670: Institutionally Inescapable
19 Dec 2025We all just wish our families would be more impressed by our TVs.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco joins team snow tires
- i3: 155/70R19
- XC90: 275/40R21
- Molex
- F-150 Lightning’s demise
- 🗣️ Remember, ATP gift memberships are a thing!
- 🗣️ New ATP Members Special: ATP Movie Club: WarGames
- Follow-up:
- Some impromptu spoiler-free follow-up about the member’s special
- John’s Cloudflare update
- Marco’s former TV (via Wayne Morgan)
- Apple executive departures
- Jeff Williams has been nominated to join Disney’s board
- Would Johnny Srouji consider Rivian? What about NVIDIA?
- Apple 2030 & carbon credits (via Zach)
- Split iMessage groups (via sirshannon)
- AI-generated voice-matched dubbing
- Fran Besora tried the Spanish version
- Stefanus Secundus tried the German version
- Ben Mattison had an odd YouTube experience
- Siri and pronunciations (via Paul Zadunajsky)
- Intel
stealinglearning from chips it fabs- Thread by Joe Lion
- Jason Biatek points out this is all basically cryptography
- Migrate Purchases (via James Wilby)
- Paris Buttfield-Addison got locked out of his Apple ID… because of a gift card
- Netflix to acquire Warner Brothers
- Dominic Preston at The Verge
- From the past: Blockbuster’s reaction to Netflix
- Paramount launches hostile $108B bid
- Post-show: Casey asks for programming help
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The State of TV
Sponsored by:
- Guru: Your AI Source of Truth
- Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- i3 winter tires
- ATP Gift Memberships
- ATP Movie Club: WarGames
- John’s Cloudflare update
- LG C7 green-splotch issue
- Sponsor: Notion
- Executive moves
- Carbon credits
- Split iMessage threads
- AI-generated language dubs
- Siri saying your name
- Fabs getting ideas from customers
- Migrating purchases
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Locked out of Apple account
- Sponsor: Guru
- Netflix + Warner Bros.
- Ending theme
- [NS]NotificationCenter?
i3 winter tires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have rejoined the winter tire lifestyle, sort of.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, in the i3? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. So, over the weekend, Tiff had taken my car out of town
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has a long range, and I was driving her car, the i3. My car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfectly well in the snow. I meant to say iX. I 100% said i3, but I was meant to say
⏹️ ▶️ John iX. The i3 is the one that has a range extender.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right, but it’s still, you know, to go like, you know, deep upstate, it’s not super great. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so she had my good car and I had the i3, which is a wonderful car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in lots of ways. However, I learned that in snow and ice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not only not a wonderful car, it is a horrendously bad car in snow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ice. Has it ever had its tires changed? Ever? has changed ever? Yeah, actually, well, it only it only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like 11,000 miles on it, but these are the original
⏹️ ▶️ John tires. What year was this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not anymore. They there was like a slow leak in about a year, about a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. Maybe there was a slow leak and they determined just let’s just replace all of them because they had worn enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by that point that doesn’t might as well might as well do it. So they’re they’re actually fairly new tires. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem as if you if you look into I three owners and their experience of driving in the winter. So it It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rear wheel drive car, which, you know, I’ve had rear wheel drive cars before. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how they handle in the snow, which is not amazing, but yeah, but you know, if you, if you have snow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tires, you can do okay. Um, it’s still not, it’s still, you know, way worse than an all wheel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive car, even with regular all season tires, but okay. Um, don’t at me.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s way worse than front wheel drive too, but yes, yes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, can I just, can I just stop you right there? Yeah. I don’t particularly disagree with you, but the, the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the snow tires zealots are going to come for you. Good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for them. They will argue. I’ve been there. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will argue. I just want to acknowledge this argument because I’m not interested in pursuing it further
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after this moment. I acknowledge and I am acknowledging on behalf of all three of us until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John argues with me that I understand that with the right set of snow tires, a rear-wheel drive car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually very performant in the snow. I agree with Marco though, for an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey average driver, which I include myself in that, it it is probably better to have an all-wheel drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car in the snow than a rear-wheel drive car, rear-wheel drive car with snow tires. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially where I am. And I am not interested in having an argument about this anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet, please and thank
⏹️ ▶️ John you. The only thing I would disagree with is if you have an all-wheel drive car with like a summer performance tires on it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco been there. Not gonna be better. Been there, it’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but yeah, my assertion is merely that all-wheel drive with all-season tires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better than a rear wheel drive with snow tires.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. People will argue with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I know. I’m not interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the argument, everyone. Thank you, but no thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and yeah, and to clarify, I’m talking about winter tires, not snow tires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically. Thank you, everybody. Okay, driving Tip’s car in the snow and ice over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last few days. I messaged her, I’m like, can I please buy you snow tires?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the problem is the i3, yeah, it’s rear wheel drive. The tires that are, so the R3 has very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow tires. It’s basically motorcycle tires, even narrower than many motorcycle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tires. It’s like a big roller skate.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing is when it spins, since the wheel base is so short, you just, you can’t even tell when it’s going forward or backward or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and the tires that are on it are like eco range maxing tires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not good for traction in the winter. They’re not optimized for that. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John optimized for roller skate. Like a roller skate, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real hard tires, yeah. Yeah, they’re optimized for range in the summer, which is fine, but not what we need. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m finally, you know, go into a tire rack, place an order, like there’s one snow tire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is made for this
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say, who makes snow tires that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small? There is one on, I think it’s a Blizzac, there’s one currently on the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fits it. And if you look like- Do you remember the tire size? No, but
⏹️ ▶️ John wheel size? It’s like 16 inches? I can tell you, hold on, my order has shipped. As someone pointed out online recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know we talked about tire sizing in context of the bootleg thing. And we went through the tire sizing. And the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John had never occurred to me until someone just pointed out recently is that tire sizing
⏹️ ▶️ John mixes metric, imperial, and proportion in the same size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the tire size, by the way, the tire size. So the regular tire size for the vehicle stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually staggered. But for the snow tires, it’s square. And the tire size for the snows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 155-70R19. 19 inches?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way bigger than I thought it would be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, seriously. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey surprised. The 155, not surprising. The 155 is millimeters. Yes. Is millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then the 19 is inches. And then the other number
⏹️ ▶️ John sidewall height as a proportion of the width, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So I assume 155 is fairly narrow for a car?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yes, yes. It’s very narrow. But 19 is way bigger than I would have guessed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And actually having just had to replace one of Aaron’s tires, which is a whole story, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what that was, but I want to say it was like 275. I can look that up as well and I’ll get back to you in a second, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was quite like two or three times, it was like twice the size of what you’re talking about. It’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So anyway, we’re here’s hoping that rejoining the snow tire, winter tire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lifestyle will improve this car in the snow for the rest of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful life in our household.
ATP Gift Memberships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so it is nearly Christmas as we record this. It is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 17th of December. Hanukkah is actually going as we speak. And if you are in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gift giving mood and you have a nerd in your life that perhaps listens to the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which maybe you do too, hopefully that’s how you’re hearing this message. Anyways, if you have a nerd that you want to gift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a membership to, remember that thanks to the hard work of one John Syracusa, A2B gift memberships
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are a thing and you can actually gift somebody an entire membership for, I believe, John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and jump in here a month, a year, maybe even forever. No, not forever. But there is all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different things you can do with gift memberships. John, how does this work?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the thing you need to know is you go to atp.fm slash gift. That’s the URL for you. I added some
⏹️ ▶️ John more instructions there. If you go to atp.fm slash store, I also put the gift instructions there. Uh, but yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can buy a month or a year. You can buy multiple months, you can buy multiple years. Uh, it’s all explained in the fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, it’s, It’s been a pretty solid system. People have been using it and it has been working for them and we haven’t really had any problems. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John wrinkle is that obviously to buy something, you have to create an account so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can give payment through our payment processor and stuff like that. You’re led through it on the page. ATP.FM.Gift
⏹️ ▶️ John will explain it all. And then they have to put in your email address if you’re the one who wants the gift
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. So there’s like a URL that’s like ATP.FM.Gift?4 equals your email address. It just pre-fills the form.
⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t worry, if they enter the wrong email address, We can even fix that after the fact. So we’ve had a lot of people successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John use this process and not get confused by it. So I think it’s working. The great thing about ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John membership gift, you can get it literally Christmas morning. There’s no shipping. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you just do a payment and then you get a URL and then you can either hastily print that or just
⏹️ ▶️ John write down the code that we give you like the redemption code and just stick it in a little envelope and put a bow on it. Perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John last minute gift, no lead time required, Instantly delivered to you, atp.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, John, you’ve made me scared now because you’ve talked about how you have to enter the recipient’s email address.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You just said instantly delivered. Does that mean the gift will be given away immediately upon purchase?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don’t do any delivery for you. After you purchase a gift membership, you’ll have instructions on what to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you deliver the gift however you want to. You can print it out on a piece of paper. You can put it in a gift box.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can text it to them. You could mail it to them in the mail. You could do whatever you want with it. you could just
⏹️ ▶️ John read it to them on Christmas morning. It’s entirely up to you. The surprise will not be spoiled
⏹️ ▶️ John by anything in our system, but that means that you must actually deliver the gift. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John is a last minute gift idea. You do have to hastily write down the redemption code or print something
⏹️ ▶️ John out or text them, but you know, whether it’s a piece of paper or a texted link, it works just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Well, I’m glad that the surprise will not be ruined. And again, atp.fm slash gift,
ATP Movie Club: WarGames
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is doubly pertinent because we also need to announce that we have a new member special for December.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, we watched, we did HB movie club and we watched the 1983 film war games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Matthew Broderick and Ali Sheedy and a bunch of other people. And I had seen it, but not in like 20 years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco effectively hadn’t seen it. And John, you seem to know this movie inside and out. So anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would, that you would like to add about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I have, uh, some very, uh, you know, rapid fire, uh, follow
⏹️ ▶️ John up for the episode that I will try not to spoil. First, uh, this movie has been often requested. And, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to, uh, if you’re, uh, dying to listen to it, now’s your time. Uh, for
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who listens to it, you can listen to how many times I say nuclear and how many times I say nuclear.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So that’s a fun game you can play. Rest assured. I
⏹️ ▶️ John do know the difference, but I, unfortunately I was born in the seventies and a child of the eighties and the incorrect
⏹️ ▶️ John pronunciation is wedged in my head. So you’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ John as you know, that’s just, that’s That’s just an accent. You’ll hear as the episode goes on,
⏹️ ▶️ John my discipline gets worse and worse. So that’s fun. Two, NORAD is located in
⏹️ ▶️ John Colorado Springs, Colorado, not Wyoming. We were at the error. Casey tried to point that out. I think I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. No, no, no, no. I also got it wrong because I saw Cheyenne or Cheyenne or whatever it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pronounced on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sign. And I thought that was Wyoming. It is not. It is in Colorado, as
⏹️ ▶️ John Three, the 80s nuclear war movie that I was trying to remember is not the day after tomorrow. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a 2004 climate disaster movie directed by Roland Emmerich. It was the day after these things
⏹️ ▶️ John jumble in my head. Because I’m old, I regret the error. And finally, the thing that I will not spoil,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’ll have to listen to the episode to know what I’m talking about. But the thing on the episode I asked, if anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John is aware of this thing existing before the movie War Games
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, let us know. And I am here to tell you that tons of people let us know and rest assured, the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that is in that movie that we discuss did indeed exist well before that movie
⏹️ ▶️ John and is a widespread phenomenon all over this country, potentially coming here from
⏹️ ▶️ John Europe. Anyway, that’s our follow-up for the member special, slightly mysterious, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John War Games. you should watch the movie even if you’re not a member.
John’s Cloudflare update
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you have yet another Cloudflare update. Is there trouble in paradise?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, last time I was saying that I had switched over to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and had it sitting in front of my website and doing caching and SSL termination, and that we
⏹️ ▶️ John did some follow up about. This workers thing they have, or the serverless thing that can do stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can host stuff in R2 and all that stuff, and I said I would look into that. I did. So now my website is fully
⏹️ ▶️ John on Cloudflare. I am using Cloudflare Workers to actually serve my site.
⏹️ ▶️ John No traffic goes to my crappy shared hosting thing anymore for that particular website. There’s other websites that are still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s working pretty well, except that I quickly learned that when you do Worker,
⏹️ ▶️ John it kind of sits alongside as a peer to caching. So I can’t put like Cloudflare caching in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John my worker, but there’s a caching API in the worker. So I basically have to manually
⏹️ ▶️ John do like the stuff that a web browser would do. I have to manually set the headers
⏹️ ▶️ John and the expires headers for caching I have to manually deal with like trailing slashes and crap. I have to manually
⏹️ ▶️ John do caching It’s still like maybe two pages of code now instead of one, but it’s a little bit silly
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be nice if you could just say hey Cloudflare do your caching thing in front of my worker but still the worker
⏹️ ▶️ John would have to do the cache expires header because the way I had caching configured was to honor the The
⏹️ ▶️ John headers that were coming out anyway It seems to be working fine I had a little a couple of glitches
⏹️ ▶️ John where I didn’t fully reproduce the behavior that I had in Apache But I think I’m gonna run it like this
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while I still have my shared hosting site and I still have the site there So I guess I’ll publish to both sites deploy
⏹️ ▶️ John to both sites as I go But it’s working pretty well. So You know, I guess I’ll give you an update
⏹️ ▶️ John if anything disastrous happens, but for now it’s going pretty well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you said hypercritical co is pointing to this worker site. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right All right, you go, if you hit that URL now, everything you see there, the files are all
⏹️ ▶️ John hosted on R2 because I have some that are 20, bigger than 25 megs and I didn’t wanna do that weird bifurcation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I could have like made a backend site at CloudFlare and then had it fronted by CloudFlare and it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t feel like going to that. I just wanted uniformity. Everything’s in R2, it’s fed by a worker, the worker
⏹️ ▶️ John acts like the world’s dumbest static content web server and it has, and it accesses CloudFlare’s
⏹️ ▶️ John caching front end as it goes. And it’s, I think it’s way faster than it was before I tried it I tried it both ways
⏹️ ▶️ John like using my crappy shared hosting as the origin server with caching in front of it Versus doing it all in worker
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much faster to do it all in worker because my mostly because my crappy shared hosting was really bad
⏹️ ▶️ John like anytime it actually had to go to the origin server the the requests from went from tens of Milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was ridiculous. So not that it matters for a static website, but it’s faster now, too Oh, and I went
⏹️ ▶️ John over that I went over the the worker. I didn’t go over it I got the warning email. It says you’re close to the daily limit
⏹️ ▶️ John for a free worker requests So now of course I’m paying for worker. It’s $5 a month, not a big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s what I’m paying Linode currently for their baby, what is it, Nano or whatever. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a full on computer asterisk, asterisk.
⏹️ ▶️ John that would have been easier. It’s just that I got sucked into this whole CloudFare thing. Like I kind of wish I had your setup because
⏹️ ▶️ John then I could just run a web server and configure it instead of writing my own crappy web server and Node.js, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, I think either approach is perfectly valid.
LG C7 green-splotch issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about Marcos former TV Wayne Morgan writes regarding Marcos LG C7 image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem This was a known issue with the C7 and B7 They actually had a repair notice where until a few years ago. They would fix it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey free I had the exact same issues as you between Minecraft and the hue burn-in in the center
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that what yours look like this picture Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never put up like a solid color to test it It was just it was so apparent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the the shift towards green and what we’ve heard over and over again is basically that like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red sub pixels would wear out in the middle faster than everywhere else possibly because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some theories are like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John where people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faces are and yeah it’s skin tone and I don’t know if that’s true or if it’s like heat or both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but whatever it is this is a very common problem as reported by the incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rigorous data of people telling us about it it seems like a pretty common
⏹️ ▶️ John know when it first started to happen it sounds like you could have got it repaired for free but you let it fester and now that it’s kind of like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the keyboard repair programs, they eventually end, and so it was too late for you anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s the kind of thing, well, that particular problem, like the Minecraft burn-in with the hearts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the bottom, that’s been there for years. But the particular problem of the middle of it slowly turning green, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only been happening for, at least in a noticeable way, for maybe a few months. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if I had done it immediately, it would have been too
⏹️ ▶️ John needed a new TV anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all’s well that ends well. It’s funny, though, so besides the TV getting ten inches larger diagonally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody in the family seems to notice. They didn’t notice the giant blob in the middle of the field? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they notice… look, as I’m sure not only the two of you, but certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many, if not most of our listeners, are aware of a phenomenon, when you are kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person in charge of the technology of the house, you only hear about things that don’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t really… like, when things work great, no one… I mean, this is true of most household duties
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most people do. Like when things are working great, no one says anything they, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might notice. Probably not. Uh, they certainly don’t notice enough to say anything. It’s only when things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go, go wrong or need attention that you tend to hear about them. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I am thanked as with, again, with any household duties that people do, the way I am thanked for my hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work in this area is an absence of complaints. And I accept that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish my family was more impressed by my TV. It looks really good. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish my family was more impressed by my amazing Wi-Fi setup, but yeah, it just It doesn’t happen. Bye bye. you
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Executive moves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s talk Apple executives. First of all, Jeff Williams retired like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two weeks ago and is now sort of kind of unretiring. Not really. But apparently Jeff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Williams has been nominated to join the Disney board. So reading from J. Peters
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in The Verge, at The Verge, wherever, something The Verge, Jeff Williams, who recently retired from Apple, will stand for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey election, quote, as a new independent director at the company’s 2026 annual meeting of shareholders, quotes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Disney says, the board will be expanded from 10 to 11 members. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to Johnny Sruji and oh, where would he go if he did leave? Joshua Price
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, after watching the Rivian event this week, where they announced that they’re building custom silicon for their for their vehicles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could that be a potential competitor for Johnny Sruji? Would he that Johnny Sruji would have considered?
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems like a big step down to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does, but you never know. Also, a lot of people reached out to say NVIDIA is another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey option, potentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s maybe a lateral move, but I don’t know. NVIDIA seems a lot more volatile and is a new member of the
⏹️ ▶️ John biggest company in the world, Club, which Apple’s been a member of for a while.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And that’s it for this episode. Thanks for watching.
Carbon credits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to last week’s overtime, we were talking about carbon credits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple 2030, where they said they would be carbon neutral. I’m sure there’s asterisk, stagger, double dagger, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zach writes, I actually work in the carbon credit space. This is, again, ATP. What did I call this something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner? Job corner? I don’t know. We have people everywhere. I actually work in the carbon credit space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My job is essentially carbon accounting, so I know quite a bit about carbon credits. In order to sell carbon credits that a company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Apple would purchase, you need to go through a registry. The registry uses independent auditors to verify the credits. In order
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your credits to be valid, there are several criteria that need to be met, which includes a minimum of 100 years of stability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Part of this means you cannot sell your carbon capture byproduct into certain markets where, for example, they would be exposed to high
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperatures or very acidic conditions that would result in the release of the captured carbon dioxide. The whole process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of producing carbon credits is honestly a huge hassle, but it has to be that way so people cannot easily cheat
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s a complex industry. It’s not entirely a scam, but it’s difficult to do in a way that satisfies everybody.
Split iMessage threads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got a lot of feedback with regard to your split iMessage situation. Given
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you haven’t put a lot of follow up in here, I’m assuming that means you have no particularly satisfying
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, lots of people had suggestions that involved, you know, like tear your world down and start it back up again, or
⏹️ ▶️ John like suggestions that would never work, like, you know, which involves going around to everybody’s device
⏹️ ▶️ John that you communicate with and forcing their settings into a particular thing. I think I mentioned this when we talked about it, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is that setting of like, by default, where do you want to begin conversations from and also what do you want to be reachable
⏹️ ▶️ John at and those settings are like I don’t know if they’re per device or per OS but definitely there’s different settings
⏹️ ▶️ John on macOS and iOS and iPads and like policing everyone even just in your like
⏹️ ▶️ John immediate family just trying to police them and all their devices and make sure all their settings are rigidly set like this so you never bifurcate
⏹️ ▶️ John things on the theory that the bifurcation is solely based on the fact that somebody started
⏹️ ▶️ John a message thread and they auto completed two Apple IDs and one phone number or whatever you know like That’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ John tenable. Like whether or not that would work. That’s, that’s ridiculous. And I think it’s stupid because the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John of the context is to say all of these things refer to this person. So just show it as this person.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, no, there were no solutions that I was willing to try because a lot of them were like, delete every thread you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John sign out of all your devices, sign out of your Apple ID, start a new thread. It’s like, nope, no thanks. Um, so yeah, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just, they continue to be bifurcated, but things could be worse. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could. So sir, Shannon and writes, I just checked my pinned three person group chat messages on MacOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So far this month, there are 21 separate conversations for that single conversation, one pinned and 20 unpinned.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Three of the unpinned threads have the correct custom image, the rest, including the pinned conversation, do not. It’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John What is a three choose three, if I’m saying that right? Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John permutations and combinations? No. Three times two times one. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John there should not be 21 separate different ways to combine three person group chat if my
⏹️ ▶️ John math is right, but either way, that’s ridiculous. Something is barely broken.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what recourse does SureShannon have? I don’t know. Just, you just, you just deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, I don’t like it. Anyway, no, it’s intractable. I still have separate conversations.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all, the best we can do is just, we all try to contribute to the one that’s the highest up in our message list,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that usually works.
AI-generated language dubs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to AI-generated voice-matched dubbing, particularly with like Fitness Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, Fran Basora writes, I’ve been able to try the Spanish dubbing of Apple Fitness Plus. It doesn’t feel completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off, but you can tell a bit that it’s an AI-generated dub. It keeps the essence of the trainers’ voices though, which makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feel a bit more familiar. Stefana Secundus writes, I listened to a German track and it’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than expected. The voice somewhat matches the trainer and conveys some emotion, though it’s more monotonous than the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey original. Some translations are awkward and the lip sync doesn’t match at all. Overall, it’s on the level of a dubbed teleshopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show. Far better than YouTube auto-dubbing, but not immediately obvious as AI, and usable if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey speak English. And speaking of YouTube, Ben Madison writes, on the topic of generated voices, a few months ago I tried to airplay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an MKBHD video from my Mac to my Apple TV, and the audio switched to what appeared to be Vietnamese
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Marques’ voice. And Ben then took a recording of that and uploaded it to, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube. And it is pretty funny to watch for a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think that’s like YouTube auto generating that or is that? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John they do voice matching automatically now, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I feel like there was news about this like six months, six to 12 months ago, but I probably can’t put my fingers on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Real time follow up. I messed up the math on the choose thing. Cause it should be like, it’s basically like how many different combinations
⏹️ ▶️ John of two possible things, phone number and email address can you have with three people? Uh, and so please mathematicians,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can write it and tell us what the correct math and that would be, but I still think it’s not 21.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good talk. Dangit.
Siri saying your name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to pronouncing your name correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and this individual has a name that my feeble American brain cannot pronounce very easily, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the midst of complaining justifiably about Siri not pronouncing their name correctly, now I get to butcher their name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you know what? Actually, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to say Paul Z writes, I’ve been fighting with my iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say my last name correctly for years. Prior to hearing your—now, see, now I’ve got to pronounce it, otherwise this doesn’t end.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Paul Zedonajski writes, I’ve been fighting with iOS. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the J is silent. Paul Zedonajski writes, I’ve been fighting, I’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one day. I’ve been fighting with iOS to say my last name correctly for years. Prior to hearing a recent episode, it would pronounce my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family members names correctly, but butcher mine. As of today, and trying again with my contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card, as you just suggested, it’ll pronounce my name correctly when I ask what my name is. But when I say, hey, dingus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remind me to do X when I get home, it still pronounces my name wrong in the confirmation response,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although less wrong than in previous years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say it with me, everybody. Shotguns are inconsistent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is Siri like acknowledging you back after a simple command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your last name?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that I’m confused too. Unless Paul is somehow mispronounced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it like, you know, Mr. Zajernowski or something? Like, is it like, but I’ve never, I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a setting to have it address you that way. I’ve always, it always just, mine doesn’t address me at all by name. Mine just. Yeah, it just says,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, remind you of that when you get home or all it repeats what your reminder is. I don’t know. I mean, maybe the name
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the reminder text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like when I, if I like don’t know someone’s name, I’ll try to avoid needing to say it. Do you think Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just doesn’t know any of our names except Paul, but everyone else Siri is like, Or Paul is her favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri, like it’s the complaint we all have about Siri. It’s like, in addition to it not working and being bad and broken,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even consistently bad and broken and not working. Sometimes things work, sometimes don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Things that used to work,
⏹️ ▶️ John stop working. Other things start working. It’s just, it’s ridiculous. And my shotgun thing was,
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact, the Destiny reference that five people will get. But awesome is what it is.
Fabs getting ideas from customers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this is the time of the show when I do a little bit of reading for everyone’s enjoyment. Joe Lyon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has come back with some information about Intel stealing, I’m sorry, learning from the chips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at fabs for others. So Joe writes, chip foundry doesn’t get the design or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey schematic from the customer. The foundry just receives the final reticles or masks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or for example masks, which is the design as implemented in physical layout over dozens or hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of masking layers. Depending on the relationship, the foundry doesn’t necessarily know what the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re making, certainly not down to the circuit level. The foundry supplies a PDK, or a process development kit, to the customer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that tells them what kind of transistors and other structures they can make, including the sizing and performance, and the PDK
⏹️ ▶️ Casey translates the customer’s design into the final reticle set that is compatible with the foundry’s process flow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all at the customer’s side. The reticle set is basically like a software binary, whereas the original schematic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or more likely the original VHDL code, is like the source code. Yes, theoretically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a binary can be decompiled or reverse-engineered, but even after that, it’s never the same as having the original source code. No comments,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no documentation, variable names are arbitrary, et cetera. Same is true when trying to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from reticle backwards to schematic, much less the original VHDL code. And that is before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the policies that are put into place to separate Intel Foundry from Intel product divisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m assuming that Intel will put up an extremely strong firewall between those divisions because the Foundry model requires complete trust on both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sides. It would immediately destroy the whole foundry business if Intel started acting sneaky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, Jason Biotech writes, regarding the Apple giving their chip designs to Intel, my company has done some research on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. It seems intractable, of course. You can’t keep your design secret from the people you’re asking to build the chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? The basic idea lies in sending a design that is obfuscated and non-functional when built, useless to everyone including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the chip fab, but that you, with secret knowledge only you possess, can fix afterward to produce the functional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chip. Like any cryptography problem, because that’s basically what this is, just in hardware, The devil’s in the details.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can find more information on the Galoy, Galoy? I don’t know, company blog, which we’ll link in the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes. Yeah. Exciting title for the paper, Reverse Engineer This Towards Provable Cryptographic
⏹️ ▶️ John Protection for Circuit IP. I don’t think Apple will be pursuing this, and I’m assuming Intel will be able to keep their
⏹️ ▶️ John secrets safe. But yeah, it’s just, although it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be a small risk, it is non-zero. And also, the risk of TSMC someday making their own chip
⏹️ ▶️ John designs is also non-zero. So it’s not a perfect world. but we’ll see, I’m still crossing
⏹️ ▶️ John my fingers that something actually happens with all this Intel stuff, but these are just rumors for now.
Migrating purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally tonight, James Willbey writes, I tried Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Migrate Purchases feature that was released earlier this year. Spoiler
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alert, it didn’t work. I tried to do the sensible thing of waiting some time for any issues to be resolved and decided that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the support articles were last updated in July, that now could be a good time to try. I initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t even able to see the option under my purchases account page, but after removing some TestFlight apps, the option appeared. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that should have been a sign right there, James. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John When we talk about this, it’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you can’t do it if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have test flight apps. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh, just remove the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. I’m sure it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, upon tapping a brief loading page, I received the warning, unable to migrate purchases. One or both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts is not eligible for purchase migration. Many hours later, contacting Apple support, a long phone call in which I was told to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delete any and all of my music library, even on my secondary account with the purchases, I was simply told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, so you just aren’t eligible. Have a great day. Eligible, excuse me. Have a great day. I’ve asked for an escalation, but as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of now, I’m no closer to migration. without any music library. I did my best to back it all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up so one day I could rebuild. Thought I’d let you know this whole process is still half-baked with no explanation from Apple support.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’re gonna hear more about that in just a second. Any other thoughts on this though?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, when we talked about this, I think we all expressed skepticism and were kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John aghast at the limitations. I think one of which was like, you can’t have a music library. So now they’re telling this person to delete their music library.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just, this is definitely one of those things. One of those things that we’ve asked for, for, you know, decades at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, we should be able to merge Apple IDs or transfer purchases and stuff. And it’s like, okay, fine. Apple, after a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ John we roll out this thing. And we’re like, yeah, but does it work? And like, for some people it works, but it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s one of those features. When Apple announces something like this, you’re like, I would do this if it was my last
⏹️ ▶️ John resort because I have no faith that it’s gonna work. If it does, hey, great. But if it doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just in the situation where there’s no good way out. Like you’ve, especially when you’ve done stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like deleting your entire music library to try to make it work. And that also doesn’t work. And then Apple support throws up their hands
⏹️ ▶️ John and says, eh, sorry, just sometimes things we make don’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John for some people and you’re one of those people. So yeah.
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Locked out of Apple account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sort of kind of speaking of, we have a news report, well not even news, it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John around. The blog post. The blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It starts with a blog post. Yeah, it starts with a blog post. And this is Paris Butfield-Addison who writes, after nearly 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years as a loyal customer authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages and spending tens upon tens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I’ve been locked out of my personal and professional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey digital life with no explanation and no recourse. The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple gift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card to pay for my 6TB iCloud Plus storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my account was locked. An Apple support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue, indicating that something was likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey untoward about this card. The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer, so if I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rely on the provenance of that and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, including the card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serial number and purchase location, to Apple. The consequence is that my account is flagged as closed in accordance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple Media Services terms and conditions. I contacted Apple support immediately. The experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was terrifyingly dismissive. Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey details on the decision. When I begged for an escalation to Executive Customer Relations, or ECR, noting that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would lose the ability to do my job and that my devices were useless, I was told that, quote, an additional escalation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t lead to a different outcome. That is the support way of saying a polite, **
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, like, like what is the point of escalation? If the people you asked to escalate
⏹️ ▶️ John can say, no, uh, they won’t say anything different than we do. Like that, that means escalation doesn’t exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, anyways, uh, many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things. One of the strangers was telling me that I could physically go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple’s Australian HQ at level three, 20 Martin place, Sydney, and plead my case. This just makes me think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it like 42 Wallaby lane,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey finding Nemo. Anyway, they put me on hold for five minutes while they looked up the address.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so most insultingly, the official advice from senior advisor was to create a new Apple account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and update payment information. This is why, this advice is technically and legally disastrous in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s a bunch of reasons for that. Well, we should
⏹️ ▶️ John touch on the reasons though, because like they’re basically saying, oh, just make a new Apple ID essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John But so many things in Apple systems say, hey, if we ban you and you just go make another Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, that’s a violation of our terms. If you have a bunch of apps, like if you’re a developer and we ban your developer
⏹️ ▶️ John account and you just go make another Apple ID and republish your apps, that’s a violation of our, like following this advice
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple would itself be violations that would cause his Apple ID to get banned. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous. And yes, I know we keep calling it Apple ID even though it already renamed it Apple account. We’ll see how long it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John at least me to pick up that vocabulary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so there’s been some updates since this was originally written on the 13th of December. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then this is Australia, right? So this is effective. So there, there, Paris is 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of December is really my 12th of December, generally speaking. But anyways, on Paris is December 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Someone from executive relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow on the 15th of December.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then later that same day, the 14th of December for, for Paris, no luck so far. Not looking good. Anyone got a good lawyer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to send them a letter and, or help me sue them? Uh, here’s my email address says Paris. December 16, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 15th for us. No luck yet. December 18, as I sit here on the 17th recording, so it’s the future, Paris writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re back. A lovely man from Singapore working for Apple Executive Relations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days says, let me know, it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey redeem, which did not work for me and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way. Sounds like classic gift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey card tampering. And my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of him. But at least things are now mostly working. Strangely, he did tell me to only ever buy gift cards from Apple themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I asked if that means Apple supply chain of Blackhawk network, income and other gift card vendors, it’s insecure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And he was unwilling to comment. I’ll post a more substantive update soon.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m glad this story got resolved before we talked about it. Cause it, it started in between our recordings
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was hoping by the time we record, hopefully this will all become, I was surprised at how long it took. Because once I saw like executive
⏹️ ▶️ John relations in the mix, I’m like, Oh, this will probably be resolved, but it still took another, what, four days for it to
⏹️ ▶️ John get resolved. Uh, but yeah, this has been going around and all the various, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, blogs and websites and podcasts talking about it and not because of the specific thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John We, I don’t know this person and you know, it’s not like we have a personal relationship with them, but I wish I had grabbed these
⏹️ ▶️ John stats. I thought I saw it fly by of like how many. Uh, Apple ID is Apple bands
⏹️ ▶️ John per year. It’s some astronomical. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, cause there’s just so much fraud and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. Um, and like, to be clear,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like driving your computer to Craig Federighi’s house, this is not a scalable system
⏹️ ▶️ John for support, which is make a blog post, get everyone in the Mac enthusiast, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, tech sphere to notice it and constantly talk about it. And then maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John in a week, someone from Apple will wake up and say, what is this? I’m hearing about something. Some, what about like the thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of other people who are in exactly the same situation and don’t have the ability to essentially mobilize
⏹️ ▶️ John the, uh, the Apple tech nerd press to make stuff like this happen. But, uh, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a good opportunity to just talk about this as a more general issue. I’m glad this person’s specific issue was resolved,
⏹️ ▶️ John although it is terrible that it happened in the first place. But every time something like this
⏹️ ▶️ John happens, it just kind of reminds us all like how vulnerable we are to these companies and you
⏹️ ▶️ John get all sorts of different people making suggestions about what could be done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the most common one I see is people say, um, it shouldn’t be legal for companies to take
⏹️ ▶️ John away all your stuff like this with no recourse. Like at the very least, people have this innate sense of justice, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I know Apple’s not the government, but doesn’t it seem bad or unfair
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can take away all your stuff and not tell you why? Right. Because if they told you why you could have a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John to defend yourself, they could say, we think you’re, you know, trafficking stolen iPods.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, but I’m not trafficking stolen. Like what is the what is the accusation? What is the burden of proof? Whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact is, it’s the company and they can do whatever they want and whatever terms you agreed to basically say, we can do whatever we want, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John we want. You have no like we get it. But because our digital lives,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we call them here, like the apps you make for a platform, all your family photos, all your email, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John digital stuff we have tied up into your Google account or your Apple ID or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it feels like that stuff is so important to us that it shouldn’t be able to get taken away with a snap of the fingers. but
⏹️ ▶️ John then people say, well, what do you, what do you want to happen here? Like they’re just a private company and you agreed to their terms.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so what’s the solution? And that’s why people start demanding like, but there should be a law
⏹️ ▶️ John like for this specific case. And I think people reaching for there should be a law
⏹️ ▶️ John or a company shouldn’t be allowed to do this is just one of the many, many
⏹️ ▶️ John signs of the same topic we talk about all the time of insufficient competition,
⏹️ ▶️ John too much power in, in too few players, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in an ideal system, in a market economy, quote unquote, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fantasy version of this is that if you do things that consumers don’t like, they will take their business
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere until you amass enough power to lock them into the point where almost nothing you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad enough to make them go elsewhere because a, there’s nowhere else for their go or be going elsewhere is so incredibly painful
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one will ever do it. And that is at the heart of all these things. Like, why can companies get
⏹️ ▶️ John away with being bad to us? Why do we feel like we have no recourse other than to
⏹️ ▶️ John fashion these bespoke laws that only apply to three companies to like fix these problems piecemeal,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s because there’s not enough competition in this market. They essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John have us locked in and if they want to enjoy that privileged
⏹️ ▶️ John position, there should be additional responsibilities deal with it. In this particular country, we have the complete inability to pass any useful laws,
⏹️ ▶️ John including privacy laws. I think someone said like the last privacy law we passed was maybe HIPAA in the eighties or nineties.
⏹️ ▶️ John I might have timelines wrong, but we’re not able to pass anything for legislation. Europe is passing privacy laws and,
⏹️ ▶️ John and rearranging them or whatever, but it’s just like the root of the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John there are too few companies with too much power over us and they’re unconstrained, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly unconstrained by any, you know, sense of decency or like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like it’s impossible to be part, it’s impossible to behave perfectly. It’s impossible for a company to not
⏹️ ▶️ John make mistakes banning accounts, right? And very often these stories come out and it’s like, you find out actually the person was running
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stealing ring, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, the reason we say Kafkaesque is it should never feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in like, you know, a maze of twisty passages with no way out and like, you can’t get in touch with
⏹️ ▶️ John a human and no one will talk to you. And then when you talk to yourself, we can’t tell you why we did it. We’re not gonna change our mind,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I mean, think until this was fixed, this person was like, so you took away all my stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You won’t tell me why. And there’s nothing I can do about it. And they say, that’s correct, sir. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. Um, and I don’t think the solution is making individual
⏹️ ▶️ John laws about your digital identity and digital photos that apply to Apple and Google, right? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rather, we should have systems where there are, it’s either not possible to get this big
⏹️ ▶️ John and have this much power or there are constraints on companies that get this big and have this much
⏹️ ▶️ John power that apply to all such companies, not just like The two that store our photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is this is a really scary story because it shows like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know back in in the earlier days of consumer computing Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a lot less controlled by online accounts from one or two or three companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it was hard for you to lose all your data by the decision of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one computer company in the 90s. Or in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John early 2000s. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was all like on your hard drive. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could screw it up yourself, but then you had yourself to blame. That felt better,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I guess? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lose all your data by not having a backup. And you know, as we’ve gone more and more into, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, cloud hosted stuff, servers, sync platforms, into the mobile world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where everything has to be like sync through services and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And not just online, but the fact that it’s all encryption encumbered and in our country protected by the
⏹️ ▶️ John MCA so that like, when you get locked out of it, it’s a felony to try to get it back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, which I mean, it wouldn’t stop anybody in this case, they would use whatever tools they had at their disposal. But the problem is like once things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are backed by services, there’s really nothing more you can do about it. Like you can’t go in and hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s servers to get your stuff back, you know, or change your account status or whatever. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we’ve moved into this, the current world of all of the, all of our computing platforms being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so service dependent, that exacerbates the problem. John was saying about there being so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few companies that are involved here, because not, you know, not only are there very few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies that have us, you know, under such extreme control, but so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of our computing life is under their control that, you know, it isn’t like if, if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks my account for some reason, not only do I lose access to a lot of data that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that anything that’s not backed up locally, which this is one of the reasons why I run my own backup service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have my own offline backups and stuff like that. Like that’s, this is one reason why, cause at least like, you know, I wouldn’t like lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos or anything, but if my Apple ID gets locked, I could lose access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like businesses. I could like, you know, depending on which, like does my overcast ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get locked, then I could lose access to my entire business. And what am I supposed to do then? Upload a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new copy to the App Store under a new developer account? That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John violation of terms of service because if they locked your Overcast account, you’re not allowed to bypass it by saying, great, I’ll just make a new Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID and put Overcast there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even if support told me, yeah, go ahead, you’re allowed to do it, first of all, I would never trust that, but second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would lose all my customers, all my subscriptions, I would lose it all. So, you know, that’s not a solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, what has to happen here is these companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see the challenge here, Because there obviously needs to be more ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to appeal these decisions and for humans to override them. You shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to email the executives and have somebody and hope that somebody takes pity on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and gives it to their executive relations team to solve your
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Well, I mean, again, I felt like that would be more of a targeted solution to this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the real solution is to give a tiny, tiny example from the bad old days when you couldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a portable cell phone number. And then they passed a law that said, no, those phone companies have
⏹️ ▶️ John to let you take your number from AT&T to Verizon, right? That was one of the tiniest things they
⏹️ ▶️ John could possibly do. But before that, boy, was it like a big decision to go from
⏹️ ▶️ John AT&T to Verizon, because you got to tell everybody your new number. Those type of laws, like
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, even if you ban someone’s, like a hypothetical law of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John say, saying to Apple or Google or whatever, this data doesn’t belong to you. So yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can ban their account, but you have to, by law, give them access to all of their stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on that front, by the way, you’re like, oh, I wouldn’t lose my photos or anything. I back off all my photos too, in many different ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if they locked my Apple ID, or actually it’d be my wife’s Apple ID, because she’s got the real account. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows, God knows how it would work with shared libraries. But anyway, if they locked my Apple ID, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure I could launch the Photos app. And my photos are not just a bunch of raw JPEGs sitting in the
⏹️ ▶️ John file system. I have edits to them, and those edits exist as like entries in SQLite databases, like they’re procedural,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re non-destructive edits. And those non-destructive edits only manifest by me launching the
⏹️ ▶️ John photos app, and it displays my photos. Would that app even launch
⏹️ ▶️ John or run if my Apple ID was banned? Because again, iCloud Photos is turned on. Would I even be able to get to the
⏹️ ▶️ John settings screen to turn iCloud Photos off? Like, I’m not sure. Like, do these things work
⏹️ ▶️ John offline, right? So much stuff is tied in, cryptographically tied
⏹️ ▶️ John in to our Apple IDs that if they’re locked, I mean, I’m pretty sure I could still log into my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John my accounts on my Mac, because I’m not using Apple ID login there. I think that’s one of the options.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I have no confidence that like literally any Apple app that contains my data would launch, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John the data would be on my thing, like unplug all my internet from my house. Like there’s no kill switch coming in.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no find my wife coming in. How many apps would launch and display data? Would the notes app work?
⏹️ ▶️ John But what I mean, it’s just it’s terrifying because it’s this is a thing that has never tested and by
⏹️ ▶️ John law Apple doesn’t have to do anything. They can just say bye. All your stuff is gone. You have no recourse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My position is that there there needs to be like a human appeals and override
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process It can’t just be like sorry support said no, there’s nothing we can do. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s final. That’s it Like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there need to chances
⏹️ ▶️ John to run to the press which never helps but it’s the only thing that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there needs to be a a human escalation process at all these companies I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also understand that at the scale they’re operating at the amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Scams that are trying to be done against them constantly is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Incredibly high like we know we’ve talked before about like, you know hearing bits and pieces about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like you know The the Chinese parts scams against iPhones and like there’s like there’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so much so many
⏹️ ▶️ John attempts That’s why I wish I had that number of how many accounts they ban Like it was like millions of accounts because there’s so much scamming that
⏹️ ▶️ John there has to be an automated system to knock them down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so I understand why they might feel that it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to offer any kind of appeal at some level because it would just be overwhelmed but That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their responsibility by being in this position in the first place There needs to be a process
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s why you have to mandate it by log is then all their competitors would have to do It too and so they can’t say well if we did this
⏹️ ▶️ John But our competitors didn’t now we’re spending millions of dollars a year that our competitors aren’t spending nevermind that there’s barely any competitors,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, mandated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think it’s one of those things, Apple, as we’ve talked about before, Apple is very cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with labor, both in terms of maybe not necessarily paying super competitive salaries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Meta’s paying big bucks in certain areas, but also Apple historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understaffs a lot of departments by just numbers. Like whatever you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of people working on something at Apple is, it’s probably a lot less than that, because they just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like doing that. And in many ways that helps, you know, the more people you have, you get a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bloat, you get a lot more management requirements and challenges. And obviously, you know, there’s limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of ways and trade-offs in a lot of ways. But the reality is Apple teams can often be way smaller than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need to be for their current scale. We see that in developer relations, we’ve seen it in things like documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, you see a lot of issues with like, a lot of Apple teams seem like they’re pretty understaffed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that also could be a role here that maybe for Apple to offer a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real human escalation process here, they just don’t wanna hire that many people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, again, my response, if that would be their answer, would basically be that’s too bad. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this responsibility. Now, I don’t think, first of all, there’s two things. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other tech companies are particularly better at this than Apple is. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, Apple just happens to be today’s example, but it could just as easily be your Google account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ve heard stories about Google doing similar things too, with your entire Google account. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happens with all the big tech companies. Amazon, it happens to them all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they all have the same problem, as you pointed out. They all have millions and millions of customers. They’re not going to pay enough
⏹️ ▶️ John human beings to service the in-person, human-to-human requests of millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who are running this, most of which are illegitimate fraud or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John to find the one human who was wrongly accused. They just have automated systems because it’s cheaper, and because nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John is telling them that they can’t do that. And why would they spend millions of dollars where supposed competitors don’t have to spend
⏹️ ▶️ John or why would they just spend it because they’re cheap? Like you mentioned that it’s their responsibility, but like responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a thing that most corporations feel in any real capacity. The only thing that keeps corporations
⏹️ ▶️ John behaving well is the fear that if they treat their customers badly, their customers will take their business elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that fear is eliminated by getting big enough, getting big enough and powerful enough, you can essentially eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ John the fear that if we do something that annoys our customers, they will go elsewhere. I mean, it’s the same thing we always say about airlines.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, if you if you say you’re never going to fly airline X again, you run that airlines real fast because there’s not a lot of airlines.
⏹️ ▶️ John Too much power in the hands of too few companies makes it so the feedback mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John of market capitalism stops working and the companies can do whatever they want
⏹️ ▶️ John that annoys whoever they want. Because what are you going to do about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing, though, is that when we’re when we’re trying to think of like, you know, what should help or what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could help or what should be done here? I don’t think using like cell phone number portability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an example is a very relevant example at this level because The reason why cell phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number portability works is because different cell carriers are all providing the same service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a it’s a it’s fairly low down the stack in terms of what they’re providing and they’re communicating over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard protocols You know between themselves like between the phone network to reach other phone numbers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco route calls and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John and yet that they didn’t want to do it. Well, of course. I just thought it was a tiny example. It’s not like it’s not like it’s something and now cell
⏹️ ▶️ John phones are fixed because we still have like three choices and they all suck, right? Like it’s the cell phone companies are in the exact same situation, too much
⏹️ ▶️ John power and too few hands. And it also has the whole infrastructure problem of cell towers and yada, yada, yada. I’m just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John like an example of how companies will not do even the smallest thing
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you force them to do it by law and how things were actually worse before that
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little law passed that allowed in this country, you to take your cell phone to a different carrier. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all I’m saying. I mean, you’re right that like because they’re like essentially a commodity that it’s, but like I’m saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of thing, no matter how common sense it is, will not happen unless you can somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John pass a law. And we seem in this country less and less able to pass any kind of useful law. And even that was like pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so like in general, I don’t think the solution is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should give people a way to export their data. You should, that’s a separate thing. That’s not going to solve this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. That’s, you know, that can help other things. That can help things like, you know, transferring accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between countries, that’s still messed up. That can help just basic backup needs, data export needs, you know, privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John But- Well, I mean, it’s not just export. You do something like a topic that will get into an overtime cable card, where it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John standard that everyone has to support for both export and import. So now your digital life is
⏹️ ▶️ John by law portable from one place to the other, and then watch how everyone maliciously complies with that law. But anyway, there are possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But no, even that though, I don’t think, I think that’s a pipe dream. I think the idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, people have often said, you know, social networks should be required, similar to, you know, the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of portability. Like social networks should be required to let you take your network out to a different platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s never gonna really happen because the platforms are different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the problem with anything that’s like, let me take my stuff out and go somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go where? To another clone of the Apple ID system? Like no such thing exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even if you think like, okay, what if I export, say, you know, from Twitter to threads, or, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you take the two similar seeming things, even that, the platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so different that what that would actually look like would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really weird and limited and not what you think and hope it would be. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course everything would be challenged really like crazy, because it’s like, then you’re saying, does Facebook need to let you access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their network for free? So there’s all sorts of practical and legal and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technical issues with that. JS –
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think social networks would be the thing that people care about. It’s more like my family
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, my email, stuff like that. And again, it would only be in cases where
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve banned your account and otherwise you would have no access to your stuff. Google, by the way, Google Takeout is a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good system. They did this essentially on their own. and I believe there is no law forcing them to do this, but Google allows you to export all your
⏹️ ▶️ John data. So does Apple. Apple has their export format’s not as good, but all these companies have some way to get your data out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But those only work if your account is not locked. The time when you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey really need them
⏹️ ▶️ John The time when you really need them to work is when they’ve locked you out of your account and won’t tell you why. That’s when you need your photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Or again, a way, a guaranteed way to run the photos app offline without logging
⏹️ ▶️ John in and be able to see all your photos and your edits. Like, I mean, this is not a thing, Like, I,
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make a law to say, you should be nicer with people’s data is like, it’s really, it’s not getting at the root
⏹️ ▶️ John of the problem here, which is that this market is not competitive. How can they get away with being
⏹️ ▶️ John this bad to their customers? The only answer is the customers have nowhere else to go. They can do almost anything to customers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Release buggy stuff, charge what they want, you know, screw them over and like, no matter how many horror stories you
⏹️ ▶️ John hear, like there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere else to run. It is a malfunctioning market.
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback mechanism is not working. And that feed mechanism is essential. Like it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John better than laws. Like we do laws when like, oh, you get so big. We now need laws constraining you because you’re too big. And people get all
⏹️ ▶️ John upset about that and have all these theoretical arguments or whatever. You don’t need those laws when it’s a bunch of smaller companies fighting
⏹️ ▶️ John tooth and nail for each other’s business because they’re intrinsically motivated or I guess extrinsically motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to do better than their competitors to get customers to come to them and not, but then eventually you
⏹️ ▶️ John get the winners and the winners crush everybody else. And now there’s two or three companies left They don’t have to do that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They just do whatever they want. And they all kind of agree to kind of do the same things. And like the meta, the
⏹️ ▶️ John market disappears and it just becomes now we are a government size
⏹️ ▶️ John entities being regulated by the actual government in this weird, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John dance of billionaires while everyone else gets screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Cool. And I don’t think anything is going to help in terms of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just take this and go somewhere else, start a new account, go and move to Android. Like none of those solutions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help. And then after Android ban you, where do you go? Where do you go then? Right. These companies are too big and too sprawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s too few of them. It’s like, like imagine if you live in a medium sized city and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, maybe one or two good airlines that serve your airport.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. Yes. Imagine that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Like suppose you’re served by like, you know, Delta and United and, and Delta bans you, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just not fly to most cities anymore?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if you try to fly United, that’s correct because it never works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s true, but but so like that’s the level, you know, what if your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ISP Bans you in America Most people have one or two broadband
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ISPs to choose from if your ISP bans you what are you gonna do? Maybe if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a second one the and and you know The second one would be a different type It would probably be significantly but significantly worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you because it would be like, you know You might have to go back to like, you know, go back to some kind of oversaturated cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco node instead of a fiber node or whatever Oh God, trigger warning. Yeah. So like there’s lots of industries where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you only have one. What if your electric company bans you? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John those are usually government man, they have monopolies. So the ISP one is a good example because lots of towns
⏹️ ▶️ John and cities are trying to do municipal broadband, which is broadband owned by the city, not owned by Comcast
⏹️ ▶️ John or Verizon or whatever. And every single city that does that, everybody loves it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s cheaper, it’s better, it’s faster. You know who doesn’t love that? Comcast and Verizon.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t love it. They lobby against it. They pass laws disallowing towns and cities from
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that to say it’s against the law for you to implement municipal broadband. No, you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to by law, pay for the two choices that you have here and they
⏹️ ▶️ John because they know if there was competition, people would never choose Comcast like who would just like
⏹️ ▶️ John people would not choose it because the competitors have better service at a lower price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s how capitalism is supposed to to work, but when you get big enough and there’s few enough of you, you can make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t happen by we’ve seen the success story. I can just see the people in like the, you know, the Comcast Xfinity,
⏹️ ▶️ John Verizon boardroom saying we’ve been seeing all these feel good human interest stories about this little town in Wyoming that implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John municipal broadband and everybody in the town has like five gig fiber symmetric and it costs them $5 a month. We hate that. Can we stop
⏹️ ▶️ John that somehow? We’re like with laws. And the answer is yes. Yes, they can because
⏹️ ▶️ John they have money to lobby.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that we can just take our stuff and go elsewhere for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies of this scale that that’s not a valid solution to a problem with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system having this limitation the problem it’s like telling somebody like the United States has a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now why don’t you move to a different country like well for most people that’s literally not possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if the ones who it is possible for that’s a pretty big lift to move your entire life to a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco country. So the much better solution for these companies is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be forced to to fix them from within. Like it’s just like in the it’s like the best thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do in the US right now is try to fix it from within because it’s our country and it’s where we all live most of us sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else. So the way to fix this problem with Apple’s account system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not to say well we’ll give you the tools you need to move somewhere else. No. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is to is is for Apple to provide human appeals
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processes that work and that are accessible. And if they have to hire more people to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s their responsibility at the scale that they’re at in the monopoly status that they pretty much have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the duopoly status they have. That’s the solution. The solution is they have to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it takes legislation in various forms to do that, so be
⏹️ ▶️ John It would absolutely take legislation because they’ve evidenced they won’t do this themselves. They won’t, they haven’t, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t. Yeah. And I do think, despite all of that, I still think that
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it should be a new privacy law in the US that dictates what
⏹️ ▶️ John companies can and can’t do with your data and what rights you have to your data, which would include the ability to export even if they lock your account.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though that doesn’t solve the problem, I agree with you there, it still needs to be there as a backstop. Because what about when you
⏹️ ▶️ John go through the human review process that is mandated by law and is a kangaroo court and they just say no anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you get to do a human review? Still then you would say, okay, but this law says I still get my data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has to be greater than just data access. Cause it like, again, what if you lose access to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the purchases you’ve ever made on your Apple account?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well that’s going to be a harder road. Oh, I didn’t even mention purchases because good luck getting that reversed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause we have tons of laws on the book that basically say, hey, you didn’t buy those movies. You bought a limited license to
⏹️ ▶️ John those movies and yada yada. We’ve already got laws surrounding that and the laws are against us. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that wouldn’t just be putting in new laws. there would be overturning existing laws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have multiple issues. You have your own personal data, okay. You also have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever purchases you’ve made to content and services on that account. Yeah, kiss those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodbye. Then you also have the potential of what if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app in the App Store? Or for Google accounts, what if you have a YouTube channel on that account? Yeah, kiss those goodbye
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. Right, but that’s lawsuit territory. Really. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good luck with that lawsuit. Right, so again, so you have to, like, they can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco snuff you out completely with some automated system for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretical violation that many people probably do, but you might not have done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are tricky to deal with, though. Like, give the YouTube example. Like, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is no competitive online video service where you can go. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re off of YouTube, you’re, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, like- Right, if you’re out of the App Store, you have an iOS app, where the heck you gonna put it? Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly. So it’s exactly what all the countries are saying, which is like, okay, well, so that kind of shows that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple or YouTube or whatever has gotten so big that they can’t just be treated like a regular company. Because if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about just a regular company that’s like small, none of these things make any sense. Why would, you know, like just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, this is not a problem, just go somewhere else. But like, now you’re so big that you are institutionally
⏹️ ▶️ John inescapable and a whole new set of rules needs to apply to you. and everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the billionaires hate that, and a lot of people think, that’s too much regulation or whatever, but it’s like, the alternative
⏹️ ▶️ John is we are ruled by a tiny number of extremely powerful corporations, and we’re in some dystopian sci-fi novel,
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re basically living that now, and most of them are somewhat benevolent, but see Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John slash X to see how that can go awry real fast. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult because we haven’t been in, I don’t think the world has been in this position many
⏹️ ▶️ John times except for like, you know, Standard Oil, the railroad trust, or whatever. And those were broken up by laws. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t take our country, at least, very long to say, you know what? We didn’t need to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why did we ever do that? What was wrong with Standard Oil? It seemed fine. Anyway, as long as consumer prices don’t go up, it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so we’re kind of in the other, we’ve swung way in the other direction. And now every company can buy anybody that they
⏹️ ▶️ John want whenever they want and get gigantic. And again, that seems like it’s fine, except it’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to come up with laws that constrain companies when they’re that big. It’s easier to not let them get that big, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John letting them get that big is also kind of like anti-market capitalism.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, if they get that way fair and square, which they never get that way fair and square, let’s be honest, but if they did get that
⏹️ ▶️ John way fair and square, it shouldn’t be illegal to be incredibly successful. It should be legal to abuse that monopoly power and
⏹️ ▶️ John see all the court cases that have been winding through and are in various stages of falling apart.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like that’s, like this whole, these situations, Google account, Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, always seem they’re like, like it’s big mean corporation, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer, you know, what was the, what was that a consumer protection agency that, uh, our country
⏹️ ▶️ John recently got rid of because it was costing big companies too much money. Like big companies take advantage of people
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. And there is a role in government to try to stop them from doing that. Um, but things are going in the wrong direction.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, this is not a, like Apple should be nicer. Apple will never be nicer unless something makes them be
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer. And it’s difficult to come up with a set of things that will make them be nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John like to do that well. I mean, see Europe, Europe’s been trying with the DMA and the GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like, like it’s not easy to get right, but I’m pretty sure that doing nothing is not the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This reminds me, if you’ll permit me a very brief tangent where I will try not to be too whiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A couple of days ago, well, let me back up just a teeny bit. We talked a few episodes ago about how Declan has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing like a squint and it looks like hyper card, Choose Your Own Adventure sort of kind of rage-baity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing on Google Slides. And he’s been very, very, very concerned that his school
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google account will get cleared out in the summertime. I genuinely don’t know if it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not. My gut says it won’t, but he’s very concerned about this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John he’ll lose… Lyle Troxell, Chief
⏹️ ▶️ John Investigative Officer, Corporation of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey American School of Journalism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Remembering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the school says it will. Leonard Mueller I mean, who doesn’t? Yeah, exactly. Lyle Troxell, Chief Investigative Officer, Corporation of the American School of Journalism The school rumor mill is very trustworthy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mueller Right, right. The fifth graders know exactly what’s going to happen. But anyways, And so he wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make his own personal Google account, fair enough, where he can house some of these things. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally fair. I go to make him a Google account so he can use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Slides because that’s what he’s used to and familiar with. Yeah, he could use Keynote or something, but this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s used to. And I go to make him a Google account. Google says, yeah, that’s all well and good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give us a birthday, which I’m like, I don’t really love that. I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fibbed, but that’s neither here nor there. And then, okay, he’d give us an email, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email address do you want? And I made up some email address that you know, is you know, some moniker or handle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he would want. Or I guess I should say I use the moniker that he made up. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next step is, okay, scan this QR code. So we can go ahead and get your phone number. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, what? Yeah, we need your phone number because we can’t make you can’t make a Google account without it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wonderful. That’s so cool. just got me thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we were kids. It got me thinking too about when Marco and I were kids and hanging out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, outside a very tiny Lake in upstate New York, when none of this fking bullsh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever happened. When you would just turn on the computer and do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like it was so much nicer than in a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ways it was terrible. In a lot of ways it was awful, but in certain ways it was so much nicer and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much simpler there then I should say. And I kind of miss that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I’m not, that’s not to say I prefer it. It’s not to say I want to go back there, but it just kind of sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in order for Declan to use the software he wants to use, which only exists online.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He needs to create a Google account, which he cannot do because he does not have a phone number.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yes, I could like make a burner number, but then what happens for account recovery? And I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I recall correctly, I tried mine at one point and it was like, well, no, no, no, that’s already used for a different account. You can’t do that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the answer is to make him a child account, but then inevitably he’ll be like neutered and gutted in some ways that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be inconvenient or whatever. I’m not really looking for a solution, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, it made me think about how wonderful it was when the stressful thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about using a computer was how much conventional memory you had to play the game you wanted. So it was whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you loaded the mouse driver in your auto exec bat and config exists was whether or not you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an IRQ conflict with your sound blaster. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John those things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I was setting you up for this, John, and I knew you’d take the bait and I was right, but still, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just, I, in so many ways, that was so nice, especially as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey someone cutting your teeth, trying to learn what technology was and in a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways, things today are so much better. Scratch is incredible. The internet is amazing. I wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a job or at least this job, I should say, without the internet. And hell,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last several jobs I had, almost my entire career, the majority of my career
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been something internet related. It’s either been an iOS app that uses the internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or literally writing websites, you know, and working on websites. So I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily that I, that I want to go back in time, but it’s like, it’s an offshoot of the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey topic. Like, these gigantic conglomerates control everything, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no recourse if you disagree with them. I don’t want to give you a phone number. Well, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then get f***ed. You don’t get a new account. Like, it’s just frustrating. And what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does an individual do about that? You just shout on your podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, and keep in mind, what you’re doing is fighting to get your son into one of these
⏹️ ▶️ John giant silos where they’ll have no recourse.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You know, you’re right, which is a sick thing. Like, because these
⏹️ ▶️ John big providers are so powerful and so important that it is actually important
⏹️ ▶️ John for us to get an online identity and have a place where we accumulate
⏹️ ▶️ John our digital lives and communicate with everybody and do all the things that you have to do. Like, it’s just, it’s not possible
⏹️ ▶️ John to live in this world without like a, you know, in the modern world to try to get a job, to have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John some place of residence, some way to be reachable. And these days that means a phone number, which is probably a cell phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and probably an email address. and like just good luck trying to live in the modern world without any of
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. And where do those things come from? A very small number of very big, very important companies. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can say, sorry, Declan, you’ll never have an online identity because we’re never gonna give you a phone number
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re never gonna have an email address. And it’s like, that’s not a tenable way to live in the modern world. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you want your kid to have, you know, like run your own web servers, run your own mail servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s not tenable for us. People get accounts on whatever, you know, AOL,
⏹️ ▶️ John Hotmail, Gmail, a Microsoft account, an Apple ID. There’s not too many of those
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are sort of reliable, long-term places to have your online identity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so what you’re trying to do is get him into the system that you know he needs to participate in. Not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he just wants to mess with his, like, Google Sheets, but eventually, this is a, these are systems that people
⏹️ ▶️ John need to participate in to live modern life, and there’s too few people controlling those systems. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel for you, but it’s like, you know, you’re failing
⏹️ ▶️ John to get him into the system that we’re complaining about it because there’s no other choice. It’s the perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John example of there being no other choice. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I can’t run Google Slides locally, I think. I mean, maybe I can and I’m not aware, but- There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John an offline mode, but yeah. Someone’s probably ported it to a WebAssembly and there’s some web version
Sponsor: Guru
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Guru. When you’re working with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI, there is one thing you figure out pretty quickly. It’s really good at giving you answers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they’re right or not. And inside most companies, the hard part isn’t generating information,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s trusting it. You got docs over here, tickets over there, conversations scattered everywhere,
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Netflix + Warner Bros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a little bit more news that we want to talk about before it gets stale. Netflix is allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe, going to acquire Warner Brothers, which is a sentence I don’t think I would have been able to understand 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 20 years ago. On December 5th, Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery announced they have entered into a definitive agreement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under which Netflix will acquire Warner Brothers, including its film and television studios, HBO Max and HBO.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Blah, blah, blah, basically 83 billion is the total cost. Netflix is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, oh, this is going to be great. It will offer more choice, more opportunities and more value. And
⏹️ ▶️ John way, the more choice thing, like it’s hilarious in light of our previous conversation about choice, because like, how does
⏹️ ▶️ John giant companies combining to be even fewer giant companies produce more choice? But what they mean is interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat interestingly for this thing is like, so you pay for Netflix, you’ll have more stuff to watch, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a early signal that they’re saying, Hey, we’re buying them. They have a bunch of stuff. We’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John going to put most of that stuff in Netflix because
⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix and you pay for Netflix and we’ll see. Like, I mean, maybe there’ll be like an HBO upsell or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s interesting that in the merger agreement, they’re like, yeah, this’ll give us more stuff to put in Netflix. Plus also
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe there’s like, well, you’ll pay extra for HBO and side Netflix. Who knows? Who knows? But anyway, that’s, that’s a slight aside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, uh, Dominic Preston at the verge writes to get the deal over the line, Netflix reported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reportedly pledged a $5 billion breakup fee in case regulators block the buyout. Uh, Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bid one, one out over interest from Comcast and Paramount, fresh from its own merger with Skydance, though early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest had been reported from Amazon and Apple, too. And obviously, there’s still a bunch of regulatory hurdles they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to get through. The Trump administration says it already views the deal with, quote, heavy skepticism.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that earlier thing of, like, in case regulators block the buyout, why would regulators block the buyout?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why would that happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking of regulators, Paramount has launched a hostile $108 billion bids. That’s, uh, what is that? 25 ish billion runabouts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more than the Netflix one to snatch Warner Brothers from Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ John But not really more because they want to buy more. So the per share price is actually lower, which makes us even
⏹️ ▶️ John more nonsensical. But anyway, just keep like they weren’t, uh, Netflix isn’t going to buy like the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV stuff, but, uh, the Paramount bid is going to buy it. So even though the number looks bigger per share, it’s lower.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, uh, Paramount offered this, you know, 108 billion, blah, blah, blah. They’re going to take the whole kit and caboodle allegedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allegedly. Uh, But then things get interesting. So regulatory filings spotted by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Axios, this is reading from The Verge, indicate that Affinity Partners, a private equity firm founded by President Donald Trump’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is also part of Paramount’s bid. Trump commented on Netflix’s plan to acquire Warner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brothers on Sunday, saying the deal could be a problem and that he’ll be involved in the decision to approve it. So OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we know that Kushner’s involved, which already gets me raising one humongous eyebrow. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is kind of leading the charge? Well, it turns out, to read this incredible headline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from an article by Elizabeth Lopato on The Verge, Larry Ellison of Oracle’s big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumb, of Oracle, excuse me, Larry Ellison’s big dumb gift to his large adult son, which is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ John David Ellison is the CEO of Paramount Skydance, another merger, that’s why CBS was
⏹️ ▶️ John giving in to our criminal in chief’s demands to do what he wanted, otherwise he would block the merger,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the overlords wanted the merger to go through, so they did what he said, and allowed CBS to be taken over by
⏹️ ▶️ John people who aren’t reporting. Anyways, if you’re wondering what’s going on in the United States, if you’ve ever seen an organized
⏹️ ▶️ John crime movie, that’s how our country runs now. The president has things that he wants and has friends,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you don’t do what he wants, he will do everything in his power, many things that are not in his power, technically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John to punish you for it. And him and his son-in-law and his friend Larry Ellison all
⏹️ ▶️ John really want Paramount to buy Warner Brothers. But Netflix wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy them, Warner wants to sell to Netflix. But oh, your merger needs to be approved by
⏹️ ▶️ John the government and the government now exists as the single person of Donald Trump and he wants his friend’s
⏹️ ▶️ John big large adult son to have this company to play with so he can ban CNN
⏹️ ▶️ John and make sure people never say mean things about his dad. It’s just it’s so sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John It like it would be comical if it wasn’t so like real and sad. So I’m not sure how this is going to turn out.
⏹️ ▶️ John In any sane world. They would take the they’ve agreed to sell to Netflix. Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ John is technically offering them a higher number per share. It’s terrible that these things are
⏹️ ▶️ John emerging. But Warner Brothers has been run by a person who has no idea what he’s doing and has been screwing up that company,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, well, whatever. Like again, I don’t like to see big companies merge. Notice there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John talk of like, oh, we shouldn’t allow this merger because it’s bad for further consolidation. The entertainment industry. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s fine with that. It’s just a question of who gets to control it all, because eventually instead of having 17 billionaires,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll just be three and all be related.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so then Gruber had a take on it, which we’ll link in the show notes. And additionally, CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Netflix was prepared for this to happen. Today’s move was entirely expected. Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat on stage at a UBS conference just now, waving off Paramount’s hostile play
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Warner Brothers. What is the D in Warner Brothers? Discovery. Thank you, Discovery. We have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deal done, and we are incredibly happy with the deal. We’re super confident we’re going to get it across.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Warner Brothers, like Warner Brothers, they were, it was like a Time Warner and then AOL
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Warner and then Warner brought Discovery. Like these are already giant conglomerations that have been passed around, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just condensing even farther. It’s so, it’s just a hideous, shambling monster
⏹️ ▶️ John filled with ancient and valuable IP and a bunch of executives who have no idea what they’re doing and just
⏹️ ▶️ John want to, just looking out for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Uh, there’s been a couple of, or maybe it was just one, but, uh, Jason and Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Upgrade had a really good conversation about this. remember if it was a couple of days ago or last week. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s also, you know, a bunch of additional stuff that we’ll put in the show notes, but my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it’s not great that, you know, Netflix is potentially going to be buying one of these, uh, one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these big entertainment companies. There’s a lot of consternation as to what is going to happen to the movie studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portion of Warner brothers. You know, Netflix is currently saying, Oh, it’ll be its own thing. But let me tell you, having lived through a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mergers and John, you’ve lived through more than me. I think anytime somebody buys something else and says, Oh, it’s going to remain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly as it is forever. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a lie. That is a bold face lie.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think anyone wants to keep it exactly as it is now because nobody is happy with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John the only silver lining in this entire thing is that currently there is probably still more
⏹️ ▶️ John competition in the streaming video market than there is in, let’s say the cell phone operating system market. Should
⏹️ ▶️ John I give just one example? Um, there’s increasingly, there’s less competition all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time if we allow these mergers to go through, but Netflix thus far has has mostly been motivated by
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do things that make it appealing to customers. And that includes like making the ads support
⏹️ ▶️ John tier because a lot of people would rather just have ads and pay a lower price or whatever. But as they gobble up more and more companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty soon they’ll reach that size where it’s like, well, we own so much media, like when Netflix buys Disney, then we have
⏹️ ▶️ John real problems. Because Disney already owns like everything. Then Warner Brothers has a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of really old stuff and Netflix has got some stuff on itself. Like we cannot have two entertainment companies
⏹️ ▶️ John for streaming video and movies in this, It’s not in this, it’s, it’s depressing, but you know, it would be even more
⏹️ ▶️ John depressing is if David Ellison gets it because at least the people running Netflix have some
⏹️ ▶️ John clue about how to be the entertainment industry and their qualification is not. I’m the large adult son of a billionaire
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s friends with the corrupt president.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excuse me. I learned today as I was doing research for this, David Ellison was briefly an actor. He was even in a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with James Franco, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John mistaken. I’m sure he got that acting job all on his own. Yep. I’m sure he did. Based on his talents
⏹️ ▶️ John as an actor. like so many other Hollywood children of Hollywood stars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Anyway, there’s a lot of links in the show notes that John has been kind enough to assemble and I put in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you. Um, but it’s, it’s just a mess. It’s just a mess. And this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is capitalism today. This is America today. It’s just, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the complete lack of any kind of regulation of companies merging with each other. Like Warner
⏹️ ▶️ John brothers, discovery, AOL, Time Warner, AT&T, like just so many, they just,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re, They combine, they’re incompetently run, the disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John strikes, and then the people just wanna get out and sell. Like, that’s the whole reason, like, the CBS takeover
⏹️ ▶️ John by all these right-wing people. CBS used to be a television network for old people, let’s be honest,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like, still, trying to be just a basic television network, and
⏹️ ▶️ John right-wing people are like, well, what if we owned it and made them only say nice things about us? And so that’s what they’re doing, and how did they make
⏹️ ▶️ John that happen? The people who own that whole big blob of stuff had mismanaged it, and they wanted to get out, and they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John their money and they’re like, we wanna have this merger happen. And the president said, well, we’re not gonna let your merger
⏹️ ▶️ John happen unless you do what we want. And they said, okay, fine, we’ll do what you want. Why? Because the billionaires needed
⏹️ ▶️ John to get their money because they would never be able to survive the rest of their life. They just don’t have enough money. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we need this merger to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why do you need this merger to happen? Because we need the money. You don’t need the money. But they basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John they sold out instead of fighting. They said, no, we’ll do whatever you want. Just let this merger go through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yay, the merger goes through. and then they installed Barry Weiss as the head of CBS news. So this is the world we live in. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t know who these people are for a be glad and B, if you want to learn, there’ll be links in the shots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just everything’s garbage. Everything’s garbage. And and I guess that’s how we’re ending the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tonight. Yeah. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the main story in the show, like being locked out of your Apple account and not having access, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got a silver lining. It’s had like, I guess, a happy ending. But like I said, this is one of those things where even where it
⏹️ ▶️ John even where the ending is satisfying. Oh, the person got their account back. You just like
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t make me feel any better. No, this should never have happened or been possible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John no one listening to this is comforted by that because they’re like, well, at least you guys have a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John where if one of you guys gets their account locked, you can complain about it. Maybe someone will hear you. What about me out here who doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know anybody and can’t get John Gruber to post a daring fireball about my account being locked? This I’m sure there’s thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of people who’s happened to have no recourse. So that’s why even though it turned out well in this case, It
⏹️ ▶️ John almost makes me feel worse that it turned out well, because it shows that the only way to get any justice in
⏹️ ▶️ John this type of system is to somehow gain, get enough notoriety and fame
⏹️ ▶️ John to raise the level where some executive notices that their company might be doing something wrong, and they do a pinpoint
⏹️ ▶️ John one person fix and they go back to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Everything’s trash. So, happy holidays, everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Guru, and Notion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thanks for members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every podcast, you can get another, usually 15, 20 minutes worth of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you were like, I just can’t get enough of this show, I need more of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just happened here. You can listen to ATP Overtime by joining atp.fm slash join. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week on Overtime, our topic is our state of TV and cord cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and streaming services. We’re gonna go over what we’re doing, what we subscribe to, how it’s going. You can join us, listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to A2.F from slash join. Thank you so much, everybody. Talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into mastodon, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s K-C-L-I-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental Check Podcasts So long
[NS]NotificationCenter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so I have a classical code-related problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was curious to get your, you guys’ folks’ input on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was working on something. I had a little bit of a race condition for something I was working on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that like being a little bit pregnant? I’ve got a little bit of a race condition? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s fair. It’s virtually unique.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had, it doesn’t even matter really. I had a situation where two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely different classes needed to tell each other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that something had happened. So one of them, if I recall correctly, and it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them was what I call my purchasing manager, which is to say my kind of front end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to store kit two and shoot, I think the other one was my user settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey class, which is my front end to user defaults, if you’re not familiar. So basically that is the thing that manages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey payment and in-app purchase and whatnot, and the thing that manages your preferences. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the two of them really don’t know about each other, generally speaking, and really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t know about each other, generally speaking, but for reasons that are not pertinent for this conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of them needed to inform the other that something had happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Things you shouldn’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what I’d written in our internal show notes was, how do you get two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely different and disconnected classes to talk to each other gracefully, and why is the answer notification center,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the answer that you typically use on iOS and perhaps Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t love that answer. And I was curious if you guys had any tips or tricks that you would advise. And for those who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may not understand, notification center is, you two are gonna be offended
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by this description, but it’s kind of like a bus that you can, not a beep beep bus, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John like in a technology sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, in, in, insofar as it’s a messaging bus where you can drop a message on this bus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and people can choose to listen to it. That’s kind of an oversimplification, simplification, but it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, you, you, you shout out, Hey, something has happened. And if somebody is listening, great. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody’s listening, no big deal. And that’s generally speaking how people solve this exact problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but it’s like, you know, how do you send, how do you send a letter from, you know, one address to another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without either, without knowing what those addresses are. That’s also not a great analogy. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcast. Yeah. Because one class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can like vend an API and the other class can like, you know, you could do like a publish subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mechanism or a delegation mechanism. But that would require at least one to know about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other if not bi-directional. So what you’re saying, you know, the function notification center serves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like one class can post a notification. The other class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can listen for the notification. And neither one of them has to know anything about the details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the other as long as the notification itself is documented and known.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And notifications… So what makes this a hard problem to do in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that programmers can swallow with modern sensibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that what it requires is globalness. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And programmers today hate anything being global and with ample reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in many cases you don’t really want global state or global you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know protocols or you know or global you know actors and things. I don’t mean actor in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And to be clear when when when Marco says global what he means by that is everyone can touch this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of information and that’s generally speaking a real bad code smell. It’s one of those things where you look and go,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t love that at
⏹️ ▶️ John And not just everybody can touch it, but also depending on how you do this, it’s very easy to
⏹️ ▶️ John get into a situation where you decrease or eliminate modularity. Oh, now
⏹️ ▶️ John I need a second one of these things. Oh, but you can’t have a second one because they all talk through this one,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, notification center using a set of name messages. And if any, you can’t have two of them. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you had some kind of interface where you’re like, now I’m gonna instance a second one of these and connect to a different server with it. Oh, but when it sends
⏹️ ▶️ John a message that a thing happened, The other one sees it too because there’s one message bus. So now, okay, I’ll give them different message buses.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll prefix their message names. And it’s like, you’ve no longer had it be self-contained, testable,
⏹️ ▶️ John modular, composable in that way. And maybe you don’t care. Lots of apps eventually have to say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my app. I’m not going to clone my entire app to be next to itself in memory
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time. Although many people have thought that and then found in version three that they need to do exactly that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s the other smell of the globalness
⏹️ ▶️ John is like the singleton-ness, right? People don’t like globals for good reasons, and
⏹️ ▶️ John some good reasons people are afraid of singletons, because every time they make one, three years later they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John damn it, I wish this wasn’t a singleton.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But I think though, there are times when global
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messages and singletons are the best tool for the job in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s one of those things that programmers so easily overthink and try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add complexity to get out of when it’s not necessary. So you know some examples
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and this isn’t quite as pure as notifications, but like you know in overcast I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some utility classes that do things like like manage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have combine publishers yes that because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is before we had a sync sequences which I still don’t really understand fully or frankly like I use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. they’re nice. They’re fine in some cases I don’t I don’t think they’re a great overall replacement but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some advantages anyway so I’ll have I’ll have a class like my reachability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class which is which basically will post it’ll publish to a publisher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when in a singleton you know OC reachability has a singleton OC reachability.shared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will publish is online publisher so So anything in the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can then subscribe to ocreachability.shared.isonlinepublisher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then that thing will get notified when the internet connection becomes online and it can do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start a sync operation or whatever. And so when you have, in this case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a global object, but the global object, Singleton, the global
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Singleton is representing the state of the system, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a global state. The system is either online or it’s not. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are opportunities that you have in programming where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you are trying to convey, respond to, interact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with, is something that is global to the process or the device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the installation of your app or whatever it is. there are global things. And so it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to write global code to deal with them much of the time or all the time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of Notification Center, and the kind of global bus of passing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messages that are just distinguished by their string names, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that for a lot of use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases. Now, granted, the API can be a little bit unswifty, and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John ideal. Not type
⏹️ ▶️ Marco safe, there’s strings, oh no. Right, and it’s trivial to make it type safe also.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think that is fine when your problem is what you describe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is two totally different classes that don’t know about each other, that maybe can’t like import their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modules and can’t even reasonably do that. Like, they want to pass global messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within the same process. The tool for that is Notification Center. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think it being old or it not being particularly Swift native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a reason that you have to somehow come up with some kind of different solution. That tool exists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it works great for that purpose. It is not the best tool for every purpose, but it’s a great tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that purpose. So I think the answer is Notification Center.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s a, I don’t know if that was the first thing I would reach for because like, I don’t know the structure of your app, but the two things
⏹️ ▶️ John you described, things managing user settings and things dealing with store stuff. Like I have to think in the hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff that you already have connected as the sort of the object graph or the responsibility graph of your
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, there’s surely something that is apparent of both of them. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, if you don’t wanna use, I mean, notifications are fine, it doesn’t matter. It’ll be fine. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the first thing I would have reached for is like, what is the common parent for these? Or like, in SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John often like, is there some environment injection that’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey above that they can all
⏹️ ▶️ John see or something like that? Like, you can get into trouble real fast there because that environment is like, it’s like globals, but we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say the G word, so everyone will be happy with it. It’s like, okay, all right. Very true. But like, but yeah, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a bunch of objects like this, very often there is, there is some party that can see both and they can, you know, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to know about each other, but they all know about the parent because they’re talking to it anyway, or the grandparent or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It all boils down to the same thing in the end. Like maybe if you have performance concerns, you didn’t want to use Notification Center or a direct
⏹️ ▶️ John call through to a grandparent thing or a common API would be fine. I think the only place I use Notification
⏹️ ▶️ John Center is, because it does, if you’re talking about the same API, it also works across processes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, cause I use it to make front and center and switch glass talk to each other.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that. I presume it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s different on Mac OS actually, now that I think about
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to be like, because of app store, blah, blah, blah. You got to be in the same app group and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all these restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ John on it and everything like that. But it is essentially a free local, like I don’t even know. I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know if it’s like using Unix sockets under the cover, like as in like, not internet sockets, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix sockets. Like I honestly have no idea how it’s working, but that’s just the kind of API I want. And you send messages, small
⏹️ ▶️ John messages between apps and it’s very fast or whatever. But within my app, I always tend to, you know, I don’t go the
⏹️ ▶️ John full Java route of like dependency injection, you build up this tree of things that all don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know about each other, but they all have the things that they need to do their work injected into them from above. And that just, I mean, there’s a reason
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s like a joke. And I guess probably some people who are still working in Java like it, like it. But I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John industry generally agreed that’s too far. Uh, if you don’t know what dependency injection is in Java,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s basically a way. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold on there. As with all things, there are times when it makes sense and there’s, there’s times
⏹️ ▶️ John went overboard, which is like, I mean, it make like to Marco’s point about global is like, at some point everyone always has to have
⏹️ ▶️ John them, that’s true unless you’re writing libraries and I think a lot of the Java stuff was like, we’re writing libraries, everybody’s a library
⏹️ ▶️ John author. And so they’d make all these frameworks where it’s like, we don’t know. The things that you’re going to use to assemble these.
⏹️ ▶️ John So first build this thing and inject this thing into it and say, okay, you’re going to use this for this and you’re going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John this for this and you can use this for this. okay, now you are gonna be the thing that this thing uses for this. And it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you can do the first thing, you have to assemble these Lego pieces, all of which are interchangeable, which is great for
⏹️ ▶️ John testability. But it’s like, man, like I just wanna do, put up a window and say
⏹️ ▶️ John hello world on it. And I’ve assembled this tree of 8,000 objects. And I mean, anyway. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if you squint, I would say environment object in SwiftUI is dependency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John injection. Oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John environment object is much kinder and gentler than all the stuff that gets injected for a lot of the Java,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more of like an API design issue. But like, again, within an individual small app, like the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just an app that is not like enterprise scale distributed across thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of systems, you know, or Photoshop size app or whatever. That’s when I say, you know, talking about a small app within something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like everybody’s always going to end up having some kind of global state somewhere. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you like know where it is and keep a handle on it and you’re pretty sure it’s not going to screw
⏹️ ▶️ John you over later or if it does screw you over later, it’s not that big a deal to, you know, turn it from,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever dot, OCReachability.shared, turn it into an instance of
⏹️ ▶️ John that object that gets given to one of the super grandparent objects of all the other things in your object
⏹️ ▶️ John graph. Like, I don’t think you need to beat yourself about it too much. My only advice
⏹️ ▶️ John would be, do you need to reach for notification center or is there some common ancestor that they
⏹️ ▶️ John can talk through? If it’s too inconvenient for the ancestor to talk through, then don’t do it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John with using Notification Center unless it’s a performance issue. But other than that, that’s…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s funny you bring up, you know, the whole grandparent thing, because when I was doing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was reaching for Notification Center, I realized, wait a second, I already have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a function or two in the Purchasing Manager that takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an instance of user settings as a parameter. So Purchasing Manager is aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the existence of user settings anyway, which means past Casey was either a genius or an idiot, depending on how
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, why are you passing it as a parameter? You’ve only got one purchasing manager in your app and you only get one set of settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine the purchasing manager might need to look at your settings because there might be settings that are relevant to the purchasing manager, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey either way, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John the purchasing manager could be instantiated with access to settings or use a
⏹️ ▶️ John singleton for settings or whatever. It’s like Margaret was saying, how many composable sets of settings
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do you expect to have?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, that is fair. But the moral of the story, though, is that I realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, wait, one of them already knows about the other. User settings does not know about purchasing manager, if I recall correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I’m not even sure that’s true, but it doesn’t matter. But I can tell you for certainty the purchasing manager knows about user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings. And so then I thought, OK, well, somewhere I’m building both of these objects, just as you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, John. And I went back to the grandfather of the grandfather, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And Well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t really suggesting that you thread down references to each other. I was suggesting is that there is something that is
⏹️ ▶️ John managing both user settings and the purchasing manager and that thing coordinates the behavior, not
⏹️ ▶️ John that you shove user settings down into the purchasing manager and they know about each other directly, but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, composability, you’re responsible for this tiny region, you’re responsible for this tiny thing that above you is the thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John responsible for the larger region that uses you to do its job. It is like dependency injection,
⏹️ ▶️ John only you’re not, it’s not injectable pieces. You’re just statically assembling the tree of stuff, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But either way, the point is it ended up being easier than I thought. But I just thought it was an interesting discussion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the three of us could have because I didn’t know if there was some architecture astronaut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach that I wasn’t aware of to solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John JS Oh, there’s like seven. There’s like seven
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey architect astronaut
⏹️ ▶️ John approaches. But I think we’re saying you probably don’t need to reach for them in this case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like space, architecture astronauts have infinite possibilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also does not mean you should use almost any
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. And again, those patterns are much more appropriate for people designing libraries and frameworks because you can’t know how people are
⏹️ ▶️ John going to use them. And if you make decisions, like I just saw something about user default saying, like if you set up
⏹️ ▶️ John user defaults with a suite name and you configure default values for settings, defaults
⏹️ ▶️ John for defaults, but you set it on the suite name, you’re also setting it for everything that’s not the suite name unbeknownst
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, and of course undocumented. So when you create a user setting without a suite name and you try to get
⏹️ ▶️ John a value, it’s like, well, it looks like somebody already said it. No, you just already said it when you set the default for the suite name, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t, whatever singleton they’re using, they don’t divide it up by names, by suite namespace for the defaults,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s undocumented. So when you’re a library author, you gotta be real careful about that because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t make those assumptions like, well, there’ll only ever be one of these, and you know, that comes back
⏹️ ▶️ John to bite you. But for an individual app, you should know how many of each of the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing there are going to be in your app. You’re not inventing your app’s code as a library for the entire world to use.