Withhold the Fun
John:
Do you want to do a Q&A episode for Friday?
Marco:
Do we have enough AskATPs?
Marco:
Do you just kind of expand on some of those?
Marco:
We have a million.
Casey:
Well, we have a billion of them.
Casey:
With respect, not all of them are very good.
John:
We're going to take real-time questions from the chat room and just the entire show will be like, no, no, that's not a good question.
John:
No.
John:
Nope, I don't like that one.
John:
Anyone like that one?
John:
It'll be the worst live show ever.
John:
Just be us yelling at the chat room, ask good questions.
Casey:
Let's start with I wanted to call attention to something that is near and dear to our hearts.
Casey:
You know, this show, all three of us are also hosts on Relay FM.
Casey:
And Relay is doing a fifth anniversary extravaganza live show.
Casey:
I don't know, just event in San Francisco today.
Casey:
uh in august so coming up i believe it's it's thursday august 22 so in a few weeks now but tickets have been on sale for a while i don't think there's too many left so if you wanted to see some of your atp co-hosts next month uh then yeah you can certainly feel free to grab a ticket to the relay live event um i think there's
Casey:
$30.
Casey:
I'm going to stall for time and confirm that, yes, they are $29.
Casey:
And so if you would like to check that out, if you happen to be in the San Francisco area or fancy a pilgrimage to the San Francisco area, like I said, two-thirds of your hosts will be there.
Casey:
Probably your favorite two-thirds.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
Yeah, I'm totally right.
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Everyone loves John.
John:
all right uh moving on let's somebody tell me about ios 13 charging optimization there's a tidbit that uh people keep sending us and i at least have known about it since wwc but we never had occasion to mention it and i think it's worth mentioning because this is an eternal topic on our show we've done i think multiple ask atp questions about this thing which is am i doing damage to my phone's battery by
John:
plugging it in when I go to sleep and leaving it charged 100% all night long?
John:
Is it better if I just charge it up at the last minute before I wake up?
John:
Should I be letting it sit around the 100% charge?
John:
All sorts of things like am I doing bad things to my battery?
John:
What we've said in the past is
John:
Yeah, it's not great, but the alternatives are all worse.
John:
You should just use your phone in the natural, reasonable way that Apple expects you to use it and just deal with the fact that you're not babying your battery every second of the day because the phone exists to serve you.
John:
You don't exist to serve the phone.
John:
So in iOS 13, Apple has added some features that will help you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so when you plug it in before you go to bed at night, it doesn't immediately start charging it to 100 percent.
John:
It sits there and it doesn't pull in any charge until like it calculates it's going to take me, you know, 20 minutes to charge.
John:
It waits until, let's say, 30 or 40 minutes before you wake up.
John:
Then it charges to 100 percent.
John:
So ideally, when you wake up at your normal wake up time, the phone has just charged to 100 percent.
John:
So it's not spending all night, every night plugged in at 100 percent.
John:
Now, the downside of that is if it miscalculates or you have to wake up early or whatever, you could wake up to a phone that's not fully charged or hasn't even started charging in the worst case scenario.
John:
So I think this is an optional feature.
John:
But most of us who have boring lives on regular schedules, it sounds like a great way to transparently extend people's battery lives.
John:
And if you don't want it again, you can just turn it off, I think, and just.
John:
let it charge the old-fashioned way but i think it's a reasonable thing to default to on especially if they're very conservative and they say like we'll we'll try to be at 100 charge two hours before you wake up or one hour before you wake up chances are good that'll be fine um it would be great if there was something when you plugged it in that threw something up in your face and said just so you know
John:
I know you just plugged me in, but I'm not actually going to charge because I think you're about to go to sleep, and I'm going to start charging right before you wake up.
John:
If that's not what you want me to do, hit this button.
John:
I'll start charging now.
John:
But that's a hell of a dialogue box that no one's ever going to read, so I'm not sure how they would pull that off.
John:
But I thought this was a very clever feature to help people get more life out of their batteries.
Casey:
Alrighty.
Casey:
We had a discussion last episode that Marco brought up about using sparse disk images to enforce a quota for iPhoto.
Casey:
And a friend of the show, Dave Nanian, had some tips about maybe a different or better approach for that.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to take us through this?
Casey:
Or perhaps John, since this is file system related?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I can't possibly let you get away with iPhoto there.
Marco:
It's a photos app with iCloud.
Casey:
Oh, God, sorry.
Marco:
Yes, thank you.
Marco:
Yeah, and so I recommended... My trick was when you're on... So when you're not doing keep all photos in all their original mode, like when you're doing the optimize my space mode, like you might do on a secondary computer, like a laptop, my trick for that is to...
Marco:
put the photos library in a sparse bundle disk image that you create with disk utility with a maximum size quota.
Marco:
And I said mine was like 30 gigs or 50 gigs, something like that.
Marco:
And so it's a great way to make Photos app respect a certain disk size maximum.
Marco:
Dave Nanian, who is of super-duper fame, knows quite a bit about storage and file systems and things like that.
Marco:
And he suggested basically for...
Marco:
for like safety and durability reasons, that a sparse bundle disk image is not as reliable and safe and everything as just using a second APFS space sharing volume, which is the same trick I use to install Catalina next to Mojave and have dual boot here.
Marco:
So I literally just told everyone about that a few weeks ago.
Marco:
And here we are.
Marco:
I didn't even think about it for this use.
Marco:
But if you do the APFS space sharing volume,
Marco:
it gives you all the protections and integrity and everything of the native APFS file system running directly itself, not in a simulated container.
Marco:
And so it's safer, and it's more flexible, and you don't have to auto-mount it using login items and everything.
Marco:
So that's actually a way better way to do it.
Marco:
So thanks, Dave Nanian, and check out SuperDuper.
John:
And I'm assuming the reason Marco hasn't done it that way is he came up with this scheme before APF has existed and has just continued to use it, right?
John:
That is correct.
John:
So anyway, yeah, that's a good idea to convert that.
John:
And to get into a little bit of technical detail of why using a sparse bundle disk image is not a great idea.
John:
So when you're doing that, a sparse bundle is this directory full of a bunch of little files, and there's this driver in front of it.
John:
that makes it look like a disk to the operating system and so when photos is running photos thinks it's writing to a disk and it says i'm going to write out this jpeg or whatever and it says write this jpeg to disk and the driver that sits in front of the disk image says yep sure totally i wrote that jpeg to disk but that driver has its own set of caches and other you know sort of coalescing io mechanisms and everything and
John:
And it hasn't actually written a disk.
John:
It was waiting to bundle it up with another big write because it's going to write out one of those Stripe files somewhere or whatever.
John:
So at that point, Photos thinks everything is safe, but it's not safe because the bits haven't actually hit your disk yet.
John:
There's like a second layer of buffering there.
John:
So it's a situation where the application can think it's doing the right thing to always make sure that everything on disk is always either a complete image or...
John:
a non-existent image when in reality it could be a partial image written to one of the stripes in the disk bundle because of that driver so that's why apfs is safer because then it really is just the same old volume as your boot volume or any other volume and when photo says please write this jpeg disk and apfs says it's done so it has all the guarantees of apfs with no extra secondary layer underneath it so
John:
Yeah, the wonders of APFS.
John:
We all need to get used to the fact that it's really easy and cheap to make volumes.
John:
And in case it wasn't clear from Marco's earlier discussions, when you make a new APS volume, you can choose to limit it, as they call it, like a quota or whatever.
John:
Like you don't pick the size of your volume because you're not carving up your disk space.
John:
They're all sharing the same space in the container.
John:
And if you don't say anything, it'll just share all the space.
John:
Right.
John:
But you can limit it.
John:
So when you create the APFS volume, just limit it to 30 gigs or whatever you want.
John:
And you have a extremely native as native as your boot disk way to manage your photo storage.
Casey:
So, Friends of the Show Fun Fact, which is a show with Eric Devins and Alan Pike, they have covered, to the best of their ability, the genesis of Wheel, which is the – was it a group, is that right?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And they did a whole segment on that this past week.
Casey:
And so we will link that episode in the show notes if you'd like to hear the results of our extreme digging, trying to figure out what the genesis of this was.
Marco:
It's pretty awesome.
Casey:
It was quite funny, as that show tends to be.
Casey:
So if you haven't checked it out...
Casey:
It is very good, and I quite enjoy it.
Casey:
Now, granted, I quite like both of the people who host it, so I'm predisposed to enjoy it, but nevertheless, it is quite good.
Casey:
And then BJ Rowland writes us with regard to the engineering standards.
Casey:
That was the pre-show of the last episode with shall versus must and things of that nature.
Casey:
BJ writes, engineering standards like civil, mechanical, electrical, et cetera, never use the word must so as to avoid confusion between legal obligations and requirements for compliance with the standard.
Casey:
The word must implies a legal obligation, whereas shall is a requirement to comply with the standard.
Casey:
And then BJ linked to me, and I will put in the show notes, a PDF from the American Petroleum Institute, which defines these.
Casey:
Shall denotes a minimum requirement in order to conform to the standard.
Casey:
Should denotes a recommendation or that which is advised but not required in order to conform to the standard.
Casey:
may denotes a course of action permissible within the limits of a standard and can denotes a statement of possibility or capability who knew that much thought went into such short words but that's the way it is and we can always trust what the american petroleum institute tells us yeah exactly right those those uh those big ice things up at the polls yeah we don't need those what are they even called nobody knows we don't need them uh marco tell me about the uh iphone se in your headphones
Marco:
Quick updates on things I've talked about recently.
Marco:
Last episode, I believe, I discussed my iPhone SE test phone that I had bought.
Marco:
I've been switching my SIM into it sometimes to go out at night or something.
Marco:
I really like the size a lot.
Marco:
And one thing I've especially noticed is just compared to my XS, the SE is not only a lot smaller and not only fits a lot better in my hand and is easier to navigate by hand, it's also a lot lighter.
Marco:
I kind of didn't realize over time how heavy the iPhone has gotten since then.
Marco:
but like when you compare a 10s to an se it's a huge weight difference and i've noticed this especially now in the summertime i'm wearing shorts a lot and i'm you know like you know it's really hot and so i'm wearing these like you know thin light shorts and having the tennis in my pocket is this not only is it this giant rectangle which you know looks ridiculous and everything but and it's hard to get in and out of the pocket and everything the tennis weighs down my pocket like it's almost like trying to pull my shorts off
John:
where it's like you might need to get tighter shorts uh now that you've lost all this weight i actually ran into that recently like i had some shorts that like uh they were probably a little bit too big of me and i think the waistband had sort of gotten stretched out and yeah i noticed the same thing my big phone would be like or the worst would be like i'd have my wallet and my keys and my phone and they would just be pulling down my shorts so try a smaller size
Marco:
no i i this is the smaller size like it's it's amazing how just how heavy the phone is when it's in a very lightweight garment like you know very light shorts really i i hope with future phones i mean i know this is it's this is the same problem of like you know all the competing desires like if you ask me in the winter what phone i should get next i would say oh maybe i should try the bigger one to have all that screen space but like in the summertime i'm like i just want the
Marco:
i need like you know summer phone winter phone here uh but just one more point in the se's favor there and and kind of one more vote for like hey you know what actually smaller phones might not be so bad to you know keep making them and keep updating them um so after so anyway this fall when i'm back in jeans and they released some awesome new giant screen phone remind me of this conversation please and what i'm saying oh maybe i should go for the big one remind me that that i said that's that no no
John:
Well, you said the rumor is that the non-Macs version is actually going to be a little bit smaller.
John:
So you're going to be getting what you want.
John:
A little bit smaller, but not, you know.
Marco:
Yeah, I believe that's for next year, but we'll see.
Marco:
And then a second minor update here.
Marco:
I went through this whole segment a few weeks ago about how I was doing my Power Beats Pro, and I really enjoyed them for summertime, except there was this nagging issue that you can't really, like, take them off and put them anywhere.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
uh because like you can't put them in your pocket because they've been their buttons get pushed and everything and well i'm back to my trex air my aftershocks trex is it air yeah the air the smaller ones yeah i'm back to those and yes they are a sponsor of the show they did not ask me to say this they aren't sponsoring this week or that week for that matter um and but yeah i'm back to the trex air because i
Marco:
I realized that they basically solved all the problems I had with the beats.
Marco:
Because I can, when I don't need to be listening to them or when I want to take it off so I can talk to somebody, I can just drop them down and have them stick around my neck.
Marco:
And even if I have to put them in a pocket, they kind of stick out the top of the pocket.
Marco:
They can't go all the way in because of their shape.
Marco:
But no buttons get pushed.
Marco:
And they don't accidentally disconnect or reconnect or anything because they have their own power control.
Marco:
So I'm back to the Trexair, my wonderful Aftershocks, and they are indeed the superior summer headphone.
Marco:
But I'll go back to the Beats Pro when it comes time to go to the gym and stuff like that.
John:
What about all those headphones?
John:
I think actually Beats makes some of them.
John:
That it's two little bud thingies, but they're connected by a wire.
Marco:
That was the previous Power Beats.
Marco:
I heard, I think, from you.
Marco:
Didn't Tina go through a lot of those?
Marco:
One of our friends, their spouse went through a lot of them because they kept breaking.
Marco:
I forget who it is.
Casey:
Well, Kyle's the Gray, I think, had gone through that, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
He had plowed through like four or five sets or something like that.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Marco:
I might be making... Yeah, they have some massive flaw, like the previous Powerbeats.
Marco:
But... And then we also had people write in to tell me... Because I had said on that show, like...
Marco:
I really loved the, you know, pairing style, like the AirPods pairing style that these new headphones had and that I really wished Apple would make full-size over-ear headphones with that, like as is rumored.
Marco:
And a number of people wrote in just to point out that they do make full-size headphones with the, not the new H1 chip from the AirPod 2s, but they do make
Marco:
Beats Studio headphones, which are indeed over-ear full-size headphones that have the AirPods 1 chip, the W1, in them.
Marco:
So that was good to hear.
Marco:
I have not had a chance to try them because, you know, beach life.
Marco:
But ultimately, I think at this point, I would wait until the version 2 because the version 2 chip is so much better, like, you know, all the fast repairing and the HeyDingus stuff and everything.
Marco:
So at this point, I will wait for version 2 before I try that.
Marco:
But it's good to know that they actually already do make basically the product I was asking.
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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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you to Lumen5 for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Apple may be bankrolling original podcasts, you know, Spotify style and trying to kind of dip their toe in the podcasting water by funding podcasts.
Casey:
So this broke midday yesterday as we record.
Casey:
And it was Mark Gurman and Lucas Shaw.
Casey:
And apparently Apple is, like I said, going to fund podcasts, according to them.
Casey:
What do we think about this, Marco?
Casey:
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Marco:
this is messy um we've talked a lot about the whole idea of podcast platforms having proprietary lockdown content that's only available on their platform usually through some kind of paid plan and i think most of what we have said would still apply to this the huge difference here is that apple has by most estimates about 60 of the market share of podcast players
Marco:
The next biggest player after that is Spotify at around 10%.
Marco:
And then everything below Spotify is like 3%, 2%.
Marco:
So it drops off very quickly after Apple.
Marco:
And Apple is the big player that matters the most.
Marco:
Spotify matters a little.
Marco:
And everyone else like me and everyone else doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
It really is a different animal when talking about this kind of concept when it's Apple doing it compared to anyone else doing it.
Marco:
So that being said, having some kind of exclusive podcast to the Apple Podcast app, it has the potential for some really negative effects on the podcast ecosystem.
Marco:
But ultimately, I don't think it will play out that way.
Marco:
I don't see a lot of podcast...
Marco:
saying will be exclusive to apple because for all the reasons we've said it for other things like if you go if you go to apple if an existing you know high demand show goes to apple you know you could say yeah they have 60 market share but you could also say they only have 60 market share
Marco:
So if you are an average show, which we aren't, but our discussion would be very different if they came to us with a truckload of money, we would have a bigger problem on our hands here.
Marco:
But for most shows, this proposition would basically be, hey, do you want to lose 40% of your audience and come work for us, basically?
Marco:
60% is enough that this kind of thing is a scary potential for bad effects, but it's also not so much that we can assume it would be successful for them.
Marco:
And their market share over the last few years is going down, not up, as more clients take more share from them and as the audience grows in places that aren't Apple, like Spotify.
Marco:
So on one hand, I don't see a lot of big shows jumping on this because...
Marco:
I don't think they'd be willing to lock out or lose such a big chunk of their audience that isn't on Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
And once you put up a paywall, yeah, right now, 60% of the people use Apple Podcasts, but how many of them will pay?
Marco:
Let's assume, for the sake of argument,
Marco:
that this is podcasts plus and it's another $10 a month, Apple service, or we know whatever it is.
Marco:
It, they keep adding all these plus services that are probably going to be around 10 bucks a month.
Marco:
Let's assume that's what it is.
Marco:
Pick your price.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
The fact is it's probably going to, it's probably a paid service that Apple wants people to subscribe to, right?
Marco:
So if they do this,
Marco:
You're not going to get 60% of your audience.
Marco:
You're going to get like 1% of your audience because the other 59% who are using Apple Podcasts won't pay.
Marco:
And then the 40% who aren't there can't even have it as an option.
Marco:
So I don't think it would be wise for most shows to sign up for this.
Marco:
Now, they could be developing original shows.
Marco:
That's a different story.
Marco:
That has different math and different effects.
Marco:
That's probably more of what they're going to be doing because, as I said, it doesn't make a lot of sense for any existing successful show to take themselves and go behind a paywall.
Marco:
That doesn't make a lot of sense strategically, money-wise, everything.
Marco:
It's not a good idea.
Marco:
So that's probably not going to happen very often.
Marco:
So if you go to the idea of they're going to be developing original content,
Marco:
And funding that, then that's fine.
Marco:
I think that would play out similarly to such efforts on Spotify and on Stitcher Premium and on places like Audible, like places that have like originals, like exclusive originals that were developed for them by them behind some kind of paywall.
Marco:
Those do okay for some of those platforms, but they don't really affect the outside world of podcasting.
Marco:
They don't have enough traction seemingly to really affect everyone else.
Marco:
So this is probably how this is going to play out.
Marco:
Apple News Plus has not killed anything except maybe the usefulness of the Apple News app.
Marco:
But besides that, Apple News Plus, which I think would be a very similar approach, hasn't really done anything.
Marco:
It hasn't set the road on fire.
Marco:
It hasn't taken off that well.
Marco:
It hasn't really been a great or a terrible thing for anybody.
Marco:
It's just kind of too small of a splash to matter.
Marco:
That same scale of effect is probably what's going to happen here.
Marco:
They're probably going to have some big names.
Marco:
They're probably going to come out the door with some kind of premium thing, and they'll get some usage.
Marco:
But I'm guessing it will go just like everyone else's paid exclusive originals.
Marco:
and not really move the needle for those of us who aren't in that world.
Marco:
And for this area of podcasting, like the kind of tech and Apple news, anybody listening to this show probably, you probably won't even notice this kind of stuff.
Marco:
Because first of all, most of you aren't using Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
Unlike the general purpose podcast market, most people who listen to shows like this don't use Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
It's a much smaller market share.
Marco:
and so you won't even see these shows.
Marco:
You won't even hear about them, and if Apple does something to make their own client more attractive to people, it probably isn't going to work very well on our listeners that listen to this kind of show.
Marco:
So I don't think it's going to really affect us much, if at all, except it'll give us a few show topics to talk about.
Marco:
But setting that aside, I don't think it's going to really do much.
Marco:
It's probably not going to go very far, and it probably isn't going to affect us even if it does go a little bit far.
Marco:
But setting all that aside, this certainly does bring up an interesting discomfort that as Apple transitions into a company that cares a lot more about services and is seeking much stronger revenue and strong revenue growth from services –
Marco:
They're looking around.
Marco:
They're poking around the company saying, hey, where can we wrestle up some more services revenue?
Marco:
Hey, podcast division over there, we haven't talked to you in a while.
Marco:
Can we extract a monthly fee out of you?
Marco:
Can we get that somehow?
Marco:
Can we get people to pay you a few dollars a month here and there?
Marco:
There's a lot of incentives now that Apple has that are at odds with a lot of its previous ideals or previous behavior.
Marco:
Things like, you know, doing things that are best for the customer.
Marco:
That changes when you sell iCloud backup space by the month.
Marco:
You know, stuff like that.
Marco:
There's all these weird incentives they now have that are counter to, we just want to make the best products for everybody.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
as they push more into the services narrative and services as a major growth engine for money, this kind of stuff is going to keep happening.
Marco:
I worry what that means for podcasting because so far they have been such a good neutral steward of their massive power in the world of podcasting.
Marco:
If it weren't for Apple's benevolent neglect of the world of podcasting, it wouldn't be what it is today.
Marco:
Podcasting would not exist the way it does today.
Marco:
It would not be this good.
Marco:
It would not be this big.
Marco:
It would not be this healthy.
Marco:
And it would certainly not be this open if Apple was actively involved in maximizing everything about podcasting for themselves.
Marco:
It would not be what it is today.
Marco:
And we really have them to thank for where it is.
Marco:
Like we have their incredible benevolent neglect and mostly hands-off leadership of their massive market share.
Marco:
And their open directory.
Marco:
Well, their semi-open directory that we all kind of use.
Marco:
We have them to thank for where we are now because of all that stuff.
Marco:
And we've just been assuming all this time.
Marco:
Well, Apple really hasn't made significant moves in podcasting.
Marco:
They probably never will.
Marco:
So when people like me would talk about things like market share diversity and client diversity and how important it is to have more podcast apps out there,
Marco:
there was this giant sitting on the side with 60, 70, 80% market share.
Marco:
And I wasn't worried about them because they were doing all the right things and they didn't seem to really care.
Marco:
And they were doing all the right things for like a decade or more.
Marco:
And so it didn't seem like they were ever going to be a threat to this open ecosystem and this wonderful medium that we all love.
Marco:
So the fact that they're now seemingly making a move that is kind of dipping a toe in the water in that direction, that is concerning merely because of their scale.
Marco:
That's kind of the pessimist take there, and I do worry about that, and I am going to be watching this closely.
Marco:
This could turn bad real fast, depending on what they do and how they do it.
John:
I have the optimist take for you.
John:
That's what I was thinking of.
John:
What's the best case scenario?
Marco:
I mean, the best case scenario is this kind of doesn't go anywhere and it fizzles out and we keep doing things the way we've been doing them.
John:
Well, no.
John:
Not the best case scenario for how it turns out.
John:
Best case scenario for their motivations.
John:
Because if looked at through the lens of a company that has the track record that Apple has with podcasts, the most charitable attribution and motivation could be
John:
Apple has done what it's done with podcasts.
John:
Apple sees what we all see, which is the luminaries and the Spotify's of the world coming for podcasting.
John:
They're throwing money at it and getting exclusives and putting up paywalls and vending their own clients.
John:
From Apple's perspective...
John:
uh presumably there is some you know that they didn't accidentally treat podcasting the way they've treated for like 10-15 years like it wasn't it wasn't an accident it wasn't like nobody noticed it was you know part of a conscious strategy which is having podcasts more or less the way apple made them by keeping them open and diverse and having their player be the most popular player
John:
makes apple's devices more valuable because if you get one of these things whether it be an ipod or an iphone or whatever it has been over the years one of the things you can do with it besides you know text people and watch movies and youtube and listen to music is also you can listen to podcasts right and these other companies uh employing their strategies and throwing money at it is a threat to uh
John:
basically a beneficial fee a benefit of apple's products because apple has lots of situations where yeah they make the product but there's some dominant non-apple third-party force that controls a major part of the ecosystem examples are youtube facebook netflix companies that aren't apple that at various times apple butts heads with but that are an essential part of the value proposition of apple's products because if you
John:
Buy an Apple device and you can't use Netflix on it.
John:
That's bad for Apple.
John:
And same thing with Facebook, same thing with YouTube.
John:
And those companies have at various times exerted that power in ways that Apple has been uncomfortable with.
John:
So I don't think Apple would be super happy if Spotify became the YouTube of a podcast or if Luminary was greatly successful.
John:
So...
John:
most charitable you could say apple sees this happening and says we need to defend podcasting and the way we can defend it is by doing more or less what they're doing throw money out of get original things like basically the old microsoft strategy of we have more money time and resources than you do so we're just going to do the same thing you do more or less the same way maybe not as well but who really cares and we'll just wait for you to run out of money and wait for your vcs to run out of patience because we can do this all day just like captain america
John:
and then once that happens they just go back to okay and now podcasting continues to be a safe neutral thing that is a that is a benefit to our products and we don't have to worry about getting youtubed or netflixed i'm not saying this is the most likely scenario but it is at least plausible and the reason i think it's plausible is that honestly i think if the server server no people came around and say can we get money out of that someone would do the math and say
John:
Not really.
John:
Like, it's just podcasting.
John:
And I know it seems big, but in the grand scheme of things, it's like, you know, an ant's fart in the app store, like three days worth of revenue.
John:
Like, it's nothing.
John:
It's nothing compared to the big businesses like music, movies, games, and the whole rest of the app store.
John:
I don't know if that's true.
John:
That's kind of like my sort of gut reaction is that podcasting is as big as it may be on an Apple scale.
John:
It's just like, yeah.
John:
So I don't, I give it a less than 50% chance that their motivation is purely charitable and they're just defending podcasting, but I'm not willing to entirely rule it out just because of the people who are in charge and the fact that it makes sense that Apple doesn't want that to happen to podcasting.
John:
It's bad for Apple if that happens.
John:
And like you said, Margot, like, honestly, their chances, I don't think they have any illusions, unlike Luminary and perhaps Spotify, I don't think they have any particular illusions about this amazing upside of them dominating podcasting, mostly because Apple has dominated podcasting and they have not reached for that massive upside, probably because it doesn't exist.
John:
And so I'm really hoping that this is a mostly defensive move.
John:
Uh, that, that won't, you know, that will stave off the competitors that we think are, have worse motivations, but they will not turn into, you know, Apple, uh, going all podcast evil on us.
John:
And the second aspect of this is about, uh, if they tried to go help podcast evil, how, uh,
John:
This strategy, you know, I mean, you've said a million reasons, Mark, about why it's probably not going to be successful.
John:
I have another reason why Apple might think it's going to be successful, but why it's a little bit different.
John:
So the thing I kept thinking of with all of their Plus stuff or whatever is their one product that doesn't have a Plus after the name, their one service product that doesn't have a Plus, which is Apple Arcade.
John:
where they pay people to make games for iOS and all their other devices.
John:
And it's like, why would Apple... We talked about this when we talked about Apple.
John:
Why would Apple do this?
John:
People already make games for all their devices.
John:
Why would they pay people to do it and then charge a subscription and distribute that subscription based on how much you play and blah, blah, blah, like the whole model.
John:
Why would they bother doing that?
John:
What's the point?
John:
And I feel like the point of Apple Arcade is...
John:
There is an ecosystem for games on Apple devices, but that ecosystem is lacking in ways that Apple cares about.
John:
The first way it's lacking is that a lot of those developers don't support all the lesser devices.
John:
Oh, you don't support Apple TV.
John:
You don't support the Mac.
John:
Of course, nobody does.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
But Apple would like you to do that.
John:
So one way they can make that happen is by giving you money.
John:
to say okay now now will you support apple tv sure i guess yeah sure pay me but the second thing is the games that are dominating the app store tend to have these exploitive mechanics and you know these uh free-to-play things that extract money from you in exchange for you know the mechanics that that uh
John:
withhold the fun until you pay them more money and have these subscriptions and all this other stuff, right?
John:
And how can Apple stop that from happening?
John:
They've built the App Store such that that is the apex predator.
John:
They can change the ecosystem by saying, what if we pay you to make a game and we'll give you a bunch of money, but you can't put it in an app purchases.
John:
It has to be you just buy a game and you play it and it's fun and that's it.
John:
So they can shape the market with their money.
John:
to make a new thing that hasn't previously existed, make that become successful.
John:
Podcasting, on the other hand, is not suffering from a blight of free-to-play podcasts that exploit these mechanics or whatever.
John:
You could argue that wouldn't it be great if your podcast didn't have ads, and lots of these companies have argued that, like, oh, our podcasts are great, they don't have ads.
It's like...
John:
Podcasts with ads are not the same thing as like casinos for kids that extract money from you and delay these mechanics and make you buy coins to get energy to be able to continue.
John:
You know, like it's not even close.
John:
I don't think people who are listening to podcasts today are particularly upset about how they're being exploited.
John:
by free podcasts i think it's a it's a trade-off that most people are more or less happy with and have been happy with when it was called public radio despite the fact that during you know pledge drive month it would drive people crazy but other than that uh you know and we have that in podcast world too it's it's a relationship that makes some kind of sense and you don't hear stories about a kid losing three grand and then having to complain to apple to get their money back you don't hear all these
John:
you know uh problems of like buying a game and feeling like you have or downloading a game and feeling like you haven't actually gotten anything and not realizing how much you have to keep paying like that's not how podcasts work today so the podcast ecosystem is not in as desperate need of a new thing that can only exist when apple throws money at it so by apple throwing money at this i think what they're going to get best case scenario is a bunch of good podcasts
John:
and probably that's what spotify can get give people a bunch of money and they make a bunch of good podcasts and so spotify will have some good podcasts they're only on spotify apple will have some good podcasts they're only on apple's player and like and there's a subscription model and blah blah blah but i don't think that fundamentally changes the nature of the ecosystem unlike apple arcade where if that came to exist and be a subscription it would feel so much different than the wild west of the app store where everything's free to play if you subscribe to apple arcade you would be having a
John:
you know, qualitatively different experience than if you didn't subscribe.
John:
Whereas if you subscribe to one of these podcast service, it's like, well, do you care about any of those podcasts or do you not?
John:
But either way, oh, these shows don't have ads, but you know, who cares?
John:
I barely noticed that the ads such a small percentage of the time and it's not a thing that bothers me or whatever.
John:
So I, I hope this is a defensive maneuver on Apple's part.
John:
I also hope they don't expect it to,
John:
you know change the landscape or go gangbusters because honestly the value that they're adding to podcasting is small the defensive value is perhaps large because you're you're basically staying on equal footing and not allowing spotify or luminary to on the off chance that they start to snowball you're not allowing them to have the leg up on you because like look we're all like this and this is the player you're already using already so the playing field is level again and you probably don't care about these podcasts anyway so just ignore all this
John:
That is my uncharacteristically optimistic dream scenario, is that we'll get a couple of good podcasts that Apple pays for.
John:
It will stave off the competitors, but the landscape will stay more or less the same.
John:
Remind me of my brief, deluded optimism three years from now.
John:
I did say it was less than 50% chance, but I'm not willing to dismiss it as ridiculous.
Casey:
So just before we get all of the commentary and questions, if Apple came to the three of us and said, you know, here's a billion apiece, would you take it and take your just peerless podcast over to our podcast plus?
Casey:
I think we can all agree that for a billion apiece, we would say yes.
John:
of course i mean everyone has a price everyone has a price we all have prices but the thing is no one's going to pay our price because we are not like it's like marco said like why would you take an existing show and convince them to reduce their audience you would just pay famous people actual famous people to make a new thing that isn't available anywhere like it's just it's such a straightforward strategy like when they when apple did its tv service they didn't buy friends or the office although arguably maybe they should have
John:
they paid a bunch of money to people for people to make new shows that's that's your value proposition unique things and no one is happy about having something that's unique by taking something that wasn't unique and hoarding it just to yourself that just makes everybody sad so that's not going to happen and anyway apple wouldn't be going after tech podcasts they'd be going after you know
John:
comedians or oprah yeah exactly oprah look at steven spielberg and oprah are on stage we were not so let's know that's the level that apple's playing it don't sell yourself short john everyone would love it if we showed up on stage everyone even the people who have never heard of everyone listening to this podcast would and everyone else would say where's oprah no way man do i get a car
Casey:
You know, for a billion apiece, maybe we will buy a few listeners some cars.
John:
We'll see what happens.
John:
We'll buy you a car podcast.
John:
Can I interest anyone in a car podcast?
Casey:
Oh, there it is.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
Maybe that's the way I'll finally get my dream of bringing Neutral back is they back truckloads of money.
John:
Apple will pay for it.
John:
There you go.
John:
For a billion dollars, I would do Neutral again.
Casey:
As would I. You hear that, Apple?
John:
It would be a shorter show if we would just listen to things that we would not do for a billion dollars.
John:
Yeah, right?
John:
That's also true.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I can't even imagine what this show would have to do differently if Apple brought a whole pile of money to us and we legitimately did take it.
Casey:
Again, this would never happen.
Casey:
It would never happen.
Casey:
But just for the sake of thinking about it, I don't know if we could continue to do this show as it exists if Apple was paying for it.
Casey:
Because even if we complained about Apple, as we do from time to time— Us?
Casey:
We complain?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I feel like even if we were complaining in this hypothetical world where Apple owns us, question mark, then people would be, oh, you're just saying that so you don't sound biased.
Casey:
And really, you just do whatever Apple tells you to do.
John:
But we wouldn't care because we'd be a billionaire.
Casey:
So that's a fair point.
Casey:
I just I really do think, you know, and people have asked me and I think you guys as well in the past, like, why don't you just go work for Apple?
Casey:
And I mean, aside from the fact that I'm not necessarily keen on picking up my family and moving across the country, especially to a state that's about to fall off the country.
Casey:
I just – everything about my life would have to change.
Casey:
Like literally everything about my life except my family would have to change.
John:
And it's just – Including you wouldn't be able to do the show.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Like there's one thing of like Apple paying for your pocket.
John:
But the rule that Apple has is if you're an employee, you don't get to do shows like this.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You just don't.
John:
So –
John:
That's even worse.
John:
Going to work for Apple would be worse than if they just paid for the show.
John:
Because if they paid for the show, yes, it's a clear conflict of interest, but if you just state it up the front, people could decide whether they want to listen to a show that's paid for by Apple or not.
John:
But if you go to work for Apple, there's no show.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
So please don't go running to Apple, you two, because I know I'm not.
John:
I don't think Marco is a flight risk.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not going to happen.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
I said, you know what?
Marco:
Let me fix this for you.
Marco:
I went on Squarespace, made the entire site, remade their site.
Marco:
It took only a few hours.
Marco:
And this is a complex site.
Marco:
There were probably 150 different documents to upload for various like PDF links.
Marco:
There were probably 25, 30 pages in the site.
Marco:
There's an events calendar.
Marco:
There's an image gallery.
Marco:
I just replicated on Squarespace.
Marco:
It took maybe three or four hours one night.
Marco:
I showed it to them and I just handed them the login info.
Marco:
It's still in free trial mode.
Marco:
I didn't give them a credit card or anything.
Marco:
Still free trial mode.
Marco:
And I said, here,
Marco:
Take this if you want it.
Marco:
If you don't, no problem.
Marco:
And the great thing is then I'm out of the picture.
Marco:
They can update stuff themselves.
Marco:
And if they need any help, Squarespace offers direct support with all the plans.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
So you can see for yourself how great this is.
Marco:
I got to say, I was blown away by how great I was able to make this website in one evening.
Marco:
They were quoted a price to modernize the website with a private contractor of $40,000.
Marco:
And Squarespace costs a lot less than that.
Marco:
So see for yourself, get this done for somebody, rescue somebody's old website from the stone ages for them and hand it off to them and say, here, if you want it, here you go at squarespace.com slash ATP.
Marco:
When you sign up or when they sign up, make sure to go back there, squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
But you know who Marco does want to work for?
Casey:
Marco wants to work for Dropbox.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Can I just say, what f***ing bulls*** just happened to my computer today?
Casey:
Because I was reading Twitter and I saw your complaining about how Dropbox suddenly appeared in your dock.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, surely that can't be a widespread thing.
Casey:
Surely that wouldn't happen to my computer.
Casey:
And sure enough, when I arrive at my iMac, guess what's in my dock?
Marco:
And the window's up, too.
Marco:
That's the best part.
Marco:
The window shows itself.
Marco:
I'm so angry.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Dropbox.
Marco:
Every so often, Dropbox does something that annoys me, and I look around at solutions to dump it.
Marco:
I think this time I'm really in.
Marco:
This time, I've really had enough.
Marco:
What they've shown me, and forgive me.
Marco:
I tweeted about this earlier, so if you've seen it already, forgive the repetition.
Marco:
What Dropbox has shown a number of times over the last couple of years, from various things like the accessibility permission, the fake permission dialogues they present, like system dialogues to capture your root password and stuff like that, Dropbox has shown they can't really be trusted to have good judgment with the amount of power they have over my computer.
Marco:
Dropbox runs as a user process on my computer.
Marco:
I think it's just a user process.
Marco:
I hope it isn't root, but it probably is.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I bet some part of it is probably root.
Marco:
But it runs as a user process.
Marco:
It has access to all of the user files that I have.
Marco:
Because it runs as use and it's not a sandbox.
Marco:
So it has access to all of your files.
Marco:
And it runs automatically updating software.
Marco:
It automatically self-updates whenever it feels like it.
Marco:
That's an incredible amount of access.
Marco:
That's an incredible amount of power it has and access it has to my stuff.
Marco:
And so for a company that has that kind of access and that kind of power to repeatedly show poor judgment of how it wields that power and what it should do to my computer and what kind of power it should have and take and how much it wants to get in my way and pop up dialogues when I plug cameras in and stuff like that, it has shown me that I shouldn't trust it anymore.
Marco:
It has shown me that it is not worthy of trusting it
Marco:
with the power it has, the immense power it has on my computer.
Marco:
So now, more than ever, I am looking to remove Dropbox from my life.
Marco:
And we'll see how that goes.
John:
You were comparing it when you were tweeting about it, or someone compared about it in that they're comparing it to Twitter.
John:
And I think the motivation behind both Twitter's
John:
changes that we all hated and dropbox changes that we're all hating is the same it's two businesses that started with a particular model that users like trying to figure out how they're going to be a business that you know makes the money back for all their vcs or whatever with twitter was like we can't
John:
We don't think we can charge people, so we have to figure out how to make money as an advertising platform.
John:
We need to take control of the clients and drive engagement with an algorithmic timeline and all these things that we hate, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And Dropbox, the old complaint is like, if you just make a folder that syncs, that's not enough.
John:
You have to be enterprising.
John:
You have to take over search.
John:
You have to become the gateway for all files across an entire organization and do all these features that we don't care about because the business thinks...
John:
To be as successful as the business wants to be, you can't just be a folder that syncs.
John:
That's a great way to get off the ground, but eventually you need to become essentially Microsoft Office and Exchange all rolled into one.
John:
You have to have the complete suite of things.
John:
That seems to be sort of the endgame of all these things that sell to businesses.
John:
You have to be able to have an email system, a calendaring system, a document sharing system, collaborative editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, cloud drive service, a real-time Slack-style chat thing, a thing that you can use for teleconferencing and calls.
John:
You need all of those things.
John:
And Microsoft has all those things.
John:
And the things they didn't have, they cloned, right?
John:
Slack has some of those things.
John:
I can't remember when Slack added video calling.
John:
It's like, video calling to Slack?
John:
It's like, of course, of course.
John:
They need that checklist that I just went down.
John:
Everybody needs all of those things.
John:
So if you're Dropbox, you're like, well, all I've got is the cloud drive.
John:
I need to get a bunch of those things right away.
John:
How many things can we start adding?
John:
And so you take your folder that syncs and you start adding, you know, document search and collaboration.
John:
And, like, how long before Dropbox has something where you can do video calls to each other?
John:
Like, it's only a matter of time, right?
John:
Either these companies get bought by one of those other big things.
John:
Like, Google has a complete suite of that.
John:
Apple sort of has...
John:
Most of that suite, albeit spread out in a strange way, but really it's between Google and Microsoft selling to corporations.
John:
And then Slack and Dropbox are like these smaller fish that are around the side where, in general, they have better products.
John:
Like Slack is better than Microsoft Teams, right?
John:
Dropbox is arguably better than, you know, OneDrive or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
what the hell is Microsoft things called or Google drive for that matter, or at least was right.
John:
But the people who are running these businesses says, is this a tenable long-term strategy?
John:
Can we just be like just the chat thing or just the drive thing?
John:
And the answer when it comes to business is probably not because the big companies are like, don't pay money.
John:
You know, don't pay money to Dropbox for them to do your cloud drive.
John:
We have a cloud drive and we'll bundle it with Office and Exchange and all this other stuff and Office Online and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like don't pay other vendors to use.
John:
Yes, their product may be better.
John:
They wouldn't say that, but their product may be better.
John:
But look how much cheaper it is if you just buy this one bundle that has everything from us.
John:
And Dropbox can't offer that.
John:
They can say, well, we can lower our price, but we can't give you a bundle that does everything.
John:
We're trying to win on quality.
John:
And if you try to win on quality in the enterprise, that is not a winning strategy because...
John:
established before the definition of enterprise software the people who pay for the software and select it are not the people who use it so your software being more desirable for users means almost nothing in the enterprise all that matters is does it do the things that i needed to do does it check all the check boxes for compliance and blah blah and how much does it cost
John:
And so the slow destruction of Dropbox mirrors the slow destruction of Twitter.
John:
It's two companies trying to be more than they started out as, trying to find a way to make a viable business that can be the unicorn that everyone thought they were.
John:
And the only way to do that is to start...
John:
adding features that users don't want but that in theory help you to make more money and whether that actually helps them whether dropbox thinks they're going to become a replacement for the google suite or the microsoft suite i don't know but it's clearly the path they're traveling and so it's you know like twitter is like are they going to hit a breaking point where uh they make their clients so bad that everybody leaves it seems like they hit the critical mass breaking point that at least they have sort of a uh
John:
a break even to use fusion parlance reaction going on where twitter is not going to collapse under the weight of their terrible clients because if it was going to do that it would have already it still might collapse under the weight of other things but for now it seems somewhat self-sustaining and has gotten probably as gross as it's going to get until the next you know until they reach for the next big leap um
John:
dropbox on the other hand it's unclear whether them slowly making their product worse for users uh is something they can afford to do because there are a lot of competitors some of them are platform owners like microsoft has their built-in thing and apple has its built-in thing if the competitors can reach competence it could be that dropbox uh starts to fade before it can get that critical mass of enterprise contracts or whatever they're they're shooting for
Casey:
It's bad, man.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
The more time goes on, and it's only been in the last, I want to say year, not even two years, but in the last year particularly, they've just taken everything that I like about the Dropbox client and ruined it.
Casey:
And I think it's clear that, as you were saying, John, I am no longer Dropbox's customer.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And so that's okay, but it's a real bummer.
Casey:
And so I think my plan is to really push for myself and my co-hosts, who are the people I most frequently use Dropbox with, to all move to iCloud Drive once we're all on Catalina.
Casey:
And that's, you know, reasonably straightforward and easy to do because in Catalina...
Casey:
Many people have noted, including Marco via Twitter, that in Catalina they are supposedly adding shared folders, which is the one big thing that I think many of us are actually missing from iCloud Drive.
Casey:
Again, we're not missing a work chat or anything like that.
Casey:
We're just missing the fact that we can't share folders.
Casey:
And once we can share folders, then I think I'm going to try to phase Dropbox out of my life very, very aggressively.
John:
So the other options people have mentioned is that you can use Dropbox without having a Dropbox software installed.
John:
Obviously, there's the web interface if that's what you want to do.
John:
But also, file transfer applications like Transmit can interact with Dropbox.
John:
So you can just totally uninstall the Dropbox software, not have to deal with their software at all, and still be able to essentially take advantage of the network effect of like, oh, everybody's on Dropbox, and we've always used Dropbox so we can continue to use it.
Yeah.
John:
So that's a possibility.
John:
Having used, I think, every cloud drive thing, I have to say that Dropbox still is the least problematic in terms of actually making the files go to the place where they're supposed to go successfully with the fewest number of conflicts.
John:
That's, you know, the kernel of reliability that is in the
John:
nagging software and by the way even when you are the customer like i'm not a business and i use like the personal version of dropbox it is constantly telling me your dropbox is almost full you want to upgrade to more storage
John:
and like there's no way to stop it from saying that like i know i am close to my limit i understand i could pay more money for more storage uh but instead i just want to sort of maintain with this whatever five percent free space and yet the cost of having five to ten percent free space is just constant nags like you know once every other day at least sometimes multiple times in a day it tells me
John:
uh you're running out of space it's like great thanks dropbox i just love dismissing these dialogue boxes and i'm like that's not an enterprise feature it's it's the it knows that i'm a person because the enterprise would just buy a huge amount of space and the enterprise version wouldn't bug the individuals it would bug like where the administrator or whatever tell them that they're running out of space right so even for it's just plain old individual users using dropbox it's getting super aggressive about
John:
you know trying you know trying to get me to spend more money and i say no i will just delete some files and that's what i said i don't want to delete files like i think this percentage of free space i made that joke about when i synology sent me an email and it said you know space on volume whatever is getting dangerously low and there was only 500 gigs free using percentages for free space it's not always the wisest thing and i understand things start to go badly if you
John:
you know fill it up but like in terms of dropbox it's a totally artificial limit i'm not actually filling a disk somewhere even if i was 99 i don't want to hear about it until i'm 100 that's when dropbox can tell me my thing is full until then i don't want to hear about it we are sponsored this week by hello buckwheat pillows i gotta say buckwheat pillows are really cool they are totally different than the regular like soft pillows that we are used to
Marco:
It's kind of like a beanbag full of these buckwheat holes, which I guess the size of them is like, it's like almost like a marble size or a little bit smaller than that.
Marco:
And so it allows you to adjust its shape and thickness.
Marco:
And because it's beanbag-like, then it stays there.
Marco:
So you can move and support it however you want it to be supported, your head and neck and wherever else, and then it stays there.
Marco:
It supports you exactly the way you want to be supported.
Marco:
It doesn't squish throughout the night, and it also doesn't really get hot, which is great in the summertime because buckwheat tends to breathe better.
Marco:
There's airflow that can get in there between the hulls, so it really doesn't get hot or sticky or anything.
Marco:
I got to say, this thing is really cool.
Marco:
It's totally different.
Marco:
I had one for a little while, and then my wife stole it, so now I have to get another one because she likes it a lot.
Marco:
It's really incredibly supportive.
Marco:
And you can also customize how it feels.
Marco:
You can add or remove fill.
Marco:
You can just open up the side and you can adjust the thickness by adding or removing it.
Marco:
You can also remove all the fill so you can wash the case fully.
Marco:
And they sell refills of the fill from their website too.
Marco:
This actually isn't that new of an idea.
Marco:
People have been doing this for centuries, the buckwheat pillows.
Marco:
It was more popular outside the U.S., especially in Japan.
Marco:
But now we're getting here in the U.S.
Marco:
It's really a more natural way to sleep.
Marco:
And it's made in the USA with quality construction materials, certified organic cotton case.
Marco:
The buckwheat is grown and milled in the United States.
Marco:
And there's fast, free shipping on every order.
Marco:
You can sleep on it for 60 nights.
Marco:
And if it's not right for you, send it back for a full refund.
Marco:
So go to hellopillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
If you try more than one, you get a discount of the $20 per pillow depending on the size.
Marco:
And once again, fast free shipping on every order and 1% of all their profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy.
Marco:
This is a pretty cool company.
Marco:
Hullopillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's H-U-L-L-O pillow.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hullopillow for supporting my neck during sleep and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Would you like to do some Ask ATP?
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
We begin tonight with Josh Lewis, who writes, on what have you placed more stickers, your car or your iPad?
Casey:
And I thought that this kind of leads to a more, perhaps more interesting corollary question, which is, do you guys have any stickers on your cars?
Casey:
So let me start with Marco and I will go last.
Casey:
Marco, do you have stickers on your iPad and do you have any in your car and which one has more?
Marco:
So one question is, are we counting things like registration stickers that have to go on the windshield?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So if we rule out, like, you know, required stickers for regulatory reasons and, like, parking permits and things like that, then I have one sticker on my car.
Marco:
So I have a fish sticker on...
Marco:
On the back windshield, right in the lower center part of it, it is blocked from my view by the center rear seat headrest.
Marco:
So it does not reduce visibility at all, but it still advertises to the world that I enjoy fish.
Marco:
And I kind of enjoy that.
Marco:
That's the only sticker I have.
Marco:
That's not a parking sticker or registration sticker.
Marco:
And then on my iPad.
John:
Before you get to your iPad, you forgot the other most important feature of that fish sticker.
John:
It lets you pick out your Tesla among the 5,000 other red Teslas in the town where you live.
John:
So when you go into the parking lot, you're not lost in this maze of Teslas.
John:
You're like, oh, there's mine.
John:
It's the one with the fish sticker.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
It's all for practicality.
Marco:
On my iPad, technically I have zero stickers because the one sticker that I have is not on the iPad.
Marco:
It's on the keyboard cover.
Marco:
oh come on on the keyboard cover is one sticker it is it is the apple logo sticker that so it kind of looks like an apple laptop uh when you we are using it uh like just right in the middle of the center on the back of the keyboard cover um but it's the sticker from the october event last fall which was my first uh invited press event and that would meant a lot to me and they gave special stickers that that were at that event and it's one of those stickers
John:
Is it upside down or right side up when it's in the folded mode?
John:
Which orientation did you go with?
Marco:
It is the modern version.
Marco:
It's right side up when it's up in use, when you see it from the back, just as a modern Apple laptop would be.
Casey:
They gave us a package of like something like five stickers.
Casey:
I have one of those on the front of the keyboard cover.
Casey:
If you're holding it in landscapes at the bottom left and mine is like a bluish and purple.
Casey:
And like I said, they had given us a package of like five and I figure I'll just, you know, use them over time on iPads or something like that.
Casey:
John, what about your cars and iPads and things?
Marco:
Can I go out on a limb here and say zero on both?
Casey:
I would agree with you, but let's hear it for real.
John:
So I do have zero stickers on my car.
John:
There's also zero magnets.
John:
My wife tried to put a magnet on her car and I said, we're not that kind of family.
John:
You know, you know the magnets, right?
John:
Like the ribbons and stuff?
John:
You see them like the, there's all sorts of ones.
John:
I think the one she was trying to put on was like a pet adoption one.
John:
Like after we'd adopted our dog or whatever, but no, no magnets, no stickers, no, nothing on the car.
John:
But I have to say the first car I ever owned, uh, which I got from my parents, um,
John:
I did put a sticker on it when I sort of took ownership of it.
John:
I put a very small white Apple logo sticker on the, like, back, you know, driver's side rear quarter window thingy, right?
John:
And part of it was just like, hey, I like Apple, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But part of it was also to be able to identify my white Honda Civic among the sea of other white Honda Civics.
John:
If I couldn't see both sides of it, because he could easily pick it up because it was the one without a passenger side mirror.
Ha ha ha!
John:
wait i'm sorry what color did you say it was it's white really i don't know if we knew this before would you say that just happened to you uh i mean my mother actually likes white cars she when she bought an acura integra later she chose white again type r second no it was uh it wasn't it was no this is the regular integra yeah my brother got that car it was better than the civic but he totally destroyed it
John:
He left the sunroof open and let snow into the car.
John:
This is the level of destruction we're talking about.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
That's pretty bad.
John:
And that was later in life.
John:
And so, yeah, my iPad, no, no stickers.
John:
I'm not a sticker person.
John:
No stickers on my device.
John:
I was going to ask Marco, is the sticker that you put on your keyboard cover, is it actually straight and centered?
John:
I'm going to guess no.
John:
It is straight.
John:
If you eyeball it, it is straight.
John:
It is not quite centered correctly.
John:
It can't possibly be straight.
John:
That's the thing about the Apple logo.
John:
You think it's easy to line up and make it straight, but it's not a square.
John:
It's all wavy and curvy.
John:
It's very easy to get it slightly crooked.
John:
I'm going to guess that it is.
John:
I mean, it's not as bad as Casey stickers, which are just...
John:
horrendously placed but it is really hard to actually get an apple logo sticker unless you're laying it on top of this is what a lot of people do work laying it on top of the one that apple puts there which is straight and centered if you just have like a empty field on the back of a case or something trying to put the apple logo like visually centered and also straight is basically impossible so i mean maybe it's it's off by amount that you don't notice but don't look at it too closely got it
Casey:
So for me on my iPad, this is the first thing.
Casey:
Well, no, I stickered my work computer actually because it wasn't mine, but this is the first device of my own that I've stickered into Marco's point.
Casey:
I haven't stickered the iPad itself, but rather the case.
Casey:
I have 10 different stickers on the front of it and three different stickers on the back of it, including a white Apple logo, horrifically twisted, not on purpose and horrifically off center, also not on purpose to serve the same purpose as Marco had said.
Casey:
So it looks kind of like a laptop when it's open and
Casey:
On my car, I have the – I don't know if you want to call it like the outline, but the shape of the Nürburgring in the back window all the way down on the left.
Casey:
I had the same basic thing on the BMW, which I had actually bought with Marco at a little gift shop at the Nürburgring.
Casey:
However, that went with – well, it was kind of falling off at that point anyway, but it went with the car.
Casey:
And so I just ordered a new one off Amazon, and I consider it okay to have that on the car since I have, thanks to Marco, driven the Nürburgring one time hilariously slowly.
Casey:
So that is my situation.
Casey:
Eric New writes, you guys all seem to go for 256 gigs of storage on your phones.
Casey:
Do you come close to filling it?
Casey:
I have tons of apps and podcasts, and I'm not even using 50% of 128 gigs.
Casey:
I don't try to keep my whole camera roll on my phone, and I don't have any local music or videos, so maybe that's it, question mark?
Casey:
For me, I believe I have something like, where is this?
Casey:
This is in general, 80.5 gigs of 256 gigs.
Casey:
And I always buy a little bit bigger phone than I think I need just in case, especially now that 4K video is a thing.
Casey:
And isn't 4K at 60 frames a thing now?
Casey:
So that gets real quick, real big, real quick.
Casey:
For me, I have 20 gigs of music that I have pulled onto my phone, 10 gigs of photos, and then a bunch of other miscellaneous and boring stuff after that.
Casey:
So I'm using, I don't know, what is this, like a third of my 256 gigs?
Casey:
Marco, you went first last time.
Casey:
John, what's your situation on your phone?
John:
I saw this question earlier today.
John:
I was like, what are they talking about 256?
John:
I don't get 256 gig phones, but I wasn't entirely sure.
John:
I'm like, do I get 256 gig phones?
John:
So I looked it up on my phone.
John:
Sure enough, I have a 256 gig phone.
John:
I'm pretty sure this is my first one that's ever been 256 because I never really went for the big storage.
John:
I just couldn't stomach the cost upgrade.
John:
But I've got one now, apparently, and I'm using 96.6 gigabytes, so 256.
John:
And I'd been managing space on this thinking that I had a 128.
John:
I didn't want to be creeping up on it.
John:
I think the reason I have that in mind is because I constantly fill my iPad.
John:
My iPad is always full.
John:
but my ipad is super old like it's the you know the original ipad pro which is now several pros old um and i think the ipad is 128 gigs and also i download like video to watch uh offline frequently if i'm gonna be going somewhere and don't want to have to deal with trying to stream it over a bad internet connection and that fills up the space real fast or like you know downloading movies from iplex or whatever so it's very easy to fill my ipad and i'm constantly like deleting big games that i haven't used and
John:
managing my space but on my phone apparently i've got tons of headroom so i should stop i should stop aggressively deleting stuff from overcast and just let those things fill up overcast is my third largest app by the way i don't but it's only 12 gigs 12 gigs of podcasts are on my phone
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
I have a very similar situation as both of you.
Marco:
I do have the 256 gig phone.
Marco:
I'm using about 76 gigs at the moment.
Marco:
And so it feels weird.
Marco:
So at first I thought, well, that was wasteful to get it.
Marco:
But then I looked, I'm like, wait, was there a 128 option?
Marco:
And it turns out, no, there isn't.
Marco:
The options are 64, 128,
Marco:
or 256 or you know even more oh that explains why i got 256 because 64 i would be way over the limit of so right so like like a couple of phones ago whenever whenever they offered 128 i did get 128 but they don't offer that anymore so i i think you know i knew that 64 would be a little bit tight for what i wanted sure enough that was true so it does feel wasteful to have all this space for a phone that i know i'm only going to probably own for a year
Marco:
And that I know for most of that year, I'm going to be using less than half of it, but the next interval down would have been too small.
Marco:
So I see my, I see it as like, not that I'm not that I spent, you know, $150 extra to get to buy space.
Marco:
I wasn't going to use, but rather I spent $150 to not have to manually manage ever any space ever during that, during that year that I have this phone.
Marco:
So it doesn't feel great that, you know, I wish they would have offered a middle option on 128 and I would have gotten that and it would have been less money possibly.
Marco:
But the fact is we didn't have that option.
Marco:
So I took the next best one.
Casey:
I mean, I still think this is better than having 16 or even 32 gigs be the base.
Casey:
And then I'd much rather be a little grumpy about going too high in the middle than being grumpy about the lowest tier being effectively nothing.
Casey:
So I don't think any of us are really complaining.
Yeah.
Casey:
Finally, Sarah Ann writes, I'm a teacher considering putting together a proposal for teaching computer science as part of the international baccalaureate at my school.
Casey:
Program languages would be at my discretion.
Casey:
Which ones do you think are the most valuable slash important for modern students?
Casey:
I have a really terrible answer for this, so I guess I'll go last.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about that?
Marco:
There's always this dilemma between languages that are easy to teach and or languages that demonstrate important computer science concepts versus what languages are currently in use in the practical world.
Marco:
Because what the students probably want to learn...
Marco:
is whatever language they need to make cool stuff that they can see in their current context.
Marco:
On whatever devices people are using, whatever platform people are using, the current language is always in demand by the students.
Marco:
What the professors usually want to teach is the more timeless concepts...
Marco:
The more fundamental things.
Marco:
So, you know, you might want to teach things like C that are kind of like underlying all this stuff.
Marco:
Or you might want to teach things that have certain theoretical benefits like Lisp to teach functional programming or things like that.
Marco:
So there's all these like competing factors.
Marco:
But I think ultimately, for getting people started, you need them to be motivated and to stick with it.
Marco:
And so I would put to the side the value of things like LISP and theoretical benefit languages.
Marco:
Put that to the side.
Marco:
Save that for year two or three of their education.
Marco:
For year one, stick to things that will get them engaged and will keep them motivated to keep going.
Marco:
And that is...
Marco:
whatever is required to make the kind of things they want to make.
Marco:
So right now, that's probably going to be, in this order, Swift and then JavaScript.
Casey:
John, I assume Pearl is the answer.
John:
My reading of this question is a little bit different because it's a proposal for teaching computer science, which is very different than a proposal for teaching people how to program or how to become programmers or anything like that.
John:
And so computer science is basically a math course, practically.
John:
And so then I would say pick one of the languages that has...
John:
the least uh things that are not important to the concept so when you're teaching computer science and complexity theory and algorithms and data structures those things you could teach just with a whiteboard right but you want them to have a program that they can write it out like a lot of algorithm books will have like pseudocode or whatever so basically what you want is the programming language that is the most like pseudocode
John:
So they don't have to worry about, oh, this is, you know, like ideally you wouldn't have to worry about a type system.
John:
Certainly you wouldn't have to worry about pointers.
John:
You wouldn't have to worry about, you know, native versus, you know, primitives versus objects.
John:
All sorts of concerns that are parts of real programming language but are not part of computer science, right?
John:
Having to understand that,
John:
you know, this is an int and that's primitive and this is an object and it's different and they behave in this way.
John:
I have to understand the difference between pointers and references and C++.
John:
None of that has anything to do with computer science.
John:
So those make poor languages to teach computer science.
John:
Arguably, like I said, you could teach computer science without a language.
John:
And I've taken courses that are like that where you don't touch a computer, but it is a computer science course.
John:
But if you do want to touch a computer, I would pick...
John:
whatever you think the best modern language is that has the least warts that will surface when teaching algorithms and data structures, right?
John:
So Swift is actually good in that regard.
John:
I've seen this as my son has been taking computer courses and he's basically had to learn and use at various times Python, Swift, Java, and C++.
John:
And
John:
Despite the fact that Swift is itself a very complicated and feature-rich language, if you're using it to learn data structures and algorithms, you don't have to touch any of the weird stuff.
John:
Protocols are not going to come up in a class teaching complexity theory.
John:
You don't have to use it.
John:
You just need assignment, conditional loops, functions, and if you're using Swift to do those things,
John:
You do have to deal with the type system, but type reference helps a little bit there.
John:
You don't have to deal with pointers.
John:
You don't have to deal with the, you know, the strange warts of types that can't contain a value and, you know, all sorts of weird things that you have to deal with in a low-level language, right?
John:
So I think Swift actually is a reasonably good language to teach computer science.
John:
You'll be using one tiny little corner of Swift, right?
John:
uh like python might be similar but honestly i think python might actually have more weird warts and strange things related to it than than swift so yeah i think i'm basically gonna end up agreeing with marco but for different reasons that swift is your number one and the number two probably is javascript because it's so pervasive it lets you ignore types and
John:
JavaScript has way more warts in the basics than Swift, like the fact that all your integers are floats and that are 53 bits long or whatever, and that will come back to bite you in the weird semantics around truth.
John:
JavaScript is a mess, right?
John:
But it's ubiquitous, and you can do all sorts of fun things with it.
John:
And if you're just going to do a bunch of algorithms...
John:
You can do that in JavaScript as well.
John:
The real answer is talk to other people who are teaching a similar course, what they're using and how successful it is.
John:
But coming from people who have never taught a course in computer science but have taken them, Swift and JavaScript seem like a good place to start.
John:
And maybe I would throw in Python as a wild card.
Casey:
You know, it's funny.
Casey:
My first answer to this was JavaScript because it's, you know, the most pervasive.
Casey:
You can use it on almost any platform.
Casey:
It may or may not be elegant, but you can do it.
Casey:
But hearing you talk, John, particularly about, you know, and I'm thinking about classes in JavaScript, which at last I've played with this, which has been a while to be fair, is not really a thing or it's so weird and esoteric.
John:
And you don't have to deal with classes at all to do algorithm and data structures.
John:
You don't.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Marco:
Also, like, intro to CompSci kind of stuff, you wouldn't really even need to get OO stuff in there.
Casey:
That's a fair point.
Casey:
So I guess, you know, and it's not Sarah's fault because she was, you know, writing a single tweet.
Casey:
So goodness knows, you know, what the parameters are for this.
Casey:
But the way I read it was, let me teach you, like, the basic – and I think this is because I'm reflecting on my schooling in the early aughts.
Casey:
You know, what's the basics of –
Casey:
of object-oriented programming because that was all the rage in the early aughts.
Casey:
Not to say that it's not a thing now, but it was like slightly newish kind of sort of and fancy at the time in the way that I think functional programming is now.
Casey:
Functional programming isn't actually new, but it's just becoming trendy now.
Casey:
Well, anyways, so if you're trying to teach basics of OOP, then I would say either Python or possibly Swift is
Casey:
And if you're just trying to teach a person more like what I suspect your son is dealing with, which is how can you write code?
Casey:
And this is kind of what I think Marco was thinking of.
Casey:
I think JavaScript was my first answer with Swift probably being second or third and Python being the other one in the 2-3 category.
Casey:
But now, I don't know, hearing you guys talk, I really wasn't going to bring Swift to the top.
Casey:
And now I'm actually starting to think you're right, that Swift might be the best complete answer, as long as you don't mind hitching yourself to Apple's wagon.
Marco:
But the fact is, a lot of these students will have Apple devices, and it is very motivating to be able to make something that you might actually enjoy and be able to run and use on your own device.
Marco:
That is incredible.
Marco:
incredibly motivating and when you're when you're at the introductory level keeping keeping these students motivated and engaged and getting them to like push forward is so much more important than whatever specific things you're teaching them because you know you have to like you know a lot of people dip into cs like as an experiment or me i might like this i don't know and so and you have to keep them motivated to keep to get a lot of them to stay and and to to to remain engaged in the course and so
Marco:
If it's something that they can make code that runs on their phone, they could make their own iPhone app.
Marco:
Their phone is certainly likely to be an iPhone.
Marco:
It isn't guaranteed for everybody, but it's certainly pretty high on the list.
Marco:
Then that has so much more value than any individual concept that you might teach in an introductory course.
John:
People dump on Swift a lot as a learning language because it's like learning language.
John:
It's so complicated and there's so many weird features.
John:
And it's true.
John:
It's a big language and getting bigger all the time.
John:
But I maintain that it actually is a reasonable learning language because the corner of the language that you need to use to learn the basics doesn't have a lot of sharp edges.
John:
Like strings work in a normal way.
John:
Numbers work in a normal way.
John:
functions look like normal there's not too much weird syntax in terms of parameter parsing especially if you don't reveal the entire power of the parameter system like if you if you just stay in that little corner simple things really are simple even the type system which is a complexity that you don't really need to deal with to teach computer science can be mostly hidden from you if you just do basic things even when you get into objects and stuff and you know structs and like it's
John:
In terms of all of the quote-unquote popular languages, it has the fewest weird things if what you want to do is simple and straightforward because you're just learning.
John:
You're not interested in learning Swift.
John:
You're interested in learning computer science, and you're learning it through Swift.
John:
It used to be an argument for Python, but Python...
John:
is old enough now that it has like i think python didn't do a good job of cleaning up its mistakes during its evolution like many of its sibling languages including parl and ruby and all that stuff they just kind of uh built stuff on and then they did the python two to three transition there's lots of weird warts in python that to explain you have to be like okay well let me tell you the history of python and why this is like this and
John:
We have a new way to do it, but the old way is still there and it works.
John:
The new way is a little bit weird because we couldn't interfere with the old way.
John:
You don't have to make those explanations for the most part with Swift.
John:
It's part of the benefit of all the breaking they've done of source compatibility over the years.
John:
It's like, we make a mistake, they're like, erase, erase, erase, try again.
John:
Okay, erase, erase, erase, try again.
John:
And they're still, you know, towards the edges of the language and the complexities, it's, you know...
John:
It's fiendishly difficult to understand all the nuances, but for the basics, I think it is a pretty good learning language.
John:
To give an example, my son was using it.
John:
He wasn't using it to write anything having to do with Apple platforms.
John:
In fact, he was initially writing Swift into a web page.
John:
And that web page would compile it for you on the back end and show you the result.
John:
And it was like doing a basic program.
John:
You could take text input from the terminal, essentially, and you could print things.
John:
And that was the introductory course.
John:
All you would do is add numbers together, make data structures, take input from the keyboard, print values.
John:
There is nothing Apple about it.
John:
Like I said, it was in a web page.
John:
Eventually, I got him to use Xcode because doing your coding in a web page is not ideal.
John:
But even though they're not using Apple devices, there is still the benefit of saying, oh, and by the way, this is the actual language people use, asterisk, asterisk, to write applications for your phone and your iPad.
John:
And like, wow, they feel like they're not wasting their time.
John:
Like, I know Swift, and they don't know Swift.
John:
Like, they know a tiny corner of Swift that have really no idea how to use it at all.
John:
And they don't realize that what you really need to know to write
John:
phone apps is not the language, but the API, which is so much harder to get your mind around than the language.
John:
But I think it has done its job as a teaching language.
John:
And apparently my son was telling me that the AP computer science test is all in Java still.
John:
So you're faced with, I'm not sure what the goal of this particular course is, but
John:
In the U.S.
John:
anyway, apparently if you're going to take the AP computer science test, you better know Java because that's what they're going to test you on, which is kind of a shame because Java does have all sorts of warts that are not relevant to computer science as a concept, but are very relevant to Java as a particular language.
John:
And who cares about that?
Marco:
Yeah, Java is actually what I learned.
Marco:
It was what my CS 101 and 102 were taught in in the year 2000.
Marco:
That was the only time I ever used it for anything.
Casey:
Huh.
Casey:
I was learning on C++ and a couple of courses you see, but only a couple.
Casey:
Um, but I'm, I've never, I don't think I've ever really written a line of Java ever, which is not necessarily by design, although I'm not complaining, but it just kind of happened that way.
Casey:
Cause you know, again, I learned C plus plus a little bit of C actually took one course in C sharp, which was extremely convenient in a couple of years into my career.
Casey:
But, uh, but no, I was all C plus plus.
Marco:
You are not missing much.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I know I'm not.
Casey:
And, I mean, C++ is a – it's got so many problems.
Casey:
I hear it's better these days just like Linux on the desktop.
Casey:
But, oh, it's got so many problems.
John:
I heard recently that it's going to get worse.
John:
Like, I mean, someone was telling me that the C++ 20 standard is like this is the breaking point.
John:
This is where C++ gets – it's just going to go over the deep end and jump the shark.
John:
And I was like –
John:
c++ has jumped so many sharks it jumps an entire ocean full of sharks like the the ship so long ago sailed on c++ becoming so complicated that no one person can hold it in their mind like that's so long but and still in the context of c++ c++ 20 has this reputation of being like oh now they've gone too far so i can only imagine what is in
John:
that standard c++ is a great example of a language that is a victim of its own success that they just keep adding things to and it's just you know i i really i really do hope for swift to be able to someday replace c++ because like let's reset the wart clock you know what i mean like every language every language gets warts over time right but there's no way to like fix a language like c++ to get rid of all those things because it's just that's just what it is and
John:
I was telling my son, like, all those video games that you love to play, they're all written, unfortunately, in C++ with some scripting thing in the middle there for the parts that aren't performance critical.
John:
But, yeah, it's a giant wad of C++.
John:
Destiny, the game I play all the time, is the most fiendishly complicated mess of C++ you could ever imagine.
John:
There's a great GDC session where the Destiny developers were explaining...
John:
how destiny works under the covers and it is way more complicated than you think it is because it has to be because if you look at the hardware that it's running on like everything has to be multi-threaded you have to use all those cores you have to use the gpu like the the the inner world of a
John:
A modern console or PC game written in C++ is just like this incredible alien city that you can't even imagine.
John:
I imagine that someone who's working on the core of an operating system would look at a game like Destiny and be like, run away screaming, because it is so much more complicated than...
John:
something like an operating system kernel because it has to do so much more and because it's written you know not from scratch but nearly from scratch by a random collection of people with strange opinions for a particular purpose and then it's so different so much different than building a platform it's like we're going to build a game maybe the game will last 10 years maybe this code base will last 20 but then we're all going to move on to the next thing
John:
And so they end up being really weird.
John:
Anyway, C++.
John:
We need a replacement.
John:
I'm not sure if Swift is it, but something needs to be it.
Marco:
Oh, don't worry.
Marco:
Swift has taken all of the worst things about C++ and adopted it.
John:
It's made it new and clean.
John:
It hasn't, though.
John:
You don't understand.
John:
You don't know what the worst things about C++ are if you think Swift has taken the worst of them.
John:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Squarespace, Hello, and Lumen5.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Marco:
Accidental Tech Podcast So Long
Marco:
oh how's the how is the uh i don't know the swim uh plan going uh i was in the ocean but not not further than like chest level because the waves were too big and tiff even suggested that was probably not a good time to go further than that um is she in the water with you
Marco:
not that time no uh because the waves are too big assuming she can swim and everything it would be a good idea to have somebody like actually there with you sort of directing where you should go and what you should do at various times yes that so that was have a more successful experience yes that was that's the plan and that's why i didn't go further that time because the waves were too big even for her to want to go in so we decided we will wait for a better opportunity where the waves are more calm and
Marco:
And then we will go in together and she will show me what to do.
Marco:
And then I got hit by, I got hit pretty strong by, by a wave that she described as that one was an under and I didn't go under it.
Marco:
So I, I was very Sandy after that.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
It's all part of the experience.
John:
It was a lot of sand.
John:
You've got to know where to stand, when to dive underneath, when to just go down, when to jump up, where not to be in general, all sorts of good things to learn.
John:
And then once you get the basics, you can learn how to do body surfing, which is fun.
John:
what is that that's when you catch a wave but you don't have a surfboard you just got your body uh and it seems like a thing that shouldn't be possible and you'll try to do it many times it'll be like i just feel like i'm flopping eventually you will actually catch a wave and be like oh that's how it's supposed to work and that's a fun the fun experience the first time you actually catch a wave body surfing it's probably easy to do on a boogie board or something but
John:
yeah first first learn how to survive the waves second learn how to you know play in them because lots of fun things you can do so either get a boogie board or try to learn to body surf but they're both fun yeah step one learn how to not die yeah
Marco:
seems like a good step do you have a boogie board do people the kids still call them boogie boards i don't know what you would call them otherwise they do still call them that uh that i i don't have one i mean i could i could get one but i think i i don't think i'm ready for that yet i think step one is like i mean i've used boogie boards like when i was a kid in in the lake as just like flotation devices yeah no it's different when you're actually catching a wave yeah never like in the ocean with real waves or anything so yeah step one is like learn how to use the waves and not die
John:
It seems like to be, I don't know if it's just because we're all big and fat now, but there's like this epidemic of boogie boards breaking all the time.
John:
I seem to remember as a kid that you'd have a boogie board and you'd use it summer after summer, it'd be fine.
John:
And now, as an adult, every time we get boogie boards, like, they last two trips to the beach and then they're cracked in half.
John:
Obviously, we're buying cheap boogie boards, but I feel like even a cheap one should, it's like...
John:
hold up a little bit longer than that i don't want to buy a real quote unquote real boogie board because they're expensive i just want to buy you know a cheap toy thing so you can have seven of them for all of the cousins and we all go in and they they use them and then eventually after 40 minutes someone comes out of the ocean with this floppy looking thing that's cracked in the middle and go well this one's dead
Marco:
I have learned like one thing, and I think I discussed it briefly last time, but like my conception of what swimming is, is not what people seem to be doing almost ever in the water.
Marco:
What do you think it is?
Marco:
I think, well, what people see me doing in the water is more like wading in and occasionally swimming for a brief second and then standing back up again.
Marco:
For me, what I'm learning to do is basically do laps and exercise in a pool.
John:
You're talking about transport.
John:
You have to be able to transport yourself.
John:
So what you're learning is, if I'm in the water and I'm at point A and I want to get to point B, how do I do that?
John:
So that's what you're learning.
John:
But when you're playing in the ocean...
John:
sometimes you need to get from point a to point b sometimes a and b are very close to each other and just repositioning yourself in the waves but mostly you're learning how not to drown so you're learning to tread water and learning how to deal with the waves and learning how to hold your breath and not you know get tumbled around and get water shoved up your nose and not drown and not be pulled in by the undertow or whatever and sometimes during that activity you will need to actually transport your body from one place to the other and you will swim
John:
a short or medium or long distance and if it's a riptide you may swim a long distance to get back to shore right so you need to be able to do that but you're right that people aren't doing laps in the surf if you go beyond the waves you've probably seen this at the beach people do do laps back and forth parallel to the beach beyond the breakers which is you know a relaxing thing you can do when you get a little more experiences to go out past the surf and then watch the people playing in the surf from the other side
Marco:
where you're just kind of bobbing them down you could just float there to be fair while i don't go to the beach as often as some people do i go maybe once a week but uh like during actual swimming hours i go almost every day with hops you know but that's like that's like pre pre or post uh lifeguard hours so there aren't a lot of people in the water but when i do go during like full full-blown daylight lifeguard covered in sunscreen hours i don't think i've ever seen a single person swimming laps in the ocean
John:
i mean it's not laps you're just you know swimming but like just like swimming like i've never seen people do that in the ocean i see i see people do it occasionally in the bay frequently in like the gym pool or like the hotel pools but like they might be out they'd be super early in the morning like when does hockinberry do it is that's the thing that he does you know yeah it's actually easier to do than in a pool because salt water is more buoyant than uh fresh water yeah yeah so it's a little bit more relaxing of course you know
John:
Anyway, it can be cold and windy and all sorts of other reasons.
John:
Obviously, a lap pool is a more controlled environment if you're just there to exercise.
John:
But one of the things that some people like to do when they go to the beach, some people like to play in the surf the whole time, some people like to go past it and just float, and some people like to go past it and maybe swim back and forth two times and then come back in.
Casey:
I've definitely seen it.
Marco:
Like ultimately, like I'm, I'm really enjoying the exercise part of swimming.
Marco:
I mean, granted, you know, I've, I've known to swim now for about like a month.
Marco:
So this is not like a, not like a huge forever opinion probably, but I really enjoy the exercise part of it.
Marco:
Like going back and forth, doing laps, like in the gym pool.
Marco:
That's, that's nice.
Marco:
And I, I, I appreciate the aerobic and strength value of that.
Marco:
But what most people seem to want to do most of the time in the water doesn't appeal to me at all.
John:
Well, I mean, they're playing in the water, right?
John:
So learning how to use a boogie board, learning how to body surf, or even just playing in the waves and enjoying big waves coming and dealing with them, like the waves are... It's like a video game.
John:
The waves are sort of...
John:
waves of enemies or adversaries and sometimes there are little ones sometimes there are big ones and you're just basically playing in the surf playing in a part where it's not dangerous but where you constantly have to be not doing battle with the waves but sort of like dealing with them riding them right it's just you're playing you're playing in the surf right it's just it's basic play and if that doesn't appeal you might want to the older people who goes out past them which itself is a fun game how do you get out past the surf without you know getting tumbled and
John:
having salt water grow up your nose right so that's a little skill section and then your reward is you get to be out past the surf and relax and floating on your back in salt water which is again more buoyant can be relaxing you just hang out there and talk with the other adults who are just hanging out there or the old person with their swim cap or whatever whatever person in the ocean you want to become marco that can you can decide what you want to do and yeah you can swim laps back and forth back there too um but yeah playing in the surf is worth
John:
figuring out how to do and having fun with it because it is kind of fun and eventually adam you know well assuming he goes through some lessons and all that stuff will want to do the same thing because kids love playing in the surf he's actually so this this summer we have a a rental house that has a pool and
Marco:
And he has loved it, and he has really taught himself a lot of swimming so far, and he keeps doing it, and he's advancing pretty quickly.
Marco:
So that's likely to happen quickly, I think.
Marco:
In fact, he and I might be learning the ocean at the same time over the next few weeks.
John:
We'll see how that goes.
John:
Kids can be intimidated by, like, the pool's a good place to start and learn stuff because...
John:
depending on the kid they can be intimidated by the waves and it's like your you know your your experience of assuming you have gotten knocked down by a wave and had salt water go up your nose that can happen to a kid once and that could be like a three-year delay of like all right i will i will revisit this whole ocean thing several years from now and i've forgotten this experience but some kids are like that happens to them they just bounce right back so it really really depends
Marco:
yeah so anyway i'm slowly slowly getting there making progress did you get salt water up your nose no actually i didn't it that's an essential part of the experience i did i got knocked down pretty hard and i got sand everywhere but uh that's part of it but also the part of of salt water being forcibly jammed up your nose by the the waves that's
John:
you're really selling it it's part of the experience tasting that and spitting it out for the next 10 minutes you have to do it at least once or twice to know what not to do it's like dereferencing a null pointer it's part of the experience of programming
Casey:
Not an objective C, am I right?
Casey:
The thing that is most striking to me about Marco's description of your ability or inability to swim is that we met at a lakeside community 20 plus years ago, wherein you had spent pretty much all summer every summer, if I'm not mistaken, for most of your childhood within 100 yards of water.
John:
of the dirt beach and your mud lake yep and i was and i spent a lot of time in the dirt beach in the mud lake however i was using flotation devices which which is terribly dangerous like if you don't know how to swim and you're just out on a flotation device it's just you know you've it's like stored up potential energy of death it's like i'm fine but if this flotation device squirts out from under me i'm gonna sink like stone and die which is not good
John:
Well, there were other people around, you know.
John:
Yeah, that would be able to fish your body out pretty quickly.
John:
You're right.
Marco:
I would venture a guess to say that going in the ocean with all of its giant waves and riptides and jellyfish and sharks is way more dangerous than that.
John:
But like it's once you can swim, like I would recommend if you can't swim, don't go in the water where you can't stand.
John:
If you can't swim, don't go in the surf for sure.
John:
But if you can't swim even in a lake, don't go swimming in a lake holding on to a floaty out, you know, past where you can stand.
John:
Because what happens if you let go of the floaty?
John:
It's bad.
John:
People drown in lakes all the time.
John:
The ocean, it's like, oh, I can see I shouldn't go there.
John:
That looks dangerous.
John:
And your lake, you're like, oh, I got a floaty.
John:
I'm fine.
John:
You're not fine.
John:
Learn how to swim.
Marco:
marco was saved by the fact that he was just inside his computer the whole time exactly right and i was there with him most times much safer very very low chance of drowning in front of the computer i didn't first of all i didn't even own a computer until sixth grade and i wasn't allowed to bring it to the lake for the summer until high school at least like mid like middle high school so they're like there was a lot of time where i just had to like just
Marco:
you know deal with it and i played in the water with my friends but i had a boogie board or i had a life jacket or i had a floaty thing or whatever were you in over your head um yeah sometimes sometimes we'd go on we'd go out on boats and we'd swim off the boats in the middle but then i would have i would have a life jacket even then i don't like the idea of people who can't swim tooling around with life jackets because you gotta be able to swim gotta have you gotta have that back up
Marco:
Now I do.
John:
There you go.
Marco:
I just have very little experience.
Marco:
So I still have a lot of things to do.
Marco:
Like to give you some idea of my skills so far, like in the pool, I can go back and forth a lot.
Marco:
I'm good with freestyle for a little while.
Marco:
I'm good with, I can do a backstroke for a long time.
Marco:
I can do a breaststroke for a long time.
Marco:
Yesterday, I finally figured out how to do a breaststroke underwater and have the right breathing rhythm to come up here and there.
John:
like that took me until yesterday to get that right like i could do it above water indefinitely but to do like down and up and down and up that without just falling that took a while yeah a good a good thing to do in the pool is to work on uh how long you could hold your breath so basically swim underwater back and forth in the pool as many times as you can without coming up for air that's a good safe thing to practice in a pool because if you get caught in the right kind of wave you may be under there for a while and it's good to be able to not panic when you are
John:
not able to come to the surface for a long period of time and to know to have the confidence like it's not a big deal I can hold my breath here for 10-15 seconds before I reorient and get my bearings and find the surface and go back up to it
John:
yeah that sounds awful you're really not selling the whole ocean thing but it's fun to do in the pool like it's fun to see how many times can you go back and forth in the pool underwater it helps you do those little flip kick turns and everything and it's a fun uh competition help build your lung capacity fun that'll give you the confidence to say if i'm under the water no big deal i hold my breath for a really long time all the time i got all the time in the world i could be down here for a minute and a half
Marco:
Yeah, but I think I'm still going to avoid things like waves.
Marco:
It sounds like I'm still going to go on the super green flag day.
Marco:
I'm going to wait until they put two green flags in the poll, and that's where I'm going to go.
John:
All the videos from the beach that have been posted, the surf does not look particularly rough there.
John:
It's not like Smith's Point or something.
John:
I feel like it's a...
John:
Obviously, the weather changes from day to day, but I think the shape of the beach and the ocean currents and whatever, it's not particularly rough.
John:
So you should have plenty of good days to play.