As Many People in the Sandbox as Possible
Casey:
The following is the complete list of sane states in these United States of America that require only a rear license plate.
Casey:
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Casey:
You'll notice that very nearby states, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, all no front license plate.
Casey:
Friggin' Virginia.
Marco:
Now, out of curiosity, can you think of any other criterion for which those would be listed as the sane states?
Casey:
Not off the top of my head.
Casey:
So we should do some follow-up.
Casey:
Yes, follow-up.
Casey:
God, I can't believe I just did that.
Casey:
I swore I'd never do that on a podcast ever.
Casey:
You just baited me into it.
Casey:
I hate everything.
Casey:
All right, I quit.
Casey:
Anyway, so we had some feedback about my iPad Tale of Woe.
Casey:
We had a lot of private feedback from Mike Hurley, the once iPad hater, now king iPad evangelizer.
Marco:
I would never classify him as a hater.
Marco:
He was more of an iPad indifferentier, if that's a word that I just made up.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
He was fairly anti-iPad for a while there.
Casey:
But anyways, he gave me some feedback that basically said I didn't know what I was doing and that's the problem, which I believe I admitted a lot of people basically said the same thing.
Casey:
And the point I was trying to make was, hey, all of this stuff comes right out of the box.
Casey:
And it does not on the iPad, except a lot of people wrote in to say that you can, in fact, do a signature on a PDF on an iOS device.
Casey:
And apparently there's a toolbox, which to me looked like a briefcase icon.
Casey:
And within there is the annotations and markup and whatnot.
Casey:
And within there, you can do a signature.
Casey:
I have not had the chance to try this myself, but I had plenty of people tell me about this.
Casey:
So I'm taking it as fact that that is the case.
Casey:
So that is just a little bit of follow up.
Casey:
You can indeed do the signature on an iOS device.
Marco:
Did you mistake the briefcase icon for the Windows 95 My Briefcase?
Casey:
You say that jokingly, but I was a heavy briefcase user way back in the day because that was about the best way in the Windows world to do kind of like a poor man's R sync between your laptop and your desktop, which is what I was doing toward the end of college.
Marco:
That was kind of like the floppy disk stage of evolution towards a Dropbox, right?
John:
That was also kind of the hangover of the desktop metaphor.
John:
The drunken orgy that was the desktop metaphor.
John:
Like, oh, folders.
John:
They're just like folders that go in file cabinets.
John:
And there's a little trash can and so on and so forth.
John:
And people would latch on to that idea.
John:
That's why the Macintosh is easier to use.
John:
Because it has all these analogies to the real world.
John:
And so people are like, what else is in an office?
John:
It's like carpeting.
John:
And it's like, there's windows.
John:
But we already got those.
John:
My carpeting.
John:
exactly you know and and the recycle recycle bin because it's not like trash because we're more trendy than that and i guess there's like a blotter maybe i mean magic cap went on whole hog they have like living rooms and dens and stuff but eventually it's like briefcase briefcase i know briefcase and so you've got briefcase and windows and
John:
but what about bob bob is after you go nuts and and this is the vision the visions you see in your head bob was like the the jumping over the shark and nuking the fridge of that metaphor it was magic cap you should look at what magic cap looked like it was very similar in terms of like making rooms of a house it became like maniac mansion it was like a you know sierra adventure where you're going from room to room and you have these little anyway briefcase was one of the and apple itself did the same type of thing where
John:
They got distracted for a bit and thought that what made computers easy to use was specifically the connections with real world things and not all the other stuff that goes along with it.
Marco:
Now we have everything flat.
Marco:
Never would have happened if Scott Forstall was still alive.
Casey:
Ain't that the truth.
Marco:
We still don't have a good alternative save icon.
Marco:
Actually, can I tell you guys a big secret?
Marco:
I've been holding this in all these years.
Marco:
My computer at the time was not good enough to run it.
Marco:
Basically, in my PC growing up era, I spent a lot more time than everybody else did on Windows 3.1.
Marco:
I did not go to 95.
Marco:
I was using 3.1 until 1998, and I went straight to 98.
Marco:
There was a brief time where I went to a friend's house and I saw Microsoft Bob on their Pentium computer because it wouldn't run on mine.
Marco:
And I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Casey:
That is a bold, bold confession.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't really remember it.
Casey:
I mean, I was around, I was all over Windows during this time, but I don't really remember Bob very well at all.
Casey:
I don't know if I ever saw it or maybe I just blocked it from my memory, but I don't remember it.
Marco:
I mean, it was just like a shell that you would launch from Windows.
Marco:
It didn't replace the shell.
Marco:
It was just like a giant app.
Marco:
And you would do things inside of Bob.
Marco:
And it was so incredibly slow.
Marco:
And this was during the super dark era of computing where the hard drives were all super slow and grinding constantly because there was not enough RAM to do anything.
Marco:
And so this was like the dark mid to late 90s in computing where just everything was...
Marco:
Just the entire sound of computing for that entire era was hard drive grinding noises.
John:
You guys both missed the floppy disk grinding era of computers where you could tell what your computer was doing by the particular tones your floppy drive made.
Casey:
Oh, you say that.
Casey:
But I was definitely rocking both the actual floppy floppy.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Five and a...
Casey:
quarter i always get this backwards yeah five and a quarter five and a quarter three and a half so yeah so i had a i had a five and a quarter um floppy drive in an 8088 that my dad had used years prior and was that i'd set up in my room and i remember i thought i was awesome because it had a 10 meg hard drive in it and at the time that was effectively infinite space like you you couldn't fill it if you wanted to um but yeah i've definitely heard that constantly
Marco:
Now all these kids these days with their Windows PCs, they have the drive letters that start with C and they have no idea why they don't have an A and B drive.
John:
What they should really be is weeping over the fact that they still have drive letters.
John:
There's that.
Marco:
Which is hilarious.
Marco:
You got to grade on a curve with Windows.
Casey:
That's also true.
Casey:
I believe this same 10-meg hard drive 8088 had the A drive, I believe, was the 5 and a...
Casey:
quarter almost got that wrong five and a quarter inch drive and i believe the b drive was a three and a half inch low density floppy so that was what like 750k or something like that something like that yeah and that was external i should add which was really cool probably scuzzy um but anyway uh the only other thing i wanted to bring this back around uh to say about the ipad is a lot of people wrote to say hey you idiot the ipad has a camera and yes that's weird but why didn't you just use the camera to take a picture of the documents and use any one of these 350 different apps that
Casey:
that people recommended in order to scan, and I'm doing mega air quotes here, scan the PDF.
Casey:
And that is a perfectly valid answer.
Casey:
And I have one of those apps on my phone and on my iPad, and it does work surprisingly well.
Casey:
But why on earth would I do that when I had a full-on, probably multi-thousand-dollar scanning machine, you know, one of those multifunction printers, in the office right there, ready and waiting?
Casey:
The fidelity of that scan was going to be far superior to any
Casey:
software-flattened picture of a piece of paper.
Casey:
Plus, there was quite a bit that I was scanning, and I didn't want to have to spend all that time doing all that.
Casey:
Instead, I spent all that time trying to get it all into Dropbox, but that's neither here nor there.
Marco:
That's better.
Casey:
Yeah, that's totally better.
Casey:
So anyway, I just wanted to follow up on that.
Casey:
The other thing I wanted to note is we were talking last week about Bluetooth headphones and...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Especially when watching video, because I never see this.
Casey:
And as we discussed last episode, I use these like fairly, well, really cheap and fairly crappy Bluetooth headphones that I love.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong, but they're unremarkable in every measurable way.
Casey:
And I never get this video latency that everyone else seems to get.
Casey:
Well, today, John had tweeted a link to a video with one of the dudes from The Wire.
Casey:
Bunk?
Marco:
Wendell Pierce.
Casey:
So he tweeted a link, John had tweeted a link, where it was Wendell Pierce, I believe you're right, Marco, talking about, it was actually very interesting, talking about being stopped in real life by a police officer.
Casey:
And I was on my work computer, and I had clicked the link, and on my work computer, because we're all in on Google Apps, Chrome is my default browser.
Casey:
And this is the first time that's ever been the case.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I started watching this video on Chrome and I was like, oh my goodness, this latency is ridiculous.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
Wait a second.
Casey:
That's never, ever happened to me before, ever.
Casey:
So I copied the link, dropped it in Safari.
Casey:
Perfect.
Casey:
No problems whatsoever.
Casey:
This is a YouTube video.
Casey:
I don't know what it is, but Miles M. wrote in when I tweeted about this and said, Safari uses system APIs to play video, but Chrome re-implements everything itself down to the media decoders.
Casey:
I have no idea if that's true or not, but I can tell you that anecdotally, based on one video I watched during the day today, it certainly seemed like that very well may be the case.
Casey:
And I was stunned by...
Casey:
A, the fact that it happened, and B, how bad it was.
Casey:
And so I wonder if all these people that are whining and moaning about this Bluetooth latency are just Chrome users.
Casey:
And because of that, they see this terrible latency.
Casey:
And so they're all thinking, man, I'm crazy.
Casey:
How could I not see this?
Casey:
At the same time, I'm thinking, man, they are crazy.
Casey:
Why are they seeing this?
Casey:
And it turns out it's just another reason why you shouldn't be using Chrome.
Casey:
It turns out everybody's crazy.
Marco:
No, I mean, so you're exactly right that basically there is Bluetooth latency on any Bluetooth device.
Marco:
There is latency.
Marco:
Not as bad as AirPlay.
Marco:
AirPlay is fixed at two seconds regardless, and that seems like forever when you're trying to get something to happen.
Marco:
Bluetooth is way shorter than that.
Marco:
It can be substantially less than a second.
Marco:
there is still noticeable latency.
Marco:
And humans can detect latency in video where the audio isn't synced up properly to watching people's mouths move when they talk.
Marco:
We can detect very, very small amounts of latency and it just looks wrong to us.
Marco:
So it has to be perfect when you're watching people speak.
Marco:
There can't be any weird latency between the audio and the video.
Marco:
Apple knows this.
Marco:
So they're in their system frameworks for iOS and OS X.
Marco:
Most Bluetooth headphones, they have some way, and I don't know the details of how it works, but they have some way of establishing with the headset what the latency is and then compensating for it.
Marco:
The downside of this, first of all, you just found one, which is that it only works in things that use the AV frameworks.
Marco:
The other downside is that not every headphone supports this, and so I've tested probably five or six sets of Bluetooth headphones now, and only, I think, two of them actually properly didn't have any latency, and the rest all had unacceptable latency, even when using the system video player, even on iOS, where you would think that would be most commonly tested.
Marco:
And the other problem is games.
Marco:
Video can account for this.
Marco:
Games almost always can't and don't.
Marco:
And so it works fine if you are using your headphones to watch a video in the built-in system API player in something.
Marco:
That works fine.
Marco:
And that's probably all you've ever done, right?
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I think so.
Casey:
I can't imagine a time other than when I was in Chrome that I wasn't using just the system frameworks.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But it's especially a problem if you're trying to play games with Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
It's basically impossible.
Marco:
You basically can't unless you are just not listening to the game audio and only listening to music or something.
Casey:
Yeah, I just thought it was crazy.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, do you have any thoughts on this?
John:
I just think that – I hope that in the future they will keep improving these wireless audio APIs to eliminate these problems because it's kind of a shame that it requires the deep integration of the system APIs with all this compensation and getting – like Chrome should be able to do it correctly.
John:
In other words, it shouldn't be –
John:
uh such a problem so i i don't know what the what the limitations are that are requiring this but i know bluetooth continues to evolve and i think it needs to continue to evolve because it's obviously not quite good enough yet
Marco:
Well, and to some degree, there's always going to be some latency inherent in a digital signal being transmitted, being accepted over wireless network, being decoded from digital to analog in certain chunks of blocks.
Marco:
And there's always, with audio latency, you're always having this trade-off.
Marco:
If you make the latency really short, that means you have really short buffers on all the sides.
Marco:
which means it becomes extremely sensitive to cutting out with any kind of reception drop or flaky signal or anything.
Marco:
So if you have very, very low latency, it is very fragile.
Marco:
Or if you increase the latency, then you have more tolerance for weirdness in the signal.
Marco:
You can back off a little bit and then burst the data that you missed before the latency has caught up, just like the old anti-skip things in Discman.
Marco:
If you ever had one of those, same thing.
Marco:
There's all these tradeoffs and it just might not be worth it if most people are fine most of the time or if they or, you know, if as often happens in the case with technological progress, if the if the new way of doing things does have shortcomings and downsides that people are just OK with because the upsides make it worth it.
Marco:
Like everyone might just decide, you know what?
Marco:
I'm fine with just not having synced up audio when I'm playing games while wearing headphones.
Marco:
Like people might just decide that because it's worth it to have all the other benefits of wireless headphones.
Marco:
So I wouldn't necessarily consider this problem something that will be solved and will be solved anytime soon.
John:
Yeah, don't have to worry because Apple's hard real time operating system they're working on for the car will solve all these problems because then you won't have any underflow problems on your buffers because you've got time slice guarantees and that'll solve all these problems.
John:
I mean, people always talk about I'm saying this is a joke, by the way, but people do talk a lot about the theoretical, you know, the real time requirements of any sort of software that Apple might be doing in the car.
John:
And I have a hard time believing that any software part of the car system, like, in other words, I imagine that Apple's going to do the part of the car that you would, you know, the software that you see on the screens in the car that you interact with, but I always imagine that the internal things that deal with, like,
John:
engine control computers will have absolutely no lineage or connection to any existing apple software code base like that it'll just be an embedded system that it won't be related to ios that none of that stuff will come to ios and other stuff from ios will go to it there'll be an ios like thing for a front end assuming they ever make a car you know the thing that runs all the dashboard and all that other stuff but the part that runs the engine computer and any other stuff i can't imagine that having any
Marco:
connection with the existing basically with darwin with the existing uh code base right well and and we've we've heard very early and very you know unreliable but still rumblings that indicate that that's exactly what they're doing that that they are working on a new kernel and a new os that might possibly use swift for everything because it's you know that's kind of one of the reasons why swift is so safe and everything like well the
John:
But that could still be for the dashboard control.
John:
Like I'm saying for, you know, for the other, for the things that have to be real time.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Because they don't, you know, the Darwin kernel is not a real time kernel where you can guarantee.
John:
I mean, they have the stuff for trying to guarantee time slices for audio and video or whatever.
John:
But it's not like hard real time, like things you put on like spacecraft that go to Mars where.
John:
uh this absolutely positively has to happen it's just it's very tightly constrained you know embedded operating system environment what is that the one really popular one wind river systems or something i don't know the one that's on all the spacecrafts and satellites and other stuff like that that is a different problem domain and i see no reason that apple would need to make a single os that spans it because you never see the real-time operating system it just runs the machinery under the covers and then apple is free to make a swift from top to bottom cool
John:
ui thing for all of the you know climate control dashboard applications audio system all the other stuff which could still also be entirely new code base but i still feel like it that doesn't even need to be real time because it just controls these sort of inessential functions if it's self-driving then i don't really know what the hell is going on
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is Backblaze.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP for the best online backup I've ever seen.
Marco:
I've been a Backblaze customer for, I don't know, three or four years now.
Marco:
It's been a while, since before they sponsored our shows.
Marco:
Because I did the research.
Marco:
I tried a few online backup services out there.
Marco:
and backblaze was my favorite by far simple as that um so they have over 150 petabytes of data backed up this isn't all for me although a lot of it is but not not all 150 petabytes are mine um they had you know anybody can do this um they have over 10 billion files that have been restored to their customers so like they've backed up way more than 10 billion files they've restored 10 billion files for their customers
Marco:
All this data that they keep up in their cloud is not in your office, not in your home, so that any kind of environmental problem that affects all the computers in your office or all the computers in your home, things like electrical problems, fires, floods, thefts,
Marco:
If you are a Backblaze customer, you know that your data is still there because Backblaze still has your data and you can get it back.
Marco:
It's a level of peace of mind.
Marco:
Backblaze saves your butt in that case.
Marco:
It really does.
Marco:
It is great.
Marco:
It is founded by ex-Apple engineers.
Marco:
They respect the Mac.
Marco:
Plus, they work on Windows, too, as far as I know.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I've never tried.
Marco:
But I'm sure, yeah, it runs native on your Mac and PC.
Marco:
So they have a Windows app, too, if you run that way.
Marco:
You can put it on your C drive.
Marco:
But not your A or B drive because you don't have those anymore.
Marco:
a backblaze is really easy no add-ons no gimmicks no additional charges five bucks per month for unlimited space unthrottled speeds everything you need no add-ons no gimmicks five bucks a month per computer at backblaze backblaze.com slash atp you need online backup and if you're going to get online backup this is the one i recommend thanks a lot to backblaze for sponsoring our show
Casey:
So Backblaze has been in the news lately, and not just because they sponsor this awesome program, but because they had a run-in with Adobe.
John:
Yes.
John:
We all had a run-in with Adobe.
John:
Sometimes that happens.
Casey:
Whoops.
Casey:
So I do not have Creative Cloud, so does one of you want to fill me and fill everyone in on what happened?
John:
this didn't happen to me either thankfully but i do have well here's the thing i have a photoshop cs6 which is the the last pre-creative crowd cloud version but for reasons oh i know why i'm saying why does this on all my systems anyway even though i have cs6 i still have the creative cloud icon in the menu bar because i think i downloaded like a trial of illustrator i might have paid for illustrator for a month uh like illustrator cc like the first version anyway once adobe gets on your system it has this creative cloud menu thing which like
John:
tries to update your applications for you and do other crap like that it's the worst yeah and it launches on login and you try to get rid of it and it comes back and you just want to quit it like steam yeah but steam does it through the system through the system login items and when you turn off it stays off creative cloud just keeps coming back like an undead zombie anyway adobe has a history of having let's say challenges related to software installation and management of installations on the mac
John:
I have at various times searched for solutions to seemingly intractable Adobe application installation problems and found instructions on Adobe's own website.
John:
Not in the forums, but literal official Adobe instructions that contain terrifying sets of steps that you have to follow to get yourself out of a situation in which your legitimately purchased Adobe application won't update or something, and they have you running commands from the shell prompt, you know, sudo rm, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And it's like, seriously?
John:
This is...
John:
They have serious challenges.
John:
And this is another one of their challenges.
John:
Apparently, they released some software.
John:
And this is all kind of experimentally determined by Backblaze.
John:
And you'll understand why Backblaze is involved at all in this in a moment.
John:
Some piece of software that would effectively list the folders, the directories at the top level of your volume.
John:
And sort them, I'm assuming, asciabetically, as in, like, capital letters first or whatever.
John:
But at any rate, periods and spaces and stuff first.
John:
Pick the first one and delete its contents.
John:
And it was hoping that first one would be, like, .adobe something.
John:
um but depending on whether you had a previous installation it could be something other than dot adobe or space adobe whatever the hell it was it could in fact be something called dot bz vol which is a backblaze hidden directory where it stores a bunch of crap that has to do with the operation of backblaze so people were messing with this
John:
adobe creative cloud update which i'm sure they were all prompted to install by the little menu item that always runs the people's systems and they would install it and that installer would delete the contents of backblaze's little directory where it stores information about your backups and that's pretty anti-social behavior when an application not made by you goes and deletes all your crap out from under it now
John:
To Backblaze's credit, they figured out this problem pretty quickly.
John:
They posted a thing on their site that explains how to solve the situation.
John:
They reported it to Adobe, and then to Adobe's credit, Adobe fixed it and pulled the update and did all that other stuff.
John:
And we'll link to a blog post in the show notes from Backblaze explaining the situation.
John:
um and again we don't have the these particular details backblaze just has like experimentally we experimentally determined this that and the other thing what people were doing in the meantime before these updates was they would make a bunch a series of sacrificial folders at the top level of their directory like called dot aaa to make the the adobe thing nuke that one and not the bzvol one
John:
um but as backblaze points out um even if you had this thing happen to you at no time were your actual backblaze uh backups in jeopardy because the backups are all server-side at backblaze this was merely setting back the client-side installation of your backup thing by deleting all the information needs to keep track of stuff so backblaze would automatically recreate it and i'm assuming it would have to grind your disk for a while to figure out what the hell is what and recreate that directory
John:
But it's good to know that despite another application coming and recursively deleting the contents of one of its directories, your actual backups, meaning like the data that is stored in Backblaze's server, were always safe during this time.
Marco:
We give Apple a hard time for software quality issues that we think they have.
Marco:
But we had a couple of people write in to say, why don't you complain about Adobe just as much?
Marco:
And the truth is that Adobe software is typically far worse than Apple software, especially the non-core thing.
Marco:
So you think about Photoshop, Illustrator.
Marco:
These are the core Adobe apps.
Marco:
Their core apps, as much as they can be weird and flaky and as much as people can love and hate them so much at the same time,
Marco:
They don't usually have stability issues or data loss issues.
Marco:
They have many other issues, but those are not usually among them.
Marco:
So it's not like the main core apps tend to work decently well most of the time.
Marco:
Although I can say the same thing about Apple.
Marco:
But the problem that Adobe has is all the other supporting crap around them.
Marco:
Also anything related to Acrobat.
Marco:
But, you know, all the supporting crap around them, like the installers, the cloud services that they use, like the Behance plugins and all this crazy stuff, those things tend to work very poorly and be very inconsistent.
Marco:
And the reason why we don't usually criticize Adobe on this show is simply because Adobe has been making mediocre software for so long that we have no expectations of quality from Adobe.
Marco:
um as sad as that is and and i say this as a long time adobe customer and user of multiple products by them but the fact is that adobe just has a really really bad reputation for this stuff and has for years so yeah we just don't expect much from them and and when things like this happen it's it's barely even worth mentioning because like it's just it happened like crap with adobe happens all the time usually not this bad but like it's just you know it's just one more day of using adobe stuff where the software's doing weird stuff and not not quite
John:
installing right or creative cloud is doing weird things in the menu bar like that's just typical adobe behavior and as big as adobe is obviously like most people don't use adobe software like especially now that you know os 10 pdf rendering built in everything people have no longer have a reason to download acrobat just to look at pdfs um
John:
If you're not a designer or not using one of, you know, you don't use Adobe products that much, whereas everybody's using, you know, the operating system and a lot of the built-in apps that ship with Apple things.
John:
So it's just a much bigger surface area for people to encounter problems with Apple stuff.
John:
The reason I wanted to talk about this, aside from the Backblaze angle, and it's just coincidence that we happen to have Backblaze sponsoring this episode.
John:
is uh the sandboxing angle because a lot of the discussion i saw about this issue was see this is why apple wants mac applications to be sandboxed um and quick sandboxing refresher sandboxing is basically a way to limit the ability of applications to do things so a typical general purpose pc or mac
John:
When you're running an application, that application can do anything that you could do as a user, as in you could delete all the files in your home directory and so can any program that you run.
John:
You could, you know, rename things, remove things like just, you know.
John:
transmit data over the network, pull data down from somewhere, anything that basically you could do as a user or in a program that you wrote, any program that you run can do.
John:
And what sandboxing does is says that each individual application has to declare what kinds of things it wants to do.
John:
So an application might say, I need to access the network.
John:
Or maybe I need to access the network and just go to certain sites.
John:
I need to access the camera or the microphone.
John:
I need access to the file system.
John:
I need access to just these two folders in the file system.
John:
And you can have these sort of permissions all the way up to the level of like, hey, I need access to the complete file system.
John:
And historically, Apple has been trying to slowly close that door to say, you know what?
John:
No application should really have access to the entire file system.
John:
And if you do, there should be a good reason.
John:
And that's the whole negotiation with the Mac App Store and sandboxing Mac applications to try to this negotiation backwards between Apple and the applications of what they call entitlements.
John:
What entitlements does your application actually need to do its job versus which ones do you just want to have?
John:
So why is your application that you use for email accessing the camera?
John:
uh and maybe you have a good reason about oh if you don't have an avatar we will take a picture of you uh and then use that as your avatar okay well that's an okay reason why is your email application need access to the entire file system well we don't really know where we're going to edit files so we just want access to the whole file system and no sorry we really want you to pick where you're going to put the files you can put a dialog box up and the user can pick and then you get permission for that directory or that directory tree but you don't have access everywhere
John:
Um, and as we just discussed with Adobe stuff, as you might imagine, Adobe is not in the Mac app store.
John:
Adobe sells its own software, has its own subscription service to create a cloud thing where you can sort of rent your software, uh, and they'll give you updates for a certain amount of time.
John:
And they're not in the Mac app store, not just because they don't want to share 30% of their money with Apple, but also because none of their applications would function if sandboxed.
John:
Um,
John:
And so that's why sandboxing is related to this, because if their application was sandboxed, surely their updater wouldn't have the entitlement that allows it gives it access to the entire file system.
John:
The updater would instead like maybe prompt you to find your application or something, and then the user would give a permission to update.
John:
All right.
John:
You know, if it was in the Mac App Store, updates would work entirely differently anyway, because it would just be able to update the individual apps and their bundles.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But the real issue is, all right, so sandboxing would have saved this, but it's not sandboxed.
John:
So what is sandboxing actually buying us?
John:
Because if you can have non-sandboxed, non-Mac App Store applications, doesn't that defeat the purpose of sandboxing?
John:
In other words, if you can't get everybody to be sandboxed, it doesn't matter how great sandboxing is, because it just takes one unsandboxed application to ruin your day.
John:
So what do you guys think about the sandboxing yay or nay angle on this whole disaster?
Casey:
I think it's a reasonable angle, but part of the reason that the Mac is so great and part of the reason I've been talking the last couple of episodes about things that bother me about iOS is that you can take things into your own hands in a way that you can't with iOS.
Casey:
And that's very freeing.
Casey:
And so I would be very upset if all software had to go through the Mac App Store or somehow in another way, all software was sandboxed.
Casey:
I don't see that as feasible.
Casey:
I do think, though, that software developers should be better systems of the ecosystem and allow their software to be sandboxed wherever possible.
Casey:
Now, I'm not clear.
Casey:
Can you sandbox without being in the app store?
Casey:
So, like, could Creative Cloud still be a third party, or not a third party, a third
John:
and outside of the app store thing and also be sandboxed yep definitely you can do that okay and some people do do that that was one of the discussions like uh why would anyone voluntarily subject their application to the sandbox if you're not in the mac app store say you're selling an application directly why would you go through the trouble of sandboxing and part of the reason is to protect yourself from your own bug say you have some sort of silly bug
John:
or not so silly bug i see this this was an itunes bug way back in the day this is a very common bug for for the mindset of the people that tend to write things like installers and uninstallers this mindset is the assumption that no mac user no really old school mac user would ever make but that basically everyone else in the entire computing universe except old school mac user makes and that assumption is for example file names do not contain spaces
John:
Because who would put a space in their file name?
John:
That's madness.
John:
You can't have spaces in file names.
John:
The iTunes bug was if you had a space in your file name, there was like a shell script that was just blindly taking a string, building a path out of that string, and then running a command on it without quoting the string.
John:
Because, hey, what if there's a quote in the string?
John:
Who would put a quote in their file names?
John:
Mac users would.
John:
That's who, right?
John:
Okay, well, I'll use single quotes.
John:
Who would put a single quote in their file names?
John:
Mac users.
John:
That's who.
John:
You know, Mac users were trained for a decade and a half
John:
that the file name is the user's domain and you can type whatever the hell you want there well except what is it a colon or a comma which one was the one that you can't use you can get a colon into you can get something that that appears as a colon oh yeah yeah or you know a colon a slash there there are limitations so basically if i can type it like you're prevented from typing those things essentially or you're prevented from really getting those into the file name but the bottom line is you would never think that because i put a space in my file name this would mean uh like the itunes one i think was if you had a volume called foobar
John:
and you had a volume called foo, and then you had a volume called foo bar, the thing would try to delete foo bar, but after the first space, the RM command would say, oh, you want me to delete volumes foo?
John:
Okay, I'll go with that.
John:
I'll delete that.
John:
Okay, and you also wanted me to delete bar?
John:
Oh, no such file.
John:
And you were sad because it just nuked your entire directory.
John:
Anyway, dealing with paths as strings, and dealing with paths as strings in a sloppy way,
John:
is an epidemic in the computing world um so it's very it's actually very difficult to get that part of the the system right and so you'd sandbox yourself to say what if i make one of those mistakes what if i'm deep in objective c code and i'm you know
John:
building you know anytime you're shelling out or doing something that you think like oh i've built a string and this is some ns string that has a file path and i'm and then instead of feeding it to an objective c framework that would presumably do the right thing instead you say i'm just going to run this external command even if it's like oh i'm just going to run this external command that converts markdown into html and i'll just feed it this path and everything will be fine
John:
In that case, you're probably not going to nuke the world.
John:
It'll probably just break when someone puts a space or an exclamation point or a single quote or a double quote, depending on how silly you're being about going through the shell to do these type of things.
John:
But I can tell you, as someone who writes in a language that's actually very close to shell scripting, even in languages like that, where...
John:
you know isn't that the whole purpose of the language just to make it easy to run shell commands right to run things that you would type of the terminal don't those languages have facilities for doing all this even in those languages people just ignore the facilities that allow you to essentially pass a list so it'll be passed directly to the exec cvpe function or whatever where you bypass the shell entirely you know what the components of the command are you know this is the command you know this is the path you know this is the whatever never go through the shell and let it try to figure out where the boundaries are because you will just it'll you'll be sad and it will end in tears
John:
so if you can sandbox your application and say i'm only going to ever edit my application will only ever modify files in these two directories plus ones that the user picks themselves with the open save dialog box then when you have this bug your application won't function directly but you will not accidentally recursively delete their home directory their volume their entire documents folder or whatever else so yeah
John:
marco would sandbox his own application and i think i would too even though it would probably be a giant pain because i think there are a lot of entitlements that just don't exist anymore because they think nobody in the mac app store should have them therefore people on the outside shouldn't either right i mean that's the main problem with sandboxing is is really not the concept
Marco:
There's two main problems with sandboxing on the Mac.
Marco:
Number one is that it wasn't always there.
Marco:
So we have this entire ecosystem of software that's been built up over decades that it was originally built without the concept of sandboxing.
Marco:
And then now it has to be bolted on.
Marco:
And for a lot of apps, that is either impossible or very difficult.
Marco:
And then secondly, the other problem is that Apple just hasn't really been a very good steward of sandboxing.
Marco:
taking sandboxing and moving it forward and adding entitlements for things that really are necessary in the real world.
Marco:
And as a result, the kind of policy by action, at least, that Apple's been doing so far is, well, if you don't want to fit into what we want for the Mac App Store, we don't want you there at all.
Marco:
We don't even want you to use any of this technology.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I'm sure that's not what Craig Federighi wants to be the case, but that's what's happening so far.
Marco:
So hopefully they remember that the Mac exists just long enough to update sandboxing and make it more useful.
Marco:
Because I, as both a developer and a user, I mean, I'm not a Mac developer, at least not yet, but...
Marco:
But as a user, I would love for more of my apps to be sandboxed.
Marco:
If Apple wants to advance this system and this practice of being sandboxed apps, which I think they should, they need to make more apps able to be sandboxed in a reasonable way.
Marco:
And so I hope there's enough people at Apple who agree with that, that that gets done at some point.
Marco:
But as a developer, not only for protecting all of your data from my accidental bugs and stuff that go into it, suppose I was making a Mac version of Overcast.
Marco:
I'm not.
Marco:
But suppose I was.
Marco:
Please don't get excited.
Casey:
You should.
Marco:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
I know.
Casey:
You should.
Marco:
I had, like, forever ago, I had, like, a branch that I could compile, like, the data layer to Mac, but not any UI or anything.
Marco:
That's the kind of app that doesn't really need deep system access to really anything.
Marco:
I mean, I would need access to play audio and download stuff from the network.
Marco:
Like, that's about it.
Marco:
So I would totally accept sandboxing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Of course I would.
Marco:
It's one of those things where if what you're doing can fit within those restrictions, you should adopt them just because it will help you not only make better software, but ensure more secure software as time goes on, as people try to hack it, or as you make mistakes.
Marco:
So of course I would opt into that.
Marco:
And on iOS, I'm very glad it's there because there's these whole classes of things where if I get a support thing that says, oh, whenever I launch Overcast, Facebook crashes.
Marco:
That's not my problem.
Marco:
I can't do anything about that.
Marco:
And in a way, that's kind of frustrating for me to have to tell people, sorry, I can't really help.
Marco:
But also, I can say, well, sorry, it's out of my control.
Marco:
And it's probably not anything I'm doing.
Marco:
So there are lots of advantages to sandboxing for developers and users, as long as the system, either in the case of iOS, that it's always been there, or in the case of the Mac, hopefully it gets better enough that more apps can adopt it.
John:
so that leads me to question like this whole sandboxing and adobe bug thing of like apple's responsibility as the platform or not responsibility apple's apple's goals as the platform owner uh is to i think it should be to try to get as many people into the sandbox on the mac as possible and they've been trying to do that like they did the important first step was they themselves sandbox a ton of the background demons that run on your mac and
John:
so that like the thing that does like name lookups and stuff can't doesn't have complete access to the file system just to make them less of a vector for exploitation in terms of if malware can do a buffer overflow and like uh the name lookup system it does it can't write an arbitrary file to anywhere in the file system because that thing is still in a sandbox so they sandbox a lot of their own things they sandbox a lot of the os they tried to sandbox some of their applications and of course they eventually restricted the mac app store to it which hurt a lot of applications but at this point
John:
The other area of trying to get more things in the sandbox is saying, are you an important popular application that a lot of people use and you're not using the sandbox?
John:
And that should be the focus of all their efforts now.
John:
Why are you not using the sandbox?
John:
What can we do to help you get in the sandbox?
John:
Yes, even for companies like Adobe that will probably never be in the Mac App Store for financial reasons in terms of profit sharing with Apple, they should still be saying, Adobe, we understand you're never going to give us 30%.
John:
We understand you have your own subscription service and your own weird thing going on there.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But we would still like all of your applications, including your installers and everything, to be in the sandbox.
John:
What do we have to do to get you into the sandbox today?
John:
Like car dealership, you know, they need to be out there trying to get butts in the seats.
John:
I'm just mixing my analogies now on the sandbox.
John:
And if that means making variants of the sandbox available,
John:
that are entirely different than whatever be allowed in the mac app store that would still be a benefit to both apple and users right so that you know trying to be ideologically pure and say if you can't fit within the sandbox as we define it define it like ideally for these isolated applications like they are on ios then tough luck you can't use it at all you know
John:
or if we say you know adobe could be maybe apple's telling adobe you could be in the sandbox now but you're not and nobody's like yeah we see kind of what the upside might be for you apple and for users but it just seems like a lot of work and even there's no real technical limitations we could do it today we don't want to and that's kind of you know apple what apple's job is to try to convince adobe to essentially spend money time and effort to get into the sandbox and so if i was apple i would uh
John:
a i would have had these efforts ongoing and b when this bug hit i would be like trying to nicely say to adobe you know depending on what the current situation is i don't know it could be that adobe can't get in the sandbox right now at all uh but if they can be and they just refuse to because it takes too much effort i would be gently pressing them to say
John:
See, if you had sandboxed your applications, you could have avoided this bug that was embarrassing for you and bad for our users.
John:
What can we do to help?
John:
Can we send engineers out there?
John:
Can we help you?
John:
And not everyone gets this treatment, but Adobe, even though a lot of people don't use it, enough people use it.
John:
And if Apple still thinks creative professionals are an important market for them...
John:
You know, anyway, that's my hope for the future for sandboxing, that it actually becomes more broadly useful because it's unrealistic, like Casey pointed out, to, you know, and counterproductive to try to get every single application to the narrow sandbox as defined in the Mac App Store.
John:
But it is good for everybody involved if the sandbox can expand and get more participants in it.
Casey:
As I become an older and older developer and person, I feel like I've learned more and more, usually the hard way, to protect against myself.
Casey:
And this is the same thing you guys were saying earlier.
Casey:
And so as you get older, you go even further than you think necessary to prevent yourself from being an idiot.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Or at least that's the way I am.
Casey:
And it seems the responsible thing to do, App Store or not, to sandbox your app if at all possible.
Casey:
And yeah, sometimes it's a frigging nightmare, I am quite sure.
Casey:
But it's the responsible thing to do.
Casey:
And it's really unfortunate that Adobe didn't and hasn't done that yet.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so there was a very interesting episode of the talk show this past week.
Casey:
Eddie Q and Craig Federighi were on the talk show, and this is the third incarnation of an Apple executive on the talk show.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Yeah, Federighi's second appearance.
Marco:
The group is already getting multiple appearances of Apple execs on his shows.
Casey:
Is he the new molts?
Casey:
You never know.
John:
Yeah, when he can't get anybody else, he calls CFED and EQ to come down.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, that's easy.
John:
totally um so anyway so they got on the talk show it was a great episode which is unsurprising um why why do it yeah that's my my first question uh is why are because you know as we made a joke that group calls them up and brings them on sometimes that happens like i don't you know i don't i'm not privy to any inside information about who calls who but the question is uh regardless of who asks who to be on when
John:
why do why does apple why do apple executives agree to come on a podcast at this particular time um when craig federighi came on uh an episode that i was actually on uh the the sort of commentary portion afterwards clearly he was there to talk about swift open source project because that's that's what he came on the show to do that's what he talked about that had just happened right when swift went open source we talked about in this show they talked about on the talk show and so that was clear and in this case there's no as far as i'm aware there's
John:
Not really any big Apple announcement.
John:
I mean, I guess there's a 9.3 beta, but that is not particularly fresh news.
John:
And so my assumption going in when I saw that these were the guests was that they were going to talk about the Walt Mossberg article because that's, I guess, big news.
John:
But, I mean, that's the real question.
John:
Not why is Apple having executives like, you know, talk to websites as they did about the Swift open source thing or go on podcasts and stuff like that, because that's all about the whole new open Apple thing.
John:
But it still seems like there has to be a reason.
John:
And having listened to the show, it's still not entirely clear to me like what.
John:
what they were there to do like when you know when a celebrity is on a talk show a television talk show they're there to promote the movie that's that's opening this weekend that they're in right or whatever you know and the same thing with the swift open source like if you're there to promote something your company's doing and then at the same time you know a good host will of course ask some other questions as well but
John:
I'm assuming, even after listening to the episode, that probably the reason they were there was to talk about the Walt Marsberg article, but I'm not entirely sure.
John:
What was your sense from listening to the episode?
Marco:
Basically that same thing.
Marco:
I also assumed that there would be more direct addressing of that, but as we know, you have three people
Marco:
talking and you know it's only a 45 minute interview um you know once you rule out the formalities like there's not a whole lot of time for like actual in-depth discussion when you have three people who want to talk as we know because that's why our show is never 45 minutes long we're lucky to have a one segment be 45 minutes long on one topic that's our show's logo is it never 45 minutes yeah so let's get started um so so you know
Marco:
I think a lot of it was just time.
Marco:
But I also think, you know, this is Apple PR we're talking about.
Marco:
And even though these are executives coming on a talk show with our friend John and, you know, in a more casual environment, this is still high power executives from the biggest technology company in the universe, et cetera, with very strong PR strategy and PR control.
Marco:
You know, like these aren't people who are going to like go off, just go off the deep end and like have a couple drinks on the show and then tell us all the secrets.
Marco:
Like that's not, that isn't what this is.
Marco:
You know, this is,
Marco:
In part, it's probably to help humanize that there are people at this company, not just robots and a brick wall.
Marco:
It's actually humans doing the best they can.
Marco:
It's to humanize them.
Marco:
And also, I think it was really about this discussion of software and service quality.
Marco:
It was very obvious that they were prepared with stats and various authorized figures they were able to give out about how well they're doing, how well their quality is going, the crash rates, the
Marco:
number of Apple Music subscribers, how well the websites and the web services hold up under all these loads.
Marco:
They were very clearly prepared with PR-approved stats they could share to demonstrate that we don't really have these big quality problems slash we have good reasons to have quality problems.
Marco:
It was kind of like this slightly defensive, but not in a really aggressive way.
Marco:
And it was basically...
Marco:
It read to me, or it listened to me.
Marco:
It listened a little defensive.
John:
You can use red.
John:
Look it up.
John:
It's an alternate definition.
Marco:
I know, I know.
Marco:
But yeah, it seemed slightly defensive, but mostly just like...
Marco:
Almost in denial that there are any real downward slopes going on here.
Marco:
And that might be true from a lot of things they talked about.
Marco:
I mean, their web services are at ridiculous scale, and they are mostly working most of the time.
Marco:
And they do have tons of people using it.
Marco:
But the only nitpicks I had with it, really, besides that I wish it could be longer, but I understand why it probably couldn't be, because I don't think you can get...
Marco:
two high-power Apple executives to give you three hours on a podcast as much as we would like them to.
Marco:
But my main nitpicks with it were basically that there really wasn't enough time to fight back a little bit or to ask... A lot of their defenses...
Marco:
were using excuses that are totally within Apple's control to change.
Marco:
So, for instance, the biggest one that stuck out to me was when Craig Federighi was... And overall, I thought both Craig and Eddie came off very well.
Marco:
But Craig, during one part, he was saying...
Marco:
how people liked Snow Leopard back in the day, but nobody ever really installed Snow Leopard 10.6.0.
Marco:
And most of the time, people were spending on 10.6.4, 10.6.5, etc.
Marco:
And so he was basically saying, back then, they had way fewer total users, and also people would wait longer before upgrading to the newest stuff.
Marco:
Well, very heavily promoted, very heavily pushed, often automatic software updates are within Apple's control.
Marco:
Apple has themselves very aggressively pushed OS updates every release since then.
Marco:
And they used to even be paid.
Marco:
That was, I think, the first one.
Marco:
Was that $30?
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
They might have been free after that.
Marco:
So back then, they were paid, and they were a bigger deal.
Marco:
And also, most critically, they didn't come out every year.
Marco:
Back then, the release cycle was more like every two years.
Marco:
I don't know the exact average because you had to write reviews of all of them.
Marco:
But back then, we had these longer cycles.
Marco:
And of course, the products were simpler because they were doing less.
Marco:
And there is a valid point to be made that we now live in a way more complicated computing environment because we have so many more devices that are doing so many more things, interacting with so many more services.
Marco:
But the argument that you can excuse more flaws today because everyone upgrades really fast to the latest OS today, I don't think is a valid defense.
Marco:
Because Apple is the one pushing the updates that frequently.
Marco:
And also, Apple is the one who nowadays, the OSes never even get to a .5 or .6 release anymore.
Marco:
The OSes now...
Marco:
They're changed every year with major releases, and a major release is kind of allowed to be a little bit less stable.
Marco:
And so now it feels like we are not reaching the states that we used to reach for half the release cycle, where things were pretty stable and you could update from Leopard to 10.6.4 and be relatively assured that, oh, they worked it all out by now.
Marco:
Now it seems like they don't have time to work it all out anymore.
Marco:
And that is entirely an Apple-created construct.
Marco:
Apple has created these conditions.
Marco:
Apple is the one pushing these conditions.
Marco:
It's totally within Apple's control to not heavily push the updates when it's still at a point zero, to not do updates every year if they don't want to for something like the Mac, which is not even high profile.
Marco:
This is totally within Apple's control to fix or to make better, to improve.
Marco:
And so that is not a valid defense.
John:
I want to pick up some of the things they said as well and the format.
John:
But I also want to hear – I'm going somewhere with this why were they on the show thing.
John:
And I want to hear if Casey has the same impression that they were on to talk about software equality or if you thought they were on for some other reason or if they were on for no reason.
Casey:
I think most simply it was about software quality, but I agree that it was a more meandering, less focused appearance than I would have expected if they were doing damage control.
Casey:
And I'm not sure if that's deliberate, if this meandering and this kind of casual conversation was to lead us to believe that it wasn't damage control, that it was just because, and they just felt like talking to Gruber.
Casey:
But I would say that were it not for Walt's article and clearly this podcast, I don't think that I don't see why they would have felt the need to go on John's show.
Casey:
And I don't mean that as a slight to Gruber at all.
Casey:
I just it's not a normal thing for one, let alone two executives to just decide to go on a podcast.
Casey:
So I think it was about damage control.
Casey:
But I think.
Casey:
Whether or not it was deliberate, it was loose enough so that you couldn't say it was explicitly about damage control.
John:
And I am leading up to Marco's points here, so bear with me.
John:
But my related question to this is...
John:
what is the job of insert whatever Craig's title is or insert whatever Eddie's title is, like senior vice president software or whatever?
John:
Like, what is their job?
John:
If you were to look at their job description, if they were hiring a new one, if, you know, if Craig retires and they want to hire a replacement and they don't want to promote from within, whatever, like, what is the job description of those executives?
John:
And I can tell you in the Steve Jobs era, the job description for all those super important guys, you know, head of all of OS X, you know, Bertrand Surly or whatever, or like...
John:
going to spearhead of the ios team or whatever that nowhere in that job description was be the mouthpiece for apple uh talk to the public in a way that moves public opinion in the direction that apple wants to move it was just absolutely not in any of their job descriptions because they never talked to the press they weren't allowed to talk to the press they barely talked to developers like
John:
And it's different than many other companies.
John:
Lots of other companies you could say, oh, well, once you reach a certain level on the executive ladder, part of your job is to talk to the public in some way.
John:
Now, mediated by the PR department, so on and so forth, but you become a public figure that occasionally says things differently.
John:
with the blessing of the corporation in an effort to change public opinion or to get your message out there or whatever.
John:
There's not a lot of those people.
John:
It's not like everybody in the company is the voice of the company.
John:
But now in the post jobs, they're in the more open Apple, which we all like.
John:
Clearly, some of these people at a high enough level are now tasked with essentially or tasking themselves with that.
John:
We don't know what's motivating or whatever, but they are being allowed.
John:
The company Apple as a company has decided we're going to send Craig Federighi to 17 different websites and the talk show to tell them about the Swift open source project.
John:
We're not just going to have a press release.
John:
We're not just going to have someone say something in a keynote.
John:
We're not just going to issue official statements through PR channels.
John:
We're going to send this person whose job up to this point did not really involve a lot of public statements about things.
John:
He's going to go out there and promote the Swift Open Source Project and try to hit the points that we've all agreed that are the bullet points.
John:
And like Marco said, the little sheet of whatever stats you want to say, whatever facts you want to get out there, like basically doing the job of PR.
John:
But now there's a human doing it.
John:
And so now you have these two guys, Eddie and Craig, coming on a very casual type of situation where they are talking unfiltered.
John:
It's not real time.
John:
It's not live.
John:
But it's very, you know, it's just kind of like we're going to talk and we're going to discuss things.
John:
And the reason I ask about this is, as in what their job is, is like...
John:
that skill being able to being able to go somewhere in an atmosphere like that and hit the points that you want to hit and not sound defensive and move public opinion and not saying it not make any missteps that's not easy thing to do not that i'm saying either one of them are bad at it they're much better than you know i would ever be like they're very skilled at their jobs but their job historically has not included this and when i listened to that episode i'm thinking some of these things as marco pointed out were clearly written down
John:
These are the points that we're going to hit about reliability and blah, blah, blah.
John:
You might think that Apple is like, oh, Apple knows all and controls all.
John:
So every single thing that was said in that program was clearly planned ahead of time.
John:
When Eddie Q said that there's going to be a new version of the Apple TV remote app for the iPhone that includes all the functionality of the remote and you'll be able to play games with that information was already out there and Gruber just didn't happen to know about it or it was intentionally broken on the talk show that they said you're allowed to discuss this.
John:
But I think there's also a possibility
John:
that eddie q had just forgotten what which things were public and which things were not and had uh accidentally officially confirmed the updated version of the apple remote application that maybe every developer i mean i don't keep up this who cares it's not a it's not a story or whatever that was public by the way all right well anyway that type of thing um
John:
where is are are all apple executives so well trained at pr despite having never done it as part of their job description that it is impossible for them to make a mistake and i think it is possible for them to make a mistake and i think every time that apple executives go into an atmosphere like this it is a risk from the old world perspective of apple of like but what if they accidentally say something they're not supposed to say i mean again a pr person is probably involved the show could be edited it's not live so and so forth it's not that big of a risk
John:
uh but it is entirely different like if i was in these jobs i would be like i've been working here for x number of years and i never had to do this as part of my job and now it's like it's like a high pressure situation where you're like you are supposed to speak for the company don't make any mistakes and by the way this is part of your job now and anytime something goes wrong we send you out to do it and even if they you know technically don't say anything they're not supposed to say or whatever as marco pointed out it doesn't mean that they are going to be able to present the information in a way that moves public opinion
John:
in the direction that they want.
John:
So, for example, if they sound very defensive and don't give convincing reasons, that may make things worse instead of better, reinforcing our worst notions or whatever about what's going on inside Apple.
John:
Or if they pointedly don't address particular points.
John:
Say it had been an aggressive interview and they were being pressed they could have looked bad.
John:
there's so many dangers and it just it's weird for me to think about it's weird for me to think about this ever being part of the job of someone who started their career as a programmer and who is a very technical person and is now asked to do this thing yeah i mean and i think part of the part of the risk evaluation here is that they they aren't sending pretty much anybody ever and if they do send somebody it's like tim cook and
Marco:
to general purpose interviewers out in the regular media.
Marco:
They're sending these people to John Gruber.
Marco:
They know that he's a respectable guy who gets Apple very well and who has a good relationship with Apple.
Marco:
That's not an accident that they're giving him this access that nobody else really gets or that very few people get.
Marco:
Because they know that he's not going to be all sensational on them and be super aggressive or just spend the whole 45 minutes asking them about future iPhones, which they will never talk about.
Marco:
Certainly, it is still a risk to go at least mostly unscripted.
Marco:
I mean, even when he had Phil at WWDC live, that was even more risk because that was live.
Marco:
That was live in front of a few hundred people and broadcast to the internet to a few thousand more at least.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I feel like Phil is actually good at that.
John:
He's been in marketing, so I feel like that has been part of his job description.
John:
Even if he's not speaking for the company, he essentially was telling people what to say on behalf of the company as part of his role as the chief of marketing.
John:
So, yeah, you're right.
John:
It's much harder in front of a live audience where you can't take back anything and there's no editing or anything like that.
John:
But Phil, I feel like, is an old hand at this and has no problem.
John:
Whereas, particularly Craig...
John:
always strikes me as a technical person who has had this role thrust upon him he's been thrust onto the stage at keynotes and he's gotten really good at that and now he's just going off the cuff and you know kind of the same thing with eddie where you didn't see a lot of him on stage until uh recent years right and maybe that's just part of his ascent in the organization but having that be part of your job and like and i'm saying that not as if i think like it's a bad thing that like oh well uh this is like a danger and apple should cut it out merely that
John:
this new open apple that we all like this this part of what comes with it part of what comes with it is understanding on both sides of the fence that being more open means that human beings are going to come out and be open and if they say things wrong or whatever you can't hold them to the same standards as we held the carefully controlled manicured pr presence of the old apple because you can't you can't have it both ways we're like we want you to be more open but we want every single thing out of every person's mouth to be perfect all the time
John:
right you have to the more you are open the more we all in this sort of dialogue is you know customer and company have to become comfortable with the idea that in an open dialogue it's not as clean and shiny and perfect and so if they sound a little bit defensive it's because they're human beings and they're being asked questions that they might feel defensive about and you can't you know excoriate them for being the humans that we always wish they were so i'm i'm i want to be clear that what i'm trying to do is i want to encourage more of this
John:
And I'm almost kind of sad that they didn't make any big blunders because I think if they did, I think it would be fine.
Marco:
Well, but I think you're right that it would be fine.
Marco:
However, Apple wouldn't think it would be fine.
Marco:
And so if they had made any big blunders, it would greatly reduce the chances of us getting more access to them in the future like this.
John:
what i'm trying to say to encourage apple to basically say uh at least i am and i think we all should be just more forgiving so that they can they can feel safe doing this because we want a more open dialogue and i think uh if anyone in sort of the apple tech press decides to jump on these type it's just going to scare them back into their hole so let's let's let's be nice
Marco:
But we can be nice, and we can be civil, and we can still disagree with things they say, or we can criticize things they say in normal civil ways.
Marco:
And so I'm not saying, and I don't think you're saying that we should take it easy on them necessarily, just that we should be civil and reasonable and kind of give them the benefit of the doubt if they misspeak slightly or something.
Marco:
Is that roughly what you're saying?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, and as for your specific points about... I mean, you're right.
John:
It was a short interview.
John:
There wasn't a lot of time to get into things.
John:
And as I said when Craig was on, they're not going to go into the level of detail that we go into about these things.
John:
That's not the forum for it.
John:
It's not as if... That's part of what is their job and also what is the purpose of a podcast like this?
John:
When you have these executives there, that is not the time to harangue them about whatever your pet problem is.
John:
You are not going to affect...
John:
The, you know, the design, Apple's Macintosh application design philosophy that leaves big empty toolbars, right?
John:
You are not going to change that philosophy by arguing with Greg Federighi about it on a podcast, right?
Marco:
And you're not going to get him to say, yeah, you're right, it sucks.
Marco:
Like, you aren't going to get ADQ to say, yeah, iTunes is horrible and the iTunes store infrastructure is just the worst.
John:
Right.
John:
but hold on i mean he did admit that like itunes has challenges or whatever but the whole point is like you're not going to like that's there's a time and place for that in this writ small that i think we're all at this point familiar with um is that if you go to wwdc and you find the one guy who writes the obscure framework that your application is using you could possibly convince him one-on-one to change this parameter in this api to do this thing in the next major version that can actually happen right that is the level of
John:
individual's ability to talk to other individuals as humans but it's not in public that person who you convince will never admit that they talk to you and it's like a parameter on an api call right you know it's very different than uh you know trying to convince the you know
John:
flying out to Cupertino and sitting down at a giant table with the entire executive team at Apple and say, in this 10-minute presentation, I'm going to convince you that you need to redesign photos in this particular way.
John:
And then they will dismiss you, and then they will realize they've been working on a new version of photos for like three years, a new version of iTunes for 12 years, or a new file system for X number of years.
John:
And you don't have enough information, put it another way, you don't have enough information to be compelling to them.
John:
So I think all we can do as the sort of the public out here is merely,
John:
explain things from our perspective uh because we just we just simply don't have enough information to to convince apple to do anything because you have no we still have no idea what they're actually doing all we can do is say here's how we feel as users and hope that gets through to them and if we feel like there's a communication barrier then that's that's what them coming on podcast is about saying we hear you we understand your concerns and you can go back and forth on them and try to clarify them or whatever and when it feels like there's a gap like in this case where marco was saying they're like
John:
well you don't understand here's all the things we have to deal with like uh where you start sounding defensive and you could come back with snappy answers like well google has to deal with this kind of volume too and they do it better so what's the deal there or well itunes been big and bloated for years and everybody agrees on this so where's the new version and you say you agree but where is that like they're not going to tell you oh well the new version we've been working on that for a while now it's going to come out and it's going to be split into this number of applications and blah blah blah and it didn't make this really they're not going to tell you that so all they can do is give their perspective in a sanitized way
John:
um so it's a little bit like boys and girls with the dance at opposite sides of the gym uh and no one going into the middle to dance and and it has to be that way because at the very least apple is not going to you know to reveal itself in the public forum um we have the advantage of being able to reveal all of our frustrations and put them out there and then have apple hear them in whatever way they want to hear them but
John:
Apple is not going to be that forthcoming.
John:
So it is still a strange relationship, but I like the fact that there is any kind of communication going in both directions these days.
Casey:
Yeah, I've been really impressed by Apple's willingness to communicate, and I agree with you, I would really hate to see that stop.
Casey:
I've really enjoyed these episodes of the talk show, and if they ever decided to branch out into other podcasts, I'm sure that it could be accommodated.
Casey:
But with that said, I was reflecting on my memory of the episode, and I listened to it pretty much immediately once it was out, so this was almost a week ago now, but...
Casey:
There was a bit of a theme.
Casey:
You keep saying John being defensive, and I think that's a fair characterization.
Casey:
But reflecting on it, the pieces that struck me the most was a little bit of playing the victim.
Casey:
iTunes is really old, and we have to support devices that go back to the beginning of time.
Casey:
What do you expect us to do?
Casey:
We have a lot of users, guys.
Casey:
You don't get it.
Casey:
We have a lot of users.
John:
Let me tell you all the things we do well.
John:
We look at all these transactions we process.
John:
You know, EDIQ is ready with big numbers for presentations.
John:
We do a lot of these things.
John:
And, like, you have to acknowledge, like, yes, they do do those things.
John:
But, like, the communication barrier is, like, we understand what you're doing.
John:
It's like playing the victim is one way to say it.
John:
But the other way is, like...
John:
It's like being in operations or whatever you want to call it at any big company where you're the one responsible for servers and stuff working.
John:
Nobody cares about your job when everything goes well, right?
John:
They only care about it when something breaks, right?
John:
You get no credit practically for...
John:
hey, did you guys realize that for the past X number of hours or days or whatever, this service was perfectly fine?
John:
No.
John:
They just expected it.
John:
It's like the power company that Marco was just talking about.
John:
Nobody cares about the power company when the power is on.
John:
You only care about the power company in the one day a year it's off, and then you're super pissed off at them.
John:
So in some ways, it's a thankless job, but that is the job.
John:
If you work at the power company, you understand that's the job.
John:
When the power goes out,
John:
because of something you don't say look you don't understand how many how many miles of lines we have and there's ice all over them and you know tree branches leaning on them and birds pecking at them and we don't have enough tax money to fund it like the power company can make all those same exact complaints and they should to the parties they can change things but when your power goes out you don't want to hear it
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And, you know, this victim sort of card got played a couple more times.
Casey:
Oh, you know, yes, we have a lot of users.
Casey:
And yes, we are decent at serving a lot of users, let's say, with iMessage.
Casey:
But you have to understand that we scale exponentially, which all of these things, to be clear, are fair observations.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But still it's, Oh, you guys don't get it.
Casey:
You don't get it.
Casey:
But the, the one that we haven't talked about that I thought was most fascinating was a pretty clear, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm going to use the word admission, but that's not really what I'm looking for.
Casey:
But, um, acknowledgement, maybe a pretty clear acknowledgement from Craig that radar is kind of fundamentally broken for serving, for serving the public.
John:
That's like acknowledging that it's dark at night.
John:
I mean, there's some things you just can't like, yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
some things are undeniable even eddie admitted itunes was bloated but radar yeah no one is going to be i don't think it's possible to send anyone from apple to come out to defend radar web and i think you're right but nevertheless i thought it was an important step for it to be said in public that hey this is broken and there was a little bit of victim playing here too well you don't understand that's super important for us internally this is this serves a really really big purpose for us we can't just throw out the baby with the bath water you know we
Casey:
We really need it internally, but we probably have some room to grow externally.
Casey:
And I thought that victim playing, all of which to some degree was fair, was interesting.
Casey:
It was very subtle.
Casey:
But most of all, I just thought it was fascinating to see some admissions of infallibility coming from the two of them.
John:
I think someone with more PR training, more formal PR training, would know that those are not winning angles.
John:
As Marco pointed out in the episode that we almost titled E for Effort, that if you work really hard on something, you can't come to the public with that.
John:
That's what you tell yourself internally, right?
John:
You can have these discussions internally about...
John:
Here's why it's really hard to do whatever, to deal with iTunes because it's really popular, to deal with updates.
John:
Everything they're saying is true.
John:
But when you go to the public, part of PR training is to know what can we say to the public that is going to move their opinion in the way that we want to move it.
John:
That's the problem with having engineers talk to anybody.
John:
They will just tell you the truth, and they will explain the real situations.
John:
And if your job is PR...
John:
it's not to simply tell the truth about the situation and not even to tell a limited version of the truth.
John:
It's to figure out what can I say that will make people change their minds slightly about issue X or Y. It doesn't mean you have to lie or be manipulative or whatever, but it is a skill.
John:
There's a reason PR is a profession and not like, oh, the engineers want us to do PR on the side.
John:
It is an actual real skill and it takes a while.
John:
Same thing with presenting on stage.
John:
It takes a while to get good at and there is training involved and everything like that.
John:
I think
John:
both of those guys in the show showed a slight lack of PR training in terms of there are things that they said that they either shouldn't have said or should have said in a different way to move the needle in the direction it seemed to me that they wanted to move it.
John:
And, you know, I like them more for it, like in terms of it seems more human, and I do want to hear the inside scoop, and I do want to hear what they're thinking about these things.
John:
But PR-wise, it may not have been effective as another angle on the same information.
Marco:
I think if they were more strictly PR trained or were adhering more strictly to PR styles of speaking and responding, I think it would have been far less interesting.
John:
So here's my perfect example of the opposite of that.
John:
Steve Jobs was, as far as I know, not PR trained.
John:
Super interesting, but he knew what to say to move things in the direction he wanted to move them.
Marco:
oh sure yeah but i i would say like like i don't like when tim cook give these interviews to like you know 60 minutes or whatever i've stopped even watching them yeah those are boring he's so controlled and so trained and and just his personality is you know he keeps things so close to the vest like i get nothing out of them also he's like a genuinely nice guy it seems like so it's like oh you mean he's nice where steve jobs always had an edge
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like, Steve Jobs, like, you knew, like, if Steve Jobs was going to, like, give some dig at, like, AT&T, you knew he'd do it, like, in public, you know, like, stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, I feel like, you know, Tim Cook speaks the way I would expect most CEOs to speak, you know.
Marco:
And he's, I mean, he's better than the average, certainly.
Marco:
But, you know, it's not, like, not in the way that it's, like, a major event when he talks to a network news show for 20 minutes about what they're doing, you know.
Marco:
Like, it's not...
John:
I mean, we're taking Tim Cook for granted, though, because like when I feel like when Tim Cook talks about the environment or labor practices like that, I genuinely or human rights.
John:
I genuinely believe that Tim Cook really believes those things.
John:
Like it's not some smarmy kind of I'm saying this to make our company.
John:
He seems genuine and he seems like a genuine, friendly person who cares about the world and wants to make it better and so on and so forth.
John:
um and that can be boring when you're when you're looking for like blood in the water or something like that um steve jobs is the example of like i think he was just instinctive like instinctively he was a natural at knowing how to talk eventually was a natural when he was young he wasn't great at it but the latter day steve job knowing how to talk to the press
John:
to move the discussion or the issue or public opinion or whatever in the direction he wanted to use i wanted to go in while still sounding entirely genuine human and interesting because he was willing to say the thing that uh you know take a dig at some other vendor or say something is crap or something is great or whatever or
John:
make blanket denials that he goes back on later or whatever.
John:
He was able to do that just instinctively.
John:
And that is, I think, a rare skill that, again, even Steve Jobs didn't have in his early days when he was young and would say terrible things to the press and regret them later.
John:
And I don't think Craig and Eddie quite have that yet.
John:
But what I'm saying is I think you can be...
John:
if not pr trained or good at you know better at moving the discussion while still being both seeming and being entirely human you know what i mean i think that the the swift open source thing was a better example of that because there was no real like that it wasn't like defensive or
John:
trying to change public opinion.
John:
It was merely promoting something that Craig really believed in that actually was a really good thing.
John:
And so he could be very detailed and human and funny and interesting and also promote the idea that Swift is awesome, that open source is awesome, that Apple is awesome for doing Swift open source and all that other stuff.
John:
all of which he agreed with and was able to promote in a way that was interesting and engaging.
John:
And in this situation, it seems kind of like these two were thrown to the wolves.
John:
And again, I don't, you know, this is based on no information.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Did they volunteer for this?
John:
Were they told they should do this?
John:
Did John ask them to be on?
John:
You know, who knows what the situation was, but it almost seemed like they found themselves in a situation where, you know,
John:
So it's up to you to try to move the needle on this issue of public opinion about this Walt Bosberg thing.
John:
So here you go.
Marco:
Good luck, guys.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else are you talking about tonight, John?
John:
This item has been in the notes for a little bit.
John:
I think I've seen some links to it because it went around the web a couple weeks ago.
John:
And I thought it was worth keeping because, well, anyway, have you seen the thing I'm about to link to here, the thing about vector networks from this company Figma?
John:
No.
Marco:
I saw it, but I don't understand it.
Marco:
But it sounds cool.
Marco:
The idea of this is a new way to draw vector art, basically.
Marco:
Basically, a new data structure for vector art.
Marco:
And I have always been baffled by...
Marco:
The few attempts I've made doing vector art, from my very, very light and very occasional needs to do it, these programs have always been very hard for me to understand.
Marco:
And it's been very hard for me to achieve the result I want that seems very obvious.
Marco:
Like, oh, I just want this line to go from here to here and be perfectly smooth.
Marco:
And it's so hard to do some of those things if you aren't familiar with the tools of Bezier curves, basically, and weird stuff like that.
Marco:
So do I understand correctly that this is kind of like an alternative to that whole system that makes more sense?
John:
Yeah, so since this, as far as I can tell, is not a piece of software you can download to try at this point, I'm just going by the various animations and then the description on their website.
John:
And I don't know if it'll be any good or we'll do what they say it will do, but I'm most interested in it because very often I see in discussions about software for any platform, iOS or the Mac or whatever, a lot of people, myself included, fall into the fatalistic notion sometimes that
John:
um there's no point in making an application that does x because that's a solved problem and you don't need another one and the market's all tied up and it's you know you don't want to go red ocean you want to go blue ocean go where nobody else is and find a market that is unserved and serve that one aren't most oceans blue
John:
analogy it's the nintendo wii thing you know about this right just seems like a poor color choice red ocean is because there's blood in the water from the the competitors eating each other but doesn't blue ocean mean there's no customers because it's just empty yes that's right you want to go where no one is serving the customers is there are no competitors like what the other competitors are the are the things that keep changing the color of the water no competitors are there eating each other you'll just be the only one there and no one is eating you so there's no blood in the ocean and
John:
But you have no better to eat either because there's no customers.
John:
The water are your customers.
John:
It's not a perfect analogy.
John:
I didn't make it up.
John:
It's Japanese, I think.
John:
Anyway, I first started for the Wii.
John:
Go reference old hypercritical episodes as always.
John:
The answer key is there.
John:
It's like the Rosetta Stone.
John:
Just go back.
Marco:
We should totally review business books in this show.
Marco:
Oh, God.
John:
you thought you were escaped casey yeah seriously yeah so so anyway with the vector drawing apps i had the same experience like i used illustrator 88 and learned how to use vector tools and the various applications seemed to be more variety back then like mac draw and all those all the other applications you guys have never heard of or used um but these days it has settled down in most vector drawing applications now that illustrator has like wiped them all from the face of the planet freehand isn't even around anymore or whatever
John:
follow a similar theme in terms of the controls.
John:
A lot of it is just because, historically speaking, that once you establish the sort of keyboard modifiers that everyone is used to and everything, that it's like, oh, well, drawing vectors in this particular way.
John:
And at this point, if you're not someone who uses a vector drawing app all the time,
John:
you will find it weird and you like marco will not be able to do what you wanted to do because it will seem like i just want to connect this line to that line to that line and why doesn't it let me connect here and oh this is actually connected that line it's actually disconnected and there's a little end cap sticking out and why can't this curve go the way i want and you know what is the winding number and why when i try to fill this region does it leak out because it looks like it's an entirely closed circle and all that other crap um and at the same time
John:
a software developer would say well i'm not going to do a vector drawing application that market is sewn up like there are so many strong competitors in there there's great applications what who am i even serving with like say i make a vector drawing application that that's really good i say it's just oh you know just as good as one of the the uh strong market leaders so what who's going to buy mine there's already an application that does that by an app by a vendor that's been around longer that has more support that has you know they have such a head start on me it's no point
John:
uh and i like the idea of this vector networks thing of i think in every application domain there is the possibility of saying yeah if there's a market that is you know heavily saturated with lots of very strong competitors that's probably hard to break into but if you look at the market and say but you know what they all suck in this one particular way and their users either don't realize it sucks in that way or don't care because they've learned the old system and
John:
And there could be people out there who are not buying vector drawing applications because these existing ones, they can't figure out how to use them.
John:
So if I can make a better way to draw vectors, I can A, get customers that don't buy these other applications or aren't satisfied with them, and B, possibly become the new great vector application because maybe even designers want to do it this way and not deal with those frustrations or whatever.
John:
um or you just fail miserably and realize that there's no competing with illustrator and uh you know too bad but uh i'm heartened by efforts like this because uh it reminds me that there is no problem that is so well solved that it can't be solved better by someone else with a better idea um and so i i'm looking forward to trying this application and if it doesn't work out or is actually worse than the old one oh well but i really like seeing stories like this and i really want people to do more things like this because
John:
As you can imagine, there is not a single application I use every day that I don't think could be better in some fundamental way.
John:
Nothing is so perfect.
John:
That's right.
John:
Hey, you did listen to that show.
John:
Good job.
Casey:
Once or twice.
Casey:
Just glancing at these graphics, I haven't read the article.
Casey:
It looks very cool.
Casey:
My only foray into vector drawing was the world's best app icon with feet.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And so I am not the one to talk about this, but it looks neat for sure.
John:
I miss what I miss because I don't I'm not good at using the current crop of vector tools.
John:
But what I miss a lot is briefly, I believe, in college got it so long ago that I can't remember what it was.
John:
I'm pretty sure it was AutoCAD.
John:
Everyone will email and tell me what application was.
John:
But it's the one where you can draw things with the command line in addition to using the mouse and stuff.
John:
It's probably AutoCAD.
John:
And for a brief moment, I got pretty good at doing that.
John:
And I could do things with that command line in what I think was AutoCAD that I still can't do with Illustrator in terms of connect this line to there, perpendicular to that, intersect that with this.
John:
Like, I always have such difficulty of like...
John:
I just want this point to be on that line and I want the angle between the two to be this and I don't care if it's not on a grid line and I don't care like just I can describe to you what I want like in you know in this command line parlance why stupid pen tool will you refuse to do that why do I have to click option click shift click no don't start making a curve no don't connect to that line no no
John:
you know in autocad i could always get what i wanted and in form z the only other thing i've come close to that form z is an old 3d program maybe it's still out there whatever um i remember the same thing i remember eventually being able to do pretty much everything that i wanted in that program despite it being incredibly complicated and yet to this day uh vector drawing tools defeat me because they follow a set of rules that i guess i just disagree with and that's and refuse to internalize
John:
Fair enough.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, Hover, and Harry's.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
John:
So long.
John:
So the sandbox title here, I'm thinking of jumping the possible over.
John:
As many people as possible in the sandbox, or as many people in the sandbox as possible.
Casey:
Leave it as is.
Casey:
Leave it as is.
Casey:
It's already in Squarespace.
Casey:
It's done.
John:
But I don't know if the title is an accurate representation of what we said.
John:
I'm just saying, which one sounds better?
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that was the accurate representation of what you said, and I think it sounds better as is.
Marco:
Yeah, agreed.
John:
I think if I was writing it, I would put the possible first.
John:
But this is a podcast, and that's how people speak.
John:
I know.
John:
I'm just...
John:
Looking at it and thinking about it.
John:
It's a long title.
John:
It's got things you can move around.
Casey:
Nothing that is so perfect.
John:
No.
John:
You mangled that too.
John:
Good job.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
It's another Metatrol.
Marco:
Yeah, whatever.
Marco:
Nothing that is so... Whatever.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
How am I this tired?
Marco:
It's not even that late.
Marco:
We've discovered a new trolling method, slightly misquoting John back to himself.
Marco:
That's not new.
Marco:
I do it to myself.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
John:
Every time I listen to myself on a podcast, it happens.
Marco:
Wait, can you explain that?
John:
When I listen to myself, I hear all the things I say wrong, and I'm effectively trolling myself.
Marco:
oh okay so but it's not like you're not like you're not like saying as you listen along saying in your head what you said differently you're just you're mad that you said something that was not what you think then is accurate i can always hear it when i'm the listener i all i hear all my mistakes oh you should try editing the show it's rough it's brutal at least you get to fix them i have no control well i can fix some of them i mean yeah but you fix yours way better than you fix mine yeah well because i i'm more critical of myself
Casey:
Would you say you're hypercritical?
Marco:
If you edited the show, we would never publish a show.
Marco:
That's true.
John:
I don't know that.
John:
I've never edited anything.
John:
I have no idea what kind of editor I would be.
Casey:
A critical one.
John:
I would probably do the same thing.
John:
I would fix everything that I said and leave everyone else to sound dumb.
Marco:
no you for me your your part of the show is the easiest to edit because you talk for long spans mostly uninterrupted and they very rarely require any alterations so mostly most of what you say i just skip over like i just skim it for like wider than usual gaps and shrink those but for the most part i i don't i don't even listen to what you say on the edit because i heard it during the show i know it was fine all right well i listen to it and i make mistakes anyway it's fine it's part of the process
Marco:
You're getting the real John in the edit.
Marco:
The raw, uncut Syracusa.
Marco:
Sorry, Syracusa.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
You're fine.
Marco:
You used to be fine, and now you're just getting inside your own head about it.
Marco:
Syracusa.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Syracuse?
John:
You're fine.
John:
Yes, it's fine.
John:
I know who you're talking about.
John:
Refer back to the hypercritical episode where I discuss the primary purpose of speech or writing is to communicate an idea.
John:
And basically, if I know who you're talking about, you've successfully communicated that idea.