I Filed a Radar
John:
it is so hot in this room and so humid the humidity has been brutal here it's only 77 degrees and i'm dying in this room because it's so humid and of course it's probably like 90 degrees in this room i feel great air conditioning's on i haven't put my slippers on mid-show because my feet were getting a little bit cold
Casey:
All right, we should probably actually get the show started, huh?
Marco:
None of that's making it in the show.
Casey:
None of it?
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
So you know how I'm going to make you put some of that in the show?
Casey:
Watch this.
Casey:
Hey, so speaking of cars, we should probably do some follow-ups, starting with more reasons for Q&X.
Marco:
Hey, Casey, do we have any follow-up?
Casey:
I hate you so much.
Marco:
So, Casey, do we have any follow-up?
Casey:
We should probably start with some follow-up, Marco.
Casey:
You make an excellent point.
Casey:
And we had an individual write-in with more reasons for using QNX.
Casey:
And these actually were the, to my ears and eyes, the best reasons I've heard yet.
Casey:
And what it basically boiled down to was incredibly fast boot times are generally important for cars because you don't want to, say, have to wait until you're five minutes down the road before your air conditioning or your radio turns on or something like that.
Casey:
And the other reason that this individual gave was, you know, if you think about it, the instrument clusters on a lot of cars are often driven by some sort of display or perhaps driven by a signal that's coming off some QNX-derived computer.
Casey:
And those need to be real-time.
Casey:
I mean, that data needs to show you exactly how fast you're going right freaking now.
Casey:
And so having a real-time OS like QNX makes that sort of thing a lot easier.
Marco:
Like, Tesla's system is not based on QNX.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure it's just some kind of Linux.
Marco:
And you can tell.
Marco:
Like, you can tell because it's... Because, like, you know, some... Like, again, like I said last time, like, most of the time it works fine.
Marco:
But sometimes... Like, we were upstate and I heard...
Marco:
We were driving around.
Marco:
I was following nav directions.
Marco:
And the map was getting a little bit wonky.
Marco:
It was starting to flick out and slow down a little bit and not update quickly enough.
Marco:
And that's great, too.
Marco:
When you're following a map doing turn by turn and it just doesn't update, so you're looking at the last turn from 30 seconds ago instead.
Marco:
That's fun.
Marco:
And then there was one point where it made the turn signal clicking sound
Marco:
When the turn signal wasn't on... What?
Marco:
I described last episode that I've had to reboot it three times so far over three or four months, whatever it is.
Marco:
One of the times that I had to reboot it, immediately beforehand, the turn signal was not clicking.
Marco:
It would turn on, and the indicator would blink in the dash, but you wouldn't hear the click noise.
Marco:
So obviously the clicking noise is made by the center console computer.
Marco:
It's adding it to the sound system in all likelihood.
Marco:
Anyway, so one of the symptoms that I knew something was wacky this time was the turn signal noise started clicking when the turn signal was not on.
Marco:
I was driving straight down a road.
Marco:
I hadn't touched it.
Marco:
Like, that was it.
Marco:
So I rebooted it again a few days ago.
Marco:
Goodness.
Marco:
So, yes.
Marco:
And when it's not booted, the turn signal does not.
Marco:
Like, when it's rebooting, you can turn.
Marco:
And the indicator on the dashboard did blink when the computer was rebooting.
Marco:
Like, it was still blinking.
Marco:
And so I assume this signal was still on.
Marco:
I hope the light was still blinking outside the car, but there's no sound.
Marco:
And again, it's like one of those things where like when you tie these things to software, they, you know, you are at the whim of the software's stability, responsiveness, uptime, you know, it's similar to like one of the things that, that I didn't like so much when I wore the Apple watch is so many, so many interactions are tied to force touch and,
Marco:
And when you push really hard on the watch face and you expect that button click, even though it's not really a button, even though it's all fake and simulated, you expect that better click back immediately as if it were a button.
Marco:
And the same thing with all the Force Touch trackpads.
Marco:
They have the same requirement.
Marco:
It has to respond like the physical object that it is mimicking.
Marco:
It has to be quick.
Marco:
It has to be immediate.
Marco:
There can't be any delay.
Okay.
Marco:
Well, on the watch, you know, the watch is very slow hardware-wise, and sometimes the software gets gummed up a little bit, and so you push, and sometimes there's a delay before it actually clicks back at you.
Marco:
And it totally breaks the illusion.
Marco:
It makes it feel broken or cheap or wrong or, you know, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
And that's actually one concern I have with the force touch home button that is rumored to be on the next iPhone.
Marco:
That, like, you know, if you push that home button and the iPhone software is, like, a little bit...
Marco:
you know a little bit overwhelmed or buggy or whatever if you push that and you don't get a click feel back for a few seconds or at all like that's gonna feel really broken really quickly so anyway similar thing with like this car stuff like you know back to this follow-up saying that q and x is really good for boot time and response times of interactions like i totally get that and i totally respect that because when you're tying things to controls of a physical object that makes a big difference
John:
my complaint about the ancient iphone 6 that i'm using is that i have a physical home button and i press it and it always you know goes in just like you said and i feel that physical feedback immediately but you know what doesn't happen immediately springboard doesn't appear immediately that's what doesn't happen i click it and then i look at my phone i'm like what are you what are you doing well i push the button i'm no i know i pushed it because it went in and then it went out and then okay now the animation is starting
John:
i'm getting picky in my old age i don't know getting picky what you should really do to make it seem like your phone is even older instead of saying my old iphone 6 you should say my first iphone which i'm still using that's true yeah i don't think my iphone 6 is getting slower but i'm just getting less and less patient for like when it doesn't respond i mean and i know it's not just because it's slow like my ipad pro the 9.7 inch ipad pro which is pretty darn fast
John:
I still feel like when I hit the home button on that, sometimes I have to wait.
John:
I want that to be instant.
Casey:
Just wait for the new touch ID sensor.
Casey:
It's pretty damn fast.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I've used my wife's phone.
John:
I know that the touch ID sensor is fast.
John:
I'm just saying, like, I feel like sometimes it's not responding to me as immediately as I feel like it should.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Anyway, the other thing that this person had to say about, you know, why do cars have crappy hardware?
John:
We read some other feedback from someone who works on these systems.
John:
talking about the uh how the car manufacturers want to save money and pinch pennies and i said that was silly uh a couple other factors that were also mentioned by many other people but reiterated by this person is that there's a long lead time on hardware that goes into cars the development cycles are really long so they have to pick hardware that's available like three years before the car even comes out and you know maybe it's even longer so maybe it's like four or five years by the time comes out so even if you pick something that was current it would be like three four or five years old by the time it ships in the car
John:
uh and finally stuff in cars has to operate at extremes of temperature if you've ever left your phone on the dashboard or even in a sealed cubby inside your car like not in the sun but just try taking your phone and putting it in the glove box or in the little console thing anywhere inside your car on a hot day when you come back chances are good after being away for several hours in the
Marco:
can't do that they have to continue working even when they're like 150 degrees or whatever and they have to continue working when it's negative 40 these are all real temperatures not crazy celsius yeah it's similar like like if you ever heard of like how slow the computers are on satellites or the space shuttle because like you know like you hear stories you know about like how oh they're still running something it's about as fast as like a 486 or something like that and like the reason one of the reasons why they have to use such slow
John:
types of hardware is that they have to operate in extreme conditions that would just kill any you know like the chip that's in an iphone and so it's similar but less severe in a car yeah that's their excuse but like still it's a little bit ridiculous they you know like i said the washing machine chips they're using like they're slower than the ones in the space probes the space probes have power pc601s that are like rad hardened in them um
John:
And they're using chips that are from a Game Boy Advance, so it would seem worse.
John:
Or maybe Game Boy Advance is faster than that.
John:
Anyway, bottom line, we have the technology.
John:
We can make the hardware in cars better.
John:
And I think we probably want to shorten up the cycle time on that, too.
John:
I know it's sort of all developed as one big unit, but...
John:
uh you just can't afford to do that if a manufacturer can shave even just a year off of the cycle time and they can have a year newer electronics that can make a big difference i think especially like i said as the as the infotainment systems and even the instrument clusters and all that stuff becomes a more important differentiator uh for cars as the software becomes like all other products the software becomes a more important part of the whole the whole product mixture the company that can figure that software out is going to have a big advantage
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell us about AudioSync and Quartz Crystals, which we've gotten a lot of feedback about.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to kind of cover this?
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
So basically, so, you know, the last couple of episodes we've discussed, a while back I discussed my podcast tool to automatically sync up tracks that were recorded locally for each person in a multi-person recording and then, you know, sync it up to the master track because if you try to import those tracks manually and you sync it up,
Marco:
The difference in the sense of time that each person's audio interface had, it caused a problem called drift, where if you sync up our recordings right up front in the beginning of a show, an hour in, we might be out of sync by half a second or a second.
Marco:
My microphone interface, the little converter in it that samples the audio at 44,100 times per second...
Marco:
has a very, very, very slightly different interpretation of what that means, like of how long a second is or how many times it has to be, than the one in cases of John's computers.
Marco:
And over time, that very, very tiny error can add up to quite a lot.
Marco:
And so this causes the problem of drift.
Marco:
So we've gotten lots of feedback about why this happens.
Marco:
Last episode, I speculated that you're making these components, these physical components,
Marco:
And any little tiny bit of imprecision in making them, when you are taking 44,000 samples per second over two hours, a very small variance in the clock performance of two different physical devices will cause them to disagree and to drift over time like this.
Marco:
So my speculation was basically like it's not really possible to make something that is cheap and in a computer like this that is more accurate than that and we just have to deal with it.
Marco:
And we had lots of people write in from the pro audio world and from some people even from like the scientific equipment world which is pretty cool.
Marco:
We have a lot of pretty cool listeners.
Marco:
also confirming what i said last episode that um that pro audio gear and actually people wrote in to say also pro uh film gear does similar things rather than trying to like sync up a bunch of different audio tracks afterwards in software from like different audio recording sources that might be on a film set or in a recording studio uh they use the concept of a master clock and they have like one device whether it's a clock generator or just a device that can that has an internal clock
Marco:
And ProGear has usually clock in and clock out ports on the back of it.
Marco:
And so they actually physically wire all to each other and they coordinate the clock based on one master source rather than each device keeping its own clock and therefore introducing this drift.
Marco:
So lots of people wrote in saying that was true.
Marco:
And then the best feedback we got, I very casually mentioned last episode that I had just anecdotally found that laptops generally have more drift than like a Mac Pro or a desktop or like an iMac.
Marco:
And it turns out there's some basis for this.
Marco:
The quartz crystals that vibrate at particular frequencies that create these clocks and these devices that have to be so accurate, they are very dependent on stable temperature.
Marco:
And if they don't have a stable temperature that they're operating at, or if they're just two different ones operating at two different temperatures, that can cause these very slight differences.
Marco:
and laptops usually their internal components usually operate hotter than desktops and they also fluctuate more um and and you know desktops have much bigger heatsink mechanisms they have usually larger fans that are spinning faster and pushing more air over them so desktops tend to be cooled better um and so i think that alone might explain that little anecdotal thing that yes this is this is a this is worse on laptops or
John:
when you have like one desktop on one end and the other person on the other end is using a laptop that might have more drift between them than if both people were using desktops or if both people were using laptops and this is related to what i the the reason i was uh i put the original feedback uh in follow-up from like this seems weird to me you tell me we can't make quartz crystals that are accurate because i remember from you know uh the world of watches which i'm not that involved in but that you know the fancy mechanical watches obviously are
John:
terrible at keeping time because they have a bunch of gears and stuff um but like you know a 10 cent quartz watch keeps amazing time for you know for an entire year maybe it would lose a second it's like so how can you make a stupid plastic quartz watch that keeps amazing time and it's very accurate over the course of an entire year but we can't make a quartz crystal for our computer that is equally accurate and there are a bunch of factors that have to go into that having to do with the specifics of the quality of the crystals for even for a 10 cent watch or whatever but
John:
um one of our readers uh readers one of our readers wrote in to tell us that the advantage a watch has is that it's essentially kept at an even temperature by being next to your skin so you are essentially temperature regulating the watch the entire time you're wearing it and that's the best thing for a quartz crystal actually in scenarios where they really want them to be stable they put them in a little whatever they called it but they put them in a little device that keeps it at a stable temperature so
John:
Having a watch and wearing it all the time keeps it accurate, much more accurate than, you know, a laptop that you're, the temperatures are going up and down and you're putting it to sleep and you're playing a game and it's just, it's all over the map.
John:
So this is all very explicable.
John:
And now we should feel, every time we learn anything about the actual
Marco:
analog physical world of components inside your computer it makes you feel scared and so now you can know that uh the thing regulating the clocks are pieces of crap too and change all the time there's nothing you can do about it yeah like whenever you learn anything about the analog component world like you start like we we live in like this digital world where we think everything is just like you know a one is just on and a zero is just off
Marco:
And of course, when you get down to the analog level of the physical implementation of these chips and these components, it isn't that simple.
Marco:
And everything is kind of like tolerances and variances and approximations and tricks.
Marco:
And it's kind of amazing all the stuff we have works at all as consistently as it does.
John:
Yep.
John:
I mean, even just the clock, like you learn from like CPU design, even just propagating the clock signal around the die of a large CPU is kind of sketchy at best.
John:
And they all have all sorts of phase lock loops and other things to make sure that that actually propagates everywhere and it's the same everywhere and you don't have delays.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So anyway, I think we are now all completely satisfied that we understand why Marco's tool is necessary in life.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And speaking of, in your quest to avoid doing actual work, you actually filed a radar.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yes, I did.
Casey:
I'm very proud of you.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
So do you want to tell us about this?
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So last episode in the after show, I got my time in the sun or whatever the metaphor is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Whatever floats your bubble.
Marco:
And so I got to finally explain the details of the MP3 file format and the efforts I was trying to do with variable bitrate or VBR encoding and why podcasts...
Marco:
Couldn't practically use VBR encoding, which basically boils down to the method to seek a VBR file that you don't have all of.
Marco:
So if you are playing a stream and the user jumps ahead to a timestamp that's way forward in the stream that you haven't downloaded the part of the file between those two points...
Marco:
You can't really know exactly what byte position to jump to to get to, you know, timestamp one hour 30 without using these lookup tables at the beginning of a VBR file that just don't have very much precision in the current standards or in the old standard.
Marco:
They're very imprecise.
Marco:
And so over the course of like a two-hour podcast, you only have in the most common jump table format, you only have 100 entries.
Marco:
So you have, you know, minute precision at best.
Marco:
You know, it might even be less than a minute precision.
Marco:
I've learned a lot since then.
Marco:
I did a lot of experimentation.
Marco:
I talked to a bunch of people.
Marco:
And I learned a lot about this.
Marco:
So I was recommending the use of this.
Marco:
There's an ID3 tag.
Marco:
It's abbreviated MLLT for MP location lookup table.
Marco:
And this is basically an ID3 tag version of the VBR offset jump table to tell you which bytes map to which timestamps.
Marco:
So you can jump between the file easily without having to have downloaded the whole thing and just scan through manually.
Marco:
The benefit of the ID3 tag is that it can be any size.
Marco:
The VBR jump table thing is restricted to the size of the one MP3 frame that they shoved it into for compatibility reasons, so it has to be basically below a kilobyte or so.
Marco:
The ID3 tag can be any length you want it to be.
Marco:
So the ID3 tag version of this would be great because you can basically have arbitrary precision, as much space as you're willing to devote to this.
Marco:
And for me, I was able to encode one-second precision of the timestamps with something like 16 kilobytes of a total jump table.
Marco:
So for like a 45 megabyte podcast, 16K for the jump table is fine.
Marco:
And by having VBR, you're saving like 20 megs on the file size in that case.
Marco:
So it's totally worth the savings to embed this little jump table.
Marco:
So I also heard from Devin Govitt.
Marco:
After recording last episode, I discovered a GitHub open source project called AudioCogs.
Marco:
And it's a group of people who make JavaScript implementations of decoders for MP3, AAC, a couple other audio formats, and a whole audio player all written in JavaScript that can decode and play these audio formats entirely in JavaScript.
Marco:
and that support MLT tag, these proper VBR seek methods, and if they didn't, it's an easy way for me to add support to this, because I could then have my site's web player switch to this, and then I would eliminate a lot of this problem.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
So I heard from one of the authors of this, Devin Govitt, we went back and forth a few times.
Marco:
Devin informed me that the Fraunhofer VBRI tag, which is an alternative version of that stupid 100-entry jump table, is basically a more precise version of that.
Marco:
It still has to fit within one MP3 frame, but instead of being 100 bytes, it can be like 1.3 kilobytes.
Marco:
So that's better.
Marco:
You have more space, more precision.
Marco:
So I did some experimentation with that.
Marco:
A couple problems came up, though.
Marco:
First, I discovered in the experimentation and going back and forth with Devin that not only does Apple's decoder not support the MLT or this VBRI tag that is the more precise version, even that stupid little 100-byte version in the Zing tag that we talked about last episode, Apple doesn't use it.
Marco:
Their decoder completely ignores it.
Marco:
It does read these tags to get the duration of the files.
Marco:
So it's parsing them, because the duration is also one of the fields in these tags.
Marco:
So it reads them for the duration, and if you edit them in a hex editor and you put any duration you want there, it'll show up in QuickLook and everything has that duration.
Marco:
So we know it's reading them, but it completely ignores any of the entries that are in these seek tables that tell it which byte maps to which timestamp.
Marco:
In any of these formats, it ignores all of them.
Marco:
This is bad.
Marco:
So I basically wrote up a bug report and I emailed some people inside Apple to say like, you know, like, hey, here's here's a problem having.
Marco:
And, you know, if if you guys would support really any of these formats, except for maybe that maybe the stupid 100 byte one.
Marco:
But if you'd support the Fraunhofer VBRI frame or the awesome MLT ID3 tag, either of those would provide usable precision for a two-hour podcast to be able to seek reliably within 1 to 10 seconds of the desired point, as opposed to the stupid 100-byte one, which is like a minute off, and their estimation, which could be any amount off, really, and is frequently like 30 to 60 seconds off.
Marco:
Anyway, so I emailed this around and I made a blog post.
Marco:
I basically made as much noise as possible about this issue because I've realized, and sorry for the massive diversion here, I like talking about ranty Apple stuff on a podcast where it doesn't get me in trouble and where you guys can tame me a little bit and rebut me.
Marco:
It's better for me to reserve my blog for issues of maybe greater importance or more boring topics or whatever else.
Marco:
My blog is a great way to spread a message to people who don't always follow me.
Marco:
And that is often the problem.
Marco:
Like when I get myself into hot water, it's often because a whole bunch of people who don't follow me and don't really get my context are
Marco:
are reading something that I didn't write very well and where I assume people would get my context and would understand me and they'd be the ones reading it.
Marco:
And that gets me into trouble.
Marco:
But something like this, like where I'm requesting that Apple implement an esoteric standard of the MP3 file format that's 20 years old, that is really boring and doesn't spread onto Business Insider or CNBC.
Marco:
And there's not much about it that's really controversial, although Hacker News found some things.
Marco:
But most people would not find this controversial.
Marco:
So this, I think, is a very good use of my blog, and it's helping inform me how I should use my various outlets going forward.
Marco:
Anyway, I filed a giant bug report with example files and examples of why their way of just ignoring these seek tables for long VBR MP3s was bad.
Marco:
Why that's bad, how you can fix it.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Nothing has happened yet on this front.
Marco:
However, I have gotten rumblings here and there that this bug report has traveled inside of Apple.
Marco:
But that's all I know.
Marco:
And I don't know anything else that's going on with it.
Marco:
It is probably too late.
Marco:
Even if Apple decided I was right and they wanted to do this, it is almost certainly too late to get it into iOS 10 or macOS Sierra.
Marco:
But I would just love for this to happen sometime soon.
Marco:
And the main reason why I can't do the audio cogs and the Aurora JS, like the JavaScript version that I was telling you about a minute ago, the HTML5 audio element can fetch a file from basically anywhere.
Marco:
But for JavaScript to fetch a file, you run into all these cores issues.
Marco:
And you can't cross from HTTPS to HTTP.
Marco:
There's all these restrictions for various web security purposes.
Marco:
All these restrictions on what JavaScript is allowed to fetch from.
Marco:
And for me to be able to play podcasts from arbitrary podcast hosts...
Marco:
I basically can't use this thing.
Marco:
I could run a proxy, but if I do that, then the podcasters don't get unique hit information, really.
Marco:
So that's no good.
Marco:
So there's a whole bunch of crappy reasons why, in practice, I can't use the JavaScript approach of just decoding the whole file in JavaScript and basically then running my own decoders.
Marco:
So I'm reliant on Apple.
Marco:
If podcast VBR is ever going to happen, Apple has to build it into their decoders.
Marco:
That's it.
Casey:
Well, but hold on.
Casey:
So a couple of questions here.
Casey:
First of all, let's assume you did desire to proxy it because this was that important to you for the web client.
Casey:
Why couldn't you proxy each request individually?
Casey:
I mean, it's a crud load of bandwidth, but is there any other reason why you couldn't do that?
Casey:
So at least all of these hits are unique.
Casey:
They're just coming from you and not the actual person that's asking for them.
Marco:
The main problem with that is that even if you architected the proxy such that every inbound request equaled one backend outbound request.
Casey:
Which would be silly in general, but in this case may make sense.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So even if you did that, the request would still appear to be all coming from one IP address.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
It's kind of a hotly debated topic in the podcast world of what counts as a download.
Marco:
As with most things, it's complicated.
Marco:
And so you can't just say, oh, well, every hit you get.
Marco:
Nope, doesn't work that way.
Marco:
Because a hit doesn't match up to a listener necessarily.
Marco:
So anyway, most podcast hosts have their own idea of what a download should count as.
Marco:
And most of them involve the IP address of the source in some way.
Marco:
So it might be like, you know, a unique download is like one IP or like the IP has to be unique within a certain time interval for it to count as a unique download or something like that.
Marco:
Like there's all these different tricks that people do.
Marco:
But basically, if all the requests came from my single IP that was running the proxy, it would not people's stats would undercount.
Marco:
That being said, I actually already wrote and run one such proxy.
Marco:
I already have this, that I designed exactly this way and that has exactly this problem.
Marco:
And the only reason that it's not really a problem, that it hasn't got me into any hot water with anybody, is because it's hardly ever used.
Marco:
And I designed it because Overcast has a Twitter card.
Marco:
On any share link, I have Twitter cards.
Marco:
And so if you view a tweet with an Overcast link on Twitter's website or...
Marco:
in any of their clients that support their cards, which is very few of them in practice.
Marco:
I show a whole little Overcast embedded player, and it works, and it's great.
Marco:
You can stream, you can do timestamps, it works perfectly.
Marco:
It's just like the website, but tiny.
Marco:
Twitter's cards require that all assets loaded through them must be served over HTTPS.
Marco:
So I actually have kind of like a little function, like a mapping, that many big podcast hosts, including Libsyn, our host...
Marco:
Many of them have, like, just, like, a simple, like, way that you can transform their insecure URLs into HTTPS URLs with, like, a simple string replacement on certain things and everything.
Marco:
So, like, some hosts I can just redirect.
Marco:
I can do a straight redirect, and it's fine.
Marco:
but not all hosts.
Marco:
And so I actually run this proxy that does this, that follows redirects.
Marco:
And when it's a host that it knows about, it can send you along.
Marco:
And when it's not, it does that proxy of one-to-one connection mapping exactly the way you'd think.
Marco:
And the only reason it isn't a problem for either my bandwidth costs or people getting mad at me is that the cards get pretty low usage, relatively speaking.
Marco:
Not a lot of people play podcasts that way as far as I know.
Marco:
So that's the only reason that works.
Marco:
And to answer GlassZ underscore in the chat room who said send them something like the X forwarded for header.
Marco:
I do send X forwarded for.
Marco:
That is a header that proxies use to tell what they're fetching from the IP of the person fetching it from them.
Marco:
So it's kind of a way to forward the source IP.
Marco:
The problem is you can't trust that.
Marco:
So if you have a podcast metrics thing that is trying to measure unique IPs in an honest fashion...
Marco:
You can't really trust if somebody sends you an X forwarded four header and you get a whole bunch of requests from one real IP, but that IP says, oh, I'm actually forwarding you these requests from these other 10,000 IPs.
Marco:
You really can't trust that for your purposes of stats that you tell sponsors.
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Casey:
So you had said before, well, if Apple just implements this, then you can start using it on the web because the HTML5 audio tag will support it, etc., etc.
Casey:
But what about your beloved Windows users?
Casey:
Or, you know, next year is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Casey:
So what about them?
Marco:
First of all, we don't have that many of them, honestly.
Marco:
Not a lot of people use Windows and use my app or follow the share links generated by my app or anything else.
Marco:
I would love to change that because there are a lot of Windows users out there.
Marco:
I would love for more Windows people to see the share links from Overcast because that would mean that the share links are being spread far and wide.
Marco:
And that's the whole point of the share links.
Marco:
But reality is different.
Marco:
Reality is that they really don't get much Windows usage at all.
Marco:
So that's problem number one or rather dodge number one where I can dodge this issue.
Marco:
Same reason why I never test my websites in IE because my audience and my customer bases tend to have such incredibly low IE or whatever IE is called now.
Marco:
What is it called now?
Marco:
Edge.
Marco:
Edge.
Marco:
Edge.
Marco:
Anyway, the main reason why I don't really need to care that much about this problem for other browsers other than things that use Apple's built-in decoders and my own app is because it's only a problem for seeking to timestamps that haven't been downloaded.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
In all other ways, VBR MP3s work great.
Marco:
already don't you have the same problem even if they added support for it that it doesn't matter because you have to wait for everyone to upgrade to an operating system that includes that support that the apple just added in practice yes but the amount of time i have to wait isn't that much especially for podcast listeners to a tech show like that's that's a pretty that's a pretty upgradey group like they we don't have to wait that long even on the mac i
Marco:
like ios probably like their upgrade curves are always pretty good but the mac upgrade curves have not been great like you wait a year and it'd be like 50 adoption which is better than windows but still for people who would see because again like i don't have to worry about users of my app i control my app i can update my app i have to worry about people who are going to see the share links
Marco:
Right now, the share links don't have big audiences.
Marco:
They get used some, and some people see them, and that's great.
Marco:
I want to make them bigger because I think podcast sharing could use help.
Marco:
I mean, everybody in podcasting thinks podcast sharing can use help.
Marco:
But here I am.
Marco:
I actually have something that does help, and I want it to get bigger and better.
Marco:
The reality is, even if...
Marco:
If Apple adds support, suppose it makes it into the next major versions of OS X and iOS, whatever.
Marco:
Not the ones coming out in a few weeks or whatever, but next year or in the spring or whatever else.
Marco:
It'll probably be about a year after that before I can reliably use it.
Marco:
Because at that point, it's going to be way more than half.
Marco:
Because first of all...
Marco:
The people who are seeing share links from social media are going to be way more likely to be on mobile than on a desktop.
Marco:
So the slower adoption curve on macOS is not going to be as big of a problem because it's going to be offset by the large proportion of those viewers who are going to be on iOS and Android, if anybody can tolerate me who's using Android, which is a big ask.
Marco:
So I think iOS will be updated faster, especially as Apple has figured out how to make people upgrade by adding emoji and messages tricks.
Marco:
So again, I think give it a year after they add support, and then I think almost anybody can responsibly do this, and it would be fine.
Marco:
podcast listening if anybody doesn't know rob walks the ceo of libsyn libsyn is a massive podcast host they've been around forever and they host a ton of podcasts including this one and if you listen to this they probably host a lot of other podcasts you listen to i'm pretty sure all of the relay fm shows are hosted there it's a it's a very big podcast host and
Marco:
And they do a podcast.
Marco:
I forget what it's called.
Marco:
I'll put it in the show notes.
Marco:
They do a podcast where it's like tips for podcasters.
Marco:
And then something like once a month, the CEO of Libsyn goes on there and gives stats of podcast user agents.
Marco:
Like what clients, what platforms are downloading podcasts.
Marco:
And Libsyn is a pretty good source of this because...
Marco:
They host so many podcasts across so many markets that it isn't just tech-heavy.
Marco:
Any stats I can give you on how people use Overcast is how Apple nerds who know who I am mostly use Overcast.
Marco:
The top podcasts in Overcast are mostly tech shows.
Marco:
But if you look at the top podcasts in the world, it's mostly not tech shows.
Marco:
So obviously, overcast usage is not representative of all podcasters out there.
Marco:
But Libsyn stats are really close, I think.
Marco:
I would say Libsyn stats are probably the best representation we have outside of Apple.
Marco:
And they're not talking of how podcasters behave in mass, what the overall market looks like.
Marco:
And the stats they give, I listen to this and I take notes every month.
Marco:
And so here, let me just pull this up here.
Marco:
So the most recent ones were stats for June.
Marco:
77% of listens were on mobile devices.
Marco:
And every month that number increases.
Marco:
So already very mobile heavy.
Marco:
iOS to Android is a little over three to one.
Marco:
And that ratio is going down.
Marco:
Android is becoming more popular now because people are finally building in, like Android vendors like Samsung are finally building in podcast clients.
Marco:
They weren't for a long time.
Marco:
And so that's adding a lot to the Android side.
Marco:
But so basically, you still have like more than three times as many people listening on iOS than Android.
Marco:
And and only like 22 percent of listeners listening on computers.
Marco:
So this is a very mobile heavy market and it's a very iOS heavy market.
Marco:
So that's why I think it's fairly responsible for a lot of podcasters, especially if you are in like the Apple tech world like we are, where your audience is going to be even more skewed towards recent Apple platforms.
Marco:
I think one year after they add support to this, it's totally safe to do.
Marco:
And I might even do it sooner.
John:
So do you feel optimistic about them actually adding support?
John:
Or do you feel like it's going to be two years before this bug is closed as it behaves correctly?
Marco:
When I filed this bug in my bug reporter, it was next to two other bugs that have been open forever.
Marco:
I'm lucky if I get a response.
Marco:
I don't file that many bugs with Apple because the effort on my side to feedback and potential benefit I will get from that ratio is so terrible.
Marco:
This took the better part of two days to do the research properly, to figure out that Apple didn't even support these tags at all.
Marco:
I thought they were supporting at least the crappy one.
Marco:
They supported none of them.
Marco:
To modify these test files, to write these tags properly and everything, took a lot of work.
Marco:
To write a bug report, give proper test coverage and everything, it takes a lot of time, a lot of work.
Marco:
And usually I file bugs and they go nowhere.
Marco:
If I'm lucky,
Marco:
they might be closed as a duplicate.
Marco:
And when they're closed as a duplicate, I believe I then lose any visibility on that.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
I think they changed it recently.
Marco:
Anyway, so the feedback loop is terrible for filing bugs for Apple.
Marco:
People who do it are good people.
Marco:
They probably floss.
Marco:
They're probably very good people.
Marco:
I have a hard time doing it most of the time because, again, I see what happens with the few bugs I do file and they sit around forever and they don't even get closed.
Marco:
And the few that do get closed are often closed in a way that I consider invalid.
Marco:
Like, you know, they'll do something like, we're going to close this unless you tell us really soon that this is still happening on the newest build of iOS for a bug that I filed like, you know, six months ago that is easily testable.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
They clearly have a wide variety of quality of people who go through the bug reports, and many of them clearly just want to close as many as possible without actually doing any work.
Marco:
The incentives are wrong there.
John:
Are you saying you don't floss?
Marco:
So anyway, I usually don't file bugs because I've had a poor history of any response from Apple on bugs.
Marco:
But this time I filed it because I figured basically there's nothing else I can do.
Marco:
I can't work around this.
Marco:
I mentioned the JavaScript thing.
Marco:
I tried doing the JavaScript thing, but because of all the cores restrictions...
Marco:
it makes it pretty much impossible to use for an arbitrary set of hosts that you don't control, most of which don't send cores permission headers already.
Marco:
So that's a non-starter.
Marco:
I could write my own decoder in my app that calculates these offsets,
Marco:
But that's only one app.
Marco:
And so to make something like even our podcast that you would think, you know, what percentage of people who download our podcast do you think listen in Overcast?
Marco:
And a lot of people would probably guess it's a pretty high ratio.
Marco:
And it is compared to Overcast global ratio.
Marco:
I haven't looked recently, but I think it's something like 60%.
Marco:
That's still 40% of our listeners who don't listen in Overcast who wouldn't have, who would need compatibility in this way, you know, for seeking in streams.
Marco:
The reason I'm following this bug is that it's my last hope to get VBR MP3s to be a thing.
Marco:
I think they'd be great if they were a thing.
Marco:
I think it's ridiculous that they aren't a thing yet.
Marco:
But if there's any hope of them being a thing, it's basically on Apple to do.
Marco:
Because if Apple doesn't do it, nobody else can and nobody else will.
John:
Did you make a strong recommendation that they implement a specific one of these?
John:
Because if you just said, oh, here are all these things you don't support, I can imagine them supporting that terrible one that only gives you 100 points and then being like, done, closed, fixed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
My bug report actually reads a lot like the blog post.
Marco:
I wrote the bug report first and then edited it to be a blog post.
Marco:
But basically, it's a similar format.
Marco:
And I gave the three options and I said, you don't parse any of these right now.
Marco:
This old one is not precise enough.
Marco:
Don't use this.
Marco:
So I said basically the MLT tag would be the ideal one to do because it can be arbitrary length and arbitrary precision.
Marco:
So that's the ideal one.
Marco:
If you only pick one, pick that one.
Marco:
The Fraunhofer VBRI tag, that's like 1.3 kilobytes worth of stuff.
Marco:
That's a good second choice.
Marco:
If you do that, I'll be happy.
Marco:
But the best one to do would be the MLT tag.
John:
I wonder if they don't support it, not out of laziness, because like you said, they are actually parsing the durations out of them, but kind of for the same reason related to something else you said, why web hosts can't trust X forwarded for.
John:
Maybe they're afraid it's going to be filled with garbage data, and then they're afraid to expose exploits in there, like a buffer overflow or something, because they put crazy offsets in there, and then...
John:
trigger a bug who knows I don't know the type of thing where it is or they just don't trust the encoders to put good data in there they don't want to try to read garbage data these are all solvable problems like you know make your make your thing not have silly buffer overflows and sanity check the the offsets in the map and make sure they seem reasonable
John:
before blindly following them and maybe disregard it if it looks like line noise.
John:
But I do wonder, because someone did have to write the code to pull these durations out of there, why do they do that?
John:
And like, while I'm in there, why don't I just actually parse this whole format and just implement it, you know?
Marco:
So, I mean, your concerns are totally valid.
Marco:
And I can completely understand how, like...
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an engineering meeting at Apple some ridiculous amount of time ago.
Marco:
Somebody was like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
We could parse these things out, but the data might be wrong.
Marco:
And if we just do this percentage of time to byte offset thing, kind of like a dumb approximation, that'll be close enough and it'll be consistent.
Marco:
And so there is, you know, there is a school of thought that says, like, you should, you know, you should override the stupid MP3 encoders because who knows what garbage you're going to get there.
Marco:
And you should just do your thing.
Marco:
But and, you know, just make it so that it works.
Marco:
It's kind of close for short songs.
Marco:
And then it doesn't matter anymore.
Marco:
It's good enough for scrubber work.
John:
Like they want the scrubber like when you're moving a scrubber around anyway, it's probably like an inch on some web page and you can't tell if it's like what pixel it's on or whatever.
John:
But for your specific use case, which is no, no, no, I'm not.
John:
Someone's not dragging a scrubber here.
John:
I'm putting an offset in a URL down to the second and I want that precision out of it.
Marco:
say hey youtube does it you should do it too exactly yeah like so you know that there is an argument to be made there but you know a they're already reading the duration of these tags even if they have the whole file they still read the duration from that header and so if you put a garbage duration as i did during testing it says all right yeah sure this file is you know nine minutes long instead of an hour like it's happy to use that value so like it's already trusting it on some level also like
Marco:
MP3 encoders don't change that much.
Marco:
There's very few that are actually in active use today.
Marco:
And they all write good data.
Marco:
This isn't 1997 anymore.
Marco:
We have solved the MP3 encoder problem.
Marco:
MP3 encoders work, and they work well.
Marco:
And no one else besides me is going in with a hex editor and messing with these values.
Marco:
You're not going to get total garbage on a regular basis.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
what's what's more likely to have happened is that maybe these decoders were written a very long time ago maybe around that time frame when the world of mp3 was still very much in flux and you had crappy encoders um in like the late 90s and maybe they just haven't revisited it since then because there wasn't a reason to that is the more that is the way more likely explanation for this is like
Marco:
This is very old code that no one has had any justification to touch for a long time.
Marco:
It works it well enough.
Marco:
So fine.
Marco:
And that's why I think ultimately it probably won't get done, because I would be surprised if anybody was really motivated to devote, you know, a limit.
Marco:
People have limited time.
Marco:
So who's going to devote time to this out of their engineering time budget inside Apple when they might have more pressing things to worry about with supporting the new Bluetooth headphones on the next iPhone?
Marco:
If anything else these people could be working on is probably more important than this to Apple's overall corporate goals.
John:
You're just supposed to be using AAC anyway.
John:
It's the future.
John:
Just use a different container format, and the offset things can be all at the front of the file.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I love that Hacker News thread, though.
John:
Just use a different container format.
John:
Doesn't that solve all your problems?
John:
Yeah, that was the best, yeah.
John:
All the existing container formats are bad, but just invent your own.
John:
Doesn't that solve all your problems?
John:
And then, I guess, make every encoder on the planet understand your new container format.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Yeah, this has been a lot of time on this topic.
Marco:
I'm sorry to everybody who doesn't care.
Marco:
You probably tuned out long ago, but we actually got a decent response on it.
Marco:
People actually enjoyed hearing about all this crap.
Marco:
I'm very surprised by that, actually.
Marco:
But I guess our listeners are both cooler and geekier than I would have assumed.
Casey:
They're definitely cooler.
Casey:
Geekier?
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
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Casey:
So, John, if the cell signal at your house is so crappy, why not enable Wi-Fi calling and solve all your problems?
John:
The first reason I didn't enable this is I didn't think my carrier supported it, but I was just looking at the wrong place in settings.
John:
For some reason, I had it in my head that only AT&T supported this and not Verizon, but now Verizon supports it too.
John:
Of course, I've never gotten where the setting is.
John:
But anyway, it's in there somewhere.
John:
You can find it.
John:
But the second thing is when I turned it on, I'm like, okay, I'll turn this on and give it a try.
John:
It makes you enter your physical address because once you're on Wi-Fi calling, if you call 911, 911 can't immediately tell where you are because you're coming from the Internet, essentially, and they can't get a location for you, which is kind of weird because you can get locations from Wi-Fi base stations and everything.
John:
A lot of things use that big map of base station MAC addresses to physical locations and stuff to help you.
John:
aid location awareness but anyway what iOS says is please enter a physical location so when you call 911 if you can't if you're too injured to speak into the phone or whatever don't worry they will come to this address but of course that means that if you go someplace else and you're on Wi-Fi say you're at work and you're on Wi-Fi and you call 911 and don't get a chance to tell them where you are they're going to go to your house that's my understanding anyway of what this message is telling me enter this address here if you call 911 this is where people will go to
John:
uh but i didn't want to enable it because i'm like well then i have to remember to turn off wi-fi calling when i leave my house because then if i call 911 people will go to my house instead of where i am um so that's one reason why i didn't leave it on and the second reason is this is the stupidest reason that that reason i think is only vaguely silly but this reason is really dumb but nevertheless is a reason everyone has their reasons this is mine it changes the thing that appears in the status bar to make some ugly thing that says like
Casey:
vzw whatever it doesn't say like the verizon the little wi-fi fan symbol it says different words like in all caps and it looks ugly i don't like it that's a reason like i can understand even though i think it's a little ridiculous the whole address thing fine whatever but because you don't want to look at vzw in your status bar that's your reason you try it turn it on and see what it does to your status bar
Casey:
I use AT&T like a gentleman, and so it says AT&T Wi-Fi.
Casey:
But it gets rid of the fan thing, doesn't it?
John:
Or maybe it doesn't.
John:
It changes what's in the status bar.
John:
I didn't like it.
John:
The location one is the larger reason, but I was kind of glad that I had a legit reason so I didn't have to look at that ugly status bar anymore.
John:
It would be nice if like an iOS enhancement would be an iOS enhancement would be only use Wi-Fi calling when connected to this base station.
John:
I would like that setting.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Because then I could say use Wi-Fi calling when connected to my home base station, but never anyplace else.
John:
And then I don't have to worry about this.
John:
Then I could set my home address to my home base station.
John:
um but no and anyway uh after i made the decision i made a couple of successful voice call calls from my house where people could actually hear my voice so maybe uh verizon loves me for coming back to them and not using this filthy internet calling wow okay uh all right well i don't even know what to make of that that yeah that's
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Graham Spencer has indicated that Google and Facebook and others also do a charity match on bug bounties.
Casey:
So just FYI.
John:
And did it before Apple.
John:
Most people didn't write in to gloat about how all these other companies did it before Apple, but they totally did.
John:
Do you have any actual topics tonight, or is this all follow-up?
Casey:
We're getting there.
John:
There's topics down there, believe me.
John:
Don't worry, we've got another podcast in like two days.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true too.
Casey:
And somebody had to go all deep on the MP3 stuff, but actually it's very entertaining and I enjoyed it, so I shouldn't give you a hard time.
Marco:
Anyway... Yeah, imagine how much dead space we'd have in the topics and everything this week if I didn't do that.
Marco:
Fair.
Marco:
You don't know what's lurking down there in topics.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff.
Casey:
Is there more about TiVo?
Casey:
Yes, there is, actually.
Casey:
Really?
Really?
Casey:
Yes, I'm so excited.
Casey:
I'm so overjoyed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, hopefully we'll run long enough that we won't get there.
Casey:
I mean, anyway, let me tell you about my iMac.
Casey:
It has been rebooted.
Casey:
I did it on purpose.
Casey:
It ran 21 days on the stock RAM.
Casey:
And without a UPS.
Casey:
And without a UPS.
Casey:
I've gotten in contact with Max Sales OWC, whatever they call themselves, and have requested and am told that I'm receiving a RMA, a return merchandise authorization, as I think that stands for.
Casey:
So I think what they're doing is sending me a box to send the RAM back in, and they said they will replace it post-haste.
Casey:
I have plugged it into the UPS.
Casey:
I have pulled the UPS power and seen the iMac stay on for at least long enough to make me feel better about myself.
Casey:
I did not leave it disconnected long enough to see whether or not the Synology would be smart enough to shut itself down, but I believe I have those settings squared away in the Synology, so it should shut itself down gracefully.
Casey:
The iMac won't, but I'm used to that at this point anyway.
Casey:
So anyway, I am running still on the 8 gigs of stock RAM until I receive my new batch of OWC RAM.
Casey:
I will try that.
Casey:
If that doesn't work, then I will probably very politely but very sternly ask for my money back and get Crucial RAM, which the entire internet has written to tell me is the only RAM I should ever really buy.
John:
I don't think Crucial buys any different RAM than OWC.
John:
I forget, someone at one point sent me a long email telling me about the different bins of who buys the good chips versus the cheaper chips, and I think Crucial was in the same bin with OWC.
John:
But anyway, I've bought OWC RAM for years, and like I said,
John:
I think the last time I had OWC thing go bad, the chip, because my computer is ancient, the chip, the RAM dim was like four years old, five years old, maybe it was six years old.
John:
Whatever it is, I just assumed, well, it's so old, whatever warranty or whatever they had must be completely gone by now.
John:
But I just called them up and they said, we'll send you a new one.
John:
That's it.
John:
I don't know if they have a forever lifetime.
John:
If this RAM ever goes bad, they'll just replace it forever and ever.
John:
And I know it's a hassle to return.
John:
If you have to keep returning it, it's a pain, but...
Marco:
i've had them last for years and years and then go bad years later and they just send me a new one uh it's i think it's like miraculous like try doing that with a hard drive for example hey my hard drive died after six years can i get a new one ha no i mean like almost all ram has a lifetime guarantee like almost all around that you would buy separately from a computer like yourself they almost all have lifetime guarantees um but it's you know it's up to the retailer or the manufacturer to make that a good or bad experience if you actually have to claim it
Marco:
And I, too, have had only good experiences with OWC RAM.
Marco:
I don't use it anymore.
Marco:
Now I just buy my computers with enough RAM from Apple because I'd rather just not deal with it anymore.
Marco:
And the OWC RAM, when I was using it, which was up until like two years ago, was always great.
Marco:
I had to return it one time.
Marco:
And that was one time in something like eight years of using it.
Marco:
I think it's pretty good.
Casey:
Yeah, and I mean, they've been really good about it so far.
Casey:
I didn't expressly reach out to them.
Casey:
They reached out to me via Twitter.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear how they caught wind of the fact that I was having issues, but they just basically said, hey, can you send us an email and we'll talk about it?
Casey:
And I said, hey, here's the situation.
Casey:
And I spelled it out and said, you know, it had been rebooting every week.
Casey:
Look at this.
Casey:
It's now running for 20 some days at this point.
Casey:
I feel like it's the RAM.
Casey:
So they said, yep, you're probably right.
Casey:
I will get you an RMA and we will replace it immediately.
Marco:
I don't know how they heard about this.
Marco:
I just I just told 80,000 people about it for a month and somebody told them.
Casey:
Well, but what I mean is I don't recall having seen anyone like mention me and them on Twitter.
Casey:
Maybe that did happen and I just missed it.
Casey:
But it seemed like they came out of the woodwork as opposed to somebody tagging them to kind of wave the flag in their face and say, hey, you should pay attention over here.
Casey:
So I'm not sure how that came to be.
Casey:
But, you know, hey, I'm happy that they reached out.
Casey:
I'm happy that they seem to be more than happy to replace the RAM.
Casey:
Because, I mean, like you were saying earlier, I bought this RAM in January.
Casey:
I looked up my order number, and I forget when it was in January, but it was still January.
Casey:
I mean, that was...
Casey:
somewhat long ago and i guess you know most things have a year warranty but i don't know it it it's nice of them to not fight me on it because i'm used to most retailers being like well are you sure it's the ram why don't you take it to apple first yeah etc etc etc and they were like no no no send it back we'll get your ram so like i said you didn't have to wait for someone to hear it and tweet you it you could have just called them on the phone all you got to do is tell them you have bad ram and notice that like last time i called for mine like i said it was years after i bought it i said
John:
I've got a bad dim.
John:
I said, OK, read me the serial number.
John:
OK, we'll send you a box like that was it.
John:
There was not even give them a reason it was dead.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I truly hand on heart was planning on calling sometime this week.
Casey:
And then right as I decided, no, it's been long enough.
Casey:
I'm happy.
Casey:
Well, I'm not happy, but I am satisfied with my my scientific experiment that around that time when I had finally concluded that was the case, that's when they reached out.
Casey:
We're like, hey, what's happening?
Casey:
So that was my plan.
Casey:
Marco, I am deeply sorry, but I have to ask John.
Casey:
Tell me about TiVo Lifetime Service, please.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Automatic, the small adapter that turns your clunker into a smarter, connected car.
Marco:
Go to automatic.com slash ATP for more info.
Marco:
Automatic has just launched the Automatic Pro, their new unlimited 3G car adapter.
Marco:
with no monthly fees and no subscription and no service charges.
Marco:
You just pay once upfront for the Automatic Pro and you don't pay anything per month to use their services and their abilities.
Marco:
Now, the Automatic Pro includes always there 3G connectivity to let you know where your vehicle is parked at any time and let you track your vehicle in case of theft.
Marco:
And of course, this builds on what Automatic has been doing for years.
Marco:
It works with If This Then That for endless customization, connecting your car for the rest of your life.
Marco:
You can do things like automatically turn on your Nest thermostats when you're nearing your home, and of course, tons of other abilities that you can do using If This Then That and the Automatic API.
Marco:
In addition, of course, Automatic provides the built-in functions they always have, things like gas mileage tracking, reaching your goals for fuel economy,
Marco:
tracking your expenses for businesses.
Marco:
So it integrates with apps such as Concur and Expensify to be able to track costs associated with your driving.
Marco:
There is so much you can do with Automatic and, of course, now with Automatic Pro.
Marco:
It has always-on 3G connectivity, which makes so many of these things even better and possible.
Marco:
automatic can also call for help in case of a crash it detects severe accidents and if you aren't able to respond a trained responder will call for help because you can't now automatic is normally 129.95 but when you use our exclusive offer code atp you'll save 20 bucks so it makes it about 110 great deal no monthly fees after that you again you buy it up front and that's it you don't pay per month to use these services
Marco:
So go to automatic.com slash ATP for more information and use offer code ATP to save $20 off the regular purchase price.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to automatic, the smart car adapter for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Once again, uh,
Casey:
John, go ahead and tell us about TiVo.
John:
You're saved by real-time follow-up.
John:
Someone just tweeted at me from the Verizon Wi-Fi calling fact.
John:
When using Wi-Fi calling, 911 calls will always try cellular service in the local market first, even when the device is in airplane mode or cellular service is off.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Now I'm back to just the status bar, I suppose.
Casey:
Which is a silly reason.
John:
I'll think about it.
John:
I'll think about it.
John:
I don't like getting phone calls at home anyway.
John:
And I have a landlord.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I should take a screenshot of that status bar.
John:
We can – Mark can switch the show art to it so you can just see what a horror it actually is.
John:
All right, TiVo.
John:
The news today about TiVo, not really that big news, but apparently TiVo is discontinuing service for the TiVo Series 1.
John:
TiVo Series 1 that was introduced in 1999.
John:
And what they mean by discontinuing is it will no longer get any guide updates or anything.
John:
So you can still watch shows that are recorded on it, but you can't record any new ones because they won't know when anything is on.
John:
And it doesn't work like a VCR.
John:
We can do it manually anyway.
John:
And it's because they're changing the format of the guide data, probably modernizing it in some way that we would be horrified to learn about if we knew exactly what they were feeding because of these Tivo Series 1.
John:
Tivo Series 1 was an analog device.
John:
It recorded video from analog sources.
John:
It was pre-digital.
John:
And of course, standard def because it was all analog.
John:
I didn't know that you could still use a TiVo Series 1.
John:
I thought they were already non-functional entirely, but apparently... Like semaphore flags?
John:
How does that even work?
John:
If you had a TiVo Series 1 and your 16-year-old hard drive, or maybe a hard drive you replaced it because you can do third-party hard drive replacements or whatever...
John:
We're still using it to record analog standard FTV.
John:
They're terminating your service.
John:
This is even if you bought, quote unquote, lifetime service.
John:
That's what the story about this.
John:
The tweet is like, oh, I bought lifetime service.
John:
But now, you know, I'm still alive and the box is still alive.
John:
But somehow the service is ending.
John:
So the tweet was TiVo Series 1 lifetime, in scare quotes, service lasted about 16 years.
John:
And for this inconvenience, TiVo is offering you a $75 prepaid Visa card.
John:
So you get $75.
John:
If you held on and kept using your TiVo Series 1 for this long, and they say there are 3,500 of these Series 1s still in use, which is a small number, but, you know.
John:
Anyway, I can't believe that there wasn't some fine print written to the lifetime service that says,
John:
After 16 years, we reserved the right to turn off the service.
John:
Maybe you should buy a new DVR.
John:
But I salute the people who are out there still using it.
John:
I never expected lifetime service.
John:
I have lifetime service on all my TiVo boxes, but I replaced the boxes long before I get to the lifetime service thing.
John:
TiVo used to be better about letting you transfer the lifetime service for some nominal fee or for free to another device to encourage you to upgrade or whatever, but those days are mostly gone and the deals have been getting worse.
John:
Anyway, I just thought this was funny that there are actually people out there still using a Series 1 DVR.
John:
I don't think I have any piece of electronics in my house online.
John:
that is 16 years old and still working, including smoke detectors, telephones, microwave maybe.
John:
I think my, as discussed in a recent reconciled with everyone, I think my microwave may be more than 16 years old, but I should look at the data on the back of it.
John:
I should see exactly how old it is.
John:
But other than that, no DVR, so that's for sure.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
We had spoken a few episodes ago about Twitter verification because all three of us are now verified.
Casey:
And a friend of the show, Brianna Wu, has been verified now in the last week or so.
Casey:
And apparently it's made everything immensely better.
Casey:
Brianna tweeted a couple of days ago as we record this fact that
Casey:
I have not seen a single death threat or rape threat since being verified and getting the, quote, quality filter, quote.
Casey:
Everyone should have this.
Casey:
Funny how that works.
Marco:
Yeah, that's exactly it.
Marco:
I mean, like we talked last time, like I joked, like we have computers now, like any computational overhead of offering this to everybody, like that's totally worth it.
Marco:
And, you know, we've since heard a little bit more discussion from various other places about it.
Marco:
It seems like the gist of the problem here is not that turning this on would be
Marco:
computationally expensive for everybody.
Marco:
Fundamentally, Twitter is very, very tied to the idea internally, politically, that this should be this kind of open platform and that there should be no filters by default.
Marco:
And that's a really nice theory.
Marco:
So is communism.
Marco:
But in practice, these things don't work quite that well.
Marco:
It is really ideal, and that would be nice, and it worked that way for a while, and that's cool, but the reality is the harassment problem is very big and very real.
Marco:
that wonderful world where anybody could tweet anybody and and they would see it by default um i think that's a nice idea like blog comments like that's a nice idea but you know in practice it doesn't work in practice there's lots of problems with that so i maintain that this should you know that that the the quality filter feature that is available to verified twitter accounts not only should be available to everybody but i'd even say it should be on by default
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
John:
Yeah, I don't know why you wouldn't have it on by default.
John:
I guess the idea is that maybe the filter is bad and things will accidentally get filtered out, but it's not like Gmail has spam filtering off by default.
John:
Of course it's not by default.
John:
Sometimes things end up in your spam folder when they shouldn't be in there, but no one would say the correct default is off.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't get it.
Casey:
Finally, in follow-up, over an hour in, a few people have taken me to task for saying in the last episode, or maybe it was one of the recent episodes, that I was not satisfied with Apple's diversity numbers, particularly with ethnicities and how many white employees Apple has as opposed to other races.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And what I'd said was, you know, hey, this is really unfortunate.
Casey:
And it looks like as I look up these numbers again, 56% of Apple is white as they self-report today.
Casey:
And a lot of people said in various degrees of obnoxiousness, well, what's the appropriate amount of diversity?
Casey:
Because the country is, and I don't have those numbers in front of me, but something like 60% or 70% white.
Casey:
So if they're less white than America, then what's the problem?
Yeah.
Casey:
And I don't have any simple answer for that.
Casey:
It's something I hadn't considered, and it's a fair point.
Casey:
But I would point out that not all of Apple is in America, and so that probably should be factored in as well.
Casey:
But I think...
Casey:
The biggest thing to me was that Apple seems to have made not a lot of change from just a couple of years ago when they started reporting this, which I admire.
Casey:
They didn't make that much change, yet it seems like the thing that was completely unacceptable a couple of years ago is now, look at us and how wonderful we are.
Casey:
And that just seems kind of weird to me.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys had any thoughts on this, but that's basically the thing that I still stand by, which is it hasn't gotten that much better.
Casey:
Why are we really celebrating it like it's completely turned around?
Marco:
So before we let John tell us the truth and why this is, you know... Before we let John basically rock this and do everything correctly, I will just kind of speak for myself and for, I think, a lot of people who listen to this kind of stuff and who see these kind of things.
Marco:
I know, having been just in the area of people discussing this for a while now...
Marco:
I know now that it is never that simple.
Marco:
And so when you throw out a stat like, well, you know, America is X percent white, and so that's fine.
Marco:
It is usually not that simple.
Marco:
And so I know to keep my mouth shut with things like that.
Marco:
Because I know... I'll hear something like that, and I'll be like, yeah, that might make logical sense when you read it in 140 characters, but I bet there's more to the issue than that.
Marco:
And so it's important...
Marco:
When you are responding to people, not you, Casey, but you, the public, and I'm talking to myself too, don't just jump to a conclusion like that because chances are the issue is way more complicated than that.
Marco:
So, John, tell us why.
John:
I was going to start getting into the thing, but I'm basically on what you just said.
John:
That's something I always notice on Twitter, and we all notice it to some degree, whether we're doing it ourselves or we see other people doing it.
John:
where people will start from a premise and then start throwing out facts in support of that.
John:
And that's fine, right?
John:
Because why wouldn't you, you know, this is what you think.
John:
And so you will find facts that support what you think, and then you will list those facts.
John:
But it's always important to kind of ask yourself,
John:
Why, like, why am I seeking out the facts that I can find that align with this thing that I already think?
John:
Like, am I actually thinking about the situation or am I merely just trying to find something that will support my ability?
John:
So maybe, I mean, this is, you know, it's not universally true, but perhaps someone who was telling Casey, hey, you said this percentage was bad, but it's about...
John:
the ratio of the, you know, the people in the United States, you'd have to go look up the ratio of the people in the United States.
John:
And you could do this.
John:
This is a bad example because they're probably completely intellectually honest in this.
John:
But a lot of times you see an issue come up and people immediately go looking for something they can throw out that supports their thing.
John:
Never really asking, why am I so desperate to find things that support this rather than, you know, looking at the
John:
looking at the issue from first principles or understanding the wider context because there'll always be things especially you know statistics that can help support one side or the other but if you're only ever looking for and saying repeatedly to anyone who mentions anything about the topic the few facts you have in your back pocket that support the one thing that you care about you probably are missing the larger issue and what you're really missing more is why is it so important to you that your current view of this be exactly correct um so anyway as for these specific stats
John:
I don't know.
John:
I thought the stats were just U.S.
John:
only.
John:
So I think there are percentages for, you know, white employees that are actually accurate to the United States.
John:
The United States has that percentage of the population.
John:
And then that's there.
John:
You know, so I thought that was an apt comparison.
John:
But like Marco said, it's never quite that simple because, you know, especially with statistics, you can they're taking like all their employees.
John:
Right.
John:
And all U.S.
John:
employees.
John:
Apple employs a lot of people and not all those jobs are the same.
John:
If you start looking at different sections of employees, the percentages, I think they do this, don't they break it down on the page?
John:
The percentages will change, you know, pretty dramatically by five to 10%, maybe even more.
John:
If you look at, like, the top level of the org chart, director level, C-level executives, they're not 56% white, right?
John:
So, and then all the way down to look at engineering versus QA versus retail versus, you know, all the different categorizations.
John:
If you lump them all together, it's nice to get a nice aggregate, but you don't know what the pieces are, right?
John:
And so Apple's not trying to mislead anybody there.
John:
They're not going to break down their hiring and their employees by individual job level and location and, well, what is the population in the state of Maryland and what are the retail employees in the state of Maryland and what about, you know, like it's just –
John:
they're not going to do that right but that is apple's job internally to work on this problem because if their overall numbers happen to work out to the same percentage of the united states but it's only because like all the leaders of the company are white men and all the rest of the company are not that's not that you're not you're not achieving your goal of diversity right your goal is not to make a bunch of numbers match a bunch of other numbers you can always pick numbers to make you look better or worse and
John:
To some degree, Apple may be doing that in the high-level numbers that are up there, but that's not the goal of the thing.
John:
Apple is not an amorphous blob of people that can bind to one Uber person.
John:
They're a bunch of individual people, and you want to know, if I get a job at Apple, what are my chances of...
John:
You know, being in charge of all software at Apple.
John:
What are my chances of raising a rising to the level of the org chart where I'm taking meetings with with Tim Cook and stuff?
John:
What you know, what are my odds of becoming an engineering manager or leading whatever?
John:
And if you look around you at Apple and it's like, gee, everybody who's an engineering manager is a white dude and everyone in the board meetings is a white dude.
John:
and everybody who's on stage at wwc is a white dude as as you know to a first approximation that was the case not too many years ago and you know like i said even now that the high levels of the company are like that um maybe you feel like oh sure i can get a job at an apple store they're good at it but like can i you know do i feel like this company is uh is giving equal opportunity to everybody and that's what apple is working towards and i don't think they've yet achieved it which is why they keep putting out these numbers
John:
So, as Casey said, if these numbers that were given are these big aggregates and they haven't changed that much from from year to year just shows they're making slow progress.
John:
Right.
John:
And so it's not phenomenal progress, but it certainly doesn't mean because you can say 56 percent is less than 60 percent.
John:
Therefore, they're done.
John:
Absolutely doesn't mean that because.
John:
It doesn't take much thinking to realize, well, that's just a big, arrogant number.
John:
And it's not that's not the goal.
John:
The goal is not to simply people are asking that, like honestly asking, like, what is the goal?
John:
What numbers are you supposed to see here to let you know that Apple has achieved its goal of diversity?
John:
And the answer is those numbers are never going to tell you that.
John:
Right.
John:
Otherwise, you know, they wouldn't they wouldn't be continuing along this path.
John:
They would just say, well, we're done.
John:
We've accomplished our goal.
John:
Isn't that great?
John:
Right.
John:
Um, and that's before you even get into details of like percentage of us population versus percentage of us population of working age, like not babies, not children, not retired people, you know, so it's numbers are complicated, but I, anyway, I'm, I'm confident that Apple understands the problem before them and is working towards it.
John:
Um, just, just as I am, uh, not particularly tied to the specific numbers they throw out on these pages.
John:
All we're basically looking for is, uh,
John:
Are the little graphs they put up going in an upward direction?
John:
Do they have enough of them every year so that they show they're making progress?
John:
And how fast is that progress?
John:
What do the slopes look like?
John:
Yeah, that's about it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, we are out of follow-up.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Betterment, Tracker, and Automatic.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Casey:
and if you're into twitter you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they didn't
Casey:
I want you to talk about the Intel fab thing.
John:
That's a topic.
John:
Can we make that quick?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Let's dig down what we have here.
John:
What do we have for an after show then?
Casey:
We can do Instagram stories.
John:
Instagram stories is a good idea because that's fluffy.
Marco:
Yeah, it's this thing that appeared on top of Instagram recently that's confusing all the old people like me.
John:
You're not that old.
John:
Your wife's face is always up there.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
She figured it out very quickly because she is younger at heart and also biologically than I am.
Marco:
I am too old.
Marco:
What, three months?
Marco:
I think like six.
Marco:
About six, yeah.
Marco:
So I am too old to understand Snapchat.
Marco:
So Instagram has basically cloned a major part of Snapchat into the Instagram interface, which has just confused Instagram for me.
Marco:
And now I have this row of heads on top of Instagram, and I tap them and weird things happen.
Marco:
And I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing with this.
Marco:
Can you explain it to me?
Casey:
So, John, I don't think I've seen any posts from you yet.
Casey:
So you are not producing using this, although I presume you're at least consuming it.
Casey:
Is that fair?
John:
Yeah, I don't see myself ever making one of these videos, but they're up there and they tap on the faces.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So the idea here, from what I can understand, as someone who's never used Snapchat and didn't really have any interest in Snapchat, is...
Casey:
With Instagram stories, you can take a photo or a video that is semi-ephemeral.
Casey:
So I believe it's after a day they will self-destruct and your phone explodes.
Casey:
It's very inconvenient.
Casey:
No, they'll self-destruct and then they won't be available anymore.
Casey:
Not to you, not to anyone else.
Casey:
And so the idea is if your Instagram profile and the photos that you post on Instagram proper...
Casey:
is the like super staged, super deliberate, super serious version of you.
Casey:
Instagram stories, which is this ephemeral thing, is more of the candid, fun-loving, like, hey, here's the real me, take it or leave it sort of thing.
Casey:
And I actually wanted to call out the latest episode of Connected, which is episode 103.
Casey:
The host did a really incredible job of talking about kind of what the motivations are behind Instagram stories and how it's different than…
Casey:
than regular Instagram.
Casey:
But regardless, I've really been enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would as someone who had not even the slightest interest in Snapchat.
Casey:
And one of the common complaints about Snapchat that I've understood is that anyone who is over the age of about 18 finds the interface completely inscrutable.
Casey:
And everything is gesture-based.
Casey:
And as much as we all hate tutorials as you install an app for the first time,
Casey:
This is one of those instances where a tutorial or walkthrough or onboarding would have perhaps been useful in Snapchat because everything's gesture-based, nothing's obvious, everything's weird.
Casey:
In Instagram, there's a little bit of that in Instagram stories, but it's not nearly as bad.
Casey:
And I was able to figure it out pretty quickly.
Casey:
And I classify myself as an old man just as much as you two are.
Casey:
And I've been enjoying both consuming and creating.
Casey:
Um, one of the things I've wondered as I consider whether or not to post a new entry in my Instagram story, which sounds super cheesy, but anyway, um, one of the things I've been considering is why would anyone else give a crap about this?
Casey:
So like, as an example, I was going to take a picture of my setup at work and, you know, after having obscured the sensitive parts of what was on my computer screen and
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, I don't think anyone really gives a crap.
Casey:
And so while I was at the beach, you know, I'm on vacation.
Casey:
We that's exciting and kind of cool or whatever.
Casey:
I had posted a handful of times then.
Casey:
But now that I'm back on my normal grind, well, it's not my normal high roller.
Casey:
You know, look at me.
Casey:
I'm so awesome life.
Casey:
It's my normal grind.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I don't know if I'll be producing that much or posting that often from now until the next time I do something interesting.
Casey:
But I really like the idea.
Casey:
And I echo what Mike had said on Connected.
Casey:
And he's talked about it.
Casey:
And he and I both have talked about this on Analog as well.
Casey:
Instagram is kind of my happy social network.
Casey:
I get a lot out of Twitter and I enjoy Twitter, but Twitter is nevertheless kind of a dumpster fire where I cannot remember a time that Instagram has made me anything but happy.
Casey:
And even with stories, it makes me happy in a different way because it's kind of the fun ephemeral, you know, hey, it's not going to be perfect and that's okay because life isn't perfect.
Casey:
And it's brought, and this is a super sleazy businessy term, but it's brought my engagement with Instagram up even more.
Casey:
And I check Instagram a handful of times a day because I enjoy it so much.
Casey:
But now I found myself checking it more often, wondering which one of my friends, because I tend to follow mostly friends on Instagram, which one of my friends has posted something new and something worth looking at.
Casey:
And so I have really been enjoying it.
Casey:
Two thumbs up from me.
Casey:
I think it's super, super interesting.
Casey:
And it seems to have traction so far.
Casey:
I don't think it's a flash in the pan.
Casey:
This isn't the next peach, I don't think.
Casey:
But remind me of that in six months.
Casey:
This is future claim.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like this, I have I've been using Instagram more and more recently because I've been using the explore view, the little search thing at the bottom, which Tiff introduced me to.
Marco:
And I didn't even realize that's what that was there.
Marco:
I thought it was literally a search and I never wanted to search for anything.
Marco:
So I never visited that tab.
Marco:
And it turns out it's more of like a browser explore view.
Marco:
And you kind of like, you know, like you pick topics.
Marco:
So mine's like full of watches and puppies now, which is awesome.
Casey:
And I didn't know that either, actually.
Marco:
It is really nice to say.
Marco:
So I'm using Instagram a lot now and I have the same feelings as you.
Marco:
Like Instagram is just a feel good place.
Marco:
It is both to browse and to post.
Marco:
It is a just nice place to be.
Marco:
People aren't universally terrible.
Marco:
Unlike Twitter.
Marco:
Well, in general, like I'm saying, including all services that we have, people in general are not terrible.
Marco:
The design of a social thing online, a social construct, a social service, like the whole design of it,
Marco:
The structure, what's allowed, what's possible, how things work, who sees what, that all affects how horrible people are enabled to be and what kind of impact their horribleness can have.
Marco:
So the same group of people can use two different services and act very differently on them and get very different things out of them just because of differences in their design.
Marco:
And so even if Twitter's entire user base is also Instagram's exact user base, you'd have better results on Instagram because just the form and the structure and the way everything works in a setup and the expectations of it and the format and everything just encourage better behavior and limit the places people can be horrible to you.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
What worries me about this, and one of the reasons I never used Snapchat, and again, yeah, that conversation I connected was awesome, and we will link to it.
Marco:
One of the reasons I never had to get into it was because no one that I know really uses it.
Marco:
All the people I would be interacting with are on Twitter and Instagram.
Marco:
So I don't need to use, first of all, I don't need to use Facebook, which is great, because I don't want to use Facebook.
Marco:
And yes, I know they own it, which doesn't matter.
Marco:
And I also never had to use Snapchat because just, you know, my people aren't there really.
Marco:
So to bring that to Instagram, to basically bring like a major feature of Snapchat to Instagram is kind of okay on one level because it's like, well, I wasn't going to use Snapchat anyway because my friends weren't there.
Marco:
But on the other hand, it really shows like, you know, Facebook has always been a very tasteless company.
Marco:
Facebook is pragmatic and ruthless and tasteless, just like Microsoft was in the 80s and 90s, really.
Marco:
Facebook now is this conglomerate, really.
Marco:
They have tons of properties that are major on the Internet.
Marco:
They have Facebook itself, which is probably the biggest web property in the world and probably will stay that way for quite some time.
Marco:
Anything that gets really big that they think might threaten that, they just buy it.
Marco:
They have enough money to keep doing that indefinitely.
Marco:
And they are clearly totally okay with like, well, if you won't let us buy you, we're just going to rip you off and we'll just kill you that way.
Marco:
And that strategy doesn't always work.
Marco:
Microsoft did the same thing.
Marco:
Apple has done things on a smaller scale with Sherlocking things, but they don't usually do a huge scale job of it with stuff like this.
Marco:
uh google does it sometimes and that strategy tends to work like in general when companies when like the big powerful companies that already have all the users and all the usage and all the attention going to them and all the time spent on their services if they clone some smaller service their clone often wins and if they can't clone it they can buy it
Marco:
And this just kind of, it's a bit of a warning sign of the power that Facebook has.
Marco:
And I'm not saying Snapchat will be killed by this.
Marco:
In all likelihood, Snapchat is too big now and they'll probably be totally fine because Snapchat's really big.
Marco:
I think they're bigger than Twitter.
Marco:
They're really big.
Marco:
But it does kind of scare me a little bit that Facebook is willing to so cavalierly just like completely rip off Twitter.
Marco:
the stories feature, call it the same thing, do the same things, use the same gestures, like, completely rip it off.
Marco:
It's so closely and so shamelessly, and they just couldn't possibly care less because they are just that ruthless.
Marco:
And we live in an age now where these handful of big internet companies...
Marco:
have a lot of control over us and a lot of resources.
Marco:
And, like, the centralization of power here is just getting more and more severe.
Marco:
And that kind of worries me for the future of, like, Internet things in general, things we do online that use the Internet or that involve the Internet or are the Internet.
Marco:
It is a little concerning.
John:
The thing that struck me about using this and having used Snapchat a little bit...
John:
What you'll often hear, and you guys said it before, is like, oh, well, you know, I don't understand Snapchat.
John:
Only the kids understand it or whatever.
John:
And there is a demographic thing about what age groups use which application.
John:
That's definitely true.
John:
And more older people use Instagram or whatever.
John:
But
John:
Snapchat and also the Instagram Stories have bad interfaces.
John:
They have bad user interfaces.
John:
There is no sensible structure to the interface.
John:
They don't use OS conventions, that's for sure.
John:
So the normal affordances and sort of the things you're used to in generic UI kit.
John:
I don't know about another platform.
John:
I'm just talking about an iOS.
John:
But it doesn't look like iOS, that's for sure.
John:
So it's kind of its own thing.
John:
And within its own thing, they don't really define any particular
John:
Like spatial metaphor or something to hang your hat on where you can say, oh, I see all up swipes to this.
John:
I mean, like basically if you, you know, if someone's like, oh, no, Snapchat is totally sensible.
John:
What you'd basically be doing is listing.
John:
This does that.
John:
This does that.
John:
This does that.
John:
This does that.
John:
There.
John:
Now, that's not a system.
John:
That is just a list of actions and the resulting, you know, where you're looking for a system is like, because I understand the system, before you tell me the list of all things I can do, I can predict, oh, then obviously the way to do X is going to be Y. That's when you know you have a system.
John:
Snapchat doesn't have a system or not a very good system.
John:
It's a lot of arbitrary crap in there, not using native controls, not using sort of unprecedented.
John:
Right.
John:
So sort of setting their own standard.
John:
And why does does that mean is that is that why young people get Snapchat and old people don't know?
John:
Like there are other factors there in terms of who it's advertised towards and who the first users were and, you know, critical mass and social networks and where my friends are and all those other things that all factors in as well.
John:
But I think there is something to the idea that young people.
John:
will be able to do something because a bunch of their friends are doing it they'll just figure it out they have a high tolerance for learning our arbitrary stupid crap if i think about all the arbitrary stupid crap that i learned which basically is the entire early years of computing where everything was terrible and nothing made sense and the mac was the only one that had kind of an understandable system
John:
Think of all the things that I memorized, things I learned how to do in video games.
John:
There was no system.
John:
It was just arbitrary.
John:
And kids have a lot of time and good memories, and they'll just plug away until it becomes second nature to them.
John:
So to kids, Snapchat makes perfect sense because they memorize all the stupid gestures and commands, even though those gestures and commands
John:
are almost entirely arbitrary countered everything that every other ui paradigm on the device they're holding has taught them uh and are just plain bad right they're just bad this is a bad ui and so instagram stories didn't use all the same things as snapchat but it's a similar thing where instagram was a very sensible straight up the middle ios application with a reasonable ui using metaphors and controls and interfaces that we understood so you could predict what would happen when you did things for the most part there's always weird edge cases and custom controls and stuff
John:
um but then when they did stories it's into la la land again where nothing makes sense and you can't you have no you have no nothing to hang your hat on except for like maybe it'll behave like snapchat which again maybe that's establishing a standard and if you're familiar with snapchat that might be a good way to go if you're trying to do like what marco said it like oh we want to do a snapchat like thing then just copy a snapchat's gestures because all the kids who do snapchat it makes perfect sense to them and if they go to your thing and swipe or drag or tap and it doesn't do what they expect from using snapchat they think your thing is broken
John:
But, again, it's not a good UI just because they make it like Snapchat for, like, or, you know, make things similar to Snapchat.
John:
It's the little bar they've got on the top with the little segmented timers and what happens when you swipe in different directions and the little rotating effect versus the sliding versus up and down and tapping, and it's just...
John:
these are bad interfaces.
John:
And so I maintain, as the old cranky person, that not only... There's an actual reason, like, old people don't understand Snapchat, because they made a bad UI.
John:
And because older people have less tolerance for figuring out a bad UI that doesn't look like all the other ones are going to do.
John:
And I don't just think it, like...
John:
i think it's bad on many many levels and again this doesn't explain why old people don't use snapchat there's so many other reasons but this is a factor i'm saying this is this is a factor in that giant stew it's not the biggest factor it's not you know even maybe a major factor but it's there and that annoys me because i feel like snapchat could have been successful
John:
with a clever innovative ui i think a lot of games do this like a ui that uses no native controls totally custom doesn't use anything for ui kit is the same on android and ios but is delightful and understandable and fun to use uh and someone can pick up and learn again this is my hobby horse but it's really true
John:
If you make some kind of physical world-based metaphor, like, oh, I have stacks of cards and we can slide them from side to side and up and down and bring them together and collapse them or I can crunch them up.
John:
Or, like, if you make some sort of thing, like, these aren't physical things, but in some ways they behave in physical things or there's, like, a larger map that you can't see of this application.
John:
Once you learn the layout of that map, you know how to move around in it and you know how to make things happen and you know what a button looks like and you understand, like...
John:
Any kind of metaphor like that, even if it uses totally non-native controls, can become understandable where people start using it, learn one or two things that, oh, I see how this works, and then they can figure out how to do the other things without being told explicitly, whereas Snapchat is like all mystery meat navigation, a bunch of inscrutable icons, and...
John:
no real sense of where you are what you're doing where you're going you just memorize how it works because you're young and you have a lot of time or use the application a lot and that becomes second nature to you and you just think that's normal so if you ask any kid is snapchat easy to use they'd be like everyone knows how to use snapchat it's like i it's like i know how to write my name i know how to put one foot in front of the other to walk i know how to use snapchat it's the most intuitive interface on my entire phone no you just use it a lot that's what that means it doesn't mean it's a good ui
Marco:
And the reason they like using it is because it makes people like us that angry.
John:
No, but that's not why we're angry about it.
John:
I'm just saying it's a bad UI.
John:
You're angry about it because it's like you're making silly videos of yourself and sending them to your friends.
John:
You're like, oh, these kids these days shouldn't be taking videos.
John:
I don't care about that.
John:
Whatever.
John:
Take videos.
John:
I mean, it's the same thing when we take videos and our things and send it to our friends.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Like, whatever.
John:
I have no anger towards people who use Snapchat.
John:
I have anger towards the developers of Snapchat for making a bad UI.
Yeah.
John:
Snapchat users, thumbs up.
John:
Snapchat developers, thumbs down.