Standing on Opposite Sides of the Gym
Casey:
Is this a show?
Casey:
Is this what people tune in for?
Marco:
Well, it doesn't matter because they're here anyway.
Marco:
So this is what they're getting, regardless of whether this is what they tuned in for.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's do some follow up.
Casey:
Why don't we talk about how my life took a turn for the better a day or two ago.
Casey:
And no, we did not have Sprout yet.
Casey:
Sprout is still not born.
Casey:
But I saw a tweet from our mutual friend, Michael Jurowitz.
Casey:
And he said something that I did not realize.
Casey:
What he said was that for you to use...
Casey:
I keep calling it SMS Relay.
Casey:
I'm not sure if that's a blessed term or not.
Casey:
But for you to use SMS Relay on iOS 8 and Yosemite, it actually does not require Bluetooth Low Energy like a lot of other new continuity things do.
Casey:
It instead just requires both devices to be on an active network.
Casey:
And I haven't done any testing to determine exactly what that is, but I've heard rumblings that basically as long as your phone is logged into your iCloud account and connected to the internet some way, somehow, and the computer that you're using is connected to that same iCloud account and on the internet some way, somehow, then apparently you can send text messages by way of your phone.
Casey:
which is amazing because I didn't think that that was a possibility without Bluetooth Low Energy.
John:
Yeah, this tweet was a nice summary to try to fit into a single tweet all the different requirements for the different continuity-related features.
John:
We'll put a link to the tweet in the show notes.
John:
But the summary is, handoff tethering and airdrop needs Bluetooth Low Energy.
John:
SMS, they just both need network connections.
John:
And the phone calling stuff, they need network connections and they need to be on the same network.
John:
Uh, now this is compressed into a tweet.
John:
So if there are technical nuances that didn't fit in the tweet, don't blame jury blame us.
John:
We're just relaying it, but it's, it's a reasonable summary.
John:
This, this type of information is difficult to convey to people because even if you tell them, for example, that handoff uses Bluetooth low energy to discover things, nobody knows if their Mac has Bluetooth low energy.
John:
Nobody knows what Bluetooth low energy is.
John:
So they see these features or even, you know, read about them in my review and then are disappointed that they can't do it.
John:
And you know, they don't know if they have something called BTLE.
John:
So it's,
John:
It's just a shame, really, because I don't think Apple needs to communicate these technical nuances, but the bottom line is that if your machine doesn't have Bluetooth low energy, you're not going to be scanning with regular Bluetooth at full energy all the time on the phone and the Mac to be able to do handoff.
John:
For the feature to be feasible relies on low energy.
John:
And the SMS thing, that makes sense that they can coordinate it all through the server.
John:
The phone, I still don't quite understand the technical details of why they need to be on the same network, why
John:
you know they don't apparently need to be in bluetooth range you don't i know you don't need to pair them uh but anyway it's a magical mystical voodoo uh and all these weird technical details will be moot in five years when everybody's computers has all this stuff but for now it's a little bit weird if you've got an older mac you may not get all these things
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's why I was so excited, because with the exception of Aaron's MacBook Air, which is what I used to record, the newest Mac in the house is a late 2011 high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro, which I've talked about numerous times on the show.
Casey:
And that is pre-Bluetooth Low Energy.
Casey:
And so, like I said before, I was devastated.
Casey:
That's a strong word.
Casey:
But I was really sad that...
Casey:
that I wasn't going to be able to use a lot of this continuity stuff.
Casey:
And as it turns out, I haven't tried the phone thing, although that should work, but I have absolutely tried the SMS relay and it's really awesome.
Casey:
Um, I really sad to miss, um, airdrop that I am most upset about of the things I'm missing because I can't tether with my phone and because I'm on an unlimited plan from AT&T still and handoff.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't, I don't use Apple mail.
Casey:
I use air mail.
Casey:
So yeah,
Casey:
But I was really, really excited to see that SMS Relay works.
Marco:
Can we break apart that tethering thing for a second?
Marco:
How much data per month do you typically use?
Casey:
Oh, this is where you basically back me into realizing that there is no need for me to hold on to the unlimited plan.
Casey:
That is a known issue.
Casey:
And I don't really know why I haven't gotten rid of it yet, honestly.
Casey:
But I haven't.
Casey:
And there's no reasonable reason for me to still have it.
Casey:
And to answer your question, I haven't looked in a while, but I guess I use between two and three gigs a month.
Casey:
Erin is still on a 200 megabyte a month plan, and I keep begging her to let me get her more.
Casey:
And she doesn't really use it.
Casey:
And especially now that she's at home almost all the time, doesn't really need more than that.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
There's almost no need for us to upgrade.
Casey:
Now, I haven't crunched the numbers, but my limited understanding is it would probably actually be cheaper for us to ditch the unlimited plan and just get on a share plan, but whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, Tiff and I did that recently.
Marco:
She was still unlimited just because she never had any reason to change it.
Marco:
I had given it up for tethering long ago, but yeah, we found, I think combined, we use something like two gigs a month on average, and it doesn't really change that much month to month.
Marco:
So I would venture a guess that if you had tethering,
Marco:
Not only would you probably be paying less per month with a combined plan, but I would guess that whatever benefit to your life that unlimited data sounds like it might eventually possibly someday maybe provide, and that is if AT&T doesn't throttle you too much in the meantime, which they do because it's not really unlimited anymore, whatever benefit that's providing to you, I bet the benefit of going to a tethering plan would be greater.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
And as you just pointed out, and Peter in the chat also pointed out, one time I got to either three or four gigs, I think it was three, and AT&T definitely sent me a nasty gram saying, yeah, we're going to slow everything down until the end of the month.
Casey:
Have fun with that.
Marco:
Yeah, so, you know, you're basically not getting unlimited data anyway.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
So you might as well get the benefits of getting rid of that plan and getting the new features.
Casey:
Yeah, I know you're right.
Casey:
Like, it's one of those things that momentum is keeping me going in this probably silly, wasteful direction.
Casey:
So, meh, whatever.
Marco:
So, John, you were saying about Bluetooth Low Energy, continuing that on?
John:
I was talking about airdrop.
John:
Right.
John:
The lack of airdrop is somewhat made less painful between iOS and Mac devices is made less painful if you have an older Mac doesn't support it by iOS 8 extensions.
John:
Now there are so many more ways from any app with a reasonable iOS 8 extension support.
John:
to you know to use a share extension to press push your files from one place to the other whether you i mean i guess you could always do it in a lot of apps supported dropbox you could continue to do that but also things like i mean i heard people using like transmit for ios to transfer files back and forth like you're not as trapped in individual ios apps now as you used to be like you're not reliant on apple's built-in airdrop to be the way that you quickly transfer any content uh from uh from your ios device to your mac so that's nice
Marco:
Yeah, I think also iCloud Drive, I think is going to be a bigger deal than we all think it is.
Marco:
I think we're probably underestimating it because bringing a Dropbox-like storage model to any iOS app that wants it is really nice.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I think that's going to have wide reaching ramifications if it works at all.
Marco:
And John, you seem to think that I was actually paying a lot of attention during that part of your review.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I pay attention to the whole thing, of course, but but in particular, the the iCloud drive part, because like I'm very interested in in in I'm really hoping that works very well because it can it can really help iOS so much.
John:
The nice thing is that it's there's a it's on reasonably level footing with all those other services that are like that, including Dropbox or, you know, Google Drive or what is Microsoft things called?
John:
OneDrive.
John:
Anybody can, you know, once you're on that sheet that comes up with your sharing things.
John:
Anybody can have something in there.
John:
So it's good that it's like if iCloud Drive flakes out or ends up being unreliable or something, you have so many other options.
John:
And reliability is, speaking of things in the review, it's so hard to gauge because anything, when I'm reviewing the OS, anything that relies on a server-side component, it doesn't matter what bits Apple sends me in a developer build of the OS.
John:
If there's a server-side component that's either not yet ready or not turned on or completely buggy,
John:
you can't judge the feature based on that at all.
John:
And even when you get what you think is the final build, if Apple servers are still being wonky, it doesn't mean that the bits in the final build are bad.
John:
It could just mean that the servers are still wonky and that, you know, the day of release, they push out the last, you know, build of the server software and suddenly things work nicely.
John:
For iCloud Drive, in the early betas, you know, it either didn't work at all or it was totally buggy, but that doesn't mean anything because they're still working on it at that point.
John:
And then once it did start working, I had like this...
John:
a series of tests that I went through to sort of gauge reliability of transferring large files moving files deleting files putting folder with a bunch of little files in it to try to run it through its paces and I rewrote that iCloud drive section many times because as it kept getting better like I thought okay this is must be how it's going to work and it's not that great and you know it's taking x number of seconds for my changes to appear on two different Macs but it just got better and better to the point where by the time I wrote the final version of that section it's like
John:
It more or less works without any huge delays.
John:
The UI issues, I think, are still a possible problem, especially now.
John:
Did you see that Dropbox has a version out that uses the new file synchronization status extensions?
John:
I'm assuming because it looks totally different.
Casey:
How can you tell just because they're not over the actual file or folder anymore?
John:
Yeah, they're not badged.
John:
I'm assuming that's using it.
John:
I just noticed it today because I upgraded my work Mac to Yosemite last night.
John:
But yeah, like the UI issues and reliability of the server part, not the client part, or I think where the rubber really hits the road with iCloud Drive because
John:
I mean, there's more than one client.
John:
There's all the access to it from various apps on iOS and from, you know, the various extensions on iOS to get to this.
John:
And then, of course, there's the Finder as another client and there's a web client.
John:
The one part that we all worry about Apple getting right is the server part.
John:
We need to be reliable, fast, up all the time.
John:
And because it's kind of like Dropbox.
John:
Imagine if you had Dropbox and...
John:
You had a bunch of little icons, and they didn't have little green checks on them.
John:
They just had, like, the little, you know, spinny blue I'm trying to update thing, and it never went green.
John:
Like, what do you do about it?
John:
You quit Dropbox and relaunch it.
John:
You delete Dropbox and reinstall it.
John:
It never goes green.
John:
Like, that's the thing with, you know, it doesn't happen with Dropbox, but if it did, what is your recourse?
John:
With all these cloud services, especially even Dropbox doesn't have a, like,
John:
force synchronize this file now please thing is just supposed to work right and when it doesn't you're like i don't know what i can do and so that's what i'm always worried about with icloud drive it's so young now i don't know like am i going to drag a file into it on my mac at work and come home and see that the file's not there and i just wait and stare at the folder and wait for the file to appear like what do i do then i don't i don't know there's not even anything to uninstall and i guess i could disable and re-enable icloud drive but
John:
So far, so good.
John:
But I have to admit that unless there's some compelling reason for me to leave Dropbox, which I've been using for a long time and my habits are all built on, I'm going to keep using Dropbox.
Casey:
Yeah, I tend to agree.
Casey:
I don't even, I enabled iCloud Drive.
Casey:
I've not ever, this is now the first time I've ever clicked on the iCloud Drive item in my Finder sidebar.
Casey:
And turns out there's stuff in there.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
Does Dropbox on iOS offer that file picker extension yet?
Marco:
So it goes in the same dialogue as iCloud Drive?
John:
I think it does.
John:
I haven't used an app with it, but I recall seeing screenshots of it.
John:
It might not be released yet.
John:
I haven't tried it.
John:
I mean, my habits around iOS are not built around the expectation that there is anything like this available anywhere.
John:
It used to be that individual apps would have to build in support for Dropbox, and a lot of them did.
John:
But it just so happens that none of the apps that I use on a regular basis had this built-in support of Dropbox.
John:
And all those apps that do have that built-in support, I'm assuming, are slowly changing to use the system way to get at that same extension.
Marco:
Yeah, I hope so.
Marco:
That's actually one thing.
Marco:
In apps that I'm using, it's actually really annoying now the ones that still present their own share sheets, like their own custom share sheets without using the system one.
Marco:
Are you guys unreasonably annoyed with that or is it just a me thing?
John:
I was kind of annoyed by the apps that I have that used to do a custom way.
John:
uh and now bring that giant sheet up because a lot of time i know i just want to go to instapaper and that used to be one tap so it's the opposite of my complaint now now it's two taps yeah i mean i'll get over it but like now it's too especially because of the stupid bug where the reordering of the things doesn't stick oh i don't know about that i just haven't reordered anything i have reordered it and it has not stuck and other people have complained about it as well i don't know what but anyway it used to be one tap on a button to send instapaper now it's one tap to bring up the giant sheet
John:
Luckily, Instapaper is usually within one scrolling section, but it's not like the upper left one or wherever I want it to be.
John:
And then I tap the Instapaper thing and then the thing comes up.
John:
So anyway, I would much prefer it this way.
John:
It's much better to have an extensible system.
John:
It's just we need the kinks to be worked out of it first.
Marco:
The people in the chat are saying that Dropbox doesn't yet have the document picker thing on iOS.
Marco:
That's a shame if true.
John:
I mean, they showed that in the keynotes, but maybe it was speculative like and that Dropbox could make something like this and they just haven't yet.
Marco:
Yeah, I thought they kind of danced.
Marco:
I don't think they actually mentioned Dropbox by name, but I'm pretty sure that was the very strong implication.
Marco:
We are basically building this for Dropbox and a couple other things.
Marco:
Same thing with the badging extension on Yosemite.
Marco:
We are basically building this entire capability for Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive or SkyDrive or whatever Microsoft thing is.
Marco:
our first sponsor this week is backblaze go to backblaze.com slash atp backblaze is unlimited and unthrottled online backup for just five bucks a month uh this is really i mean we've talked about backblaze before so you know i don't need to tell you guys why you need cloud backup but i will anyway because the fact is you know a backup somebody wise recently said and i'm pretty sure this is a very old thing
Marco:
uh somebody wise recently said that uh that a backup is not a backup if it isn't automatic um and yes i know probably everyone has said that before anyway moving on um if you have some kind of backup system where you're only backing things up in your house then you could lose data if something happens to your house that would affect all the things in it or all the things plugged in so for example if you only have a computer with a time machine drive if you get a big power surge or a fire or a flood or a theft uh
Marco:
That will wipe out both of those things in all likelihood.
Marco:
And so you don't want every copy of your data to be in your house or plugged into your computer all the time.
Marco:
So, you know, most people have figured out along the way, like, oh, an off-site backup would be nice, off-site backup of some sort.
Marco:
And the problem with that is that usually it's really, really hard to ever remember to actually do it.
Marco:
So most of the time, like you might have like a hard drive in, you know, at your parents' house or at work with some of your files that you've last updated six months ago, maybe at most, you know, and then forgotten about.
Marco:
With online backup, it's so much better because it's just continuously happening in the background.
Marco:
You are always backed up off-site.
Marco:
And the class of problem this protects you from is so big and it's so easy because you just don't think about it.
Marco:
You're just always being backed up online.
Marco:
And among the cloud backup providers, I've tried a number of them.
Marco:
And I personally stuck with Backblaze even before they were a sponsor.
Marco:
I chose them as the best for me.
Marco:
And I think they'll be the best for you, too.
Marco:
They're really extremely good.
Marco:
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Marco:
Unlimited disk space.
Marco:
Five bucks a month.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Also, the unthrottled point is very important.
Marco:
Many cloud providers can't accept the files quickly enough.
Marco:
So even though you can upload them fast, they couldn't accept them.
Marco:
And so it was going to take months to upload my first backup.
Marco:
And with Backblaze, that was never a problem.
Marco:
They were always very fast.
Marco:
They can basically accept them as quickly as you're willing to send them.
Marco:
And their client does a nice job of throttling automatically to make sure it doesn't mess anything up for you.
Marco:
Their app is native.
Marco:
It is a preference pane with a menu item.
Marco:
It runs... They're always up to date with Mac releases.
Marco:
It runs on Yosemite.
Marco:
They also have an iPhone, iPad, and Android app.
Marco:
You can access your backed up files from Backblaze on the go from your apps.
Marco:
You can also... Let's say you're on a trip and you forgot to bring a file with you and it's not in Dropbox or anything.
Marco:
You can log into Backblaze and restore just one file onto your laptop as you're traveling to get access to it.
Marco:
Things like that.
Marco:
It's a really helpful system.
Marco:
Really nice.
Marco:
And all that backup is just...
Marco:
You know, to use the words of John Gruber, you're nuts if you don't have online backup.
Marco:
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Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Highly recommend it.
Marco:
I've used them myself for years now.
Marco:
And I definitely recommend that you have a cloud backup service.
Marco:
And if you're going to have one, I'd say this is the best one.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring the show once again.
Casey:
John, you have some real-time follow-up for us.
John:
Chat room and a couple other places have pointed screenshots of the Dropbox document picker.
Marco:
Okay, then.
John:
This is from Vatici's review of iOS 8.
John:
So it's a thing.
John:
There you go.
John:
We'll put the link to Vatici's iOS 8 document provider's
John:
story and everyone else take a look at it i'm sure everyone else already knew that i don't when i think about like what kind of apps do i have on ios that would use a document picker it's kind of chicken egg because before you have a generic document picker if you keep all your stuff on dropbox then you're not going to have one or whatever but what apps do you guys use that you would find yourself using the dropbox document picker with
Marco:
uh well i think what's interesting here is you know before one of the big problems of doing any kind of like productivity task on an ios device if you're working with documents and stuff one of the big problems is always just getting the files on and off of it and some apps would support the iCloud documents and data thing it was always limited and i personally was always a little bit afraid to use it because i was i never really knew where those files were and it was kind of weird um for me
Marco:
iCloud Drive not only replaces that, but I think just having this as a thing.
Marco:
Right now, it's going to take us a while to realize that we can do this.
Marco:
It's going to take developers a while to realize that they can do something with this.
Marco:
So I think this is the kind of thing that in six months or a year or two years, we might look back on this and say, oh my God, this made such a big difference.
Marco:
But right now, it's hard to see it because nothing's really using it yet.
John:
Yeah, I can think of one place I would have liked to use it when it's too late now.
John:
But when doing e-book previews, I would have loved to not have to use iTunes.
John:
And in the past, what I could do is take the versions of the e-books and throw them in by Dropbox.
John:
And then I would go to the Dropbox client, the dedicated Dropbox app in the days before iOS 8.
John:
and find the you know whatever file that i wanted to open and i would tap on it and it would download in the dropbox app and then it would show me a little thing that says sorry drop the dropbox app doesn't know how to display this thing but then there was a little button that said open in these applications which understand it
John:
And the most recent version of the Dropbox app did not understand how to do that with all the formats that I was using.
John:
And it would just not offer to open it in the Kindle app or to open it in the iBooks app.
John:
So if I had a Dropbox document picker, I could have gone to the iBooks app, use the Dropbox document picker, assuming the document pickers are supported at all.
John:
They don't even know if they are.
John:
And just pull it that way.
John:
And same thing from the Kindle app.
John:
So too late for me.
John:
But that's one scenario I can think of.
John:
Anything so I don't have to use iTunes to transfer files.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So to continue with some follow-up, do you want to tell us, John, about some person-to-person Bluetooth-based mesh networks that are particularly popular, perhaps were particularly popular in Hong Kong?
John:
A couple shows ago, we were talking about Twitter and decentralized messaging services not controlled by any one company like Twitter or whatever.
John:
Protocols like IMAP, POP, and SMTP instead of
John:
proprietary services like Twitter with APIs and OAuth tokens and all that stuff.
John:
And I don't remember if we brought this up on the show, so I threw it into the follow-up.
John:
I'm sorry if this is a repeat.
John:
But what I was thinking of when we were having that discussion, and I might not have remembered to interject, was when they're having those protests in Hong Kong, the people in the crowd were using an application that
John:
for messaging that use bluetooth person to person so there was no connection to a centralized server over the internet i think they might have actually not even had internet access but since each individual phone had bluetooth the message could be passed from phone to phone to phone to phone to spread to all the people in the crowd and this application is an application that was used for uh like if you go somewhere where there's no wi-fi signal like you go camping or something
John:
And so you and your friends can all, you know, send messages to each other on your information phones, even though none of you have internet access or cell access.
Marco:
And you're all near each other?
John:
Yeah, well, you know, you're in a bunch of tents all set up somewhere, you know what I mean?
John:
I think that's what it's for.
John:
But anyway, regardless, they were using this technology to basically communicate with each other despite the, you know, the government or whatever, the centralized authorities making other forms of communication impossible.
John:
So I think in this scenario, it's kind of weird because this was like a protest or whatever, but
John:
The dystopian future, the dystopian sci-fi future is everybody uses Twitter and Twitter is controlled by one company.
John:
And the utopian future is everybody uses peer-to-peer mesh networks that can't be controlled by any single government or entity.
John:
And there's nothing you can do to break communication in the entire world.
John:
world because we all are just connected to each other by proximity and mesh networks and you could you could black out little portions here and there but eventually the mesh will cover everything so i think we are not in either one of those scenarios we're between the dystopia and the utopia but uh hopefully we'll push things in the right direction somehow
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And a couple of shows ago, we were also talking about bent iPhones, which, by the way, did that just magically go away?
John:
I think it's still there, but I don't think there's any new news, you know?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, anyway, Jared Villamare.
Casey:
I'm probably butchering that.
Casey:
Sorry, Jared.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
He said that with regard to Apple taking bent iPhones, we were talking about how we thought it was interesting that – or somebody had written in that it was interesting that a genius or whoever it was took notes on what that person was doing when their iPhone bent or something along those lines.
Casey:
Well, anyways, Jared says Apple taking bent iPhones.
Casey:
Apple always does, quote, engineering captures, quote, for specific issues on new products for a short time.
Casey:
So that is just a little bit of follow-up there.
Casey:
And also, it occurred to me, what happened at that Twitter thing today?
Casey:
Was that a thing?
Casey:
Wasn't there a thing today?
Marco:
Yeah, they had a developer conference today.
Marco:
And honestly, I have not been paying attention to what they announced, except they announced something called, is it Digits?
Marco:
It's basically like SMS two-factor as a service that anybody can use.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
But honestly, I don't know the details.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So more of the same.
Marco:
You know, I don't know.
Marco:
I keep meaning to blog about this.
Marco:
So I wrote an article the other day in anticipation of this conference because WSJ had posted some kind of crazy thing saying Twitter is going to start over again with developers and start fresh and reset their image.
Marco:
And I basically said, no, they're not.
Marco:
And the gist of my post was that they're not trustworthy to developers.
Marco:
And there's been a number of responses.
Marco:
Dave Weiner notably responded pretty publicly.
Marco:
Basically saying in short, and I hope I'm not butchering his argument here, but in short that we can pick and choose our gatekeepers and that it's hard for me to say this kind of stuff without pointing out that I accept the Apple App Store gatekeeper and Apple has done crappy stuff to developers in the past.
Marco:
And that's all true.
Marco:
I think the main difference is alignment of interests, though.
Marco:
Twitter, there's a great quote.
Marco:
Let me see.
Marco:
I have it open here.
Marco:
It's on the verge today.
Marco:
There's a comment from somebody at Twitter that said, referring to their old API before they put in the restrictions with the token limits and everything for clients.
Marco:
They said, our API was so open that we allowed people to compete with us.
Marco:
And this was like their justification for locking it down two years ago with the token limits and everything.
Marco:
I think that, you know, our API was so open that we allowed people to compete with us.
Marco:
That right there says a lot more than that person probably planned to say.
Marco:
That explains a lot.
Marco:
So what this means is...
Marco:
Twitter's API made it possible for people to compete with Twitter and they shut it down because they had to.
Marco:
Their API has the potential to make people compete with them.
Marco:
It gives people the ability to compete with them.
Marco:
It gives people the ability to do things like...
Marco:
Build a whole following graph.
Marco:
When Instagram launched, Instagram became a social network primarily by importing people's Twitter friends and then building its own side network.
Marco:
And then you didn't need Twitter anymore after that.
Marco:
And then Twitter, of course, realized this and cut off access to the friend finder thing for them.
Marco:
These situations will keep coming up.
Marco:
Twitter also had a problem where...
Marco:
There was some client, I forget the name of it, but there was some company buying up a whole bunch of Twitter clients.
Marco:
And they were going to start their own shadow network next to Twitter.
Marco:
And you'd be able to post to both of them and integrate the timelines and everything.
Marco:
And that, I think, was the bigger freakout that Twitter had.
Marco:
And that was a couple years earlier than Instagram, I think.
Marco:
So Twitter freaked out that you could use their API to steal value from them and devalue them and compete with them.
Marco:
If you look at the situation Apple's in with app developers, it's a very different situation.
Marco:
I mean, yes, it's possible that you can make an app that competes with one of Apple's apps, but Apple's primary interests are selling the hardware.
Marco:
And so if you're a developer making apps, the chances that you're...
Marco:
interests are going to conflict with apple's interests are extremely low there's there's almost no chance for that to realistically happen in any plausible future scenario uh at least at least during at least enough of a future you know maybe on a syracuse time scale maybe but in there's you know in in the next like you know 10 years like how how long is your software likely to last you know five ten years if you're if you're lucky um so you know in that time like are apple's interests really going to change dramatically to the point where they're going to be at odds with what app developers do on their platform
Marco:
And, you know, the answer is probably not.
Marco:
So I think it's a very different argument to say that, oh, well, Apple has complete control over their platform and you buy into that and you're investing in that and therefore your argument is invalid.
Marco:
I don't think that's a fair counter argument.
Marco:
Twitter, on the other hand, like there are so many ways you can use a Twitter API in ways that if you say, well, if this gets big enough, this could be a real problem for Twitter or we've just stolen a whole bunch of value from Twitter.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
That is so much more likely given what Twitter is and what their API allows access to.
Marco:
That's what makes it so untrustworthy, is that the chance that your interests will conflict with Twitter's if you are successful are very, very high.
John:
I don't think it's a structural difference, though.
John:
I think it is the actions of the companies involved.
John:
Because, I mean, when I heard that quote about, you know, Twitter saying we actually let people compete with us, I just shook my head thinking they don't...
John:
Their their view of API usage is different and it has caused them to act in ways that makes them untrustworthy because they've proven they don't understand what the heck is going on there.
John:
Like the aspects of competition you just talked about are real and they're there, but.
John:
Even before Instagram was able to steal value from Twitter by exploiting its relationship graph to bootstrap its own photo social network thing, Twitter only became Twitter, or so the story we tell ourselves go in our little circle.
John:
Well, not only, but at least partially because third parties made clients that made the service more palatable for people who didn't want to go to their ugly-ass web page.
John:
Like they were not those people who are using Twitter's API to make client software for all these sorts of platforms and to refine it and everything like that.
John:
for Twitter to view them as people, we even let people compete.
John:
They weren't competing with you.
John:
They were helping you become the Twitter you are today.
John:
Without them, who knows if you would have become the Twitter.
John:
You could have still been, you know, like a tent, right?
John:
Like a service that nobody wants to use because they don't like using your webpage and your client software is crappy.
John:
Like, who cares?
John:
Like, you wouldn't be worried about protecting your value.
John:
Like, so to view those people as competition is just weird.
John:
Like, that was the whole sort of, well, we all felt betrayed or the Twitter client developers is like,
John:
They felt like they helped build this service into what it is today, and then Twitter was like, okay, don't need you anymore, thanks, bye.
John:
Whereas Apple, for all its weird foibles and everything, still seems to be able to keep the eye on the ball and say, developers are actually an important part of, you know, they add value to our devices.
John:
We can sell our hardware because these app developers make apps from that.
John:
Apple's constantly saying, hey, look at all these apps, and not being like, we even let people make apps to compete with ours.
John:
Apple would never say that, because it's like...
John:
you know, all they do is brag about how many people make that, how many apps are on the app store, how much money they give to developers.
John:
Like they know that the apps make without apps, their hardware is way less valuable.
John:
So Apple pushes that like crazy.
John:
And, you know, it's the hierarchy of Apple needs of Apple first or customers first.
John:
Apple second and developers third, and that still annoys developers, and Apple still does have a tremendous amount of control over its platform, but that's why I said it's not structural.
John:
Twitter and Apple have similar amounts of control at this point over their platforms, but based on past actions, we believe Apple understands to some degree that everyone who makes an app for the App Store is increasing the value of Apple's products.
John:
Whereas Twitter seems hell bent on not understanding that people writing applications against the Twitter API in all sorts of ways makes Twitter more valuable.
John:
And you're right, there's still this possibility, you know, exploiting it to bootstrap some other network or stuff like that.
John:
But things like Twitter clients, like the reason, you know, doesn't that add value to your network?
John:
It's like, no, because we have a monetization strategy that relies on you not being able to get tweets and we need to be able to insert tweets into your timeline and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like...
John:
That tension is kind of of Twitter's own invention over their inability to figure out a business plan that that that benefits everybody.
John:
So I don't trust Twitter particularly, but it's not because they have a lot of control because Apple has a lot of control, too.
John:
It's because it just doesn't seem like Twitter understands their view of the relationship between third parties and their service is just different than than my view from the outside.
Right.
Marco:
Well, but I think Twitter's view is very valid.
Marco:
Twitter's view, I totally see why they want to own the client experience.
Marco:
The changes they made were not only to squash competition from stealing from Twitter and taking over their network or replacing their network, but was also to take back control of the client experience for most people and to never let a third-party client get as big as their client again.
Marco:
What that allowed them to do then is have the power over their own experience that their product is not an API.
Marco:
It originally kind of was.
Marco:
But now, you know, for a long time, their product has not been the API.
Marco:
It has been the Twitter app.
John:
But that's their view of the service.
John:
Our view of the service was you're like email, but smaller.
John:
Like you are you are you are a protocol.
John:
You are a message format.
John:
That's not what they actually were.
John:
But like, that's how we viewed it on the outside.
John:
In the same way, we would make awesome email clients back in the day to work with email.
John:
And, you know, Clarice, I'll listen for your time, but Clarice email or come out and people love you, Dora and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And those were all email clients, and we liked the client, but email was email.
John:
Well, Twitter was Twitter, but Twitter's view of itself was not that, and you don't make money being a company that invents pop or SMTP or whatever.
John:
So that was the tension.
John:
But I still get back to Twitter, the service would be nothing, would be a footnote in history if it wasn't for all of those clients that added value.
John:
And Twitter didn't make those clients.
John:
Twitter couldn't make those clients.
John:
Twitter could only have made one of those clients at most if it had tried to take control earlier.
John:
But there was tons of clients, and that's why Twitter is what it is today.
Marco:
Yeah, sure, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Marco:
That's ancient history.
Marco:
I mean, anybody at Twitter who possibly cared about that has probably left by now.
John:
But that's the betrayal.
John:
And that's why we don't trust them anymore.
John:
Like that's why it's not, again, it's not structural.
John:
It's not because of what the control they have.
John:
It's because what they have done with that control in the past.
John:
And it's a, it's a bit of divorce between the way we want, the way we saw Twitter and the way Twitter sees itself.
John:
And so no change of heart on their part, unless they prove that they see their service differently and that we're on the same page again.
John:
And we don't see their, you know, they're not on the same page.
John:
They're still saying, Oh, we let people compete with us.
John:
It shows that there's still a disconnect.
John:
We want to think of Twitter as a protocol, a service, a message format, or whatever.
John:
We want to think of Twitter like blogging.
John:
No one owns blogging, right?
John:
Just conceptually.
John:
We know what blogging is conceptually, but there's no owner of it technology-wise.
John:
But we want to think of Twitter that way, too.
John:
It's not that way.
John:
So I think we'll always be sort of standing against opposite sides of the gym during the dance, not ever going into the middle.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i don't see i don't see a way out of this for i don't see any overture unless unless twitter changes its mind decides to become like an infrastructure company but that's not gonna happen yeah i mean once the vcs come in and everything it's like well you know they they can want their money back somehow
Marco:
Well, the VCs were there.
Marco:
I think we all thought, you know, when Twitter came to its initial rise when we were writing all these clients, that was during the era of web development where every web app was expected to have an API, often from the start.
Marco:
It was often best wisdom to have an API first and then build your actual app on top of it.
John:
Right, like the web app was like, who cares about the web app?
John:
It's all about the API, right?
Marco:
This was kind of like this weird time in web development history where everyone just kind of temporarily forgot about making money.
Marco:
And granted, this happens a lot, but this was an especially bad time that everyone was like, you know, let's make an API and see what people mash up with it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The reality is that there's a reason why so many new services these days don't have full APIs and almost always don't at least launch with them.
Marco:
Because that's just a really hard thing as a business case to justify.
Marco:
And it opens you up to a lot of risks of things like, what if Instagram had a full API from the beginning where you could read and write and you could make your own Instagram client?
Marco:
Then what happens when they want to change the way the client works?
Marco:
You know, there was that time in the mid 2000s where APIs were expected and were the cool thing.
Marco:
But that time is over and it's been over for a while.
Marco:
And that's never coming back because it's just it's so difficult from a business perspective and from a control perspective.
Marco:
It's so difficult to actually maintain that.
Marco:
So, you know, we might expect Twitter to to someday go back to that or we might be mad that they're not doing that now.
Marco:
But the reality is it would be a very bad idea for Twitter to ever do that again.
John:
that was a good move back the reason everyone was doing it back then is because it's kind of like a wolf in sheep's clothing where if you make something look like a a protocol or a piece of plumbing or part of the internet you can get traction among a certain set of people that like you know we like that the utopia we were thinking of is there you know okay we have some existing protocols and we have some old protocols we have you know
John:
SSH, HTTP, FTP, NNTP, all these protocols, old and new, all kind of mixing together in the stew.
John:
But now if we make these APIs with this REST format, we can turn the web into a giant API machine and it'll just be like the internet, but now people can innovate and like you said, the mashups and all that other stuff.
John:
If you make it look like infrastructure, people are attracted to it, especially technical people, because immediately your mind goes off, what can I do with this?
John:
If I had this API and that API, I could pull this and that, and I could synthesize these things, and this is great.
John:
And what you don't realize is that all those companies with APIs are, like, lying in wait and just hoping they become massively popular.
John:
And then they can be like, aha, we've got you, because this wasn't really a piece of infrastructure.
John:
Really, this is a wholly owned proprietary thing.
John:
We are the only source of it.
John:
No one else can copy it.
John:
We have all the data.
John:
You know, you know what I mean?
John:
And Twitter, basically, you know, one...
John:
succeeded in that strategy of looking like infrastructure to people who weren't thinking about it too hard and then when everyone realized they're not it's too late they've spread like it's an it's a good way to spread things where if you had just made a website people would know like you know i mean just ask myspace how that worked out if myspace had tried to be a protocol first and then turn the screws and turn into a site and then really probably wouldn't have worked for myspace but anyway it's much harder to get people to come to your site and make that like as big as facebook right but everyone everyone had apis
John:
people were mixing them all together and if any of them caught on you could you could lie in wait and say like i'm part of the internet this is not i'm not a single private company or a single website i'm invisible i'm a protocol i'm like app.net uh and then grow to tremendous size like that and then change your mind and
John:
That's what everybody did.
John:
And I still think that strategy could work.
John:
Like if you made something look like a protocol, everyone would forget the fact that you're a private company and completely control it.
John:
And then you could do exactly what Twitter did again.
John:
I think that strategy is not entirely dead because we'll all be fooled again by it.
John:
I mean, we'd be the same with app.net, right?
John:
Like this is slightly better.
John:
They're charging up front, but it was the same situation.
John:
We would have all done it.
John:
If app.net had become tremendously successful, it would have been a small step up from Twitter, but they would have ended up doing the same thing.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Igloo appears for the sixth consecutive year, along with tech giants like Microsoft, IBM, Google, VMware, Salesforce.com, and SAP, which I still think should be pronounced SAP.
Marco:
It's kind of a shame they went with SAP.
Marco:
In a report that values the size of the vendor, which in Gartner terms means viability, Igloo is praised for their responsiveness and customer experience.
Marco:
From Gartner's profile of Igloo, they said, feedback from Igloo's reference customers was consistently positive.
Marco:
They praised the product's quick deployment, configuration, and customization flexibility with self-service options for non-technical users control over branding and information organization and ease of use.
Marco:
That's a big sentence.
Marco:
The breath is not in the sentence.
Marco:
I just took that because I had to.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, that is igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you very much to our friends at Igloo for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Once again, they're long-term friends and sponsors of our show.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
So, John, I wanted to quickly ask you, what's going on with the review?
Casey:
How's the initial feedback?
Casey:
Did you have to make any big updates or is it basically the status quo as usual?
John:
That's so last week, Casey.
John:
We're still talking about that thing.
Casey:
Hey, you never know.
Casey:
A week has passed.
Casey:
It was like 24 hours or something like that when we got to speak about it last.
John:
Yeah, most of the updates come in the first 24 hours.
John:
I think I did one e-book update every couple of hours, every time for a while, but it's been quiet since then.
John:
I only put in a couple of... One more update about core storage application, which, I mean, we talked about this last week, the type of things that you can't test when the final bits aren't out until...
John:
After you publish your review and also the type of thing that I personally can't test because I don't have a lab full of computers.
John:
It's just me here.
John:
And I had loaner hardware from Apple, which was useful, but it's still like a total of like five computers, many of which are the same vintage or similar.
John:
So I can't do the type of like we installed this OS on, you know, five different computers with, you know, 10 different partition configurations each and both internal and external drives and determined, you know, so I still don't know under what circumstances does it decide to turn your volume into a core storage volume.
John:
Uh, does it sometimes doesn't do it.
John:
Other times I put a correction, the most recent correction I put in was, uh, this doesn't happen all the time.
John:
Uh, it happens under these scenarios.
John:
It didn't happen under this scenario and other people on Twitter, like installing it to their machines with different partition arrangements and stuff and seeing when it doesn't, doesn't happen.
John:
So, uh,
John:
I don't know if I had known that it was that weird.
John:
Like it basically happened in every installation scenario that I did in my test hardware.
John:
So that's why I thought it was done all the time.
John:
And I asked Apple about it and they were giving me explanations of why they were doing it.
John:
They didn't ever offer the information like, oh, by the way, you know, we don't actually do that all the time in these scenarios we want.
John:
So missing information to be clarified.
John:
Basically what I'm trying to do is make it so that if someone stumbles across this review five years from now, or if I try to look something up in the review five years from now,
John:
i will see these little corrections in there and uh understand that this was uh the way i thought things were uh on the day of release or before but actually things were more complicated so uh don't take this as the final word but other than that it's been fine uh there's been a big difference in feedback over the years between these things it used to be that i would do one of these reviews and i would have like
John:
20 or 30 pages of comments attached to them.
John:
Now, not that many comments.
John:
And most of the comments are no longer discussions of the article.
John:
They're just people complaining about what they do or don't like about Yosemite, which is fine, I guess.
John:
But it's definitely a change in commenter behavior at Ars Technica, you know.
John:
Lower volume of comments, maybe because they feel like they have other avenues to talk back to me, like Twitter or whatever.
John:
And comments that aren't interested in discussing the article, but just are interested in, hey, everybody, let's talk about Yosemite.
John:
How's it working for you?
John:
I don't like this.
John:
I do like that.
John:
I had this bug.
John:
I didn't have that bug.
John:
Yeah, it's mostly done.
John:
It's off the front page of ours.
John:
It's slowly fading away.
Marco:
That's so sad.
Marco:
With the exception of comments, is interest, if you can say, has interest remained high in recent years in the reviews, or is that going up or down?
John:
It's going down.
John:
Like, I mean, it's been going down for a couple of years.
John:
It's still not awful, but definitely interest is going down.
John:
I mean, you know, people are just more interested in iOS these days.
John:
I don't blame them.
John:
It's the bigger platform.
John:
It's more popular.
John:
More people are likely to have it.
John:
And yeah, so it's still doing fine and everything.
John:
But it's like if you were to graph it with the past four or five reviews I've written, it's a steady downward slope.
Marco:
Do you think it's a problem with the fact that it's now released every year?
Marco:
And so there's more frequently, there's less of a built up to new OS releases because they're happening so much more frequently now.
John:
I don't think it's the frequency.
John:
I think it's just the primacy of the Mac in the Apple nerd space is just so much less than it used to be.
John:
It used to be all there was.
John:
It was all about the Mac.
John:
And then iOS has been just coming on strong.
John:
And it's kind of generational.
John:
Even when iOS was just insanely popular and it long eclipsed the Mac in terms of every possible number you can imagine,
John:
early on the people who were interested in reading about it were the same people who had come up with apple as apple's that company that makes macs and i'm super into macs right and then ios is this other thing that's interesting too now there's generations of people who barely even know the mac exists they grew up thinking of apple as the iphone company and they're super interested in reading about ios and they could care less about the mac and i really see a big like generational turnover
John:
And, you know, in the people who are, you know, Apple nerds on the Web, there's whole generations of Apple nerds on the Web now.
John:
Maybe, you know, I don't know if it's just one generation or two or whatever, who think of Apple as the iOS company.
John:
And that's that's what they're into in the same way that like the Mac people replace the Apple to people like people like I'm really into Apple.
John:
It's all about the Apple, too.
John:
And this Mac looks like it's cool, too.
John:
Eventually, there was sets of people like me who entirely identified Apple as the company that makes the Mac and could care less about the Apple, too.
John:
So.
John:
that's uh it's a natural consequence of the different number of these products as they sell well but the mac is selling more than ever so do you think it's more of a more of an issue of just like the nerds not caring as much about each mac update well they sell way more ios devices than macs like in terms of numbers in terms of revenue in terms of profit like every possible metric that the ios devices eclipse macs easily
Marco:
You know, maybe it's just me.
Marco:
I have never once read anybody's long iOS reviews.
Marco:
Because, I mean, part of it is like I'm involved in the iOS beta process, so I already know generally what's different.
Marco:
But I've never felt the need because it seems like iOS changes are kind of more... I don't know.
Marco:
They seem very...
Marco:
relatively surface level in in what you could possibly really discuss about them like you get into a lot of the internals a lot of the reasoning a lot of the like you know under the hood stuff i don't see a lot of people doing that with ios it's usually just like here's an overview of the features and visuals that have changed
John:
Well, there's less poking you can do to iOS.
John:
You can't get a terminal.
John:
You can, but you know what I mean?
John:
Without going to more heroic lengths, you can't get a terminal prompt and start screwing around with things.
John:
And moreover, if you do jailbreak and get SSH in and get a terminal prompt and screwing with things...
John:
That has zero to do with most people's interaction with the OS, whereas on the Mac, if you open a terminal, a lot of people who use the Mac, that is part of their experience of using the OS.
John:
The terminal is not a jailbreak feature.
John:
You guys don't remember, but back in the days before 10.0 came out, like in all the developer previews, that was a hot topic.
John:
Would Apple...
John:
Would Apple ship the terminal with OS X?
John:
Would Apple ship it but have it disabled or hidden?
John:
That was something we seriously thought about because it's the old school Mac users saying, you're not going to sell a Mac with a command line or whatever.
John:
Those of us who are Unix nerds were like, please let them do this.
John:
The whole point is it's supposed to be Unix plus a Mac combined.
John:
If they ship it without... But we were like, but you know Apple, maybe they'll just...
John:
the terminal will be a developer download kind of like you know uh the graphic tools are graphics tools are now for xcode or whatever like you'll have to go to adc to get them whatever you'll be able to use it but they won't advertise it but it turned out it totally shipped with it they never got rid of it they never hit it it's in the utilities folder it's still there today
John:
right so but that's that's just not what ios is like and the second aspect is i'm kind of cheating with these uh reviews i found myself doing it this year's wwdc i found myself going to the metal sessions and taking notes i'm like what the hell am i doing metal isn't even a mac technology but you just start thinking of and that was a big point of this review you start thinking about all these things as just part of apple's platform like
John:
I could have written that entire Swift section if this was an iOS review.
John:
Metal is iOS only, but I'm writing about it as if it's an Apple technology because there's nothing stopping it from appearing on the Mac except for Apple's willingness to, you know, port it to the GPUs that are available on the Mac, which granted are much more numerous and it would be much more difficult and there's much more reason for them to put it on iOS.
John:
But like so many technologies apply to both that a larger and larger portion of the review
John:
could have been you know i could change it to review ios 8 and put a lot of that same stuff in there uh so i don't know i don't know if that what that has to do with traffic numbers or anything i just i just think the the the mac is less a focus even though so many things that are relevant to the mac are also relevant to ios and vice versa it's still ios is where everyone's eyes are do you think it's because there's less to see on mac every year or because no one's paying attention
John:
Well, this year, it was tons to see.
John:
I mean, this is the whole thing.
John:
It looks totally different.
John:
A layperson could tell the difference, I think, between Mavericks and Yosemite, or at least tell that these are two different OSs because they just plain look different.
John:
But...
John:
I mean, there's just as much as, I mean, iOS 8, uh, when you look at it, it's like, Oh, it looks like iOS 7.
John:
What's even different.
John:
And unless, you know, all the extensions on people update, they're absolutely better in this way or whatever, but it's really like iOS 8 was a much more subtle change from seven than Yosemite was from Maverick.
John:
So I don't think that was the problem either.
John:
Like if anything, people should be super bored by iOS 8 and really excited by Yosemite.
John:
If just based on like the, uh,
John:
the sort of in-your-face wow factor of the changes because iOS 8 is not in-your-face about almost anything.
Casey:
You know, to go back, Marco, you had said, who writes a really big iOS 8 review?
Casey:
A friend of the show, Rene Ritchie, did a pretty solid one for iMore that we should definitely mention.
Casey:
In fact, I believe it was Crashing Safari.
Casey:
I don't remember if that was on the Mac or iOS, but the darn thing is a single page and it's so darn big that it ended up causing issues for a lot of users.
Casey:
That's how in-depth it was.
Casey:
I concur with what you were saying, that it's harder to poke at iOS.
Casey:
It's harder to get the depth that John does with the
John:
os 10 review but nevertheless his ios 8 review was huge yeah when i look at the ios updates i always thank my lucky stars that i'm not doing an ios review like maybe not so much in eight but like in seven and everything because there's so many changes so many things that are different so many screens and just all those screenshots you have to retake every time there's a new beta
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, you know, I don't know if it's better or worse that you'd be filling your camera roll with screenshots or that you don't have a good way to screenshot things you'd have to like crop.
John:
And, you know, anyway, I guess it's kind of easier in that all your screenshots are full screen.
John:
You don't have to worry about windows and backgrounds.
John:
especially on your side.
John:
But anyway, various iOS updates have been like, wow, I'm glad I'm not reviewing this because they added a ton of new features.
John:
Cause it was a young OS and they just added tons of, you know, like things.
John:
So everything changed.
John:
You know, there's not, there's very little, the built-in apps changed the way you deal with, you know, the OS itself.
John:
Like when they added multitasking and stuff, those are, those are big changes.
John:
So you expect that in the early versions of an OS.
John:
Now,
John:
It seems like it's settling down a little bit.
John:
So now you have features like extensions, which seem to be non-features at all.
John:
You're just like, oh, I don't see anything different.
John:
It's like, you got to wait for the apps to update.
John:
Then it'll be totally different.
John:
But just trust me.
John:
But how do you really review that in an OS review?
John:
You got to talk about it speculatively.
Marco:
Maybe the difference that I'm perceiving, and whether it's real or not, maybe the difference I'm perceiving is that the iOS reviews that I've seen all seem to be extremely long.
Marco:
I don't want a comprehensive overview of everything.
John:
that's like just a slideshow like a lot of people do that you know a gallery or a slideshow here's every screen that's different right i mean and ours did that too ours did a slideshow like they asked me if i was gonna have galleries in my review because they have a gallery feature where you can just take a whole bunch of photos and have like a carousel that you you flip through them right on the page
John:
And I said, no, I'm not going to have any galleries because I'm old.
John:
And the way I do things is I write words.
John:
Then there's a screenshot with a caption.
John:
Then I write more words.
John:
Then there's a screenshot.
John:
You know, it's like it's interleaved.
John:
Like it would never be like, and here's 50 photos of this new app.
John:
You know, even if I could put a caption on every single one, that's not that's just not how I do a review.
John:
But so since I didn't do and they did a slideshow that showed essentially, here's what the screen looks like in Mavericks.
John:
Here's what it looked like in Yosemite.
John:
And I forget if each one had a caption or not.
John:
But that gallery was tremendously popular.
John:
Like a lot of people do want that out of a thing.
John:
And the other thing you're talking about, like a reference type thing, those are the old days where you'd go to the bookstore back when we had bookstores and there would be like, you know, you know, ultimate guide to Mac OS 8 or learn Mac OS 8 in 21 days or whatever.
John:
And it would just be this gigantic paperback book that would just take you through laboriously every single feature at a time.
John:
Here's how you rename a file in the finder.
John:
Here's how you move a file.
John:
Here's how you copy a file.
John:
Like, just every single freaking thing you need to know to use.
John:
Like, essentially a manual for the OS.
John:
And that's not a review at all.
John:
That is a manual, right?
John:
And there's a place for that as well.
John:
But, like, these days...
John:
No one's going to write a book like that, at least it's not going to be out at the time Yosemite is launched.
John:
I bet there's probably something like that in bookstores, but that's not what people are looking for.
John:
And back in the day when I was on top of it and when the OS was small, I could pretty much document every single pixel that changed and every single new keyboard shortcut and behavior, but...
John:
it's been years since mac os 10 has been small enough for me to do that now it's just too big and once i started to have to pick and choose which things were important that was a big transition in my reviewing like because going from 10.0 to 10.1 i could try to find every single little thing because there was like five things that changed you know except for faster and stuff right but going from you know 10.4 to 10.5 forget it like that's there was no way that that i could fit everything in is that thunder
John:
That is thunder.
John:
I still have power though.
John:
You'll be able to tell when I go out, I get emails from my Synology, uh, downstairs when, uh, the UPS kicks in, it sends me an email and says Synology is running on UPS power.
John:
And then it sends me another email says up, I'm back in regular power.
John:
Uh,
John:
And when I get that, that means either someone plugged in too many vacuum cleaners to the same circuit and did a little power blip, or as we just had here earlier, the houses on the other side of the street lost power and our power flickered for a second.
John:
So I know our power flickered because I got email about it from my...
John:
for my network attached storage device.
Marco:
See, that is technological advancement right there.
Casey:
All right.
Marco:
That timing was flawless.
Marco:
Well done.
Casey:
You're going to have fun editing this episode.
Marco:
I'm just keeping that in.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's talk a little bit about Yosemite.
Casey:
I don't know why I said it like that, but it sounded good in my head.
Casey:
What did Stephen or Mike say?
Casey:
Was it Yo-S10?
Casey:
Yeah, Yo-S10.
Casey:
That was amazing.
Casey:
Stephen, who yells at me for RetinaPad Mini.
Casey:
Did I say RetinaPad Mini?
Casey:
I meant RetinaPad Mini.
Casey:
I said Yo-S10, and I yelled at him about this, and he said, oh, it was an accident, dude.
Marco:
Oh, I think it's better.
Marco:
I think that's an improvement.
Marco:
I think we should go with that using Yo S10.
Casey:
Well, I think so too.
Casey:
But he's the king of the pedantic people when it comes to these sorts of things.
Casey:
So we're going to talk about your RyMac later.
Casey:
Hi, Steven.
Casey:
But for now, let's talk about Yosemite.
Casey:
So have you installed it, Marco?
Marco:
No, I have it on my laptop that I hardly ever use.
Marco:
I have not installed it on my desktop for a reason that will make you angry.
Casey:
I probably should know what you're alluding to because you're going to replace it.
Marco:
Yeah, because Yosemite kind of apparently looks like crap on non-retina screens.
Marco:
So I'm trying to never see it on a non-retina screen.
John:
It doesn't look like crap.
John:
It just doesn't look as nice.
Casey:
It's so adorable for you guys who live, not you, John, I should say you, Marco, who lives in this oh so mighty fine tower high up in the middle of the beautiful sea.
Casey:
Oh, well, I will only look at things on my flick of the hair.
Casey:
Retina screens.
Casey:
I don't want my actual retinas tarnished by non-retina screens.
Marco:
Okay, I hate towers.
Marco:
I have no hair.
Marco:
I hate the water.
Marco:
I know we're near the water.
Marco:
You know what I mean.
Marco:
You know what I mean.
Casey:
Seriously, I have precisely zero Retina Max in my house, and only a couple of people have them at work.
Casey:
Those of us who live in the real world have to look at Yosemite on regular screens.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
I actually don't think it looks bad.
Casey:
I will say, however, that there's so much white.
Casey:
It's like white everywhere.
Casey:
And I kind of miss having a little bit of contrast.
Casey:
I do think it looks pretty, but gosh, especially since I've run multiple screens and I typically don't use full screen mode for a lot of stuff, it's just white everywhere.
John:
everywhere where do you see where do you see all the white like what i don't i've heard people say that but i don't that's not the impression that i get i get different impressions of the ui but like i i guess there's less contrast but i don't see all the white like where where are you seeing this white coming from where it wasn't before well here's here's a question casey you are the most recent windows user among us are you a window maximizer
Casey:
Um, only for a couple of windows.
Casey:
So I always run a VMware fusion.
Casey:
Speaking of windows, I always run that in a window, but taking up an entire screen, I find that it behaves better when it's in a window rather than when it's full screen.
Casey:
Um, my text editor of choice for my website, what I'm writing for that, which isn't that terribly often is Adam judges.
Casey:
You will, I don't care.
Casey:
It works for me.
Casey:
That's the GitHub one?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Is it good, by the way?
Casey:
I like it, but to be fair, I'm not a particularly heavy user of a text editor.
Casey:
I don't have particularly involved or complex needs.
Casey:
So those of you who are like facepalming and like somebody in the chat is saying, yuck, seriously?
Casey:
Yes, seriously, because you know what?
Casey:
It works for me.
Casey:
I don't have a lot of complex needs and it works just fine.
Casey:
So that I run full screen, but just about everything else I run in a window.
Casey:
So where is all the white?
Casey:
Where are you seeing so much?
Casey:
Any non-active window, which if you have a few of them on the screen, maybe they're gray.
Casey:
Like, I'm not a designer.
John:
They are.
John:
They're lighter gray, maybe, than they used to be.
John:
And there's less contrast between the parts.
John:
Like, the window widgets go lighter gray.
John:
It doesn't contrast as much against the thing.
John:
And even things like the window, like the toolbar thing, like in Safari or whatever, is a little bit lighter and less of a gradient.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't find it particularly blinding.
John:
I still find it pleasing and nice, and I think it's a nice aesthetic upgrade.
John:
My one big complaint, and I talked about it extensively in the review, is the whole transparency issue.
John:
The thrust of that section of the review was like, here's what they're doing, here's the technology behind it, and here's how it manifests in the OS, and then the question of why.
John:
Why are you doing this?
John:
What's the point?
John:
You've done this thing.
John:
I see how you're doing it.
John:
I see the different ways you're using it.
John:
What are you trying to say?
John:
To what end is this transparency?
John:
What is it behind the menu bar that I desperately need to see?
John:
I don't need to see details, but I need to see hints of the color of my desktop packet.
John:
What is that helping me?
John:
All you're doing is potentially impairing readability, potentially making things ugly in exchange for...
John:
Dot, dot, dot.
John:
And so I asked Apple this and I pulled Apple's own quotes from WWDC, which was public and everything.
John:
Here's what they said in exchange for, you know, the temperature and mood of your desktop background leaking through into the things.
John:
And by the way, this was discussed on the talk show and lots of people were confused about it.
John:
And I tried to clarify it in my review, but maybe it was not enough sentences about it.
John:
so there's two kinds of blending in vibrancy this transparency thing one is in window blending where you're scrolling up something behind the toolbar and whatever it is you're scrolling up behind the toolbar kind of like shows through the toolbar a little bit right uh and the second one the weirder one is uh i forget what it's called
John:
I don't remember.
John:
But anyway, the other kind of the other kind of transparency is where it's composited with the other things that are on the screen.
John:
So like the sidebars have that kind of transparency, where if you have something with a sidebar and you wave something around behind it, like another window, you can kind of vaguely see the thing you're waving around behind it through the transparent thing.
John:
You do like control drag or something so you don't bring it to the, you know, only the window in the front has this transparent effect on it.
John:
So you have to sort of drag a window behind something or drag the window in front, back and forth in front of something.
John:
You can see that's going on, right?
John:
For that transparency mode where you can see the stuff that's behind the window, Apple also takes a touch of your desktop pattern and also mixes it into that, right?
John:
And it's subtle so that people don't even see it if you don't point it out.
John:
But...
John:
if you just take like a a transparent i have little applications just as a you know a transfer of a light and dark transparent windows i can just drag anywhere but if you take anything with a sidebar take a huge white text edit window put it behind it and put the transfer window over you're like all right the only thing that's behind this window is in totally empty 100 white thing right and you'll put it over it and if you have like a very intense colored desktop background like one of apple's things where it shows grass or something and everything's all green
John:
You'll notice that your sidebar is tinted green and you're like, why the hell is my sidebar tinted green?
John:
The only thing behind this sidebar is 100% white opaque window.
John:
Where is the green coming out?
John:
The answer is it's coming from your desktop background.
John:
If you change your desktop background to something that's all red, suddenly your sidebar will be tinted with red.
John:
Now, when you have something other than complete white behind it, it's easy to miss this because if you take like a
John:
little hint of brown because your desktop is kind of brownish and you mix it with whatever is behind it like a picture that's behind it you'll never see that hint of brown but if you just have white behind it you'll see this hint of this other color and this does you know take the temperature and mood or whatever of your desktop and put it into your windows but why i have a desktop pattern that i like at work which is like my son standing in a bunch of pumpkins so it's a lot of green a lot of a lot of orange for the pumpkins and then his blue jacket that he's wearing
John:
and now all of my sidebars are infected with kind of this dull orange you know rusty tinge i love that desktop picture i do not like a rusty orange tinge on all of my menus and sidebars so i'm faced with a choice change my desktop pattern picture which is now leaking into all of my windows or turn off transparency and you know it's kind of like working as designed it is it is changing the mood of my desktop but not for the better in my opinion
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, that's, it's so weird to me because I look at this and I genuinely think, wow, this really is pretty.
Casey:
And I think to myself, you know, I like the look of it.
Casey:
And then two seconds later, I look at maybe the other screen because I'm a two screen kind of guy and I'm, and that's where all the non-active windows are.
Casey:
And yes, maybe it's gray.
Casey:
It's white, whatever.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
The point is there's no contrast.
Casey:
It's just this like wall of
Casey:
very very very very light gray and that i don't care for but generally speaking i do like the look of it it does seem more modern it seems nice um it's a little creepy going over to windows and and seeing um what is the the metro arrow glass that's what i'm thinking why do i know this and you're done i don't know um so anyway i look at the arrow and i'm like oh look that's oh no no wait that's been that way for a while but it's
Casey:
um so they all kind of blend together a little better now but all in all i like the um i like the look even though it's weird i like a lot of the new features like the sms relay that i was talking about that's really awesome um but i mean i don't know it's new it's cool i enjoy it thumbs up
Marco:
I'm a little worried looking at this.
Marco:
Sometimes when you introduce a new design, it takes people a while to really adjust to it because it's so shockingly different from the last one.
Marco:
iOS 7, when that was unveiled, it's like, whoa, this is so different.
Marco:
But eventually, people are like, this is really good.
Marco:
I think heavy use of translucency in desktop interfaces with overlapping windows is questionable.
Marco:
It's always been questionable.
Marco:
It was questionable when windows, when windows Vista did it, what a decade ago now, uh, that's kind of sad actually.
Marco:
But anyway, um, we are so old.
Um,
Marco:
looking at this it's i think it's kind of up in the air like is this really a good idea and like i don't think anyone's looking at this and saying this looks amazing everything about this is such a good idea like i think it's a lot more measured it's like well some of this looks good some of this is kind of i don't know what they're doing and i guess maybe we'll get used to it like is anybody really enthusiastic about the design i haven't heard it
John:
I have this to say for like, if you, if you look at the screenshots, if you've scrolled through my review as many times as I have just, you know, scrolling through looking at things and stuff like that, the, the screenshots and the Yosemite review, I think are the most visually interesting of any review because like, I mean, it,
John:
You know, all the other reviews, toolbars look like toolbars, window chrome look like a window chrome, but never change.
John:
And this review, of course, I'm explicitly taking pictures of the window with different things behind it, with different things scrolling up into it.
John:
They look amazing to me, like as sort of like interesting works of art.
John:
You know, like I love when I scroll through, I love the crazy rainbow colors through these things.
John:
Like it looks amazing.
John:
it's pretty to me.
John:
Like, obviously I made these screenshots to be, I'm emphasizing, I'm picking the most extreme scenarios to show you what your windows might look like.
John:
And partially I'm doing it to show how bad it is.
John:
Like for example, in the Safari screenshot where I show the different rainbow colored windows, I'm like, this is all the same window.
John:
I'm just changing tabs.
John:
Look how crazily different the window looks.
John:
But if you just look at it in isolation as pieces of art or even like the docs on different backgrounds,
John:
they all look really nice and interesting.
John:
That was the other reasoning.
John:
We're doing this because we want to let you control the mood of your OS by changing your desktop picture, and also we're doing this so that things look pretty.
John:
The same reason you do anything is fashion.
John:
We want it to look pretty.
John:
I think it does look pretty in a lot of scenarios.
John:
The thing is, I think they just went a little bit over the line.
John:
I think I put this in the review.
John:
This habit they have of...
John:
Trying to do something, going too far, and then having to back it off.
John:
They did it in iOS 7 with the super thin fonts and backed it off before release.
John:
And, you know, did they back up any stuff in iOS 8?
John:
Maybe a little bit more.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know the details.
John:
But in OS X, they've done it like crazy.
John:
In 10.0 and in the developer previews, they had a super translucent inactive title bar in all windows.
John:
And they backed that off because it was a bad idea.
John:
They had all sorts of other kinds of pinstripes and translucency that were just way too strong that they had to back off later.
John:
Uh, even the translucent menu bar, which I railed against and thought was ridiculous.
John:
They backed off on that and added a checkbox for it, right?
John:
So, I mean, maybe this is just the way you go, you know, go too far and then take it back a notch instead of being too timid.
John:
Uh, but I think they've essentially done it again.
John:
I think they only went a little bit too far.
John:
Like I like the translucent dock.
John:
I think that is a perfect use of, Hey, make it pretty and have crazy colors behind it, but you can still see your icons cause it's pretty chunky.
John:
Like it's huge icons and
John:
Maybe when you get it smaller, it gets worse.
John:
They could have had the opacity increase as they got smaller if they wanted to be clever.
John:
But I think I'm fine with that.
John:
The translucent title menu bar, I really don't like.
John:
I would have wished they had a check mark there, but it's not the end of the world.
John:
But the sidebars are what kill me because like using Outlook all day at work,
John:
I don't want to see this muddy, dingy sidebar where some text is doing the vibrancy blend and some text isn't.
John:
And when you select things, it gets bold.
John:
And it's just like the people who made Outlook never designed their app with that in mind.
John:
And then all of a sudden they find themselves running on Yosemite and their entire sidebar is just totally screwed over and looking ridiculous.
John:
And I'm looking at it every day.
John:
And it's like Casey said, it's lower contrast now than it used to be.
John:
It's muddier than it used to be.
John:
And I'm faced with a little awkward decision about changing a desktop picture I like because it's infecting my windows.
John:
So they're so close.
John:
Like if there was just one checkbox to say no translucent menu bar, no translucent sidebars, everything else about the system I think is great.
John:
I think the buttons look way better.
John:
I even like the little skinny progress bars.
John:
I think it looks clean and crisp.
John:
I like the window widgets, even though I keep moving the little things with my eyeglasses because of chromatic aberration.
Marco:
Well, did you see there was there was that thing?
Marco:
Stephen Hackett posted a pretty good photo.
Marco:
I think it was him that it actually like the X is actually off center in the in the bubble.
John:
It's just sub pixel sub pixel rendering for that.
John:
It's not actually off center.
Marco:
No, I think it actually is.
Marco:
I think it's a half pixel.
Marco:
I think it's a half point off.
Marco:
So on retina screens, it's actually one pixel off.
John:
someone sent in a screenshot of the actual pixels like from pixie yeah right and it was centered but due to sub pixel if you look at the picture elements it gets off center but anyway the chromatic aberration with my glasses trumps all of that i can move i can move that circle so the x is practically poking out of the side of it you can't just like turn your convergence knob in your head and fix it
John:
no it's it's not that that's not how it works light light enters the lens and has to enter the pupil and all that stuff and anyway uh that's a whole separate issue i almost put that in the review but i thought it would have been a distraction but i have been tweeting about it if people don't know what we're talking about uh the window widgets in mavericks are solid primary colors red yellow and green uh and different colors bend different amounts when they go through lenses uh
John:
And the little glyphs inside these circles are completely black.
John:
So if you have glasses, powerful glasses, and you turn your head so that the red light comes in at a different angle, the red, the green, and the yellow widgets will move, but the black will not move as much.
John:
So what it looks like to you, what it looks like is it looks like the X that's inside the red circle.
John:
It looks like that X is moving to the side.
John:
And so now the X is touching the left edge of the circle.
John:
Now the X is touching the right edge of the circle.
John:
Now the X is touching the top of the circle.
John:
Like, you want the X to be centered, but as you move your head, the X seems to move around.
John:
What's really happening is that the circle is moving around and the X is kind of staying still.
John:
But either way, we'll link to the Wikipedia article on chromatic aberration.
John:
This is just how lenses and light work.
John:
This is an effect that is emphasized by the fact that it's just plain flat red instead of being like the little jewel-like specular highlighted reddish thing where it is much less visible.
John:
So...
John:
A lot and even if you don't have glasses what Marco was talking about is if you just look at the pixels I know on the sub for sub pixel rendering it's going to be off by at least a partial sub pixel and Marco seems to think that it's also off by one hairline half a point pixel on retina which I'm not sure about but it wouldn't surprise me if they just didn't have the right number of pixels so anyway
John:
i don't fault the design for that i think the design looks great and people with glasses all the colors are always shifting i mean everyone with glasses knows when you used to look at crts you could deconverge the edges of the screen and see like a red line on one edge of the screen and a blue line on the other edge like that's just the way glasses work i would i would not design an os around avoiding that there's no avoiding it a white square will will demonstrate uh misconvergence if you
John:
tilt your head and have powerful enough glasses so we glasses wearers just deal with it and everyone else you know i i think that's fine i guess that's why i didn't put it in the review because i knew about it from a long time ago but i'm like this like it's kind of like i didn't want to make another bend gate type thing like yosemite comes with a feature that causes window widgets to leave their circles it's like it's just it's just guys chill it could be a really advanced parallax feature yeah i
John:
I disable parallax on my phone too.
John:
I don't need any extra elements that are moving in relation to each other.
Marco:
So going back a minute before I move on, going back a minute to the blur being potentially annoying or being a downside.
Marco:
Certain designs, like if you look at the design of Windows Phone 7 and the kind of Metro design that brought in, it has a lot of downsides.
Marco:
And just like the design language it creates has certain limitations with things like showing complex navigation and showing things being tappable versus not and things like that.
Marco:
That entire design language, that entire design style just has certain built in shortcomings that like it is not possible to design X well in that style.
Marco:
Every design style has things like this.
Marco:
Do you think the iOS 7-like aesthetic and the way that it has been kind of half taken for Yosemite, do you think that requires the blur in its language to look right or to be harmonious with the aluminum and everything else around it?
Marco:
um do you think it requires that uh or do you like do you think the blur is like just a cost that we have when building certain types of interfaces with this new style that we're just going to have to live with or do you think they could have done something else there that wouldn't just totally look crappy
John:
you could have gotten the family resemblance by using that blur in the places that were already translucent.
John:
So use it on the dock, obviously.
John:
Use it on the little overlays that come when you change the screen brightness or volume, right?
John:
Use it on like, you know, floating pallets or like, you know, the menu, pull-down menus and stuff.
John:
Like that effect, which is not just a blur, it's a blur plus a, you know, pulling forward of certain colors and increasing saturation in certain areas.
John:
Like that is an aesthetically pleasing effect that adds interest.
John:
Without taking away, you know readability because that's the whole point of the thing is like we want to show what's behind it But we don't want what's behind it to interfere.
John:
So we have this crazy effect It's all over iOS 7 for transient things.
John:
It could be on, you know Yosemite for transient things as well Where you get into trouble is when you start making it part of permanent interface elements like the sidebars and toolbars the toolbars I can see what they're doing there because
John:
If you just made the toolbar opaque, as I said in the review, completely opaque, it still looks pretty handsome.
John:
It's a nice design, but it's also kind of plain.
John:
And the in-window blending, as annoying as it can be, and as distracting as it can be, and sometimes as ugly as it can be, also sometimes adds interest and has less of a chance of impairing readability because it's not a lot of words in toolbars.
John:
It's a bunch of big, fat buttons.
John:
The buttons are still opaque.
John:
You're not really hurting readability.
John:
The sidebars are just a bridge too far because they're filled with text.
John:
You are hurting readability.
John:
And it's such a huge part of the application.
John:
Like a new Safari window, the toolbar is 100% gray because you haven't scrolled anything up behind it yet or any web page scroll to the top.
John:
Like there's nothing behind it yet.
John:
It's just you have a chance for it to be 100% gray.
John:
But the sidebar and outlook is forever infected by my desktop pattern and possibly even worse infected if there's nothing behind it except for the desktop or some other crazy window behind it.
John:
So I think you could have gotten the family resemblance
John:
uh without going as far as they did but i think what more what they were going for is how do we make this interesting and someone said hey look at this i can mix colors into the parts of the ui and it is kind of daring in like like the aero glass which you talked about which is like kind of like what what os 10 did i forget but if it was in 10.0 or in dp3 or dp4 or something
John:
where, like I said, any window that was inactive, its tile bar was kind of aero glassy.
John:
They didn't have the ability to blur back then because it would have been too slow, but they just made it super transparent.
John:
Like, it really looked like frosted glass at like 10% opacity, right?
John:
But, you know, Yosemite doesn't do that.
John:
Yosemite doesn't make every single title bar translucent so you can see what's behind it.
John:
It makes the title bars 100% opaque until something scrolls up behind it if you happen to do in-window blending and developers can choose to do that or not.
John:
It's not like Arrowglass.
John:
Arrowglass was a bridge too far.
John:
I hate seeing people's Windows machines that have Arrowglass because they just look like a damn mess.
John:
It's like it's just too much.
John:
Sidebars are also too much, but not every window has a sidebar.
John:
And, you know, it's...
John:
It's not like they took the entire OS and said, everything is see-through.
John:
They just made maybe one or two too many things show what's behind them for no reason.
Casey:
See, I like the transparency in principle, but I agree with you.
Casey:
I think it's been turned up too high, if you will, and it needs to be backed off a bit.
John:
And it's not even up too high.
John:
I think it's the right amount.
John:
Like I said in the review, if you're developing an application, this actually ties into the extension section, believe it or not.
John:
The old bad world of extensions is like I write a great app and then someone comes along and jumps into the memory image of my process and starts screwing with it.
John:
Like I wrote an app, I debugged it, I tested it.
John:
I'm sure it works correctly.
John:
And then you're going to jump into my code and put a jump instruction there and jump off into some other section of code and then jump back there after you change the state of something in my program.
John:
I can't defend against that.
John:
How can I debug something when I don't know when someone is modifying my code while it's running?
John:
Like,
John:
I have no idea who these people are, what their software does, what it's doing to my application.
John:
It's unsupportable.
John:
And that's why people hate extensions that are memory, memory patching extensions.
John:
Screw, you know, because as a software developer, it's like the worst thing in the world.
John:
It's like, look, debugging my own program with code that I wrote is hard enough on top of debugging the OS libraries and everything like that.
John:
But now you're telling me that while my perfectly debugged nice program is running some other program that someone who I never met wrote, it's going to jump into my program and change how it behaves.
John:
That's crazy.
John:
It's unsupportable, right?
John:
Well,
John:
If you're a designer and you say, I'm going to design an application and it's going to look like this and I'm going to make sure everything is nice and I'm going to make sure all the text is readable and all the interactions are nice or whatever.
John:
And then I have no control over what the background of my sidebar is.
John:
It's up to whatever is behind that window and whatever the person's desktop background is.
John:
And I'm just relying on the system to keep my text legible and not look ugly.
John:
That's not as untenable as as memory patching extensions doesn't crash your app.
John:
But from a design perspective, it's almost untenable.
John:
You're like, I can't, you know, if you don't even give me the option to make that completely opaque, I feel like I just can't use a sidebar anymore.
John:
I just have to, you know, use a different UI element because I do not want I can't control what you're going to put in my window.
John:
How am I supposed to design it when I can't control that?
Casey:
Anything else on Yosemite?
John:
I have tons more on Yosemite, but not for today.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
I wanted to very quickly talk about Apple Pay and complain that I haven't had a chance to use it yet.
Casey:
And that was most of the reason for bringing it up.
Casey:
The other part of the reason I wanted to bring it up is it struck me just a few minutes ago.
Casey:
It seems...
Casey:
To me, a little odd that neither Target nor Home Depot, who arguably need Apple Pay the most, since they seem to be leaking like a sieve when it comes to credit card numbers, neither of them are supported right now, which is a bummer.
Marco:
Well, there's a pretty big downside to this for them, and that is that the way they used to run credit cards, they could automatically track you and everything you bought automatically.
Marco:
identified by your credit card number and the name that was read through the readers and so they they were i don't know that they did this but they probably did um they they had the ability to make money off of off of that and you know market to you in some way or at least track what you were doing and sell that data to somebody so like apple pay actually removes a revenue stream from these people
Marco:
And so I can totally see why certain vendors are not going to be interested in doing this.
Marco:
And, you know, eventually they'll probably be pressured into doing it anyway.
Marco:
But I can see why they wouldn't want to be launch partners at least and wouldn't want to do it sooner than they have to, because they depend on being creepy as part of their business model.
Marco:
And Apple is taking away one way that they can be creepy.
Casey:
Well, yes, but they already have – in the case of Target anyway, they have alternate ways of being creepy, which is their – shoot, it's like a shopping cart app.
Casey:
I forget the name of it now and it's going to drive me nuts.
Casey:
But basically, there's an app that you can get and you can scan barcodes while you're standing in the store –
Casey:
And it will selectively issue you coupons.
Casey:
And so then when you go to check out, it puts up a QR code, Cartwheel.
Casey:
Thank you, Friday Pants in the chat.
Casey:
Interesting name, by the way.
Casey:
It will show a QR code that they scan on the Cartwheel app, and then that'll give you money off.
Casey:
And granted, it's nice for the consumer because you get a little bit of a discount, but I am quite confident they're doing exactly what you described, which is check out.
Casey:
tracking that, okay, Aaron and I went in and we looked at this thing and it didn't have a discount.
Casey:
We looked at this thing and it didn't have a discount, but we looked at that thing and it did have a discount.
Casey:
And, you know, piecing that all together.
Casey:
And wasn't it Target that ended up telling somebody's dad that his daughter was pregnant?
Marco:
Yeah, there was that story.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, they sent the house like...
Casey:
diaper coupons or something like that because the daughter had gone to Target and bought pregnancy tests or something along those lines.
Casey:
I forget exactly what the details were.
Casey:
So you make a very good point, which actually I hadn't considered.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I'm just bummed that – I'm looking at the list of –
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Well, I'm saying I haven't been there in a couple of weeks.
Marco:
I haven't been to Panera in two days.
Marco:
It's really rough.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
We spent all of our money at Babies R Us a week or so ago, maybe two weeks ago.
Casey:
I was actually at a Walgreens just a few days back, but it was like Sunday.
Casey:
So man, it's terrible.
Casey:
I haven't used it yet.
Casey:
I don't know what to do.
Casey:
Apparently I have to go buy some stuff I don't need.
Casey:
I assume you haven't used it, Marco?
Marco:
I used it once at Whole Foods yesterday or something.
Casey:
Oh, and how'd it go?
Casey:
Tell me about it.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
What I was really incredibly impressed by was how insanely fast it was.
Marco:
Like, so ever since I started using Touch ID on a regular basis on my phone, my typical thing is I pull the phone out of my pocket.
Marco:
And as I'm pulling out of my pocket, my thumb's already on the home button and has already tapped it.
Marco:
So it is unlocking as I'm lifting it up.
Marco:
So by the time I raise it up to my face level or whatever level I'm using it at, it is almost always unlocking by then or has already unlocked by then.
Marco:
So I just did this instinctively.
Marco:
I raised it up and I saw on screen my credit card for a split second.
Marco:
I saw the Touch ID thing fill in the fingerprint for like literally half a second and it was done.
Marco:
And that was it.
Marco:
I'm like, whoa.
Yeah.
Marco:
like it was so fast i it blew me away i still had to sign though it was it was just over a hundred dollars so maybe that's why uh i did still have to sign so that was like a little bit like like an animal you know but uh but then when i went to i went to another store later on that day to get some other stuff and uh and of course i had to use a regular machine it felt so archaic even at
Marco:
i've been doing this like every day of my life for my entire adult life and and and uh i've never thought this was really a problem and now all of a sudden everything else feels old and broken why did you have to sign i think it's because it was over a hundred dollars like there's probably still a threshold but you can't get out of whole foods without spending more than a hundred dollars i know it's impossible they don't let you leave the store i think
Marco:
I'm guessing it's just like other signature rules where there's probably some threshold that possibly depends on the store or the type of merchant account they have or something.
Marco:
But we will see.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I expect the rich people to rebel at that because seriously, what kind of person goes to Whole Foods and comes out spending less than $100?
John:
It's impossible.
Casey:
It's funny you bring up getting out of Whole Foods for $100, a really quick story.
Casey:
A couple of years ago, I typically bring my lunch to work and I just eat at my desk.
Casey:
And a couple of years ago, for whatever reason, I'd forgotten it or whatever.
Casey:
So I decide, you know what?
Casey:
I'm going to go to Whole Foods, which is a store I very rarely go to.
Casey:
And I'm going to go to their little salad bar that is way more than a salad bar.
Casey:
I'm going to get myself a little smorgasbord of randomness.
Casey:
And so I get like a little box and I put all the food I want in there.
Casey:
I
Casey:
thinking, you know, this is probably like five or 10 bucks worth of food.
Casey:
And I go to checkout and it was a solid like $18 worth of food.
John:
Too many hardballed eggs.
John:
They go by weight.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
To be honest, I think what it was, and this was my first thought as soon as I was checked out was, should have been a little lighter on the mac and cheese.
Casey:
That stuff's dense.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, that's a rookie mistake.
Marco:
All those like, like by miscellaneous hot and cold food mixes by weight things like Manhattan's full of those places.
Marco:
I'm sure they're probably everywhere.
Marco:
But like, that was like a rookie mistake.
Marco:
And like, if you if you get a job in the city, and you're going to launch everybody, you go to a place that has one of those big hot bars in the middle, like
Marco:
rookie mistake never go to those things because like it like you all the stuff that looks good is so freaking heavy and you know you put like a little side of some pasta and like you know a little piece of chicken in there eleven dollars like there's there's no way of getting out of there getting a good deal i think i've complained about this before but the the cut up fruit where they will take a fruit and cut it into small squares or something there's like a thousand dollars a square of pineapple like i don't know what
John:
how they're pricing the labor but like you can buy a whole pineapple for x amount and you can buy a cut up quarter pineapple for 20x i don't know what happens to it to make that price change but yeah well clearly we're on we're in the wrong business we should be getting getting into the cutting fruit business right that's obviously worth a large premium now john since you have an iphone be it apples or whatever
John:
No, I don't.
John:
All my loan hardware is gone.
John:
And you mentioned before other people were telling me like, well, you think Yosemite is fine because you get to look at a retina screen.
John:
I also have no retina Macs either at home or at work.
John:
You know, so my loaner hardware that I use to review Yosemite is all gone, including the phone.
John:
So I am back to my dumb phone.
John:
I am back to all my non-retina Macs.
John:
So I have not used Apple Pay to answer your question.
Casey:
OK, and what is the current plan with regard to getting an iPhone?
Casey:
Is that still happening?
Casey:
Is it happening soon, happening later?
John:
Yeah, I'll probably get one.
John:
Marco reminded me today that about Apple discounts.
John:
So they have those friends and family discounts.
John:
And so I may be able to get one of those.
John:
And if I do do that, that will influence my hardware buying decisions.
John:
And I got to figure out how those work and blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
I'm very annoyed that I didn't even know these existed until today.
John:
I've known they existed because various people have offered them to me in the past when I wasn't buying hardware, and I just keep forgetting that they exist.
Casey:
So with that in mind, let's really quickly, I know we're running a little long.
Casey:
Marco, did you order a Rimac?
Casey:
I think so.
Marco:
it's a little vague with the business reps like when your order has actually been placed i have not yet been charged for it and i asked if they had an order number because they said it was it was already really preparing for shipment but so i don't know i i have no tracking number i have tried like the the look up my order number thing on the website and i don't even know what email address they put in for me and i tried a few and like they couldn't find anything so i don't know it's always vague with business reps
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And John, are you intending to buy a Retina iMac?
John:
Not really.
John:
I'm still waiting for everyone else to get theirs and see what they're like and all that jazz.
John:
Although, now that I'm hearing more and more about the iPad Air 2, I'm lusting after it more, so...
John:
i don't know i don't i i don't know like i after my review is done i have all these like things i'm gonna buy to reward myself for finishing it and you know use some of the money i get paid for the review to buy stuff and like one of the things is i want to get a ps4 but i'm like oh i don't really need a ps4 there's no games out for it that i want now i can still wait on that maybe by the time i buy it slim version will be out if i wait long enough
John:
They read an iMac.
John:
Well, I got to wait till Marco gets it.
John:
He'll tell me what all the problems are, blah, blah, blah.
John:
The iPhone, I'm probably going to get one, but then I got to deal with all the hassles of trying to like, you know, get a Verizon family plan and doing all that billing stuff that I know is going to be a nightmare.
John:
And
John:
And then the hardware discounts will mix into this.
John:
And so, you know, paralysis means that I just end up sitting here not buying anything.
John:
But I will buy some things eventually, probably before the end of this year.
Marco:
That's extremely useful.
John:
You don't even know if you bought an iMac, so we're both in the same boat here.
John:
That's true.
John:
Hardware may or may not be showing up at both of our houses at some point in the future.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Goodness gracious.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Backblaze, Igloo, and Linza.com.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Margo and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C-O-A-R-C
John:
So I went back to my smaller iPod touch now and, uh, and I just used the big phone and then I went back to the smaller one and the smaller one.
John:
the biggest things i feel are it's so much skinnier not so much the height but the skinniness i just feel like i i guess i just got used to the wider screen and just having like more of a web page visible and stuff even like reading tweets where like what's the big deal it just feels wider uh but the other thing is like even though i can reach so much more of the ipod touch
John:
I don't know like I started to even if the short time I had the six I started to get like the hand motions to reach the really far parts of the screen like the hand shuffle I would have to do to reach the upper left corner I started to get good at that and now when I go back to the small and I start doing that motion and it's like oh you don't need to do that motion to get that corner and I like I don't know it feels like I built up skills at playing a particular game and now the game has been taken away and those skills that I built up are not useful anymore and I'm kind of sad about it
John:
it's a strange feeling i i did not i did not expect to have this feeling but it just it just feels like i was getting good at that big thing i mean and it's not there's not so much positive feeling like oh this is so much smaller i like it so much better there's not even that much of that i do i do feel it's a little bit less kind of it's less precarious but again i was using without a case so it's weird we'll see when i get my iphone 6 eventually how i feel about it longer term
Marco:
So out of curiosity, what is making you not buy it yet?
Marco:
If you've already decided that you're probably going to buy an iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 has come out.
Marco:
We know it's not going to change until roughly a year from now when it will be a terrible time to buy an iPhone 6.
Marco:
Why not get it now?
John:
Well, I just have to decide, am I going to go into an Apple store and do it?
John:
How am I going to deal with phone number stuff?
John:
How am I?
John:
How are we going to change our Verizon plans?
John:
I just, you know, I'll do it eventually.
John:
Like, it's just if there's anything involved with it other than me clicking a bunch of buttons and waiting for a package to show up at my house, then it's it gets put off, you know, and that's what's happening.
Marco:
Do you want to make a bet, Casey?
Marco:
I'm betting he doesn't get an iPhone 6.
Marco:
I'm betting this takes until close enough to next fall that John just decides to wait.
Marco:
Wait until next fall.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Here's the bet.
Casey:
I will take that bet.
Casey:
But if you lose, I get to give you a playlist for pre-show music one night.
John:
You picked the wrong thing to bet there, Casey, because you're going to win this bet.
John:
So you should pick something much better than that.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm willing to do that.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It's mood anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, no deal.
Casey:
All right, what else is going on?
Casey:
Do we have anything to say about this Gamergate stuff?
Casey:
Is there really much to say other than it's terrible?
John:
Yeah, I...
John:
I have two links that I'm going to put into the show notes.
John:
It's still grinding on.
John:
We talked about it in vague terms before, but didn't get a lot of bad feedback about it, mostly because I think people who know about or care about this issue don't listen to our podcast, which is nice.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm kind of glad that the people who are...
Marco:
all raging and crazy on the Gamergate side of it, like, trying to, like, abuse all these people.
Marco:
I'm kind of glad they don't listen to our show because, like, those don't sound like very good fans to have.
John:
I mean... Right.
John:
Like, we got one email from, like, the well-meaning people who, like, are...
John:
were affiliated with it, but, you know, couldn't understand why I was trashing it and so on and so forth.
John:
And I replied to one of them by email, who sent a longer email.
John:
And what I basically said is, even though your intentions may be good, and even though this was like weeks and weeks ago, and even though you may not have done anything bad, and even though you agree with the stated aims of this movement,
John:
The movement itself has been entirely co-opted and tainted by all the bad things that happen.
John:
It is irredeemably corrupted.
John:
And by associating yourself with it, you are bringing yourself down.
John:
Like, it's basically, you know, I don't... If I try to think of some group that this applies to, I'll just get into other situations.
John:
But anyway...
John:
This group and this name has been irredeemably tainted.
John:
It doesn't matter what they do going forward.
John:
It doesn't matter, like, the name, the banner.
John:
It's just too many bad things have happened under this banner, and you can yell all you want about that's not what it's really about, blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's too late now.
John:
So if you really believe in the good things that you think that this thing, you know, that Gamergate said it was about, you must disassociate from them.
John:
Start a new hashtag under a new banner with a new name and a new platform or whatever, because this one is dead.
John:
And if you really cared about the things, you wouldn't care about the name it's associated with because you would just go off and do something else.
John:
and fight for whatever it is you think you're fighting for.
John:
But Gamergate is, you know, is lost, is lost to decent people.
John:
So anyway, there's been tons of links about this.
John:
I keep tweeting about it.
John:
People complain that I tweet about it, that they don't want to hear about it.
John:
Yeah, tough luck.
John:
Like, if you don't like it, follow somebody else.
John:
Lots of people, talk to Jason Snell about how many people love to tell him what he should be tweeting about or not.
John:
It's like, that's, you know, that's the way it is.
John:
And it is the ultimate in luxury to be able to say, I'm tired of this Gamergate thing.
John:
Stop telling me about it.
John:
Yeah, it must be nice.
John:
Anyway, whatever.
John:
I don't want to get into it.
John:
So the two links I have, these are actually from today, and there's been a lot of good links, and I've been reading them and tweeting them about, but these two good kind of bookends, not that this thing is over, but two good bookends as of where we are right now.
John:
One is from the perspective of a journalist who was trying to write stories about Gamergate and was frustrated with the process of trying to just do straight up.
John:
This is the view from the outside.
John:
This is the sort of
John:
uh disengaged uh dispassionate view of the thing where it's like i don't know what this is i'm not a gamer but i'm a reporter and i'm trying to report on this and here and here's the frustrating situation uh you know here's why it's difficult to report on it uh and so i'll put this in the show notes from uh new york magazine who is the person who wrote this i had the name up before uh jesse single i don't know if that's a man or a woman it shouldn't matter but when it comes to gamer gate it definitely does
John:
So that's the view from the outside.
John:
And the view from the inside is Felicia Day, who you may or may not know as an actress and online media person doing all sorts of things, and is also known as a gamer.
John:
Hasn't said much about Gamergate, but finally posted something about Gamergate.
John:
And hers is a personal story of like...
John:
how it is affecting her and why she was afraid to say anything about it and why she is ashamed for being afraid and just what this has done to the gaming community.
John:
So two total huge, you know, opposite ends of the spectrum talking about Gamergate.
John:
And I think if you read both of those things, you have a good idea what this is like.
John:
You know what what the whole thing is about and what it's like and by the way She posted this thing and less than an hour later The Gamer Gators attempted to dox her according to what people are tweeting these days, but you know par for the course anyway I'll put those two links in if you're sick of reading about this stuff But you haven't read anything since you last talked about just read these two things And it will sort of get you up to speed.
John:
I think Anyway, it continues to grind on bad people continue to do bad things
John:
The rest of us continue to suffer under it.
John:
There's all sorts of sideshows associated with it.
John:
I really wish it would just go away.
John:
I, again, urge everybody who is in any way associated with it, disassociate yourself.
John:
Start something new.
John:
That one is poisoned by bad people who no decent person agrees with.
John:
Just stop.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the thing is I just can't wrap my mind around being upset about whether or not there are women in video games or let's even assume being upset about supposed impropriety in journalism.
Casey:
How does that work?
John:
lead to forcing brianna woo and her husband out of her home like how is that a reasonable course of action and maybe it's because i'm sane maybe i i don't i don't get it it's just an excuse it's just an excuse to lash out at things you don't like it doesn't matter what it is and i'm not going to use any analogies but there are plenty of them like you hate something something happens and you use it as an excuse to lash out at the thing you hate like no matter what happens it's an excuse to attack women
John:
If women are tangentially involved in any way, it's an excuse.
John:
I mean, the Felicia Day thing is like, she wrote this heartfelt thing that is not really an attack on much of anything, immediately gets attacked.
John:
And various men have written things and not gotten attacked in the same way.
John:
Various men have written things very recently that are much worse.
John:
Do they get attacked?
John:
No, they don't.
John:
Why?
John:
Because these people have, you know, they hate women.
John:
Like, they're misogynists.
John:
Like, that's their thing.
John:
And no matter what happens, it's an excuse to say, woman, get in your place.
John:
no matter what happens it doesn't matter what it is it's like you gave my game a bad review or i don't like what you said or like it's like and therefore that is an excuse to attack women everything is an excuse to attack women they're just looking for it right and again this doesn't if you hear me saying this this doesn't apply to you because everyone says like you're
John:
saying all gamers hate women nope nope not you i'm telling you the gamers who don't hate women don't associate with gamer gate because it's it's poisoned like go someplace different to do what you wanted to do which should be fine you shouldn't care about this particular cause this particular decentralized thing this particular hashtag you know if you care about corruption in the gaming press which is a thing and has been a thing for years and years fight that but has nothing to do with gamer gate anymore and never really did
Casey:
But John, Gamergate is not about hating women.
Casey:
It's about journalistic integrity.
John:
Right.
John:
And that BS is now finally filtering through to everybody.
John:
Now, essentially everybody, even reporters who had no idea what it was and come in and like, I tried to report on this, but everybody keeps telling me it's not about hatred of women.
John:
And every time I look at the Gamergaters, that's all I see.
John:
And they say, oh, those aren't the real ones.
John:
It's like the no true Scotsman thing, which they talk about in this thing.
John:
You know, every time something bad happens, someone says, oh, that's not really what Gamergate is about.
John:
It's
John:
It's a decentralized thing with no actual leadership, with no actual platform, and anything bad that happens is say, well, that's not really what we're about.
John:
That's not how it works.
John:
You can pick a political analogy.
John:
The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, they have platforms.
John:
They have leaders.
John:
you can you know be expelled from them you're not allowed to say that you're a member you know i am a representative of the democratic party i am i am their duly appointed representative and i will tell you what their position is and then you say a bunch of hateful stalk you are no longer the duly appointed representative of the democratic party they have an actual platform they have actual leadership they have things they can say here's what we want here's what we stand for but it's gamergate completely decentralized terrible things happen and everyone's like well that's not what we're really about
John:
Well, that's all you guys are doing.
John:
If you go into these Gamergate boards, it's all about attacking women and saying terrible things or whatever.
John:
That's not really what it's about.
John:
Well, it doesn't matter what you say it's about.
John:
It only matters what you do.
John:
And with no leadership and no platform and no formal organizing body, there's no way for you to say these people are not part of Gamergate.
John:
If they use the tag and they do bad things, they're part of it.
John:
You can't kick them out because there is no centralization.
John:
If you can't kick them out, everything they do, it just becomes what Gamergate is about.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And there's a difference between what you, one person, might want it to be about or might believe it's about versus what it actually is about.
Marco:
And what it actually is about is widespread abuse.
Marco:
Like, that's all it is.
Marco:
It's widespread abuse of women.
John:
Like Brianna has said, it's like, I don't care about what your theory is.
John:
All I care about is outcomes.
John:
Exactly.
John:
This is the outcome.
John:
The outcome is so plain as day.
John:
Like you don't, you know, it's just ridiculous with the outcome.
John:
And the worst part is the recent phenomenon has been sort of right wing political.
John:
I don't know what you'd call them.
John:
People are like a D list right wing political celebrities latching onto it as a way to further their agendas because they don't know or care anything about games.
John:
So they see this thing is going on here.
John:
And they're like, oh, well, you know, we can use this angry mob to our advantage to further our agendas, which have nothing to do with video games and certainly nothing to do with ethics and video games.
John:
It's it's all a ridiculous sideshow that the worst thing about it is like we it shows that sort of the immune system of decent people and sort of like our way of handling like this is this this movement should not be giving us the trouble that it is.
John:
Right.
John:
Like where the game regators will organize sort of ballot stuffing campaigns.
John:
to tell a sponsor not to support some website that said something negative about Gamergate.
John:
And sponsors will be like, oh, we're getting all these emails.
John:
We better stop doing this.
John:
And then they'll bail out because they don't know what Gamergate is.
John:
They don't know anything about this.
John:
And then we're like after the fact saying, no, what are you doing?
John:
Like you've been you've been fooled by a bunch of trolls there.
John:
Yes, they did send you lots of angry letters, but they don't represent anybody except for terrible people.
John:
Like don't make financial decisions based on, you know, a human driven letter writing campaign.
John:
Like people are running stats on like the tweets that are going up about this.
John:
Like they said, I forget what the percentage is, but some huge percentage of tweets with the GamerGate hashtag were made by only 100 Twitter accounts, most of which were created in the last two months.
John:
It's entirely a sock puppet type.
John:
They are able to further their nefarious ends through means that are completely transparent and yet are able to fool large corporations into believing they represent an important constituency.
John:
And then all of us are out here like, I can't believe this is even happening.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We don't have a good way to deal with organized, extremely negative, terrible, anonymous trolling.
John:
And hopefully this whole terrible experience will sort of teach the civilized world, essentially, how to manage situations like this better, like make us all more savvy, give us better tools, give us better organizing sort of antibodies against this kind of disease.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, maybe it'll take two or three more runs at this, but, you know, it's terrible.
John:
I wish it would get better, but who knows?
Casey:
I disagree with one small thing that you said.
Casey:
You said that Gamergate doesn't have a platform, and I don't think that's true.
Casey:
Their platform is hate.
Casey:
They just hate things.
Casey:
They hate women.
Casey:
They hate supposed journalists.
Casey:
They hate things.
Marco:
Oh, no, it's just women, because men journalists seem to be doing okay.
Marco:
Fair point.
Marco:
They just hate women.
Marco:
That's the platform.
Casey:
Right, and I just...
Casey:
I don't understand how any sane and intelligent human being cannot see through this and see that this is wrong.
Casey:
Like, these people who are doxing these women and making these threats against these women, like, I just – it does not compute how that is acceptable behavior.
Casey:
How is that okay?
Casey:
What have these women really done to affect your world?
Casey:
And even if they have, how is that an okay reaction?
Casey:
Like, it's just –
Casey:
I don't understand how any of this makes sense.
John:
Lack of empathy, ends justify the means, all sorts of things that like, you know, and really, as I said in the original show about this, that these people, you know, don't understand what they're actually angry about.
John:
And so many people were insulted by that because they always think I'm talking about them.
John:
If you know what you're angry about, then I'm not talking about you.
John:
I'm talking to people who don't know.
John:
Anyway, it's kind of a tautology there.
John:
But like...
John:
these are people who are in pain people who act this way are not like happy well-adjusted people with awesome family lives and fulfilling jobs and like you know what i mean that's they're in pain currently they're in pain from the past or whatever and they've focused that on like you know why why am i in pain what's wrong with my life and you know they're placing a lot of the blame on that on the perceived enemies whatever they may be and in this case it's women and progressives and whatever it is that they're you know
John:
But, like, the people who do this, like, you're like, oh, I can't understand.
John:
Like, how can people believe that they're the bad guys in their own stories?
John:
And sometimes they don't.
John:
Sometimes they don't believe they're the bad guys in their own stories.
John:
But sometimes they do believe in their heart of hearts that they're the bad guys in their own stories.
John:
And they're doing it because they're in pain for unrelated reasons.
John:
And they feel like they deserve to be the bad guy or they should be.
John:
Like, it's not, you know...
John:
it i have i have empathy for the people who are on that side of the fence because really like in my experience people who do terrible things unless they're actually clinically insane which most people are not uh it's because they're in pain right it doesn't make it any better and we need to find ways to deal with this and help ourselves and secondarily help them you know but it's you can't it's easy to demonize people who do terrible things but really like if you think about it like when you're trying to get into their headspace
John:
Imagine your life was not like it was.
John:
Imagine your life was just terrible in all possible ways and you had an amazingly bad childhood or you're super angry about something or you have some kind of undiagnosed, unmedicated emotional imbalance that you have not been able to deal with.
John:
all of that dissatisfaction and hatred and anger has to go somewhere and it ends up landing in weird places.
John:
Sometimes it turns inward on themselves.
John:
Sometimes they're outward, sometimes both.
John:
So I think I vaguely understand what it is that's making this happen.
John:
It's just that like, as a society, one job is figuring out why that's happening.
John:
And like, you know, we should prevent these outcomes by making people have better, happier lives and not end up in these terrible situations.
John:
And, and, you know, but the other aspect is how do we protect ourselves as a society against it to not to, to essentially say, Hey,
John:
you know, as you will find out when your child arrives, you know, this is not okay.
John:
This is not okay behavior to, you know, enforce limits on, you know, it's so difficult to do that online.
John:
What is okay behavior online in real life?
John:
This is not okay.
John:
We don't accept this.
John:
And that's the worst thing is like part of what the whole, you know, what's happening in games these days to sort of progress games are making and doing and saying more interesting things.
John:
If the people who are on that side of the fence doing bad things to women had grown up in a world that sort of
John:
post you know like uh feminist revolution of gaming you know like if if these people had grown up in a world where women were not as objectified as they are in popular culture now they would be less likely to direct all their hatred and bad feelings towards women you know what i mean like if they could see women as human beings instead of people they would actually be happier people like they're fighting against something that could have saved them from being the things that they are today you know what i mean like because all this contributes to like
John:
Why am I miserable and where do I direct that energy?
John:
The stew that you grew up in, the same thing that's making me say unintentionally racist or sexist things because that's just how I grew up, that influences all of us.
John:
And these people working for change in the games and everyone else are trying to make a world where people are less steeped in these bad things growing up so that when they come to adulthood, hopefully they won't hold on to these antiquated and harmful notions about other people.
Casey:
It seems like the same kind of playbook that all oppressed groups have gone through.
Casey:
And I'm coming from very much a position of luxury because I don't really know what that's like.
Casey:
I mean, my dad's family is Jewish, but I never really practiced growing up.
Casey:
So I've never personally been exposed to any sort of anti-Semitic behavior.
Casey:
But it seems like from an outsider's, from a luxury point of view –
Casey:
It seems like the same playbook that, you know, oh, let's hate Jews and oh, let's hate black people.
Casey:
And it's and now it's oh, let's hate women.
Casey:
And when does that ever work out?
Casey:
When does that ever end up OK?
John:
It's been working out well for hitting women because that is evergreen.
John:
Women have been subjugated for millennia and it will continue to be the case like that's.
John:
You know, progress has been made on all these fronts, but like they seem to go in cycles and women is the one that most people don't.
John:
I have to admit that I did not think about as much like when I'm growing up.
John:
And again, this has to do with education and environment and who you are.
John:
I'm growing up as, you know, like you, Casey, just a white male, you know, the same as all of my peers, not different in any particular way.
John:
you learn about in school.
John:
You learn about Martin Luther King.
John:
You learn about slavery.
John:
You learn about the Native Americans.
John:
You learn about all sorts of things.
John:
And you do women's suffrage in voting, and you're like, oh, that's so silly.
John:
At one point, women couldn't vote.
John:
That's obviously ridiculous.
John:
They can vote.
John:
But you don't go that far.
John:
In my education, at least, we talked about
John:
the basic human rights of like women being able to own land and vote and stuff like that.
John:
And we talked about slavery and civil rights and stuff like that.
John:
And then it's like, and we come to the present day and everybody's equal.
John:
And it's like, no, not exactly.
John:
And we, at least in my education, in my pre-college education, there wasn't a lot of time spent on talking about feminism or the objectification of women or whatever.
John:
They're just sort of like the natural undertones of everything, of everything you live in.
John:
You're like, you just accept it.
John:
Like you could say, I am,
John:
You know, I understand that racism is terrible and still exists, but women, you know, white women are treated perfectly fairly now.
John:
Right.
John:
And women, that's not the issue.
John:
The issue is like, you know, minorities.
John:
That's where all the problems is.
John:
But, you know, well, women are everything's fine there.
John:
It's like it's not like it's just this.
John:
It becomes the baseline that you don't even notice that this is.
John:
It doesn't even seem like it's the whole thing with the Gamergate people.
John:
It doesn't even seem like women are oppressed.
John:
It's like, what are you talking about?
John:
That's just the way things are.
John:
That's not oppression.
John:
Everyone's in their designated roles.
John:
The woman stays home and cooks.
John:
The man goes to work.
John:
And like, that's just the natural order of things.
John:
That's not oppression.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
And it just it seems so far.
John:
It's like slavery.
John:
That's oppression, obviously.
John:
Right.
John:
But it's.
John:
You know, it's I have to admit it took me a much longer time to have a clear view on pervasive sexism in the world than than it did for any of these other things.
John:
And as I said in the last time we talked about this, like if you just expose yourself to these things, don't don't necessarily engage with them.
John:
Don't argue with them.
John:
Like just expose yourself to women explaining what it's like to be a woman, a woman in the world.
John:
And don't like.
John:
And just take it in.
John:
Like, just accept it.
John:
Listen to it.
John:
Don't take offense at it because you're not the one doing these things to them, right?
John:
You know, maybe think about things you might have done to other people that are like this.
John:
Maybe you can decide whether you think it's good or bad, but...
John:
If you listen enough, the preponderance of stories about this happening will slowly make the gear start turning your head and realize the ridiculous inequalities that existed that you didn't see before.
John:
And I don't have any hope of that happening for people who are involved in Game Brigade, maybe when they're older, if they're young.
John:
Like, I mean, again, it took me until my 30s to start to even think about these things in a serious way.
John:
And if you're an 18-year-old in a chat room trying to figure out how you're going to send anonymous death threats to a woman,
John:
you got a long road ahead of you.
Casey:
Certainly do.
Casey:
It's just, it just, it's so terrible.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I, I, I just, it's not fair.
Casey:
It just plain isn't fair.
Marco:
I think, John, you said something earlier, much earlier now, but you said something earlier that we as technology or as a society with the modern internet, we don't really have good ways to deal with very strong anonymous negative feedback.
Marco:
among the many other things that we need to work on as a society that are more long-term and difficult to attack.
Marco:
This might be something we can do sooner or at least start thinking about, you know, like in designing our systems and in designing social networks and designing technology and in designing the tools and the networks and the media that, that we as, you know, modern technically connected people use, um,
Marco:
we need to consider, like, you know, what are the possible abuses here?
Marco:
You know, how much damage, how much abuse can a very small group of determined individuals dish out with this thing that we're building?
Marco:
And is there a way that we can design it in such a way that both they can abuse fewer people or in fewer ways, and that somehow we can reduce their incentives to abuse?
Marco:
So, and this is, you know, in many ways...
Marco:
When I've designed similar systems for Tumblr, for Instapaper, for Overcast, I've always been concerned about spam.
Marco:
And so one of the big things in Overcast, you can recommend episodes to your Twitter followers.
Marco:
There is nowhere in the entire app, and there probably never will be anywhere in the entire app, where you can see a most recommended global list.
Marco:
And the reason for this is very deliberate.
Marco:
It's because I didn't want anybody to to be able to spam to create a whole bunch of accounts to all recommend certain things to boost them to the top of that list.
Marco:
It's like the old dig front page problem.
Marco:
I didn't want to have to deal with that.
Marco:
And, you know, same thing with Instapaper.
Marco:
There was never like Instapaper had its recommended global stories, but those were human picked.
Marco:
so there you know there's never like i intentionally try to avoid creating things that can be reasonably spammed or i i try to avoid spam by by avoiding creating incentives to spam like there's no reason to spam with a bunch of overcast accounts recommending episodes because only people who follow you on twitter will ever see them and you know then and it's attached to your name and so like you like that that kind of solves itself right
Marco:
In designing systems now and in the future, I think we should, in addition to considering things like spam incentives, we need to consider abuse incentives.
Marco:
How much attention can one person get with relatively little validation from others?
Marco:
How much can anonymous comments be heard?
Marco:
Right now on Twitter, anybody can at reply anybody else and it will show up in their replies timeline.
Marco:
And Twitter, obviously, Twitter is... A lot of people are pointing out and have been pointing out Twitter's policies on dealing with abuse complaints.
Marco:
I don't know the details of them, but they sound pretty terrible.
Marco:
That might not be solvable.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It sounds like... Because it's...
Marco:
it's always a problem like saying, oh, well, Twitter should, you know, always suspend these accounts.
Marco:
And then, then it becomes a question of, well, you know, what if somebody files a false report against you?
Marco:
And so it's, these are all tough problems.
Marco:
I think Twitter can do better, but I don't think they can magically solve the problem.
John:
Like, like I don't like, they could do a lot with just, I've been looking more at like the problems with reporting on Twitter.
John:
And it mostly has to do with how, how Twitter approaches the problem.
John:
Like if, if they, if they approach their form for reporting people more like,
John:
A sort of a crisis center would approach supporting someone who's having some kind of crisis, like domestic abuse or something like that.
John:
Like it's a different approach.
John:
Like you assume that the person is in crisis.
John:
You don't you know what you can't demand of the person.
John:
Like one of the big things is like enter all your information in this form, including your real complete first and last name.
John:
And by the way, we may send this information to the person you're reporting.
John:
Like, I know what they're kind of getting at in that, but the way it's worded doesn't isn't made for a mindset for a person who's coming in like in crisis and saying, you know, or or sorry, we rejected your report because you're not the person who is, you know, who is being attacked.
John:
Like if you send someone a link to an abusive tweet, but if you're not the target of it, like they just reject it out of hand, like it's just not it's just not designed properly.
John:
The way it should be for something that people go to when they're in crisis or when someone they care about is in crisis, it should be totally designed to put that person at ease to give strong guarantees that the things that they would reasonably fear, for example, that you reporting someone, the person you report would know who you are and would have more information about you because you reported it.
John:
Like, you can't have a form that even hints at that, let alone, you should, firstly, you should obviously never actually do that.
John:
And I don't think they would actually do that, but the form makes it seem like they would.
John:
And so if you're in a crisis situation and you land on that form, you hate Twitter.
John:
It's like, what the hell?
John:
I have a problem here.
John:
Or if they bounce back your thing with an automatic response, it says, sorry, your report could not be processed because you're not the target of the abuse.
Marco:
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
John:
Like, and someone just posted it.
John:
Someone just posted a death threat with someone's full name and address on it.
John:
And you get a robo response.
John:
Like, there are tons of things Twitter can do to make this better.
John:
But you're right that at the root of it, it's like anonymity is important for large classes of people on the Internet.
John:
And you can't just say, oh, everyone can't be anonymous.
John:
You need to use your, you know, full name and social security number and everything to have a strong correlated ID.
John:
Like, anonymity needs to be there.
John:
But once you have anonymity, then just people keep making new accounts and, like...
John:
It's not 100% solvable, but Twitter could be doing a hell of a lot better job.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I think, though, ultimately, this is a design flaw of Twitter and systems like it.
Marco:
When I had that whole Wirecutter drama, I quoted Howard Stern in a blog post saying, Howard Stern, he uses Twitter here and there.
Marco:
But he said on his show a few months ago, because he always complains about how everyone on Twitter is basically a huge bad person to everyone else.
Marco:
and um and he said you know why do we give these people so much access to us like why why do you let any random person yell at you 10 seconds after you post anything and why do you go and read it and and why can anybody in the world have have your attention so easily that i think like the question of the the amount of access we and systems like twitter allow other people to have to us
Marco:
That is something that I think we've assumed in designing social and internet communication systems for the last decade or so.
Marco:
We've all assumed that it had to be this way.
Marco:
That, of course, that's the power of the internet.
Marco:
Anybody can talk to anybody else.
Marco:
But maybe that's a bad assumption.
Marco:
Maybe that is a fundamental design flaw.
Marco:
And maybe future social networks and future directions of current social networks may be.
Marco:
maybe future networks and future communication, things like that need to be more limited.
Marco:
Maybe I shouldn't be able to at reply Howard Stern whenever I want to and have him see it.
John:
Like, but don't you think that's part of the beauty of Twitter?
John:
Like when it's good, that is an advantage.
John:
Like it's, you know, I think that's,
John:
What we want out of Twitter, we like that direct connection to people who had a connection.
John:
Like part of the reason that works at all in Twitter is because people are constrained.
John:
They can't send 500 paragraph screeds to Howard Stern.
John:
They just have to send one line or insults.
John:
But like the problem is when it's not, you know, because the block function does exist.
John:
Like a system like Twitter without a block function at all works.
John:
would be terrible.
John:
The block function is not perfect, but it does exist.
John:
But the problem with the block functions is totally defeated by the ability to just keep creating new accounts, right?
John:
So if you are super famous and you get that abuse, you're like, oh, no problem.
John:
I managed that with blocks.
John:
And eventually you block all the most horrible people and you're fine.
John:
No, you're never fine.
John:
They just keep creating new accounts because they're crazy people, right?
John:
And...
John:
that that is like it's the anonymity you couldn't keep creating new accounts if an account was strongly tied to your id but anonymity i think is an important feature of twitter and other internet services so you can't say like google tried to do oh no anonymity real names only like that's that's not a tenable solution either so it is a very difficult problem but when i was talking about the tools we need to deal with this i was talking more at the macro level than the micro level because at the micro level
John:
You can just get off Twitter, like either permanently or for a certain period of time.
John:
But at the macro level, it's like when sponsors are pulling ads from from websites, financially impacting that entire site and the jobs of various people because of a coordinated fake letter writing campaign of people like pretending to be concerned about some BS issue.
John:
And in reality, they're trying to ruin the lives of women and journalists who happen to write for the site.
John:
When that happens, it shows that our our corporations and organizations are not Internet savvy enough to know when they're essentially being trolled into stupid behavior.
John:
that has real consequences for real people.
Marco:
Neither are politicians with all the policies that they make.
John:
We assume like, you know, this is like Intel and Adobe.
John:
We assume companies like Intel and Adobe would be a little bit more tech savvy than politicians, let's say, you know, and then finally, like obviously anonymous death threats, completely untraceable with no, you know, I mean,
John:
It goes with the anonymity.
John:
You don't want you want anonymity when you're trying to talk about how your husband is abusing you and you're afraid for your life.
John:
But you would like the person to threaten your life to not have anonymity.
John:
So we kind of can't have it both ways there.
John:
I don't know what the solution is to that.
John:
But, you know, I guess a step would be law enforcement taking these reports seriously, being able to do anything at this point.
John:
Like all these things get reported to the authorities.
John:
It's like it's like reporting a stolen bicycle to the police.
John:
Basically, I think stolen bicycle probably has a higher priority to the police than anonymous Internet death threats.
John:
Uh, stolen bicycle, you're disappointed about it and it might've been expensive, but it's not a big deal.
John:
But series of considered death threats associated at plus your real address being sent out to people.
John:
Like you don't even care if the person who sent that death threat meant it.
John:
All you care is that other people who might be seriously unbalanced now have your address and now hate you because they've been riled up by this group or whatever.
John:
And yet what the heck can the police do?
John:
They're not tech savvy.
John:
They can't get IP addresses for these people.
John:
Even if they could, could they track it down to, you know, it's just,
John:
I don't know what the solution to that is, but I can tell you that I would imagine law enforcement maybe would put on a good face, but what the hell are they going to do?
John:
They're not going to give you a personal bodyguard for the rest of your life, and unless you're rich, you can't afford to have a personal bodyguard.
John:
You're not a celebrity with an entourage and a compound in a fortress.
John:
You're a person living in a house or an apartment, and now you're scared for your life, and the police tell you realistically there's nothing they can do about it.
John:
So I don't know what we can do about that, but we're not doing a good job right now.
John:
And this is a new kind of threat.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's kind of like... And people shrug it off, but as many people pointed out, that crazy misogynist guy who went and shot up that school, where was that?
John:
I forget what that was.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It was a while ago.
John:
But anyway, this guy had...
John:
had a series of, you know, anti-woman screeds that he had written on the internet, YouTube's videos that he had written, then he went and just shot up a bunch of women and himself, right?
John:
It's not as if we're saying, oh, this is never going to happen.
John:
Like, it has happened in the past.
John:
This is a plausible threat that some crazy person who hates women and has put all his hatred and all his pain in life into that can get a gun and go shoot people up.
John:
So when you make a threat like that, it's like, haha, funny troll, that would never happen, right?
John:
It has already happened.
John:
It is so plausible.
John:
And yet...
Marco:
we have no tools to deal with it all we can do is like well we'll have to wait till someone shows up with the gun and then maybe we can do something about it and it's like it's too late now yeah well and that's that's why i think like you know you're right that like there's always going to be like this like a baseline number of disturbed people in the world that you know we just can't do anything about that like we have like that's they're always going to be there and we can you know we can attempt to
Marco:
do our best to produce fewer crazy disturbed people in the world that that's the best we can really do and we can try to find them and treat them or imprison them or whatever like but that's a that's a really hard problem to ever eradicate it's like we're going to eradicate all bad people and well that's you know that's not real
Marco:
But I do think there's a lot to be said for removing the incentives here.
Marco:
So right now, if Twitter removes the ability for crazy people to coordinate their efforts and stalk people and creep people out and dox them and everything...
John:
those people all have different places they can go they can all go to private message boards they can go to i mean that's where they are they're coordinating on these private message boards they're not even the worst thing is they're not the message boards aren't even private they're probably these people aren't the brightest but like no obviously public message boards where they're talking about how they're going to do these things that if they had real names and addresses associated with these posts you could arrest them all now for the things they're all doing and talking about are already illegal it's just that well you just have no idea who they are
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that's like the you know, that's that's never going to be solved like we that like that problem, the way the way the Internet works that like that's anonymous coordination of things is always going to be possible.
Marco:
It's always going to be and it's just going to keep getting easier as tools get better, you know, that we're never going to solve that problem.
Marco:
what we can solve or what we can help, what we can reduce is the access people have to anybody they want, anytime they want.
Marco:
And that's what I'm saying.
Marco:
I think we need to really rethink these social systems we've built and to say, is this really a good idea to allow this kind of
John:
totally like open you know in a way you know democratic but like but like what would your solution be like you make it like live journal where you only have to invite people to see your Twitter you can already protect your Twitter feed but that's just not how Twitter works like the openness of it that anybody can follow you and that anybody can contribute like when it's working well and when people are all nice to each other that is the beauty of Twitter that's the beauty of you know life of relationships with people so I don't see how you can fix that without you know sort of going insular and making everybody sort of
John:
in their own little cocoons, like that would take away what's good about Twitter.
John:
Like, I'm like, when I think about how to try to fix this, I think for the people who are doing all these bad things, the people, those, those people in that group who live in the first world, who otherwise have more or less comfortable lives.
John:
And, you know, because you don't know what country these people and they could have, they could be in war torn countries that were currently bombing, uh,
John:
And their whole family is dead and they're starving to death.
John:
And they're an internet cafe somewhere or whatever, like so many more problems.
John:
But if your baseline comfort is taken care of and you sort of like have food and have shelter, but you're still super angry at the world, which is probably a large portion of this thing.
John:
It's like if we could have helped those people have their lives and
John:
turn out differently and have the things that influence them be different they would not be doing this now like it's the long-term plan of like we have to change society so that people are not raised in an environment where they see women as less than human and direct all their anger at them when things don't go the way they want you know what i mean like it
John:
that's the long-term solution it's like how do i think i have a more pessimistic view of like the twitter type stuff you can't like you said you can't stop them from making anonymous chat boards you're never going to you can't get rid of anonymity and i don't think the solution is to not give people public access to you like to retreat to your compound to to keep yourself in a circle people who all you we just need to we need to make a a society in a world that produces fewer of these people who are who are this angry about these things you know
Casey:
Yeah, and I think, Marco, your point about when you're designing Overcast, when you were designing all the other things you've designed in the past, and not encouraging that kind of nefarious behavior, a lot of times I ask myself or sometimes others, and I think a lot of good-intentioned individuals ask yourself,
Casey:
you know, what can I really do?
Casey:
Well, something that may seem as silly, but really obviously isn't silly is you doing the right thing and trying your best to not encourage nefarious behavior and overcast.
Casey:
That's something that can be done.
Casey:
That's what you, the royal you can do is make those decisions and make them intelligently and try to do the right thing.
Casey:
Even if it's the harder thing, do the right thing to prevent this kind of BS behavior.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I don't... Well, I don't know what else to do.
Marco:
You know, I think... I really do think there is a lot that we can... There's a lot of low-hanging fruit with the design of these systems that we can do to improve conditions.
Marco:
And yeah, we're not going to get rid of these problems totally, but we can certainly start to address them and start to reduce their impact and start to reduce the incentive to be problematic on these systems.
Marco:
Like, if Twitter just had some simple filters you could set, like, I would love... Like, I would love for...
Marco:
Whenever I say anything remotely controversial, like which text editor I prefer, which is more dangerous to discuss than the Palestinian situation, whenever I say anything about text editors, I would prefer to have some kind of setting on Twitter where I could say, don't even show in my timeline any responses from people who maybe I don't follow or are not within two degrees of following or something like that.
Marco:
Because sometimes it gets really out of hand and I can't handle it.
Marco:
And I can't even imagine like if you have if you have a bigger audience or and especially like if you're a woman with a big audience and you say anything remotely controversial like I can't even imagine what like there are there are many people not not least of which celebrities but there are many people out there who would leave a control like that on all the time.
John:
Yeah, I think that's actually an actionable thing because we talked about how you could have a protected account or it's open to the public.
John:
And I think that the openness is a strength of Twitter.
John:
But if there was a range between there where you could do something like Marco said, where this is kind of techie, but like
John:
Set up rules that say, don't show me replies from someone who doesn't follow me, who has fewer than 50 followers, whose account was created in the last month.
John:
Like basically sock puppet detection or a degrees of separation limit or a temporary degrees of separation limit because you know you just said something controversial.
John:
Those are controls that you can give individuals that is not turning Twitter into like LiveJournal or like some private type thing.
John:
Twitter is still open, but give people control.
John:
And like some of the things people have been doing outside the system of like, have you seen the community block lists where they will sort of pull together their blocks?
John:
Because everyone is blocking the same sort.
John:
And I know there's SOC purpose and they just recycle the accounts and everything like that.
John:
But.
John:
just to have a communal block list that can be shared among people so that if you know if basically the decent people all band together chances are good that one of the decent people in the circle has already blocked this troll so you'll never see his tweet and you didn't have to see it and block it like why are we all individually blocking the same stupid accounts as they wander through saying terrible things to people right
John:
if one person could block it we could all benefit now there are downsides to communal block lists as well but this is the type of feature that if twitter supported it and twitter was more serious about those type of controls you could make a communal block list there could be a master block list of sock puppets there could like it becomes a big thing it becomes and this has to be part of twitter stuff anyway like dealing with abuse in the system becomes a major part of what anyone who runs any big community side knows suddenly you find out your real job is just spending all your time moderating and dealing with trolls and dealing with sock puppets and dealing with hacks and
John:
stuff like that and that's probably not avoidable but you know low-hanging fruit twitter could start by making their reporting system for abuse be a lot friendlier to the people who are reporting it a lot clearer a lot nicer framed in terms of someone who is in crisis not in terms of here's a dry clinical form that protects us as a corporation and doesn't really make any acknowledgement of what you might be going through
Marco:
Real-time follow-up from Holgate in the chat room.
Marco:
Apparently, Twitter verified accounts, which just make me angry, Twitter verified accounts already have features I've been talking about.
John:
yeah no that i've mentioned that i've been talking about that on twitter people why isn't verified something anybody can get if if anybody like like if you're like we would pay for it like whatever it costs twitter in terms of like they can even make a profit on it whatever it costs them in terms of manpower and time like because there is some you know it's not an automatic system like someone has to verify your id you probably have to make a phone call maybe you have to send someone a fax because it's 1991 again like whatever you have to do right that because people do get verified check marks but it's not on demand so a lot of these people who are getting all this abuse they
John:
The trolls make fake accounts and pretend to be them.
John:
And then the people, the angry people get re angry all over again because they believe a fake tweet really came to happen to Brianna's the other day.
John:
They made a fake account with her, made her say something terrible.
John:
And she got attacked from 50 different directions again.
John:
Right.
John:
Why does she not have a verified checkmark?
John:
Oh, it's because she's not important enough because she can't control it.
John:
She should be able to call Twitter on the phone and say, here's 100 bucks.
John:
Verify my damn account.
John:
I'll send you like IDs and stuff like that.
John:
That is an example of another piece of low-hanging fruit.
John:
Anybody should be able to get verified if they're willing to take the time and money.
John:
I mean, if you want to do the cost, you're like, oh, that cuts out people who can't afford $100 or whatever.
John:
There's two ways.
John:
Twitter can just be more proactive at realizing, look, this person is under onslaught.
John:
Give them a stupid verified checkmark.
John:
Don't charge them for it.
John:
But they're not.
John:
They're dropping the ball on that.
John:
And there's no way you can request verification and actually get it because...
John:
You know, you can say, I've been impersonated, I've been attacked, look at all these people that I'm blocking, look at my daily activity, can I get a verified checkmark?
John:
And you get nothing from Twitter.
John:
So, it is insane that those people don't have verified checkmarks, and the reporting system is stupid and broken.
John:
And this is before we get to the things that you were talking about, of like, having those type of controls about seeing replies, and having sock puppet detection, and all the type of things anybody who is like...
John:
you know, does anything with big data.
John:
Like I feel like it's so easy for humans to detect sock puppets and, and trolls.
John:
I think computers could do a really good job of it too.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, one, one more item before we finally leave this topic.
John:
Someone, someone in the chat room was complaining like, you know, isn't it okay to just dislike Anita Sarkeesian?
John:
Who's another person who's talked about, uh, feminist issues and, uh, sexism in games.
John:
Uh,
John:
Uh, you know, can I, can I dislike her or whatever?
John:
Yeah, yeah, fine.
John:
Right.
John:
And he goes like, I just happen to believe that she's a snake oil salesman who's lying to us and blah, blah, blah.
John:
So I'm putting one more link in the, uh, the show notes here is, uh, this is not a conspiracy theory.
John:
It's a ongoing video series that I think is only about two parts so far.
John:
It's by, oh, who is it by?
John:
Um, you guys should know.
John:
It's the guy, the guy did everything's remix.
Casey:
Kirby Ferguson.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think this is like a funding thing where I paid for it, whatever you had to pay when you needed a Kickstarter or whatever.
John:
So I'm seeing the new things as they release.
John:
I'm assuming you'll be able to see all of them eventually once this is all over.
John:
But anyway, consider funding it.
John:
They're really good.
John:
I think you can see the first part for free.
John:
The reason I put this in there is...
John:
there is a very long long long history and this is something as an engineering major i can't believe i'm saying this but like if i could make everyone in the entire world take one uh sort of major in a college education i would make everybody learn about history because everything you know it's a cliche to say it but if you know anything about history how can you not see the same things happening because people don't haven't changed that much in the past 10 000 years or so anyway conspiracy theories have a long and illustrious history there are readily explainable obvious reasons why people love the
John:
People love conspiracy theories.
John:
People fall conspiracy theories.
John:
They believe them with every fiber of their being.
John:
And it is just part of the human condition.
John:
And yet when people are in the midst of a conspiracy theory, like that there is a giant cabal of feminists who are controlling the gaming industry.
John:
And Anita Sarkeesian is stealing money from people and getting rich and selling snake oil.
John:
These crazy conspiracy theories, which everyone else sees as crazy, seem perfectly rational to a lot of people.
John:
So I feel like rather than attacking that issue head on, if we just learn about the history of conspiracy theories and how they work with the human mind and society, you will eventually, I have to feel, at the end of all that, perhaps re-examine what you believe about whatever conspiracy theory you happen to believe in.
John:
So anyway, it's a really entertaining video series.
John:
Even if it doesn't change your mind about Anita Sarkeesian, you should still watch it and fund it because it's good.
Casey:
It's sick to me that we still have to talk about this, but I'm glad we have.
John:
I try to like, I could talk about it every week and I tweet about it all the time too, but it's just like, I don't know.
John:
I mean, we have to do something and talking about it is one of those things.
John:
No, no, I'm not complaining.
John:
This is a tech show.
John:
I know people will complain, but like we saved it for the after show.
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, this could have been like a quote official topic.
Marco:
We just didn't get to it until the after show.
Marco:
But I mean, it is an important enough story in our industry.
Marco:
Like this is not, this is just as valid of a topic as what we think of the new iMac and all that crap.
Marco:
I mean, this is more important than everything that we had as real topics tonight.
John:
This is not a how to make the world a better place podcast, but we're in the world too.