again, it’s one of those things where I think it’s easy for Apple to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eh, it’s not great for us either, you know, or eh, you know, you don’t really understand how many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we get, or eh, it’s really, really a hard problem to solve, which all of those things are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter. At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some point, you need to fix the problem. At some point, Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs to be better than a pile of trash. At some point, radar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and feedback assistant need to be better than just throwing thing into DevNull and hoping for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best. Like, it doesn’t matter if you can excuse yourselves away from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why this is bad. I don’t care. You all make a ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amount of money to solve really hard problems. Here’s a really hard problem to solve. Fix radar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s actually not that hard, but still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please and thank you. All right, can we do a semester ATP to cheer me up, please? Yes, please. All right.
#askatp: Defederation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Goza writes, John and others have mentioned a bunch about Mastodon being federated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I can’t wrap my head around it. I ignored it for a while until last week, which was probably two months ago, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John said an instance could become, quote, unfederated, quote. Now I can’t ignore my confusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore and would love an explanation when you have a chance. Which, unfortunately, that time didn’t come until now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now we have the chance. So John, what does federating or federation mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually people use the email analogy, and I will use that briefly here before I try a different one as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the email analogy is you can pick an email provider, Gmail, Hotmail, you can host your
⏹️ ▶️ John own email in your own domain, whatever, iCloud, Mail, all that stuff. That
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of your instance. You can email me at mynameaticloud.com, at mynameatgmail.com,
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. You picked Gmail, you picked iCloud, you picked Yahoo, you picked Hotmail. Those are your instances,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But you can send email to anybody when they say, oh, just send me your email address. You don’t look and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, I can’t email you. I’m on Gmail and you’re on Hotmail. No, you know that you can send an email
⏹️ ▶️ John to anyone on any other email instance, because that’s how email works. It is a federated system
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of, right? So in Mastodon, we have little Mastodon addresses. It’s your username
⏹️ ▶️ John at your instance. They look kind of like email addresses, but we put another ad on the thing. So mine is at Syracuse, at Mastodon.social,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s like an email address, right? but I can follow people
⏹️ ▶️ John on any other instance and they can follow me the same way we could email each other if we are in different
⏹️ ▶️ John email instances or servers or whatever. That’s what a federation means.
⏹️ ▶️ John The more precise or slightly more precise technical explanation,
⏹️ ▶️ John which still glosses over some details is the mastodon.social server that I’m on,
⏹️ ▶️ John it talks to other servers to find out what’s happening on them. And the way it does
⏹️ ▶️ John that is it looks all the people who have accounts on mastodon.social, what is the, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna give you a SQL query now, give me the unique list of instances that people follow
⏹️ ▶️ John on this server. So 500 people follow someone from this instance, one person follows from this instance,
⏹️ ▶️ John just give me the uniquified list of all the instances. Those are the instances that mastodon.social needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk to. It doesn’t need to talk to all the instances in the world because if nobody on mastodon.social follows
⏹️ ▶️ John someone on foobar.social, it doesn’t need to talk to that thing at all, right? and vice versa. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I can figure out who do I need to talk to. And then periodically, they communicate using the activity
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol to exchange information. Tell me what the people that my
⏹️ ▶️ John people follow are saying. And by the way, here’s what my people are saying. And I will send that to all the other instances
⏹️ ▶️ John that for the people that follow them, right? So you can sort of see how they work. In the same way that an
⏹️ ▶️ John email server will receive an email from anybody who sends it and then will allow email to go out or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfederation is something that kind of also happens in email as well, where
⏹️ ▶️ John an instance, where one instance will decide, like for example, Hotmail. If Hotmail decided,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, we’re not going to allow any more email from Gmail users. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ John they would ever do that, but just hear me, right? That would mean that if you’re on Gmail and you send email to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John at Hotmail, it would bounce back and say, nah, sorry, I couldn’t deliver the email.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Hotmail server said they’re not accepting email from Gmail anymore, right? That happens with spammers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s some thing that’s emailing, and it’s spamming, right? The big email
⏹️ ▶️ John services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, iCloud will unfederate. By the way, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called de-federate.
⏹️ ▶️ John The big email servers will have a deny list that will remove all of the
⏹️ ▶️ John spam servers that they don’t want to receive email from. So you can imagine with a federated
⏹️ ▶️ John system like this, especially with something like Mastodon it’s not quite the same as email, you could draw
⏹️ ▶️ John them out as little islands. You could have an island of instances that all talk to each other, but they don’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to this other island of instances, or maybe there’s one or two connections or whatever. So it’s not like there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John one giant pool, and if you get defederated, you’re off to the side. It could break up
⏹️ ▶️ John into a whole bunch of little islands with sparse connections between them and lots of internal connections. We’ll see how this is gonna shake
⏹️ ▶️ John out. But in the case of Mastodon, defederating is considered
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature, not like a burden, because email is supposed to be universal communication, setting
⏹️ ▶️ John aside spammers, anyone should be able to email anyone else. But on a social network,
⏹️ ▶️ John the instance can set rules for behavior. For instance, just off the top of my head, you could say,
⏹️ ▶️ John this instance does not allow anyone to use curse words.
⏹️ ▶️ John And everybody who doesn’t wanna see curse words could be on that instance, and they might decide, that instance might
⏹️ ▶️ John decide to defederate from any other instance that allows the use of curse words. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John did that, anyone who’s on that instance would be like, wait a second, I used to follow person over there, now I can’t see their stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. And they say, oh, well, we don’t want curse words coming into our instance, so we defederated from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that person might say, oh, that sucks. I’m leaving this instance and going to an instance that is federated.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in that way, people would sort themselves into groups according to who
⏹️ ▶️ John they are willing to be federated with or whatever. In practice, what we mostly expect
⏹️ ▶️ John is there’ll be a reasonable set of behavioral rules that the
⏹️ ▶️ John vast majority of people will agree upon and defederation will only happen when like a Nazi or a child
⏹️ ▶️ John porn server or some terrible thing comes and they’ll be defederated and it’ll kind of be like the
⏹️ ▶️ John civilized world of people who have basic standards for behavior.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, because defederating is like the nuclear option, right? You can always just not follow people
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can block individual people and you can mute people and you can do all those types of things. The defederation is like, look, this entire instance is filled
⏹️ ▶️ John with Nazis. It’s so bad, it’s unredeemable. If any good people are there, I’m sorry, but we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to defederate from you or whatever. And so we don’t know how this is going to work out. This is kind of the first time
⏹️ ▶️ John this is being done at a large scale where defederation is a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the system and not just something to use to deal with spam and abuse, but just, you know, potentially ideological tool
⏹️ ▶️ John or a way for people to sort them into different bins. said in past shows, it
⏹️ ▶️ John may be the case that what happens here is kind of what happened with emails, you get a bunch of really big instances that are kind of too big to
⏹️ ▶️ John fail. And they could never defederate from each other because it would break the entire system. And that would be kind of a shame because
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of defeats the purpose of federation when you have these, you know, you know, duopoly
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever really big things, but we’ll see how it shakes out. So that’s how mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John is structured. That’s how it’s supposed to work. We’ll see how it’s going to actually work work in practice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, really quick shout out to the Decoder podcast, which I don’t personally listen to every episode, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone I’ve heard has been very good. They just had on Eugene Rochko. I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey butchered that pronunciation. I’m sorry about that. But he is the benevolent dictator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for life for Macedon, and it’s like an hour, hour and a quarter. It was really, really, really good. I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listened to it a few hours ago. So that is worth listening to. And it’s clear that he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is someone who, whether or not you agree with him, deeply cares about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mastodon and deeply cares about doing the right thing. And I think I generally agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the things he said, except maybe quote tweets or quote toots, but that’s neither here nor there. But they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk a bit about federation in this. And I really think it’s a fascinating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case study on, can communities really self-govern? what happens if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn kind of evil, you know, what is this all gonna mean? This is what you were talking about earlier, John. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the conversation with the guy who created Mastodon is really, really, really interesting. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have the time, I definitely suggest it. We’ll put a link in the show notes. All right, moving on.
#askatp: Software getting worse?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric Smith wants to know, is software getting worse? And this is a blog post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Stack Overflow blog from late January. And it talks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, is software legitimately getting worse? And so someone, I presume John, pulled some quotes for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to read from this blog post. I suspect bugs per line of code is more or less staying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey constant, but applications are much more complex than they were, leading to more bugs in the absolute numbers sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, the threshold for a quote unquote bug has changed over time. For example, tearing and frame latency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were considered normal. Now they’re a bug. I don’t think that expanding the set of bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is terrible, but a byproduct of that will be that it’s hard to keep that set small.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s an old adage in software, which is one of those old adages that no one really
⏹️ ▶️ John has the wherewithal to actually test, but people hear and it rings true to them, so we keep repeating it, so here I am doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s that the number of bugs per line of code written by a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t changed that much over the years. You know, there’s a range, it’s a bell curve or whatever, but in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re gonna write a thousand lines of code, how many bugs on average do you expect to find in a thousand lines of code?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that makes some sense. Obviously not all lines are created equal, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it depends on what language you’re writing it or whatever, but in general, if you’re gonna write a thousand lines, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some average percentage amount of bugs you’re gonna have. And then you debug and there’s various software testing
⏹️ ▶️ John methodologies and QA and stuff to remove those bugs and make the software as bug-free as time
⏹️ ▶️ John and money will allow, right? That is a well-known thing. I don’t think that’s changing much. Mostly, and the reason most people believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that is because although the software industry and technology advances by leaps and bounds, humans
⏹️ ▶️ John change way slower. And so in the blink of an eye between the
⏹️ ▶️ John invention of electricity and today, like human evolution has done nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Except for maybe like work up some immunities to some viruses and stuff. but like just
⏹️ ▶️ John generally nothing. So it’s not as if, oh, because humors are faster, we’ll get so much better at programming
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’ll make fewer mistakes. No, we’re pretty much making the same amount of mistakes. And incidentally, this particular
⏹️ ▶️ John argument very often comes up in the context of high-level versus low-level languages, which we’ve talked about many times
⏹️ ▶️ John in the past. And it’s why proponents like me of high-level languages say,
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter how much you love C or C++ or assembly or whatever you may be arguing for
⏹️ ▶️ John our objective C or whatever, the bottom line is higher level languages let you write fewer lines of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if you think it’s all syntactic sugar or it’s pointless or it’s taking me too
⏹️ ▶️ John far away from the internals and I need a lower level or whatever, the unescapable
⏹️ ▶️ John fact is the more things you type, the more opportunity there is to make bugs. So if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a higher level language that lets you do things with fewer lines of code, with less
⏹️ ▶️ John boilerplate, with less repeated things, with less worrying about details that aren’t important to
⏹️ ▶️ John your program, you will produce fewer bugs for the functionality you’re making.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re still doing the same number of bugs per lines of code, but because 1,000 lines of Swift does
⏹️ ▶️ John way more than 1,000 lines of assembly, your bug per line is the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John but your bug per functionality is way better. As for Eric’s question, is software getting
⏹️ ▶️ John worse? I think basically no. I think it’s actually getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because every part of the stack that we’re using, it gets higher and higher and higher level.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course we’re building on top of everything that has come before. We’re getting so much more functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John for the amount of bugs that we’re getting. Now, that might not feel important to you because you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care that what Twitter client is doing would be science fiction to someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the 60s in terms of holy cow, like what is it actually doing under the covers? Networking
⏹️ ▶️ John stacks and requests and data encoding and decoding and the whole operating system stack
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of it and the layout engines, like it is insane what, and then for you it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I scroll, I see a bunch of words and I scroll, right? It’s easy for us to take that for granted, but the amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of functionality, as in what is it actually doing to let you use your thumb to scroll a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John words, right? Is phenomenal and the number of bugs that it has compared to that amount of functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John versus the number of bugs like a recipe manager on an Apple IIe had, Like the number of
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs is similar, but the functionality is vastly greater. So I would say software is getting
⏹️ ▶️ John better, just maybe not in a way that users notice because users are very quick to take for granted,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the magic of what these things are doing. And then all we can see is like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are still bugs. There are always going to be bugs unless you can spend huge amounts of time and money
⏹️ ▶️ John stamping them a lot, which you can’t for an application that lets you scroll tweets or whatever, right? But we
⏹️ ▶️ John do get more and more functionality over time. So that’s my take on this question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think there’s also, you have to look at what software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is asked to do over time and how that changes over time. Our expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so vastly accelerating over time and what we expect software to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today is so different from what it did back when we had Apple IIs running PrintShop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro or whatever. It’s so different compared to that. We expect our software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do way more. On one level, John is right, that the languages get better, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abstractions we’re working on get better, the tools get better, and so that does, that multiplies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our productivity. How good can a program be per program we’re working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it? Or per hour of time that’s put into working on it? We have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made huge advances there. But the reason it can feel like software is so buggy these days is that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking it to do a heck of a lot more than we ever have before. And that’s always increasing. as soon as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software achieves some new amount of functionality, we immediately take it for granted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and move on to asking about other things. So for instance, even if, we don’t have to go back to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco II, I’ll just go back to the beginning of the iPhone, because this is like where I’ve done a lot of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco professional software development. So I’ve been here a while, I’ve seen a lot of things change over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and customer expectations changing over time. And when the iPhone, I’ll even say when the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store first launch. So the iPhone gets the first year for free. When the App Store first launched in 2008,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one person could make an app and the tools were pretty primitive. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware was pretty primitive. I mean not compared to the Apple 2, by any means we’re way we were way past that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know compared to where we are today, things were simpler and more primitive and lower level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We didn’t have luxuries. I mean heck the first version of the iPhone SDK didn’t even have interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco builder or core data or anything like it. It was we were super early. You know, everything was, we have to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, manual retain, release, auto release, like that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey of stuff. Oh gosh, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the, all the UI was built in code for that first, you know, there were no storyboards yet or anything like that. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, it was early, it was basic and you know, UI kit was super early, super basic, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all you had to focus on was whatever that app could do on the iPhone 2.0
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. And it was a single device with a single screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution, and there was no background tasking, there were no extensions,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were no, you know, there was no Apple Watch, there was no iPad, there was no Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, there was no widgets, like, all the stuff that we expect today wasn’t there. And back then,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you expected also that the app would kind of hold its own data. There was a lot less expectation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cloud-based storage, a lot less expectation of syncing and of cloud backup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most things didn’t use accounts and didn’t have account mechanics in them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was no in-app purchase. There were very few ads. Like it was such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different experience back then, not only because of the technological situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also because the customer expectations were simpler. Now, you are expected, if you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPhone app, you’re expected to have all of that stuff. You’re expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely to have sync. To do sync well, you’re probably gonna need some kind of basic account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, and that adds a whole bunch of complexity. There’s a lot there. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna have interactions with different web services to pull different stuff in. Your customers are gonna expect you to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like an iPhone and iPad app that somehow sync. Definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those have to be the same purchase. You’re gonna have to have a watch app, probably, for certain types of things. You’re gonna have to have extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re gonna have to have share extensions. you’re gonna have to have a widget somewhere, lock screen widget,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main screen widget, watch complication maybe. So the expectations of what people want you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so high that the software necessarily has to be more complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to fit what people expect all apps to do these days. And so it can feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like things are worse quality because we’re just asking them to do so much more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are parts of what we do that are crappy quality. I mentioned Siri earlier and Siri is really inconsistent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Siri is so vastly more complex than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything we asked things to do even 15 or 20 years ago. It’s frankly amazing it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, let alone as quote well as it actually does. Like, you know, because Siri actually does work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well in certain things sometimes. And it’s amazing to know that when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were here in earlier days of technology, like when we didn’t have anything close to that. And it’s remarkable that it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it does even. But the software that we wrote back in the day that might have felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more solid was a lot simpler and in some ways was more solid,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also now we wouldn’t be happy with that. And customers demand so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more now. You can’t make software like that anymore. And it’s a shame because I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if software was super reliable and super simple in some ways, or rather I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love that. But then my actual customer demands would be like, well, I love this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really simple software, but can you maybe make an iPad app? Or can you maybe add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some shortcut support? There’s always something that you want them to add. Man, I love paying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once for apps and never having to pay again. But oh, can you add sync to a cloud service? Like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many of those things that modern customer expectations and modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technological environments in which everything has to work and interoperate and meet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expectations, just can’t support that old, simpler way of looking
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you know, so if the lines of, the bugs per lines of code was still the same back then, part of the reason,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think it was, and that is still a factor, but part of the reason some of those older programs felt
⏹️ ▶️ John more reliable, especially the good ones that we remember, is because the market structure
⏹️ ▶️ John and the incentive structure were different back then, and not back when the iPhone came out, but I’m talking like farther
⏹️ ▶️ John back than that. So before the internet, you had to buy your software in a box on a floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John disk. And if there was something wrong with it, you couldn’t just go download an update
⏹️ ▶️ John to that, pick it, download it where? On a CompuServe? Maybe. They’d have a second
⏹️ ▶️ John version on a different floppy disk. So the incentives were for the software developer to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John way more time making sure the software they were going to pay to put on
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of floppy disks was as bug free as possible because they knew they can’t just have people
⏹️ ▶️ John install a patch, a day one patch when they launched the app because there was no internet, right? So those incentives are different, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like that doesn’t mean that the programmers weren’t making the exact same number of bugs per lines of code. All that means
⏹️ ▶️ John is they had to spend more time and more money getting that
⏹️ ▶️ John version 1.0 to a more bug free state. Like any company could do that today, it would just mean
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to ship later, right? That also means if there was a bug and there certainly was, there was always bugs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would take way longer for you to get that fixed because you couldn’t just download an update. They’d have to print
⏹️ ▶️ John a version 1.1, put that on floppy disk and sometimes sell it to you or you’d send away for it. And it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was worse in all sorts of ways that people would not tolerate, right? Whereas now we just expect, oh, there’s a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John There better be an update tomorrow when I wake up. Like, there was not gonna be an update to your floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John disk when you woke up, right? You know, it was what it was. So those incentives could exist
⏹️ ▶️ John today and do in different markets, for example, in theory, I don’t know if this is true, maybe Casey can tell me, but in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John military software development has a much slower pace and more
⏹️ ▶️ John process and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco whatever. I hope so. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you know, more money being spent in various states to
⏹️ ▶️ John be basically a jobs program where we blow people up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. Yeah, but it’s also a lot higher stakes than like, you know, some weather app on your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or like self-driving. Ha, don’t think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John that was originally the DARPA challenge. You guys don’t remember that, it was a good Nova on it. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah. So I think like different incentive structures can and do exist
⏹️ ▶️ John and those also influence perceived quality, but in general, the human beings
⏹️ ▶️ John produce X number of bugs per Y number of lines of code is not going to change until and unless
⏹️ ▶️ John human beings change and that happens really slowly. So I think any perception that you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John think about the surrounding context. You know, what what functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John am I getting? What incentives exist for this functionality? How fast can I get an update? Because you’re trading
⏹️ ▶️ John things off. You’re you’re trading off the ability. You know, the ability to ship something with a bug in it
⏹️ ▶️ John is traded off against the ability for that bug to be fixed tomorrow through the magic of software updates. Right. And so that
⏹️ ▶️ John creates an incentive structure for shipping software that is different from the one where, you know, you can’t do an update
⏹️ ▶️ John until six months from now.
#askatp: John’s ARM GPU needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, and then finally for tonight, Thomas Alvarez writes, John mentioned how he wants a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro with GPUs on cards, and I’m curious what use he has for GPU-powered in an ARM-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac. If it’s gaming, aren’t we past that on the Mac now with Apple Silicon and moved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on to running Windows on a dedicated gaming PC? We all know how you feel about a dedicated gaming PC, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would you just mind answering the question, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, I mean, I don’t think I’ve actually talked about my specific needing
⏹️ ▶️ John GPUs on cards for an ARM based Mac. Mostly we’ve been talking about if it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have GPUs on cards, how is it not just a, you know, a Mac studio with a bunch of empty space
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So anyway, setting that thing aside, I am actually interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in significant GPU power in an ARM based Mac. Back when
⏹️ ▶️ John we were still entertaining rumors of this sort of quad SOC arrangement, and I did the math
⏹️ ▶️ John on that, that would have enough GPU power to be equivalent to
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty okay, you know, external PC graphics card.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would be fine with that. And why do I want that? It’s to play games. And you’d be like, well, you can’t play any games on an ARM Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still am personally holding out hope that Windows and gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John will get on the ARM bandwagon eventually. I don’t have any reason to particularly believe that because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t seem to be really happening, but you know, it seems plausible. Technically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s certainly possible, we know that. But markets move slowly and I’m not sure if there’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John motion there. Maybe the server stuff needs to go and destroy the economics of good x86 CPUs for that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how that’s all gonna happen, but I would like that to happen. And in the meantime, I just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the same reason I have this big honking Mac that I don’t need over here, I just like the idea of having more computing power
⏹️ ▶️ John than I actually need. Even if it’s just so I can download like some demo of some 3D program that I’m never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out to use and just play with or whatever. Or, you know, like, I locked myself
⏹️ ▶️ John out of a locked note, you know, the Apple notes, like back before, you could use your Apple ID to lock
⏹️ ▶️ John a note, you could put individual passwords on notes. And I had a note that I had put an individual password
⏹️ ▶️ John on that I had forgotten and hadn’t put it in key chain or anything like that. And so I used
⏹️ ▶️ John my dual GPUs to crack it, like brute force. To brute force crack. Yeah, you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John force crack my own password. And guess what? The fans really spoiled my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco crack it. It was a short
⏹️ ▶️ John throwaway password or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco How long did
⏹️ ▶️ John it take? I don’t know, like five minutes. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wasn’t, I did not use a 15 character
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever password. This is an argument for you to do the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where, I don’t remember when they did that. It was ages ago where they let you do the thing like, do you want to update your thing so your Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John and your face can unlock all your notes or whatever? I eventually did that, right? But, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just a silly example. but like I could have also cracked it on, you know, on an iPhone, right? Like I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John pretending that I need a big GPU to do this, but the same reason people don’t need a sports car because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not race car drivers, they just like to have one, even though you can’t really use it without breaking the law. At least I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not, you know, breaking the law with my Mac Pro here or whatever. Remember those ads when you couldn’t export the
⏹️ ▶️ John G4 to communist countries because it was like a restricted
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco export thing? I think Apple had an ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Classified as ammunition because it’s too good of a computer. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I just want it. Even if it’s for that, you know, so I can play a five-year-old port, a port of a five-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ John game at high frame rates, the Mac OS version or whatever, that’s it. It’s, you know, and it’s for games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I really hope someday, well, you know, cause ARM-based SoCs made by Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of GPU power, that’s really good hardware for games. Too bad no one makes games for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Too bad Windows doesn’t run it. Like I get it, it doesn’t make perfect sense. And as for the dedicated gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John PC, honestly, if I had a different house with another desk for things to put on. I probably would have bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a gaming PC by this point, but I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The desk is what’s holding you back. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna buy an entire Mac Pro instead of a
⏹️ ▶️ John desk. Well, I mean, no, it’s not the desk. It’s the house where the desk would go. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no place. It’s not like I’m getting a new house anytime soon. And I do have my, I’ve talked to those about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have my own irrational personal biases against Microsoft and Windows that will make me never want to buy a PC. And honestly, at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been such a long streak. I feel like I need to keep it going. But in theory, if
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I also haven’t bought an Xbox for that same stupid reason. But in theory, if I had a bigger house with another desk
⏹️ ▶️ John for me to put stuff on, I might actually get a gaming PC to play PC games.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I’m enjoying my Mac Pro. I can play Microsoft Flight Simulator with like my fancy new GPU and it looks really cool and
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t play it on any other platform. I play it in Windows and I get good frame rate and it looks really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And someday soon, well, someday, I can’t, I don’t wanna say soon, but someday that will be over because I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John an ARM-based Mac Pro. but hopefully by then, like Microsoft will like port flight simulator
⏹️ ▶️ John to Windows on ARM and I’ll be able to somehow boot into Windows on ARM from an ARM-based
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro and play flight simulator at even higher frame rates. That is the future I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John in that I’m dreaming of and that’s why I want my ARM-based computer to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a beefy GPU. Good luck. You might have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep dreaming on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, I know. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Collide, and thanks to our members who support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us directly. you can join us at atp.fm slash join. Thank you so much. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John to ♪ No, accidental ♪ ♪ Accidental ♪ Tech Podcasts,
Member-special ideas?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of sponsorships and memberships and things of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that nature, we are trying to come up with, like we were talking about the pre-show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more ideas for member specials and it would be really awesome if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we could get some ideas from listeners. And so it would be excellent if you used Mastodon, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possible, to toot at, and I’ll take the fall on this, you can toot at me or the ATP show account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can send it my way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John particularly… What is
⏹️ ▶️ John the ATP Show account, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at ATP FM at mastodon.social.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does Mike do this on Upgrade? He has a really good way of handling it. It’s on mastodon.social
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John which is what… Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to overcomplicate it. Most mastodon clients and the websites, the search is good enough that if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John type ATP FM into your search box on any mastodon instance, it will probably find
⏹️ ▶️ John us. They should do a better job. I was thinking about this, that clients should do a better job of indicating
⏹️ ▶️ John the verified URL. Oh, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good point. Yeah, like, put it like as like a little subtitle in the in the search results like name verified
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because what you want to know if there’s like 15 ATP FM accounts that like impersonate, which one is the real one,
⏹️ ▶️ John only one of them can possibly be verified against ATP that I found the website.
⏹️ ▶️ John And clients know that and show it this showed in search because it would help people find things. But anyway, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John address, we’ll put a link in the show. You can also go to what? Atb.fm slash feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but that sends email. Nobody likes email.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you have ideas for members episodes and the, okay, so here’s the criteria. Like we’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll accept any ideas, but generally speaking, what we’re trying to figure out is something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are equipped to handle. So as an example, I would love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to play Destiny one time with John and Marco. I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any PlayStation in the house. I don’t have any video capture software in the house. I don’t think any of the three of us, except maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, has the patience to put together a video or do any of that sort
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I totally have the patience for it. And like I said, PlayStation 5 has video capture built in. We’re very close people. Marco’s got a PS5.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a PS5. KC’s the holdout. But anyway, that’s already on the list. You don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggest that one. Well, I’m just saying that something along those lines that requires hundreds of dollars of investment.
⏹️ ▶️ John us going on a road trip across Australia, probably not gonna happen. Cool idea, but you know. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great idea, but not gonna happen. So things that we can handle with just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microphone, and we can spend some amount of money. In fact, if I can convince
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the boys, I think I have a pretty decent idea for one that involves spending an absurd amount of money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little bit of food. I mean those words, I choose those words very carefully. But, um, but anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that we can handle and one thing in particular that we’ve been wrestling with, particularly John is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we, we think, how did you phrase this when we were talking privately, we think we can get a pretty good licensing agreement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, I think John had said, uh, for top four. And so what are, what is a good top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four? Well, top four Apple products. Sure. That’s kind of obvious, but there’s gotta be something more creative.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Top four. We were talking about doing privately. We were talking about top four Apple announcements, but then we have to do like 35
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of research. remembering all these announcements. Or do we? Haven’t you listened to Top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, the point is, particularly in the vicinity of Top Four, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even in general, if you have a member idea, please send us a toot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon or feedback if you must. I guess our feedbacks are much better than Apple’s, aren’t they?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, yeah, send it our way. We would love to hear it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we hope to, again, This is not a guarantee. But our goal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we may not always achieve, is maybe one of these a month, if we can. It probably won’t be every month. It may be every other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But our goal, our hope, is about one a month. And we can keep watching movies. And I’m sure we will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But let’s try to figure out as a collective, let’s figure out some other fun stuff to do. And if enough of you do join,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then yes, I will buy a stupid PlayStation. And I will play Stupid Destiny with my stupid friends.
⏹️ ▶️ John And your kids will thank you for it. And by the way, for people who don’t know, Top 4 is a podcast that Marco does with his wife,
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiff, It is on relay. We’ll put a link in the show notes. They I don’t want to try to explain it They
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey ostensibly list the top
⏹️ ▶️ John four of something. It’s an experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It is an experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure. It will make you mad guaranteed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Can’t confer
⏹️ ▶️ John and I and I have to say I have a newfound respect for what they do in that program having done just one
⏹️ ▶️ John Very easy food based challenge on a podcast and I cannot fathom But
⏹️ ▶️ John true these two champions have done to their bodies
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this show No, very, very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. I have a visceral reaction now to thinking about what they’re going through.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s also why I’m not really gung ho about new food-based challenges in ATP. But I may be forced
⏹️ ▶️ John to do some. Semi-related to membership, which Casey also
⏹️ ▶️ John skipped over because I wanted to put before this, I’m going to take advantage of my podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John platform to say I’m trying to sell my old cameras and no one seems to want to buy them. So I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to put a link in the show notes to a webpage I put up for me selling my old cameras. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John being silly and for now, trying to sell them to people who are willing to meet up in the Boston metro
⏹️ ▶️ John area to avoid shipping fees and stuff like that, that’s probably not gonna work and it’s probably gonna fall through and I’m gonna have to ship these
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. But for now, if you live in the Boston metro area and wanna buy any of my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s listed on this webpage that’s gonna be in the show, it’s just my old Sony a6300 and a couple lenses for
⏹️ ▶️ John what I think are pretty reasonable prices and everything’s in nice condition. You know, hit me up. All the information is
⏹️ ▶️ John on the webpage that will be in the show notes, or you can just go to, I’m gonna read a URL now. Hypercritical.co
⏹️ ▶️ John slash for-sale slash camera. Anyway, go to the show notes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say this is directly related to the bad sponsorships, but it’s not not related. Ha ha