Moving to Antarctica
Casey:
wow that's a weird one i wonder how that happened oh you know i i think okay it's probably just a copy and paste though i think it was yeah copy and paste though are we making that happen is that is that a thing that we're making happen copy and paste though yeah sure i meant to kind of yell at you on merlin's behalf because you were just on all over merlin for for sharrow which i understand why you're grumpy grumbly about it it's sharrow he's from he's from long island so it's sharrow right
Casey:
Anyways, you're crapping all over Merlin for Sharo, but then you busted out.
Casey:
Shoot, what was it?
Casey:
It was not a round rack.
Casey:
There was something else that you'd said.
Casey:
Oh, Squircle.
John:
I didn't bust out Squircle.
John:
I did not invent Squircle.
John:
That's the problem with Sharo is Merlin like inventing a terrible word, but Squircle is not.
John:
I didn't invent Squircle.
John:
Squircle was before all of us.
Marco:
First of all, I don't think shero is bad.
Marco:
However, I do agree that it seems to be a Merlinism that no one else uses.
John:
Right.
John:
Whereas squircle is a thing.
John:
It's a term of art.
John:
I didn't make up squircle.
John:
Don't yell at me about squircle.
Casey:
I'm not yelling at you about squircle.
Casey:
You are.
Casey:
You are yelling at me about squircle.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Because my point is, to my brain, they're both, I can't pronounce this word properly, but they're both portmanteaus.
Casey:
You know, shero and square circle.
John:
If I say like a pent oval or something, feel free to yell at me, but squircle is not on me.
I'm sorry.
John:
all i'm saying is you're you're you're grumbling at merlin for one portmanteau yet you're just because he's making it up and it's it's dumb whereas squircle is pre-existing pre-existing condition so he's not he's not given the right to create no only to no i mean he can try to make he can try to make shiro happen but good luck
Casey:
So he does not have the C in crud, is what you're saying.
Casey:
For those who are confused, Sharo is the Merlinism, which I agree with Marco.
Casey:
I actually liked it.
Casey:
It's the Merlinism for a share arrow.
Casey:
So, you know, like the square with the little arrow popping out that you see is like a share icon on iOS.
John:
Well, no, he's made it when you go into SF Symbols and type Sharo and it comes up.
Casey:
Anyway, I didn't mean to start this episode antagonistically, so we should probably come up with a happier pre-show than that.
Casey:
But we can't.
Casey:
But we can't.
Casey:
All right, here we go.
Casey:
Hey, so if you wanted to order a shirt but missed the sale because you don't listen to your pal Casey and do your vision exercise and visualize where you're going to be when you can actually order things during the time-limited sale, well, guess what, baby?
Casey:
The on-demand store is back open.
Casey:
And John, would you mind taking us on a quick tour of what we have available, please?
John:
Sure.
John:
Normally, I wouldn't even mention the on-demand store for the podcast listeners because the podcast listeners all hear about the real time limited store, which has much better quality shirts with better quality printing that, yes, cost a little bit more money.
John:
But on this special occasion only, I will mention the on-demand store because the holidays are coming up.
John:
But if you did happen to miss the other sale or you're just desperate for a gift for a nerd in your life or something, the on-demand store is up.
John:
uh the products we have in the on-demand store are the m1 and m2 shirts no suffix just plain old m1 and m2 also no back printing on any of these so if you wanted a shirt without anything on the back these all have nothing on the back right um but i think that for the for the printing process that uses on these cheaper shirts i think the rainbow colored m1 and m2s don't look as good as i hope the monochrome ones will look so we have monochrome m1 and m2
John:
two shirts as well there it's just white printing on it and that will i think will come out a lot better with this uh you know less expensive printing process and we also have monochrome atp shirt uh and for the rainbow m1 and m2 logo shirts the shirts are just black because the logo you know has so many colors on it doesn't you know it goes well with black but for the monochrome shirts all the shirts come in different colors and if you load atp.fm store and wait a few seconds you'll see the shirts rotate through all the different colors that are available uh
John:
So there you go.
John:
If you're desperate for shirts and you missed out on it before and you want a chance to buy slightly less expensive but slightly lesser quality shirts, they are available.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
And what about a chicken hat?
John:
We do not yet have more chicken hats.
John:
The chicken hats remain sold out.
John:
I promise you, if we manage to get more chicken hats in time for the holidays, we will tell you on this program.
John:
But that's probably not going to happen because we are rapidly manufacturing and shipping all the chicken hat orders that we've already received.
John:
And we have made another order, so there will be more chicken hats eventually, but...
John:
You know, anyway, stay tuned to this program.
John:
In time for summer next year?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
John:
They're going to be here in time for winter in the northern hemisphere this year.
John:
It's just a question of, like, will they be here in January or whatever.
John:
So we'll let you know on the show.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
With regard to what I have called FC Model 2 in no small part to try to encourage Marco to come up with a better name.
Marco:
Oh, wait.
Marco:
I have a better name.
Marco:
I just haven't told you yet.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Well, are you sharing it now or no?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Okay, good talk.
So, anyway.
Casey:
So with regards to FC Model 2, a.k.a.
Casey:
redacted, and async await, and then bridging async await into legacy Objective-C code, I certainly, and I think John also was wondering, hey, how does that even work?
Casey:
And Aaron Farnham wrote in and pointed us to an article or an entry on GitHub.
Casey:
within Swift dilution that talks exactly about this and talks about, hey, how do you go from Objective-C into Async-Await, and how do you go the other direction?
Casey:
And it talks about it, and it's pretty straightforward and pretty reasonably easy to read.
Casey:
And so if you're interested...
Casey:
you can dig into that.
Casey:
And the short, short version is basically compiler magic based on convention.
Casey:
And obviously it's more complicated than just that, but that's a short, short version.
Casey:
As an aside, however, I wanted to bring up a toot that Marco made like a day ago.
Casey:
I would like to read it to you.
Casey:
This is Marco Arment at mastodon.social.
Casey:
Spent the day working in Objective-C for the first time in a month.
Casey:
And for the first time, I hated it.
Casey:
I think I finally fully crossed over Swift all the way now.
Casey:
I know, welcome to five years ago.
Casey:
And to this, I just would like to say as I tooted,
Casey:
Finally.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm not sure about that dramatic reading.
John:
It didn't really sound like Marco's voice.
Casey:
Would you like Marco to do the dramatic reading?
John:
Before we get to the substance of this, there is the problem that for many years, lots of us, including me, have occasionally referred to tweets on Twitter with the word toot, just as a kind of an informal way to say tweet without saying tweet, right?
John:
And what you're trying to say is Marco posted something on Mastodon.
John:
Which I think they've decided to change the name, though, haven't they?
John:
Yeah, and the Mastodon has since stopped calling them toots as of a while ago, because there was some controversy, because some small sport was like, I don't like toot, it sounds whatever.
John:
Anyway, they changed it to post.
John:
So now when someone says toot, I can't tell if they're fancifully talking about something on Twitter in a kind of informal, fun, whimsical way, or if they mean the things on Mastodon that are no longer called toots.
John:
Anyway, this was on Mastodon.
John:
Continue.
Indeed.
Marco:
Which, by the way, by the way, so now that it's, I think they've publicly acknowledged this, now that, oh my god, I'm on the TapBots ivory beta, which is basically TweetBot for Mastodon.
Marco:
Why are you on that beta and I'm not?
Marco:
This I don't understand.
Casey:
Both of us are, both Marco and I. Why am I not on this?
John:
I'm the only one who is posting any content related to Mastodon clients on Mastodon and you both get on the beta?
John:
This is ridiculous.
Marco:
I'm outraged.
Marco:
You should be.
Marco:
It's really good.
Marco:
Like, okay, look, it's just TweetBot for Mastodon, right?
Marco:
It doesn't have a unified timeline though, right?
Casey:
No, it does not have a unified timeline.
Marco:
It's Tweetbot for Mastodon, and that's exactly what I want.
Marco:
See, what's great about it, as I'm trying to give Mastodon a real solid try, and honestly, I really do think it's getting quite a bit of steam.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Marco:
A lot of people who I have followed mostly on Twitter, a lot of them are there now as well or instead.
Marco:
And there is enough of a community forming there that I think this might stick, especially once the app situation gets worked out.
Marco:
So I'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
But really, like...
Marco:
The community that is growing on Mastodon is really seeing quite a bit of traction, not necessarily amongst, quote, non-geek people.
Marco:
I mean, there are some non-geek people there, but I don't think it's anywhere near as successful as Twitter was and probably ever will be.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There's enough people who I want to follow, who I do follow, who are there and posting there, that I think if you consider yourself to be in similar circles of interests as us, I think you should go try Mastodon.
Marco:
It's time.
Marco:
There is a lot of good posting happening there.
Marco:
There's a lot of great people there, very interesting people there.
Marco:
Many of the people you know from Twitter and from our little nerd circle are there.
Marco:
Many people who are outside of that circle are also there, which is even better because you get to diversify what you're seeing and who you're interacting with.
Marco:
It's time.
Marco:
It has won the current battle of where's everyone going.
Marco:
In the intervening time between last episode, I also got into Post, the post.news.
Marco:
And it seems fine, but no one I know seems to be there.
Marco:
And there's no native app.
Marco:
It's just like the PWA, just the web app icon on the phone.
Marco:
And it just seems like – I don't know why I would use that.
Marco:
because mastodon is there doing a better job of a similar thing um so so far i'm i'm really getting a lot of success with mastodon and i'm telling you what changed it for me was when i got on this beta
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Because when you're a Twitter user and you try Mastodon, some of the friction that you encounter is, wow, there's a bunch of weird new terms and conventions I need to learn.
Marco:
Some of the friction you encounter is the whole nerd setup of, like, I got to choose an instance and figure out where people are.
Marco:
Okay, that's another thing.
Marco:
And those two, you know, those kind of solve themselves once you get over the initial, you know, day of usage.
Yeah.
Marco:
Then, longer term, the paper cuts that hit you are, wow, this is weirdly different from Twitter, but a lot of that is simply because the apps are all different, and there's a whole bunch of different master on apps, and I have not been super thrilled with any of them, frankly.
Marco:
I've tried, I think, five before Ivory, including ones that are still in beta, ones that people say are great, and they're all different degrees of fine.
Marco:
But they're not great.
Marco:
And if you are accustomed to Twitterific or Tweetbot, which really provide great Twitter experiences, none of them are up to that level.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
It's like using a web app versus using a native app.
Marco:
It's that level of difference.
Marco:
So now that I, for the last day or so, have had Ivory, which is effectively Tweetbot for Mastodon, it works like Tweetbot.
Marco:
It looks like Tweetbot.
Marco:
It feels like Tweetbot.
Marco:
that makes such a massive difference in my opinion overall of mass on itself because now it seems much more like a drop-in replacement for twitter there are still important differences but they're much more minor once now that i have the exact same interface to it on my phone that i have for twitter because i'm accustomed to tweet but i've been using it for years i'm extremely confident now in the future of this because while it is
Marco:
There's certain areas where it's never going to be like Twitter.
Marco:
There's no quote tweeting, the Federation angle.
Marco:
There's different things that it's never going to be like Twitter in certain ways.
Marco:
And there's definitely still all of the challenges we've mentioned before about scaling, moderation, the Federation reality.
Marco:
There are a lot of challenges in Macedon for sure.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
The app situation, once the ivories come out, because they've also said they're making a Mac version, which I'm not on any beta for that yet, but that would change everything for me.
Marco:
Because right now, I have TweetBot open on my Mac all the time, and I have four different columns open.
Marco:
Because I have...
Marco:
I have my account, then my mentions, then ATP's mentions, then Overcast's mentions.
Marco:
Because I have to be monitoring everything that people are saying to these other two business accounts that we have to care about.
Marco:
And I can post to any of those three accounts from the app super easily, switch between them, etc.
Marco:
So it's an important part of my workflow.
Marco:
The Mac app situation for Mastodon is...
Marco:
dire but but now that they've said they're working on a mac version like from tapots uh if it's anything like tweet by for mac that's gonna really raise the bar for me and that's gonna be you know super great just drop in replacement for twitter and at that point uh i i think i i really might substantially move over
Marco:
Right now, I've kind of partially moved over.
Marco:
Once the Mac app situation gets worked out, I think I might really move over because it's just a nicer place to be in a lot of ways.
Marco:
And again, yeah, there are problems.
Marco:
There are going to keep being problems.
Marco:
But it's funny.
Marco:
I think we've crossed a threshold where when I was trying out Post the other night,
Marco:
I was like, you know, here I am in this proprietary closed system in this private VC funded, you know, Andreessen Horowitz funded company.
Marco:
Why am I doing this?
Marco:
Like, it's like, you know, I've already been burned by one giant VC funded company with a closed social network.
Marco:
Why would I invest my time and content into another one when we have this kind of open standards-based ecosystem over here in Mass on an activity pub land?
Marco:
Why would I invest in some closed VC-funded one again?
Marco:
That thought process and that emotion...
Marco:
I don't think anybody had that thought process a year ago or even a month ago necessarily.
Marco:
So I think it's really interesting that because Mastodon and the activity pub environment, the whole ecosystem there, because that, which is mostly Mastodon, because that is...
Marco:
really gaining a lot of steam right now I think a lot of us are going to start thinking this way of like now it's going to be very hard to convince any of us nerd types to join closed privately held VC funded social networks when we have this other ecosystem that we can participate in instead
Marco:
And the ones that are already there, like Instagram, those will stick around because they're already established.
Marco:
But for something to replace Twitter in particular, Twitter has always been the more nerdy social network.
Marco:
It's been the information junkies, the tech nerds, the kind of news and politics nerds.
Marco:
It's been that kind of community much more strongly on Twitter than the other social networks.
Marco:
And I think that group
Marco:
might actually start to care in a meaningful way.
Marco:
Like, wait, why should we go invest in some other close thing?
Marco:
Especially the nerdy half of it, which actually understands these kind of differences.
Marco:
But even the information junkie part, I think they're going to largely feel burned by Twitter.
Marco:
And you go over to look at something like Post, and yeah, there are a bunch of people posting there, but...
Marco:
It's not my scene.
Marco:
And I think I think my scene is now much more likely to stick with the open ecosystem.
Marco:
And I feel really good about that.
Marco:
Like, I hope it works out again.
Marco:
Major challenges around scaling and moderation.
Marco:
Those are massive challenges in this open ecosystem that I think are going to be really big problems in the future to tackle.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe we'll figure it out.
Marco:
You know, I'm more optimistic than I've ever been about this world now because I'm seeing it really start to take off and I'm feeling that feeling of I don't want to go, you know, invest my time into building up some giant following on post or whatever when I can when I can do this instead.
John:
jwz has an even more in his typical fashion forceful and extreme version of what you just said about posts in a blog post entitled psa do not use services that hate the internet uh it's about post and hive and other things like that and in terms of people ending up on proprietary platforms or whatever
John:
Like it has happened before and it will happen again.
John:
I mean, how did we all end up on Twitter?
John:
Part of the reason we all ended up on Twitter is because when we all went on Twitter, it wasn't clear that Twitter would be anything other than a curiosity that people don't, you know, if you didn't join Twitter and, you know,
John:
January of 2007 you don't know this but like Twitter there's a million things that happen on the internet and they come and they go whatever just so happens that Twitter became a thing but the reason it got us all there is because that was technical curiosity and we'll try it out the same reason we're trying all the other things out and then it snowballed and we were already there and it became sort of self-sustaining in the way that social networks do.
John:
um you could say the same thing about uh you know our favorite computing platform how are we all using this proprietary you know publicly traded uh company that runs this closed ecosystem that that creates our phones and our uh you know max and controls the app stores that do them and we could be using an open alternative that is open source and is not and actually has actual meaningful competition instead of two companies that control the entire market and you know
John:
So the answer to that question is the same as the Twitter answer used to be, which is, well, Apple makes really good stuff and they kind of got there first and they built momentum and pulled this in with really good products.
John:
And they aren't currently run by a terrible person who's making bad decisions.
John:
So.
John:
What would it take for us to go to Linux on the desktop or whatever?
John:
Well, things would have to get pretty dire in Apple for that to be a thing that happens.
John:
And that's basically what happened with Twitter.
John:
Things are getting pretty dire as far as a lot of us are concerned over at Twitter.
John:
So we're looking for alternatives, and luckily there is an alternative.
John:
And when it comes time to look for alternatives, then we can say, okay, well, among the alternatives, let's choose the one that is...
John:
not a not a repeat of past mistakes not a private company that you know uh controls the entire platform top to bottom it doesn't even have a web ui or whatever can we find something better than that and and more open right um and if like the reason we're doing that is because we already like margaret was saying he already has the habit of using twitter it is a known quantity it is not a technical curiosity like
John:
huh, I wonder if I'll enjoy reading and writing small snippets of text.
John:
I'm like, no, we know that's a thing already.
John:
So it's not like we're stumbling into this just trying out a random thing.
John:
What we're looking for is something to fill a similar role in our lives if Twitter is not going in a direction that we want.
John:
I think the same thing would happen if Apple started going down the tubes we'd be looking for.
John:
It's like, well...
John:
You know, laptops and mobile phones are still a thing, so now I need to find a new place to get that.
John:
It seems much more plausible than an open solution to the problem that Twitter tries to solve can happen and be feasible than, for example, to say, oh, let me find another mobile phone platform because...
John:
once you get past Apple and Android, it's slim pickings.
John:
Lots of people have tried, and we've got these two left, and that's a big problem, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Casey:
Well, Elon's going to do it soon.
Casey:
Don't worry.
John:
Yeah, no, that'll be fine.
John:
I'm sure it'll be great.
John:
It's not too hard to do.
Casey:
Oh, I hope he tries.
Casey:
I echo what you were saying earlier, Marco, that a lot of this has become a lot more appealing to me, and I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
I think I was the biggest curmudgeon of the three of us in moving my world over to Mastodon, but
Casey:
It's gotten, perhaps because it's less new and scary, I don't know, but it's gotten a lot more palatable.
Casey:
And then I jumped on the Ivory Beta about a day ago.
Casey:
And it is very, very comforting to have that nice warm blanket over you and for everything to feel so familiar.
Casey:
And it's not...
Casey:
It's not exactly the same.
Casey:
And I really like that they've kind of refreshed their iconography to be kind of in a different spirit in a good way.
Casey:
But it's an alpha.
Casey:
So, like, if you're clamoring to be on the beta, it's actually really an alpha.
Casey:
And that's how they self-describe it.
Casey:
I mean, it crashes kind of a lot, but that's...
Casey:
that's what an alpha is.
Casey:
Like, that's fine.
Marco:
They're setting quality expectations by their standards, but this rough, sometimes crashing alpha of a tweetbot app for Mastodon is already way better than every other Mastodon app I've tried.
Marco:
Like, it's better than all of them by a large margin.
John:
Mastodon client app authors, let me give you one tip.
John:
I don't know why all Mastodon clients do this particular thing.
John:
I think it's because...
John:
My use case is not the common one, but I think my use case is a valid one.
John:
So people should do it.
John:
Mastodon clients all seem to have like, you know, they usually use like a little house icon for like the home, you know, timeline.
John:
Right.
John:
And then there's usually some other icon or, you know, wait a way to switch to that's your notifications timeline.
John:
Right.
John:
every single mastodon client i have tried when you go to the notifications timeline it shows you a view that i never want which includes like here's all the people who favorited you here's people who are following you it's like i never want to see that i don't care about it ever ever ever what do i want to see marco mentioned it before for people like us which are granted we're not the common use case but we are a use case and i think it is a reasonable one to accommodate we just want to see our mentions don't show us people who are favoriting our things
Marco:
Well, actually, the client I was using before, Ivory, is called Tusker.
Marco:
It's still in beta, but the Testify links are being shared like crazy.
Marco:
I've got it.
Marco:
Tusker has a setting under, I believe it's called something like digital wellness, and it says default notifications mode.
Marco:
You can change it to mentions only.
Marco:
And so when you go to that screen, then it's doing what you want.
Marco:
It's showing your mentions by default.
John:
Yeah, most of the clients have this feature, which is usually on notifications.
John:
You can filter notifications to just show mentions or whatever, right?
John:
But A is not the default, which whatever, you can pick the default.
John:
But B, almost every single app doesn't care how many times I change it to show mention.
John:
Tusker is an exception, but it's a test flight beta, so who knows where it's going, right?
John:
But like...
John:
don't make me filter to show mentions every single time i change the timeline this is setting aside things that i'm accustomed to in twitter where i can save uh searches so i can i can i don't think this is the thing you can even do in mastodon yet but or at all which is a shame but i also on my main uh twitter account i have a little icon twitter that lets me see atp fm mentions right can't do that in mastodon that's a mastodon thing not uh not a client but anyway
John:
yeah notifications if if you allow me to filter it to just be mentions remember that i did that otherwise i have to do it every single time and it's really and it amazes me that like you know i think tusker may be the literally the only client that remembers that setting or has a way to make it remember all the other ones you tap on notification and they're like look at all the people who favorited stuff i don't care not that i don't care you can favor my thing that's fine but i just need to see a timeline of every single person who did the favorite i just want to see mentions anyway
Casey:
Real-time follow-up, John Syracuse on Mastodon, so Syracuse at Mastodon.social, at Ivory, how are Casey List and Marco Armit on the Ivory beta and I'm not?
Casey:
This is an outrage exclamation point.
John:
I feel a little bit bad because Aline replied to me and said that she was so sad that she missed the sign-up window, and I didn't know there was a sign-up window.
Casey:
I don't think there was.
John:
I don't know if there was.
John:
All right, well, I'm mad again.
Marco:
Never mind.
Casey:
Maybe there was and I missed it, but I didn't think there was.
Marco:
I think one of the things that makes this kind of migration or giant switch different from something like if Apple's platforms go bad, it's so easy to change where you are microblogging.
Marco:
The switching cost and the switching workload
Marco:
are just so tiny.
Marco:
And it's not nothing.
Marco:
And depending on how integrated you are with Twitter, it can be substantial.
Marco:
But I think, first of all, it helps that most of us nerds who even know what third-party Twitter apps are don't use a large portion of the features that Twitter has made in the last 10 years.
John:
Because they never exposed them to the third-party API.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, you know, so we don't see things like, you know, the trends.
Marco:
Yeah, ads.
Marco:
We don't see, you know, like we don't do Twitter spaces really.
Marco:
Like all these things they've added.
Marco:
And it also helps they've barely moved their product forward in 10 years.
Marco:
But anyway, so I think that's part of it too.
Marco:
You know, if you look at like, you know, to change your operating system, like to move platforms either on mobile or on the desktop or, you know, or on your laptop or whatever, you know,
Marco:
To change that, I know our friend CGP Grey once said a long time ago, I think on Cortex, once said, it's like moving to a different country.
Marco:
It's such a massive disruption to move from iPhone to Android or from Mac to PC or whatever.
Marco:
That's such a huge change.
Marco:
And especially if your work involves one of those platforms or if you have a lot of software investment or workflow investment in these platforms, it's a massive thing.
Marco:
Whereas
John:
changing from twitter using tweetbot to mastodon using ivory is basically nothing you just move over i mean you gotta have the people go along with you like this is true of uh of computing platforms as well but there is a network effect thing that is super important because no one would care about mastodon if if no one was there like there has to be some critical mass of people you care about following or want to converse with and the same thing with uh computing platforms if
John:
If you decide you're going to change computing platforms, are you going to change to whatever those people who sort of took the code for BOS, the Haiku operating system, right?
John:
You're probably not going to go to Haiku as much as you might like it because you're like, well, who else uses this and who else develops software for it?
John:
And so there is a network effect on platforms as well.
John:
And you mentioned moving to another country.
John:
It's like, well, if I don't want to use Apple platforms and I don't want to use Windows or Android, I'm going to use Linux on the desktop.
John:
That's like moving to Antarctica.
Yeah.
John:
i mean it exists and is a landmass and you can go there and stand on it but it's not that i mean it's not good mind you but like i mean compared to the software ecosystems of you know the amazon jungle of software ecosystems of the you know windows android ios uh yeah linux is tough um
John:
But yeah, no, there's not a lot of choices there.
John:
But like I said, the problem of a microblogging platform or whatever is small enough that a bunch of open standards and some reasonable software can hopefully get us over the finish line.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
And I think the movement here is so strong.
Marco:
The last time we tried to do this was app.net.
Marco:
And there were a number of major differences between then and now.
Marco:
But I think the biggest one, first of all, well, first of all, it's that Mastodon is this federated open source distributed thing.
Marco:
App.net was not that.
Marco:
So this has that selling point that we didn't have back then.
Marco:
But the biggest difference is that
Marco:
Way more people hate Elon Musk than we thought.
Marco:
Like, it's such a huge difference.
Marco:
Way more people are fleeing or have fled Twitter.
Marco:
And he has made so many more enemies.
Marco:
You know, back when the Amp.net thing was trying to get started, I think our main beef then was that Twitter was being kind of jerks to API users and to developers of client apps.
John:
And they were, but there's no match for this series of decisions that we all don't like coming out of Twitter on a daily basis.
Marco:
Yeah, the number of people who were upset about Twitter's API policies 10 years ago, whenever that was, versus the number of people who hate Elon Musk and what he's done in the last month, it's a world of difference.
Marco:
And so there are just so many people fleeing from that sinking ship of Twitter or being kicked off of it that I think...
Marco:
it's like an order of magnitude more uh movement happening um you know or more momentum happening like it's just it's such a bigger difference now and so i think you know once once ivory comes out on ios and mac game over for like all all of us all of our all of our people our community it won't be there anymore it won't be on twitter anymore
John:
We'll see about that.
John:
I'm still not entirely confident that that's going to happen.
John:
But hey, I'm in both places living two lives here.
John:
So we'll see how it goes.
John:
And I also still kind of think that if...
John:
Twitter itself is going to have value even if it is totally destroyed by Elon Musk.
John:
Just like the brand and the legacy.
John:
I know this is not a thing that he does, but if he gets bored and decides to move on, someone will scoop it up.
John:
And then if someone scoops it up and starts running it, not like an idiot, they'll get people back.
John:
that's a pretty good chance well they might they might i mean it depends on how long that happens if that if mastodon snowballs and becomes really big and activity pub catches on and it becomes like rss right you know what i mean if that if the good scenario happens it'll be tough to get people back but the i feel like the brand cachet of twitter is such that the the desiccated husk of twitter after it's been hollowed out and everyone has left is still valuable enough that someone will scoop it up and try to make a go of it and i think if they do do that
John:
there's a good chance that a lot of people will come back.
John:
Maybe not even us, but the fat part of the bell curve would definitely return.
Marco:
I think where we will keep using Twitter is probably if some major world event happens, like some earthquake happens or some big political event happens, then you're like, oh my God, somebody just died.
Marco:
You want to go, oh my God, what happened?
Marco:
Where's the news?
John:
You got to go somewhere where it's not just your nerdy friends, but everybody else is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think Twitter is going to remain that go to place for that kind of thing indefinitely into the future, unless unless it really gets destroyed.
John:
But yeah, unless the Nazis just really take it over, which is, you know, what seems to be the direction things are going.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
But I think for like like the casual hangout version of all this stuff, I think many groups, including most of our people, I think I think have already moved over.
Casey:
One of the things that I wanted to quickly point out, which is known, but I'm now seeing it myself, is that you can set up your own instance of Mastodon.
Casey:
And I don't see a lot of that, but I was exchanging don't call them toots with my dear friend Jelly, who is running his own instance.
Casey:
So he's Jelly at Jellystyle.social, if I remember right.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Well, that is not something I think I'm terribly interested in doing.
Casey:
And it's funny because I was speaking with Jelly about it and he's like, oh, you should set up one for ATP.
Casey:
And I said, yes, I should.
Casey:
But none of the three of us are interested in doing it.
Casey:
So it's not going to happen.
John:
Running an instance is one thing you take away from past discussions.
John:
Running an instance is not, it's quite a thing.
John:
Like,
Casey:
Yeah, but even just for the three of us, I think it would be manageable.
John:
I know, even just for the three of us.
John:
Like, I'm not entirely convinced that the scaling concern – like, this came up with the person who shut down their server that I was on because they were just tired of running it, right?
John:
What they said is basically, hey, here's a server that basically nothing is going on because it's been like –
John:
it's been in sort of like you have to give like six months of warning or whatever, or they suggest you give six months of warning.
John:
So no one's on it doing anything, right?
John:
This is basically a dead instance, right?
John:
But even this dead idle instance where everyone had accounts there has moved elsewhere and stuff, when the Mastodon spike happened, when all like the rest of us came back to Mastodon and everything, on his dead instance, he saw huge spikes in activity and load, right?
John:
So even if you make a Mastodon instance where it's just literally the three of us and we're the only people on the instance, we still have to...
John:
communicate with the rest of the network for the all the people that the three of us follow and if something big is happening elsewhere on the activity pub network that would impact our server and do any of us want to be babysitting another server mark certainly doesn't i don't want to sign up for it either there is a way to use your own domain name as sort of like a redirect with through webfinger with another instance so you don't run the instance but your name is like your name at your domain.com but that still looked a little bit janky to me so i wasn't ready to dive down that path but
John:
But yeah, no, if you want to run an instance for your friends, you can, but don't think it'll only have three people on it.
John:
There'll never be any load.
John:
I don't think that is necessarily the case.
Marco:
I think also, you know, as this network of instances grows and matures over time, as we start having more and more force required to solve things like the moderation issues and scaling issues, it wouldn't surprise me if...
Marco:
really small instances that have like one or two people on them if they if they kind of become second class citizens in the ecosystem in the sense that like you know the the major instances are all probably going to maintain like you know you know blocking lists and and allow lists and everything else to try to try to keep moderation under control and and it's probably going to be kind of like trying to run your own email server now which is like
Marco:
You'd be signing up for a world of headaches if you try to run it yourself.
Marco:
And you might have no reputation among the network.
Marco:
It might make your post not show up right for everybody or not show up quickly or whatever.
Marco:
I hope it'll be better than email.
John:
Because I think running instance with three people is easier than running an email with three people.
John:
Already is easier.
John:
And I think the scaling concerns, it's not like...
John:
you're going to be overwhelmed because your activity pub traffic is going to be related to how many people the three accounts actually follow so you have some control over it it's just not zero it's not like oh it'll be free and i'll never need to look at it i'll never need to babysit at minimum you'll need to update it when there's like patches and software updates to keep up with the rest of the network and then you underneath eventually need to update the underlining os or the version of docker or just like
John:
Just running anything 24-7 you expect to be up all the time is a lot more work than people think it is.
John:
It's less work than non-technical people think because you can just get it up and running and doing it.
John:
But it is just one more thing to be thinking about.
John:
And I really hope it doesn't get as bad as email servers because the culture seems to be, for the most part, federate with people by default and, you know, defederate as needed.
John:
If that ever reverses, then we'll probably have a problem.
John:
But that seems against the spirit of ActivityPub, like the idea that,
John:
A new instance will only federate with like this hard coded list.
John:
And if you want to add anyone else, you have to do it manually.
John:
It seems like that just is not a way to go.
Casey:
And then very quickly, since we've gone on quite a bit longer than I intended about this, there is a better Mastodon friend finder, which I haven't tried, but I think John has.
Casey:
Do you want to tell us about this?
John:
Yeah, so there was a couple of ones we linked last time, like the Feti Finder and Glitch.
John:
But this one that I found finally had an interface that was closer to what I wanted.
John:
I didn't like the Feti Finder one.
John:
It was like, oh, download this CSV and upload it to import all your things.
John:
I was like, I don't want to do that.
John:
What I want to do is...
John:
every once in a while be able to look at something and say hey have any more people that i used to follow on twitter have they come over to mastodon and if they have i want to follow them and so move to don.org all right um has the interface that i want you do the authentication with all the things and then it gives you a list of all the people and it says uh you know if you're already following them it says you're already following them and if you're not following them right next to their name is a button that lets you follow them that's all i want
John:
right and i can just reload this page every day and see if any new people have arrived and if they have a click the button to follow them it is so much easier than like download a csv or copy and paste this or go to their profile and hit follow and like yeah so i just i think move to don.org is has a way better interface than fedi finder and i hope it's not stealing all my information because you have to give lots of permission so
Marco:
Yeah, I actually also have used Move to Donna, and I'm keeping the tab in Mobile Safari on my phone just open, and I go out there every couple days and refresh the page and just see, like, oh, look, so-and-so just joined.
Marco:
So it's actually really nice.
Marco:
I really like it.
John:
yeah this is a flaw in the system and for people to know like how is this working i think we mentioned this before we're going to mention again this only works if people on twitter change their profile to put their mastodon address somewhere in there right that's how this works it's like how does it know like it gets your list of followers then it basically looks at their profile page on twitter and tries to find something that looks like a mastodon address so it knows that hey joe schmoe that used to follow on twitter
John:
They have in their Twitter bio or something else or in their Twitter name somewhere.
John:
They have something that looks like a Mastodon.
John:
So here's where they are and you can follow them.
John:
If people don't do that, they're never going to show up in this tool.
John:
I follow a lot of people.
John:
Right now, it has only found 53 out of the 314 people I follow.
John:
Are the rest of those people I follow ever going to put a Mastodon handle in their address?
John:
Have they even moved to Mastodon?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So this is a weak point.
John:
It's definitely better than nothing.
John:
And these tools are great.
John:
And I'm glad we were at least enough of us have gotten on board with this convention to put the Mastodon address in our profiles.
John:
But not everybody will.
John:
And it's kind of a shame.
John:
And as you can imagine, Twitter is not.
John:
I'm surprised that they haven't started removing those things from our profile.
John:
Because I think a bunch of Mastodon related stuff has already been like blocked or muted on Twitter because Elon.
Marco:
Do you think we are registering on his radar, like this kind of movement?
Marco:
I'm not sure that we would.
John:
It will eventually, if it keeps going in this direction.
John:
It'll come up.
Casey:
And then speaking of Elon, very, very quickly, please, please, please, very quickly, I wanted to call attention to the after show, the paid after show of Reconcilable Differences, episode 196.
Casey:
So Merlin posed a very, very interesting question, which I'm not sure ever actually got answered, but nevertheless, the discussion was excellent.
Casey:
And Merlin asked John, if you want Twitter to stay live, how do you want Twitter to make money?
Casey:
Which seems an obvious question to ask, but it's not a question I was asking.
Casey:
I totally agree.
John:
Totally answered it.
John:
I mean, it's spread out over in the typical rec diffs way.
John:
But yeah, no, I think the way they'd make money is because they're too big to make money by charging everybody because there's just too many people and it's not the right business model for them.
John:
They were already making, I mean, they were, you know, in terms of revenue, they had millions and millions of dollars of advertising revenue, and they had a large, desirable audience to advertise to.
John:
So I feel like advertising to your pretty large audience filled with people that advertisers want to reach is a good business.
John:
So how should Twitter make money?
John:
Again, assuming they weren't just like spending all their time allowing Nazis to get their accounts back.
John:
You advertise to most of the people.
John:
And then for the people who are willing and able to pay for something, you allow them to pay for something.
John:
Like the way I phrased it on Rectifs was...
John:
the people who pay have to pay for something that does not make the service worse for people who don't pay.
John:
So they can't pay to like make their posts more visible or like make them more prominent or they can't pay to be able to like delete other people's accounts.
John:
Like you can't, you, what they have to pay for is instead is like, now you have more powerful search features.
John:
Maybe even that could be abused.
John:
Like it's, it's tricky to pick, but like obviously verification is worth paying for.
John:
You paid to have a human being to look at your ID and prove that you're really you and so on and so forth.
John:
Uh,
John:
paying to have, you know, better API access for more sophisticated APIs for more sophisticated clients like TweetDeck or whatever, right?
John:
So that's, yeah, that's how I should make money.
John:
You advertise to almost everybody and you make the people who want to pay for services that most people don't want or need, but the people who do want or need find worthwhile.
Casey:
You know, John, here it was.
Casey:
I was trying to get people to implicitly sign up for your show and pay to hear the after show, which I will reiterate was excellent.
Casey:
But here it is.
Casey:
You've now just given us the TLDR of the whole damn thing.
John:
But I didn't imagine if that took like 15 minutes and was filled with bad jokes.
John:
That's what you're paying for.
Casey:
That's the idea.
Casey:
Anyways, so yeah, 196, you should listen to the after show.
Casey:
It starts at about an hour, 36 minutes, which speaking of, how am I the one that wants chapters all of a sudden?
Casey:
The three of us were resisting it so much.
Casey:
I don't edit that show.
John:
Don't talk to me about chapters.
Casey:
It's just that you should have chapters.
Casey:
And finally, with regard to this, 196 episodes of Rectifs, when the hell did that happen?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
Episodes count isn't a thing.
John:
It's what we talked about last time that we did.
John:
It was like our seven year anniversary or something.
John:
And both of us were very shocked by that.
John:
It seems like that's my new show that I just started doing.
John:
Maybe we've been doing it for two years, but no.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run all of my servers.
Marco:
Visit linode.com slash ATP and see for yourself why so many people like me choose Linode to run our stuff.
Marco:
So first of all, they are a great host for the regular stuff that we used to use hosts for all the time.
Marco:
compute instances slash cloud instances slash VPSs these are all the same thing they are the best at this I've been with them for almost a decade now using primarily that product and it's it's amazing what you get at Linode for the price so first of all amazing value right they also have all sorts of different capabilities that you might need so if you need a really small instance that prioritizes maybe price over everything else they have that I think it starts at five bucks a month it's amazing then if you need more resources maybe you need more disk space more CPU power more RAM
Marco:
They have amazing plans above that that are all, in my experience, the best values in the business by far, and they always have been.
Marco:
And also, they have dedicated specialties.
Marco:
So if you need things like high memory plans, GPU compute plans, dedicated CPU plans, they have all that.
Marco:
You need more disk space than what they offer on the regular ones?
Marco:
They have block storage.
Marco:
You can have giant volumes if you need to.
Marco:
They also have, if you need something that's maybe an S3-compatible object storage, they have that.
Marco:
They have managed databases now.
Marco:
They have managed load balancers, managed backups.
Marco:
All of these things available at Linode and all of this backed up by amazing support, an amazing API, amazing documentation, and at amazing value.
Marco:
So to me, honestly, you look at other hosts and it's no contest.
Marco:
Linode is the best.
Marco:
So see for yourself all this stuff at linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Create your free account there and you get $100 in credit to start looking around at Linode and trying stuff out.
Marco:
So linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Free accounts there.
Marco:
Get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable, so you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving on, finally, with regard to your recommendation to instrument your code, Marco, John was recommending to instrument your code and figure out ways to... Oh, yeah, we were talking about ButtDB.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And so we were... Wait, did you just drop the name?
Casey:
And I missed it.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Make a joke about what he called it last week.
John:
To make it Googleable, call it ButtDB so you can find it instead of calling it SQLite.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Anyway, so ButtDB, you should instrument it.
Casey:
And so this way you can figure out how to debug concurrency issues.
Casey:
And we had a listener write and say, hey, you should check out this WWDC session, which we will link in the show notes, with Hargis Manga and Mike Ash.
Casey:
Mike Ash, who used to be independent and then got sucked into Apple, as so many people do a few years back.
Casey:
And I'd seen it before, but had forgotten about it, and then re-watched it and was reminded that it's actually a very, very good session.
Casey:
And among other things, it will show you what they call a task forest, which this is in Instruments, I'm sorry.
Casey:
In Instruments, you can see a task forest, which shows you a hierarchical tree view of your tasks, which was super freaking cool.
Casey:
And I actually thought it was a really good, like...
Casey:
It was contrived, but a semi real world example of why actors are important and how you use them the correct way and so on and so forth.
Casey:
The whole video is like 25, 30 minutes and it's worth checking out.
John:
yeah that's definitely a cool tool what i was saying was to instrument for metrics on like you know slow queries how many queries are you running how long do they take you know to just find performance bottlenecks and this is the type of thing that you do while you're developing your application to sort of make sure you're not doing something silly in terms of concurrency or to debug issues you're having but obviously you can't run this instruments thing when it's running on other people's phones and stuff and so that's where your telemetry and logging and everything will uh potentially save your butt to figure out like hey
John:
uh someone says when i go to this screen it hangs for two seconds before the screen comes into view maybe you're you're logging of like oh i see there's a slow query happening here and then you would go back to this instruments thing and say is if this query is slow can i make it not block the task like am i using actors poorly and really mostly just say why is this query slow so i can fix it
John:
because he's got that choke point with butt db of like all the queries go through this library so if you're wondering if you've got slow queries well there's one place that you can instrument and for timings on every single one of your queries and then you'll find or even just do just log the ones that take longer than x number of milliseconds then you'll only log the slow ones you can do that on everybody's phone and then have a button in your ui which i think mark already has somewhere which is like hey email me your logs or whatever yep um yeah that was my suggestion but yeah the instruments thing is definitely cool too
Marco:
yeah i i was i've been working on butt db a lot for the last week and i've mostly just been um you know you know i like i learned yesterday like oh wait a minute i forgot to write a delete method whoops never delete that it's a pen append only database yeah which is a thing i think you need to just you need to just switch over to xcode right now a right click and go to refactor and just write butt db just go do it
John:
No, I like the name I've picked.
John:
But DB, I know.
John:
That's the name you pick, so go change the name of your actual class to that.
Marco:
Yeah, and I did the Objective-C compatibility layer yesterday and today, and boy, that was not fun.
Marco:
That was...
Marco:
It was just because first I first I wrote like this whole, you know, Swift version of the class with the little objects all over the place.
Marco:
And then when I went to try to use it, I learned, oh, wait a minute.
Marco:
Objective C can't subclass a Swift class, even if it's an object class subclassing in this object.
Marco:
You just can't subclass it from Swift from Objective C. So I had to like move a lot of that functionality into an Objective C class and it had to rewrite some stuff.
Marco:
It was a whole thing.
Marco:
So it's been a little unfun, but I've been able to keep most of it in Swift.
Marco:
And the way I've designed this so that the Objective-C support is only like a few extra little files and the whole library doesn't depend on those files.
Marco:
And so if you have a project or if I in the future have a project where I don't need Objective-C compatibility, I can just omit those files and the rest of it still build just fine and it's fine.
Marco:
So I have I'm trying to be very forward looking here with how I'm doing this.
Marco:
That being said, I still have not actually tried to integrate it into like a functioning app yet.
Marco:
Like there's a there's a thing in Overcast I need to build this month to start trying to track stats a little bit better for listening stats.
Marco:
because this is the month where the Spotify... What's it called?
Marco:
Spotify Replay?
Marco:
Yearly Wrap.
Marco:
Yeah, the Spotify Wrap.
Marco:
Yeah, it's when Spotify tells people in December, like, here's the artist you listen to the most this year, and then everyone posts them all over Twitter, and everyone starts emailing me asking, like, hey, when are you going to add this feature?
Marco:
What's my Overcast Wrap?
Marco:
And so what I have to do, really...
Marco:
is at some point start like recording better stats on how much time you spend listening to each show or whatever and do that for a whole year.
Marco:
And so if I'm going to release this feature next December, the time to start doing that data collection is like now before January 1st when, you know, it'll then be less complete.
John:
Well, so like the Spotify thing and other podcast clients do because I've seen some other people tweeting at us saying that we were their number one listen thing.
John:
That's what happens when you make shows that are this long.
John:
We get a lot of extra listen time in there.
John:
But like the people doing the Spotify things, I understand why they do it now because it's kind of like, oh, the year is winding down.
John:
It's kind of the new year and it's the time you do those types of things, right?
John:
But the year is not over.
John:
What have you listened to, like, hundreds of hours of some other podcast on December 30th and 31st, right?
John:
I know you can pick any arbitrary time in the year, and that's what I'm getting at with Marco trying to rush to get this feature done.
John:
Like, why?
John:
Why not just start your counting from January 15th?
John:
Well, it's because Spotify does it around this time, and this is the time when people are thinking about the end of the year.
John:
it's probably wise that you do try to get it done in December.
John:
It just kind of annoys me that, like, you can't do any year-end accounting when the year hasn't ended yet.
Marco:
I know, right?
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, a lot fewer people listen to podcasts in the last couple of weeks of December than in the rest of the year.
John:
You go on a long road trip or something.
John:
You never know what's going to happen.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, so I haven't done any actual integration into an app yet.
Marco:
I think the async only nature of this library is going to prove to be a massive pain in the butt to integrate in any legacy code.
Marco:
That being said, I still want it to be designed this way.
Marco:
So, you know, that's just going to be, you know, in typical me fashion, I'm going to start in fifth gear.
Marco:
and just slowly get myself going.
Marco:
And once I'm going, it's going to be great, but it's going to be a slow build.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Casey:
With regard to an Ask ATP from last week, with regard to Xfinity Wi-Fi, I think one or all of us had said, you know, oh, it's a little bit weird using somebody else's bandwidth.
Casey:
And Clayton O'Neill wrote in to say the following.
Casey:
This actually does not use the customer's bandwidth.
Casey:
The cable modem is provisioned to have a completely different, quote, service flow, quote, for the alternative SSID.
Casey:
The service flow is effectively how DOCSIS enforces quality.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Not quality of service.
Casey:
Yeah, quality of service.
Casey:
And it is how cable providers sell you a specific tier service.
Casey:
For example, 75 down, 10 up.
Casey:
The Xfinity Wi-Fi service will have a separate service flow in addition to the service flow provision for the customer service.
Casey:
And there's a whole article about this that's a little bit less explicit language, or not explicit language.
Casey:
It discusses it less explicitly in a less nerdy way, but there's an article we'll link in the show notes about this.
John:
i mean i understand what they're saying about dividing up the different flows or whatever but in the end it's the same cable leaving the people's house and you know maybe there's plenty of leftover bandwidth so it doesn't affect the customer but there's a reason cable have crappy cable you know services have crappy upload speed and it's how they choose to proportion the you know the bandwidth they have going to and from the house and so yeah you're probably not screening things up too much but if you were to grab that and start uploading a massive amount of
John:
I would imagine that you can impact the other quote unquote flow.
John:
Maybe it is.
John:
Maybe they do reserve bandwidth.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, as you said, this is part of the service that you're paying for.
John:
So try not using it out of some like form of politeness or because you feel bad is silly.
John:
You're paying for it.
John:
Xfinity service is bad in many other ways.
John:
At least take advantage of this perk.
Casey:
And then finally, earlier this week, I took my iPad to my beloved park bench, I mean picnic table.
Casey:
And I think we had discussed this like three or four weeks ago when I had said, oh, my iPad wasn't on the appropriate like Verizon cellular plan such that I didn't get ultra wide band.
Casey:
Well, I've since rectified that problem, and I am getting ultra-wideband, and I did a speed test, and it got 4,373.71 megabits down.
Casey:
So that's four gigabits.
Casey:
We're almost four and a half gigabits down, 300 megabits up.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I used, in the span of this, like, 30-second speed test, I used six and a half gigs of data, and I think...
Casey:
I think I get like 15 or 30 in a month.
Casey:
So it was really wild.
Casey:
So I did the math.
Casey:
This is approximately 550 megabytes per second down.
Casey:
So at home, I get, in real world usage, I get something like 80 megabytes on a good day, and that's on a gigabit files connection.
Casey:
Sitting on a picnic table in a park in the greater Richmond area, I was getting 550 megabytes a second down.
Casey:
That is 85% of a standard CD in one second.
Casey:
Do you remember when you would download like an album in the early Napster days?
Casey:
And I've told the story so many times in this program.
Casey:
And I would be sitting in my dorm at Virginia Tech and I would get like a megabyte a second and go, holy smokes, this must be somebody else on campus because look how fast this is at a megabyte a second.
Casey:
and it would take like an hour or two to download an entire CD's worth of stuff.
Casey:
I mean, not that any of us would ever do that.
Casey:
We would always pay for everything.
Casey:
No, of course not.
Casey:
Hypothetically, if you were to do that in the early 2000s, and it would take like an hour, it would take one second or maybe a second and a half to download an entire CD worth of data.
Casey:
That's just bananas.
Casey:
Technology's cool.
Marco:
It is really funny to me to think that, like, you know, how many seconds would it take to use up your entire data cap for the month?
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
It's so true.
Marco:
It's definitely measured in seconds.
Marco:
Oh, man, that's ridiculous.
Marco:
And I'm also kind of impressed that, like, the speed test architecture can serve things through all the way from wherever they're serving it to your device at four gigabits.
Marco:
Like, nothing is throttling that along the way.
Casey:
yep no that's so true and i mean obviously like so many people when i had tooted about this uh you know so many people were like in a nice way but like okay why and honestly i don't have a good answer for that but it's just cool that you can do it i don't know you're basically you're basically like playing ghostbusters where you're trapping those bits inside your ipad where they can't get out except for through the wired connection that runs at usb 2.0 speeds or no actually the ipads have thunderbolt don't they
Marco:
Well, some of them do.
Marco:
And previously, there were a couple, I think the 10.5 and then the first couple 12.9s before they had Thunderbolt, they had USB 3 speeds over lightning.
Marco:
That was possible.
Marco:
And a few iPad models had that.
Marco:
But iPhones, for some reason, have never gotten that capability.
Casey:
it's just bananas I think I told you when I was first using ultra wideband with my iPhone I'm pretty sure I told the story already but I was tethered via USB to my computer and I did a speed test to my computer and it was slower than dirt and I was like what the hell is going on oh and then I tethered via Wi-Fi and suddenly it got way freaking faster so bring on our USB-C iPhones is what I'm saying in a roundabout way
Casey:
All right, let's talk topics.
Casey:
I wanted to just briefly call out in part to prevent everyone and their mother from tweeting this at me, but also because I think it's freaking cool.
Casey:
FFmpeg has been ported to WebAssembly.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Not sure, but that's so freaking cool.
Casey:
And I just wanted to call that out.
Casey:
What does this mean?
Casey:
I guess you can run FFmpeg in the browser, but I'm not sure why you would, but WebAssembly is supposed to be pretty damn fast, right?
John:
Someone should make a website where the URLs are the command line strings with the appropriate translation, so it works as a URL.
John:
So you have to come up with a weird command line, and then you just paste it into the address bar, and then it runs.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
That would be very cool.
Casey:
Honestly, I don't know why this is.
Casey:
I'm not even sure why I think this is cool.
Casey:
Other than that, I think it's cool.
Casey:
So I just wanted to call it to everyone's attention.
Casey:
This is ffmpegwasm.netlify.app.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But yeah, you can apparently transcode stuff in the browser for fun and profit.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just thought this was super cool.
Marco:
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Casey:
And we've had something in the show notes for about 13 years, and it's probably time to go ahead and talk about it.
Casey:
There's been a couple more ads added to basically everything you touch on an Apple device.
John:
We talked about the ad slots already in a past show.
John:
We're like, oh, here's the new ad slots or whatever, but there's fallout from that.
John:
I think we just discussed the fact that they were going to do it.
John:
They were going to add these ad slots, and this is where you can buy ads, and this is where they'll appear or whatever.
John:
But since then, we've been trying to let this...
John:
run its course so we'd be able to say something conclusive about it but it seems to kind of be in stasis at this point so i guess we can talk about it the way it is now
Casey:
Yeah, so to recap very briefly, there's a bunch more ads either already here or coming in other places.
Casey:
On the App Store, the Today View has advertising on it now.
Casey:
It never used to.
Casey:
That's kind of like the landing page of the App Store.
Casey:
It used to be exclusively curated content, which, although I didn't personally look at it very often, it was very, very good.
Casey:
Anytime I looked at it, I was impressed.
Casey:
Anyone I've ever spoken to about it was impressed.
Casey:
It was good stuff.
Casey:
But now on the day view, there's advertising.
Casey:
There's always been advertising in search.
Casey:
Alarmingly, on an app's detail page, and Marco in particular was talking about this a few weeks ago, there are also advertisements there.
Casey:
And when this first dropped...
Casey:
Apple just assumed the best, as people want to do.
Casey:
And it turns out that the people who are most likely to buy advertising on the App Store are gambling apps and hookup apps and things like that.
Casey:
So a lot of people were pointing out that when you did a search for an app that will help you with getting over an addiction to gambling, well, what's getting advertised at the bottom?
Casey:
And this is a tweet or something.
Casey:
Yeah, a tweet from user John.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
And so John was looking at the app Recover Me, which its subtitle is Manage a Gambling Addiction.
Casey:
At the bottom of the details page, you might also like Jackpot World, Casino Slots.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
That's great.
Casey:
That's not a bad look at all.
Casey:
And they've said that there's going to be ads and maps potentially, or maybe that's not been said, but it's been rumored.
Casey:
It's just, I don't know.
Casey:
And it's hard for me not to just regurgitate what so many other very, very smart people have said about this.
Casey:
But one of the reasons I like Apple stuff so much, and I've gotten the same feeling from Sonos, and I used to get the same feeling from BMW and from Sony in the past, is that it just felt premium.
Casey:
It just felt like people who really gave a crap made this.
Casey:
And having ads kind of junking up everything, I feel like it's gone too far and it makes my devices, makes my Apple stuff feel less premium in the same way that like nickel and diming you over iCloud storage.
Casey:
I'm not gonna be able to find it for the show notes, but I've saw a tweet recently where it showed a graph of iCloud storage since like iCloud debuted and it's a flat five gigabyte line since like 08 or no, it was like 2011 or something like that.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
It's silly stuff like that.
Marco:
How fast could you fill that up over ultra-wideband?
Casey:
Apparently about 30 seconds.
Casey:
But anyways, it's silly things like that that kind of nickel and dime my opinion of Apple and just make me feel like, ugh, this thing that used to just unabashedly make me happy –
Casey:
just kind of feels yucky now.
Casey:
And I just, I don't like it.
Casey:
And I understand that services seems to be the golden child now.
Casey:
And, you know, obviously Apple has an interest, if not a responsibility, in making as much money as they possibly can.
Casey:
I'm behind on my podcast, and I was listening to the talk show with Gruber and Federico Vatici from, I don't know, probably like a month or two ago.
Casey:
And they were talking about this quite a lot.
Casey:
And I think both of them had a lot of really smart things to say about it.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
At what point does Apple look around and realize, this is making us look gross and crummy.
Casey:
And maybe they just don't care as they're making piles and piles of money.
Casey:
But not only does it just make them feel gross, but I think that there's...
Casey:
This is just making the whole antitrust, like, Tim Sweeney and Elon Musk, oh, it's an Apple tax, it's an Apple tax.
Casey:
Like, I really don't want Elon Musk or Tim Sweeney to be my champion on this issue, but I kind of agree with them.
Casey:
Like, this is all just, it's just all yucky, and I don't like it.
Casey:
Make it make sense, one of you, please.
John:
I remember when Steve Jobs was talking about iAd, I think, like his pitch, which was that keynote search tool that Stephen Hackett linked to today where it's like a full-text search of Apple keynotes.
John:
But anyway, Steve Jobs was talking about iAd, which was one of the early ad services.
John:
And I remember how he talked about it kind of using the –
John:
the model that he grew up with and the model that we kind of grew up with, where he was saying like, you know, you as a user, when you see these ads, you're going to like these ads because Apple has a hand in making them and they're going to be nice ads, right?
John:
That was why this was going to be an Apple ad service.
John:
Like it's not going to be a punch the monkey, right?
John:
Because Apple is involved in this iAd process, you'll like these ads.
John:
I don't remember what the quote was, but it was something like there'll be ads that you want to see, right?
John:
And that's very similar to the model from all of our youth.
John:
Like you'd watch a TV show and there'd be ads on it.
John:
Those ads got on the TV show because advertisers connected with the, you know, the television network and said, hey, we'd like to advertise on your show.
John:
And they would work something out between them and they would pay the money and their ad would go up.
John:
Right.
John:
The networks performed an important function there, which is like so, you know, Coca-Cola or whatever would contact the networks and there'd be some advertising department that sells ads.
John:
If you said you wanted to put a casino gambling ad on the Cosby show, NBC probably wouldn't let you.
John:
like there was some editorial control about what kind of ads go on there there was human at the very least there were humans involved right if you wanted to put an ad for you know playboy magazine or your you know hardcore porn whatever on on a particular show that was supposed to be a family show the network wouldn't take that ad they wouldn't let you do it they they exercised control and you know there were people involved in that process because the network would be protecting their show and their brand
John:
And, you know, bottom line is they would, you know, it was a it was a human to human sales relationship.
John:
One of the innovations of the Internet and the innovation that is, you know, power to Google to great heights of money and fame is you can take the people out of that equation and instead just make a quote unquote efficient market for selling advertisements where you have advertisement slots.
John:
And then advertisers bid on who wants to fill that slot, and the slot goes to the highest bidder.
John:
And boy, doesn't that make you a lot more money.
John:
You don't have to pay an ad sales staff, and you always get the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for a given ad slot.
John:
And that's what Apple has done.
John:
for advertising in the app store they're like well we don't need to sell these individual ad slots to individual people and have people involved why don't we just do what everyone else does on the internet with advertising and use the power of the internet to make a site where you can bid on these ad slots and that will make us more money and we it'll be hands-off and it'll be a self-service type of thing and that's how you get casino ads
John:
because who's going to pay the most money for ad slots people who get the most revenue for a person who gets roped into the ad and casinos make a lot of money from people who go use their apps because it's kind of the function of a casino app uh and if you know it's like oh like it's almost like apple was taken aback but it's like what did you think was going to happen i'm sure the advertising people knew it was going to happen it's what happens whenever you open up an ad slot to the highest bidder you get the mesothelioma or whatever that you know asbestos like
John:
cancer law firm lawsuit things like whoever has the most money to spend will get the slot and it may not be who you'd want to have that slot but you don't have people involved what apple said back on october 26th was this is a statement from apple we have paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories on app store product pages that is the extent of the statement
John:
They use the word pause, which doesn't mean they've stopped, but it does show that Apple had decided that they didn't like how this was going.
John:
Maybe they didn't like being yelled at for having casino ads.
John:
Maybe they said, we know those ads are going to go to casinos because they have the most money and they're going to be the top bidder, but we're okay with that.
John:
But then it turns out people weren't and we stopped.
John:
Or maybe they were surprised and someone somewhere in the organization said, I didn't realize that casinos would be the top bidder for all these categories.
John:
And it's like...
John:
If you didn't realize that, like, what world were you – I think some people were still in the Steve Jobs world where they were envisioning the ads would be like the premium ads you would see on, you know, the top-rated television program in 1987, right?
John:
Hand-selected ads or the ads that go in the Super Bowl.
John:
They're expensive ads, artfully made.
John:
And it's like, no, it's just – I mean, the Super Bowl has shown cryptocurrency ads too, so it's probably not that much.
John:
But, hey, the cryptocurrency ads have movie stars in them.
John:
Anyway –
John:
That's what it feels like to me, that Apple didn't fully take on board what it means to sell ad slots to the highest bidder in an automated process that does not involve humans.
John:
This is what that looks like.
John:
I don't know how they didn't know that.
John:
Didn't you see Punch the Monkey?
John:
Didn't you live through the end?
John:
That's what happens.
John:
And yes, it is much more efficient than having a sales staff, but you're not going to get to Casey's point that sort of,
John:
high touch experience where everything is quality.
John:
You're not going to get that thing that Steve Jobs talking about.
John:
I as like, oh, you'll like these ads.
John:
No, we won't like these ads.
John:
And it is.
John:
Yes, it is also worse that, hey, you know what they're advertising stuff in their own app store?
John:
Like these are apps that Apple sells, which is itself another, you know, not problem, but another sort of decision point that we've talked about in the past.
John:
what apps should apple out on the app store on the one hand we're like we hate that apple has the control to say what is allowed on the app store but on the other hand we don't like casino games for children and all this gets back to the the root problem which is there's only two places where you can sell uh mobile applications like
John:
You can sell them the Android App Store.
John:
You can sell them the Apple App Store.
John:
And everything else is a rounding error.
John:
And that, of course, is the root problem.
John:
And that's what puts Apple into these no-win scenarios where we yell at them if they don't allow apps on the App Store, but we yell at them if they allow casino games for children on the App Store.
John:
And then we yell at them some more if they programmatically sell ad slots that are bought by casino games for children or adults.
Marco:
I think what got to me the most about this was twofold.
Marco:
I think number one, having all of these not only accidentally irrelevant ads, but intentionally irrelevant ads.
Marco:
The ad unit that sparked all this is if you go to an app page in the app store, you scroll all the way down, and it says, you might also like...
Marco:
And this is a it's a category that Apple search ads added, you know, and they and they told us that they were going to add it, you know, a couple of months ahead of time.
Marco:
And you could go in like I buy search ads for overcast.
Marco:
You go in, you could like, you know, preorder these like, you know, a week beforehand and they would start running on this day or whatever.
Marco:
Like it was not a surprise.
Marco:
But I think what I think the surprise was that this was, I think, the first type of search ad that you could explicitly anti target.
Marco:
um you could like other search ads the way they launched when they first launched search ads whenever that was five six years ago they launched them very carefully that was the first time they were ads in the app store they knew that they had to be careful and they were being careful and one of the things they the way they designed that system was you can bid on keywords you can bid on any keywords you want you can type in whatever you want any arbitrary keywords but they would only show your ad in
Marco:
in a context where they thought it was relevant based on their relevance algorithms.
Marco:
Now, their relevance algorithms are terrible, but they were at least trying to be relevant, and they would occasionally succeed in that.
Marco:
But this ad unit, it explicitly was anti-targetable.
Marco:
You could select on how to target it.
Marco:
You could actually say, show it in other categories that my app is not considered relevant in.
Marco:
that's why you could get casino ads showing up on podcast apps.
Marco:
Because you would think... If you look at the bottom of the Overcast page right now, you might also like... The actual organic results are almost all podcast players, or at least things that are adjacent to podcast players.
Marco:
There's also Pocket, which I guess that's relevant.
Marco:
I wish it was Instapaper, but whatever.
Marco:
And everything else is relevant.
Marco:
And then the ad for that that I'm seeing right now is Wolf Game Wild Animal Hunters.
Marco:
The hunt is on!
Marco:
And it appears to be a game where you play as a wolf and you go eating other animals and possibly fighting other wolves, which is frankly a little close to dogfighting for my comfort.
Marco:
But oh well, I don't know what this game is.
Marco:
So that has nothing to do at all with...
Marco:
podcast apps or any of the other results that are in that list.
Marco:
And so, on one hand, this offended me because it allowed us to have all these totally unrelated apps, some of which were offensive to a lot of people, myself included, like all the gambling stuff.
Marco:
It had that problem of all of a sudden you're seeing dramatically irrelevant results in places where they make no sense whatsoever and it's just insulting.
Marco:
And then the second part of that
Marco:
is that it revealed for, I think one of the first times ever at this level, it revealed quite how large an amount of the money that Apple makes from the App Store is coming from really seedy places.
Marco:
that they are making gobs and gobs of money.
Marco:
And by the way, this is a large chunk of what they call services revenue.
Marco:
You know, like the term services revenue when they use it is a wonderful euphemism.
Marco:
And you think when you hear that, you think things like iCloud, you know, Fitness Plus, TV Plus, you know, you think of those things that are kind of more directly, obviously services that people can sign up for and pay for and they serve them in some way.
Marco:
You know, that's,
Marco:
That's what you think of.
Marco:
But massive chunks of Apple services revenue are the deal to make Google the default search engine in Safari and also app store revenue, which is mostly the 30% cut.
Marco:
And then obviously some portion of it is now ads.
Marco:
That's where that's most of services revenue and services revenue is one of Apple's biggest growth areas in the last few years as their hardware businesses have largely matured and have seen slowing growth.
Marco:
So it's a very important area of the company in like finance analytics ways and and you know stock price and analysts and it's it's very important for all those reasons.
Marco:
and yet when you look at what it actually is such huge parts of it are this gross google deal and then this gross area of app store revenue which is most so like you know what is the app store revenue well it's you know some of it is going to be 15 of all my subscriptions and you know the other indie apps that we make and you know good games stuff like that but a lot of it probably the vast majority of it
Marco:
is stuff that Apple probably would be more comfortable if we didn't see.
Marco:
Casinos, scammy dating apps, overpriced subscription scams for apps that charge for a weekly subscription for some calculator app or something.
Marco:
They broke it down in one of the trials.
Marco:
Wasn't it like 85% games?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Something like that.
John:
It was some massive, like, app store.
John:
Income from the app store is basically games.
John:
It's games and everything else.
John:
And it was, like, 85%.
John:
Now, all those games aren't crappy.
John:
But, boy, a lot of them are.
John:
Right?
John:
Like, because you're not getting it.
John:
And even the games that are, quote, unquote, good.
John:
Like, even, like, the high-profile, like, oh, this is a high-class, high-profile game like Candy Crush.
John:
That is a standard bearer for casino games for children or casino games for adults, for that matter.
John:
Like, they do...
John:
Not shady things, but they leverage human psychology to extract more money from you in exchange for hopefully the fun that you're getting.
John:
And a lot of those games, even the quote-unquote good ones, depending on how you feel about it, may cross a line in terms of exploitive mechanics where their main concern is not allowing you to have fun.
John:
The main concern is finding ways to get money out of you.
John:
And there's a balance to be struck there because they need money to make the game.
John:
I'm not saying don't pay for games, but...
John:
Uh, kind of like we're like, we're kind of all feeling with these ads in the app store, the relationship between, uh, how, how do I give you money for the thing that I want to get?
John:
That's delicate.
John:
Uh, you know, I, like people want to play games for free, but I think people also understand if you want games to be made, you have to give money for them.
John:
But, uh,
John:
What is the exchange there?
John:
How much money did it give you when in exchange for what?
John:
There's lots of different ways to slice that up.
John:
And I think in the games industry in particular, there's been lots of experimentation in terms of what relationship is sustainable and makes people not feel abused, but also makes the developer be able to continue to make the app.
John:
And I feel like almost everything in the app store is on the wrong side of that line in terms of how it makes the customers feel.
John:
well and not necessarily almost everything but almost all the money like we're almost all the money is going yeah i'm talking about games all that 85 of game revenue for in-app things like even the very best of the best the best games i feel like the way they make money is not on is not on the right side of that 50 point in terms of how the people who pay that money feel about the relationship whereas i would say for example console games the very best console games um
John:
have found a way to make money that the players do not doesn't make the players hate themselves right i mean to give an example like in destiny or like fortnite even you sell cosmetics which sounds like it shouldn't work but lord does it work right and and uh and players feel okay about it because if you don't want to buy the cosmetics you don't have to but people do
John:
do want to buy the cosmetics but if you don't buy them it doesn't make you know you're not going to get killed by someone who bought a better gun than you like it's not pay to win it's pay to look fancy and that relationship mostly is people are mostly okay with it can still be exploitive right but the whole energy mechanics and paying to uh you know watch this 30 second ad to continue further or pay like you were saying with that minecraft thing paying a weekly fee and pay to like what was it like pay to compile your thing or whatever it was pay to save your work
John:
It was literally pay to save.
John:
What?
John:
That's right.
Marco:
Each time.
John:
That's so far across the line that just no one feels good about that.
John:
It's just bananas.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I feel like when you look at... I think it's so easy for us...
Marco:
And probably for most Apple executives and employees and shareholders, it's so easy for us to not see this inconvenient underbelly of what's really going on in the App Store and what's really going on in revenue and services revenue there.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
It's so easy to just look at the apps that we use and that we care about.
Marco:
And most people... The iPhone is such a mature platform.
Marco:
It's been around for so long that most people are not just casually browsing the App Store as a pastime to look for new apps anymore.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why new user acquisition costs are so high and why Apple's trying to capture all that with search ads.
Marco:
Because it used to be a thing where when the App Store was new and when people were getting iPhones for the first time for years...
Marco:
it was a good pastime.
Marco:
Hey, let's go check out what's new in the App Store this weekend or whatever.
Marco:
You'd go browse it casually just for fun, like the same way you'd browse Twitter or something.
Marco:
You'd go, oh, let me go look at some apps.
Marco:
That doesn't happen much anymore.
Marco:
And so I think it's so easy for all of us and all of them
Marco:
to not see this if we're not looking for it.
Marco:
And again, part of the reason why this new ad unit was so offensive is that it just revealed it all to us.
Marco:
Everyone started looking at these ads and started seeing all of these high bidders for these ads were all these really disgusting apps.
John:
And it reminded people those apps exist.
John:
Forget about the fact that they have an ad slide.
John:
It just reminded people, hey, just so you know, these are things on Apple's App Store.
John:
They've been there.
John:
They've always been there.
John:
And you don't want to think about them.
John:
And you think you're not the type of person who would use them.
John:
But here they are.
John:
And they're there.
John:
And that gets back to the rock and a hard place I was talking about before.
John:
you know that part of us would say like i want apple to curate the app store so it's only the good app so the other part of us says why is apple being so restrictive about what they allow in the app store and you can't have both it's it's the the problem that apple has made for itself by choosing not to have side loading to try to find some impossible balance between having an app store that allows uh you know that is open to innovation in apps but also that keeps out the crap and they're not doing that now
John:
We can tell which way they picked.
Marco:
Right, and they're making a killing from it.
Marco:
That's, I think, the most uncomfortable part of this.
Marco:
It's not necessarily that these apps exist in the App Store, which is its own question, which can be debated, but that it became so obvious to us in such a short time
Marco:
oh my God, Apple is making all of this money.
Marco:
This is where so much of their profit and growth is coming from is scams and garbage and low quality, low rent, inconvenient apps that they really would rather the public not really pay much attention to or not know about.
John:
And things that exploit their customers in ways that the customers themselves feel somewhat a little icky about.
John:
Again, finding a way – the game developers themselves, it's on them to find a way to make a relationship where both sides feel okay about.
John:
And instead, what game developers have done is become very, very good at finding the most efficient way to extract money from people no matter how they feel.
Marco:
I mean, don't minimize the outright trickery also.
Marco:
There's a lot of actual fraud and BS going on too.
John:
Yeah, I do think the scam apps don't make as much money as the legitimately good app.
John:
Again, sorry to use Candy Crush as an example, but it's a legitimately good, fun game that's well made and also uses every trick in the book to get money out of people, right?
John:
I think those are the real money makers.
John:
The actual scam ones, it's...
John:
It feels bad when we see it happening because we think no one should ever be scammed by this.
John:
And we see the big numbers like this.
John:
We estimate like those things that we estimate this made a million dollars like Candy Crush probably makes that in a week.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's you know, it is a crime does pay.
John:
But making a making a really good app that also extracts money from people efficiently pays way more for a longer period of time.
Marco:
I think you're right individually, but I think collectively, the collective damage done by scam and misleading apps and trickily price subscriptions and everything, I think that's collectively quite a lot.
Marco:
I think you are right that in general, the big whale apps are doing most of the... I do wonder how people blame for those things.
John:
Although speaking of damage, this is part of the meta commentary about this from the people in our circles is about the reputational damage that Apple is taking by engaging this thing.
John:
So here's
John:
A quote from Gruber that I think boils this down to sort of the different thing that they're doing.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to this.
John:
This is a post from October.
John:
Yeah, October, sorry.
John:
It remains true that Apple is not monetizing the information we store on our devices or in iCloud, but they're certainly monetizing our attention and their exclusive hold on that attention for all apps and games for iOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
apple's business model is no longer the straightforward selling of great products and these new ads in the app store are not designed to make anything better other than apple services bottom line so you know that's again harkening back to the old days it's like apple just makes really good products and they sell it to us for a lot of money and that makes them billions of dollars and this is like but they also sell our attention and that doesn't make us feel better but it does make apple money and it is a it is a change in our relationship with apple the relationship before was like we pay really huge margins for
John:
Right.
John:
For the things that we buy from them.
John:
But in the end, we're satisfied by that.
John:
And when they come out with a fancy new thing, we want the fancy new thing.
John:
So we pay them the money.
John:
And that is what has made Apple its billions of dollars.
John:
Like people didn't buy the iPhone.
John:
You know, it's like the iPhone was not a didn't make Apple tons of money because it made them tons of service revenue.
John:
At least initially.
John:
Initially, they sold a lot of phones at like 40 percent margins and they still do that.
John:
And it makes them a lot of money.
John:
But now this app store, the ad stuff, is not making the products better for its users.
John:
You could argue that it's making the products, the platform better for developers because developers do need some way to reach their customers.
John:
But if you look at what actually happens if you programmatically sell an ad slot, it's not like the developers that you want to connect to customers, the people making the best applications that Apple features on stage and gives awards to, those aren't filling the ad slots.
John:
They probably don't have enough money to fill the ad slots.
John:
It's the casino games that are lurking as the 85%
John:
uh thing underneath it all and then we'll put a link to uh mj size uh blog post where he collected a bunch of uh comments from people but a lot of them are just like talking about the reputational and brand damage that's that's being done by this because most people didn't think of apple as a company that sells their attention because apple tends not to be in that business and to that end there was a one thing that did come out about this was there was a report and the information that tried to get some uh some information from inside apple about this
John:
This is a Mac rumor summary of it, but we'll put a link to the information as well.
John:
The Mac rumor summary says a new report revealed internal disagreements within Apple causing some employees who work on the company's ad business to raise concerns that showing more ads to iPhone users ruins the premium experience that's long been offered to its customers.
John:
Makes sense, right?
John:
Because it's not what they're used to.
John:
This is directly from the information report on this.
John:
It says, one person familiar with Apple's ad business said the company doesn't harbor ambitions to compete at the same level as Meta and Google in digital advertising, nor does it plan to build an advertising network similar to those of its rivals that would serve ads to users outside its own apps and services.
John:
The person said ad executives are pleased with revenue growth based on Apple's existing ad spots and don't plan to significantly increase the number of ads on phones to meet growth targets.
John:
So this is from inside Apple saying, yeah, we added more ad slots, but we're not going to like we're not going full Google here.
John:
We're not just like, hey, we're going to sell ads against every piece of information that we have, you know, because that'll make us tons more.
John:
And it would make them tons more money.
John:
That is Google's business model.
John:
Sell ads against what we know about people.
John:
Right.
John:
and facebook's business model it's a good business model in terms if you want to make a lot of money but this person is saying we're not going down that road but we're you know we added these ad slots but we're not just going to keep pursuing that to get more and more growth is that true or will it will it be irresistible for them to do that but like regardless regardless of whether this is 100 true i think that they have crossed a threshold here with with these ad slots
John:
Because, like we were saying before, it's revealed things that people would rather not see.
John:
And I think it's just a bridge too far.
John:
If this is the truth, if this Apple ad executive is leaking to the information that they don't want to actually pursue this to the extent that Google does, they just want to have, like, you know, enough ad slots to give their developers a way to advertise, this is not helping.
John:
This is hurting.
John:
It's making people think of Apple in a new way.
John:
It's making people less pleased with their phone, kind of like the search results when you try to search for an app and instead of finding the app that you wanted, you get a big blue ad for a different app.
John:
Most people don't like that, both because Apple's relevance is bad and because it just seems like it's getting in your way.
John:
It's not making the experience better for users, right?
John:
And that was before these new ad slots.
John:
These new ad slots at the bottom of the products, most people probably won't see, but I just feel like this is...
John:
This is crossing a line with at least the nerdy people in our circles, maybe not regular people, right?
John:
And I do think it will be hard for Apple's advertising folks to resist adding another slot, turning a dial to monetize this or whatever, despite the fact that they say that they're not going down that road.
John:
maybe that's what every one of these ad executives is going to say after they add every new ad slot for the next 10 years.
John:
And you wake up one day and every part of the Apple's applications are filled with ads.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, because it's, it's such, you know, when you, when you talk about adding ad slots everywhere, it's such a slippery slope.
Marco:
It really, it's so easy once, like, again, as I was just saying how, you know, when they added the very first ads to the app store, the very first search ads, they were very careful about it.
Marco:
They still did a really mediocre job, but they were very careful about it.
Marco:
At least, um,
Marco:
And they were very sloppy about this one because now it's like, well, once you have ads, what is it to add?
Marco:
Hey, look, there's some real estate down there.
Marco:
It's kind of out of the way.
Marco:
It's below the fold.
Marco:
We could just add a few more.
Marco:
Just add, hey, what's one more?
Marco:
It's such a slippery slope with ads.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I've been there.
Marco:
I run ad-based businesses and have for like 20 years.
Marco:
I'm very aware of the pressures here that results from this.
Marco:
But
Marco:
You know, you do have to worry about the experience and it matters a lot.
Marco:
Like we had many years ago, you know, we started out doing this podcast.
Marco:
You know, once we got going and started having ads, we briefly had two ads per show and then pretty early on went to three because, you know, the length of the show made sense.
Marco:
You know, we have six minutes of ads in a two hour show.
Marco:
No one really cares.
Marco:
But we have a format and, you know, where we put them, what kind of ads we take, et cetera.
Marco:
And we've gotten so many offers over the years to, hey, you could make a lot of money if you do a 30-second pre-roll ad, which means before the show starts, the very first thing you hear is an ad.
Marco:
And there's a reason why a lot of podcasts do that.
Marco:
because they they're very high priced they make a lot of money um and we said no because that is not the format of our show and that's not the experience we wanted to have and we think the ads we have are enough and that's why we've had three ads and it's been fixed at three ads for something like six years and we don't programmatically sell them in an auction that runs by like a human being human being sells our ads and we choose which ads go on the show like obviously we're much smaller we couldn't programmatically sell them right but we totally could
John:
Well, anyway, it's like the whole point is it is more it is more, quote unquote, efficient, like the magic of the Internet.
John:
Wow.
John:
We don't have to have salespeople and we can just have people bid and we'll always make sure we get the maximum money out of the advertisers.
John:
And it's like, yeah, but what are you trading for?
John:
Like, we know what you're trading.
John:
We know what that looks like.
John:
But every ad would be casino ads or mesothelioma ads.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's not what we want the show to be.
John:
And so we're making less money and paying someone to sell our ads and everything.
John:
But in the end, we think we make a better product and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
And we're small potatoes, but like it's the same exact decision for companies the size of Apple, Google and Facebook.
John:
And unlike Google and Facebook, Apple has a really, really good way to make a ton of money that doesn't involve ads.
John:
It's a proven business model.
John:
It really makes a lot of money.
John:
Now, people in the chat room keep yelling growth, growth, growth.
John:
It's like, oh, it makes a lot of money, but doesn't have growth or whatever.
John:
That's supposed to be the lesson that Apple is always trying to teach the rest of the industry, that if you chase growth, you will catch nothing, right?
John:
What you should be doing is, as we said before, make great products, make things that people like, and in the end, that will actually make you more money and give you more growth than pursuing the other thing.
John:
But everyone else says, no, ignore that.
John:
Chase growth, right?
John:
Apple has been historically one of the best companies in the entire world at resisting that urge, which is why they have all this money.
John:
They don't have all this money because the service revenues has made them the richest company in the world.
John:
No.
John:
The resistance to pursuing things like this is what has made them the richest company in the world.
John:
That is the lesson of Apple of the last several decades.
John:
And this is just like...
John:
you know, one part of the company going down a dark path that we don't want them to go down.
John:
And this statement from inside Apple makes me hope that they're not, that this is not going to consume the company from the inside out.
John:
But, you know, I guess the final little bit here is not a great sign.
John:
But speaking of ads and places where they can appear, every one of us who uses Xcode has been recently annoyed by a dialog box that pops up in Xcode saying, hey, did you know you could use, what is it called, Xcode in the cloud or whatever?
John:
Xcode cloud, yeah.
John:
yeah xcode cloud to compile this xcode cloud is a thing that will like build your applications on on cloud servers and you know it's if you have a complicated application or lots of unit tests or you want to farm it out to more different kinds of devices it's cool it's a good product it's a good service apple should make this i i don't have any objection to this product what we object to is i just hit build and run on my application and you popped up a dialogue saying hey you can do the next code cloud that's a freaking ad
John:
And when I dismiss it, like I remember the original dialogue box, the only choices were like, yes, or like later or something.
Marco:
Oh, that's like the most pat.
Marco:
I, I want to punch somebody in the face whenever I see a dialogue that says like maybe later when I just want to say, no, I never will.
Marco:
I never want to do this.
John:
they changed it they changed the button in an xcode update to say like yes and like i don't know it says yes but whatever it says it's like the positive one then the other one says dismiss which at least is better than later because later is a lie later is like but here's the thing you hit you hit dismiss right you're not saying later you hit dismiss but you'll be seeing that dialogue again i believe it was every build an archive i think
John:
and i don't know if it's everyone but it would pop up again and it's like get out of my face like and this is the worst because this is a good service that that is useful for the people who need it and may be worth money for the people who want it and it's an apple server it's not a casino game it is a legitimate thing but seriously dirtying up your ide by popping up this dialogue in our face like i understand you want developers to be aware this feature exists i get that lots of apps have an onboarding experience say hey you might not know this but in this menu here's a new feature we want you to look out
John:
Fine.
John:
Do it once.
John:
We all see the things in the upper right-hand corner of Mac OS when we do a Mac OS update that wants to tell us what's new in the OS.
John:
Eh, whatever.
John:
Like, it's annoying.
John:
You turn it off.
John:
You can just turn off notifications for tips and you'll never see it again.
John:
But, like, we're fine with that.
John:
It's like, hey, I want you to know there's new features in the new OS you upgraded.
John:
But that's it.
John:
Just one time.
John:
You get that once.
John:
So this, I mean, they're not, is this part of the same ad for us?
John:
No.
John:
But someone is involved with trying to make enough money with Xcode Cloud.
John:
to pay for its development and maintenance i understand that but if the go-to move is hey we just made this uh this product and we have to pay for all these servers uh we need enough people to sign up for it to make it worth our while we need we want to make this new service profitable how can we do that if the go-to move is like well lots of developers use xcode why don't we put an ad in xcode and why don't we have a comp every time they do build an r it's like
John:
no stop don't do that like i understand you can do that and it's right there in front of you but that's not the apple move and by the way we'll put in the show notes apparently there's a default right command that you can do for com.apple.dt.xcode where you set xcode cloud xcode cloud upsell prompt enabled and set that to false i love they call it the upsell prompt so they know what they're doing so you can disable it
Marco:
I don't want to have to run an ad blocker for my developer environment.
Marco:
Except for your freaking IDE.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
But again, this is the corrupting influence of ads and services revenue upsells.
Marco:
They're just going to keep doing this.
Marco:
We we've just you know, we're not really a financial podcast because we don't care and we don't know anything about it.
Marco:
But you can look around the industry and you can see like this is a bad time for the economy around tech companies, especially like this.
Marco:
We're in a serious downturn.
Marco:
We're probably nowhere near the end of it.
Marco:
All the big tech companies are doing these massive layoffs.
Marco:
Apple, at least, has done a hiring freeze.
Marco:
Not layoffs yet, but obviously, times are getting tight.
Marco:
We're in a crunch right now.
Marco:
And Apple has been... Apple has had trouble for years now trying to...
Marco:
keep one-upping their previous sales numbers, trying to keep the growth going because they've been so successful over time.
Marco:
They've made so much money over time.
Marco:
It's hard to keep making more money.
Marco:
When you're at those levels, it's very hard to keep growing.
Marco:
And they have been.
Marco:
That's the other thing.
Marco:
It's hard to, and also they have been.
Marco:
Right, but...
John:
that is slowing down and it isn't because their products suck or anything it's just because these these industries are all maturing you know everyone has phones now everyone has well not not everyone has phones because they apple can't make enough phones to even meet demand due to the covid stuff in china so there's that right well that's a separate problem that is but it but it is it is as they would say in the financial calls a headwind that apple is going to have to deal with
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But anyway, the point is we're in tough times for that continued growth to keep going for the whole tech industry, many of whom are doing much worse.
Marco:
But as these times are getting a little bit more tough for Apple to maintain their growth and their expectations and possibly their stock price...
Marco:
They're going to keep tightening these screws.
Marco:
We're going to keep having more and more upsells.
Marco:
The prices are going to go up.
Marco:
The capabilities that you get for free are going to go down.
Marco:
The upsell points are going to get more persistent and more in your face.
Marco:
And there's going to be more of them.
Marco:
And anywhere they can squeeze harder, they're going to squeeze harder.
Marco:
That's why I get concerned when I see moves like putting more search ads everywhere because I know they're going to just keep going on this.
Marco:
Anything that they get away with in terms of their whole business doesn't collapse and there isn't a giant PR outburst, anything that they can kind of slip by and wear people down with –
John:
they're going to keep going and do more of those things that's the pessimistic take but like the statement from inside apple is that they explicitly saying that they don't plan to do that this is like an anonymous leak so it's not i doubt it's like apple pr speaking through this leaking thing it doesn't seem like that's the plan but we do we can you know regardless of what they might say we're the reason we're talking about this is we see on the outside new things like that coming out and we think there's we think they're crossing a line the thing in xcode and these ad slots and it's just you know it's
John:
They are doing that, and I think that's the only thing you can say.
John:
Whether they take the lesson from that and back up, again, if they want to look at what are the lessons of the great success story in the technology market of our lifetime, which is Apple, the lesson is when things were going bad for the whole tech industry, Apple's strategy then under...
John:
iceo steve jobs or whatever stated many times that everyone in the industry was sad and their heads were down and things were bad and it was a dot-com bust and all sorts of terrible stuff was going on and the apple strategy was we're going to innovate our way out of the downturn or the recession or whatever
John:
Whatever the words were, they always say we're going to innovate our way out of it.
John:
What we're going to do here is unlike everybody else who is like running scared and firing everybody and trying to figure out how to make money by selling Punch the Monkey ads or whatever, we're going to do something different.
John:
Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to invest in ourselves.
John:
We're going to spend more money.
John:
We're going to hire more people.
John:
We're going to undertake more projects that cost us more money and burn more of our capital and more time.
John:
Because we think the only way out of this downturn is to innovate our way out of it or whatever the catchphrase was.
John:
Like basically, we're going to figure out how to make the iMac and the iPhone and the iPad.
John:
And that's what's going to save us.
John:
Not let's scramble to run ads against everything that we have or whatever.
John:
Again, against the instinct of other people, which is like, hey, business school, we need to find a maker to make money.
John:
Turn all the money dials up in the company, right?
John:
I would hope that as things enter a downturn, that they pursue that strategy.
John:
What we're seeing now is not the strategy of a downturn into trying to make growth grow, but instead what it is is the exuberance of success and saying, we make money everywhere.
John:
We turn all the dials up.
John:
Everything's going great.
John:
And as things get worse for the industry, that Apple finds its previous strategy, which is that's not the move.
John:
The move is because we're Apple and have a jillion dollars, even when we didn't have a jillion dollars, we did this.
John:
The move is
John:
reinvest like yeah maybe tighten down focus or whatever but you know come out with the great thing let's really work on that headset let's figure out the car whatever they're gonna do right let's make max great again which they did uh like that's the move when things are in a downturn is not uh now's the time to scramble and find how way we can scrape more pennies from people by putting uh you know xco cloud ads in everyone's ide
Marco:
But I don't think modern Apple has those sensibilities anymore.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
In that one big tech downturn when Steve Jobs took over, his strategy was, let's make our products better.
Marco:
Tim Cook's strategy appears to be, let's cover our products with ads for casinos.
John:
but i think that is a strategy of peak like i think that's a success a strategy our things are going great and it's a it's a you know a lagging indicator we don't get to see what apple has decided to do until much later when that actually does it but i feel like if we if we actually enter a really bad tech downturn for you know it's barely been touching apple but i feel like the the manufacturing stuff in china is is really going to touch apple and that's going to hit their revenue like well
Marco:
Wait till their holiday quarter results come in, and there's not a lot of iPhone sales in them.
John:
Yeah, no, it's going to be bad for them, right?
John:
But I hope what this does is, and the whole discussion around this whole issue with ads, I hope that what we're seeing was the last burst of exuberance of the go-go-rah-rah, Apple always continues to grow, grow, grow, right?
John:
And instead, if they need to find other areas for growth, they're available to them, and they're pursuing them.
John:
The whole, like, let's get sports people to watch Apple TV.
John:
Let's get more people signed up.
John:
signed up for apple tv like there are other growth opportunities that have a a that don't destroy your brand right getting more people to sign up for apple tv plus because they like the tv shows that's a clean win if you can do that do it pursue it right that's that's service revenue that we're not complaining about people love severance they want to sign up for apple tv plus to watch it thumbs up that's the equivalent of making the imac you made a good show that people want and they signed up for your service so they could see the thing good do that selling more ad slots
John:
Not good.
John:
Don't do that.
Marco:
Yeah, because that's a service.
Marco:
When you're offering something that people want for a reasonable price to them, that is a service you are offering to them.
Marco:
If you're going to call it services revenue, that is exactly... First of all, that's the story they probably tell themselves.
Marco:
But also, that's a good service.
Marco:
That fits within Apple's expertise.
Marco:
That is the best of Apple is making something that people like doing a good job of it and selling it for the maximum price people will tolerate in that category.
Marco:
But we're happy to pay it, most of us, most of the time because it's a good product.
Marco:
That is how Apple should and usually has operated their business.
Marco:
And I just I worry that we haven't seen stuff really hit the fan yet with Apple and its expectations with the stock market and everything like I think we're in for a rude awakening over the next few months.
Marco:
And we are just going to have these screws tightened so so much more than we think.
Marco:
And I hope I'm wrong.
Marco:
Please prove me wrong, Tim Apple.
Marco:
But I am worried.
Marco:
I'm really worried because I already see the direction they're going.
Marco:
And because they have so much lock-in, it's hard for any of their metrics to go down in a meaningful way.
Marco:
That would actually kind of weight them up here.
Marco:
They are still sensitive to negative press.
Marco:
That's why the casino ads got, quote, paused on that ad slot.
Marco:
But there's only so much negative press that can be generated by small paper cuts.
Marco:
If they do something really bad, like casino ads on gambling recovery apps, that'll get bad press.
Marco:
But all these little paper cuts of minor ads and minor upsell opportunities all over the place here and there, those don't get the bad press.
Marco:
And so I worry that they've made so much money.
Marco:
They're so wildly successful in so many ways.
Marco:
And they are so good at smelling their own farts and thinking they're just wonderful.
Marco:
And I mean that in the most loving way, Apple, but you know it's true, that I think they don't see the paper cut nature of things enough.
Marco:
The highest up people in the company who are in charge of such directions and decisions are...
Marco:
are not seeing these things or are not sensitive to these things.
Marco:
Similar to the problems that our Twitter owner friend has, where he has surrounded himself only with yes-men and with numbers and things that support his worldview.
Marco:
I think Apple suffers from that a lot of the time, where a lot of the higher-ups at Apple...
Marco:
seem to be making decisions without all the information or with bad information or with an inability to read the room.
Marco:
That's going to really hurt them in this area.
Marco:
They're going to keep adding these paper cuts and these little annoying missteps and these reputation and brand eroding factors in their user experience.
Marco:
And I don't think they have a good feedback loop up at the top for them to really say like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
This is kind of making things worse.
Marco:
And this might not be worth, you know, the dollar that we're going to make from this today might not be worth the $10 we're going to lose over time from the damage it causes.
Marco:
I don't think the higher up people think that way at Apple.
Marco:
I don't think they have the right sensibilities or priorities to think that way.
Marco:
And I think they've demonstrated that over the last decade very effectively.
Marco:
That's why I'm concerned about this.
Marco:
I don't have faith in the leaders to think this way.
Marco:
They're really good at running operations and making money, but they're not really good at avoiding paper cuts in their product experiences and properly valuing those long term.
Marco:
They're really not good at that.
Marco:
They've repeatedly shown themselves not to be good at that.
Marco:
And now that they are going to face...
Marco:
challenges in the things they are good at the operations and the money they're going to start tightening those product screws and increasing the paper cut load because that's how they know how to fix those problems and they don't care about the cost of these problems i will say that part of the report was also that there was internal disagreement and that employees don't like it so maybe apple's maybe the asset that apple needs to leverage here is all the uh the rank and file employees who
John:
uh don't want apple to be like this because i feel like apple employees do to some extent have influence over what the company does it sounds like silly to do of course don't the employees isn't there aren't the employees the only thing that influences what apple does well certain employees not all employees right there is
John:
it is a hierarchy it is not a democracy right but internal agitation can move the leader a little bit it's not the way you like to your point marco like if you had internal agitation to do the right thing but you didn't have steve jobs there who is receptive to that or who already agreed with it uh they wouldn't have dug themselves out of the hole that they were in like leadership in the end needs to be on board with that i'm just not as pessimistic about apple's leadership as you are i agree that they definitely have blind spots and often seem to be living in a different universe than we are but
John:
I think if they heard this conversation, they would mostly agree with all the things I said about what Apple had done in the past.
John:
It's just that they think they're doing that now, and we're telling them you're not doing that as much as you think you are.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
John:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
John:
tell us the name of your uh database framework what's the point of having a secret name is it embarrassing is it a sexual position like what no it's called butt tv yeah uh-huh sure it is no all right it's called blackbird because i like the plane okay
John:
There you go.
Casey:
What's wrong with that?
Casey:
There's nothing wrong with that.
Marco:
I didn't want to, like, you know, name it and then have everyone tell me, you know, there's a million other things called that.
Marco:
I know there's a million other things called that because it's a cool name and it's a cool play.
John:
And that's, you know, it's kind of long to type, though.
John:
You know, I guess autocomplete saves you there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and how often are you typing in, you know, Blackbird dot database?
Marco:
Like, it's not that common of a thing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
anyway you didn't make a capital b in the middle of it did you no what are you crazy just making sure we have to have to go to the title case site for all these atp titles i just want to make sure there's nothing was going terribly wrong here yeah well you can do lots of uh lots of fun uh associated vocabulary that you could throw in there with all lockheed skunk work sled driver all sorts of other words associated with that whole thing
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and the thing is, like, and there's all sorts of different ways.
Marco:
Like, I'm not even a plane nerd.
Marco:
I just like that plane.
Marco:
So, like, I don't even know most of the other references I could make.
John:
If you want to go onto YouTube, the SR-71 Blackbird YouTube rabbit hole is awesome.
Casey:
Oh, I can only imagine.
John:
Just go down there on YouTube and just watch these three-hour videos of like someone who flew this thing as their career telling you all about it or the engineers that worked on it or the Engineering Explained video.
John:
There's like seven Engineering Explained videos that talk about this plane.
John:
So good.
John:
You can just spend, if you like this kind of stuff and even if you don't think you like it, it's just hours and hours of qualities.
John:
I should find the Engineering Explained one for notes.
John:
Let me go find that.
Marco:
yeah anyway yeah because it's i like the plane it's fast and it's old and well i made a sequel light thing that's and that's old and and i made it fast so you know it's like sequel light is like old and awesome and fast and that's what this is it's you know so when your library is on the runway will leak fuel from the fuel tanks because it needs to get up to speed to have enough heat to close to close the seams that's so nuts and it will be a super big pain in the ass to use it but it will be awesome yeah
John:
all the all the async calls i'm gonna have to make like it's it's gonna be a big pain in the ass to use this thing from my code however when i'm using it it's going to be awesome and fast yeah i'll put one engineering explain videos in there uh and then probably once you watch that video your recommended videos along the sidebar we'll just just follow those and yeah eventually you get to nazis but it'll be a while
John:
Wow.
John:
One of my favorite things on the Esser 71, though, in one of the videos, I don't know which one it is.
John:
You'll have to dig it out or whatever.
John:
But it was like I think it was like it was either predating GPS or they needed something.
John:
They need something to tell where they are right on the globe in this in the spy plane.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, it's so old and was engineered in such a long time.
John:
Like I was just I mean, I don't know what I was thinking that they would use that.
John:
But like if you didn't have GPS in your plane, how would you try to figure out like for the people in the plane so they know like where on earth they are?
Marco:
I guess I would.
Marco:
I mean, you know, obviously you have like compasses, but beyond that, I guess I would just like descend until I could look around the landscape and try to identify it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
So what they did was they have they have a package that's in the plane that has a bunch of cameras in it.
John:
And what it does is it points up at the sky and looks at the stars.
John:
it positions itself by the positions of the freaking stars with an optical camera that's amazing and it's like well how else were you gonna do it it's like well ships at sea you navigate but because they have to know where they are anywhere on the earth and they can't do like dead reckoning of like well i've been going this direction according to the compass headings for this amount of time and the wind isn't like they literally look at the stars and it's like that's what era this plane is from it's it's amazing that's awesome
John:
And then you look at the device, you're like, who had to design that?
John:
Who had to engineer that?
John:
It's like, okay, it's going to be in a plane, and we'll have, like, a little window, and you're going to look at the sky, at the stars, with, like, 1960s technology, figure out where we are on the planet, and show it on, like, just, it's mind-boggling.
Marco:
Yeah, they didn't really have, like, Raspberry Pis and camera modules back then.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, that's it.
Marco:
It's not that exciting, but that's what it's called, and it's super fast, and I love it.
Marco:
Well, it's not too late to call it BudDB.
John:
i feel like butt db now has some you know some wonderful cachet as as uh as seo yeah oh my gosh