Everybody Has Asterisks
Casey:
When we last saw our heroes, they were doing all the things they normally do.
Casey:
But today, they do something different.
Casey:
This is the Q&A episode.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Are you telling our audience to please stop asking questions now?
Marco:
Is that what that means?
Casey:
Well, you can certainly continue to ask questions, but we are not planning another Q&A episode for at least a year.
Casey:
So you can ask, but they're pretty much going into the ether.
John:
But what about the Ask ATP segment that we're going to add to the show?
John:
Yeah, I would like to keep the questions going.
John:
Oh.
John:
I mean, they don't have to be as many questions, because we're going to answer like two of them, but... All right, the hosts have spoken.
John:
We have a... So just two or three people ask a question every week.
John:
You figure it out amongst yourselves.
John:
You coordinate, and then...
John:
all right fair enough so uh we are going to do this in quasi chronological order we have selected questions because here's the thing this they were going into the spreadsheet but i was afraid if i tried to sort them that it would like mess with the automate i don't know like whatever yeah we're gonna go from top to bottom in this document i think you can't see the document you can't see i
Marco:
I think it turns out that adding every single tweet with this hashtag to a giant spreadsheet and having no way to like filter or upvote or sort them at all might not be the best tool for this job, turns out.
Casey:
Well, I am happy for you to coordinate the replacement, my friend, because this seems like the lowest impact way to me.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
It is not ideal, but it's the lowest impact version I got.
Marco:
Are we supposed to be using things like Reddit?
Marco:
Is that a thing?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
That is what the Reddits are for, isn't it?
John:
No, we're not supposed to be doing that.
Marco:
All right.
John:
That's question number one answered.
John:
All right.
John:
All that said, if anyone on this show or off the show wants to make a replacement that's better than the spreadsheet, I will endorse it.
Marco:
We probably should have some way to upvote or downvote, and some way for one of the admins, which would be us, to say, all right, this question we're just not going to answer, so just kill it.
John:
Yeah, but unlike Reddit, I'm not sure this needs to be publicly accessible, but whatever.
Casey:
All right, let's do it.
Casey:
Okay, so the show notes for this episode may or may not exist.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But because it's basically just a bunch of questions and answers.
Casey:
And so I'm just going to try to emcee this and do the best I can with names, with questions, etc.
Casey:
And we're going to dig in with Gulick, who asks, Hey, why no more toaster reviews, John?
John:
The toaster reviews were a sponsorship, believe it or not.
John:
I know you don't remember that, but like they weren't just like, hey, review a bunch of toasters.
John:
It's actually ads for Cards Against Humanity.
John:
But instead of an ad read, they wanted me to do toaster reviews.
John:
So they are not advertising, quote unquote, advertising on the show anymore.
John:
I don't have any other campaigns.
John:
So that's why there's no more toaster reviews.
John:
And if they did, they wouldn't do toasters again.
John:
So you're not going to get any more toaster reviews.
Marco:
And we have had many people suggest new things that we could have a series of reviews for.
Marco:
And honestly, none of them sounded as funny as that.
Marco:
Like, that was such a great thing.
Marco:
It had a wonderful progression.
Marco:
It ended.
Marco:
I don't think it could have continued indefinitely.
Marco:
I think it was pretty much done when it ended.
Marco:
And every other suggestion we've seen since then has been less funny.
Marco:
So, yeah, nobody has tackled anything more than that.
Marco:
And I think it probably won't happen, at least in that format.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And those suggestions weren't from sponsors, right?
John:
Sponsorship is the key part of it.
John:
Because I don't think we would have endured, like, in the middle of a tech podcast, let's talk about toasters for five minutes, unless it was a sponsorship behind it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think one of the funniest things about that was, like, you know, Cards Against Humanity, and we later came to learn that the person who was organizing all this there was Alex Cox, now of Dubai Friday fame.
Marco:
And, like, they really...
Marco:
they weren't just sending random toasters like there was a clear progression like getting like from the normal ones slowly into the really bizarre and crazy and horrible things like those big like breakfast stations i could make the egg on top and stuff like that like it was clearly in this wonderful progression that it was it was just so well done and you got to give cards against humanity credit for that incredible run
Casey:
Yeah, completely agree with you.
Casey:
Kathy Wise writes in, what cameras are you using now?
Casey:
And so I will begin.
Casey:
I'm using the same camera that we got shortly before Declan was born.
Casey:
That's an Olympus OM-D EM10, which is a truly terrible name.
Casey:
It is a Micro Four Thirds camera.
Casey:
I have a prime lens for it that is what I use, generally speaking.
Casey:
And if you remember from the last episode, which in ATP time happened about 15 minutes ago, I also have a zoom lens, which I actually quite like.
Casey:
And I was going to argue with you, Marco, when you were saying, oh, you can't get a zoom lens that covers all three parts of the triangle, if you will.
Casey:
But as you were talking, you had mentioned, well, you know, if you do have a decent zoom lens, that means it's exorbitantly expensive and still probably has some other concessions.
Casey:
And that is the case for me.
Casey:
The zoom lens I have was like $800 or something like that.
Casey:
And otherwise, it's very nice.
Casey:
It's f2.8.
Casey:
I think it's 100 to 300 millimeters in size.
Casey:
regular cameras.
Casey:
I forget what it is in a Micro Four Thirds.
Casey:
But anyway, I like it a lot, but it was very expensive.
Casey:
Marco, what are you using?
Marco:
I am mostly using my iPhone, which makes me sad, but that is the reality of it.
Marco:
We do have...
Marco:
uh the 5d mark 4 now in our family like we we actually had we had for years ever since they came out we had the 5d mark 2 which came out i think in 2007 or 2008 uh something like that and uh it was late 2008
Marco:
And so we had that since then, and it was great, but it was getting long on the tooth in a lot of different ways.
Marco:
And so for a little while, I had a Sony phase, because the Sony A series of cameras, first I had the little RX1, then I had the a7R II, and...
Marco:
Those are awesome cameras in a lot of ways.
Marco:
But I found, I'll make it brief because we've talked about this before, I have found that I generally prefer the speed and handling and battery life of full-sized SLRs to the little Sony mirrorless cameras.
Marco:
And I think over time that will probably eventually change back as the little Sonys get better.
Marco:
The A9 has now come out and it solves some of the problems I had.
Marco:
It makes certain things worse.
Marco:
So maybe there will be an A7R III at some point or an A9 Mark II or something like that that I might go back for.
Marco:
But for now I'm very happy in the world of big Canon SLRs when I need fancy photos.
Marco:
But I take fancy photos less and less every year.
Marco:
My wife takes them much more often.
Marco:
And she is way, way better of a photographer than I am.
Marco:
So most of the good pictures of our family and stuff are taken by her.
Marco:
And so that kind of frees me up to do mostly the casual stuff.
Marco:
So I'm shooting mostly on my iPhone if I shoot anything at all.
John:
I'm still using my Sony a 6300.
John:
I thought of trading in for 6500.
John:
That was right up until I saw that the battery life was slightly worse.
John:
And that really much did it for me because the battery life in 6300 is just barely enough.
John:
Like I have two batteries and on vacation, I never needed to swap the batteries even on a day at the ocean, but I come close.
John:
And so I don't think I can give up that whatever 10% battery life.
John:
um and the 6500 is more expensive and so i've never i've never done the swap i'm still looking at it i'm still you know i would still recommend the 6500 or the 6300 as long as you can deal with the battery life but be sure that you can because that's that's a big quality of life issue so i'm happy with that um the only new lens i got recently was that is that big zoom i forget which one it is but it's one of the sony ones it's not it's not a very good lens like whatever uh it's what is it uh
John:
55 to 300 so it's a pretty big range again adjusting for what that is on a apc sensor it's not you know those are the full frame uh numbers still like my 50 millimeter prime the best i have my own super expensive zoom that does 16 to 70 and is over a thousand dollars
John:
And that is my sort of general all-purpose lens that I keep on the thing.
John:
It's not as good as the 50 prime, and it doesn't zoom as long as the big zoom, but it's kind of a nice all-arounder.
John:
And to get a reasonable okay all-arounder, $1,000.
John:
So, yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Also from Kathy Wise, did the last show, which was actually two shows ago, if I'm doing this mental math right, shame you into clearing out your application folders?
Casey:
No, it did not.
John:
nope john not only did it not shame me into cleaning out my application folder but i realized after he finished that show that i was just looking at slash applications i also have a tilde slash applications with way more things in it way more things in it which is that's like an old an old school next early mac os 10 error thing of having an applications folder in your home directory which you can totally have and the os knows about it and gives it the little a icon but only weird people do that
Marco:
all right moving on uh oplez asks which ad blocker do you guys did actually marco choose it's not you guys which ad blocker did marco choose i'm kind of you know i'm i i was for a long time so as soon as i killed peace within i think a month or two i stopped using it too um and you kind of just to be fair it kind of felt wrong for me to use it and no one else did
Marco:
I switched to OneBlocker back then, and OneBlocker is fine.
Marco:
I don't have really much bad to say about it or much great to say about it.
Marco:
If you're going to go with one of those mass market blockers, OneBlocker at the time I looked was the best one.
Marco:
I have noticed, though, over time, more and more sites are broken by it.
Marco:
and uh and it there was a there was one of the ios uh 11 betas where it was not working due to some limits that had changed so i i went looking and i i started using better which is better.fyi uh it's a paid app i think it's like five bucks they have a mac version and an ios version which is nice and the mac version kind of keeps itself up to date which is nice with this little like menu bar extra thing
Marco:
Um, so I've been trying better out.
Marco:
It doesn't seem to block as much stuff as one blocker, but it also doesn't break as many sites and it seems to block enough that works for me and it seems to get regular updates.
Marco:
So right now I'm using better, but I've only been using it for, uh, maybe a few weeks at most.
Marco:
So it's hard for me to really say you should definitely go buy this.
Marco:
But if you're looking to buy something right now, that's the one I would start with.
Casey:
John, any thoughts?
Casey:
I also use one blocker for the record, but John, any thoughts?
John:
I'm also using one blocker, but occasionally, I don't know if the OS updates do it or something.
John:
Sometimes it gets turned off and I don't notice for a while.
John:
I don't have a good blocker situation going on.
John:
And half the time when things don't work, I do the little long hold down on the reload to reload with that blocker to see if that's the problem.
John:
I think some sites are getting more obnoxious.
John:
One, I think the Boston Globe is like, you're running an ad blocker.
John:
I don't like you, whatever.
John:
And it's like, all right, well, fine.
John:
You're going to learn not to even tap those links.
John:
And some site, I think it's like the Atlantic or something like that, is like,
John:
uh sorry something is wrong and we can't serve you ads and so i reload without content blockers and it says the same thing like what do you want me to do like or like you're running an incognito mode like i'm not i'm not an incognito mode i'm just on my phone and i want to read your website and i turn everything off and you still and the worst thing is it does it with like a sheet that goes down over the actual article and you just want to like right click and inspect and delete node but you can't because you're on your phone it's like this is this is when when casey occasionally goes off
John:
on his little angry rants about how he feels constrained by iOS, I have that in small degrees, too.
John:
And it's basically whenever I do anything on a web page and I realize I don't have access to my web developer tools and I feel just completely crippled.
John:
It's like, it's just a stupid web.
John:
It's just a freaking div.
John:
Let me delete it.
John:
I just saw the article.
John:
It's right there.
John:
So here's what I do.
John:
This is what I literally do.
John:
To find out if I want to actually read the article, I did long press to read the slug in the URL, hoping that it's something sensible, but sometimes it's not.
John:
Or I repeatedly revisit the page and try to read the headline before the stupid thing slides down on it.
John:
Like I get, you know, three words and oh, it slid down.
John:
And then I reload three words and just to find out is this a story that I want to bother going to a quote unquote real web browser and, you know, looking at or whatever.
John:
Anyway, websites are annoying.
Marco:
You guys try way too hard to like if if a site makes it difficult for me to read an article.
Marco:
I just close it and I move on.
Marco:
Because, like, you know what?
Marco:
No matter how good of a writer you are or no matter how great of journalists you are or whatever else, there's a lot of things to read out there on the web.
Marco:
And if you're going to make it hard for me to read yours, I'm just not going to read it.
Marco:
And that might be, like, if you have a site with, like, an anti-ad blocker blocker thing...
Marco:
If you won't let me read the site with an ad blocker, that's fair game.
Marco:
I respect that decision of yours, but that means I'm not going to turn off my ad blocker.
Marco:
I'm just not going to read it like that.
Marco:
But if that's the option you presented, then fine.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Like, I'm willing.
John:
Like, oh, I detect you have an ad blocker.
John:
Like, fine.
John:
I will turn off my ad blocker.
John:
I'll turn it off.
John:
I'll be like, wait, reload without content blockers.
John:
Here I am.
John:
I'm ready to see your thing.
John:
It's not behind a paywall.
John:
It's not like they want me to sign up, subscribe, or pay money.
John:
Like there is no, the site is just broken is what I'm saying.
John:
I think it's a pretty well-known site.
John:
Maybe it's the Atlantic or whatever.
John:
It's like, I'm doing everything you want me to do.
John:
Turn off all my blockers, turn them off in settings, not be in incognito mode.
John:
There's no paywall.
John:
You're not asking me to sign up or subscribe.
John:
Every time I try to load it, it's like, sorry, I couldn't figure out something, and I'm going to slide a big animated sheet down over the article that's perfectly good.
John:
And there's no reader mode for people asking.
John:
There's no, you know...
John:
Websites, man.
John:
Do you ever test on the iPhone?
John:
It's a popular platform.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Warby Parker, making buying glasses online easy and risk-free.
Marco:
Get your free home try-ons today at warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Warby Parker believes that eyeglasses should not cost as much as a phone.
Marco:
They offer prescription eyeglasses and sunglasses starting at just $95, including the lenses.
Marco:
They make buying glasses online easy and risk-free with their home try-on program.
Marco:
This allows you to order five pairs of frames and you get to try them on for five days.
Marco:
And there's no obligation to buy.
Marco:
It ships to you for free and it includes a free prepaid return label.
Marco:
And all you got to do is pick out what you want and they'll send you this box of home try-ons.
Marco:
You can try them.
Marco:
You can show people in your life.
Marco:
You can look in the mirror.
Marco:
You can take pictures, whatever you want to do to decide what's right for you.
Marco:
And there's no obligation.
Marco:
You don't have to buy any of them.
Marco:
But I bet you will because they're really high-quality glasses.
Marco:
My wife has a bunch of these, and they are just wonderful.
Marco:
And they come with great accessories, a nice hard case, a cleaning cloth.
Marco:
And for every pair you buy, a pair is distributed through robot vision charities to someone in need.
Marco:
Warby Parker really believes in giving back to the world, and they really make great glasses, and they're helping the world, too, with these charities.
Marco:
Get a free home try-on program today.
Marco:
You will be shocked how nice these glasses are.
Marco:
They're trendy designs.
Marco:
They have anti-glare and anti-scratch coatings.
Marco:
And they even have a home try-on companion feature which allows you to use their iPhone app to preview how the glasses will look on your face.
Marco:
You can stitch it into a video.
Marco:
You can share it with friends to help you pick a winner.
Marco:
So even before you get the frames mailed to you in the home try-on program, you can preview how they're going to look on you.
Marco:
And then you can educate your guesses that way.
Marco:
They make it so easy to buy glasses online.
Marco:
And the value here is incredible.
Marco:
All of this starts at just $95.
Marco:
And they also offer sunglasses, non-prescription starting at just $95, prescription starting at just $175.
Marco:
Just like their eyeglasses, their sunglasses are also available through their home try-on program.
Marco:
They have premium polarized lenses that are scratch resistant and provide 100% UV protection.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
Warby Parker offers such a great value, such great glasses for starting at just $95.
Marco:
Go to warbyparker.com slash ATP to get that free home try-on kit started, and you'll see for yourself how great they are.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, Jack Johnson, yes, from New York City apparently, has two questions that are related.
Casey:
Do you think it would be a good move for iTunes to offer a higher resolution audio file for download or streaming?
Casey:
And then kind of tangentially related, do you think part of the HEVC strategy is to set the groundwork for 4K streaming?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I will say that I don't think anyone really cares, except Marco, about higher resolution audio coming out of iTunes.
Marco:
I don't.
Marco:
I don't even care about that.
Marco:
I'm surprised.
Marco:
So as for all my audiophile-ness when it comes to selecting headphones and stuff, I have never been swayed by...
Marco:
like higher than CD quality audio files or lossless compression schemes.
Marco:
I know a lot of people like these.
Marco:
A lot of people think they can hear a difference.
Marco:
I don't think you can, but I know for sure that I can't.
Casey:
All right, hold on though.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
How do you download your Phish concerts?
Marco:
MP3.
Marco:
They offer flack options.
Marco:
I am stunned.
Marco:
That's what I assumed you were going to say.
Marco:
No, they offer flack for a few more dollars.
Marco:
And there is... So I have bought... So quick background here.
Marco:
Phish sells all their live shows legally through their own site like a few hours after the shows end.
Marco:
And so you can buy a season pass and you can basically have downloads of every show they do for like a whole tour.
Marco:
So I do this.
Marco:
I've been doing this since something like 2009 or so.
Marco:
And there was one tour...
Marco:
early on that i bought in flack i like i pre-ordered it and i'm like gosh let me get the flag version i'll see if it sounds any different and it was such a pain because like first of all like itunes didn't support flack at the time i think i think it actually is finally adding that in high sierra i think
Marco:
uh but it didn't at the time and and so i had all these massive files that first of all i didn't want to ever delete them because like well i paid for these massive files uh so they're taking up tons of space in the hard drive then i still had to transcode them to make them actually playable in anything uh i did play the original ones or there was let's see i think i i think one one time i transcode them to alac or maybe i download maybe they sold them as alac i forget
Marco:
So I did, for a group of them, transfer them and play them as lossless files, as ALAC files in iTunes.
Marco:
And I just – I couldn't tell any difference at all.
Marco:
And there's lots of – again, there's lots of people who claim they can hear a difference.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of tests that have been done that have shown mostly otherwise.
Marco:
But this is one of those things, kind of like my subwoofer thing from last episode of like –
Marco:
I do things my way, and some people consider them insufficient, or some people want better things, and I think I can't care anymore.
Marco:
If you want to do things your own way, if you want to get massive files with 2496 or 24192 sample rates, and if you want to have lossless encoding and you want your albums to take up a gig each, fine.
Marco:
Hard drive space is cheap.
Marco:
Do whatever you want.
Casey:
Well, I could not possibly agree with you more, but I was expecting to snicker as you told me about how flack is the only answer.
Casey:
So kudos to you, sir.
Casey:
I am stunned.
John:
Do you want audio that's lower quality and has, like, hiss and pop in it?
John:
No.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
John:
Here we go.
John:
Something for Casey.
John:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
John:
I think it's not the right move for Apple to offer higher resolution audio, but...
John:
if apple ever gets to the point i don't think they will because again streaming is what everyone cares about now as marco pointed out earlier slash on the last show um but it would be a way to make the ferrari have purchasable downloadable music hey can we charge more money for something that people perceive as better the answer is yes you can
John:
You sell a lossless or higher bitrate or some combination thereof.
John:
And a very small number of people who think that is worthwhile for them will buy it.
John:
It doesn't really matter if anyone can hear the difference.
John:
It only matters whether they'll give you money in exchange for these goods which are able to be produced.
John:
So I wouldn't totally rule it out.
John:
I don't think it's something Apple needs to do at all.
John:
But someday...
John:
if buying music at all downloadable continues to be a thing some smart person in marketing may say we're leaving money on the table by not selling high resolution audio uh and they'll just do it and charge more money for it and a couple people buy it and there'll be a tiny bump in a graph and some of them will get a good performance review
Marco:
Yeah, but you're right.
Marco:
The thing is, there is demand for this.
Marco:
There is absolutely demand for higher-than-CD quality sample rates and everything and higher bitrate formats or more advanced formats or lossless formats.
Marco:
There is definitely demand for that.
Marco:
Most people don't even know.
Marco:
People who listen to the show probably are not aware...
Marco:
quite how many options there are for what basically amount to fancy iPods that sell today for like $400 or more that like they're like they're they're Sony makes a bunch of them they're basically like little you know pocketable portable audio players that you know size like a deck of cards like that kind of size class that have a headphone just like the old iPod classic and
Marco:
that play these super high bitrate files, like they could actually output them and decode them with a fancy DAC and everything else.
Marco:
This market exists.
Marco:
People buy these things for like $400.
Marco:
but not a lot of people.
Marco:
And there are streaming services, things like Neil Young's Pano, things like even Tidal, which is a fairly decently sized streaming service now, like streaming services that have either been, or even music sales service.
Marco:
I don't think Pano even was streaming.
Marco:
I think it only sold stuff if it even still exists.
Marco:
But anyway, there are services that will either sell you high bitrate music legally or that will let you stream them like Tidal.
Marco:
They use the quality as their main selling point, but they don't really ever become mass market.
Marco:
They don't really ever get anywhere off the ground, really.
Marco:
The only reason Tidal has gotten anywhere is because it has had exclusives.
Marco:
They've had exclusive album releases on there.
Marco:
Other than that, when they were really only about the music quality, they got nowhere.
Marco:
The fact is, most people don't care, and most people don't need to care, because for most of these gains, there actually is no perceptible difference to most people.
Marco:
So while Apple could sell high bitrate songs and stuff, that would just be appealing to a very, very small market in what is already a declining market, which is the market of music sales.
John:
So the second part of this, about HEVC being part of 4K, yep, 100%.
John:
Like, 4K video is bigger.
John:
HEVC is a higher efficiency codec.
John:
It supports higher resolutions for music.
John:
Like for video, not just the images with the Heath thing.
John:
Anyway, yes, it's 100% part of that.
John:
And that's why we're going to see a 4K Apple TV and HEVC encoded content that plays on it.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Adam Sack writes in to say, and this is the first in theme that I noticed, which was try to get the ATP hosts to hate each other.
Casey:
So he writes in, if you had to use the daily tech setup of one of your co-hosts for a week instead of your own,
Casey:
Whose devices would you choose?
Casey:
And I will start off, and I would probably choose Marco's because it is, in general, most similar to my setup.
Casey:
Obviously, there are differences, but most similar to mine.
Casey:
And he has some pretty kick-ass headphones, so win-win.
John:
Everyone would pick Marco's, including Marco, because he has the best stuff.
John:
Who's not going to pick Marco's setup?
John:
I don't want to use Casey's crappy laptop.
John:
Come on.
John:
No one wants to use my 10-year-old Mac Pro, so we pick Marco's.
Marco:
Yeah, I would pick Casey's because non-retina.
Marco:
Sorry, John, you lose.
John:
You should have picked my wife's.
John:
You could have picked the 5K iMac.
John:
It's the one without image retention.
John:
Yeah, that's actually better than mine.
Casey:
That's funny.
Casey:
Ian Murren writes in to say, and I don't think I selected this as one to answer, but I have a feeling I know who did.
Casey:
I have an 08 Accord.
Casey:
When's the ideal time to replace it?
Casey:
It's at about 80,000 miles, no maintenance issues to date.
Casey:
John, did you perhaps star this as a question to be answered?
John:
I did, because I think this is a good question.
John:
So the right time, probably the best time to replace this Accord was...
John:
right now or last year because the the best time to get an accord is at the tail end of a generation when they worked all the kinks out of it and they have we always get like the special edition even if you don't get the special edition like they know how to build that generation of car it has the most doodads and and you know nice things added to it and they figured out oh and the first models you put the usb port in the wrong place or you know fiddle things like
John:
that's the time to get it uh the the first car of the generation the new accord i think the new accord is is uglier than the old one uh but it does have a better infotainment system so that's the other time you can get is like uh the excitement of getting in on the first car in a new generation but in general when your court starts getting to be around 10 years old i feel like that's the time to if you want to have any chance of having any reasonable trade-in on it
John:
or private sale whatever you want to do with it don't wait until the car is basically worthless or it's worth like a couple hundred bucks wait till it's you know it's still a couple thousand dollars worth of value in your car it's before crap starts breaking like i said you know it's 80 000 miles nothing is nothing is issued with it it's an 08 right it's a getting to be around 10 years time to replace
Casey:
You know, just as a point of comparison, I pretty much agree with you.
Casey:
But when we bought the Volvo, we traded in Aaron's 2007 Mazda 6, which had a little bit shy of 80,000 miles on it.
Casey:
And as I believe I talked about on the show, was pretty much a tank.
Casey:
Like that thing almost never had any problems.
Casey:
And we got $3,000 in change for it.
Casey:
I think CarMax offered us three grand.
Casey:
So it was not worthless by any means, but I agree with you, John, that this is the kind of edge of the cliff, I think, and you go too much further and you're going to fall right off that cliff.
Casey:
marco any thoughts on this nope good talk uh joe sullivan writes in is there anything that syracusa is in favor of or likes without any caveats reservations or asterisks and i have to i have to congratulate joe sullivan because there are about a million ways to ask this question like a big fat jerk and this was not one of them so well done that's a great question
John:
They put too many things at the end of this question.
John:
Caveats, reservations, or asterisks?
John:
Well, caveats, you kind of know what that means.
John:
Reservations, it's still getting a little bit vague.
John:
What asterisks mean?
John:
Oh, something else in addition that you want to say about it?
John:
To answer your question, there is nothing so perfect.
John:
Come on.
John:
That's right in the slogan.
John:
There are tons of things that I really like, but if pressed to say, hey, you really like Kiki's Delivery Service, is there anything wrong with that movie?
John:
Well, I mean, because it's actually probably closest like I can if pressed, I can come up with asterisks for Kiki's delivery service.
John:
Sure.
John:
Of course you can.
John:
Right.
John:
There is nothing is going to be absolutely perfect if you can't.
John:
If you literally can't think of anything wrong with it, then you probably don't understand the thing.
John:
But that doesn't mean that these are my favorite things in the whole world.
John:
Overwhelmingly, everything I feel about these is that they're great.
John:
So I think that qualifies.
John:
And that reasonable definition of is there anything that you are...
John:
like without any caveats reservation like if someone said hey uh you know i need a good movie to watch and i say well you know if you've never seen the empire strikes back watch watch star wars and then empire strikes back i'm not going to add reservations oh but also here are some reservations by the empire strikes back
John:
I'm going to add no reservations.
John:
There is nothing to say about it.
John:
So I would say that qualifies.
John:
The only definitions are the pedantic one, in which nothing qualifies for anybody, or the reasonable definition, in which there's tons of things that I really like.
John:
If you want to hear things I really like, listen to The Incomparable.
John:
Very, very often on that show, I talk about things I really like.
John:
You know, from the video game journey to television shows, movies, books, we do talk about asterisks, if you want to call it that, but that doesn't mean we don't love them.
John:
So I think this question is not a good question.
John:
that's more than an asterisk more than a reservation i think that was a great question because of the answer it got yes i spent most of the time complaining about the question i mean but that's true of anybody like is there anything even we ask you the youtube is it is there anything you two like uncritically without caveats reservation or asterisks i think if you're honest with yourselves you have to say that's not true for either of you either
Marco:
I mean, I think the chat room offered up a number of good options.
John:
Your kids, your wife, your dog, Long Island, Journey.
John:
Those are BS questions.
John:
You got reservations about your wife and your kids.
John:
Don't say you don't.
John:
Ice cream.
John:
If you think your spouse does not have any asterisks, you are either newly married or willfully naive because everybody has asterisks.
John:
Everybody.
John:
no i like where i am what can i say yeah but they're always asked what is asked it's like the tiniest little thing you know it's like could something be a little bit different of course of course always i i don't even know where to go from here like and especially kids like no my child is perfect yes lots of parents think that
John:
maybe a little bit less screaming like not you know like like three seconds less screaming in a lifetime of screaming would you accept that and say yes i would accept three seconds less screaming well that's an asterisk there you go maybe if that poo hadn't exploded out the side of the diaper that one time when i had a new car would you oh it's an asterisk oh now you don't love your children because you didn't want the poo to come out the side of the diaper and go all over your new car seats
Casey:
Oh, that's amazing.
Casey:
We got to move on, otherwise we're never going to get through this.
Casey:
That's amazing.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
What was next?
Casey:
I have so many freaking tabs open.
Casey:
I must be John Syracuse.
Casey:
Edward Lovell writes in, what podcast do you currently listen to and would recommend?
Casey:
I listen to a ton of podcasts.
Casey:
But there's a couple that I would recommend.
Casey:
The aforementioned Dubai Friday is excellent.
Casey:
I will pitch one of my or a couple of my co-host shows.
Casey:
I think that Reconcilable Differences is phenomenal and so is Under the Radar.
Casey:
But I will also pitch a couple others very quickly.
Casey:
If you wanted to hear...
Casey:
a smart person talk about conservative politics, which you may or may not want.
Casey:
The Ben Shapiro show is very interesting and very good.
Casey:
I don't listen to every episode by any means.
Casey:
It's like 45 minutes and it's pretty much every weekday.
Casey:
But when I have time, and usually about once a week, I'll catch it.
Casey:
And I typically...
Casey:
deeply, deeply disagree with the things he thinks, but nevertheless, it is interesting.
Casey:
I will also say that wheel bearings is neutral by people who actually know what they're talking about.
Casey:
Who want to listen to that?
Casey:
Yeah, I know, right?
Casey:
And then 20,000 Hertz is also very good.
Casey:
Think 99% invisible, but specifically around sound.
Casey:
So those are just some selections from my extraordinarily long list of podcasts that I listen to.
John:
uh john since i've been tagging marco more uh first more often let's let's go to you next uh i have a strong recommendation for roderick on the line which i love um the flop house obviously my my old probably oldest recommendation that show is still going uh obviously uh hello internet and cortex the pair of uh shows uh both involving cgp gray those are great
John:
uh what else we got i'm scrolling through overcast to look at i have way too many things in overcast i'm scrolling through there uh debug uh which i don't know if it's still ongoing but the back catalog of debug is great it's a tech show uh where they talk to lots of important people in tech uh you should definitely check that out and you know there's there's tons more but i think that's a good place to get started
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
You guys have already mentioned pretty much everything I was going to say.
Marco:
The usuals, Dubai Friday, Hello Internet, Cortex, Roderick on the Line.
Marco:
In the tech world, again, you've covered many good ones.
Marco:
I would also add Upgrade on RelayFM with Jason Snell and Mike Carelli.
Marco:
That is...
Marco:
probably my favorite tech show.
Marco:
It's just really, really great.
Marco:
So, yeah, otherwise, you guys pretty much covered it.
Marco:
Yeah, 99PI, you know, and what I love about, I mean, I could obviously talk about podcasts forever, so I would try not to, but what I love about this is that none of us mentioned shows that were, like, the biggest podcasts in the world.
Marco:
99PI is probably the biggest one we mentioned, but when people think podcasting, they so often will make an assumption, like, everybody listens to This American Life, right, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
But the fact is there isn't any podcasts out there that everybody listens to.
Marco:
And the world of mass market or very, very popular podcasts is still actually fairly diversified.
Marco:
And there's a lot of people who listen to a lot of podcasts who don't listen to any of those big ones.
Marco:
So it's just part of what I love about podcasting is like it's so incredibly diverse and specialized that like I can look at so many podcasts and there are so many amazing podcasts out there.
Marco:
But I don't need to spend any time listening to things that aren't like really interesting to me and that aren't specialized to my interests because there's so much that is.
Marco:
And that's just part of what I love about podcasting.
John:
And, you know, my overcast list is huge.
John:
I subscribe to tons of things.
John:
I was trying to give recommendations that maybe people might not go for.
John:
Like, you know, I didn't recommend the talk show because I assume you know that show exists and it's good and you should totally listen to it.
John:
Like, I didn't recommend This American Life because I assume you know that show exists and it's good and you should listen to it.
John:
Right.
John:
Trying to find the slightly more obscure corners.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh that's the other thing i like about podcasts i subscribe to way more podcasts than i than i faithfully listen to like i'm not a podcast completionist i have tons of descriptions a few shows i keep up with very religiously but a lot of shows i let age and then go through five episodes at a time and a lot of shows i just pick and choose from
John:
um that's the best thing not only do you not have to like oh there's only five podcasts that everyone listens to you should find a podcast that you really like and sometimes you find a podcast and you only have to listen to the episodes that you really like like even like the incomparable like if they do an episode reviewing something you don't care about skip that episode like they're standalone if they're you know they do a thing about a tv show that you didn't watch and you're not interested in fine like just pick and choose it's the beauty of podcasting
John:
But you just listen to every episode of our show, obviously.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, obviously.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
I mean, how could you not?
Casey:
Regular Language writes in, what do you think about the current state of Swift?
Casey:
I would like to hear what John and Marco have to say about C, I guess, Casey, a rant about Swift opens.
Casey:
Oh, I think there's new lines missing here.
Casey:
Basically, what do you guys think?
Casey:
And maybe me talk about Swift open source.
Casey:
So I will, I guess, round this out at the end.
Casey:
So let's start with Marco and then go to John.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't pay that much attention to what's going on in Swift.
Marco:
I know I'm supposed to.
Marco:
I know I should.
Marco:
Overcast contains some Swift code that I added to try to cheap myself the language and stuff, but I'm still writing most code in Objective-C, and it's not really out of a judgment of Swift so much as it's just a pragmatism that I still don't see a lot of motivation for me to switch.
Marco:
I recognize that I should, but I, in practice, don't.
John:
john this is too open-ended a question i would have never picked it swift seems like it's chugging along uh i i do keep up with the things that are going on in it it's it's still got you know challenges but it's making slow steady progress so i think swift is moving in the right direction at varying speeds um
John:
And what do we have to say about C?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
That's not C the language.
Casey:
I think basically the question was what do you guys have to say about Swift and what do I have to say specifically about Swift open source?
John:
All right.
Casey:
Well, go ahead.
Casey:
Yeah, I think your summary of Swift is good and brief and I stand by it.
Casey:
Swift Open Source is a double-edged sword, I think.
Casey:
I think that the problem that I have with Swift Open Source is that it seems like a lot of the really, really, really academic, like, I'm trying to think of a way to say this without being pejorative, but people who are much more interested in the academic side of programming languages seem to be the ones that are most vocal and most interested to participate on, like, the mailing lists and things of that nature.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Where someone like myself, which is not to say I'm like at the same caliber as a super academic, but someone like myself who I like to think of as I'm a reasonably smart guy, but I don't really have any interest in like following the intricacies of what's going on in the mailing list.
Casey:
I don't really have any interest in arguing about, you know, different pitches that have been made via the mailing list.
Casey:
I just want to get crap done, man.
Casey:
And to me, I feel like Swift open source, it feels like from an outsider's point of view, that maybe it could use a little more stern direction from Apple to prevent the kind of meandering and the kind of
Casey:
I don't know, language features that I find to be really, really silly and not terribly helpful for actually just shipping products.
Casey:
And that's where I kind of get a little frustrated.
Casey:
But that's easy.
Casey:
It's easy for me to throw stones from outside the glass house.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And and really, if I wanted to affect change, what I should be doing is participating on the darn mailing list that I'm lamenting.
John:
I'm not sure you should be doing that because I'm going to put this out there.
John:
Language design is a different skill than being a programmer and using that language.
John:
And so I think it is entirely appropriate that the list where people are designing the languages looks weird to someone who's like, I just want to write my programs.
John:
Like you make the language and give it to me.
John:
Like you don't need to cross over.
John:
I think Swift Evolution, I've seen a lot of languages on mailing lists and Swift Evolution,
John:
Is above average, believe it or not.
John:
And maybe if you look in the outside, this is the first time you follow the development of any language.
John:
It can look like dominated by academics and weird and chaotic and a lot of bike shedding.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, they are above average.
John:
And, you know, just coming so early to say, look, we're going to have releases.
John:
We're going to exclude things from them.
John:
And then, you know, there's going to be people discussing things on the list, even though they say they're excluded from Swift 3 or Swift 4.
John:
But in general, I think they're pretty well behaved.
John:
And I do want essentially language nerds or people with the language design skill and RPG problems or whatever to be designing the language rather than having a bunch of people who just want to use the language.
John:
throwing out the first idea that pops into their head that they think might make their their like beginning language designers like i've been programming for 20 years and i think a language would be cool well how many languages have you designed have you tried doing that what does it actually turn out to be so um i like i like language design as a separate skill being developed among people who just do that and seeing them do their thing definitely does look weird but i endorse it
Marco:
And part of why I have not adopted Swift more is that the idea of investing my time into a language that is still very much a beta is a huge turnoff for me.
Marco:
I have no interest in participating in the design of this language.
Marco:
I have no interest in beta testing this language for anybody.
Marco:
uh in the same way like i don't want to beta test brakes on my car you know like i want to get the final brakes thank you and i want them to work and i don't have i don't want to ever have to think about them or i never want them to flake out or fail or cause me undo undo work sound like a tesla owner you don't want to beta test the brakes that they just sent us new firmware for your brakes last night while you were sleeping like for me like i like especially like every summer when during beta season when like all the new stuff comes out and i see all the ios developers i know complaining about something that swift broke
Marco:
I am very happy to not be very reliant on it right now.
Marco:
Because the fact is, I'm an independent developer.
Marco:
I don't have a lot of time.
Marco:
And the time I have to spend coding, I have to spend it very wisely.
Marco:
And the most frustrating thing for me, which is true of many people, is fighting with my tools.
Marco:
And so any language or part of my developer toolchain, I'm going to try to minimize reasons that I would have to fight with it or the amount of work it's going to require from me to use.
Marco:
And Swift, while it does look like a fairly...
Marco:
i'm sure it will be good once it's done for me right now the reality of using swift is still a lot of overhead and a lot of dealing with the changes as they come and dealing with weird things breaking sometimes and i just want to wait till it's all settled before i invest heavily into it because i have zero interest in being an early adopter for things like this all i want is for it to work so i can spend my time in other ways
Casey:
I will say that there are certainly annoyances, and I can't legitimately argue with anything that you've said, but it feels like it's gotten a lot better over the last six to 12 months.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
It has.
Casey:
By and large, I mean, it's a beta, of course, but by and large, it looks really solid.
Casey:
And so I think, and of course, you would say this every year, right?
Casey:
Now is the time to dive in, Marco.
Casey:
It's all better than it ever was.
Casey:
And, you know, it's the year Linux on the desktop, right?
Casey:
It'll always be better the next year.
Casey:
But it is not nearly as scary now as it once was.
Casey:
But there's still dragons back there from time to time.
Marco:
And I would also love to use Swift on the server.
Marco:
That's one thing that has me very interested in learning it because the idea of learning one language that I can use in both places is incredibly attractive to me.
Marco:
Because that would be a great use of, you know, if I'm going to learn more languages and master more frameworks, being able to use the same one in both places basically makes it twice as valuable to me.
Marco:
So I would love that.
Marco:
But it's all just so early.
Marco:
And to have basics like concurrency not worked out yet is like I just I need.
Casey:
Well, yes and no.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Like it's just as worked out as it is in Objective-C because you still have GCD and whatnot.
Casey:
It's just that.
Marco:
Well, when I'm saying server, I mean Linux, though.
Casey:
Well, okay, fair.
Casey:
But my point is just that concurrency, I agree with you, should be worked out in a much better way.
Casey:
But it's not like we're handcuffed now.
Casey:
It's just that it's the existing GCD API.
Casey:
Again, maybe not on the server, but at least on the client.
Casey:
It's the existing GCD API, and it actually is a lot nicer in a lot of ways.
Casey:
But there should be something like everyone is calling for C Sharp's async await.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
David Klein writes, about two years ago, you discussed women in tech and podcasting and even exchange hosts.
Casey:
How do you feel today regarding women in tech?
Casey:
This is a very good question, which stresses me out because I feel like I'm going to step on some landmine here.
Casey:
But that being said, I feel like we have made, we, not the three of us, like we as a community,
Casey:
have made a fair bit of positive strides, but still have a almost equal amount of improvement left to make.
Casey:
And I feel like people are paying a lot more attention to the fact that there's so much sexism in tech and it's such a crummy place to be a woman.
Casey:
And I think the easiest example of this is people like regular people knowing what a cesspool Uber is slash was and regular people deciding to use Lyft instead of Uber, which quick aside, I used Lyft in Chicago when Aaron and I were on our 10 year wedding anniversary.
Casey:
And it was great.
Casey:
Worked great.
Casey:
No different than Uber.
Casey:
And so I highly recommend it.
Casey:
But anyway, so we still have a ton of room.
Casey:
Like it's one of those things where we have taken like the tiniest, littlest step forward, but there's still like 85,000 miles in front of us.
Casey:
So it's almost imperceptible.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
I basically agree.
Marco:
I mean, I unfortunately am not an expert on this topic.
Marco:
Few men in tech are.
Marco:
That's not a coincidence.
Marco:
It's a huge problem, and we still have so, so long to go.
Marco:
But we are talking about it now way more than it used to be talked about.
Marco:
So even though I don't have the knowledge to know whether it's actually making progress, really, I have no idea.
Marco:
I would guess it's making slow progress.
Marco:
But we are talking about it.
Marco:
And a lot more people, ourselves included, are much more conscientious of this being an issue than we used to be.
Marco:
And that has to help, too.
Marco:
And there's obviously a lot more that we can all do and that we need to all do.
Marco:
But I do think that awareness is way better than it was.
Marco:
And that will slowly start helping this problem.
John:
Yeah, that's like the first stage of all these things is the very long process of getting people to be aware that this is an issue at all.
John:
What's the issue?
John:
What is the problem?
John:
Is this a thing that exists?
John:
And that takes a really long time.
John:
It's kind of depressing to me because my childhood, like I felt like the whole one of the previous names of a larger version of this is the women's lib movement back in the 60s and 70s and even to the 80s.
John:
was also in that stage of like, hey, raise awareness, like women's liberation.
John:
What do women need to be liberated from?
John:
What do you mean, right?
John:
I felt like we went through that and then like that knowledge was lost somehow.
John:
And now we are back in the tech sector, which is a microcosm of the larger world.
John:
It's like, do we have to relearn that sexism exists?
John:
Apparently the answer is yes.
John:
And we're learning it better and more thoroughly.
John:
And with, I think, a...
John:
a clearer eyed picture and not accepting as many limitations as the previous, you know, feminist movements and women's liberation and all the other stuff.
John:
But I still very strongly feel that we are in the awareness phase for everybody, like for, you know, for me as well.
John:
Like the, and I do see some concrete signs of progress.
John:
I find myself seeing, I mean, from my perspective, a lot of what I see is like, who's speaking at this tech conference, uh,
John:
I see and watch and hear about and get forwarded to me more really good talks by women at tech conferences, the circles I travel in, in my Twitter or whatever, than I did several years ago.
John:
And I feel like that is progress, probably just progress in my awareness that that is a thing, and also progress in the people I follow forwarding me those things.
John:
And, you know, like you said, like the fact that there can even be a story
John:
that has any real world consequences to a company about, Hey, this company is run by a bunch of sexist jerks.
John:
And that actually like, is a, a thing we hear about and be something, anything, literally anything happens about it.
John:
Maybe not the right thing, maybe not the best things, but something happens.
John:
Like if one extra person deletes their app, like that is a tiny bit of progress.
John:
Um, but yeah, that's, that's pretty much how I feel, uh, how it's going.
John:
And,
John:
about us specifically on the show like we're still we still talk about it we still discuss it we still try to do what we can in the ways that we can you know it's it's a continuing struggle yep robin christopherson writes in which if any of the many rumored changes to the new iphone would actually make you decide not to upgrade if it comes to pass
Casey:
I'm going to go on a very small rant about this.
Casey:
I don't understand people who say, and I can't think of a specific example of, oh, actually the Touch Bar is a great example.
Casey:
I will never like the Touch Bar and I will never buy a Mac that has a Touch Bar.
Casey:
That to me just doesn't make sense because it stands to reason that at least for portable Macs, the Touch Bar is going to be the future probably across the line.
Casey:
It may not be for five years or something like that, but it will probably be the future.
Casey:
And even if the touch bar, if you think that's a crummy example, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
My point is, like, just get on the bus.
Casey:
The bus is pulling away.
Casey:
Get on the bus.
Casey:
And you may not love it, but get on the bus.
Casey:
Because what's the alternative?
Casey:
Go to Windows?
Casey:
Ha, have fun.
Casey:
And so to me, there may be something that I don't like about the new iPhone.
Casey:
So for the sake of example, I'm skeptical that I would terribly enjoy the face unlock.
Casey:
And I suspect I would miss Touch ID.
Yeah.
Casey:
But I mean, I will certainly give it a shot and I will certainly give it a shot.
Casey:
And if it ends up that I like Touch ID better, well, then that's a stinky part of the new iPhone, but everything else will be amazing.
Casey:
So it'll all even itself out.
Casey:
So I don't really I understand the question, but I don't really understand this question.
John:
I think the narrower view they're asking would make you not want to upgrade.
John:
When I saw this question, I thought about Touch ID on the back.
John:
If they can't get the Touch ID under the screen for this generation, but we know for a fact, because other phones do this, that
John:
fingerprint sensing under a screen is a technology that exists that just you know wasn't up to apple's caliber yet for whatever reason i might say if i was if it was my upgrade year which isn't by the way i might say oh i'm i'm not gonna upgrade to to this phone i'll wait till next year when i when hopefully they'll have that sorted out or we even wait to the next generation because you know i have no problem waiting it's not like casey was saying like oh i'm never gonna buy with a touch bar like
John:
obviously eventually you have to get a new phone and eventually i would choose to get an iphone but specifically like oh if they make a new form factor and it's the first model year and they had to make weird compromises and touch ideas in the back even if it's just as simple as like they put touch it in the back but i've never used touch it in the back i'm not sure i like it i'd rather let a bunch of my friends who i know really well buy this phone and tell me about it so that the next year i'll know whether i think i'll like it or like just play within the store whatever so yes there are lots of weird things
John:
involving the phone that would make me decide not to upgrade.
John:
But I don't think there's many things that would make me decide I'm never going to buy an iPhone again.
John:
And that's a different question.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think pretty similarly.
Marco:
I mean, look, we all know I'm going to buy it regardless.
Marco:
So why even bother?
Marco:
I mean, you know, I think the answer is, you know, I'm going to do what I always do, which is I'm going to buy the new thing immediately and then I'll complain about anything that's worse about it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
That's typically how these things tend to go.
Casey:
I did not want to answer this question because this is another example of where I don't care.
Casey:
But somebody, and I think that person's name might be John Syracuse, has decided we should answer this question.
Casey:
So Stephen Sandhoff writes, tabs or spaces?
Casey:
I honestly don't even have the faintest idea what my editor is set to.
Casey:
It's whatever the default for Xcode is.
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
You're a monster.
Yeah.
Marco:
You don't even know?
Marco:
Don't even know.
Marco:
Just pick one.
Marco:
Actually, I can say the same thing.
Marco:
So I know what it is in TextMate, but for my iOS code and Xcode, I actually have no idea which one it is.
Marco:
But I will say in TextMate, it's spaces.
Marco:
I tweeted about this a few weeks ago.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter because good tools let you switch between one or the other with one command.
Marco:
So it's...
Marco:
It really doesn't matter at all.
John:
No, no, no, no.
John:
That's something a tab user would say.
John:
It totally matters.
John:
Let me tell you why.
John:
So first of all, my answer on tabs versus spaces is spaces.
John:
And the reason I say spaces is because spaces are the same size visually everywhere.
Casey:
But the whole point in tabs, I thought, is that I can choose to have my tabs be a thousand width.
John:
Right, okay, yeah.
John:
So now tabs, now it's like, okay, well, tabs are semantic in depth here, but don't tell me how big it has to be.
John:
The problem with that is that I think good formatting in most, not maybe, some, let's just say, in some programming languages, good formatting is
John:
needs to be done has instances in which you want to indent by less than one indentation level to align things.
John:
right and if you use spaces everywhere there is no ambiguity and you can make it look like how you want it to look like if you use tabs some joker is going to set their tab to two and someone else is going to have it set to four and someone's going to have it set to eight and the part and the line where you use tabs but then use spaces to align a bunch of things is going to look crazy pants so spaces is the correct answer but i'm forced to use tabs at work and have for many years and so
John:
If you're a working programmer, you got to do what you got to do with the actual entry spaces.
John:
And Chris Lattner agrees with me.
John:
So there you go.
Casey:
And that's all that really matters.
Marco:
I bet that's going to be what eventually drives you to quit your job.
Marco:
Like eventually one day you're going to hit that tab key for the last time.
Marco:
And you're like, that's it.
Marco:
I'm done.
John:
No, I mean, you still hit the tab key even when it does spaces, but work changed both my brace style and the indenting character, but this is what it means to be a working programmer.
John:
It's too far.
Casey:
Wait, what is your preferred brace style?
John:
Many years ago, I used BSD style, opening and closing in the same column.
John:
for basically my entire career up to like maybe 10 years ago and then I switched to forcibly switched to K&R no cuddled else's come on people I'm a K&R person myself you know I used to first of all I had no idea those were the two like I didn't know the names for those two styles but I used to be violently devoutly in favor of what did you say BSD where all of the opening maybe I'm getting it wrong it might be Allman it's the one where the opening curly is underneath the I and if
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
That's the way I used to be.
Casey:
And I was passionately about it, almost as bad as I am about people who say GIF.
Casey:
I passionately believed that you have to put it under I, and those monsters that say GIF that also put the opening brace at the end of the line are just without help.
Casey:
And over time, similar story, I think because I started writing a fair bit of JavaScript...
Casey:
I ended up kind of switching to the other style where you have, you know, if something open, open brace, new line.
John:
I think it's an important part in every programmer who doesn't work for themselves in a single person shop in their, in their careers is becoming not just multi-language fluent, but becoming able to, and you work in open source projects, you're forced to this too, becoming able to write code in the style demanded by the thing that you're doing, whether it's a job or an open source project or whatever, you can't,
John:
I mean, you can be precious about it and have a preferred thing, but you have to be able to get the job done in whatever language or formatting that is dictated by them.
John:
You just have to just practically.
John:
And, you know, in the end, like I was also pretty strongly about opening curly under the little eye.
John:
And I still think it's the style that makes more sense.
John:
But.
John:
uh you know you get over it a few years of using knr and you're like okay like it's fine uh and it's actually difficult uh if you get into a groove to switch back and forth like you have to mode switch between them you'll just your fingers will you'll find them doing the thing that they do and you have to switch back but like that's life that's programming for you
Marco:
Actually, the reason why I use KNR style is that I used to use the brace under the eye.
Marco:
In college, as I was teaching myself how to program and going through college, I used that style.
Marco:
And then my first job used strictly KNR style.
Marco:
And they just broke me of that habit.
Marco:
And then that became my style.
Marco:
Anyway, we can all agree, tabs versus spaces.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter, but the right answer is spaces.
Marco:
Unless you use two spaces, in which case you're an animal.
Casey:
I think I could probably get behind that.
Casey:
Spencer Holbrook writes in, what low-level part of Apple's stack would you like to see replaced next?
Casey:
HFS Plus to APFS, Objective-C to Swift, OpenGL to Metal, etc.
Casey:
I think I'm most anxious and most interested in HFS Plus to APFS.
Casey:
And I can't think of another example off the top of my head.
Casey:
I'm sure, John, you'll probably have one.
Casey:
uh but none of these are i really rev my engine that much sorry john marco asking you what you want to see replaced next they listed a bunch of ones they're already doing oh so following all of that yes yeah wish list i don't even know i'd have to think about that i'm not sure to be honest i'll pass on this one marco what do you think
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure John's going to have the best answers here.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Thank you for going to me first.
Marco:
I don't have to follow him.
Marco:
My boring answers are basically I have two.
Marco:
It's like if the API framework or if the UI framework is the correct level for this question, I would love to see what surpasses AppKit on the Mac, if ever.
Casey:
Oh, that's a good one, actually.
Casey:
That's very good.
Casey:
That's not low level.
Marco:
So if you go a little bit lower level, what I would also like to see... It's another thing on the Mac, actually.
Marco:
I would like to see Mac sandboxing completely rethought and matured.
Marco:
And a rethinking of the Mac security model with the new... So basically...
Marco:
Bringing a more iOS-like sandboxing environment to the Mac.
Marco:
So to do things like you could knowingly, safely install an application and then delete that application and know that everything that goes with it gets deleted.
Marco:
Know that it can only write to and read from certain directories that are easy to manage and isolated from other things and can't, like, every app that you install as you, the user account, can't read your entire user directory.
Marco:
And they started down this path with sandboxing whenever that was like eight years ago.
Marco:
And they did like the most bare bones basic version and then just stopped.
Marco:
And they never matured it.
Marco:
And because of the version they did and the various shortcomings it had, it basically made it so that most apps could not be reasonably sandboxed if they did anything cool at all.
Marco:
And I bet there's a better balance to be struck now in the modern day with what we know, with where the software world is, where the economics and where the ecosystem has gone since then.
Marco:
I would love to see a more modern, more secure version of sandboxing on the Mac that brings it closer to iOS in those security and user assuredness ways.
Marco:
but that still has the power of mac software available in in various you know new clever ways i know that's a very hard thing to solve but there's also you know a i think we need to solve it and b i think there's massive gains to be had there when it is solved
John:
Alright, John.
John:
There's probably a bunch of stuff all the way down to the kernel itself that I can list here, but the reason I put this in was because I don't have any really good answers for low-level stuff that I'm dying for, except for one.
John:
It's actually mentioned in here.
John:
They said, you know, HFS to APFS, Objective-C to Swift, OpenGL to Metal.
John:
The OpenGL to Metal one is the one I actually have objections to.
John:
I don't... I understand Metal, and it's a good thing to have, and Apple is heavily behind it, but...
John:
I think Apple should still have a world-class OpenGL implementation.
John:
And I know that's a tough sell, but it's like, what do we even need that for?
John:
We're all in on Metal.
John:
Metal is the future, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I don't think you should get rid of Metal, but OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever is still a thing, and it is still worth Apple not just maintaining, but like...
John:
you know advance it uh like either don't have it at all it's kind of like flash like look if you think it's viable to have a web browser without flash don't support it at all don't don't just say oh our flash implementation is slow and so people won't use it and they'll migrate to h3 just don't support it at all either don't support it all and if you think you can't you know oh we can't drop open gl we have to have it our whole oh west runs well then make a good version of it like i was this came up recently in the article i think casey read
John:
he retweeted it but i i read earlier about the dolphin uh uh gamecube emulator and all interesting technical problems uh casey you can have a show note there put that one link in the show notes um it's a good article lots of good articles on that and it goes through some fun technical details and then towards the bottom of this really nice article it says here's a section for mac users none of this is relevant to you because your open gl stack is a piece of crap and none of the features that we even talked about even exist in your open ngl implementation let alone exist in our performance so
John:
screw you guys and it's like look apple it's embarrassing i wish i want them you know and what do we lose by that we don't get to have a cool gamecube emulator unless we boot into windows or linux for crying uh linux uh so i hope that apple gets their act together with open gl either don't support it at all and then figure out what you have to do to make your computer still viable or actually support it and be awesome that was not what i expected but that was a pretty good answer
Marco:
Thank you.
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Marco:
jc calhoun writes uh how about an update on how the overcast advertising is working out so uh john no i'm just kidding what do you think marco i mean the short answer is it's great i mean there's there's not a whole lot to say on it um this is so they're talking about like how i switched a few months ago to uh selling my own direct ads uh and now they're entirely for podcasts they at first it was like for podcasts and or websites and
Marco:
The podcasts have been buying them so much that I actually recently stopped selling them for anything that's not a podcast.
Marco:
The capability is still there if I choose to use it later, but I don't think I will need to for a while.
Marco:
I worked out some various pricing and inventory level tweaks over the last few months, just working out how should these things be priced, how many should I have in each category, what should the categories even be.
Marco:
But I think it's pretty stable now.
Marco:
And it's making good money.
Marco:
It's making something like 10 times what I was making from Google Ad whatever.
Marco:
AdMob, that's what it is.
Marco:
Yeah, the mobile ad thing.
Marco:
So it's going great.
Marco:
And as long as this continues to sell at all reasonably, I don't see myself changing the model anytime soon.
Casey:
From your analytics or whatever you've got running against these ads, does it seem like they're working?
Casey:
Obviously, they're working in the sense that you keep selling them, but are they working in the sense that it seems like they're pushing subscriptions to shows and all that?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I have that info, and I share that.
Marco:
The advertisers, when you buy an ad, they see in their little control panel on the website how many impressions, how many taps, and how many subscriptions it has gotten.
Marco:
They don't see anything else, but they see those three numbers.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't collect anything else.
Marco:
That's all I collect.
Marco:
That plays into how I price them.
Marco:
I try to keep the cost per new subscriber within a certain range.
Marco:
The challenge in pricing these ads is not...
Marco:
trying to get people to buy them it's it's trying to avoid the temptation to raise prices like crazy because they're selling out frequently and i it's hard for me to know like what should a new listener be worth like what ring should i keep this price in the way i've been pricing it i've been keeping it between one and two dollars for most categories
Marco:
But certain categories, like I recently separated out business podcasts into their own category.
Marco:
Because I ran the numbers of what's a listener to ATP worth?
Marco:
And if you've run the numbers over the course of certain time spans or a year or two, it ends up being $5, something like that.
Marco:
And so I thought, if I keep the prices between $1 and $2, that keeps it pretty good, pretty compelling for most people.
Marco:
But certain categories, like business...
Marco:
Business podcasts are huge, first of all.
Marco:
That's a huge market for business tips and tricks and writing books and everything.
Marco:
And many of them monetize not just by ads, but by selling you books, e-books, conferences, seminars, stuff like that.
Marco:
So they might have a very different valuation of what a new subscriber is worth to them.
Marco:
And this is true of many of the different categories of podcasts.
Marco:
And some of them, the people don't care what a new listener is worth them.
Marco:
They just want to get some listeners and then they have a new show maybe and they want to get it basically going from zero.
Marco:
And so they use the ads for that.
Marco:
If you look at it purely as how should I price these, in terms of pure demand, they keep selling out, so I should price them way higher.
Marco:
But if I price them higher, we're going to start getting into numbers that if you think about the numbers, if you run the numbers of what is a listener worth, it starts not to make sense for a lot of people.
Marco:
So I don't want to reach that level.
Marco:
So basically the answer is I think I even could make more money from it if I tried to.
Marco:
But I would be afraid if I did that, that I would have like a brief period of making more money followed by a crash as a lot of advertisers started seeing, you know, this actually isn't worth what I'm paying for these users and starts bailing out.
Marco:
So I want to keep it reasonable so that I have the most advertisers possible.
Marco:
But besides that, that minor concern, which I think is largely alleviated now by just time and stability, it's going great.
Marco:
It really is going great.
Marco:
And it's one of the only advertising things I've ever seen where basically all the parties win.
Marco:
Because I'm not showing you ads for Viagra mattresses.
Marco:
I'm showing you...
Marco:
ads for podcasts in categories that you subscribe to while you're using a podcast app in a way that respects your privacy, that isn't a huge burden, that doesn't get in your way.
Marco:
It's a great setup.
Marco:
This obviously is not a method that every app can do.
Marco:
I'm not saying every app should monetize the way I've monetized because you simply can't.
Marco:
It doesn't apply.
Marco:
But for what I am doing, it's working great.
Marco:
And I have more advertisers who want to buy ads than I have inventory to sell them.
Marco:
And that's wonderful.
Casey:
That's really awesome.
Casey:
John, any additional thoughts on that?
John:
Nope.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Edgar Perez writes in, and this is the first one that I noticed in this context, but I've seen this come up a lot, particularly after our 1Password discussion.
Casey:
And he writes to say, I agree that $3 a month for an app service is reasonable, but what if all the apps I use monthly want $3 a month?
Casey:
Can't let apps kill the Mac.
Casey:
I understand what people are driving at.
Casey:
And again, Edgar isn't the first person to say this.
Casey:
You know, oh, if every app I use is a subscription app, well, suddenly I won't be able to afford anything anymore.
Casey:
And I get that.
Casey:
But I think in my eyes,
Casey:
If everything I used became a subscription, I would either change my usage or I would pay for it all.
Casey:
And since we're now deep into the second episode, I don't remember if it was this episode or last week, we talked about ad blockers.
Casey:
I think it was last week, which was really two hours ago.
Casey:
I talked about ad blockers and how, you know, Marco, you were saying, well, if an ad blocker shows up, then I'll just leave and I just won't read that content.
Marco:
It was this one, by the way.
Casey:
Oh, was it this one?
Casey:
Okay, thanks.
Casey:
So I'm getting tired.
Casey:
It's nearly midnight.
Casey:
But anyway, so point being, you know, I think it's a similar thing.
Casey:
So like for me, and this is just for Casey, it may not be for others, but for me, I absolutely will pay for 1Password and I will absolutely pay for day one.
Casey:
But maybe you're, you know, the listener here, maybe you're a day one user, but you don't love it.
Casey:
You just kind of like it.
Casey:
And maybe it's not worth paying for on a regular basis.
Casey:
So you just stop using day one and use Apple notes or something like that.
Casey:
That's okay.
Casey:
That's an option.
Casey:
Like that will work in life will go on.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
That's just the way I look at it.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
If you had remembered back to actual last week, I addressed this on the One Password episode.
John:
I said, look, I did it from the perspective of an app developer.
John:
Not every app can sustain subscription pricing.
John:
Your app has to be valuable enough to enough people to sustain subscription pricing.
John:
So I don't think there's any fear that every single app is going to be, you know, $3 a month.
John:
Because there are app categories, entire categories, let alone individual apps that can't sustain that because they don't deliver that much value to people.
John:
So you have to you have to know your application and your market to say, is any are enough people willing to subscribe to this?
John:
People probably aren't going to pay $3 a month for a fart app.
John:
right even if you have new farts released every month like they're they're a whole you know you have to turn you'd have to turn it into like a free for free to play you know casino gambling exploit human nature type service to get that and then it's a different kind of app entirely right so i this is this is a fear that i don't think is a real thing if you're a customer this will take care of itself don't like the price don't buy it right and from a developer's perspective if you don't want to be on the losing end of that problem taking care of itself you should know you know
John:
If if we can't develop this without subscription pricing, make sure that it is valuable enough to enough people to justify subscription pricing.
John:
And one password certainly is because a lot of people find it a very valuable thing and they want it to work on an ongoing basis and they understand the ongoing maintenance costs and they're willing to pay for it.
John:
But your fart out might not be.
John:
So I would say don't worry about this too much.
John:
And if you don't want to pay for a subscription, don't pay for it.
Marco:
I mean, every time subscription pricing comes up, people bring up this issue of what's going to happen when everything's subscription and everyone gets tired of it and stops paying for it.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
The idea of subscription fatigue.
Marco:
And, you know, we've been able to charge subscription prices now for a little while.
Marco:
And that's just not happening.
Marco:
Like, I have not seen any sign that that's happening.
Marco:
I think this is one of those things that the market just sorts out itself.
Marco:
You know, like John said, like, most apps aren't willing to... Sorry, most customers aren't willing to pay for most of their apps.
Marco:
But they wouldn't be buying a $36 a year upgrade either instead of paying $3 a month.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
The fact is, most apps have a lot of competition and aren't that necessary for most people.
Marco:
So they're going to have a hard time no matter how they charge.
Marco:
But the apps that are really valuable to people, that are difficult for people to go without, or that are required for them to do their work, or whatever else, or that appeal to markets that don't care about spending $3 a month, they can do this just fine.
Marco:
I don't think... The whole slippery slope argument of like, well, once all the apps go this way, no one's going to want to pay anymore...
Marco:
I just don't think that's happening.
Marco:
Like, I think we would have seen that by now.
Marco:
We would have seen that at least starting.
Marco:
And it's just not.
Marco:
Most apps are not even trying to charge subscription rates.
Marco:
And the ones that are mostly do okay.
Yep.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Jude Dunn writes in, is it technically possible for Apple to make second gen AirPods noise canceling or noise isolating?
Casey:
Really, really want that.
Casey:
I don't see why not.
Casey:
I think the problem with that is it's even more processing to be done, thus even more battery usage.
Casey:
But I mean, at this point, I don't know that it would be a tremendous difference.
Casey:
And certainly noise isolating.
Casey:
I mean, they could change the look of these things and change where they sit within your ear.
Casey:
But I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, you basically got it.
Marco:
I mean, the noise cancellation requires a microphone on the outside and then DSP on the inside to basically emit sound waves on the inside mixed into your sound that will...
Marco:
cancel out by phase of the wave that will cancel out the waves of the ones coming in from the outside world.
Marco:
So there's nothing stopping them from doing that, as far as I know, in the hardware they have now, or in that style of hardware they have now, rather.
Marco:
But that wouldn't be very useful without better isolation.
Marco:
and isolation is right now where they really fall down um you know and that doesn't require any circuitry that requires physical barriers basically of you know literally just isolating you from the world around you and to do that you know right now they are earbuds and what earbuds are are little drivers that sit kind of kind of inside your ears but they're more like resting in a little curvy spot in your ear they're not really blocking your ear canal at all
Marco:
There are other types, like canal phones, or in-ear monitors, they're also called, that actually block your whole ear canal with some kind of big rubber cone thing or something like that, and they physically block the sound from getting into your ears.
Marco:
Larger over-ear headphones have a similar effect, but they cup over your ears as if you're putting your hands over your ears and block the sound that way.
Marco:
Either way, you're physically blocking the sound from getting there.
Marco:
For the AirPods to do that, they would have to have a totally different shape that would actually block your ear canal and be more like canal phones.
Marco:
Or they would have to have some kind of coating or cover you could put on them, some kind of accessory that you could put on them to do that.
Marco:
Although, ideally, they would be designed for this from the start.
Marco:
There's nothing stopping Apple from releasing...
Marco:
airpod canal phones uh but it's it's a different style of product it has it's a whole different shape it's a whole different set of constraints and design goals you'd have to have for it i don't expect they would do that uh probably at all but if they do it it would probably be a separate product it probably would not just be like airpods 2 now they block your whole ear canal it would probably be like here's the new you know air canals or you know whatever they would have a better name than that but
Marco:
it would probably be a separate product because that's a very separate physical design of these products let's just work on apple being able to ship airpods in a reasonable time frame before we worry about adding features sick burn yeah and i again i also would not uh spend too much time waiting around for the airpod twos you know airpods to whatever i don't think apple was updating the airpods anytime soon
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're probably right about that.
Casey:
Alex S. Glomsas writes in to say, if you could make a single change to Swift, what would it be?
Casey:
I will say that even though it's probably not the biggest thing in the world, what I really love to see is reflection.
Casey:
And I've talked about this from time to time.
Casey:
So reflection or introspection means at runtime, you can look at an object in code and say, you know, what are the properties it has?
Casey:
What are the methods it has?
Casey:
And typically, along with that, you'll see annotations, which are attributes in C-sharp world, which means you can kind of decorate your code with metadata, which is also super useful.
Casey:
I could go on and on and on about this, but it's not terribly interesting.
Casey:
So I'll just say reflection with a bonus choice of stealing Marco's thought earlier of a better concurrency model.
Casey:
So since I've stolen your obvious answer, Marco, what would you say afterwards?
Marco:
Honestly, I don't really have a good answer to this question because I don't know enough about Swift because of the aforementioned factors.
Marco:
I don't use it really enough.
Marco:
So I really am not qualified to say.
Marco:
John?
John:
So if a single change, if concurrency counts as a single change, oh, just solve concurrency.
John:
The solution of your choosing, either a good implementation of async await or something entirely different or whatever, that would be my single thing, but that's kind of vague.
John:
If I have to be narrow, I would say regular expression literals.
Casey:
You?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No way.
John:
Both of those things are coming, by the way.
John:
It's just a question of when.
Casey:
Brian Middleton asks, what arcade games are each of you nostalgic for from your childhood?
Casey:
Is there one game you would like to own?
Casey:
I will start as usual.
Casey:
We actually have a pinball machine in the house.
Casey:
My dad, many years ago, had gone through a phase of restoring, or maybe not restoring, but repairing old pinball machines.
Casey:
And so he had like six of them at one point, but unloaded all but two of them, one of which went to me and one of which he still has.
Casey:
Uh, so I obviously have nostalgia for all those, but in terms of like traditional arcade games, uh, NBA jam cruising USA and street fighter two, I didn't play any of them that much, but.
Casey:
But I enjoyed deeply all three of those, both in arcade form and occasionally in console form.
Casey:
So I would say those three.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Honestly, I hardly went to arcades in my childhood.
Marco:
We didn't really live that close to them, and we didn't have a lot of money.
Marco:
And so the idea of just going there and blowing...
Marco:
tens of dollars maybe like that would be that would not really happen in my family um but when i did play a little bit of arcade games as i was like a teenager here and there um the one i most liked was daytonia usa this was during the you know the mid 90s or so so like the sega saturn was coming out and so they they had like a few cool games like virtue of fighter and everything that were coming out with you know alongside of it
Marco:
and daytonia usa was my favorite one it was a racing game um and it was just you know basic kind of like nascar style i think i don't know i don't know i don't know about racing to say but whatever style uses what appeared to be stock cars on a round track without a lot of turns so that um and it was a lot of fun but it was a dollar per play in most arcades so i hardly ever played it with the exception of there was this like
Marco:
I was in some kind of youth group and there was one time that they had a lock in at a magic mountain arcade, uh, where we just got everything set to free play and we have to play them all night.
Marco:
So I played a lot of Daytona USA for one night and that was awesome.
Marco:
But other than that, I mean, this is kind of a sad story.
Marco:
Like other than that, I hardly ever played arcade games.
Marco:
So I don't really know.
Marco:
John,
John:
I've played a lot of arcade games.
John:
I was a lot that I'm very nostalgic for.
John:
It's hard to pick one that I would want to own, though, because in general, arcade games back then, and I'm assuming still today, were made to take your money.
John:
And so I remember getting lots of tokens or quarters and feeding them to these machines.
John:
And I think if I owned any of them,
John:
they they would become shallow very fast especially the games i'm nostalgic about unless you do something like centipede or like pac-man or you try to make it like the perfect game or whatever but uh in in a couple of summer camps i went to they had arcade games that were either set to free or were only 25 cents when instead of 50 or whatever and
John:
And that I played a lot.
John:
And so there are some games I got really good at.
John:
Like one of them, it was Tiger Heli, which is a top down, vertically scrolling shooter thing or 1942, similar type of game.
John:
Both of those were at camp.
John:
I got really good at those games.
John:
Like that was where you put in one quarter and I'd play for a really, really, really long time.
John:
um you know um and but even then you feel like oh well now i've seen the whole game like this is all there is to this game and so i really wouldn't want to own it so i don't think i would want to own any of these machines but most nostalgic for um the star wars sit down game after burner which was impressive when it first came out especially with the one that you move around inside the thing it was one of the first 50
John:
50 cent games i can remember the classics centipede galaga i like time pilot there's a weird one called section z sidearm this was a totally weird one that i still think is awesome i have all these on mame now though so i don't need to own any of these machines nice
Casey:
Uh, nuclear eclipse asks, uh, this is John Reese.
Casey:
When will you record neutral season two?
Casey:
My official answer is we've been recording it for the last like three years and after shows of this show.
Casey:
Uh, my unofficial answer is not soon enough.
Casey:
John, let's go to you first.
John:
Well, you answered it.
John:
There's no neutral season two.
John:
You're listening to it.
John:
This is it.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Done and done.
Casey:
Krusty the Clown writes, do you think an iOS laptop would be a viable product, i.e.
Casey:
an iBook?
Casey:
I was hoping Apple would announce it at WWDC, but it didn't happen.
Casey:
Isn't that kind of what an iPad Pro is?
Casey:
I presume that Roger Escobar, the person who wrote in, is asking something that has the physical connected keyboard and screen that you can never separate the two.
Marco:
i i feel like an ipad pro is so close to there that it's oh it's i don't see really is it not okay so i've never owned it okay well that's the thing i've never owned an ipad pro so so learn me to show me why i'm wrong yeah so i i have i've now had the 9.7 pro and the 10.5 and i i keep i keep it always in the keyboard cover almost all the time the apple keyboard cover
Marco:
and and there are other keyboard covers that kind of make it a little bit more laptop like but they're mostly not that great um for the way some people use it and i'm one of these people i would use that i would buy that product because i always want the keyboard the keyboard is what made ipads usable for me as simple as that like
Marco:
i do occasionally like go on the couch and fold the keyboard back behind it and try to use it without it and i hate it i always end up like folding it back out and like trying to use it on my lap which is awful because it's all floppy and like back weighted and everything so i would say this is not a huge market probably but if they did it i would i would certainly buy it that way because
Marco:
iOS for me, part of the reason why it feels so hobbled to me so often is the lack of a keyboard when I'm on my phone or when I'm on an iPad without that.
Marco:
So that's why for me the keyboard really has made a huge difference for me in making iOS on the iPad and making the iPad worth having and worth keeping out in my kitchen all the time.
Marco:
So a clamshell version of that would be welcome.
Marco:
But I honestly would be very surprised if they did it.
Marco:
John?
John:
uh this is whether it would be a viable product and i think it totally would like as ios expands its functionality to solve some of the same problems that are currently only or best solved by a mac today it inevitably has to come into that area because uh it it's proof it's a proven form factor people like that form factor it's just a question of oh can you combine that form factor with a bunch of other things software and battery life and cost and other trade-offs to make a compelling product yes you totally can
John:
Yeah, I think you could do it with iOS today, but certainly as iOS continues to get more sophisticated.
John:
So it would be a viable product.
John:
Whether or how soon Apple will do it, I don't know.
Casey:
Chance Rubbage writes in to ask, more and more podcasts are going behind paywalls.
Casey:
Is it a good idea for Apple to enable a tip jar or in-app purchase for podcasts?
Casey:
I don't see how that could really work out, especially since it would presumably be locked to the Apple Podcasts app.
Casey:
And even if you could just magically snap your fingers and make that work across any podcast app anywhere...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think it would help the smaller podcasts, but for something like us, I don't know that it would make, and not to say we're like, sorry, that implies that we're like a 99% invisible.
Casey:
We're not that either, but like a mid-level, if we can generously call ourselves that, like a mid-level show like this one, I don't know that it would make a big difference.
Casey:
Let's go to John first.
John:
Apple implementing it is the problem here because having a way for people to do a tip jar in-app purchases for podcasts, that would be a good thing because the ability to do more business models more easily lets different shows find different ways to fund themselves.
John:
Depends on the show and the audience and so on and so forth.
John:
But having it be an Apple thing is bad because one of the great benefits of podcasts is they're not owned and controlled by a single corporation or
John:
to the degree that a lot of other things are.
John:
And so I wouldn't want Apple to do this because if they're wildly successful, it's a problem.
John:
And if they're not successful, then what the heck was even the point?
John:
You don't allow more business models.
John:
So I would love for there to be standards that clients would work with across multiple platforms, just like RSS is a standard that clients work with across multiple platforms to distribute podcasts.
John:
If there was a similar standard, a similar open cross-platform standard for podcasts,
John:
enabling different kinds of business models, that would be great.
John:
But guess who's motivated to make such a thing?
John:
Not Apple and not a lot of other companies too.
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
I would say also this question starts with the statement, more and more podcasts are going behind paywalls.
Marco:
This sounds like a big trend, but I don't think it is much of one really.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
The only podcasts that have actually succeeded in going behind paywalls for the most part are the ones that monetize their back catalogs.
Marco:
They're fairly timeless and that you can either use their own possibly paid app or pay for some membership to download archived older episodes, but then the current ones are still free.
Marco:
That's a way more common thing.
Marco:
And even that doesn't work for every show.
Marco:
That only works for shows that are timeless.
Marco:
It wouldn't work for a show like ours where we talk mostly about news.
Marco:
I don't think a lot of podcasts overall are going behind paywalls in the traditional sense of like...
Marco:
You can't listen to this unless you pay us.
Marco:
The fact is, it's really hard to grow an audience if you're behind a paywall.
Marco:
Look around the whole rest of the web.
Marco:
Lots of news sites and everything have tried paywalls.
Marco:
Very few have succeeded because of this problem.
Marco:
And the ones that have, have these kind of porous paywalls where you can get a bunch for free up front and then you might have to pay us or clear your cookies.
Marco:
Or you have to pay us to read all of our articles unless you come from Google or Twitter.
Marco:
There's all sorts of these holes because paywalls are really hard to make work.
Marco:
Podcasts have survived and thrived and grown all this time, driven almost entirely by advertising.
Marco:
The exact same way most websites have always funded themselves.
Marco:
For all the same reasons.
Marco:
Again, it's hard to grow an audience if you're making people pay on the way in.
Marco:
And it's generally easier to sell ads than to do that.
Marco:
And advertisers will typically pay more than your audience will.
Marco:
So I don't really think this is a big problem, either a trend that is happening or something that really needs to be explored that much.
Marco:
So that being said...
Marco:
If Apple were to enable tip jars or in-app purchases for podcasts, honestly, I have thought about doing this in Overcast before.
Marco:
I've talked to podcasters about it.
Marco:
The overall conclusion I have reached is that that would be a very messy business to be in, and that for the most part...
Marco:
But podcasters now, because there isn't a big centralized system run by Apple anywhere else, podcasters now have found ways to monetize their podcasts on their own.
Marco:
Ways that they own.
Marco:
Ways that they control.
Marco:
People have Patreons.
Marco:
People have memberships.
Marco:
Some people just do ads like we do.
Marco:
Some people do some combination thereof.
Marco:
But the point is that no one's involved.
Marco:
There is no middleman.
Marco:
There is no Apple skimming 30% off the top and making everything go through them and disallowing everything else like the way there is in apps.
Marco:
There is no middleman.
Marco:
And when I talked to podcasters when I was thinking about doing something like this in Overcast, the universal response was, we don't want anyone else handling our money for us.
Marco:
We don't want anyone else getting between our audience and us.
Marco:
Me or Apple or anybody else.
Marco:
No one wanted that.
Marco:
And I would say, what if I started collecting money and I just distributed it to you readability style?
Marco:
Would you go for that?
Marco:
And the universal response was kind of like...
Marco:
Yeah, I guess I would take the money, but I wouldn't promote it because if I'm going to promote something, I want to promote my own membership thing on my own site or my own Patreon or whatever else.
Marco:
Everybody wants to do their own thing with their own money, and they don't want middle people to come in and collect money on their behalf.
Marco:
You're not doing them a favor by doing that.
Marco:
so ultimately i i see why this question is asked and it's going to keep being asked like every six months for for the next 10 years as everyone thinks about these things with podcasts uh but i just don't think this is really a big problem and i don't think anybody wants a huge middleman to come in and and get in the way of between them and their customers
John:
And things like Patreon are a middleman as well, but they're divorced from podcasting.
John:
There's nothing about Patreon that is podcast-specific.
John:
So it's just a question of, like, how do you find a way to fund the thing that you're doing?
John:
And you have all these tools.
John:
I mean, Stripe is, you know, a middleman there.
John:
Like, taking a percentage of your transactions.
John:
Like, there's always going to be people taking a percentage of transactions, but...
John:
In the world of podcasting, it's nice to not have, oh, you have to do it this way because this is how podcasts are sold.
John:
You want to use Stripe, you want to use Patreon, you want to use Kickstarter, you want to solicit donations on your webpage and use any one of those services.
John:
None of those are tied to podcasting and are intrinsic to the podcast ecosystem or force you to do something.
John:
Unlike, for example, the App Store where Apple absolutely controls how you can collect money for your applications.
Casey:
Chris Adamson writes, what streaming services other than Netflix do you guys use?
Casey:
Does Syracuse have a Crunchyroll subscription?
Casey:
So actually, let's start with John and then we'll end with me.
John:
I saw this question I was trying to think of.
John:
I mean, I do.
John:
I subscribe to Hulu.
John:
I subscribe to Amazon Prime.
John:
I do not have a Crunchyroll subscription, but I have had one in the past.
John:
maybe there's other ones i honestly i thought about the other day i should catalog all the things i've subscribed to so i am aware right around the line eel style eel style of not having too many subscriptions but they've been creeping in like i mean for things like hulu it's like oh i want to see the handmaid's tale so i've subscribed to hulu but now i just have a hulu subscription forever because i find other shows that i want to watch i already watched the good place on there there's other things i'm
John:
Right.
John:
This can't continue indefinitely because I will be end up, you know, I got to add up all those five, ten, whatever dollars a month and see whether I was HBO.
John:
Well, no, but that's part of my cable.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Too many, I guess, is my answer.
Casey:
fair enough marco uh for me for us it's just uh it's netflix and hbo go or now whichever one is you know the one that doesn't require cable those two that's it yeah for us it's netflix and uh we are amazon prime members by virtue or prime video members by virtue of amazon prime oh yeah us too never use it yeah and that's the thing like outside of the grand tour we never use it and i probably would have subscribed to prime video specifically for the grand tour and then regretted it because the
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
Zelf writes in.
Casey:
Do I have a real name here?
Casey:
Sorry, a little fancy spreadsheet doesn't catch real names.
Casey:
Zelf Rydin writes in, I'm standing in the computer store in my local mall before Christmas 1986.
Casey:
John, sell me on a Mac Plus over the Apple IIgs.
John:
Oh, the pixels are the size of boulders on the Apple 2GS.
John:
The number of amazing games that you'll have to play on the Mac Plus will impress any Apple 2GS.
John:
Yes, I know the 2GS is color, but A, the Mac is the future, and B, the pixels are tiny, and C, the Mac has an incredible amount of charm.
John:
Like, it's no contest.
John:
If you have the money, as they say, if you have the means, I highly recommend one.
John:
Do not do the Apple 2GS.
John:
It is a dead end.
Casey:
That was Ferris Bueller, by the way.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Melvin Gundlach writes in, how did you initially meet and what got you started making podcasts together?
Casey:
Bits and pieces of this story have been told many, many, many times in the past.
Casey:
So I'll try to give the chief summarizer in chief version.
Casey:
Marco and I met when we were little kids.
Casey:
Your parents or grandparents, it isn't entirely important, had a house that was on a small lake in upstate New York.
Casey:
My grandparents had a different house on the same small lake in upstate New York.
Casey:
And we would hang out over the summers because basically we're the only kids that were there.
Casey:
And we kind of fell out of touch, not in an angry way, just in a, you know, we were kids and we grew up kind of way.
Casey:
And I think one of us would email the other from time to time over the years.
Casey:
And then shortly after, I think it was after we both got married, so not too terribly long after college, one of us reached out to the other.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, each of us blames the other for doing this in both the good way and the haha way.
Casey:
But anyway, somehow or another, we fell back in touch and and we just kind of rekindled our friendship from forever ago.
Casey:
So of the people that I still talk to, Marco and our now mutual friend, Brad Lautenbach, who works for Light, they are they are my two oldest friends that I've known for about the same amount of time.
Casey:
And it's been something like 20 years now.
Casey:
So fast forward to WWDC 2011, 2012.
Casey:
I forget which one it was.
Casey:
I want to say it was 2011.
Casey:
Marco and I are in line for the keynote.
Casey:
And I forget if John Syracuse walked up to us or Marco found John.
Casey:
But one way or another, John found us and we found John.
Casey:
And we hung out for the rest of the day.
Casey:
And then John and I kind of became friendly after that.
Casey:
And around the time that Build and Analyze ended in late 2012, I guess it was,
Casey:
I had started needling Marco about, hey, we should do a car show.
Casey:
We should do a car show.
Casey:
Even if nobody listens to it, it'll still be fun.
Casey:
We should do a car show.
Casey:
Spoiler alert, nobody listened to it.
Casey:
But anyway, Marco had the presence of mind to say, you know, Hypercritical just ended.
Casey:
I wonder if John would do it, too, because he likes cars.
Casey:
And so that's how Neutral got started.
Casey:
And then we would, as three nerds are off to do, we would start talking about nerdy stuff after the fact.
Casey:
And Marco, similar story, had the presence of mind to put that on SoundCloud, which by the time you listen to this may not even exist anymore.
Casey:
And so he put those episodes on SoundCloud and we realized, well, people actually like when we talk about things we sort of know about.
Casey:
And people are not that interested in us pontificating about cars, of which we know nothing about.
Casey:
So maybe we should stop with the car thing and start with the tech thing.
Casey:
And that's kind of the super abridged version of how this all came to be.
Casey:
And so ATP really became a thing, I think, in March of 2013.
Casey:
And here we are in the middle of 2017.
Casey:
It's still a thing.
Casey:
So let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Any other thoughts to add?
Casey:
And then John after him.
Marco:
Only that this is now one of the longest jobs I've ever held.
Marco:
Instapaper was longer.
Casey:
You caught me while I was taking a sip of water.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I almost died just now.
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
Instapaper was about five years.
Marco:
So we're in year four now for this.
Casey:
Does that mean the clock is ticking?
Casey:
Should I get worried?
Marco:
No, I'll celebrate it again.
Marco:
Once this becomes the longest job I've ever held, which I'm pretty sure will happen, then I will celebrate then.
Casey:
fair enough john any other thoughts i continue to protest the characterization of not knowing anything about cars speak for yourselves i know a lot about cars fair enough i i can't really argue with that all right uh let's see what else is good and uh what else is good here do you tape your webcams gentlemen john do you put tape over your webcam
John:
Nope.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Same here.
Casey:
Uh, Marco, are you still, and this is a question from Mark.
Casey:
So Mark to Marco, are you still happy choosing go for the overcast backend?
Marco:
Eh, not really.
Marco:
So first of all, only a very small part of the overcast backend is in Go.
Marco:
Most of it is still PHP.
Marco:
There's simply a separate Go process for the feed crawlers.
Marco:
And it doesn't even do the whole process.
Marco:
It just pulls a whole bunch of feeds and fetches their contents for changes if they don't respond with cache headers.
Marco:
And then if it detects a changed feed, it then stuffs the contents of that feed into a queue, which is processed by PHP consumers.
Marco:
And the whole web app is all PHP.
Marco:
So I would not even say I have a Go backend.
Marco:
I have one Go component in the backend.
Marco:
um and and go is go is an interesting language i'm sure a lot of people like it a lot uh i i like it a lot for certain things but it's very cumbersome to do complex things um so like it's really great for what i'm using it now for which is like something that is a fairly simple task that you need to be really fast you need to have a certain concurrency story there um but like
Marco:
I would not want to write, now that I've gotten to know the language a bit enough to do this, I would definitely not want to write a whole web app of complexity using Go.
Marco:
Just because simple things are cumbersome to do.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We only have time for a few more because I'm about to die.
Casey:
And so let's choose a few.
Casey:
Oh, God, I'm so sorry.
Casey:
I don't know how to pronounce this.
Casey:
But Joshin Marshall, I'm so, so sorry.
Casey:
How did you or how did this year's ATP T-shirt campaign work out for you?
Casey:
I'm happy to share my not so good experience.
Casey:
This is another example of doing something nicely that could have taken a terrible turn.
Casey:
Um, so the, the, the shirts are tough thing, right?
Casey:
Because right now we kind of have two choices.
Casey:
We can use a company that has a printing press, if you will, in Europe, but doesn't seem to do the best with fulfillment and oftentimes has problems.
Casey:
Or we can use a company that is only based out of the U S which kind of screws the Europeans and
Casey:
but is way more reliable.
Casey:
And we've fluttered back and forth between these two options.
Casey:
I will only speak for myself and say, I will probably petition for the U S only company next year and understand completely.
Casey:
If like a $90 t-shirt is just too darn much money to ask for from the Europeans, because it's,
Casey:
In some cases, like with import tax and VAT or whatever that stuff is called, it got to be unbelievably expensive.
Casey:
And I am deeply sorry for that.
Casey:
I really truly am.
Casey:
But I'd rather have everyone have a good experience and just decide whether or not it's worth the money to them than having a really crummy experience.
Casey:
So this is your warning, Europeans, right now that whenever we do T-shirts next, it's probably going to be expensive.
Casey:
And I am sorry.
Casey:
John, any other thoughts?
John:
i don't think uh it was that bad this year like we sold a lot of shirts and there's some percentage where there's going to be problems uh i i'm more happy having more the larger number of people who are happy with the shirts that they got across the whole world even if it also means a proportionally larger number of people who are unhappy because i'm presuming the unhappy people can at least at the very least get their money back um
John:
But it is a trade-off, and we've tried it both ways, and people complain either way, and who knows what we'll do.
John:
The problem is that this is not our core competency.
John:
We are not a t-shirt-generating enterprise.
John:
We are a podcast-generating enterprise that once a year does this silly thing with t-shirts.
John:
So the right way to do this is like, oh, you've got to do it all in-house, but we're not a corporation here.
John:
We're just three people.
John:
So every year, these three people...
John:
Try to figure out how to do t-shirts in a way that makes sense for everybody involved.
John:
And we have varying degrees of success.
John:
And guess what?
John:
We're going to try again.
Casey:
Marco, any other thoughts?
Marco:
I'm with you, Casey.
Marco:
And I would go a little further to say...
Marco:
So basically, you know, I'll name names here.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau does great work.
Marco:
They have awesome quality.
Marco:
They have awesome people who are there who help with the designs or often do the designs.
Marco:
They designed our ATP Rainbow M logo kind of thing.
Marco:
Like, they designed that themselves without even us telling them.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They are great and they do great work.
Marco:
But, yeah, their international shipping is really expensive because they print here in the U.S.
Marco:
And so Teespring, which is what we used this year and a couple years ago also, Teespring has printers in multiple locations around the world.
Marco:
We've had lots of problems, though, with Teespring.
Marco:
So it is cheaper.
Marco:
And we actually make more money from the Teespring shirts, usually, I think.
Marco:
But I would go as far as to say right now on the record, I don't think I ever want to use Teespring again after this year.
Marco:
Because in the past, the quality issue was a single large mistake.
Marco:
It was like when we had that wrong font on the source code on the back of the shirt.
Marco:
That was a single large mistake that...
Marco:
We worked with them.
Marco:
They corrected it.
Marco:
They sent everybody new shirts.
Marco:
It was one mistake, one big mistake that was fixable.
Marco:
This year, the problem, I don't know what has changed at T-Spring.
Marco:
I know there was an article about they were having, you know, layoffs or something.
Marco:
So I don't know what's going on over there.
Marco:
I don't pay attention.
Marco:
But this year, it was like a large number of different diffuse small problems.
Marco:
Even the shirts I ordered, I have bad printing on two of the four shirts that I ordered.
Marco:
There were things like missing colors, things like misalignment where the logo was slightly slanted instead of being aligned properly.
Marco:
Stuff like that, just a lot of small diffuse issues with Teespring this year.
Marco:
that it seems like maybe they have more printers i don't know what the deal is but it was the kind of problem that you can't really just go to them and have them fix you can't go to them and say hey like a third of these shirts from random color combinations and and places are weird in different ways and they're all inconsistent like they're not going to be able to fix that
Marco:
So, I would rather, going back to what Kate said, I would rather have something that I at least know is a good product.
Marco:
That is at least coming out right and coming out with high quality.
Marco:
Even if it costs too much for some people to be able to justify.
Marco:
I'd rather sell that than to do what we had this year and see people sending in pictures of the shirt that they were so excited to get.
Marco:
And I see it's missing a color or it's slanted or it's a bad print job, bad ink.
Marco:
That crushes me.
Marco:
So I cannot deal with that again.
Marco:
So I would not want to do Teespring anymore.
Marco:
And I don't care what it does.
Marco:
I'd rather not sell t-shirts than sell Teespring t-shirts again.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty similar in that feeling.
Casey:
Marco, since you were just talking, let's have you talk a little more.
Casey:
Why do you do all the ad reads?
Casey:
That's by Phil Cohen, by the way.
Marco:
I just kind of do.
Marco:
We never really talked about it.
Marco:
I just kind of do it.
Casey:
That was exactly my answer.
Casey:
It just was the way it started with Neutral.
John:
The short answer is that I don't want to do them and Casey doesn't want to do them and Marco does them.
John:
And so neither of us are going to go, hey, Marco, can we do that thing that neither of us want to do?
John:
No, we're going to let Marco do it.
John:
So basically it's because Marco is nice enough to do them and Casey and I are nice enough to let him.
Marco:
i think i think it started out that like i used to sell them directly myself at the beginning so it started out that i was selling them so it just made sense for me to also read them because i was talking to the sponsors and learning what they wanted me to say and everything else um these days i think anybody could do it but yeah i do it and i don't mind doing it and it's part of my workflow and it's totally fine
John:
And also part of the thing, like this is true in a lot of relationship situations, very often there's one person that cares more about something than somebody else.
John:
And I have a feeling Marco cares more about the ad reads than either one of us do.
John:
Certainly more than I do.
John:
How much tweaking he does to the ad copy and getting it so that he's happy with it.
John:
I think that is a factor.
John:
I think if either one of us did ad reads, we would do it in a way that Marco does not find satisfactory.
Casey:
Definitely.
Casey:
That is a good point.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think this is going to be the last question, and it should be a good one.
Casey:
Hans Schrader writes in, I'm from Europe.
Casey:
Could John explain for a foreigner why he is so touchy on the subject of bagels?
John:
No.
John:
I'm going to explain to Casey why he should select the question that I highlighted in yellow in the spreadsheet as our final question.
Casey:
I can only see but so much of the spreadsheet at once.
Casey:
My word.
John:
Oh, 100%.
Casey:
Oh, I am nowhere near there.
Casey:
That's why I skipped it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So the answer to the question is – the answer to the question that John isn't answering is there are good bagels and there are things that vaguely resemble bagels.
Casey:
And John and I both have reasons to prefer – actually, and Marco too.
John:
Do you want me to actually answer this one?
John:
Because I can answer it.
John:
Yes, please do.
John:
So this is a very simple thing.
John:
Everyone has foods that they eat growing up that are like regional or local to their family or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
nostalgic for it's like i want to have the x that i had when i was a child that's a thing um and bagels like that for me only bagels are pretty widely regional to the new york metro area so i grew up with the expectation that i can get bagels that taste in a certain way and pizza that tastes a certain way pretty much anywhere and as you know a
John:
a sheltered child who didn't travel too much i assume this was true everywhere in the united states but then when i went off to college i learned this is not true and even just up a little bit farther north and east everything i got that people called a bagel didn't taste like the things that i when i was growing up and i'd go back to new york and said no they're still there but nobody else has them and same thing with pizza so
John:
It's basically that's that's why it's important that bagels are made a certain way in the region where I grew up.
John:
And because that's the sort of their entry point into the US, they have some stake in saying this is the way the bagels are, quote unquote, supposed to taste.
John:
Right.
John:
And that I can't get them where I currently live.
John:
So that's why I'm nostalgic for them.
John:
That's it.
John:
Same thing with pizza.
John:
Pizza is actually probably worse than bagels, but both of them I miss.
John:
But when I was on Long Island, I had both.
Marco:
It's reasonable for me.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Warby Parker, and Squarespace.
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.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
All right, so the Zelda question is the one you want, John?
John:
It's the one in yellow.
John:
I mean, it's not enough material for an after show, but yeah.
Casey:
I can't.
Casey:
I have Flux on, so I can't tell what the hell is yellow right now.
Casey:
Oh, God, I'm blind.
Casey:
Oh, God, I'm blind.
Casey:
This is a problem.
John:
See, Flux is, I don't like those things.
Casey:
We can't even tell yellow.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Vincent Scurved.
Casey:
I'll get this one day.
Casey:
What is the status on your Breath of the Wild progression?
Casey:
Did you finish every aspect of the game, etc.?
Casey:
As I did with most questions, I'll start this off.
Casey:
I still very much enjoy the game, but haven't played it in probably like a month and a half.
Casey:
I have just been incredibly busy lately.
Casey:
and haven't had a chance to sit down with it.
Casey:
And also, I think we discussed on the show at some point, I am not very good at picking the game up and remembering exactly what I was doing when I put it down.
Casey:
So I'll have like a particular task or mission or thing I want to accomplish, which sometimes is like, you know, one of the official game tasks.
Casey:
But sometimes it's like, oh, I want to go and get myself ready for this game task by going across the map and doing such and such thing or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And then I never write it down and completely forget that
Casey:
And then I get frustrated when I pick the game back up because I have no memory and need to reestablish where I am and what I'm doing.
Casey:
That's my two cents.
Casey:
Marco, let's talk.
Casey:
Are you playing Zelda at all?
John:
No, not at all.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on to John.
John:
Well, Marco can give us a tip update.
John:
How is she doing it?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
They're playing it sometimes.
Marco:
I can't tell you how far they are.
Marco:
I have no idea.
John:
Try to participate in your family, Marco.
John:
Sit down and watch with them.
John:
They watch you play your stupid Sonic games.
Marco:
I watch sometimes, but I have no idea how to communicate to you how far they are.
John:
Alright.
John:
So for me in Breath of the Wild, I don't usually 100% games.
John:
I have 100%ed many Zeldas.
John:
That series I play a lot.
John:
I like a lot.
John:
There's a chance I would have 100% did Breath of the Wild if it wasn't for the Korok seeds.
John:
I don't think I'm ever going to do that.
John:
There's just too many of them.
John:
But I'm coming close to doing every non-seed thing in the non-DLC portion of the game to the point where we're also doing things like having every possible armor set also fully upgraded.
John:
I'm getting close to that.
John:
It's within reach and I might end up doing it.
John:
um for the dlc i did the the was it the trial of the sword i did that so my master sword is fully charged up to uh to 60 all the time which is awesome and also lasts a much longer time i did all the side quests in the dlc so i've done everything of 100 of the dlc which was tiny whatever it's not a big deal
John:
And like I said, I don't even have all the shrines left.
John:
I'm in the hundreds.
John:
But I'm within striking distance of 100%ing everything in the main game aside from the Korok seeds.