The Elder Programmer Look
Marco:
Hey, have we ever recorded this show before noon?
Marco:
I would be surprised if John has ever recorded a podcast before noon.
John:
No, I've done a bunch of morning ones for usually like people in the UK and stuff.
Marco:
Have you even shaved yet?
John:
Shaved yet?
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
I don't think you understand my shaving schedule.
John:
Yeah, maybe you've completed the morning shave, but not the evening shave.
Casey:
Right, right.
John:
no that's not i shave like once a week ish uh i thought i figured you know your your thick italian heritage you just like just it's just constantly just it is oh it is it's just i don't feel the need to shave it off now that i'm not going into an office
John:
all the time even when i was going to an office honestly it was uh pretty hit or miss in the later years yes you slowly become like the elder programmer look and it's just right yeah because like one or two days it's like stubble and then people start asking you whether you're wearing a beard and then you shave and then just repeats
Marco:
By the way, if anybody asks, today is not December 26th.
Marco:
It's December 24th.
Marco:
And, you know, I figure if Roman emperors were able to dictate whatever they felt like the calendar doing, I feel like I can do it too.
Marco:
So today is really actually December 24th in our family.
Marco:
And we have our own custom calendar.
Marco:
Only for this year, because this has been, oh, this has been an experience.
Marco:
So we drove halfway upstate on the day before Christmas Eve on Friday, this past Friday.
Marco:
The idea was to drive the rest of the way upstate to our family's place on Saturday, Christmas Eve day.
Marco:
And we woke up on Saturday morning and our kid had a massive fever.
Marco:
And we were like, oh, no.
Marco:
So, you know, here we are, you know, scheduling to go up to visit like the whole family, including, you know, his grandparents who were, you know.
Marco:
We want to be careful with what we bring to them.
Marco:
And so we were like, oh, no, we can't go up like this.
Marco:
We can't bring this very fever-y kid.
Marco:
First of all, we can't make him sit in a car for three hours.
Marco:
That's not super great when you're feeling sick.
Marco:
Second of all, we don't want to get them sick.
Marco:
So we're like, oh, God, what do we do?
Marco:
It's Christmas Eve.
Marco:
And so we worked out this plan where we were basically going to wait until the fever broke and talk to a doctor and see when safe and everything.
Marco:
And then so as we're working this out, we get reports from some of his school classmates' parents.
Marco:
his whole class basically has flu a like it's the whole class cool it's the real flu many of them got tested it's it's influenza a real flu and now he's showing flus and we're like oh crap and it's christmas eve may i remind you it's not like anything's easily accessible or open or you know so we do like a telehealth thing which thank god that that even exists
Marco:
I mean, that's, that's an amazing thing.
Marco:
Like that's, I'm so happy that that's like, I think, you know, one of the, if there is such a thing as a silver lining for the COVID era, it's that I think we have way more access to virtual services than we used to.
Marco:
And even though telehealth existed before COVID, it was a much smaller and less commonly available thing for most insurance plans and stuff.
Marco:
Um, so now it's super easy.
Marco:
So we, we did telehealth, we had, and then, and then we had to get a prescription and
Marco:
And by this time, by the time that we had done the telehealth and done all this, it was 6 p.m.
Marco:
on Christmas Eve.
Marco:
Ugh.
Marco:
So try getting a prescription filled at 6 p.m.
Marco:
on Christmas Eve.
Marco:
So we did, we eventually found like a 24-hour pharmacy that was open Christmas Eve, had it sent there.
Marco:
It was a whole thing, you know, a whole thing, but we got it and
Marco:
Anyway, so we've had it and we're like, all right.
Marco:
The good thing about Christmas is that unlike things like, for example, Halloween, if you are sick on Halloween, you just miss everything because Halloween is a holiday that depends on the rest of the surrounding community celebrating at the same time you are celebrating it.
Marco:
Otherwise, you can't really go trick-or-treating.
Marco:
If you just show up on strangers' doors and knock on them on November 3rd, you're going to have a bad time, I think.
Marco:
But Christmas, it really just depends on when your family wants to celebrate it.
Marco:
It's basically within your own household for the most part, and so you can kind of celebrate it whenever you want.
Marco:
So we just delayed it.
Marco:
So yesterday, we sat inside and played video games all day.
Marco:
Big fan of Project High Rise right now.
Marco:
It's like a modern Sim Tower.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Casey:
Oh, I loved Sim Tower.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
But yeah, and so we just played video games all day.
Marco:
They tried to teach me how to play Don't Starve together, and I starved.
Marco:
Well, no, I died...
Marco:
almost instantly like i think i lasted maybe 90 seconds in the game before dying so that might not be a strength of mine uh but but certainly sim tower like games i'm enjoying so we just did all that yesterday and this afternoon we are driving upstate and it's today is fake christmas eve and tomorrow is fake christmas and we're gonna celebrate it damn it anyway so i'm very thankful for modern medicine and for our flexible family you know in their scheduling
Marco:
And yeah, it's been a time.
Marco:
Oh, and 24-Hour Pharmacy is also thankful for that.
Marco:
Did you give Adam COVID tests?
Marco:
Yes and no.
Marco:
And had he gotten his flu shot?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, this is the thing.
Marco:
So he had COVID on Halloween.
Marco:
So that's why I'm such an expert in what it's like to miss Halloween.
Marco:
That was awful.
Marco:
And because we thought we might be exposed to it, we didn't get any boosters or anything yet.
Marco:
Because we're like, all right, let's wait two months, like they say, and then we'll get all of our boosters.
Marco:
And that puts us about now.
Marco:
Whoops.
John:
Yeah, I always remember like when they would start advertising the flu shots and they'd be advertising them.
John:
And like before, you know, Halloween, I'd be like, that seems a little early for flu shots.
John:
But I eventually gave in and said, all right, well, I'll just get it as soon as it's available.
John:
So let this be a lesson to the listener, even though sometimes it seems like they're giving out the flu shots way too early and it's not even close to flu season yet.
John:
It's a good idea to get them when you can, because it's easy to forget.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Last year, we got them all regularly on schedule, and we had a totally fine, smooth winter.
Marco:
I know it's on 100% or whatever, but at this point, I'll take any improvement in chances, even if it's on 100%.
Marco:
I'll take it.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up, and it starts with Brad Crittenden, who writes, I got a butterfly keyboard class action lawsuit settlement notice.
Casey:
It claims that they will pay $300 to $395.
Casey:
I have no recollection of this flying by.
Casey:
I probably filled it out and just don't remember, but I have zero recollection of this.
Marco:
So here's the thing.
Marco:
I never filled it out, and I got one.
Marco:
Well, I got the notice saying I'm entitled to one or whatever, but I'm not going to submit it because... See, I never... As far as I can recall...
Marco:
i think i only got it repaired once or even did i ever get it repaired or did i just not see i can't even remember if i actually ever got one repaired um so that's why i'm like you know it's because the the class action is basically like if you got a butterfly keyboard laptop repaired by apple depending on how many times you got it repaired you have a certain number you have a certain you know payout of you know a hundred bucks or 200 300 bucks apparently but
Marco:
it's it's not a huge amount of money because like i mean look the the real problem with the butterfly keyboards well there were two real problems number one people getting them repaired out of warranty had to pay quite a lot of quite a lot of money and more than that um remember the price was i believe like over 500 to get to get one repair out of warranty so there's that issue which this you know i guess partially addresses but doesn't fully address the other issue is
Marco:
any replacement you got would have the same problem eventually.
Marco:
And so, really, the whole laptop was incredibly devalued over time.
Marco:
That was the big problem.
Marco:
And so, you know, this is... I'm glad Apple, you know...
Marco:
got sued over the butterfly keyboards because frankly they should have um they they you know one one issuance of that keyboard was bad enough and then to keep issuing it year after year after year after year claiming they'd fixed it was beyond negligent and and borderline fraudulent um but so so they should have been held held liable for that and it seems like they've been held a little bit liable for that but ultimately you know if you're if you were an owner of a
John:
this kind of helps a little bit but it doesn't really address the actual value that you lost by having that laptop and having to eventually you know sell or trade it in or get it repaired out of warranty i was excited to get my money for this and then i realized oh wait my butterfly keyboard that broke wasn't mine it was on my works laptop it was annoying though you're gonna get your work laptop taken away and you gotta have a replacement and all your stuff is on it it's even more annoying with all the work you know because they own the machine so it's not like you can just copy stuff off of it because they don't let you attach external drives and blah blah blah so
John:
Anyway, I hope my old workplace gets the money they have coming to them for all the butterfly keyboards that broke.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't end up getting any of these repaired.
Casey:
In fact, I'm trying to remember.
Casey:
So we still have, you know, Aaron, what was my adorable.
Casey:
Now Aaron's adorable in the house.
Casey:
And once every few months, she'll be like, oh, my such and such key is sticking.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Sure is.
Casey:
I bet you're right.
Casey:
But anyways, I never got a repair.
Casey:
And then I think the one or two other MacBook Pros that I had during the butterfly era were either works or have already been sold off.
Casey:
So yeah, I'd never had a repair.
Casey:
And that probably explains why I never got this notice.
Casey:
But I'm glad to hear that this is a thing.
Casey:
And I agree with you, Marco, that it's one thing to release a keyboard that's flawed.
Casey:
And maybe you didn't know it.
Casey:
Maybe you thought, oh, it'll work itself out.
Casey:
And OK, fine.
Casey:
The thing that bothered me about this whole fiasco, well, one of the things that bothered me about this whole fiasco was the fact that, like you said, they just kept saying, no, no, no, it's fine.
Casey:
No, it's fine.
Casey:
No, it's fine.
Casey:
No, it's fine.
Casey:
This time we fixed it.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Oh, we added a gasket or whatever it was.
Casey:
I don't remember the details.
Casey:
We added a gasket.
Casey:
That'll fix it.
Marco:
Yeah, because you're right.
Marco:
They were also saying, nothing's wrong.
Marco:
Keep changing it.
Marco:
Nothing's wrong.
Marco:
Oh, wait, we changed it again.
Marco:
Nothing's wrong.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
There's no flaw.
Marco:
We fixed the flaw.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
There's no flaw.
Marco:
Oh, we fixed it again.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it was a rough time.
Casey:
Huge Apple energy.
Casey:
Not to mention the fact that it sucked even when it was working, but we'll move beyond that for now.
Casey:
I mean, what are you going to do?
Casey:
But no, I'm glad to see that this is finding, as late as it is, I'm glad to see it's finding some sort of resolution for regular people.
John:
Two related things to this one.
John:
I couldn't find this feedback for the show, but we did get some feedback from somebody through some channel, live streams, that said that they had a Mac with a butterfly keyboard and it went bad and they brought it to the Apple store and they were informed that, oh, the Apple repair program for the butterfly keyboards that said, hey, if you have a problem, you know, whatever it's called, the extended repair program, if you have a problem, we'll replace it.
John:
that program has ended so this person had a butterfly keyboard brought it in and and they're no longer eligible to get it repaired for free or for cheap because the apple we talked about this one apple wrote the program it's like okay at a certain point uh apple says yeah we have this repair program because we realized we put out a defective keyboard but at a certain point we just want to stop paying for that so we're going to and i think we're past that point now which is pretty crappy so if you do want it repaired you're on the hook for whatever the you know 500 repair bill it really just
John:
probably want to throw that uh into the sea at that point the second thing is that just from some brief googling i believe i still have a butterfly keyboard mac that's in semi-active use the original retina macbook air had it right the intel one yeah the first one the 2018 model but the 2019 did not yeah maybe oh maybe oh maybe i got the 2019 one i have to look it up um but there was there was an intel macbook air retina that didn't have the butterfly keyboard
John:
hmm yeah i'll double check but i was thinking oh maybe you know if that one ever goes bad i'll get paid but apparently i won't uh again according to that feedback that i can't find so that's pretty crappy like i understand the repair programs can't last forever but it's kind of like like what's the point of the repair program if you're saying we're sorry for putting out a defective laptop but we have a timer on the on the lifetime of your computer so like i mean it's more it seems like the keyboard is even more likely to fail after the three or four or five or however many years after that time period is up but they're just saying yeah we can't
John:
pay for that forever because we basically know there's probably some graph of like over time what are the odds that a keyboard will fail and at a certain point it becomes like ruinous not ruinous but very expensive for Apple to repair because the percentage of them that are going to go bad after you know 10 years is approaching like you know 25% or something
Marco:
It does make sense to have a time limit on it.
Marco:
I just think this time limit was probably too short.
Marco:
At some point, they have to stop manufacturing and keeping the parts and the service equipment and stuff like that.
Marco:
It does make sense to have an expiration date, but that expiration date should be...
Marco:
However many years their products are expected to be in use, that number of years after they stop being for sale.
Marco:
And so maybe it's like seven years, you know, whatever it is, like as long as they can expect a laptop to reasonably still be in use by most people.
Marco:
It should have covered that duration, and it didn't.
John:
They don't have to keep making the butterfly keyboard parts.
John:
That's not the only solution available to them.
John:
They can do what they have done in the past, which is that you bring something in to get repaired, and they're like, oh, we don't make parts for that anymore, and we don't make that product anymore, but we recognize that you've got a broken thing and it's our fault, so here is the new version.
John:
We've heard lots and lots of stories of Apple doing that.
John:
They basically give you a new laptop or a new iPod back in the day that's not the one that you had, that is better than the one you had, but it's the only option available to them because they don't make the old one anymore.
John:
They could always do that, but of course that would cost money.
John:
And that would cost way more money.
Marco:
Well, you stopped shipping a defective keyboard for years.
Marco:
I know, but this was not a small number of affected products, even though they kept saying, it's only a tiny percentage, but we all know it's a much bigger percentage.
Marco:
It's a tiny percentage after six months.
Marco:
Is it a tiny percentage after six years?
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
This would have been a massive number if they actually did that.
Marco:
And I've heard of that happening, and one time it even happened for me.
Marco:
back in the white plastic MacBook days.
Marco:
But it's not super common.
Marco:
I feel like you have to have a fairly exceptional case, and I think it has to go through some levels of approval before they just give you a new thing to replace your old broken thing.
Marco:
So that's not that common of a thing.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Nebula, a streaming service created and owned by some of the internet's most thoughtful creators, offering full length and ad free videos earlier than anywhere else, as well as Nebula exclusives.
Marco:
Personally,
Marco:
I love Nebula because here's what happened.
Marco:
You know, I'm a YouTube, you know, video addict, you know, like many of us.
Marco:
And I started noticing that many of my favorite creators who would have all this cool, like usually it's like educational explainer kind of content, people like Wendover Productions and Real Engineering and...
Marco:
Practical Engineering and Georgia DAO.
Marco:
I was seeing all these people who videos I was watching and they would keep saying, hey, by the way, we started the streaming service.
Marco:
We're over here on Nebula and all of our stuff there is ad free and you get some bonus content or some exclusive features.
Marco:
And I was like, OK, I got to check this out.
Marco:
And it is so great.
Marco:
They have so many creators, you know, the ones I already knew about, plus so many more that I've discovered that I also like because it's kind of in a similar vein or, you know, similar like, you know, quality levels that of what I was hoping for.
Marco:
And everything there is ad free and it's full length.
Marco:
You know, it's like it's like getting the director's cut or getting like, you know, bonus features.
Marco:
Plus, they have these exclusives that are like even bigger and kind of higher production value or more in depth than you could often go in a place like YouTube.
Marco:
And so I'm super happy with Nebula.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Nebula for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's move on and talk about Stable Diffusion, baby.
Casey:
And apparently artists can now opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion.
Casey:
This is an article on the Technology Review.
Casey:
Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion.
Casey:
The company behind it has announced Stability.ai will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website called Have I Been Trained?
Casey:
That's in the spirit of Have I Been Pwned, isn't it?
Casey:
That's so good.
Casey:
That allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train stable diffusion.
Casey:
Artists will be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data.
John:
I mean, you don't even need to read the summary or the article.
John:
Just the headline, which I've copied and pasted directly into the notes, just the headline is enough for you.
John:
It's kind of like the Ian Betteridge laws for you to just say no.
No.
John:
Artists can now opt.
John:
No, you're not getting it.
John:
The idea is not, oh, we'll steal all your stuff and build a commercial product off it and make money.
John:
But you can always track us down, find out we're doing that and tell us to stop.
John:
Everything's fine now, right?
John:
No, it's not.
John:
We'll siphon money from your bank account slowly over time.
John:
But if you catch us doing that and tell us to stop, we'll stop.
John:
Everything's fine now, right?
John:
No problem anymore?
John:
No, this is not the solution.
John:
You can't take people's stuff, use it, and say, but we'll stop if you ask us to.
John:
It should not be an opt-out.
John:
Would you like to opt out of having your intellectual property stolen?
John:
Please offer that to Disney.
John:
Hey, Disney, we'll be using your intellectual property, but if you ask us to stop, we will.
John:
It's hilarious that someone thought this was a good idea.
Marco:
Well, I mean, look, I know this is probably unpopular, so maybe I shouldn't even bother.
Marco:
But I think the issue of copyright and rights in terms of whether AI can be trained on your copyrighted material...
Marco:
is a weird, blurry situation.
Marco:
I don't think it's clear cut.
Marco:
Because if you think about what training is and how it might relate to real world analogs to which we have precedent, it's kind of like I am able to view a copyrighted work if it's being shown to me in a legal way.
Marco:
I'm able to view it and remember it and learn from it.
Marco:
Artists everywhere are able to look at other artists' work, be inspired by them, and generate new things in their spirit.
Marco:
And so it is kind of a weird, blurry line in the sense that the AI models that are being trained in this data, they're not making illegal copies and distributing illegal copies of the original works.
Marco:
they are, in a way, viewing them.
Marco:
But they're not people, so they're not... Right.
Marco:
And so that's... And I know there was recently a court thing somewhere that said that they basically failed, that AI stuff, the output of AI models does not qualify for copyright because it was not created by a human.
Marco:
And I think that's also going to be worked out over time in the court system because I think that's also...
John:
probably i think that's actually that that ruling is actually more questionable than in my opinion than the whether they're allowed to take your stuff because they're not created by a human thing is fuzzy in the okay so the program is in human but a human runs the program and tweaks the output and so on and so forth so you can always say this isn't copyrightable because it wasn't created by a human it's like well the program didn't create it on its own it's just sitting there waiting for a human to it's like saying
John:
This is not copyrightable because it was created by Photoshop and Photoshop's not a human.
John:
Well, someone ran Photoshop and used it and clicked around and did stuff, right?
John:
How many tweaks to the output do you have to do for it to suddenly become a copyrightable, right?
John:
I think that is actually more fuzzy.
John:
What is not fuzzy, in my opinion, and again, who knows what the law will be, but in my personal opinion, it is not fuzzy at all that you cannot take, that you can't take works that you don't have the rights to and use it to train an AI model because, and I talked about this on Upgrade a while back, like it just, in my opinion,
John:
there's there's no like i i see where people think it might be fuzzy but the difference is that it's not a person doing you're feeding it into a program and the value of that program is nothing without being fed input you have to feed input into the program if you if i just give you that program and say well it's a program that i wrote so anything that comes out of it is mine sure okay go ahead but it's like okay well my program doesn't work unless i feed it data okay well now what data where are you getting that data from
John:
I'll just feed it any data I feel like.
John:
The point of the acquisition of data, you are taking that data and using it.
John:
It's like taking a font and using it to make a sign.
John:
This is more complicated because you can't copyright a font.
John:
But anyway, if you want to use the official version of a font or whatever, you have to pay for it.
John:
You can use a clone of the font or whatever, which gets things complicated.
John:
But anyway, I don't think you can take people's copyrighted material and use it to train an AI model.
John:
I just don't.
John:
Without some kind of compensation for them.
John:
Because...
John:
You are directly deriving value from their work.
John:
And I don't think the analogy to people makes any sense because the program is not a person.
John:
Yes, a person can look at art and make derivative art, right?
John:
But it's not a person.
John:
It's a person using a program, right?
John:
It's like, well, if I use a program to copy this, I didn't copy your art and resell it.
John:
I use the CP program.
John:
and the cp program copied your art but then once i had it from the cp program then i sold it but you know it's fine because the cp program did just what a person does looks at the art right now it's like it's just a more complicated version of the cp now will lawyers agree i think it really depends on especially in our country how rich the corporation is on each side of the of the case when it comes to like if disney arrives and says hey we see you've trained your ai model on all of our intellectual property probably disney's going to win and
John:
because based on the precedent and in this case i think disney would be right that you can't train your model on you know stuff that made by disney uh but as i said an upgrade disney can train an ai model on stuff made by disney like i'm not saying ai models are useless disney can train all the models they want on all their own intellectual property and use it to generate stuff and i think the stuff that disney generates from disney's own intellectual property should be copyrightable because humans are running that
John:
and doing the prompts and tweaking the output and whatever.
John:
And I think that should be copyrightable.
John:
So, so far, the one legal case that we've heard of has gone the opposite way as I expected.
John:
But this is, you know, I think you're right, Mark, that lots of people have different opinions on this.
John:
I just feel like mine is...
John:
very strongly against using other people's intellectual property.
John:
And I think the problem with this stable diffusion thing is it's kind of admitting that, hey, we probably shouldn't be using your stuff because they will immediately stop using it if you ask them.
John:
So based on that silly policy, they're saying, oh, we understand that you have the right to make us stop.
John:
Or maybe they're just trying to say we're being nice and we'll stop if you want.
John:
But given my opinion that it is totally wrong for them to be taking that stuff in the first place, I think this is a dumb policy.
Marco:
I think this is one of those areas where we're going to look back at whatever our opinions are now.
Marco:
We're going to look back in five or ten years and be like, man, we were way off.
Marco:
And I don't know which direction we're going to go in, but I think this is going to be a rapidly evolving policy.
Marco:
And what's acceptable and what's legal are both also going to rapidly evolve, you know?
Marco:
I agree with you on the output being copyrightable.
Marco:
Because again, if you use Photoshop to flood fill an area with a pattern, does that not qualify for copyright because the program made the pattern and you didn't?
Marco:
Obviously, I think using it, I think the output is copyrightable.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think the input is really questionable, and it's not clear-cut.
Marco:
I think one area where it could kind of fall legally into some kind of settlement is that when you watch a movie and you get the little FBI warning at the beginning,
Marco:
There are certain rights that you have and certain rights that you don't.
Marco:
You are not, for instance, allowed to buy a copy of the movie on Blu-ray or whatever and then show it to an audience who has paid to be there.
Marco:
You aren't allowed to use it commercially.
Marco:
You aren't allowed to do public performances.
Marco:
And the same thing applies to most music and things like that.
Marco:
And so you could argue...
Marco:
If you are a copyright holder, you could maybe argue like, well, the use of your model viewing or listening to my content is not licensed because, you know, it's not personal private home use or whatever.
Marco:
So like they could maybe get something in there.
Marco:
But I think overall, the concept I still currently at least I still fall on the side of.
Marco:
The AI is just watching and learning from things in a similar, well, maybe not too similar, but it's in an analogous way to how humans might see something and be inspired by it over time.
John:
But what do you have to say about the idea that the program doesn't have any rights?
John:
Computer programs don't have rights right now.
John:
Right.
John:
So and I think this specific computer room definitely shouldn't have rights because it's not a sentient being.
John:
So, yes, it is doing something similar to what humans do, broad strokes, but it doesn't have any rights because it is not a sentient being.
John:
And all of our laws apply to sentient beings.
John:
right no for that i mean i i i guess i agree with that but i don't i don't see this as as whether the ai has has rights you know itself i see this as like you're trying to give it creative control like saying it's saying like it created this thing therefore now the program has rights to it i mean if you wanted to say that i would say great now the program can do whatever it wants with it you're like
John:
Well, the program doesn't want to do anything with it.
John:
The human that ran the program, though, wants to sell it for an in and out purchase.
John:
So it's like, OK, if you actually want to assign rights, assign them to the program.
John:
And then you're like, that's dumb.
John:
The program can't do anything.
John:
Exactly.
John:
That's why it doesn't have any rights.
Marco:
Well.
Marco:
But I think it's more complicated than that.
Marco:
When you dive into the technical part of it, like, okay, well, what about when Google indexes fact data off of pages?
Marco:
And then you do a fact query and it shows one of those Google knowledge things.
Marco:
That's a questionable area of copyright as well, right?
Marco:
But I think that's very, very similar to this.
John:
It is.
John:
But see, here's the thing, like you're saying, like how this turns out, it can go a couple of different ways.
John:
It really depends on like, you know, in the case of the Google thing, like when that case comes, I don't remember what the resolution of the case.
John:
I think Google won that one.
John:
But like when when the cases come out, like there are two strong forces here.
John:
One is rich corporations want.
John:
uh want something right in this case google is the rich corporation it wanted to be able to take summaries of web pages and show them as its own output right which is arguably you're right very similar to what these models do but i'm pretty sure and you know i'll follow up on this for i'm pretty sure google won that case and did they win it because they were right or did they win it because they're google and they're rich and they have a lot of lawyers right see also disney and copyright right exactly right so i think
John:
But you're using the analogy to what Google does.
John:
I kind of agree that Google, it's a little bit fuzzier, but because, you know, Google's whole thing is they're, you know, every one of their search results is arguably a summary or whatever.
John:
But Google is trying to be a venue for you to go somewhere.
John:
And by putting the summary things, they're making you not go there.
John:
Like, it's...
John:
When a program is summarizing and providing an index or whatever, if you follow that road too far down, you're like, oh, you can't have search engines anymore because you're not allowed to reproduce any portion of my work, even a summary of it, if it's programmatically generated anywhere.
John:
And that gets absurd.
John:
Obviously, we think we should have search engines, so let's not make a dumb law like that.
John:
you can't even have browser caches if you if you follow that law too closely right but but then there but you know this is the kind of the new technical nuance that laws aren't great with okay but what about when they take my web page and they don't even provide a link to it and they just summarize the content and re smash it through and say oh here's the answer and it's provided by google and they don't give credit to my answer i'm the one who wrote that like you know grapes are poison to dogs on my web page and they just took my paragraph and summarized it or massaged it and put it on there right
John:
And, you know, again, I think Google won that case because they're rich, not because they're right.
John:
I would have decided that differently.
John:
But it's a nuanced ruling in that case, very nuanced, because I don't want to outlaw search engines or browser caches.
John:
In the case of the, you know, Disney finds someone's been training their AI models on, you know, Marvel superheroes, which absolutely has already happened, I'm sure.
John:
Right.
John:
And Disney gets angry and sues.
John:
Disney is probably going to win that because they have, you know, all the politicians in their pocket or whatever the paraphrase of line from The Godfather is.
John:
But on the other side of that, unlike the Google case, there is another side to that that is potentially just as powerful, which is people like free stuff.
John:
And combined with the fact that it's very difficult, it's not immediately obvious what has been used to train an AI model.
John:
And then mixed into that, these sort of academic things, which is like, well, they're not selling anything that's just part of academic research, and they should have broader purview to do things for non-commercial purposes or whatever, right?
John:
But...
John:
the fact that it's just going to be like, well, Disney can sue, but they can try to make laws in the U S but the world is bigger than the U S and anything that gets on the internet is everywhere.
John:
So good luck trying to stop people from making pictures of pregnant Sonic, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Pictures of pregnant Sonic, probably Sega would not like to exist, but people are going to make them and it's a derivative work.
John:
And that's probably a bad example.
John:
But anyway, like the,
John:
these AI models are going to create images and they're going to go everywhere if people want them.
John:
If it is a useful thing to have, it's going to be so hard to stop them.
John:
So the countervailing force here is at a certain point, the cases come and they're going to say, well, we think this should probably be illegal, but it's just so common and people really like it.
John:
And I know courts don't put an opinion that says, well, everybody does it, so it's fine.
John:
But practically speaking, you can end up with decisions that kind of lean in that direction.
John:
I'm sure there's some legal precedent of like, you know,
John:
like people who squat on a piece of land at a certain point they own it that doesn't make any sense you're like that doesn't seem fair but it's like but we have laws like that because it's even more absurd to do the opposite in some cases well we've been living on this land for 100 years but it you know you're going to kick us off because oh again in this country there's terrible analogies for that as well anyway i'm not doing well with analogies it's early in the morning what can i tell you you know so so it depends on when these cases come out i feel like there actually is
John:
something that may be equivalent to Disney trying to say, hey, again, legally, hey, we've decided that this is okay.
John:
Regardless of what the law ends up being, I think it is not right to take people's copyrighted work, train a model on it, and sell the results of that model's output.
John:
If that model ever becomes a sentient being,
John:
which is plausible in the future, then we'll have a different discussion.
John:
And that discussion will be what kind of rights do sentient computer programs have.
John:
And that is a very different discussion.
John:
But I want to be clear, none of these programs are sentient.
John:
No one is arguing that they are.
John:
So we can set that aside for a sci-fi future.
John:
But that's not what we're dealing with now.
Marco:
see i i see where you're coming from i don't agree i still think that would you agree if you're an artist and your work was being taken and then the results of it being sold we are artists so what would you think about somebody downloading all all episodes of atp we've ever made all the podcasts we've ever made and training a model on that yeah i don't think that's something and selling the results i don't think that's something you should do what if they what if they took uh you know the source code for overcast and and fed it into a program that tweaked it and then started selling new copies of overcast
John:
well i don't i don't release the source code so that's a little bit different but you know they can it can reverse compile because you release the binary and they can just generate the source code from that you've all seen that and the program doesn't care what the variable names are all a b c d and stuff because the program doesn't care about that but the program refactor decompiles it refactors it changes it a little bit and sells a new thing it's a derivative work it just looked at it just the same way a person would
Marco:
Well, see, and that I think, that's why I'm fairly hesitant to restrict the training side of things.
Marco:
Because in my opinion, I would rather use the systems we already have with copyright and fair use and trademark also, which is a little bit relevant in some of these things.
Marco:
But anyway, I'd rather use the systems we already have around copyright and fair use to...
Marco:
manage when things go wrong and when things are misused rather than say this new kind of technology that's really exciting and has a lot of good valid uses we're going to make it way harder and way less practical to create because you know if somebody uses an ai model that's been trained on whatever they could find if they use that to generate something that is too close to an existing copyrighted work or that is clearly a derivative work of a you know protected character or franchise or whatever
Marco:
We already have infrastructure in place to issue takedown notices, to sue for something being or not being fair use.
Marco:
We already have all those systems.
Marco:
And I think we are better off relying on that human judgment side rather than kneecapping this technology in its early days in ways that are extremely impractical.
Marco:
I mean, if you think about, look at a similar problem that we faced when making Web 2.0 and everything else.
Marco:
We had the rise of
Marco:
user-generated content sites, places like YouTube and Flickr and Tumblr and all these places.
Marco:
And you could say, legally speaking, you could say, it should be impossible for anyone to ever upload a copy of my work to these services.
Marco:
in practice that's really impractical and limiting and so kind of what you said a minute ago john like so really the the practice became all right well we're going to have the structure in place to manage when there are violations but it's not going to be perfect and it's not going to you know it's not going to be the the intellectual property ideal of having it be impossible to break the law but we're going to just make a process in place so that we can deal with when people do do things that are over the line the
John:
But their process is they have a program called Content ID that will immediately detect if you have, like, music playing in the background that's copyrighted, even if it's, like, this next house over, right?
John:
It is so incredibly fast and automated and defaults to rejecting, I mean, that...
John:
The YouTube video I wanted to see about Fusion that I think I might have mentioned on a past show is from Real Engineering, I think.
John:
It was rejected because by copyright ID from YouTube or whatever, because the music used in the background was copyrighted.
John:
And the music used in the background was from a set of licensable music that the channel had licensed.
John:
So the copyright ID thing is so automated and so strict and so defaulting to rejection that it says, oh, this is copyright.
John:
It's like, yeah, and I paid for it.
John:
I paid for it to use on my channel, but it's like, no, program says no.
John:
So if it becomes possible to programmatically detect if your AI training model was trained with any copyrighted data, no one will ever be able to upload any AI trained stuff to YouTube because YouTube will immediately detect it and reject it, even if you've paid for the rights, because that's the side they err on because...
John:
Big corporations don't like it.
John:
It's more like, you know, OK, so that's YouTube.
John:
But then what about the wider Internet like that?
John:
It'll be everywhere.
John:
And like I think again, I think AI models are still useful and can be useful, particularly for companies that want to train it on their own intellectual property.
John:
Like it is useful to train things on stuff that you own.
John:
And even an individual might not own enough to train a model, but there are licensable image sets that you can train on.
John:
That's also legally valid.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't think to your point about kneecapping this order.
John:
I don't think we need any new laws.
John:
My interpretation of the existing laws is this is already illegal.
John:
But the existing laws also provide lots of ways that it's legal.
John:
You know, Getty Images can sell image training sets.
John:
There are free public domain image training sets.
John:
If you would like to license an image training set from Disney, maybe they'll sell you one and then you can train your model on that.
John:
And then we have to have all the automated systems saying, OK, I can tell this was trained on X, Y and Z images and X, Y and Z images are from these licensable sets.
John:
And then you have to show that you license it just the same way the real engineering had to say, no, no, I licensed this music thing from this company.
John:
I'm allowed to use it in my video.
John:
This is how the system is supposed to work.
John:
YouTube, stop rejecting my videos.
John:
Right.
John:
So it is complicated.
John:
and annoying but if anything if there is a programmatic way to enforce existing laws on fair use and intellectual property it will be worse for for creativity and innovation than humans enforcing it because computers are really really good at doing stuff like detecting if there's copyrighted music and i presume eventually computers will be pretty good at figuring out if any copyrighted works from some set are part of a training set because that's you know have i been trained or whatever
John:
Maybe they just have a database.
John:
I don't know how it works or whatever.
John:
But once it's programmatically possible to answer this question, it swings farther in the direction of Disney stopping you from ever training any image set on Star Wars.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I think using content ID on YouTube as an example, that's kind of an extreme case, even though it is a highly relevant one, just because content ID is so overly aggressive.
Marco:
But, you know, that's not if you think about also some other angle of this, you know, if Disney starts using this technology to like, you know, scan everything that they could find uploaded to YouTube and be like, oh, wait, that's Elsa.
Marco:
Oh, stop.
Marco:
Wait.
Marco:
And they can they can use the AI to detect derivative works even.
Marco:
Disney could start scanning, like, DeviantArt and Flickr and stuff for, like, fan-drawn versions of their characters.
John:
Well, but under existing laws, they have to show it was taken from, like, one of their actual drawings, not a picture of Elsa, right?
John:
Although, if you do want to put Elsa on a t-shirt and sell it, you can't say, well, I drew the Elsa myself, so it's fine.
John:
Actually, I don't know where the law is on that, depending on how derivative the work is.
John:
But anyway, what you would expect for the training thing and having it be trained is not just...
John:
hey you drew a picture of an apple and there's a picture of an apple in the training set is like is it literally your picture of the apple and that's where you know it gets tricky i don't again i don't know how this have i've been trained thing works maybe it is a byte provided they they know the the checksums of every image that was part of the data set and you can upload one of your images and if the checksum matches then it's the same like is it literally bite for bite and if you like resize your picture or change one pixel it doesn't match
John:
or is it fuzzier than that this is kind of similar to the the c sam system of like uh perceptual hashing or whatever because that gets into what you're saying it's like okay well it's not from a disney picture of elsa it's a picture that i drew of elsa and you know and that's different and again with disney being overly aggressive saying oh great we have a way to tell if anyone never trained any uh
John:
training set on any picture of elsa i'm not sure where that falls under existing laws but is that even possible i don't even is it possible for them to say we can tell that you trained your model on these images i i don't know if you can reverse it but i assume the people who train the models know literally every single image that's in the image set it's a long list but they probably they have the data somewhere and they could build a database based on that data with either you know real content hashes perceptual hashes right like that's how i assume have i been trained is working like if they know
John:
If you trained it on a data set and then you delete the data set and then you can be like, oh, well, shrug, I don't even know what it was trained on.
John:
I think it's difficult or impossible to reverse it to say, oh, I can tell by looking at the output what it was trained on.
John:
I don't think that's possible.
John:
But hopefully you keep around.
John:
This is where you might need new laws.
John:
Like, hey, if you want to use an AI model, you have to be able to prove something about your training set.
John:
and if you have an ai model and you say oh we deleted our training set oh well the law would say yeah you can't use any of that because part of whatever our laws that new laws that come out will say okay here are the situations under which the output of an ai model is copyrightable can be used you know successfully you probably have to be able to prove something about the training set and ignorance would not be a defense of the laws i don't even know what the training set was so everything's fine right yeah probably not
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm still on the side of this is addressing it at the wrong stage of the pipeline.
Marco:
I mean, because it's going to be more complicated.
Marco:
You know, many, many new models that come out are not based on nothing and trained from scratch.
Marco:
They're based on initial models that were pre-trained by somebody else.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that that's part of that's part of what's in favor of the chaos of the internet is like now we can't even tell what are you going to do now right you know like that i think there's going to be i think it's going to be quickly very difficult to ever tell how something was trained in in completion and and i think again this is it's i think this is as unenforceable as it should be impossible to ever upload copyrighted material to your platform like that that should it's just impossible to
John:
But I mean, but that's more of like a practical practicality.
John:
The legal thing is like, oh, you can't actually you don't actually own this copyright material.
John:
The law is clear.
John:
It's just the practicalities of the enforcement of the law are not clear.
John:
And here I think the the the law is not clear yet.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yeah, because I still think it's it's definitely a very open question about like whether training an AI model on on a copyrighted work is.
John:
is itself a violation of that copyright or not again because i i still don't think it is well we'll see what the courts say but i'm i'm pretty strongly on one side of this but and again this doesn't mean i'm against ai models i think they're super useful and i think there's lots of places where they can be used uh it's just that i think there should be some should be some discipline about the training that's all we'll see
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Ted Shop writes that we would probably get a kick out of a new Twitter to Mastodon web app, and this is at mastodon-flock.versell.app.
Casey:
I didn't try it past the first screen or two, but as a former Windows user, oh, the nostalgia.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
This made me laugh quite a bit.
Casey:
And it looks like a Windows 95 installation wizard.
Casey:
Big NSYS, like Nullsoft install system energy.
Casey:
I remember I used to play with that probably around the time that Marco and I were.
Marco:
No, NSYS was what replaced this.
Marco:
That was much better.
Marco:
Wasn't NSYS not full screen?
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
This is that full screen blue gradient that was used a lot around that time.
Marco:
And now this is, you could tell that they had installed the driver for their GPU before they ran this wizard because the background gradient is not super dithered in 16 color mode.
John:
This was really interesting because, well, two levels.
John:
One, it is just like Move to Don in that it gives you follow on following.
John:
So ignore the whole like Windows 95 look or whatever.
John:
It is another tool that is like Move to Don.
John:
So if Move to Don never goes away and you want to try something similar, this does the same thing.
John:
It authenticates with all your things.
John:
Then it gives you follow buttons for all the people who have the info.
John:
I don't know if it does a better job of scraping or whatever.
John:
But the second thing is part of the gag of looking like Windows 95 is
John:
It's not as far as I can tell.
John:
Maybe you can tell me.
John:
Maybe you're familiar with Windows 95.
John:
It's not a pixel for pixel reproduction.
John:
It's almost like it's vector.
John:
They have the Windows 95 look, but they've done it with vector pixels.
John:
Because it looks way bigger.
John:
It's scaled up.
John:
But it is pixel accurate if you imagine the pixels being these smooth vector-y things.
Marco:
Well, if you zoom in on the next and cancel buttons, on the corners, you see that they have a beveled edge.
John:
now in actual windows 95 that would have been probably a one pixel thick line and so here they have like a beveled edge in the corner so obviously it's you know it's like a css border trick or something yeah and i'm i'm on the uh like the final page and i'm looking at the headers of the table like and the headers have like a 3d gradient on them and you can see that there is like a you know a dark dark line on the bottom and lighter line on the left and top and that line is made of a chunky like would have been like a windows 95 size pixel
John:
But then the bevel is made with pixels that are one eighth of that size that would not exist on Windows 95, right?
John:
Because they're on an angle.
John:
So I think it's very clever.
John:
It's a little bit of an uncanny valley thing.
John:
I'm like, this looks like Windows 95, but Windows 95 didn't ever look like this down to the pixel.
John:
Anyway, I thought it was a little extra fun sauce on top of a useful tool.
John:
So, and, you know, just in case it moved it on, it goes away.
John:
I'll put this one in the show notes if you want to try another one or get a little bit of weird uncanny valley Windows 95 nostalgia.
Marco:
And while we're on the subject, Mastodon continues to be great, by the way.
Marco:
It just continues to be awesome.
Marco:
And it's way better than Twitter right now.
Marco:
In my view and for my needs and for the people I follow, it's way better than Twitter.
Marco:
So I'm happy there.
Casey:
Briefly going back to this web app, did you notice that if you click the X on the installer, it actually drops you down to a Windows desktop, and it has a privacy policy link, an about link that opens Windows Explorer, that opens Internet Explorer.
Casey:
And then if you click on the homepage, or no, not the homepage, what was it?
Casey:
It was one of these icons.
Casey:
Oh, I guess it was the bookmarks icon at the top.
Casey:
Then you go to what appears to be the author's old 1999 website, which is pretty delightful.
John:
uh big like geocities energy on this one uh it's just there's a lot more here than i thought this is really great oh that's so cool yeah isn't that neat yeah i would have the other way i would have imagined doing this that would have been fun is you know all the ones that like run older operating systems in like web assembly in your browser they have ones for there's one for uh all the versions of mac os it's like mac os 9.app system 7.app mac os 8.app try those urls um
John:
And those are basically running a virtual machine in JavaScript that's running the real version of those operating systems, right?
John:
If you had done that and then moved it on in Windows 95 and ran it inside the Windows 95 that's running in your browser, then you wouldn't have to fake any of this stuff.
John:
You could literally just make everything exactly in Windows 95.
John:
Although that might be more difficult trying to authenticate with modern SSL stuff from Windows 95.
John:
yeah i was gonna say like can you imagine trying to make just any network requests that would work in the modern era from that i think some i saw like someone who did like a 68k motorola 68k classic mac os like mastodon client and i think somehow they like they compiled a version of open ssl or something like they basically found a way to make a tls connection from classic mac os just to support their idea of doing this funny uh you know classic mac os client for mastodon that's amazing that's that's pretty good stuff
Casey:
Aye, aye, aye.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then let's see what else we have.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I wanted to make note.
Casey:
This is actually – this news is a little bit old.
Casey:
We spoke about Rewind.ai, I don't know, a couple months ago.
Casey:
This is the live streams thing that John apparently has always wanted.
Casey:
It is available to anyone at this point, I believe.
Casey:
It is 30 days free trial, but then it's $20 a month, which –
Casey:
I don't mean to begrudge like, you know, they've written software that deserve to be compensated for it.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't love I don't love the idea of like this 30 days free and then you have to come back and remember to cancel.
Casey:
So I have not personally tried it, especially since this is not an itch.
Casey:
I feel like I need scratching.
Casey:
But for those that are interested, it's it's available if you want to give a shot.
John:
I don't begrudging anything.
John:
It's just a question of, you know, do you think the price is worth the value for you?
John:
And I like I was into this thing.
John:
I'm like, oh, I'm going to try it out of technical curiosity.
John:
And I actually got an early and they sent the email and said, hey, it's available for you to try.
John:
I'm like, great, I'll try it.
John:
And then I saw it was one of those free trial and then we'll start charging you.
John:
and I knew myself well enough to know I'm probably going to forget, and then I'm going to get charged, and then I'm going to feel bad.
John:
In fact, I did that with the Lenza app.
John:
Speaking of AI, I make money off other people's stuff.
John:
The Lenza thing, like you sign up for a free trial of the $50 a month subscription.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Oh.
John:
And then it was $50 a month or $50 a year.
John:
I forget.
John:
But anyway, you sign up for the free trial.
John:
And then once you sign up for the free trial, it gives you a discount on the in-app purchases.
John:
And so I made like several $6 in-app purchases for to play with it.
John:
Right.
John:
But then I'm like, OK, I just got to remember to cancel this before the $50 thing.
John:
And sure enough, I forgot because I didn't make a reminder for myself.
John:
And, you know, I got a refund for it because I asked a refund like the second it kicked in.
John:
And Apple was nice enough to give me a refund.
John:
But anyway, that's why I haven't tried to rewind.
John:
I do.
John:
I am curious about it.
John:
And I'm like, I don't want to have to, like, sign up for it and set myself a reminder, remember to cancel it.
John:
It's just like, for me, that price and that situation was enough of a barrier to not want to deal with it.
John:
And honestly, since we've talked about it, I'm like, oh, I'll try for technical curiosity.
John:
I'm still kind of skeeved out by it.
John:
I'm like, well, I'll try it on my laptop that's more isolated.
John:
But not that I think they're doing anything nasty.
John:
It's just...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I probably will try it eventually as well.
John:
In terms of $20 a month, if I got a tons of value from it, I would pay $20 a month if I felt like I was getting $20 a month worth of value.
John:
That's the question of software.
John:
How do you price it such that enough people will think that price is acceptable?
John:
Casey was also scared away by that price.
John:
But I think none of us are in the situation where we think we would possibly... The only reason we'd be looking at it is a little bit of curiosity.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know maybe maybe we'll try it uh i can see this like i said this company eventually being spun off into like an enterprise software because i think lots of companies might like something like this so they can spy on their employees this is a rich and burgeoning market that already has existing players that are probably worse than rewind.ai because the technology is newer and better but so far their their sales pitch does not seem to be to corporations seems to be to individual users so if you're an individual user already tried it uh write in and tell us what you think
Casey:
John, real-time follow-up, you cannot run this on your Mac Pro because it is not sufficiently powerful.
John:
I have ARM Macs in the house.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Well, you said you would run it on your laptop.
Casey:
I thought you were trying to imply that you would have otherwise run it on the Mac Pro.
John:
The Mac Studio is another choice.
John:
I have a couple of ARM.
John:
Yeah, some.
Casey:
Well, because your Mac Pro is just too old and busted, doesn't have Apple Silicon, which is required for rewind.ai.
John:
It's got an immunity to the spyware.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about your iPad mystery.
John:
My son got a new iPad for Christmas.
John:
He was long overdue for one.
John:
Which one?
John:
he was using well that's part of the thing he was using a really old one he'd been using it for years i actually he wanted to draw with the apple pencil so i had an old like the original 9.7 inch ipad pro like the very first one that i think it's the first one that had pencil support well the 12.9 but that was the first small one yeah okay yeah that's right uh yeah so i anyway i i said here you can use this and use my old rolly apple pencil and laugh at how it gets charged and everything
John:
And I'm like, well, you should just use that as your new iPad because it's better than his iPad was so old.
John:
It was older than the 9.7 inch iPad Pro.
John:
But eventually he said, like, now there's something haunted on your iPad, which I kind of agreed with him that 9.7 started getting weird in its later years.
John:
I don't know if it's a hardware thing or it just doesn't agree with the modern OS's, but he kept using super ancient iPad.
John:
So he was due for a new one and I got him a new one and I bought it a while ago.
John:
Uh, and it was just, you know, sitting somewhere and then wrapped it and gave it to him.
John:
And then I was setting it up for him because that's what dads do.
John:
I was like, I was, I was trying to give it a name and I wrote, you know, you know, general about it and wrote the name of the thing.
John:
Remember to change the name.
John:
So it's easy to find, uh, and the device list.
John:
And I started saying, Oh, wait a second.
John:
which ipad because i like to give it the name of the thing you know like you know uh my wife says like uh you know tina's apple watch series 8 so i know it's the series 8 one like how that's how people ask that it's an ask atp question how do you name your devices i name it john's ipad 14 pro like because otherwise or an iphone 14 pro because otherwise i'll never freaking remember what the names are and i can't just reuse the same name i give them the name that is named with the device
John:
it's nice too like when when you down the road when you upgrade that device it's nice to be able to keep the backup straight and like do the migration correctly and everything it's it's it makes it very nice yeah and and i do rename them to be like okay now it's alex's iphone 14 pro right but it's still iphone 14 pro so i know which device we're talking about and and luckily in the house we tend not to buy multiple devices of the same type just because people end up getting things at different years but if we had like two iphone 12 pros that might be a
John:
um i wanted to give this thing a name of what it was so i named it alex's m2 ipad pro because it was like hey he got you know i got him the fancy one he's you know he deserves it he's been using an ancient ipad i think he was using original ipad air maybe it was like super old right you know no face id very slow very old and he uses it all the time it's a very you know important machine for him so i got him a big fancy one
John:
uh but then i went to general about and it said ipad pro fourth generation i'm like is that the m2 or did i change my mind and say the m2 was too expensive and get him a cheaper one so i do what i normally do and type in a google query for whatever and i usually go to the wikipedia page because it's usually straightforward and i know the sidebar is going to have the name of the
John:
soc in it and it's gonna you know there's some basic information it's kind of like why i don't go to imdb anymore i just go to wikipedia because i want to just know what's the cast of this thing i can find it on the wikipedia page and imdb is just a cluster and i can't find anything on that freaking site anymore and i hate it so bad um so i go to wikipedia and i go to ipad pro fourth generation wikipedia page and i scroll down the thing it says system on a chip a12z bionic
John:
Did I get him something with an A12Z?
John:
Because I was originally looking for a refurbed M1 iPad Pro.
John:
Could not find one.
John:
Apple didn't have them.
John:
You could find them used at other places.
John:
But I wanted to get an official Apple refurb.
John:
And Apple was not selling refurb M1 iPad Pros for whatever reason.
John:
They just didn't have them.
John:
All right.
John:
And so I thought I had decided to get an M2.
John:
And so I'm holding the device in my hand.
John:
I'm like, how annoying is it that I can't tell if this thing has an M2 in it?
John:
Because Apple's thing just says fourth generation.
John:
And when I Google fourth generation, it says A12Z.
John:
So I downloaded Geekbench.
John:
I'm like, look.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
I know what the Geekbench numbers should be for an M2, and it's going to be very different from the H12Z thing.
John:
First of all, Geekbench immediately says in the sidebar, this has an M2.
John:
It's like, I got the right one.
John:
But there was like 20 minutes where I was like, did I buy the wrong thing from, I was looking at the orders, like maybe I bought the right thing, because the amount looked like an M2 amount.
John:
It looked like an M2 iPad Pro amount, but like maybe they charged me for the M2 and shipped me a different one.
John:
So this is just a PSA to let everybody know.
John:
On the Wikipedia pages for iPad Pro, they have a list of generations that go up to sixth generation.
John:
The iPad Pro sixth generation on the Wikipedia page is what Apple calls the iPad Pro 11-inch fourth generation.
John:
So do not be confused.
John:
And I think Wikipedia should really change this.
John:
because it's the fourth generation of the 11 inch exactly right and so if you and they're called like the main articles ipad pro parentheses fourth generation which is exactly what you will see in general about on your ipad but it is not right so anyway when in doubt get geekbench and by the way i actually ran geekbench to make sure the number that came out was the m2 number so he has an m2 ipad oh and the other thing is when i was doubting and i'm like oh this is an easy way to tell because i got him an apple pencil with it because he does a lot of drawing on his ipad
John:
I tried to do the hover thing.
John:
I'm like, well, I have Procreate.
John:
Let me launch Procreate.
John:
I know Procreate has the hover, and nothing would work on the hover.
John:
And so I looked at a YouTube video, and I saw people hovering over the icons on the home screen with the pencil, and they would make the icons bigger, and that didn't work either.
John:
And I'm like, is there something I have to enable for hover?
John:
And is there some preference of hover in Procreate?
John:
But why doesn't it work on the home screen?
John:
This is why I was like, I think I got the wrong iPad.
John:
It doesn't hover.
John:
It can't possibly be an M2.
John:
Did I get the wrong pencil?
John:
I Googled for like...
John:
is there a is there a second second generation apple pencil that does the hover i'm like no it's all a second the ones with the flat side he's got the one with the flat side it magnetically connects this should be doing hover the answer to that was you gotta update to 16.2 oh it's shit with the wrong
John:
So it was a confusing morning where I was like, what the hell did I buy?
John:
And don't put it past me.
John:
I've bought the wrong thing before.
John:
When I ordered his MacBook Air, I ordered the wrong color and I had to cancel it and did a big thing.
John:
Or at least I caught that before it shipped.
John:
But lots of confusion on Christmas morning.
John:
But he does indeed have an M2 iPad Air, which he very richly deserves with an Apple Pencil.
John:
And once updated to 16.2, hover started working.
Casey:
All right, so that brings up something I've been wondering about for a long time, and I keep forgetting to bring it up.
Casey:
So I got my first and only set of AirPods Pro a year ago for Christmas.
Casey:
I love them.
Casey:
I do want the new ones, but I'm too cheap because ones I've got work really well.
Casey:
Battery's fine, no rattling, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
The thing that's driving me batty is if you go into Find My and you go into the Devices tab,
Casey:
It shows my AirPods Pro and it shows them as outside of the case, which I'm looking at them.
Casey:
I'm holding them in my hand right now.
Casey:
I can assure you they are not outside the case.
Casey:
And it shows them last having been seen on September 27th, 2022.
Casey:
And I vaguely remember, because, again, my memory is garbage, that when I think it was 16, I was 16 first came out, or maybe it was a late beta.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it was.
Casey:
But my AirPods Pro could do the homing beacon W1 or whatever it is where you wave your phone around and it shows you where the AirPods are, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And I think that that only worked for a minute.
Casey:
And then they pulled that for the original AirPods Pro, and now it only works on the AirPods Pro 2.
Casey:
But the stupid Find My app is stuck on September 27th.
Casey:
And it's like it never got a clue that this feature, the homing beacon feature, whatever it's called...
Casey:
doesn't work.
Casey:
And so according to this, my left AirPod, or my left AirPod, that's a great movie.
Casey:
My left AirPod Pro was last seen September 27th, 2022 at 2.38 PM.
Casey:
And it is now, well, according to Marco, it's December 24th, but in most of the world, it's December 26th now.
Casey:
What do I do to fix this?
Casey:
Like, I don't want to unpair the things, which I guess I could.
Casey:
I really do not want to sign out of iCloud because that's a nightmare.
Casey:
Is there a thing I can do to fix this?
Casey:
I'm asking you too, and I'm asking the audience, like, what do I do about that?
Casey:
hmm i don't know the answer to that i mean i would unpair like because unpairing is not that big a deal and it's definitely the first thing you try like yeah restart it do it over there yeah maybe i'll do that yeah that's the right move all right i'll take that as a homework assignment for myself uh people in the chat are saying oh i'm seeing some of this as well so i'm sorry if i've just made you aware of this but i don't know it was really cool for the 10 minutes that it worked with a little homing beacon thing um and and i really liked that but then apple took it away because they're meanies
John:
And then people are saying when you unpair it, then remove it from Find My when it's unpaired.
John:
And then, you know, start fresh.
Casey:
All right, fair enough.
Casey:
I'll take that as homework.
John:
And do what Marco said, and then you have to reset all your preferences on all your devices.
John:
Well, if you want auto-pairing, I guess the defaults are in your favor there.
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right, iOS 16.2 came out a little while ago, but it has a feature that we wanted to call to everyone's attention, and it was called to our attention by Brandon Butch, who writes, You can now stop your wallpaper and or notifications from appearing on the iPhones always on display.
Casey:
This was as of Beta 3, which obviously now it's true for the shipping version.
Casey:
But yeah, there's several switches and always on display.
Casey:
There's just on-off.
Casey:
Then there's show wallpaper and show notifications.
Casey:
So you can turn the wallpaper on or off and the notifications on or off individually.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So remember when the 14... First of all, right before the 14 Pro came out and we were speculating about the rumors about the always-on display, I had said, wouldn't it be cool if they basically had this whole new aesthetic on the display where like...
Marco:
you know the most of the screen is black and you have like maybe just monochrome uh you know icons or widgets and the clock and have you know have those things glow and have the rest of the screen be black which you know people quickly pointed out that that's basically how android phones with always on displays have always been and that this was not a new idea in the android world um so thank you for that you know they all probably used opera as well um so the when the 14 came out though
Marco:
the only option you really had through ios was just take whatever your home screen is just make a dim version that's it like that's what it did and there was no customization and this led to i think a couple of shortcomings um one of the biggest ones being obviously it wasn't very power conservative it wasn't as power conservative as it could be if most of the screen was black and only some pixels were being lit and
Marco:
um if you had any kind of colored wallpaper but also it became harder to tell whether your phone was awake or asleep and that was a huge um i think stumbling point for people when they first got the 14 pro because you know iphone users were never accustomed to having always on anything and so you'd see your phone kind of like out of the corner of your eye and you kind of freak out oh it's awake like you'd think there was notification on it or something or you think it was ringing or whatever
Marco:
because you were conditioned to believe that a phone with the screen on is awake and trying to tell you something.
Marco:
And so what they added with 16.2 is an option to turn off the wallpaper when it's in, you know, sleeping always on mode.
Marco:
And you could also optionally turn off notifications, which I believe Do Don't Disturb always did on its lock screen, but it was kind of, you know, custom on other ones.
Marco:
Anyway, the big thing for me was the wallpaper toggle.
Marco:
So if you turn off,
Marco:
show wallpaper under the always on display settings you now have in sleep mode a black background that then only shows the clock and the and your widgets and whatever notifications you might have uh there and you can turn off notifications if you want there as well so i've been using this since the 16.2 betas which were it's been a couple of months now i think and it has radically improved my interaction with the 14 pros always on screen
Marco:
I can strongly recommend if if you are a little bit put off by like, you know, it not looking too different or if you keep still thinking that your phone's awake when it's not.
Marco:
Try this option.
Marco:
Turn off show wallpaper.
Marco:
And it is I think it's massively better.
Marco:
I think it looks cooler and it functions better in the sense that it allows me to know my phone is not awake right now.
John:
I definitely believe you, but I did turn off the always-on display ages ago, mostly because, for what you said, it seems like my phone was always on.
John:
But now that I've gone back to the old way, I'm not anxious to sacrifice battery life.
John:
Because what I did learn after using it for a while with the always-on display on is that I didn't derive...
John:
a lot of utility from it there was the downside which is like oh i think my phone is on but setting that aside setting aside the downside did i find occasions where it was useful for me to have the screen always on and i think the answer to that is no so even though this is i agree a much better way of doing it at least for my purposes so i'd be able to tell
John:
that that's the always on display because the background is black i don't think i get any value from it the way i use my phone so i'm not going to sacrifice the battery life for this um but i agree this is a great feature and you know it might even be useful to be the default but that could just be you know old habits right maybe new users who their first iphone has the always on screen will just be used to it and not develop the habits that we all have to
John:
expect a phone with our wallpaper being displayed is you know is on or trying to tell us something and i think related to wallpapers didn't 16.2 also add the thing where they separated the screen that appears under your icons on springboard from the lock screen like it used to be whenever you made a custom one it made you make both of them as a as a match set yeah yeah yep and i think they split that out is that correct
Casey:
I thought that was the case.
Casey:
I haven't tried it either, but I thought that was the case.
Casey:
And it drove me nuts.
Casey:
It drove me nuts in the original version 16.
John:
And they should be split out.
John:
Especially when I was first messing with it, I wanted to make lots of different fun lock screens.
John:
I did not want to make lots of different thing that goes behind my icons.
John:
Because the thing behind my icons is 100% black and always has been.
John:
and that doesn't change for me and so every time i had to wanted to make a new lock screen it's like oh and don't forget you also need to make it just separate these it's two different things you know so if you want to make a million different i guess they would call what would you call it you would call it the well they call wallpaper the images behind stuff but i think there should be a different name for the image that appears behind your icons on springboard and then the image that appears on the lock screen and they call
John:
they call that image wallpaper in this setting because the option is do you on the always on display do you want to show your wallpaper they mean do you want to show the image that shows behind the icons on your on springboard anyway confusing nomenclature but i'm glad they're working this feature out to be more flexible
Marco:
Yeah, because one issue I still have with the always-on display is that when it's in sleep mode, whatever is on screen is not tappable.
Marco:
It looks like it's tappable, but it's not.
Marco:
The first tap that you do will put it into awake screen mode, and then you have to tap again or swipe or whatever you're doing to interact with something on that screen.
Marco:
And so having like part of the reason why I like this, this option of turning off show wallpaper is that it makes it more clear to me.
Marco:
Not only is the phone not awake, but it is not interactive right now.
Marco:
Like if I want this thing to be interactive, I have to tap it so that it's no longer mostly black.
Marco:
and then i know oh it's lighting up with my i still like like the um the weather background it's lighting up with the rain that's outside great now i can interact with this notification or whatever like so it's and that's i hope i really really hope in future hardware iterations i hope they are at some point able to make the sleep state more interactive i know there's a lot of challenges with that and a lot of kind of
Marco:
practical concerns of like well what if it's in your pocket or what if you're handling it and you know whatever it is and and i think there you know there are certain risks and maybe it's not possible to do that well but i would love for them to at least try to do that well because or or at least make it more obvious that something's not interactive and in the design
Marco:
And then ideally also, hopefully, make it wake up faster.
Marco:
That would also help a lot.
Marco:
If it can go from sleep state to awake state in half the time it does now, I'm sure some of that is a choice in terms of animation speed, but also I think some of that is giving the OS time to wake up and using the animation as kind of cover for that time.
Marco:
So whatever they can do to make it
John:
more interactive when you want to interact with it that would feel very good and and right now it still feels a little bit clunky in that way they could do kind of one of the only safe way i think they should try doing this is kind of like they do for continuity camera which is the thing where you can take your phone and use it as like the the quote-unquote webcam for your laptop and continuity camera works by detecting that you have taken your camera and put it in a particular orientation and it is more or less stationary when you put it on those little clips or stands to be behind your display right and
John:
so the feature you want it would be extremely uh it would have lots of accidental input if it was just like that all the time oh the lock screen but it's interactive because people like i said people put in their pocket it would activate my parents are constantly accidentally calling me because just because they the delay between when they lock their phone and when they put it into their pocket is is too uh too long and they end up like touching something on their phone when they put into their pocket and they dial me right so
John:
But it could detect, for example, when it is laying on its back on a table for a certain period of time and say, now I've detected that I'm on a table and I am going to actually register your taps, whatever you tap on.
John:
But as soon as you pick it up and start moving, it's like, nope, nope, I'm locked.
John:
No input means anything to me, right?
John:
So that you, you know, it's tricky to do, right?
John:
But I think if you just make it active all the time, people are going to dial things like crazy.
John:
Like it's just, it's...
John:
It's impossible to have, because again, if you, when you lock your phone and you put it into any of your pockets, the expectation is there's nothing that can happen in that pocket.
John:
That's going to do stuff on my phone.
John:
Right.
John:
Even if I accidentally hit the power button, which is a physical button for now anyway.
John:
Um,
John:
it's still not going to unlock my phone because face id will fail touch id will fail it's inside my pocket right whereas if that tap would actually activate the notification as we know from stupid ios once you look at a notification it's gone forever and you can never see it again and i hate that so much i wish there was like here are the last 100 notifications that you dismissed just show me them keep them around so anyway um tricky tricky to add feature but i get where you're coming from and i do think the 16.2 things are all improvements
Casey:
I actually left my always on display in all the default settings.
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's been an earth shattering change for me.
Casey:
I will say kind of tangentially related that battery life when I first got the new phone and it was chugging on photos and all that and all the machine learning stuff.
Casey:
Like the battery life was garbage as expected.
Casey:
Then it got really, really good for a while.
Casey:
And then I don't know if it was 16.2 or something, but sometime in the last month or two, both Aaron's and my phone's, our battery life has gone through the crapper recently.
Casey:
And I haven't dug much to figure out what's going on there.
Casey:
There was nothing obvious when I went, you know, spelunking in the battery, like history and all that in settings.
Casey:
But it struck me as a little odd that both of us were having similar problems.
Casey:
So I don't know if that's just a list family thing or if that's broader or whatever, but it's been a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
And so I might be turning off the always on display if it continues to be a problem.
Casey:
But all told, I do like it.
Casey:
I have it rotating between pictures of the kids and pictures of Aaron.
Casey:
And I like that every time I pick up my phone or – well, every time it gets locked, there's a new picture there.
Casey:
And then the next time I lock the phone, there's a different picture.
Casey:
And I can see it dimly on the display while it's just sitting.
Casey:
And I dig that.
Casey:
I think that's fun and cute.
Casey:
But I totally understand if it's not for everyone.
John:
And by the way, even without the always-on display, like part of my problem of being distracted by it is that I would think like someone is calling because I see their face on my phone.
John:
But I also have a rotation of my family.
John:
Right.
John:
So every time I pick up my phone, it's the picture of someone in my family.
John:
But if my phone starts ringing and it's like a spam call from just, you know, random spam number telling me my car warranty repair or whatever.
John:
But my phone screen will light up and I'll see a picture of my son's face on it.
John:
And I'd be like, oh, I'm getting a call from my son.
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
That was the problem with the always-on display.
John:
I always thought that was being contacted by somebody.
John:
Even without the always-on display, that's just a side effect of putting people's face as your wallpaper or lock screen or whatever.
John:
Because you have to actually then say, ignore the face, look up at the little caller ID thing that shows when you're getting a call to see what number it's coming from.
John:
And if my son does call, I think it still shows his face, but it's a different picture, but it's still him.
John:
So, anyway.
John:
possible confusion i mean i guess i could just do landscapes or you know for this is the first this whatever it is the the iphone 14 pro is the first phone and iowa 16 that i did not have a picture of uh one of my past dogs as my lock screen that has been my lock screen since since the ipod touch in 2007 right i remember this was huckleberry or whatever right yep
John:
But I decided because because I wanted to try the feature, I decided to try the rotating thing.
John:
I had a bunch of nice pictures of my family that I, you know, made very tall and put room above their heads for the clock so the clock wasn't over their face.
John:
And I do like that.
John:
I do like seeing those pictures rotate, but it continues to be a little bit confusing when I get a call.
Casey:
So a week or two ago, I think something like that, it was sometime in December, we got word through Bloomberg, and I presume it was Gurman, that the Apple Car Project has, quote, scaled back, quote, and is delayed, and it won't feature full self-driving capabilities.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
But yeah, this was a news report and some highlights that were reported, re-reported on MacRumors.
Casey:
Apple Inc.
Casey:
has scaled back ambitious self-driving plans for its future electric vehicle and postponed the car's target launch date.
Casey:
about a year to 2026.
Casey:
The car project has been in limbo for the past several months as Apple executives grappled with the reality that its vision for a fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals isn't feasible with current technology.
Casey:
You don't say.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
The car will have an Apple-designed custom processor to power AI functionality.
Casey:
The chip is equivalent to four of the highest-end Mac chips and is nearly production-ready.
Casey:
That actually kind of brings us back to our discussion about the Mac Pro last week, but that's neither here nor there.
John:
Doesn't it, though?
Casey:
well i mean i would think um apple will use the cloud for some ai processing and the company is considering a remote command center that could assist drivers and control the cars from afar during emergencies that sounds safe uh i don't know if we really need to go into the ins and outs of the particulars of this but it is interesting that this this poop show is still a poop show
Casey:
from what it sounds.
Marco:
I mean, why are they still doing any of this?
Marco:
Like, that's my... I don't know.
Marco:
This project has gone through so many phases and ideas and certainly people and certainly money.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Like, how...
Marco:
How long do they have to keep fumbling around with this massive money waster before they're like, you know what, this isn't for us.
Marco:
Let's just, you know, crap can it and move on.
Marco:
I still don't see why they even want to be in this business, let alone why they keep plowing forward without seemingly able to go near any kind of outcome.
John:
The story is interesting because it's kind of like the best line of the story is where it says that grappling with their vision, that blah, blah, blah, isn't feasible with current technologies.
John:
What it's saying is they don't have it.
John:
They would like to have a product that does X, but they don't.
John:
It's like, I would like something that lets me levitate.
John:
uh that would be a cool product but we don't we don't have that like so how much money are you going to spend on a project right so is this r&d like that's kind of the problem with self-driving it's difficult to do the r&d to figure out if you can make a product without spending a lot of money and i get that it's not as simple as like oh you know we'll have these people tooling around with a multi-touch right and that'll be a small team of you know uh you know a handful of people and they'll tool away at it for years and
John:
And eventually, if we get to the point where, you know, we could probably make a product of this, maybe we'll make a tablet, maybe we'll make a phone, then you form the iPhone team, and then the iPad team, right?
John:
And that's when you staff off, and that's when you spend the money, although the amount of money that was used to develop the original iPhone is comically low, and every company should feel bad when they read those histories of like...
John:
So how much money did Apple spend?
John:
Even if we count like everything we can think of, how much do they spend to make the iPhone?
John:
The small number, I think, is they spend $150 million, which is like we spent $150 million to change the color of the logo.
John:
Right.
John:
That's what big companies normally do.
John:
So they spent $150 million to make the iPhone.
John:
And how much money is it made?
John:
Anyway, there's more to it if you add to that.
John:
Right.
John:
But for self-driving cars, it's like, OK, I can understand why they're saying it would be cool if we had a self-driving car.
John:
I agree.
John:
That would be cool.
John:
Right.
John:
Can we make one?
John:
Let's do some R&D to find out.
John:
But it has always seemed to me that this project at Apple was created as if they had already done that.
John:
It's like, oh, we know how to make a self-driving car.
John:
Let's just make a project to make one like that.
John:
It's already in the phase of like we're designing a product and we're staffing a team to build that product.
John:
And we're going to contract manufacturers to manufacture that product.
John:
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
John:
What product are you making?
John:
Our self-driving car.
John:
Do you have a software?
John:
No, but we'll probably be able to figure it out, right?
John:
Nope.
John:
Like, you got to be able to make the thing first before you make a product team.
John:
So again, no one knows the details of this, but to the extent that anything with Project Titan has been in like, let's make a product mode.
John:
That has been a bad idea if the premise of the product is a car without a steering wheel or pedals.
John:
You cannot make a car without a steering wheel or pedals until it can drive itself.
John:
And if it can't drive itself, maybe get out of the product phase and back into the R&D phase.
John:
don't go to the product phase until you think you have something that works like the multi-touch.
John:
We've got a multi-touch screen that we think works.
John:
Maybe it's too big.
John:
Maybe it's too clunky.
John:
Maybe it takes a lot of power.
John:
Maybe it's connected to like a power Mac or something, but it works.
John:
And the question is, can we make it smaller, cheaper, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They don't have anything that works.
John:
Nobody does.
John:
nobody has this right it would be cool if you could make it but make it first i think this is just a hilarious story that the premise is apple has decided they can't make a product they can't make like yeah you gotta be able and the other thing they can decide is we're not going to make a car without pedals or steering wheel make one with pedals and a steering wheel that humans can drive lots of people do that you can have lots of self-driving assistive functions that i think are probably a bad idea in many cases but that's a thing you can make but the idea that they keep trying to make a car without a steering wheel
John:
you can't do that so i'm i'm sad for them and i'm sad for the story i do like the idea that their their ai powered chip or whatever is sounds so much like the uh the mac chip that they canceled equivalent to four of their high-end processors you know i mean you can't afford to put it in a ten thousand dollar you know mac pro because ten thousand dollars is too much for a mac pro how much would this car cost again if it actually existed and worked
John:
My advice to Apple is if you want to make a car, add a steering wheel and pedals.
Marco:
Yeah, I just I still go back and like, you know, to me, like the question you asked, like, all right, can we make this thing work?
Marco:
And then, you know, then move on from there.
Marco:
I would step back again and say, is this even a business that we need to be in or want to be in?
Marco:
And what would it what would it mean if we entered this business and actually, you know, stayed in it and maybe even succeeded in it?
Marco:
What would that actually mean for the rest of our business?
Marco:
Can you imagine Apple selling cars?
Marco:
How would that even physically work?
Marco:
Can you imagine Apple servicing cars?
Marco:
Can you imagine Apple going through all the regulations?
Marco:
I can see that it's possible for them to do all that, but why would they want to?
Marco:
And what they would achieve in that would be they'd be a car manufacturer.
Marco:
Look at all the car manufacturers.
Marco:
How happy are they?
Marco:
How good of a business does that seem to be?
Marco:
It doesn't seem like it's worth them entering this business, even if it was fairly easy to get into.
Marco:
And it's super not.
Marco:
And so I don't see why they would even want to be in this business.
Marco:
And that even sets aside the question of...
Marco:
is apple could apple be good at designing cars which i think is a huge question mark honestly like you know apple's very good at designing a lot of things i don't know that i would want an apple designed car but again that that's i think that's even that's too far down the line of thinking of like why are they even doing this why why do they want to be in this business that that to me makes no sense
John:
I mean, it is different in many ways that we've discussed, but I think it is actually a better fit with their traditional strengths than some other things.
John:
Because it is manufacturing a product that they sell for a profit.
John:
It is, you know, regulation stuff.
John:
Again, Apple's not used to automotive regulation, but they are used to dealing with the FCC and the various, you know, radio regulations and heat.
John:
Like there are different laws in different countries and being in compliance with them with electronic devices is a thing, right?
John:
It is a scaled-up version of what they do.
John:
They're good at manufacturing.
John:
They don't have their own manufacturing plants.
John:
They outsource that, and they're good at helping those manufacturers do a better job of manufacturing.
John:
Apple is good at actually, quote-unquote, making things, even if they're doing it through third parties.
John:
I can squint and say, this looks like, again, a question of whether they'd be able to make a good car, but they make hardware products that are software-powered, and they manufacture them and comply with a bunch of laws.
John:
So it is conceivable...
John:
that they could get good at this after many years because it is like what they do.
John:
And it reminded me of this great quote that Gruber had back on December 21st.
John:
I put this in contrast to something that Apple already does that I think is not a good fit for their traditional strengths and model.
John:
This is a quote from talking about, what was it?
John:
Oh, Gruber's guested on a podcast, and they talked about various Apple-related things.
John:
And he put this little summary at the end of his link to the podcast he was a guest on.
John:
This is quoting Gruber.
John:
The App Store's financial success is the worst thing that's happened to Apple this century.
John:
It's a distraction at best and a profound corruption at worst.
John:
services revenue and the App Store do not fit with Apple's traditional strengths of making a really good product and selling it to people for a profit because it's really good and they like it.
John:
It is a much more complicated model where you're selling access to them, you're rent-seeking, you're controlling a platform and then charging other people money to get access to the people, you're potentially
John:
collecting information about them and advertising to them that model does not fit with the apple that we love in a way that the car does because if apple made a good car product i believe that they could figure out how to sell it how to service it in the same way they figure out how to sell their hardware products their phones and everything they figure out how to service them they figure out how to comply with laws they figure out how to get them manufactured figure out how to sell them all over the world with different regulations obviously a car is way different than a phone it is a much bigger scale thing
John:
There are so many other complications they're working with, a bunch of other players, but that fits better.
John:
The incentives are aligned better for the Apple that I like, the Apple that makes its money by making a good product, not the Apple that is, again, a distraction at best or a corruption at worst, paraphrasing Gruber.
John:
that is distracted by the idea of like yeah but but have we considered rent seeking because that's where the real money is and i don't like that does not align with the incentive i want them to be incentivized to make good products the incentives that i like is hey if we make a bad keyboard we have to pay people class action lawsuit and we make good people keyboard people buy our stuff when we put ports back on our laptops people buy more of them if we make a really fast low power computer people buy it right if we make an amazing touchscreen phone people buy it because it's a cool phone like that model aligns better with my interest as a customer
John:
make cool technology, make a profit when I buy it because it costs you less to manufacture it than it does for me to buy it from you.
John:
That's your profit.
John:
That's a really good business.
John:
It's a model I understand that I'm more comfortable with than the App Store model, which is, you know, sell tons of devices that are awesome and then charge people 30% of all the money they make on them because you deserve it because you made the platform.
Casey:
The thing that, just to go back a little bit to what Marco was saying, I think the thing that makes me very worried is maybe a little dramatic, but worried about an Apple car is that I feel like the same problems that everyone snarks on Tesla about, like, oh, the windshield wipers don't work because it never rains in the Bay Area, which I know is not really true, but, you know, just go with it here.
Casey:
They don't work that well.
Casey:
Well, fair.
Casey:
And then the door handles would freeze constantly because it legitimately really rarely does freeze in the Bay Area.
Casey:
You know, this very myopic view of the world, which I feel like is a very common problem for engineers in the Bay Area.
Casey:
I wonder if that's going to be an affliction for an Apple car as well.
Casey:
And where that would manifest itself is, oh, surely a $150,000 car is something anyone would want, right?
Casey:
I mean, we charge like 200% of what an average run-of-the-mill Android phone is for a new iPhone.
Casey:
People pay 2x for a new iPhone.
Casey:
Surely they'll pay 2 to 3x for an entire car, right?
Casey:
And no, no.
Casey:
People will not.
Casey:
It's like, maybe it's just me, but I don't have $150,000 just laying around to buy an Apple car, to lease an Apple car at $4,000 or whatever.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't lease cars, but whatever that lease payment would be.
Casey:
I don't have that just laying around.
Casey:
Like, it's wonderful if they think that them and their cushy worlds with their $3 million, 2000 or 200 square foot houses and their, you know, R8s and their, and their, you know, Lamborghini Uruses and all that.
Casey:
Like, yeah, $150,000 car may be great in the Bay Area, but that ain't going to work in the real world, my friends.
John:
Is that
John:
Doesn't he think it fits with Apple's model?
John:
Their hardware is always more expensive than everybody else's.
John:
And I know it's a different matter of scale.
John:
It's like, oh, 20% higher is an extra $200 versus 20% higher is an extra $20,000.
John:
But still, I think that it's not impossible to be the car manufacturer that sells mostly cars that are too expensive.
John:
Look at Porsche.
John:
Oh, I agree.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But I just...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I think the thing, and maybe it was Gruber, maybe it was you, John.
Casey:
Somebody had once said, like, the great thing about Apple and about Coke is that if, okay, so if you want the best Coke in the world, the best Coca-Cola in the world.
Marco:
And he was paraphrasing somebody else.
Marco:
Yeah, wasn't this like Andy Warhol or somebody?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
But, you know, if you want if you want the best Coca-Cola in the world, I don't care if you make a thousand dollars a year or a hundred million dollars a year, you're still getting the same Coca-Cola.
Casey:
If you want the best iPhone in the world, you know, you're still if you're rich and famous or if you're just somebody a regular schmo, you're getting the same iPhone.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like Apple wants to be in that space where they are a premium product.
Casey:
Full stop.
Casey:
But they're not a 10X premium product.
Casey:
I mean, look at how well that worked out for the Apple Watch Edition.
Casey:
Like, yeah, some were sold, some to some of the hosts on this episode.
Casey:
But nevertheless... Not the gold one.
Casey:
Fair, fair.
Casey:
But you get what I'm driving at.
Casey:
They want to be a premium product, but...
Casey:
I don't think that a 10X premium product has ever really fit that well for them.
Casey:
See also Mac Pro.
Casey:
And beyond that, we're talking, and this is what you just said, John, we're talking about 10X, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10X of what's an average car these days?
Casey:
Anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000 for like an okay car?
Casey:
Like how much does a Civic cost, John?
Casey:
Like that's a decent version.
Casey:
very run-of-the-mill car.
Casey:
A Civic is like $15,000, $20,000, isn't it?
Casey:
Easily.
John:
What planet are you on?
John:
You cannot buy a Civic for $15,000.
John:
You haven't been able to do that for decades.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
So it's been a while since I bought a car.
John:
The average selling price of a car is like $40,000 or something.
Casey:
Oh, there you go.
Casey:
So you think that they're just going to slide in here and charge 3X, 4X, 5X?
Casey:
Like, yeah, again, maybe that works in the Bay Area, where you folks are all getting paid absurd amounts of money and spending it all on housing.
Casey:
But that doesn't work in the real world.
Casey:
And I'm very...
John:
concerned that that they're going to strut in thinking oh we can totally charge 3x for our car because it's awesome and it's that was that was one of the rumors of what one of the what one of the revisions of project titan apple's car project one of the many yeah they did a product design and they said here's the car we want to make and then they priced it out and said no it's too much
John:
right so they've already stopped one of their iterations but due to cost because they realize i mean again i think it is perfectly valid to be a car manufacturer that makes expensive cars you're just going to sell fewer of them the question is where do you want to be do you want to sell as many cars as ferrari they actually sell a lot of cars for a car company that sells cars that start like 200 grand or whatever but they don't sell as many as you know porsche and then porsche does not sell as many as volkswagen and on down the line so you have to kind of decide how many you want to sell
John:
iPhones, they sell a heck of a lot of those.
John:
They sell them to not half the world, but an appreciable portion of the potential smartphone selling market is iPhones.
John:
I don't know what it is worldwide.
John:
It's like 30% or something.
John:
If you wanted to sell 30% of the cars in the world, you can't price it at $100,000.
John:
There is a question of, you know, is our first one really expensive?
John:
And then the price comes down, especially with electric cars, which is what everyone assumes they're building.
John:
A lot of the price has to do with battery, right?
John:
That is the cost driver for your car is the battery.
John:
Those electric motors don't actually cost that much.
John:
And building a car costs as much as it's ever cost in terms of making a
John:
frame and suspension and tires and brakes or whatever but the battery is the big cost thing if the batteries cost nothing electric cars would be incredibly cheap but if the batteries were expensive as they were two decades ago they're you know less feasible right so that's and again battery technology something's apple's familiar with and you know has relationships with and stuff like that so i think it is plausible that apple could sell a car
John:
at a reasonable price range but i also think they're whatever if they ever come out with a car it's definitely going to be the apple of cars which is going to be too expensive most people especially the first one think of the shock of the iphone remember when the iphone came out and it was like everyone was making fun of it because it cost so much money because it wasn't like a carrier subsidized or whatever
John:
And today, the iPhones we all have are very expensive devices.
John:
If you had told us back when we were using flip phones that someday you're going to, every year, or in my case, every other year, buy a phone for $1,200.
John:
You'd be like, $1,200 from a phone?
John:
I'm going to carry that around and drop it on the pavement?
John:
That's ridiculous.
John:
But people derive enough value from their smartphones that they're willing to pay hundreds, sometimes up into $1,000 for their phone, sometimes every year.
John:
So that, of all things, I get where you're coming from, that it just doesn't seem like...
John:
You know, something that's going to be they're going to be able to sell a lot of.
John:
And it also doesn't seem like they want to be the Ferrari or the Porsche of phones, but they don't have a product to sell at all right now.
John:
So it's not really an issue.
John:
And then as for the Andy Warhol thing of like, no matter who you are, a Coke is a Coke.
John:
when gruber uses that analogy and said no matter who you are a phone is a phone i think it's a little bit it's a little bit two different things because the idea of coke is like coke is not an expensive product to make anyone can buy it because it's very inexpensive and it's also not expensive to manufacture the things that are in it are not rare right whatever the secret formula is it's not it's not made with with uh you know platinum flakes or something right
John:
so everyone can get it because it is accessible to everyone and it is the same and the whole point is because it's basically you know the cultural hegemony of coca-cola because you're all raised drinking coke and you want something to taste like what you were raised on you have brand loyalty to coke because if you try rc cola it doesn't taste like what do you think a coke could taste like not because coke is fancier and more expensive than rc but just because it's what you're used to due to the dominance of the coca-cola brand whereas the iphone
John:
No one can get a better iPhone, no matter how rich you are, because making a phone is really, really hard.
John:
Unlike Coca-Cola, which is protected by whatever the secular formula is, the iPhone is protected by the fact that making a smartphone with a complete ecosystem around it has a huge barrier to entry.
John:
And so, yeah, no matter how rich you are, you can't get another iPhone, because even if given, you know...
John:
$3 trillion.
John:
Try making a better iPhone than an iPhone with $3 trillion.
John:
It's a harder thing to make.
John:
Whereas if I gave you $3 trillion to try making your own Coke, you just buy Coca-Cola.
John:
You got your own Coke now, right?
John:
Like it's different in that like one is like everyone gets the same Coke.
John:
which seems weird because it's so easy to make.
John:
And the other one, everyone gets the same.
John:
No one can make a better iPhone, no matter how rich they are, because it's so tremendously hard to make a smartphone.
John:
So I'm not sure that analogy works out.
John:
What it is trying to say is there is a, you know, that it's nice that, to your point, Casey, that the very best X in the world is accessible to a large number of people.
John:
And although the iPhone is very expensive, it is accessible to a lot of people, especially if you're buying a used iPhone.
John:
I think that's what Gruber was celebrating, the idea that
John:
iPhones are so important to our life.
John:
And if you want the very best one, you don't have to be a millionaire to get it.
John:
You just have to, you know, shop for refurbs on Amazon or whatever.
John:
Whereas the very best car in the world is not accessible to most people because even if you're shopping for a refurb, whatever you consider the best car, it's going to cost a lot more than a Civic.
Casey:
It certainly will.
Casey:
Do you think that they would do something, I forget the term for it, but like Volvo and I'm sure other manufacturers are doing this, have like a subscription service.
Casey:
And the way this worked when it first came out.
John:
You had to go there.
Casey:
I'm asking because they love their services revenue.
John:
I agree with you.
John:
I think the Apple car would have a service revenue component.
John:
That's what the thing with like the data center where they can assist drivers.
I bet you.
John:
pay for that service oh my gosh i hope that's not true but i hear you and you're probably right griber saying that it's a you know a distraction at best and a profound corruption whereas it is a profound corruption to every time they make a cool tech product to figure out and now how can we make a service out of this how can we make it a recurring payment how can we make it so that you don't just buy the apple car you buy a subscription to the apple car and if you want your heated seats to like again the audio industry is way out ahead of apple here but
John:
I have to imagine that in Project Titan, this is discussed because the old Apple that would create a technology product without service revenue attached to it seems dead.
John:
Like the headset.
John:
Headset's going to be cool tech if and when they ship it.
John:
And you're like, well, that's not going to have a server associated with it.
John:
Of course, it will have an app store.
John:
Like that is the easy go-to of like if we sell anything that is a platform, it has an associated app store where we try to make service revenue, which may or may not work, but that's the play.
John:
So if Apple comes out with a car, there will be service revenue associated with it because that's what modern Apple does.
Casey:
Yeah, I just don't know if they're going to do like a care by Volvo.
Casey:
I was just looking it up is what I believe I'm thinking of where you get to get a car and I believe insurance as well and maintenance and all that.
Casey:
You just pay a monthly fee.
Casey:
And I think you might even be able to switch which Volvo you have from time to time and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like it wouldn't surprise me if that's how they get in the door is that you're not buying a $300,000 Apple car.
Casey:
You're instead paying a hilariously expensive lease or subscription or what have you to have access to Apple's Apple car that they own.
John:
That's the Apple car upgrade program.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
You get a new Apple car every year.
John:
And again, that's less than the service revenue that I'm complaining about.
John:
I'm just like, hey, it's kind of like a rolling lease where you get a new car at a certain interval.
John:
But you can also buy it outright.
John:
It's a service revenue I'm talking about.
John:
Your car is useless to you unless you pay X dollars a month for the service that, I don't know, whatever they would charge for.
John:
We're not going to go with the heated seats or whatever BMW, but...
John:
Like, this is obviously, it's not just like, oh, Apple's being mean, they shouldn't do this.
John:
This is the way the whole industry and the whole world is going.
John:
And to some extent, it makes sense, but it feels worse when the people who are charging are not charging because the service is useful, but charging because...
John:
you know they've got uh you know they've got you in a vice it's like they can't you know you have no other choice right that it doesn't seem like you would pay for this otherwise but because apple has complete control over the platform they get to extract 30 of all the transactions that feels worse than uh let me pay even just something simple let me pay for sirius xm radio or whatever i want to pay for ongoing access to this thing if you if you think it's worthwhile pay for it if you don't don't but you're not the
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, let's do a little bit of Ask ATP, and let's start with Pitar Petrovich, who writes, in this day and age of social media all around us and with the Fediverse gaining traction, is it still worth one's time to have a personal website or a blog residing on one's personal domain?
Casey:
Yeah, I think so, because I'm a nerd and I want that control.
Casey:
I mean, no one can ever take away CaseyList.com from me.
Casey:
It's mine.
Casey:
Well, that's not a challenge.
Casey:
Please don't take that as a challenge.
Casey:
But you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
That's mine.
Casey:
That's where I live.
Casey:
That's my space.
Casey:
My space.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying.
Casey:
And so anyway, I control that.
Casey:
And my email address is at caselist.com.
Casey:
So when I moved from Gmail to Fastmail, then nobody knew it.
Casey:
Well, I mean, people knew it because I talked about it on the show.
Casey:
But like any of the people I knew, I was going to say everyone knew it.
Casey:
Hush you.
Casey:
Nobody asked.
Casey:
It's caselist.com slash Fastmail.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
But again, you get the point I'm trying to make here is that because it was under my control, everyone else that I was emailing with was completely ignorant to the fact that these emails were actually getting routed to PassMail instead of Gmail.
Casey:
And similarly, my website will live there.
Casey:
Maybe it will continue to run on my broken blog engine.
Casey:
Maybe it'll run on something else, but it will always be there.
Casey:
And even though my hot takes and quips and whatnot I used to put on Twitter and now I'm putting on Mastodon,
Casey:
It's still, to me, important to have a canonical place to live, if you will, a place that is mine and that is kind of my home base on the Internet.
Casey:
And I think it is absolutely worth it, even if all you have is a single-serving site.
Casey:
you know, an about page that says, hey, I'm Casey, I do these, you know, I have these projects, you can find me at these places.
Casey:
I still think that's important.
Casey:
And let's not lose sight of the fact that, you know, we were all on Mastodon servers years ago, most of which have crumbled, except John, who apparently was on every Mastodon server.
Casey:
But for like Marco and me, you know, or at least certainly me, and I thought Marco, you were in the same boat, we signed up on servers that have since disappeared.
Casey:
And that could happen.
Casey:
Now, granted, you know, the three of us seem to be using Mastodon.social now, which seems to be the most stable platform
Casey:
But you never know.
Casey:
You never know what will happen.
Casey:
And so I absolutely stand by and think it is important.
Casey:
And it's not that expensive.
Casey:
You know, you can use past sponsor Hover to get a domain.
Casey:
You can use past sponsor Squarespace in order to put a website there.
Casey:
In fact, I think you can even get your domain through Squarespace if you so choose.
Casey:
Linode.
Casey:
Linode.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That's another past sponsor as well.
Marco:
Pretty sure those two are also current sponsors, by the way.
Marco:
Not this episode.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
That's what I meant.
Casey:
Sorry, just not this episode is what I meant, but thank you for the correction.
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, we bring these services up in part because genuinely we either use or genuinely recommend them because they really are great.
Casey:
And so this is something that I absolutely think you should have a little corner of the internet that is under your control.
Casey:
And I stand by that 100%.
Casey:
Let's start with Marco.
Casey:
Where do you land on this?
Casey:
And I think I have a pretty strong feeling about it.
Marco:
So I think we have to separate out, like, you know, is it worth having your own domain from, you know, what Peter was asking here was, is it worth having a personal website or blog on a personal domain?
Casey:
That's fair.
Marco:
So, you know, whether you want to have a website or a blog, that's up to you.
Marco:
I do think it's worth having a domain because, you know, as Casey was saying, like, you know, on the long term, on an infinite timescale, services come and go.
Marco:
and servers come and go and companies come and go and what you want to do on the website, what your identity is, what services and functions it needs to offer or provide, all of that changes over time.
Marco:
And so it is nice to have something that is your own domain.
Marco:
So that way, like when you have your email address at your own domain instead of at a certain email provider, that pretty much guarantees that as long as no one
Marco:
any big email provider that does not support custom domains ever takes over and and makes it impossible to use a custom domain which seems unlikely with email that pretty much guarantees that like you can be service provider portable or agnostic and so if for instance if you use gmail with your own domain and then gmail starts to suck or they start charging money for that and you don't want to pay or whatever you know whatever happens there gmail you if you don't want to be on gmail anymore
Marco:
You can just move what is hosting your email, but to the world, it's still your domain.
Marco:
You change over the MX records and that's it.
Marco:
So you can change your hosting provider and not affect your ability to be reached or found or whatever popularity you've built up or whatever.
Marco:
You know, if Macedon continues to be a thing, and I hope it does, then certainly there might become some value in having your own domain for that in the sense that, again, that's a username that you can easily port between different backend options.
Marco:
That being said, it's a little bit less important there because they have this whole redirect mechanism in place.
Marco:
But, you know, basically for many services, the redirect procedure isn't so simple or effective.
Marco:
and or permanent and so it is nice to be able to have your own domain that things are pointing to and that you can host whatever you want there over time now whether you should have a blog that's a different question and that's up to you uh you know it personally i i've had a blog for a long time i don't really use it much anymore but
Marco:
I like the idea that I can always go back to it.
Marco:
Many people in the collapse of Twitter, many people are going back to their own personal blogs and reviving them and writing again.
Marco:
I think that's great.
Marco:
And so whether you're going to become the next Engadget, posting 30 posts a day or whatever, you don't have to do that to make it worth having a personal blog.
Marco:
It could be like John's where you post once a year.
Marco:
Or it could be like mine.
Marco:
I mean, you post whenever you want to promote something or call out a particularly bad bug to Apple and hope they fix it.
Marco:
Like whatever it is, you can post once every five years.
Marco:
And through the magic of RSS readers, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
You're not going to lose your audience.
Marco:
They'll just see a post once every five years and that'll be it.
Marco:
So whether you have a blog, that's up to you.
Marco:
But I think that can be very flexible.
Marco:
But I do think whether you should have your own domain.
Marco:
And some way to put stuff on that domain, whether that's, you know, whether you're pointing it to even like a static page on GitHub, they'll host it for free, or whether you're pointing it to like an S3 bucket, or having a full blown host like Squarespace, or running a full blown server like Linode, whatever it is, having a domain, if you are nerdy enough to even know what any of the stuff I'm talking about means, is probably valuable to you, and you should probably do it.
John:
Yeah, this is kind of, this topic comes up a lot, and I think it's kind of a, not a happy accident, but we were lucky enough that the standards of the internet that were made by, you know, people who wanted to do something good for the world or do it in a kind of open way, or the attitudes of the people who made the internet were such that people
John:
The things we got out of it, DNS, TCPIP, the fact that it was part of a government program that became open, you know, all those different systems, that they sort of snowballed and gained critical mass before private or public corporations could come in and extract all the value.
John:
means that we actually have a competitive market for the things we're talking about.
John:
The reason we say it's so important is not because, like to Marco's point, not because we think you should have a blog or be a blogger, but because DNS and owning your own domain name
John:
is a way for you to control your identity and your data on the Internet.
John:
The Internet is really important and having control of your identity is important.
John:
The reason you can control it is because DNS is not owned and controlled by Google or Microsoft or Apple, right?
John:
TCPIP is not owned and controlled by any corporation.
John:
It wasn't embraced and extended by Microsoft, so they own all the networking.
John:
We're not doing all this on MSN or whatever.
John:
Those open standards that sort of got their foot in the door before corporations come and ruin everything,
John:
exist and you should take advantage of them and all the technical ins and outs of why it's portable and everything are important but the underlying technology is what makes that possible that's why there is a competitive market for where you register your domain name you can use one of our sponsors you can use it at different companies these companies that compete to try to be the place where you register no one controls all domain names you can register at different places and
John:
What about hosting?
John:
Where do I host my website?
John:
There is a competitive market for hosting your website.
John:
Once you control the domain, the hosting companies know you can put that domain anywhere.
John:
You can run a server out of your closet.
John:
You can put it on Squarespace.
John:
You can put it on Linode.
John:
You can put it on like there's a million companies that do that because nobody owns and controls.
John:
Oh, this is the one company that controls like AWS does not control web hosting, although sometimes it seems that way.
John:
They don't.
John:
you can you can host anything anywhere same thing with email it happens to be an open protocol that yes there are dominant players in the market but you can host your email at different places it's not as easy to be receiving email which is what we talked about in past shows because of all the spam rules and all crap like that some some of that early sort of open stuff didn't go quite so well maybe email didn't work out that well for the world but uh
John:
that's why we're always pressing on that you should have your thing not because we think you should be a blogger or not because we think you should like use one of our sponsors and have a website but because we want individuals to own and control their identity on the web that's why we push for the idea of you know some username at twitter.com you don't own and control that twitter does right same thing with maston although maston does let you use the web for web finger protocol and various other things to basically be your username at domain that you control on mastodon but
John:
I haven't gone into the Webfinger thing to try it.
John:
It seems like it might not be as well supported in various clients and places as I expect.
John:
But that is the ideal.
John:
That's what we're shooting for.
John:
Open protocols, open standards, a competitive market to provide the services.
John:
And that's where this falls down.
John:
It's like we're a nerd show and we know that, you know, if you're listening to this, maybe you know how to make your own website.
John:
We all wish it was easier.
John:
And that's why, you know, in a competitive market, you have companies like Squarespace are saying we're going to try to make it as easy as possible for you to do this.
John:
It's still more complicated than you would like.
John:
And the competition is, oh, look how easy it is to sign up for Twitter.
John:
You don't have to pick a server.
John:
You just go to Twitter dot com and you create an account and it's so easy.
John:
private companies can make it easier because there is less competition there's one place to go mastodon you have to pick a server and even then you're sort of under the thumb of that server even with the redirect rules and everything right domain names and uh web hosting are the most open and that means there is the most choice and that means there is kind of a barrier to entry because like where do i go what if i don't want to use where is this what i want to use you know like it's a little bit trickier to use but that is the beauty of it like
John:
claim a portion of the internet for yourself because as websites come and go as as myspace you know rises and falls as facebook comes in and out of favor as twitter comes and goes and mastodon comes and goes if you own your own domain name your place on the internet will always exist that static urls that you control that's why we always send you to atp.fm store because that is a url that we control and
John:
And yes, it leads you to Cotton Bureau with various URLs, but at various times it has led you to other places.
John:
We want to send you to the place that we control so that we, you know, so that if you hear something that says ATP at FM store, you know, five years in the past or five years in the future, that page will still exist.
John:
And we know that because we control it.
John:
And whether we're hosted on Squarespace or Linode or, you know, Marco's Water Closet, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Wherever we're hosted, we control that URL.
John:
This is the ideal.
John:
The web happened to get out the door before corporations could totally destroy it.
John:
And yes, it is tricky or whatever, but this is why we wish everything was.
John:
We wish that our names on social were our names at a domain that we control.
John:
But that is unfortunately...
John:
it is not reasonable to expect as much as nerds would like it every person in the world to have their own domain name the namespace contention alone would be horrendous right so we recognize this is not you know it it's a little bit of a fantasy to say every person in the world is going to have their own domain name although with ipv6 they can have their own ip address but that's a different story
John:
But for the people listening to the show, you're not every person in the world, unfortunately for us.
John:
You are very, very, very tiny subset.
John:
And for the people listening to this show, I definitely recommend getting your own domain and using it and making a bunch of static URLs that never change and putting stuff on them.
John:
And if you post it once every five years, that's fine.
John:
If the only thing on it is a link to your resume, that's fine.
John:
Whatever you want to do.
John:
The point is that you control it.
John:
And once you have that, no one can take it away from you except probably the government.
John:
And hopefully we'll stop that from happening.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jeremy Nash writes, I've recently learned about BitRot and I am going down a rabbit hole convinced all my data will be corrupted one day.
Casey:
Do you guys worry about this on your synologies?
Casey:
Is ZFS or TrueNAS the only answer?
Casey:
And related, if your synologies died today, would you immediately replace them or would you look at a do-it-yourself solution like Unraid or TrueNAS?
Casey:
I'll start here.
Casey:
I am actually looking, I feel like we just talked about this, maybe we didn't, but I am looking to replace my synology probably in the first half of this coming year.
Casey:
Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's 10 years old and
Casey:
I think it's starting to feel its age, and it's time to maybe get something new.
Casey:
But I freaking love this thing.
Casey:
I adore my Synology.
Casey:
I totally understand that if you're patient enough and enjoy fiddling enough, that Unraid or TrueNast may be interesting to you, but it is not to me.
Casey:
With regard to BitRot...
Casey:
It's something I try not to think about because I don't want to think about it, but one of the things that I want to do on a new Synology, which I don't think my current one supports, is I want to move to some file system, I believe Butter, BTR, whatever it is.
Casey:
I'll talk to John about it when the time comes, but I would like to move to some file system that prevents this.
Casey:
Maybe Butter isn't the one I'm thinking of, but one of the ones that at least does a passable amount of effort to try to prevent bit rot.
Casey:
But yeah, it's a fact of life unless you're actively avoiding it and
Casey:
And I'm not actively avoiding it yet, but I hope to be soon.
Casey:
Let's start with John this time.
John:
Yeah, so congratulations for learning about BitRot.
John:
Yes, all your bits will be corrupted someday on an infinite timeline.
John:
And the defense against that are these systems that, well, there's two defenses.
John:
One is you want to detect when this happens.
John:
Because if you don't detect when this happens, all you do is you propagate your corrupted data to all your backups, right?
John:
So there's lots of different file systems and storage systems that do this.
John:
uh there's two parts that one is detecting whether it happened in which case you have to have some kind of like checksum to say hey we wrote bits like this are they still like that you need to be able to answer that question second is when you get the answer says no actually when we wrote these they look like this but now they look like that uh you know or they don't you know they might just know this is not what we wrote 10 years ago we wrote some data here and now the checksum doesn't match so this is bad
John:
what do you do about that well what you want is to to be notified at the very least for for your device to say hey this file is corrupt that doesn't help you if you don't have a way to fix that corruption one way you can fix it if you're lucky is okay well i have a backup of that file and that and i got notified promptly that the file was corrupt so that means that my backup isn't corrupt because it just turned corrupt and i backed up you know i have like 30 days worth of backups
John:
So I can pull that file from 30 days ago and restore it, and now it's not corrupt anymore.
John:
That relies on timely notification and timely action and frequent backups, right?
John:
The other way you can do that is the file system itself can store enough redundant information such that when it finds something is corrupt, it can just fix it itself if it has a good copy of the data somewhere.
John:
But of course, that eats your storage space because now you're not just storing all your data once, you're storing it 1.2 times, 1.5 times, depending on how many errors you want to be able to recover from.
John:
If you want to store your data twice, three times, five times like AWS does in S3 or whatever, the more copies of your data you store, the more likely you will be able to repair it when the computer detects that it's bad.
John:
So again, two parts.
John:
Detect when it's bad, be able to fix it.
John:
And those are two different things.
John:
Just because you use a file system that has checksums, you're like, I'm protected.
John:
All it's going to do is tell you when you're screwed immediately.
John:
Oh, I found your files corrupt and you don't have any other copies of it.
John:
Ha ha.
John:
That doesn't help.
John:
You have to have a good copy of the data somewhere.
John:
So ZFS and BTRFS and a bunch of other things can let you sort of choose how much storage space do you want me to burn saving redundant data such that you can repair, you know, small errors, bigger errors or whatever.
John:
really if you want to be the best protected you should use a file system that does that store some amount redundant data and also have backups with like you know not just one backup not like you overwrite the backup of the new one every time you want to have multiple versions of backups like even backplace has this now where you can save like different versions for 30 days or whatever so you have seven different versions of this file not just one and then pay attention when it tells you that something is corrupt right
John:
this is a high bar kind of like hosting oh i don't want to think about all this stuff or whatever but if you're if you're looking into true nas and stuff it seems like you're on board to dive into this so that's what you need detect the errors and be able to fix them as for me if my synology died today i would immediately replace it with the synology i love it it's been one of the best technology products i've had in you know in you know in my entire life i actually i don't want to replace it because it just works and it's fine
John:
But I also frequently go to the Synology site, but I had to replace it.
John:
What kind of cool Synology would I get?
John:
Because I love it.
John:
It's my favorite thing.
John:
It's in the basement.
John:
It's out of sight.
John:
It's out of mind.
John:
It does everything that I want it to do.
John:
It is almost 10 years old.
John:
It is old and creaky.
John:
It will soon be exactly 10 years old because we got them in 2013, right?
Casey:
Yeah, in April, I believe.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So in April, this will be the thing will be 10 years old.
John:
I hope it doesn't take that.
John:
I don't want to replace it because it would be expensive to replace, but I kind of look forward to replacing it because I want to shop for a new Synology.
John:
So that's an endorsement of that brand.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Edwin Guggenbichler writes, do you use native mouse acceleration?
Casey:
And then somebody, I don't know if that was Edwin or somebody else, put in a link to Steermouse.
Marco:
i don't even know what this is about so john all right so casey you probably remember when you switched from windows to mac the way the mouse accelerates is different between those two systems oh god it was so long ago i'm sure you're right but i have zero recollection of it well you know you certainly notice if you go back that's fair like if you if you happen to use pcs and macs to get like on a regular basis you happen to use both
Marco:
you will probably notice especially if you use mice on both like it's a little bit hard to notice with trackpad on the mac or whatever but you know if you use mice on both you will definitely notice like oh it doesn't move right on you know one or the other so basically yeah the mouse acceleration works totally differently on macs than it does on windows
Marco:
so to answer edwin's question do i use native mouse acceleration yes because you know i uh i i'm mostly on mac and uh you know with the exception of playing my weird sim tower game i'm mostly on mac most of the time um and games are the only thing i use windows for and games i feel like you kind of get used to whatever however the mouse behaves in the game anyway and it's always different from how it behaves on a desktop so it kind of doesn't matter
Casey:
So is there a setting for this?
Casey:
I still feel ignorant.
Marco:
So the reason why the steer mouse link is here, I assume John put it there, is that steer mouse is a utility that I believe allows you to change the mouse acceleration curve on Macs to possibly better match what Windows PCs do.
John:
Uh, that's not what it's, it's not, it doesn't match what it is.
John:
So yeah.
John:
So the, when we talk about acceleration curve, it's basically saying when you move the mouse, there's, uh, there's multiple pieces of information coming in.
John:
There's how far you moved into which direction and over what period of time.
John:
Right.
John:
And those are all factors in how the cursor moves.
John:
the new position of the cursor is a factor of all of that it's not just how far you move the mouse and it's not just how fast you move it and it's not just the direction it's all those things combined and the equation that takes those inputs and translates them to the new position of the cursor is called like they call the mouse acceleration curve right and there's lots of different kind of you know if you could graph like here's the three inputs here's the output you can graph that and it's probably more than three inputs but like there's
John:
There's lots of different ways you can do that.
John:
I'm very sensitive to mouse acceleration, especially since I was basically born on the Mac and used to the Mac's mouse acceleration, which was just phenomenally better than mouse acceleration on other platforms from day one.
John:
If you use a mouse on the Apple IIgs and use it on the Mac, it did not feel the same.
John:
Even that's from the same company.
John:
It was not the same at all.
John:
I was so sensitive to it.
John:
I remember when I got my SE30,
John:
There was some kind of bug.
John:
I don't know if it was a bug in the OS, a bug in Mac Paint.
John:
I think it was probably a bug in the OS that would cause the mouse cursor to jump in a little L-shaped right angle thing where instead of going from one point to another point that's on an angle from it, it would go...
John:
up and then over to the right like you know up three pixels into the right three pixels instead of going like the hypotenuse right and that would manifest if you tried to draw with the mouse in mac oh no you would see these little stair steps and not just stair steps from pixels but stair steps like three pixels high three pixels right and it's like no i wanted you to do you know five pixels on an angle on the hypotenuse i actually brought it to the that was such a complaining kid brought it to be like authorized some things never change
John:
because i got a new computer this is my new fancy computer and the mouse doesn't work right like i can't draw in mac paint i brought it to we brought it to the authorized apple dealer because there was no apple stores in those days and said hey we just got this new computer and the mouse don't work right and i showed them and they're like how much you're talking about kid go away like they just i mean there's nothing they could do about it i don't know if it ever got fixed or if it was just i got a new computer after that but anyway i'm very sensitive to the the mouse curve
John:
the reason i use steer mouse which is what i put link in here is and this is uh sometimes the case for people when you go to the uh like system settings or whatever and see the little slider for mouse acceleration what is it called now it's like pointer speed or something
John:
yeah mouse uh tracking speed yeah it's a slider and it goes from slow in the left end to fast at the right those are literally the labels there are no labels authentic marks the left edge is labeled slow and the right edge is labeled fast that's basically saying do you want the mouse cursor to move a lot when you move the mouse a little or you do you want it to move a little when you move the mouse a little right uh and there are there's a setting for this under the covers
John:
I think it's just a floating point value or something.
John:
Just a single floating point value, which obviously, you know, given what I said about the inputs, it's more complicated than that.
John:
But the OS gives you this one setting, slow and fast.
John:
If, like me, you have a very large monitor, even the fastest setting might feel too slow.
John:
Like it might feel like it takes you have to like move the mouse, then pick it up and move it back to the middle and move it again just to get from one side of the other thing.
John:
Or you have to move the mouse unreasonably fast and it doesn't feel accurate to do it or whatever.
John:
So if you're on the highest setting and it still doesn't feel fast enough, one thing you can do is just like defaults, right?
John:
Whatever that thing is and set the value of that thing to a higher value than the slider.
John:
I don't know what the values are, but let's pretend the left side of the thing is like zero and the right side is 1.0.
John:
you can from the command line and set it to 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, like basically set values that are not settable with the GUI.
John:
So that's one way to influence the mouse tracking.
John:
On my big monitors, I have found that no matter what value I put into the one value that Apple lets you pick, the mouse doesn't feel right to me.
John:
It feels slow, but also inaccurate.
John:
So for a while, I've used a third party utility, a steer mouse, that lets you more concisely tweak
John:
the acceleration curves for individual input devices.
John:
This is another factor that I didn't mention.
John:
The actual mouse influences this as well.
John:
If I'm using my Microsoft mouse connected through USB versus using an Apple mouse connected through USB, they behave wildly differently.
John:
This may seem strange to you, but they absolutely do.
John:
Different mice will behave differently with the same tracking setting.
John:
So to make this Microsoft mouse not drive me insane, I needed to be able to tweak the
John:
the acceleration curves uh you know in a more accurate way and so steer mouse gives you two numbers that lets you lets you type in the values i don't know what these numbers mean they call them acceleration and sensitivity who knows what they're doing under the covers but the point is i can fiddle with these sliders and type in exact values and save my settings and associate them with this specific input device so if i plug in an apple mouse it will feel apple mouse normal
John:
And I can make this Microsoft mouse feel the way I want.
John:
So do I use the native mouse acceleration?
John:
No, I don't.
John:
Not with my Microsoft mouse.
John:
If I had an Apple mouse, I think I probably would use the native one because the Apple mice, when you crank up the built-in setting, still feel right to me.
John:
When I went on the big mouse journey buying all these different mice, I was amazed at how different they feel.
John:
A Logitech mouse, a Logitech gaming mouse feels different from a Logitech regular mouse, feels different from a Microsoft mouse, feels different from an Apple mouse.
John:
That's why it's great to have third-party utilities to let you tweak this.
John:
And again, associate that tweak specifically with the device.
John:
So once you get every device set up the way you want, you can even have different curves for Bluetooth versus USB connection of the same mouse.
John:
Then it just remembers them, and when you plug in the device, it feels normal.
John:
one of the fun things steer mouse has is like a social networking aspect where you can see other people other people's popular saved settings for your mouse are there like achievements that like you know oh you've you've moused 100 miles you know there should be but no it's just i think it's just like save settings for your mouse because you're like i don't know what to set these numbers to every time of these sliders around still feels weird can i find a setting that lots of other people use for this mouse and you can just use one of the save settings
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Nebula, and Blaze.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Happy New Year, everyone.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
Did anybody watch any Christmas movies?
John:
Even Marco, when he thought his Christmas was going to be a normal time, did any of you watch a movie that you always watch during Christmas?
Casey:
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Casey:
You have to watch several movies.
Casey:
There's a litany of movies that you are compelled to watch, John.
John:
Every year, though?
John:
Yeah.
John:
How much room is there for multiple?
John:
I feel like maybe you can have one or two movies, but you can't have like 17 movies you have to watch on Christmas.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, you absolutely can.
Casey:
Christmas, for most of us, is the 25th, man.
Casey:
You got plenty of time.
Casey:
I think you were intending to mean on the day of, and that's a different conversation.
John:
No, no, not on the day of.
John:
I always have to watch these in the Christmas season.
John:
What is your list of terrible 90s movies that you like to watch?
Marco:
Since we haven't actually gotten to the rest of the family where we would normally watch Christmas Vacation, we've only watched kind of second-tier movies, and in fact, we've actually watched, no joke,
Marco:
only bad sequels to second tier movies so far so the christmas movies we've seen so far this year are die hard 2 and home alone 2 oh die hard 2 is not that bad it's not as good as the first but it's not that bad it's not as bad as home alone 2 i'll give you that but but neither are good i would say
Casey:
I mean, for us, the Christmas season in terms of movies starts really any time after Thanksgiving, the very latest on December 1st.
Casey:
And for us, we have to watch Elf.
Casey:
I have always enjoyed Elf, and it is becoming possibly my favorite Christmas movie over time.
Casey:
Aaron is a big fan of Love Actually.
Casey:
I know that's very polarizing.
Casey:
I never had seen or even heard of Love Actually before we had met.
Casey:
And I actually have come to really, really like Love Actually as well.
Casey:
This is where John rolls his eyes and tells me the litany of ways in which it's wrong or bad.
John:
I was rolling my eyes at Elf, but go on.
Casey:
Yeah, me too.
Casey:
Oh, how can you not like Elf?
Casey:
Oh, God, you monsters.
John:
I don't dislike it, but it is not.
John:
Here's the thing with classic Christmas things.
John:
It's whatever you get used to at a certain point.
John:
It has really no connection to quality.
John:
We all just have to admit that.
John:
The Christmas movies that we like is unrelated to the quality of those things.
Casey:
Well, with that in mind, for me, the thing that imprinted on me when I was a wee lad, you know, many, many moons ago was Claymation Christmas.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Which almost nobody has heard of.
Casey:
But Marco is the prime age is because we're basically the same age as the prime age to have heard of Claymation Christmas.
Casey:
It is not the Christmas season.
Casey:
If you have not watched Claymation Christmas at least once, preferably thrice to 10 times.
Casey:
So that is definitely on the list.
Casey:
I'm trying to think of what else.
Casey:
I just watched for the very first time.
Casey:
I watched Christmas Vacation.
Casey:
I'd never seen it, which is funny because my parents' license plate growing up was Griswold, but I'd never seen it, and I went into it expecting it to be garbage, kind of like,
Casey:
a Christmas story.
Casey:
And I actually thought it was pretty good.
Casey:
There are some jokes that didn't age well, but for the most part, when you come to something that's 30 years old, 40 years old, whatever it is, today, usually it's bad.
Casey:
It's real bad.
Casey:
And I actually enjoyed Christmas Vacation.
Casey:
It was pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm actually kind of surprised that as a newcomer to it in 2022, I'm surprised that you would have liked it, honestly.
Marco:
Because, yeah, you're right.
Marco:
Most 80s and 90s movies really do not hold up well to modern eyes, especially comedies like there.
Marco:
especially chevy chase movie like oh god there's so much like the you know odds are poor that that that anything you see from that time period is going to hold up today and and even that you even be able to get through it let alone think it's funny and not be horribly offended by it and but yeah it actually as that goes you know again the bar is low but as that goes it's it's good but it's all relative
Casey:
So, so John, what are you, what are your John Syracuse approved movies?
Casey:
And is there, are there any, or is, is there at least one?
John:
I don't, I used to watch things like every year just because they were on like the Rudolph thing.
John:
Cause that's how old I am.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
But that was just on TV and I'd watch it every year.
John:
But as I got older and surprise, surprise to everyone, uh, like the, what, when things were of bad quality, but they were still like, Oh, you watch us every year.
John:
The bad quality eventually went out.
John:
I, then I stopped watching things that I don't like.
John:
It's like, yes, it is traditional.
John:
I watch this all the time, but it's not like the Rudolph thing.
John:
It's for kids.
John:
I'm not interested in it.
John:
I don't feel compelled to watch the Rankin-Bass Rudolph thing every year because it's not something that I enjoy.
John:
So I haven't seen that in ages.
John:
That's true of most things.
John:
I remember watching Christmas Vacation when it first came out and enjoying it when I was however old I was when that happened, a teenager or something.
John:
But I don't think it would hold up on repeat viewing.
John:
And so I don't watch it, even though it's like, oh, it's traditional.
John:
I've seen it all the time.
John:
Like it's part of my Christmas memories.
John:
It is, but it's not a movie that I enjoy.
John:
So I don't watch it.
John:
The one thing that I would probably be willing to watch again is A Christmas Story, which I think is actually good.
John:
uh as opposed to the other ones but i know people are bored by it it may require i think it is a well-executed version of what it is but it is a nostalgia trip for people of a certain age it is nostalgic for a time that is before my time but it is my parents time so i can i can relate to it and kind of the same way i can relate to goodfellas i wasn't a mobster in the 70s but my 70s some of my relatives probably were so i have a
John:
like my when i look at goodfellas i see people who i remember from my childhood like my uncle was like that my cousin was like like i can connect to it in that way so in the same the same way christmas story connects with me because it is a a fantasy fantasy nostalgia version of a world i never experienced and probably never really existed but that i feel like i have a connection to and i think it's actually kind of funny and a fun movie
John:
But I understand it's kind of like the same way that I'm never going to like Elf the way that 90s kids like it.
John:
But I thought Elf was fine, but it doesn't have that connection to me.
John:
So if I had if he was forced at gunpoint says you must watch a movie every Christmas from now on as a Christmas tradition.
John:
A, I wouldn't like it because that's not how I roll the B if I had to pick a Christmas story.
Casey:
Oh, I mean, obviously, whatever makes you happy makes you happy.
Casey:
But for me, I came to Christmas Story just like five-ish years ago, and I did not care for it at all.
John:
There's no Claymation Christmas, right, Casey?
Casey:
No, it is not a Claymation Christmas.
John:
It's so much better.
Marco:
Frankly, that'd be my one.
Marco:
If I had to pick one, it'd be Claymation Christmas.
Casey:
Oh, amen, brother.
Casey:
I am right there with you.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
No, you are doing through rose-colored glasses.
Casey:
Oh, 100%.
Marco:
Also, honorable mention for the Garfield Christmas as well.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever seen that one.
Casey:
Claymation Christmas, I absolutely will concede that it is probably garbage if you look at it with any sort of reasonable point of view.
Casey:
But as someone who is of the correct age like Marco...
Casey:
who's of the correct date for Claymation Christmas.
Casey:
If I had to choose just one, it's that one.
Casey:
But if I got two, I think Elf would be my second.
Casey:
I really freaking love Elf.
Casey:
That being said, Aaron and I watched Die Hard last night because that's what you do.
John:
Yeah, I mean, Die Hard is more of a recent internet phenomenon.
John:
It was like a decade ago, like, oh, Die Hard's a Christmas movie, right?
John:
I love Die Hard and I'll watch it anytime.
John:
It's a fun movie, but it's not something I ever watched at Christmas.
John:
I never went in on that fad.
John:
I guess the one Christmas tradition thing that I do have that I actually do do every Christmas season is not a movie, but music.
John:
When I was a kid, we had a record, Casey, of the Muppets and John Denver Christmas album.
John:
What?
John:
We were a big John Denver family.
John:
We had John Denver records.
John:
And I loved the Muppet Show when I was a kid.
John:
I watched every single night or whatever time I was on, 730 or whatever.
John:
I loved the Muppet Show.
John:
I loved the Muppets.
John:
I loved the Muppet movie.
John:
I'm of that age.
John:
uh and because we had that christmas records of the muppets singing christmas carols with john denver we heard it all the time during my childhood and for whatever reason unlike well here i'm probably unlike the movies which are crap movies and i stop watching if this is crap music i can't tell because i still enjoy listening to the muppets and john denver sing christmas carols so when we put on christmas music when we're decorating the tree and it's my random playlist of holiday music
John:
a huge swath of that is john denver of the muppets i love that album it reminds me of my childhood and i think they do a good job i mean they're singing christmas carols it's like you know it's not it's real off the red news reindeer silent night like it's christmas songs sung by the muppets and john denver and i still give that a thumbs up i think some of the songs are funny and good for kids and you know especially if you're a kid you like muppets but some of them are just good renditions of a song i guess it helps if you like john denver which i do
John:
uh so yeah that's the one thing i actually still do every year not a single christmas has gone by where i have not listened to john didn't run them up at sing christmas carols at some point this is from a tv special apparently i've never heard of this i'm digging on wikipedia now but apparently it's a soundtrack album from a special i think it was on tv but i have i have the record and now i have it in mp3s
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Also on the list, it will surprise nobody that I'm a bit of a pack rat about certain things.
Casey:
And I really enjoy the Pentatonix Christmas specials from the years and the Disney Christmas specials through the years.
Casey:
And I'll put those on as like background noise and whatnot.
Casey:
All of these, of course, are living in Plex, as they are wont to do.
Casey:
But no, I freaking love Claymation Christmas.
Casey:
And Elf, again, I think I'm of the right age.
Casey:
That Elf just absolutely clicked for me.
Casey:
Even though it came out when Marco and I were like almost graduated from college, if I remember right.
Casey:
I think it was like
Casey:
2003 or thereabouts.
Marco:
Yeah, we were a bit old for it.
Marco:
I think if I liked Will Ferrell, I would like it, but I don't, so I don't.
Casey:
Oh, see, I love Will Ferrell, so I'm all in.
Casey:
But no, I don't have any real problems with any of these.
Casey:
Not that it really matters.
Casey:
You do you.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Christmas Story just never clicked for me.
Casey:
I've never seen It's a Wonderful Life, so I don't know if that's good or bad or whatever.
Casey:
Obviously, The Grinch.
Casey:
I'm okay with the Jim Carrey version, the original version I love.
Casey:
One of you, I think John, had mentioned Rudolph and all the Rankin-Bass stuff and Frosty.
Casey:
That always happens.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, Elf and Claymation are my two winners.
John:
Speaking of owning your place on the web and having permanent links to live on, this is a difficult problem.
John:
I think it's because I put a link in the show notes.
John:
I said, I want a link in the show notes to the John Donovan Muppet albums that I was thinking of.
John:
Someone in the chat room put an Apple Music link, but then you're like, oh, but what if people don't use Apple Music?
John:
Should I have a Spotify link?
John:
Maybe it's on YouTube, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So there's these services that have grown up.
John:
uh over the past few years that try to provide a canonical link to a song and say hey if that song is available in apple music here's how you get to it with song on spotify here's how you get to it there and so on and so forth but of course those services themselves are just another thing that might disappear so you know album.link is the song.link there's you know oh i see i use uh song whip but it's the same idea
John:
Right.
John:
But that's the problem.
John:
None of those things are any more permanent than the individual services.
John:
So I'm going to put an album.link thing in the show notes.
John:
But five years from now, when an album.link is a spam site that tries to give you a virus, I feel bad.
John:
But there just isn't a canonical place for this.
John:
Like, you can't rely on the record label to have a canonical link because they change the URLs every day and they probably don't have it up anywhere.
John:
So we're going to put an album.link here.
John:
But this just shows the problem of, like, if...
John:
If the people who own this media really cared about it, they would provide canonical links for all of the media in their catalog that then sublinked out to its availability on services.
John:
But that's a lot of work and they just seem like they're not going to ever do that.
John:
So we're stuck with these things.