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

692: A Thinking Hitch

21 May 2026

People really don’t like AI. (Sponsored by AI.)

Episode Description:

Sponsored by:

  • Cotypist: Type as fast as you can think.
  • Claude: Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today.
  • DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.

Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

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

Chapters

  1. Pre-show 🖼️
  2. Immersive Inlet
  3. ATP Movie Club: Her
  4. Follow-up: Cut/paste files
  5. Terminal follow-up
  6. Sponsor: Cotypist
  7. Dropbox excludes
  8. Time Machine vs. npm
  9. 20th-anniversary iPhone series?
  10. Reminder and Reminders updates
  11. Sponsor: Claude
  12. People really hate AI
  13. Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
  14. People really hate AI, cont’d.
  15. Ending theme
  16. Adventures in webviews 🖼️

Pre-show

Chapter Pre-show image.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you got that colored bullet, Casey. Oh, it’s so hard.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s so hard. You don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John appreciate what I do to edit this document. Now what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are

⏹️ ▶️ John you going to do? Now, are you going to style that bullet? What are you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to do? Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going to live with it. Wait,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do you? Casey doesn’t know. I don’t know. Neither do I.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’re a Google Docs whiz, John. I’m not a Google Docs whiz. What I am is I am a victim

⏹️ ▶️ John of decades of word processing programs that do not make this task easy. That’s what I am.

Immersive Inlet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so let’s let’s go into what I’ve decided to call immersive inlets.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s just cruise right into immersive inlets You love it

⏹️ ▶️ John it used to be a corner what happened

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no because everyone uses a corner I

⏹️ ▶️ John figured you were copying everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey else Yes, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m trying to branch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out on my own. Well in the immersive world. There is no corner

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, and that is true. There’s no corners in immersive world and thus it is an inlet. We have no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco boundaries no attachment to physical spaces whatsoever. We’re just floating.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except for where the

⏹️ ▶️ John video ends. Except for

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey where the video ends because it’s not 360. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So there is, as we record this, it is Wednesday, the 20th of May,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2026. On Friday will be the official debut of Real Madrid, the Weight of Greatness, which is a 20 minute

⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentary about the, I will call it soccer. You’re going to have to to deal with it, Soccer Team

⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash Club Real Madrid, which I presume is based in Spain or something. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even know. I don’t know anything about soccer,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but. Sounds like Ohio.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real Madrid. I did watch this 20 minute documentary and I just wanted to briefly point out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that A, I think it’s worth noting whenever there’s new immersive stuff, not only because it shows everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pace, or lack thereof, of immersive releases on Apple Vision Pro, but for the six of us

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that do have a Vision Pro, I thought it’s worth mentioning for them as well. And what this is, is like I said, a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentary about Real Madrid. I was talking, I was speaking with a friend of mine, Justin, who said that this is very kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of timely because I guess Real Madrid is like imploding at the moment. And this was all filmed, I believe late 2025.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But they talk about, you know, the team and how important it is and the history behind it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of things I wanted to call out as highlights. They did a lot of like moving the camera,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they are getting better at doing it very slowly. Still gives me a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of like, what’s happening. but it’s better than it used to be. Still a lot more cuts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I think they need. However, there was one time where the ball was like on the right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey side of my field of view and it was kicked to the goal, which was on the left side of my field of view. And rather than whipping

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the camera around or like cutting to a different view, they just let you do the thing that you can do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a Vision Pro. I turned my head and watched the ball go by, which sounds

⏹️ ▶️ Casey silly, but a lot of these immersive things, they’re like cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. You know, there are all these, I guess, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sports directors or editors or what have you that are used to doing that all the time. They at one point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they showed what I think was a sped up film it but it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so preposterous. I almost wonder if it was CGI in the sense of in the scale of it all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but what apparently the stadium for Real Madrid it’s it has like a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey turf that all this gray I won’t say turf the grass I guess can get like sucked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey down into the the basement of the stadium and the mechanism to do this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is ridiculously large and they just sit you, I guess on what I would call as an American

⏹️ ▶️ Casey football person, the 50 yard line or the midfield or whatever. And they let you look at this happening at probably like 10

⏹️ ▶️ Casey X speed. The scale of this, I cannot verbalize how big this was. And I think this is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey such a great use of immersive video because you can look around and everywhere you look, you’re seeing the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pitch field, whatever, like rising up what appeared to be like a hundred feet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way more than seemed necessary, which is why again, I’m wondering if this was like all faked and I’m just ignorant and don’t realize

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but it was very, very cool. Um, and I also enjoyed, and they’ve been doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this more and more in different videos. They, they showed a bunch of stills. And so it’s like a dark room, like 2D

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stills, right? So it’s a dark room that you’re in and they’re showing a still dead center near field of view,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they’ve done the like, well, I forget the term for it on iOS, but the thing where they add depth to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, and remember, everything’s 3D, right? So it looks like these are 3D stills. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other thing I really enjoyed, I’ve said this in the past, is they have light coming from over your right shoulder. So it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a projector over your right shoulder or something like that, which I thought was really neat. And then finally, because a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was spoke Spanish, I believe, they had subtitles, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happens if you twist your head? Well, the subtitles were just a floating pain that followed your gaze, which I thought

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really neat. Um, but yeah, this is, even as someone who does not particularly care about soccer,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, this was very, very worth the 17 or 18 minutes of my time. And as someone who

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does love sports quite a lot, I, this is a great. Uh, example

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or, or investigation. I can’t think of the word I’m looking for case study and how wonderful sports

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be and how it can really bring a group of a disparate group of people together. And I know that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not everyone who listens to this program enjoys sports ball, but I do enjoy sports ball. And this was a great, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes you feel good, kind of gives you, you know, it gives you goosebumps about, oh, all of these people are enjoying something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey together. And it was really fun. So, uh, Real Madrid, the weight of greatness. We will put a link in the show notes for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the six of you that have a vision pro. You should check it out. I think it’s worth your time. time.

ATP Movie Club: Her

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a new member special. I believe on the episode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I credited it to John, which was erroneous. It was actually Marco that brought this idea to us. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, would you like to describe it?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so it turns out there was this movie called Her a long time ago that everyone saw except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. And that alone isn’t anything new, but then what happened is people kept talking about it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and over again. And then the world that we live in started getting more and more like what I thought the movie

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Her was about. And so I thought it would be a good idea for us to actually watch it. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we did and we talked about it and I think it went pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. This is a 2013 movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Johansson. And it’s all about falling in love with AI basically, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2013 was reasonably far-fetched, but in 2026, it’s all too real.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I really think the movie was very good. It is not for youngsters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we talk about that on the special. Um, but it is very,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco very good. Your discretion is advised.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Your discretion is very much advised. Uh, it is a good movie though, and I think the discussion was really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, like Marco said, and I really enjoyed it. So, John, anything to add?

⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, it was just, it’s very timely. Marco was good to think of it for us to talk about, and it’s even more timely based on what we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John going to talk about as the main topic of this show, as we’ll see in a little bit. But yeah, it’s definitely, if you haven’t revisited

⏹️ ▶️ John the movie, if you saw it when it was released like I did and you just haven’t thought about it since then, Rewatch it because you definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John look at it with different eyes today than you did in 2013. Very much so.

Follow-up: Cut/paste files

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up as we always do. Let’s talk cut, copy, and paste with files

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Finder. And the whole of the internet wrote to us to say, after you copy a file

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Command C in the Finder, you can press or use the key combination command Option

⏹️ ▶️ Casey V, which will move item here. This is in contrast with Command V without

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the option, which will paste here. And so the internet wanted us to know that, and now we do.

⏹️ ▶️ John But we did say that on the show, just to be fair. I know it went by quickly, but when Casey was reading

⏹️ ▶️ John the question from the listener, the question contained that information by saying,

⏹️ ▶️ John I know you can do this and that or whatever and command option V was in there. So just tell you what, you can’t do command

⏹️ ▶️ John X in current versions of Mac OS, but if you want to move a file using a tortured version of the

⏹️ ▶️ John cut, copy and paste metaphor, you can do so. You just command C to copy and command option

⏹️ ▶️ John V to move. I suggest not doing that. I am super against move commands because I feel like bugs

⏹️ ▶️ John in any bug during the process can leave you with a Totally deleted file that you can’t even get out of the trash,

⏹️ ▶️ John but people seem to like it So if you want to do it, it’s there for you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty

Terminal follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you refresh my memory or perhaps you haven’t talked about this, but refresh my memory with what’s going on with your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey terminal in state restoration, please.

⏹️ ▶️ John We in fact talked about it last episode, Casey, you were there.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I thought so,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, I never trust myself

⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. We’re talking about like terminal emulators. It was like an ask ATP question, like what theme to use for your terminal emulators.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I got into, we all got into the whole thing of like trying different terminal apps and stuff. And I had mentioned that one of the things

⏹️ ▶️ John that frustrated me about Apple’s terminal, which was the app that I continued to use despite many alternatives

⏹️ ▶️ John that I have I’ve tried over the years is I’ve had sporadic

⏹️ ▶️ John luck with getting Apple’s terminal to restore its state to the way I want it

⏹️ ▶️ John when I launched the app. I wanted to restore all my windows and all my tabs because of course I do. And

⏹️ ▶️ John at various times, I’ve also gotten it to restore the current working directory

⏹️ ▶️ John of all the tabs to where they were when I quit terminal. But like that broke

⏹️ ▶️ John or like it would work and then it would break, then it worked, then it break. and it’s currently in a broken period. And I was like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John I was mentioning this because like third-party terminal applications do better in that sometimes because

⏹️ ▶️ John they have more sane preferences and it makes more sense to me. You can just say, yes, restore everything. And it’s like, great, it works.

⏹️ ▶️ John But terminal settings are Byzantine and confusing. And so lots of people wrote in and said, you should try

⏹️ ▶️ John X, Y, and Z. A lot of people wrote in to say, here’s what I do. But of course, all those people are using like, they’re either using Bash

⏹️ ▶️ John because Bash is extremely popular shell and it used to be the default on Mac OS. Or they’ll say, do

⏹️ ▶️ John this, and it’s with the current Mac OS default shell, which is ZSH. I don’t use either one of those shells.

⏹️ ▶️ John None of those solutions are gonna work for me. The shell scripting in my shell doesn’t look like

⏹️ ▶️ John those shells. It’s totally different. I use TCSH. It’s super old. No one should ever use it. Do not.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s bad. It’s old and it’s bad. It’s like me using PHP. Why do I use it?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because it was the default shell on the first Unix system I used in 1993. That is

⏹️ ▶️ John the answer. I remember that. You saying that I really truly do. Yeah, that’s what I use. But anyway, seeing

⏹️ ▶️ John people say, here’s what I use in ZSH, I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember that. That was part

⏹️ ▶️ John of the solution when I did this. And then of course I just Googled for, you know, a TCSH

⏹️ ▶️ John version of the ZSH thing. Like I’m sure there’s an equivalent. And I found a webpage and it’s like, yeah, you need to

⏹️ ▶️ John put this in one of your dot files. I go into my relevant dot file and there is that code staring me in the face.

⏹️ ▶️ John Which I’m sure I wrote 20 years ago in that exact spot. So yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ John had whatever that was like, I’ve got it. This is it. This is the solution. I’ll just add this to my, oh, it’s already there.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that was a humbling experience, but they did get me on the trail. Like, well, why

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t it working? Why was it working sporadically? It turns out at some point, I don’t know, let’s say in the past

⏹️ ▶️ John five years, I made some kind of edit to one of my dot files that was silently causing

⏹️ ▶️ John certain code in it not to run due to like a mismatch conditional thing somewhere in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I had conditionals and don’t don’t ask it’s complicated anyway. The code that I had there was correct, but it

⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t running or wasn’t running all the time or wasn’t I was only running in the in the like the first login shell. Now

⏹️ ▶️ John that anyway, it was complicated. But once I was on the trail, I figured it out. So I figured I would just at the very least

⏹️ ▶️ John document how you know what I got to work here. Not that anyone out there is wondering

⏹️ ▶️ John how do I get this work in TCSH but maybe just for me this is just for me so that when I look for it later, I’ll find this ATP

⏹️ ▶️ John episode and they are the transcripts that we’ll have by then So here’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the solution that we’ll put in the show notes the code that’s in my it’s not in my

⏹️ ▶️ John CSHRC But anyway, if you put it in your CSHRC TCSH reads the CSHRC

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a bunch of stuff that basically says if you’re in Apple terminal Before each command

⏹️ ▶️ John run this thing and it’s a prints a bunch of VT you know, VT100 escape

⏹️ ▶️ John sequences, combined with some more modern stuff with a file URL and blah, blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John that basically talks to the terminal and tells it what directory you’re in, so

⏹️ ▶️ John it can be restored. But an interesting thing is I believe, I’m not entirely sure about this, someone can correct

⏹️ ▶️ John me for wrong, but I believe the way the restoration works is that you tell Apple Terminal, yeah, restore the scroll back to what

⏹️ ▶️ John it was before. And when it restores the scroll back, because these escape codes are in the scroll back,

⏹️ ▶️ John They essentially change the current working directory because they are text content in the scroll back that the terminal

⏹️ ▶️ John Interprets as a please change this directory thing. I think that’s how it works. Anyway the

⏹️ ▶️ John other part of it and the part I struggle with the most even after rediscovering this and even after fixing my dot files was

⏹️ ▶️ John What do I change all the stupid settings in Apple’s terminal app to be? And so I’ll put screenshots in the show notes

⏹️ ▶️ John of that. The answer is even though the terminal application can do

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of fancy stuff related to to window and tab titles,

⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t want any of it. Uncheck everything. Uncheck the working directory

⏹️ ▶️ John or document or path in both the tab and the window. There’s two separate tabs. There’s the tab for tab and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the tab for window. And there is a little thing, a little, some blue text that says escape sequence

⏹️ ▶️ John that even if you didn’t know about this, has a little tool tip popover thing that explains

⏹️ ▶️ John or tries to explain, does a bad job, but it tries to explain the escape sequences that you need to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John you guys can see that popover. If you read that, would that have helped you at all with this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey problem? No, probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like in hindsight, now that I, you know, if I look at my dot file, because I’m familiar with escape sequences

⏹️ ▶️ John from back in the day, like I can see what they’re getting at, but nobody who doesn’t already know the answer is ever gonna look at this popover

⏹️ ▶️ John and get it. But at the very least, you could like copy and paste the text from the popover into Google

⏹️ ▶️ John and find better solutions. Anyway, that’s how I got my stuff working the way I

⏹️ ▶️ John want it. And the way I want it, by the way, is this. I want my tab titles to be

⏹️ ▶️ John setable by me manually. I have a command line thing that would have set the tab title by printing an escape sequence

⏹️ ▶️ John and never change. But I want the current working directory to be whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ John was when I quit the application. So if I have a tab title that says like home, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John not in my home directory, doesn’t matter. That’s reminding me that this is the tab that is normally in my home directory and

⏹️ ▶️ John I may have changed out of it, but now if I wanna go back to where it should be, I will go back to the home directory and blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the way I want it. It’s a weird way to want things. Lots of people, most people want it so that when you change in directory,

⏹️ ▶️ John the tab title changes to reflect the directory. And I don’t want that. So if you want that, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can achieve that with various settings, but I, I’m glad that I figured this out and now I have documented it at least in a

⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. So that when I forget this in 20 more years and I’m still using Apple terminal, I

⏹️ ▶️ John can look it up.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then with regard to terminal apps for Mac iOS with text-based config files,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I I think you were lamenting this idea if I’m not mistaken. I remember us talking about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t like it. All right. But maybe it’s not so bad. Tell me why.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, everyone said, Hey, yeah, text-based config files can be confusing. You know, to be clear, these are GUI

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple terminal applications for the Mac. They’re GUI apps. But when you hit command

⏹️ ▶️ John comma for, for preferences, it opens a text file in your text editor.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then, you know, it’s just like a config file. It’s like, all right, well you kind of just opted out of the whole GUI thing there.

⏹️ ▶️ John And people are like, no, it’s not so bad. You just tell an LLM to set the configuration the way you

⏹️ ▶️ John want it. So you just basically decide, I want the cursor to be red, I want this, blah, blah, blah. And the LLMs read the

⏹️ ▶️ John documentation and understand the config file and set it for you. And it’s like, I would prefer to have check boxes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that will sort of work. Although I can tell you that sometimes you just can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John get what you want. Lots of people were suggesting Ghost TTY, which I think installed that back when it was

⏹️ ▶️ John released. And I tried to get, on the applications that I tried to get to look like Apple terminal, but I could not get the title

⏹️ ▶️ John bar to look right. So I’m like, all right, all right, Claude and Codex, you take a crack at it. And they just told me to do things

⏹️ ▶️ John that I had already done that did not work. And so that was it for them. They could not help. It could be that you just

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t configure it the way I want. But But anyway, that’s the suggestion. I think that is not the path

⏹️ ▶️ John forward for a good Mac application. Talk about Mac ass map applications, which we may someday talk about at length,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in a member special. This ain’t it. give me a text config file and tell me to use an LLM set

⏹️ ▶️ John the preferences. You have to actually make a GUI for that. So I can click on little checkboxes and pop up menus.

⏹️ ▶️ John You got to do it. Sorry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was just looking. I use Visual Studio Code for tracking what becomes the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey external show notes for the show, the things that are embedded in the RSS feed.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it used to be that when you hit command space, it would drop you in a text file, basically say, go pound sand. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now there is a very not native, but large and voluminous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferences window in here. So you can go and click checkboxes and so on and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so forth. All right. We also got recommendations for fancy shell prompts in including

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam Brown, who suggested starship.rs, which I maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just a dummy, but I was failing to totally understand what the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pitches here. It seemed like it’s like a get aware thing that’ll tell you what what get branch you’re in and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what version stuff like that, but I’m sure it’s more than

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because you’re so old, you don’t do what the kids do. Or maybe you do. Tell me about your prompt Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s just the path and little else. I think actually fish gives you what branch you’re in if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey get friendly or get aware sub directory.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But the first

⏹️ ▶️ John question about your prompt is you say, oh, it’s just the path and little else. Am I to assume that that

⏹️ ▶️ John path appears on the same line as your insertion point? Yes. now you’re an old man

⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s not what the cool kids do. Oh, my mistake. They use multi-line prompts, which have existed

⏹️ ▶️ John for decades. And Starship.rs is a fancy way, you know, that people have encapsulated,

⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s how to make a cool multi-line prompt. It’s a wherever you get repo and this and that and the other thing, right? And Starship

⏹️ ▶️ John is just sort of like, we’ve packaged that up for you so you don’t have to like find tutorials and stuff like that. But the thing, the reason I noted

⏹️ ▶️ John it is here is because I go to these things and they’re like, yeah, we’ve, we’ve got this cool shell feature. look at all these

⏹️ ▶️ John fancy smart completions for this thing or whatever. And they never work with anything except

⏹️ ▶️ John for bash and maybe ZSH and phish, right? This one actually says, oh yeah, and if you

⏹️ ▶️ John use TCSH, just do this. I’m like, are you kidding me? So kudos to the Starship people. I’m never gonna use this

⏹️ ▶️ John because I am not a multi-line prompt person because I’m old. But if you like a multi-line prompt

⏹️ ▶️ John and you use ZSH, bash, phish, TCSH apparently,

⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what else? Maybe the corn shell with a K. Yeah, you should check it

⏹️ ▶️ John out. So I did not try it. I’m not interested in it, but multi-line prompts are definitely a thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point with multi-line prompt is your prompt can be as wide as your window because your insertion point is not there

⏹️ ▶️ John and it can contain lots of fancy information. What branch am I in? What files have been modified?

⏹️ ▶️ John What’s the current date and time? What is the uptime? What is the CPU? Like people put so much stuff there. This one has like

⏹️ ▶️ John a special font that lets you put like your battery health in there, like a little battery symbol with a part of the battery to be

⏹️ ▶️ John filled. Like it’s, anyway, I thought it was neat and I was excited that it used TCSH. So you can check that out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am so old looking at the features of this and seeing how far this is from my like default

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bash shell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John prompt. Like, oh boy.

⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when people first started doing this several decades ago, when it became popular in my workplaces where

⏹️ ▶️ John I’d go to someone’s desk and they would have a multi-line prompt and they’re like, it’s so amazing. They were just like rolling their

⏹️ ▶️ John own in Bash or whatever. Like there was no packaged up stuff for it. I was like, uh, nah,

⏹️ ▶️ John nah, no, not interested. I’m still not interested, but people love it, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also very disappointed to learn now in Wikipedia that apparently Corn Shell has nothing to do with the band.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it does not. It predates them

⏹️ ▶️ John substantially. Yeah. Yeah. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s funny. All right, and then continuing in the terminal in Shell

⏹️ ▶️ Casey area, Derek wrote in to say, I just came across this explanation of the inner workings of the terminal,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the terminal, the TTY and the shell, which is in turn from the Linux field guide

⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Uros Popovic, Popovic. And we will link all this in the show notes.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know basically nothing about how all this works. So at some point when I have a minute, I’m gonna be checking this out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I have a suggestion in that area, which is the secret rules of the terminal by Julia Evans.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s one of her wizard zines. If you have never read wizard zines, it’s wizardzines.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John You should check them out. It’s basically, it’s a reminder to me every time I see them go by, and I’ve purchased several of them,

⏹️ ▶️ John every time I see them go by that basically people learn in different ways, and if you

⏹️ ▶️ John learn in the way that is catered to by wizard zines, it is just a godsend to you. So it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, multi-panel comic strips telling you

⏹️ ▶️ John about technical details of, you know, Unix-y, nerdy stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John programming parts of Unix, stuff like that. And it’s not telling you like the basics,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s trying to get you at like, to understand fundamentally how they work and also

⏹️ ▶️ John to like demystify the technical nerdy inner workings. But of course, they’re short comic strips. So

⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t, it’s not like pages and pages of text, so it can’t go into a ton of detail, but that doesn’t mean it’s surface

⏹️ ▶️ John level. It goes deep on a few specific things and tries to describe them in

⏹️ ▶️ John casual ways, but the things it’s describing are incredibly nitty gritty. So the secret rules of the

⏹️ ▶️ John terminal is like, hey, all that escape sequence stuff and the VT codes or whatever, it doesn’t go into like an extensive 200

⏹️ ▶️ John page history of it and where it came from and glass teletypes and blah, blah, blah. But it basically says, there

⏹️ ▶️ John are mechanisms under there and here’s how they work. And it gives you like practical advice. And it

⏹️ ▶️ John basically lets you to know where to look to find out more information. It lets you

⏹️ ▶️ John know what you don’t know and also sort of laser targets at a few specific things. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John think they’re a great way, if that’s how you learn, if you’re not one of those people, Like I need top-down

⏹️ ▶️ John tell me just the broad strokes or I need bottom-up start from the the ones and zeros and the bits in the history

⏹️ ▶️ John this is Somewhere vaguely in the middle and I find I find the fascinating there’s tons

⏹️ ▶️ John of them on tons of topics. It’s a great one on DNS There’s ones on how git works

⏹️ ▶️ John Julie has also contributed to the git the actual official git user manual written substantial portions of it I believe

⏹️ ▶️ John so check out wizard zines comm if you haven’t already there the these themes zines are well worth the money

⏹️ ▶️ John you can find lots of free samples. She posted them herself

⏹️ ▶️ John on social media and stuff and free samples on the pages. And you can learn a ton just by following her on social media.

⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, she’s not this is not a sponsorship. Not sponsored. This is entirely just because I think it’s a cool thing. And just so

⏹️ ▶️ John happened she recently wrote one about the exact weird nitty gritty terminal

⏹️ ▶️ John escape sequence. Like what is the relationship between the terminal, the application Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John terminal, the shell, the TTY, what even is a TTY,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like when you hit control C, what catches that keystroke and what

⏹️ ▶️ John chooses to take action on it? These are like terrifying questions if you ever ask them an interview, because nobody

⏹️ ▶️ John knows this stuff anymore because it’s so old and it’s also steeped in history, but this will give you

⏹️ ▶️ John a handle on ensemble.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Cotypist. Cotypist is smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco autocomplete for the Mac. It predicts your next words as you type in any app and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI runs entirely on your own machine. Now I tried out Cotypist to do this ad and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was blown away by a few things. First of all, I love the idea of a better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco autocomplete because it can save so much time and so much typing. Now, autocompletes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past, I haven’t used them that much because they usually are not predicting what I actually wanted to say. CodeTypist is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way smarter because it uses modern AI technologies, but it does it all locally on your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac. So the suggestions are better than previous techniques, but also it’s private. It’s not sending

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your data to some cloud service, to some big model to be trained on or anything like that. It’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local using the power of your Mac locally. So it’s super private and it’s super fast, and you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not hitting some token limits or anything like that. So here’s how it works. You start typing and it suggests, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can hit tab to accept its suggestion or not. and it just goes word by word. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s four words, you hit tab, tab, tab, tab, you accept the whole thing, and it’s saving you all this time typing. Now, if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to accept a word, you just start typing whatever you were gonna type, and it, in real time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will update its suggestions based on what you’re typing. So a lot of times, you just type the first letter or two

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what you wanted, and it figures out, oh, you wanted this word instead, and it offers that up next. So you can hit tab and accept that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it saves you tons of time. Check it out, because what you’re getting is a faster version of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and what you’re typing, not like AI garbage. It’s actually what you are already writing, just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster. Get a free 30-day trial of Cotypist, plus 25%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first bill at cotypist.app.atp. That’s Cotypist

⏹️ ▶️ Marco spelled C-O-T-Y-P-I-S-T, Cotypist.app.atp.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring our show.

Dropbox excludes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then let’s talk about Dropbox and other cloud, you know, syncing providers and ignoring node

⏹️ ▶️ Casey modules. It seems like this is the story that never ends. We’ve been talking about it for years. Hunter Hillegas

⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Dropbox has a rule system that can be used to omit stuff like MPM output, etc. We’ll put a link in the show

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes to their documentation about this. And from there, ignore rules will

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not apply to files already synced online. files need to be manually removed from Dropbox.com.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So I tried this. They basically say, make a text file in your Dropbox and here’s the format

⏹️ ▶️ John of the text. I’m like, great, this is great. This will solve my problem because it has like rules kind of like get ignore rules where you can basically say, Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ John any directory that is named node underscore modules, no matter where it is, just ignore it. And so I did that

⏹️ ▶️ John and I was like, oh, it didn’t work. And then it said, oh, well the rules won’t apply if the files are already synced. I’m like, oh, maybe I have to go to Dropbox.com

⏹️ ▶️ John and like delete them. So because obviously they had previously synced and I went to Dropbox.com and they weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ John there. Like, well, but did it work? And so I kept doing a series of experiments. Basically,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would empty out a node modules directory, right, and when I emptied it out, and you know, rm minus

⏹️ ▶️ John rf, the contents of that directory, I would see in the little menu bar, like the, you know, the Dropbox

⏹️ ▶️ John popover would be like spinning, and if you click on it, you’d see a progress bar where it’s like syncing, you know, syncing 8,500

⏹️ ▶️ John files, right? And it would go, and this progress bar would go, and because I just deleted 8,500 files, and

⏹️ ▶️ John the progress bar would go and march along, and it would be like, done, right? Now I’ll put these ignore rules in. I try like

⏹️ ▶️ John every possible variation. Maybe I don’t understand the syntax. Maybe I should try every variation. Maybe I should try an

⏹️ ▶️ John absolute path. I just tried every possible ignore rule you could put for like totally, Dropbox, you’re gonna totally ignore this directory.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I would run npm install. And I would run npm install and it would create 8,500 files, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox would show a progress bar, sinking 8,000, but it wouldn’t actually sink any of them. It would just show the progress

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. And I guess it would, for each file, it would say, oh, this file appeared. Oh, that’s on my ignore list. Oh, this file appeared. Oh, that’s on my ignore list.

⏹️ ▶️ John still take time, it would still essentially delay the syncing of other files.

⏹️ ▶️ John As it looked at each one of those files, presumably, you know, drinking from the FS events fire

⏹️ ▶️ John hose, and just say, gotta ignore this one, gotta ignore this one, gotta ignore it. And it’s like, that’s not what I want Dropbox,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to just not touch them at all, or at the very least, don’t tie yourself up and don’t show up. And the progress bar was slow.

⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t like the progress bar in zip. Now it’s so much faster. Like, I timed the progress bar when I was ignoring

⏹️ ▶️ John them when I was not ignoring them. And they weren’t that different. Like it was in the margin of error both directions because they’re small files

⏹️ ▶️ John and have a fast internet connection. So this is a super weird feature. Like I left it in there. I’m like,

⏹️ ▶️ John all right, well, I guess I bother, I don’t need them to actually be synced, but it’s not solving my

⏹️ ▶️ John problem, which is when I do lots of activity in node modules, the actual files that I

⏹️ ▶️ John want to sync have to contend with the processing of the node module files and that still seems to be the case. And I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ John a non-file provider version, so maybe it’s different for file provider, but I have to give a thumb sideways to this feature from Dropbox.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Noted. Good to know. All right. And then speaking of Dropbox, you can also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use what is the correct verbal pronunciation for this thing, John? Just mark

⏹️ ▶️ Casey him.

⏹️ ▶️ John Enum. I say Xatters or extended attributes. Zatters.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can use Zatters or Shatterans. Zatterans. And maybe it’s Shatters. Anyways, you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use XATTRS. You can use those things to tell Dropbox that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a file or folder should be ignored. Baz Mandalo writes, solving ignoring node modules

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and other folders from syncing on a Mac. And this is a Medium post. God help me, every time I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey open a Medium post, I get angry because of the stupid popovers and how hostile it is to reading,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, this post is actually pretty good and talks about how you can accomplish this using.

⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, there’s two sets of extended attributes, one for file provider and one for not file provider. And of course, you have to remember to set

⏹️ ▶️ John them on the files in the Dropbox. It’s kind of like the time machine ignoring thing. you can set extended attributes on files to

⏹️ ▶️ John have time machine ignore them. So now you need some mechanism to make sure every time you make a new node in modules director, you always make sure you

⏹️ ▶️ John set the correct XADR for your version of Dropbox on it, yada yada, but just suffice it to say there’s you can do

⏹️ ▶️ John the XADR approach or the Dropbox rules file thing.

Time Machine vs. npm

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then with regard to Time Machine, as we had just mentioned a moment ago, Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gallo writes, regarding John’s issues with Node modules and Time Machine, I found that switching to PNPM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey helped a lot. PNPM stores all package files in a single content addressable store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on disk and hard links them into each project’s Node modules. So identical packages across projects only occupy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey space once. And this saves disk space and speeds up installs when packages are already in the store.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey For Time Machine specifically, the big win is that the project level node modules folders shrink down to mostly sim

⏹️ ▶️ Casey links. The stored stealth, it still gets backed up, but it’s only a single directory. Also, PMPM recently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey introduced more reasonable defaults to protect against supply chain attacks.

⏹️ ▶️ John This sounds very neat to me, but I’m always terrified of running anything other than the bog standard stuff in Node,

⏹️ ▶️ John so I didn’t actually try it. But kudos to them for coming up with the cool way to make things

⏹️ ▶️ John faster and save space.

20th-anniversary iPhone series?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, moving completely sideways, the 20th anniversary iPhone’s curved

⏹️ ▶️ Casey display is going to get better a year after the 20th anniversary iPhone is released. Which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this always cracks me up when we have news about like current iPhone plus

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two or three or whatever. But nevertheless, Tim Hardwick at MacRumors writes, Apple’s already

⏹️ ▶️ Casey planning a second version of the quote, four edge bending display that is rumored to debut on next

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year’s 20th anniversary iPhone, claims a new report out of Korea. ET News reports that Apple is planning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a two-stage rollout for the new OLED display technology that the commemorative iPhone will use,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a more advanced version said to be coming a year later. For the 2027 variant, Apple will reportedly rely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on OLED technology that uses a magnesium silver alloy in the cathode layer. This implementation

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can cause image distortion and brightness loss in curved areas, but Apple is apparently willing to live with the compromise for the 20th anniversary

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone while more advanced technology scales. Apple then plans to address the issue in the 2028

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone by transitioning to next-generation transparent electrodes. Apple will reportedly switch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to indium zinc oxide cathode materials, and because IZO

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is more transparent, it should reduce distortion, uneven brightness, and heat issues around the curved edges when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey enabling even narrower bezels.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is relevant to Marco wondering whether the 20th anniversary phone would be like the 20th anniversary Mac and be like a

⏹️ ▶️ John one and done special model. But if they’re planning a second variant the next year, it

⏹️ ▶️ John seems like they’re at the very least at this moment, to be believed, hoping that the curved screen

⏹️ ▶️ John is not a disaster and it turns out that people mostly like it and eventually all phones will look like that. But we’ll see.

Reminder and Reminders updates

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so long long time ago, I don’t know it was like 10 15 episodes ago

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco was talking about reminders and had some very reasonable gripes about it. I don’t even remember what iOS version we were on I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was 26 dot something and at the time the whole of the internet the same entire

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet that spoke to us earlier wrote in to ask if Marco had tried the alarm style

⏹️ ▶️ Casey reminders and we’ll put a link in the show notes to what exactly this means this is a a post for Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rumors that explains how you can set alarm-style iPhone reminders in iOS 26.2.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Marco, were you aware of this at the time or perhaps now? Have you messed with this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Morgan At the time, I don’t think I knew about it. I do know about it now and I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco messed with it because I am building an app that, you know, at least so far for myself,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I will probably end up releasing it at some point, But I’m building an app called Tentatively Reminder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’ve mentioned on the show before. And it reads and writes the reminders

⏹️ ▶️ Marco database. And I had what I wanted to make sure of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much of the built in reminders features am I covering? And how many of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features would my app either, you know, have to reimplement to support them or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many of the features are not even available in the API for me to detect or set? So therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will I clobber those features on those reminders if my app edits them? And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the alarm reminder is one of these, one of the latter things, where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reminders API does not contain anything about the alarm reminders whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you edit those in the API, if you edit their alarm objects at all, those just get blown away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not used them, but you know, except in testing, but I did find in testing an alarm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is exactly what you think it is. It’s a reminder that at a certain time makes the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone alarm function happen. So, you know, it’s, it’ll, it’ll break through,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t disturb, it’ll, it’ll make noise no matter what, it’s that kind of thing. So I suppose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are reasons people would want that, you know, that’s, it’s a, it’s a big world, but, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t imagine a reason why I would personally use that. I like, I like reminders

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I like And I think in my life, those are two separate things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am now aware of these, my reminder app will not and cannot support them. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really see a need for them myself, but I’m sure people like them.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they were suggested to you because this was so long ago when you were talking about, why am I making a reminders app for myself?

⏹️ ▶️ John Why am I unsatisfied with current solutions? And it was like, well, maybe this will solve the problem. I think you were talking about like how

⏹️ ▶️ John a reminder will come up and you’ll dismiss it and then forget that it existed and everyone has suggested do

⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah, blah. And that’s right around when alarm reminders are coming out then. And people were thinking, this will solve your problem. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John these are harder to ignore because there are literally alarms, but you don’t want it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, cause the reality is, here’s what I would do. I would hit okay or snooze.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be angry cause it like made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John noise.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I would forget it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Now- I think you

⏹️ ▶️ John have to swipe now, don’t you? You can’t just hit a button.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they do like, when you test one of these out, It does have a different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dismissal UI than a regular alarm does. It has like a live activity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a whole thing you have to like, you know, tell it that it’s done. So it is a little bit more involved.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can see why people suggested it to me, but it’s not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then this all was spoken about a long time ago, like I said, but you were very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey confused and justifiably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, no, I was not confused. I was angry.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, fair. You were angry about the way that snoozing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey works in reminders and Rob Howard wrote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey say…

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The labels in particular. This is what, this is what drove me nuts because so to recap, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem was, you know, I’ve been using reminders forever because that’s how I get anything done and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications for Apple Reminders would say things, you know, it would be like 8

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a.m. and I get a reminder and I would go to snooze and it would say, remind me this morning. It’s 8am.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is this morning. So it turns out those actually mapped to exact

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times. They just didn’t want to say.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So Rob Howard writes in, the snooze options and reminders are actually pretty consistent, but Apple being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, you have to figure it out for yourself. Remind me in the morning means it will go

⏹️ ▶️ Casey off at the next 9am. Remind me in the afternoon means it will go off at the next 3pm.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me this evening means it will go off at the next 6pm. Remind me tomorrow will go off

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the originally scheduled time, but tomorrow. So Rob writes, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this does mean if a reminder goes off to 57pm and you say remind me this afternoon, it will go off three minutes later.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this like, and can I just say, morning being 9am and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco afternoon being 3pm. Your California is showing Apple. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. All right. And then with IO six, I will keep saying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 6, iOS 26.5. There we go. We got there everyone. There were a bunch of changes around this and Ryan Christoffel writes for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 9to5Mac, as discovered by Aaron Paris, Apple has updated the language for its snoozing options in iOS 26.5 to make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very clear what time a reminder will pop back up. For example, here are the snoozing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey options I saw this morning in iOS 26.5. Remind me in one hour, remind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me at 3pm, or remind me tomorrow. Additionally, Ryan writes, the second option

⏹️ ▶️ Casey changes based on the time of day. So you’ll see the 3 PM language change if it’s not currently morning. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for example, in the evening, you’ll see an option that snoozes until tomorrow at 9 AM.

⏹️ ▶️ John So was that so hard Apple? It only took what five, six years. I don’t know how long these options have been this

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bad, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John much longer, like it’s been so long and like, just, you just wonder like the original, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, they came up with this maybe in the first version of reminders that had this feature and they said, well, what should the tech say? And it’s like, well, we don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John to be so precise and people are maybe picky about it. So let’s just say morning, afternoon, evening, and tomorrow,

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll just pick times and it will be fine. And how many years does it take of literally billions

⏹️ ▶️ John of people using this feature and all of them having no idea what these things, no one would guess the behavior

⏹️ ▶️ John because the behavior is bad and doesn’t make any sense. And you would think like after

⏹️ ▶️ John the years and years of confusion, they were like, why don’t we just say when it’s gonna, I mean, we have limited

⏹️ ▶️ John options. Obviously it might be better to have more flexible options. And I know there’s a way to customize it. You can go into it like there are, but like we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna give some quick options. Why don’t we just say what they are? Remind me one hour, remind me at 3 p.m. Remind

⏹️ ▶️ John me tomorrow at 9 a.m. Was that so hard?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, look, you know I’m a very humble person. I’m taking full credit for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this.

⏹️ ▶️ John We did a podcast and then two weeks later, I was 26.5 fixed it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, cause I’ve been complaining about this for months and no, I’ve never heard anybody else complain about this. And I’ve complained about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very aggressively for the last couple of months.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve complained about it within my household. That’s for sure. I mean, look, the whole world has been subject

⏹️ ▶️ John to these terrible labels forever. I’m sure people have complained about it just idly to themselves,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah. But I, because this is like, one of my reasons for making my own reminder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app was that those snooze notification options drove me so nuts because I just never knew what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they meant. And it would always seem like, again, it would be like, you know, it would be 2.30 PM and it would say, remind me this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco afternoon. What does that mean? You know? And it turns out it meant 3 PM.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have to pause and think about it. Like it just has like a, it’s like a thinking hitch, you know? Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, so I, I am still happy that I’m making my own reminding app because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding lots of other nice little customizations that make my life that make it work the way it fits me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and I don’t know if anybody else will ever use this app. I do plan to release it as I said, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it to fit me. Um, and it’s, it’s pretty opinionated in certain ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result to surprise nobody. Um, so we’ll see about that. But anyway, I’m glad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see Apple is kind of swallowing a little bit of their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco design purity pride and just giving us concrete options that tell you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco times so that it’s more predictable.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s design purity, I think it’s neglect. I think no one has even considered the badness that

⏹️ ▶️ John has existed for many years because it’s just like, well, we’re not working on that feature now, why would I ever look at it or think about it?

⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m sure Apple employees are annoyed by it too, but it’s like, well, that’s not on the schedule, It’s not what we’re doing. It’s not prioritized.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it just takes a certain amount of, like, can we just actually get any human being ever to look at this

⏹️ ▶️ John and find the one obvious problem and fix it? And it’s like, especially in this case, it’s not just a matter

⏹️ ▶️ John of changing some strings. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge change. I mean, I know it’s got to be localized and everything. But

⏹️ ▶️ John like, on the scale of a company the size of Apple, I feel like this change did not need to

⏹️ ▶️ John wait the vast number of years that we had to wait for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s one of those things, like, I think you’re right. it is most likely the result of neglect. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many areas in the common system apps. Like I believe it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John Gruber was just talking about like how like the contact app is like so ancient and basic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you look at you know all of Apple’s built in apps like the ones that kind of have like not a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of attention like contact is a great example. Certainly reminders,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco calendar, I would say. Notes seems to have a pretty good amount of effort. But like the other those other

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, it just seems like much of the time they have a staff of literally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero people on them. Maybe in like, as Apple is, you know, considering its, you know, certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leadership changes and restructurings and things, I would love, one thing I would love is just like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more of an ability to multitask. And they already look, they have a lot of platforms,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of products, like they’re multitasking way better now than they used to. But there still seems like there’s so many areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their products and software that just go years with seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one touching them and we’ve actually heard from people inside that that is literally the case that like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things have like literally no staff or there’s like one engineer who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solely by themselves manages like 16 different system apps that are all. It

⏹️ ▶️ John was my joke about terminal having 0.15 people on it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s we’ve heard multiple times over the years that is literally the situation for a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these apps that there really isn’t anybody working on them because it seems like you know for whatever reason the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco internal structures that that is where the intent the incentives that’s what they create

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that kind of situation and I would love for for that to change over time. It’s like imagine imagine how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better the basic system apps like reminders and calendar and stuff like that. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much how much better they could be if they had even one full-time person

⏹️ ▶️ Marco each because it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t. only job was to make that app better and not by implementing the new feature

⏹️ ▶️ John of the month, not by adding AI to it, but instead, you know, whatever the existing functionality

⏹️ ▶️ John is, find the parts of it that didn’t work so well last year, fix the bugs, speed it up, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in this case, like in the case of contacts on Mac OS, I almost wish there were zero people on it because

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever fraction of a person did mess with contacts for Tahoe just made it worse.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s almost worse to like understaff it and then require them to make changes like like liquid glassify it like

⏹️ ▶️ John the contacts app got worse in Tahoe. It is uglier, it is harder to use, and it has either the

⏹️ ▶️ John same number of features or fewer features depending on how you look at it. That’s not good. Like it would have been better if they

⏹️ ▶️ John just left it untouched. But it would be even better if every year got a little bit better. Like, we like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is weird, because I don’t know the economics of everything works. But we like to think of like these apps like, well, if that was

⏹️ ▶️ John an indie app, the indie would be busting their butt every year to keep up with the OS changes and template new

⏹️ ▶️ John features and to fix bugs and to find the parts that their users are confused about and improve them and blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you have a solo indie developer for every app, would that break the bank at Apple? Because that’s how we conceptualize

⏹️ ▶️ John it. But that’s as you just point out, Mark, that’s not how they do it. They don’t they don’t put one indie developer per

⏹️ ▶️ John small app on each iOS, I guess, because they just think it’s a poor use of resources. And I would

⏹️ ▶️ John argue that it would be an amazing use of resources if

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything got better

⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere every year in small ways. And then you have a separate team. I’m like, okay, well, a big feature this year is you got to do

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence integration. That would be separate from the single indie app developer who’s just there

⏹️ ▶️ John fixing bugs, improving performance and finding the parts of the app that are confusing and making them less confusing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like, you know, you look at something like I saw Flexibits and who makes fantastic colleges celebrated, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe, their 15th birthday. Look at something like fantastic. How did this amazing calendar app that that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was made? I don’t know how big they are now, but certainly originally they were pretty small company. I think it was like, you know, just a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. you know, that’s an amazing app, tons of amazing features, loved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by so many people, really hits so many needs better than Apple’s app. And that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was made by like a few people, you know, forever ago. I believe the same company, don’t they also make Cardhop?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that their contact app? I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey believe that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, it’s like a better contact app. You know, that’s another big thing. Look at how many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people make, believe me, as I’m finding, just as a quick aside here,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been trying to come up with a backup name for my reminder app because I’m pretty sure Apple probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t let me call it reminder. Trying to come up with a name for a to-do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app in the app store in 2026. There’s only a few of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is comical. Like every name is taken. Or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll go down like a route in my head. I’ll be like, I was driving home the other day from picking up my kid

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I, oh, let’s see. What about an app that helps you remember, what animals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco help you remember? Oh, elephants. Oh, I just reinvented Evernote.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco one’s ever

⏹️ ▶️ John thought

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of

⏹️ ▶️ John that before.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally every idea I have, it leads me right into an app that already exists.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because as it turns out, there are many reminding and to-do and productivity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John apps. You

⏹️ ▶️ John got to use the passphrase, password strategy and go with, you know, cracks horse battery

⏹️ ▶️ John staple, because as you add more words, the combination becomes less and less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to already exist. I mean, honestly, that’s what I’m going to have to do, is some

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of just totally unrelated word or word pairing. One of those hipster

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brands like oak and moss or whatever. Just something just totally non-sequitur

⏹️ ▶️ Marco words, because everything is taken.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or you could go the Amazon approach and just put a random collection of consonants with nowhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey near enough vowels in there and just go with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John all caps.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Or you

⏹️ ▶️ John could do the Alexa approach just prefix everything with your name, Marco Reminders.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, that’s, I hope they just let me call it Reminder because it’s such a good name. They won’t. They won’t. No,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they definitely won’t. And they honestly probably shouldn’t. But it’s, I understand why that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to be challenging. Also, you shouldn’t call your app that either. That’s also a bad name.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a terrible name, but also an amazing name because that’s what it does. It reminds you. It’s a great name.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really isn’t, Marco. I love you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the reverse of the Aliens movie with dollar sign for the S.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You’re just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John what if reminders but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take off the S? What if I make a magazine and call it The Magazine?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drop the the. It’s cleaner, right? Or maybe that’s the answer. The reminders. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you got to do. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reminders. The reminder. It’s singular. I like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that. Actually, that’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The reminder.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds like a bad Jason Statham movie.

⏹️ ▶️ John He doesn’t track people down. He just sends people notifications. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you want to be reminded again this afternoon? Oh my gosh.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Claude. I’ve actually used Claude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think seven or eight times today so far. Claude is the AI for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minds that don’t stop at good enough. It’s the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thinks with you. Whether you’re debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude

⏹️ ▶️ Marco extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So today I was using Claude in a number of different ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco First I was using Claude code. Now this is, look, you’ve probably heard about it already, let’s be honest, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it runs in your terminal, it reads your code base, and it can take on tasks like writing tests,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I love, because I don’t want to write those myself, refactoring code, or, here’s what I use it for a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco debugging, and you don’t have to be hand-holding it and walking it through every step, or copying things and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pasting things back between different windows or everything, it’s all right there working in your code with you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have found Cloud Code can really help me figure out edge case bugs on things. Like some algorithm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve written Like I, you know, I was trying to align the ad break detection for overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the transcripts would line up with different ads inserted. I got the algorithm mostly right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Claude Code found some edge cases and it fixed them for me. And I was able to review all the code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. It wasn’t even that much code, but it’s still like, and it made a bunch of tests for me. It was amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love using Claude Code for stuff like that, because it’s the debugging partner and the very diligent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tester that I’ve never had. And it does it all for me. So I strongly recommend check

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out Claude. There’s so much else you can do with it. That’s just one example. There’s so many great reasons to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Claude. So for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. That’s Claude.ai slash ATP and check out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features that I mentioned. Claude.ai

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you so much to Claude for helping me out and for sponsoring our show.

People really hate AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey John, why does everyone hate AI?

⏹️ ▶️ John This is a topic that the verge has been covering a lot lately and uh, and they’re covering it for a reason. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, it’s in the zeitgeist and particularly there’s a couple of events that happened recently that are just adding on the pile here,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I thought we would just go through some of the bullet points. I will preface this by saying, um, I mean

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to talk about other people’s opinions cause there’s a lot of like surveys and what other people, mostly Americans think about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Okay. Um, and people have their reasons and they have their opinions or whatever. And you can’t really argue with their opinions. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John what they think. It’s interesting for us to talk about because we were like, why do we think they think that? And that’s what I’m sure we’ll discuss.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I would say for myself personally, I think there are a huge number of what

⏹️ ▶️ John I think are extremely valid reasons to hate AI. Despite what we all talk about, all the things

⏹️ ▶️ John that we like about it, and the things that it’s good at, and the things people do. We just had the last episode of the overtime about non-app developers making

⏹️ ▶️ John apps. And we’ve got so much feedback from other people doing that. Like, just because good exists doesn’t mean that it’s not also bad exists. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then the question is, OK, given the view of the world, like obviously the things that loom large in our mind as

⏹️ ▶️ John developers is like we’re talking about development topics, which happens to be something that this AI technology is actually pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ John at. But that’s not the only thing people are doing with AI. And then what about the people who

⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t even using it at all, but just have an opinion on it based on what they experience in the world and hear about? So that’s this

⏹️ ▶️ John broader topic. So I know this is opinions of other people. And even though we have talked recently

⏹️ ▶️ John about the useful or fun things that we’re doing with AI in the particular narrow realm of programming, which I think is,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe, maybe this is a narrow view because I’m just a developer. In my opinion, it’s the thing that AI is the best

⏹️ ▶️ John at, like LLMs are the best at maybe, but maybe I’m wrong because I just have a narrow view, but either way, the

⏹️ ▶️ John world of AI is so much bigger and lots of people have negative opinions about it as we’ll see.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Righto. So Pew Research did a study and wrote a post about it. How Americans view AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and its impact on people and society. We’ll put a link to this in a bunch of different graphs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. I’m going to read out some bullets that John has extracted from that post.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey 50% of US adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey daily life. This is an increase, which is up from 37 to 50 in 2021.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a lot more people are saying, I’m not so sure about this. Additionally, about half

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of US adults say AI will worsen people’s to think creatively and form

⏹️ ▶️ Casey meaningful relationships. And let me remind you about our member special. The vast majority

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of US adults think it is important to be able to tell the difference between AI and human generated content, but few

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel confident that they can. When I was reading this and when I was preparing for the show this morning, I read

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that line and felt like, I don’t think I’m terrible at figuring out what’s AI and what’s not, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say I feel particularly confident about it. So I’m right there with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And decreasingly confident as days pass.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, very much so. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t stay the same.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, absolutely. All right, about half of US adults are highly concerned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that people’s ability to do things on their own will get worse because of AI use. The majority of US

⏹️ ▶️ Casey adults rate the risks of AI for society as high. Fewer rate the benefits of AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as high. And finally, from Pew, young adults are more likely than adults 65 and older

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say they’ve heard about or interact regularly with AI.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that makes sense, young people using it more. And again, these are just people’s opinions. You don’t know how informed their opinions

⏹️ ▶️ John are or what their opinions are based on, but this is just what they’re thinking and feeling. They’re thinking that

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like it might cause people to be de-skilled is the word that they’re throwing around these days for this,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that it’s making things worse instead of better, and that the potential downsides are not as

⏹️ ▶️ John good as the potential upsides. And again, if you were in this industry, which we are

⏹️ ▶️ John not really, it would be worth thinking about why people have these opinions, because part of the problem,

⏹️ ▶️ John part of the angle that The Verge has been taking on this is like, oh, but they’re wrong. They don’t know X,

⏹️ ▶️ John Y, and Z. And it’s like, it doesn’t matter that they’re wrong, if they’re wrong, even if they are wrong, it matters

⏹️ ▶️ John that they think this. And they’re thinking this for a reason. Like they’re not coming with these opinions out of thin air. They’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John so consistent that there’s something happening in their lives related to AI that is giving

⏹️ ▶️ John them these opinions in vast numbers. And it just gets worse. But anyway, with young people being more likely

⏹️ ▶️ John than older adults to say that they’ve heard about interact regularly with AI makes total sense. Like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John young people are more hip to technology. I’m sure young people are probably much more into

⏹️ ▶️ John AI than older people. Well, they use it more, but…

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, so The Verge, as you said, have been banging this drum for a while. And so a post from the end of April

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this year, Janice Rose at The Verge writes, far from the stereotype of lazy young people looking for shortcuts,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gen Zers have had some of the loudest and most detailed objections to generative AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use. Their attitudes also reflected much wider backlash against AI and the tech industry in general,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which has recently resulted in a nonpartisan movement against data centers across the country and threatened both

⏹️ ▶️ Casey CEOs and politicians supportive of Silicon Valley’s AI frenzy. According to a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent Harvard Gallup study, 74% of young adults surveyed in the United States said they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use a chatbot at least once a month. At the same time, 79% of those surveyed by Gallup,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, expressed concern that AI makes people lazier. And 65%

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said that using chatbots, quote, promotes instant gratification, not real understanding,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and prevents people from engaging with ideas in a critical or meaningful way. And in a more recent Gallup

⏹️ ▶️ Casey poll, Gen Z’s opinion of AI tools hit a new low. Only 18% now say they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are hopeful about the technology, down from 27% last year. And only 22% say they are excited, down from 36%.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The number of Gen Z workers who think AI’s risks outweigh its benefits has also

⏹️ ▶️ Casey increased over the past year by 11 points to almost 50%. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think the deltas are important here. This is from April, 2026, this article. So it’s not as

⏹️ ▶️ John if like, like these, the headline is here is young people are using AI more, they hate it more.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like AI use is increasing. Like we all see that young people are using it more than old people and year over year,

⏹️ ▶️ John more young people are using it and they’re using it more. And over one year gap, they went from 20%

⏹️ ▶️ John saying they’re hopeful about the technology, which is already not great. That’s last year. And then it goes down more to 18,

⏹️ ▶️ John Only 18% they’re hopeful about the technology? These are

⏹️ ▶️ John rough numbers for the public perception of AI. Among the group that you would think would be

⏹️ ▶️ John the most receptive to it, young people who are using it more than other people. But they super don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The fear that chatbot tools will lead to a permanent loss of critical thinking skills ranks high among the worries

⏹️ ▶️ Casey held by young people about the technology. It’s also backed up by data. A recent study from the MIT Media Lab

⏹️ ▶️ Casey found that EEG scans of the human brain show decreased activity in people who have been writing essays using AI

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools. Other research has found that this process known as cognitive offloading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a wide range of negative impacts on humans, including diminishing people’s skepticism and their ability to discern

⏹️ ▶️ Casey truth from deception, leading to heightened manipulation and weakened democratic decision-making

⏹️ ▶️ Casey processes. The fact that so many young people are well aware of these dangers, even as they make

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use of the tools, shows that they aren’t buying the hype of AI boosters like OpenAI’s Sam Altman. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one other explanation for Gen Z’s stance on AI tools that isn’t measured in data points. AI use has become culturally

⏹️ ▶️ Casey toxic and many young people, like their older counterparts, won’t admit to using it out of social shame.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is one of those things where like, if, speaking of Sam Altman and OpenAI, and

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to them, I’m sure, as we discuss this a little bit more, but like for the people in the industry

⏹️ ▶️ John who are announcing products and giving speeches and doing interviews about

⏹️ ▶️ John their current technology and the promise of their future technology and everything. It’s really easy

⏹️ ▶️ John for them to not have their finger on the pulse of what the world broadly,

⏹️ ▶️ John what impression the world is broadly getting from their tech. Because at this point in their

⏹️ ▶️ John growth, it’s like we need to get funding, we need to scale, we need to fiercely battle with our competitors, we got to

⏹️ ▶️ John have the best model, we got to add this feature, we got to do this thing. And it’s easy for them to also focus on the realms

⏹️ ▶️ John where where they’ve got customers, they’re collecting money, people love it, like the coding agents and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Anthropic and Claude Code, and all their government contracts and the battles. They’re like, there’s so much for them to focus

⏹️ ▶️ John on. It’s easy in this stage in their development to not really be thinking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John but what does everyone think of us? Because it’s almost like not relevant to them. And they just assume, well, everyone loves

⏹️ ▶️ John technology. And like, if old people are scared of it because they’re like, oh no, it’s gonna, you know, do something bad, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be fine. The young people will pick it up or whatever. But like, I feel like the older people and the industry

⏹️ ▶️ John people are failing to see what’s happening as evidenced

⏹️ ▶️ John by two coincidentally very recent events where some adults

⏹️ ▶️ John totally did not, as we say, read the room, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in a

⏹️ ▶️ John catastrophic way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So four or four media reported both of these stories on may 11, speaking to graduates of the university of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey central Florida commencement speaker, Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Group,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey told graduating humanities students that AI is the next industrial revolution and was met with thousands

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of booing graduates.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is such a weird phenomenon. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I’m aware, this is not a hot button political issue where students arranged

⏹️ ▶️ John a protest because they knew the speaker was coming and was going to say this, and we’re going to protest because they’re talking about,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, some selling arms to people or whatever, and they’re going to protest. It’s not like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we, we, a group of students are against this thing. You invited a speaker who’s about

⏹️ ▶️ John this thing and they’re going to come here. If you watch the video and listen to the audio, it seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially be a mostly spontaneous thing where a couple of people who are against

⏹️ ▶️ John the I started booing and then everyone just joined in. But it’s like, you know what? Yeah, screw AI. And this

⏹️ ▶️ John person, to be clear, like I don’t like I don’t think they were an AI booster. They were just mentioning it offhand.

⏹️ ▶️ John But they’re like, is the thing I’m talking about? It’s a new thing in technology. And these are graduating kids. And they’re probably like, they didn’t give it

⏹️ ▶️ John a, probably didn’t give it a second thought to their offhanded mention of AI as like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an up and coming thing. Like everyone agrees with that, right? And I’m giving you a commencement address. Like, I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone would have flagged that as a you’re sure you want to say this in your speech because it seems so undangerous

⏹️ ▶️ John to people who don’t understand how AI is currently being perceived and received

⏹️ ▶️ John by the public. And so they get up in front of a bunch of students and you can see the speaker, like cheese

⏹️ ▶️ John just did not expect this. And so I feel like it was a genuine response.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was essentially spontaneous. The booing grew because it tapped into something that people were feeling, but

⏹️ ▶️ John not saying. And the speaker was like, what the, what’s going on? I didn’t think this is not a controversial

⏹️ ▶️ John section of my talk.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh. And then, so again, that was on May 11th. So May 17

⏹️ ▶️ Casey former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, Schmidt was booed throughout his commencement speech at the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey University of Arizona for his praise of AI. This comes just a week after another commencement speaker who also mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI was booted at a school in Florida.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of reasons to boo Eric Schmidt, to be fair. Like, but

⏹️ ▶️ John just, I mean, this is one where you know the guy’s going to come and he’s going to talk about AI. So maybe these people were prepared and obviously they probably

⏹️ ▶️ John saw the video on the internet of the other person being booed, but the kids are like, yeah, we

⏹️ ▶️ John should do that. We should do that because we want them to know we don’t like what’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, we are not hopeful about the 18% of us are hopeful about the technology. That’s a low

⏹️ ▶️ John percent. So don’t talk about it. We don’t want to hear about it. We don’t want to hear about your stupid AI, even

⏹️ ▶️ John though they’re all using it and like they realized it is like a thing, but like they don’t like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not happy about it. And I think probably Eric Schmidt was surprisingly shouldn’t have been because again, there are many reasons to

⏹️ ▶️ John dislike him. So maybe he should have expected to be booed, but this was just such an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John coincidence of events where, and I just went to my son’s

⏹️ ▶️ John commencement address where there was no booing by the way, but mentions of technology and things to

⏹️ ▶️ John get reactions from the crowd is a good way to gauge, you know, how are the kids feeling about

⏹️ ▶️ John what the industry is doing? And they don’t feel good about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, seemingly not. And then Joanna Stern has recently left the Wall Street Journal, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And started The New Things. And there is a post about this that she put up today as well as a YouTube

⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, which we will link in the show notes as well. And in there, she apparently talked,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, John, you were the one who took a look at this. She talked to a recent UCF journalism grad, is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was just like, let’s grab one person who’s a student of, who had recently graduated and talked to them about how they

⏹️ ▶️ John feel as AI to give like a human face to this type of opinion. You can watch this like a YouTube short or whatever. This is just an excuse

⏹️ ▶️ John to link to Joanna Stern’s new thing that you should subscribe to. The domain is thenewthings.com.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the actual branding of the newsletter is new things with Joanna Stern. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, if you want to see what she’s up to, you can subscribe to her newsletter again, not sponsored. I just think she’s fun person

⏹️ ▶️ John to watch and she makes fun content.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, there’s things like, uh, the AI friend necklace on the daily show, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen the daily show in a long time. I know their reporters

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, you know, obviously comedians and whatnot, but were the other two numbskulls on this with, were those actors

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or these real honest people?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey great

⏹️ ▶️ John that you have to ask that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was so unbelievable. I thought they were real people and then it was so ridiculous. I was like, man, they must be actors.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, we talked about the friend necklace on a past episode, I believe. It’s one of those like pendants that goes around your neck that’s going

⏹️ ▶️ John to be like your AI friend. I’m pretty sure the people they’re talking to are the actual

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, founders or whatever, representatives of this company. And they’re just obviously the comedy shows. So they’re making fun

⏹️ ▶️ John of them saying, why don’t you get a real friend and stuff like that. But like the fact that you can make a comedy sketch out of this, I mean, obviously the The

⏹️ ▶️ John product is ridiculous and these people should not have gone on the show, but they probably thought it was worthwhile

⏹️ ▶️ John for the free publicity, even though they’re mercilessly ridiculed for the entire thing. But like stuff like this, where

⏹️ ▶️ John there is some company that somehow got funding that thinks, you know, your friend should be a thing that hangs around your neck

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re going to make that a product and make all these ads for it. And then they become comedy fodder on the daily show to

⏹️ ▶️ John just rip them a new one and say, let’s laugh at these people. Now, that’s not, you know, again,

⏹️ ▶️ John people’s opinion and what currently gets laughed at now doesn’t necessarily say what things

⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be successful in the future. I’m sure you can find probably things from specifically from the

⏹️ ▶️ John Daily Show where they took some new technology and made a very funny sketch about it and that technology

⏹️ ▶️ John later went on to dominate the entire culture and we all love it. But where we’re at right now is

⏹️ ▶️ John the get the get the startup founders on the Daily Show and mercilessly mock them for what we perceive

⏹️ ▶️ John to be their extremely silly product and their as you put it out to Casey ridiculous statements about

⏹️ ▶️ John it, ridiculous, overblown statements about it, because that’s where we are in the hype cycle for this.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this video was incredible in both excellent and not so excellent ways.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, it was just astonishing. And then relevant, but tangentially related

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to all this, Americans really, really, really do not like AI data centers in their area. We

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can point to our friend Stephen Hackett about this. But there was a Gallup post that came out recently

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. Let me read from that. Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in their local area, including nearly half or 48% who are strongly opposed barely a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quarter favor these projects with 7% strongly in favor. This March survey is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction and say March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose

⏹️ ▶️ Casey building a nuclear energy plant near their area. Far less than 71% opposed to data center construction

⏹️ ▶️ Casey said differently. People are more enthusiastic about nukes, nuclear energy than they are about data centers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they’ve been pulling about power plants, not, you know, not that not a lot, only back

⏹️ ▶️ John to 2001, that was what? 25. Yeah, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey For 25

⏹️ ▶️ John years they’ve been pulling about it and the most opposition they’ve ever gotten in their 25

⏹️ ▶️ John years of polling about nuclear power plants was 63% opposed. AI

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco data centers

⏹️ ▶️ John are at 71% opposed. But if you give people a choice, Would you rather have an AI data

⏹️ ▶️ John center built near you or a nuclear power plant? People are going with nuclear power plant. I don’t know. That’s weird for the rest

⏹️ ▶️ John of the world because the rest of the world has nuclear power and we basically abandoned it after three mile island in Chernobyl

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything and setting the side, the, you know, again, reality versus perception. The perception in this country

⏹️ ▶️ John was no thanks

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to nuclear

⏹️ ▶️ John power. And so I think it would have to like three mile island, something like a hundred in progress, nuclear power plants

⏹️ ▶️ John in the United States were just basically canceled because it was essentially public sentiment was like, I don’t care about the facts.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about how much you tell me about how it’s safe. It is. No, I don’t want it. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and data centers,

⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know, have not sprayed radiation anywhere now, although maybe the one that you’re Stephen Hackett

⏹️ ▶️ John is, uh, cause that’s run by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Elon, but yeah, maybe not radiation, but it’s certainly a lot of, they’re certainly causing a lot of pollution as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they burn a whole bunch of natural gas to get quick power.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And, and dirtying the water and taking resources and stuff like that, right? But, um, but yeah, people

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want and you could chalk this up to like NIMBY ism, which people aren’t familiar with the phrase is not in my backyard ism

⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, Oh, I’m fine with whatever, but I don’t want it in my backyard. I want it somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ John else. Like every, you know, everyone likes the idea that, uh, you have garbage pickup and people

⏹️ ▶️ John come to your house and take your garbage away, but they don’t want where their garbage goes to be next to their house.

⏹️ ▶️ John They want it to be out of sight, out of mind. And so maybe people would be okay with the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John of data centers could be somewhere. But when it comes time to build one near their house, they’re like, no.

⏹️ ▶️ John And again, for lots of really good reasons, like Marco pointed out, a lot of them are being

⏹️ ▶️ John built hastily with, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just the Elon Musk ones, I don’t want to hear about

⏹️ ▶️ John because of Stephen Hackett, like we’re gonna build this huge data center to get enough power for it. We’re just gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John install a bunch of essentially like, I just think of it as like outdoor grills, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco basically like natural gas burning engine

⏹️ ▶️ John generators and we’ll just install dozens of them and just pump natural gas into them and spew

⏹️ ▶️ John into the atmosphere, all of their exhaust to generate the energy that we need for our data centers. And there’s all

⏹️ ▶️ John these rules like, well, you can’t do that there. You have to have a permit for this and you have to have an environment, look back, study, and you have to have this and you have

⏹️ ▶️ John to have that. And Elon says, what if I just do it? And what if I just pay off all the local politicians?

⏹️ ▶️ John So they let me do it. And that’s bad. And then there’s the noise, the noise of the generators

⏹️ ▶️ John and the noise that you think a data center doesn’t make any noise, not when it has all those things. You know? So and the water pollution

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything else. So yeah. And I do wonder, like this was something Ben Thompson said when they were

⏹️ ▶️ John discussing this topic. He’s like, well, if we told them the data center was for Netflix, people would be would not be opposed to it or

⏹️ ▶️ John not be as opposed to it because people like Netflix and they have a positive opinion of Netflix and a negative opinion of

⏹️ ▶️ John AI. But I don’t think anyone would really want a Netflix data center near them either if it was behaving

⏹️ ▶️ John in the same way as the identity centers in terms of noise, pollution and all that other stuff. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John and because our government is bought and sold because of our terrible, you know, our terrible system of government

⏹️ ▶️ John has led to a system of government where if you have a lot of money, you can pay off local politicians to

⏹️ ▶️ John ignore, uh, you know, the people and instead just say, well, they’re just going to give us so much money and they’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ John help me specifically get a lot of money. And with this money, I can convince you to keep reelecting me because money

⏹️ ▶️ John equals my ability to convince you to reelect, keep reelecting me. And there’s an infinite supply of money going in here. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I actually don’t care that you can’t get drinking water out of your faucets anymore. And I don’t care that you can’t sleep

⏹️ ▶️ John because of the noise. And I don’t care that they’re spewing pollution. I don’t care. We have rules against it. Money.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s kind of the situation we’re in with data centers. And does that make people like a more? No, it does not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the I think the energy question is obviously the biggest one, because, you know, the data

⏹️ ▶️ Marco centers are basically limited by only two major

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources, NVIDIA chips and energy. And the more energy they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can burn, the more capacity they can have and the more money they can make. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in the long term, what we’ve done is we’ve created a very strong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco financial incentive to make cheaper energy. And what’s amazing cheap energy?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Renewables, solar and wind. And it’s really, really cheap, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time. And it has a very, very, very low carbon footprint compared to almost everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco else that we could possibly come up with. And it doesn’t have the risk of radiation and meltdowns like nuclear

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having to deal with waste and having to buy all of our fuel from Russia and things like that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all sorts of amazing benefits and huge incentives to get lots

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of solar and wind built for data centers. In the long run, that is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. But in the short term, they’re impatient and greedy, and they’re just burning a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of natural gas. So they’re not doing any favors for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco our carbon footprint. They’re not doing any favors from the environment. They’re not doing any favors for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get ourselves off of fossil fuels over time. It’s just a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nightmare right now in the short term. I hope the long term goes towards

⏹️ ▶️ Marco renewables because, again, it just makes a ton of financial sense long term, but short term,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not seeing that to the scale that we should be seeing it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. If our, if our government system actually reflected the will of the people, this would be like logically

⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, this would be the absolute perfect opportunity for every local municipality where

⏹️ ▶️ John the someone wants to build a data center to say, sure, you can build any data center you want. It’s got to be a hundred

⏹️ ▶️ John percent powered by solar and wind, renewable, non-polluting things, but we’ll just pass a law that says

⏹️ ▶️ John that if you want to make a data center here, we’re this is the rules. You can’t you can’t take any of our water beyond

⏹️ ▶️ John what limits we set. You can’t the only energy you’re allowed to use is solar and batteries

⏹️ ▶️ John and wind and whatever other things like you can make the rules for it right? It’s like, wouldn’t that be because you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you want like we want the financial we want to tax base like there’s all these reasons where like, it’s not entirely

⏹️ ▶️ John bad to have a big new industry in your area. Although data centers do not employ a lot of people and there are a lot of other

⏹️ ▶️ John ancillary downsides or whatever. So like balance the equation, right? If the people were given a chance to to vote

⏹️ ▶️ John on something like this and actually elect representatives that reflected their will, you would never let them

⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, yeah, just do whatever you want. Set up as many polluting gas generators that are already against

⏹️ ▶️ John the law and just do it. And, you know, promise that you’re going to like the currently,

⏹️ ▶️ John Stephen’s talking about the water treatment plan, like, oh, we’re going to use water, but we’re going to install a water treatment plan and blah, blah, blah. But just don’t do it

⏹️ ▶️ John because nobody can stop you. Right. Because like there’s a disconnect between the obvious win,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you’re talking about Marco, which is like, this is a thing that doesn’t exist yet. I know it’s so hard to convert

⏹️ ▶️ John things that are currently using fossil fuels to renewables, which we should be doing anyway. But of course, our actual current government is

⏹️ ▶️ John our actual current federal government is vehemently opposed to that and is outlawing and adding fees

⏹️ ▶️ John to all renewable energy and paying companies to not build wind turbines. We’re all screwed over here. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John local governments like this, you have them over a barrel. They have to build it somewhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if everybody is against it, require them to be clean, renewable energy.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s like, it’s just, it’s so mind boggling. But of course that’s not how it works. How it

⏹️ ▶️ John works is, you know, money talks and the, the will of the people walks. And so they just, and another,

⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing that Ben came up with was like, what if they just said they would give everyone who lives near the data center money

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a cut of the the revenue or profit or whatever, going through the data centers to just pay them off.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the grouper link to the like Alaska, the state of the US state of Alaska has this thing where

⏹️ ▶️ John oil revenues are shared with the citizens every year from some long ago agreement. So every resident of Alaska

⏹️ ▶️ John gets like 1500 bucks every year as like their cut of like allowing the oil industry to be in Alaska.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and so if you’re going to build an AI data center, uh, and people in the town are like going

⏹️ ▶️ John to try to vote it down or whatever, what have you just told them? Every one of them will get a thousand dollars a check every year for the thing or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is like, It kind of reminds me of people like

⏹️ ▶️ John selling their organs when they’re desperate for money. You can pay people

⏹️ ▶️ John to do things that are not in their own interest. Like that’s one of the most sort of like devious

⏹️ ▶️ John and not very nice things to do. Because if you offer the entire population,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll all get $1,000 and in exchange they all get cancer and die in 15 years. They’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John all take it, but it’s not the right thing to do. It is the worst spot. I am not in favor

⏹️ ▶️ John of, hey, just offer people cash to do a thing that’s going to harm them, because people will make

⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong choice. And it’s like, oh, it’s paternalistic. Just let them choose what they want. But that kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of incentive is bad. It’s the same reason you can’t pay someone to vote for someone else. Why not just allow it? I’m sure in a few years

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be allowing that, too. But I believe it is currently illegal to pay someone to vote for a particular politician.

⏹️ ▶️ John If they could, it would be a much more efficient use of all the money they funnel. They would just pay everybody to vote for who they wanted.

⏹️ ▶️ John But this is basically the same thing. I will just give you money and everyone just wants. I just need to pay my bill that

⏹️ ▶️ John that thousand dollar check that I’m going to get today. It’s all I care about. I don’t care that, you know, this is going

⏹️ ▶️ John to pollute the water or do some other harmful thing that’s going to harm me. 20, because that’s just not how people think. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s a terrible solution. And I think the actual solution is the people who are

⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly self-governing, who like vote for what they want, don’t let people build data centers

⏹️ ▶️ John that do bad things, force them. you have to do X, Y, and Z. You can’t make this amount of noise.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t do this, you can’t do that. And if they don’t want to build there, have them go somewhere else. And the somewhere else will also be populated by people who are

⏹️ ▶️ John also don’t want their houses to be polluted and have noise and all of that stuff. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ John just another highlight area of our dysfunction. I have to think that like, because there’s this huge boom in data centers

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think there’s an article, I forget how to link to it, but there’s also like the speculative boom

⏹️ ▶️ John of phantom data centers where people get in line with like the regulating bodies to like pre-purchase

⏹️ ▶️ John the right to make a data center. So they’re next in line to get the electric company’s electricity for their data center.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they don’t know if that data center will ever be built, but it’s important enough to sort of save their spot in line at the cost

⏹️ ▶️ John of a few million dollars just in case it gets built. So the boom looks bigger than it is because it’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ John a speculative market on potential. It’s all just signs of a bubble, like

⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff going on. But either way, there’s definitely a lot of activity here. But how many

⏹️ ▶️ John people in the US live near a new potential AI denicator versus how many people in the US

⏹️ ▶️ John have experienced AI in any form. And so I do feel like the data center thing, although people are very opposed to it for lots of good

⏹️ ▶️ John reasons, is just a tiny fraction of the larger anti-AI sentiment.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it’s worth thinking about and discussing why does everyone have such

⏹️ ▶️ John a negative opinion? I think most of it probably not based on experience, but based on what they hear

⏹️ ▶️ John or what they like feel. Why is everyone upset about AI, especially the people who don’t actually I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John never actually used it in any appreciable amount.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it represents a lot of unpleasantness, a lot of discomfort,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of threats to people’s livelihood, a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco theft of what people have made. I mean, there’s so many reasons. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, those of you out there who hate AI are very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aware that I tend to use it a decent amount. I’m not an AI hater at all, but that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not come for free. In the same way that, like, you know, I eat meat, but there’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugliness in the system that brings me meat. And I kind of, you know, I’m accepting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that by eating meat, but I also know maybe I shouldn’t do a whole lot of that, or,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe I’m better off not knowing some of the details. That’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how my use of AI is. It’s like, well, I’m choosing… It’s a bunch of trade-offs. I’m choosing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it despite some of its kind of ugly realities of how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came to be because I think it does provide value. I’m willing to accept

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those downsides. But, you know, look at what we were just talking about, energy generation. We accept similar

⏹️ ▶️ Marco trade-offs there. For most people, at least some portion of the energy that you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use or cause to be used used is generated in polluting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. Fossil fuels, carbon generation, you know, possibly poisoning groundwater

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point. So, across all of modern life, we have to kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make those decisions of like, all right, we’re going to choose to use something for the value

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it provides us or for the needs that we have, even if it has negative downsides.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that can be from all the way from choosing which food to eat,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco choosing what stores to buy things from, choosing how to get from place to place,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way up to whether we use AI and how much and in what contexts. There’s a lot of unpleasant

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realities to it. And different people are going to draw those lines in different places in the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that different people draw those lines differently for things like whether they eat meat and whether they drive everywhere and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. We’re all going to have different tolerances for we’re all gonna have different priorities, and we’re gonna have different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco options. You know, for a lot of people, using AI tech is amazingly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco enabling. It has massive upsides in lots of ways for things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like learning new languages or operating in an environment where the language is not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your primary or first language. There’s lots of accessibility amazing benefits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to AI tech. Like so many blind people are finding that the meta Ray-Ban

⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses with the cameras in them are amazing because they describe the world around them while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping their hands free. Because blind people often will have a cane or a dog

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one or both of their hands. So hands-free glasses that describe the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco world to them using AI are life-changing. There’s all sorts of amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses of AI. Many things that we didn’t necessarily call AI in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco past are also made better by it. So for instance, like dictation, like this, like the whole, you know, overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole transcript thing, it uses a model on the phones that is by most accounts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an AI model, although it’s a pretty small one, it’s because it runs locally.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, the year before that was announced, it was called machine learning. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but AI, quote AI, took this feature that we already had and made it a lot better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s all sorts of things like that. You know, if one of our sponsors this episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an AI app that helps you type with autocomplete style suggestions that runs entirely locally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your Mac, there’s all sorts of versions of quote AI out there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think they have different downsides and different impacts and different kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of bitter pills you have to swallow. Obviously, like the major flagship

⏹️ ▶️ Marco models that are running in giant data centers and those data centers are powered by natural gas polluting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tennessee, that’s pretty bad. But when you scale it down, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s a lot less bad. And so I think everybody has to kind of figure out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they land on that. How much of that kind of externalized badness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are they willing to tolerate and for what benefits to them or the world? And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tough question.

⏹️ ▶️ John My read on these, and again, this is just based on my interaction with regular people and how much they seem to actually know about

⏹️ ▶️ John AI, is that that a lot of the reasons that I, a lot of the problems that I

⏹️ ▶️ John see with AI, a lot of the things that we’ve discussed in the show are not in the minds of these people at all. You hit on some things that are in their

⏹️ ▶️ John minds, but also you hit on a bunch of stuff that I just never see reflected in opinion polls for regular people

⏹️ ▶️ John outside the tech sphere. For example, helping themselves

⏹️ ▶️ John to all the world’s data to train their models. We’ve talked about that endlessly on this show. That is not

⏹️ ▶️ John seemingly in the public consciousness. It’s in the tech nerd consciousness, in the content creator consciousness,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t see it in any of these things. Like it is not like for if you’re going to do like a survey of US adults,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just not going to come up in an appreciable percentage because only I feel like tech nerds, content creators

⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe lawyers have any interest in that. But it is a huge thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is again, still mostly unresolved in this country and many lawsuits continue to wind their way through

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t come up, right? The data center stuff, people who are near data centers, sure,

⏹️ ▶️ John super duper hate it, but I but there’s so few of them compared to the hundreds of millions of people who live in

⏹️ ▶️ John the US. I feel like that’s still got to be a small percentage. The good things that you all talked about,

⏹️ ▶️ John some people probably don’t even know about half of those good things, because why would they if you’re not super into the tech and keeping up with the latest

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, you only know about it when it reaches the public consciousness or if you know someone who is vision impaired,

⏹️ ▶️ John who’s using the meta, you know what I mean? But like, we know about this stuff, because it’s like tech nerd stuff, and we’re thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it’s not offsetting most people’s opinion about these things. And so I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John looking at this and I’m always thinking like, what is it that they don’t like and the things that they list here that I call these bullet

⏹️ ▶️ John points and a few other ones, but I feel like it’s the biggest one for me has got to be AI is going to take my jobs

⏹️ ▶️ John because everybody cares about having a job, you know, and whether it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to take their job or not, that is in the air. And it’s not in the air for the hell of it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The people who run the AI can not shut their mouths about how many jobs AI

⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna replace. And I’m gonna say that’s not a winning message. Yep. Yeah. I mean, like,

⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside whether it will actually happen or not, or whether it is happening on or whether people are just using it for covers,

⏹️ ▶️ John lots of things like, oh, everyone’s doing layoffs, and they’ll just, they’ll just say it’s because AI is replacing the jobs because it’s the current

⏹️ ▶️ John cover for it. But they were gonna do those layoffs anyway, because they overhired during COVID-19 lockdown. And like, there’s all this BS,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t matter. Like the point is, that is, I feel like that’s gotta be in the top handful

⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons why people don’t like it because whether they know anything about it or not, whether they use it or not,

⏹️ ▶️ John whether they think it’s useful for them, but like no matter what they say, but also, like you said,

⏹️ ▶️ John Bargo, I’m afraid. I’m afraid for my job. I don’t know what this means for me. What does this mean for me, for my job, for

⏹️ ▶️ John my career, for my literal entire career? And you don’t have to be a programmer to do that. No

⏹️ ▶️ John matter what your job is, someone somewhere has said something is filtered to you.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are you seeing some news story that’s like, I’m going to lose my job. So and I just, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, and then so getting to the executives who are out there saying, because when they’re saying this again, they’re not talking

⏹️ ▶️ John to the American people, as we would say, who they’re talking to our VCs, tech nerds,

⏹️ ▶️ John and like, you know, utilitarian techno futurists who don’t care if the world burns and just want

⏹️ ▶️ John to make money or whatever, that when they that’s why they’re saying it, they’re not saying it because they because they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know people won’t like it. They say, I’m not talking to you, American people. I’m talking to the next people. I want to invest

⏹️ ▶️ John in us because executives love the idea of we have to pay for all these employees. Can we fire

⏹️ ▶️ John them all and not have to pay them and still do the stuff if we pay you a fraction of that? And

⏹️ ▶️ John and the AI is like, just like totally. Yeah. In the future, you’ll be able to fire all your I mean, that was the whole picture, like

⏹️ ▶️ John self-driving cars. Uber was like, yes, we won’t have to pay drivers anymore. The cars will drive themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ John We’re going to save so much money. Maybe we’ll even be profitable someday. Think of all the people we can help you fire

⏹️ ▶️ John Right like and who is the audience for that message? It’s not the uber drivers They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want to hear that It’s it’s the executives at uber right or the people who are investing in uber

⏹️ ▶️ John like and so there’s this little world while they’re talking to each other and saying things that

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just talking to each other But like it’s so big like the rest of the rest of the the

⏹️ ▶️ John world overhears them and say wait what? Like it filters down to them eventually. And

⏹️ ▶️ John what they hear is not encouraging. And then of course, like the young people are like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re using it to cheat on their homework. They’re they’re being forced to use it in their first jobs. And they’re like, is this

⏹️ ▶️ John going to replace my job? I don’t like using it in this way. I don’t like that people cheat on their homework with

⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t like using it to write, which is the analogy I always tell my kids, which I heard

⏹️ ▶️ John online somewhere I probably repeated on the show is that using AI to write something for you is like sending a robot to the

⏹️ ▶️ John gym to lift weights for you. It’s missing the point entirely, like

⏹️ ▶️ John especially for school assignments. It’s like, yeah, I go to the gym and work out every week. So yeah, I send my robot there

⏹️ ▶️ John and he lifts weights every week. It’s totally missing the point.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John people like don’t and they’re afraid like am I going to lose the ability to everyone? You know,

⏹️ ▶️ John am I going to lose this ability? Like whether or not this is a real thing because whatever people are studying it, they’ll figure figured out, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And this probably has analogs and fast, you know, setting aside what the reality is,

⏹️ ▶️ John people feel like I have a skill. You’re telling me I can use this to not have to use my skill anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ John My skill will atrophy. And it’s like infantilizing and they don’t feel like, well, okay, well, that

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll pick up another skill. And it’s like, and they look over that other skill and some executive is saying, yeah, our thing is going to do that too.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, well, well, then what the hell? Right. And then I think the other thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe this is getting more into tech sphere, but maybe not based on the recent open AI versus a

⏹️ ▶️ John Elon stupid trial of their little slap fight that they were having about whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing about the prominent executives in the industry. Elon Musk being

⏹️ ▶️ John just prominent jerk in our country, in our world. Right. Sam Altman,

⏹️ ▶️ John Dario, what’s his face in? I’m a day. Yeah. And Tropic. None

⏹️ ▶️ John of these people I feel like inspire the

⏹️ ▶️ John general public in literally any way. And in the trial

⏹️ ▶️ John versus OpenAI and Elon, they were having trouble finding jury members who didn’t already hate

⏹️ ▶️ John Elon. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this is just a jury pool.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is not tech nerds. This is not people who have a grudge against Elon. This is just like the pool of

⏹️ ▶️ John jurors and everybody they were getting was like, they all come in with established opinions

⏹️ ▶️ John about Elon and they hate him. And it was tough to pick the jury. And I think the judge was somebody that says, look, you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t exclude people because they don’t like him because we’ll never fill the jury. People don’t like, people don’t like you for a reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s it is what it is. Right. And, and like all these executives, like

⏹️ ▶️ John to the degree that they’re in the public consciousness at all, they seem to have nothing to offer.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t, they don’t produce things that the public really wants. Like, you know, Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John you made a, you know, Steve jobs makes the iPod and the iPhone eventually, and you know, people didn’t notice when

⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs announced the iPod, but eventually lots of people had iPods and they liked them. And

⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s the iPod guy. I have an iPod, I like the iPod, and there’s a new iPod and it’s even better.

⏹️ ▶️ John You get a positive opinion about the Steve Jobs guy that you’re hearing about because you put in the file card in

⏹️ ▶️ John your head, Steve Jobs iPod, I like iPod. There’s nothing like that. Even the people who use Chat

⏹️ ▶️ John GPT all the time, like it’s a technology where it’s like, hey, hey peons,

⏹️ ▶️ John have the free version of Chat GPT. It’s OK, but obviously all we care about are the ones that we get to charge people a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of money and coding models, and you don’t care about that. And then like there’s all the negative stories about that and all the

⏹️ ▶️ John negative aspects of cheating on home market, having things written for you and taking your job. So even that product that thousands

⏹️ ▶️ John and millions and millions of people are using, I don’t think they’re coming away from it with the same positive vibes that they get from

⏹️ ▶️ John an iPod. And so all these executives are like, they’re not talking to me. They’re not inspiring people.

⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, some of them are really terrible people. And even the ones that aren’t terrible, just like, you know, Sam Altman,

⏹️ ▶️ John whether or not he’s a terrible person does not come across well in any events that have happened

⏹️ ▶️ John in his life, in, in any capacity working or personal in the past many years.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like I just feel like, and I don’t want to go

⏹️ ▶️ John dwell too far into the executives, but I just like, I always wonder when I see these trials and these people, I don’t want to get into

⏹️ ▶️ John the, it was the Elon Musk suing because he’s sad about that. He didn’t get to control open AI.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thing got thrown out because of statute of limitations or whatever. But like, but during that trial, they had all this discovery

⏹️ ▶️ John and you hear all these interactions of all these people and they just all sound like the worst people, like the

⏹️ ▶️ John worst people you’ve ever worked with. Like they’re dishonest, shallow,

⏹️ ▶️ John stupid. Don’t they don’t seem to have, it’s like you, it makes you wonder like, wait, why are you,

⏹️ ▶️ John why are you in charge of anything? Why are you rich? Why? Like why?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because like if you talk to Steve Jobs, you’d be like, this guy seems to have a passion for technology. He seems to

⏹️ ▶️ John have good taste as evidenced by the things that he says yes and no to. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John he’s very enthusiastic about the next, whatever he’s introducing. And you don’t just don’t see that any of that in any

⏹️ ▶️ John of these people. I mean, Elon is just like, he doesn’t care about anything. He’s just a nihilistic walking

⏹️ ▶️ John rod nerve of it or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, I think what you’re looking for, John is colossal piece of

⏹️ ▶️ John shit. Yeah. Like, but like, he’s just a bad person just in general. But then like Sam Altman, it’s like, so is he

⏹️ ▶️ John like super knowledgeable that AI? Not really. Does he have any particular insights about the future or

⏹️ ▶️ John the present? Not really. Does he have any particular skills in this area? Not really. Is he particularly charismatic

⏹️ ▶️ John and people like hear him speak and are inspired? No, not at all. Uh, is he like, does

⏹️ ▶️ John he have integrity and I don’t know. Absolutely not. That’s just like what, like what

⏹️ ▶️ John is there to make people the ambient sort of AI rate and only radiation, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the ambient AI atmosphere. If you’re not into technology and you’re not really paying attention, but

⏹️ ▶️ John about AI touch your life from mass media and your personal interaction with things, what is there to give you a positive

⏹️ ▶️ John impression? So I’m not surprised that everybody hates it. And I think it’s a reflective

⏹️ ▶️ John of the state we’re in where nobody cares that they don’t like it, because it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ John until the bubble bursts, or until we have consolidation, or until a winner is declared, we don’t really have to pay too much

⏹️ ▶️ John attention to what people think of us, because we’ve captured the government because they’ll do what we want. And like, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John corrupt state. And we don’t have have to worry about local regulations and like we don’t we don’t have to care about

⏹️ ▶️ John what people think of our things until and unless, you know, we the top companies are at

⏹️ ▶️ John each other’s throat and some winner emerges. And then maybe someday someone has to make a profit on something and we’ll all figure

⏹️ ▶️ John it out and it will come out in the wash. But by that point, all the people at the top of all these things will be rich and moved on to other things.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like that’s where we are, which is like an industry with tons of money

⏹️ ▶️ John And we think tons of potential in certain areas that nevertheless has huge

⏹️ ▶️ John downsides and negative externalities that either people don’t know about or

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care about or they’re just pushing off into the future and saying, la la la, not gonna worry

⏹️ ▶️ John about that now, I’m sure it will sort itself out. And it’s just, it’s a sad state of affairs. Like, and

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad The Verge did this story because it definitely tapped into something that I had been thinking about this, which is like

⏹️ ▶️ John in my personal life, using these coding models to do things, despite all I know about the negative

⏹️ ▶️ John parts of it, I can see the promise of that technology. It’s so clear

⏹️ ▶️ John to anyone well-versed in the art of programming, the promise of that technology, and also the concern

⏹️ ▶️ John about it, worrying about taking people’s jobs and what does this mean for the future of people’s jobs. But that is such a tiny,

⏹️ ▶️ John such a tiny corner of the world of AI. It might as well, like, and I think if I was these companies,

⏹️ ▶️ John I would just concentrate entirely on that corner because it’s the proven thing that works and people will pay for it, but you know, whatever, I’m not an executive.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the whole rest of the world is like, I don’t care about coding model. I don’t even, they don’t even know that people

⏹️ ▶️ John are using it for that. They just assume AI does everything and they don’t like it. And I didn’t even touch on the whole like

⏹️ ▶️ John fake images and fake video and how people are upset about that. And it’s just, I don’t know. Reading this

⏹️ ▶️ John whole thing has made me depressed. Not because I think the technology

⏹️ ▶️ John is hopeless or cannot do anything, but because the way the technology

⏹️ ▶️ John is being used by the people who control it has so far been really,

⏹️ ▶️ John really bad. And Apple, its use of technology,

⏹️ ▶️ John this technology has been, they’re doing a poor job too, but for different reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, but at the very least, the things that Apple is doing, I don’t think thus far

⏹️ ▶️ John are contributing to the negative impression other than them advertising features that didn’t exist, obviously. But

⏹️ ▶️ John everybody else, all the big players, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta with its stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John are just making things worse every single day. And I don’t see how they’re going

⏹️ ▶️ John to turn that around until and unless there’s some winner emerges and that company is forced to

⏹️ ▶️ John try to be a real business.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data broker websites at a time when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So there’s the data brokers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there. These are these sites that when you search a search engine for somebody’s name, they’re the ones that all advertise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, you want to get their home phone number, their cell phone number, their address, their relatives names. Those are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco data brokers. as much info on as many people as possible. And they try to sell it to anybody who comes by

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is willing to give them a few bucks. Now you can get your info removed from data broker websites. The problem is there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hundreds of them. There are new ones popping up all the time. And all the different takedown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and opt out procedures are different. Of course they are. So what DeleteMe has done is they have automated

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process of opting people out and getting takedowns for all of the data brokers they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco find. And then you can sign up for one service, DeleteMe. And what What they do is on an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ongoing basis, they are constantly working to keep your data opted out of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every data broker they can figure out and that they know about. So it’s a great service, because you could never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, like an individual could never do this on their own. But they’re going and keeping your data out of all those sites

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. They send you regular reports showing what they found and where they were able to delete it. And it’s constantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco working for you, monitoring and removing the personal info you don’t want to be on those sites. I personally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went looking for one of these sites myself couple years ago before they were a sponsor found Delete Me, they come recommended by everybody including

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Wirecutter, all sorts of other sites. I was very happy with it and this is before they were a sponsor. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now a special discount

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to join

⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete me.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only way to get 20% off is to go to join delete me.com slash ATP and enter code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP at checkout. That’s join delete me.com slash ATP code ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to Delete.me for sponsoring our show.

People really hate AI, cont’d.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, what’s funny about all this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it makes me think about, um, this band, this, this duo

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that went storming into popular consciousness like a month ago, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little more, uh, engine engine day, Patrine, I probably butchered that pronunciation. Sorry, French people.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, but well, it naturally, uh, uh, the Cobra qua I believe, cause I’m pretty sure they’re But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, this is a two person duo that dresses up in paper mache, like headdresses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and black and white polka dot costumes. The guitarist

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plays a two headed bass guitar slash, you know, regular guitar. They have the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey most ridiculous costumes. They play microtonal music, which I guess is, you know, Hey, let’s take

⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes between regular notes and play those, which in Western music is extremely unusual.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, this stuff is so weird and so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like almost off putting at first because it’s so different. But I, I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey been going deep into this band because I’m just fascinated by it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and I can’t wait

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to see

⏹️ ▶️ John where this is going. I cannot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so, so the reason I bring this up, well, were either of you two at all familiar with these?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I did look

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey at the video and

⏹️ ▶️ John I, I, it didn’t, I can tell you that watching the video multiple times did not help me

⏹️ ▶️ John in determining where you’re going. So I’m fascinated. I’m riveted. Please, please

⏹️ ▶️ Casey continue. So here’s where I’m going with this. I think, well, I’ve been going deep

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this band, like I said, and I was, it’s very popular to have like musicians record

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like reaction videos to this one particular performance, them on KEXP. This is like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half an hour video. And you’re not going to offend me if this music is not for you. When I first listened to it, I didn’t think it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. And then I listened to it again. I was like, well, actually, this is kind of cool. And I kept listening to it. And I was like, oh, actually, this is very

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I bring this up is because one of these reaction videos, I couldn’t remember which one, so I can’t link it, but one of these reaction

⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos to this, this band said, you know what this might

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be in a way like the popularity of this band and the band itself might be is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this strikes you or strikes me anyway. As

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that is so deeply weird and honestly kind of f**ked up that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is this is not something that an artificial intelligence would ever create. And part of the draw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this band is that it’s so weird and so f**ked up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that an AI would never come up with it. And that’s arguably, that’s why so many people are drawn

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it and interested in it and loving it. Because everything about it on paper is wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, even if you’re, maybe we’ll put a link in the chapter art, maybe we won’t, but one way or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey another, if you look at these people and these ridiculous costumes, with extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey phallic noses. Like everything about this is weird. And yet

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I find joy in it perhaps more than anything else, simply because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s weird and it’s not just another form letter with a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey headings punctuated with emoji, which by the way, we got one of those from our school principal a couple of weeks

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And as soon as I saw

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco it, I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, Oh, yep. That’s chat GPT right there. And I think that it’s just so weird

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so delightful because it’s so weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s definitely the moment in time we’re in where we mentioned before, like people, uh, uh, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John are afraid of not being able to recognize AI stuff and, and, uh, and aren’t sure that they’re able to do so, but there

⏹️ ▶️ John is, be given the negative sentiment, especially about content generated by AI and all that entails and everything.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I think there is currently a sentiment that like, but it reaction against

⏹️ ▶️ John that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What is like, you said, what

⏹️ ▶️ John is the opposite? What is the opposite of me seeing the clearly AI generated form letter from the

⏹️ ▶️ John school? Because I want to run in the opposite direction of that. I want to go to something that is clearly

⏹️ ▶️ John human made and all this other stuff. Right? And that’s definitely kind of the moment we’re at and the backslash

⏹️ ▶️ John we’re at. Backslash? Backlash. Backlash. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, things change so quickly that I’m sure that, you know, the moment will change and like

⏹️ ▶️ John the danger of this type of thing is like, that’s the thing. That’s the thing. I always hear this when people talk about, a computer

⏹️ ▶️ John could never do X. I’ve been hearing that my whole life. Like, don’t say what a computer will never

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco be able to

⏹️ ▶️ John do. It’s generally a bad idea. But today, you’re probably right that, the

⏹️ ▶️ John reason people can recognize AI stuff because people are amazing intuitive pattern matchers

⏹️ ▶️ John and being exposed to enough AI generated stuff with current technology

⏹️ ▶️ John that generated it, you start to say, oh, now I can start to recognize it. The more you see it, the more you’re able to recognize it. But of course, things

⏹️ ▶️ John change and the AI changes and they start producing different things or whatever. And there’s nothing that says in

⏹️ ▶️ John some many years time that AI wouldn’t produce things even weirder than what a human would create, because who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John But like, that’s that’s the the state we’re in right now is that people who are exposed to a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John of this stuff can identify it. And the amazing thing about our brains is very often it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to articulate how you know, it’s AI generated, like you highlighted the emoji and

⏹️ ▶️ John the headings or whatever. Like, yes, there is a certain sameness to it because the pool of

⏹️ ▶️ John training data has a lot of overlaps in the way these models manifest what

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve been trained on, you know, has some sameness to it. But like, it’s just sort of like this intuitive sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John But for the fake videos and stuff of like, is this a generated or is it not? Setting aside things where it’s like a fantastical

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that could never happen, we’re like, well, it’s a generated because that doesn’t seem like a real thing that could happen. Just like

⏹️ ▶️ John an AI generated video of a everyday thing is rapidly approaching the point where

⏹️ ▶️ John even the most the person most well versed in it could not tell in first viewing whether it’s generated or not.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like that’s going to be true about a lot of things going forward. But that doesn’t change where we are right now. And we are right now. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re absolutely right, is that people are seeking out things that are

⏹️ ▶️ John the farthest away from what they don’t like, whether that means reconsidering their potential future careers

⏹️ ▶️ John to a place where they think, well, I is not coming for this job anytime in my lifetime because

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, you know, we’re not there yet or they seem safe for a while or changing how they think

⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, what things they want to do in their life. That market was talking about the choices we all make. People are changing

⏹️ ▶️ John those choices based on what they see as this new thing in their life that has

⏹️ ▶️ John upsides and downsides. And previously, you know, before the stuff existed, it wasn’t a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing I had to think about at all. But now suddenly there’s this thing exists and it has

⏹️ ▶️ John very big downsides and potentially very big upsides. And I have to now suddenly make decisions about that, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John am I going to contribute to this open source project that accepts AI generated code submissions?

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m picking things in the nerd circle because this is the things I see, but like it’s very similar to, am I going to go to Walmart

⏹️ ▶️ John because I don’t like how Walmart behaves, but also I don’t have a lot of money and Walmart is the closest store to me, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Am I going to fly somewhere, even though it uses a huge amount of fossil fuel to fly?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And like, and this, this is definitely falls into the carbon footprint trap, which is the, the

⏹️ ▶️ John concept of the energy companies came up with to make individual people feel guilty while they continue to do systemic things

⏹️ ▶️ John to destroy our planet. Like the individual response, like you’re not going

⏹️ ▶️ John to cure global warming by like using less water in your shower. Right. Uh, but systemic rules

⏹️ ▶️ John that say all new power plants that are built can’t burn fossil fuels that will save the planet. Not I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ John use a little bit less. I’m not saying don’t conserve, don’t recycle, don’t blah, blah, blah. But the idea that individuals

⏹️ ▶️ John with individual consumer choices are, are the thing that’s going to save us is a fiction

⏹️ ▶️ John put out by the large companies that actually make a difference because they don’t want to be regulated. They don’t want to have to pay

⏹️ ▶️ John taxes. They don’t want to have to change. They don’t want to be, they don’t want to go out of business. They don’t want to disappear. You know, all,

⏹️ ▶️ John all these reasons. And I think that is true of AI as well. Whereas the idea is like if a bunch of individuals

⏹️ ▶️ John refuse to, um, refuse to work on open source projects that allow AI

⏹️ ▶️ John submissions, then AI will go away and individuals can make whatever choices they want. But I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John if your goal is to not have AI code, you know, being

⏹️ ▶️ John submitted to open source things, your individual choice to participate or not in open source projects is probably not

⏹️ ▶️ John gonna make that happen unless you’re super duper famous and important as a developer or in charge of a really big project. And the

⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with like, you know, I’m not going to

⏹️ ▶️ John watch a TV show where I know they use AI in the script writing

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, like setting aside your ability actually accurately know that information because there’s, you know, who

⏹️ ▶️ John knows what’s actually happening. It, you know, it’s much better to instead say that we should have rules

⏹️ ▶️ John about like creative content and ownership and we should come up with laws involving what is allowed to be used

⏹️ ▶️ John for training data and what are your rights if your training data is used in a thing and you know, the the writers guilds and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about systemic things are are currently trying to come up with rules for like human ownership and human authorship

⏹️ ▶️ John and what things are allowed to be eligible for like awards and Oscars and credits and residuals and all this

⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff because they actually do have organizations that in theory are there to serve

⏹️ ▶️ John the needs of the certain narrow creative communities and certain industries. But whole swaths of the rest

⏹️ ▶️ John of the US public do not have any collective bargaining body or anyone looking out for them.

⏹️ ▶️ John And you would think their ability to vote for representatives would help. But again, see previous conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John about their vote not mattering because the only thing that matters is money. And given a certain amount of money, you can convince people

⏹️ ▶️ John to vote for you. So we’re kind of in a bind here with this, but I’m hoping things take a turn for the

⏹️ ▶️ John better if and when we see the, I love when they use consolidation as the, it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John the gentle phrase when we see the consolidation in this industry, which means winners, some companies win, some companies

⏹️ ▶️ John lose some companies, big fish eats a little fish, and we’re left with hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John a smaller number of companies that are better, um, incentivized

⏹️ ▶️ John to actually do things that people like. Because right now, that is not any of their

⏹️ ▶️ John incentives. And it shows. And it shows they are doing things that investors and people who want

⏹️ ▶️ John to fire people like and everyone else hates.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this episode, Co-Typist, Claude and Delete

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP overtime, our weekly bonus on this topic.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This week on Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about Google Book and the, I believe it’s Aluminium

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS. We’re gonna be talking about that in Overtime. Join to listen at https://www.youtube.com.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon, you can follow them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so long

Adventures in webviews

Chapter Adventures in webviews image.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I spent the whole day doing a very nerdy thing. Oh, I love this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The current version of Overcast Transcripts, it is basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s rendered as a giant VStack of text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nodes in SwiftUI. Now, I can’t believe that even works.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Same.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does, and yeah, inside a scroll view. So it works. The reason it’s done this way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, Um, first of all, you know, it was reasonably simple to code up the entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is Swift UI. So I wanted to stick within that. Um, however, for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco transcripts to work and to, like, follow along with the text, you have to be able to set the scroll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco position to as the as the content is playing to scroll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to certain, you know, specific text nodes in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I saw some good articles about that recently.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So that and that can all be done with you. I and it is being done with Do I right now? The problem is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that, you have to load all of those text nodes and render them all.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is not great for performance. And that’s why if you have a very long episode

⏹️ ▶️ Marco loaded, especially if you’re on an older iPhone, if you tap that mini player, there’s now like a half

⏹️ ▶️ Marco second delay before it actually opens up. And that’s because it’s rendering all of those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco text nodes before any part of the now playing screen can show. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmers out there are probably saying, why aren’t you using things like LazyVStack? That’s a great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco question. The problem with LazyVStack is that that scroll behavior doesn’t work anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because LazyVStack does not know how tall each paragraph thing of text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is until it’s rendered. That’s kind of why it saves so much time. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco LazyVStack does not actually solve this problem for me. It doesn’t work for this use case.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are other, like, you know, using list, you can kind of do stuff, but basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no good way for me to do this in SwiftUI. So I had the idea,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this should probably be a web view. Now, before you get mad and say,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web views are terrible, I have a proven history of making good web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco views in my apps. Instapaper was entirely a web view. Basically, you know, the main content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Instapaper reading the articles was a web view. Overcast has used web views since the very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco beginning to render show notes. If you currently look at show notes on any Overcast installation,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a web view. If you look at the feedback page, all the other static pages like the privacy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco policy, those are all web views in Overcast. I know how to make good web views. It’s a decent amount of work, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be done. And over time, it’s actually been made easier. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realized a web view will solve this because web views are made to render very long content,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to render them off the main thread, which SwiftUI cannot and will not do, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be able to jump to different points in their scroll hierarchy in a performant way and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know where those points will be.

⏹️ ▶️ John And do you remember when we had the past discussion when I was dealing with the one complicated view in hyperspace?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yeah, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I couldn’t get the performance, because it’s like a table view, and I was doing it in SwiftUI, and it was just too damn slow for the, for

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of the reasons that Mark just said, like the pre-computing, if you have, so I have like a hundred thousand, I have things even longer than transcripts,

⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe not, because it’s a really long podcast, but, and then I was like, well, why can’t I get this to perform

⏹️ ▶️ John well? And I tried to do it the Cocoa way, and I was faster with AppKit, but it was still seems slow, and then it was like, screw it, I’m gonna make

⏹️ ▶️ John it a web thing, and remember I have those demo web pages. I feel like, and I don’t know, that was like

⏹️ ▶️ John last year sometime, I feel like that has come back again, not just because Marco’s talking about it in his

⏹️ ▶️ John app, but there was a article I read from the 17th of May by Artem Lonko,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how to pronounce the last name, where the title is native all the way until you need text, which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John going through the similar thought process of like, so I’ve got an app and I’ve got a lot of text. It’s a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John app, I’m gonna use NSTextView, it’s gonna be great. And I can even use TextKit2, the modern Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John text layout thing, and goes through all the pain of trying to do this and eventually saying, you know what, if you’ve ever

⏹️ ▶️ John got a bunch of text in an application, just use a WebView because, and like, he doesn’t go into the detail

⏹️ ▶️ John on this, but like, I feel like it is explicable because if you think about how, getting

⏹️ ▶️ John back to how many people Apple has on certain teams, how

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco many

⏹️ ▶️ John people do you think are actively working on NSTextView and TextKit and the native text

⏹️ ▶️ John controls? Even in SwiftUI, how many people are working on the specific problem of

⏹️ ▶️ John text layout in SwiftUI versus how many people, how many person hours

⏹️ ▶️ John have been put into web rendering engines in the past several decades? Exactly. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John not even close. Like the world has been highly motivated to put just

⏹️ ▶️ John an astronomical amount of person hours into web rendering engines. They

⏹️ ▶️ John are amazing. Like they’re just so good and so fast because

⏹️ ▶️ John there was so much competition and the web is advancing so much that you’re like, oh, I wanna use native because that’s gonna be faster.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. And it turned out in my case that eventually when I wrangled Dennis TableView,

⏹️ ▶️ John it became like essentially infinitely fast and it works the way it’s supposed to because AppKit is amazing once you get it

⏹️ ▶️ John working right. And WebKit did eventually show limits. I forget, it was around like 200,000 or 300,000 rows sometimes it would blank out.

⏹️ ▶️ John But considering WebKit was basically brute forcing it and not like reusing cells in the same way because it didn’t like,

⏹️ ▶️ John AppKit was able to do it because I’m literally telling it through the API. Yeah, reuse the cells, here’s the data,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Whereas WebKit is just like, I just see a bunch of markup, man. I don’t know about cell

⏹️ ▶️ John reuse. This is not being fed by a data source. This is just a giant text file that I need

⏹️ ▶️ John to make something out of. So all this is to say is, I am 100% with you, Marco, that

⏹️ ▶️ John using a webpage for this is like switching from a technology that five people have worked on a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ John over the past few years to a technology that thousands upon thousands of people have worked upon

⏹️ ▶️ John for literally millions of hours and continue to work on and continues to be maintained and gets more featureful

⏹️ ▶️ John and more powerful every single year. So fully endorsed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And the funny thing is, so as I was researching different options and everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks helpfully with the use of AI for some of that research, I quickly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized that, wait a minute, the next feature… So having transcripts out there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s like three major things that I have to do next. Number one

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is improve the alignment around DAI, which I’m currently… I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thought

⏹️ ▶️ John search was going to be number one.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no. Number one is improved DAI alignment, because the transcripts are wrong for a lot of podcasts. So that’s… Wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco schmong. But the good thing is I have my current… Thanks. My current test flight beta, I think I made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty great progress in that. Also, thanks to AI, finding that edge case bug in some of my code.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, then I wanted to fix this performance problem, because it is pretty embarrassing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because also, keep in mind, when the highlighted text changes in SwiftUI.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is some like which happens, you know, as you play, whichever paragraph is highlighted changes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I’m not changing the overall dimensions of the text by like by setting it to bold maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that’s and that’s the reason I’m not second to bold because that would then like reflow everything below it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But SwiftUI still has to do a decent amount of diffing computation whenever anything in the hierarchy changes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see what changed and what do I need to reload and redraw and it’s probably doing more redrawing that it needs to do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s causing performance problems plus this like you know this initial load performance problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then my number three thing on my hit list is everybody is requesting some ability

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to select

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know do something copy it out whatever. You can’t really do good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco text selection inside a series of Swift UI text nodes.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what that RTIM article talks about I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah so the reality is literally doing my next feature request

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having any way to select text will already require me to switch to a web view anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because web views do that. Like if you want to have arbitrary text selection that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can select part of one paragraph into other paragraphs and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it cross boundaries of nodes and everything but not select entire nodes. You basically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to use a web view like that. That is by far the best option.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think text selection and web pages is awful and I fight with it all the time, but at least it’s possible.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the difference.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John saying, hey, because like if you’re trying to select text, and I’m selecting text and web pages all the time for the purposes of building

⏹️ ▶️ John the show, the internal show notes for this thing. And it’s so bad being like, oh, why is the thing jumping around

⏹️ ▶️ John is not letting me select this? And do I have to use the inspector and blah, blah, blah? But at least you can do it. And for the easy

⏹️ ▶️ John case, which I would say the transcripts are an easy case, which is paragraph after paragraph of text, there’s no intervening

⏹️ ▶️ John floating ads or sidebars or header graphics or like

⏹️ ▶️ John none of that is there. So for just that case, selecting text from a webpage works like a dream.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in SwiftUI, as you noted, their current state of their selection technology, especially if

⏹️ ▶️ John you are essentially doing a series of views, one for each paragraph, and you want to select across them,

⏹️ ▶️ John is not great. And by the way, it’s not just SwiftUI. If you try to use any of the other native

⏹️ ▶️ John controls, it also is fairly tricky.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, the same. And it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, I don’t want to become a framework engineer to work with the type system to do this. I just, I have some text, I

⏹️ ▶️ John want to lay it out, I want to allow people to select it. And I can’t believe you go into the top three features and still haven’t mentioned search. But eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco somewhere on your list

⏹️ ▶️ John is search. And you know what? That’s really easy to do on a web page too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Quote unquote client side with JavaScript, I type a string and it can jump right down to it and it can highlight

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And this is like web technology 101 and it’s so easy to do and it’s super fast and you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about it losing the offset and putting you in the wrong, like the thing with the scrolling APIs, we’ll put a link to that one in

⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes, I found the article, which is, it’s from the Nilkol Essing blog, about

⏹️ ▶️ John the sad sorted history of SwiftUI APIs for programmatic scrolling. And I can tell you,

⏹️ ▶️ John even the most advanced current one still has tons of jank.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So, so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just talk to the people who made Tapestry, Icon Factory, which is a giant timeline app, and the amazing Herculean

⏹️ ▶️ John effort they had to do to even hack UIKit to get this the way they wanted it, to have it be stable and

⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to know where they are and go to offsets and SwiftUI, forget it, was not even close to being able to do it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a hard problem, but you know what’s not a hard problem? Jump to a DOM element.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, there’s multiple ways to do it. They have animations, you can say where on the frame it should be oriented.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fast. And yeah, that’s the thing. There’s really no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant downside because, as you said, this stuff is so fast. yeah it can be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco implemented half-assedly but if you if you do a little bit of work to polish it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know to prevent it from being a crappy experience it doesn’t take much work to get there honestly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s that’s what I was working but that’s not actually the super nerdy thing that I was that I was talking about that’s just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the framework within which I had to do the super nerdy thing which is as you know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my transcripts I have those little music notes and I have at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the top that little banner that says the transcript that will contain errors and has like a little guy falling.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are SF symbols. I use SF symbols all over my app. This is Apple’s icon

⏹️ ▶️ Marco library and they’re all over the place in my app. How do you get SF symbols in a web

⏹️ ▶️ Marco view?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, have fun with that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ John just pasted SF symbols into my source code today. Yeah, you can do that actually. Because I had

⏹️ ▶️ John like a string, I was adding app intents and you have to pick like the SF symbol like string name and I’m like, I’m never gonna remember

⏹️ ▶️ John what that string is. Copy, paste. Now I’ll remember what it is because it’s next to it in a comment.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so, because yeah, because like in the, in the SF Symbols app and you right click a symbol, you have different options. One of them is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco copy name. One of them is also just copy symbol because they are just glyphs

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the font, but they are like special private glyphs and they’re kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of difficult to access programmatically and, you know, especially in a way that Apple would actually allow in the app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco store. And so there really isn’t a great way to get SF

⏹️ ▶️ Marco symbols into a web view. But there are some hacks to do it. And now my

⏹️ ▶️ Marco web view in Overcast, long ago, many, many

⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, when podcast ad companies started trying to insert tracking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixels into show notes, Overcast basically made

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so that external images and stuff like that will not load. Now, how do you do this in a web view?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The web has a thing for that. It’s the content security policy. So Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco WebView has very, very strict content security policy in it, such

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that only, basically, the WebView content

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is heavily filtered for show notes because that’s being externally supplied. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco untrusted HTML. So it is being heavily filtered and then being rendered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a context where it is super locked down by content security policy. So that way,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody can sneak anything into there that’s gonna track you without you knowing. That’s why I don’t load external

⏹️ ▶️ Marco images by default, and I put those giant placeholders in and saying, do you wanna load images from soandso.com? And you have to tap each

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one each time. That’s why. It’s to avoid all that tracking and everything. And so I had this whole

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local resource handler that serves external images through a lot of protection

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and checks and everything like that. So how do I get out some symbols in there? This sent me down this rabbit hole today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that first I’m like, all right, can I somehow export an SF symbol

⏹️ ▶️ Marco programmatically as an SVG with vector data? So I can just put it in,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t want them to look crappy. And the answer is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically not really. Like there’s a few different methods that both, you know, blog posts and forum

⏹️ ▶️ Marco posts and eventually LLMs have told me about. And they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all basically either don’t work or have such severe limitations and downsides.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One even, like, like Claude generated me an entire PDF

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to SVG converter to like first render this into a PDF graphic context

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then, you know, export it to SVG, which would have worked, but doesn’t work because of the way they render the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco symbols. They’re not vectors actually, like in that context. So there’s all, I tried all these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different ways to do it. Eventually what I had to do was I have in my like custom URL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource handler through my content security policy stuff. I have an endpoint URL

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can hit that will render the SF symbol to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an image. The JavaScript that interprets those nodes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the source file first checks their size with CSS and like dynamic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript, you know, stuff like that. reads their size and reads their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco font size around them and reads their font weight. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously as symbols, they will react to different font weights. So if you have like in a bold line,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your symbol should render wider, you know, thicker line weight than in a regular line.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So all that is being done client side and with JavaScript, it’s basically seeing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where is this being used. It passes that to the back end. The back end generates

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image of the thing, but then it uses this weird CSS trick with shadows or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco something so that it matches the color of the text around

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Because that’s how it works in SwiftUI. Like when you use as a symbols, you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them like in text and they work with the text. They are the text size, they flow with the text, they inherit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the text color and the weight, etc. I built all of that today with like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the craziest JavaScript hacks and CSS hacks and a little bit of help

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my friends in the LLM world. But I finally got it working.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It took me all day. But now I have SF symbols

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a web view, being able to be called up in a secure way through my content security policy,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any symbol rendered on any size text with any color with any font

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and should I have done all of this? Definitely not. This was a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use of my time, but you know what? I work for myself and I can do stuff like that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result and I chose to waste my day doing that and I feel great and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m glad I did it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is there a reason you couldn’t just specify use the system font and just show the F symbol? You know what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean? I’ve tried that not today. I tried that a while ago and it didn’t work. I forget why.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never tried it. I’m just wondering because I know like obviously you have the advantages you have going for is you know the web

⏹️ ▶️ John rendering engine is WebKit and you know you’re on a platform where SF symbols exists and you know you can specify

⏹️ ▶️ John the system font and CSS. So that would have been a way less work. I thought you were you were going to end up going to as you ended up making

⏹️ ▶️ John a image with data URLs with the data colon and then like just the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you

⏹️ ▶️ John know base 64 encoded content of the images that you wanted that you were serving up. But you know what you did with images will also work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just think it’s funny that all of this was because of the falling down guy.

⏹️ ▶️ John How many symbols

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are using right now? Well, yeah, like three. I mean, I could have just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco X. But so what I but I also like the reason I wanted to make this generalizable. First of all,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, I’m a programmer, but and I work for myself. Second

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all, I have a mechanism to put like announcements in the app, like remotely server side.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can say like, hey, here’s what’s new. And I wanted the, because I use SF Symbols all over the interface,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted the ability to include them in those announcements, to be like, tap this button,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then in parentheses, show the icon of that button to get to this new feature. So I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted them to be generalizable, but also safe so that you couldn’t just do that from like show notes and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do weird things in my app.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you might have done is guaranteed that the upcoming WWDC, they’ll say, and we know a lot of people have wanted to export

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco SF Symbols as

⏹️ ▶️ John SVG, and now you can do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t see that happening, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t be surprised because I’ve a lot of people. The problem you’re describing, I’ve seen people asking about and trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to do for a long time in it because for all the reasons you said that assembles are this weird thing where they’re like

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re really cool convenience for people writing apps for Apple’s platforms, but they’re also not images, but they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John also not fonts, really. But they’re, you know, they’re animated and can react like they’re they’re this weird thing. And people

⏹️ ▶️ John always just want to right click one in the app and export it as an SVG. And they’re like, why can’t I do that? But you can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Like you can export vector data. Oh, can you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from SF Symbols? So, one way I’ve done that in the past is in Paint Code.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like my wonderful programmatic drawing app that I use, Paint Code, which I don’t… Honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it might be abandoned. It’s been awfully quiet recently. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Paint Code, you can export text as vectors. So, I just paste I do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the copy symbol thing and paste it in. And then I just export, I just like convert that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco convert that to a vector and then now I have a vector. But that only works like one by one. But

⏹️ ▶️ John some SF symbols are animated and you can’t really do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or maybe you can. Can SVGs do animation?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably, they can do like all WebKit inside of them. It’s one of those like dramatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-specced technologies that you can do way too

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you can copy the SVG right from the SF Symbols app, I just did it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, there you go. That’s how I made my wonderful icon that you loved so much for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the contour map.

⏹️ ▶️ John The SF symbols weren’t the problem with that icon. Everything else about it, where they’re placed, what

⏹️ ▶️ John color they were, what color the background was, which symbols you picked, how big they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey were. Gracious. It’s just so funny to me. Like, I’m not trying to say you did anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. I mean, you nerd sniped yourself and then you accomplished what you set out to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was only a day, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this for what is two or maybe three SF symbols, at least how it sits right now, that really cracks me

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco up. But what if I want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco change them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John later?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah, yeah. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John already put the XKCD974 in the chat. Yep. Standard protocol.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course.

Related posts