That Big Ring Underground Somewhere in Europe
Marco:
I have no idea what day it is anymore.
Casey:
It's still Thursday.
Marco:
What week is it?
Casey:
The first week of April.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
Is the watch out yet?
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
Soon, but not yet.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Check your wrist.
Casey:
Just look at your wrist.
Marco:
It's hair o'clock.
Marco:
It's hair o'clock.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So do we have some follow-up, starting with cooking, apparently.
John:
Seriously?
John:
That's awesome.
John:
Yeah, this was last week on the toaster episode.
John:
I was making fun of the temperatures printed on the glass door of the toaster, saying that 160 to 170 is not an appropriate temperature for pork, despite the fact that it is printed on the door of the toaster that I tested last week.
John:
And I also blame the government for these crazy temperature ratings because they tend to be super conservative to make sure you don't get any foodborne illnesses.
John:
Well, I was told by several people that the government had, in fact, changed their recommended temperature to pork.
John:
They changed it in 2011.
John:
And when people mentioned this to me, I then recalled reading the story back then.
John:
But anyway, the government now recommends 145 for pork, which is a perfectly sane temperature for pork, and it will make it not taste like cardboard.
John:
So everybody...
John:
uh you can say the government says the u.s government that is that you can safely cook your pork to 145 and eat it and not have it taste like cardboard all right well i feel better knowing that piece of information i don't know about you guys all right so uh why don't you tell us about the f-16 that was another thing last week how the hell did that come about i think it was four stretch touch trackpad you know the trackpad doesn't move but it feels like it moves and it reminded me of the stick in the f-16 which doesn't move um
John:
A couple people knowledgeable about this stuff wrote and tell me that the f16 the original f16 stick didn't move at all and The pilots found it disconcerting because there was no feedback and so it was modified so that it moves slightly Some people say fractions of an inch.
John:
Some people say it moves an inch total So I saw a video of it at one point moving it doesn't move much But it moves a little bit because there was no feedback.
John:
It just felt kind of weird and I didn't I wasn't sure about the f18 and people over and tell me that the f18
John:
Stick does move, and it actually has a mechanical connection to the flight controls as a backup.
John:
I remember reading about that years ago, the fly-by-wire thing.
John:
Before drive-by-wire came to cars, not that we want to turn this into neutral already.
John:
But fly by wire came to planes first where the controls were not hooked up to the things that you put your hands on were not hooked up to the control surfaces of the plane by a mechanical connection, but rather just by like you would move the stick.
John:
It would figure out what you were trying to do, and then it would instruct electronics to move the control surfaces of the plane.
John:
And predictably, that freaked out pilots like, oh, I got, you know.
John:
I got to have a direct connection.
John:
I don't trust these computers, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But they made it triply and quadruply redundant.
John:
Anyway, in the F-18, it's fly-by-wire, my understanding.
John:
But there is a backup system where if the fly-by-wire system fails, you can still move the surfaces with a stick.
John:
So there you go.
John:
The F-16, with its unmoving stick, needed some haptic feedback as well.
John:
I guess they decided not to go with vibration and just go with tiny amounts of movement, but it still seems pretty weird.
Casey:
That's definitely wonky, but hey, whatever works.
Casey:
Tell us about the current MacBook Pro and how many monitors you can connect to it.
John:
Yeah, last week talking about the confusion of what would happen if they had two USB-C ports on the new MacBook, but it only supported two monitors, so you could only have the internal monitor and one external monitor.
John:
Wouldn't it be confusing that you had this other port that you thought you could hook something into it?
John:
I said it would not be confusing because you would know that you bought a machine that only supports dual displays.
John:
You would know.
John:
Yeah, and Frank wrote in to tell me, well, the current MacBook Pro only supports two external displays, but it has three places you can plug a monitor.
John:
So those people must just be thoroughly confused when they plug in that third monitor and it doesn't work.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So there were two big pieces of follow up that we got or two pieces of follow up that we got often.
Casey:
One of them was everyone getting angry at you for falling into the Steve Jobs said or Steve Jobs did trap.
Casey:
Would you like to defend yourself, John?
John:
Yeah, that's not it's one of those things where there's sort of a shared cultural knowledge of a meme or whatever.
John:
And it all nuance is wrung out of that meme.
John:
And the meme is kind of when when Tim Cook took over Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs died.
John:
Among the Apple nerd community, there were there were a lot of there was a lot of pushback on the idea on the other stories that were coming saying, oh, Jobs is gone.
John:
He was the only one who could have led Apple to victory.
John:
Now, no matter what Tim Cook does, he's doomed.
John:
Without Jobs, Apple can't innovate.
John:
And everything Tim Cook did, it was, well, Steve Jobs would have done it this way.
John:
Well, he's no Steve Jobs.
John:
Well, Steve Jobs would have done that.
John:
And so the blowback meme in our little circle was always, I don't want to see anyone comparing anything Tim does to Steve Jobs.
John:
I don't want to see anyone ever saying Steve Jobs would have done this and would have done that.
John:
The spirit that meme was developed in was worthwhile, and that when that transition did take place, there were a lot of those hysterical stories about how Apple could never possibly succeed without Steve Jobs and so on.
John:
But it has morphed into it is now impossible to ever compare and contrast Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
John:
And that that premise I reject.
John:
I think it is perfectly valid to compare and address Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, whether or not you think one is better than the other and whether or not you want to make that particular case.
John:
And the last episode, I was comparing them directly on things that they had each done with the product line, not saying, well, like,
John:
What was Steve Jobs had done about the watch or some product that didn't that he didn't even know about?
John:
I don't even know about the watch.
John:
But anyway, that type of thing, I think, is not as useful.
John:
But still, I think, is a valid line of inquiry, as long as you're not using it as a cudgel to say, like, Steve Jobs would never have done that.
John:
Therefore, what Tim Cook is doing is wrong because Steve Jobs was infallible and so on and so forth.
John:
So anyway, I reject that criticism because I think it is useful to compare these things.
John:
And as long as you do it in a thoughtful way and not just, you know,
John:
elevate steve jobs to godhood and use him as a way to say whatever tim gook does is bad or to try to support your own opinion by saying uh i think the watch is a dumb idea and steve jobs would have agreed with me as he was here he's always right therefore i'm right because i i'm telling you what steve jobs would have thought about the watch or you know again i don't know if you knew about the watch it would be better if we had an example of a product that we were sure that steve jobs never knew about uh but a lot of these things have been in the works for a long time but anyway uh that's that's how i feel about the comparisons to steve jobs
Casey:
So you stand by your comparison from last week.
John:
Yes, totally.
John:
Because, you know, it is not like completely speculative.
John:
I'm not using the ghost of Steve Jobs to try to support my opinion.
John:
I said I didn't even know which strategy was better than Tim Cook, one of the Steve Jobs one.
John:
And I could go either way on it.
John:
And it's not clear.
John:
Like, it's not it.
John:
It is completely valid, I think.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's wake Marco up and have him tell us about something awesome, and then he can go back to sleep for a few more minutes.
Casey:
Something going on?
Casey:
We're doing a podcast?
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
Is this the show?
Casey:
Is this what people tune in for?
John:
Do you want to explain why you're all sleepy?
John:
Because no one's going to know why you're all sleepy.
John:
You think that everyone follows your life down to the tweet on Twitter, but people are going to listen to this who haven't been following you on Twitter and have no idea why you're out of it.
John:
So why don't you explain that?
John:
Thank God.
John:
I'm so tired of Twitter.
Marco:
People are so nasty there.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
honestly i'm i'm pulling away from twitter i i think i oh it's just not worth it it is simply not worth it you haven't even been tweeting that much what are you that's what i'm talking about i'm pulling away from twitter all right well maybe we'll save this for the after show and we'll have a therapy session and see what's going on on your twitter
John:
All right.
Marco:
Well, it isn't anything recent.
Marco:
It's like I'm slowly realizing over the course of time that Twitter is a tricky balance between whether it makes your life better or worse overall.
Marco:
And I've been questioning what the value of it is for me recently and whether it is a net gain or loss.
Marco:
And I think maybe it's probably a net gain still, but the ratio there is not as good as it should be.
Marco:
So I'm really not incredibly happy with it.
Marco:
Anyway, I'm exploring ways to try to fix it.
Marco:
Young man, when you are tired of Twitter, you are tired of life.
Marco:
Another reference you will not get from a long time ago.
Marco:
So the reason I sound like this and the reason I'm out of it and probably not making any sense is because I have just returned from a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland for the wonderful Ool Conference.
Marco:
And I would tell you how amazing it is in great detail.
Marco:
However, Casey didn't get to go this year.
Marco:
And so it would just be cruel for me to tell you how awesome it was.
Marco:
But suffice to say, it was awesome.
Marco:
And I've been awake for approximately 22 hours now.
Marco:
I forget what time my body thinks it is.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
But I'm a zombie and I sound like this, so I apologize.
Marco:
In better news, we have a new sponsor this week.
Marco:
We do.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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I don't know how British people say that.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I had said earlier that there were two major pieces of follow-up that we had got a lot of complaining about via the feedback.
Casey:
Just two?
Casey:
Well, this week there were two.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
uh fabbing ram which in turn were based on some follow-up that we had gotten two weeks ago so john do you want to set all this straight yeah this was my memory i would which i just asserted as fact the first time i talked about it that uh
John:
When fabbing silicon chips, the first thing they do to work out the kinks in a new process size was fab RAM because it's simple and very regular and not as complicated as actual full-fledged CPU.
John:
And then we got some feedback that said, no, no, no, actually DRAM is really complicated because they have capacitors.
John:
They're not like two flat plates facing each other.
John:
It's like a tube within a tube, and it's really complicated to fab them, and actually it's much harder to
John:
to fab those capacitors than just regular plain old logic transistors so that's definitely not the case and i was like all right well you know maybe my data is old maybe i'm just remembering this from when i was a kid and i never revisited maybe when they passed through like 32 nanometers something changed because you know things get weird when you start getting really small process sizes like
John:
Who knows?
John:
Maybe we don't have X-ray lithography.
John:
Maybe we already have X-ray lithography.
John:
That's how much I've been keeping up with it, as in not much.
John:
It's not like it just shrinks, shrinks, shrinks, and it's going to shrink your whole life.
John:
We should have a whole episode about the end of Moore's Law, by the way, because, you know, Moore's Law has existed for most of our life, where it's like, oh, you know, they just keep shrinking the process, but, like, it doesn't take a genius to figure out.
John:
You can't keep shrinking forever.
John:
Eventually, you get down to the things that they're slamming together in that big ring underground somewhere in Europe.
John:
And...
John:
and you run into some problems uh but anyway we're not there yet um and so last week i said what the heck was i remembering with this whole fabbing ram first am i just crazy or was it something they used to do but don't do anymore and i got a lot of people uh who would be in positions to know telling me that what i was it wasn't that they don't fab ram it's that they found s ram not d ram s ram is the stuff you use to make like the caches and stuff on cpus it is not the same as d ram um
John:
Uh, it is much more expensive than DRAM and faster because you need to use way more transistors per bit of stored memory.
John:
Uh, but unlike DRAM, it doesn't need to be refreshed every X number of milliseconds.
John:
Anyway, we'll link to the, the, the SRAM, uh, Wikipedia page.
John:
SRAM is not a new thing, but the point is SRAM does not, is not filled with capacitors.
John:
It's just a bunch of logic gates and it is very regular.
John:
And that is what they use to test out the kinks and new processes.
John:
In fact, we have someone, Andrew Yang from, uh,
John:
I don't know, he's not the one from Intel, but it's someone else from Intel.
John:
But anyway, he links to an Anatech story from a while back, specifically talking about SRAM.
John:
The Anatech story says, the good old SRAM test vehicle is a great way to iron out bugs in the manufacturing process.
John:
And he talks about how Intel was demoing in 2007 their 32 nanometer SRAM test chip.
John:
And Eric, who used to work at Intel until 2006, says that each new process node, an SDRAM module was fabbed prior to the main production of CPUs.
John:
I saw someone else, I don't have the notes here, was saying that that measurement of like how small were you able to get SRAM is kind of like the yardstick for how you're doing on your process size.
John:
Like, oh, we first got SRAM down to this size at this date or whatever.
John:
So there you go.
John:
One letter makes a difference.
John:
If you don't know the difference between SRAM and DRAM, I encourage you to read the Wikipedia pages that we will put in the show notes because all RAM is crazy.
John:
And examining the difference between SRAM and DRAM will make you appreciate the stuff that's inside your computer that you never need to think about.
John:
uh and finally gordon mcgregor sent us a link to a chart that shows uh process size and i didn't quite understand this chart and it seems to contradict some of the things i just said but this chart shows that dram still leads process development versus logic but the gap is closing over time did you guys look at this graph here no it is somewhat confusing it shows logic and then dram then nand flash and uh i don't know what that other line is there anyway i will leave the graph in the show notes anyone wants to parse that out and figure what it is i'm looking at there
John:
But I'm fairly convinced that what I was remembering was SRAM and not DRAM in that first little letter makes all the difference.
John:
That took surprisingly little time, John.
John:
I'm very proud of you.
John:
I tried to trim it down.
John:
There was some more rehashing of the new MacBook, but I feel like we've covered it.
Marco:
Yeah, I think we can definitely never talk about the one port on the MacBook again.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
When Apple sends us all our free sample copies, then we'll talk about it some more.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't mention I got five of them in my mailbox today.
John:
I said, check your wrist.
John:
You're wearing two Apple Watches right now.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
If it were only that easy.
Casey:
Oh, damn.
Casey:
It's the sport.
Oh, man.
Casey:
okay so um so it's funny that this is the week that we run through follow-up so quickly because we don't really have any terribly pressing topics that's right now you where is your follow-up now that's what you get all right so um i i don't know which one of you guys put this in the show notes but um would you like to talk about arm max and roadmap rumors
John:
i think we all would i think we should all bring up this page which is from a long time ago and it is a completely unsubstantiated rumor as far as i can tell but i so we ran out of topics so we're moving from discussing new bs rumors to discussing ancient bs rumors yeah well i mean the
John:
this bs rumor is a it's a jumping off point first of all it it's in one of those sub communities that we don't really travel in like the whole uh semiconductor forums which you know whether where they're debating they're really into whose uh particular process size and what particular technology is getting what contract for what chip and you know all that stuff um so at the very least like and
John:
Anyway, look at the story.
John:
It talks about like the A9, the A10, the A9X, the A10X, the S1 and the S2, all names that you could very easily make up based on, you know, Apple's current naming of their chips and who might get those contracts and what technology they're using and the date they're supposed to start production and contracts that are split over different fabs like Samsung and TSMC and Global Foundry and whether Intel is fabbing anything.
John:
uh and there's a big table showing all this information most of which is not that big of a deal except from the perspective of apple you know how is apple managing its relationship with its fiercest competitor samsung that it is still relying on to fab a lot of its chips and that's always an uncomfortable situation and we've talked in the past about
John:
perhaps getting intel uh into the mix here because they are usually at the forefront of process technology uh very often far ahead of the rest of the field but so far apple hasn't been using them for anything but it's because of course intel has their own chips they want you to use instead of arm and anyway
John:
Inside this entire story is a one line item showing on the A9X and A10X line.
John:
Well, on the A9, A10, it says those are the iPhone.
John:
On the Apple Watch, it says, of course, the S1 and the S2.
John:
And then it talks about the baseband chip on the iPhone and iPad.
John:
And then the middle item, it says A9X, A10X, iPad and Mac.
John:
And that is not an exciting part of the story, really, to the people discussing this, because all they care about is who's fabbing them and what technology it's on.
John:
But it's like, oh, we'll just throw that in there.
John:
Yeah, of course, the A9X and the A10X, of course, there'll be Macs based on those.
John:
And this is the eternal ARM-based Mac rumor that we've talked about at length in the past.
John:
I think it was worth revisiting.
John:
Do we think anything has changed on the feasibility and likability of ARM-based Macs in light of, let's say, the new MacBook with its 5-watt CPU and the very latest iPad Air 2 with its benchmarks versus existing computers?
John:
Do we think now is the time?
John:
Do we believe this little table here any more than we did in the past, or is it just still a wait-and-see attitude?
Casey:
You know, I actually had an interesting and related realization at work the other day.
Casey:
One of my coworkers who is not a developer, she had just swapped a Dell iPad Air, excuse me, MacBook Air knockoff for a actual MacBook Air.
Casey:
And this MacBook Air happened to be a few years old.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly when it was built.
Casey:
But she didn't have VMware installed.
Casey:
Now, typically, when we used to issue Macs to everyone, doesn't matter if you're a developer or not, our IT department of one would install VMware Fusion on every single Mac.
Casey:
Because inevitably, all of these people, be it business people, developers, whatever, are going to need to do something in Windows that they can't do in OS X. And so...
Casey:
our IT guy would just get ahead of the curve and just put VMware Fusion on there.
Casey:
And I went to do something in VMware Fusion on her machine.
Casey:
I can't remember what it was, but it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
And VMware Fusion wasn't there.
Casey:
And that was a little bit odd for me because I thought it was a given that, say, for Vizio, if nothing else, that VMware would be on every Mac we hand out in the company.
Casey:
And it isn't.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That relates to this discussion because I have to imagine that virtualizing a Windows installation, unless it was whatever that weirdo version of Windows is that runs on the ARM surfaces, virtualizing a Windows installation on an ARM device.
Casey:
mac would be unbelievably slow i mean we've talked about this in the past but my recollection of macs before i ever touched a mac was that they would have like separate daughter boards on some of these old macs that would basically be a pc on a on a daughter board that you would plug into your mac in order to make emulation of pcs way faster do you know what i'm talking about john they had those but nobody owned them like you would never see one in the wild they made a couple machines that you could do that with a couple third parties actual shoulder card but
John:
it was not a thing.
John:
Like virtual PC was the thing.
John:
And that was, I'll emulate an x86 PC on my PowerPC Mac.
John:
And it was super slow.
Casey:
Exactly, exactly.
Casey:
And so that's one of the things that I love about my Macs.
Casey:
And this is granted directly driven by the fact that I do all of my work on the Microsoft stack.
Casey:
But nonetheless, I love being able to boot into Windows.
Casey:
Well, I don't love being able to boot into Windows, but I love being able to get my job done by booting into Windows.
Casey:
And using Visual Studio and doing all that sort of thing.
Casey:
But it was very interesting to me that someone who isn't a developer apparently doesn't need Windows anymore.
Casey:
And that's a change from just a couple of years back, at least in my workplace.
Casey:
And that is kind of what you were talking about, John.
Casey:
You know, is this more feasible now?
Casey:
Well, I don't know, but certainly could be.
John:
I think it's not just Windows, because we always think, oh, x86, it's great that we can run Windows software.
John:
Now, finally, this divide that existed for so long, it was Mac versus PC, and it was the software compatibility problem.
John:
And when Apple went to x86, it was cutting the Gordian knot and say, game over.
John:
It is not an issue anymore.
John:
You can boot Windows on these things.
John:
there is no excuse not to not to get this mac right you know i mean they can do it can do everything you can kind of look at it as a transitional thing like we need to we need to uh be able to do what the competition can do long enough to defeat the competition and then it doesn't matter anymore it's not like the mac is defeating windows pcs but what's happening is that you know the pc is being defeated by every by mobile right and so it becomes less relevant what goes on down here in in the pc world
John:
And maybe Windows becomes less relevant.
John:
Even Microsoft is bringing all of its stuff to be, you know, net-based services and cloud subscriptions and web-based things.
John:
And, you know, it's just the stakes are a lot lower.
John:
You know, the need for Windows is a lot lower.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Within specific applications, like if you really need to use Windows stuff, x86, I think, is still indispensable for those things.
John:
I don't think it's feasible for Apple to go all arm for a variety of reasons.
John:
And for x86, the reason I break up Windows is from my perspective.
John:
in my particular job, and everyone's varies, Windows, yes, is important, but I feel like Linux is just as important.
John:
And you say, well, it doesn't matter.
John:
Linux runs on everything.
John:
Linux doesn't need x86.
John:
You're right.
John:
Linux does run on everything.
John:
I had Linux on my PowerPC Mac.
John:
There was lots of different distributions.
John:
But practically speaking,
John:
It's a lot easier to get binary packages and to work out compilation problems and to just sort out everything you need to sort out on x86 64 Linux, right?
John:
Because that is the sweet spot.
John:
That is what everyone's using.
John:
That's the common thing.
John:
And if you have some exotic CPU like ARM or PowerPC or whatever,
John:
you are a little bit off the beaten path is that a big deal no but it's just a hassle it's an annoyance it's it's the kind of thing that mac users used to have to deal with because like oh i can do that but i'm a little bit different right it's like os 10 in the beginning you try to compile your unix software and it'd be like you can build it on a mac but it's kind of weird you might tweak a make file and it's like why doesn't this just build out of the box luckily every all the uh
John:
People who maintain software packages for Unix seem to get Macs because it only took a few years for all those packages to start building.
John:
And now you just expect if I get something from the open source world, it will build on the Mac.
John:
And if it doesn't, you're angry at somebody.
John:
So we've already become entitled, like, how dare that thing not build on the Mac, right?
John:
But yeah, I think x86 still serves a role as the sort of common base Windows, Mac, Linux, even though the Mac in the past has run on different platforms, and even though Linux in the present runs on a bazillion different platforms, and even Windows has at various times run on different platforms.
John:
There's an ARM version of Windows now.
John:
There was a PowerPC version of Windows NT for people who are really old and remember that one.
John:
But x86 is still that commonality.
John:
So regardless of what goes on in the low end of ARM, I have to think that...
John:
they apple would have to keep x86 64 at the very least on the high end for some period of time and the thing that makes trips me up about the arm based mac is like so do you have two different cpus in max for a long period for multiple years where you can get both arm max and x86 max that seems like more trouble than it's worth to me
Casey:
Yeah, that seems weird.
Casey:
I mean, that's what Microsoft is doing with the Surface, right?
Casey:
Because they have the Surface, what is it, RT, which is... Windows RT, yeah.
Casey:
I'm sorry, I'm conflating them.
Casey:
But yeah, there's a Surface that runs ARM, which at least the early ones, I haven't kept up with the later ones, but a few co-workers go to build every year.
Casey:
And that's kind of the Microsoft WWDC, if you will.
Casey:
It's in Moscone, the whole rigmarole.
Casey:
And anyway, unlike Apple, Microsoft gives away all sorts of awesome goodies.
Casey:
Like, I think they got Xbox Ones last year, etc.
Casey:
Well, anyways, they got Surface RTs a couple of years ago, and they said that they were great for the three or four or ten pieces of software that came with it.
Casey:
But they were pieces of crap for anything else.
Casey:
And the chat room is telling me, well, that's not really a thing anymore.
Casey:
But it's still an illustrative example of, well, it makes everything harder when you're not running on the CPU that most of the platform is running on.
Casey:
Now, granted, just like you said, John, over time, that would change.
Casey:
But it's weird from a consumer point of view.
Casey:
Like we've been lamenting, maybe not the three of us as much, but we as a community have been lamenting all the different SKUs that Apple has now between iPads and certainly the watch and iPhones and Macs.
Casey:
And this would just further complicate things.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's...
Casey:
I agree with you for sure, John, that it seems really aggressive to get rid of Intel.
John:
Even on the low end?
John:
Even on the low end?
Casey:
Even on the low end.
Casey:
It seems aggressive, but I would believe it because Apple is aggressive.
Casey:
I hear they're coming out with a computer that only has one port very soon.
John:
Don't know.
John:
Warning.
John:
Just to acknowledge that the chat room is talking about that the ARM-based version of Windows...
John:
It has gone around in circles a few times.
John:
Oh, it's dead.
John:
It's just going away.
John:
It's just sleeping.
John:
You know, it is an X version of Windows.
John:
Anyway, that always struck me as a trial balloon.
John:
We can make, you know, because it's when they were doing like the original Surface, right?
John:
And they were going to have one that was Intel power, but the best chips Intel could give them still required like vents to be on the side of their tablet.
John:
And that was kind of like, they're like, can we make one that's iPad-like, but still using, you know, like, can we do it?
John:
We want to make an iPad-like.
John:
and intel doesn't have a chip for us can we still put windows on it because their whole thing was like windows 8 it's the same everywhere blah blah well we can make an arm version of windows how about that and if it sold like gangbusters they would be like full steam ahead on it but surface in general didn't sell like gangbusters and the arm version even less so because it's just like casey said people bought them and either i can imagine people buying one saying wow this runs windows i'll be able to run everything and being mistaken despite the fact that i'm sure the nice microsoft sales people tried to emphasize to them that you will not be able to run x86 software on your arm based surface
John:
And then it required Microsoft to do the thing that has not been really good at doing lately, which is make all the people who make its third-party applications also compile an ARM version, make sure your app works on ARM.
John:
Like Apple is the king of hurting its developer community through platform transitions, whether it be from one CPU to the next, from desktop to phone, or from PowerPC to Intel.
John:
Apple has done that more times and more successfully than any other technology company.
John:
and microsoft has not done a great job of hurting its developer community from one api set to the other from one cpu architecture to the other hell they had a really hard time getting them onto the windows nt code base off of the you know windows 3.1 windows 95 windows 98 dos space code base so
John:
It could just be different strengths in the company.
John:
I totally believe Apple could pull off an ARM Mac transition.
John:
But I'm always looking like, aside from the obvious upside that we talk about all the time, Apple wants to own and control every important technology and its products.
John:
Like, that is there.
John:
That's the reason we're talking about this at all.
John:
It totally fits with everything they want to do.
John:
But then you say...
John:
What are you going to do about the Mac Pro?
John:
What are you going to do about the MacBook Pro?
John:
Are you going to become a CPU design powerhouse?
John:
You say, we already are a CPU design powerhouse.
John:
Look at the A8.
John:
We are amazing.
John:
Yes.
John:
All right.
John:
So I believe you could do it, but do you do it all one big bang?
John:
Do you say...
John:
And all the Macs are armed now.
John:
We've got a 12 core arm for our Mac Pros all the way down to the tiniest little arm in our Apple Watch.
John:
And we designed them all because now we're the new Intel.
John:
And I guess we get Samsung and TSMC to fab them for us at a process node that may be a little bit behind Intel.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It worries me.
John:
The whole thing worries me.
Marco:
Well, and also, if we look at... Did you see there was a benchmark on Geekbench that has been since taken down?
Marco:
But I saw a screenshot of it earlier.
Marco:
This is a benchmark of the new MacBook, the new slow MacBook.
Marco:
And it's roughly equivalent to the performance of 2010 MacBook Airs.
Marco:
It's in that ballpark.
Marco:
And I have reason to believe, from a few details about the screenshot, it looks legitimate.
Marco:
I think this is a real deal.
Marco:
So we now can see kind of what the CPU performance would be like, you know, I mean, what the CPU performance is as Intel tries to go all the way down to ARM-level chips.
Marco:
And this is not an Atom chip.
Marco:
This is an actual, you know, core series chip.
Marco:
But it's pretty close.
Marco:
And if you think about, compare this to the speed of the A8X chip in the iPad Air 2, which is currently, I believe, the best ARM chip that's kind of in that ballpark for wattage and everything like that, right?
Marco:
It's fairly close.
Marco:
It's in the ballpark.
Marco:
It's very similar to what we're seeing in the ARM chips in the same power envelope, roughly.
Marco:
So I think if you look at this, you can kind of see, well...
Marco:
An ARM version of this laptop really wouldn't be that different performance or battery-wise.
Marco:
I think it would be certainly in the same ballpark on both of those criteria.
Marco:
So then the question is, why go through the transition at all?
Marco:
If Intel can, with enough pressure and enough technology, if Intel can kind of reach down to the power levels of ARM chips to make a very low-level chip that still performs okay, even though it's not great...
Marco:
And if ARM can reach up and try to make a chip that performs as well as Intel but still keeps that envelope, and they're both kind of reaching the same general range by doing that, then why should Apple transition a product line that is so well-established on Intel chips and has all these massive transition costs if they were to choose to do it?
Marco:
Why make the jump?
Marco:
It seems like there's not enough gain to be had there.
John:
Simon Witte tweeted at us earlier on April 1st.
John:
You may have been in the air.
John:
He says the iPad Air 2, he just, there's not enough room in the tweet to expand this out, but he says 27.3 watt hours.
John:
Is that just the battery capacity?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, 1,800, 4,500 Geekbench.
John:
Those two numbers separated by a slash and it's at 20 nanometers.
John:
And the new MacBook is 39.7 watt hours.
John:
Again, I assume that's the battery.
John:
1,900, 4,000 Geekbench.
John:
So it's comparable Geekbench score and it's 14 nanometers.
John:
uh so like you're saying they're like they're ballpark uh you know close to each other the ipad air 2 and the new macbook but the bottom line of his tweet is core m is 200 more i don't you know maybe that's retail price or whatever um what can you do what can apple do if they fab their own chips save money sell their computers for less money i guess you know i mean i still think it's about owning control and not about you know we don't want to give a portion portion of our profits to intel
John:
uh but as i've said on many past programs i really wish apple and intel those two crazy kids to just work this out you know i want i want the best i want my max and everything to be fab with the best process technology human beings can make and usually that's intel has that and the best cpu designs and like just i don't understand why we have to fight why can't i have both like
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Well, right now we have competition.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
I mean, right now you have, like, you know, I'm sure we've all heard that Apple probably has had an ARM Mac, like in the labs for testing as a contingency plan for years.
Marco:
I mean, that's not new, right?
Marco:
So, you know, anyone would agree to that who knows anything about this stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Apple knows they can make an ARM MacBook whenever they want to.
Marco:
Intel knows that Apple can make an ARM MacBook whenever they want to.
Marco:
And so I think that healthy competition there.
Marco:
Intel has a bit of a fire lit under them in the last couple of years to try to get these power needs down to compete with ARM because they have no meaningful mobile presence.
Marco:
They really need a mobile presence if they want to see any more growth ever again.
Marco:
Uh, and, and so, and, and they can't stand to, they certainly can't lose the business they already have in, in, uh, in PCs and servers.
Marco:
So they are working really hard and you're right that they do have like the best process manufacturing technology in the world most of the time.
Marco:
So, uh,
Marco:
I think that competition is great, and I think we will see better results from Intel as long as they are separate, as long as this battle has not been settled yet, as long as there's a threat that Intel might lose their PC business or any part of it to ARM, Intel's going to keep working really hard.
John:
And so is ARM, and that's great.
John:
The semiconductor community site that this rumor thing is on,
John:
Part of what they talk about in this article is speculating about the idea that for future chips, assuming this little table is correct for future chips, that Apple is spreading the manufacturing around, not for technical reasons, but just sort of the same reason that like the music makers went to Amazon and tried to spread their business around from Apple just because they don't want to give any one fab.
John:
uh more more power than than the other so like the idea is that apple apple you know makes their own chip designs they own the intellectual property for the chip designs and they want to farm out fabbing of those chips to the best company the same way they do like who wants to build who wants to assemble our computers who wants to make our glass who wants you know like that's the the relationship apple is comfortable with we own the intellectual property we have a competition amongst all these other lower margin businesses to kill each other for our business
John:
who wants to manufacture the watch well go ahead you know fight fight with each other and we will pick the winner like who wants to manufacture our car like you know i mean who wants to fab our chips and even if one company clearly has the best deal and the best technology for a particular generation the speculation in this semiconductor semi wiki.com website is that apple is saying if we were you know if we wanted the best for the best price we would give all of our business to whoever samsung tsmc or whatever but
John:
Long term wise, it's better for us to kind of spread it around.
John:
So maybe give 75% to Samsung and 25% to Global Foundry just because we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.
John:
and intel as much as intel is in this fight or whatever like that's the relationship i feel like apple wants is we just want intel to be just another fab just like all these other people are uh and then we will have you all fight amongst yourselves and they would love to have intel like fabbing some of their chips like we'll give intel 50 and tsmc 25 and like
John:
but intel's just not in it at all maybe because intel wants all their business or none of their business or demands that apple use x86 in its phones i'm sure intel is showing apple roadmaps that show uh what amazing chips they're going to have that could be in an iphone and the iphone 7 or 8 like that's how intel got apple's business to begin with they showed them the core lineup and they said
John:
I know we have stupid Pentium 4s now and they suck, but like Netburst is dead.
John:
Here's what we're going to make for you in the future and no one can compete with it.
John:
And Intel was 100% right.
John:
They got Apple's business and they did have by far the fastest, most power efficient chips during that first generation when they were, you know, coming out in Apple's laptop.
John:
So...
John:
I'm sure those meetings are still taking place, but in the meantime, Apple is shipping a hell of a lot of ARM devices manufactured by nameless, faceless, sometimes very big competitors that we don't know or hear about, and that's just the way Apple likes it.
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Casey:
John, you made an interesting observation, or at least I think it was John, maybe it was Mark.
Marco:
It's probably John.
Casey:
That maybe other people have also realized, but the first place I saw it was here in the show notes.
Casey:
And you had pointed out that the Apple TV is actually cheaper than the VGA adapter for the MacBook that only has one port.
John:
Yeah, I'm not the first person to make that analogy.
John:
Because in the same keynote, they announced the price drop of the Apple TV from $99 to $69.
John:
And they also announced the availability or they announced the product.
John:
And did they announce the availability of the adapter?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Shortly after the announcement, we all went to the website and looked at the adapters for the one-port MacBook.
John:
And one of those adapters is $79.
John:
Yeah.
John:
oh they should have called it the macbook one yeah what a missed opportunity there you go it's like the xbox one they'll start over exactly they should have named it like the one one you know that one what the car the super car the hyper car sorry the one one i've lost track of what you're saying they're still words but they're not making any sense anymore
John:
I believe is it, the chat room will tell me, is it like O-N-E and then the number one or the reverse?
John:
You haven't heard of this either, Casey?
Casey:
No.
John:
It's because it wasn't on Top Gear and that's where you got all your cars.
Casey:
Oh, don't even bring it up.
Casey:
I can't handle another week of feedback about that.
John:
Anyway, the one one is by the car manufacturer whose name I'm not going to attempt to pronounce, but you know it as the really long one on the Top Gear board.
John:
What's the name of that company with the K?
John:
Koenigsegg.
John:
yeah okay there you go that one they're making a car called the one one uh spelled in some weird way and i think it's because it's one uh one horsepower per pound or something anyway it's insane go google the one one and see what the crazy people are making for cars you should yeah apparently it's o-n-e colon and numeral one that's not confusing at all it is a crate you have to look at it it's just it's crazy um anyway the ferrari love ferrari it is more way more crazy than that and will probably break after being driven 100 miles but you know like anyway
John:
It's yeah, you just still get the LaFerrari.
John:
But this this car is crazy.
John:
One horsepower per kilogram.
John:
Sorry, they're in European.
John:
It's not one horsepower per pan.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, the fact that the new Apple TV is cheaper than the adapter.
John:
I don't know what it highlights.
John:
Does it highlight the fact that that adapter is too expensive?
John:
Does it highlight the fact that that adapter also contains silicon chips?
John:
We know that.
John:
Are the silicon chips that are in that adapter actually more expensive than the ancient single-core A5 that's in the Apple TV?
John:
I don't know, but like the price drop itself, like dropping the Apple TV from $99 to $69, all points towards
John:
And the fact that they announced the HBO deal we'll talk about in a second.
John:
All points towards the idea that...
John:
this current Apple TV is finally, blessedly, going to not be the best Apple TV you can buy, whether it goes away or continues on in its $69 slot, as many people think it will.
John:
Either way, a new Apple TV is coming.
John:
It is long overdue, and when the new Apple TV comes, by dropping this one, it leaves room for the new Apple TV to come in at $99 to have an actual decent CPU and to not give me obscure errors when I try to watch television programs.
John:
And if I'm really getting greedy here, and I know everyone who has a Roku or some other box that they love is going to tell me this is not a problem there, but all the TV connected thingies that I have, anything that streams video, whether it's streaming from my Synology, streaming from my Mac, streaming onto my PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, from my TiVo, from my Apple TV, what else do I have connected?
John:
All these different devices from my TV itself streaming from Netflix.
John:
All these things, this one elusive piece of technology seems not to exist, which is the ability to scrub around in a television program in anything resembling a reliable, meaningful way.
John:
It is just like fast forward, rewind to be able... Sometimes fast forwarding a rewind scan totally screws the stream and you have to start from the beginning.
John:
Sometimes it kind of moves a little bit and stutters.
John:
Sometimes a perfectly good stream will stop and just like...
John:
I don't know what the problem is with this.
John:
I do it on web pages all the time.
John:
I move the little scrubber in YouTube and it actually works.
John:
And yet for everything connected to my television, if I ever want to fast forward or rewind scan, as in not jump to the beginning, not jump to the end, but move in either direction at a speed faster than 1x playback, these applications, these devices throw up their hands and say, you're crazy.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
I don't know why you're even bothering.
John:
Now I will punish you with at least a three minute delay before any picture moves again.
John:
and you won't know where you are in the stream and you won't be able to get back to where you are and sometimes i'm you know i'm starting over entirely i'm going to lose your place and you have to start over from the beginning and by the way you can't get back to where you left off because if you try to fast forward scan that won't work either stream error drives me nuts i wonder if if any part of it is related to the hardware decoding chips they use for the video codecs
John:
I don't know what it's related to.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, that's probably not the problem.
Marco:
It's probably just because they're sloppy and cheaply made and their software is sloppy and cheaply made.
Marco:
I mean, this is like... I'm really not that into the idea of a new Apple TV right now.
Marco:
I mean, it's fine.
Marco:
I hope they make one and I hope it does well and everything.
Marco:
But I'm not really excited about the idea of a new Apple TV hardware device because...
John:
the problems i have with the existing apple tv don't seem hardware related well that's the thing that's what people are saying in the chat room as well it's like when something like this happens like the puck or anything you connect your tv you're like what's the problem is the problem that i'm not getting data from the streaming service is the problem that the software is crappy is the problem that the hardware is crappy is it some combination sometimes is it one problem sometimes the other is the problem that you know my isp is throttling connection to this thing and if i change my dns i'll get a better stream
John:
is the problem that the authentication servers for iTunes aren't working, and really you would stream fine if only the authentication servers weren't constantly installing when it's trying to re-authenticate while I'm watching.
John:
There are so many moving parts, and there is so little that you can debug with these closed systems that you're just like, look, it either has to work all the time, 100%, or...
John:
Or I just throw up my hands and I say, I don't know.
John:
You go into Merlin Man mode and you're like, well, I guess I'm rebooting everything I own.
John:
I guess I'm unplugging my Apple TV from the power because it's the only way I can get the thing to reboot because even the secret command handshake that you hold down on the remote isn't working because the thing's frozen hard.
John:
It is so frustrating not to know where the problem is.
John:
Marco, you're diagnosed as saying you think it's not a hardware problem.
John:
I think there are problems at every level.
John:
And the hardware, because it's old and the software, because it's so clearly in kind of like maintenance mode, I just hope that all the good people are working on the new version and the new version won't have these problems.
John:
But even if they come out with a new hardware, a new software that's better, I also believe that my streaming connection is crappy because I've heard that Apple uses a different connection for streaming its Netflix than the other Netflix clients.
John:
And I think this is mostly borne out by experimentation when I can't get a stream on Apple TV Netflix client.
John:
I use my TiVo Netflix client and it can.
John:
Or I go to Netflix in a web browser on one of my Macs and it works.
John:
It really just... The whole...
John:
interconnected mess of things that that have to work correctly and in harmony for me to watch a television program streaming over the internet it seems like there's always at least one out of the three layers that's screwing up and usually all three of them are screwing up in some way and it's very frustrating the biggest the biggest frustration for me with these things so uh i don't know maybe a month or two ago two months ago whatever i i bought
Marco:
both a roku tv whatever the newest roku is and uh an amazon fire tv like the the big powerful one because there's two we have two tvs in the house and they both have apple tvs and the apple tvs are getting so flaky i'm like let me let me just try something else uh to see what everyone's talking about and uh wanted to check out amazon video service anyway
Marco:
So they're both just really mediocre.
Marco:
Like they're fine.
Marco:
If I had to pick one that is less crappy, I guess I'd pick the Amazon one.
Marco:
But what's really frustrating is that the Apple TV is still the best one.
Marco:
That depresses me.
John:
I like having the fantasy that the Roku that everyone loves would be better.
Marco:
that's the problem i had that fantasy too and now that i've been using them like the apple tv is still the best one which a few people on twitter told me in advance so i i but i was afraid that they would be right and unfortunately they are i mean just by general like just usability the basic interface i mean these other players have had years to rip off the good stuff from apple and they just haven't and like i don't know i don't know what it is i i i
John:
maybe they just don't have the kind of sensibilities to develop simple interfaces i don't know maybe maybe they think the way to compete with apple is by throwing on a whole bunch of stuff well but that is the road like the roku's like up is like it's the most flexible it can run plex like it's it's going to let you do everything right that's that's what it's trying to do but all of these boxes the problem is like for all the features and all the ui or whatever like
John:
If I could put some big giant sign like the big old IBM think pads or the big thing, you know framed poster after that or whatever But I would put it all these people's things is would be much longer and I'd have to come up with a snappy phrasing for it but the bottom eyes I
John:
When I want to watch a program, I want to press a series of buttons and have video play.
John:
Pretty much immediately.
John:
And that has to work every time.
John:
Maybe it's because I'm old.
John:
Because I come from a place where if your television wasn't broken and you turned it on, you could see moving pictures pretty much instantly.
John:
Every time.
Marco:
The funny thing is, what you want out of seeking...
Marco:
But VCRs offered that perfectly.
John:
Right.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It wasn't great, but you could do it on a VCR.
John:
You can do it on DVDs.
John:
It was like, wow, I can skip without scrubbing through.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And there wasn't little staticky lines on DVDs when you fast forward.
John:
You could pause.
John:
You could like, right.
John:
We seem to have been making progress.
John:
And now streaming, when it works right, it's like, this is what I want.
John:
It's magic.
John:
I have access to a million shows anytime I want them.
John:
I can go to any part of it.
John:
It's amazing, right?
John:
They're organized by season.
John:
Whole seasons are released at once.
John:
But all the magic crumbles into dust as soon as I sit down in front of a television, press a series of buttons on my remote, and moving pictures do not start happening.
John:
And I either get an error message or something else.
John:
And it doesn't have to happen.
John:
90% of the time, it works, right?
John:
But that 10% just destroys the illusion that I'm living in a future where things work.
Casey:
So it's funny that Marco had brought up the Roku and the Fire TV and compared them to the Apple TV because I, maybe a month ago, got a Fire TV stick, which is the less powerful version of what Marco got.
Casey:
What Marco got is physically, as far as I know, is about the same size as an Apple TV.
Casey:
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Marco:
It's like an Apple TV that's been rolled over by a steamroller slightly.
Marco:
So it's like just same volume roughly, but just flatter and wider.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So the Fire TV stick is more like a Chromecast in that it's just a little HDMI dongle and a little power brick to power it.
Casey:
And I got it on Dan Morin's recommendation because he had said he had had pretty good luck with Fire TV.
Casey:
And I don't believe he had said he had ever tried the stick, but they're roughly equivalent unless you have a really, really nice home theater setup, which I do not.
Casey:
So I got this Fire TV stick, I believe it was $40 on Amazon, and I love it.
Casey:
And the reason I love it mostly is because I can use Plex with it natively.
Casey:
Basically, the only things I tend to do with my Apple TV are airplane mirroring, typically video, but not always, or Netflix.
Casey:
The Fire TV stick doesn't natively support airplane mirroring, of course.
Casey:
There are apps that you can download and pay for to get airplane mirroring.
Casey:
I have bought a couple, and they're not very good, which is not surprising, but they're enough in a pinch.
Casey:
Um, but it has Netflix and it has Plex and that is easily 90% of what I want out of a box or dongle connected to my TV.
Casey:
And again, what makes the fire TV sticks so wonderful for me is that the Plex support is fantastic rather than air playing from my iPad or my iPhone.
Casey:
Or yes, I'm aware of that God awful hack you can do with the trailers app on the Apple TV.
Casey:
I'm not going to do that.
Casey:
So I love it because it works great with Plex.
Casey:
You can Seek, usually, with Plex.
Casey:
It works pretty darn well with Netflix.
Casey:
So I really like it.
Casey:
Now, that being said, the user interface is crappy.
Casey:
Marco is exactly right.
Casey:
The user interface, it's different, but too much Android leaks out for my taste.
Casey:
Not that I have anything intrinsically against Android, but fiddly bits that I shouldn't have to worry about.
Casey:
And I guess I don't have to worry about them, but they're still there.
Casey:
Like, do you want to allow sideloading like that?
Casey:
Why is that even an option?
Casey:
No, I don't want that.
Casey:
And the way you go and get like apps is a little weird.
Casey:
It's just like a generic search, which maybe is better.
Casey:
But it's weird to me that when I search for Plex, I could be ending up in apps or I could be ending up on...
Casey:
audio or whatever the case may be so there are definitely odd bits to the user interface but by and large i like it and the other thing i really like about it that just occurred to me is that the remote is either bluetooth or rf or something so that you do not need to point the remote at the apple tv which is really awesome because our apple tv is kind of tucked away a little bit and not extraordinarily easy to point a remote at
Casey:
So for all of those reasons, I really love my Fire TV stick, and I definitely recommend it if you have similar needs from your device that I do.
Casey:
Now, Marco, I think you have very different needs from your device.
Casey:
And as far as I recall, you get a lot of your media through iTunes.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Um, not as much anymore.
Marco:
The constant DRM errors on authentication trying to play my media that I've bought from iTunes is really convincing me to try to stop doing that.
Marco:
I actually, when I got these boxes, I did start using Plex.
Marco:
I installed myself Plex for the very first time.
Marco:
Using Plex for me feels a lot like building a gaming PC in the sense that I'm getting a lot of functionality, more than I actually really need.
Marco:
Also coming at a cost of maintenance and fiddliness that I'm sure I just have settings wrong, but it's just so freaking fiddly.
Marco:
Plex?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
There's nothing.
Casey:
The only fiddly thing about Plex is that you have to use their naming convention, which is not my favorite, but not so egregious that I can't bend to it.
Casey:
Other than that, everything just works magically.
Casey:
I can watch my media that's stored on my Synology anywhere in the world as long as I have an internet connection.
Casey:
It will automatically transcode on the fly to whatever my speed is as it sees fit.
Casey:
And it will grab all the metadata it needs as long as I name things appropriately.
Casey:
I could not disagree more.
Casey:
I've had nothing but wonderful experiences with Plex.
John:
I've tried to use Plex, but my problem has always been I don't have anything attached to my television that can run it.
John:
And once the PS4 version of Plex came out, I'm like, now, finally, well, now, this is when my PS4 was still attached to my television.
John:
But anyway, I figured, well, the PS4 version of Plex came out, I should try it.
John:
And I did, and it's very bad, and the setup process was super painful, and there's no way a human could have figured out the crap that I had to go through to try to get this thing to work in terms of opening ports on my modem and getting reverse lookups.
John:
It was just like insanity, right?
John:
But what I'm looking for out of, yeah, that's just because of the PS4.
John:
I've used Plex on my Mac before and it's way nicer.
John:
Like the Mac version of Plex, if I could get the Mac version of Plex on my TV, say by having a Mac Mini or something, it would make a big difference, right?
John:
But anyway, what I'm looking for out of Plex and why probably no one will ever have it is I think what you're talking about, Casey.
John:
the dream thing sort of the the software connected box equivalent of the omnivorous box that i was dreaming about way back when like that someone will make a box that takes that takes video input from everywhere and unifies it so i don't actually care where it comes from and it would do everything like no one ever made that and no one ever probably will uh the software equivalent of that is like plex where it's like
John:
Give me your video.
John:
Do you have random BitTorrent things that you illegally downloaded?
John:
Do you have videos that you ripped?
John:
Do you have videos of your kid?
John:
Do you have Blu-ray extractions that you make MKV from Blu-rays that you own?
John:
I don't care where this video came from.
John:
You just throw it all into the pit.
John:
And I don't care what you name them.
John:
I don't care what's in them.
John:
I have this crazy, you know, crowdsourced, internet-powered database.
John:
Well, I will figure out what the heck these files are.
John:
I'll look at the, you know, the fingerprints of the data, organize it into seasons, give you cover-up, give you descriptions of every episode.
John:
Like...
John:
plex does a hell of a lot of that plex you can more or less throw a bunch of stuff at like the metadata lookup the cover art the being able to play a million different crazy formats transcoding on the fly doing all that stuff plex and various other utilities and other sort of uh software apps do a lot of that but
John:
they're a little bit flaky they can't really play every file that you download sometimes the device you're running it on can't transcode fast enough to handle this thing sometimes you lose the 5.1 track and it mixes it down to something else you can't see the special features from your dvds or your blu-rays like the limitations just start stacking up and stacking up and because no one like none of the legit people are motivated to be able to take your illegal downloads or your rips of dvds and figure out what they are and sort them into sessions apple's never going to do that like
John:
Roku is probably not even going to do that other than running the Plex app, right?
John:
And so this is definitely an in-betweeny stage where we are in the transition from broadcast television to streaming television.
John:
And there's lots of sort of do-it-yourselfer solutions that work to varying degrees, but...
John:
I feel like to come over the hump, the non-broadcast television experience needs to be like the old one in one specific way.
John:
When you press play, video has to play.
John:
And I don't care where the problem is and neither does anyone else.
John:
Is it with the networks?
John:
Is it an ISP fighting with Netflix or something?
John:
Is it the hardware?
John:
Is it my router?
John:
Is it jumbo packets?
John:
I don't care.
John:
I just want...
John:
want video to play and i have to say of all you know all this complaining about streaming devices the one television connected device that i have in my house that is closest to the ideal of press play and video plays is the tivo why because it's piggybacking on the old cruddy coaxial cable that comes into my house that delivers television which has you know developed over the years to be different than what it was and
John:
But, yeah, you know, I have a cable card.
John:
The coaxial cable goes into the back of my TV.
John:
I pay for all the pay channels.
John:
I pay for all the fancy stuff, right?
John:
And then there's a hard drive and an incredibly weak CPU and a bunch of video decoding chips that record six of those channels at once onto a hard drive.
John:
And when I press play, it plays the video off that hard drive.
John:
And when I fast forward and rewind, it fast forwards and rewinds.
John:
and it works every time, and it doesn't crash, and I don't get authentication errors, and that's, you know, it does have a Netflix client on it, which is flaky, and it does have all these other streaming clients on it, which are flaky, but for the core purpose of recording video that's coming over my house through the coaxial cable that I pay for, it works.
John:
And so my vast preference is...
John:
record Game of Thrones on my TiVo, watch it on my TiVo.
John:
Yes, I have HBO Go.
John:
Yes, I'll have HBO Now.
John:
I have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
You know what I know will work?
John:
Sit down in front of the TiVo, turn it on, go down to Game of Thrones, hit play.
John:
The video will play every time it plays.
John:
And that, like, that's going to keep me loyal to TiVo and it's going to keep me paying my whatever the heck it is
John:
huge bill for real live old fashioned cable service until the streaming people can get their acts together to the point where now I can start choosing things based on features or pricing or something like that.
John:
But right now I'm choosing based on reliability.
Casey:
Yeah, I hear that.
Casey:
I mean, it sounds like we all sort of have our own unique needs.
Casey:
John apparently boils down to just freaking work.
Casey:
But yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
It's sad that this hasn't been solved, which I know – I think this is where you started, John.
Casey:
But it's sad that this is still – that –
Casey:
Marco and I both felt like we needed two different manufacturers boxes in order to fix this problem.
Casey:
And neither of us feels completely satisfied with that fix.
John:
Yeah, all of us have multiple things like I have.
John:
I watch things from Netflix and I choose the Apple TV to be my Netflix client because it has no fan.
John:
I watch things from streaming video.
John:
I buy things from iTunes.
John:
I do all of it, right?
John:
But it's like when I have a choice, sometimes you don't have a choice.
John:
When I have a choice, TiVo is my go-to.
John:
But if I don't, I go down the cascade.
John:
Do I want to try to stream it with my Synology?
John:
Do I want to try to watch it on Apple TV's Netflix client?
John:
Do I want to try my TV's building Netflix client?
John:
Sometimes I make the rounds until one of them works right.
John:
Sometimes my kid wants to watch a movie that I have...
John:
bought it on itunes i have an illegally downloaded file i have the blu-ray i have the dvd this is very common case there are movies where i have all those things right and it's like how how should how should we watch that file is it important to make pictures moving on the television as fast as possible before the kid gets cranky or is it for me is it important because it's a family viewing that i'm going to take out the actual blu-ray disc and put it in because that has the highest fidelity video and sound and that's very important to me why i own a big stack of blu-rays right
John:
Because movies that I've already owned and they're already watched, I like to have on Blu-ray if I really care about the movie because it is the best quality.
John:
So having to be like a connoisseur of like, how do I want to watch this today?
John:
And having to pick based on quality and predicted reliability and speed and which one is just going to work, like especially with like illegal downloads, which thing will actually successfully play this?
John:
Let's try it directly from the Synology on my TV.
John:
Let's try it through the PlayStation media server.
John:
Let's try it through Plex.
John:
Let's try transcoding it manually.
John:
And it's like,
Marco:
you know sometimes you just want to watch a movie well and the sad part is like i've hired almost nothing and it still sucks like you can do everything quote right you can you can you can totally buy into one of these ecosystems you know whether it's the apple ecosystem the amazon whatever you can totally buy into it you can do everything right the way most people do and it still doesn't work very well it's worse because that's a monoculture you need biological diversity right that's why it
John:
Like, doing illegally has the advantage that there won't be, like, unskippable FBI warnings at the front of it.
John:
You won't have to fight through seven layers of menus and downloading new Java updates on your Blu-ray player just to get to the movie.
John:
Like, pirating is almost always better, but then, like, you're like, okay, well, no, I don't get the... I don't like the way this was transcoded, or it was cropped wrong, or I don't like the audio tracks that were included in this, or they don't get the director's commentary.
John:
There's always trade-offs, but I would say...
John:
overall illegal gives you a better experience like again even for movies that i own the discs for sometimes if i just want to watch the thing right now i will look at the either the ripped version of it or the illegally downloaded version of it because i know i'll get to the movie part faster
Marco:
Well, and that's one of the reasons why I've been ripping all my Blu-rays using Don Melton's scripts because I bought this LG Blu-ray ripper and I have this Mac Mini that's doing this live stream now.
Marco:
And when it's not doing live streaming tasks, it's doing Plex and Blu-ray ripping.
Marco:
And I'm doing all that because I keep having these stupid errors with stuff I've actually bought on iTunes.
Marco:
And when my kid wants to watch a Pixar movie and we try to play it and I can't get it playing after 10 minutes of fiddling with stuff because of random Apple TV or CDN or service errors...
Marco:
I want to just have it locally on the LAN and have it play, which used to work great, but now home sharing sucks.
Marco:
Everything sucks.
Marco:
You should never have turned off jumbo frames, Marco.
Marco:
I don't get...
Marco:
It is so frustrating.
Marco:
And the good thing is that I think there is hope in sight.
Marco:
Right now, there is kind of this inconvenient hole or this inconvenient division in the market right now because you can't get all the big stuff in one box, basically.
Marco:
because the biggest offenders are that Apple... The Apple TV is the problem, basically.
Marco:
The Apple TV is the only thing that can play iTunes stuff, and the Apple TV can't, for the most part, can't duplex, and it can't play Amazon Instant Video.
Marco:
If there is a future Apple TV coming out soon that offers an app platform,
Marco:
Maybe that is how Apple will kind of finally quietly allow those things to happen on the Apple TV.
Marco:
Without having to partner with Amazon, which they really probably wouldn't want to do.
Marco:
And without having to install Plex as a built-in app, which might cause piracy, concern, pressure from their content partners or whatever.
Marco:
If there's just another Apple TV that has great hardware and an app platform...
Marco:
and they permit Plex and Amazon TV to build apps for it, which they almost certainly would, then that, I think, will be a really great box, potentially, if it actually works.
Marco:
And maybe by then, they will have fixed Discovery D, which I assume is probably what's causing all the home-sharing issues.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I still feel like the ISP issue is unresolved, like the battle between the content providers and the content owners, whether it be HBO or Netflix or some combination and the ISPs who just want a cut of everything and want, you know, like the whole strangling networks that they know that the Netflix content comes from and like the whole net neutrality thing like that.
John:
That needs to sort it out.
John:
you know you need everything to work even if all the hardware and software and business deals get worked out on the device connected to your tv if the isp is still in a spat with one or more of those people your experience is going to suck and there's like nothing you can do about it because you'll do like a speed test and you're like you've got 100 megabits down but you can't watch a video at more than 480p and even then it stalls sometimes it's like why am i even paying for this service and you know it's
John:
that i guess the the you know the hbo now deal that was part of the same keynote with the one port macbook right um it's called the macbook one now john yes that's what we're calling it god all right but well before we do the hbo one stuff let's uh let's thank our last sponsor
Marco:
Our last sponsor is Harry's.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg.
Marco:
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Marco:
It was actually an old blade factory in Germany that they liked so much that they bought the factory.
Marco:
These are high-quality, high-performing German blades crafted by shaving experts.
Marco:
And this is not, you know, I was reading a little up on this for this week.
Marco:
It is surprisingly difficult to make really good disposable razor blades.
Marco:
There's a lot of engineering, a lot of R&D that goes into that.
Marco:
This is a long-standing factory.
Marco:
They've been doing this stuff for a very long time, and they know how to do it.
Marco:
These blades they make give you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet.
Marco:
Harry's offers factory-direct pricing at a fraction of the big brand prices.
Marco:
They are usually about half the price or less compared to something like a Gillette Fusion or something like that, which I would say the Gillette Fusion is the most equivalent rival in the market.
Marco:
An 8-pack of Harry's Blades is just $15.
Marco:
A 16-pack is just $25.
Marco:
For reference, 12 Fusion Blades are $41.
Marco:
12 Harry's Blades are just $20.
Marco:
So it runs about half the price of the big razor brands.
Marco:
Now, the Harry starter set is an amazing deal.
Marco:
For $15, you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream or gel, your choice, and three razor blades.
Marco:
Really, this is an incredible deal here.
Marco:
And they have great packaging.
Marco:
They have a great design skill over there.
Marco:
I would say they really have kind of like the modern hip-slash-mad-men aesthetic nailed.
Marco:
It's like this nice...
Marco:
old style but modernized and it still has that classy old look.
Marco:
The handles can be nice and weighty and metal and polished.
Marco:
You don't feel like you're using an Android commercial.
Marco:
You feel like you're using something classy that's really designed for modern people and not 80s robots.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Go to harrys.com, and you can use the promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Harry's for sponsoring once again.
Casey:
All right, so back to the HBO deal that came up in the last Apple keynote.
John:
Yeah, this is framed as an Apple win, but really it is just the natural evolution of HBO.
John:
In the past, they were a thing you had to buy as a premium addition to your cable bill.
John:
Then they had the HBO Go application, which first you could only watch on iOS devices, and then eventually they let you stream to your television.
John:
But the important point was you couldn't do anything with that iOS app at all unless you had a cable subscription that included HBO.
John:
uh and that frustrated people because they were like come on hbo this is the future we the whole point of us watching your content on our streaming apple you know apple tv puck thing or on our iphone or on our ipad is that we don't want to pay for cable in fact we're cable cutters we don't want to pay for cable at all except for cross for internet access which we'll never get rid of that but anyway uh we don't want to pay for cable television we don't watch espn or you know they we watch it on their website or we watch things on youtube or whatever like
John:
divorce your service from the cable television industry and now finally hbo is ready to do that they're not ready to do it themselves because apparently their technology act is not together on the whole hbo go front so they're outsourcing it i believe to the mlb.tv people the people who do major league baseball television streaming which by all accounts despite the silly blackout nonsense the actual streaming part of it works pretty well
John:
So there are high hopes for this business.
John:
If you pay them $15 a month, you can watch HBO.
John:
You don't need to have a cable subscription.
John:
All you need is some device that can do this.
John:
And it is exclusive to Apple for how long?
John:
Like six months or three months?
Casey:
I thought it was three.
Casey:
But I've also heard that it's not really exclusive to Apple.
Casey:
I didn't read up on this because I don't really watch HBO and I don't have HBO.
Casey:
But I could swear I'd read somewhere recently that it may or may not actually be exclusive.
John:
Yeah, well, but the deal is like, you know, so the new season of Game of Thrones is starting and Apple did just drop the price on its little silly puck thing.
John:
So for $69, cord cutters can buy a puck and $15 a month.
John:
They can watch Game of Thrones.
John:
They can watch it in theory.
John:
whenever they want without a cable subscription without uh borrowing some borrowing quote unquote someone's hbo go password who does subscribe to hbo which was the past practice uh and for a short period of time which includes the time that the game of thrones season will be premiering the only way to do this or according to apple the only way is on their particular thing but that will expire and very soon i'm
John:
it's exactly what we all wanted out of hbo and this is the slow crumbling of all the people who are holding out uh holding the line on old media going towards like what marco said eventually a potential app platform kind of like we have on ios today where there's a series of applications that you can use to watch you know uh nba or mlb or uh maybe i don't know if the nfl is out there all these three letter acronyms for sport things that none of us watch uh i do yeah do they have an nfl app you can tell me maybe
Casey:
Uh, they do, but it only is useful if you get NFL Sunday ticket, which you can only get if you're a direct TV subscriber or live in like the UK or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So those deals, yeah.
John:
Like they're still kind of entrenched, but trying to slowly divorce themselves like that.
John:
I shouldn't have to pay for cable television or satellite television or whatever.
John:
I should just be able to a la carte by the, it's still, you know, it's not the shows you want.
John:
You're still buying the channels you want, right?
John:
You're buying HBO.
John:
You're not buying game of Thrones.
John:
Uh,
John:
uh people would rather just be able to get game of thrones without buying the season on itunes after it's already aired or whatever or the day after it aired like we're narrowing it getting closer and closer used to be you couldn't get a digital version of a television show ever and then you could get a digital version of the television show much later and then you could get it the next day and now you're going to be able to watch it at the same time as the people who subscribe to hbo again in theory because if their servers crush are crushed under the weight of all the uh
John:
people trying to do that i know my tivo will record it and i'll be able to watch it in real time uh that's the great thing about hbo no commercials you don't have to you know you can watch it in real time because you don't have to wait for the commercials to queue up but anyway i continue to watch those things on my nice reliable tv but they're trying to get to the future and i feel like uh
John:
If people go out and get the $69 puck so they can watch it and pay the subscription to HBO so they can watch Game of Thrones finally in, you know, without borrowing someone's password and without having to subscribe to HBO and they plug in the puck and they turn it on, they're all excited to watch it and they got their popcorn and maybe there's some friends over and they hit play and it doesn't play.
John:
They're not going to be excited about the future of streaming TV.
John:
They're going to regret that $69 purchase.
John:
And when the new Apple TV comes out for $99, they're not going to be enthused about buying that.
John:
It is so easy to sour a normal person, not a geek, but like a semi-normal person on the experience of TV connected pucks by just having it not work once and them going, you know what?
John:
I didn't like paying for cable.
John:
I didn't like paying extra on top of cable for HBO, but at least I could watch my show when I wanted to watch my show.
Casey:
I have nothing to add here.
Casey:
I agree with you completely.
Casey:
I mean, I think you nailed it.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Reuters TV, Squarespace, and Harry's, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Marco:
Dream too accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Tech podcast so long.
John:
My stories, they call it.
John:
Why do I watch my stories?
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Good God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Marco, we talked a little bit earlier and we told you to save it for the after show about how you're falling out of love with Twitter, which is funny because I feel like you're coming to a conclusion quicker than I am.
John:
have similar feelings about is really is twitter really doing anything positive for me or is it just making me angry all the time well like the thing that i quoted to you guys before i put it in the show notes so maybe you've looked it up by now but did any of you recognize the quote i was referencing when marco first talked about this nope this is this is an older quote is from 1777 i don't know if you guys remember back that far
John:
We're not as old as you, John.
John:
It's from Samuel Johnson.
John:
And the well-known part of it is, I'll read the whole thing.
John:
You find no man at all intellectual who is willing to leave London.
John:
No, sir.
John:
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.
John:
For there is in London all that life can afford.
John:
And that was my way of saying that it's not specifically Twitter that is a tiresome thing.
John:
And that I think at this point, Twitter offers all that life can afford, more or less.
John:
It is.
John:
exposure to lots of people which can happen anywhere on the internet whether it be in a usenet group where the exact same toxic things that marco is going to discuss i'm sure uh haven't you know could happen and did happen or it could be irc or it could be web forums or web bulletin boards or aol chat room news group things i don't know is everyone aol whatever those things are called like
John:
Yeah.
John:
is you know being tired of life and i'm not saying that that means he's wrong or anything i'm saying like that we should put the blame where it lies which is like you know other people suck right and or whatever like however you want to deal with like how how are you current feeling like i'm gonna put in video game turns like how how are your shields holding up against the current onslaught right are you feeling weak are you feeling strong do you feel like it's wearing you down and doing something negative and disengaging is the way you deal with that like if your shields are going down you get bombarded from all sides
John:
But you go elsewhere.
John:
You pull your ship back.
John:
You hide behind a rock and let your ships regenerate.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm mixing video game metaphors here.
Marco:
Treat it like the Halo thing so that you can step back for a minute and you recharge your things.
John:
Right.
John:
And what I'm getting at is that it's not so much Twitter specifically.
John:
It really could be anything.
John:
It could be blog comments if you had comments on your blog.
John:
And one way to fix that might be to turn off comments.
John:
It could be people sending you hateful emails.
John:
There are many vectors through which people who have any amount of notoriety can be
John:
put upon by others and it can start to affect them for a variety of reasons and i think acknowledging that and dealing with it in a way that were expressed for you is healthy uh my only point with the tired of life thing is that i don't think it's specific to twitter or any one thing and i don't think shifting your use to like app.net or usenet or going back to irc or whatever like nothing is going to solve that problem it is not a technology problem it's just a like
John:
thing that you have to deal with that goes in cycles that you have to deal with no matter where it is.
John:
And you have to do whatever you need to do to make yourself be happier, essentially.
Marco:
So I actually agree with most of what you just said.
Marco:
It's not... The problem I have with Twitter, the problem I'm having is partly my fault.
Marco:
It is partly that it is... And I've talked about it before, like struggles with trying to keep my Twitter usage under control so it's not just...
Marco:
constantly sucking away little bits of time throughout the day and just being this massive time suck and distraction suck, which hurts my productivity.
Marco:
And when I see my report from Rescue Time every week and it says I spent X hours in Twitter, I don't feel good about that.
Marco:
So that's part of the problem.
Marco:
And I've always had that problem.
Marco:
And I've tried different techniques over the years to try to minimize that, like only using it on my phone or only using it in a notification center or quitting it during the workday or whatever.
Marco:
And they've all done slight help here and there, but they mostly just kind of move the problem around.
Marco:
They don't really tend to reduce the problem meaningfully.
Marco:
The problem there is just me that I want to keep engaging and interacting with Twitter.
John:
You're not a Twitter completionist, right?
John:
I keep forgetting.
Marco:
No.
John:
You don't have that problem.
John:
If you were, I would say that's one thing you should definitely stop.
Marco:
Another problem that I have is that I'm not keeping up because so much is going on on Twitter.
Marco:
I'm missing what my friends are saying.
Marco:
A couple of weeks ago, I unfollowed about a third of the people I was following.
Marco:
I went through and tried to call as much as I could.
Marco:
I started using mutes here and there, but that's a little too much work for me, so I'm not going to do much of it.
Marco:
The problem is that all of my friends, for the most part, are talking to each other on Twitter.
Marco:
And if I want to keep up with what my friends are doing or talking about or what's going on in the world, I need to be reading that.
Marco:
Right now, I'm already not reading most of it because I'm not a completionist.
Marco:
I can't keep up.
Marco:
So I'm already not reading it, but I'm missing all that.
Marco:
And at the same time, if I want to talk to my friends in that context, if I want to be part of that conversation...
Marco:
We're in public.
Marco:
And so what I need, what I'm looking for, is some separation.
Marco:
In public, somebody, I forget who, somebody about a year ago, I heard a talk where they were comparing having a conversation briefly with your friends on Twitter.
Marco:
It's like having a conversation on your front porch with somebody.
Marco:
And there's tons of people walking by on the sidewalk and they yell at you, like, responses.
Marco:
Like, you weren't part of this conversation.
Marco:
And they're, like, yelling, butting in, like, you're a dick.
John:
It's like, what do you, like, get off my porks.
John:
But that's one of the strengths of Twitter as well.
John:
Because if it was only happening in private, fewer people would benefit.
John:
The reason it kind of works the way it does is that groups of people can sort of organically form who like discussing a particular topic.
John:
And, like, you're doing it in public.
John:
partially because you want some of the public to see it.
John:
What you don't want is people going by your porch and yelling at you while you're doing your thing.
John:
But you do want, hey, maybe this interested guy who you met once or twice will hear your conversation and join in, kind of like at a party, right?
John:
So the public nature of Twitter is both a strength and a weakness.
John:
And how it plays out really depends on how many people are walking by your porch, so to speak.
Marco:
And I agree that that is an important strength of Twitter.
Marco:
I like that that exists.
Marco:
I don't like that that is the far and away dominant place that my friends interact with each other and that I need to interact with my friends.
Marco:
We are always in public, and I think it should be the opposite.
Marco:
I think we should interact in public sometimes, and most of the time, it would be more pleasant if it was private.
Marco:
And so there's, you know, different ways to do that.
Marco:
There's, you know, chat rooms and stuff and Slack and, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
I think I'd rather spend more time looking into stuff like that these days because it is so exhausting.
Marco:
It is like, you know, like I was just at a conference and being at a conference was great.
Marco:
But most groups of people on Twitter are not as nice as the attendees of Ool.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And it's a much bigger crowd on Twitter.
Marco:
Imagine going to a conference where you have tens of thousands of people all around you and listening to everything you say and being ready to butt in.
Marco:
And so you're going to get a lot of good stuff out of that.
Marco:
You're going to meet a lot of good people.
Marco:
You're going to get a lot of good ideas and good conversations out of that.
Marco:
But you're also going to get a lot of jerks, especially if it's free to enter and nobody knows your name and you don't have to show your face.
Marco:
So it is exhausting after a while to be always partially or fully in public like that when you're really just trying to have everyday interactions with mostly just your friends.
Marco:
It's like always being at a conference.
Marco:
So there is value in being at a conference sometimes.
Marco:
But there's a certain threshold of sanity where you can't be publicly performing all the time and have that be mentally healthy.
Marco:
At least I can't.
Marco:
And so what I'm saying is not that Twitter is bad.
Marco:
And by the way, a lot of people rightly point out in the chat room...
Marco:
Much of the problem when people complain about, quote, Twitter is they're complaining about the group they're following, the group they're paying attention to.
Marco:
I'm aware that social networks are what you make of them with what you choose to follow.
Marco:
However, in a network like Twitter, they are not what you make of them in terms of who talks to you.
Marco:
and what you receive.
Marco:
That is mostly up to the public.
Marco:
I mean, you can try to avoid talking about certain topics, which is stupid, but you can do stuff like that to try to minimize what you get.
Marco:
But for the most part, once you have a non-trivially sized audience, you're going to have random jerks talking to you all the time in a jerky way.
Marco:
And no matter how much good is interspersed throughout that, it's just really exhausting.
Casey:
Well, the problem is, is that the cost of entry to affecting somebody else's day is almost zero because you can fire off this 140 character or less message to darn near anyone you want.
Casey:
And that's free and it takes almost no time.
Casey:
And just like you were saying, John, that's one of the strengths of Twitter is that it's, you can, you can get messages across quickly and easily.
Casey:
Um, and you can have access to almost anyone on the planet if you so desire like celebrities.
Casey:
And I'm talking about like actual celebrities, not us three idiots, but, um, but yeah,
Casey:
The problem with that is all of these people also have access to you.
Casey:
And the thing that I've been struggling with with regard to Twitter is I feel like maybe I'm just becoming more sensitive.
Casey:
I thought I'd been becoming less sensitive, but I feel like I'm seeing more and more negative or
Casey:
not constructive comments coming my way that bother me.
Casey:
And granted, the easy answer is, well, don't let it bother you, you idiot.
Casey:
But it's hard.
Casey:
I'm not good at just putting up that wall.
Casey:
So like, for example, I had put up a post about Apple Pay and about how I thought it was crummy that when my
Casey:
card had expired the card didn't update which i've since found out it is theoretically capable of doing if the bank handles it right and it also didn't tell me when i went to use it to use the the apple pay version of the credit card that it had expired it just said denied so i wrote a post about that well somebody tweeted apple pay messaging at casey list you're being ridiculous keep track of your cards
Casey:
Sorry that I made an honest mistake.
John:
But did you also learn about the fact that your bank, if your bank had handled it correctly, that that wouldn't have happened?
John:
Did you also learn about that on Twitter or from some stranger?
Casey:
I learned about it from some friends, but I also eventually heard about it on Twitter.
John:
It's the blessing and the curse.
John:
It's kind of like follow-up.
John:
Anything we talk about here, we are wrong.
John:
Many people will tell us, which I like.
John:
I like the fact that that's an advantage of having an audience.
John:
Some of the people who tell you will be mean about it.
John:
That's the price you pay for having a bunch of people tell you solve your problems for it.
John:
A lot of people who only see the upside would love to do that.
John:
They're like, boy, it must be good to have a popular tech podcast because you can say, hey, I'm having trouble getting my who's it, working with my whatever.
John:
And then a million people will tell you how to get them to work together.
John:
And like some percentage of those people will be right.
John:
And you will have your solved problem, right?
John:
But then some percentage of the people will be jerks.
Marco:
Like when I had my jumbo frame issue, I would never have found that problem if I hadn't asked on Twitter and gotten hundreds of responses of what it might be.
Marco:
And like two of them said jumbo frames.
Marco:
And that ended up being right.
Marco:
I am so lucky to have such a big audience on Twitter.
Marco:
that I have access to that kind of information.
Marco:
I'm so lucky that I have a big enough audience that I can launch products and write blog posts that get attention.
Marco:
I have built-in attention for anything I do now.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
That's why I would feel like a jerk just walking away from this.
Marco:
I would feel ungrateful to all these people who have been following me,
Marco:
And also, I would feel like I was throwing away a giant professional advantage.
Marco:
So I feel like I can't leave Twitter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But that's why I need to find a better balance.
John:
But yeah, but that's a skill.
John:
Like anything else, it's a skill you have to develop.
John:
It's like, you know, none of us have experience with this, but can you imagine running a huge company, being the CEO of a company with thousands of employees?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That is not usually a natural thing that most people are used to.
John:
You're used to just dealing with yourself when you're a kid and you learn to gain responsibility.
John:
But at these extremes of extreme ratios of you to other people, it's a skill that you have to learn.
John:
There are things you can learn about being a manager and being a CEO or running a large company.
John:
you just have to figure out, right?
John:
And you have to research them and learn them.
John:
And some people are just not cut out for it.
John:
Some people will never be a good CEO or a good manager of a lot of people because it's just not how they work, right?
John:
So if suddenly you get an audience and you have to deal with notoriety and fame and a lot of input from other people,
John:
You have to either learn to deal with that or learn what your limits are.
John:
Learn that I don't want to be the CEO of a big company because no matter how good I could possibly get at it, doing so doesn't make me happy.
John:
How big are you comfortable?
John:
You see a lot with actual celebrities who get big because of some talent they have.
John:
They're in a hit movie.
John:
They're a great singer.
John:
They have a hit song or something.
John:
And very often the prerequisites to get that fame, being very talented, being a good actor, being in the right place at the right time, some combination of those things are totally unrelated to the ability to deal with the fame that is going to come with that.
John:
You know, the ones that stick, the ones that stay are like, yes, they're really talented.
John:
And also they are able to figure out how to have a successful, well-balanced life in the face of what must be, you know, the insane onslaught of like real fame.
John:
Right.
Right.
John:
Other people have the talent, get the notoriety, and very clearly can't deal with the onslaught of real fame and have tragic, terrible lives.
John:
We are lucky that in our tiny little dose of notoriety here, it's unlikely that Marco is going to go on a bender and drive his Tesla off a cliff or something.
John:
But that's why I think our problem is more relatable, because I think everybody...
John:
Has, you know, even if it's just like someone said something mean on your Facebook post, you know, who is like an acquaintance or someone you knew in high school and that ruins your day.
John:
That's pretty much the level we're talking about here.
John:
It's not like we're getting bombarded with thousands of people hating us, but it doesn't take much.
John:
It just takes one person making one mean comment to make you think like, and are you used to that?
John:
Are you used to?
John:
uh acquaintances or even strangers perhaps telling you mean things about yourself maybe that's not something that happens in your regular life but suddenly it happens on the internet because they have access to you and everyone i think like this is the complaint we get when we talk about this like would you stop talking about your problems of like oh you have a lot of twitter followers i think everybody if you have one twitter follow if you have 10 people who read your face everybody has this problem at pretty much exactly the same scale we do because what we're talking about here is
John:
of handfuls of negative feedback from people because we're not that big.
John:
And I think our handful is within an order of magnitude of your handful and is really the same type of scope of problem.
John:
I think everybody who has any interaction in any social media or any sort of
John:
one to many communication medium that's not just like face to face has to deal with this and has to figure out what are my limits how do i feel about this am i gonna grow a thicker skin or am i going to pretend i'm growing a thicker skin when really i'm just internalizing it all and it'll come to a breaking point and i'll like snap at my children i realize i'm snapping at them because someone said something mean to me on my facebook post two days ago and i'm still thinking about it right
Casey:
That I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
That's exactly how I feel, that I'm trying to just fabricate a thicker skin, but I don't think I've actually built a thicker skin yet.
Casey:
And it's hard.
Casey:
It's a hard thing to deal with.
Casey:
It's weird.
Casey:
And I think an ecstasy said a couple of things in the chat that I thought were great.
Casey:
Some people are a pleasure to interact with.
Casey:
Others just suck your energy.
Casey:
And I think that's a really good way of putting it, that I see this comment like, oh, don't be ridiculous.
Casey:
Keep track of your or you're being ridiculous.
Casey:
Keep track of your cards.
Casey:
And that just kind of like sucks the air out of my day a little bit.
Casey:
Should it?
Casey:
No, I should be big enough to realize this is some stranger that I'm never going to interact with.
Casey:
And that shouldn't bother me.
Casey:
But it does.
Casey:
And the thing I'm struggling with, again, coming back to an ecstasy, is in his or her case, I will also say the older I get, the less tolerant of energy-sucking people I become.
Casey:
I put up with a lot more crap at 18 than I do at 48.
Casey:
And I feel like even in the last couple of years, as I've gained some fame, and I can't say notoriety because I was corrected once, that it's not notoriety, it's fame for us because we didn't do bad things.
Casey:
But anyway, as I get more fame, I'm finding that I have less and less tolerance in time for that kind of energy suck.
Casey:
And I've noticed kind of building on what Marco had said that I'm getting much more aggressive with the block button and and.
Casey:
and those sorts of things than I ever have been in the past.
Casey:
And granted, I'm just freshly 33.
Casey:
And so it's not that I'm getting too old age, but even as I'm getting older at this age, I'm finding that I'm less and less tolerant of it.
Casey:
And where we started this conversation is where I'm coming back to now, which is
Casey:
Is it really worth me getting upset over these random strangers on the Internet?
Casey:
And I feel like I'm getting more and more upset over time.
Casey:
And in fact, at the end of last year in December, and this is a little bit of a corollary for half or so of December.
Casey:
I kept track every single day of what Twitter was pissed off about because I felt like every day there was some unbelievable travesty that Twitter was all fired up about every single day.
Casey:
Now that oftentimes that didn't relate to me at all.
Casey:
But that much negativity, man, oh my goodness, eventually it just wears on you.
Casey:
I kept track of this because I intended to post a blog post about it.
Casey:
As it turns out, right around the time, I guess it was midway through the month, somebody, I want to say maybe it was time, but somebody put up a post that had basically done that for an entire year.
Casey:
And so at that point, I figured, well, my post wasn't really worth it.
Casey:
It's stunning to me how much negativity I've seen on Twitter.
Casey:
And like Marco, I'm trying to evaluate where does that fit in my life?
Casey:
Because I don't want to eliminate it entirely entirely.
Casey:
But I think I'm giving it much more time and too many thought cycles and I need to back it off a bit, but I'm not sure the right way to do it.
Casey:
And like Marco, I'm a freaking addict, which is not, I don't say that with pride.
Casey:
I wish I was less so, but it is, it is unbelievably thrilling to get responses from people that you respect or even strangers that have good information, like the, the big frames, fat frames, whatever you call it.
Casey:
um that is the title sorry frames comma fat frames fine see now i'm totally derailed myself but um but you know one way or another there's good things that come from twitter but there's also so much bad and i can't figure out is the bad outweighing the good these days for me anyway what marco is doing like he's doing all the all the logical things that you would think to do
John:
trim your follow lists mute people try to cut down on when you do it don't be a completionist like he's going through he's he's going down the punch list of things you can do to manage this on somewhere on that punch list for certain people maybe think your way out of it most people that doesn't work like a little bit casey it sounds like you're trying to think your way out of it like should i be upset intellectually can i can i rationally think about that i shouldn't be bothered by what strangers have like
John:
I don't know if you can have that conversation with yourself and have it have effect.
John:
My experience, it is very rare that people can, can use reason to change their emotions.
John:
They feel from input from other people, but some people can, so it's worth at least giving that a try.
John:
Uh,
John:
but you know and curating the follow list i think is probably the first thing you should do because you said like you know what is twitter upset about today as marco pointed out twitter is who you follow like what is twitter upset about you have no idea what twitter is upset about twitter as an aggregate is probably talking about justin bieber that is not in your timeline right you know i mean your twitter is upset about some apple thing that nobody knows about except you know so changing your follow list and it can be painful because even for all the asymmetry in twitter can be painful to unfollow people
John:
who you know you may agree with them you and you may be this part of the reason you would unfollow them like their outrage about issue x you 100 agree with them about issue x and you are also outraged and that outrage is a negative feeling and so you're unfollowing them not because they're posting things you disagree with but because they're posting things you agree with and you're like now i too am outraged you have transferred your outrage to me because we agree on everything therefore i'm going to unfollow you like you're not unfollowing people because their their opinions are the opposite of yours you're unfollowing people who you agree with
John:
but who seem to be angry all the time that's rubbing off on you, you know?
Marco:
Well, and there's also, you know, to me, I feel like there's a big difference with Twitter, and a lot of it comes from the blog world, too, which is that...
Marco:
With Twitter, there's a very, very... It is who you follow.
Marco:
That's what you see in your timeline.
Marco:
But there's still the big problem with all of the replies from jerks and everything.
Marco:
A few weeks ago, I mentioned how I feel more comfortable saying things in podcasts that I do on my blog.
Marco:
Things that might be controversial or that might get people to call me a jerk or whatever.
Marco:
And the reason why is because...
Marco:
In blogs and on Twitter, it's really, really easy to get drive-by rash reactions from people.
Marco:
And that anger that you see bubbling up on Twitter, that's directed at something.
Marco:
That's a mood.
Marco:
It's this drive-by mood where someone sees...
Marco:
A few words or a headline that they disagree with, and they fit it into their narrative with their confirmation bias of whatever they think those people are like or whatever, and they just lash out and yell immediately.
Marco:
They don't look at context.
Marco:
They don't know the people they're talking to.
Marco:
It's just this quick, harsh reaction.
Marco:
With podcasts, you don't really get a lot of that because podcasts are so undiscoverable fundamentally by the format mostly.
Marco:
And I know there's ways we can improve it, but ultimately the format is just pretty undiscoverable compared to text.
Marco:
And I think it always will be that way, relatively speaking, with the exception of minor improvements here and there.
Marco:
But with podcasts, most people who are hearing what I'm saying right now
Marco:
are subscribed to this show and who hear it on a regular basis who hear the three of us talking for a couple hours every week and who have probably heard us for a couple hours every week for a long time so they like you listeners who are hearing me say this you know us like the vast majority of you know us on some level you know the context you know the kind of people we are you know roughly you know the the
Marco:
The context in which we are saying the things we say, in which we think the things we think, you know, if we say something that's a little bit off, you'll probably give us the benefit of the doubt because you know who we actually are.
Marco:
And so I think there are way fewer of those drive-by nasty interactions for things you say on podcasts than there are for things you say on Twitter or on blog posts.
Marco:
And for me, and the result is...
Marco:
Podcast audiences tend to be much smaller than popular blogs, popular tweets, accounts, or whatever.
Marco:
YouTube channels that are a little more accessible to this kind of drive-by-ness.
Marco:
Podcast audiences are way smaller, but...
Marco:
I get so much less nastiness per capita in podcasts than I do from any other audience by a long shot.
Marco:
And I'll say things on here that are potentially way riskier to say than I would ever say on my blog.
Marco:
And yet, I get almost no crap for it.
John:
It's just too much work to listen to a podcast.
John:
Anyone, if someone starts retweeting your tweet around, you will get all the crazy drive-bys from people who have no idea who you are and who are angry.
John:
But it is just so much work.
John:
You're like, I got to download a big audio file, and then you got to listen to audio, and they don't know Overcast exists, so they don't know podcast clients exist, so they don't know they can listen faster.
John:
And it's like, where's the part where they talked about this?
John:
Oh, never mind.
John:
Whereas anyone can read a tweet in two seconds and get angry.
John:
Exactly.
John:
And even a blog post, like when your blog post goes viral, you're on CNBC or whatever, like,
John:
You're just going to get drive-bys for half a year just because of that one thing.
John:
Right.
Marco:
I would love, I would absolutely love if Twitter had a setting that would not show me mentions from people who didn't follow me for more than the past week.
John:
Think about that.
John:
Yeah, there's a lot Twitter can do for that, but that does actually get into the realm of features that would only benefit the people who have a larger than normal number of followers.
Marco:
But they already have those features.
Marco:
Verified accounts have a setting where you can only see reports from people you follow, right?
Marco:
And that's too aggressive, yeah.
Marco:
Because then you can't hear from strangers, right?
Marco:
So that's too extreme.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If you look at the trash that you get, if you look at the nastiness, the nasty comments from people on Twitter, the vast majority of them for me are from people who don't follow me.
Marco:
Because they saw some retweet somewhere or something, then they're like, ah, and they lash out and they yell at me.
John:
And they get nastier when they're eggs.
John:
I mean, we can show them to the whole group.
John:
anything like you know we don't usually get the eggs but we just get we get the drive-bys of people who have established twitter accounts and they just talk with their in their circle and we talk in our circle and our circles don't interact but some little thing from our circle lands over in their circle and they will just come back and yell but the good thing about them is for the most part you'll never see them again like they most of them won't make it their mission in life to make your life miserable like i mean my one was they had the video of like the woman being cat called on the street and i made one or two tweets about it and they somehow came leaked out of our circle because some right-wing site
John:
put up the you know one of my tweets on their page and it was just you know it was like months months of random fairly aggressive hate from from people who are totally outside circles who have no idea anything about who i am or that i have a podcast or like i'm just a person you know what i mean like and it's just
John:
that was miserable it was like i think i said i tweeted about it it was like you know five millisarkeesian's worth of uh of of hate right but it just goes on but it just goes on forever like and eventually you know like i mean i deal with things in a different way probably than than you two do but like it was it was miserable and and it was like the rainstorm it doesn't end like it
John:
I don't know what your CNBC story, the Apple Functional High Ground stuff is going.
John:
I'm assuming you're still getting those.
John:
But I'm hoping they're not as hate-filled as the things I was getting for this thing.
John:
And at the very least, anyone who's going to be angry about Functional High Ground probably cares about Apple, right?
John:
And so at least they're somewhere in your circle.
John:
In that respect, you may not get rid of them.
John:
But when I was getting the random hate from strangers, it helped that I knew these people...
John:
didn't know anything about me it helped that i knew that i was never going to see these people on twitter again right it helped that it was so outside of the normal things i tweet about unlike your functional high ground things which is you're just you are like cultivating the worst of your actual audience like people who care a lot about apple and you're really angry about you for saying stuff about apple like the you know if you say something i was what i'm saying is i was able to deal with it by saying by by thinking to myself
John:
I'm never going to see any of these people tweeting again.
John:
It's probably not even worth my time to block them because like if I just simply don't engage with any of them, they'll get it out of their system.
John:
They don't know who I am, you know, and it just and it will blow over in two to three months.
John:
Right.
John:
And so and it did more or less.
John:
I haven't got one of those in a long time.
John:
And that was the way I dealt with that one.
John:
but you know having to deal with that for two to three months like going off twitter would be another way to deal with that one like just say i'm going to come back from twitter in two to three months when this is blown over right uh and you just have to do whatever it takes for you to feel okay and these unfortunate flare-ups can happen to anybody like and again i would say again this is not a thing oh poor you you got too many followers anybody's tweet it's not because i had a lot of followers anybody's tweet can be pulled out and put into the right place on like you know
John:
some website or forum or bulletin board that has an organized presence that disagrees with whatever it is that you are passionate about.
John:
That can happen to anybody because on the page I was on, there was there was 50 other people.
John:
You know, some of those people had 10 followers, right?
John:
They were going to get the same exact volume of hate mail that I was going to get because nobody who's sending hate tweets to those people knows who they are.
John:
They just saw their tweets on a page, became enraged and funneled that rage into sending hate in their direction.
John:
It can happen to anybody.
John:
That's the beauty of the Internet.
John:
You know, if the Huffington Post grabs your tweet and puts it up and you could get angry, hate filled email from people for months.
John:
and you could have 10 followers.
John:
That is the beauty and curse of our age, I guess.
John:
And so I really think that everyone will eventually have to
John:
find their way of of dealing with the situation and learning what their limits are and i think what casey was talking about before of like not lying to yourself about what your limits are not thinking because it shouldn't bother me therefore i will continue to do the thing that i know bothers me because i intellectually believe that it shouldn't bother me that's probably not probably not a healthy coping mechanism
Marco:
That's what I've been attempting and failing at.
Marco:
I've been failing miserably at that for years now.
Marco:
I think for me, the ultimate solution is going to be reducing how much I use Twitter.
Marco:
Because Twitter is not going to change.
Marco:
Twitter is, as a medium, that setting I just said, no client is ever going to be able to add that, really.
John:
they probably aren't even allowed to anymore like with the new twitter rules of the road yeah that would have to be a twitter service thing because like you know these are the type of features that twitter as a service can do and and maybe they could think about that but like the fact that verified is still this rare thing that not everybody can get shows they really have no idea what the hell they're doing in terms of making twitter a more pleasant place
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And it just seems like the leadership of Twitter has no interest from a product direction perspective in doing much about these kind of problems.
Marco:
And some of them are not problems that Twitter really can solve.
Marco:
And I recognize that.
Marco:
So for me, this is why I really... The direction I'm going to really try to go now is just taking a lot of my usage that is currently on Twitter and just taking it private.
Marco:
because being in public for everything I do is just not working.
Marco:
It's just not.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny because I have the show on Relay, because I have Analog on Relay, I've been a part of the Relay FM Slack channel, and that has a really awesome group of people in it.
Casey:
And I feel like that's kind of filling...
Casey:
not filling a void necessarily, but I'm getting more positive experiences from that.
Casey:
In fact, they're pretty much universally positive.
Casey:
And a lot of the little quips that I may throw into Twitter, a lot of times I'll just share with my close friends on the Relay Slack because I know reliably that they will understand where I'm coming from, get my intention, and get what I'm trying to say.
Casey:
Or maybe I'm just whining about something.
John:
They'll only secretly hate you.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I'm okay with that.
Casey:
I'm okay with them secretly hating me because this way I don't have to know that they hate me.
Casey:
But all kidding aside, I wonder if I sway – let's say the pendulum swings just all the way over to the Relay FM slack and I almost completely –
Casey:
stop using Twitter.
Casey:
I think at that point, though, I'll miss some of the random interactions.
Casey:
I'll miss hearing about fat frames, and I'll miss hearing about hearing things from people that I don't know, because genuinely, as much as we're complaining and moaning or sharing, if nothing else, our experiences with Twitter, both of you have said it, and I can't agree more, that some unbelievably wonderful, wonderful things are
Casey:
happen on Twitter with random people.
Casey:
And some people have sent 140 character messages to me that are just heart crushingly awesome in the best possible way.
Casey:
And so because of that, I don't think I necessarily want to give up on Twitter.
Casey:
And I'm not saying that either of you are saying that either, but I worry that if I get into this echo chamber in the Slack chat,
Casey:
That maybe I'll miss out on some of the contrarian opinions that, if I'm honest, I'm probably not getting on Twitter anyway.
Casey:
But I like to think I'm getting on Twitter.
Marco:
That's why it's a balance, right?
Marco:
It's a balance we all need to find.
Marco:
And I think right now we've, in the last few years, with the rise of all this social stuff and mobile stuff...
Marco:
I think we've gone a little too far in the everything is public on social networks direction.
Marco:
And now I think we're going to start swinging back a little bit, hopefully on that pendulum, with like, okay, not everything needs to be public all the time.
Marco:
And being private can actually be quite peaceful and a relief from always being in public all the time.
John:
Well, there's a gap in the model lineup, so to speak, going back to the MacBook type analogy, where we all have private messages.
John:
We all have iMessage, text messages, instant message, one-on-one or one-on, you know, a small circle of people, right?
John:
There's that.
John:
Then there's the public thing over there on Twitter, right?
John:
And then the in-between thing is this, and I think there's a reason the in-between thing is a big gap.
John:
We're thinking things like Slack or Glassboard or like a small group of people or even an IRC channel, a small group of people who know each other,
John:
because you don't want to talk one-on-one with all your individual friends you do want a place that's in between because if you want to talk one-on-one you'll just send people text messages or instant message like that's fine as a solved problem but sometimes you want to talk to two or three or four or be in a room or even be someplace as big as all with like a whole bunch of people right but it's still not public there's a difference between you know even if you were talking to everybody wwc that's only a few thousand people it's not the entire world of you know whatever it is seven billion uh so why is there that gap there and i think
John:
one of the reasons that gap is there is we used to have before we had the big public things all we had were the little places we had private which would be like one-to-one email or instant message and then we had self-constructed small social groups isolated by obscurity like a bunch of people on you know the galapagos island where you have this little miniature ecosystem would be like one usenet group up in a corner that with like 200 regulars and that makes a little community there
John:
and technically it's in public but it's protected by the fact that google doesn't exist yet and there's no way for people to find you and it's you know it's like you're hiding on your little island until the boats show up right uh and even things like slack or whatever you end up with these little islands and i remember those days and what happened in those days was you ended up with too many islands here's where i go to talk about people about star wars here's where i go to talk talk to people about computer stuff here's where i you know talk to my family and it was like
John:
they were these little private islands at the scale that Marco was looking for, but you ended up with 50 of them, and you're like, geez, I don't like having to go to all these different protocols, all these different places, and sometimes I want to cross-pollinate, and I've got to check five different places for it.
John:
What happens is either those little places die out, or those little places sort of metastasize and become Twitter, essentially.
John:
That is the life cycle of those places.
John:
It's things at that scale either...
John:
just like fizzle and and die out or become like there's too many of them that you can't go to all the ones like the reason we aren't going back to app.net even if there's like seven people there we know it's just it doesn't have critical mass or they grow but they start just like well why isn't everybody on usenet now why isn't everybody on a well instant message and what you know like why isn't everybody in this slack room there's some people i wish were in the slack room who weren't but the people you wish were in the slack room were different instead of people the other person thinks were in wishes were in the slack room and eventually everybody that you follow on twitter is in the slack room you just recreated twitter inside your slack room
John:
Right.
John:
And so it's true.
John:
It's true.
John:
That uncomfortable middle part is like it's I think it's very difficult for things to live in that middle part because they always move in one direction or another.
John:
It's very difficult to find stasis there unless you have a very narrow focus.
John:
I think people find that stasis with Facebook, even though Facebook is basically public.
John:
because they have the same protection of obscurity and because they have one axis they just want to talk to their family and friends maybe that's two axes but it's not like you it's problem you want to say where are the people i want to talk about fixing up my car where are the people i want to talk about metal working where are the people i want to talk about this sports team where are the people i want to talk about that sports team and then you end up with these little islands again if you try to do it all at once then you just end up with twitter and it's
John:
It is a difficult balance talking to all these people who you never see who live all over the world.
Casey:
I couldn't agree with you more.
Casey:
And the funny thing is I have now dedicated one of the spaces on my work machine to be my communication pain.
Casey:
And accepting Twitter, I have Slack in the upper left-hand corner.
Casey:
I have IRC in the upper right-hand corner.
Casey:
I have iMessage and IM in the lower right-hand corner, and I have HipChat for work in the lower left-hand corner.
Casey:
So I have four panes all on the screen at once that are the four different places that I have real-time communication, and then on top of that is Twitter, and on top of that is email.
Casey:
And I already am feeling a bit of exhaustion, but I'd much rather have tiredness
John:
then the sadness that i wonder if i'm getting more of than happiness from twitter at least you don't have web forums and usenet right so you're you're trying to list a little bit i remember i remember back in the days where most of my communities of this size were web bulletin boards like because usenet had gone away and the big web hadn't come and there were web bulletin boards that i would just you just cycle through and check all of them or little communities in each one and
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know because other people would reply to them and then you see their replies like twitter has helped in that regard both by keeping their volume down because they can only post too much and by sort of letting you try to trace the outlines of your own little island by curating your follow list to give yourself a fighting chance whereas the you know if if for example in your slack thing a bunch of people were invited in who you didn't like who didn't like you
John:
You can't participate in that Slack room in an enjoyable way.
John:
Anyway, the tools aren't there for you to do it.
John:
It becomes dead to you.
John:
You have to just leave.
John:
Whereas if a bunch of people come on Twitter and obnoxious to you, you can or start becoming obnoxious.
John:
You can either unfollow them or block them and still have the conversation with the people that you like.
John:
So, you know, I think things are better now in in the sense that.
John:
the big public one is actually viable enough to fool us all into thinking like oh i don't need that in between one anymore the big public one is fine and for a long time that kind of worked out uh that's how good the big public one is now compared to what it was before but we definitely do need those middle-sized uh islands of of connections i just don't know the solution to getting a set of those that is stable and satisfactory that don't either disappear or become big things
John:
yeah oh we'll see what happens but uh it's interesting it's an interesting conversation and and i love when we uh get a little touchy-feely on this show although we're just stealing all your analog yeah oh i mike is gonna be so angry oh i want to give you a a couple more i don't know if they count as tips but thing things that i've been doing to try to help manage like twitter twitter twitter negative they yeah may or may not work for you um but
John:
One of the things is like, you know, you're talking about people don't give us the benefit of the doubt and assume the worst about us and everything.
John:
It goes both ways.
John:
We do the same thing about them.
John:
Like, because, because it's like, you know, it's why smileys were invented because text is not the best medium.
John:
When someone said type something like, you know, with the kids while you typed okay with a period, that means you're angry.
John:
Right.
John:
It is very easy to misread what people are saying.
John:
Um, and in the same way they do.
John:
So very often someone will come at me with something that I think that is aggressive, uh,
John:
And I will do something to try to determine whether they were intentionally aggressive or whether they were trying and failing to make a joke.
John:
Because that's the whole thing, like Marco was saying, these people listen to us and they know us and they feel like they're familiar in the same way that we can say things to each other that, you know, we take for granted that the mean things we say to each other are jokes.
John:
Right.
John:
And so at the very least, that gives us a leg up on thinking, does he really think that you're like, well, no, it's obviously meant as a joke.
John:
But when strangers do it, they think they know us.
John:
We have no idea who they are.
John:
Totally reads as naked aggression to us.
John:
And so I will reply to them in a way.
John:
that will that will give them an opportunity to basically say in in whatever so many words like i didn't mean it that way or like to reveal themselves as being it was an attempt to good natured joshing and they were actually a fan and they were trying to be nice and they failed like trying to give them the benefit of the doubt especially if they follow me because i am unlike uh you know
John:
I'm more aggressive in my blocking these days, but unlike Marco's policy, I have not come to the point where I will reflexively block people, and I feel really bad about blocking anybody who follows me.
John:
Again, this is just how I'm dealing with things, but you would think like, okay, fine, do that thing where you try to see if they give them the benefit of the doubt.
John:
All you're going to do is just make them pissed off more and make yourself more miserable, and I have to admit that does happen sometimes, but what I have found is that the one or two times that I...
John:
engage in someone in a way that lets them reveal the fact that that I should have given the benefit of the doubt that just like it was a joke that came off wrong right or whatever
John:
I feel better like that is a that is a positive lift more than I think even if they had just come out in the beginning and said something nice like I feel that there's a positive lift that like I was able to turn it around that what could have turned into a fight didn't turn into one and we came to an understanding that someone was misunderstood and that we worked it out and that like that it gives me faith in humanity that they're like that not everyone who I think is evil and mean is actually evil in me and sometimes I just make a mistake with what they type you know and
John:
it happens every once in a it doesn't happen a lot i have to admit like it's not gonna you know they're not all good like but the few times it does happen i think personally it gives me a lift to counteract like you know how like the one bad comment is disproportionately weighing on you the one good thing that happens i find disproportionately lifts me uh and i also think like you know the person on the other end of that feels better at as well and maybe learn something about
John:
You know, not being mean.
John:
And the way I do this, someone says they just saw me do this on Twitter today.
John:
The way I do this is probably doesn't look very nice because very often I do this by coming back at them directly to essentially give them a reply that looks very aggressive, but it lets them know you said something that hurts my feeling and I don't even know who you are and maybe you didn't mean to do that.
John:
And if they are actually mean, I've done a comeback.
John:
Like, you know, I've come back at them in the typical way that you argue with somebody.
John:
But if they didn't mean to be mean...
John:
like i i found that rather than trying to engage them and say did you really mean that or blah blah blah if i come back at them in a way that would make a good person feel shame they will feel shame and come back with nice things if i come back to them in a way that would make a good feel person feel shame and they're they are did intend to hurt my feelings then i still feel like i've made an aggressive counter move and then i just block them and move on right and
John:
I don't know if that's going to help for you guys.
John:
I don't know if it's ever happened to you, like you've turned someone around or like you.
John:
I mean, we kind of had it with like, you know, someone in the chat room who was sent us an angry email and we talked about it and like, you know, kind of work things out and turn things around.
John:
Right.
John:
That positive outcome lifts my estimation of humanity and can turn a bad day into a good one.
John:
I don't know if you guys want to take that chance.
John:
It's certainly a lot of work, but I found that that does help me feel better about the whole thing.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, that's another thing I'm working on in that sometimes I'll try to reply with an equal amount.
Casey:
What I feel is an equal amount of snark for exactly the same reason, John.
Casey:
So, for example, the person who had tweeted to me, you know, you're being ridiculous.
Casey:
Keep track of your cards.
Casey:
My reply to that person was it was an honest mistake.
Casey:
You're being ridiculous.
Yeah.
Casey:
which I'm not saying I'm necessarily proud of that, but my thought was I have replied in kind.
Casey:
And the thing that, that bums me out about it though, is that looking back on it, I don't think I feel good about that reply.
Casey:
And it, and it's tough because it bothered me enough that I felt like I wanted them to, this person to know that I am bothered by,
Casey:
but I don't know that I've gotten enough relief from replying in a snarky way either.
John:
I don't think you let them know that you were upset, though.
John:
I think you just came back at them in the regular just arguing way.
John:
Like the one from today, I can't remember what it was, but someone was...
John:
complaining about my pronunciation of Mario, which happens all the time.
John:
It's fine.
John:
That's fine.
John:
It happens all the time.
John:
But you can do that in a funny way, or you can do that in a mean way, right?
John:
And this person did it in sort of a mean, condescending way, right?
John:
But as far as I knew, they could have been in their in their mind and could have been exactly the same feeling as all the other people who like, you know, do it in the silly way.
John:
Right.
John:
Like we do it to each other.
John:
And so like it's a it's a running gag on the show.
John:
Right.
John:
But if someone misfires in an attempt to humor, it can come off seeming really mean rather than thinking that person is really mean and getting down about it.
John:
What I came back with them was like, you know, using a similar like echo of their comments of like,
John:
You know, I told them basically like, you know, being condescending.
John:
There's something like, how hard is it not to say the word Mario?
John:
Like, you know, like it's a subtle difference in phrasing of just, you know, you pronounce it a weird way, blah, blah, blah, or making a joke or just saying I roll.
John:
How hard is it to pronounce this word?
John:
Right.
John:
And depending on your mood, and I was in not a particularly good mood at that point, I'm like, really, you're going to come at me and say, how hard is it to print?
John:
Like, there are ways to phrase that that are not quite as mean.
John:
It wasn't the mean, it's not that mean, but I would just it annoyed me.
John:
So I said, how hard is it not to be condescending to strangers on Twitter, which emphasized a couple of things.
John:
One, that I don't even know you, that you are essentially like Marco said, walking by my porch, seeing me have a conversation, not even because it's like from a podcast from who knows when.
John:
And just yelling at me that you're disappointed that like, how hard is it to do this thing?
John:
I find so easy.
John:
You're a terrible person.
John:
Right.
John:
And my thing comes back at them.
John:
It's like it is kind of a comeback.
John:
Right.
John:
But it's also emphasizes the fact that what were you just doing there?
John:
You are being condescending to someone you don't even know on Twitter.
John:
We have we have never met.
John:
I don't know who you are.
John:
I don't even know what you're referring to.
John:
And your opening salvo is to be condescending to me about how I pronounce something.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, and the person came back and I forget what their reply was, but it was like, it was acknowledgement that that's really not how they meant to come across.
John:
And they're just like, they just thought it was funny how it was pronounced or whatever.
John:
And then I explained to them, there was a regional accent and whatever, like, you know, it is, has an effectively a positive result.
John:
But the important point was to like, uh,
John:
communicate to that like make them realize how their actions look from my perspective i don't know if you saying that like you know that uh you said about the the expiring credit cards let them really let really communicate to them how you were feeling about it or what it looks like from your perspective but like i said sometimes it's you know i think the percentage of this working is really low like is and most of the time i don't do anything and i just ignore it and move on but every once in a while i make a go at that and
John:
And I'm just so happy and pleasantly surprised that it makes me feel better when it actually does work in someone.
John:
And what could have been a conflict turns into not a conflict.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just feel like in retrospect that maybe the right answer.
Casey:
I guess the reason I tweeted and replied was because I wanted some amount of closure.
Casey:
But in retrospect, the closure I got was not the closure I wanted.
Casey:
Because if I just ignored it, it would have eaten at the back of my head like all day long.
Casey:
Like, why was that person such a jerk?
Casey:
What did I ever do to bother them?
Casey:
It was an honest freaking mistake.
Casey:
Why are they so upset?
Casey:
And so that's why I replied because it did get out of my head, but I am not getting the relief and satisfaction from my tweet that I wanted.
Casey:
And that's probably – it's certainly on me.
Casey:
I mean, I could have said something different like you're saying, John.
Casey:
I could have handled it differently, but –
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just, it's stuff like that.
Casey:
Like this little one shot thing that really in the grand scheme of things is not a big deal, but you get it constantly and it weighs on you.
Casey:
I mean, I'm telling you things you already know.
Casey:
It's just, it's constant.
Casey:
I feel, and a lot more constant than it ever used to be.
Casey:
And I think that's in large part because I have more of an audience than I never used to have, but I don't know.
Casey:
It's just, it's tough.
Casey:
It's, it's been tough for me to deal with.
Casey:
And, and yeah,
Casey:
And we're very lucky that we're receiving any sort of feedback at all.
Casey:
And we're not just shouting into the abyss.
Casey:
But sometimes the echo you get back is not the echo you want.