Sea Conditions Are Calm
John:
destiny shadowkeep moved to october 1st but i'm not gonna move atp for that so thank you whatever that is delayed it was supposed to be september 17th they said boy when game when game companies like you know when apple like tells you that like the thing that they don't even tell you they're like it's gonna be in the fall and it ends up being like the last day of fall or whatever like
John:
Game companies announce a launch date and they have to announce like a specific day, like months and months and months in advance.
John:
And then if they miss that day, like they're moving it from the September 17th to October 1st, which is like nothing in computer land.
John:
Like, so what?
John:
Who cares?
John:
They end up writing like a two page apology letter and explaining in detail because like game fans are so rabid and insane that they'd be like,
John:
You're delaying my thing.
John:
You said September 17, six months ago.
John:
I planned my entire life around it.
John:
Now you tell me October 1st verse.
John:
Computer land, it's like October 1st, September 17th, whatever.
John:
Like, who cares?
John:
Ship it when it's done.
John:
Fix the bugs.
John:
God, gamers are the worst.
John:
They are.
John:
They're absolutely the worst.
John:
Like, because I read these letters and I'm like, I feel these companies.
John:
I'm like, and then I think they have
John:
to do that they have to be you know prostrate themselves and be like we're so sorry that six months ago we didn't know the exact date time and hour that we were going to launch a thing that we're working on that is basically software please forgive us we just want to make sure it's okay but it's like it's fine it's like two weeks not even two weeks sorry but you said october one that's a tuesday that doesn't bother us it doesn't yeah it doesn't matter it's fine it's not like i'm taking a day off of work and
Casey:
I wouldn't put it past you.
John:
People take weeks off of work for these launches.
John:
They take the entire week off.
John:
It's a way of life.
Casey:
vacation is over for at least one of us summer of back to work for some of us hey we work occasionally yeah i'm working right now on my vacation how was your time in long island john on long island casey on long island whatever oh my god you two are you know i expect this from john marco but for you to have fallen this far this fast
Casey:
I'm sad, but it's okay.
Casey:
It's okay.
John:
Marco has nearly adopted the island.
Casey:
All right, Bane.
Casey:
So how was your time on Long Island?
John:
It was fine.
Casey:
Good talk.
Casey:
I'm glad you're so busy.
Casey:
Really?
John:
That's all we're going to get?
Casey:
It's like talking to a teenager.
Casey:
it's that same vacation i have every year and i enjoy it and it's good and you sound like you really enjoy it it was fine well in john's defense in john's defense not only was i'm sure it was it was very hot here i can imagine it was very hot there but what you woke up this morning i almost said in again on long island and then you drove some amounts of time is that right to a ferry and then drove many amounts of time to home
John:
Yeah, no, it was an easy trip.
John:
Not a big deal.
Casey:
How long does it take at a broad order of magnitude?
John:
Like an hour to the ferry, an hour and a half on the ferry, and another hour and 40 minutes in the car.
John:
It's a really easy trip.
Casey:
I have never been, to my recollection, I've never driven onto a car carrying actually anything.
Casey:
I've been on things that carry cars.
Casey:
Like I've been on the Channel, for example, and I believe that carries cars.
Casey:
But I've never driven onto anything.
Casey:
Like there's actually possibly the only car carrying train that I'm aware of anyway.
Casey:
I think the only one that Amtrak has is a train that goes, I think they call it the auto train.
Casey:
And it runs from the D.C.
Casey:
area to the Orlando area.
Casey:
And don't tell Declan, but we're going to Disney in a few months for his fifth birthday.
Casey:
And I had kicked around the idea of taking the train, but it's like a 24-hour journey or something like that.
Casey:
I forget how long it takes, but it's long.
Casey:
And long enough that you have to sleep overnight on the train, which to some degree is part of the fun.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure Michaela, a year and a half, almost two at that point, will really see the fun in riding on a train for 24 hours straight.
Casey:
But that's right.
Casey:
Anyway, all that's to say that I'm jealous of going on the ferry.
Casey:
It sounds fun.
John:
Yeah, you haven't lived until you've tried to take your stick shift car with no hill hold up a wet 45-degree angle, slick ramp with metal inches from either side of you.
Casey:
That sounds absolutely delightful.
John:
Yeah, my modern cars have hill holds, but I still remember back in the days when they didn't, and you'd get unlucky and you'd be on one of the side ramps and they'd be guiding you.
John:
There's no room.
John:
They alternate the cars so that...
John:
they're staggered so that the doors can open because you need like the door to open into the, the, like the gap between the cars.
John:
Cause there's literally like, you couldn't get out of your car.
John:
Uh, if you have the car, it's just all lined up right next to each other.
John:
Like you couldn't open the door wide enough for humans to fit out of it.
John:
So maybe you come out the window, Duke's hazard style.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I've, I've cut it close.
John:
A couple of times I've had to go out a different door than the one that I'm sitting in.
John:
Cause it turns out it can't open the driver's door, but they really, they really wedge them in there today on the way, uh,
John:
Back though, I had, they offer like priority boarding or whatever.
John:
It's not always available.
John:
Like I think they sell out.
John:
Anyway, I had priority boarding on the way back.
John:
So I was dead center first one off the thing, which means that my car was like three inches from falling into the sound the entire trip.
John:
Just one block under one front wheel is between me and Audrey Grave.
Casey:
Wait, all kidding aside, the ramp doesn't fold up to block the car from falling out of the car?
John:
The thing that was keeping me there is the block under my driver's side front wheel and a couple of metal poles about the diameter of a golf ball with chains strung between them.
Casey:
So there's no – what do they do for a ramp to get the car off of the boat?
John:
So when I board it, I'm boarding through the front of the boat.
John:
So my car ends up at the very back of the boat facing backwards, and then the boat backs into New London, and the flat deck of the boat backs right up to the dock.
Casey:
Oh, fascinating.
John:
And then they pull those little metal poles out, the little metal pole I described.
John:
Those poles and chains – like the pole just goes in like four inches into a little hole in the deck.
John:
They just pull those poles out, undo the chains, and I just drive right off.
John:
So really, like, there was nothing stopping my car from going into the sound except for that pole that just manually shoved into a hole in the deck.
Casey:
Sounds super secure.
John:
But those blocks, they do the job.
John:
And, you know, as they say on the Long Island Sound Ferry, sea conditions are calm.
John:
And that's what I like to hear.
Casey:
Do you get real bad motion sickness during this hour and a half journey?
John:
No, because sea conditions are calm.
Casey:
But on not-so-calm sea conditions, have you gotten— They're always calm when we go.
John:
And I always pick the biggest boats.
John:
You can see which boat is going to be your boat, so I don't pick the dinky boats.
John:
I pick the really big ones, so the odds of them being rocky is low.
Casey:
Do you pre-reserve this spot or do you just kind of pitch up at the last second and say, here I am?
John:
Oh, yeah, I got to make a reservation.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Okay.
John:
That's why you like to go for the priority.
John:
The priority boarding is like, I mean, hopefully they don't learn anything in the airline industry.
John:
Priority boarding is like $10 extra.
John:
It's the most no-brainer purchase you ever made in your entire life, right?
John:
It's not like an extra 300 bucks for two inches of leg room on an airline or something, but they do sell out.
John:
So depending on what boat you're going for and what time and what day, you might not be able to get priority.
John:
Does it earn your car extra room in any dimension?
John:
It did, actually, this time.
John:
First of all, you want to be in the center.
John:
You don't want to be off to the sides because then you just have to drive straight on.
John:
So you don't have to maneuver into any of those little alleys.
John:
And the center aisle is usually wider.
John:
That's where they put the big trucks and stuff.
John:
And yeah, so I was straight right back to the back of the boat and we had plenty of room on either side.
John:
It was very nice.
John:
The only problem is that means your car is out in the sun.
John:
So it gets super hot on the journey over.
Casey:
Does your car have an electronic or a hand parking brake?
John:
Hand.
Casey:
Okay, so are you wrenching up even harder than normal in this particular circumstance?
John:
I'm trying not to brake.
John:
I have the whole thing with the parking brake thing seizing up, so I had to get the whole rear brake caliper replaced at tremendous expense.
John:
So I'm trying to be gentle on my – because I think I do – I tend to, like, pull up on the parking brake too hard just from a lifetime of – Yeah, yeah.
John:
older cars there where you needed to do that and i think in modern cars you don't need to pull up quite as hard so i'm trying not i'm trying to lengthen the lifetime of my parking brake by not yanking on it like it's my 1983 volvo
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
We didn't ask you, I forgot, how was the refurbished, re-renovated, whatever, beach house this year?
John:
Nah, I mean, they didn't do much.
John:
Like, they had ripped up a bunch of carpeting, which was good, and then they ripped up a bunch of, like, very large linoleum tile, which was, like, neutral because the old tile was, like, fine.
Yeah.
John:
And what they did was they put this wooden laminate flooring over top of all of it, and you can tell it's over top because it's like another half inch higher than the rest of the floor in the house now.
Marco:
No, no.
John:
And it was not a good – like, first of all, it's not like real wood.
John:
It's like particle board or something, and it's like –
John:
It's squeaky, and it looks okay, and it's better than the carpet.
John:
And then what they did is they had these nice wood grain cabinets.
John:
They had them all painted white, like just spray-painted white.
John:
Nice.
John:
That's like instead of getting new cabinets.
John:
And then they replaced the countertops with some kind of stone countertops.
John:
It's like they spent a bunch of money to quote-unquote fix things that did not need fixing.
John:
And things that did need fixing, like every appliance in the house, remains the same.
John:
So...
John:
Cool.
John:
They replaced a really old 80s couch with a newer couch.
John:
That was an upgrade, but the room they have in is still a little bit ridiculous.
John:
What I'm saying is I could have brought my dog.
John:
I'm not allowed to bring the dog because the house is all remodeled.
John:
It would have been fine.
Casey:
Have you picked Daisy up yet or is that tomorrow?
John:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
I'm assuming she's at like a kennel or something, no?
John:
A kennel, yes.
John:
We send her to the orphanage.
John:
First of all, oh my God, sorry.
John:
Daisy gets picked up immediately upon returning.
John:
You're going to leave the dog stranded while you're, oh, I'll just get my dog tomorrow.
John:
You're going to get the dog immediately.
John:
And second of all, Tina came home before I did, so she got the dog.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I knew that.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I thought you had come home before her, but in retrospect, I don't know why I thought that.
John:
Wait, so where is the dog?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Where was Daisy when you guys were both gone?
John:
She goes to like a doggy play date four days a week where she just, in the middle of the day, she goes and hangs out with a bunch of other dogs and runs around.
John:
and the person who does those doggy playgroups also does boarding, and so that's where she was.
John:
So she's boarded there several times.
John:
It's just a person at their house, and there's a bunch of other dogs that she knows already there, so it's great fun for her as well.
Casey:
Everyone's on vacation.
Casey:
Always on vacation in New York and Massachusetts.
Casey:
All right, to go back a half step, I think we should start the follow-up with the most important follow-up.
Casey:
I know that I am on pins and needles to find out the one true version of the story of the Apple sticker on your Civic from 20 years ago.
Casey:
Please, John, fill me in.
Casey:
What was the story with your sticker on your Civic?
John:
It's actually related to a topic farther down in the notes that we may or may not get to.
John:
I forgot.
John:
Oh, it was some Ask ATP question a week or two ago.
John:
It was like, do you put stickers on your cars or your iPads or something like that?
John:
And I said I had one sticker on my first car, which was a Honda Civic.
John:
And first of all, I'm surprised my wife didn't call me on this.
John:
Maybe she didn't hear the episode yet.
John:
But when I was listening back to it, I heard myself say that I had an Apple logo sticker on the
John:
the back window of my honda civic and i said it was a white apple logo sticker but
John:
By the timelines, I think this might have been before Apple had dropped the rainbow logo.
John:
It was a 92 Civic, but I didn't get it new, right?
John:
So maybe this is like 98.
John:
When did they drop the rainbow?
John:
Maybe around the iMac.
John:
Anyway, bottom line is a good thing I have photos.
John:
I went into my photo collection, looked it up, because as soon as I heard that, I'm like, wait, it wasn't white, was it?
John:
It was a rainbow sticker.
John:
Rainbow logo Apple sticker, which is what used to come with all your Macs before they started to go to the solid color thing.
John:
And the story that it's related to is the potential return of the rainbow Apple logo.
John:
We'll see if we get to that this week.
Casey:
I feel better for having known that piece of information.
Casey:
And your old man Mac user cred has been restored, don't you?
John:
Also, it wasn't on the rear quarter window because the 92 Civic did not have a rear quarter window.
John:
It just had a little piece of plastic there.
John:
Like, you know, like there's the part that goes up and down that has that has straight sides.
John:
Right.
John:
And sometimes they have that little tiny bit.
John:
First of all, the little bit of window would have been tiny.
John:
But second, it's a very inexpensive car.
John:
So it was just plastic.
Casey:
Marco, do you feel better knowing this?
Casey:
Because I know I do.
John:
I'm not even sure I know it now.
John:
I'll send you pictures.
John:
You've seen the picture of me with my cool white Civic, right?
Casey:
I don't think so.
John:
I really want to see this picture now.
Casey:
Yeah, I really want to.
John:
When I show it to you, it will look familiar.
John:
It's not in front of me now because it's in my wife's photo library, which I have no access to on this Mac, of course.
Casey:
All right, let's move on with the other beach-related follow-up.
Casey:
Michael T. Raymond has some information for us about underwater swimming.
Casey:
So this was with regard to Marco learning how to swim, specifically in the ocean, and Michael had some feedback for us.
Casey:
Would you like to take it away, John?
John:
Yeah, this is about my suggestion that Marco spends time in his pool, like being comfortable holding his breath.
John:
And you can build up your lung capacity by holding your breath and swimming underwater back and forth.
John:
Fun thing you can do in a pool.
John:
And Michael T. Raymond had this long, harrowing email explaining how you could die instantly without knowing it, even if you're like a lifeguard, because the problem is that people almost invariably young males, which I guess excludes Marco.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Figure out that you can extend the distance that you swim underwater by hyperventilating right before.
John:
And so you've seen the movie sometimes when like a boat is capsizing and everyone's stuck in a cruise ship like a Poseidon Adventure or something and they have to like hold their breath and go under a thing.
John:
They breathe in and out real fast before diving under the water.
John:
Have you seen that in a movie?
Casey:
You know, I have not seen this in a movie and I am really going to regret sharing this out loud.
Marco:
As usual, I haven't seen it.
Casey:
Well, as usual, I'm going to regret saying this out loud.
Casey:
There was a TV show.
Casey:
I don't remember the name of it.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes for it.
Casey:
But there was a TV show way back in the day that starred Hulk Hogan, of all people.
Casey:
And it was like two dudes with this like cigarette boat who went and solved crimes or something like that.
Casey:
And I can't remember the name of the show, but I will never forget watching one episode where they needed to, I don't know if like the boat capsized or something, but something happened where they needed to be underwater for a long time.
Casey:
And that's exactly what they did.
Casey:
They, you know, and then dove in.
Casey:
And I was like, what in tarnation just happened?
Casey:
And at some point they explained, maybe beforehand, they explained what they were about to do.
Casey:
And I was like, does that make sense?
Casey:
Well, apparently, apparently it's real, but unwise.
Casey:
So continue, please, sir.
John:
Yeah, and it's not just one particular movie or TV show.
John:
It's a way to be able to stay underwater longer.
John:
But it lends itself to what's known as shallow water blackout or shallow water drowning, where it upsets the balance of stuff that normally forces you to surface and take a breath so that you can stay underwater longer, which allows you to deprive your brain of oxygen for longer than you would expect.
John:
And then you just...
John:
basically blackout while you're underwater, which is bad because as soon as you become unconscious underwater, then you, you know, your body will take a deep breath and then you'll inhale water and you will basically drown.
John:
And at that point, your brain will have been without oxygen for a long time anyway, because that's what you were doing by extending the time you are underwater.
John:
It was a very long email.
John:
Bottom line is, do not hyperventilate before going under as a way to try to let yourself break your record of going back and forth.
John:
Just do it the old-fashioned, straight-up way.
John:
No pre-hyperventilating apparently is very dangerous.
John:
And I'll just add to this, this is like a specific case of the general idea of the buddy system.
John:
Don't swim anywhere ever by yourself if you can help it.
John:
It's always good to have someone else there with you because water is dangerous.
John:
And even if you are an experienced swimmer, you can get tired.
John:
You can knock your head on something.
John:
You can have low blood sugar and faint.
John:
Any of those things happen while you're in water.
John:
It's very bad.
John:
Always have someone with you.
Casey:
The television show that I was thinking of is Thunder in Paradise.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
And apparently, now that I'm reading the Wikipedia page, it was, I guess, Knight Rider on the water to some degree.
Casey:
Thunder in Paradise follows the adventures.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
It follows the adventures of two ex-Navy SEALs who work as mercenaries out of their tropical resort headquarters along Florida's Gulf Coast.
Casey:
Using their futuristic high-tech boat nicknamed Thunder, they travel around the world fighting various criminals and villains.
Casey:
I know you feel better for having known that particular piece of information.
John:
Unrelated to Hydra Thunder.
Casey:
Yes, which is a fantastic video game.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I had asked last episode, which feels like it was 17 years ago that we recorded it, for an idea for what to do about ditching Dropbox.
Casey:
Because I was very upset with Dropbox, and I kicked the tires very briefly on Synology Drive as a replacement for Dropbox.
Casey:
And my initial impression, after having spent 30 seconds with it, was...
Casey:
that it's too much like Google Apps with documents and spreadsheets and all sorts of things I don't care about.
Casey:
Well, many people very gracefully wrote in and said, no, no, no, really, it's not bad, you should try it.
Casey:
And it turns out it's not bad, and I'm glad I tried it.
Casey:
So the good news, it does seem like it is very similar to a hosted Dropbox that's on My Synology.
Casey:
And so it seems to work pretty much instantly.
Casey:
It works inside or outside of my home network.
Casey:
In that sense, everything seems good.
Casey:
You know, it operates just like Dropbox would.
Casey:
It has a native app for the Mac.
Casey:
Thankfully, one of the few good options, there are almost no options in this app, but one of the few options that it does have is to make a grayscale menu.
Casey:
What do we call these things?
Casey:
Menu bar items on the upper right?
Casey:
I don't know, whatever it's called.
Casey:
You can do a grayscale one of those, which is great, because otherwise it was going to be the only colored icon in my little... I don't want to call it a tray, lest John yell at me, but we'll call it a tray.
Casey:
Anyways, so on the surface, it seems good.
Casey:
Bad news, however.
Casey:
The client is very CrashPlan-y, very Java-y.
Casey:
It is not...
Casey:
very native at all and in particular the notifications which can get very chatty don't use the notification center stuff that is native to mac os it looks very much like um uh what was the growl that was around before notification center was a thing
Casey:
I think there may be a mechanism to get like a synced folder to someone that does not have an account on your Synology, but it does not seem clear to me the mechanism by which one does that.
Casey:
So I'm 50-50 on that.
Casey:
Additionally, when I tried to set it up, port forwarding requirements were extremely ambiguous.
Casey:
It seemed like it wanted other ports besides the ones that I already had exposed to be forwarded, but I couldn't find any documentation about what they wanted forwarded specifically.
Casey:
So I had to use Synology's Quick Connect, which is sort of kind of like a, you know, dynamic DNS sort of thing for your Synology, where your Synology phones home and says, you know, Casey Synology is at, you know, IP address 192.168.1.1.
Casey:
Well, of course, that would be an externally accessible one.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
Anyway, so I did have to use Quick Connect for the first time, and then it worked no sweat.
Casey:
So it is not flawless by any means.
Casey:
I don't think it would solve the problem for the three of us of passing our microphone recordings around.
Casey:
But if you're just doing stuff within your own family, for example, or people who may have an account on your Synology account,
Casey:
In that sense, it seems to work really well.
Casey:
So I have stopped using the Dropbox client on all of my computers, at least for now.
Casey:
When I do need to share files with somebody, I'll just go to the web interface and upload them.
Casey:
And so far, so good.
Casey:
Synology Drive seems good.
Casey:
The other thing that was offered as probably the second most popular contender was, I think, Resilio?
Casey:
I might have that name wrong.
Casey:
But it was...
Casey:
The BitTorrent-based thing that has recently changed its name to something else, and that was the other thing that people said worked really well, I have not tried that.
Casey:
So Synology Drive, don't fall trap like I did to it looking like enterprise garbage.
Casey:
It actually seems pretty good.
Casey:
Have you guys explored any of this or don't care?
Marco:
These things have social components.
Marco:
They have network effect components.
Marco:
If you only need to share something with yourself and your other computers and you have no need for shared folders, well, I got iCloud Drive.
Marco:
That's everywhere.
Marco:
It's built into all my computers.
Marco:
I'm already paying for the space, so I might as well just use that.
Marco:
The whole reason why so many of us feel like we're stuck to some degree on Dropbox is because it has social network lock-in.
Marco:
There are files that we have to share with people or folders we have to share with people for various workflows or things we like to do or things we need to do for work or whatever else.
Marco:
And so there is this degree of lock-in.
Marco:
And so for anything to come along to replace it, it has to be something that has a really large social network already or a really large install base already among people who we would need to trade files with or sync files with.
Marco:
And so that's why I think ultimately...
Marco:
nothing is going to stand a chance against Dropbox in that way, except maybe iCloud Drive.
Marco:
If you have an Apple-centric work group like we do, then we can very easily... But when all this Catalina and everything ships in a few months, chances are the three of us, well, John can't because Mac Pro can't run it, but chances are two of us can switch to this new iCloud Drive-based system and have shared folders that way,
Marco:
and we can get rid of Dropbox.
Marco:
But most of the other solutions that are like, well, yeah, this is great if you're the only person who's using it, but if you're the only person who's using it, you probably don't even need something like this, or at least you need it a lot less.
Marco:
And or iCloud Drive can be fine for you.
Marco:
So ultimately, I'm not really interested in trying any of these other solutions.
Marco:
I think I'm just going to hang out with Dropbox until iCloud Drive launches with its shared folder support, hope it works, and switch to that.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't disagree with you.
Casey:
The one nice thing about using something on your own private cloud or hardware or whatever is that I have no space quota of any kind.
Casey:
Like if I wanted to put 15 terabytes in this, you know, quote unquote dropbox, I could.
Casey:
Now...
Casey:
I don't see myself doing that.
Casey:
And in fact, I removed a lot of old cruft when I pulled pretty much everything out of my Dropbox and put it onto this thing.
Casey:
But I think I'm going to stick with it for my own personal stuff.
Casey:
As you had said, Marco, I completely concur that if you do any sort of social thing with this, as the three of us do, this is probably not a good solution.
Casey:
And if there is a good solution for that, for having people who are not on my Synology house,
Casey:
have access to some sort of shared folder.
Casey:
I will put out a call for help for that, please, since you fine ladies and gentlemen were so great to provide such good help on this.
Casey:
If you have an answer for that with regard to Synology Drive, I'd love to hear it.
Casey:
But one way or another, I suspect you're right, Marco, that iCloud Drive is going to take up this spot for most of us, including probably you and me, if not John as well.
John:
One aspect that I like of the original Dropbox and the version that I continue to use is that it has complete copies of everything, plus or minus SelectiveSync, but complete copies of everything on the Macs that are connected to Dropbox.
John:
No weirdness, no user space file system, no magic automatically downloading files.
John:
They're just there, right?
John:
And it's a cloud service where all of my files are kept in somebody else's computer far away.
John:
that will survive if my house burns down.
John:
And also that that cloud thing keeps version history for some period of time.
John:
And a lot of those things are not true of Synology.
John:
It's not in a cloud anywhere unless I use like B2 to back it up to the cloud.
John:
It doesn't have a versioning.
John:
It does.
Casey:
Synology Drive, I believe, has versioning for possibly infinite amounts of time.
Casey:
I'm not confident I'm right about that, but I have seen mention of versioning somewhere.
John:
Your description of the client interface is not particularly reassuring.
John:
Not that I love the Dropbox client, but a weird... Same thing with iCloud Drive.
John:
Despite our complaints about the Dropbox client, as mentioned the last show, I think, you can just completely uninstall the Dropbox client and either use the web interface or use Transmit.
John:
Both of those interfaces do not muck up your computer with anything and still allow you to participate in the network effect, like we're all using Dropbox type of thing.
John:
Whereas if we switch to iCloud Drive, I think there's a web interface, but I'm not sure if there are any other interfaces to iCloud Drive that are...
John:
more sensible, let's say, or more trustworthy as far as I'm concerned than the thing that the Finder exposes for iCloud Drive, which I have found to be terrifying in so many ways.
John:
And I'm not sure, does iCloud Drive have versioning?
John:
I'm not sure about that.
Casey:
I don't think so, but again, I'm not terribly confident.
Casey:
The chat room is saying that I am right, at least in part.
Casey:
Would you trust it if it did?
Casey:
I wouldn't trust it either if it did, that's true.
Casey:
The chat room is saying that Synology Drive does have at least some amount of versioning, but it doesn't sound like anyone's really played with it heavily.
John:
Yeah, so I continue to prefer the actual cloud solutions that have options for interfaces, even Google Drive.
John:
I think Transmit does Google Drive as well.
John:
And then, of course, there's the web interface.
John:
And then there's the Mac interface, which is not great.
John:
But I like the idea of it being a cloud service far away from my computer and then me having options of how I...
John:
I have some kind of interface to it.
John:
And of course, Google Drive sharing thing requires people to have a Google account.
John:
I think every time I try to share with somebody, I think they all end up having to have a Google account, but I'm not sure if that's true.
John:
But anyway, bottom line is I have successfully shared many, many files using Google Drive where I have tons of space, mostly because the people I share with all have Google accounts.
John:
And I continue to like the network effects of Dropbox and my many options for using the clients.
John:
If the Mac client becomes unusable, then obviously I'll look elsewhere, but elsewhere might be okay.
John:
Uninstall the Mac client and just use transmit.
John:
Like that, that may be an acceptable solution for certain limited uses of Dropbox.
John:
Um, mainly I'm just still scared of iCloud drive just because I've not had successful experiences with it.
John:
So I'll let somebody else go first and tell me if it's safe.
Yeah.
Casey:
That's probably going to be Marco in me.
Marco:
So I'm wondering.
Marco:
So I had this idea that I haven't had time to try yet.
Marco:
I'm a little scared to.
Marco:
So, John, tell me how this could fail and why.
Marco:
So I did for last time I tried to give up Dropbox.
Marco:
I basically gave up Dropbox for like a month or something like that, like about a year ago because I got mad at them then again.
Marco:
Problem number one is that the iCloud Drive folder is some weird file path buried deep in library, mobile documents, something like that.
Marco:
It's some big folder path that you're not really supposed to ever use the folder path.
Marco:
It's totally obfuscated.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
Inside of it, and this is something that actually John Gruber brought up on last week's talk show.
Marco:
By the way, I was on the talk show this past week.
Marco:
You should go listen if you want to hear more of me talking.
Marco:
Anyway, so one thing he brought up the week before was that with iCloud Drive, it creates all these folders for all these different apps that you have.
Marco:
You are not really creating the folder hierarchy.
Marco:
If you create a folder in there, it's buried between 17 other folders that you didn't create, so it's kind of annoying.
Marco:
One thing I did a year ago
Marco:
when I was doing my Dropbox diet back then, I just created a folder inside iCloud Drive called Dropbox.
Marco:
And I symlinked home slash Dropbox to that.
Marco:
And I just moved everything into that from my Dropbox that that was actually mine.
Marco:
And so I was able to use like...
Marco:
My command line utilities and stuff that call into various scripts I have in Dropbox, it all just worked because the file path was the same.
Marco:
The only downside to it was that I didn't have shared folders, which is hopefully about to get fixed, and that every time I would type in home slash Dropbox as a folder path, it wouldn't autocomplete the slash at the end because it was a symlink.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
I would have to type in the slash before it would all complete to the stuff below it.
Marco:
So the idea I had earlier today is what if I hard link a folder from iCloud Drive to home slash Dropbox or the other way around?
Marco:
And then wouldn't... So first of all, would Time Machine back that up as a normal folder?
Marco:
And then would anything weird happen if I had a hard link into or out of iCloud Drive?
John:
What shell are you using that it wouldn't tab complete with the slash?
Marco:
Bash, the built-in one.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
Does Zish change that?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Well, just hit tab a second time.
John:
TCSH does it on the single tab, but for Bash, just hit tab a second time and you'll get the slash.
Marco:
No, it ruins too much muscle memory.
Marco:
So anyway.
Marco:
Change to TCSH and you'll get it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I'm not going to change my entire shell if I'm not willing to hit tab twice.
John:
That's probably some setting in Bash.
John:
So I would not do this.
John:
Why not?
John:
Either one of those things.
John:
Don't mix cloud file system thingies.
John:
I understand that it's possible that it worked and that's fine, but you're relying on unintended cooperative behavior.
John:
Because all of these things have some mechanism of monitoring the local file system and some mechanism of syncing those changes up.
John:
And if you try to do what you're doing where
John:
There's basically a single directory that two cloud file thingies think they own.
Marco:
Wait, to be clear, I would not have Dropbox installed anymore.
Marco:
The only reason it would be called home slash Dropbox is for all my file paths for all my scripts not to break.
John:
OK, well, so my second concern then is if you don't have Dropbox installed and you're just doing with iCloud Drive, I would be worried that iCloud Drive really, really expects its stuff to be where it expects it to be.
John:
Symlink is not the same thing.
John:
Hardlink to directory could be done.
John:
You could also use firm links if you can find the private API that creates them.
John:
But all of those things are not the same as directories.
John:
And I don't know how well the various daemons that run iCloud Drive handle those things because they would have to be designed to explicitly handle them, I believe.
John:
Even in the case of firm links, I'm not sure about that.
John:
And hard links directories might work.
John:
Because we don't have the source code to these daemons, it's not clear how well they'll handle it.
John:
Now, if it worked with sim links, you'd be like, oh, fine.
John:
But you're relying on an implementation system.
John:
Uh, that like it may work now, but they may make some change during the future.
John:
All of a sudden it stops working or it hoses all your files or deletes them all or something like that.
John:
Like, I don't feel like this is a supported scenario, despite the fact that like we all do things like this.
John:
To give an example, I had a bunch of my BB edit, uh, directories sim linked to Dropbox for a really long time.
John:
I think at one point it was actually recommended, oh, if you want all your BBEdit settings to sync between your computers, just put them in Dropbox and then go to, like, you know, library, application support, BBEdit, blah, blah, blah, and make a bunch of sim links to point to your Dropbox.
John:
And it worked fine for years and years until it didn't.
John:
And when it didn't is when BBEdit decided we're going to have official support for having your stuff in Dropbox.
John:
And their official support...
John:
It stopped like working with the symlink thing and said, we will look in your Dropbox and see if the files are there and they have to be in a particular location, but we will totally ignore your symlinks.
John:
And there was, you know, I read the release notes and I'm on the list.
John:
So I was able to fix things, but everything just would have stopped working.
John:
I would have had fresh preferences or would have hosed my preferences.
John:
I don't write them with fresh versions if I didn't, you know, keep track of that.
John:
And that was a more or less supported configuration recommended by the application developer at one point.
John:
But yeah, for Cloud Drive, stuff like this, I would like, give iCloud Drive the best possible chance at success.
John:
Use it in the default mode.
John:
Then you can say, look, if it messes up, it's not because I was doing some weird stuff behind its back.
John:
If you really want to keep your muscle memory the same or whatever...
John:
Maybe like do it in the opposite direction.
John:
I know as everyone who seems to be confused about the order of arguments to the LN command, we had the verbal equivalent where you were what you described wasn't clear to me whether you were sim linking from the Dropbox location into iCloud thing or vice versa.
John:
But if you symlink into the iCloud location, then iCloud should be none the wiser because all the symlinks are in the old locations where Dropbox was.
John:
It just means you can't go in the reverse direction.
John:
So if you're just symlinking into it, like Dropbox is a symlink into the iCloud drive, then that's fine.
John:
But it wouldn't symlink out of iCloud drive into the actual Dropbox directory.
Marco:
Hmm.
John:
I mean, it reserves your muscle memory, like, and all your commands and stuff, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I guess.
John:
Because they're doing tilde slash Dropbox slash whatever, and that will work.
John:
Although, who knows how many commands and scripts you have that might be confused by that if someone, like, runs a real path or whatever on a path and resolves it.
John:
I mean, you have some regular expression running against the path that's no longer going to match because it's not where it was.
John:
Yeah, don't.
John:
Let's give iCloud Drive a chance here.
Yeah.
John:
All we are saying is give iCloud a chance.
John:
I can't believe Bash makes you tab a second time for that slash.
John:
Barbaric.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, then we had something that was kind of intended to be an Ask ATP, but it's also sore to follow up.
Casey:
And one way or another, it was a really good question.
Casey:
So I'm going to ask it on behalf of Justin Cardinal.
Casey:
Marco, what steps are you taking an overcast recommendation algorithm to avoid the radicalization issues that have resulted from YouTube's similar approach?
Casey:
I thought that was a really good question.
Casey:
And I commend Justin, no snark, for asking it in a way that wasn't snarky.
Casey:
There's a way to ask this question like a jerk.
Casey:
And that is not what Justin did.
Casey:
So well done.
Casey:
So Marco, what are you doing?
John:
Before you answer this one, can you briefly explain what the radicalization issues are?
John:
What is he talking about?
Marco:
Basically, Overcast has a new recommendation algorithm we discussed last week or the week before, I forget.
Marco:
And basically, I'm looking at people who subscribe to this also subscribe to this.
Marco:
And so I can provide recommendations based on what other people subscribe to who listen to the shows you listen to.
Marco:
um the problem that that happens with youtube and i think facebook has a similar problem i don't know enough about facebook to say youtube's algorithm will eventually make you like if you just keep clicking on like recommended videos in the sidebar from what you're looking at you will very quickly eventually get to like really radical conspiracy theory content or stuff like that or hate content or whatever
Marco:
And so the algorithms on these big social networks that are very advanced optimize for engagement.
Marco:
So what that means on YouTube, on Facebook, that means clicks and time looking at stuff and sharing stuff.
Marco:
On YouTube, it means watch time and clicks.
Marco:
So whatever you end up watching the most, spending the most time watching or clicking on at least, YouTube then feeds that into the algorithm to recommend that content more to other people.
Marco:
And what tends to get clicked on and watched the most is stuff that makes people angry.
Marco:
There's actually a really good CGP Grey video on this, like the mental virus thing or whatever that was.
Marco:
We'll link to it.
Marco:
Anger is a very powerful emotion.
Marco:
Making people angry is a quick way to have something spread very quickly virally online and everything.
Marco:
And so what ends up happening is because the algorithms are optimizing for whatever engagement happens, good or bad, it still counts for engagement.
Marco:
Then...
Marco:
all this stuff that makes people angry ends up bubbling to the top and being recommended.
Marco:
So there's a number of layers to Overcast's engine that I think won't let this be a problem.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, time will tell, and I'm happy to adjust it if it needs to be, but really out there stuff in podcasts...
Marco:
tends not to be found very easily because all podcasts that are in the apple podcast directory are reviewed by humans at apple at submission time now they're not listening to every episode they're not you know like it's possible for a podcast to get submitted get reviewed by a human and then get you know get crazy afterwards and you know that can happen and podcasts can get delisted later but it's more like only in response to complaints and stuff like that but like
Marco:
But Apple does have humans screening things for initial submission.
Marco:
So that initially cuts out tons of stuff from getting into the Apple Podcast Directory, and there is this process for things to get removed.
Marco:
Now, almost all podcast apps that are on iOS, including Overcast,
Marco:
use the apple podcast directory somehow the way i use it is i use it as a filter if something is not in the apple podcast directory i don't show it in search results and i don't show it in any kind of editorial recommendation context like these recommendations
Marco:
So anything that is not listed in Apple Podcasts, I basically treat it as private.
Marco:
So if you enter the URL for it, you can subscribe to it.
Marco:
If you know the feed URL, fine, I don't care.
Marco:
But I'm not going to promote anything that's not in Apple's directory.
Marco:
So that right there filters out a whole lot of the really extreme and harmful content.
Marco:
I do have a switch that I can press on a podcast that even if it is something that is in the Apple directory, I can say, this is not appropriate to be recommended to people.
Marco:
I don't know if that's currently active for anything.
Marco:
I had to look it up.
Marco:
It's not a switch I use more than twice a year or something.
Marco:
Sometimes I use it if some podcaster writes to me and doesn't like that their podcast shows up in Overcast, I can hit that switch for that.
Marco:
But that's very rare.
Marco:
The other thing is that I think podcast subscription activity is very different from clicking a link once in a web browser.
Marco:
If you click something and it makes you angry, and even if it takes you two or three minutes of watch time to realize this is making you angry, and you back out of it, YouTube doesn't know that that just made you angry.
Marco:
All they know is you just click on that and watch it for two or three minutes.
Marco:
So they're going to show you more stuff like that.
Marco:
In a podcast app, if you subscribe to a podcast, first of all, that's kind of a bigger action if you're going to subscribe to a podcast.
Marco:
And then it ends with this podcast is not for you, and you delete that subscription if you unsubscribe from it.
Marco:
That data's gone out of my database.
Marco:
That's a hard delete.
Marco:
If you subscribe to a podcast and delete it, I have no record that you ever did subscribe to it.
Marco:
The subscription is a row in a table that gets deleted.
Marco:
It's not marked as deleted.
Marco:
It's not soft deleted.
Marco:
It's an actual SQL delete statement.
Marco:
Once somebody unsubscribes from a podcast...
Marco:
Next time that podcast's recommendations are refreshed, which is every time the feed is crawled, or rather every time it has updated contents, that data is going to be gone then.
Marco:
So it's not going to keep contributing.
Marco:
So the only way to have my algorithm recommend stuff to you is if people are subscribed to it currently.
Marco:
So while it is possible for something to maybe get a whole bunch of rolling one-time subscriptions every time it happens to update itself, that's not going to be the common case.
Marco:
So ultimately, I don't think my algorithm is going to fall prey to the same types of dysfunction that the big guy's algorithms do that could potentially make me promote weird, radical content more than usual.
John:
I feel like the incentives are – the alignment of incentives are different too because Marco is not incentivized to – and none of the – well, Marco as the player maker is not incentivized to try to get people to subscribe to more podcasts or listen to more podcasts or whatever because there's no –
Marco:
I am.
Marco:
I have ads in the podcast player.
John:
So the more time you spend... I know, but if someone is subscribed to a single podcast that listens to 24 hours a day, that is better to you than someone who is subscribed to 1,000 podcasts that listen for two minutes each.
John:
So you're not incentivized to try to get them.
John:
The advertising is not as associated like it is with videos because if you see ads in YouTube...
John:
you'll see an ad at like the start of a video.
John:
So watching one video for 20 minutes that has a single ad at the beginning is worse for YouTube and worse for the creators than watching 20 videos that are a minute long, each of which shows a head in front of it.
John:
I know YouTube doesn't work exactly that way, but the incentives are different.
John:
Like you just want people to be in your application.
John:
You don't necessarily need them to be hopping from thing to thing.
John:
And like,
John:
you know, podcasts in general are more, are longer than YouTube videos, right?
John:
They're not, there's not many two or three minute podcasts.
John:
There's tons of two or three minute YouTube videos.
John:
I just feel like it's, it's a different, a different incentive structure for, for both the podcast makers who, you know,
John:
Generally don't want to put out hundreds of two to three minute podcasts per day, but rather one, you know, 30 minute podcast a week or every day or, you know, like it's just it's like long format versus short format.
John:
You know, the advertising model is different.
John:
The advertising inside the podcast is different than it is on YouTube videos.
John:
The advertising and the client is different than it is.
John:
It's just.
John:
The revenue sharing with YouTube selling the ads that run in front of other people's things, then YouTube shares the revenue.
John:
That's not how Overcast works.
John:
It's different enough that I feel like there's not enough in common to end up in a similar situation.
John:
And honestly, being audio only eliminates a large category of toxic engagement or whatever you want to call it.
John:
The example I kept thinking of are those...
John:
I forget what they're called.
John:
I knew at one point.
John:
I'm glad I don't remember.
John:
Please don't tell me.
John:
Those clusters of images that you see at the bottom of websites that make you lower your opinion of the website.
Marco:
You know what I'm talking about?
Marco:
Like those like, yeah, like celebrity, look at them and look, buy these cheap shoes and 11 ways you can turbocharge your blog or whatever.
John:
Yeah, it's like six pictures, and they're all appealing to base emotions.
John:
There's going to be a sexy lady.
John:
There's going to be something really gross.
John:
There's going to be a thing that appeals to your –
John:
sense of like gossip or knowing what people happen.
John:
Like, you know, there'll be some kind of celebrity thing.
John:
There'll be some kind of thing that appeals to your sense of insecurity about your personal relationships or your health.
John:
Right.
John:
And there's like six boxes and each one, each one does a thing.
John:
Right.
John:
And they're all gross and they're all like trying to, you know, to get you to engage with them in some way.
John:
And each one of those things relies on the fact that when you're scrolling some article on a website, whose opinion is about to, your opinion of which is about to go down when you get to the bottom, these images scroll up and
John:
You're confronted with all of them essentially at once because there's visual information.
John:
They have text in them, yes, and they have pictures, but there they are.
John:
There is no equivalent of suddenly being assaulted with six different one-sentence come-ons in a podcast player because you can't hear six snippets of audio at the time, and you're not going to engage with it in that way because it's visual and because they can put text in visuals as well as regular visuals.
John:
It's a lot easier to and that's how the YouTube algorithm works, too.
John:
It's a lot easier to appeal to all of the base instincts in a person, you know, whether it's, you know, sex appeal or insecurity.
John:
Those are the main ones, sex appeal and insecurity.
John:
And I guess, you know, that's it.
John:
I'm trying to think of if there's a third pillar that can all be reduced to like lust and insecurity in one form or another.
John:
immediately poking your lizard brain in those places not sort of against your will but like like by looking at that section of the screen it's like poke poke poke and that's what leads to the radicalization on youtube it's it's like what will cause people to go and click on that thing all right something sexy or something that appeals to your sense of insecurity about something
John:
And the more sort of gross and purient you can like, like the, the more extreme, the more likely someone is to click on it.
John:
So that just, that just drives the cycle.
John:
It's like, okay, well, you know, you clicked on something on this sidebar.
John:
Now what's going to, what is it going to take to get you to click?
John:
You're mad about the last video.
John:
What is it going to take to get you to click now?
John:
And you end up in Nazis in like three clicks, right?
Yeah.
John:
I don't think because you can't generally just have someone scroll to the bottom of a screen and overcast and have six audio snippets play in their ears and have some way for them to engage with those that like it's just it's just not the same.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think it's just because it's audio and it's a more deliberate medium.
John:
You have to actually choose to listen to a thing.
John:
Listening takes longer than looking.
John:
And it's harder to get at those insecurities in such a sort of broad bandwidth way.
John:
You can still say things like, do you think you're too fat?
John:
But, like, it's just not the same as showing, like, someone pinching some fat and saying, you know, magic, lose weight, whatever.
John:
It's just different.
John:
So I haven't seen any – forget about Overcast.
John:
I haven't seen any podcast clients –
John:
That suffer from this cycle of radicalization that lots of these visual mediums do.
John:
I'm not saying it's not possible.
John:
It totally is possible.
John:
You can add a visual component to podcasts.
John:
You can add thumbnails to podcasts that are come ons for the things like it.
John:
This is all technically possible to be done.
John:
I just haven't seen it yet.
John:
So we've been blessedly spared this particular disease for now.
Casey:
For now.
Casey:
So I need help.
Casey:
I have shipped to beta testers something that I have called duplicate detection in Vignette.
Casey:
And in discussing with Mike this very feature on a forthcoming episode of Analog, it was made very clear to me that duplicate detection is a terrible freaking name for it because it makes people think that it's doing something it isn't.
Casey:
So what am I talking about?
Casey:
So what I have shipped to beta testers and hope to ship very, very soon to the greater public is a mechanism by which Vignette will detect if it's offering up the same image to replace one that you already have.
Casey:
So let's run through like an example use case.
Casey:
So you have my phone number in your contacts list.
Casey:
You have an entry for me.
Casey:
You know, the 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 is sitting right there.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Casey:
And you eventually put in my Twitter handle, and Vignette offers an image.
Casey:
And as we record this, that image would be me looking down to the left, bearded.
Casey:
In fact, I think, John, you took that picture, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Anyways, you see that picture of me looking down to the left.
Casey:
And you have Vignette update my picture.
Casey:
And now my picture in your contact card is me looking down to the left.
Casey:
Then fast forward a week.
Casey:
And you go back to Vignette, and it's looking at all these different things.
Casey:
And today, as it exists in the App Store, it will offer you, hey, here's Casey's Twitter avatar.
Casey:
Would you like to use that to replace what you've already got?
Casey:
Well, what you've already got is Casey looking down to the left, and here's the Twitter avatar, which is Casey looking down to the left.
Casey:
And that's not very helpful, right?
Casey:
So what I've been calling this internally, and by that I mean what I've been referring to it for myself, is duplicate detection, because I'm detecting a duplicate image.
Casey:
Now, what Mike thought I was talking about, and I think that's completely reasonable, is, oh, you have two entries for Casey in your contact list.
Casey:
That's not good.
Casey:
That is not at all what I'm talking about.
Casey:
What I'm talking about is detecting when an image that I'm suggesting matches the image that is already there.
Okay.
Casey:
So, one of my questions is, what should I call this?
Casey:
But we'll get to that in a minute.
Casey:
But my bigger question is, and what I need advice on, is, okay, let's say my contact card has my Instagram account, my Twitter account, my Facebook account, my GitHub account, and my Gravatar.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And so in theory, Vignette will find, what is it, five?
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
Some number of images.
Casey:
And they may or may not match.
Casey:
So what if my Instagram avatar, which I think it is different than my Twitter avatar, and what if my GitHub avatar is different than my Twitter avatar?
Casey:
And so on.
Casey:
So what should happen if Vignette sees that the Twitter avatar matches the contact card, but maybe other networks do not?
Casey:
So my two choices here are I could eliminate only the things that are found to be matched.
Casey:
So in this example, Vignette would not offer Twitter as a way, as a thing to replace the existing image because it is the same image, but it would offer Instagram and Gravatar and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Or do I just throw away that entire contact the moment I find any matches?
Casey:
So in that case, it says, well, even though the Instagram image doesn't look the same as what's in his contact card, the Twitter image does match what's in his contact card.
Casey:
So screw it.
Casey:
We're not even going to offer Casey for updates.
Casey:
Am I making any sense at all?
Casey:
Let's start there.
Marco:
So first of all, the name for this feature should be nothing.
Marco:
There should just be some logic that you do behind the scenes.
Marco:
This is not a marketing feature.
Marco:
This is not a marketable feature.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
This is just the way people expect these things to work.
Marco:
They expect it to just figure it out.
Marco:
Interesting.
Marco:
You're not going to get much recognition for this feature.
Marco:
In the blog post where you release it and talk about it as an update note, you can describe it there, but it doesn't really need a name.
Marco:
And I think duplicate detection is a totally fine name.
Marco:
I would maybe say duplicate photo detection to clarify that it's the photo, not the contact.
Marco:
But anyway, this is not a marketing or public name as a marketable feature.
Marco:
You don't currently have...
Marco:
hold on, maybe you do.
Marco:
So I was going to say you don't currently have the concept of when you have multiple image choices, like which ones are like the best ones.
Marco:
But you do because you choose which ones to show as like the one, you know, when you have like the little stack interface, like you have whatever you show as like the suggested replacement.
Marco:
So you are, you do have logic there to somehow rank the images in order of what's, what do you think is the best one?
Casey:
That's adorable.
Casey:
But that logic is just what's the first one.
Marco:
Okay.
Casey:
I appreciate your vote of confidence, but it is undeserved.
Marco:
So anyway, I think this might be how you can potentially solve this, is develop a stable ranking algorithm so that given a set of possible avatars on a contact...
Marco:
to somehow like be able to rank like which which of these out which of these avatars are are like you know the best ones which to show people and so some obvious examples of this i would think would be like which one is the largest one like image image size wise like which is the biggest image um if you have any way to get modification dates on any of these i know that for most of the services you probably don't
Marco:
But if you have any way to get modification dates, you'd say, like, what's the most recently changed one?
Casey:
Sure, sure.
Marco:
Or you could do something more complex that you probably shouldn't engage the engineering effort in, such as, like, which of these social networks have they posted on most recently?
Marco:
You know, but that's probably not worth the trouble.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It isn't, but that is a clever solution to the problem.
Casey:
I do like where your head's at, but I agree that it is a big waste of my time.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Or if you're doing similar photo detection, you could see if they have three photos and two of them are the same and one of them is different, probably the two that are the same, that's the right one.
Marco:
Then you could just pick the larger file size out of those two or whatever.
Marco:
so there's a couple of heuristics you can use but somehow develop like a stable sort use that to like basically compare like does whatever you have in the contact now does that photo match using the similarity algorithm does it match the current like one that you would show at the top in this sort and if it does then it's considered a duplicate
Casey:
And in that case, you would just move to the next highest scoring image or you would throw out that entire row.
Casey:
So if I've decided that what you've got for my image matches Twitter, would you throw Casey out entirely or would you just re-rank or would you eliminate Twitter as an option to overwrite what you've already got?
Marco:
Right now, do you store in any kind of metadata whether you have modified the image for a contact?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
And I am resistant to doing it because I don't feel like I should have to, but it absolutely would solve this problem.
Marco:
Yeah, because obviously then when someone has changed something, you basically force that.
Marco:
Whatever they picked, you force that to be the top element in that ranking algorithm.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
but i don't know like that yeah like it obviously this is this would require you to first like start writing metadata if there is even a way to do that in without some garbage like putting stuff in the notes field exactly which you probably shouldn't do i mean you could even keep a local database sure in the app of some kind of like is there like some kind of unique id on a contact you can just like keep like a list of them that you have modified
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know if it's consistent across different runs.
Casey:
And I could do it by first and last name or something like that.
Casey:
Again, I'm with you.
Casey:
I'm with you.
Casey:
I understand where your head is, and it does make sense.
Casey:
I don't think I want to go that deep on it.
Casey:
I think what I'd rather do is just make a best guess with the information I have.
Casey:
The two original options were either throwing out that one or more images that match.
Casey:
or throwing out that entire contact.
Casey:
Or this third option, which you brought up, which I do like, which is just re-rank the options that I have to perhaps move something that I believe to be a duplicate further back in the stack, so to speak.
Marco:
I mean, one thing also, like, I don't know, do you have any kind of analytics to know what percentage of your users are running the app multiple times?
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
I do get enough feedback about this that I know it bothers people, and it should.
Casey:
I mean, it's kind of...
Casey:
the way it works right now.
Casey:
Because let's say you run it and you decide to run it again for whatever reason, like immediately.
Casey:
It's going to show you everything and all of the left and right images are going to look identical.
Casey:
Maybe not all of them, but you take my point that almost all of them will look identical if everything goes according to plan.
Casey:
And that's not good.
Casey:
Like that's not a good runtime experience for users.
Casey:
So I feel like this is something that in a perfect world would have been in the 101.
Casey:
in the launch version of the app but I just couldn't get it in time and now I've got it basically right I'm just not sure how to design for it
John:
My thoughts probably require more work than you want to put into this, but I'm going to bring back my old favorite from the beta period, which is that I still, again, kind of like the LN command for some people, but not me for some strange reason.
John:
I still look at your interface and have to remind myself forcibly what the arrow is trying to tell me.
John:
It is not telling me that...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Which one is the current picture and which one is the one that it's offering to put on it for me, which makes me think this is related to your question that like, you know, backing up a bit utility wise, the whole point of this program is to do a bunch of stuff for me that would be tedious for me to do myself.
John:
Uh, and, uh,
John:
That utility is strengthened by saying, like, I found a bunch of images, right?
John:
And maybe you picked one of them last time, but maybe you change your mind in the future.
John:
Maybe someone updates one of their things before you chose their Gravatar, but then they updated the Twitter icon, and it turns out the Twitter owner is better.
John:
Like, I basically want to see, here's all the work I did.
John:
I'm the application.
John:
I did a bunch of work.
John:
I got a bunch of images.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and i would like to say here is the current image here are all the other options that are available for me maybe one of which you've already picked and i'll like gray it out or indicate that which basically means a much more complicated interface than the current two circles with an arrow between them right which is not ideal and it's going to be difficult to design
John:
But that gives the most utility.
John:
Like, if I was to care about, like, what is a power user tool for dealing with my contacts and not something simple and straightforward, but that's what you're getting into with this whole, like, well, I've got multiple options, and you picked one of them before, and I have to detect whether it's a duplicate.
John:
Like, you're starting to get into that realm anyway, but it is...
John:
Like, bigger rows, different interface, sort of, you know, the GameCube controller style of thing.
John:
Like, one button is more prominent than the other.
John:
Like, the current image should not be the same size and prominence as the options available to change that image to.
John:
And I would imagine that if you picked one of the images, there'd be some animation showing that you've selected one of them so that it's clear and that some resting state display so that it's clear.
John:
If you scroll down the list, you can see which ones am I changing at all.
John:
Like, maybe get rid of the checkboxes and maybe have...
John:
the selection of the image cause a animation and translation and overlay and graying out.
John:
So it's clear which ones you're going to change at all and which ones you're not going to change.
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
Like a different interface.
John:
Like this is not a minor issue of like, Oh, I just, which one do I pick or do I show this or do not show it?
John:
Like I'm getting into more bigger changes, which may not be worth your time, but, uh,
John:
To solve this problem in a more comprehensive way, I think you need that kind of interface.
John:
And on going in the far opposite direction from large scale changes that you probably don't want to make to small scale changes that you should make, I'm using the beta with supposed duplicate detection.
John:
And I posted a bunch of images to our Slack channel that show a bunch of things where it is not successfully detected duplicates.
John:
So you might want to look into that.
Casey:
Yeah, so the way this works was a suggestion from Craig Hockenberry, which I had never heard of something called a hamming distance, and I probably will do a terrible job describing it.
John:
How did you graduate from CS without hearing about hamming distance?
Casey:
I did not go through a CS program.
Casey:
I went through a CPE program just like you did, but be that as it may.
John:
Oh, I learned it.
John:
Anyway.
Marco:
Wait, am I the only one here with a CS degree?
Yeah.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
That's incredible.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We're both engineers, which is much harder.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I didn't learn this, just for the record.
Casey:
In any case, I'm going to hugely oversimplify it, and then we'll see if I get away with it.
Casey:
I think I have a degree.
Casey:
you kind of get a hash for each of the two images and then figure out, okay, how far away from each other are the bits of these two hashes?
Casey:
And if they're not far away from each other, eh, they're probably the same.
Casey:
And if they're pretty far away from each other, ooh, then they're probably not the same.
Casey:
And one of the nice things is by just changing what the threshold is between what I consider to be far and what I consider to be close, then I can crank up or down the sensitivity.
Casey:
And I haven't had the chance to look at these screenshots because you just sent them to me moments ago.
Casey:
But if it's really a whole ton of duplicates, then maybe I need to make it so that it needs to be closer together than I already need it to be in order for them to count as the same.
Casey:
So, in other words, the distance really needs to be almost nothing for them to be considered.
Casey:
Oh, did I get that backwards?
Casey:
You get that.
Casey:
The opposite, yes.
Casey:
Yeah, sorry.
Casey:
But anyway, you get the idea, is that I can crank up or down the sensitivity.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Take a look at the screenshots.
John:
It's like two seconds to see.
John:
Like, look at, like, Will Shipley.
John:
Clearly, that's a duplicate Gruber.
John:
atwood jeff atwood yeah they're just i mean i if you look really close at the pixels you can see how they aren't actually identical as like jpeg compression differences but they are literally the same picture just with different levels of compression so you have to adjust that oh and i also threw a screenshot down at the bottom where this yeah getting back to the big bigger changes thing i thought of this when i saw this like i i run the app all the time obviously because i'm running the betas and trying it out and stuff like that
John:
And after you do a bunch of updates, like I select a bunch of ones I want to change, it updates them.
John:
It leaves the button for updating, but it changes the number to update zero contacts.
John:
I don't want to see that button anymore.
John:
I don't want a grayed out button to update zero contacts.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
And then it says search again.
John:
And to Marco's question of like, who's running the application more than once, the actual sort of non-beta tester users who are legitimately running the application more than once, what they want to make their experience better
John:
I would say the number one thing before the things we're talking about with duplicates and like maybe their other options is for it to remember what it did last time and to just see if anything has changed since then, like for it not to take as long, basically.
John:
Because every time I run it, I got to wait for that progress bar to go through.
John:
And even with multi-threading, it takes a really, really long time and makes a lot of requests.
John:
I'm like, you just did a bunch of this.
John:
Like, remember what you did last time and just show me anything that's different.
John:
Like, in other words...
John:
have in the ui to say i found all these last time you can consider them again if you want like i'm not going to hide them from you but here's what's changed since the last time you did this search here's some new stuff you might want to consider and you can also go and consider stuff that you didn't make decisions on last time but that that differentiation and the acceleration of like doing the new stuff first i'm not sure how easy that is to do given all the apis or whatever but that's the experience you want we don't want it to be
Casey:
a frosty the snowman happy birthday every time we launch the application has no idea that you've ever run it before do all the work again up front because i have a lot of contacts and it's a long wait yeah i don't think that what you're asking for will empirically change the amount of time it takes to process things unless i just blatantly refuse to pro you know to look for updates on anything that that has been updated in the last x days services don't have like if modified since header support or whatever not not to the best of my knowledge no
Marco:
Aren't really all these images are probably being sort of CDNs.
Marco:
They probably all support that.
Casey:
I mean, I'll have to look again.
Casey:
I hadn't really looked in the past, but I, to the best of my knowledge, they don't, but I am not confident I am correct about that.
Casey:
So I can certainly look again.
Casey:
But yeah, I take all of your points and they are all genuinely very good.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's a tough knot to crack, right?
Casey:
Because I think to get to the app that you want, John, is a considerable amount of effort.
Casey:
And I don't disagree with any of your desires.
Casey:
I just don't know if I want this app to solve those problems or to solve them in exactly the way you want.
John:
Well, you do, but it's just a question of how much development effort you want to put into it.
John:
it like you do want your app to solve all these problems but like it's a question of do i want to put in the amount of work that it would take to do that because does it provide what is the marginal value like is the point of diminishing returns like the app basically does solves the problem for 80 of the people now and now you're getting to like well what if i run the app multiple times or what if i have lots of different options and it's diminishing returns really fast so yeah it's up to you to decide whether you want to invest any time in this although for the duplicate detection thing
John:
If you're going to have it at all, you definitely need to tune it so that it doesn't, you know, because despite this not being a marketing feature, and I agree, for you to even say you have the feature, you can't have results that are clearly a bunch of duplicates that people can see with their eyeballs.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just it's going to be – there's only so much I can do, right?
Casey:
Because if the JPEG compression is utterly mangled one version and not at all mangled another, it's going to be relatively hard for me to really be – well, no, it shouldn't be though because – There might be core ML stuff that you can do some kind of – like we discussed this before.
John:
I figured there's got to be some kind of API for image similarity that will –
Casey:
give you something close but you know again how much time do you want to invest even just searching for that there yeah i think it can it certainly can be tweaked i'm not i'm not debating that at all um the question is you know where do i land and inevitably it's going to be wrong for some people right like when i initially tested it looked pretty darn good to me but i i cannot sit here and argue with what these screenshots that you've shown me that that clearly are offering duplicates in some cases so
Casey:
Yeah, it's a tough nut to crack.
Casey:
I feel like now I'm left with more questions than answers, but that's okay.
Casey:
It gives me a lot to think about.
Marco:
You can always count on us.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Maybe we can revisit this in a little while.
Casey:
But no, I appreciate the talk through.
Casey:
And thank you, gentlemen, for the time.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Apple is buying the corpse of Intel's modem business, which I think all of us expected, not just the three of us, like all of us expected when all the brouhaha happened with Intel basically shutting all this down.
Casey:
But it is officially a thing.
Casey:
Apple is getting something to the order of 2200 or thereabouts more employees, and hopefully they will not need to rely on Qualcomm much longer.
Marco:
so i i think this is good right i mean i don't see why this is anything but a good thing but uh but maybe i'm missing something marco how do we feel about this i feel great about it i mean like i remember like back when intel kind of like or when the news came out that intel's modem business was for sale um i believe there was some initial reporting that like apple had been in early talks and then basically bailed out and i found that's very surprising because it does kind of seem like they would be you know the best buyer and i thought well that's weird why why would they bail out why didn't they buy it
Marco:
And now it seems like that was probably just part of some negotiation or process or who knows what.
Marco:
These things are complicated.
Marco:
So I'm glad to see that I was wrong and that that report was wrong and that they actually are buying it.
Marco:
And I don't know how you possibly absorb 2,200 new employees.
Marco:
That seems like a big job, but I'm sure they're a big company.
Marco:
They can figure it out.
Marco:
And so I think this is great.
Marco:
I think it's been kind of, you know, an obvious prediction for a while now that, of course, Apple wants to make its own cellular modems if it can.
Marco:
I was under the impression there already were, but hey, whatever.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
I look forward to the results of this, which I don't think you're going to start seeing the results of this
Marco:
certainly not this year and probably not even next year but maybe in iPhones that come out and iPads that come out like two or three years from now you might start seeing Apple branded modems or Apple Apple made modems or they might just become integrated into the A series systems on a chip which would be you know a bunch of wins in a number of ways so
Marco:
I think that's great.
Marco:
It makes a lot of sense.
Marco:
It's probably going to work out about as well as their acquisition of PA Semi did, and that's how we had A-chips in the first place.
Marco:
So, yeah, I think this is great, and I'm kind of surprised it didn't happen sooner, but here we are, and I'm looking forward to the results.
John:
I don't think it's going to be as good as PA semi because it's so many more people.
John:
It's such a larger group.
John:
It's not like a small group of super duper experts.
John:
It's a much larger group of super duper experts plus every other kind of employee that you need.
John:
But the biggest thing it has going for it is like there are very few companies in the world that have any experience building and selling cell radio chips for smartphones online.
John:
on the scale that Apple needs with the quality that Apple needs.
John:
Like we've talked about them all in the show.
John:
There's Qualcomm, there's Intel, there's Apple's team that they've been working on internally, but Apple's team has never actually shipped a cell modem chip.
John:
Intel's has, again, as we mentioned in past shows, we're using them right now in our iPhone XS, right?
John:
And how many teams in the world can say, yeah, no, we totally have made the cell radio chip for Apple's top tier smartphone.
John:
Not only do we know how to do it,
John:
But all of the legal hurdles and all of the regulatory hurdles and all the intellectual property issues, we have overcome all of those to get to the point where we sell them, they put them in the phones, and you buy them and they work.
John:
Now, 5G is a different ball of wax.
John:
It's not just because they did it with their current things doesn't mean 5G is going to be more difficult.
John:
But that kind of experience is just invaluable.
John:
That and the IP, if any, that's coming with this, to say...
John:
They have overcome all those things, and they have actually shipped.
John:
That's who you want.
John:
Because PA Semi, even though it was a smaller team and easier to integrate, they hadn't made all these great A-series chips yet.
John:
We just thought they were very talented people, and they probably can.
John:
But the Intel folks that they're getting have done it at least once or twice.
John:
And they're two varying degrees of success, but apparently they were good enough.
John:
So them combined with Apple's in-house team,
John:
that has presumably been working on this for years.
John:
I'm a little bit worried about integrating those thousands of employees and what kind of redundancies there are and how to merge the efforts of those teams because I don't think, as we've discussed in many past shows, Apple's strategy was not, let's twiddle our thumbs for years and then hope we can buy someone else's cell modem business.
John:
They had their own team working on this.
John:
And now they have these Intel people who have also been working on this.
John:
They need to merge those two things together.
John:
And it's probably a smaller team at Apple and a much larger team at Intel with two totally different projects that had no relation to each other whatsoever suddenly smooshed together.
John:
And we want to get something out of that.
John:
Now, that could accelerate things if the Intel project is really close to being done and the Apple one just kind of waits on the sidelines and the Apple one becomes a 2022 chip and the Intel one becomes a 2021.
John:
Or it could delay things even farther to say, like, we need to rationalize these and come up with a single project.
John:
And that single project is going to be 2022 instead of 2021.
John:
And in the meantime, we'll buy from Qualcomm or whatever.
John:
Either way, we continue down the long path that we've discussed many times in the past, which is that Apple wants to be masters of their own destiny here.
John:
And just like they make their own system-mounted chips, they want to make their own cell radios.
John:
So far, they're not making their own flash.
John:
Well, they are making their own Taptic engine.
John:
You should start looking at the chip breakdown from iFixit and see how many chips on the iPhone's board are made by Apple and how many aren't.
John:
And I feel like Apple is sort of going by area.
John:
The system on the chip is Apple's.
John:
It's usually the biggest or one of the biggest chips on there.
John:
The cell radio may not be the biggest, but it's one of the most important.
John:
I guess the flash storage, probably Apple's not going to be into that because it's more of a commodity and it takes a lot of space.
John:
But we're getting to the point of diminishing returns, where all the major important components are made by Apple, and that's kind of where they like to be.
John:
Because having to deal with third-party vendors is a pain, especially since Apple usually wants to have two of them, and that becomes increasingly difficult for components that are...
John:
difficult or highly differentiated like the cpus or the cell modems so i think this is good news for apple probably good news for the people on the intel teams that their alternative is to be laid off by intel and now they have a slightly less chance of being laid off by apple i'm sure there will be some layoffs but uh
John:
Hey, now you're an Apple employee instead of an Intel employee, and that may be a good thing depending on whether you get to move to Apple Park or eat the fancy food or whatever.
John:
I don't think they're on a totally different campus, right?
John:
I forget where they are.
John:
San Diego or something?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I honestly don't know.
John:
Which I think is also where Apple's team was.
John:
They did a good job of sort of setting things up for this.
John:
I think they're geographically co-located so that acquiring doesn't require everybody to move.
John:
in either the Apple side or the Intel side.
John:
Anyway, things are looking up.
John:
This is a good move.
John:
I still think we'll be waiting a year or two to see the fruits of that labor, but when we do, it should be good.
Casey:
And then I think finally for today, before I ask ATP, apparently Apple has employees or contractors listening to Siri audio.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
So this was a report from the Guardian from a few days ago as we record saying that Apple employees and or contractors are occasionally listening to Siri audio to help improve Siri, which on the surface makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
But what?
Casey:
what apple is the self-proclaimed you know top of the mountain you know the the king of the hill if you will on privacy and this doesn't feel very private to me so what's going on here and should i start putting on my tinfoil hat
John:
I'm trying to think.
John:
I don't know the details of whether they're just doing it for transcription.
John:
They're also doing it for commands.
John:
But Apple often touts the things they do on your device.
John:
But there are many things that Siri does that require contact with a server.
John:
But all of that is separate from the idea of...
John:
You say something, and Siri turns it into text, which then sort of drives the rest of the system, right?
John:
So that could all be happening in device.
John:
You say something, Siri translates it into text, that text gets sent to a server, the server does a bunch of work, gives you a response, something like that, or it could happen on device.
John:
But the bottom line is that usually, with Siri architecture, as I understand it, no reason for your audio...
John:
to leave the device except of course this reason which I have to say I'm not surprised this is happening but I can understand why people would be surprised that it's happening given Apple's privacy stance which is Apple wants to make its thing better and if someone says something and Siri interprets it terribly badly
John:
That's something that Apple wants to know.
John:
And if you picture yourself as tasked with making this better, making Siri better, you're like, well, some user said, you know, set a timer for 10 minutes and it totally interpreted it in some bizarre way.
John:
And even if you give them the bizarre way, you're like,
John:
if you're the developer working in siri like well i can't this is not actionable how do i fix this i have to know what they said i have to know what it sounded like i have to know where the problem happened was there lots of background noise did they have an accent was there a certain cadence like what part of our system is failing i need the audio to be able to debug this the part where i think people are you know that you know as a developer that's not surprised like you can't you you can't improve it without without this audio the part that people find surprising is that
John:
sometimes that audio will just be taken and fed into the machine to make it better without any kind of consent or notification or anything like that.
John:
And that is off-putting and not in keeping with Apple's privacy stance in general, despite the fact that Apple says, oh, it's not identifiable as you, it's not associated with your Apple ID.
John:
Like...
John:
It's your voice.
John:
I don't know.
John:
People's voices may sound similar, but, like, it's your voice and you're saying words.
John:
It's your voice and your content.
John:
Just because it's not associated with your Apple ID, if Morgan Freeman says something to his thing to remind him to set up a meeting with Steven Spielberg about the whatever movie, you're going to know that it's Morgan Freeman.
John:
You know who Steven Spielberg is.
John:
It's information that some random contractor gets to hear that and now can, like, sell the story to the Hollywood Reporter or something.
John:
Oh, but don't worry.
John:
They don't know Morgan Freeman's Apple ID.
John:
So everything is equally anonymous.
John:
It's not like and the fact that that's happening behind the scenes statistically, you know, not all the time, just once in a while or whatever.
John:
Like it seems like Apple has sort of snatched defeat from the Joseph Victor here, because what do we all think every time we try to tell Siri to do something and hilariously screws it up?
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
right because he would know like i'm not sending that audio to apple right or he wouldn't even see that button wouldn't even hit it it would just turn off the phone or whatever like it has to be informed and opt-in and there's a benefit for being opt-in because like it provides satisfaction like when series grows up now there's no satisfaction you just get angry at it and just sits there mocking you with its ridiculous answer i had one recently oh i saved a screenshot of it i think it was like
John:
what the hell did I ask it?
John:
Oh, I asked it, uh, to change the volume.
John:
No, I think I asked it what the weather was and it told me the volume level or something like it was, it was totally bizarre.
John:
And of course I screenshot it because you screenshot all these ridiculous Siri interactions.
John:
If there had been a big button that said, send this to Apple right now, because it's ridiculous.
John:
I would have sent it because I would, and it would, you know, say I'm about to sound this and it would play the audio back to me.
John:
And it says to confirm that you want to send this Apple.
John:
I would say, yes, that would have made me more satisfied as a customer.
John:
Uh,
John:
That I was actually because, you know, I'm not filing a radar.
John:
I'm not creating an Apple developer account like it's just happening on the device right then.
John:
And I get to say, hey, Apple, your thing is broken.
John:
Here's exactly how it's broken.
John:
Yes, you can have this audio that I just heard.
John:
It's fine with me.
John:
Fix your stuff.
John:
That would make me a happy customer.
John:
Whereas if you tell me every once in a while, unbeknownst to you, and this may never have happened to you, but you really have no way of knowing some of your audio may have been sent to someone at Apple so they can try to fix some sort of problem.
John:
A, you're mad that like they may be getting my audio or whatever.
John:
And B, you're probably mad that like maybe they picked up something where there was just lots of background noise.
John:
Like that's not the one you need to fix.
John:
You need to fix the moment where it was a quiet room and you correctly interpreted what I said, but still told me about the volume level instead of the weather.
John:
That's the one you need to fix.
John:
And I don't know if you sent that one because it's just a random sampling of stuff that you send.
John:
So I really hope Apple fixes this.
John:
There are lots of ways to fix this to make everybody happier.
John:
And I feel like to give Apple more better data because Apple doesn't just care about making Siri better.
John:
They care about making it better in ways that make customers more satisfied.
John:
So the more angry and confused the customer is, the more likely they are to opt into the system and the more valuable those are to be the ones that get fixed, not just the randomly selected ones that fail for some reason.
John:
So this is all just disappointing all around, easy for Apple to fix, and I hope they take some action on it.
Marco:
And I talked about this on the talk show this week.
Marco:
So listen to that also, please.
Marco:
So I won't repeat myself too much because we have a lot of audience overlap.
Marco:
But I don't think this is as egregious of a problem unless you consider two things.
Marco:
Number one, there is no way to opt out of this and still use Siri at all.
Marco:
There is no, like, don't share this with Apple.
Marco:
If you use Siri at all, your audio is transmitted to Apple.
Marco:
And John, by the way, you said earlier that you think it's transcribed on the phone and sent.
Marco:
That's not the case.
Marco:
That can be the case sometimes.
Marco:
I believe still, by default, the audio is transcribed remotely.
Marco:
And so it is sending the audio.
Marco:
And that's going to probably still be the case for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
So that's problem number one.
Marco:
Problem number two is that there's a lot of accidental invocation.
Marco:
So it's one thing if you hold on the Siri button and you say, hey, do this thing, and it gives you some bad response, and you say, well, I guess hopefully someone on Apple is going to see stuff like this and try to fix them.
Marco:
It's a whole other thing when the HomePod in the corner of your room says, hmm?
Marco:
when you weren't asking it something and it all of a sudden you realize like oh wait a minute uh that was listening to what do we just say and it's you know what if what if you were saying something sensitive and that like all the time i have the home pod or any hey dingus enabled ios devices very frequently will butt into conversations where i didn't say hey you you know wake up um i didn't even say anything that even remotely sounded like it
Marco:
But and oftentimes we'll think back and realize, wait, it thought that was, hey, whatever.
Marco:
Like, wow.
John:
I have a sound alike problem that related to last last week's link to the look right into the eyes of your sweetie, which is what I call my sweetie and sweetie when I mumble it or yell it across the house.
Marco:
sounds a lot like siri so i get a lot of accidental activations with incredibly bizarre results that follow the word sweetie because it tries to transcribe what i'm telling it to do right like siri has a pretty significant problem with accidental invocation by accidentally recognizing those words especially on home pods and so not only is it sending recordings to humans potentially when you intentionally invoke siri
Marco:
But it's sending recordings to Apple for humans to review when you didn't even realize you were invoking Siri and didn't intend to be invoking Siri.
Marco:
Or maybe it's sending them.
John:
You don't know.
John:
Right.
John:
You don't know which ones it's sending because it's not sending 100% of them.
John:
That's too much.
John:
It's sending some amount of them, but you don't know which ones it's sending.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So to me, because there is accidental capture happening...
Marco:
There must be clear communication.
Marco:
There must be an opt-out that allows you to keep having Siri enabled as a service, but that you can say, don't use recordings of me.
Marco:
Don't let humans review those.
Marco:
That needs to be an option.
John:
I found my screenshot that I took of the ridiculous Siri thing.
John:
This was actually a legit thing that we were trying to do with various iOS devices of my family on vacation.
John:
We were trying to say what version of iOS device is running without having to go to settings, general, about, blah, blah, blah, and scroll and look for the thing.
John:
So just ask Siri.
John:
And so Siri shows you what it transcribed of what you said.
John:
So it correctly transcribed my question, which was...
John:
what version of iOS am I running?
John:
Correctly capitalized iOS.
John:
Like that's, you know, it got the question and its answer was the current volume is 13%.
John:
Oh my God.
John:
Which is an interesting answer to the question that it correctly transcribed.
John:
And you may think, I think it just can't tell the answer to that question.
John:
not true because if you do it again and it retranscribes it it tells you like the version like it's in typical bizarre siri fashion why does the same question result in different answers in the same device seconds apart um yeah so i did take a screenshot of this i yeah i there was no button to submit it to apple but i submitted it through other channels whether anything comes of it who knows
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And we start tonight with Prone to Bits, who asked for a twofer, which is usually against the rules, but they were both pretty good and hopefully quick.
Casey:
Number one, does Marco have any favorite tracks for testing speakers or headphones?
Marco:
I have a whole playlist called Audio Quality Tests, and there's a few go-tos in there.
Marco:
I shared it at some point.
Marco:
I blogged about it, I think, or I showed a screenshot of it.
Marco:
Right now, there's 31 songs on it.
Marco:
And the idea is to span a wide variety of musical genres, at least within what I know and what I have, and to include songs that are very well-recorded and songs that I just know really well.
Marco:
And that way, I kind of have a very quick benchmark for
Marco:
one of my favorite ones one of the ones that i go to fastest and most often is the once and future carpenter by the avid brothers that is usually the very first song i will test on any new pair of headphones and then i will go on from there i have songs from i have old songs i have a couple of cat steven songs i have new songs i have like
Marco:
90 songs like Counting Crows, I have Decembrists, Dispatch, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Maroon 5, Milk Carton Kids, obviously some Fish, some Social Distortion, stuff like that.
Marco:
As songs I know very well, and especially some songs that are very, very well recorded, so that when I'm listening to something that has very high quality potential, I'm feeding it really good input, so I know...
Casey:
if i'm if i have really good headphones that i have something that can sound really good on them uh nobody asked me but i really like uh two kevin gilbert tracks one is uh thud or excuse me it's the album is uh thud live the track is cashmere which is a cover of zeppelin i forget i know everyone's gonna be angry at me i'm so sorry
Casey:
um anyway it's really good cover of cashmere and then uh last plane out which is also kevin gilbert but part of the band as part of the band toy matinee uh both of those i really enjoy using for similar circumstances coming back to ask atp well actually let me give john a chance john do you care and ever have any favorite tracks for these sorts of things
John:
Audio quality testing.
John:
I don't think I've ever been faced with this problem, and I don't know what I would pick, so no.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
How is it, this is back to prone to bits, how is it macOS chides you for disconnecting external drives before ejecting, but iOS 13 doesn't?
Casey:
Isn't that because the file system went to user space, or like mounting USB stuff went to user space in iOS 13, or in iPadOS 13?
John:
No, it's because iOS doesn't care about your data, that's why.
Yeah.
John:
wow this is an eternal question of like you know because pc users say i hate on max you have to unmount volumes before ejecting floppy disks or disconnecting drives or stuff like that and the mac users would say like well then how do you know all the various buffers have been flushed to disk and then the unix people say just type sync and hit return then type sync again and then hit return and everything will be surely on disk and we go around and around and then the pc users i just wait for the light to stop blinking and then you can yank it out and
John:
It's a complicated issue.
John:
I was complicated.
John:
Very often there is buffering involved.
John:
There are various mechanisms in operating systems that are supposed to ensure that all bits have been successfully transferred to the persistent storage media so that it is now safe to remove things.
John:
The Mac OS way, the Mac way of unmounting,
John:
is always going to be the safest because it allows the operating system to decide that everything truly has been written in disk and to give a visual indication in the interface that says now it's okay for you to pull your disk out or disconnect your thing because as far as the operating is concerned everything has been flushed to it and we have unmounted the device and it's gone from the operating system so if it didn't make it to your disk now or your storage now it's never going to make it there but either way it's safe to pull it out but practically speaking given modern
John:
uh io stacks and modern storage mechanisms and you know the experience of all pc users are just staring at the little blinking light and yanking it out when the light is done blinking that technique also works if you always wait for the light to be done blinking as long as you're not sure it wasn't about to blink one more time right before you yanked it out uh yeah as for ios like
John:
It's no different than any other operating system.
John:
It's trying to get everything flush to storage as fast as possible.
John:
It's trying to handle cases where there were things in flight.
John:
If you yank it out while it's in the middle of a transfer and put it back in, maybe it can resume where it left off.
John:
I don't know what things it's doing.
John:
But the bottom line is it is always safest to let the operating system unmount and be completely done with the thing.
John:
It's never going to be as safe to do it the other way because you can yank it out at any time and the OS may not be ready for it.
John:
The fact that lots of operating systems let you yank it out is a feature in that it's more convenient and you don't have to deal with unmounting.
John:
But I have to believe that there is no possible way that you can allow the user to yank it at any time and never suffer any data loss.
John:
if they don't plug it back in ever.
John:
Because if I yank it out and it's in the middle of a transfer and I'd never plug that thing back in, I'm not getting those bits.
John:
They're on the device.
John:
They're not on the thing that I yanked out.
John:
And there's nothing, you know, that's just the arrow of time, right?
John:
So I don't like systems like this where it says, just pull it out at any time.
John:
I'm sure it will be fine.
John:
Because the answer is no, it won't always be fine.
John:
Almost always will be fine.
John:
But I would rather it be closer to always fine.
John:
We need more nines.
John:
So you get a lot more nines with unmounting.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Aaron Bushnell writes, you wake up to an email from Phil Schiller that you're on the new Pro Workflow team for complete overhaul of macOS, iPadOS, and iOS.
Casey:
What suggestions would you provide for the next generation of Apple operating systems?
Casey:
So I did not spend enough time thinking about this, but I thought about this briefly before we recorded, and I came up with... It's kind of a big question.
Casey:
Yeah, I came up with some ideas.
Casey:
I don't think they're revolutionary enough, but let me just throw some ideas at you.
Casey:
For macOS...
Casey:
I first of all think that we should get cellular radios, and particularly Marco and I have been barking up this tree for a while now.
Casey:
For portable Macs, I think they should have cellular radios.
Casey:
I think I'm also on board with touch support, which makes me sick to say out loud, but I think I'm on board with at least giving it a shot.
Casey:
Uh, for iPad OS, I, the best I could come up with was increased system access, which is very nebulous, but I'm thinking of things like, is it, why can't you sideload an iPad app?
Casey:
Like if this is really a professional device, let us maybe get something from places other than the app store.
Casey:
And yes, I know the million and six reasons why that's a bad idea, but maybe let us anyway.
Casey:
And also like audio subsystem access.
Casey:
Like, can we please be able to, I would like to be able to record a podcast on my iPad.
Casey:
I would never do it, but I'd like to be able to, that would be kind of cool.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then finally, with iOS, picture in picture, please.
Casey:
And I feel like there may be something better we can do with the home screen.
Casey:
I'm not sure what, but I feel like Springboard, which has gone through a zillion changes over the last 10 years, but I feel like we could get something a little more interesting on the home screen.
Casey:
So again, most of those not terribly revolutionary, but just some ideas I thought about.
Casey:
I feel like I've been picking on Marco first a lot recently.
Casey:
So John, what do you have for us?
John:
This is too big a question to be answered in any kind of comprehensive way, especially in SACP.
John:
So I'll just give one tiny thing that occurs to me.
John:
Aside from the fact that I probably shouldn't be on the pro workflow team because I don't have any pro workflows.
John:
So I don't understand why I would be on the team, but this is a hypothetical.
Marco:
John, you are a developer.
Marco:
They said developers are their largest segment of pro users.
Marco:
Yeah, the most important pros.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
Not the most important.
Marco:
Clearly we're not.
Marco:
But they are the largest segment.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right, and those same developers need $7,000 monitors.
John:
They can view text on it, right?
John:
Yes, well, obviously the most important members of the Pro Workflow team are video editors.
John:
All right, but yeah, my one quick tiny answer that spans all of their OSes would have to do with responsiveness.
John:
They did a lot of this in iOS 12 with enhancing it, but I feel like it's something that needs to be done across the board.
John:
To give an example of what I'm talking about, well, the larger issue is like,
John:
Today, we're using computers and phones and iPads and whatever that are fantastically more powerful than the ones I started out using when I was a kid.
John:
They're just tremendous.
John:
They have so much faster CPUs and more RAM and just like there's so many more computing resources.
John:
And yet the second by second moment by moment interactive experience of using the computers, it's faster than it was, but not by the same amount.
John:
that that the actual resources have increased because we're using the resources to do fancier things obviously right so we're not not just because your cpu is a million times faster you don't expect everything to be a million times faster because you're doing stuff with that i get that but there are many corners of the various operating systems that are less responsive than they should be to give a tiny example if you are in the list view window in the finder and you hit command n to make a new folder because you've remapped that command because you've spent 16 years typing command and then you refuse to command shift in anyway set that aside you hit the keyboard shortcut
John:
To create a new folder, right?
John:
And because you're used to doing this frequently, you immediately start typing the name of that new folder because you know the untitled folder text will automatically be selected.
John:
So, you know, as you command N and you start typing the name of the folder, it will miss the first few keystrokes or maybe just the first one keystroke of what you typed.
John:
What you have to do is
John:
Hit your keystroke for a new folder.
John:
Wait a moment for the computer to catch up to what you've done.
John:
Then start typing the name of the folder.
John:
And this seems like a tiny thing.
John:
It's like, just wait a fraction of a second.
John:
What's the big deal?
John:
The big deal is, on a computer with...
John:
Like an 8 megahertz CPU or whatever the hell it was, I used to be able to type command in and immediately start typing the name of the folder and it would get all the characters every single time.
John:
On a computer, it was so much slower than any other computing device I have in my life.
John:
That's an example where responsiveness has not been prioritized.
John:
And by the way, it's only list view.
John:
Like, column view doesn't have that problem.
John:
I think icon view doesn't have that problem.
John:
It just lists view.
John:
There are all sorts of weird corners of the operating system, of all operating systems, where there are delays where I have to wait for the computer.
John:
iOS and iPadOS have tons of delays that are built into the interaction model, whether it is because you have to hold down a certain period of time or you have to check whether I'm double tapping.
John:
Like, all those kind of delays, it's harder in iOS and iPadOS.
John:
Find a way for me not to have to wait for the computer.
John:
I think a lot of the stuff where they eliminated the loop for the cursor insertion point and everything on iOS 13, which I still haven't tried because I've still been afraid to install it, but those are steps in the right direction.
John:
That's what I want.
John:
I don't want to be waiting for the computer for things that I shouldn't have to be waiting for the computer for, for small interactive things.
John:
That involves, like, it's not saying, oh, you have to eliminate animations because they take too long.
John:
I just want everything to be interactive all the time.
John:
I want it to be responsive to my input.
John:
Um, and this occurs to me because I just have gone through, you know, many hundreds, multiple thousands.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Probably multiple thousands of photos of the course of my vacation.
John:
So I spent another, uh,
John:
Many, many arrows in the Apple Photos application on my Mac.
John:
And boy, is that program not responsive.
John:
Like, you'll hit the right arrow key to go to the next photo.
John:
And not only will it not go to the next photo, often it will show you a beach ball.
John:
I was starting to do counts.
John:
One, two, three.
John:
Oh, you went to the next picture.
John:
Great.
John:
Sometimes it will just never advance the next picture and you have to hit the right arrow key again.
John:
This is not an example of a responsive program.
John:
I'm not asking for the moon here.
John:
I'm asking to go to the next completely unedited picture as I go through imports.
John:
It
John:
they need things need to be more responsive and it's not just something that benefits people who are in a super duper hurry it's like oh you're in such a hurry you hit command n you want to type the name right away just wait a second nobody's in that big a hurry it's not a big deal blah blah blah responsiveness benefits everybody even if you think for 15 seconds between what you do everybody likes it that when you finally after thinking for 15 seconds go to do what you want you immediately see the result on the screen that's what people want it makes a satisfying user experience it feels like
John:
you are directly interacting with the thing.
John:
It feels less like you are sending a letter in the mail to the computer for it to do something at some point in the future.
Casey:
Oh, my words.
Casey:
How do you really feel, John?
Casey:
Don't hold back.
Casey:
Marco, thoughts?
Marco:
All right, so I picked just a few things.
Marco:
I spent maybe 15 minutes on this earlier, so forgive me, this is not comprehensive, as John said.
Marco:
On macOS...
Marco:
I had forgotten until John just mentioned that the Photos app is kind of considered part of the OS.
Marco:
I would completely throw away the Photos app.
Marco:
Everything about it except the syncing engine.
Marco:
Throw away the entire browsing and editing interface on the Mac.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
It seems designed for people who don't actually use it.
Marco:
It seems programmed by people who have never used it.
Marco:
And I don't know how anybody could be expected to do anything in the Apple Photos app for Mac on more than one photo at a time ever without throwing it out the window.
Marco:
It's still baffling how...
Marco:
Basic stuff like going through a bunch of photos and trying to delete the bad ones to keep the good ones is so clumsy and bug-prone and slow and unintuitive.
Marco:
Simple things about editing, as John said, are unresponsive, slow, confusing.
Marco:
It just seems like the people who make this app don't use it.
Marco:
Or maybe they're not empowered.
Marco:
I don't know what the problem is.
Marco:
But whatever it is, it seems like the Mac Photos app is just bad.
Marco:
Simple things, very, very common things you need to do with such an app are bad or unintuitive or slow or buggy or just clumsy.
Marco:
So that app needs to be totally thrown out.
Marco:
But moving on to kind of larger themes for macOS, I would say, again, I echo Casey on cellular support.
Marco:
I actually am not convinced yet on Touch.
Marco:
I go back and forth on Touch.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
I would say at kind of a big user experience level, I think time has proven that the Lion document model was the wrong choice.
Marco:
It is still, all these years later, still confusing.
Marco:
People frequently still do unintended things, make unintended changes.
Marco:
People know how to do things like file save as.
Marco:
We've been doing this for decades on our computers.
Marco:
People know that.
Marco:
They learned that.
Marco:
It is how all computers worked for so long.
Marco:
And by trying to make the Mac work more like iOS, and getting rid of save as, and making everything autosave by default, and having these weird duplicate commands instead, I see what they were going for.
Marco:
It didn't work.
Marco:
It's very confusing.
Marco:
i would like to see that totally rolled back honestly or at least an option to enable because like right now you can like hold down the option button and you get like a save as command for real but like the fact is users i don't think ever caught on with the system
Marco:
Pro apps mostly didn't adopt this system, so now you have a situation where a lot of apps on your computer don't work this way, but then all the built-in ones from Apple do work this way, so you have incredible inconsistency now.
Marco:
The Lion document model failed.
Marco:
It was a good idea to try something like that.
Marco:
They failed.
Marco:
It didn't work.
Marco:
Get rid of it.
Marco:
architecturally speaking if if if we didn't you know if this is like a total overhaul as it was kind of you know stated i would like to see a an ios style container folder structure for each app like on the mac you have like the library folder and inside the library folder you have all these different folders so like if you install an app on the mac or if you run an app on the mac
Marco:
it's a, it's expected to write files in, in standard locations.
Marco:
They're kind of all over the place.
Marco:
You know, it has like, it's supposed to write documents in your documents directory.
Marco:
It's supposed to write its temp files in a certain folder under library.
Marco:
It's supposed to write its preferences in a different folder under library.
Marco:
And if you delete the app, all those files are still there.
Marco:
And, or even if you just install a new version of the app, it might start writing them in new locations.
Marco:
And so you have all this garbage accumulating all over the file system.
Marco:
And that's why you have, you know, all these like app cleaner app uninstaller apps that are supposed to try to help you out.
Marco:
But like the,
Marco:
On iOS, you delete an app and you know it's gone.
Marco:
You know it can't possibly have left anything behind, like Zoom's stupid web server.
Marco:
You just know it's gone because the container structure of the app is such that you install an app, it gets its own little folder with its own little library folder inside of it.
Marco:
And that library folder has all of its temp files and everything else.
Marco:
And when you delete the app, that whole container gets deleted.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Now, there would have to be some concessions about where documents go, for example, because the Mac works differently about documents than iOS does.
Marco:
But I think having that kind of structure come to the Mac would be great and would solve a lot of problems.
Marco:
And yes, it would be a lot of work and a big change and a lot of things would break, but this is in a re-architecting kind of scenario.
Marco:
I would also say I would like to see more background app services come to the Mac from iOS.
Marco:
Things like background refresh, content available, push notifications, background downloads of URLs and stuff like that.
Marco:
I don't know how much of that is there yet.
Marco:
I don't think much of it is.
Marco:
Moving on to iPadOS.
Marco:
uh i would like to see this become a little bit more mac like in in a few ways that i don't think are popular but that i would like to see um number one and this is going to be controversial a desktop for files on the ipad
Marco:
people want to work this way i know it is not what nerds like to have a desktop covered in files but this is how i work i'll admit it i'm a desktop file clutterer i have crap all over my desktop my folders are all over there that's like all my active working files are on my desktop and then once they're done i move them somewhere else maybe but like
Marco:
The desktop is my home base for my files.
Marco:
That's how most people use their desktops.
Marco:
That's why Apple made a feature one or two Mac versions ago that will optionally sync your documents and desktop folders and none of your other folders because no one uses any other folders.
Marco:
They will optionally sync your documents and desktop folders between your Macs.
Marco:
I would like to see that feature extended to also include iPads to be able to potentially, optionally, sync your desktop and documents folders between your Macs and your iPads.
Marco:
So the iPad would have a desktop that could have files and folders on it.
Marco:
That is what I would like to see.
Marco:
Additionally, a few other kind of Mac niceties come to the iPad.
Marco:
I would like to see a standard window chrome for the iPad.
Marco:
Right now, the iPad can do things that are kind of window-like, but they're all with only hidden gestures.
Marco:
There's not a lot of on-screen controls to control them or to invoke them and everything.
Marco:
I would like to see some kind of standard title bar with standard buttons to shrink it to the various window sizes, the various split configurations that can exist on the iPad.
Marco:
And not every app would have to show window chrome.
Marco:
Those apps that...
Marco:
benefit from full screen edge to edge content could opt into it the same way right now we have the home indicator and apps can opt to hide it by default so some kind of standard title bar with window chrome going along with this to make multitasking less slow and horrible and painful like it is now a fast mode for multitasking that skips all the animations of moving and resizing apps on the ipad and instantly snaps apps into place
Marco:
so you drag that thing over it doesn't have to go whoop and slide it over you don't have to set it down and wait for it it just goes bam snaps right into place you want to resize it drag the handle bam snaps again instant finally uh much more responsive and much more reliable keyboard shortcuts
Marco:
The iPad is slowly gaining keyboard navigability, but it's pretty slow.
Marco:
It's still pretty few and far between, and it's unreliable, and it's not very responsive at times.
Marco:
I want to see just, again, kind of what John said about responsiveness.
Marco:
Get faster, because if they're trying to push the iPad into a lot of Mac-like uses, Mac-like territory, it needs to be fast and responsive, and multitasking has to be immediate.
Marco:
We can't be waiting around for things to...
Marco:
swoop around and slide around and get pushed around.
Marco:
It's just too slow.
Marco:
That isn't how pros work.
Marco:
You need things to be faster.
Marco:
Broadly, moving on to the iPhone, including iOS, I would like to, for iOS generally...
Marco:
It's time.
Marco:
We want user set default apps for HTTP, Mail2, and the camera at least.
Marco:
And any other buttons that appear on the lock screen by default.
Marco:
They have this on the Mac.
Marco:
It's been fine.
Marco:
It hasn't prevented them from shipping a web browser on the Mac or having awesome user features on the Mac that involve integration between the system and Safari or Mail or whatever else.
Marco:
two little things uh phone calls to show as notifications not as full screen takeovers as an option multiple named timers to be supported i would like to see the ability to integrate widgets into the home screen alongside icons if we see fit and to let those widgets update
Marco:
much more frequently.
Marco:
Right now, widgets seem to update basically only when you navigate to them.
Marco:
So when you swipe over to see your widgets, which itself is kind of buried, you first see old stale data for a second as they update to fresh data.
Marco:
And that's how dashboard on macOS always worked.
Marco:
May it rest in peace.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
We have computers.
Marco:
They have background refresh.
Marco:
We have enough power now, enough RAM now.
Marco:
We can have those widgets update more often.
Marco:
Maybe like every couple of minutes, every 10 minutes.
Marco:
That would be great.
Marco:
And finally,
Marco:
I would like to see complications like watchOS as complications, although better because they're terrible from a programming point of view.
Marco:
So a complication API customizable for the lock screen on iOS.
Casey:
So what you're saying is you want tiles on springboard that are like alive.
Casey:
So you want these like alive tiles on springboard and then you want to have a whole bunch of little things hanging out across the top of your screen on the lock screen.
Marco:
Yeah, basically, I want the iPhone lock screen to become watchOS.
Marco:
I want the iPad to become the Mac, and I want the Mac to become the older Mac.
Casey:
What you're saying is you want Springboard to become, what is it, Windows Metro?
Casey:
What was the thing that looked visually?
John:
Yeah, a lot of tiles are dead now.
John:
I'm not sure that's what I was asking for.
John:
I think he just wants to ugly up his lock screen like an Android phone.
Casey:
That's the other thing I was going to say is what you want.
Casey:
Every time I see any family members or friends Android phone, the amount of that is across the top of their screen is insane.
John:
I don't understand.
John:
He wants complications like there's a lot of, quote unquote, wasted space on the lock screen.
John:
I know there's notifications and stuff that can potentially fill up that space, but there is space you could carve out on the lock screen for watch size complications.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, why not?
Marco:
What is it for?
Marco:
Right now, it's basically a giant billboard.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Why can we not use the space?
Marco:
iOS uses it sometimes.
Marco:
If you have a timer running, it'll show on the lock screen.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
Very useful.
John:
And notifications, if you have notifications set to show on the lock screen, you could fill that entire lock screen just with notifications.
John:
That's what that space is reserved for, essentially.
John:
It'll fill your screen.
Marco:
sure but what if look look the apple watch look at how many apple watch screens could fit on your iphone screen like the apple watch like most of the complication face things on the apple watch like most faces have support for between three and six complications you could fit like five or six complications in the space of one notification
Marco:
That could just be pinned to the top of notification area.
Marco:
You could have a little complication zone, right below where the clock and date are, that if you wanted to, you could have a little row of five or six little square complications.
Marco:
There's so much potential there.
Marco:
Weather, temperature, timers, flight status, whatever, what everyone uses the watch complications for.
Marco:
Why isn't that on the iPhone, which would also, by the way, have the battery resources to be able to update those more frequently?
Marco:
To me, the iPhone lock screen is a huge amount of wasted potential, and it's just empty space right now, and I would love to see us be able to use that more and to have apps be able to use that more.
Casey:
Certainly an interesting point.
Casey:
Do you envision this phantom desktop on iPad to be like an app that you open, or is this in replacement of Springboard?
Casey:
What is the experience there?
Yeah.
Marco:
Right now, like in iOS 13, you have the option to optionally put basically your widget zone as the left side of your springboard.
Marco:
What if this is just another option for that?
Marco:
What if you could put, instead of having half of it be your widget zone and half of it be your app icons, what if half of it is your desktop files?
Marco:
The left pane could be widgets or desktop.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
What if app launch moved?
Marco:
What if it really became Mac-like?
Marco:
And what if the apps all moved into the dock?
Marco:
and then the whole desktop was there for your files it works on the mac we've done it on the mac for a very long time and this is how people are accustomed to working and if you're trying to say the ipad is more and more appropriate to replace the mac hey maybe it would make a little more sense to be more mac like in this way that everyone's familiar with as well i don't know i mean maybe part of the reason why the ipad why ipad people like it so much is that it isn't like the mac in some ways but
Marco:
Certainly, when we've given the iPad more Mac-like functionality in some of these basic workflow ways or the way multitasking our windowing works, the more Mac-like it gets in a lot of ways, the more iPad power users like it.
Marco:
But I think right now we still have these major problems of a lot of clumsiness around file access, a lot of clumsiness around multitasking, discoverability and performance and everything else.
Marco:
I feel like if we improve that by bringing over more helpful things from the Mac, I feel like it wouldn't just make it a little Mac, but there are more ideas we can borrow that I think it would benefit from.
John:
You two are too new to the Mac to remember this, but there was a time when applications cared way, way, way less where they were, and people did indeed put applications on the desktop.
John:
I know you just said, like, oh, applications are in the dock and files are on the desktop.
John:
Nope.
John:
You could put anything on the desktop, including all your applications if you wanted, and people did.
Marco:
Yeah, you can still do that with a lot of apps.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
Like, look, who cares where people put their apps?
John:
Apps these days, though, are super cranky about it.
John:
So many of them detect whether they're running from Slash applications or not.
John:
They're like, hey, I'm not running Slash applications.
John:
Do you want to move me in there?
John:
I might be running on a read-only disk image.
John:
That might screw me up because I wasn't created in an age of sandboxing.
John:
Things are more complicated than they have been.
John:
Marco loves desktop.
John:
Everybody loves desktop, as I've been pointing out for years.
John:
I was going to say multiple decades now.
John:
It is the one, the most reliably spatially consistent part of the Mac operating system that remains now that the spatial finder is gone.
John:
And so it's the one place people always know that they can find, and that's why they put all their stuff there.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Well, and like, I feel like...
Marco:
like kind of like raging against people keeping all their files on their desktop it's like raging against people taking photos on ipads or taking portrait video those fights are lost people made people do what they do and the fact is everyone keeps files on the desktop but it's not it's
John:
It's not you're fighting against them doing that, though.
John:
It's not like saying, oh, you shouldn't be doing it.
John:
It's a bad thing.
John:
The reason I rage against it is not because people are doing it, but because it shows that what people want is a spatially consistent place to put their stuff.
John:
That's why people put it on the desktop.
John:
And the fact that there's only a single one of those places left...
John:
is a problem that the operating system needs to address.
John:
It's not the people's fault.
John:
They're using the best that is offered to them.
John:
The best that's offered to them is like, oh, there's one place where I can put stuff where I know it will not move someplace else and I won't have multiple places where I can see it.
John:
It's just this one place, right?
John:
And of course, they're putting everything there because there is no other place like that.
John:
And so what I'm not raging against is, you know, people having messy desktops.
John:
I'm raging against the operating system for not providing more places that feel as secure as the desktop.
John:
They don't have to be exactly like the desktop, but it's obvious that that is the characteristics that make the desktop so attractive should be duplicated elsewhere.
John:
Like you should make other places that also feel as secure and as easily findable as the desktop or close to it or try to do that.
John:
And it's like they don't even try.
John:
It's like, no, there is the desktop and then there's just a series of a million different windows that are all a million different views on things and no one can find anything.
John:
So continue putting stuff on the desktop.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And finally, from Ask ATP this week, Anthony Roberts writes that the last episode reminded Anthony that John is a tennis fan.
Casey:
John, how would you rank the following players not taking into consideration their competition record but using some other criterion such as style of play?
Casey:
And the options are as follows.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
John:
brutal brutal the options are andre agassi uh michael chang jim courier and pete sampras i don't know why johnny mack isn't there but uh you know you can't win them all you're not a tennis fan these these are a more or less a particular class of tennis players as in like high school class like they're they all came up around the same time so and these are american players so this this grouping does make some kind of sense
John:
Yeah, so I'll make the short.
John:
I'm glad that the question was not about rank or whatever, because you can easily rank them by number of Grand Slam wins or whatever you want to pick, and that's boring.
John:
So I'm going to pick based on my amalgam, which is like...
John:
It's not just my favorite players, but they're favorite for a reason.
John:
Anyway, Andre Agassi is my number one.
John:
He's always been my favorite player, even though his record is not as good as some other people.
John:
I've always loved his style of play.
John:
I've always loved his personality.
John:
I've loved his personal struggle, yada, yada, yada.
John:
He's my favorite player.
John:
I really like him.
John:
He's number one.
John:
Pete Sampras is number two.
John:
Pete Sampras is probably a better player, has a better record.
John:
But whenever Andre played Pete, I was always rooting for Andre because he was the underdog.
John:
Right.
John:
So Pete is a better player, probably in most regards, except probably return of serve.
John:
Anyway, so Pete Sampras number two.
John:
This is where it gets harder, Michael Chang versus Jim Currier.
John:
I'm going to have to give it to Currier just because he's so much more accomplished.
John:
Michael Chang had a lot of potential, but could only break through a very small number of times.
John:
I know he's rooting for him, but Jim Currier made it happen more often, despite the fact that Jim Currier took advantage of one of Andre Agassi's big chokes and defeated my favorite.
John:
So there's your ranking.
John:
It's Agassi, Sampras, Currier, Chang, which I think is a ranking that most people would agree with, except people would probably have Sampras above Agassi.
Casey:
You know, I do like that as I'm looking up who Jim Currier is, because I have no idea who that was.
Casey:
One of the items in the contents for his Wikipedia page is item number four, ATP career finals.
John:
Excited by the fact that ATP stands for Association of Tennis Professionals.
Casey:
Well, they stole it from us, man.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Away, and Molecule.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
John:
john how was your uh camera stuff for your vacation this year did not drop it in the ocean did get one very big splash sort of over the top of my entire head and camera so like it's not like the camera went in the water but i don't understand how the camera could have gotten any more wet based on the amount of water that fell over both of us so it was you know just water just imagine dumping a bucket of water on top of your camera and then just letting it fall over it right and so i
John:
dried it off and it seems like it's okay, but I guess we should now accelerate the salt corrosion countdown clock on the innards of my camera.
Casey:
It is absolutely astonishing to me that a man who has a phone condom for putting his phone in his pocket will take a probably far more expensive camera and lens combination into salt water for it to get splashed on.
John:
I'm not taking it underwater.
John:
I'm very – see, I think it should not be too incongruous because my little sleeve is a way of taking care of my phone.
John:
And because I'm trying to be careful and take care of my things, I'm also trying to be very careful and take care of my camera as I use it standing knee-deep in ocean waves, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's a dangerous thing that I'm doing with my camera, but I'm very careful during that process, which is why it survived as long as it has.
John:
So it's all just me being careful.
John:
But the bottom line is this is what my camera is for.
John:
It's to be used.
John:
So I'm using it, and this camera has long since outlived its expected lifetime of being taken into the ocean like this.
John:
I did have success with, I think I mentioned in the show, someone suggested when I was having some walkingness with the camera to use this deoxit stuff, the electrical contact cleaner.
John:
I don't know what terrible chemical is in this spray bottle, but it really did help.
John:
I had an issue that is apparently common with my model of camera, even if you don't take it in the ocean, which is that the little, the main shutter switch gets a little wonky and the camera thinks that it is half pressed down when it's not half pressed down and that locks out a bunch of functions.
John:
And so you'll try to use controls in the back of the camera and it will just be totally unresponsive.
John:
And it's because the camera thinks that like the shutter button is like quarter pressed or half pressed or some other thing that locks out the UI.
John:
Um,
John:
A little bit of electrical contact cleaner about a year ago.
John:
Solved that problem completely.
John:
I brought the contact cleaner with me on vacation just in case it came back, and it hasn't.
John:
So camera still going like a champ.
John:
I am really kind of feeling frustrated with both the limits of my lenses and the limits of my camera.
John:
Now that I'm more intimately familiar with those limits, I can see, like, boy, this zoom lens that I use at the ocean is...
John:
not a great lens i knew it was not a great lens it's cheap it's not a good one it's doesn't you know zoom lenses are compromises we've talked about this many times like and so and you know resolution wise sometimes i can't get the crop i want right sometimes the dynamic range isn't there and so i do think about getting a bigger fancier camera the new uh a11r4 is out now so i was looking at that but then i look at the prices of all those things and i look at the fact that i want to get a new tv and i look at the mac pro prices so i'm just continuing to
John:
I have a lot of things that I want to buy, but that's all just pushed off into the future.
John:
But I may consider next year getting myself a better zoom lens because my zoom lens is really cheap.
John:
It's like the cheapest, longest zoom I could get.
John:
And I take so many pictures with that lens.
John:
Half my pictures are with this cruddy lens that I should probably get one that is...
John:
twice as good for twice the price or something you know i just got one for twice the price basically because twice the price would only be a couple hundred bucks and that's not insane for a zoom lens i'm not going to be able to get a good one but i can get a better one um so i try to take most of my pictures with like my prime lens that most of my non-ocean pictures with my prime lens which is more expensive than my zoom and takes way better pictures obviously because it's not a zoom uh but then i look at all those pictures take with zoom and like you know i could do better there so
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm thinking about cameras.
John:
I'm definitely going to be reading the reviews of the new A11 to see what... A7.
Marco:
A7.
Marco:
A7.
Marco:
A7.
Marco:
A7.
Marco:
There we go.
John:
711.
John:
Got it.
John:
A7R4, but it's IV for the four.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
It's pronounced IV.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
What's the 35mm full frame equivalent focal range of your telephoto right now?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
Um, maybe, no, I don't actually, I don't know.
John:
I don't know the math on that.
John:
I like, I do everything in, I do everything in APS-C.
John:
So I think what I think of is like my 50 millimeter.
John:
I know it's not what everyone else thinks of 50 millimeter because it's 50 millimeter in APS-C, but that's the, you know, this is my first interchangeable lens camera.
John:
So I have no idea what the real equivalents are.
John:
I just know what the E class mount is.
John:
APS-C.
John:
So what is it?
John:
What is it?
John:
Like a 200 at the end?
John:
What is my zoom lens?
John:
My zoom lens is 200 millimeter.
John:
Okay.
Marco:
So you're looking at like a 300 millimeter equivalent.
Marco:
So here's what I would suggest.
Marco:
Spending money on zoom lenses to get good ones is not money well spent most of the time.
Marco:
Because as we've discussed, it's pretty much impossible to make a zoom lens that gets really good quality over a very wide zoom range.
Marco:
Typically, the biggest kind of range that you can get good quality at is something like 24 to 70 or 70 to 200, which is why those are such popular ranges.
Marco:
It may be 100 to 300, but you're not getting massive zoom ranges, generally speaking, that have...
Marco:
good quality at any price.
John:
My 200 is like a 70-200 or 50-200.
John:
It's not a huge range.
Marco:
What I suggest is especially since you only use this lens like once a year, get a better camera and use the money instead of buying a new zoom lens, use that money to just rent a nice 70-200 that mounts on a good full frame camera.
Marco:
And that will – it won't give you the kind of reach you have now because what you have now is literally the cropped-in version of that.
Marco:
But any new camera that you get will have so many ridiculous megapixels that you can crop it if you need to to get what you have now.
Marco:
And even if you take the a7R IV and just take like an APS-C sized crop out of the middle with a nice 200mm lens that you've rented because they're big and heavy and like $2,000 or something, you don't want to buy those necessarily.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
you know for for your kind of use that's going to result in much better quality than the entire output of the entire frame of your current camera shooting through your lens is made of like a plastic cup basically oh i mean there are other factors that you mentioned one of like the size and the weight and the fact that this won't be my lenses when i drop it in the ocean i'll actually have to pay someone a whole bunch of money
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
You'll buy the insurance.
Marco:
Every lens renting place has some kind of like all risk insurance that you could pay like 30% more and you literally can drop it in the ocean as long as it's an accident and you're okay.
Marco:
That's actually probably a better idea than actually buying it yourself and taking on the risk yourself.
John:
Well, they're all buying a new camera thing like that stalls out too because that's like $3,500 or whatever the...
John:
r4 is i'm i'm i like the fact that they fix a lot of the problems with the with the sony's they have like the battery is twice as big now and they you know there's a bunch of nice new features and they made the handle bigger but it's still like i don't know i'm still i'm my order of operations is obviously mac pro first and then you're done you can't afford anything after that right yeah then i then i go back into saving money but then like television is next in line because i more or less know what i want and we're getting close to the thing i want to get in the camera is like a distant third it's like
John:
Do I even want a bigger one?
John:
Do I want bigger, heavier lenses?
John:
I kind of really like my current camera.
John:
I like how small it is.
John:
I really hope that the R4 treatment, they have their new, what is it called?
John:
The backside illuminated sensor that they did and the RX100 and
John:
Same thing with this and the R4.
John:
I hope that this size camera, the A6000, 6300, 6500, I hope this size camera gets that same treatment and gets all updated internals.
John:
Because I might buy that.
John:
Because I really do like this size.
John:
And I like the size of the lenses.
John:
I don't like the full frame lenses.
John:
And honestly, I don't think I need more pixels for what I'm doing.
John:
If they were just better pixels, I would be fine.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Obviously, I'm still...
John:
waffling like i'll definitely consider that it's not like i'm going to run out and buy a new zoom lens because honestly i don't know what the options are if i want to spend twice as much money as my cheap lens to get a slightly less cheap lens is there anything on the market that is better than what i have for that amount of money or do i have to jump immediately to gigantic expensive lens at which point i should probably do what you suggest and not buy that but just rent it so i don't know i'll think about it but uh
John:
Maybe I should just spend some money and buy a different prime lens instead.
John:
I don't know.
John:
What I really want to do is, I think of this every time I'm on vacation, I'm going to be, yeah, like one of those real pro photographers.
John:
The ultimate luxury is not having to change lenses on the beach, let me tell you.
John:
oh yeah so i want to have multiple bodies with different lenses on them so i can just reach into the bag and pull out the other camera with the other lens on it you know what i mean there you go then you can drop two cameras in the ocean yeah or just drop one at a time right like because it's very like i have to plan what i want to do and like when i change lens i try to make like a little like microclimate clean room involved somehow like make this little area where i can just
John:
I told the story in the podcast before.
John:
I went on vacation through Europe and brought my then fairly new fancy camera with her to take pictures and had a hair stuck inside like the shutter thing for the entire trip.
John:
You could just see it in all the shots of this line going through at various levels of blurring and it was just tragic.
John:
In this trip, in a couple of shots, I'm like, do I have dust on the sensor or something?
John:
And I'm not sure what it was.
John:
It might have just been like,
John:
a water spot on the lens or something, but I immediately, you know, as soon as I saw one shot with a little smudge and I, you know, took it up and took a bunch of shots of the sky and, you know, check the sensor and like, I don't know what it was, but it was, it was not persistent and I don't think it was on the sensor.
John:
It might've actually been on the lens.
John:
It's really hard to get something on the lens that actually shows up in the picture.
John:
So I'm still not entirely sure, but many pictures of clear blue sky later convinced me that there, that is my thing is entirely clear.
John:
So it didn't muck up any of my pictures, but yeah,
John:
But yeah, I would love to have multiple cameras with multiple like a 6300, you know, and let me invent a camera, the a 6700, which is like this camera in size and shape, but has better battery life and is faster in all regards and takes better pictures, but is the same, you know, same size and everything.
John:
I want two of those, one of them with a cruddy zoom lens and one of them with a good prime lens.
John:
And I just want to have them in a bag.
John:
That would, that would be sweet.
John:
And it would probably cost less money.
Marco:
yeah that that actually might not be that ridiculous of a solution because you already own one you could keep the one you have and keep the prime lens on it or whichever lens you use less often keep that keep that lens on that one and then you know have like a nice 70 to 200 kind of thing on a new one or you know like whatever the crop equivalent would be
John:
Yeah, well, I have three main lenses that I use.
John:
I have four total lenses, but three that I actually use.
John:
I have my prime.
John:
I have my sort of expensive zoom, which is a tiny range.
John:
What is it?
John:
16 to 70.
John:
But it is a very expensive lens, so it does the best you can do for 16 to 70, which is not great.
John:
but it's really versatile.
John:
Like it's a good vacation lens.
John:
It's small ish.
John:
It can do a reasonable zoom range.
John:
Uh, and then I have a big zoom.
John:
So those are the three I go between.
John:
So the, the prime I'm mostly using when I know, when I know all the ranges involved, I wouldn't go out into a city, uh, to do touristy things with just the prime.
John:
Cause I feel like I would be in scenarios where I wish I would could go a little bit wider, but you know, cause I'm,
John:
On APS-C, a 50-something millimeter on APS-C, that's zoomed in more than you think it is.
John:
Yeah, 85 millimeter on real camera.
John:
You might want to get some landscape, and you're just not going to do it.
John:
So I need that in-betweeny zoom.
John:
And then the big zoom is all for when people are super far away from me.
John:
Anyway, I got a lot of good shots this year.