Blue Ring Stud
was it john that fixed my bullet issue yes and i said stop what magic did you use to do that don't you know haven't you learned by now that when dealing with rich text editing applications where you have the kind of a what you see is what you get output that even though this is not probably technically the case although it used to be in some things you can conceptualize it as there being individual uh individual
invisible formatting uh characters zero with invisible formatting characters attached to text that you can't delete and that when things touch them they infect the thing that they touch so all formatting and rich text editors like word or any of these types of things
involves manipulating what you can conceptualize as invisible zero width formatting characters.
What was the one that actually had them?
Was it WordStar?
One of the old text editors, one of the old word processors, a really old one, actually had invisible formatting characters and you could make them visible.
Those were the days.
You could do that in Word, I believe.
And I thought Claire Swartz would do that.
i don't know if any of them still have it uh you know the old days word process actually were done that way these days it's on behind the scenes i have no idea how it works i'm sure it's much more complicated than simple invisible formatting characters but anyway yeah you just have to learn how to bump the invisible the bump the conceptual invisible formatting characters up against each other to infect their neighbors get their infection and move it down it's just well that was the problem is i was trying to indent just the reddit related follow-up and
and i was unfortunately indenting all of the rest of the topics and i couldn't figure out how to uninfect them i am not as good a doctor as you are i know i saw that you know and you just gotta like you just gotta find a part that looks the way you want and use it to spread its correct lookingness to its neighbors and it's you know so this is like an outbreak i need to find the monkey and then that'll solve all my problems
word sometimes would defeat me word sometimes in word i could not figure out how to manipulate the invisible forces that control the formatting and it's just like delete everything start a new document right because like even if you delete all the content and you try to like paste it back in or type it in again it would like it would still obey them oh yeah it's like a homeopathy where like the the document still has the what is it the the essence sense memory or whatever of the content that was there before
diluted a million times it still has the essence of the old formatting right you delete all the text but when you put the text back the document remembers the text that used to be there
Do you want timestamps to make your chapter markers easier?
No, the timestamps move when I edit, so it doesn't matter.
Adding the chapter markers is only taking like five minutes.
Can I just point out that I think if we've received, let's say, 20 pieces of feedback with regard to the chapter markers, easily 18 of which have somehow traced back to Germany.
Oh, at least.
I bet the other two that weren't from Germany were people who were actually Germans just were living somewhere else temporarily, you know?
Maybe a German heritage.
I don't know.
It's so funny.
I don't know what it is with the Germans and their chapter markers, but God, do they ever love them.
They really do.
It's funny because no one else really seems to care or even notice.
Nope.
But the Germans love them.
Well, they're all using a popular podcast client that doesn't support chapter markers.
I wonder, so what clients do support chapter markers?
You would know.
I think I'm the only one who doesn't, actually.
I don't know.
Oh, really?
I know the Apple one does to a limited degree.
I mean, it's easy because there's actually an API in AV Player to just fetch chapters, and it supports chapters.
almost every format that's out there in at least a basic way and I actually tried it briefly and it had an issue where it would just it would just write all over random memory garbage with certain files that had embedded artwork in their chapters oh cool so it would just destroy the memory and corrupt everything and eventually the app would crash when you load it like this one particular file and it's obviously it's not well written enough to for me to want to use so I don't know
You know what you should do is whenever you're up for a new lease, you should spend the time leading up to then building chapter support.
So when you return to Munich to do European delivery, you will be welcomed there like a god.
You think that would work?
I think so.
Because if there's anything that Germans love in the entire world other than order, it is chapters.
Yeah.
yeah they i i really do like the germans though actually i do too as much as i'm poking fun i really do as well i feel like these are like my people like they're they're nerds who drive well and are on time to things and that's just amazing again as much as i'm poking fun i couldn't possibly agree with you more and as eschatologist says in the chat chapters are a form of order so that's a fair point
Well, I've never used chapters myself as a podcast listener.
And maybe it's because I spent the last two to two and a half years or whatever it's been using my own app, which doesn't support them.
But I've just never been compelled to.
And there's also a major supply issue where very few podcasts use chapter marks.
Yeah.
What are people using to put them in?
I know there's a web service called Authonic that does a lot of podcast post-processing stuff, and they offer it.
But that's like a paid monthly kind of service.
And I know Jason Snell uses that for Clockwise.
But...
Beyond that, there used to be an Apple tool, I think, in GarageBand or something, but they discontinued it years ago.
So I don't know.
I think there's two problems here.
There's a tools problem and a client problem, and that combines to form at least part of the demand problem.
So I don't know.
We'll see.
So what magic are you using?
I'm solving the tools problem first, and we're going to move on.
Mm hmm.
All right.
So we should probably do some follow up.
John, why don't you tell us about what Satya Nadella has said about your hatred of Apple?
That's nobody's.
Anyway, this is a review from a while interview from a while ago where Satya Nadella is talking to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet and a long interview.
And one I think we pulled a snippet from this interview before, which is why I had read it.
But I pulled out this other snippet that I thought was interesting.
This is Satya Nadella talking.
He says, you've got to remember even the Apple regeneration started with colorful iMacs.
So let us first get the colorful iMacs.
I think with what we're doing with Lumia, we're at that stage.
I want to do good devices to people like, and then we will go on to doing the next thing and the next thing.
I thought this was really interesting to see the CEO of Microsoft.
basically, like, intentionally pull Microsoft down to Apple's level to say, we are where Apple was before their resurgence.
We are at such an incredible low point that we're at the stage where we're going to make some colorful iMacs.
We're not at the stage where we're making the iPod.
We're not at the stage where we're making the iPhone or the iPad.
We're at the stage where we're making the colorful iMacs.
which I think is sandbagging in the highest degree because Microsoft is nowhere near the low point that Apple was when Steve Jobs came back or when they were introducing the IMX.
Nowhere near that low, like financially, like the quality and number of products they have and that they sell and just like in every other respect.
But this is how the CEO of Microsoft is positioning his company to say –
we want you to lower your expectations of us, I guess, like think of us like where Apple was like, you know, give us a chance where, you know, maybe we're not blowing you away, but we just want to make something cool that kind of catches the imagination is kind of popular.
And that's what we think we're doing with these new Lumia phones.
And I know they're not the next iPhone, but you know, come on, give us a break.
It took Apple a while too.
Really interesting strategy, something that I think also that someone from the old Microsoft, like Gates or Balmer, could not pull off just because since they were the people in charge when Microsoft was king of the world, it would sound weird for them to say Microsoft is basically where Apple is in 1998.
But, you know, because it would just I don't know if those words could even come out of their mouth or if they could put themselves in that position.
But a new CEO can say that.
And I thought it was an interesting strategy for how they're trying to position their company to the outside world.
That's an odd analogy, but I mean, it sort of makes sense.
Why don't you tell us about the trim saga that will never end?
Yeah, I think we talked about the popular Samsung SSDs and people were filing bugs against them.
And then Samsung was like, that's not our problem because you're using it in Linux and Linux isn't a supported platform.
And people got angry and then we didn't know whether there were problems with these popular SSDs or not.
The latest development in that saga is that Samsung says it's not a problem with our firmware or our drives.
It's a problem with the Linux kernel, and here's a patch to help fix it.
I don't know what the actual problem is.
Maybe their patch to the kernel works around a problem in Samsung's SSDs.
There's another link that's eternally being put off in the show notes where some...
mac and an article is trying to uh test these popular ssds and os 10 and see if they can create a corruption uh and i don't know how rigorous their testing is but i would say this whole thing is still a question mark to me because just because samsung says it's a bug in the lingus crawl and provides a patch to work around it uh
Was it a Linux kernel bug?
Like I said, is their patch just working around a bug in the firmware?
And is any of this relevant at all to people running OS X?
I don't know.
So still, I'm just hanging back and not bothering with the trim stuff and keeping my fingers crossed.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton.
We'll see if it pays off for him.
That's a reference, by the way.
Marco, tell us about your cellular option dilemma.
Yeah, so in last week's episode, I talked about how I was having an issue with deciding Overcast's cellular download preferences because I'm adding streaming for the next big version and there was a question of should streaming have its own preference and I already had these two other preferences and how do I combine these possibly three preferences in any way that makes sense and is understandable by users and doesn't have too much clutter and the options and complexity and everything.
And I explained that part of the reason why... So right now I have in the current version, there's two options.
One of them is download over cellular, which makes sense.
The other one is basically like try to do anything over cellular.
And the reason why I couldn't just rely on the system toggle for that was because of what I considered a bug in the system reachability framework, which is that if a user had disabled cell access completely for the app in iOS settings, which you can do per app...
The system would still tell the app that it was connected to the internet via cellular.
And so the app would have no way to tell that it wasn't allowed to use this connection.
So if it tried to use the connection, it would show the annoying box to the user saying, cellular's data is disabled for this app.
You can change that in settings.
And my feeling was it should be the way it used to be, which is that if somebody disabled cell access for you in iOS 7, the system would report to your app that it was just offline when it was on cellular.
So then you could just avoid doing things and not show that stupid alert to people.
Turns out, in iOS 8.4, that bug is still there.
But in iOS 9, it's fixed.
So in iOS 9, I did some testing over the last couple of days.
In iOS 9, if you as the app use the reachability framework to test the connection, if the user's on cellular and you aren't allowed to use it, it properly reports it as offline, which is the way it used to be and the way it should have always been.
So, this lets me remove that second setting I have now, which is the... It's called Sync Over Cellular.
It lets me remove that setting completely, which is great.
So now I only will have the Download Over Cellular option in the...
in the downloader area and i don't need i don't need a streaming option at all because streaming can just rely on the system setting if you don't want overcast to use slow data just disable it in system settings and that's it so i've gone from two settings in the current version to potentially needing three in the next version but instead going down to one which is fantastic why don't you need the settings anymore are you saying the next version is not going to run on ios 8
I'm saying I will no longer care about a minor annoyance detail that will affect very, very few people.
It's not worth keeping it.
So, for instance, the current version of the app also has a setting in nitpicky details called Steak Acceleration.
This is a setting I've actually had since 1.0.
When you seek an overcast, if you hit seek back or forward by the 30 seconds or whatever, if you hit that a bunch of times in a row, so that you're doing more than one per second, basically.
I forget exactly what my threshold is.
But if you do more than one of those per second, after a few, I start increasing the interval that they're seeking by.
So it lets you, if you're in a situation where you only have access to seek back and forward features, like if you're in a car and it has the button integration, or if you have headphones with those buttons on them or a remote with those buttons on it, if you want to seek a long distance in a track, it lets you get there a lot faster.
So if you seek a whole bunch of times in a row, it'll go like 30, 30, 30, 45, 50, 60, 90.
It'll accelerate up to a certain ceiling.
And I've always had an option to disable that since 1.0.
And that option syncs to the server, because that syncs to your account.
So I can actually tell how many people use it.
And I've been watching, and I brought up on Twitter a few months back, hey, can I just remove this option?
And I learned that most of the respondents didn't really understand what it did.
Whether they said, yes, remove it, or no, keep it, most of them seemed like they were misunderstanding what it did.
And so I decided that doesn't need to be an option anymore.
And I looked at the server, and usage of it was under 1% of people who changed the default, which is on.
So in 2.0, that option is just gone.
I'm not going to keep a setting around in what is a very small setting screen that's used by fewer than 1% of the users.
That's not worth the complexity.
So back to the cellular thing, this, you know...
people who are going to disable cellular in the system preferences completely for the app.
I can't measure that right now.
I'm guessing it's probably not below 1%, but I bet it's pretty low.
So people who are going to disable that and also who are going to be running iOS 8 for longer than the next couple of months, it's not worth it.
It's not worth keeping that setting around just to have them be able to avoid seeing the cell data disabled dialog box
as often as they could.
It's such a small gain for so few people for such a short time that it's just not worth it.
Also, I'm not taking the move to iOS 9 as something that needs to be very carefully and slowly done.
As soon as iOS 9 is out, I'm probably going to release an update that requires it, or at least soon afterwards, depending on what compelling reasons I have.
Because the fact is, iOS 9 runs on every device that iOS 8 runs on.
Jailbreakers haven't jailbroken it yet, I don't think, but I don't care.
I honestly do not care at all what jailbreakers can run.
I don't follow that.
I don't need to follow that.
I think if you jailbreak, that's up to you to follow, and I can't waste my time on that because jailbreaking is just a nightmare of support complexity, and it's just not worth it.
So, regardless, I don't care about jailbreakability.
And people who hold on to old versions forever because they just don't like the new version, I don't really cater to them either.
I feel like if your device can run iOS whatever...
I don't feel bad requiring iOS whatever.
Even if you choose not to install iOS whatever, if you choose to keep the old version around, I consider that like, okay, well, part of your cost of doing that is you're going to lose future updates to apps that require all this stuff.
So anyway, that's how I feel about that.
What was the question?
I forgot.
I was basically asking you if you were going to make Overcast iOS 9 only, and you eventually worked up to it.
yeah i mean right now i'm building 2.0 against ios 8 because i would like to release it before ios 9 is released i don't know if i will like i don't know i don't know if i'll be able to i mean i'm trying i i would like to release it as soon as i can just to be clear the last time you said you want to release soon you ended up a year late is that correct something like that okay just want to make sure we're all on the same page here
Actually, what is motivating me to want to release this soon is actually the playlist reordering bug.
It's too complicated to backport the fix to that into the 1.0 branch.
I'm actually planning on now cutting a few features from 2.0's initial launch just so I can get it out faster and then adding back those features later in 2.1 or whatever.
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all right uh so we had a discussion about reddit last episode and we got some feedback about that we got nothing wrong we got nothing wrong not a thing we got some feedback about that we got less than i expected which i was kind of happy about and it was less vile than i expected which i was super happy about but we've got we've got some new thoughts or some things to address perhaps and
um john would you like to tell us about some of the things that you that you've learned discovered or thought about since then back when this was in the follow-up section seems so long ago um this topic i mean i thought of like removing a lot of it because i just listened to uh last week episode and i was like yeah i pretty much i think i pretty much said everything i wanted to say on the topic and the reason i you know because i had all this follow-up i'm you know when feedback comes in i add corrections to the follow-up go through you know the normal pattern of stuff but then i listened to the episode i'm like
Yeah.
One of them was that Reddit is owned by Condé Nast, and that is no longer the case.
We'll link to a little fact about it there where they were owned by Condé Nast, and then they were owned by Condé Nast's parent company, but then they were spun out and reincorporated independently.
And so, according to this thing, the best characterization might be to say that Reddit is a part sibling once removed of Condé Nast.
So...
That totally clears things up.
That was something I did not know I got wrong.
Because most of the other details, I was just like winging it and giving examples.
And every time I gave an example, I was like, I know that's probably not accurate or true.
I mean, it makes it seem like I didn't read a lot about this.
When I did, I just didn't write down or memorize the individual facts.
It was why I was trying to go big picture.
And that brings me to the next topic, which is...
the few uh mildly mildly negative uh bits of feedback we got seemed to me to be treating all three of us as if we had never heard of reddit like what is this crazy reddit thing have you heard about this and i don't know about you two guys who are younger than i am but like if i gave the impression that you know like we all said we don't we're not reddit regulars we don't go to the site we are not part of the community we don't consider ourselves redditors or whatever but
it's not as if reddit is this new thing that we just learned about when this controversy came so i went and looked up my info at least uh reddit was founded on june 23rd 2005 according to wikipedia which is never wrong my account at reddit was created on august 8th 2005 which is 46 days after it was founded so i'm sorry that i did not get in on the ground floor of reddit the site was around the whole 46 days before i joined and was a member for the next 10 years like
Again, I'm not a regular member of Reddit, right?
I do not go there frequently, but I think the most angry characterization of us being entirely out of touch with Reddit or just having discovered Reddit due to the Ellen Powell controversy is wildly inaccurate.
Yeah.
And I think part of what we were trying to describe is expressly what an outsider thinks of the situation.
And I agree with you, John.
I don't think any of us painted us as experts on what the intricacies of how Reddit works internally, either for users or moderators or employees.
But I know that we were all speaking more of, hey, from an outsider, kind of third party that's not really invested in this looking in, it looks kind of gross.
And I stand by that.
Yeah, like that's the perspective we were giving as casuals, like not as people who are confused by what this whole crazy Reddit thing is, but it's just like there's a community, it exists, and we're not really that involved in it.
We know about it.
We dip in and out of it.
We see it, right?
But we're, you know, and I think that's most people.
Like most people are not hardcore Reddit users.
Reddit has tremendous traffic.
Only a small portion of that tremendous traffic are the sort of very dedicated people who are very invested in Reddit as a community.
That's the nature of any high traffic site.
You know, you don't have millions and millions of people, all of whom are super invested in you.
That's just that's just, you know, numbers.
Right.
So our perspective as sort of outsiders, outsiders who I think understand the phenomenon of Reddit and sites like Reddit and the dynamics of online communities, but are not so invested in it that sort of.
Any discussion of any negative aspect of Reddit is seen as a condemnation of all members of Reddit.
Like, that's not where we were coming from at all.
But we were we were giving an outside perspective.
And I think I certainly was not particularly interested in the specific details of whatever the controversy of the day is about Hesha.
He said and she said this.
And these people are harassing this person.
And these are the internal politics there.
Just trying to say, like, is Reddit a place that we feel like we would like to hang out?
You know, and if not, why not?
Yeah, I agree with you.
The only somewhat decent feedback.
Well, that's not fair.
The feedback that struck me most that we got was someone who said in so many words, you know, you were complaining and moaning about Reddit and how gross Reddit is.
But a lot of gross stuff happens on Twitter and none of the three of us really complained and moaned about Twitter last episode.
And that really made me think for a minute.
And I don't have any good answers.
Maybe because I'm pretty invested in Twitter and I'm invested in what I like to think of as the good corner of Twitter, I don't see a lot of the just absolutely vile, terrible, disgusting things that happen on Twitter because they happen.
They definitely happen.
But I don't get exposed to it yet.
I feel like I hear a lot more often about the terrible, violent, disgusting things that happen on Reddit.
And I was curious, John or Marco, if you guys had any thoughts about why Twitter is OK, but Reddit isn't.
Oh, they're both disasters.
We just know how, I mean, I think it's, you can look at both of those and say, wow, both of these are absolutely horrible at dealing with abusive people.
That's just the way it is.
In fact, Twitter might even be worse.
I don't know.
I don't know enough about Reddit to say.
Twitter's really bad about it.
I know that.
We did talk about it last show.
And I mentioned this was the objection that I said, like, I was feeling some trepidation about going to Reddit because I felt like I was kind of tacitly supporting an organization that provides a home for, you know, communities that that I that make me uncomfortable that I don't like.
Right.
And I didn't feel that with Twitter.
And I think for me, the difference is and I'd mentioned like, well, because, you know, I don't see any ads on Twitter.
So what am I really doing that's supporting them?
But, you know, this feedback from Don is right that like by my participation in Twitter, I'm still supporting them whether I see ads or not.
Right.
And I think the reason I feel differently about is not so much with my investment in Twitter, but that for as bad as Twitter is about dealing with harassment.
They they have policies in place that if you were to look at the policies, you would say these are good and they show that Twitter doesn't want this thing to happen.
They're really bad at implementing those policies.
Many times their implementation again is like, oh, we have a way for you to report people for harassment.
We'll do something about it.
And like the form of require revealing your personal information to the person you're harassing.
and their decision-making process would not be great on it.
But the fact that the Twitter CEO comes out and said, we are really bad at this and we need to get better, and that they have taken positive steps to make their company better at dealing with this shows that this is the direction they want to go in.
It's not as if the CEO of Twitter is saying, we're really bad at it, and that's by design because we don't want to clamp down too much.
We want to make sure people feel free to say whatever they want to say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the thing that's most upsetting to me about Reddit is the aspirational thing.
I don't agree with their aspirations.
Reddit says, we want our community to be like this.
I'm like, okay, well, I don't like that.
I don't like that goal state.
I think Twitter's goal state, if you were to talk to the CEO of what do you want Twitter to be like, what are you trying to reach?
I would agree more with what they're going for in terms of a place where people feel like they're free from abusive behavior or have not free from, but have the tools to deal with abusive behavior.
Right.
The Twitter wants to provide that, whereas Reddit seems to want to provide a safe haven for people to trade ideas and behave in ways that I that I don't like.
Right.
and again this like i'm glad no one has brought this up to the credit of all the people of all the various reddit people uh who have uh listened to this thing and sent feedback nobody has brought out the old you know the old saw about like uh you're trying to say that reddit doesn't have a right to exist like i'm so glad that i mean either that speaks to the the small number of reddit people listen to our show or the the general intelligence of people who are reddit not to bring out that ridiculous argument of like
I tried very hard in the last show to frame it as, does this community feel like something that I want to participate in?
Why and why not?
Everyone's free to make the community they want to make.
All I'm talking about is, does this feel like something that I want to join in?
And my secondary point, which I think we'll get to in a little bit, was like, does the community that they say they want to make, is it the type of thing that I think would be broadly appealing?
Right.
And I think that's where you get into, you know, like Marco not allowing KKK podcasts on his hypothetical podcast network.
That's the type of decision where you can say, if you did that, most people wouldn't care.
Like that is something that excludes that.
That would be broadly appealing because it's not a system of government.
It's just a private website.
And if a private website banned that type of content.
everyone will be like, all right, yeah, I'm fine with that.
That is a broadly appealing decision.
Less broadly appealing, banning vegetarians.
Then all of a sudden, well, now you are really narrowing your audience because if you decide that's what you want on your site, that's fine, but a lot of people are going to rightly say...
Now that's getting to be, you know, like the whole idea that there are that there are standards, sort of community standards, like human community standards, whether they're local or state or country or international community standards that mean if you want something to appeal to the broadest number of people.
everyone's okay with you excluding these ideas and this behavior but once you start getting what you know once you start crossing over into like well that just seems like arbitrary and weird like not allowing left-handed people hmm that's you know that that seems that doesn't seem weird but not allowing the kkk yeah sure go ahead ban them i don't like i think that's okay they they were bothersome anyway i don't like those ideas right and that uh
Maybe that bothers a lot of people, especially if you have a sort of logical mindset.
I was like, no, you can't.
You either have to allow all ideas or allow no ideas.
If you can't, how do you describe that?
What's different about the KKK and left-handed people?
It's equivalently arbitrary, right?
They're just ideas, man.
Yeah, and I think that brings it down to the Reddit Q&A that someone linked to with...
The current Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, Spez on Reddit.
It's a nice thing with the Q&A.
The best thing about it, of course, is speaking of Marco's complaints about the giant indented conversations.
A nice person emailed this to us.
I lost the name because it's somewhere in our email, but...
the q a is like a bunch of questions and that with numbers and then the answers follow them so it's like questions one through seven questions one two three you know and then and then down below there are the answers and the nice person who emailed us did the same thing and put the question then answer the question then answer instead of a giant list of questions and then a giant list of numbered answers and you have to keep like mapping back and forth in your mind or keep scrolling back up all right so this is section two question number two the question was blah and i'll scroll down and read the answer
god reddit just really is not yeah this is totally aside from the policy issues
It's not a really welcoming site for people who don't like navigating giant walls of indented text.
Anyway, a few items from this Q&A, which I think doesn't pin anything down.
Like they're still trying to work out what they're trying to do.
But I picked out a few examples that spoke to the thing that I find unappealing about Reddit.
So again, this is the CEO answering some questions.
Mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment.
right that was an answer to which question i gotta scroll up and find it uh in regards to subreddits for mocking another group what is the policy on them blah blah blah so mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment i assume that it's defined as not harassment because either implicitly or earlier they're saying well harassment is something we don't want and mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment turning this position around what it basically means is if you come to participate on reddit
it very well may happen that you get mocked and called stupid.
Which, fine, like, again, you know, you define the rules of the community, whatever you want, right?
But I would compare this to the Ars Technica policy that I talked about in the last show, where Ars Technica's thing is no ad hominem attacks.
Have a discussion on the topic at hand.
Disagree as violently as you want about, you know, whether Altevec or MMX is better.
but no mocking people are calling them stupid.
Don't attack the person, attack the ideas.
That's the Ars Technica comment policy, right?
And I don't think Ars Technica is a super high-minded site wherever it has good behavior.
It is a pretty rough and tumble crowd there, right?
It's also probably male-dominated.
It's got all sort of similar pathologies of the Reddit stuff.
And yet Ars Technica has this rule that says, don't attack the person, attack the ideas.
Reddit, they're saying, mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment.
That's something we think is acceptable behavior in all of our communities.
It's going to happen.
It's going to happen to you.
You can't ban someone for doing it just because they call you stupid or mock you.
That I find that distasteful.
I don't think that's beyond the pale where it's like, oh, now your site is not broadly appealing.
But I think it does.
I mean, like Twitter, if you come into Twitter and people are going to mock you and call you stupid, you're going to want some you're not going to like that.
You're going to want to not see their tweets.
You want to be able to block them.
And if they keep doing it, then it might become harassment.
But anyway, they're categorizing.
It's not harassment if people do that.
What if you come onto a Reddit and everybody says that you're stupid, but everyone only says it once?
And every time you appear and post anything on Reddit, each individual person on that entire forum mocks you or calls you stupid, but only does it once.
That's, I guess, still not harassment.
Your experience at Reddit is that anytime you appear, no one addresses anything that you say, but they merely download you, downvote you, call you stupid, and mock you.
That's not a particularly healthy or welcoming community that I would want to participate.
And yet that's the type of thing they're defining.
Another item.
Filling someone's inbox with PMs, private messages, saying kill yourself is harassment.
Calling someone stupid on a public forum is not.
Again, now it's like if you fill their inbox with private messages that only they can see saying kill yourself, that's harassment.
But if you just call them stupid in public, that's not.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
These are outlining behaviors.
What they're basically saying is if you're just if you're just sending people private messages and saying mean things to them, that's that's harassment.
But if you're just saying it in public and you say it once, it's OK.
And again, they can define they can figure out what they want the rules to be.
This is the things that I read that make me feel like this is not someplace that I would like to hang out because I'm not interested in watching people call each other names, even if I'm not involved.
I'm not interested in seeing people mock each other and call each other stupid.
I'm interested in an exchange of ideas.
I don't think any of this makes Reddit broadly unappealing, but the type of communities that can fit within the rules that they're laying down, a lot of those communities are broadly unappealing.
And I think, like, if you follow the letter of the law as Reddit appears to be defining things, you can have a community that is just terrible, that all it is is a bunch of people reinforcing their own really bad ideas.
There was another really good one here.
The number one thing was, harboring unpopular ideologies is not a reason for banning.
Which sounds great.
It's like, exactly like, yeah, just because my ideology is unpopular, I shouldn't be banned.
I think when people read that on Reddit, what they have in their mind is...
if i think enterprise is the best star trek series i shouldn't be banned that is definitely an unpopular that is an unpopular idea that enterprise is the best star trek series and so that's kind of what's in their mind yeah why should i be banned because i have just you know there's a tyranny of the majority why should i have to agree with everybody else it's supposed to be a free and open exchange of ideas harboring unpopular ideology is not a reason for banning right but ideologies are different than just ideas or statements or opinions
harboring unpopular, there's lots of unpopular ideologies that you would say are not reasons for banning.
But if your unpopular ideology is that all black people should be slaves, that is a different unpopular ideology than you think there should be a flat tax of 90% on all Americans.
Right.
To those.
And from from sort of logical perspective, those are just both unpopular ideologies.
Why should one be banned and another not be banned?
It's all up to what kind of community you want to make, especially if you had rules against like attacking the idea, not the person.
I think you could have a community in which that person who is really in favor of the 90 percent flat tax on all Americans could have a reasonable discussion or debate about
his or her position and the person who thinks all black people should be slaves is never going to have a reasonable debate about it like they are different by their nature and i think anyone can tell that they're different but the rules according to the letter of the rules they're both unpopular ideologies and neither one is a reason for banning and that's the type of community that reddit seems to be trying to create and you know go for it like that's the one i'll make this one i make that's why that's what i'm getting at when i say when i read
um their sort of goal state what what are we trying to make reddit become like they're still working on the details i'm not saying they got to have it all figured out now the site's only 10 years old you know take your time um but it it's this it's that's what's repelling me and i think like i said i think uh the rules sort of as they're as they're evolving them now allow for a lot of things that would definitely be beyond what regular people want to get involved in um
and i guess the final only final other item i have on this is a couple people saying the bad stuff on reddit doesn't affect me some people saying the bad stuff on reddit does affect them and they're thinking of pulling back uh
There is something to be said about subreddits that you don't go to not affecting your life on the Reddit with the cat pictures, right?
And I think this gets back to, like, is all of Reddit, you know, are all the people on Reddit bad?
No, obviously not.
The vast, vast majority of people who are heavily participating, even, like, the super heavy users, they just want to look at cat pictures, man.
Like, you know, it's all good.
Like, and there's great forums there where they discuss interesting things, like tons of great stuff on Reddit.
This is a case of...
uh the rules that allow all that great stuff to bloom on forum uh on forum on reddit also allow some bad stuff and you don't want to think about the bad stuff and you don't want to see it but sometimes those people wander over to your end and if they even if they don't wander over you know you're participating in a system that provides a little incubator for these people to reinforce their own ideas and recruit new people and
Even if they stay within the letter of the law on the subreddit stuff, it's basically an organization tool for things that you don't want to happen.
Like, so fine, maybe they email each other privately about inciting violence.
Maybe they email each other privately about doxing people, about harassing them, about doing all the things, as long as you don't do it on Reddit, it's fine.
Like, what do you think these communities are about?
Like, they're just hateful, right?
And...
If you are on Reddit, some people isn't bothered.
Like I stick to the cat picture Reddit subreddit and I'm fine and I don't associate with them at all.
I don't think the cat picture Reddit people are tainted by the other people, but they are participating in a system that allows for that.
Whereas if you're on Twitter, you are participating in a system that would like not to allow for that, but does because they're incompetent about enforcing it.
So I think that is a fine line.
They're like, it's not clear cut.
It is definitely not clear cut, but I like where Twitter says it's trying to go
And so far where Reddit says it's trying to go doesn't, doesn't match up with what I prefer.
It just seems like they pride themselves in these decisions that like you, I find kind of distasteful and it doesn't take a very big logical leap to realize that just like you said, saying enterprise is the best star Trek is a very, very, very different thing than saying that, you know, all black people should be slaves.
It's just,
One is not an ideology.
That's why I've hit the flat tax.
Like the 90% flat tax, it's more of an ideology or like Marxism or communism or something really unpopular, but it's an ideology, right?
I think that type of ideology, like there are certain ideologies that we collectively all agree as a society are so distasteful that you wouldn't want them to be
You don't want them to be part of your community, right?
People talking about that, groups discussing it.
Again, because your community is a private website.
Obviously, we're not the United States government.
People should be allowed to protest, say what they want, print what they want, do whatever you want.
We're talking about what kind of community does Reddit want to create on their private website.
And the kind they want to create...
allows for things that that I don't like and the enterprise example so that's why I'm trying to come up with something that is like non-controversial but is also an ideology that is super unpopular but but I think perfectly okay to discuss in a constructive way you know what I mean
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Anything else on Reddit?
Marco, you've been quiet for a while.
Any thoughts?
I just don't care, honestly.
There's a limited number of things I can care about.
And the drama of what seems like a really fragmented and sometimes good, but sometimes extremely problematic community that I'm not in.
I can't make myself care.
I just can't.
Yeah, it's not really the specifics of Reddit that I care about so much, because again, I'm not that regular of a user, and I don't think it's like a linchpin of the internet that if something bad happens to it, it diminishes, that that'll be the end of the world.
Oh, that's not what Redditors think, though.
Well, you know, I think it'll be fine.
But anyway, I think it's just a good example of...
how if you read like these guidelines they all seem to make sense you know like you read them and you feel they're egalitarian they're high-minded or whatever uh but i you know as a uh incredibly uh insightful podcast once said it's ramifications uh
Harboring unpopular ideology is not a reason for banning.
That sounds awesome, right?
What are the ramifications of that?
What does that lead to?
What do these series of guidelines lead to?
Mocking and calling people stupid is not harassment.
What kind of community do you build with this set of guidelines?
Uh, the shape of that community is not appealing to me and I, and I'm making, you know, I'm going to get called on this and I think it's true.
I'm making the extrapolation that because this is not appealing to me and because I think I kind of understand what is generally accepted to be sort of like, okay, within polite society, uh, certain things that fit within these, the letter of these guidelines are, are things that most people will find distasteful and would not want to be associated with.
right?
You know, our coontown, people do not want to be associated with that in general.
Advertisers certainly don't, right?
And just general people, if it gets too close to them or they realize what's going on back there, you know, definitely is not something they want to deal with, right?
And I think there is a standard for that.
It's hard to define.
That's why it's hard to write down in rules.
And if you write down the rules for it, it's like, oh, slippery slope, now you're going to ban everything, right?
But it's something that every community of real people, virtual communities, everything...
I think deals with much more naturally and, and calmly.
Like I can't think of another group of people that, you know, like if you had a bowling league and people came in the bowling league and were mocking people and calling them stupid.
And you're like, well, that's not against the, you know, that's fine.
Like people will say, you're jerks.
I don't want to bowl with you anymore.
Right.
That's the way.
And that somehow online, it's like, well, they must be allowed to do that because we need to allow them to put their hateful words into our database.
Otherwise we're monsters.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Free speech doesn't mean what you think it means.
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So one of the things that's been announced for El Capitan is this rootless mode thing.
And I have not had a chance to look into this at all, but I'm very fascinated by what it means to me.
And I say that because my day-to-day life is, I live in VMware Fusion.
And I am running Windows and VMware Fusion in order to do my day job.
And it may be, and we'll find out shortly, that this will not affect VMware Fusion at all.
Or it may be that VMware Fusion will have to go to extraordinary lengths in order to get themselves back to where they are today.
So, John, tell me about rootless mode and what does that mean?
The framing for this is I just want a brief review of the basic Unix security that OS X has.
Unlike classic Mac OS, which these days no one listening to the show probably remembers, there are user accounts on OS X. You log into one, maybe get logged into one by default.
your user account uh when you create files from your user account you're the user that owns them you can only mess with for the most part the files that you own or that have permissions for anyone in your group or anyone at all to modify uh and in practice what that means is the operating system itself and other users crap does not have permissions set on it that allow you to do anything to it so the files to make up the operating system
are owned by a different user they're they're in a different group and you as your regular user can't mess with them you can have an administrative user which has is in some elevated privilege groups including including something that lets them become the super user like when you're at when something asks you to enter an admin user password that's elevating your privileges to okay now even though you logged into your whatever your account is now you have super user privileges you can modify anything on the system
And usually you're doing that on behalf of a program that wants to mess with files that otherwise you as a user wouldn't be able to mess with.
And this was seen by Mac users as a little bit of an annoyance, but also as a big win of like, oh, finally, I'll only be able to mess with my files by default.
So you can also make non-admin accounts that can't elevate their privileges.
You'd have to enter some other administrative account password to elevate privileges.
So those people maybe couldn't install applications or mess with the operating system or whatever.
The downside of this, as people have always discussed, and which Rootless does not really address that much, but it's worth keeping in mind, is that, all right, so say you have a non-admin account, which a lot of people recommend.
You should have a non-admin account because that way you can't elevate your privileges to the level where you can modify anything.
And all you'll ever be able to modify is your own files.
You can't delete the operating system.
You can't mess with anything like that.
So if somehow malware got onto your system or hijacked your web browser or whatever, and it was running as you, the lowly user, it would only be able to modify files owned by you.
Well, guess what?
If they delete everything in your home directory owned by you, you're going to be super sad because that's all your crap.
That's all the stuff that you care about.
In the end, you don't really care about the operating system, or so this counter to the Unix security model goes.
You can reinstall the operating system, but you own all of the pictures that are in your iPhoto library, all the music that's in your iTunes thing, all the documents, all your reports, all your homework things, all your work files, all your source code.
That's all owned by you.
All the files you care about are owned by you for the most part.
So what is this little model where I have a regular user and then the root user is elevated privileges?
It doesn't really help me.
Like if something if some piece of code runs loose on my system, it can delete all my stuff anyway.
That is the sort of counter to the unique security model.
It sounds so great, but really doesn't doesn't help me because it still can delete all my stuff.
Uh, that is all true, but that's not what malware wants to do most of the time.
Malware kind of like viruses that kill their host really fast, like literal, you know, biological viruses, malware that wants to either be useful or to spread can't kill its host immediately.
Malware that immediately delete someone's hard drive is not going to get very far because it's not going to have a chance to propagate because it's going to immediately nuke the person's computer and, you know, not delete their hard drive, delete all their files.
Like that will be really obvious that all their crap is gone.
They're going to be super mad and it won't spread.
what malware wants to do both both for the spreading purposes and like why does it want to spread it wants to spread because it wants to become a powerful thing what you want malware to do is to silently infect someone's computer to make it a slave of your botnet to let it mine for bitcoins to launch distributed denial of service attacks to do keystroke logging to steal pictures to turn on the webcam and record people like what most malware wants to do is be hidden it
doesn't want to delete all your files because that would be really obvious and you would notice and you would immediately know something is messed up it wants to get its hooks into your system in an invisible way and that's where the standard unix protection comes from um where
If it wants to really get its hooks into your system, what it really wants to do is modify files that are part of the operating system.
So we can like log all the keystrokes of every user logged in or control the hardware in ways that an individual user couldn't.
It wants to sort of infect the binaries that you run, a lot of which are applications installed in the application folder that maybe you don't own because they were installed by a different user or a main user or infect the operating system itself or get into the IO level.
You know, that's what malware wants to do.
And so having a separate set of permissions where
plain old your plain old user account can't modify system files can't install kernel extensions that uh that intercept all your keystrokes or whatever that's a good thing right so that's the content that's that's the current situation we haven't discussed anything about l kappa 10 yet right
what el capitan's system integrity protection or rootless mode or whatever is trying to do is add another layer of protection which is instead of just having your regular user that can elevate you know the privileges up to uh the root user that can do anything and having the root user account that can do anything they want to say okay you got a regular user account some of those regular user accounts are admin users who can elevate their privileges to root level but even root can't do everything
So even if you elevate your permissions by entering an admin password or you become the root user or whatever, even that user still can't do some stuff.
And the some stuff that they can't do is modify system files, inject their code into other running processes and all sorts of other things that you would take for granted on a regular Unix system.
Once you elevate your privilege to super use level, you can do anything.
That's the whole point of the super user.
They are, you know, ID zero.
They can do anything they want.
It doesn't matter who owns it.
It doesn't matter.
They can do everything.
This system,
This is limiting the power of the root user.
And it's doing that because history has shown that it's not too difficult to take an admin user account and either trick them into entering their admin password or find an exploit that elevates their privileges up to admin level.
And that's where the malware can really get its hooks deep into your system.
And this is saying even if the malware gets that far, even if the malware tricks a user into entering their admin password and they are an admin user or finds a bug that elevates their privileges,
We still don't want them to be able to mess with the operating system.
Not because the operating system is super important, like that's where their stuff is, but because that's what Mailware wants to do to really take over the computer, to really like, you know, install that key logger that gets every single keystroke that every user ever types on this computer and, you know, emails it to everybody and takes pictures of them and records their credit card number and does all sorts of other nasty things.
That's what these things want to do.
Yeah.
so yeah that's that this is the feature as described uh and the details this uh if you want to see the details of this this is in wwdc session 706 innocuously named security and your apps which is probably the reason i didn't even favorite it when i was at wwdc you know because it's like what are they gonna talk about there that's boring but by the time i heard what it was in it was too late but anyway
videos are freely available we'll put the link in the show notes you can take a look at it goes through all the different things it's going to do i'm heartened to learn that like the directories they're limiting to the system only is like slash system slash bin slash user slash s bin all the things you would expect them to forbid uh messing with
Uh, where are you supposed to put your stuff, your Unixy stuff?
User local.
Like, like they've been saying for years and years, put your stuff in user local.
User local belongs to the user.
Apple will not blow it away on system installs.
I've been using it for a long, long time now.
I've never had it go wrong.
Uh, user local is your friend.
That's where you should put your Unixy stuff.
And of course in your home directory and all sorts of stuff like that.
Um, the, the limitations that they're adding here, uh, you know, all, all sound good for, for the purposes of, uh, increasing security, but there are once again, ramifications of them that are worth considering.
Like, um, you know, can't modify system binaries.
That's fine.
You shouldn't be able to do that anyway.
Can't install things in the system locations.
That's fine.
Kernel extensions have to be signed.
Well, they had to be signed already.
So that's not a new, you know, thing.
um there may be some badly behaved software out there that does currently try to shove stuff into bin user sbin or something like that maybe vmware does but it's pretty easy for them to fix that by just putting their stuff in user local so that's why i think vmware will probably be okay kernel extensions vmware i think has kernel extensions i don't know casey maybe you
i've never paid close enough attention but i would presume so but if they do you can still have kernel extensions current extensions are still saying they have to just have to be signed and i think there's probably some you know approval process or something involved but like you know official uh atv tipsters and bmware doesn't have kernel extensions but anyway you can still have kernel extensions they just have to be signed um oh now he says it does and they're signed anyway i'm i think they're behind uh
Anyway, that's that's not a big deal either.
It's just probably like installers that put stuff in slash bin just because their shirts and everybody's path and they really should put it in user local bin and, you know, modify people's path or do whatever they have to do.
Can't attach to running processes and inject code, you know, can't use detrace probes on these projected processes, all sorts of stuff like that.
uh this is the thing that you can disable obviously you can't disable it by becoming root so you're not going to do sudo uh some command and then turn this off as the whole point is root's power is limited uh if you want to disable it you have to boot into the recovery os and disable it from there the little recovery partition they put in there
um the configuration changes are stored in nvram uh and if you if you turn off this mode if you say uh i don't want this rootless prediction anymore that setting will persist across across os install so if you install a new os it won't suddenly turn back on or whatever so they're trying to be friendly about this although the slides say this system of how do i actually enable this if i don't want it is something to change
um probably but you know this is again just you know i doubt most people will bother uh messing with it's kind of like when trim support was only available if you turned off the kernel extension signing verification nobody wanted to do that and it was scary i don't think anyone will want to turn this off um
But there are ramifications for this type of decision.
And the one that came to my mind immediately after hearing all sorts of Mac developers talk about this and all developers complaining for years about the things that the Mac App Store doesn't allow to exist, like the kinds of apps that aren't allowed in the Mac App Store.
are very often the most interesting apps to me.
And the one I thought of immediately is Dropbox, a fairly popular application that got its start.
The Mac version of it got its start by making that magical folder that syncs.
But one of the key features, I think, of Dropbox when it was introduced and to this day is that when you install Dropbox on OS X and you have your little Dropbox folder and you drag things into it,
a little it badges your little icon with like a little blue spinny thing and when it's completely synced you get a little green check mark badge and those little badges like it's like oh it's just a magical folder but also there's this little extra bit of ui that tells me when something has finished syncing right that is there weren't many features for dropbox i made it a folder with an icon it did a bunch of magic stuff behind the scenes
And those little icons are basically the whole UI and also adding a context menu that pops up.
But those little icon badges, how the hell do they add little icon badges to the Finder?
Like they didn't install an alternate version of the Finder.
Well, they did in-memory patching of the Finder process.
The Finder was a running process.
It's part of the operating system.
And they would inject their own code into the running image of the Finder to make it do those little badges.
You could not have Dropbox in a world where rootless mode exists in the old days.
Obviously, now you can because Apple made an official API for it because there are no dummies and they know Dropbox is really popular.
What I'm thinking of is the next innovative app like Dropbox, like, you know, if Dropbox didn't exist, El Capitan came out, became the dominant OS install, and then someone had the idea for Dropbox.
It could not exist on OS X because there's no way to do what it did.
the path that it followed was do something super nasty that apple doesn't like keep fighting apple for years to be able to in memory patch their running process eventually become so popular that apple is forced to give you an uh to give you an official api and then have apple close the door behind you and say now no one else can do what dropbox did uh and this is the type of thing that i worry about from uh with all of apple's policies
not so much that like they're going to stop me as a user from doing what i want because apple's pretty good at least on os 10 for giving you a way to like turn all this crap off if you don't want it but that is necessarily limiting the types of things creative third-party developers can do where it
Is the next Dropbox going to even be on the Mac?
Is it even going to be able to get off the ground?
Is it going to be able to get to the point where it can get to the level of popularity where Apple is forced to put official support for the APIs that it wants into its operating system?
Or is Apple just slowly closing the door on interesting application ideas, which have never been available on iOS because you've always been limited to what you do there.
But the Mac has been the remaining area where people can try crazy sorts of things.
And even if Apple doesn't have an official API for them.
if something works and it becomes popular and people want it that's sort of the signal to apple hey people really like using their macs to do this and this company has been doing it in a super dangerous ways for years maybe you can give them a nice api for that this rootless thing is like nope you're never even going to be able to do it a dangerous way because no one's going to be able to tell everybody like dropbox could not have gotten off the ground if they had to tell everybody hey by the way reboot into recovery partition and turn off this security thing you don't understand and then install dropbox it's great nobody would do it it would not become popular so
That is the promise and the worries surrounding rootless mode or system integrity or whatever you want to call it in El Capitan.
Do you think some degree of that might be solved by market forces if necessary?
So for instance, suppose one of the ways that a lot of these, one of the most common categories of this kind of thing that I know of are kind of hacks and plugins to mail.app.
Aren't most of those using some kind of thing like this that won't be possible anymore?
They were back in the day.
I don't know if they are, if that's the thing that goes.
Does Apple have an official API for mail plugins at this point?
I don't remember.
I'm not sure.
Anyway, you can look at situations like that.
where there's some system app and it has some shortcomings or there's some compelling features that can only be added by these kinds of things, right?
And so you're saying like, you know, we're not going to see those at all.
I'm saying we will probably still see that.
Like if it's compelling enough, we will still see those things.
But we will see them just in other places.
So in the example of Dropbox, we just won't see it on Mac.
If that kind of thing is not possible, it'll come to Windows first.
In reality, these days, mobile really matters so much.
I'm not sure if something like that could launch today and end up mattering.
But regardless, it would go on other platforms first.
In the case of application plugins, like mail plugins...
If those become not possible through any kind of rootless protection or anything like that, then we'll just see things like alternative mail clients coming up with compelling features instead.
Do you think that's an equivalent thing, though?
The people who would make the mail plug-in, making a full-fledged mail application that includes the feature that you want is a way higher bar than figuring out how to hack some plug-in into mail.
Well, look at where the innovation is happening now.
It's not in mail.
It's in Gmail.
Anyway, maybe that was a bad example.
But there are things like that where there are other ways for great, compelling ideas to gain traction and get out.
And maybe it's harder, and maybe some of them are closed off.
But overall, I see this as really just...
another technological progression.
First, in the early days, you could just scribble all over memory, now we have projected memory, and you can't just do that quite as easily.
A lot of these things are kind of memory invasion hacks like that, but some of them are not quite as bad as that, but...
As technology progresses, we're getting more and more protections and safeties around things like system processes and user security and everything.
And most of these protections cut off categories of apps and hacks and add-ons that were previously possible.
And so far, you can look back at these progressions, and I don't think anybody's arguing that we should undo any of them or make holes in any of them.
Overall, I think we really have made substantial improvements by adding more protection over time.
And there are certain things like...
The political downside of these protections are things like they're not being able to sideload apps on iOS for users, stuff like that.
And that's bad.
Well, they improve that too on iOS 9.
Now a regular person can build and sign their own applications in Xcode and put it on their device without doing any weird stuff, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, yes, that's true.
That's of limited usefulness, maybe, because most people are not going to be able to do that, but just skill-wise and time-wise.
Regardless, these protections over time generally improve computing for people.
They generally improve stability and improve security, and usually we look at them all and say, you know what, we're better off now.
So most of these rootless protections are common sense.
There's only, you know, some of them might be restrictive to applications and innovation and everything.
But I think the percentage of those is going to be extremely low relative to like everything that matters in computing today, where the innovation is happening in computing today.
I think it's moving away from places where it's important to be able to inject code in random places or modify system files.
I don't think we're seeing a lot of that kind of innovation anymore.
I don't think we will because just the way the world is moving.
So even if Apple didn't do this, like how likely is it that the next disruptive startup was going to be a finder hack?
You know, it's honestly not that likely.
How likely was it to begin with?
But it was like it totally was.
Dropbox was essentially a finder hack and a bunch of Python scripts.
And how many years ago was that?
I know, but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.
As doors close, obviously, it's like, oh, we're seeing less of these hacks.
Well, no doubt you're seeing less of these hacks because they're making them less possible.
But I agree with you.
I'm not arguing against these protections, but I think if you're going to add these protections, which I think you should do, you have to modify your other policies to match the reality that you are now disallowing.
Because previously...
you know intentionally or not what apple was relying on is sneaky clever people will find ways to bypass things and do things that we don't want them to do we will be angry about it and try to stop them but despite our best efforts some of them are going to become wildly popular and then we will grudgingly add official api support and
Whether that is a conscious strategy or just like how things turn out, that is sort of the life cycle of the of the innovative software application right on the Apple platform.
And if you change that life cycle by saying, you know what?
We want to cut out the early part where they do the nasty thing in the gross way that we don't think it should because it's dumb.
Like we don't want people hacking.
Like I don't want people, you know, I didn't like the fact that Dropbox did in-memory hacking.
I remember finding ways to disable it by removing the little context menu, like injecting things and stuff like that.
Like that's all bad.
But if you take that away, you have to come up with a new life cycle.
And the new life cycle could be a developer, you know, a bunch of developers have a reasonable request for system API support for badging icons in the finder.
the current apple would there's no mechanism for you to get that api like it's chicken and egg you can't say no matter how many developers say boy we really wish there was a way we could intercept audio system wide because we have some great ideas for like audio hijack three or whatever like even if 15 different companies or even if like adobe and microsoft said apple is just like that doesn't seem important to us you shouldn't do that anyway like like there isn't there is no alternate life cycle for these innovations it's
They're cutting off one way for these things to come out, and I don't see them opening up to the point where we're willing to entertain your suggestions for new APIs, even if it's a lot of works for assemblement, and it will only benefit you as a third party, simply because we want those kind of innovative ideas on our platform.
right like they need to you need to make an alternate path like as i put just put a link in the show notes for the umpteenth time to my really old paths in the grass thing with the which is a thing about haxies with the larry wall quote which is not really his quote but he's quoting somebody else about uh university campus where they don't pave anything they just let people walk around and wherever they wore down the grass that's where you put the path
System hacks like that are telling you what is it that people want to do.
And it's really like you need to come up with a good way to find out, all right, do people really want stupid badges on their icons or is this just something some random kid at MIT thinks would be cool for people to have?
It's not even a product.
It's just a feature.
Like it doesn't sound like...
could uh what's his name drew whatever could he somehow have convinced apple to add an official api for badging icons in the finder i don't see how there's any way he could possibly do it like there needs but there needs to be some way for uh if you can't do it the hacky way what is the official way of doing what is the official way of making os 10 or ios or any platform that apple controls
a viable place for you to do this new innovative thing that currently there's no well-supported way to do and like you said mark was like well they can't do it here they'll do it first on windows or whatever like i think all computing platforms are moving in this direction um and secondarily i don't think apple would be happy with the answer oh we'll just let the innovation happen another platform then we'll copy it right apple wants the innovation to happen on its platform but innovation is weird and that you can't predict what it's going to want so you have to have some way for the people with good ideas to be able to
do what they want to do on your system.
And that's a harder problem, I think, because back when you just let them hack stuff up, you didn't have to decide.
You'd be like, well, that person did a crazy hack and no one cares.
That person did a crazy hack and no one cares.
That one did a crazy hack and no one cares.
Oh, this person did a crazy hack and the entire world loves Dropbox.
Apple can't make that call.
How does Apple know?
Is it going to listen to all those guys and say, I want an API for this.
I want an API for that.
Like in some respects, the old one where you let the people hack your system was easier for Apple.
But now they're kind of putting themselves on the hook to either box out these creative ideas or find some new way to sort of vet which crazy ideas are worth implementing and which aren't.
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Before we leave this topic, a real-time follow-up from the ATP tipster.
VMware doesn't shove stuff in the system directories.
VMware does use kernel extensions, and VMware currently works in El Capitan's seeds 1 through 4.
so life is good for me right and and he and he mentioned also too like uh rogue amoeba's uh various audio hijack products and stuff like that those all have signed text so those will all still work as well so like i mean i think they're not available on the mac app store right no definitely well that doesn't mean anything these days right but but couldn't be available not just because of their choice to put it there but they could not put the my understanding is that you could not put audio hijacked on the mac app store it violates the guidelines of the mac app store
As far as I know, that's true.
There are certain loopholes.
Some apps will have a basic version on the App Store that can do some functionality, but then to do anything fun, you have to go to their website and download this optional extra component and all sorts of stuff like that.
There are different hacks, but for the most part, I think...
Whether something is allowed in the Mac App Store is almost completely irrelevant to the possible innovation that can happen on the Mac.
Because the fact is, the Mac App Store is just a disaster in so many ways.
I mean, the actual app itself from a user perspective is awful.
The policies are draconian and restrictive and oppressive and way worse than iOS relative to what's normal on the platform.
It's buggy.
It's just awful.
So many things about it are terrible that we can't say that, well, if that won't fly in the Mac App Store, then it won't happen on the Mac.
Because the fact is, it's getting to the point now where the App Store is really a ghost town, and almost everything good on the Mac is outside of it.
The Mac App Store, as bad as it is and people may be leaving it, I think it does express what Apple wishes Mac apps would be like.
The fact that sandboxing was there first and was a requirement.
They don't want you to do any sort of hacks and they don't want you to install stuff.
Apple wishes all apps were as nice and neat and self-contained as the Mac App Store guidelines dictate.
Yeah, but the Mac App Store, it's like XHTML.
You really hate XHTML, don't you?
You keep pulling that one out.
Really?
Why not?
Well, no, it was a great example of like, the cat was already out of the bag.
Everybody was already doing things this whole other way.
And the standards group said, all right, we're going to lock everything down and be very restrictive and formal.
Here's the new way to do it.
And everyone basically just said, no.
XHTML had a transitional DTD.
Like, it wasn't that hard and fast.
But I think the Mac App Store is more like it's all going to be S expressions.
Like, you know, forget about all those attributes and tags.
Like, it's so limited.
But the limitations of the Mac App Store, like, I really feel like they express...
what apple wishes mac software development was like they don't match the reality of of what mac app software development actually is like and i don't think they also are enough of an overlap with what users actually want i think applications like audio hijack fill a need for people who want that type of application like this is great it makes me happy that i have my mac because this mac can do this amazing thing with this application that like lets me use my mac to do interesting things
But that can't fit within the guidelines of the Mac App Store.
So, you know, history has shown so far that Apple has been really good about, like, well, we'll have this Mac App Store where we show you what we want to be, but we're not going to stop you from loading crap.
Like, we'll do everything we can with, like, developer IDs and the...
the what is it called gatekeeper thing and they even have like the gatekeeper setting toggle back from the insecure one to the secure one if you like turn on the insecure mode for a second you forget about it and you don't launch an app that wouldn't be allowed like it toggles back like they're trying to do everything they can while allowing power users to do what they want but still they just want everything to be kind of herded over there um and eventually they're just going to come up against these hard things like what if you know
They should go through the exercise and say, what if you really did want everything to be in the Mac App Store, but now you couldn't have Photoshop anymore?
How would you square that circle?
What would you do to deal with it?
You'd obviously have to do something because you're not going to say like, well, tough luck.
Adobe's got to rewrite their application so it fits in the Mac App Store.
Like they would figure out, hey, Adobe, what do you need to get like... And they just don't seem to extend that sort of effort to these smaller applications.
And so we're left in the situation where most Mac software that people really like and care about
is either not in the mac app store or not in the mac app store only and more and more software that people do care about is leaving the mac app store because it's too much of a hassle to be there and i don't think this is bad software like panics applications you know talk about the poster child for like doing things the apple way they're practically a miniature apple even they can't stick it out in some cases for the mac app store for their applications because it's just too darn much of a hassle uh did they leave the app store or did they just get rid of the iCloud thing i forget i think they just did their own sync service because they couldn't handle the iCloud thing um
Maybe they did leave for one of them.
I don't remember.
Anyway, the fact is, the Mac App Store has been, I think, a colossal failure.
I mean, not a level of ping, but honestly, not that far off in just like...
How much people are using it these days, how relevant it is, how much it is really not at all the future of app deployment and sales on the Mac.
I mean, again, it's not as bad as Ping, but I don't think it's that far off.
It really is terrible.
It really has been a huge failure.
And it seems like there are lots of forces within Apple and some of it just like inertia.
Some of it might be politics.
I don't know.
I don't know the internals, but...
It just seems like whatever forces got it to that state where it's in now, where Apple just tried to rule with such an iron fist, especially with sandboxing coming in after the fact, which really hurt things, just ruling with such an iron fist there that...
everyone really just left.
And now, as a consumer, we've tipped the point where I used to, when it first came out, I used to buy as many things there as I could because then I wouldn't have to deal with serial numbers or anything.
I knew I could install it on my laptop and my desktop and it wouldn't give me crap.
But what has happened since then is enough big apps have left it
that now i'm afraid to buy anything there now if something's available in or out of the app store i'll buy it out of the app store by default now so like i and i feel like i bet that's happened with a lot of people like as soon as that happens to you once for like an app you bought in the app store then leaves the app store i think as soon as that happens to you once you're very likely to to switch in that way the way i did
Yeah, there's still a barrier, though, to buying outside the App Store for normals, right, for regular people.
Like, there's a reason everyone loves the iOS App Store.
Like, you just click, click, oh, you got a thing.
Like, especially because so many people have iTunes accounts and the credit card is already there.
Like, the benefits are there for regular people.
It's a luxury that we have to be like, oh...
uh i know what to do when i get burned in this way because i think regular people do get burned and by the way cmf in the chat room pointed out that coda 2 is the one i was thinking of is out of the mac app store what about all those people who bought coda on the mac app store and now it's out of it like they have the frustration they're in the situation but are all of them ready to
go know which website to go to and know how to buy it online and deal with the serial numbers and do it like we're okay with that because that's the way it was for the longest time but for people who are sort of came into computers in the in the ios app store age they're used to just going someplace and clicking a thing and getting the application and just having it there like the those benefits are still there and you mentioned like them ruling with an iron fist in the mac app store i think the problem is that
they it wasn't that they're really with iron fist they have the carrot and the stick right and the stick was sort of floppy and non-existent because bottom line you didn't have to buy through the madcap store you can get your stuff so the stick is barely there like they don't really have much of a stick
to make people be in the Mac App Store, as evidenced by all the people leaving it, right?
And the carrot was kind of a rotten, crappy carrot, too.
So there was no real stick to force people to be there and no real carrot for your, like, this is why you should be in it.
In the beginning, it seemed like there was a carrot.
Hey, people are excited by the Mac App Store.
I got to be there to get the sales.
But as it kind of fizzled, the carrot is looking less appealing.
And, like, there basically is no stick.
Like, even for regular people, if anyone has a Mac and knows how to buy software for it at all, like...
you can google and find something and something like it's difficult but it's no more difficult than it was before the app store it's exactly as difficult and before the mac app store existed people made money selling software for the mac somehow that it wasn't a mass market like ios it wasn't something that everybody did you know the number of people who owned macs and who bought software for it was much smaller than the number of people who had ios devices and install apps everyone who's got an ios device is just tapping around that app store installing something right
Even if it's just a Facebook app, right?
But it was still a viable business.
So it seems like we're slowly reverting to that, where the Mac App Store is filled with the few apps that can still fit within its guidelines.
And again, Coda and Panic.
When Panic can't get their app on your thing, they're the most conscientious...
made in apple's image all the similar like quality and wanting to do the right thing and they struggle with a really long time with sandboxing with their application trying to make a go of it working with apple for like a year two years like if they can't make a go with like that like what hope is there for anybody else because they're not coda is not like a you know an application that's injecting code into the finder to put badges on icons like it's
It's an IDE for web development, for crying out loud.
And you can't have that?
Is that outside the realm of things you can have on the Mac now?
Well, Xcode's in the Mac App Store.
Not that that counts because it's Apple's.
That's the best thing.
Apple can put stuff in the Mac App Store.
It does whatever the hell it wants because the rules don't apply to Apple.
Which is part of the problem.
I mean, that's part of the problem with both app stores, but especially the Mac one is that they don't dog food most of these things, so it's really a disaster.
And even as a user, so not only am I now disincentivized from buying things there that are available elsewhere, but
In recent times, I don't even look there anymore because so many great apps are not available there.
And it only takes a couple of times you're looking for an app before you kind of develop that pattern of, you know, now I have to look in the App Store and out of the App Store.
Like on iOS, it's great.
You can just look in one place and you can see this is everything available for this platform.
For the Mac, it was never that way, but at least when it started, you could tell, like, it's going this way, and there was more stuff there, it seemed like.
Now, it's like, if I want an app to do X, I have to search in the Mac App Store, and then I also have to do a web search, and I also have to find... It's like...
the bad old days when you just like you didn't have one place to look like this again this this is something that should be an advantage for the mac app store and it's just it's just not enough it's not enough of a carrot like that's why people were in in the beginning well i'll be findable people don't even know that a website exists like people don't know where to even start to get mac app store uh to get mac software but hey here's a place to start it's right at the top of the apple menu let me just go there uh and like i think i fear what's happening now is
people go to that item on the top of the apple menu and they think that's all there is for the platform like that's a natural thing to think if you are someone who like came to the mac from ios or whatever oh i guess these are all the things i can get for the mac maybe someone might have heard of photoshop and go where's photoshop isn't that i've heard of that isn't that not that i guess the casual people wouldn't buy photoshop because it's an expensive application but
uh or i guess microsoft office too is that in the mac app store i forget i think it might be actually yeah but anyway like some things are still outside of it um and there are applications that you know like apple applications that don't have to abide by the rules but like that would be the worst thing like if you if you get a mac and and think that the stuff on the mac app store is the extent of what you can do with a mac like you're just missing out on too much stuff you know
is dropbox in the mac app store maybe it is now that they have the uh the icon badging thing but certainly in the old days that dropbox couldn't be in the mac app store because it injected code into the finder not going to be on the mac app store if you thought that you got a mac and you couldn't get dropbox like i went to the mac app store and i couldn't find dropbox is that not a thing on the mac like because i've heard my friends talk about it and they said i should get it but i don't see it anywhere right and like first of all little aside here dropbox for me has never worked worse than it does on yosemite
It is because when they added that integration, the Finder integration with the extension point so they don't have to inject code, it's buggy as hell.
It's so buggy.
And I tweeted about this and a bunch of people said they said the same thing.
I constantly have issues where a file will be updated remotely from somewhere else.
Often it's like our shared folder when you guys upload your audio.
A file will be updated and in Finder, in Finder Windows, it will lose its badge
And it will be the old file name, not the new one.
So basically a ghost file name will appear to be there.
And if you go into Terminal and you LS it, it shows the correct contents.
But in the Finder window, it's showing stale contents.
And it will still show an old file, and a new file won't show up until you relaunch Finder, in which case it'll be fixed for 20 minutes, maybe.
So many people have reported that they have the same problem.
Old Dropbox never had that problem.
Like, this is yet another thing.
It's like they high ground.
Anyway, haxies, man, haxies.
Like, that's that's the thing about the whole like injecting memory into another process.
Yeah, I know.
The applications that become popular that do that necessarily have to be the ones written by people who really know the ins and outs.
Not that, again, that I'm recommending this, that it's a crazy practice or whatever, but how did Hacksies, how were Hacksies a thing for so long?
On Sanity, this company making these products that just like did terrible things to your system.
How did that work at all?
How did they ever become popular?
It's because the people who made them were able to find ways to do them that would
They would actually work for a large number of people, which is incredibly hard.
It is not a scalable way to do development, but it kind of weeds out all the people who wanted to find hacky ways to do stuff who didn't know every little intricate detail because they would just crash your system and you would never use them.
And so the people who did Dropbox, I think there was a presentation on this, went to heroic efforts to figure out how to safely patch the finder, which is a terrible way to do this, and an official API is better.
But...
It was entirely in their hands to figure out how to do this, whereas now you're cooperating with Apple and Apple's Finder team on we'll make this API and you can use it.
And you know what it's like with Apple APIs.
The first release that it's out in, there are bugs.
It doesn't work right or whatever.
You're hoping the next year it will they will fix the bugs and like, you know, and El Capitan, this this new API will work better or whatever.
But.
maybe not, maybe it's not a big priority for them.
So I don't, I don't know what kind of hope there is for this getting less buggy for you.
I haven't had as many problems as you described for it, but I have seen situations where like, what I get usually is like that the badges don't appear.
I'm like, doesn't this have integration?
Isn't this supposed to be officially API?
Why do I, where do I see no badges?
Why,
Like, is it even working?
And then, like, the context menu is the same thing.
Like, I think it was an official API for that before.
Anyway, real-time follow-up from the chat room.
Dropbox is not in the Mac App Store.
I did a search for Dropbox in the Mac App Store.
I get a screen full of results that say things like app drive for Dropbox, app for Dropbox, app for Dropbox, menu, drop for Dropbox, drag share for Dropbox, app for Dropbox, instant app for Dropbox, instant app for Dropbox, plus Swift drop for Dropbox.
Anyway.
Search in the App Store and Apple's decision to let everything in but draw no distinction.
Like, I don't even know what these things are, but I fear for someone saying they want Dropbox.
And these have prices $299, $299, $499.
I don't think there's any free.
Oh, there's a couple of free ones here and there.
DropLite for Dropbox, DVR Webcam Dropbox, Revisions for Dropbox.
I fear for someone thinking the Mac App Store is where you get applications.
I've heard of this thing called Dropbox.
Let me go find it.
Face with this screen.
I don't know what they would do, but they certainly wouldn't get Dropbox.
I can tell you that because it's not here.
That's exactly the thing.
It only takes a couple of times of searching for something that you know is out there and not finding it in the Mac App Store before you just stop looking in the Mac App Store.
Or you download half of these because obviously they all have Dropbox icon.
They all have a little box that is either an exact copy of the Dropbox icon or someone trying to redraw the Dropbox icon.
Oh, it's so bad.
Yeah, App Store searches a whole other kind of worms.
So things are going really well in the Mac App Store then.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, and we should mention Craig Hockenberry's recent post, too, on this.
Yeah, I was going to say, just so we can put it in the show notes, someone mention it.
Yeah, yeah, definitely read this.
Because one of the problems with the Mac App Store and Mac development in general...
is not only that there's all these policy issues and ruling with the iron fist and their floppy carrot and lack of stick, but also it's like they're ruling with a neglectful iron fist.
They don't even care.
And so many luxuries that iOS developers get or new features that iOS developers get from things like iTunes Connect, iCloud, APIs, so many of them don't come to the Mac at all or come very late to the Mac.
and like Craig's had examples of like test flight builds and stuff like that where it's just like this stuff is like and usually it's promised for Mac it's like oh Mac will have it soon and just hardly ever gets there it gets there very late or whatever and yeah it just obviously the Mac API wise development wise and Mac services for developers obviously these things are not
incredibly high priorities at apple because if they were you know regardless of what apple says and regardless of what we hear from from like you know hard-working people inside the company or in the middle of the of the hierarchy somewhere uh regardless of that we can just tell by their actions you can tell by the results and
This is not the priority.
iOS is the priority.
iOS has way more users, brings in way more money, is way more high profile.
Obviously, that's the higher priority.
And I can't really fault them for that.
But it's unfortunate as Mac users, and it's even more unfortunate if you're a Mac developer, that you're really on what used to be the thing Apple cared so much about and now is clearly third or fourth priority these days.
The one that hurts the most is where they did the thing where they disabled app reviews from beta versions of iOS.
And they didn't do it on the Mac.
Like, that's not a hard... I don't want to say, oh, that's so easy to do.
But look, they dedicated the resources to do it on iOS.
That feels like the type of thing just to save face.
You would like, can we do that for the Mac users too?
Is it that big a deal?
Maybe they will do it eventually.
Maybe it takes longer to patch the Mac App Store application.
Maybe there's no one working on the Mac App Store application.
I don't know what the details are, but that one really hurts.
Because like...
everyone's so excited hey people can't review never mind that it's kind of like a little too little little too late because already betas are in people's hands and they were writing reviews but they fixed it right not for mac users sorry you don't even get that you don't even get what you think is probably like the lowest effort type of nope just not not a priority at all
And in some respects, the Craig Hagenberry thing is coming at it from the perspective of a Mac developer.
And as people have always said, Apple cares about Apple first, users second, developers third or later.
It's a reasonable prioritization.
So it's like a lot of times developers want things from Apple that Apple doesn't give them because they think it's more important for users to have something or for Apple to have something.
But this is a case of developer versus developer.
It's comparing what is it like if you're developing for Apple's most popular platform or developing for Apple's second most popular platform.
And it's a hell of a drop-off going to the second most popular.
And we'll see what happens if suddenly the watch becomes the second most popular one.
Then you're developing for the third most popular.
Not good.
Yeah, I honestly, yeah, I'm not sure that'll happen.
But that's another show.
And either way, remember, just a couple years ago, we came back to the Mac.
So things are fine.
Don't worry about it.
i mean i think they did do are doing better with uh api parity because so many guys reappear in both like extensions api that did come out at the same time in both but just kind of when that happens it's like it's like a boost to the mac because like oh i wouldn't expect that i would expect it to be ios first and mac second when it comes out simultaneous you're like wow the mac really got a boost there but that's a user-facing feature it's not a developer-facing feature and so yeah the there is a priority cascade and it does still affect things but
And I would not hold out any hope for improvements to the Mac App Store.
I mean, like the beta thing you said, like not allowing people to review from betas.
Just look at the state of the Mac App Store application itself.
Just try to use it for anything.
Try to do anything in it.
Try to browse anything.
Obviously, doing anything to this app is... It must be extraordinarily difficult and impossible inside Apple to get anything done inside this app because it doesn't happen.
I just don't think there's a lot of people working on it, though.
I think the underlying frameworks probably have people working on them.
Again, you can run updates from the application and then close the application entirely, but the updates still run because there are like...
processes and demons behind the scene that manage software updates those i think are being worked on because they they you know they do the os updates and they do app updates i think there's people working on those but sort of the gooey skin that provides like the view into the store and does all that that seems like i don't think i can't remember the last time a new feature appeared in that maybe they have someone fixing the most egregious bugs it just seems like no one's working on it
i i can honestly say it's worse than itunes it has many of the same problems and challenges of itunes of of you know having this this giant web service rendering what's basically a big web view in the app is it a web view or is it like xml like the itunes store used to be
remember when the itunes store was like custom xml yeah that's a good question it might be that it feels like a big web view it behaves like a big web it could be like what are the what is that thing that they bought for ios like chomp or whatever like the thing that when they redid the regular app store like oh yeah when they made the search suck even more by having those big cards they don't let you see one app at a time on screen that was great yeah anyway we shouldn't be trying to guess what the underlying technologies are who cares we just know the end result is an application that does weird things and sometimes the only solution is like close it and relaunch it or to restart your mac and that's not good
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, Squarespace, and Need.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
It's accidental.
They did it.
i joined a gym you joined a gym i joined a gym what are you going to do with the gym it's gonna lift heavy things i haven't done that yet i probably won't it's gonna run in place like a hamster in a wheel
i haven't done that yet i have walked really fast in place though does that count like a like a hamster that's not in a hurry yeah yeah like a hamster who's like reading his iphone how does that work with the official marco wardrobe what do you mean i wear shirts there and then i wear them home black t-shirt and uh he's got i'm sorry do you have uh shorts as part of the wardrobe
in the summertime yes i do wear shorts because it's just it's way too hot for pants in the summertime and i don't like i really hate shorts honestly but uh but i own shorts because i live somewhere with with summer that's a season you do have casey yep so you're doing this to fill your circles i am yeah i mean that you know i would like to generally stay healthy you know but but yes it essentially really is just for the circles
So with all the circle filling in the gym, are you like dropping pounds?
Some, yeah.
I'm down, I don't know, like six pounds for like the two months or something.
I don't know.
I'm down some.
It's not a dramatic thing because I'm still eating ice cream, but...
It's the Apple Watch versus Blue Apron.
Blue Apron's fine.
No, Blue Apron is actually great because it's pretty small portions.
Ever since we started that, it's been actually easier to be healthy and lose weight because it is so... It's just... A dinner from Blue Apron...
Even if you add more oil than they tell you to because you have to add more oil than they tell you to because the amount they tell you to is not nearly enough to fry those vegetables.
Even if you add more oil than they tell you to, you're still under 1,000 calories for dinner, and that's pretty good.
Anyway, I joined the gym because...
I live in an area with a great variety of weather and a good portion of that weather is not that pleasant to be walking very quickly for three miles outside.
So I joined earlier this week when it was like 90 degrees one day and a billion percent humidity and
i joined during that day and it's like 10 bucks a month for what's basically the worst gym in the world but i don't care because it's 10 bucks a month and that means i don't have to buy a treadmill and put it in the house anywhere you're scoping out the gym people you're doing some people watching seeing the varieties of people that show up at the gym
In my two visits to the gym so far, I have not seen that many other people, honestly.
It's a pretty big gym, and I go at weird times when everyone else is working.
So I go when it's almost empty.
So I've seen a handful of people, and I just kind of look straight ahead and watch my iPhone stuff.
You're watching video on your iPod?
You're reading things?
You're listening to podcasts?
Yeah.
I haven't quite figured all this out yet.
The first... Again, I've only gone twice.
This was this week.
And it's been nice other days this week.
So I've been doing... I've been walking outside other days this week.
But the first time I did podcasts and it was kind of boring because like...
I'm fine doing podcasts when I walk outside because visually I'm amused by the outside world.
But when you're just walking on a treadmill, staring at bad cable TV that you're not listening to, you're listening to podcasts, it's kind of boring.
So the last time I went, I watched Nevin's CocoConf talk that was really good.
And I'll link to that in the show notes, I guess.
And that was an hour long, so that was perfect.
So this might actually be a good time to watch conference talks and do other things that have a visual component.
need to get you some vr goggles i don't know about that hey does have you either of you guys ever used a treadmill before yeah does the thing where you have like vertigo after you get off does that ever go away what i can't say that i got that one yeah maybe you're just getting lightheaded because you're uh it's only your second day at the gym
no no maybe it's because you're looking at the screen and not paying attention what's going on around you yeah maybe you're getting motion sick well yeah it's it's like when i'm on it i'm fine but then if i stop and i've tried like slowing it down gradually but but it doesn't really matter whenever i stop i feel like i've gotten off a boat you're like whoa you know like i feel yeah i don't feel great for a few minutes afterwards
you might be getting motion sick i mean it seemed like it's a form of motion sickness where it's i don't know people in the chat are saying you get used to it the times i've been in a triple i haven't been staring at an iphone in front of me right exactly so i don't know what maybe that is a common thing if you're especially if you're like the difference between like the iphone in front of you and the tv across the room i think is a big difference in terms of like where you're where you're focusing
Well, the problem is it's a TV on your treadmill right in front of you.
And I've tried looking at the ceiling, looking across the room.
I've tried other things like that.
And it doesn't really seem to make that big of a difference.
Like where I'm looking at just like, I'm running, so my body thinks I'm moving forward.
Or my brain thinks I'm moving forward.
So it's probably compensating for that.
And then when I stop walking in place, then it has to switch back to the uncompensated mode.
And I think that's what causes that.
but so if you had vr goggles as you walked you'd be moving through you could be moving through a forest a virtual forest while a virtual screen floats in front of you so you can watch nevin's conference talk while walking through a virtual yosemite i could do that or i could just like use the bikes and ellipticals instead i don't know
or you just walk outside i'm amazed that you hate humidity so much that you'd rather walk in like people usually go to the gym like in the winter when you know it's freezing outside well and that's i've i knew like you know i got the apple watch in late april when it was really beautiful outside and it's been pretty beautiful since then but i've known like well winter is going to come eventually and i'm gonna like i want to keep this up in the winter and winter here is pretty bad not as bad as you but but pretty bad and uh and so i wanted to have some kind of option
And I looked into, like, you know, should I get a treadmill in my house?
And it seems like there's almost no reason for a regular person to do that.
There's, like, the pros and cons.
If you need someplace to hang laundry.
Yeah.
Well, it ends up they're huge.
I know.
They're giant.
turns out oh my god like when you're when they're in a gym you don't you really realize it but like when you when you like tape out measurements in your house or how big a treadmill actually is oh my god they're they're massive and not just how room how much room it takes up but especially for the ones that like if they're like a stair thing or whatever like how much room you need around them for swinging body parts and getting on and getting off and then if the thing has moved moving itself yeah for the winter activity maybe you have
almost the makings well maybe not for you maybe for adam if you could get hops and the other two dogs that your parents have you could have the makings of a kind of like a dog sled team you just need to be like maybe they could pull adam if you just get four of them instead of three then it would be even that would be adorable
Oh, my God.
That's way better than buying a treadmill.
Now that I put that idea into your head, I want to see some pictures of that.
All right, we'll work it out.
Because if there's one thing that that breed of dog does well, it's pull in the same direction, right?
It's just going to run in five different directions.
Yeah.
Yeah, that'll be interesting.
Anyway, yeah, you can't exercise outside in the winter.
People do it.
Speaking of Rogamiba, Paul Kofasas is out there with his bare feet and 20 degree below weather.
Paul Kofasas is not a fair comparison.
He's like a superhuman.
It is not fair to hold me up to his standard at all.
Not even close.
I just I cannot believe like when you saw the watch announcement was the first thing that popped in your head.
Darn it.
I'm going to join a gym.
Not even close.
Right.
How did we get from A to B here?
Doesn't have the antibodies.
He was infected.
you're right because even like when when when we first started seeing good pictures of it i was concerned seeing the sensor bubble on the bottom and i i was concerned that would be uncomfortable pressing into my skin so i even have said in the past like before i before i got it i was like you know if they just made a model that lacked all the fitness features and lacked that big bubble on the bottom i'd buy that instead so it'd be more comfortable and yeah now now that i have it no i would never do that that that's stupid
I'm depressed at how strong my antibodies are and how little I care about the circles.
I really wished I was more like Marco.
I would be like, maybe Marco's got into it.
Maybe, you know, I haven't done anything like this in a while.
Maybe I'll still get back into it.
God, I just can't.
We could start competing with each other.
Do you have those antibodies or whatever?
Maybe that would help.
Like, Apple doesn't really have that integration.
You have to use, like, some third-party app that keeps track of it.
That's it.
Underscore should add that to Pedometer++ if it's not already there.
Maybe that actually would help, but I don't know.
Well, one of the problems also is that even in WatchKit 2, a lot of the data for the circles, like, I don't think apps have access to all that.
Like, you have access to the step count for the orange circle, but I don't think you have access to the green or blue.
Yeah, the step count is enough, though.
You see, like, Amy Jane and Montero, like, competing for their, just with their Fitbit step counts.
I think that all is the Fitbit is just step count, you know, how many steps.
Yeah, I think so.
That does motivate a lot of people.
Maybe that would help.
I'm not doing terrible with the circles.
When it tells me to get up, I do feel a little bit of guilt.
Like, oh, I should probably get up and go for a walk now or whatever.
But the bottom line is I'm not filling them.
And whatever value of all my circles are at, it's low.
I was filling them all at WWDC.
I know what it takes to fill them, but my daily schedule just does not do enough to fill them, at least when my watch is on.
Because I tend to find when I come home from work, I want to take my watch off just because
I just want to get stuff off my body.
Um, and then trying to get totally naked.
Just, you know, like my house doesn't have air conditioning, so I'm certainly, uh, changing into shorts.
Uh, and, uh, yeah, getting into a home mode and that involves taking the watch off.
And so that means anything I do after that, like walking around with the kids or whatever, is going to not count.
But I don't care.
I don't care.
Whatever.
You care just enough to be annoying to yourself, but not enough to actually do it.
Yeah, to feel like a little twinge of guilt when I don't feel them, but not enough to actually feel them.
Yeah, you're just going to be perpetually, mildly annoyed by this.
It doesn't bother me that much.
I tell you what, I am a blue ring stud, but the green and red, not so much.
The green is the hardest one.
Basically, I think I filled the other ones, but the exercise one, because I don't quite know.
I have never actually initiated a workout workout, so all of my green filling is, I guess, incidental from heart rate stuff, and I don't even know how that works, like whatever, but I'm just never filling it, except for a WWDC.
To completely change pace, how's potty training going?
It's going, actually.
Oh, good.
Yeah, it's not complete, but it's going.
Is he afraid of going to daycare?
Are they reinforcing it there?
Yeah, so he goes to preschool, and he's going now to summer camp, which is just school in the summertime.
We were able to do this transition with their support, and they do it all the time because they have school for two- and three-year-olds, so they have...
seen lots of potty training uh in their time and they're experts at it so they support it and they you know they you know they do it while he's there so it's good we're all good are they doing any positive feedback stuff like sticker charts or anything like that like either at home or at school to try to like reward for uh for uh compliance basically sticker i had not thought of a sticker chart that's a good one
That's one of the things that our kids, they recommend it at home, but like it doesn't work on some kids or whatever, but like you just have a piece of paper and it's like every time you do it, you get a sticker on the chart and some kids are motivated by it and some kids aren't.
I just didn't know if that was one of the things that you were doing.
No, we've just been doing like food motivation, basically like candy and cookies and stuff.
We very quickly learned that you can't reward going to the bathroom.
You have to reward like time spans in which you have had no accidents.
Because if you reward going to the bathroom, then he just wants to go every five minutes.
Yeah, so that's no good.
So to go back a step, you've basically outsourced potty training to the summer camp is what I'm hearing.
well he's there for like two and a half hours a day i mean it's not like camp is a very you know it's technically called camp that's a very generous word for for what it really is it's just preschool in the summertime and it's mostly outside and that's that's basically it and preschool as you will learn soon casey is really short every day like it's it goes that two and a half hours goes by very quickly
Oh, I don't doubt it.
Yeah, it's been a wild couple of weeks at the List household because Declan has gone from sort of kind of able to crawl-ish to pretty adept at crawling.
And he used to, up until this point, barrel roll pretty effectively.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Do a barrel roll.
That's a reference, John.
Anyway, so he would barrel roll pretty effectively.
And then he'd figured out how to crawl.
And now our world is upside down because he doesn't just stay still anymore.
And that's kind of petrifying.
And additionally, he's also starting to pull up onto his feet.
which is adorable to watch and wonderful, except that he's also doing that in the crib, which is not as good because then he gets himself all woken up and doesn't want to sleep as long and we have to lower the crib again and blah, blah, blah.
So a wild couple of weeks at the List household.
My favorite picture of Declan recently was showing him next to your computer with the note that he'd already pulled off a keycap.
Yeah, it's genuinely it had been it had been like 15 seconds and he crawled over there, ripped off a key.
It's the great dawning realization that like the idea like we have a kid, he won't destroy our crap.
Like the second that kid can move, he's like, I'm going to destroy your crap.
yep that's pretty much how we can seek out the most expensive item and say i can get my little baby fingernails underneath this keycap look it comes off this is awesome it's like i looked away for two seconds yeah that's pretty much were you there that's exactly how it went i know i know how kids work i just you to your credit you're not one of the people who i who looked down on the other people and said well my child won't destroy my stuff i'll just make sure they don't touch my things it's like
There's a reason baby proofing is a word.
Well, so I'm not like that about most things.
However, I have been very smug about my car never will my car will not get ruined.
I will not allow my car to get ruined.
If that means no food in the car, screw it.
No food in the car.
Is there a car seat installed in your car now?
Yes.
Oh, there's been for a while.
So isn't it destroying your seats as we speak?
No, I have a cover.
A cover, yeah.
Yeah, I've had similar good luck.
I mean, you know, we also, like, just by policy, there's no food in the car.
And that's been fine.
You know, we also have a policy that you don't kick my seat.
And so far, I mean, he sometimes forgets and kicks my seat anyway, and we have to yell at him.
But so far, overall, it's pretty good.
You know what I did with the seat kicking?
It really depends on your kid.
I think you could pull off the seat kicking thing.
My kids, not really.
But the thing I did with them, it lasted a pretty long time.
I knew it wouldn't last forever.
Is that I told them that the seats have airbags in them, which is true.
And that airbags contain explosives, which is true.
And that if you kick the seats, you could cause them to explode, which is not true, but they don't know that.
Nice.
That's amazing.
Actually, I don't think I ever did.
I don't think I ever actually told them that they caused, I would say, the seats have airbags and the airbags have explosives.
I think that's all I would say.
And I would say it in an alarmed voice and they would stop kicking it.
It was awesome.
That worked for so long until they were like, you know what?
These things are never exploding.
Kick, kick, kick.
That's so amazing.
Good.
grief adam's a good boy you won't need to do that with declin i don't know he looks like a scamp i can't tell but i think he's in trouble casey i i can't wait to see casey just go through all this because like it's not like i'm any expert on it but just just by being like two years ahead of him basically like that's like that's amazing to me like like seeing like seeing now casey like now you're going through like the beginning of mobility which is as you said terrifying
For the parents.
Oh, yeah.
And, yeah.
What's great about parenting is that every time you think you have the current stage down pat, everything then changes with the next stage.
It's like, so it's like, yeah, you know, we finally got him to...
you know eat and sleep oh my god now he's moving and oh my god now he can hurt himself on every possible thing yeah and then you know once you get that down then he's gonna start learning how to open doors and go outside and then he'll get some attitude
Yeah.
Then you get some attitude.
Then, you know, then eventually, you know, you have everything down and then, Oh, delete the diapers.
Yeah.
It's just, Oh my God.
Like every, everything is like, you know, it's hard and then you figure it out and then everything changes.
yeah that i've asked a lot of parents um most of whom are you know roughly my age you know what what is their secret what if you learn what should i know and the single most consistent answer i've gotten almost every time is don't get used to anything because the moment you do it all changes that's good yeah uh john has your front door do you have a front door yet
they are ordering a new one so you'll have a front door in like three more months maybe two to three weeks so whatever hopefully they'll it'll happen between the vacation i'm leaving on now and the vacation i'm leaving on after there's some time in between there but anyway people have been painting how's that going
that well i don't know what i don't i have yet to find someone who does what i think is a good job of painting anything because it's all about surface prep like you know they just they just they just want to get to the point where they can start slapping on the paint it's like i want the surface to be smoothed out before you start slapping on the paint i want you to think about how it's going to look when it's finished painting if it's not going to look good like well whatever
What we learned when we've done both renovations.
Tiff can paint.
She and her parents can paint the whole room in no time at all.
It turns out professional painters are really no better than good home-taught painters.
You don't have to do it.
That's the big thing.
You're not paying them to do a better job than you could do.
You're paying them so that you don't have to do it.
That's it.
I continue to believe there must be contractors out there like the ones I see on TV that do do a good job.
And especially for things like surface prep, sometimes you can't do what they do because you don't have the tools.
It depends on the surface.
Like if you're painting a room, like big walls are big and flat, fine.
But if you're painting like the trim around a window where you just pulled off storm windows from the 50s, they're a wreck.
You have to spend a lot of time on surface prep, pulling off old caked on paint.
filling in voids sanding everything down so it's smooth and i don't know that i could do a better job of that than a professional because mostly because i don't even have all the tools all the little like just a plain old random orbit sander but the little tiny sanders to get into the corners and all the experience filling things and and like just that just takes a long time but like they don't the reality i mean you could buy the tools at home depot for like 30 bucks if you needed to
if given the limited time yes i could but i would take the amount of time they took to do all my trim i wouldn't get one window done a better job than they do on that one window but i wouldn't get one window done because i'd be there like and instead they're just like you know what good enough you're not gonna be able to see it from the street paint paint paint well exactly that's the thing like you're not paying for them to be do for them to do a better job than you could do you're paying for them to do it so that you don't have to do it and they can do it faster
Anyway, almost done.
Almost done.
Front door.
I think the front door is going to be the worst part, though, because there's a bunch of carpentry stuff around there, and it's just like it's been hand-waved over, and we just say, like, see how our front door looks now?
We want it to look like that, but with a new door.
And they're like, oh, yeah, sure, no problem.
I'm like, I keep asking them, so what part are you going to remove, and what are you going to put back?
Well, it's going to look like this.
Well, not exactly.
Like, what do you mean by now?
Oh, it's going to be bad.
But anyway.
Yeah.
If there was ever a time that any human being should periscope anything, it's the conversations that you have with your contractors because they've got to be just amazing.
They're very one sided and involve a lot of nodding and smiling from the other end of the conversation.
And then me going, yeah, just they hate you so much, don't they?
I don't know.
I don't know if they hate me.
Do you tip them?
No.
Wait, you're supposed to tip contractors?
That's what I thought.
The amount I'm paying these people, no.
We didn't tip any of our contractors ever.
We'd occasionally buy bagels and stuff for the guys that were working, but we wouldn't.
I mean, yeah, you're paying a lot for this.
I don't think it's a tipping thing.
Yeah, seriously.
This is a tremendous amount of money.
They can take their tip out of the tremendous amount of money I'm paying for this project.
Yeah, you don't tip like when you buy a car.
I don't think that's really an apples to apples comparison, but it's about the same amount of money.
I fully confess that I have no idea when it's appropriate to tip, but I also hate tipping as a concept.
And so I'm probably a bad person.
The places when I'm supposed to tip, I do, but I literally have no idea when I'm supposed to tip other than eating at restaurants.
That's it.
And staying at hotels.
I know you're supposed to do that there, but only because I Googled it.
Wait, what?
I never tip in a hotel, ever.
The housekeeping tip.
How much is that?
When I Googled for it, they were like a couple bucks a day, and that's what I've been sticking to.
What?
Yeah, and then the problem is you need small bills.
You know the little envelopes on the desk?
That's for housekeeping tips.
In most hotel rooms, there's a small envelope that says some kind of passive-aggressive thing on it, and that is for you to put the housekeeping tip in.
Because if you just leave cash around, then they might assume it's your cash,
You can leave it, you want to leave it, and even if you don't use the envelope, you just want to leave it with a note for housekeeping or thank you or something in a way that they know that you didn't accidentally leave it.
Because housekeeping people don't want to take random cash laying around, because then you're going to be like, hey, housekeeping stole from me.
But when you're checking out, take the wad of cash, a couple bucks a day or whatever, put it somewhere with a note that makes it clear that this is for housekeeping, and then you go.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever done that in my entire life.
Yeah, it's a big pain because you either have to have, like, you know, let's say you're doing a few bucks a day or five bucks a day.
Then you either need to have a whole bunch of fives when you get there or you have to, like, tip, like, a 20 at the end.
But then, like, that could be a different person than who worked the last few days.
Yeah, I just do it all at the end.
I don't do it every day because that's just too much of a hassle.
Like, in my Googling, what I discovered, it's, like...
that if you do it all in one day it evens out in the end for the people who work there like you're right it might not be the same person or whatever but it's not as if one person has a line on when everybody's checking out and gets all the money like it evens out across the whole uh staff that's good because it's usually i'll just like put a 20 in there on the last day and then they call it call it a day but
This is lunacy to me.
I've never heard this before.
See, tipping is crazy.
I hate it with a passion.
I think they should just raise the prices for everything and pay people living wages and so on and so forth.
Do you tip barbers?
Yes.
I do.
Yeah, I do too.
So it was actually a dilemma.
So my barber, usually I only have 20s because that's what ATMs give out.
And whenever I have small bills, when I empty my pockets at night, they collect somewhere on my desk and I forget to put them back in the next morning.
You should really only have 50s in your wallet.
I feel like Marco with your M5 and your lifestyle.
You should be the type of person who only has 50s, like a grandpa.
So with the barber, the barber I've been going to for years, these four Italian guys, they're amazing.
They used to charge $16 for a haircut.
So I'd give them $20.
They'd keep the extra four.
Perfect.
Then they raised the price to $17.
Now, I don't want to just give them $20 again because now it's like I'm just... You give them $21, right?
Right.
So now I have to remember to bring a single now every time.
They'll give you change.
If you give them two $20s, they'll give you change.
That's such a hassle.
$3 on $17, that's a sufficient tip.
But it's like they took a pay cut.
Well, it's not your fault.
It is kind of his fault because he doesn't want to have a single with them.
Like, just give them two 20s.
They'll give you change.
It's fine.
No, now I just bring a single whenever I remember to because it's so much... Because I don't want to give them a less tip than before.
Why don't you give them a $20 bill and one silver dollar like a grandpa?
That would be a grandpa.
Do those still exist?
Can you still get those?
Someone's got them.
They're still in circulation somewhere.
Give them a $2 bill.
all right let's do titles floppy carrot and lack of stick is amazing wasn't there a better one i think remember seeing a better one somewhere blue ring stud that was my other favorite oh that's that is really good actually that's probably better than floppy carrot even though that is not really related to anything i think it's a good title
I just want people to listen to the episode waiting for, like, what the hell is Blue Ring Stud?
And it's all the way at the end, and it has, like, nothing to do with, like, Reddit or the Mac App Star or anything.
It's just me saying that Casey knows how to stand up.
Hey, guys.
I know how to stand.
Now your son knows how to stand.
Where did he learn that from?
He got those standing jeans from me.
I know how to stand.
Yeah.
Declan stands up and says, you go, just like Dad.
Just like your dad.
Oh, goodness.