Sand and Water Interface
Marco, I have two questions for you, deeply unrelated.
To each other or to tech?
Deeply unrelated to each other.
First of all, how's your call recorder doing?
It's gone, man.
I'm all M1.
John, how's your call recorder?
I have a question for Marco about call recorder before I tell you about my call recorder.
Oh no, this must be quick.
Marco, did you actually try call recorder?
Well, yes, because I have to.
Because the stupid installation that I'm still on, that it was imported from my iMac, call recorder's on it.
And so every time I launch Skype, it pops up a thing saying, hey, you got to update me.
So I try, you know, I humor it.
I'm like, all right, sure, go ahead.
Let's see what you got.
so it tries to update and it instantly launches and it's like oh i can't do this what am i talking about i can't run on this architecture i'll never run this architecture but see that's my question like why can't it like is it a dialogue from the app itself why can't it just run on rosetta
I don't know how exactly it hooks into Skype.
My best guess is that whatever mechanism it uses to hook into Skype has been tightened security-wise on the M1 Macs and no longer works.
And there probably is no good alternative without doing a kernel extension or something.
If you had to install any of our friend Rogamiba's audio products, you know that that process is kind of cumbersome in Big Sur on an M1 Mac.
And so I'm guessing that's the kind of thing they ran into.
It's not that they have some x86 assembly code they don't want to port.
It's much more likely that the mechanism by which it hooks into Skype at all is somehow broken with this new architecture.
That's what I assumed, but I hadn't actually heard anyone who had tried it.
Merlin asked about that on our last podcast.
He's like, does it just not run at all, or does it run just in Rosetta?
I didn't know, so it's good to know that it's not that it's unsupported.
It's just a no-go entirely.
It launches, presumably using Rosetta, to display a dialog box saying, this doesn't work, and then quits.
Anyway, my call recorder's fine, because I'm on Intel, and it'll be fine until I'm not on Intel.
I've got to get rid of this installation.
like I'm still on it because I haven't there's never a good time to reinstall your OS on your main computer like that's never a fun thing but and man I've gone so many years using the same installations like my entire time using Macs which is since 2004 I think I've had a total of three installations of Mac OS on my desktop laptops are you know they throw away whatever but desktop like my main desktop installations I bring them forward for a long time
That seems to be impossible on Catalina Forward.
Catalina was such a garbage fire that anything that has ever touched Catalina is messy and has problems like the weird Chrome is bad Windows Server thing.
There's so many weird things that seem to be related to Catalina installs
like rotting and going badly the same way like old windows installs used to slowly just slow down and accumulate problems over time like it feels like windows it really does like now like this feels like back when i used to reinstall windows xp and windows 2000 like every nine months like this feels like that again it feels like you kind of have to keep things clean the installation i have on my mac mini which is the the imported iMac installation is so much worse and has so many weird problems than the one i have on my fresh new macbook air that was a fresh installation
so i gotta i gotta move over but again it's just there's never a good time to do that you should you can try just doing some house cleaning i mean i'm i'm using essentially my install that i ported from catalina that i ported from whatever like you know i'm using my 2008 mac pro brought onto this mac uh through uh migration assistant and then upgraded to big sur in place and you know i'm not i haven't done any clean installs is what i'm saying i did spend a little bit of time
going through the cruft and cleaning out things that I thought were old.
I did that actually before Big Sur.
I just did it when it was still in Catalina using just the normal suite of tools that are available to do that.
Actually, I'm going to give you a recommendation for one of these things.
What the hell is it called?
Hang on.
You should use a utility like a mat cleaning utility or a defragger.
No, that's not actually what I want.
The application that I like for the type of thing that most people forget about is called launch control.
Uh, and it just, it's a launch services, uh, you know, editing application.
And you can, you know, again, you don't need an app to do this.
It's all a bunch of XML files and you could do it all yourself, but having an app that does it is super convenient.
And that's where you find the real sort of dark matter of stuff that you had no idea was still running on your computer.
Now, uh,
I will caution you that if you don't understand what these things are, you can really screw up your computer.
So don't just get it and say, I don't know where any of this crap is.
Delete it all because you will break everything.
But if you have some confidence that you can kind of tell what things are and if you're super duper sure like, oh, I'm not running VirtualBox anymore.
It's totally uninstalled and I haven't used it in 60 years and yet there is a VirtualBox user agent running.
i know i don't need that and yes i'm sure that it because it says virtual box it really is virtual box and i'll double check and i'll look you know like then you can clean that out and say why am i running this you know and all these things aren't running they're just available to run on demand in response to certain things so you kind of also have to understand how launch d works on the mac and it's complicated but anyway i found tons of old crappy stuff to be able to be cleaned out and then also just looking for
In your case, you'd be looking for Intel binaries where you're like, ah, you know, let me just delete that because I don't plan on using it.
If I ever do, I should redownload the M1 version.
I did this for 64-bit to 32-bit transition.
Just general house cleaning of finding stuff that you haven't used in forever that you don't want and then really cleaning it off of your system instead of just dragging the icon to the trash.
One thing, all of my Adobe stuff is broken.
well i mean how can you tell well that's fair like won't launch broken so i've got speaking of that i just launched launch control they're one of the user ranges agent says com.adobe.gc.invoker-1.0 i have long since refused to let that thing load so it's not you know you can set it in various different states again you have to look up the launch documentation to figure this out so it is unloaded right now so it's not running
But I still I'm not sure if I can actually delete it because Adobe stuff puts so many things on your system.
And I do want to use Photoshop like I pay for Photoshop and have it and use it.
And you have to get the creative cloud and all like that has to be there.
Otherwise, nothing for Adobe will work.
But I never know which part of it is like from a decade ago that I can safely delete and which part of it, if I delete that one file, I'll never be able to update an Adobe app again.
I eventually was able to reinstall Creative Cloud, and I got Audition working.
Audition is the only Adobe app that I really don't have any good other apps that can replace.
I don't have anything else that can do what Audition does for me.
Now, maybe I'll start looking a little bit harder because it's crazy for me to think that I'm keeping all of this Adobe Cruft around and paying this subscription for basically just Photoshop and Audition.
And Photoshop, I haven't gotten to launch on this computer yet.
And so it turns out I had bought Pixelmator Pro during one of the times it was on sale in the last couple of years.
Yeah.
And I just never opened it because I'm like, oh, I should buy this.
I might need it someday.
And I always had Photoshop.
So it was always the easier path to just use the app I knew.
But last week, I had to do some basic manipulation of something, I think for our show art, actually, for whatever I was doing for chapter art and stuff.
And I did it.
I couldn't launch Photoshop.
And it was easier for me to just launch Pixelmator instead of trying to fix Photoshop.
So I launched Pixelmator Pro.
and just started hitting the key commands that work in Photoshop, and they all work in Pixelmator Pro, because a lot of people would face this problem, so they've accommodated for that.
And so I just started doing things the way I would do it there, and it mostly worked.
The icons are in different places, and everything looks a little bit different, but most of the functionality that I actually needed, I don't know about the rest of the app, which it's a pretty big app, but most of the functionality that I needed out of a basic image editor, Pixelmator Pro had it just fine.
And so...
That's one more Adobe thing off my list.
I might not need Photoshop anymore.
Maybe I'm just going to get Audition.
I think they have a special subscription that's just for one app if you only need one.
It's just down to Audition now.
I've got to figure out how to either fix Photoshop or downgrade.
I got super into the Affinity suite of products.
Affinity Designer, Affinity whatever.
There's like three or four apps.
The one that's Illustrator, the one that's Photoshop.
They have to have a photo thing.
um i got into them when i was working on the t-shirt stuff because i used to have like a thing of illustrator with them and then i then i it was no longer licensed and so i was getting like like you said the one application for one month and you pay like eight bucks and so i would just like pay eight bucks for illustrator for a month to do a t-shirt for us and then just let it expire and then you couldn't do that anymore i think and so let me just get the affinity designer and i used that for a bunch of shirts and i liked it
and when i was going through and cleaning stuff out i think it was maybe the 32 to 64 transition or maybe a little bit later i was going through like my serial numbers and all the other stuff and i realized i bought most of the affinity suite twice i don't know how they even let me do that but like i bought it once when it was like oh it's a cheap bundle get all these apps for a price and then i also bought the individual three apps that i want so i really need to pay attention to what the hell i'm buying in software but
All right.
So, Marco, I said I had two questions for you.
Two quick questions ten minutes later.
Well, I thought that the first one was going to be quick.
I should have known better.
I should have, in retrospect, reversed these.
Maybe we'll do it from the magic of editing.
I don't know.
No, we won't.
I know.
My icebreaker slash warm-up slash let's ease into the show, I don't know, five, ten minutes in, is...
And I think we've discussed this in the past, but I'm curious to hear your answer now, because I think it may have changed quite dramatically.
If you had to pack up and leave New York State, and in fact leave the entire eastern seaboard, where would you go?
Oh, jeez.
See, before I discovered the beach and I found my happy place, I would say, I don't care, whatever, it doesn't matter.
But now that I like this place a lot, it's a little harder of a decision.
I think...
i think i like being near the water a lot and so i think i would with a heavy heart go to california oh that's a bad choice no uh you want a sort of long island methadone and long island methadone is called like cape cod nantucket martha zing he said the whole eastern seaboard no the eastern seaboard's off limits no
Those are not... I mean, I could go to the Gulf maybe, but I don't know.
I'm saying the beaches in California are very different.
Agreed.
Than the ones in Long Island.
And the land that leads up to the beaches are different?
Yeah, I mean, I care less about the actual sand and water interface and more about just like...
the like the air and and the sound and the climate that you get when you're at when you're next to the ocean like that is that is what i like much more i know but that's that's but that's different too because it's a gigantic land mass butting up against the pacific ocean with all these weird weather patterns it's nothing like where you are forget about the water that you say you never even touch the water like just the land is different you need it like an eye you're on a little island you want island life maybe you should go to the bahamas i don't know
yeah i mean maybe like you know caribbean because like it's all there's no winter there that would be nice the but yeah the answer is probably like i would go to some other coast you know maybe even europe maybe like europe seems a little more stable than california in certain ways uh but it has its own issues you know so i don't know i mean everywhere has its issues you know so hopefully i wouldn't have to make that decision but if i did i think the most likely outcome would probably end up being california
See, I think for me, I would probably stay on the eastern seaboard, but I already declared that's not allowed.
So with that in mind— Yeah, if that was allowed, I'd just go, yeah, I don't know, Boston or the Carolinas or something like that.
There's lots of other good places on the eastern seaboard.
And I think I speak for all three of us in saying whether we're from the north, from the south, or somewhere in between, I think all three of us—
seem to dramatically prefer the Eastern seaboard to anywhere else.
For me, I think if I had to leave the Eastern seaboard, I would really want to investigate the Pacific Northwest because I've never even visited and I've heard universally good things and except maybe weather.
And so I would want to at least check it out.
But I think I might end up in Austin because I lived in Austin as a middle schooler and really enjoyed it.
And I know that's super trendy to say now, but I was there before it was cool.
There's a lot more traffic now.
Yeah, a lot more traffic as well.
I don't know.
I'm not sure how well you deal with that.
I know Austin seems super cool and everything, but it's in the middle of a not super cool area.
Remember where I live today.
Yeah, exactly.
Where would you go?
Still not the same.
I mean, I would obviously need to be somewhere near the coast, even though you think I'm not now.
But, you know, I really am in the grand scheme of things.
If you look at the dot on the map, it's near the water.
Yeah.
California is such a big place that I'm pretty sure there's some place in California that I could probably tolerate.
I just haven't found it yet.
It's a big place, right?
I haven't been to all of it.
Pacific Northwest, I don't think I would be able to handle the weather and the vibe.
I don't know.
I always think about like, I mean, this is Canada, but like, you know,
Some places in Canada, I think I would be happy for two months out of the year.
Yeah, that's the problem.
The warm two months.
Yeah, I could just live on Prince Edward Island for two months out of the year and then just blink out of existence for the rest of the year and then blink back into existence for those two months on Prince Edward Island.
I think I'd be pretty happy there.
the pacific northwest whenever i've been there i've thought this is a very nice place for people who are not me like it seems like it's a lot it's a fantastic place for a lot of people but it's not for me and and california i think i'm with john on that like i i found a lot of nice places in california i've never found the place yet that i would want to live necessarily um
And I can tell you one thing.
It would not be San Francisco.
That is not for me at all.
But I have the parts of California that I've seen that have been a little bit outside of San Francisco, the various suburbs up north, the Marin area, down south, basically between that little beach town and Santa Cruz, that whole strip.
There's a lot of very nice places.
Half Moon Bay is what I'm thinking of.
Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, that whole area.
I've liked seeing a lot of that.
But again, I don't know enough about it to actually say I would want to live here.
And I've actually never seen L.A.
in that whole area.
Like the whole bottom half, I've never seen it.
I feel like it's trendy to hate on L.A.
and, you know, insert the letter, Kenny, L.A.
right here.
But I actually quite enjoy L.A.
And in fact, I strongly agree with you that San Francisco is not for me.
I think that having never experienced the Pacific Northwest, I suspect if I went, I would come to a similar conclusion.
Great place, not for me.
But I actually really enjoy Southern California.
And I've only ever been to the greater L.A.
area.
I've been to L.A.
proper.
I've been around L.A.
a lot.
um i've never been way southern california like san diego for example and honestly i can only speak for me but there's no way i could afford to live in basically anywhere in california but i actually prefer la in that area sprawl be darned i i prefer la over northern california for me i'm not saying it's the same for everyone else so far what we've learned is that you want to live places with terrible traffic
Yeah, I guess, which is funny because I really don't.
I mean, you said the same thing, Marco.
Have you been in those areas of California long enough to actually try getting to that beach on a day when you might want to go to the beach?
The traffic in California is ridiculous.
I live on the beach, man.
I know, but that's the secret.
You don't have the traffic.
To getting away from the people, one of the beautiful and terrible things about Long Island is as you go out on it to the extremities,
both man-made and natural forces align to make it very difficult to get there, which is terrible when you're trying to get there, but good once you're there.
Right, yeah.
If you're, again, California being this massive place with all of these highways, and you can get right to the water in all of them, it's very difficult, unless you're going to go out to one of the islands off the coast of California or something, it's very difficult to get away from...
the people you know to get to get the lower population density essentially if you want lower population density it's really easy if you go to live in the desert or someplace you know in the middle of the country that has much lower population density i feel like that's one of the things that you've always said you appreciate about fire island is there's not you know a traffic jam every day and you know tons of people like coming and going and all that other stuff it is you feel like you are it's more relaxing because you're away from the rat race right
yes but in but in a in a strangely dense place but it's just everyone but almost everyone's on foot most of the time like yeah you're on you're on top of each other because you're on this tiny tiny little thing right but it's not you know no one is commuting to and from manhattan from fire island every day and there's a giant traffic jam when you try to go shopping because everyone's on their way home from work also stopping at the store that doesn't doesn't exist
That's the thing.
So much of your happiness in life depends on your daily grind.
Do you have a bad commute?
Do you have a super long commute?
Is your commute always full of angering traffic or stuff like that?
That stuff matters so much to everyone's happiness.
Yeah.
When you want to go food shopping, do you dread it because it's going to be so packed and you're going to be waiting on a checkout line for an hour and you won't be able to find a parking spot?
That type of stuff.
Exactly.
If doing everyday stuff is hard.
I remember one of the impressions I had when we lived in Brooklyn for a year, it was very clear that all of the delivery people, UPS drivers, the mail people, everyone who had to work in Brooklyn was always angry.
Because doing common tasks in the area of Brooklyn we were in is just difficult because there's just tons of traffic constantly and everyone's mad at each other all the time.
It's very, like, tense and there's just tons of friction to a lot of stuff.
Whereas, like...
Here, everyone's really chill and happy because there is so little friction to the admittedly limited things that we have access to.
But what we have access to is really great and really easy to just go do.
And so this is a place where people come here and they can just kind of be happy.
It's like a storybook.
You're like, ride your bike to the grocery store.
And you ride home with a bag in your bike basket with a baguette and a pineapple sticking at the top so that you know it's from a grocery store.
That's how you indicate that.
And it's just nice.
It's a nice, pleasant thing.
And, you know, compared to before where we were living and just I'd have to, you know, get in the car, drive across.
Oh, of course, they're tearing up the street again to put in more water main work somehow.
Somehow this work needs to be done every six months on every street in Westchester.
I don't know.
We joke, there must be a construction mafia.
There's some kind of under-the-table deals where somehow they're tearing up every main street in Westchester to do water main work every six months.
I don't know why it still needs to be done so often.
More often than anywhere I've ever lived.
They should come to my neighborhood because the road in front of my house desperately needs work.
It's never going to get done.
Oh, and when they're done, they don't repave the road nicely.
They just kind of patch it up, and so it's a bumpy mess of patches and those iron plate things.
But there's so much friction involved in just like, okay, I have to go pick up something at the grocery store, or I have to go – it's time to go pick up our kid at school or something.
Common tasks –
That is a recipe for just stress and anxiety and frustration and anger and just unhappiness.
Whereas the more of those everyday things that you can strip that frustration from, like it pays massive dividends in overall happiness.
And that's part of the reason why I love it here is like a lot of that stuff is just a lot nicer.
It's interesting to me.
I wonder if in the aftertimes I could convince you guys to come down to Cape Charles, which in so many ways, having never experienced Fire Island, in so many ways strikes me as a very similar thing, because there's this historic district where it's a grid of not that many streets and not that many avenues, and
You can walk to pretty much anything.
There are cars for sure, but most people don't bother using them because you really don't need to.
It's a very chill, laid back vibe.
But the difference is it's not separated from the rest of the world.
Well, it kind of is, but it's not as dramatically separated from the rest of the world that requires a ferry.
Like you would still need to drive over a humongous, tremendously long bridge tunnel thing, but you don't need to take a ferry.
And so you can get deliveries in less than a week, which is kind of cool.
So,
I wonder if you would enjoy not to say it would cause you to move or anything like that because there's a million and seven reasons why I know you'd want to stay in New York but just I think a lot of the perks again not apples to apples but a lot of the perks from Fire Island you can get or I can get in Cape Charles with in some cases fewer of the drawbacks yeah it would never happen alright gentlemen your DTK's they are worth a lot more today than they were a week ago today which is super exciting
Yeah, this was great.
You know, we talked briefly last week about how Apple had offered a very weirdly short time windowed $200 credit for the Apple Silicon GTKs back.
And they have heard us and they agree.
Us being the general community developers who was kind of like, that's not very good.
Yeah.
um so yeah they uh they are revising their offer uh no one's actually gotten this yet because they they still haven't sent like the the email that says all right now send it in with this label they're just saying like this will happen shortly uh but yeah they've revised it so now instead of a 200 credit that expires on may 31st that seemingly could only be used on an m1 mac uh now they're giving us a 500 credit which is the entire purchase price of the dtk
So basically giving us 100% refund on having used it and we can use it on any Apple product through the end of the year.
So that's fantastic.
That is like – again, like what I said last week, I still stick with of like –
Modern Apple is usually pretty stingy about any kind of hardware discounting or giving away free hardware.
They almost never do it.
And so when they said you can buy this DTK for $500 through this kind of invite-only or application-based program, I figured they're not going to give us anything for these.
So to have even offered us the $200 last time, I thought it was weird how many weird limitations there were on it, but it was still more than the zero I thought we'd get.
And to have those limitations be largely lifted and to have the amount also be raised to $500 –
That's really nice that this was, this is the kind of thing that like, this is going to cost them almost nothing relative to like the other, like the difference between this for such a small volume program is going to cost Apple, like maybe 90 seconds of profit or something like it's going to, it's going to cost them like nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But this is such a nice gesture.
And, and,
Apple does have this weird habit recently of really reading the room wrong.
That initial offer they did last week was really reading the room wrong.
I don't know why anyone at Apple thought that would go over well.
When they put their foot in their mouth like that, it's nice to see them sometimes remove it again and resolve the problem and say, all right, that wasn't very good.
Here's something better.
And that's what they've done here.
And it's a nice thing.
It's a nice gesture.
They didn't have to do it, but I'm very glad they did.
This move is like the least Apple-like thing I can recall them doing in recent history just because it's so low stakes.
Like the thing that we're talking about here is a program that only affects a limited number, even just a low number of developers, let alone a limited number of customers.
It's a fraction of a fraction.
How many of these do you think are out there?
How many people do you think actually got DTKs?
Many more than got the Intel one, for sure, because it was cheaper and there were just so many more developers, but nothing compared to their actual customer base.
It's probably only a single-digit percent of their developers, because they have so many developers, and most of whom are not Mac developers.
What do you think it is?
Maybe like 50,000?
The real thing is they had a program
And nowhere in that program did it say, oh, and when you send these back, we're going to give you a treat.
Now, we talked about that because that's what they did with the Intel thing.
But that was like 15 years ago.
Of the people who got this DTK, how many of them were Mac developers 15 years ago or whenever the hell the Intel thing was?
It's a very different environment today.
There was no reason that anybody should have expected anything.
And then Apple decided to give us something...
albeit slightly weird.
And I feel like of all the circles that we travel in, the old school Mac developer circle is one of the ones that we are the most deeply entrenched in.
We know a lot of old school Mac developers, right?
That's our circle of people.
And I did not see...
like an incredible outpouring of anger like we see so much more anger of like everyday app store stuff and all sorts of other things where people are just genuinely pissed and angry there was some discussion of this but it was discussion in the context of they did a nice thing it could have been nicer like you said mark of like oh maybe reading the room a little bit wrong or whatever but there was also the discussion of like well they could have just done nothing and solve this problem too because they didn't promise us anything and it's just like of all the things to immediately
come in and say oh no never mind we're totally we're gonna double it and you have a longer time it's like a totally unapple like because they almost never react that quickly to something so low stakes and b the fact that it is unapple like is a condemnation of modern apple of what apple like has come to mean in terms of developer relations because this is exactly what they should do you should you know if you make a fumble like this just quickly correct it it's no big deal and
And the fact that I was so shocked by it made me think, you shouldn't be shocked by a company essentially having good customer support or good developer relations.
Like, this is basic table stakes, good developer relations, right?
And the other thing I thought was like, boy, inside Apple, I'm sure there is at least one person somewhere saying...
See, I told you we should have just given them the DTK for free and asked for it back for free and paid for shipping.
We wouldn't have had any of these problems.
Think of how much more simple that would be.
Hey, if you want a DTK, sign up here.
We'll send it to you and then later we'll send you a prepaid thing to send it back.
Think of how simple that arrangement is.
Zero dollars.
It gets people to develop for your platform.
No one is angry about it.
this instead they did this give us five hundred dollars with this vague potential expectation if you're a crusty old mac user that we might give you something back and then we'll give you something back but not in a satisfying way but then whoops we'll give you more back it's like this is this is not apple uh developer relations finest moment
And it was like it was like I said, it was a depressing revelation to think that what you would what would you would expect from good developer relations?
Essentially, like, hey, we want you know, if you're inside Apple, you're like, we want people to develop for our platform.
We want people to port to the M1.
How much can we afford to spend to make that happen?
And someone's like, well, we got to charge them for this Mac Mini with an iPad inside it, don't we?
No, you don't.
Actually, you can.
I mean, they did with the Apple TV where you got it for a dollar and you got to keep it afterwards.
You didn't have to send it back.
Like, yep.
Anyway, this is fine.
Apple did the right thing.
I'm all happy about it.
I'm especially happy because I have the full year.
So now I can just let that $500 sit there until in a panic in December I buy something.
I don't have to buy a Mac Mini or...
a macbook air i can wait out the rest of the year where presumably there will be at least one or two more uh arm based macs to come out during the year and then i can put this money towards one of those so i'm very happy and it doesn't even have to be a mac it looks i think it's just going to be like an apple store credit it says any apple product so maybe it wouldn't work on like you know a pair of b&o headphones or something like that but like it's probably going to work on a lot of stuff we're going to be buying i think this would pay for like the apple care on my monitor or something yes it would
I don't know.
Someone asked about that.
Did I get AppleCare on my stuff?
I think I got AppleCare on all my expensive stuff.
You did.
Maybe I just blocked it out.
I think that AppleCare was not cheap.
It was $500.
I'm very familiar with those.
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ios 14.5 watch unlock we've been discussing kind of the implementation details as best we can figure out uh for that and apparently it wants to see a masked face first before it offers or investigates the option of using the watch for unlocking and one of you probably john wrote any masked face question mark
we talked about this last time like why do you need to see a face first if you're going to let me unlock because of the watch just let me unlock because of the watch and a lot of people uh were discussing this on twitter and sending feedback like oh well it wants to see like the top half of your face it does like a partial face match because that's more secure than than not looking at your face at all which makes some kind of sense but something in my mind was just itching in me like i don't know much about machine learning but it seems to me that a lot of the machine learning models if they're trained on your actual face the whole reason they don't unlock for your whole face is that they're just
machine learning is not you know where someone just writes a program to recognize a face it's different than that if you could write the program you wouldn't need machine learning the whole point is it's really hard to write that program so you sort of let the program write itself by teaching it by showing the face and you know it's complicated i don't understand all that's more or less how it works what it means is what you end up with that model that recognizes faces what you end up with is not
a sort of a program that a human could look at and understand because if they could they would have just written in the first place right and so just because we conceptually can think of the idea of like oh i can recognize your whole face and i could probably recognize the top of your face but we're human beings just because you have a a machine learning model that can recognize the whole face who's to say it can make heads or tails of half your face with a mask on it as far as it's concerned it's like no match
Now, I don't know.
I don't know if that's the case.
But but either way, that was my thought when I was suspicious that, you know, that it's not doing a partial face mask match.
And so why look at the face at all?
And I have at least one report from someone who has used the iOS 14.5 beta to say that you can take you can be wearing your watch and take your phone and show your phone anyone's masked face.
your wife's masked face, your child's masked face.
Just show anyone's masked face, and then your watch will unlock your thing afterwards.
So it doesn't even need to be your masked face.
Now, granted, this experiment was with people related to the person.
So maybe the top of their faces looks enough like theirs that it was able to unlock.
But the fact that it worked on a wife and a child makes me think that maybe it's not actually doing a partial face match.
Or if it is, all it cares about is that it's a human face with the same number of eyes as you or something.
So...
I still don't quite know how this book works.
And I still think it's weird that it wants to see anything first.
And by the way, I don't know if we mentioned this last time, but it does buzz your watch when it unlocks and gives you the option to immediately relock it.
Right.
So it's trying to do the right thing.
No one's going to secretly unlock your phone without you knowing, because if you have the watch on your wrist and it just unlocked it, it will buzz you.
And then you'll look at it and say, hey, someone just unlock your phone and you can just smack it and say, lock it because it wasn't me anyway.
And it's opt in.
So this is not going to happen to you unless you turn this feature on.
But I'm interested to see for those of us who have iPhones and watches, which is, I guess, you two, when the 14.5 comes out for real, setting aside whatever the betas do, does it need to see a face and does it take any face or does it require your face?
All right, moving on.
Mike Vossler has some information with regard to listing your trash.
Can you tell me about that, John?
Yeah, last week I was surprised that Marco couldn't even just list the contents of his .trash directory, his home directory.
And I had long since forgotten that it has been my habit ever since...
whatever OS this was introduced in, to give the terminal application full disk access, because I find it maddening when I'm asked for permission to do stuff from the command line.
So I always just give terminal full disk access.
And a lot of people reported that if you do give terminal full disk access, then you can go into .trash just fine.
still yet some people have said i have terminal with full disk access but the particular problem marco was talking about i had something like that too where there was some sort of you know something in my dot trash directory that was somehow protected by system integrity protection i needed to reboot and recovery mode to remove it so both of those are failure modes that might happen but if you're just wondering why terminal is not letting you see things that normally it used to and you don't mind opening up a you know what we now call a giant security hole but what we used to just call the way unix works
give the terminal application full disk access and then when you're in terminal it won't complain i mean you're still subject to unix permissions obviously that's that's so weird when you say full disk access what it means is go back to just honoring unix file system permissions so you can't actually see everything right but we call this full disk access and the opposite of that is oh you can't see anything unless you explicitly ask permission for it and that is a little bit annoying
By the way, for some actual follow-up on this topic on whether it solved my issue, nope, sure didn't.
Yeah, like I said, there's the one where you actually have to go into recovery and delete the thing, and you probably have that one.
Yeah, I didn't attempt that yet because I don't want to.
To me, having my stupid...
x11 alias stuck in my trash forever is it's just kind of like this reminder like i have to get rid of this installation of mac os like just i don't yep i just i have to get rid of this that is not the real problem the real problem is not my x11 alias the real problem is that this installation is broken and i have to hear it
You're just making me want to dive in there and nurse it back to health.
Just feed it chicken soup and clean out all of its old launch agents and find all your old corrupt fonts and really just shine it up.
It's like those car detailing videos where they find the old car in the barn that hasn't been out in 20 years and then by the end of the thing it's all shiny.
That's what I want to do to your macOS.
Excellent.
And then this next item in follow-up, I haven't a clue what is happening here.
So, John, tell me about SSD traffic.
Last week, there was an Ask ATP question where someone was saying, hey, if I get the M1 with eight gigs of RAM, am I going to shorten the life of my SSD just from like swap file usage?
Right.
Yes.
And my general answer to that was like, don't worry about it.
It'll probably be fine.
SSDs, you know, are fairly sturdy and you're not going to be swapping that much.
And if you are, you're going to have other problems that you notice way before you wear out your SSDs.
So on and so forth.
And there was some thread on Twitter where people were discussing this and saying, well, I got I'm looking at my M1 Mac and I looked at like the total data written to the SSD over some period of time and I was shocked at how much it was.
And so the tweet was, this is actually on a MacBook Air with an M1 and 16 gigs of RAM, so it's not even an 8 gig model.
And this person was shocked that two months in, the data written to the SSD was 13.4 terabytes.
It was like 15.5 terabytes read, 13.4 terabytes written.
And everyone in the throat was like, oh, that seems like a lot, right?
Like, you've only had it for two months.
Like, boy, at that rate of I.O., are you going to wear out this SSD?
And so I was curious.
I decided to look at my work laptop, which is an Intel machine, but it also has 16 gigs of RAM.
And I had it for a really long time, so I figured it would even out.
And my work machine is thrashed by...
corporate malware right it's got sopost antivirus that's constantly scanning things it's constantly doing an inventory it's constantly searching my hard drive for personally identifiable information and running reports on it right like everything you can imagine is just incredibly abused but i can tell you that the fans run high a lot of the time a lot of the time it is swamped by cpu and like i said disk io you know when it's just grinding over your whole disk looking for stuff not to mention running like you know the uh
microsoft one drive and dropbox and plus you know running large vms on the thing and pushing it into swap and you know so i really this is i feel like this is a heavily used laptop that is you know slowly wilting under the load that i put it in on top of all the corporate malware so i'm like this is going to be a good test to see what you know what the io is and by the way the way we're getting these numbers both the twitter thread on this is uh
using smart utilities i forget what smart stands for it's probably an acronym for like uh anyway it's the tools that like measure hard drive health or whatever so we'll put a link in the show notes too i just searched for it on google and i found this smartmontools.org website that downloaded the command it's called smart smart control or smart control and it's just you know run smart control dash dash all slash dev slash disk zero for you know built-in ssd probably
And the number I got was 246 terabytes written on my internal SSD.
And that is over the course of the entire life of the 2017 MacBook Pro.
So I did some math to figure out how many gigs per day of writes.
I never really care about the reads.
We're just worrying about writes for like wearing out the SSD.
How many gigs per day is that?
The shocking one that was in the Twitter thread that was only two months old on the M1 Mac was 223 gigs written per day.
And my, you know, four year old Intel MacBook Pro was 197 gigs written per day.
And I'm shocked that the two numbers are that close to each other, because surely the usage patterns are different.
Like, I don't think this person has Sophos antivirus scaling, scanning every single file on their hard drive every single day.
But yeah, they're both in the same ballpark, 200 ish gigs per day written.
there's some other stats that are printed out by this thing that i don't understand but i can surmise one of them is available spare remember we talked about over provisioning how much extra storage is in there just in case you wear out some part of the ssd you can use the the extra stuff that it keeps in reserve my available spare is at 100 i think that means it's all available i don't know
There's a bunch of other fun stats in here if you want to take a look at what your laptop is doing.
But I can tell you that it never crossed my mind to worry about wearing out my SSD on this laptop.
I did worry that it was going to overheat and explode because the fans are running high all the time.
But 200 gigs per day of writes seems like a not unreasonable thing for a laptop to be writing to its SSD if it's used a reasonable amount, whether it's an M1 Mac or an Intel Mac from many years ago.
Now, hold on.
So how are you getting how many days to divide by?
By power on hours?
No, I'm getting that by the date I know I got the laptop from work.
It was a brand new laptop, fresh out of the box, and then I'm going to start counting from there.
And obviously, I don't use it on weekends for the most part because it's my work laptop, but this laptop probably has more.
I didn't run this on my Mac Pro, but this laptop is definitely the hardest used piece of hardware that is in my house right now.
Okay, because I ask because I have 1295 power on hours and 54 terabytes written.
And so computing that out, if you treat it as, you know, powered on hours, that's 1001 gigabytes a day.
But again, that's power on hours.
So it's not exactly the same as what you're computing.
But that's considerably more than what you're talking about.
Yeah, I mean, it really depends on what you're doing.
Like I said last time, you can wear out an SSD if you're doing something that's just constantly doing huge amounts of I.O., but most normal loads don't do that, right?
So it really depends on the specific things that you're doing.
The question was about whether swap would do it.
I think, like, if you're swapping that much, you're going to be suffering in so many other ways.
That's your concern.
It's not going to be SSD.
Some other interesting stats here that make me wonder what it's actually showing.
Power cycles.
i'm assuming that means like maybe like the the os or the hardware takes power away from the ssd when it doesn't need to be there or something because my power cycles number is 26 000 and i know i did not turn this on and off to 26 000 times right so that must mean something else
unsafe shutdowns i think we all know what that means 160 i'm like yeah that seems about right it's because this machine did have a tendency to kernel panic for at least the first year or two of its life it's settled down a little bit now media and data integrity errors zero no errors
Oh, interesting.
So I recomputed your laptop as per what's in the show notes, and I computed it the same way that mine was computed, and yours is actually 847.2 gigabytes a day, and I'm still sitting at 1,001.
I have no idea how.
Yeah, I feel like those are shockingly in a similar ballparks, right?
For two machines that are used for entirely different purposes, running entirely different software, like it's amazing how these are not like double each other or have a huge range.
Because I have no idea how you use your computer, but it can't be like I use my work laptop, which does such weird things, you know.
yeah i do so much i mean i'm running like database servers on my work laptop i feel like it's it almost doesn't matter unless you're doing something that you know is intentionally not abusive but intentionally uh extremely heavy like say you're constantly recording 8k video to the drive 24 hours a day from a security camera like that's the type of thing where you expect to see a 10x difference or whatever but if you just use your laptop like a human it seems like the numbers sort of regress to a mean here with with our three data points because marco hasn't downloaded this thing and tried it yet
no and he had all his computers are so new that it's like you know power on hour seven three soon i'll be leaving marco's house you see the number of like battery cycles whenever i sell a laptop it's embarrassingly low yeah marco has charged his battery 10 times looking at uh looking at r2 readouts your controller busy time is 21 799 would you like to guess what mine is
I don't even, what's the units for that?
Is that seconds?
Is that minutes?
What is that?
No idea.
I have no idea.
But remember, like this is a 2017 laptop.
It's old.
Sure.
Well, but would you like to guess what my controller busy time is?
how old is your computer what a year ish something like that a little over a year uh it's zero yeah well i don't know i mean i don't know what that number means but yeah me neither my computer is stressed it should move to the beach yeah that's what it needs to do yeah that's it uh it you know you also have 60 error information log entries and i have zero yeah but i have no data integrity error so i'm happy about that
By the way, while we're doing things that are going to generate tons of email over the next week, thanks a lot, guys.
I'll add to the pile.
I would like recommendations from listeners.
Not an overwhelming number of them, maybe, but I would like recommendations.
Listeners can't control that.
They don't know what other people are doing.
There's no global knowledge.
Organize amongst yourselves to submit.
All right.
Submit one copy of each thing.
Oh, God.
The problem I need to solve here is every time there's a new Mac OS update or something, I have to set up a new computer or the OS changes some policy or PHP gets updated or stuff like that.
it always breaks my local web development stuff.
What I want to do is run PHP, Nginx, or any other web server, but hopefully Nginx with PHP and MySQL locally on my Mac.
I have done this for over a decade just by usually either using the built-in stuff, like back when it was...
present and reasonably good, which it mostly still is, but I think they're phasing that out.
Or I would use Homebrew or similar package managing kind of stuff to install a different version or a newer version of something like PHP and have that be automated in some big script.
And
Every six months, whatever process I did before breaks.
And whatever installation I had before either can't be carried into the new OS or some component of it breaks.
This is just the world of package management.
And trying to run a package manager on macOS...
seems like a very hostile environment to try to operate in.
It seems like the OS is constantly changing and breaking stuff like that in ways that Homebrew tries its best to get around, but it often doesn't succeed.
And so I'm kind of at my wit's end here.
And what I would ideally like, I don't even know if this necessarily is possible with what we have so far today.
What I would ideally like is a Linux VM system
that I could run, that I can just, that could just be like a file or like a folder on my computer that is mounted into a Linux VM.
And that folder, I could still edit all my code, like in TextMate, all my PHP, you know, copies of everything.
That could all still be like in a regular Mac editing app.
So mounted natively in the Mac file system.
But I want just like a Linux VM that I can set up that can actually execute this code.
Okay.
it's like you should listen to some tech podcasts where they talk about things like docker which we've talked about on this show many many times you realize you just invented docker well so right so so i've never used docker is docker the solution to this and second question does it work on m1 max yet now here's the thing other qualifications so number one it has to work on apple silicon which i know most of the like virtualization stuff doesn't yet number two
I don't care how fast it is.
It doesn't need to be fast.
In fact, if it's slow, that's actually kind of a feature because then I'll be forced to optimize my web code if anything is noticeably slow, but it won't be.
I mean, PHP and MySQL, even if it was doing full x86 machine emulation on the M1,
i would still not notice the slowness like it so performance doesn't matter at all what does matter is it has to work on m1 it can't have any kernel extensions it can't have like the old virtualization methods where you install kexts all over the place like none of that if that even still works i don't think it does so i just want like a container that
that can that i can keep independent of what the os does and i don't care how much overhead it takes to execute the contents of that container so it can be very very slow it can be full emulation of x86 if it needs to be it can be arm probably but ideally it would be x86 just because that's what i'm running on the servers and it would be nice to match like everything exactly to just be able to like install my server you know ubuntu distribution with my server install script here locally so that's ideally what i want
i'm i'm interested to know like what is the best solution to this that actually works on m1 max in any in any possible way so i mean you have you have three main options here one uh i know you said you didn't like this but homebrew has been updated for the m1 max and so if you still want to go that route you actually have that option available to you uh two you got plain old vms lots of options for them and as you noted uh the ones that you since do i have lots of options for them
I mean, you're going to have lots of options.
Yeah, right.
I'm going to.
I don't right now.
But it could be like by next week.
Things are happening fast here, right?
But I'm saying don't set that aside because traditional plain old VMs, whether you use VMware, commercial product, or VirtualBox or whatever,
you could literally run the same version of linux that your servers run and yes most of them have some way for you to essentially mount through some folder on your mac so you can use all your native mac tools like they all do that and the good thing is on big sir with the virtualization framework they don't need kicks anymore because the os supports virtualization itself so i bet the people at vmware i mean i haven't talked to them but like
I bet they're excited.
It's like, Oh, thank God.
We don't have to do this part of the whole part of our application that we had to write.
There was a pain in the butt to maintain.
Now we don't have to use it anymore.
Apple gives us one and we can essentially ship you an app that just runs without asking for weird permissions to install a text or whatever.
Like that's great for them.
Now this is assuming Apple's virtualization framework actually works well.
And I'm sure the people who worked in that part of VMware say ours was better and had better features.
But what I'm saying to you is that don't be afraid of virtualization because, uh,
all the things that we complain about on Big Sur and locking stuff down or whatever, it makes things like virtualization less scary because now they're not allowed to do that dangerous stuff and they can't.
And the OS supports it natively.
So look into virtualization, whoever ends up supporting that the best.
And then finally, there's Docker, which is probably, of all those solutions, going to be the weirdest to you.
And I also don't know whether it's entirely supported in M1 Macs yet, but it will be inevitably.
It looks like it's in tech preview mode right now.
yeah and also like i believe it will be able to do x86 stuff for you which is what you want um so those three options should cover all of the possibilities and i think you should try all three of them when you can right so like you can try homebrew now and get angry at it all over again i will and then like as soon as vmware you know is or something like that is out try that and then try docker docker is free for you to just run locally and my experience with the mac version of docker has actually been pretty good obviously not on the m1 but
like the mac version of docker has like it's not super duper mac like but it's way more mac like than you would think something like docker would be uh you do probably do have to learn a little bit about docker and you're not going to like what you learn because it's weird but learn a little bit about docker to do the thing that you want where you want to sort of mount through the directory and have it visible and stuff you'll have to mess with that in some ways that are going to be a little bit scary and more complicated to you than you know vmware is like you can practically like drag a folder over and make a shared thing it's really easy and like vmware right
but of those three options surely one of them will work for you better than your current setup and i guess the fourth option is what i did which is compile everything from source and just deal with it but it seems like oh i'm not doing that no it's the best though no the best for what in what way is it the best it's the worst it's the best and that you have you should love it it's the marco solution that you have total control you're such a control freak about so many parts of your tech life but not this one and you're like
Well, because this is an environment that, like, this is, to me, a tool.
Like, I don't want to build, like, my text editor from source.
I just want this to be a package that I download as, like, a complete polished thing that is easy because this is an area of my toolkit that I don't want to become a power user and nerd about.
This is something that I currently am forced to be a power user and nerd in trying to keep all the native, you know, homebrew kind of stuff working throughout installations.
And I just, to me, like, any time I spend...
maintaining that is a waste of my time.
Like anytime I spend on that, it's like, I'm not working on my app.
I'm not doing anything I like.
I'm not doing something productive.
Like customers won't see or care about any of this.
Like it, that's, that to me is like burned time.
And so that's exactly the kind of context where I would pay if, if like, you know, VMware worked perfectly the way I want to and was out today and was $300.
I would buy it.
They'd be like, great.
I can throw money at this problem and get all this time back to not have to deal with this.
I think it might already be out.
I might just be thinking of the Big Sur update, not the M1 update.
But it's so much like your other situations in that when it breaks, you get frustrated if you don't know exactly what's going on because it's using some third-party thing, and so let me just write my own library to do this thing, right?
So that way I know the code from top to bottom.
Every time your homebrew stuff breaks or whatever, you're like, and you don't control homebrew, and it's not your thing, and it's big, and it's complicated, and it's like, ugh.
So I can imagine you would derive some satisfaction for...
like understanding how your local setup works from top to bottom in the same way that you do with code instead of dealing with oh well why did you use a third-party library that does that does it for you and it's like but i don't want the whole third party third-party library and it's complicated and when it breaks i don't understand why so i feel like that the compiling from source as ridiculous as it sounds to you actually does fit with some of your other tech habits in the vein of i know exactly how it works and it does just what i need to do and only that and when it breaks i understand and can fix it
Yeah, I'm still not doing it.
I know.
No one is.
Just me.
But I enjoy it.
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all right moving on oh god we're gonna get so much email this week uh tesla as if we didn't have enough email coming away you put this in here casey this is all you yeah this is my fault everyone everyone has a reason for email apparently uh we had discussed i think a couple of weeks ago how marco has to periodically reboot half of his car as he's hurtling down the road because that's totally safe
And don't worry.
Don't worry.
Elon will fix it, I'm sure.
Well, apparently he is fixing it because they have basically been forced to do a recall for touchscreen failures.
And so NHTSA has all but compelled Tesla.
And I guess this is normal that NHTSA will basically say, hey, we're going to make you do a recall if you don't voluntarily do it.
And then the car manufacturer, not just Tesla, will fight it for a little while.
And then they're like, no, really, this is going to happen.
And the car manufacturer says, no, no, no, no, no.
We'll do it voluntarily.
No need for recall.
It's cool.
It's cool.
It's cool.
It's cool.
It's cool.
So anyway, we will put a link in the show notes.
And from that link, NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, something like that.
Is that right?
Yeah, we got it.
All right, go team.
The agency said touchscreen failures posed significant safety issues, including the loss of rear view or backup camera images, exterior turn signal lighting.
We were wondering about that when we were discussing it.
And windshield defogging.
I almost said defragging.
Defogging and defrosting systems.
I think if you have to defrag your windshield, you have other problems.
That's a big worry.
That, quote, may decrease the driver's visibility in inclement weather.
Quote,
And it's said last month that, quote, during our review of the data, Tesla provided confirmation that all units will inevitably fail given the memory device's finite storage capacity.
Quote, are you kidding me?
I guess they're just vomiting up like log files or something until kingdom come.
No, I...
The way I interpreted it was not about that.
It was actually about flash wear.
That's how I interpreted this.
Ah, okay, okay.
Then maybe I'm wrong.
That's fair.
Yeah, whoever wrote this in NHTSA doesn't understand the tech involved, but that's my understanding, too, that it is actually a case of wearing out flash memory.
So it's actually topical for this week's show.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
I mean, but who's going to think when designing a car system that the cars will be running for a long time?
yeah i mean why would you think that it's like such a such a uh such a tesla move where they're just like we don't need to do things the car way let's just do things the fast and nimble way you know why would we spend all this money for this really enterprise grade over-provisioned car industry flash module that costs a bazillion dollars i can just buy a bunch of these on amazon and stick them in the cars and oh now they're all wearing out
whoopsies but we need to do all that logging to find out why things are broken hey oh oh god we're gonna get so many so many emails but you're so right yeah this is this is a super old story isn't i i'm i guess it's finally getting around to recalling it or whatever but i remember reading about this particular problem years ago
it isn't on any of their recent cars like i think i think the the latest affected cars are probably from like three years ago right it's it's not it's not super recent right well yeah and it's the type of thing that happens after over time right so if it is happening on the current cars we wouldn't know it for years that's true yeah that's true
Now, with all that said, Michael Swindler wrote in to say, in my Model 3, I had to reboot while driving recently.
Why is this such a thing?
Why are people okay with this?
Oh, my God.
It happened to be at night, so I could see that the turn signal did still work, just no sound.
Oh, that's reassuring.
So that's a Model 3, which is a newer car, as I will say.
yeah that's what i what i hoped was happening but yeah i don't uh i it's still it's still not a good thing to have to reboot your car while driving it and also like it just it just shows like anytime people we keep getting email from people who are like you guys don't understand the new model s it's all about self-driving they're going all in on full self-driving so they don't need a steering wheel they're just designing it so you don't need to drive it it's like yeah that's that's wonderful full self-driving's coming out in 2018 marco
Yeah, right.
You don't buy a car or design a car for promises of future software capabilities, especially things that seem really hard for anybody to actually achieve.
If you ship a car and it turns out that in one year you have amazing full self-driving capability somehow magically and it turned out that the steering wheels you put on the car for that whole year were redundant,
Oh, well, you got some redundant steering wheels.
No big deal.
If you bet wrong and you have like you design a car for a software future that doesn't ship on time or never maybe makes it in the lifetime of that car.
And now you just have a badly designed car that could get people killed.
I'd say you made the wrong bet.
And that's a bad design.
heat and also i mean i know we discussed this a little bit tangentially the whole split between like the car computer and the and the sort of infotainment computer and whether they were merged or whatever but just in general the idea that rebooting your car while you're driving it is in any way a common thing even if it's just like the non-driving computer does not make me particularly confident about any kind of self-driving future which by the way i'm super
I continue to be see years ago episodes, super pessimistic that we will ever see anything like that in our lifetime.
But regardless, uh, if you have to reboot your car while driving it, uh, the one thing that probably won't work if you're, you know, forget about turn signals, the part where the car drives itself is,
Yeah, I'd worry more about that because if you don't have a steering wheel and the car, the driving part of the car reboots and you're going 70 miles an hour, that's a bad situation.
So add yet one more pebble to the giant pile of reasons why full self-driving continues to be a fantasy in the way that most people envision it.
That's the thing.
I'm so happy and I'm so fortunate that my entire career has been spent writing software that in the grand scheme of things doesn't really have any major stakes.
It doesn't really matter.
If I write something that has a bug or if I mess up a server and something crashes –
No one dies.
I don't have any kind of heavy stakes on what I do.
I've made an entire career basically out of helping people waste time in various ways.
And it's kind of wonderful in the sense that I don't have all that stress, you know, that like I might, you know, mess up somehow and really get somebody hurt or killed.
Yeah.
But I also then don't tackle problems with this skill set that might result in heavier stakes.
Tesla, their software quality of their cars is, granted, better than anything I could write.
And you look at all the miles driven and autopilot and everything, and they are largely pretty good.
But to take on something like full self-driving requires a level of rigor and perfection and conservatism in development methodology and things like that.
You have to be so careful and so rigorous and so slow-moving and well-tested that
That's just not how Tesla does almost anything.
And so I see them having a wonderful present and future in doing stuff like autopilot on the highway, which is like this is a smaller problem set.
We can do a pretty good job of it that works almost all the time and is a nice convenience feature and maybe improves average safety of our cars per highway mile driven compared to humans doing their own cruise control stuff.
That is a narrower problem domain that they have proven to be pretty good at.
And as a five-year Tesla owner, I can say that has worked great so far.
Not 100% of the time.
There's still a lot of conditions in which it doesn't work, but it is a wonderful convenience feature.
When you design convenience features, though, that's a whole different ballgame compared to full self-driving.
What that actually means, not whatever Tesla's package of options calls that.
What full self-driving actually means is such a different ballgame and requires such incredibly different and much more advanced and much higher quality control in that software development.
I don't see that just magically coming out next year based on what Tesla has delivered so far.
And I don't even see Tesla being a company that's going to be the world leader in that if and when it ever comes.
I don't see them being that kind of software organization to have that kind of...
engineering discipline and quality control frankly i see them making really great cars that are driven mostly in the traditional way that have occasional convenience features like autopilot that they're very good at and i'm very happy using their cars that way but they seem to be wanting to push the cars into a direction that i don't think they can do very well and i'm worried about that
If you look at the industries that are tackling similar problems, they have gone through and continue to go through all the things we always talk about with Tesla, like aviation, for example.
Planes that essentially fly themselves, they have the exact same problem of like, well, if the plane almost flies itself, it can train the pilot into assuming that the plane knows what it's doing.
But then the times when it gets it wrong, then the pilot's not ready to intervene at the right moment.
And lots of crashes are about...
you know if if it was just the human the human error causes crashes if it's just the computer computer error can cause crashes and if it's the human and the computer they can collaborate to get a whole new series of crashes that would not happen if either one of them was solely in control right like even just like the the what do you call it 737 max thing of like how the plane behaves slightly differently and the the control program was trying to do something safe but the pilot didn't know and they're fighting each other right that anti-pattern of like
Well, it's not.
The human needs to be there and needs to be aware and might need to intervene in a moment's notice.
But most of the time the computer does it and it makes the humans not be able to be vigilant for that amount of time.
And so aviation is constantly struggling with that.
Yes, we do want these safety features because the plane can know and do things by itself and eliminate human errors from many areas.
But we can't disengage the pilot.
The pilot still needs to be there.
It's super important that the pilot be there because we know for a fact that there's no such thing as full self-flying.
Like it's just you need to have a pilot with controls and the human it's super important that the human is there because sometimes it's super important that the human take over.
Right.
And you have to manage that relationship so that the human is not expected to do things that no human should be expected to do.
Right.
and making that interface making it help but not help too much but not help too little but not you know like it's super hard and aviation is like marco was saying the opposite of how tesla does things everything in aviation has so many regulations and so you know they're so careful in such a long history that's respected about what works and so conservative in every possible way every time they push the envelope a little bit like the 737 max like oh it's software we can do this and do this advance and save money for the shareholders
if we just reuse some of this but just modify the plane in this way and just like just the littlest nudge in the direction of trying to be like move fast and break things and hundreds of people die right so i you know i i'm setting aside tesla when i'm pessimistic about self-driving i'm so pessimistic about it just in general someone asked in the chat what episode we talked about that last
I think it was 165.
We'll put it in the show notes if you want to re-listen to that episode and hear what we had to say years ago about self-driving.
But my attitude towards it hasn't changed.
But yeah, to Marco's point, Tesla is the company that I least trust to do the default safe thing when it comes to self-driving, even if they happen to be the company that actually has the most expertise in the area right now, which is not a great combination.
Lots of expertise, but not a lot of wisdom, let's say.
In the defense of Tesla, which I can't believe I'm the one saying this, I remember when I was working government contracting that some of a lot of the stuff we did was like C++ and C Sharp.
But I vividly remember that one of my co-workers had to learn.
I think it was ADA, if I'm not mistaken.
And there was a completely different programming language that that the government had basically compelled us to use.
And I probably have the details wrong and it doesn't really matter.
But I remember being told something along the lines of with ADA, every like entrance and exit from every function has to be defined or something like that.
That sounds wrong.
But, you know, like it was extremely explicit about everything that happened in every piece of the program.
And so because of that,
you knew with increased confidence, if not perfect confidence, that what you were writing, you have covered every possible case involved, outside of the envelope case, inside the envelope case, happy path, unhappy path, and everything else.
And that's why they used it for some more embedded style systems at the place in which I was working for government contracting stuff.
And it wouldn't surprise me, I bring this up because it wouldn't surprise me if the car control computers are using something along the lines of ADA, you know, maybe not ADA exactly, but something along those lines, even if the infotainment is running on like Java or something like that.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why they're totally separate computers.
The infotainment system should have nothing to do with driving.
And from my understanding, it doesn't now, which is good.
I mean, whatever system has to do with the turn signals, at least on your car, potentially is the system that needs to be rebooted.
So that's not great.
Well, the display or the sound of the turn signals is different from the operation of the turn signals.
Right.
Well, think of the recall, though.
The recall was about, like, oh, well, climate control won't work and you can't turn on the defroster.
Okay, so now climate control, which I would argue is part of, and NHTSA would argue as well, is part of the safety features of the car.
If the computer is the only thing in the car that can turn on the defroster, if that one has to reboot, I'd say let's move that out of wherever it is now and into the computer that supposedly doesn't crash.
Yeah.
Yeah, and to be fair, that is true.
The climate control is controlled by the navigation and media computer, and that's another reason why physical controls can win out, because anything that is on the touchscreen – this is why this came up in the first place like two episodes ago – anything on the touchscreen, you might occasionally have to go without.
for a few minutes while the system reboots and so you know that that could be a problem if it's you know if it's just you know you don't have to worry about the car suddenly like stopping and flying off the road but you might have to worry about the defroster not being accessible or you know turn not knowing whether your turn signal is on or not or not being able to control your drive direction in the new one if it if the car guesses wrong so yeah that's well you do you do have to worry about it flying off the road but just you're supposed to take over control immediately when you see that happening just fyi oh right
Or you die like that poor guy who died commuting to work at the same place his car had veered towards the barrier multiple times, and then the one day he was just too sleepy to catch it, and he died.
That's just so terrible.
I mean, granted, people die every single day in cars from their own mistakes, but it's like I said last week, somehow, because humans are weird, somehow it feels more fair when you screw up yourself and die.
You're just as dead, and you're dead maybe even more often than you would be if the car was helping you drive, but it just feels worse when it's like...
hey like i you know car you you turn toward that tree and yeah i was too slow and yanking the wheel back but honestly car you turn towards that tree and i feel worse about that than me just not paying attention and hitting the tree myself i don't know it's it's so wild to me listening again to you describing this operation marco and thinking the rebooting while driving the rebooting operation yeah
This is the same man who refused to use a monitor that was slightly wobbly and occasionally didn't work perfectly.
And yet his 4,500 whatever pound automobile, he can occasionally reboot the infotainment and just shrug it off as, oh, no big deal.
Yeah.
Oh, it makes me angry every time, but I just like the car so much.
I love this car.
I really do.
We'll see.
My living situation here is going to make it difficult to decide what to do this fall when my lease is up.
But if I end up not keeping a car like this, I'm going to be very upset.
I'm going to very much miss it because I love this car so much.
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All right, so moving on to topics.
This is actually really exciting.
This is the second exciting thing I've seen from iOS 14.5.
I'm not running it yet, so I'm just looking at reports.
But supposedly, iOS 14.5 lets you set Spotify or others as Siri's default music service.
How cool is that?
So it used to be, even today, in the released versions of the OS, you can say, hey, Dingus, using Spotify, play the most recent album by Meat Math or something like that.
And it would work, usually.
But now it appears, from what I've read, that you can just say, hey, Dingus, play the most recent album by MuteMath, and it'll just go and do it using Spotify or whatever your service may be, which is super great.
Yeah, and this seems like it's super early still.
Like, I mean, granted, this is reporting a feature that's still in a relatively early beta.
beta series of ios but even its implementation in the beta seems a little bit flaky so far so we'll see if this ships with with 14.5 i would not recommend that anybody install the beta right now just for this feature because it is still a little bit iffy but this is a this is one of those things that we kind of never expected apple to do and
And maybe they're only doing it because of potential antitrust and regulatory pressure.
I'm sure that plays a significant role in their decision to do this now.
But the reality is they're doing it, and that's great.
This is a feature that the Alexa ecosystem has had forever.
If you buy an Amazon Echo, you've been able to go into the app and select any of their supportive music services as the default for years.
I don't know if it was there since day one, but it's at least been there for years.
to have this feature here it's wonderful because then as case said like instead of having to say on every single request like hey play atp in overcast now like you can just set a certain thing as your default for most people it's probably going to be spotify in this context but you know you can set a certain thing you can say all right play green day in spot if you know green day doesn't really hold up anymore have you have you heard green day recently
No, I was never that into them.
Like I didn't actively dislike them or anything, but it never really did that much for me.
And I have not heard it recently.
There's a whole section of like angry 90s music that if you listen to it at the time, it didn't seem like it seemed totally normal.
But if you listen to it now, like with modern sensibilities and it kind of doesn't hold up, it's kind of uncomfortable to listen to some of it.
Anyway, they're one of those bands.
So suppose you played something better like, you know, I don't know, Weezer.
They seem relatively inoffensive most of the time.
Before, you'd have to say on every single request, you know, play the latest Weezer album on Spotify if you were a Spotify user.
And now you can you could set Spotify as your default music app.
And it looks like they're also possibly doing podcast apps that are built into this.
At the API level, the way this works is there's a whole Siri IAM PlayMedia intent series of APIs.
They launched a very basic version of it when they launched Siri shortcuts.
Was that iOS 12?
It was either 11 or 12.
Anyway, when they did that, they did a very basic version of it that could do almost nothing.
The commands weren't parameterized.
You could vend to the system a shortcut that played a particular artist or playlist or whatever, but you couldn't
Yeah.
And you could even provide the Siri system with a vocabulary of things like the names of the user's playlists.
So that way it would be able to recognize that a little bit better.
Or you could provide it like a list of artists that the user has in their library.
And this API is structured.
Like the data formats are structured.
So you can say, for instance, like, all right, this thing I'm telling you is a playlist or the thing I'm telling you is a band or an album or a podcast.
Okay.
And all those things are separately structured in the API.
So the API support is 100% there for them to actually have podcasts be a separate thing and to be able to say, all right, this is my podcast app.
This is my music app.
So I'm actually looking forward to that.
And Overcast in the current App Store version does not support that kind of thing, but the current beta does.
And I'm hoping to have it out in the store possibly in like a week or two.
So anyway, Overcast will someday support this list and I'll be very happy when that happens.
And I hope they do podcasting separately because I wouldn't expect most people to set Overcast as their default music app.
But if they have a way to set a podcast app, which the API support is totally there for, then this could be really cool.
This is very cool.
I feel like we're really starved for these features, the default apps thing.
What did we get in the recent OS?
We could do default mail.
Mail and browser.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then the music one, looking at the story, the fact that like the way you do it is not remotely the same way you do it for mail and stuff like it's like, oh, well, if you talk to, you know, hey, dingus, you can interrogate it about being able to say, hey, what do you want me to use to play music for you, which is nice and everything can mean that should totally be there.
But.
Again, I go back to, you know, girl, general-purpose personal computers.
We had this super-secret technology, which was to define default apps for different protocols, for different URL schemes, for different functions in the system.
Back in classic macOS, it's not rocket science.
I mean, it changes with the times.
Like, you know, URL schemes is not probably the way you want to do it.
But, like...
ios clearly has a notion of a thing that it uses to send mail a thing that it uses to play music right a thing that uses to open web pages right that's already baked into the os just make it generically configurable instead of this weird piecemeal like doling out of just the minimum we think we can do to avoid antitrust you know condemnation from the us government which honestly seeing this happen at this point is like just everything they do from now on right or wrong
makes us think, oh, the only reason you're doing this is to try not to get, you know, sued into oblivion because of antitrust stuff, right?
And really, I just wish they would allow the incredibly powerful computers in our pockets to sort of blossom and just be like a Mac from the 90s and just let me configure my default newsreader, my default... Like, just let me do it in a straightforward way.
And I think the way they did it for mail everything is great.
Like, there are things that you have to...
qualifications things you have to fulfill to be to be eligible to be the default email application and as as i said ages ago and as people have proven they'll do it people will do it the gmail is it configured itself to be the default app like chrome to be the default browser like never mind that chrome isn't really chrome on ios which is a whole other thing but i just wish they would they wouldn't wouldn't stop dribbling out these little crumbs piecemeal and just go whole hog and say we have a generic system for
defining the default application for all common functions on the phone and a system for you to be able to qualify to be one of those applications and let the user control which one of those applications they want to use.
And then Apple's apps have to compete on their merits and not just get by by being the default one, which granted is a huge advantage just because it's pre-installed.
If that's not enough advantage for Apple and they still also have to say, oh, and by the way, it's super inconvenient to use anything else, that's terrible.
Just all we're asking for is a little bit more competition and a little bit more flexibility for people who want to configure their phones the way they want.
Well, I think in all fairness, almost every year at WWDC, we talk about some new API that they have offered or some new capability they've changed so that something that was previously locked down to only Apple's stuff or only them being able to do certain things is then now opened to third parties.
And they have been knocking down a lot of these walls over time.
They were just starting from a place where there were a million walls, and they're knocking them down pretty slowly.
Yeah.
yeah and sometimes they just knock down a couple bricks in one of the walls and then say they think that the job is done and it's like well i can see through the wall and i can reach one arm through it but it's not really the same as they're not being a wall or they give you a ladder to go over the wall but it doesn't actually work and they don't have to use that ladder they don't even realize how badly it works and you try to use it and you keep falling off and the rungs keep breaking and everything yeah so this is a complicated analogy i
I was thinking like a custom, custom keyboard support, right?
Which they did.
And we were all shocked, but it's like, but if they don't like maintain that and test all their stuff, it's like, oh, you know, it's there and it's available for you, but a whole bunch of bugs happen with it.
And when you report the bugs, it's like, well, just use the regular keyboard and that bug one happens.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, and I mean, there's, I mean, God, there's nowhere that I want to break down the walls more than the watch.
Oh my God, the watch is, but that's, that's a story for another day.
Why?
Okay.
He couldn't help himself.
He couldn't help himself.
all right i as i said i've been wearing the apple watch full time for the last few months for reasons and every night adam's in bed we sit down and we watch a little bit of tv and we have some tea and i i pour the tea water into the teacups i pick up my watch to my face and i say set a five minute timer most of the time it sets the five minute timer
Fine, okay, that's a story for another day.
But most of the time it works.
It pops up a thing, and it says, timer counting down, and there's a button on there that says open timer.
Now, no matter what I do from this point, here's what I want.
I want my watch that is a computer that is smart to show a timer on the face when one is running.
And then for that timer when it's no longer running to not be shown on the face.
The iPhone does this.
The iPhone has done this for over a decade, actually, on the lock screen.
It's smart.
It has this concept that, you know, this area on the lock screen that's by the clock and that little area can be used to display high importance things in a conservative way, you know, sometimes.
But like that's a valuable thing that is useful to display that information.
On the watch, a timekeeping device, these timing functions of things like timers do not display on the watch face by any reasonable way.
The only way you can make it display on the watch face is either to leave the timer app on the watch open as the active app, which I'll get to in a second, or...
to have it as a complication on your watch face which means all the entire rest of the day that you're not running a timer you have this complication spot wasted and sometimes it even depending on the type it might even say things like set or you know whatever so it's not doing a great job at integrating this temporary high importance thing into the watch face
Secondly, we have an always-on screen for the last year and a half.
This is a wonderful feature.
This has changed the Apple Watch so much.
One of the biggest reasons I am now able to tolerate wearing it full-time is that it has that always-on screen.
But when the only-on-screen launched...
It had this weird behavior that, okay, when you're on a watch face, when that's what's showing, and the screen kind of goes to its half sleep mode, where the screen is still on, but it goes to a less information display mode and doesn't activate as much and everything.
When it's in its sleep mode,
you see just a dimmed kind of version of the watch face.
It's simplified certain things, you know, don't animate, but you're still seeing the watch face and any data that's on the watch face, like, you know, your complications, the date, whatever, that's all still displayed.
If, however, you had an app open at the time that the screen went to sleep, it simply displays a blurred version of that app behind a digital clock face.
Yet another way I was able to tolerate the Apple Watch full-time now is that I just use the solar face, which is digital.
So the time always looks the same no matter what state my watch is in.
I don't have to keep bouncing between their bad analog displays and their digital displays.
It's just always digital.
Fine.
So anyway...
When you have a timer running, you either have to go back to your home screen watch face, which probably doesn't have a timer complication on it, or you can leave the timer app open, in which case, when the screen goes to sleep and blurs...
It just shows a blurry version of whatever time amount was left when the screen went to sleep.
And it leaves that there indefinitely until you wake it up and then you see the actual time remaining pop in after a second.
The screen is always on.
When this was a brand new feature a year and a half ago, maybe they didn't have time to really integrate all of the features of the watch into this new hardware capability of the always-on screen.
That was a year and a half ago, though.
Now, today, I would expect a timer to be able to display live countdown time once per second, like the workout screen can do once per second updates full-time.
Why can't the timer do that?
Why does it instead show this blurry card of the old time under it?
Am I the only person who uses timers on a watch?
Like, I can't possibly be, right?
Does anybody use this stuff?
So I do...
And I do it a lot.
And I almost always start a timer using the call word.
Hey, dingus, start a timer for five minutes.
But honest to goodness, the amount of times that I'm looking to see the state of the timer is near as makes no difference to zero.
I do not care how much time is left.
I just care that it has or has not happened.
And because of that...
none of what you're saying bothers me.
I don't disagree with anything you've said.
I think you're correct.
I think it should work differently, and I think it should work as you describe.
But for me, I'm never like, oh, it's 30 seconds left, or oh, how much time is left?
And if so, it's so unusual that I'll just tap the watch and go to the timer app or whatever the case may be, which is frustrating, but it's so rare that I do it that it doesn't really bother me that much.
The problem is the way that all the other apps besides Workout, the way that they just blur under whatever the digital time is, it's as though the same company didn't make the watch and the timer app.
It feels as though this is a bunch of third-party apps working on this platform that has no idea about them and doesn't treat any of them as first-class citizens on the platform except the Workout app.
And there's a lot of value.
When I'm doing a workout, I love what the workout app has because then I literally can see everything all the time.
That's fantastic.
Why can't that be applied to a few other things that would be really useful on a watch?
And you know what?
If you can't support third-party apps that way yet because you're not ready to give them that kind of power budget...
Okay.
I understand.
But your own apps, like the built-in timer and stopwatch, like why can't they do that?
That's, it just, it seems like everything with the Apple watch, it just seems like they have like two interns working on it.
Like where, where is the movement happening here?
Why is this smart computer watch so dumb?
Why does it not take advantage more of the fact that it is a computer and it has a dynamic screen?
It can show whatever it wants to all the time now.
Why are the apps all still so dumb?
I feel like this is one area where I can map on to the departure of Johnny Ive and say hopefully all the people who are super precious about watches have mostly exited the building or aren't in control.
And we can finally get things like watch faces that don't feel as much need to...
imitate what a physical watch face could do and instead just fully embrace being computers and then we can get third-party watch faces and all that good stuff so i'm hopeful that will come down the road because it always seemed to me that especially the beginning of the apple watch that apple was very tied to the idea of it as a
as something is just as not only just as valid as a mechanical watch but also gaining that validity by imitating the limitations of that form and that is there is and probably has always been the wrong choice for the watch and we continue to lobby for it to be more like the little computer that it actually is someday
All right.
Finally, for today, before we get to Ask ATP, maybe, we have a story that broke in the last few days.
So Dan Riccio, we were wondering, to some degree, where he's ending up.
And according to Bloomberg...
His new project is, as we kind of thought may be, overseeing Apple's VR and AR headsets.
And Apple has shifted its team to develop in-house screens and its team to develop camera technology to its chip chief.
So reading from this Bloomberg article, Dan Riccio is focusing on the company's upcoming virtual and augmented reality devices after he shed his role as the head of hardware engineering, according to people with knowledge of the move.
Apple has also told staff it is moving the group working on in-house displays and camera technology to Johnny Surugi, the executive in charge of processors and cellular modems.
The move suggests the company is getting closer to shipping its first devices with fully custom displays, replacing those from outside suppliers.
Apple is a facility near its Silicon Valley headquarters that's developing micro LED screens.
so a reminder micro led screens are the super cool ones where every little tiny element in the pixels the little red dot the little green dot and the little blue dot each one of those little tiny led that puts out its own light no backlight uh and no organic these are you know not organic leds so it's not an oled screen it's micro led at least i think they're not organic anyway micro led is cool and i'll be excited to see that um
confirmation that or confirmation a a rumor in support of the idea that dan regios is doing the vr headset um makes perfect sense and then moving the display and camera stuff under uh johnny seruji the the chip guy i mean being the big chip guy at apple right now it's
pretty good place to be reminds me of that of that uh funny intel ad where like the guy who invented usb is like the big star of intel right never mind they should be throwing food at him for it isn't for approving the usba connector but anyway that if you're the chip guy at apple right now you feel pretty good you're feeling pretty good about your job performance i have to say not that you shouldn't have been before because the iphone chips are phenomenal right but just chips at apple
doing good and so taking something like displays and camera and putting it under the chip guy that's got to be good not that apple's been a slouch in the in the displays and camera area but mostly like they buy sensors from sony and they buy displays from lg right and the whole apple's in-house uh display stuff we we heard the rumors of micro led i think i think in fact that's the first time i even heard micro led years ago was that apple was investigating it and then they bailed on it because it wasn't ready enough but they continue to dig away at that
And I have to think, at least for some of these rumors, the screen, the first sort of Apple-made display that we might have some hope of seeing would be in the glasses, right?
But there have been rumors for years about, oh, we're going to get laptops with mini LED screens or like different kinds of display technology on laptops, maybe an OLED laptop, all sorts of things.
But I always just assume Apple would buy those from third-party vendors.
But from the rumors, it seems like whatever they're putting in these AR, VR thingies,
may actually be some displays that you can't just buy off the shelf from somewhere.
And possibly Apple's in-house stuff is going that direction.
And we've talked in the past for a long time about Apple doing its own cell modems.
They're getting there.
It takes a long time.
They'll eventually do it.
But I am actually excited about the prospect of Apple either doing its own cameras, as in their own sensors, and or doing their own displays.
Because both of those areas...
are places you know for the with the tim cook doctrine or whatever to own and control all the primary technologies there's a limit to that like apple you know doesn't want to own the maybe the the mines where the aluminum come from right but they do want to like you know making your own displays like they buy parts from lots of people and they love being able to buy parts from lots of people because then you can set one vendor against the other and be super demanding and get good prices and so on but sometimes you do want to try to do it yourself like the chips
Great move, Apple doing that yourself.
That turned out to be a super great idea.
So good, they did it across their whole line, right?
I think making your own displays is maybe borderline because displays is a tough gig and they're kind of a commodity.
And I think Apple has done pretty well
essentially buying off the shelf displays or specifying displays like lg can you please make us a 5k iMac display and you'll be able to put it in your own credit monitor too right but i am excited about apple trying to make its own displays even if they're like special purpose displays for the goggles or whatever just because
Apple's got a lot of money, and why not try your hand at that?
Because it is definitely a value-add, especially for things like VR glasses where the display and the specifics of the display are, you know, A, it's a different kind of display in terms of what features make it good and bad, like when it's an inch from your eyeballs and you're only looking at a portion of it, and B, no one has really cracked that nut.
Like, the current set of VR goggles, the displays are, you know, good, but most people look at them and say...
I could see how this display could be better, right?
And so I would love for Apple to innovate in that area.
Cameras, I'm less optimistic that Apple's going to come out with something that is amazing sensor-wise because it seems like Apple's strengths with the cameras are not maybe the sensor or even the lenses.
They're more about the processing.
But who knows?
Like vertical integration.
I think it can work out well in both of those areas.
So I think this is all good news for things going on inside Apple.
And I will be super excited if anything micro LED comes out of Apple anytime soon.
Well, I got dibs on your $7,000 monitor when you resell it.
They're not going to come out with a 32-inch micro-LED screen, I don't think.
Or if they did, it would cost a lot more than this one.
John, on an infinite time scale, anything is possible.
Eventually.
Well, that's the problem with display technology.
It's like, God, the alphabet soup of display technology is really getting confusing up to the point now where I think someone, one of the, I wish I could remember these details, but I'm just going off the top of my head.
One of the TV manufacturers tried to like trademark one of the alphabet soup acronyms
But someone, another TVA manufacturer already did the actual thing that's that.
I think it was QNED.
It's very confusing.
But like these things mean something like they make up an acronym for a thing.
And one company that's not doing that.
decided they're going to use the same acronym and trademark it but your screen isn't a QNED I forget if it was QNED but your screen isn't a QNED so why would you try to trademark QNED for your non-QNED screen and it's just it's so I don't know how consumers try to make heads or tails but I have to remind myself three times every time I look at this you know
all the different quantum dot come combined with inorganic or organic leds just it's a mess um but all that is to say that uh it's not clear what the next great display technology will be we may skip over some of these ones that we keep trying to get to work and they don't seem to ship you know right now you can get a
micro led display for 100 grand that fills the wall of your house but we may just skip over micro led if it turns out one of the other more promising technologies that has even better attributes ends up becoming manufacturable at a reasonable price first
All right, let's try to power through some Ask ATP.
Jordan Cosentino writes, what are your thoughts on corporate device management profiles on personal use devices?
I know that Casey and Marco no longer have jobby jobs, but I was curious how you felt about this policy when you did or how John feels.
My company requires that we have MS Teams, Outlook, etc.
installed on our phones, which must then be managed by a corporate profile.
They will grant a small monthly subsidy for your cellular plan, but it's not generous.
I talked to IT, and while they claim it's primarily to give the company remote erase functionality, they said they would only monitor web traffic related to, quote, client information, quote, which really feels like a gross situation.
I could, of course, buy a cheap side phone just for this, but the subsidy would not cover a full separate plan, so it would end up costing me monthly, and then I would have to carry another device around with me.
I don't like either option, but companies forcing management device policies through bring your own device really feels aggressive to me.
Yeah, I agree.
When I most recently had a jobby job, I knew the IT guy really, really well.
And I really browbeat him about this.
I was like, what is this about?
What am I really signing up for here?
And what he parroted to me anyway, and what I believe to be true, was that no, really, it was just about remote destruction if necessary.
Like if I lose my device, they will fire off a remote wipe just to make sure that nothing private or no corporate secrets get out.
And because I knew the IT guy and because I trusted him, I went with it and it was fine for me.
If I was in Jordan's situation where it's like, no, no, no, they're going to be sniffing your web traffic and it seems like they're willing to reach a little further.
Honestly, what I would probably do is try to use some sort of web-based email client.
if possible, or just not check my email on my phone.
Like if this is the way you want to be, then that's fine, but I'm just not going to have my email on my phone.
And I understand that that's something that can be a very hard thing to sell.
But hey, listen, if you want me to have a device so I can check my email anytime, give me a device.
And if you want to take over my device, it should be my option to say thanks, but no thanks.
I don't know, John, what are you doing about this?
Yeah, I feel like this is one of those things that you should think about and potentially talk about when deciding which job you're going to take.
Like if the company requires you to have a phone but also won't give you a phone but then requires that they install this profile.
Maybe if you talk to the IT person like Casey did and you believe them, you can say, oh, no, we're not doing anything bad.
But once they get that profile in there, that enterprise profile thing, they can man in the middle all of your traffic.
They can do everything they could possibly imagine, right?
So you should know that.
If this type of thing, if you have any concern about this whatsoever, you should know and ask about
Are you going to do this to me?
Because I think that's the worst scenario is like this bring your own device.
Hey, you get to use your own phone.
Isn't that great?
Yeah, it's great for the company.
You don't have to buy me a phone then.
Oh, but by the way, we have to install this profile on it because you have to be accessible by smartphone because of these job requirements, right?
Talk about that.
Find out about it before you accept the job offer.
And it's not like you're going to change corporate policy by demanding it because they'll just be like, all right, see ya.
That's the way this company works.
But you should know that that's what you're signing up for and decide not to sign up for it if it bothers you.
I've been lucky enough at the jobs that I've worked where,
they will they insist on having all their crap on your device if it's a device that they give you and pay for right um but if you if they don't give you a device and pay for it then they don't insist that they put crap on your phone so my personal policy is it wouldn't probably be a deal breaker because i'm you know anyone who has had a jobby job for any amount of time
knows that there's a surprising amount of crap that you'll tolerate.
I just talked about all the, you know, antivirus crap that's all over my Mac, right?
I'll tolerate a lot.
You know, I've had a corporate job for 20 plus years, right?
You just, you learn to tolerate it.
But I really, really prefer to not have any stuff on my phone.
I could do more from my phone if I allowed them to install the enterprise profile, but I won't.
And so I just simply can't check my work email from my phone.
And it's fine.
Like, you know, I have a work laptop that I can check it from.
I could tether it to my phone for internet access if I really needed to.
Right.
But my phone, my preference is to, to essentially have a personal phone that has absolutely nothing related to work on it.
The only thing work related I have in here is like, you know, some two factor apps that I can run on my phone.
They just download from the app store and they work fine.
Um,
I think if the two-factor apps didn't work because I actually do need those apps for my work, I don't know what I would do.
Would I buy a second phone?
Most people don't have the luxury to be able to reject the job because they don't like some nuance of corporate IT policy or the luxury to just have two phones, their day phone and their night phone or whatever.
But I would just suggest thinking about this when you go in and if given the choice at all, keep all work stuff away from your phone.
If you can, like if they'll buy you a phone and pay for it, just make that your work phone and then just have it be separate from your personal phone.
And I know that seems like it's cumbersome, but it's actually not that bad.
And you'll have a lot more peace of mind and a lot less terrible corporate malware on the device that you use.
Your phone is one of your computers.
In many people's cases, it's their only computer or their primary computer.
Listeners to this show, it's probably not your only, but I bet it's an important computer of yours.
And so reframe the same question as if we're about your computer.
Would you tolerate your employer forcing you to have certain software installed on your home computer?
probably not right and many people the only computer they have is their work computer and you know they make that work somehow um but for like the more overbearing your workplace is going to be about it uh you know obviously people listening to the show care a lot about their computers probably and so you would probably not want your workplace to control your home computer that much if they were going to have this level of control over it um so your phone should be the same way your phone is another one of your computers and
You should treat it with the same kind of separation and reverence and care that you would treat your home computer.
And so I would never in a million – I mean granted, nobody cares what I think about this.
But like I would never in a million years let my employer install a controlling profile on my home computer.
And in the same way, I wouldn't let them install it on my only phone.
And as John said, if they are buying me a phone for work purposes, then I think if they're paying for it, they have the right to control it.
As long as they disclose to you that they're doing that, I think then that's fine.
But then in that case, I would also choose to carry my own phone.
I think we all agree.
Doc Davis writes, I actually really, really like this question a lot.
What is your favorite or most obscure media file that you are proud to have and or enjoy the most?
I've mentioned this a few times in the past.
The first, I'm going to mention three really quickly.
The first is The Concert for Charlottesville.
So in 2016, after the god-awful things happened in Charlottesville, Dave Matthews, amongst others, put together a concert with many, many, many different artists.
And it was something like six hours.
And it happened in UVA's football stadium.
And it was free for those who attended, if I'm not mistaken.
And it was simulcast online.
And using my beloved YouTube DL, I recorded it.
And to my knowledge, last I looked, my recording is the only one that I'm aware of.
Maybe not the only one in actuality.
That is the entire concert start to finish.
And I have hemmed and hawed quite a bit about, you know, should I upload this somewhere?
And I'm currently sitting on the conclusion of no, because I don't want to get yelled at for DMCA stuff and stuff like that.
But this concert is a phenomenal concert.
And most of my favorite parts of the concert have nothing to do with Dave Matthews at all.
It is a phenomenal, phenomenal concert that I don't think exists anywhere else.
And that's really too bad.
It's really quite unfortunate that it doesn't exist anywhere else because this is something that I think should be viewable and potentially for free or for a donation to a worthwhile charity or something.
Very quickly, when I was in college, I was really into Vertical Horizon, who, if you've heard of them at all, you know their song, Everything You Want.
They actually started not as a rock band, but as a kind of folksy acoustic duo.
And some of their early stuff in particular is really phenomenal.
And when I was in college in the early aughts, and this was around the time that Napster was coming out, but oftentimes if you wanted a big collection of media, particularly by the same artist, you would scour the Internet for credentials to an FTP server that was public.
And in certain cases, you know, people would put up FTP servers where you could just go and leech or basically download all the stuff on that server.
And I did that with some god awful terrible sound quality, but extremely rare Vertical Horizon concerts.
And so I have what is probably hundreds of megs of MP3s, which for the time was an obscene amount of content.
of a very, very early on Vertical Horizon concerts, which I'm sure most of you are thinking, oh my God, you would, but you know what?
I like it, so piss off.
And then finally, my granddad, my dad's dad, who passed a couple years back, when he was younger, he would occasionally have New York area jazz musicians come into his house or later apartment and play sets.
Oh my God.
And and so dad, who is probably about my age, maybe a little, maybe a little younger than me at the time, he would record these concerts on reel to reel because this was like late 70s, early 80s.
And just recently, my dad has has rediscovered.
I think he has one of the reel to reel tapes, but he had also at some point in the past had them put on cassette and has even has a video of one of the sets.
And so he's in the process right now of digitizing some of these old jazz sets with like, I think Milton was there.
I think Zoot Sims.
Apparently Zoot Sims was like my best friend when I was two or something like that.
So anyways, maybe I got these names wrong.
But the point being, these are concerts that maybe 10 or 15 or 20 people saw ever and from artists that are mostly dead at this point.
And so dad is trying to digitize them.
And granted, the audio quality is meh at best, but it's better than nothing.
And so dad's digitizing them and I have already started pitching to him.
Hey, you really got to put these on like archive.org or something like that when they're all said and done.
Um, it, I don't know if that's, what's going to happen.
Cause it's his, as far as I'm concerned, he might not be interested in it, but I will say, uh, I have channeled my inner Marco Arment and have convinced him to record off of the cassettes to flack and
and then compress those to MP3 or do whatever he wants with them.
So that is my inner Marco Arment slash my old school Dave Matthews coming out of me.
But all of this stuff, like, all of this stuff I think is worth sharing, and it bums me out that...
there's no obviously safe way to share all of these things because especially with the concert for charlottesville these are all modern artists who are still touring and record well you know all things not being equal uh they're touring and recording and whatnot and i'm sure that i would get you know hit with dmca takedown requests or something like that and it sucks because i should i would love to share this but i can't and it bums me out
So I've totally railroaded this question.
I apologize.
Marco, what do you have other than 94 terabytes of fish?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of fish.
And, you know, I definitely consider my fish collection to be like my most important, you know, music that I have.
It's certainly what I listen to the most, but it's not really obscure.
I mean, even though allegedly no one likes them, they're selling out stadiums somehow.
So anyways, and all of these, this is all like, you know,
concerts that i downloaded from them like legally officially that are you almost all still available if not all um so it's not like super rare um you know i have the collection of like you know the the various you know older usually deceased relatives um you know i have videos of grandparents here and there um even my dad you know i my dad died in 1984 and
I was two.
Uh, I barely remember him.
And when you die in 1984, there's not a lot of like media captured from you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I, I mean, all I have of him is like a few pictures and I think there was like a two, like a two or three second.
He's in the background of like one video that like this, this whole side of the family had like one video taken at like some big party once.
And that was it.
I have no idea anything about, like, what he was like.
Like, if you see somebody, like, in a video, you could see, like, the kind of person they are.
You could see a little bit of their personality.
I don't really have that with him.
What I do have, though, is one tape...
of one concert that he, on the side, he was a musician and he, he played guitar and sang with people and, and, you know, nothing like that anybody would have heard of, you know, nothing, nothing big.
He just kind of played like some local stuff, like mostly cover songs and stuff.
But I have one cassette tape of him,
singing oh that's awesome he isn't even on every song it's like him and like two other guys but he's on like four songs and i a while back i finally got to digitize that in in a pretty reasonable way and it's a terrible i mean it's just like this was not recorded on professional gear this was recorded on like a cassette recorder that was stuck like it
probably at the foot of the stage of the bar they were singing in.
This was not a professional deal at all, and the tape was then kept in a dusty shelf for the next 20 years until I could finally get it and digitize it.
But I have a capture of that.
Again, not a good capture, but I have that.
It's all warped and warbly and everything, but I have something.
Considering how little I have of him, that's significant.
That's so cool.
And then besides the family and sentimental stuff and the massive amount of fish, as we've just mentioned, the other category of precious media files I have are things that are not available at all anymore.
And a lot of this is just due to crappy DRM or rights changes over time.
So one example is I have this fun crash test dummies live performance that...
I think I mean, geez, I must have bought it in 2006 from the iTunes Music Store.
And every time the iTunes Music Store would advance in some way, it would like, you know, drop DRM or it would, you know, add things like iTunes Match.
This album was never eligible for it.
And so it's still DRM'd, locked down.
It's no longer even in the iTunes store to even go look for it to rebuy it or anything like that.
You can't stream it.
You can't iTunes match it.
And I have, I think, three or four albums that have this kind of status in my collection of just like...
through whatever rights changes over time have happened no one seems to have the rights to sell or give this to me anymore and so my one copy that is drm locked to like itunes's old drm system is all i have of it uh so yeah there are a few things like that that are uh that are just kind of you know these weird little relics of drm past
You know, it's funny you bring that up.
I don't think I told this story on the show.
Maybe I didn't.
I apologize.
But this past Christmas, I had a real hankering for my Guilty Pleasure Christmas album, which was recommended to me actually from a friend that I made on Tumblr, of all places.
I don't know if you've ever heard of that website, Marco.
A little bit, yeah.
And anyway, it's Family Force 5's Christmas Pageant, which by any reasonable metric is a truly terrible Christmas album.
But I just have such an affinity for it and I love it just so darn much.
And I was looking everywhere for it because it fell off of Spotify a few years ago.
It fell off of the iTunes store, if I'm not mistaken.
I might have that wrong, but I think that's correct.
And I was looking everywhere for it.
I ended up reaching out to the friend that pointed me to this originally and asked him, like, hey, would you mind just, like, sending it to me?
Because I couldn't buy it anywhere.
Like, even physical media, I couldn't find any.
It was ridiculous.
And as it turns out, I had a copy of it in iTunes Match.
So of all the places I thought to look, my own frickin' music library I didn't look in, and it was there all along.
And I think I had bought it off iTunes when it was available then,
Um, and, and I just never, I never did anything with her.
I never thought to look there and, and I feel so stupid because of it.
But anyway, that's another great example of something that I can't, I mean, I could get back.
I'm sure.
And I mean, I kind of did by asking a friend, but I can't really get that back.
And that's another great example, like your crash test dummies album that, um, that, that I really love.
And it really bummed me out that I hadn't been able to hear it for the last couple of years since it fell off Spotify, John, what do you have?
All your stories of like digitizing like family tapes and stuff and making me feel guilty because I have a bunch of tapes that I'm supposed to be digitizing.
They're just sitting in a pile somewhere waiting for me to get around to it.
I will say, by the way, if they're videotapes, just send them to one of the dedicated services.
That's so much easier and better than what you can do yourself.
Yeah, and I've done a bunch of that stuff in the past and have used services for it.
The ones I'm talking about now are actually just audio tapes.
My mother did this thing where she would like, we had, you know, the cassette recorder, the long skinny one with the buttons on the front and the handle?
Of course.
You know what I'm talking about?
Yep.
Anyway, she had one of those and she would record, she would start recording and just talk to us kids when we were like, you know, could barely...
and then just record what it was that we said.
And so it's a bunch of stuff like that.
The only one I remember, because I'd heard a bunch of times, was when she was telling my sister and I that we were going to have a new baby brother.
She recorded that whole conversation.
Oh, that's so delightful.
Wow.
So that is one of the tapes.
I have no idea what's on all the other ones, but...
Anyway, I should digitize those, but that's not really what this question is about.
I think it's more about like the, you know, obscure media as in like things that are not recordings of your own family or like your family pictures, which of course I have a bazillion of and are very precious.
For obscure media, like...
thankfully most of the stuff that i would have answered this question about is no longer that obscure for like for years and years for example lots of like the extremely famous like the most you know well-regarded anime movies like the miyazaki movies were actually really hard to get anywhere except on a plastic disc and that was a shame luckily we don't live in those days anymore so back when i you know
I had all of them because I had all the plastic discs and I had ripped all the plastic discs.
It was kind of cool to have a digital collection of, you know, Studio Ghibli movies.
But guess what?
Now they're on streaming services, so you don't have to worry about it.
And it's much better for them to be on streaming services, right?
So I'm glad that those things are no longer obscure.
Ditto for all, like, the other anime series and stuff.
Like, they're so commercial that finally the people who own the rights to them said, you know what?
We should just, we can license these to Netflix or whatever and don't just make them available on plastic disc.
it's the same thing for like uh like when i first went to college i was super excited to be in the city of boston to be able to go to for the very first time a store that would sell you know youtube music that was not actually ever released like it's like fish but not officially released by youtube at all instead it's just recorded from the soundboard somehow and smuggled onto a cdr and you can buy it right um
So I have a bunch of YouTube bootlegs, which was super exciting for me to have and would blow people's mind.
But like I could pull out different concerts and different live versions of things and tracks that were never released.
But YouTube is a pretty popular band and that stuff is really easy to find now.
So it's not particularly obscure.
I think the only thing that still qualifies obscure is the things that aren't super popular.
Right.
So I have a lot of video game music in my collection.
and the video games the music is about or inspired by are not rare at all but video game music even in the big music stores even on the big streaming services you'll find 50 versions of a song but not the one version i have and i don't even know where it came from it was like an mp3 i downloaded the napster days from some obscure thing that just went out of print and no one ever bothered like again who knows what the rights are maybe they didn't even license it from nintendo when they did it or maybe it was like a college orchestra that did a version of a song and
that's why I still use iTunes Match because they can't match that stuff.
I upload it to the cloud, hopefully, and they don't destroy it.
We talked about keeping your installation going.
My iTunes library installation, for the most part, the official one, if iTunes mismatched something, hopefully they didn't overwrite the local files, and especially for these obscure ones where iTunes Match has no idea what it is.
those are just the original mp3 files from when i got them and as far as i'm aware that is the only copy of that song and i have no idea where i would get a replacement for it and like and a lot of them are like oh i can find you 20 versions of that song you can but not this version i don't even know where it's from because the id3 tags are screwed up because they probably got it from lime wire or something right so those are probably my most obscure most precious files um
And although, speaking of iTunes match, the other thing that is annoying me is the one where iTunes does think it can match it.
Remember the bad old days when they're like, oh yeah, I totally have that song.
It's real popular.
And it's like, no, you've got the radio version.
It's different.
That drives me nuts, especially when I find out about it later, playing the song.
I'm like, wait, that verse doesn't sound right.
What version of this file is this?
Even with things like
U2 album, like I have all the U2 albums like on CD, right?
Sometimes the digital files, I don't know, like it's either the single version or like they did a different version in digital.
I'm like, that's not right.
I remember that happened with like Mysterious Ways or something from Octung Baby.
I'm like, this file, this digital store sold me this copy of this file.
and it's not right like they changed the timing of this verse or whatever and just to make sure i wasn't crazy pull out the cd and put it in back when the mac had a cd player and a cd player app and i would play it i'm like yeah it's different and then i would re-rip it and put it in there and then fight with itunes match about it so yeah obscurity is uh some protection of that and itunes match i think is better behaved about that bad stuff now but
it does speaking of obscure media files i'm glad i have i actually am kind of glad that i have all those plastic discs and unlike all my cdrs i hope the actual cds that were stamped with little pits in them are still readable so worst case scenario i could spend a month re-ripping everything because i do actually have all this crap on plastic disc except for the obscure stuff that i downloaded from limewire so that needs to not be destroyed
And even all the obscure music piracy stuff from those early Napster, etc.
days, I have so many great things from those days that were never actually released.
And this is one of the problems with modern streaming music environments, that you can get everything that's ever been released, but only everything that's ever been released.
And that's not everything.
And I have so many awesome like, you know, like Weezer promos and stuff that were that were, you know, trickling around the early music piracy scene, like when I was in college.
That's how I met my wife is I like offered to give her a CDR full of all the Weezer stuff I had found.
It was amazing.
You know, that was such a there were so many great gems that were passed around that way.
And on modern streaming services, you know, maybe half of them might be there because the bands actually released them.
But much of it is not.
And so if you happen to have anything like that or, you know, I mean, heck, my whole world of Phish, like part of the reason why I don't use Spotify is that using Spotify as a live Phish listener is terrible.
because you have to either try to do like, I think they do have a feature where you can upload your own stuff, but it sucks.
And so no one really does.
Whereas like, you know, with Apple Music, it integrates my iTunes library in with the luxuries of a streaming service with like, you know, cloud sync and everything like that.
So that's one of the reasons why I'm an Apple Music person.
Even I recognize that actually for most music, it's worse than Spotify.
But like for my particular needs of having this massive collection of songs that are mostly not released through major labels, then that actually works a lot better for me.
I just remember the days, I know I've told the story a thousand times, but I remember the days sitting in my dorm at Virginia Tech and seeing I was downloading an MP3 from somebody else at about a megabyte a second and being like, oh, they're on campus.
Yep.
That's the good stuff right there.
And if I remember right, it's been so damn long, but if I remember right, then you could like drill into that particular user's library and so you could just go like basically leeching all the stuff you liked from them because it was so darn fast because they were somewhere nearby.
It was so delightful.
Yeah.
All right.
And then finally, Anonymous writes, is it rude to put another app's name in your own app search keywords?
Asking for a friend.
And I'm going to steal your thunder, Marco.
I read this Ask ATP shortly after I listened to Under the Raider 210, Thinking Like a Business, which I thought covered these sorts of things really well.
But would you like to kind of give your short, short version of this?
So putting other apps' names in your app's search keywords is officially against the rules in the App Store.
And it's kind of a gross thing to do.
That being said, lots of apps do it.
And most of them don't ever get busted for it.
Because you, as the external viewer or as the owner of those apps' names, you can't necessarily tell for sure...
what search keywords another app has listed you can search for those keywords and see what turns up and some sometimes you know you can kind of deduce based on certain operations like well this sure looks like it probably has that it has you know my app's name and its keywords or whatever but you mostly can't tell so it's mostly just left to you know that developer it's like between them and apple what's in those keywords and apple doesn't look very consistently and
So the result is many apps will put stuff like that in there.
They'll put all their competitors' names in their keywords.
So it's not great.
Many of the other ones, even if they can't get in the keywords, they...
i'm sorry i've been sitting on this for so long i i i know it's not nice to talk about your competitors but i just want just just keep it between us you you listeners and me here just don't tell anybody just if you're an overcast user i want you to get the same joy and amusement i have gotten out of reading the description for cast box i want you to go look up cast box in the app store and expand that full text description and
And look at the bottom two-thirds of what's in that description and how creatively they have managed to spam the names of all of their competitors and every popular search term somebody might be searching for in the App Store into their description in an incredibly, like, totally fraudulent way.
So this claims to have podcasts such as The Overcast by The Seattle Times, sports podcasts such as MLB Network, The Chicago Audible, The Overcast Podcast, Google Cloud Platform Podcasts, The Book from Stitcher, Ted and Audible, Luminary from Luminary.fm.
These are – oh, Waze and Waze Out Radio, Sirius XM Entertainment.
These are all allegedly popular podcasts that are available on this app.
It's incredible.
This is something.
This is so unabashedly bad.
It's actually somewhat beautiful in its badness.
Oh my gosh.
It makes me wonder why they didn't just say, this app is a lot like these other popular apps that you may have heard of and then just listed the apps.
Because that at least would be A, true, it's like those apps, it's like they're related, and B, just straightforward.
I'm sure there are lots of podcasts with the words Stitcher and Overcast in the titles, but you're not fooling anybody with that litany of podcasts, so just say it.
This app is a lot like these other apps you may have seen, colon, Overcast, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Audible.
Well, I suspect that AppReview would stomp on them for that.
But AppReview isn't going to stomp on them for this thinly veiled... But why would... Because you're not putting it in the keywords.
You're just describing your app.
And in the course of describing your app, you could say, this app is a lot like these other apps you may have also heard of.
which I don't know.
Who knows what the actual rules are?
And you bring this up, Mark.
You say it's actually against the App Store rules.
I had no idea it was against the App Store rules.
Now I'm super mad about... So I have two tiny apps on the Mac App Store that sell essentially zero copies.
And yet...
My one or two competitors slash clone apps, not only do they put my app's name in their keywords or description somewhere, they put my name.
What?
My last name.
If you start for Syracusa, you will find my apps because I'm the developer of them, and you'll also find my quote-unquote competitors apps.
And I feel like, all right, putting your other apps names in your keywords or description...
I thought it was within the rules, but if it's against the rules, they shouldn't do that because it's against the rules.
But secondarily, forgetting the rules, I feel like I'll use this word again.
I think the last time I used it was when we were talking about Samsung.
It is dishonorable.
Right.
Yeah.
It may not be against the rules.
It may be against the world.
It may be wise.
It may not be wise.
It may be smart.
It may not be smart.
But it sure as hell is dishonorable.
Yeah.
Right.
But at least it's the app.
When you put the author's name in your keywords, now some person who is searching, I want to go find John's apps and they type Syracuse into the search field.
You know, they're not looking for a generic app that does this function.
They're looking specifically for my apps.
And so I feel like you should not put that in the keywords.
Like if they're searching for my app because they want an app that does what my app does.
Sure.
By all means, do your dishonorable thing and get your app in the mix, because how else would they find your app?
Because it's not a common function.
But my last name being the keywords really burns me up.
and i like for a while i thought they weren't going to let me put my last name in my keywords but that's the handful of people thank you very much who found who found and bought my apps they probably found it by searching for my last name rather than searching for my poorly named actual apps so which i wish yeah you put the links in the show notes that's how people buy things switch glass and front and center but just search for syracuse on the mac app store there's only two apps buy them both they're great
Yeah, and I feel like this whole category of dishonorable but possibly advantageous app store optimization, ASO, which is a term that angers me just as much as the web.
What was the web version again?
SEO.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the same thing as SEO.
There's a few things that are just good ideas and a bunch of weird tricks that are kind of dishonorable and hacky and possibly against the rules.
So you should do the things that are the good ideas, but the ones that are in the vague area, you probably shouldn't do.
This is one area where I don't care if it gets me 5% more downloads or whatever.
I want to know that I can sleep at night and I want there to be no reason for anyone to ever look at anything I'm doing and say that's unfair or that's against the rules or they're getting away with something they shouldn't get away with.
I want no reason for Apple to ever reject my app for anything that's stupid little stuff like that.
I don't want to give anybody any ammo to use against me.
I want to know that I'm doing everything on the up and up and
And not having to hide anything, not hoping Apple doesn't notice something or someone else doesn't notice something.
Stay on the honorable side of things and don't do this stuff.
The reality is this problem, though, is never going to actually really be solved unless Apple decides to dramatically shift its enforcement abilities or the sophistication of its search engine.
And I don't see those things happening anytime soon.
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Thanks, everybody.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
I have a question.
Shoot.
No, it's not time for your question.
Do the one before that first.
I don't want to talk about that right now.
I'm very down on it.
Just do it.
It's not going to be long.
We just want, say it with me everybody, a pup date.
Oh, yeah.
Give us a pup date.
What's going on with the pup?
I don't want to do a pup date.
I'm not feeling good about the pup right now.
Oh, come on.
What's going on?
You and Faith are killing me with the puppy sadness.
What in the world is going on with both of you?
I mean, you have less than excuses.
You have two kids.
You've done this before.
Not with a freaking dog.
You've been in the shit, you know, literally.
Yeah, you're in it now.
I mean, Faith, I can understand.
If you've never had a kid before and you get a puppy, you may not know what you're in for.
But you should have known what you're in for.
And honestly, puppies... Anyway.
Oh, my God.
I love Faith's dog.
It's so cute.
It looks like Hopped when he was little.
Yeah.
The pup date is like everything's fine-ish.
Let me put it to you this way.
We have started the process of talking to a dog trainer that will train us how to train the dog.
So things were going reasonably okay.
And then there were some developments.
They were going reasonably okay in the sense of housebreaking because she had been doing really well with smacking some bells that we had put on the door that we used to take her out.
I don't recall if I'd said this on the show or not.
And she'd been doing pretty well with that.
And she would maybe have like one small accident every day, every other day, something like that, probably every day.
But for the most part, she would be asking to be let out, and she would do her thing, and that was that.
Over the last week or so, she seems to be less interested in bothering to go outside to pee.
Thankfully, we have not yet had a number two inside.
Uh, but she like was, she looked at me as she was in the hallway, nowhere near the door where we go out and I was standing next to her and she looked at me squatted down and was in basically with her, with her face, you could tell she was just thinking, just thinking to herself and now what?
What you got?
I wouldn't necessarily say that.
Stop personifying dogs.
I guarantee you that's not what the dog was thinking.
Dogs are not little people.
They're not taking revenge on you.
They're just like little babies.
Intellectually, I know that.
Chances are, usually when you're in this kind of adolescent phase of housebreaking, most accidents are not the result of willful disobedience.
They're usually the result of confusion.
I mean, it's not like you have a cat.
No, yeah, no.
Cats would do it willfully.
Yeah, yeah.
Cats will poop in your shoes because they're mad at you.
Yeah, they're the worst.
But, you know, chances are, like, she probably is simply just confused about where the right places and times are to go.
But she shouldn't be because she so clearly got it.
Or she's in distress.
And the Belle thing, I'm going to caution you that there's a lot of anti-Belle wisdom out there, and I mostly agree with it.
But...
Like it just, there's no, there's no super secret trick to training.
It's all about a consistency above and beyond the level that a human should be expected to be consistent.
Like that's what it is.
That is the work of house training.
Your dog is relentless, uh, dispassionate consistency, uh,
to a degree to even more of a degree than you had to do with your kids.
Cause your kids are smarter than the dog.
Right.
And so they have a little brain and you can eventually like communicate with them and reason that will never happen with a dog.
It will never learn to talk.
Right.
So you always have to operate at this level where it's like, but I don't want to take it out now.
And it just went out and does it really need to go out and you need to become like hyper attuned to the dog's needs and schedule, subsuming everything that you want to do in your life to an even greater degree than you did with your kids and
To super consistently do this thing and power through the years of the dog's life when it actually can't physically control this to the degree that you want to get to the other side of it, which honestly isn't that far.
It's like 18 months or 12 months or whatever.
Oh, God, don't tell me that.
Probably less.
You will get to the other side of it.
If you've been super consistent during that time, you will get to the other side and you're set for the rest of that dog's life.
Well, and so to that end, like there was definitely an accident that was my fault.
Like she had just taken a big nap.
They're all your fault.
Well, okay.
No, no, no.
That's fair.
That's fair.
That's fair.
But you know- They're at least all your problem.
They're also all your fault because it's a dog.
No, you're right.
I think they are all my fault.
But like one particularly egregious time when she had just taken like a big nap and she had woken up and I was in the middle of something, Aaron was in the middle of something.
And I thought to myself-
you should probably take her out.
And I didn't.
Every time I wake up from a nap.
Yep.
Wake up or eat.
Yep.
And so I didn't.
And then she rang the bell and then I went to walk over to her to take her out.
And in the time I was walking the 10 paces over to her, she squatted and peed everywhere.
And that was clearly my fault.
Again, like, yes, I know everything's my fault, but like particularly that time, because she clearly should have gone out immediately.
And I had waited a few minutes to try to test like,
oh let's see if she'll tell us which to her credit she did but she didn't do it with enough time to actually get get her out the door no don't test your dog and say let's see if she'll tell us it's not that it is not what you want to be doing it's just relentless consistency of serving the dog's needs rewarding for doing what you want which is they go outside they get a treat they come back you in just over and over again
It feels maddening.
It feels like you're living your life for your dog.
Like I said, in even more of a way than you did with your infant, which seems impossible if you have kids.
It's like, how could I ever pay more attention?
But it's more of like a mindless, you know, just serving the needs of the dog because the dog cannot serve its own needs.
And the reward of that relentless consistency is the dog is all set.
The reward for doing it with your kids is they become rebellious teenagers and hate you.
So that's great.
But they do eventually leave the house and get a job and stuff.
So it's pluses and minuses.
Yeah.
And remember, at the end of the day, dogs are tubes.
Stuff goes in one end.
It eventually comes out the other end.
There's only so much control that they have over that process, especially when they're this young.
Because they don't choose when they eat, right?
And they can't choose how well they can hold it in when they're very young pups.
So you just have to be taking them out way more than you think and rewarding when they do it and just consistency.
And you're going to mess up a few times.
It's not like if you mess up once you've ruined it, right?
That's what I want to say to people.
They're like, oh, it's just like, you know, if you have like one accident a day is too much.
Like you should work on that.
But like I remember I put in my Google Calendar, but I could go back and find it.
I would put P events in my Google calendar at a certain point because when I was, yeah, you know, house training Daisy, because I was at the point where I'm like, we've been doing this, you know, I was on sabbatical, right?
I've been dedicated, I was dedicating my whole life to this dog.
I feel like we should be getting on the other side of it.
And it would see, we'd go days and days and everything would be fine.
And then we'd have a P accident.
And I was, it was so disheartening.
And so I started putting events in my calendar just so I could see is the gap between P abstinence increasing.
And guess what?
Eventually there was just no more P accidents ever.
And that was like years ago, right?
So you will get on the other side of it, but it's disheartening.
But it's just consistency, learning what to do.
Don't do things like testing the dog and like, let's see if they'll tell me how to get out.
Or, you know, the dog needs to learn how to hold it.
These are not good strategies.
No, it's not.
I shouldn't have phrased it that way.
What I was trying to figure out is like, is she putting this together at all?
and because that's not that yeah that's not how the dogs work though it's not there's not going to be a light bulb moment where the dog just suddenly figures it out it's just going to be it's just routine it's just they're just little they're just little love machines they just they just do a thing and you're just gonna you're gonna program them through repetition i'm trying to think it's like computer stuff where you would like program it by repeatedly doing a thing and like wearing a groove in that's what you're doing with your dog
And so like that, like the accidents are disheartening.
And like Aaron said to me just before I came up to record, the thing that's frustrating is I felt like we were making progress and then we've either plateaued or regressed.
And that's extremely disheartening.
And I probably have unfair and unreasonable expectations, which is part of the reason why we are trying to engage a dog trainer, which by that I really mean a people trainer.
But nevertheless, it's very disheartening when I feel like we were making some pretty solid progress and then all of a sudden we've just hit a wall and that's too bad.
But the real issue that's really starting to frustrate me is that it's like when the kid starts crawling and suddenly the world is bigger and that's bad because there's more world to screw up.
um penny has very consistently learned that she's capable of jumping on the couches and we don't want her to for various reasons and yes i know we're going to lose that fight but um she knows full well she's not supposed to be up there like i'm absolutely convinced she knows she's not supposed to be up there but she does it anyway which in and of itself is okay but like aaron you think she knows she's not supposed to be up there but what she probably knows is hey if you want to play a fun game where the human chases you a good way to get that started is to jump on the couch
that's more likely what the dog knows than oh i'm not supposed to be on the couch because the concept of a place where you're not supposed to go is not communicated in the ways you think it is right to a dog also like you know there's there's the overriding factor factor like you know maybe she knows that she's not really supposed to be up there but then you sit down on the couch and she really wants to be with you
And I totally understand that, but it's like we clearly prevent her from getting up there when we're up there, and she loves to be up there when we are not there.
Cauches are comfortable.
Yeah, they really are.
And John, I think your point about getting attention is possibly fair, but we're certainly not showering good attention on her.
Not that we're cursing her out or anything, but it's clear to a fellow human it's not what we want.
Perhaps it's not clear to her.
Again, engaging a dog trainer by that.
I mean, people trainer.
The clarity of communication is so important because you might be thinking that you are communicating... If she jumps on the couch and you shoo her off, you might think she's learning you aren't allowed on this couch.
What she might actually be interpreting from that is...
they're mad at me for some reason.
Let me jump up here and visit them and see if I can... Like, I want to be with them.
Let me jump up there.
Oh, they're mad at me for some reason.
Or more likely, this is the best game ever.
I want to play this as much as I possibly can.
Right, exactly.
Because puppies love to play and, you know, so that's like how... It's distinguished from playing your mind.
Is it distinguished from playing her mind?
And on the dog trainer thing, like...
I never actually engaged a dog trainer, but we did a lot of research about it just to tell you.
It's kind of like most of your kids seem like they were better than my pale children.
But at a certain point, you start being like, is there something wrong with my child slash dog?
I need to engage a professional.
And we did so much research or I did so much research on dog trainers because we're in the exact same dark hole that you're in.
It's like it seems like it's never going to work and I'm out of doing wrong.
Yep.
And that's me.
And it's hard to find good dog trainers because especially with dogs, also with children, but especially with dogs, you will find lots of dog trainers that tell you that you essentially need to punish your dog and physically abuse them to maintain dominance and all this other crap.
And basically, it's actually hard to find dog trainers that don't have some aspect of that.
So if your dog trainer tells you at any point to start choking your dog with something, get a different dog.
training no that's that's fair or any of those weird like noise things like it's yeah there's there's a whole lot of bad advice out there yeah anything that punishes that punishes the dog it will not work out for you you should like i sent you the the youtube video kiko pup um the that lady does some great uh dog training stuff and there's a bunch of other people who do i forget what they call it but like positive only training or whatever i always show people kiko pup because her dogs essentially will make tea for you
Like, they are the best trained dogs you've ever seen in your entire life.
The things she has, she, like, does them in competitions and everything.
Like, you have, like, these dogs do things that boggle your mind.
And she did every ounce of that training without punishing any of those dogs once.
And she's got dogs of all shapes and sizes and all different breeds.
So anyone who thinks, like, well, if you really want to train your dog to behave...
You're going to have to, you know, choke it out sometimes.
Like, no, you actually don't.
And let me show you the best trained dogs, the best trained five dogs you've ever seen in your entire life doing things that will make your brain explode, like sitting quietly, you know, three feet from the side while another dog is trained and given treats and they don't move an inch the entire time and standing up on their hind legs and twirling in circles and going between people's legs.
And if that's all possible with everything from a chihuahua to a sheep dog,
Without any kind of, you know, punishing the dog whatsoever, there is no excuse whatsoever except for, you know, machismo and toxic masculinity and just general venting of frustration for you to engage in any kind of training that involves, you know, menacing your dog or physically dominating your dog or choking your dog or playing a loud sound that your dog hates or doing anything like that.
Just say no.