562: Do You Have a Dragon?
21 Nov 2023OpenAI’s turmoil, M3 Max thermals, keyboard wear, and the Humane Ai Pin.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- 🚨 LAST CHANCE FOR THE ATP HOLIDAY STORE 🚨
- Note: long-sleeve and utes sizes have been added!
- 🚨 LAST CHANCE FOR THE ATP HOLIDAY STORE 🚨
- Follow-up:
- Keyboard wear
- Finger grease (via Ryan Holmes)
- A true horror show (via Andrew)
- MacBook Pro thermal tests
- More about chip packaging
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGEDjust will not die
- Keyboard wear
- OpenAI
- The Verge headlines/coverage
- Net promoter score
#askatp:- What ever happened to ECC RAM, now that Apple Silicon is here? (via Tim Schmitz)
- How do we photograph kid art (via Chris Gleim)
- Does tech actually improve our lives? (via Jamie West)
- Post-show: Humane ai pin
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Chapters
- They’re having a bad week
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Keyboard wear 🖼️
- M3 Max 14” vs. 16”
- Chip packaging
- ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- OpenAI turmoil
- #askatp: ECC w/Apple silicon
- #askatp: Photographing kid art
- #askatp: Is tech improving our lives?
- Ending theme
- Humane Ai Pin unveiled
They’re having a bad week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want to like really screw anything up big time, like really if you want to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really make some of the biggest public mistakes of your life, now is the time to do it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least we’re not the open AI board.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re jumping ahead my friend, jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead. What a mess, oh my god. Like this, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you talk about people having bad weeks, like sometimes, oh yeah, they’re having a bad week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boy are they having a bad week.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least it’s relatively low stakes. I feel like it’s fun because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s only like whatever, $80 billion on the line, but it’s, you know, in the end it’s people with computers and stuff and things
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not like life or death. And most of the people involved, you feel okay laughing at them
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit because they’re such big distant figures. They don’t seem like real people to you, but rest assured
⏹️ ▶️ John they are. And that’s probably why they’re in this mess.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final warning! This is the moment where you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dear, beloved listener, who has not yet put in your order, you sit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or stand there and you think, pfft, I’ve got this. No worries. I’m gonna take care of that as soon as I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to the office, or pfft, I’ll take care of it as soon as I get home. And then, you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dear, beloved listener, you forget. And then what happens? Then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the rules state you have to go tweeting, even though I won’t see it, or tooting at me saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m the one. I’m that person this time. Don’t be that person. Don’t do that to yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Go to atp.fm. This is your final warning. This is all we got. This is it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sale ends this weekend, Sunday, November 26th. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all the time you get. So, go now. Don’t hesitate. Pull over the car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal because you’re an adult and courteous, use the signal. If you’re walking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do what you need to do to indicate to those behind you. You will be pulling to the side of the sidewalk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you’re biking, God help you, but do what you got to do as a bikist, as Marco would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get to the side of the road and not get run over by a car. That makes people so mad, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way. I know it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that it’s a joke. It makes them so mad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We know what we know that it’s by guest is not a thing anyways all kidding aside go to a tp.fm Slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store check out our merch check out our wares and remember if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a member you get 15% off the ATP store during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time limited sale and all other time limited sales Now is the time I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we kind of glossed over it last week But John would you mind just doing a brief overview of everything just one last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to really? We sell it, just nail it, and send it home. Let’s get a few more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sales, John. What do we have on offer?
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not going to go through all the merch again. They know what’s there. People know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, I’ll go through all the merch. Why you got to be such a party pooper? All right, here we go. I’ll do a speed run. We’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP Pixels. We’ve got ATP Space Black. We’ve got the M3 shirt, the M3 Pro shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M3 Max shirt. We’ve got ATP Six Colors, which is six colors of fabric, actually more than six colors of fabric,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the text is always white. Really should have workshopped that name, but here we are. ATP logo shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OG. We’ve got the ATP hoodie, ATP polo. Don’t let me down, polo ponies, polo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people. Don’t let me down, this is my jam. Get an ATP polo, please and thank you. We’ve also got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ATP mug in now white and a bluey, purpley sort of thing. John will correct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the actual color. It’s cobalt, please, Casey, cobalt. Of course, I said that. It’s definitely cobalt, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a bluey purpley.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh-huh, sure. And the ATP pint glass. So go now, atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. And remember, if you’re a member, go to your member page landing strip, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you call it thing, and go get your bespoke discount code for 15% off, atp.fm slash store. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it people, 26, that’s all you got. The
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing I’ll add is remember that a lot of the products come in long sleeve t-shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John versions and sweatshirt versions. I think this is kind of the first time we’ve done those in a lot of these products. So check,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though a lot of times It will show a picture of a t-shirt. If you watch long enough, the picture will rotate and you’ll see some long sleeve
⏹️ ▶️ John varieties. And it’s, you know, the cold winter months in our
⏹️ ▶️ John parts anyway. So think about those long sleeve options if you’re interested. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John sale does span Black Friday. We did this intentionally. So it ends on the 26th.
⏹️ ▶️ John Black Friday is a couple of days before that. You’re gonna be thinking about shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John for the holidays. Probably, or you’ll be bombarded by messages about shopping for the holidays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t forget, this is your last chance. I know we do this sale kind of early, but we’re trying as best we can to have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John of getting these things to you in time for the holidays. So, you know, nerdy gifts for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John or for others. Don’t forget, when Black Friday arrives, that’s another reminder for you to hear Casey’s voice
⏹️ ▶️ John in your head of saying, oh wait, was I supposed to buy some nerd thing? Yes, atp.fm.com/. Indeed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also Utes sizes as well, which we added a little bit late, apologies about that. So you can check out for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kids, you can get them stuff for friends, kids, you know, whatever you want to do. atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. I’m Tony. This is good stuff that you should, you should definitely check it out and time’s running out. My friends,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time is running out. I feel like that’s something else I wanted to add, but I forgot what it was. So that’s all right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll just make me feel well, make me sound smart and post right, Marco. Right, right, right. Okay, good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Garbage in Garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, brutal, brutal, well played, but very mean.
Keyboard wear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keyboard wear, let’s talk about, God, you really derailed me with that. Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wear, let’s talk about what happens to keyboards because of your damn dirty fingers. Ryan Holmes writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey, I think what you’re seeing as finger grease is likely what keyboard enthusiasts call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote shine that happens to ABS plastic. It’s relatively soft plastic that is susceptible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to finger oils and heat. To John’s point, some people’s finger oils shine them more than others. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a magic eraser to remove the shine, you are literally abrading off a layer of plastic. Okay, so interrupting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey briefly, I don’t debate that that’s very possibly true, but I’m not like sawing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard with a magic eraser. Like just a quick glance with it is more than enough. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I only do this a handful of times a year. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I- Well, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that is true though. Like that is how the abrasive and a magic eraser works. You are taking a layer off. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small layer because it’s a very fine
⏹️ ▶️ John abrasive. But you’re also leaving bits of the magic eraser on your keyboard and going down into the,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still against the magic eraser.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not a great option to have to use. Ideally, you don’t need it. Because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, there is some risk of getting little dots of it stuck in there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jamming up the keys. Obviously, now that we have a little more robust keyboards than we used to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that risk is lower,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is still a risk. So yeah, you are better off not doing that if you can help it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Continuing back to what Ryan Holmes was writing, ABS is nice for key caps because they are easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to double shot meaning the letters can be embedded into the key and won’t wear off. It’s a separate layer of plastic molded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside. This also enables any color combo. A more durable option is PBT, polybutylene
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terephthalate, oh my gosh, that’s a lot of consonants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all at once,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terephthalate, which takes much higher temperatures to deform. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not quote-unquote shine. It often has a deeper sound and can be double shot, but double shotting it is not common
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and can involve a blend with ABS. The more common way to print legends on PBT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is dye sublimation, which involves heat and dye. The dye embeds into the top layer of the key,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so the legends will essentially never wear off. There is so much lingo here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my word. I know every, like, interest and profession has their own vocabulary, but my gosh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, it’s difficult to get them as crisp as doubleshot, however, and they will not let LEDs glow through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PBT is also difficult for light legends on dark caps, since the whole cap will need to be dyed except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Legend, which is masked out. This amount of dyeing involves longer exposure of the plastic to heat and often deforms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger keys, most notably space bars. Cheaper OEM keyboards use other kinds of surface printing that wears off relatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily. So that was way more information than certainly I needed or wanted to know about
⏹️ ▶️ John Some background on Apple’s keyboards, like so Apple’s using ABS, which is the softer plastic. Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John used PBT in the past on older laptops, you, before your time, but back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John day, the PowerWorks used to come with keyboards It was kind of hilarious. They look kind of like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve all seen the Apple Extended 2, right? Even if you’ve never actually touched one, what those key caps look like. Imagine those,
⏹️ ▶️ John but imagine you took them into a 3D program and you squished them so they’re not as high, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they made the PowerBook key caps look like. From the top, it looked like, oh, that’s just a regular key. But then you’d look
⏹️ ▶️ John from the side and you’d see they were squished down. Like they had the same kind of like slanted edges, but just much,
⏹️ ▶️ John much smaller. I’m pretty sure back in those days, the key caps were PBT. Of course, they weren’t backlit.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s the whole big thing. I think all of Apple’s keyboards now on their laptops are backlit. You can’t backlit
⏹️ ▶️ John like the PBT because it doesn’t let light through it. That’s why they were talking about having ABS mixed in because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can let the light go through the ABS part, like just the letter that’s on them or whatever. But anyway, Apple’s key caps
⏹️ ▶️ John on all their modern keyboards all appear to be the very much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ABS. Anonymous writes, the backlit keyboard key caps on Apple laptops are injection molded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in clear plastic. They are painted with white paint, then black paint. The glyphs are then laser etched using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a method that removes the black paint, but not the white paint. Lastly, a protective clear coat is applied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Andrew writes, your conversation about wear on keyboards reminded me of a recent article by a British cycling journalist. Would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that be a bikist, Marco, is that correct? A bikist journalist. A bike-alist. Oh my, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna get so much hate mail. On the recent demise of his 10-year-old MacBook, which had survived an impressive amount of abuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might like to see how worn his most used keys were. We will put a link in the show notes and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco will make this chapter, maybe, maybe. Let me tell you, actually, you know what? I would not advise you to make this chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this keyboard is freaking horrifying. Not only is this the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous Tetris key return key, which I know the British people love, leaving that monstrosity aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is an abomination. Look, this is disgusting, this thing. I can’t handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I need to scroll down. Because this is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of many photos that we got. This is the worst one, obviously. But it’s one of many, many, many photos that we got. most
⏹️ ▶️ John of which were not 10 years old, to be clear, most of which were much younger laptops. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to visualize what this picture looks like, picture an Apple keyboard with all of its black key caps and then
⏹️ ▶️ John have little circles worn through them at various places, seeing the mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John beneath, because as the earlier feedback item said, Apple’s keys are made
⏹️ ▶️ John from clear plastic and then they have black paint and white paint over them. And so this,
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine the keys with the black and white paint rubbed off, just showing you the clear
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic. It’s like these little window panes of various sizes. And you can see where they wore through the black first,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the white second, right? And you see kind of like a terrace pattern where it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John black, then there’s a white ring, and then there’s a clear spot. And you can tell where this person hit the space bar. Like they hit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in one very specific spot
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Yeah, tons of people had this. And again, the leading
⏹️ ▶️ John theory is pH levels either more acidic or more basic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sweat from their fingers or whatever, essentially wearing through the paint because these are
⏹️ ▶️ John painted clear plastic. And if they were PBT where it was the
⏹️ ▶️ John color of the plastic instead of being painted, this wouldn’t happen, but then you couldn’t have the backlights unless you double
⏹️ ▶️ John shot them. But then there’s the, you know, they’re saying like to put the dye on the entire key or something
⏹️ ▶️ John along key like the space bar might warp. So I would say, like, as we mentioned in the last show,
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard durability on laptops, aesthetic durability,
⏹️ ▶️ John not like, you know, making the keys continue to work, still seems like an area where Apple could use some improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think what they have now is a reasonable-ish compromise because they’re lightweight, they’re fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John sturdy, they hold up pretty well most of the time, but if you’re one of those people who
⏹️ ▶️ John wears away key caps, it’s a bummer for you because you’re going to have a worse experience with this
⏹️ ▶️ John keyboard. It’ll be nice if the keys still work. And I guess as long as you remember what those letters were
⏹️ ▶️ John before you wore them off with your fingers, you’re fine. So functionality is job one, but aesthetic should be
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere in the top five and the current keyboards are failing that for some
⏹️ ▶️ John subset of Apple’s customers.
M3 Max 14” vs. 16”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This next section is John tries to make Casey feel bad about liking 14-inch laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’m just gonna…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, it’s not just John. I mean, if only one of us would have said last episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, with this amount of power draw, so much increase from the M1 generation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the 14-inch might be a bad idea if you get the Max chip, because it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a lot of heat for the 14-inch to quietly and gracefully get rid of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the 16-inch. So John, what happened?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, to be clear, this was true of the M2 and M1 generations as well, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco gave that advice. But anyway, we’ll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video
⏹️ ▶️ John where they tested the M3 Max 14 inch versus 16 inch. And I think I said
⏹️ ▶️ John in the last show that like, well, you know, maybe the cooling should be roughly equivalent. And the thing that is
⏹️ ▶️ John stuck on top of the M3 Max, like the little whatever heat spreader thing that’s pulling the heat off. Yeah, that part’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same. Every other part of it is not the same though. First of all, the heat pipe itself that’s leading
⏹️ ▶️ John away from the SOC, that heat pipe is wider on the 16 inch. So right away there’s a difference in the cooling system.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the big difference is the fans in the 16 inch are so much bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ John the fans in the 14 inch. Like they’re really using that extra space to good effect.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a dramatic difference in the size of the fans and obviously the amount of air they can move. And then the fans are blowing
⏹️ ▶️ John that air over, you know, these little fin things are attached to the heat pipe and there’s more of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, in the testing, two big things came out. First, that 14 inch is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to run the fans at much higher RPM. So they did like a Cinebench benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ John and the 14 inch was running the fans at 7200 RPM and the 16 inch at 3800. So it was like double the fan speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously, if the fans are running faster, they’re gonna be noisier. And since the 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John fans are smaller, they’re gonna be a little bit more annoying too because they’re higher pitched. That’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John They stabilize fan speed. I love when they fancy up their benchmarks here. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the average speed in the Cinebench 2024 GPU test was 7200 RPM for the 14 inch, 1700 RPM for the 16 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a big difference. That’s as in like you can hear the
⏹️ ▶️ John fan screaming the entire time in the 14 inch and on 16 inch you probably wouldn’t hear anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now Casey may be saying, I don’t care about that. I don’t run 3D benchmarks. I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about the average fan speed over a 10 minute run of some type of thing. But then they did an Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John test and that’s really, really hidden that Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John it hurts. Cause that’s the thing that he does do. And this is not about the fan speed
⏹️ ▶️ John or about temperatures or anything like that. This is the fact that all those things with the fan being higher on the 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John translate to the 14 inch being in more thermal distress and thermal distress
⏹️ ▶️ John means thermal throttling. And so this is where the rubber meets the road. the 14 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit slower than the 16 inch because it thermal throttles
⏹️ ▶️ John when doing Xcode compiles. Now this is probably a big Xcode compile. Maybe it’s bigger than any of Casey’s apps. Maybe it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John affect him or whatever. And the difference isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge. Yeah, because this is, it took like almost a minute and a half to do this compile. So like, if you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very long sustained CPU or GPU drain, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna hit throttling on the 14 inch, no question. Like that’s what this is clearly showing. Like if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pegging the CPU or GPU for, you know, a minute or more, you are almost certainly going to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttling on the 14 inch that is not present on the 16 inch. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Xcode benchmark was 82 seconds on the 14 inch and 72 on the 16 inch. So not a huge difference. Not like the fan speed difference. I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the big quality of life differences, the fan speeds. Like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like an M2 to M3 difference in performance though. Like, but again, like this is a, this is a long, sustained one. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if you know, my build takes 11 seconds, like it’s probably in, in that span,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably wouldn’t see the difference between a 14 and a 16, but if you’re doing builds that take a minute, you probably will.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I mean, as the case with all these laptops, right? It’s just a question of how
⏹️ ▶️ John much the cooling system can fight off the inevitable heat saturation
⏹️ ▶️ John due to long range jobs. It’s rare that a laptop, a very high powered, top of the line, stuffed
⏹️ ▶️ John to the gills laptop, can sustain its full power for a very long period of time because the cooling systems
⏹️ ▶️ John usually aren’t adequate to get all that heat out of there to keep up with it. Especially if you have some
⏹️ ▶️ John contrived, like CPU maxed out at the same time as GPU maxed out, at the same time as neural
⏹️ ▶️ John engine maxed out, at the same time as a video encoder maxed out, like they’re not gonna be able to deal with that. But almost no real
⏹️ ▶️ John job is like that. That’s why the GPU benchmark is so brutal here, because this was just a benchmark of the GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fan speeds were 7,000 RPM versus 1,700. That’s not even close. That’s just, they don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John even just stressing the GPU is enough to really, really
⏹️ ▶️ John see a difference. And that’s relevant to people playing games. If you’re gonna play games on your laptop, and you’re like, I wanna, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I want one of these M series laptops. I don’t need to hear the fans screaming when I play games. Get a 16
⏹️ ▶️ John inch. You’ll, you have a fighting chance of making that real. Because if you, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanna find something that’s gonna really stress the GPU, yeah, playing a game for a long period of time will do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this means that a case you should get a 16 inch. I think the 16 inch is too big as well. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the whole point of being portable is to have something small. But if you are concerned about sustained performance,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, don’t get a laptop, but B- Hey, the 16-inch sustains it just fine. Well, no, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16-inch eventually heat soaks as well, especially if you do a CPU plus GPU combo. These benchmarks are
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit shorter. Yeah, and also the other thing they were measuring, which isn’t in any of these graphs in the show notes here,
⏹️ ▶️ John is clock speed. Like they’re just seeing, like are they hitting their rated top clock speed? And
⏹️ ▶️ John both of these laptops, occasionally depending on the benchmark, would never actually achieve their
⏹️ ▶️ John rated top benchmark, top clock speed, or would do it very briefly in the beginning of the test and then never see it again,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So there’s always room for improvement, right? 16 inch versus 14 doesn’t mean the 16 inch never thermal throttles, it just means it does it less
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 14, which is why it’s coming out ahead in these tests. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say these tests prove my hunch last week that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going for the max chip, maybe don’t get the 14 inch. Like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the 14 inch for like a all around balance of portability and size and maybe you’re going for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 Pro chip, that’s a different story. It can probably handle that a lot better. But if you’re getting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 Max and you intend to push it at all, which you probably are if you’re getting the Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should be aware of this. Like this might not change your mind, but this is something that you should really be aware of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M3 Max seems to be substantially crushing the 14 inches thermal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system more than the M1 generation did. The M2 was probably somewhere in the middle, because its power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was probably, was between the two. But, you know, they’ve ramped up the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peak power draw of these chips compared to previous generations. The M1 draws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less power than the M2. The M2 draws less power than the M3 Max, in all those cases. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be aware of that, that they have raised the power envelope without increasing the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thermal dissipation capacity significantly. So, if you’re coming from a 14-inch M1 Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’re thinking, well, it handled my M1 Max just fine in the 14, the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t necessarily apply to the M3 Max. Like you have to reevaluate because they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dropping replacements in terms of power and thermals. The M3 Max uses substantially more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power and makes substantially more heat under load than the M1 Max did. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might change your calculus of whether you want a 14 or a 16. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the cooling system has upgraded a tiny bit in the M3 generation versus the M2.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the heat spreader thingy on the SoC is a little bit larger in this generation, and I’m not sure about the fans,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they are exactly the same, but I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely true they just use exactly the same cooling system. Otherwise, it would never be able to do it, because the power difference in the
⏹️ ▶️ John 16-inch, comparing the M2 16-inch versus M3 Max 16-inch, it’s a pretty big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 Max is pushing like 50 watts, and the M2 Max was only ever getting like 36 or so. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a lot of extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heat. Yeah, and the M1 generation I think was in the 20s. Like it’s substantially more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and heat here. And also that also results in a larger difference between the two models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in battery life than there used to be. There was always a decent difference because the 16 inch battery is just much bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, the screen uses more power than the 14 because it’s bigger, but not that much more power. So the 16 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still the battery monster, but in this case, like keep in mind, again, the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is drawing more power than the previous generations at the same, you know, marketing name level. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, I don’t know how much of a factor this is, but if those fans are spinning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster, fans also use power. So the result after these tests, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result in this video, the 14 inch battery was substantially more drained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the 16 inch. It was not a small difference. So again, just don’t make assumptions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on whatever worked for you in the M1 generation. don’t assume that the same thing will work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you in the M3 generation, because the power levels are very different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand everything that you guys are saying, but I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I’m bumping into thermal throttling issues any time other than when I’m doing transcoses with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FFmpeg, at which case, okay, yeah, I’m reaping what I sowed or whatever the turn of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phrase is, you know what I’m trying to say. Okay, that’s fine. The other thing is I didn’t want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down from 64 gigs of memory. I probably could have and been fine, but I didn’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in order to do that in this generation, you have to have an M3 Max, like that’s the end of the meeting. So in fact, you not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only need an M3 Max, you need the baller M3 Max. That’s the only, I’m looking at the configurator right now. It’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option in the 14. So if I want 64 gigs, well, guess what? I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an M3 Max. In fact, the Pro appears to top out at 36 gigs, which even for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me is probably fine, but I didn’t want that. I wanted 64. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, I have zero regrets about this machine. I’ve been using it at home. I’ve been using it away from home.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I freaking love this computer. And I mean, I freaking love my M1 Max as well. Don’t get me wrong, but this computer is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t heard the fans except one time when I was doing a transcode. I have no reason to believe battery life is suffering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to the last one. It’s been flawless so far. I don’t argue any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what you guys are saying. I’m not trying to say that you’re wrong or lying or anything like that. It’s just in real world use,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not personally noticing, not to say it’s not affecting me, but I’m not noticing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the results of any of these problems in the 14. And for me, and I totally understand, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why you reached a different conclusion, but for me, I don’t want a frigging aircraft carrier in my backpack. And I travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this machine often enough that that matters to me. And so I made the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choice I made, and I think it’s the right one for me. You made the choice you made. I think it’s the right one for you. And everyone’s happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why won’t you just let me be happy?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, look, I think it’s important to point out, if the 14-inch still works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, that’s great, but people who are buying it should know this ahead of time that it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have these trade-offs. The M1 generation of it had fewer trade-offs compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the M3 generation. And if what you are seeking is the highest performing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, in the M1 generation, you could say, well, these are basically the same. Now, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really say that. now the 16 inches is noticeably higher performing with a lot of workloads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is worth knowing. Also, again, if stuff like fan noise is really critical to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then again, that’s something that’s worth knowing ahead of time. So that’s why. And for many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna still get the 14 inch like you and be totally happy with, and that’s great. But again, you gotta know going into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, the assumptions that you might’ve made from previous generations of the M series laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a little bit different now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if there’s not a low-tech solution to this. Remember we were talking about a little RGB fan
⏹️ ▶️ John cooler thing on the back of your phone to get sustained
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco frame rates?
⏹️ ▶️ John just get some giant plate. Yeah, like I know they make laptop cooler type things, but I do wonder. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quiet and elegant.
⏹️ ▶️ John right. But I do wonder, say you get a 14 inch and you want to use it in desktop mode and you don’t want it to thermal throttle, just how
⏹️ ▶️ John much extra cooling would it take? Probably not that much. And probably could be applied externally. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John caveats about condensation and don’t destroy your computer and blah, blah, blah, or whatever, but like based on how well
⏹️ ▶️ John it works on the little phone thing to sort of sustain frame rates when the phone could not do it without the cooler,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if just a little bit of extra help on a 14 inch would help it not thermal throttle at all because it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s the fans are almost doing the job because you have the fan speed difference is huge. Those fans are working overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But the benchmark difference is not that big. So it’s just, it’s like the 14 inches
⏹️ ▶️ John cooling system is overmatched, but just by a little bit. So I wonder if you just gave it a little bit of help, which is unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of other computer things, like, oh, I didn’t get enough core as well. There’s not really anything you can do to add more cores to your computer. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if thermal throttling is your problem, pointing a fan at the back of your laptop when it’s like sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John upright, you know, like in a bookshelf type thing, might be enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One potential limitation there is, remember we learned this from people who wrote in, like a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of years ago this came up, where we were talking about like the MacBook Air thermal design without any fan, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there are certain standards that different governments and things set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how hot the outside of a laptop can get for safety reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the way these are designed, usually the processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not like heat pipe directly to the exterior case. Like there’s usually some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of air gap there so that the processor is intentionally not transferring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its heat much to the metal case. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually makes it difficult to make external coolers that are very effective because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not getting all that heat away from the chip through the case very much. It’s mostly dumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into the air. So it’s a little bit harder. So you couldn’t, for instance, just stick like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Peltier element cooler on the back of a laptop and have it be- Well, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good. You just need a temperature differential. And one exists. I mean, feel the bottom of a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s hard working. I know what you’re saying, like not all the heat is being dumped out there, but there’s still a temperature differential. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a test that someone should try. Like just consider that. I guess the reverse of it is like, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John doing some sustained workload with your laptop, don’t throw it on your bed on top of your comforter. Like, don’t, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John You see how kids treat laptops, they have no idea that these are like living, breathing things, right? It’s a little empathy for the machine here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t take your laptop and just put it on a big, soft pillow surrounded by blankets. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to get it, with the lid closed, of course, right? Naturally. Give it a fighting chance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and just as a final note, because I’d like to move on, I feel like there’s a lot of FUD going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around right now. These, I really don’t subscribe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have any anecdote that indicates that this problem is any worse with this generation than it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my two year old laptop. Like, yes, again, I’m not trying to argue that the facts that you’re presenting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me are wrong. All I’m trying to say is that in day-to-day use, I straight up do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear the fans. So yes, in the occasion that I can hear the fans, yes, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably are faster, they probably are more annoying, they’re probably louder. I don’t debate that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we’re making a problem out of nothing here. This machine is phenomenal. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a desktop replacement that you occasionally move, 100%, get the 16, no argument.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But if you want a computer that you move occasionally and you favor that, you know, the ease
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of moving it over anything else, which is where I am, get the 14. Don’t let these two knuckleheads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to convince you otherwise. It’s a perfectly good computer. There’s no need to, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John need. I’m trying to convince, I also agree, I think the 16 inch is too big for a laptop and really you should just get a desktop anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s so good. The 16 is so good. There’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no trade-off except it is large. But again, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at, I mean, we are so spoiled now. The 16 inch MacBook Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lighter than most 15 inches of most of our computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using careers. And it is 16 only because they made the bezel smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the footprint is roughly 15 inch class that we’ve had forever. The weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is similar or lighter than most 15 inch class laptops we’ve ever used. Like, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glorious. I’m not going to argue that the 14 inch isn’t noticeably smaller and lighter. It is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it is noticeably smaller and lighter. I would maybe argue that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s really your top priority, maybe consider the Air. But the 16 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s all relative.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is larger and heavier than yours, but compared to anything ever in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the history of computing, these are all very thin and light, and it’s fine. And even like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like when you’re looking at, suppose you’re putting it in a backpack and bringing it to wherever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The weight of your backpack empty is probably a few pounds. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends on what kind of bag you have. The weight of like your total carry of what most people bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around in their backpacks every day, maybe 10 or 15 pounds. And so the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in laptop weight of like a one pound difference between two things. That’s fair. Is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really that significant. It feels significant when it’s in your hand, but like however
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are carrying it, generally speaking for most people, the difference between a 16 inch MacBook Pro and a 14 inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, being like a pound or whatever, is not a massive difference in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever they’re carrying it in total. So again, if it matters to you, and if you really still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to minimize it, great. I get that. Please do. But, these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs that you should be aware of. Despite what you said, Casey, they weren’t as severe of trade-offs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the M1 generation because the total power usage of the M1 chips was way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower. Like, rather, the peak power usage, like under load, the peak power usage was way lower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the M1 generation than it is in the M3 generation. So that is a difference that is worth noting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And before, again, like before with the M1 generation, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could say these computers are basically the exact same computer, just bigger and smaller. And now that’s a little harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say. there’s a much bigger asterisk on that now.
Chip packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s talk about chip packaging. Johnny Srouji had an interview in July with his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alma mater, who is a college that’s, the name is escaping me, it was somewhere in Israel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he went back there and did an interview with somebody there and talked a bit about chip packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you want to either intro this or read it to me or tell me how you want to handle this? Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the interview that I referenced on a past show where, I forget what we’re talking about, we’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John 3-nanometer processors or stuff like that. I’ve said that Apple executives won’t reveal anything about future products,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, but anytime one of them talks, they’ll usually say something that lets you know some
⏹️ ▶️ John vague future direction. And in the interview, Johnny Surgi said that he thought that packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John was a potential area of innovation. And I wanted to follow up on that today
⏹️ ▶️ John to first provide the excerpt from the interview because the whole blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah is interesting is I think that was like Tim Cook saying the wrist is interesting or some BS like that. And whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote rose from Jobs when he was talking about cell phones was similar. That’s how we all knew Apple was making a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I just wanted to get the actual words that he said about packaging because there was
⏹️ ▶️ John also recently an interview of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger
⏹️ ▶️ John with Ben Thompson of Stratechery or Stratechery, however you want to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, where the Intel CEO talked about, you guessed it, packaging and how important
⏹️ ▶️ John it is to Intel and for the future. And so I feel like this is a confluence of events that’s worth digging into deeper, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if this gen, as we said in the past episode, of this generation, it just looks like the M3 is gonna be, M3
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra’s just gonna be two M3 Max’s stuck together just like it was before, which is fine and great and it’ll be awesome,
⏹️ ▶️ John but keep your eye on the future for packaging stuff. So yeah, Casey, you just wanna go through the interview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. So how about I’ll play the role of the interviewer and you can play the role of Johnny Cergi.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure, give me the longer one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fine, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ll take one. We can play
⏹️ ▶️ John acted. We can get Marco to be mixed in. He can be the announcer. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gosh. All right. So you be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interviewer. I will be Johnny. Let’s do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it that way. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need two people to read them. You can just be one person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Play with me in the space, John. Come on. Are you really just going to leave me hanging like this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Jesus Christ. I forgot this is my line. Yes, it’s you. Line, line. We’re actually doing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes. Yes, you are the interviewer, John. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the interviewer. What are the next challenges in the design and architecture of processors that Apple should tackle
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the real next generation of processing? This is where the interviewer starts asking questions like they shouldn’t ask if
⏹️ ▶️ John they know that I’m going to give the answer. What’s the next challenge? You know, what should they tackle
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the real next generation? I’m not asking a question about the future, but I totally am. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Johnny Sroority said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is getting more and more challenging. Those of you who follow CMOS technology, whether it’s 5 nanometer or beyond,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s getting harder and harder, which I think is great, by the way, because if it gets harder, that means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will try even, try better and better. So that’s good. I’m not going to describe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our future roadmap, but there are many challenges. For example, when you take CMOS technology, I think one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is going to be important is packaging without getting into details. So the way you package the chip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is going to be important, or maybe you architect the chip in a different way. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John know you think like, that’s saying nothing. What are you talking about? This was the quote? Yeah, they don’t say a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. But the fact that they say anything about anything, oh, packaging, just just that word
⏹️ ▶️ John packaging. What does that mean? I mean, again, Apple already does interesting things with packaging. The Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Interposer is an interesting thing done with packaging. And we’ve talked a lot about packaging technology in the past, but this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny tidbit they left. You know, maybe you architect your chip a different way. Packaging is interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like these typical Apple bravado, where they said, oh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of Silicon is it’s getting more and more difficult. And that’s great for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, because when things get hard, like we will excel. Like that’ll make us try harder, we’re the best and basically
⏹️ ▶️ John bring it on because the harder it gets the more you’ll see that apple is the best Which is great for him to say we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see if it actually turns out to be true how those cell modems going johnny I
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought that was uh some top tier, uh apple executive,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh bragging in this issue
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that’s that’s what he said about packaging. He just dropped the word packaging So now here is a in the intel ceo pat
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about packaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I will be playing the role of Pat Gelsinger in this one, since that’s the longer one. OK. Gelsinger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, this idea of chiplets, I think, is the new way that all chips get designed. The idea of advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey packaging, multiple chips into the advanced package, and whether that’s an MCP, or multi-chip packaging,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether that’s a 2 and 1 half or 3D construction, I do think that becomes the standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is Ben Thompson. The interviewer was saying, why is advanced packaging the future? You can see you can ask Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John questions about the future. I know this has been a big focus for Intel. It’s something that you want to talk about. And from everything
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, your technology is leading the way. Why is that so important? In addition to the traditional Moore’s law, why
⏹️ ▶️ John do we need to start stacking these chiplets? Give me the top reasons. So this, you know, that is asking a good question
⏹️ ▶️ John here, which is like of all the things, the problems Intel has and you can read the full interview. You know, he’s interviewed
⏹️ ▶️ John the new Intel CEO a few times. Intel’s got some problems. They fell behind. They’re getting beat in
⏹️ ▶️ John the fab business by TSMC. Why in the world does Intel care anything about packaging? And more importantly, why is that
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel putting tons of money into innovations in packaging? And so he’s asking,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, what’s the deal? Give me the top reasons for the whole focus on packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One is now you’re able to take the performance sensitive transistors, move them to the leading edge node, but leverage some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other technologies for other things. So you get to mix and match technologies more efficiently, effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this way. John, would you like to jump in and explain what I, Pat Gelsinger just said?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is part of Intel’s problem is they, their fabs
⏹️ ▶️ John fell behind. They couldn’t get off of whatever, or were they stuck on 14 nanometer for ages, right? And TSMC
⏹️ ▶️ John went ahead of them and has been ahead since then. And so they’re like, look, we
⏹️ ▶️ John know at Intel that we have some fab problems. In fact, Intel is paying TSMC to fab a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of its stuff. They’re saying, one of the things that we can do by breaking the chips up into smaller individual
⏹️ ▶️ John pieces is get the most important parts to be fabbed by TSMC,
⏹️ ▶️ John not by us, on like the good process node, and then use other
⏹️ ▶️ John lesser fabs, like Intel’s fabs, to fab the parts of the chip where it doesn’t matter as much.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re Intel, you don’t wanna pay TSMC, and Intel, you can read all about it in Ben’s
⏹️ ▶️ John coverage, but Intel is trying to split where they’re like, we’re gonna have a fabbing part of the company, and then we’re gonna have the chip design
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the company, and we’re gonna pretend like they’re separate. So the fabbing part is way behind and needs to catch up, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John part that owns like x86 and makes the chips, we think that’s good. So, you know, they’re using TSMC, but they don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to have USTSMC for everything. That would get very expensive. Intel’s big advantage is they
⏹️ ▶️ John fab their own chips and they design their own chips, their, you know, protocol integration and everything. So like, this is why, one
⏹️ ▶️ John reason why packaging is important. Intel can pay the minimum amount required
⏹️ ▶️ John to the company with the good fabs to make the part of the chip where it’s most important for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be on the top process level. And then I can use cheaper stuff for the other parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Second, we can actually compose the chiplets to more appropriate die sizes to maximize defect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey density as well. If you have a monster server die, you’re going to be dictated to be N minus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, N minus three just because of the monster die size. I get to carve up that server chip. I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to move the advanced nodes for computing more rapidly and not be subject to some of the issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey defect density early in the life of a new process technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is about Intel, setting aside SOCs, where it’s a whole bunch of stuff on a big giant,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a system on a chip. They’re giant server chips, like the huge, like 56 core
⏹️ ▶️ John Xeon things, which is just a single gigantic chip. And you have to fab that, it’s fabbed
⏹️ ▶️ John in a single die. And if some part of that screws up, like the more area you start covering on the silicon wafer, the
⏹️ ▶️ John more stuff you put there, the more chances there’s gonna be some error and you might have to throw out the whole chip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is another advantage to packaging is like, if you just make it out of smaller parts,
⏹️ ▶️ John A, if it’s bad, you’re only throwing away like a smaller area of your wafer. You don’t have to throw away this
⏹️ ▶️ John huge square, you throw it at the little square. And B, your defect density can be lower. He says maximizing defect density,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever he meant minimizing. That you’ll get more of those little things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you fab will come offline and be completely error-free. Whereas trying to just get a single error-free humongous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SRAMs in particular, SRAM scaling will become a bigger and bigger issue going forward. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually don’t get benefit by moving a lot of my cache to the next generation node, like I do for logic, power and performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually want to have a 3d construct where I have lots of cache and a base die and put the advanced computing on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey top of it into a 3d sandwich. And now you get the best of a cache architecture and the best of the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generation of Moore’s law. So it actually creates a much more effective architectural model in the future. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally you’re struggling with the power, performance and speed of light between chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, this whole technique, this is a particular technology that Intel has advanced with, which lets them take
⏹️ ▶️ John power and feed it through the layers of the sandwich in a more efficient way to get to precisely
⏹️ ▶️ John where they want it. I think that’s what they’re referring to here. The sandwiching isn’t just because of that, but Intel has an
⏹️ ▶️ John innovative way to send power up to the bottom of the chip instead of sending it through the top, because when you send it through the top, you’ve got to weave
⏹️ ▶️ John it around a bunch of obstacles where you send it through the bottom. There’s nothing in the way because you make these layered sandwiches or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what that’s talking about. And you know SRAM is like look the you know the SRAM is what we’re talking about before with the
⏹️ ▶️ John the GPU RAM That was be it was being shared better with dynamic caching That’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the RAM that’s out under RAM chips like your main memory But it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as registers. It’s kind of in between there It’s like very expensive RAM or each a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of RAM takes a large number of transistors But it’s much faster than regular RAM and it’s in the CPU And
⏹️ ▶️ John I say I’m like you don’t get any benefit of doing that on 3 nanometer So not only do you not want to waste money doing it, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be more expensive, you don’t get benefit from doing it anyway. So keep that on a different lower process and then
⏹️ ▶️ John sandwich it all together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Any other questions for me, Ben?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m Ben again. All right, so how do you solve that with chiplets when they’re no longer on the same die?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the chiplet construct, we’re going to be able to put tens of thousands of bond connections between different chiplets inside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an advanced package. So you’re going to be able to have very high bandwidth, low latency, low power consumption interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between chiplets. It also becomes very economical for design cycles. Hey, I can design a chiplet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with this IO and use it for multiple generations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can see how all the stuff that I just described would be appealing to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s already making SOCs, which are essentially single dies, system-on-a-chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that have a bunch of stuff in them. And they’re getting pretty big. That’s part of the reason the Ultras have been
⏹️ ▶️ John two maxes weaved together with the silicon interposer, rather than just being a single large
⏹️ ▶️ John chip, the size of an Ultra, because that would be even more expensive to manufacturers. But also probably
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the reason we didn’t have the quad, right? So Apple would love the idea that you could
⏹️ ▶️ John take subunits of this, like the thing that does I or whatever, and reuse
⏹️ ▶️ John that between generations, because it’s doing generations like, you know, it’s run over run now, Thunderbolt three,
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt four. That lasts a couple of generations. I think both the M2 and the M3 have the same speed
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt interface. So if that was in a separate chiplet, you can just reuse that one From before
⏹️ ▶️ John on the future ship and mate you don’t even have you could that could still be seven nanometer for example I don’t know if this is the right part of the chip to
⏹️ ▶️ John be reused But you can design it once and reuse that little sub chiplet in future generations
⏹️ ▶️ John As long as you can do an interconnect between all of these that has all the attributes that is described low latency blah blah
⏹️ ▶️ John So far Apple’s packaging innovation has been the interposer, which is technically impressive and it makes the ultra possible
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is more like talking like a more general purpose thing of like lots of different little, you know a
⏹️ ▶️ John city of chips, lots of different little islands on your chip to even to just make what Apple does currently in a single
⏹️ ▶️ John SoC. And that can make things less expensive and improve your yields as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you want to tell me about the universal chiplet interconnect express. Is that a train John?
⏹️ ▶️ John UCI and then lowercase e. So this is a one of these multi
⏹️ ▶️ John company consortiums to do exactly what we were just describing. So this is a press release from
⏹️ ▶️ John March 2nd, 2022. It says Intel along with advanced semiconductor engineering, AMD,
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC have announced the establishment
⏹️ ▶️ John of an industry consortium to promote an open die-to-die interconnect standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John Express or UCIE. The chiplet ecosystem created by UCIE is a critical step in the creation
⏹️ ▶️ John of a unified standard for interoperable chiplets, which will ultimately allow for next generation of technological innovations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not on that list, but TSMC is, and Apple has a good relationship with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if we’re looking towards a future where it becomes untenable to continue making
⏹️ ▶️ John larger and larger dies, you know, with everything on them and these SOCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John a good industry standard system for making chiplets at whatever the most
⏹️ ▶️ John economical and useful size is and weaving them together to essentially form
⏹️ ▶️ John an SOC out of it seems like a good idea. Doing it all in one die
⏹️ ▶️ John probably still has advantages, but price may not be one of those advantages. And again, Intel is super
⏹️ ▶️ John interested because they essentially can’t do that without having TSMC do all of their fabbing
⏹️ ▶️ John for them if they want the top tier technology. Apple doesn’t currently have that problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that Johnny Sirugi mentioned stuff about packaging and the fact that this whole chiplets
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, like other companies are already doing this, AMD has been big into the chiplets thing for a while. Intel is putting a lot of money
⏹️ ▶️ John and research into this and their chips that they’re going to be coming out with use some of this technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s unavoidable that Apple will start using it too. Why am I interested in all this? You know why.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s to keep the dream alive of a Mac Pro chip that is not the same as one you can get in an
⏹️ ▶️ John X studio. And what’s going to make that possible? Apparently with the approach they used for the past two
⏹️ ▶️ John generations, not economically feasible. If it’s ever going to be economically feasible, We need
⏹️ ▶️ John a change. This change in packaging could bring that about. Stay tuned. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John 2027? Who knows? Don’t worry. Thank you.
ERR_NETWORK_CHANGED
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, in keeping with the idea of keeping the dream alive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about error network change. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is a nightmare. It’s not a dream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Error network change continues. Some more
⏹️ ▶️ John research from the internet about this. So here is a Stack Overflow question. This person
⏹️ ▶️ John asks, whenever my iPhone and Mac OS are on the same Wi-Fi, Chrome and Mac OS often reports the
⏹️ ▶️ John error network changed. I found that whenever my iPhone and Mac OS on the same Wi-Fi, a record
⏹️ ▶️ John will often often appear in the routing table in Mac OS and disappear after a few seconds. When this route
⏹️ ▶️ John record appears, my Chrome will most likely have an error network changed error. I turned off the iPhone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Wi-Fi, the routing and the record in Mac OS disappeared and Chrome no longer had the error. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone is always looking for like what causes this and so they start looking at anything like what changes my network. What is
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it about my network that has changed and they’ll spot something and they’ll find a thing to attribute it to
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll stop that thing by saying, it looks like it’s happening because my phone is here and if I turn off my wifi, I fixed the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every single one of these that has been reported, I have experimented with and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually eliminate the problem, it just moves it around. Because the problem is the network changed
⏹️ ▶️ John and Chrome flips out about it. Is the problem that the network is changing? Is the problem that’s Chrome’s flipping out
⏹️ ▶️ John about it? Is it both? Either way, if you stop the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John changes in your network, doesn’t mean that something else won’t also change your network and cause the error. But I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John that somebody found something that helps them. This next one is about tail scale. Gil Penderson
⏹️ ▶️ John says, the tail scale VPN used to trigger this, but they fixed it with, and there’s a link to a patch. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is tail scale, patching their own code to avoid this error because they were seeing this error happening and they were saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that we’re doing, macOS is flipping out about it. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, basically it says iOS slash macOS, and apparently not just a Mac thing, will reconfigure their
⏹️ ▶️ John routing anytime anything minor changes in the net map. And so they’re changing their code to not do that because they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna anger iOS slash macOS. This is a change that committed in 2020. So
⏹️ ▶️ John is our iOS and macOS, you know, changing their routing more?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there something that was part of the operating system that’s causing it? Lots of theories about this. One that’s not even
⏹️ ▶️ John in the notes here is about if you have a dev device, like if you have an iPhone that is configured
⏹️ ▶️ John as a dev device, There’s apparently a new way that Macs communicate to the phones for
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes of development That also uses a you know network connection that’s brought up and torn down
⏹️ ▶️ John and apparently causes network to be changed as far as Chrome Concerned and it flips out. So anyway, here’s an anonymous bit that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John getting us closer to the root of the problem and this is an explanation of it from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John of Chrome chromium, whatever because again, this is not just a Mac or iOS problem. This happens to be
⏹️ ▶️ John all Linux. This is a A part of the problem is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John with the Chrome slash Chromium browser engine, but the operating systems
⏹️ ▶️ John participate in it as well because they’re the ones that control the network that is changing. Anyway, Anonymous writes,
⏹️ ▶️ John the network layer from Chromium is available as a standalone cross platform library called Cronet,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is open source and used in other non Google applications. I work at Google on a major Android app that uses Cronet
⏹️ ▶️ John extensively. So I’ve got experience with error network changed. This issue appears to be with QUIC,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the UDP-based web protocol thing, and or HTTP 3, which is sensitive to changing networks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever the networks on the device change, the connection needs to be reset. This isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly a bug, it’s a necessary step. Not doing this would mean connections wouldn’t work properly. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John this causes error network change when the device’s network is changed. As previously mentioned, this can be
⏹️ ▶️ John for non-obvious reasons such as dock or desktop, customizing the networks repeatedly, VPN apps misbehaving, cell
⏹️ ▶️ John signal dropping in and out, etc. There are ways in which this can be fixed. First,
⏹️ ▶️ John not using HTTP slash QUIC is the easiest. Safari and other Apple stuff doesn’t use this yet, so
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t currently experiencing these issues. However, this will likely change as Apple rolls out HTTP3 support.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apart from this issue, it’s a much better technology, particularly for mobile devices. So this is the first offered explanation of,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, why doesn’t Safari have this problem? The theory is, oh, Safari doesn’t use Quick or HTTP3,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so it’s not going to see any of these errors. Difficult to test, because
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I was able to determine in conversing with this person, there is no way to disable HTTP3
⏹️ ▶️ John in Quick in Chrome to disable it entirely. There’s some flags in Chrome Flags where you can turn some things off, but I think you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John turn it off entirely, so it’s hard to do an apples to apples comparison. But you pin
⏹️ ▶️ John your hopes on the smallest thing. If Apple does plan on rolling out HTTP3 or Quick, their browser
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna break like Chrome is. And hopefully they’ll be like, oh, geez, this browser has become useless
⏹️ ▶️ John because half of my HTTP connections fail. Let’s see if we can fix this. As opposed to now where apparently no one is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Next possible fix. OSs and networking apps will need to be more careful about network
⏹️ ▶️ John changes. Apple will probably fix this in a Sonoma point release. Other platforms I’ve seen this
⏹️ ▶️ John on are working on fixes. I wish I had this person’s optimism. Will
⏹️ ▶️ John it be fixed in a Sonoma point release? Does Apple even know about this? I haven’t bothered reporting this
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just gonna say it’s a Chrome error and I’m not sure they’re wrong. Like I honestly don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how much of the blame to apportion to Chrome versus MacOne is. Anecdotal evidence is that
⏹️ ▶️ John this is way worse than Sonoma. There are a bunch of new network related demons for various things
⏹️ ▶️ John that people have assigned blame to. Oh, it’s because of the U-turn thing. It’s because of talking to a developer, iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John device. You know, it’s because of Docker, it’s because of a VPN. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s because whenever your iPhone and your Mac are on the same Wi-Fi network, it happens. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. But I don’t know how to communicate this to anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John involved other than to say, Chrome no longer works on Mac in a reliable way. Like in a fundamental,
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer useful as a browser kind of way, because some larger percentage of your
⏹️ ▶️ John requests just fail. And it’s not great. Finally, the last thing, there is an experimentation
⏹️ ▶️ John going on in Chronet to improve things by migrating connections across network interfaces. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John the migrate sessions on network change V2 flag or feature or whatever, we’ll put a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the show notes. This isn’t just a bug fix though, it has trade-offs. So it likely needs to be done in combination with
⏹️ ▶️ John improvements from OSs and networking apps. So the idea behind this thing is, hey, if there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ John connection in this Cronut networking library and the network changes, and we have to, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, not use that connection anymore because it won’t work, whatever was using that connection, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John we smoothly migrate it over to the new working connection and then the application that is using Cronut,
⏹️ ▶️ John which would be the Chromium browser engine, doesn’t need to worry that that happened, it will just continue to work. That would be great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not just like, it’s not just a bug fix because there are performance implications of that. Migrating it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not free, it takes time, and it’s not the same as just not having the network
⏹️ ▶️ John change. So I don’t know what the solution is here, but it’s extremely frustrating. We did
⏹️ ▶️ John not have an error network change shirt as part of this sale, but I’m seriously thinking about it for future ones. It
⏹️ ▶️ John continues to happen. And then the final bit, this is really the icing on the cake. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John not seemingly related to neural network change, but kind of is. This was a toot by someone named Thomas,
⏹️ ▶️ John who said, I just learned what the user interface in the SpaceX capsules run.
⏹️ ▶️ John The capsules that provide life support for people traveling into space have to be absolutely reliable. The user
⏹️ ▶️ John interface that controls an explosion. it runs a home compiled version of Chromium and the UI
⏹️ ▶️ John is written in JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And this person wrote this to say, can you believe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using web technologies and a thing that has to be reliable? But that’s not the thing that sticks out. The thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that sticks out is the word Chromium. Do you think if they have air network changed in
⏹️ ▶️ John a SpaceX rocket, that might be a problem? And who’s responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for fixing that bug? I’m sure it’s running Linux or whatever, but again, people running Chrome on Linux or Chromium based things
⏹️ ▶️ John on Linux are also experiencing this problem. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person
⏹️ ▶️ John with this problem, but every time I talk about it on the show, people send me toots on Mastodon. Here I
⏹️ ▶️ John am, I’m getting it, I’m getting a network change. I got people on Linux, people on Macs. So far, no one on iOS, because maybe those
⏹️ ▶️ John errors are hidden from you on most iOS apps, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think my Window Dragon bug is more important because I can just use Safari. But for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the SpaceX capsules that have a UI that’s running Chromium, Maybe talk to your bosses
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OpenAI turmoil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we record this, it is Monday, what’s today, the 20th? Is that right? Yes, Monday the 20th. In
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last three days, there have been approximately, I’ll carry the seven, 7,304 different CEOs for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow still only one board?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, yeah. Well, we’ve been recording for a while, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, right. That’s also fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t really have too much to say about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John read the headlines in the notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so these are the headlines and we’ll link these in the
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is like 48 hours span, 24, 48? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been almost no time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So these are the headlines as per The Verge. Sam Altman fired a CEO of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OpenAI. That was on the 17th.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, out of nowhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so let’s get through the headlines. Yeah, I think it’s worth unpacking all this. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear is the new CEO of OpenAI. that was apparently today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, also today. Hundreds of OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey employees starting to resign and join Microsoft today. Is Sam Altman joining Microsoft?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Satya Nadella doesn’t seem to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s hours between those. How can you have like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, it’s a comedy of errors. But then, every time there’s a headline, it’s like, this is a thing that happened. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but has it? it? Yeah. I skipped the ones where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, he was fired, but they’re negotiations for him to come back. But no, he’s not coming back. But yes, he is coming back. But they’re talking about coming
⏹️ ▶️ John back. But now he’s at Microsoft. But has he been hired by Microsoft? And this is not just like, Oh, we’re wondering what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is that’s why the headline says, is Sam Altman joining Microsoft Satya Nadella, who, by the way, is the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John of Microsoft doesn’t seem to know Satya Nadella announced, hey, Sam Altman’s coming to Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when asked about it, like hours later, it was like, well, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t check back in a few hours. Boy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So let me let me try to give the quick executive summary of this. Now, I’m surely going to get a little bit wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the general gist of it is, I think it was late Friday, Eastern Time, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a blog post from the open AI board, basically, that said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Sam Altman, who was the former CEO, maybe by the time you’re listening to this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might be the the CEO again, who knows. But former CEO had basically not, what was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phrase they used? Not been, forthcoming wasn’t the word they used, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something along those lines. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty severe. It was vague, but normally
⏹️ ▶️ John when a CEO is fired, this is the privilege of being in the executive ranks. When a regular
⏹️ ▶️ John person is fired, you just get fired. But if you’re a CEO, no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible whatever you did was, no matter how badly you screwed up, you’re always like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, moving on to spend more time with your family or or want to pursue other interests
⏹️ ▶️ John or like they have some euphemism about how you’re it’s not like we’re firing him. It’s a mutual decision. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John all come to and he’s decided to leave and he’s, you know, pursuing his passions in this other realm.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we thank him for all his blah, blah, blah. And this wasn’t like that. This is as close as you’re ever going to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John saying we fired him because we don’t like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him. Yeah, it was that’s how I remember being with Forstall. It was basically like it was clear that he got fired,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but everyone put on the happy face. We would like Scott to spend more time with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his family. Yes, I would like to spend more time with my family.
⏹️ ▶️ John And usually, and usually in those type of statements, there’s something from the person who was fired, like quote,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever quotes from them, right? They’ll say like, I’m happy that I spent all my time with this company. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John glad to be moving on and blah, blah, blah, blah, like it’s a participatory process. But what happened with Sam Altman,
⏹️ ▶️ John the story I heard on podcast I was listening to is that he was on stage doing something like in his official capacity
⏹️ ▶️ John as CEO. And he said, Okay, well, you know, thanks, everybody. I have to go have a meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ John In that meeting. He got on. He got on a call. This is I was listening to the verges podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. He got into the call using Google Meet. And one of the people on the show said, even for $10 billion, no one will use
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft invested $10 $10 billion or whatever in open AI. So anyway, he goes to his meeting, he sits down
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s an online meeting, right? And all they did in the online meeting was read him
⏹️ ▶️ John the blog post you just referred to, Casey. They just put it in, that’s what you do in these meetings. You have a script, you stick to it so you don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John sued. You just read the words. So if you’re wondering like, oh, they must have had an extensive meeting in which they explained to him why he was
⏹️ ▶️ John fired. When we say this came out of nowhere, didn’t come out of nowhere like to us on the outside, because what do we know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Came out of nowhere to Sam Altman, who just got done doing a CEO thing and said, I got to go to a meeting
⏹️ ▶️ John and they just read him a thing said yeah you’re fired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way the thing he was doing like to have that having their whole their whole developer conference was widely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lauded by the industry as like an amazing thing everyone thought he did an amazing job this is a great path and beyond
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John excited everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super excited open AI and him like it was that’s why when this news dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the board fired him everyone in the entire tech business was like what are you serious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this a joke like what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so here’s from the blog post I was able to dig it up while you guys were talking. This is the blog post from the OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board. Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberate review process by the board, which concluded that he was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, by the way, like that’s a really serious accusation. Like that is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially misleading the board is in many cases a crime like it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really serious accusation that’s why like this isn’t just oh we had creative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differences we you know we don’t like him anymore that’s a that’s a very serious thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco throw around what they threw
⏹️ ▶️ John and by the way as far as I understand it the board doesn’t have to have a reason like
⏹️ ▶️ John they they have complete control there’s no like power struggle or whatever this the structure of
⏹️ ▶️ John this company is such that the board can decide, oh, we don’t want you to be CEO for I think for pretty much any
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. Like he needs to do anything wrong. It just happens all the time. The board’s like, we want a different CEO. We want to go in a different
⏹️ ▶️ John direction happens all the time. They don’t need to explain which is why you can do the Oh, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to spend more time with the family or whatever, whatever the real reason is, it’s not like they need to make something up. Like, we
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t fire him unless we say that he lied to us. They could have just said later, but they threw that in there
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, oh, and we have reasons. We think he has not been quote unquote consistently candid. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to put that in there for any reason other than to just, I mean, I don’t know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, maybe this will give us cover because it’s vague enough. People can imagine some terrible thing happened. But
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is, uh, apparently a majority, we don’t even know how much, because it’s not like it’s not a public company.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not like they have public records to say, was this a unanimous vote? Did everybody vote to kick him out or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John a majority of the people on the board decided they don’t want him to be CEO anymore. And they made this
⏹️ ▶️ John decision without consulting Sam Altman at all. I mean, maybe they’ve had press conversations about it. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John he should have known it’s coming because they said in their last meeting, if you if you do really well in that dev conference, you’re fired.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what they might have said to him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the impression I get in in I don’t have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody has facts here at the moment, But the impression I got based on the coverage that I’ve read
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that there were two different factions or tribes, I think Sam had called them at one point or another, two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different tribes within OpenAI. OpenAI was originally founded in 2014, 2015, thereabouts, as a nonprofit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And their theory was, we want to make, basically, artificial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey general intelligence. We want to make AI. But we understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that with this great power comes great responsibility. and we want to do this to improve the life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the lives of people everywhere, but we’re going to try to do it very methodically, very deliberately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very safely. And that was how the company was founded. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not even really a company, I guess. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a nonprofit, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s how it was founded. Well at some point, Altman swoops in. I don’t recall exactly when it was in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey timeline, but it’s clear that Sam Altman is very Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Valley VC, which I personally find to be a very ugly stereotype.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just don’t care for that whole grow, grow, grow, take over the world mindset. Lyle
⏹️ ▶️ John Troxell And he is the embodiment of that stereotype. He used to be with Y Combinator, which is also kind of a poster child for that type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matz Yeah. And he’s not the guy who had the day phone, night phone. He’s the guy who wore the multiple polo shirts at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Lyle Troxell Yeah. Sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco track of all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Now, I’m trying to make plain, to quote Merlin, my priors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this. I find that whole Silicon Valley mindset to be very off-putting. You know, grow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grow no matter what. We don’t care who we run over in the process. Grow, grow, grow. You know, let’s make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, make money, and that’s all that matters is making money. Nothing else matters. Grow and make money. Grow and make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money. Or sometimes you don’t even have to make money, you just grow. Well, so anyway, so consider that when I give one of my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, lip turns up as I tell you this story. But nevertheless, so Sam comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and he’s grow, grow, grow, money, money, money. And everything, I guess everyone was kind of coexisting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. And even though they disagreed internally, everything was mostly all right. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then they release chat GPT what about a year ago. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it’s, it makes a tremendous splash. It’s, I think a lot of people are saying it’s the quickest adopted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consumer product ever because, you know, they had something like a hundred million signups in the span of like four minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not literally, but you know what I mean? And so now money is becoming a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like for real. And suddenly we have to pay the piper on this division between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, money, money, and let’s do this for the good of all people. And their chief scientist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ilya, something or other, I don’t have the name in front of me, I guess was more on the, let’s play it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey safe. Let’s be deliberate. Let’s do this for the good of humanity. And Sam was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much money, money, money. money. And at some point it appears something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gave and the rumblings that I heard, not from like sources or anything, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on the reporting I read was that Ilya had convinced the board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which I think he is a part of the board, let’s give her to Sam. And then all hell broke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loose. And now as we record on Monday night, we don’t really know what the latest and greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. But I understand both sides of this. Like on the one side, if the board
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really did establish, or if OpenAI really was established as a non-profit, which I think is factual, I don’t think that’s up for grabs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is within reason for them to say, well, hold on. Suddenly we’ve taken a turn and pivoted to money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money, money. We don’t like that. And Sam seems to, by most metrics, have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pivoted them in that direction. So if we don’t like this pivot to money, money, money, then we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably don’t like Sam anymore. So on the surface, I don’t have a problem with that. And again, my priors tell me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, screw that Silicon Valley nut job. You know, let’s do this for the good of people rather than the good of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, wait till you hear about the other side of that, because I think that they’re both not jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s fair, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair, too. But I’m just trying to make plain, you know, this is my biases coming to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light. That being said, unquestionably, chat GPT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the work of OpenAI and DALI and you know, all this AI stuff, whether or not you think it’s cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not you think it’s good, I think unquestionably it’s important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s been making a big damn splash. And I think that there’s a lot of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things here. And unlike blockchain, I think there’s a lot of fascinating threads that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull. And I think that there’s a lot there. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that, I also have sympathy for the, let’s grow this product and see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the world can do with it. And let’s just, let’s not slow down. Let’s not be deliberate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. Screw it. Let’s just figure it out as we go, which is when Silicon Valley is at its best. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have very mixed feelings about this. And I mean, as someone who likes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drama more than I should, because I’m a grown-ass man, I really shouldn’t enjoy drama this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. But oh, this is delicious drama, and I am here for the drama of it. But I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong. I’m not sure any of us do. I don’t know what to make of this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is a mess. And it’s been a mess every other hour since late Friday
⏹️ ▶️ John by the time you hear this episode, who knows what will have happened. I think this is actually, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John the most Silicon Valley thing about this is that a lot of the companies that,
⏹️ ▶️ John from my youth that sort of came out of Silicon Valley, they were at the forefront of some technology
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were at the right place at the right time. They decided to make personal computers and personal computers
⏹️ ▶️ John are just becoming possible. You get your Apples, you get your Intel, right, you know, microchips,
⏹️ ▶️ John memory, you know, CPUs, x86, Microsoft with the software, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John riding a wave of something. And those particular companies, especially, you know, we know a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the names of the founders, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, a lot of them are younger people. And
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much none of them went into it thinking, I’m going to found what’s going to become
⏹️ ▶️ John what we know today as tech giants. Because that’s not what, you know, who, who, who’s, if you told, if you tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John tell a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak what Apple look like today, they’d be like, yeah, right. No one thinks that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen. So what happens with these companies that are incredibly successful is they’re made up of people,
⏹️ ▶️ John the founders, but also usually they bring in other people to help them run the company. And especially
⏹️ ▶️ John for companies that experience explosive growth, the people who are responsible for running that company,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just people. Sometimes they’re people who’ve never done anything like this before. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you’re wondering how can this company that’s been so financially successful and apparently has such amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John technology not have their governance straightened out and basically, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John conduct the the the their business in this ridiculous way
⏹️ ▶️ John With this whipsawing of the CEO being fired and asking him to come back and regretting telling him to leave and all those stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s because there are young Tech company riding the wave of a new technology
⏹️ ▶️ John run by a pinch of people who are bad at doing this. And that’s, I mean, look, Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs was fired from Apple by a bunch of people that were brought on to run the company. That was probably the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong decision for them to do at that time. If they had, you know, nurtured his talent, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have had a more successful 90s. But you can also understand why they fired him because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, read the history. Like a lot of these companies in their early days at least run up to
⏹️ ▶️ John the edge of being, you know, doing something terrible by being run
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is not, I’m not gonna say not sane, but that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you expect a very wealthy company to run. Even with Google, they have the two founders and we have to bring
⏹️ ▶️ John in the adults to help run things. You can go, it can go badly
⏹️ ▶️ John in so many different ways. It’s very rare that you get a company that manages to get
⏹️ ▶️ John through this sort of awkward adolescence and sustain its success into something
⏹️ ▶️ John that continues and becomes like a company that is more reliable and
⏹️ ▶️ John steady and does not have weird boardroom drama like this. So I’m not saying that this is unique to OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. In fact, like I said, I think this is the most Silicon Valley thing that they’ve done. That said,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people in these two camps here, the Sam Altman and the OpenAI people
⏹️ ▶️ John are a little bit weird. They’re both sides are a little bit weird. So we didn’t talk about the Microsoft stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like OpenAI is this nonprofit. Microsoft wanted to do a thing with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s the thing with open AI. Their, their goal is to make artificial general intelligence is like how 9,000 or whatever that doesn’t kill
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Um, big asterisk there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah. Yeah. So they haven’t done that to be
⏹️ ▶️ John clear. That’s, that’s like their aspirational goal. It’s like their mission statement. Uh, but what they did do was make chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it turns out that chat GPT is a useful thing that people can do stuff with. And
⏹️ ▶️ John people, everyone’s interested in it. And Microsoft was interested in it. And they said, Hey, we would like to do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John with your technology too. So the problem OpenAI has is they want to make artificial intelligence,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it turns out doing anything, even approaching that, costs tons and tons of money. And so OpenAI’s
⏹️ ▶️ John idea was like, we’ll just, we’ll raise money somehow. And people will give us money because they know we’re doing the good
⏹️ ▶️ John work to make HAL 9000 not kill us. And they, the amount of money they were able to raise was a
⏹️ ▶️ John fraction of the amount that they would need. Microsoft came and said, we kind of like that things you’re doing over there.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about we let you use our massive computing resources and our data centers to the tune
⏹️ ▶️ John of billions of dollars worth of free credits, like little token Chuck E. Cheese tokens. Now you can run your stuff in Azure
⏹️ ▶️ John because OpenAI can’t do anything without large amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ John computers, which takes large amounts of money. And they’re a nonprofit and their idea was like, we’ll raise that money. People
⏹️ ▶️ John will give us money to pursue this. They just did not get as much money as they would need. But chat GPT, Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, hmm, kind of like that. So they did this deal where Microsoft is like
⏹️ ▶️ John giving them $10 billion, most of which is in the form of credits to run stuff on their Azure, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, cloud computing stuff. And but how can they how can they do that? Well, if you look at the org chart,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like there’s a nonprofit, and the nonprofit controls this other for profit thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets money from Microsoft. But the for profit part, it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not for I think it’s like what profit capped or something like that. Anyway, it’s entirely controlled by the
⏹️ ▶️ John nonprofit. But still, Microsoft has its financial interests. And by the way, as part of this deal, Microsoft gets all the rights
⏹️ ▶️ John to the open AI IP, like their intellectual property. I don’t know what their intellectual property is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably whatever it is they use to make chat GPT, Microsoft now has the rights to that, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, as part of this $10 billion deal. The only thing Microsoft doesn’t have the rights to, this is another one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John great deals, kind of like Microsoft doing the Internet Explorer thing and saying, Oh, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry, we’ll give you X percent of all of our Internet Explorer sales and then giving it
⏹️ ▶️ John Internet Explorer away for free to everybody. And so that person got nothing. Anyway, the company that got
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing from that opening is like, Okay, we’ll do this $10 billion deal, we’ll get access to your computing resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we kind of need to like literally do anything because we don’t have enough money to do AI stuff. We don’t have enough money
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay for the computers to do it. But what we won’t give you and we’ll license you our current technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we won’t give you is anything having to to do with artificial general intelligence. So if we
⏹️ ▶️ John invent how 9,000 Microsoft, you don’t get it. And Microsoft’s like, okay, I guess. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John actually thinking they’re never gonna do that, it doesn’t matter. So they retain the right
⏹️ ▶️ John to the fantasy thing that they wanna make, but gave Microsoft the rights to all the other stuff. And so Microsoft’s, you know, doing all
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff with their, you know, a co-pilot, chat GPT, but like all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, you know, chat GPT, the fact that it does useful things, that is a product that can make money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft can incorporate technology into its own products, Microsoft Office, GitHub, everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John and use that to make money. That’s what everyone’s doing. Meanwhile, the nonprofits
⏹️ ▶️ John over there are going, what are they doing making products and making money for? Don’t they understand we’re trying to make HAL 9000
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re trying to make sure HAL 9000 doesn’t kill us? And so there’s already a disconnect. And so on the
⏹️ ▶️ John one side of it is like, you have a technology that people will pay money to use. I forget what the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John are, but like if they got a hundred million users, they’re making some huge amount of revenue to it because they charge for access
⏹️ ▶️ John to this stuff. And of course, Microsoft, to the extent that Microsoft incorporates any of this technology into their products, that helps
⏹️ ▶️ John them sell more of their products, which of course they make money on. So it’s, you know, it’s a product business. Hey, we
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thing we came up with where it was Google search or, you know, whatever, and we can use it to make
⏹️ ▶️ John money. And that’s what Sam Altman’s out there doing, using a product to make money. And then the open AI people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John like, AI is gonna kill us, we need to create it in a, first we need to create it, but we need to create it the right way so it doesn’t kill
⏹️ ▶️ John us. And everyone else is like, yeah, but you haven’t created it, we’ve got this thing over here called chat tbt that people want to pay for that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not AI, even though everyone calls it that. But it is a product that people want to use. So can
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a developer day and make an API and charge people for API access and do deals with Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like, Okay, I guess but eventually like no, we’re making hell 9000.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t like that other stuff. Stop it. And so now you have this disconnect. And if you think
⏹️ ▶️ John about what open AI is, is it’s this mission statement. It’s a bunch of employees
⏹️ ▶️ John that implement this mission statement. And then it is the output of the knowledge and the output of
⏹️ ▶️ John those employees. And so Sam Altman apparently was popular within the company. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when he left and went to Microsoft or did he of the 700
⏹️ ▶️ John or so employees at OpenAI, about 500 signed a letter that said, hey, if you don’t bring him back
⏹️ ▶️ John or if you don’t all quit or whatever, we’re all going to go to Microsoft because Microsoft said we have an open standing offer
⏹️ ▶️ John to go work for them instead. So if Microsoft gets Sam Altman
⏹️ ▶️ John and 500 of the 700 employees, what is the nonprofit left with? Microsoft already
⏹️ ▶️ John has the rights to all the IP of everything they actually made because they didn’t make pound nine thousand. So they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got they got the rights to that. And if all their employees also go over there and they have the former CEO,
⏹️ ▶️ John an open A.I. has a mission statement and 200 loyal employees left. And really,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess those people can regroup and use their $10 billion of Azure bucks to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to make hell 9000 any day now. Meanwhile, Sam Altman and Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John are over there continuing to sell access to chat GPT to auto complete stuff when you
⏹️ ▶️ John type reminders in or the hell they’re doing to make money. The reason I think both camps are a little bit weird is because
⏹️ ▶️ John Sam Altman’s in the as Casey alluded to before, the grow, grow, grow, boil the ocean, kill
⏹️ ▶️ John all the poor people so we can make it another another buck, because in the end, what really matters are the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are going to live a trillion years from now. Lots of interesting philosophical exclusives to be a jerk today.
⏹️ ▶️ John But really, it’s for the future anyway. Money, money, money. And then the flip side, the people will think AI is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to come and kill us all. And they need to be really careful about how they create it. And you’re like, what? What’s going to kill us
⏹️ ▶️ John all? They’re like, oh, the thing no one’s been able to invent yet. But when they do, it’s going to be really bad. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John dragons can kill us all too, but there aren’t any dragons.
⏹️ ▶️ John there could be. You’re right. There could be. Someone could genetically engineer a dragon, but do you have a dragon? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think I know how to make one. All right, well, get back to me about the dragon thing. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like self-driving cars. It’s like, any day now, it’ll come. It’s like, well, no one’s ever done it. But all these companies sprung
⏹️ ▶️ John up about the promise, like based on the promise of like, well, you know, in five years, there’ll be self-driving
⏹️ ▶️ John cars. So we need to build business around that reality. And that reality has not happened. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of those companies are having problems. So open AI is trying to pursue
⏹️ ▶️ John how 9000 but I don’t think they know how like everyone else who has tried before them,
⏹️ ▶️ John but unlike lots of other companies, they’ve made a useful thing that is a marketable consumer product in the
⏹️ ▶️ John course of trying to do that research. And it seems that that useful consumer product
⏹️ ▶️ John is not compatible with their mission statement, because that’s not what they wanted to do. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. And all that’s a step along the way. let’s not get distracted by trying to make a multi-billion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar business about out of this useful thing that we’ve made. And by the way, open AI is not the only company that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John done this. Lots of other companies have similar things. So it is kind of a cut through a business. Open AI is,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, seems to be the leader in this field, which is why Microsoft is interested in them and why they did that deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not like this is unknown elsewhere. What is unknown everywhere is how 9,000
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t exist. Don’t. And so if you’re scared of it existing, okay, it would be scary
⏹️ ▶️ John if it did exist but it doesn’t and I’ll be more interested once
⏹️ ▶️ John you think you have a road to making it like can you go from chat GPT to hell 9000?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe maybe this is step one of five Maybe it’s step one to five thousand Or maybe you
⏹️ ▶️ John just barking up the wrong tree and this approach isn’t gonna work anymore than planes that flap their wings We’ll see but uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s that’s kind of the state of the world and these two camps At least the Sam Altman
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, you’re like, okay, I’ve got this guy’s number. I’ve seen people like this before. I know what he’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s making products, he’s selling them. It makes sense. And the opening eye people are more like very
⏹️ ▶️ John confused sort of monks who have noble, if
⏹️ ▶️ John misguided goals and great ambitions. But what they increasingly don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John are people and money to accomplish that. And it’s all through their own kind of, I’m not gonna say
⏹️ ▶️ John mismanagement, but through their own apparent misreading of the situation, which is, what did you think you
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have? Oh, we control the company, we can fire him. But if all the employees log to him and he goes to Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and all your employees leave, then you’ve really got nothing left. So I feel kind of bad for OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ John because I admire the nobility of their mission, even if I think their
⏹️ ▶️ John reasoning or predictions are a little bit silly. I don’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John admire the nobility or lack thereof of Sam Altman’s ambitions, but at least it’s a devil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think what they created is so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commercially valuable and commercializable that I don’t think there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was any chance of this going any other way. Like the idealists in open AI who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to keep it, you know, non-profit for the good of everybody, that is a noble goal, it’s an interesting idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there was no way that’s gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the only way it would have worked if all the employees agreed, if they said, we
⏹️ ▶️ John are OpenAI employees because we believe in the mission of doing this not-for-profit. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if that was true, they got $10 billion from Microsoft to run all their stuff and they’ve got 700 loyal employees
⏹️ ▶️ John who want it to be non-profit and they got one obnoxious CEO who wants to make a product out of it. But that wasn’t the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turns out they had 500 employees who wanted to do what the CEO did and that is a big miscalculation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like maybe the OpenAI board thought, this is gonna work, all our employees believe in our mission.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why when you do those net promoter score surveys at work, Marco doesn’t know about these.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No. Oh yeah. I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that’s for our clients. But anyway, for internally, like do you believe in the mission of open AI?
⏹️ ▶️ John People are like, oh yes, totally. For the first clients to shove, they believe in making money and getting rich.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and again, even the reality is just when you have that many employees, a lot of them are gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paid in stock or some kind of stock-based thing where like the company, if the company does well commercially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you make more money, that’s really hard for all those employees to say no to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing, like, whatever their ambitions are or were about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being a non-profit and everything, again, that is laudable, and the world needs more of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the cards were stacked so hard against them to achieve that here, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they were sitting on is such a goldmine that it’s just impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustain that in the environment around them. And once they got in with Microsoft, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much was sealing the deal. Okay, this is the direction you’re gonna go now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, but they think they needed to do that. Like, they couldn’t pursue their goal of trying to make Hell 9000
⏹️ ▶️ John without tons and tons of money, and they were not able to raise it on their own.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They couldn’t get people to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John like a type of thing where you can just do one quiet person alone at their personal computer is gonna have this amazing breakthrough.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current approach to solving this problem requires massive amounts of computing, which requires massive amounts
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. and you’re really gonna be stymied in the attempt to achieve your goal if you just don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough money. I think they raised like $130 million or something, and Microsoft gave them 10 billion. They weren’t even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was no way that the nonprofit side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their leadership, that side was inevitably going to lose. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question now is how and when. I think they just did, frankly. And I think it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very short matter of time, possibly tonight. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very short matter of time before that entire part of the company, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the board, is cleared out and replaced.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and also, it’s not even clear to me. I know that OpenAI is viewed as the leader in this area,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not the only company doing large language models. Like, everyone, everybody’s got one. Facebook’s got one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple reportedly has one. Google’s got one. Like, everyone is working on this technology. It is not
⏹️ ▶️ John like a secret sauce that only OpenAI has. Maybe they’re the best at it. Maybe they were there first. Maybe they have advancements
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know about, but it’s a type of thing that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like, yeah, so the iPhone is the best phone, but Android phones exist. It’s not like Apple is the only
⏹️ ▶️ John company in the world to have a touchscreen smartphone. It is a thing that exists in the industry. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a hard choice because it’s a platform type thing, but like anything, like SSDs, everybody’s got SSDs. It’s not one company that says, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s laptops are better because they don’t have spinning hard drives and everyone else does. No, everybody has SSDs. It’s just who has the best
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs. like, these large language models are so useful, and so widespread.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that open AI in especially in the beginning of their their nonprofit existence,
⏹️ ▶️ John shared all their technology with the world, they shared their discoveries, like that was part of their charter and their mission statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everyone’s more or less on the same page with these things, they’re useful technology. Everyone is thinking of new
⏹️ ▶️ John ways that they can use them and their existing products, and make new products that they hadn’t weren’t able
⏹️ ▶️ John to make before with student technology, whatever happens to open AI, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to happen, right, which is the other absurd thing about the the board saying we want to keep this purity
⏹️ ▶️ John of nonprofit, like, even if all of your employees and Sam Alton agree with you, the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John rest of the industry is taking this ball and running with it, because it’s a useful technology that you can make money with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they’re sticking it in everything. Will it go beyond that? Will it like, you know, the future of these
⏹️ ▶️ John type of things? Will they just get better and better until they’re practically held 9000? We’ll see right now. They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re useful. They’re useful right now. So Everyone wants to have access to them and
⏹️ ▶️ John have open AI disappeared from existence The rest of the industry would continue forward with
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, making fancy code auto complete in xcode 16 for example, that’s going to happen with a rather open
⏹️ ▶️ John AI, but uh How 9000? I don’t I don’t know if there are any other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John with anything close to Access to the resources that open ai has that are attempting to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Part of the fear of the OpenAI board is it’s just gonna happen accidentally and so we better do it deliberately so we can do it right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s gonna happen accidentally any more than self-driving cars are going to happen accidentally, but we’ll see.
#askatp: ECC w/Apple silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some Ask ATP. Tim Schmitz writes, what’s the story with ECC RAM in the Apple Silicon era?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember it being important to some folks on Intel, but I haven’t heard much about it lately. Is it not applicable or relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple Silicon? If so, why? John, would you mind giving us a quick rehashes to what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ECC RAM is, and then answer Tim’s question, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John ECC, that stands for Error Correcting Code, is a technology used in RAM chips
⏹️ ▶️ John that will account for errors in the memory and be able to correct them if the errors are small
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. So RAM chips, they’re not perfect. They’re tiny little analog electronic
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. What you would hope is that you would write some bits to one location and when you read it later, you get the exact same bits back that you
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote there. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes you’ll read and one of those bits will be wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe two of the bits will be wrong. And why? Well, you know, electrical issues with the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John of the chips, cosmic rays, all sorts of things can go wrong. And you would think, who cares if
⏹️ ▶️ John one bit is flipped here or there. But as RAM sizes have increased, the odds of finding
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those one or two bit errors has increased as well. Because if you find, oh, that’s gonna be one in
⏹️ ▶️ John a million. How many bits do you think are there on RAM? Back when you had eight kilobytes of RAM, there weren’t as many bits
⏹️ ▶️ John as when you have 128 gigabytes of RAM. So how many errors are there? More than you might think. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as RAM sizes have increased, one of the technologies that was introduced on really important computers
⏹️ ▶️ John is ECC, where they say, okay, we store some extra information, which costs money because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John storing more information. And with that extra information, we can tell when one of the bits is not what it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be. And in fact, sometimes we store enough information that we can tell what it was supposed to be and we can fix it and change it back.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so your RAM gives the correct results on like Casey’s third-party RAM and his iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the kind of computers that would do that were expensive server computers that people would run important
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on, like financial things or banking transactions or basically server hardware. Server hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John would have ECC RAM because it’s really important that the contents of RAM be correct. The consequences
⏹️ ▶️ John of even a single bit being flipped could cause a security problem or a crash or something else that you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to happen because it’s a hardware failure. Back in the day when the Mac Pro was a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John more pro, it came with ECC RAM because Intel Xeon
⏹️ ▶️ John CPUs were their sort of server class CPUs and they supported ECC RAM and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would buy and you know, the CPUs from Intel and they would get motherboard chipsets
⏹️ ▶️ John from Intel and they would support ECC RAM and they would put that on their Mac Pro motherboards.
⏹️ ▶️ John These days, we know what the situation with the Mac Pro is. It is very much like a Mac mini and a
⏹️ ▶️ John much, much, much, much, much, much bigger case with some extra stuff thrown in there. These days, Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John not do as many things to differentiate the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John from the less expensive and vastly smaller computers. as in they’re not designing
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely different RAM, entirely different SOC, entirely different anything
⏹️ ▶️ John really for the Mac Pro except the big case and some PCI Express stuff. The parallel story here
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and I don’t know the details on this, but as RAM has advanced over the
⏹️ ▶️ John years, a lot of the new RAM designs necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporated a technology much like ECC just to function correctly because they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John various arrangements of bits or speed enhancements or whatever, that they would incorporate
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of error correction within just the regular functioning of the RAM. And you wouldn’t call it ECC RAM, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John call it DDR4 or whatever. But if you were looking at like, what’s inside DDR4 RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d find some parts of the circuitry that are there to try to detect and or correct errors.
⏹️ ▶️ John That leads us to the question of ECC RAM in Macs today. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John this something that Apple should have in their Mac Pros and don’t? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John do all Macs with the unified memory architecture with the ARM chips have ECC RAM? I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say that much like the keyboards and everything having to do with the Mac Pro, the situation is this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could spend more money to essentially make RAM that is more resilient
⏹️ ▶️ John to errors in the Mac Pro and only in the Mac Pro because that is the model
⏹️ ▶️ John that costs the most and it’s where it’s most important that you not have any bit flip errors. Apple does
⏹️ ▶️ John not do that. So could it benefit from it? Yes, it could, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would cost more money and it would be better. Would it be better in a way that anybody would care about? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure. Because again, I think the RAM that they do use, like
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the reliability of that RAM compared to the ECC RAM that was in the old Intel Mac Pros, like in
⏹️ ▶️ John absolute numbers, not in terms of like, well, that the back then ECC RAM was better than regular RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, more expensive RAM with more complicated error correcting would be better than RAM without
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But in absolute values, are bit flip errors in
⏹️ ▶️ John the M2 Ultra more of a problem than they were on a Xeon with ECC RAM? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would follow some of the category of, if they offered it, I would like it and think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good. And practically speaking, especially back in the old days, ECC RAM did provide
⏹️ ▶️ John better reliability than that same amount of RAM that was in ECC. So, you know, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering why did my computer have some random crash sometime, again, ask Casey about this. Was it because you had some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with the RAM and would it have been prevented from ECC? Hard to say, but maybe. Like there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they sold it on all those server chips for a long time. And if you had a server that didn’t have ECC and data center next to one that did
⏹️ ▶️ John and you had enough of them, you could see the difference in the reliability of, you know, across hundreds and
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of servers of ECC versus non-ECC. Like people weren’t paying extra for that ECC RAM just for the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. It actually did provide a benefit. So I think it is applicable, I think it is relevant to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon, and I think we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey never going to get it in the Mac Pro. So don’t
#askatp: Photographing kid art
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Gleim writes, I’ve undertaken the task of photographing my son’s art, he just turned five,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to replace my previous strategy which was throwing it in a cardboard box in the storage room and forgetting about it for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ideally, I will only keep a few of these items and toss the rest, and I’m planning to make a photo book for the grandparents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Christmas. Thankfully, I was able to borrow some lighting equipment from work and I have a decent camera. I was wondering if you all had a strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this. My strategy is, generally speaking, throwing it in a cardboard box in the storage room and forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it for years. So no, I have no good answers for this, unfortunately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you have anything?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, for the most part, most of my kid’s art
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is really, you know, that was like when he was old enough to care and put time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it, most of that has actually been in the digital realm. Like, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had an iPad for a while, and my wife is really artistic and introduced him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early on to Procreate, which is this iPad drawing app that everybody uses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he does a lot in there. And so most of what he has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artistically is either stuff on pieces of paper that are easy to store in different places,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of three-dimensional stuff, or drawings in Procreate on iOS, which of course we back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and everything. So I don’t really have this problem as much as many parents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, just because my kid’s art format is more easily storable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I My strategy is to take photographs of art so I can get rid of it because we have the same situation just boxes
⏹️ ▶️ John and boxes of the stuff For the most part. I just take iPhone pictures Like it’s really especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with just like rumbly kid artwork on construction paper with glue and the corners are curling like
⏹️ ▶️ John this you know Kristen in a picture of like he had like a lighting setup
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s big company I’m just like put it put it down on someplace with good sunlight on the floor and take pictures of with
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPhone because that’s That’s all I want. Like, it’s not great works of art that I need to preserve for future generations. Just I wanna remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll remember the thing that he made. And I look at the pictures and make sure they’re clear and not blurry and I can see all the things. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s one that I really, really cared about, I could square up the edges and put it in Photoshop and, you know, try to
⏹️ ▶️ John fix the shadows of the curling corners and do all that stuff. But I think the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the main goal is kind of like, you know, scanning the digital photos or negatives, get it out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John physical realm and into the digital ASAP. And then you just can’t hold onto that stuff. Kids make a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of drawings. You don’t wanna throw it away and never see it again, but just use your iPhone, take
⏹️ ▶️ John a picture, and then get rid of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s also important to kind of distinguish. A lot of kid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco art that comes home from school, depending on your kid, of course, in my case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times, it was very easy to see, okay, the teacher told him to do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever came home was not really a work by him, it was a work by the teacher’s lesson plan. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, there’s a place for that, but it was very obvious when he had made something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that he really cared about, rather than just follow the template the teacher set out for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so for the follow the template stuff, he didn’t care about it, and so we didn’t have to care about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And our level of care would ramp up with his level of care and involvement. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so when he was doing something on his own, of his own accord, with his own direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that stuff is significantly better and worth keeping. And there’s way less of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a kid goes through school compared to template stuff that everyone did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s a hierarchy. The other thing you should do with them, aside from taking a picture and throwing it out, take the really good ones and frame
⏹️ ▶️ John them. We have a bunch of select things from various points in our kids’ lives that are in frames hanging on the
⏹️ ▶️ John wall. That’s another way to preserve them. Also take digital pictures of those, by the way. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you get rid of most of it, you take a little extra care to take photos of the gems, and then the really good ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John put in frames, Put up or run your house.
#askatp: Is tech improving our lives?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jamie West writes, do you think the use of technology actually makes your lives easier or if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it because it’s more of a hobby? These days I try to have as little technology in my home as I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have regular light switches that make the lights go on and off and I don’t have any home automations of any kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t notice my life being appreciatively worse because of this. In fact, since reducing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the use of technology, my life has become consistently calmer and more stress-free. The same is true for my computer these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days. Time was my menu bar would be filled with stats and custom functionality. Are we sure this wasn’t John writing this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco with custom icons. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his menu bar never had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Along with custom icons in the Finder and automation scripts, all of which required ongoing maintenance and updating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I have a pretty vanilla installation of macOS. My second sideline career of being an author, I only really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit my stride productivity-wise when I got rid of all the complicated software and decided to just use a plain and simple text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey editor. Maybe I just like the simple life, and these days I only use as much technology as I need.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I’m interested to know where the trade-off lies for you with the added minor stresses that come with incorporating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maintaining technology in your home life. Do you only use technology, which makes your life genuinely easier or better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or is there a part of you that convinces yourself it’s useful because tinkering with tech is a bit of a hobby and you find it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun to do? I understand what Jamie’s coming from here. I think for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s both. I think unquestionably, it’s a hobby. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one does not come up with a three raspberry pi solution to knowing whether or not your garage door open if it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hot. Like that’s just that is just straight up lunacy, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knowing when the garage door is open does indeed make my life better. So it’s a little of both.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have a lot of automations. In fact, I just went on automators just a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey months ago now, and talked about some of the automations I have. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really have that much. But the ones I I have, I genuinely do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think make my life better. Would I be fine without them? Of course I’d be just fine without them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they do make my life a little bit better and I like that. And, and again, so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this though, is I like the certain kinds of tinkering. I like certain kinds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of projects and stuff like that. And yeah, this is, this is certainly a hobby.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and, and ultimately when, when I come up with a solution for something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it’s just an out-of-the-box solution. As I have been espousing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a little over a year now, and Marco is now starting to join me, one of us, one of us, when you have your Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing the same music in an uninterrupted way and without
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any sort of latency across your entire house, including your backyard, that’s pretty rad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey granted, that’s not as much tinkering as it is spending a copious amount of money, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does make my life better. That is tech that makes my life better. So I see it definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a lot of column A and a lot of column B. But that’s where I come down on it. I don’t know. Marco, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it depends a lot on the role of technology in your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you an enthusiast about technology and you want to explore stuff like that? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you using it more as a tool to get your job done? And your job might be something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else, or something that the technology is only playing an assistive role in. And this changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at different points in people’s lives and for different reasons. You know, for me, when I was younger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like, you know, my high school and college days, I was much more of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tinkerer. And I would spend a lot more of my time, especially on the software side, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of my time like messing with my, you know, I didn’t have a menu bar yet because I was on Windows, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, messing with my Windows setup and installing a bunch of different system utilities and doing up a whole bunch of power user stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like tweaking things and, you know, messing around with the registry and making my start button say Marco and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I all sorts of that kind of tinkering stuff that you do especially as a young person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because back then my priorities were well you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to get a girlfriend but that wasn’t going so well so instead I guess spent as much time on computer as possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I was using the computer back then for the sake of using the computer like that was the activity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the activity I was spending most of my time on was messing around on my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. And actually to interrupt quickly because I was very much on the same boat, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the tinkering was finding an excuse, I think this is what you’re driving at, but finding an excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to need more time on the computer. Like, oh, I don’t really need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my start button to say Marco, but if I wanted to figure out how to do that, that’s more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I can spend using this thing, which is both a toy and a hobby and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. But I probably speak for Marco and actually probably John as well in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying that the computer was like everything to me when I was young because there was just limitless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opportunity to do anything there in a way that I think is both there today and is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different today. But finding all these things to tinker with was in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no small part for me anyway, giving me reasons to continue to sit at the computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Oh, totally. Me too. the day would be, I’m gonna sit at my computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’ll find stuff to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And largely, today, I actually still largely do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just have more things that I need to do that are at the computer and I have more things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my life that break up those times so that I don’t, so I have less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the computer than I used to. But as you go through life, your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priorities change, your needs change, and for the most part, most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people do some degree of specialization. You specialize in some part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your career or your hobby life or your family life or whatever, and that necessitates having less time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spent messing around with stuff like this. And some people, they make the messing around their career.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To some degree, we do that here by being on a tech podcast, although you mentioned automators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like other shows where there are people who go way more in depth with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that side of things than we ever do. And they’ve kind of made that a part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their career. So in some ways for them, it’s both work and play. The same way like for us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying new Macs is both work and play. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, for me personally, as I have gone through a career
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and adulthood and adult responsibilities and family responsibilities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my tolerance for tech that requires a lot of tinkering has gone down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. And that happens to a lot of people. You know, like oftentimes, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you find yourself trading money for time, which is the opposite of when you’re in college, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have no money and tons of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you get older, a lot of times, you’re like, you know what, rather than figure out how to hack myself into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not needing this extra terabyte of disk space, I’m just gonna buy the one with a terabyte more of disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space. Because your trade-off is different at that point in your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for me, for what I’m doing this part of my life, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some areas that I’m still willing to do some degree of like technological tinkering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, I mentioned a few episodes ago, I’ve been burning these, you know, Blu-ray 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gig M-disk things for archiving data. I’m still doing that. I’ve burned 26
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them so far. I have my entire photo library, TIFF’s entire photo library, and now my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music library all backed up on these really weird disks. Took forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there are certain areas like that that I will try, partly for show content to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, partly because I’m just interested in them, but my tolerance for tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t work very well or that requires lots of messing with is down to almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero. So for instance, smart home stuff is a great example that Jamie brought up, and this is such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great example. Smart home stuff leaves you infinite potential for tinkering,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most of it really doesn’t work very well. Or it’ll work for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks, and then something will change or break. And then you gotta like redo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything to make it ever work again. Or you have to add these different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, bridging and hacking projects or you know, tricks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get this thing to talk to that thing and then involve this web service so that this thing can bounce things off the web service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and send this thing and this other thing. Like, that’s where you lose me. Like once you get into that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s where you lose me. because that doesn’t make things better for me. But for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people, they are on a different part of that trade-off continuum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, do you want to spend time tinkering or do you want to spend time just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having stuff work for you and not messing with it? So for everyone it’s different, but as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, for me I’m closer now to I just need things to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I need to make time for the parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my computing life that are more important to me. So that when I do get that precious time sitting in front of the computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I don’t have a different obligation that I must be doing at that moment, I’m able to do the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things I really want to do. Like work on Overcast. Like deep programming work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or really creative work. That’s what I want to make time to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the more I have to mess with my technology, the less time I have for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those higher priority things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so asking three programmers on a tech podcast is probably gonna give you a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey different answer than the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the population. But yeah, for me, tech has been my hobby,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, since early childhood. It’s also an area of interest, which I think is different than a hobby,
⏹️ ▶️ John because when people hear hobby, they’re like, oh, it’s a thing that you’re doing. It’s an interest of mine as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of in the same way that like cars are. Like I don’t, I spend all
⏹️ ▶️ John this time reading about cars that I’m never going to own. And a lot of them I’ll never even see in person. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is your hobby cars or like all these car rebuilding videos? Are you working on cars? No, I’m never doing any
⏹️ ▶️ John of that, but I’m interested in it. I find it interesting. It is an interest of mine. So a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John the tech stuff that I’m into, it’s an interest. Even if I’m never gonna do it, I’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. I wanna learn about it. I wanna know about it. I find it interesting. So it is more than just a hobby.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course, it was my profession as well. And not in the way that like, you use a computer to help you
⏹️ ▶️ John do your job. Computers were the job. It’s kind of like being a builder and you build a hospital.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, oh, you really super into hospitals? Like, no, I’m a builder. I build things. And then you build a fire station. Oh, I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ John really love fire stations? Like, no, I’m a builder. I’ll build anything. I, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John like the task of building. Well, I was a computer programmer and yes, I was a web dev. So it was more narrow than
⏹️ ▶️ John just being a builder. were like, I built so many different things with web technology, depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what company I was working for. So my job was wrangling the computers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The computers were a profession directly, not that I’m using a computer to write a novel and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John a novelist, I’m literally wrangling the computers for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s my hobby and it’s my interest. So as you can imagine, the balance in my
⏹️ ▶️ John life about trade offs for technology is massively tilted towards the tech side.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the way that manifests in daily life and sort of home life is for somebody like me,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I imagine Marco Gassi as well, the personal payoff
⏹️ ▶️ John of getting something set up the way you want it, finally got my Emacs
⏹️ ▶️ John set up the way I want it, you know, the personal payoff of getting the three raspberry pie solution or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people like us, very often balances the amount of tinkering required
⏹️ ▶️ John to get there. Even Marco says he doesn’t wanna deal with a lot of stuff. He does deal with a lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it’s just buying and returning products and getting them set up and seeing how they work. There is some amount
⏹️ ▶️ John of tinkering and engaging in that hobby. And the reward is when you come in and it’s finally set
⏹️ ▶️ John up the way you want and the music plays the way you want and you use the voice command, the lights go on and the automatic thermostat
⏹️ ▶️ John does all the things, you get a level of satisfaction out of that. And if you are in a house with people
⏹️ ▶️ John who are not exactly like you in that regard, you have something to compare it to, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, they like it fine when like the lights work and you can watch stuff on the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re over there going, see, did you see how well that worked? Like, they didn’t do any of the work to set it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this amount of satisfaction they’re getting out of this, you know, pristine 4K
⏹️ ▶️ John television signal going to your fancy TV that you researched, they’re like, oh, I guess TV works. Right, they didn’t even have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the work. And they like, their scales, it takes so little to unbalance their scales.
⏹️ ▶️ John that TV doesn’t work one time, this is garbage. I hate everything that you’ve done here. Get rid of it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re willing to put in hours and hours of buying products and hooking them up and doing all this stuff or whatever, if we wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John get that satisfaction, like now it’s finally working the way I want. Even in the marketplace, it finally works without
⏹️ ▶️ John me having to deal with it. You put in effort to get to that goal. No one else,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though, that no one else is asked to put in any of that effort. So if there’s any downside whatsoever, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, scale’s unbalanced, I don’t like this. Right, I just don’t want the light switches to work it. If the lights don’t turn on
⏹️ ▶️ John one time, even though they put in zero amount of effort to make this home automation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, nope. You know, every time lights do come on, do you think they’re getting some amazing satisfaction
⏹️ ▶️ John of knowing that the giant Rube Goldberg machine that you put together to make that happen? Nope, nope, they just want the
⏹️ ▶️ John lights to work. And so everyone has to balance that differently. And I think maybe the key to
⏹️ ▶️ John at least family happiness within the household was to realize that if it is your hobby,
⏹️ ▶️ John your interest, your profession, or God forbid, all three, your
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfaction when everything comes together is not experienced
⏹️ ▶️ John by other people. And so the second something doesn’t work,
⏹️ ▶️ John they will give it a thumbs down. And when it does work, they will think nothing of it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John keep that in mind when trying to balance, like, is it a benefit to
⏹️ ▶️ John your life or is it like a hindrance? You’re not the only one. If you’re living with other people, you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John the only one who’s in play here. You have to think about how it’s affecting everybody else’s life. And by the way, as you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if they’re unhappy, you’re probably also gonna be unhappy. So it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can say, well, I’m satisfied with it, this trade off or whatever. If everyone else in the house hates it, you will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John not be satisfied with that trade off. So self-reflection is the right approach, including
⏹️ ▶️ John being true to yourself and knowing, I do like this stuff. I am interested in it. I do, like
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s part of the thing, he wants to do it for the sake of doing it, and it’s fun, and he feels a sense of accomplishment when he’s done and he has to realize
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a him thing. That is not a rest of the house thing. And let people have
⏹️ ▶️ John hobbies. Like let, enjoy your interests. That’s what life is all about. You know, just like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John hobbies and interests, engage in them in a constructive way and get as much enjoyment out of it as you can. And
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully you enjoy your work and hopefully you’re doing something in your profession that is also something that you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least have some kind of interest in. But be aware that other people have different opinions about
⏹️ ▶️ John the thrill they get when it works and the feeling they get when it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsor this week, Squarespace, and thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us at atp.fm slash join. and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was accidental John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long
Humane Ai Pin unveiled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So did you did we order our IE pins yet?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you order them? Are they accepting orders?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here’s what happened so so a couple episodes ago as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right before we recorded the verge got the leak of most of the details about the humane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI pin that was about to be unveiled we did our episode we talked a little bit about our impressions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just seeing the verge leak and we were like well you know we don’t want to judge it too too much because we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their side of the story yet. Let’s see what happens when they officially unveil it.”
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then the next day, they officially unveiled it with this really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odd video and open up pre-orders. And then what happened in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pre-orders opened up, no one noticed, and then all this stuff blew up with OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. And so it seemed to breeze by without much mention and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I I had to guess, I think Humane’s chance in the press is already over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I thought it might be interesting to just talk about it a little more because we did get more details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the Humane AI pen product, you know, their first product, and this is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of a, it’s a noteworthy thing, but I think it’s interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the era of technology that we are in, all of this drama around open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI has gotten way more attention and is way more interesting to the tech press
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a launch of a pretty hyped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device that’s a whole new device type from a whole bunch of ex-Apple people. Like, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 10-15 years ago, that would have been way more headline grabbing than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ends up that it has been. And way more relevant, I think, to the modern tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world than it will probably end up being. So I think that’s interesting by itself, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also just kind of looking at the Humane product now that we know all the details about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, or at least whatever they have chosen to show so far, which seems like pretty much everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if anything is different now that they’ve unveiled it? Basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything that VIRG said was correct, but now we just have more details about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what some of its features are, how some of these features work. We see the laser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that don’t call it a screen screen. We see how Humane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is positioning it, what they want it to be. It has all these, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of like wearing an Amazon Echo on your chest that happens to have a few extra features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say, the video, and again, the video was really weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m just gonna set that aside and just focus on the product because the video didn’t do them any favors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think. But at least we see what they’re going for. We see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s this thing that you’re going to wear as this basically as this badge on your chest that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap and ask it to do things. It can play music for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can answer questions for you, sometimes correctly. It can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take pictures for you with a camera that faces front, like a body cam if you’re a cop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that kind of perspective. There’s a whole bunch of interesting ideas here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this is going to go well. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually, I would honestly kind of be surprised if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they made it to their lunch day. They’re taking pre-orders now and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say estimated delivery early 2024. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be surprised if they’re getting any pre-orders that aren’t just from like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gadget reviewers and even then I don’t think it’s gonna be that big of a number. But anyway, but I think it’s interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, when you look at this product, there are a lot of interesting ideas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s definitely going to flop, and I think it’s going to flop because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone for an ideal physical environment that doesn’t really exist for a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on tech features that really aren’t ready yet. Or in some cases, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulled off technology that is cool, but is not actually better than what they are trying to replace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for instance, the physical challenges. As discussed last time, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a pin that attaches to your clothing, has magnetic backs to hold it on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge it. I mean okay, what if I don’t want this giant thing on the front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my shirt? It’s pretty big, it’s pretty noticeable, it’s not like a little tiny enamel pin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a big badge sized pin. It is not discreet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Anyone would see this and anyone who doesn’t know what this is would definitely ask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you about it. What the heck is that? What is on your shirt? So there’s that angle of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s the reality that it weighs about as much as two AA batteries, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not heavy but not light. Imagine that just flopping around in your chest all day. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would actually be noticeable and that would be kind of annoying. If you’re wearing any kind of lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clothing, that’s going to be very noticeable. Suppose it’s a season
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you want to go outside and put a jacket on or a hoodie or something. Do you have to not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the features of this thing during that time? Or do you take it off your shirt and move it to your jacket?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time you add or remove a layer of clothing, it’s going to be a problem with this kind of device? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but I mean, but Marco, I don’t understand why you would say that that would be an issue. I mean, first of all, how could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they possibly know, a company based in the greater San Francisco area, how could they possibly know anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about putting on and off layers? I mean, that’s not something that happens in San Francisco ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, it’s like, again, and even just the whole concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I hate my phone so much that I’m going to wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing and use it instead of a phone in many cases for things that really a phone would be better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. But the environment that they want to use this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, it’s like, I don’t want to be talking to something constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in the world. I barely even want to do it in my own house. Like the idea that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a voice first interface, I find optimistic, but not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super compelling for most realities that most people live in. They also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to replace the screen. this is like, this is a screenless device, kind of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it does have that laser projecting thing that can project a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen onto your hand. You know, they don’t call it a screen, but I got news for you, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen. Like, that’s just a really weird, crappy screen that is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limited and a little bit difficult to use. Excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, it is a laser ink display. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, like, and like, that’s, again, that’s kind of cool tech for something. Like I’m sure there’s good uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like when it showed it in the video, I was like, oh, you’re just navigating a screen. It just happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be projected onto your hand and you gotta tilt your hand in weird ways to interact with it. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a screen. It’s just like, you know, what John always brings up. Like when I tried to have my magazine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that didn’t have a settings screen, and it ends up I just kinda had to shove settings everywhere and it was a worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design and I ended up just having to make a settings screen. In this case, like navigating this device, that they were showing in the video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re using a device with a screen. It’s just a really unusual kind of screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are still navigating it like a screen and using it like a screen, and it turns out you need a screen for a lot of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re gonna have a screen, just use your phone. It’s way better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s, so there’s all that to contend with and so I think they have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical challenges this that like there is just just physically speaking I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see any reason why this is better than a phone and a watch like for all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the like kind of ambient availability that they have on it it should be a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because a watch is physically a much easier and more versatile thing that can work for more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in more conditions than this and even then it’s like but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean this is not that different from what a phone does and a phone is better at all these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you already have a phone. But I also think what’s interesting is that the ecosystem realities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the modern technological world is like even if this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a great idea that was very well executed and then everybody would want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is they’re trying to have this replace your phone in a lot of key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roles including things like it has its own phone number that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want people to call this and to message this. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you’re going to give people a whole new number just for your AI pin? Are you going to move your number to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and then not have that number on your phone? Are people supposed to text this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it’s just going to read you a summary of your friends text messages? Like, hey, you know what? I don’t actually want to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my friends text messages. Just summarize them for me. There are so many parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this that it makes for a cool two second demo, but if you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it for another two seconds, you’re like, oh wait a minute though, but what about this? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait, wouldn’t this fail in this one way? Or wouldn’t this have this major shortcoming?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think it’s interesting that because of the ecosystem realities of our tech world today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this is trying to replace your phone, it has no chance whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is who is gonna buy this to replace their phone if it’s not going to sync all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to their phone? It’s not gonna sync with your, it’s not gonna have iMessage support,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you’re gonna become a green bubble friend, and it’s gonna sync to nothing. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have none of your messages that come to your AI pin are gonna appear in your phone’s messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app because it doesn’t work that way. You have to have this different phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number for it. Maybe you could do some kind of forwarding tricks, but who’s gonna do that? So it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the modern Apple and Google duopoly here, there’s actually not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much room for a startup like this to come in and make their own thing. Because unless it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really well and is very, very integrated with either iOS or Android,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like this is not gonna get off the ground. Which is kind of a shame. Like honestly, again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is a very compelling product, honestly. But suppose it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still would fail because of that massive hardware lock-in environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we are in now with these modern platforms. And that’s kind of a shame. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I don’t think this is what Humane originally intended to launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Humane company and the massive talent drain they did from Apple and all the work they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been doing greatly predates the rise of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re calling AI today. What we’re calling AI today is a very recent thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Humane’s been in development for longer than that. So I think what probably happened is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were probably planning something else, or at least a very different focus for this product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It wasn’t working out so well, they started running out of money maybe, or running out of time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they kind of pivoted recently to be like, hey, you know what, let’s make it really AI focused. That way that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get more attention, it’ll fit the current market better, I mean, maybe it’ll help us raise more money or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s a more complicated story here, but basically this product doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even seem like what they originally set out to make. And also it doesn’t seem like it’s going to succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. So frankly, again, I would be surprised if it ships.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the company might go under and get bought, you know, for acquihire or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before this even ships. And if it does ship, I don’t think it’s gonna last
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about this for a while in the upcoming episode of Rectifs. So I won’t repeat too much of what I said there if you wanna hear
⏹️ ▶️ John me talk about it for a little bit longer with Merlin. But yeah, this thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kinda hard to tell when they talk about it, whether they
⏹️ ▶️ John really believe this wrongheaded idea of replacing people’s phones, as in like any moment you spend on your phone is
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. And so to the degree that we can reduce that or replace it, our product is good, like this is a kind of value
⏹️ ▶️ John judgment, this is, you know, everything that we can help you do with your little badge,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a win because it’s time you didn’t spend on your phone and that’s why it’s good because phone is bad and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is good, right? I can’t tell if they really believe that. I kind of think maybe they do
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s what makes me think this is actually kind of the product they wanted to make, which is essentially, get off those
⏹️ ▶️ John screens, kids, and don’t look at screens and just
⏹️ ▶️ John have a thing that’s a badge And I think the AI stuff coming along was like, wow, this is a great boon for us. Cause we were already going
⏹️ ▶️ John down this path of like screens, bad project light onto your hand instead and talk to your badge. And now we can do it even
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Right. But it’s hard for me to really, like if they really did believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s like, really, did these smart people all really buy into that thing? Maybe they had a very charismatic, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, leader who really believed in that or something. The flip side of that is what you just alluded to. And what I mostly spent
⏹️ ▶️ John all rectives talking about, the platform problem. A product like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially an Amazon Echo that, you know, a smarter Amazon Echo that you pin on your clothing that
⏹️ ▶️ John you can talk to and that has a camera that faces out or whatever. Great idea. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John you cannot make that product without deep integration with Android or iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only companies that can have that kind of deep integration with Android or iOS are companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John are currently heavily entrenched in that. Either Google, because they make Android, or a very
⏹️ ▶️ John big Google phone maker like Samsung or whatever, or of course Apple. Human out
⏹️ ▶️ John here cannot have the integration they need with the iPhone and iOS to make
⏹️ ▶️ John a good version of their little badgie product because Apple doesn’t allow it because their platform does not
⏹️ ▶️ John allow things like this to happen. And Rectus, the example I gave was Quicksilver. We ended up talking about like quick, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, command space things that you type or whatever. Mac OS is a, as a platform
⏹️ ▶️ John was able to and continues to be able to support things like this. A system
⏹️ ▶️ John integrated extension that starts to become part of the way you use your computer that the person who made that computer and the
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system didn’t foresee, but that becomes like, that is like deeply
⏹️ ▶️ John entrenched, hitting command space, I don’t know if spotlight exists, but before
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey spotlight exists,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was things like quicksilver and launch bar and stuff like that, right? What we would call a system
⏹️ ▶️ John extension. The things that the AI pin would have to do would have to make it like
⏹️ ▶️ John a system extension. It’s the same reason we can’t replace Siri with something better. The same reason we can’t replace reminders. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone ecosystem is too closed to support innovation like this unless
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes from Apple. That is, when you’re saying this is a shame, Marco, that is the biggest shame of it, is that Apple’s control
⏹️ ▶️ John of this platform does not allow innovations like this to be successful. The only company that
⏹️ ▶️ John could do a pin like that well is Apple on the iPhone. And on Android, it’s a little bit better,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not much, because Google really controls that platform very well there’s a small number of Android phone
⏹️ ▶️ John makers that have the wherewithal to do their own software stacks and that kind of integration. And by the way, if you do something that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t like, they’re not going to let you in the play store. And then you get, you know, it’s these platforms are not as
⏹️ ▶️ John open as the personal computer and the Macs were, right? Because on there are so many things that we
⏹️ ▶️ John can do to this day, even as locked down as the Mac is today, there are so many things that you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party can do to enhance the way a Mac works at a system level
⏹️ ▶️ John that feels part of the system that allows innovation that yes, eventually the platform owner copies like, Oh, someone made a
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar, a clock in the menu bar. Eventually Apple’s going to put that into the operating system, but that’s how things advance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And iOS, it’s like, run your little apps in your little sandbox in your little world and get your little, you know, squircle,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But don’t you dare mess with any other part of the system. We control notifications, we control the status
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, we control the default, you know, the web browser, the the
⏹️ ▶️ John the AI agent that’s installed the default mapping thing. And like, to the degree that Apple slowly opens
⏹️ ▶️ John that stuff up, they’re so far from allowing something like the Humane
⏹️ ▶️ John pin to work. So I feel for the company and that’s why I think, did you make this because you think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the best thing to do? Or did you make it like this because you have no choice? It has to have
⏹️ ▶️ John its own phone number. It can’t sync, it can’t use iMessage, like it can’t share, like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have no choice but to do this. You have no choice to at least try to be standalone because Apple doesn’t want you,
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t let you integrate in the way that you want, right? you’d want to be able to just talk to it and have
⏹️ ▶️ John it do things on your phone when you talk to it and have a tight connection. But Apple can barely make a connection between their own watch and
⏹️ ▶️ John their phone for quite a while, let alone letting the third parties do it. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I again, I can’t tell if this company thinks this is actually a good idea and phones are evil or they just they had a,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they just see the reality that’s like if we have no choice, we have to pretend that we are
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing the phone. We have to be a standalone as possible. We have to get our own phone number. We have to have our own world with
⏹️ ▶️ John our own context and our own messaging and, you know, it’s just, and that’s, that’s never going to fly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you did everything great. And it seems like they didn’t. And then there’s the problems we talked about last week of like, they’re, they’re assembling
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of disparate parts into a whole that they hope is greater than the sum of that parts. I don’t think it is. And I think a lot of that parts
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t work right yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also vehemently agree that it’s going to flop. Like I will be flabbergasted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this really gets any traction whatsoever. In fact, I would be surprised if it gets as much traction as Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Glass got. And yes, I realized what I just
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope it does get to the point where tech reviewers review it, because I want to read those reviews. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreed. But I do think there are some very clever and interesting ideas here. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just I really am extremely put off by voice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being the only real interaction model, like, yes, there’s the lasering display or whatever, but effectively it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey voice. And I really don’t like that at all. Like I would much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rather type than speak almost any time. And maybe that makes me an old, I don’t know. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s unique to old
⏹️ ▶️ John But what would you type on?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, no, no, no. I agree. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Eventually they end up making a phone and we know they can’t. Oh, well maybe they can just have an app on iOS and then you get back to the integration
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Okay. So you’ve got a hardware device and you’ve got an app and iOS. How well do they integrate with each other? Is your app running
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time? Can they communicate easily all the time? Or is it, it’s just, you have to fit within this little walls that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple makes. So here’s what apps are allowed to do. And here’s what accessory hardware accessories you’re allowed to do. and here’s when they’re allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to each other and how much and through what means and it’s so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with you. But like as an example, one of the things they demoed in their very funny video, which by the way, it’s like 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes and it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John watching longer because it’s so weird, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so weird. And Imran or whatever his name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the head, I think for like the TED talk he did way back when he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like kind of, I don’t know if aloof is the word I’m looking for, but he’s kind of like chill.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really care what’s going on right now vibe. I think that did work for the TED talk. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the product video, it did not land well. And it is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spending the 10 minutes watching this thing because it’s something else. It looks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little sleepy, not high energy. I understand that’s just his his vibe. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the whole video, it’s like there is no enthusiasm about this product being displayed whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, no, it’s very true. So all that aside, there are I genuinely think there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very cool things in this. So like as an example, I forget exactly what the phrase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, but he talks about how, oh, if you’ve been not paying attention to your text messages for a couple hours, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re at a dinner at a, you know, a kid’s thing, you can say, catch me up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will use AI to hopefully do a good job of saying, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the 907 text messages you’ve just received, the key takeaways are you got to go to dinner and half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an hour with your wife at such and such a location. And you know, your kid wants to know if they can play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more Minecraft or whatever the case may be. Like that to me is cool. Or I think they’ve shown other examples
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be cool if it worked. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I like it with any of these things. You’re always like, okay, so what is the consequence? If it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t quite work? Probably not that big for summarizing text messages. But
⏹️ ▶️ John are you going to rely on like what if it’s something about when someone needs to be picked up or dropped off or stop
⏹️ ▶️ John off of the store and get something or whatever. And it either tells you something like that that didn’t exist or doesn’t tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John about it when it does exist. And getting back to the technology making your life better and you come home and your wife’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, did you forget to pick up Timmy? You’re like, oh, what do you mean? I texted
⏹️ ▶️ John you. I said, you need to pick him up at the school. And I was like, oh, well, I asked my
⏹️ ▶️ John AI pin to catch me up and it didn’t mention that. How do you think that’s going to fly? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are you supposed to do after it summarizes your messages? Do you just delete them or do you read them later?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m saying, is the summary useful? The summary’s only useful to you if you believe it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And if you have any doubt,
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe, again, maybe you don’t care. Maybe it’s like, oh, I don’t care, but I feel like it’ll only take
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those things where you were supposed to pick up your kid and you didn’t, and you have to explain why by saying that you
⏹️ ▶️ John asked for a summary from your pin, and your wife’s gonna say, well, never use that again, because obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work every time. You know what I mean? And it’s not life or death, like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the kid’s at school, But that type of thing, when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John on to stuff like interperson communication and ask me for a summary, it looks great in a demo, like look, it’s saving me
⏹️ ▶️ John time. It’s like having an executive assistant. But if your executive assistant forgot to mention you have to pick up your kid, you fire them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know what I mean? Or you’d have a talk with them at least. It’s like, this is the job. Then the AI thing does it. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have no one to blame but yourself because you believed it. And it turns out that that was consequential enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that now your hobby tinkering with this little thing versus
⏹️ ▶️ John how much benefit is it actually giving you in your life? Like you love it when it comes together and you feel like you’re in the future when it’s summarized,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that one time you forget to pick up your kid, you’re never gonna use that summary thing again. Or if you do, you’re gonna use
⏹️ ▶️ John a summary and then take out your phone to confirm and read every message, then what’s the point of that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And if anything, like this, I think this just shows, like the leaps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bounds they had to jump through to avoid having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen, just shows how good screens are. All the different ways this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t work, all the different conditions this doesn’t work in. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s somebody in the chat, David Shaw, and RepoMan27 just posted, the operating temperature range is only 41 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re in a really cold place, or a really hot place, like nope, won’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Really cold is lower than 41? I guess you have to wear it inside your jacket if you live in any place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so you can’t use it if you’re when you’re outside wearing a jacket, really, because it’s gonna be covered up anyway, but even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you move to the outside of your jacket every time you put your jacket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty solid. Yeah, it’s gonna freeze. On their own site, is AIPen waterproof? No, basically, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the long answer, the summary, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It doesn’t rain in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so you’re fine. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can’t use it if it’s raining. Like, there are all these different conditions. It’s like, okay, what if it was a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your pocket, like a phone? Well, it turns out those are really good, And you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a screen that lives in your pocket or purse or bag or whatever, you can use that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many more places and contexts and conditions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you can use something like this. And that’s why it has no chance. Like, even if people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hated their phones, which they very much don’t, but even if, for some reason, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could buy into the narrative that there’s lots of people who want to spend less time on their phones out there, there aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again even if people hated their phones the versatility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of screens that are handheld that fit in your pocket and that you can pick up and take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in a split second whenever you want to that versatility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overpowers everything else here that’s like you can’t use the AI pin in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cold in the hot in the rain when wearing a jacket when wearing a light shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what like Like when somewhere where it would be visibly obtrusive or draw too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much attention to you. You can’t use it in a place where you can’t use your voice. Maybe you are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhere where you have to be quiet. You know, in a certain context where you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be quiet. People have those all over their lives. Screens work in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many more places and contexts. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I understand, like again, I’m glad they’re trying stuff. I’m glad people out there are making cool gadgets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fun. But don’t bet against the smartphone, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so directly against the smartphone. You will lose every time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Screens are awesome. There’s a reason we have them. And projecting a laser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen into your hand that you have to tilt and gesture in weird ways to use, that’s not better. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you see the laser screen, they blew it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even on the rumply demo hand, it’s like, I don’t wanna see something on my hand. I can barely tell what anything is. The hand’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John wrinkly and rumbly. Yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hardware. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if you just put a phone into that hand? Then it’s so much more useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you’re looking at it. Yeah, the hardware problems could be solved if the company had a good enough product that
⏹️ ▶️ John they could iterate on the technology and so on. But it feels like this entire
⏹️ ▶️ John product hinges on, as we pointed out at the last show, the thing that this company is not actually really
⏹️ ▶️ John making, which is the quote unquote AI part of it. And we all know that that part of
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work as well as they would like. Imagine if this thing, you’d buy this thing for the same price and pay
⏹️ ▶️ John the same monthly fee. And every time you tapped it, it was like Amazon Mechanical Turk and there was a person there who’s your
⏹️ ▶️ John own human personal assistant. If you could get a human personal assistant to be on call 24
⏹️ ▶️ John hours a day for $24 a month, that would be a great deal. And that is the dream of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d say, oh, but the hardware is bad and it’s not waterproof and it’s this and it’s that. It’s like, no, $24 a month and I tap this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can literally ask it to do anything and it does it for me. Summarize my text messages and it tells me and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a person so it gets it right. You know what I mean? Like that would be a great product. And if they had that product,
⏹️ ▶️ John people would pay for it. And then the next version would be better. And the next version would be better. And you’d be like, I don’t need to see anything on a screen. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John ask my little assistant and it tells me everything. Why do I need to see anything on a screen, right? I can whisper real
⏹️ ▶️ John low if I’m in a library and they can hear me because of these amazing microphones. But they don’t have a human
⏹️ ▶️ John at the other end of that thing. They have whatever quote unquote AI
⏹️ ▶️ John thing they’re using, which is useful in lots of other contexts and may be useful in some of the contexts they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to use that, but not useful enough to make up for all their other failings. So they’re never gonna get to the point
⏹️ ▶️ John where they can iterate on this hardware, right? And again, they don’t even make,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t even really make the AI part of that. They’re just piggybacking on a technology that other people are innovating. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t, this company, I wouldn’t trust this company to continue to push to the forefront of making that part
⏹️ ▶️ John smarter and better, because that’s not their core competency. Their core competency is apparently this idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, let’s not be on screens as much and let’s use a badge type thing, and the hardware that they’ve made,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, the software stack that it runs on. And the hubris to believe that, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone platforms that dominate our lives are so closed that we can’t build the product we want, so we’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John it all ourselves. And I admire that, I admire the attempt to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s one of the reasons I admire Lucid, because they did so much stuff themselves, but Lucid actually pulled it off and this
⏹️ ▶️ John company I think has not. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Lucid was making something people want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but they didn’t choose to do so many things themselves. Like, you’re gonna make your own drivetrain? You’re gonna make your own, like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John would you do that? We can do, all the other EV companies did. I mean, you’re not just gonna buy parts from somebody else and
⏹️ ▶️ John assemble them? Like, no, we’re gonna build all this stuff ourselves. It’s like, boy, that seems really hard. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is, and most companies can’t do it, but the ones that do, it’s very impressive. And this company, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John AI was humane, was forced to do this because they can’t build on any of the platforms that is natural
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to build on. So it’s sad. It really, like, as much as I think this product
⏹️ ▶️ John is not, you know, gonna do anything in the market, I wish that it was possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a good version of this product on any of the dominant platforms today that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John appropriate, which, you know, iPad, iOS, iOS, Android, right? But it’s just not. Those companies don’t, if they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna make it, they don’t wanna let you make it. And that is the real shame of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, agreed. And again, this is a bad idea for so many reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like your Lucid analogy, it’s like if Lucid was like, hey, why don’t you give up your car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and switch to a hot air balloon? Like, well, OK. I mean, that’s going to be a tough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we would have made a car, but we’re not allowed to be on the roads. Because the company that owns the roads won’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John us. But we think hot air balloons are actually better than cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, don’t you hate your car? How about something that’s less capable and less convenient and you can operate in less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco conditions? Great. How about a hot air balloon? Oh, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God. Anyway, but yeah, you know, you’re right. And it’s ultimately like the inability for products like this to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really have a fair shot is a tragedy of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the modern tech lock-in ecosystem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no telling how much innovation out there we could have today and that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be making our lives better and could be making the world better. If not for Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google’s massive platform lock in on their modern platforms that basically make it impossible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if anything, like a company that had this idea could fail much faster, because they wouldn’t have to build
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, you know, all the all the operating system and platform stuff, they could just, you know, piggyback build the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you make an app on your phone and build a little bit of the hardware and have them integrated. And
⏹️ ▶️ John just do the part that you care about. They can’t do that. Because you can’t get that kind of deep integration
⏹️ ▶️ John with iOS. But if they could, boy, they would save a lot of time. And they would be able to come with their product, they would flop
⏹️ ▶️ John in the market because nobody wants it in the AI system. So too dumb. And it would save everybody a lot of money. But
⏹️ ▶️ John they had to build so much stuff. And you know, go this whole route of like we are our own thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with our own phone number and our own operating system and our own lack of apps or whatever they were pitching. Like we have experiences,
⏹️ ▶️ John not apps. It’s like, you have to build all of that for what’s probably going to turn out to be if not
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad idea, at the very least an idea that is too ahead of its time because the tech is just not ready for it yet.