It Sucks, Doesn’t It?
Marco:
I am here on time in part thanks to a product that I never thought I would use before, a rapid tire deflator.
Marco:
Isn't that just called a knife?
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
I think a knife is the most rapid tire deflator, but unfortunately that makes it difficult to use the tire afterwards.
Marco:
True.
Marco:
I first got this when I first started driving on the beach because you're supposed to, you know, air down your tires down to like, you know, the 20 psi-ish range when you're driving on the sand here to keep things, not only to keep yourself from getting stuck, but to keep yourself from tearing up the beach too much unnecessarily and tearing up some of the routes.
John:
Oh, I just realized, now that I've been thinking about this, it sucks, doesn't it?
John:
No.
John:
Because that's the only way it could work, right?
John:
Go on, go on.
Marco:
So anyway, so I frequently have to change my tire pressure in both directions between like 20-ish and like, you know, 40-ish PSI.
Marco:
If I'm going on a long highway drive, I want to put it up to about 40 just for additional rigidity and safety and a little bit of efficiency.
Marco:
Although it's a giant box, like it's not going to be that efficient, but you know.
Casey:
How did you land on 40?
Marco:
well the car wants me to do 50 and i think that's dumb so i i get i get impatient and stop no way it wants 50 pounds is that what it says on the door jam thank you john um i think it says 45 or 48 on the door jam no way is this a case where casey has to google for the pdf of your car manual again yes either way the um
Casey:
What year is your car?
Casey:
It's a Land Rover Defender.
Marco:
What year?
Marco:
2021.
Casey:
I will solve this.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So, and it has, like, the one that happened to be on the dealer lot in the color I wanted has this optional accessory of an onboard inflator, deflator thing, which is really fun.
Marco:
It's in the trunk, and, you know, it comes with this big hose.
Marco:
You reach all four tires.
Marco:
So it's fun.
Marco:
It's just slow.
Marco:
And so I haven't found a rapid tire inflator yet besides, you know, I don't know, a bomb.
Marco:
But a rapid tire deflator is this thing that...
Marco:
Again, I'll put it in the show notes.
Marco:
I'll find the link and dig it up.
Marco:
But it's this weird little contraption that normally if you want to deflate it higher quickly, you can do a compressor that just kind of holds the valve in and lets air out.
Marco:
Or you can poke the valve stem with a coin or a key or something if you want to do it that way.
Marco:
But what this thing does is it screws onto the valve stem thing, and then there's an inner thing that you twist.
Marco:
Once it's screwed onto the valve, you twist this inner thing the opposite direction, and it unscrews the inner valve stem and lets it pop out inside of itself.
Marco:
And then you just pop a thing, and it just...
Marco:
like lets huge amounts of air out it can go from 40 psi to 20 psi in like 20 seconds it's massively fast i find this very alarming so like bb edit it doesn't suck yes it just basically disassembles your tire valve temporarily and i was able to deflate all four of my tires from 40 to 20 in less than five minutes like it was shockingly fast
Marco:
So anyway, I don't know who needs this product besides a very small handful of people.
Marco:
But if you are one of those handful of people, this is amazing.
Marco:
Check it out.
Casey:
Why is it so difficult for me to find the owner's manual for this car?
Casey:
Why is this like state secrets?
Casey:
I will say this is actually going to be the KCO's Marco Apology Tour episode, apparently.
Casey:
But according to a spot of Googling, I found a very unofficial looking site that said it was like 47 or 50 pounds, which is what you said, to your credit.
Casey:
And I said no freaking way.
Casey:
But I'm trying to find the actual owner's manual, and I can't.
Marco:
So one thing, it lets you kind of customize the different sections of the dashboard to a few different selections.
Marco:
And I want a constant display on the left side of the four tire pressures.
Marco:
There is no option for that.
Marco:
However, if it's below the recommended pressure, it puts it up there by default until you click a certain button.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And because mine are always below the record, this is why I know the recommendation is higher than 40.
Marco:
Mine are always below the recommendation.
Marco:
And so because of that, as long as I don't hit this one button, it's displaying the four tire pressures all the time, which is a nice little accidental feature, but I'm really enjoying it.
Casey:
Well, I owe you an apology.
Casey:
I am apparently very wrong.
Casey:
Oh, wait, okay.
Casey:
Oh, no, wait, I found it, but it's not a PDF.
Casey:
Just give me a frigging PDF.
Casey:
God, I hate everything.
Marco:
So before we get into topics, I want to start this episode also with a public service announcement.
Marco:
If you know people in your life with Apple Watches, in the most kind way possible, if you see them using an Apple Watch face that has complications...
Marco:
You will blow their mind if at some opportune time, if they're open to such suggestions, you tell them, hey, by the way, you know you can change what those are.
Marco:
So in my experience, I have a bunch of friends who are kind of nerdy.
Marco:
They're nerdy enough to get an Apple Watch, and they're nerdy enough to care about it being good, but not nerdy enough to be able to know some of that stuff, like you can customize the face and all the complications.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I've shown a couple of people this in the last couple of weeks.
Marco:
And these are people who've worn an Apple Watch, like, for years.
Marco:
And every time, like, you know, I'll see that they're using, like, the infograph modular face.
Marco:
I mean, it's full of complications.
Marco:
And the default set is, like, it's okay.
Marco:
You know, you got a weather, okay.
Marco:
Then you got, like, the compass, like, eh.
Marco:
it's like how you, you know, there's a couple things on there that I think most people wouldn't use.
Marco:
And so, and sometimes they'll see mine and they're like, oh, what face is that?
Marco:
Because mine's of course all customized.
Marco:
And when I tell, when I show them like, hey, you can hold down here, swipe over, and then you can change every single one of those to all these different things.
Marco:
everyone's like oh my god like it changes their it blows their mind they're so amazed no one knows that you can customize watch faces especially complications so just psa if someone you know uses a face with complications and you see that they're all the defaults because they usually are again some opportune time don't be like the annoying nerd like you know like you know at some nice time like hey by the way you know you can change that and here's how and show them how
Marco:
You can also show them that they can have multiple faces they can swipe between really easily.
Marco:
No one knows that either.
Marco:
And both of those things I have had very strong positive reactions to when I have shown people.
John:
As a non-Apple watch wearer who does know that you can change complications...
John:
Every time I try to change complications on someone else's Apple Watch for them, I have to, like, re-figure out how to do it.
John:
It is not an obvious UI, so I don't really blame people for not knowing.
John:
I mean, I kind of blame them for not knowing it's possible, but even when you know it's possible, it's not obvious how to do it if you haven't done it recently.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Like so many things about, you know, touchscreen discoverability.
Marco:
Like it's so much worse on the watch because like it's such a small screen.
John:
It is way worse on the watch because there's just nothing.
John:
There's nothing there for you.
John:
And I think the sort of the credit to the original Apple design, having two things that you can press the button and the crown both press in does add to the number of possibilities of things that I have to blindly try before I figure out how to work things.
John:
And then, of course, oh, I forgot you can turn the crown too.
John:
And it's like it just I go through the same little dance every time I do it.
John:
It's ridiculous.
Casey:
uh do you know marco if you have 18 19 20 or 22 inch rims uh 19 then 47 pounds up front 50 and back i am wrong well well done i have never seen tire pressures that high goodness it's because they're big tires right it's big i mean i guess yeah they're pretty big
Casey:
yeah i did eventually find it because google not because of land rover site which as i've heard is trash yes uh but hey you know what is not trash what is not trash is atp merch which is available right now baby at atp.fm slash store so you know how every time i say oh you really got to order quick because you never know something's going to sell out huh you never know well guess what the
Casey:
Guess what?
Casey:
It's happened.
Casey:
Chicken hats, boom, gone.
Casey:
Second run of chicken hats, which we did under duress, boom, gone.
Casey:
Pine glasses, gone.
Casey:
Mugs, gone.
Casey:
You snooze, you lose.
Casey:
No sympathy from me.
Casey:
This is what you get.
Casey:
You had sympathy from the other two, not from me.
Casey:
I warned you.
Casey:
I warned you.
Casey:
We did the visualization exercise, which I'm pretty sure I stole from Mike Hurley.
Casey:
We did the exercise together.
Casey:
You still didn't order, and this is on you.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
For those that haven't ordered and would still like lovely, excellent, delightful merch, we still have M2 shirts in colored and monochrome versions.
Casey:
We have the classic ATP logo shirt.
Casey:
We have the utterly delightful ATP hoodie, all available.
Casey:
So if you're interested, and you should be, go to atp.fm slash store, and you can buy any of these three, four items, the
Casey:
Two different varieties of shirt.
Casey:
Well, three if you include the ATP one and the hoodie.
Casey:
All available.
Casey:
And remember, members, if you are a member and you can become a member at ATP.fm slash join, then you get 15% off.
Casey:
You can get your bespoke discount code on your member page.
Casey:
It's all linked from ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Go get yourself some treats.
Casey:
Treat yourself.
Casey:
You deserve a treat.
Casey:
You deserve several treats.
Casey:
Treat yourself.
Casey:
Treat your friends.
Casey:
Treat your husband.
Casey:
Treat your wife.
Casey:
Treat everybody.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
John:
Couple more items on the store.
John:
Reminder to the, about the monochrome M2 shirt, it just shows like a blue shirt with white, but it comes in a whole bunch of different colors.
John:
So if, you know, the regular M2 one, the really expensive one with the color stripes just comes in black.
John:
But this other one comes in like
John:
Red, purple, green, pink, teal.
John:
So check out the different colors.
John:
I think a lot of them look really good.
John:
Second thing, for one of the sold out items, chicken hat, pint glass, or mug, all three of which I specifically warned you about last week as the ones that would sell at first.
John:
And they did in the order that I said.
Marco:
Wait, in all fairness, before we rag on people too hard on this, which Casey already did, you do have some sympathy for me because the first batch of the chicken hats, it was like halfway gone before we even published the episode, just from bootleg listeners.
Marco:
Yeah, that is true.
Marco:
That is true.
John:
We guessed wrong on the demand for the chicken hat.
John:
That's on us.
John:
But we did do a second order, and we did a second order for more than twice the amount of the first order, and that sold out too.
Casey:
As much as I'm snarking earlier, that is 100% accurate, and that is 100% on us, that we clearly underestimate, which is lovely, and actually a heck of a compliment from our wonderful listeners.
Casey:
It was a complete miss on our part.
Casey:
We thought nobody would be interested in a hat that we presented as something that John bought 20 years ago and really likes.
Casey:
And is weird-shaped.
Casey:
And is weird-shaped.
Casey:
Yeah, but it turns out the Paul of John Syracuse has no bounds, knows no bounds.
John:
Morbid curiosity is what I would call it.
John:
But anyway, related to the sold out items, if you go – they're still on the store page.
John:
They just put like sold out text on them.
John:
You can still click through on them.
John:
Click the little buy link.
John:
Click the name.
John:
Click the image.
John:
Like anyway, click through to the item.
John:
It has a button on the store that says bring it back.
John:
It's just cotton beer is like normal, like, hey, I want this even though it's not in stock.
John:
If you still want a hat, a pint glass or a mug, click through on it and then click the bring it back thing.
John:
It makes you enter the email address because they want to email you when it comes back in stock.
John:
And I know that's annoying, but cotton beer is good with email.
John:
That's how we knew sort of that's how we gauge demand for the second order of chicken hats based on how many people click the bring it back link and enter an email address.
John:
And that gave us a rough estimate of how many people probably wanted them.
John:
And I think we got it pretty close because towards the end of selling out of the chicken hats, the sales were really slowing down.
John:
It was like just real, like a real trickle, like the number wouldn't move at all for like hours at a time.
John:
So I think we kind of mostly met demand, but we're not entirely sure.
John:
And the mugs we did a new order of in the paint glass, we were just selling through an old order.
John:
So in order for us to have a better idea
John:
For the next sale, how much demand there is for this stuff, you can use that bring it back button, and it just ticks up a counter that we can see on our internal dashboards to know how many people are actually interested in this again.
John:
So that's my suggestion there.
John:
And then finally, lots of people are sending pictures of the chicken hats.
John:
If you ordered it, especially if you were in the first batch, you might get them already.
John:
I already got my chicken hat, and lots of people are getting them.
John:
Because the things that are in stock, I think...
John:
I'm not sure about the mugs and the pint glasses, but certainly the hats.
John:
They just ship them as soon as they get them.
John:
The other ones, we have to wait until the campaign is over so they know how many they have to print because they're going to make them based on how many people order them.
John:
Anyway, people are sending me pictures of them wearing the chicken hat.
John:
You know, bad on us for not including instructions with the hat, and far be it for me to tell you how to wear hats.
John:
And I was like, yeah, you put it on your head.
John:
Like, people are getting that far.
John:
Comma.
John:
But...
John:
Part of the reason it's called a chicken hat is because it looks a little bit like the little thing on top of a chicken or a rooster's head, the little floppy thing.
John:
The little mohawk thing?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And that mohawk thing, it's like a vertical fin that goes from front to back.
John:
That's how – I'm not going to say supposed to be worn, but that's how I wear the chicken hat is –
John:
front to back, like a vertical, like a shark fin, right?
John:
And then second thing to know is this hat, although it's pretty uniform, it does have a seam.
John:
Like there is a seam down one part and the seam goes in the back.
John:
Like most items of clothing that have a seam, the seam goes in the back.
John:
which means that the little ATP tag is also more towards the back.
John:
Originally we wanted that tag to be in the front, but they made the first batch of them with them on the back.
John:
And then seeing people like put them on their heads and especially with glasses, the tag when it's on the front kind of interferes with the glasses and messes up sort of the line of the thing.
John:
So we made the second batch.
John:
I said, put the tag in the back.
John:
I think it looks better there.
John:
But everybody who I see wearing this online thinks the tag goes in the front.
John:
And it can.
John:
Like, it's a uniform hat.
John:
It's a single color.
John:
No one's going to see that the seam is in the front.
John:
But technically, the seam goes in the back and the hat goes vertically forward and backwards.
John:
If you want to wear it any other way, feel free.
John:
It's your hat.
John:
You can do whatever you want with it.
John:
But I'm just saying, if you're wondering, how does John wear his chicken hat?
John:
I wear it chicken style, like a dorsal fin with the seam in the back.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got a lot to talk about.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
I need to continue my apology tour for Marco.
Casey:
Apparently, based on our feedback, freaking nobody knew how to use the AirPods Pro 2 volume control.
Marco:
Vindicated.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I assumed that this was obvious.
Casey:
I do not have Pro 2.
Casey:
I only have the pedestrian original OG AirPods Pro.
Casey:
And I just assumed this was pretty self-explanatory.
Casey:
And wow, did I assume wrong?
Casey:
Because we got a lot of very kind feedback saying, oh my goodness, thank you so much for telling me how to do this.
Casey:
I had no idea.
Casey:
So Marco, first of all, I'm sorry because I think I was snickering in your general direction last week and saying, oh my gosh, are you serious?
Casey:
And turns out I was wrong.
Casey:
Second of all, would you mind reiterating since we brought it up again?
Casey:
Can you just quickly reiterate how is it that you control the volume on an AirPods Pro 2, please?
Marco:
so you don't use two different fingers in motion as i was doing like front and back kind of you know uh doing something to it you don't do that um instead you put the thumb of your hand on like in the back of the stem to hold it in place and with your index finger you swipe up or down on the front flat part of the stick to uh change the line up and down
Marco:
And you know you did it because only that AirPod will make a little like click sound out of that ear to confirm that you did it.
Marco:
And so my mistake was moving both fingers.
Marco:
What you're supposed to do is support it with one finger and swipe with the other.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So my apologies, Marco.
Casey:
You were right to bring it up.
Casey:
And I was wrong.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Marco:
So many people wrote in and were like, yeah, I didn't know how to do it either.
Marco:
Or I've been doing it wrong.
Marco:
I also wrote it off.
Marco:
You know, I'm so vindicated.
Marco:
I thought I was the only one.
Marco:
Like I felt so dumb when I finally figured it out.
Marco:
That's why I brought it up on the show to be like, hopefully somebody else can feel less dumb by this.
Marco:
And sure enough, many people now feel less dumb.
Marco:
Dozens.
Marco:
Dozens.
John:
And hearing your complication story, I wonder if the people who didn't know that you could adjust the volume by swiping it were just too embarrassed to write in.
John:
you can change complications what you can change well and keep in mind this volume thing only works on the airpods pro 2 it doesn't work on the airpods 3 it doesn't work on the original airpods pro even though they all look kind of similar we are sponsored this week by linode my favorite place to run servers visit linode.com slash atp and see why so many people including us use linode to host our servers
Marco:
I run a lot of servers and Linode makes it super easy.
Marco:
They're all at Linode.
Marco:
I've moved off of all other hosts over the last few years because Linode is by far the best.
Marco:
They even have other services now, things like an S3 compatible object storage, which I'm also now using.
Marco:
They have managed load balancers, managed backups.
Marco:
They also now have managed databases.
Marco:
I'm not using those yet, but those are very tempting, honestly.
Marco:
So Linode is great.
Marco:
They're an amazing web host to run servers and all these different manic services they now offer.
Marco:
And they have amazing support, amazing capabilities, huge variation in things like resource levels and what you're concentrating on for your resources so you can have high memory or high CPU or GPU compute plans.
Marco:
All of that in so much variety.
Marco:
And what really is great about Linode is that you get all of that at incredible value.
Marco:
This is why I got there in the first place almost a decade ago.
Marco:
And that has kept me there all this time because I have not found a better value in the hosting business at all times.
Marco:
I've been with them again for almost a decade now.
Marco:
They have been either the cheapest or tied for the cheapest for anything I'm looking to get.
Marco:
And I have a lot of stuff there that, you know, that really adds up.
Marco:
And so I'm just super happy at Linode.
Marco:
I strongly recommend whether you're going to spend five bucks a month for a really basic VPS kind of server or whether you're really going in and making some really big stuff.
Marco:
linode scales with you they offer the great the same great support no matter how much money you're spending with them it's a great server server host and they have a whole api and everything it's amazing being a linode customer see for yourself linode.com slash atp create a free account there you get a hundred dollars in credit once again linode.com slash atp run all your cloud stuff at linode thank you so much to linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show
Casey:
I have a little bit of news about my beloved, don't call it a park bench picnic table.
Casey:
I went there to do a little bit of work today because it was a very nice day here in Richmond.
Casey:
It's just a touch chilly, but not too bad.
Casey:
And I was all slicked with myself.
Casey:
I was all excited because I've got my fancy pants new iPad Pro.
Casey:
It's got 5G.
Casey:
It can support 5G ultra wide band by Verizon.
Casey:
Baby, I'm ready.
Casey:
Except I got there and my phone, you know, took a few seconds, but my phone shows 5G UW, 5G Ultra Wideband.
Casey:
I am ready to rock on the phone.
Casey:
And the iPad says, you got 5G.
Casey:
So I wait a little bit.
Casey:
Still got 5G.
Casey:
Wait a little bit.
Casey:
Kind of diddle around on the iPad a little bit.
Casey:
Do a fast.com test just to see if that would kick it into high gear or whatever.
Casey:
And I look and it's still just 5G.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Did your phone work on it?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
My phone was fine.
Casey:
My phone was good to go.
Casey:
So, okay, what's going on here?
Casey:
Remember that this has a physical SIM.
Casey:
I was briefly confused by this when I did the transfer because I was waiting for it to transfer the eSIM.
Casey:
That wasn't an eSIM.
Casey:
But anyways, so I get on the Verizon chat, which, while annoying, is actually...
Casey:
got a pretty high success rate, their online chat, for getting me an answer and or getting me what I want.
Casey:
You know, I got my cable card through the online chat.
Casey:
That mostly worked.
Casey:
I've done a lot of stuff either online chat.
Casey:
And so I get on the online chat and I did that thing you should never do.
Casey:
And I kind of led with, do I need a new SIM card?
Casey:
You know, it's the SIM card, which was, you know, originally in an iPad that did not support 5G.
Casey:
It only supported LTEs.
Casey:
Does the SIM card perhaps not have whatever magic bit flipped or whatever it may need in order to get 5G ultra-wideband?
Casey:
And after a considerable amount of time waiting for the person that was surely helping 35 other people, it turns out that there are multiple iPad plans in Verizon.
Casey:
The one that I have is normally $20 a month, but because of my phone's plan, I only pay $10 a month for it.
Casey:
It's half off.
Casey:
And that gives me 5G, and it gives me 15 gigs of data, of quote-unquote premium data, which I guess means basically you get 15 gigs and they start to throttle you.
Casey:
But if I want ultra-wideband, I need to go to $30 a month, which I think would only be five bucks more for me, because I think all of the iPad plans are half off, but I've got to do some research on this.
Casey:
Anyway, so it's strictly speaking, $30 a month.
Casey:
Then I can get my 5G ultra-wideband, and I go from 15 gigs of premium data to 30 gigs.
Casey:
So I got to confirm, because this is not worth an additional $10 a month, because remember, my plan is supposed to be $20.
Casey:
I pay $10 because of the way I have my phone set up.
Casey:
I would pay probably $5 more a month for this, because darn it, I want my ultra-wideband.
Casey:
That's the whole point, man.
Casey:
Uh, but I don't think I would pay 10 more dollars for this.
Casey:
So I got to figure out what the story is.
Casey:
And yes, I know I'm frugal slash cheap slash whatever, but, uh, I got to look into that.
Casey:
But I just thought in case anyone else is, this is kind of another PSA, another entry in the PSA corner, uh, in case anyone else was confused, that apparently is the case for Verizon.
Casey:
I cannot speak for any other carrier.
Casey:
And I just, I did not expect that.
Casey:
So I was disappointed, but I was at least happy to understand it.
Casey:
So there is that.
John:
This is also another case where if you were to hotspot to your phone, you'd be throttled by the Bluetooth bandwidth.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or whether it's using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Yeah, you're you're way throttled.
Marco:
But even by Wi-Fi, you'd be throttled.
Casey:
Yeah, that's correct.
Casey:
Like, in fact, when I first was it was piddling with the ultra wideband stuff, I had done it via a physical like USB connection to my computer.
Casey:
And it was dog slow on the computer end.
Casey:
And I'm like, what the heck?
Casey:
I've got like two and a half gigabits per second down on the phone.
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
This is USB 2.
Casey:
It's slower than dirt.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dipsie.
Casey:
And so I decided, oh, if I'm going to tether, I am not going to tether via the USB connection.
Casey:
I'm not going to tether, to your point, via Bluetooth.
Casey:
I will tether via Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Even if I have the phone connected to the computer for power purposes, I will still tether via Wi-Fi because that is as close as I can get to full bandwidth from ultra-wideband.
Casey:
So yeah, you're exactly right.
Casey:
Anyway, I just thought that was fascinating.
Casey:
We have a lot to talk about with regards to system settings, John.
Casey:
Tell me about this in Ventura, please.
John:
This was something that someone asked about a while ago that I found when I was digging through some old stuff regarding the switch controls in system settings.
John:
The switch is like the ones on your iPhone.
John:
When you go to settings in your iPhone, there's a little on-off switch that goes horizontally.
John:
A little circle goes horizontally in a little channel, right?
John:
And, of course, system settings in Ventura looks a lot like that now, right?
John:
lots of people were throwing this entry from the apple human interface guidelines back in apple's face when the betas were out uh it's worth it's not the this is not the item that uh was brought to my attention but is relevant to it so in the apple hig at a location that we'll link in the show notes uh apple says avoid using a switch control for a single detail detail or minor setting a switch has more visual weight than checkbox so it looks better when controls more functionality than a checkbox typically does for example you might use a switch to let people turn on or off a group of settings instead of just one settings
John:
one setting rather in general don't replace a checkbox with a switch if you're already using a checkbox in your interface it's probably best to keep using it that's what the apple human interface guidelines are say arguably apple violates that 10 ways to sunday but with the ventura system settings because pretty much all those things used to be checkboxes and they didn't leave them alone and pretty much all of them are controlling a single detail or minor setting so
John:
There's that, right?
John:
But that's not the biggest thing because you can argue, oh, well, this is a minor setting.
John:
It's a big setting.
John:
Is it important for it to match the iOS settings for familiarity?
John:
You can go all around in different directions than that, although it is kind of weird that it is directly in violation of what they say in the Apple interface guidelines.
John:
But this is inarguable and another example of...
John:
I don't know, just sort of not meeting the minimum standard for Mac user interface.
John:
And this is kind of like complications or possibly changing the volume on your AirPods.
John:
It may be a thing that nobody knows about, but I feel like if anyone should know about it, it's the people making GUIs for the Mac who work at Apple.
John:
I don't think that's too high of a standard.
John:
And that is this.
John:
On the Mac, when you have a checkbox, and also on the web, by the way, if you do it right.
John:
But anyway, on the Mac, if you have a checkbox and it says like, you know,
John:
Turn on turbo lasers and it's got a checkbox and the text next to the checkbox says turn on turbo lasers, right?
John:
Or turbo lasers on, I don't know.
John:
I'm doing a bad job with the copy here, but suffice to say there's a label next to the checkbox.
John:
You can click the checkbox to make the checkbox be on or off, but you can also click the label text.
John:
And the reason why you might want to do that is the label text is way bigger than the checkbox.
John:
Checkboxes are pretty small.
John:
They can be hard to even see.
John:
That's one of the arguments people make for switches.
John:
Oh, the switches are so much bigger than checkbox.
John:
They should use switches because they're just easier to hit.
John:
It's a bigger target.
John:
And there is something to it being a bigger target, right?
John:
Although the switches on Mac are actually kind of small.
John:
The label is a way bigger target.
John:
It's very wide and just as high as the checkbox, if not higher.
John:
That's why on the Mac, you can click the label anywhere in the label text and it will activate and deactivate the checkbox.
John:
And you can do that on the web if you know what you're doing and you should.
John:
And if you don't do it on the web, you should feel bad.
John:
All right.
John:
So the question was, hey, in Ventura system settings, when they have these big long lists of labels and switches, can you click the label to toggle the switch?
John:
And the answer is, at least in the one that I tested, no, you can't.
John:
And that is bad.
John:
That is very bad because that is way worse than a checkbox.
John:
And yes, I know the labels are distant from the slide from the little switch to instead of right next to like checkboxes, but I think it's also kind of bad.
John:
But why can't I click the label to activate and deactivate the slider?
John:
That is a Mac idiom.
John:
And this is a replacement for a, I mean, I don't know, maybe there's somewhere in the United States guidelines where they say explicitly don't do this, but that makes the targets for every one of these little things so much smaller than they used to be.
John:
They're bigger than checkboxes, but they're way smaller than a checkbox and a label.
John:
And I just don't understand that.
John:
I don't understand how that comes to be.
John:
where they replace all the checkboxes with this kind of control.
John:
And then, oh, and by the way, we forgot for this type of control to make the label clickable.
John:
Upsetting.
John:
Very upsetting.
Casey:
And then apparently some things are disappearing from the settings, system settings, system preferences, whatever it's called.
John:
Yeah, we know that like the network locations was gone.
John:
I don't know why that feature disappeared, but it did.
John:
But there's one more feature that disappeared and it's relevant to my interest because I use this feature.
John:
It's a feature I've talked about in the past that used to be an energy saver in system preferences.
John:
There was a GUI for setting a time when you want your computer to wake up and setting a time when you want your computer to go to sleep.
John:
And I use these features to have my computer wake up in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping, do a bunch of backup stuff and then go to sleep.
John:
So I put my computer to sleep when I go to bed, and then while I'm sleeping, it wakes up, does a bunch of stuff, back up stuff, and then goes back to sleep, right?
John:
those the ability to do that like timed waking up and going to sleep still exists in the os they just either got rid of or didn't have time to reinvent the gui for that which is kind of a shame uh we'll put a link in the show notes to apple's support document that shows you how to do it from the command line so i had to go and you know read the man page and come up with the command lines that are equivalent to my settings in case i ever want to restore them it's an easy way to to get rid of the schedule and it's an easy way to add it back so it's not so bad but
Casey:
no one's ever going to find this document uh the gui was much friendlier way to let people change this and since the feature is still there i hope the gui will come back someday indeed uh really quick thing i wanted to know what i should have talked about this earlier but it completely slipped my mind i am not trying to be funny when did landscape ipads start treating the volume up down physical volume up down switches as backwards
John:
Wait, they do?
John:
Right?
John:
Thank you!
John:
What do you consider backwards when it's left and right?
Casey:
Well, so here's the thing.
Casey:
This is like natural scrolling all over, which I believe in.
Casey:
I believe in natural scrolling, but last I recall, I don't think either of you do.
John:
I do not.
John:
And I disagree with the terminology, too.
John:
It's like death tax.
John:
I don't accept your framing.
Casey:
I'm just using the Apple terminology.
John:
I know.
John:
I don't accept that framing either.
Casey:
The way I'm used to it is that, okay, hold your iPad, either mentally or physically, hold your iPad in portrait, you know, tall.
Casey:
So on the right-hand side, for larger iPads anyway, the volume up button is the top button, volume down button is the bottom button, right?
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
Take that and twist it counterclockwise.
Casey:
So you're taking the top and sliding it so it's now the left.
Casey:
I am used to, and in every other iPad I've ever used, the left side is volume up.
Casey:
The right side is volume down because it's the same function.
John:
It's the same button as it was before.
John:
If you had kept your finger on the buttons, it would be the same button.
John:
That's what mine's doing.
Casey:
So on my brand new iPad, and I believe I read that the Mini is doing this as well, but I could have that wrong.
Casey:
On the brand new iPad, which actually is not in the room with me.
Casey:
I wish it was.
Casey:
But if I have a portrait, twist 90 degrees to the left.
Casey:
So now the top is the left.
Casey:
Volume up is the rightmost button.
Casey:
Volume down is the leftmost button.
Casey:
Now, if you think about it for half a second, that actually does make more sense because you are looking at the meter as you're voluming up and down.
Casey:
And as you increase volume, it goes to the right.
John:
As you decrease volume... If you change your language to Arabic, does it change?
Casey:
I don't know, or Hebrew or something.
Marco:
Wait, so Benzie in the chat and Jitanger in the chat also have pointed out this is actually now a setting.
Casey:
You know, I looked for that and I must have missed it because I looked for it and didn't... Oh, no, you know, that's what it was.
Casey:
I told myself no.
Casey:
Embrace it.
Casey:
This is backwards.
Casey:
The way you're used to doing it, Casey, is backwards.
John:
Just like a quote-unquote natural scrolling advocate would do.
John:
Correct.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
Exactly right.
John:
Yeah, you see the error of your ways, don't you?
John:
Now that you know the settings there, you can restore sanity.
Casey:
No, I disagree.
Casey:
I think this does make more sense.
Casey:
It's just because it's not what I'm used to that I'm flummoxed by it.
Casey:
But I do think it actually makes more sense because, again, as you're voluming up, this slider is moving from left to right.
Casey:
As you're voluming down, it's moving from right to left.
Casey:
So it does make sense.
Casey:
But the fact that the buttons are software-controlled, which obviously they were the whole time, but you feel, or I felt at least, as though they were hardware buttons.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
This button will always and forever be volume up.
Casey:
This other button will always and forever be volume down.
Casey:
And it turns out that, well, no, they aren't quote unquote hardware buttons.
Casey:
They're just, you know, giving a hint to the software to do something.
Casey:
And yeah, it actually does make sense to me anyway to have the right one go up and the left one go down.
Casey:
But it took me by such surprise.
Casey:
And I forget what I was doing.
Casey:
I don't think I was like in bed with Aaron or anything like that, but it was at a time when I was not expecting a bunch of volume and I wanted to turn the iPad down and I mashed down on the right hand button because I was in landscape, mashed down the right hand button.
Casey:
It just got louder.
Casey:
And I was like,
Casey:
oh my god, what's happening?
Casey:
And then it occurred to me, oh, this is reversed.
Marco:
Unintended volume acceleration?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
It was hashtag Toyota, am I right?
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah.
John:
Come on, get the fake story right.
John:
Oh, sorry, my mistake.
John:
Are you sure it wasn't Toyota?
John:
I guess, was it later Toyota?
John:
The Audi one wasn't real, I think, but I don't remember.
Marco:
I think either of them were super real.
Marco:
The big story was about Toyota, but I think it was a little not super solid of a story.
John:
anyway for the volume button thing i guess we have to wait for apple to come out with the brand new landscape volume buttons to match their landscape camera which is what they call it when they move the camera to the other side well if they move the volume buttons to the other side of the ipad i guess like the the short side then it'll be up and well it'll be up on landscape it'll basically give the landscape one a top i guess it already has the top because once you put the camera on the landscape edge that's the top in landscape so then they can put the volume button somewhere and then i guess the
Casey:
you know they would be on the left side and then up would be volume up and down would be volume down and then you could debate how they should work when it's in portrait yeah yeah anyway this took me by surprise obviously apparently that's how the mini works too yeah i think that's correct because they had to have room for the pencil that's right the pencils along the edge right again i don't have a mini so i can't verify but i believe that's correct anyway i just thought that was very very confusing and surprising and i don't remember that having been mentioned anywhere perhaps it was it's probably mentioned the keynote but it's a long time ago
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John:
uh hey would you tell me about the great news coming out of uh the verge among other places with regard to the new apple tv 4k which arrives friday if i'm not mistaken isn't that right i think so yeah it's okay news uh we talked about uh i should have had the uh the expansion of the abbreviation in the notes here with a quick media sync i believe it was qms hdmi qms it was part of the hdmi 2.1 standard that lets
John:
uh the uh the television change frame rates without blacking out the screen like you're using uh leveraging the vrr the variable refresh rate feature that already is an hdmi the main television support qms is the thing on top of that that would try to avoid some of those black screens i talked about the limitations of it last week that one limitation is that everything except for the frame rate has to stay the same and i wasn't sure if that included hdr versus sdr so you still might be getting black screens when you go from your
John:
uh apple tv menu screen to a video program if the hdrness doesn't match but we'll see but the real main limitation is both devices have to support uh hdmi qms and so the news is that apple says that and i don't know this was in the verge article and a bunch of other girls apple must have just told people reviewing the apple tv this information but apple basically says that the apple tv 4k will be getting qms uh in a future software update
John:
No timelines or whatever, but it's coming, right?
John:
But as the Verge article says, how many TVs work with QMS VRR, you asked?
John:
Well, zero at the moment.
John:
But you'll start seeing them hit the market next year.
John:
I really hope they'll be able to do firmware updates because if you already support VRR, which most fancy modern TVs do, supporting QMS VRR seems like it's within the realm of possibility for a firmware update, but you never know with TV makers.
John:
Sometimes they just never update old TVs to be able to do something that any TV does, so...
John:
My fingers are crossed for my television, which doesn't currently support QMS, that someday in the future it will support QMS.
John:
And also someday in the future, the Apple TV forecast coming to my house will eventually support QMS.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I was looking at this briefly, and I believe that VRR and QMS are part of HDMI 2.1, I think.
John:
But they're optional, like every part of HDMI 2.1.
Casey:
So I guess the question is, you know, what version of HDMI do all of our televisions support?
John:
it's not the version there it's the standard is so crappy you can be compliant with hdmi 2.1 if you only support hdmi 2.0 features it's a ridiculous standard like it's just it lets people put the label on you have to that's why you go to these review sites and they have a giant grid of like what features does it actually support alm vrr you know it's all these acronyms soup or whatever but hdmi 2.1 tells you almost nothing all it tells you is that
John:
It's plausible that it might support these things, whereas if you see HDMI 2.0, you know it absolutely doesn't.
John:
But you have to look at the individual specs to know which, you know, alphabet soup thing you're actually interested in.
John:
It's stupid.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
Talk to me about iCloud Shared Photo Library, which, by the way, due to breaking news, I finally got the chance to have Erin update her phone to 16.1 just like an hour and a half ago.
Casey:
And so as we are recording, I am moving 47,733 items to the Shared Photo Library, which, based on my network bandwidth, seems like is actually...
Casey:
Like, a thing?
Casey:
Like, it almost appears as though these photos are moving back and forth.
Casey:
You would think that it would just be like, oh, take all these on the server side and glob them into the new shared photo library, but it does not appear to me that that's what's happening.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
I don't think it's moving your data at all, like I said last week.
John:
I think it is purely a metadata-based operation.
John:
Right.
John:
I think when you did the move of 40,000 or whatever, you should have seen within a few seconds, all 40,000 of disappear.
John:
If you are like the personal library view, they should have all disappeared from the personal library view in your local thing.
John:
And then there's a countdown again, scroll down to the bottom for the progress.
John:
But I think it's just a purely a metadata move.
John:
I don't think it's moving any of the data at all, but I don't know.
John:
Someone who works on Apple photos can come and tell us.
John:
do you think anybody who works on apple photos would actually like be on speaking terms with us that is a plausible thing that could happen uh unrelated to that here's some news about photo shared library uh mikhail gawk asked um or told us that in the camera settings on ios there's a toggle to send photos
John:
you take directly to the shared library i'd asked about that last week what if i just want everything i take every photo i take with my phone to go right into the shared library i don't want it to suggest to me when it thinks they should go there i don't want to move them manually there is an option for that i think during the onboarding process on the phone it asks you that and says hey do you want me to do this but i onboarded on the mac and so there's that's not my phone and so either i missed that option or i didn't even ask or whatever but if you want every single
John:
you know photo you take on your phone to go directly into the shared library you can turn that on it's in the camera settings on your iphone as for my unsaved photos warning i'm not sure if casey saw that when he was trying to move his 40 000 photos but if you select a bunch of photos and try to move them to the shared library you might see something that says hey you've got unsaved photos do you want to save them uh and i wondered what the heck that was about lots of people gave me the answer that those are the shared with you photos if you have that feature on when someone like sends you a photo in messages like an iMessage
John:
there's a feature that will surface that photo in your photos application.
John:
And it'll say like, oh, this was from Casey when you were having a message thread.
John:
And it shows his name and like a little message icon or something or whatever.
John:
Those are the ones that haven't saved.
John:
And what it means by saved is we're showing you this photo because it's in one of your message threads.
John:
We're showing it to you in the photo grid view or in the Mac version of photos app.
John:
But you haven't actually saved this photo to your photo library.
John:
And because I did select all or select a whole bunch, some of the things I selected were shared with you photos.
John:
So you have two choices.
John:
You could either save them, which means basically copy them out of the message thread and put them into your photo library where they will live forever.
John:
Or you can go to the, on the Mac anyway, I think on the iOS one too, there's like a filters menu option in the upper right.
John:
You can tell it to filter out, like don't show me the shared with you photos.
John:
And then it just won't show them.
John:
And then when you select huge swastle, you don't have to worry about that.
John:
so that's that feature that's that mystery solved um deduping so deduping is still definitely a frustrating situation and i'm not even you know i'm not even talking about deduping like with two people's accounts like i said last week my wife and my account on the same act i'm talking about deduping where two people contribute the same photo to the shared library or there's a photo in the shared library and also in a personal library and
John:
It's a tricky situation.
John:
So just to give an example, an example that I tested, if I and my wife both contribute the exact same photo to the shared photo library, which might happen if we both got like airdropped the photo from someone else, it's literally the same photo down to the byte, no differences whatsoever.
John:
There'll be two copies in there.
John:
And deduping is a little bit tricky because if we dedupe that, I mean, to do it right, what you would have to do is
John:
Keep track of the fact that two different people contribute this photo because and I'm noticing this when I'm hopping back and forth between accounts.
John:
If you're in the shared library, you can take one of the photos and say, move this back to my library.
John:
But if you're not the one who contributed to the share library, you can't like it doesn't say move it back because you didn't contribute it.
John:
So if two people contributed, the system has to remember, hey, both people contribute to this.
John:
And so if you move it back,
John:
A, it has to, like, understand that you're allowed to move it back because you were one of the two contributors or one of the three contributors or one of the four or four people contribute or whatever.
John:
It has to understand that you're allowed to do that.
John:
And B, it should probably leave it there for other people to get back because they contributed, but they didn't pull it back.
John:
So you can pull, like, your copy back.
John:
Like, it's got a lot of weird edge cases.
John:
It's not as simple as just, oh, just delete one of them.
John:
Because if you do that, then you're left with, like, the one contributed by one person, but now the other person can't pull it back even though they think they contributed it.
John:
So it is complicated and confusing, but I do hope it's on the list.
John:
I don't think I put it in a feedback for that, but I probably will at some point.
John:
But I hope this is already on the roadmap somewhere because it would be a useful feature.
John:
It's surprisingly easy to get dupes.
John:
And the reason it's surprisingly easy to get dupes, at least for me, is we've had just like years and years, decades, at least a single decade, a long time where we've had separate libraries.
John:
And inevitably there are photos that end up in both of the libraries because even when one is the real library, sometimes I want to have like the good pictures on my phone so I can make wallpapers, so I can post them to Instagram.
John:
And there are just so many photos that are both on my phone and also in the quote unquote real library.
John:
And trying to manually sort that out is fraught.
John:
I'd rather just dump everything into the shelf library and say, now de-dupe and have it handle that.
John:
But it doesn't do that yet.
John:
And it doesn't have a way for you to ask it to do, but just does it on its own sweet time, which is not great.
John:
and finally people and faces uh so here's how uh as far as i can tell the people and faces stuff uh the people and like the names of the people and all the face data doesn't seem like it goes with the photo so if i contribute a photo and i have all the faces named you know and like identified all the people in them that stays like i don't lose that by pushing into the shared library it's exactly there because i'm contributing the photo but other people who see that photo they have to then run
John:
face recognition according to their face database and they have you know assigning their names or whatever and so in theory if you want to be weird or funny you could have totally different names and totally different face assignments for multiple people looking at the same photo in the shared library but the face data and the name data is not shared it is private to each contributor
John:
There's a privacy angle to that.
John:
You might not want to know that, you know, Uncle Bill is named Poopyface in your in your library or something.
John:
But, you know, for families, it would actually be kind of convenient if the the people data could be shared, kind of like the keywords are shared, because that's another privacy thing.
John:
When you like I said last or a couple of weeks ago, when you assign a keyword to a photo and you share it.
John:
uh other people see that keyword so i hope your keywords aren't like you know something you don't want other people to see it's just text you know it's not a big deal in terms of the sharing but it saves a lot of time and energy because i want the keywords to be saved uh to be shared rather so that i can take advantage of the years i have spent keyword tagging photos
Casey:
You know, as you were talking and I was looking at the show notes and I noticed that I realized I hadn't looked at the shared library settings within camera, within settings on my phone.
Casey:
And it's worth noting there's some clever stuff here.
Casey:
So, you know, there's a kind of global, do you want to share photos directly from your camera?
Casey:
Yes, no.
Casey:
Then below that, you have two choices, share automatically or share manually.
Casey:
And if I understand this right, basically...
Casey:
If my phone, in my case, sees Aaron's phone nearby, it will automatically, if I so choose, share photos that I take while we're near each other to the shared library.
Casey:
And then additionally, which I think they had talked about on a keynote somewhere, but additionally, there's share when at home, yes, no.
Casey:
And so whenever I'm at home, irrespective of whether Aaron is physically near me at the time or not,
Casey:
it can optionally share directly to the shared photo library, which I think is very slick.
Casey:
And we'll see whether or not any of this actually works.
Casey:
But I'm very impressed that these options are available.
Casey:
It seems reasonably well thought out.
Casey:
The one thing that I do think I screwed up, though, is I wanted to capture photos of the four of us and basically anything since Aaron and I met.
Casey:
And I think what I accidentally did was an and, not an or.
Casey:
Like, it seemed to me like I was doing an or operation.
Casey:
Like, take anything that is, you know, from before, from the time we met and after, or, I have to choose my words carefully here.
John:
Did you mean, like, during the onboarding when you were at Ed, prompted you to say, like, hey, what photos do you want me to send over?
John:
Yeah, I didn't understand any of those options, which is why I said, I'll do this myself later, whatever that option was.
Casey:
Yeah, see, that's what I should have learned from your wife.
Casey:
I was going to say mistakes, but not mistakes.
Casey:
I should have learned from you.
Casey:
And so I think what I did was I said, you know, start from whenever we met and take the four of us.
Casey:
And it appears to me that what it heard when I said that is take pictures of the four of us.
Casey:
Rather than just glob everything from 2005 onward, I think it's just taking photos that it recognizes as either me, Aaron, Declan, or Michaela, which I'm going to have to go back and add a whole bunch more, but what are you going to do?
Casey:
Also, I mean, it's still churning, so maybe I'm wrong.
Casey:
Maybe I'm basing this off of what's in progress, and once it all settles down, maybe it'll be what I expect.
John:
You're just reminding me of how much the search in photos annoys me, either because I can't figure it out, in which case someone, again, from the Apple Photos team, please tell me how to do this because I want to do it.
John:
But like Photos has had for many years now a search box in the upper right, and you can type stuff in there like you can on your phone.
John:
Like you can type the word dog and it will find all the pictures of dogs, right?
John:
And it understands a whole bunch of things.
John:
It's very useful.
John:
And now it also does text.
John:
So if you take a picture of a street sign, it'll do OCR on the text.
John:
You can type that text, right?
John:
Powerful search field up there, right?
John:
also there is a thing called smart folders that are in the sidebar and smart folders have never heard of that search field in the upper right because everything that search field can do smart folders like i have no idea what that is don't even talk to me about it so if i wanted to do something like show me photos with these people show me photos of a dog that were taken between these years the smart folder was like ha ha i don't know what a photo of a dog is what are you even talking about unless you keyword tagged it with dog
John:
I have no idea about that AI thing.
John:
You can't even and it doesn't know about face recognition either.
John:
Smart folders like show me photos of these five people.
John:
But also like it's just it's so there's they're so divorced from each other based on like the year and team that they were created.
John:
And I'm like, look, if you can do these searches, the smart folders should support everything the search field can support and vice versa.
John:
But they don't.
John:
There's so many smart folders that I wanted to create to help me deal with the migration and stuff that just aren't possible to do.
John:
Or maybe they are.
John:
Please tell me I'm wrong and let me know how to do this.
Marco:
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Casey:
So we had some news that happened this week and it's one of those times when like the entire internet points to you and says, did you see this?
Casey:
Did you see this?
Casey:
Like there was a, I probably won't be able to find it for the show notes, but there was like a satirical thing where an FFMPEG fan talks about FFMPEG.
Casey:
It was not directly about me as far as I'm aware, but like,
Casey:
The entire internet sent it to me.
Casey:
If I remember it, and if I can dig it up, I'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But in this case, I was not the star.
Casey:
It was John.
Casey:
And you were the star because coming out of, apparently out of the woodwork, is Rewind.ai.
Casey:
And Rewind.ai is, by another name, a Lifestream.
Casey:
And this is something I've heard you talk about for years.
Casey:
So John, remind me what a Lifestream is and tell me what's going on.
John:
Not to be confused with Life Day.
John:
Yeah, I had to dig up where I talked about this.
John:
Most recently, back in November of 2021, I talked about it with Merlin on RECDIFs, Reconcilable Differences.
John:
I keep abbreviating.
John:
People don't know what that is.
John:
Another podcast I do.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
A timestamp link to 53 minutes, 22 seconds if you want to hear my most recent conversation about it.
John:
But way before that, back in May of 2014, I talked about it on this very show on ATP episode 66 at one hour and 52 seconds into the show.
John:
uh and it's not a thing that i made up as i said in both of the times i talked about it it's a thing i saw on tv when i was a kid possibly a teenager but in my advanced age it seems like when i was a kid and it was like some research thing that some academic had done uh and written papers about or whatever in fact i was digging some more stuff about this someone wrote a paper about implementing this on the newton pda back in the day um i don't know if it was ever implemented a lot of the papers had broken links but anyway as i think i described in both times i talked about this it was back early enough where
John:
people were still thinking about new ways to look at data on computers.
John:
We're all kind of familiar with the files and folder metaphor of sort of arranging things in a hierarchy and the desktop metaphor and like, you know, filing things away like that.
John:
We're also kind of aware these days of the search paradigm where things, you know, files and objects have attributes and you can search based on those attributes unless you're Apple Photos, in which case you can only search on some of them in the sidebar.
John:
But anyway,
John:
That's a different way to view your text, view your content.
John:
You could use search and then the search doesn't care where the thing is located, just cares that they're all pictures of dogs or whatever.
John:
And another way you can think about slicing and dicing data is purely based on time.
John:
We don't care if it has a picture of a dog in it.
John:
We don't care where it is in the file system.
John:
All we care is when something happened to it.
John:
And so you can imagine every single thing that you interact with on a computer being a time ordered sequence.
John:
I looked at this thing.
John:
I click this thing.
John:
I made this thing.
John:
I wrote this text.
John:
I did this.
John:
And it's just a long stream of things you can visualize.
John:
I think they even visualize it on the thing I was watching on PBS is just like a, you know, kind of like a roller coaster ride where you're flying through a whole bunch of things.
John:
And the past is way out there and the future is in the other direction.
John:
And they called it life streams or life streaming.
John:
And
John:
It was bigger than that.
John:
It was like, what if I wear a camera on my head and record myself 24 hours a day or whatever?
John:
But just in the realm of computers, imagine if you could see everything that you've interacted with on the computer ordered by time.
John:
And the reason I brought that up probably in both podcasts is because I always find it frustrating
John:
When I know I saw something somewhere the other day, but I can't remember where it was.
John:
Was it a tweet?
John:
Was it an email somebody sent me?
John:
Did someone send me a message?
John:
Was it in Slack?
John:
Was it a phone call?
John:
Was it an in-person meeting?
John:
I know this doesn't help with that, but that is a thing that, again, at my advanced age, very often the lines blur between things that happen on the computer and things that happen in real life.
John:
And I hate it when I hate that feeling where it's like, I know I saw this.
John:
I just saw it.
John:
And like, I go through my history and my browsers and I'm searching the file system and I'm trying to search Slack and hoping that like the free Slack, you know, hasn't scrolled off the end because it doesn't keep everything.
John:
You know, I hate when I can't find it.
John:
And I always think if I had live streams, this would be a problem because the whole point of live streams is just it notes everything you do and orders it by time.
John:
And if I can remember it happened sometime yesterday, then I can find it because that's the only thing I care about.
John:
I don't care about did it happen in Slack?
John:
Did it happen in messages?
John:
Was it an email?
John:
I don't care about that.
John:
And I don't certainly don't care about where it is in the file system, where the file was saved, if it is a file or whatever.
John:
I just want to find the data.
John:
So.
John:
This startup at Rewind.ai has basically implemented live streams.
John:
When I talked about it on Rectifs back in November 2021, I talked about the pitfalls of potentially implementing this.
John:
And so Rewind.ai has implemented it, so now we have a concrete implementation to look at.
John:
And what it does is you run it on your Mac.
John:
It's a Mac application.
John:
So cool for people making innovative new Mac applications.
John:
And it tries to implement live streams.
John:
And so if you're like, what was that thing that I, it was something about the TPS report.
John:
I think they used TPS report in their demo video.
John:
TPS reports yesterday.
John:
Where was that?
John:
And you don't remember, and it will find it in the example they give is like, what if it was just something that was on somebody else's screen in a Zoom call, right?
John:
They did a screen sharing on a Zoom call and that's where it was.
John:
You're never going to find that because it's not even on your disk.
John:
It's not in your browser history.
John:
There's no history in Zoom where you could find text that was on a document that was being shared over Zoom.
John:
Someone was doing screen sharing, right?
John:
But rewind.ai will find it.
John:
And how does it do this, you may ask?
John:
Exactly the way you're thinking it.
John:
it records everything that happens on your screen and that's where people start to get scared but like honestly that's the only way to do it with current technology is what if we just record everything that happens on your screen every single window ocr all of it uh do text to speech from any audio that happens and just record it all because that's the only way we're going to find anything so it doesn't really care what it is doesn't need to integrate with your browser doesn't need to do any of that stuff it's just basically going to record everything and
John:
If you are technically minded, you're thinking many things.
John:
You're thinking about the privacy implications, and you're thinking about the technical implications.
John:
But before we get into all that, and there's a lot to get into, I just want... I'm thinking about the legal implications.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Like two-party consent for recording.
John:
I just want to say that, as always when I was discussing on Rectifs,
John:
that I would love this feature, but anyone who actually implements it, it becomes immediately terrifying and probably also not technically possible.
John:
And I think what I said back on the rectifier, so that I haven't listened back to the whole thing, is like the only company that I wouldn't even remotely trust to implement this in some future where implementing it doesn't bring my system to its knees would be a platform owner like Apple that is privacy-focused.
John:
Because anybody else who implements this...
John:
It is so scary that I would – how could I possibly have trust in them?
John:
And, you know, as we'll get to in a little bit, this is a venture-funded company.
John:
And so I'm like making, you know, like it's like, do I want a venture-funded company being responsible for keeping all my data privacy as it records everything that happens on my screen?
John:
Probably not.
John:
But anyway, that's the product.
John:
The I think it actually is cool.
John:
I am certainly a fan of live streams.
John:
I think it's technically cool, but it also scares the heck out of me.
Marco:
I'm not sure I would trust even Apple with this for a number of reasons.
Marco:
I mean, number one, I think just the the liability that you're creating by recording everything that passes through your screen and or, you know, microphone or whatever else.
Marco:
if somebody had access to that even if it's just somebody who like you know sat down on your computer when you walked away for a minute it's having access to everything that is shown on your screen and and granted you know and this app says you know they could do things like exclude your private you know safari windows so you know when you're looking at stuff you shouldn't be looking at uh you know in in polite company or exclude the zoom window if your work doesn't want you to record and stuff like that like it like they they built the features you would you would expect they they would built in but it's
John:
Now, like getting back to the life streaming thing of like the guy who was like a camera on his head and records his whole life.
John:
It's the same idea.
John:
And this is visited a topic visited very often in science fiction.
John:
You know, obviously, they're doing it for like his academic.
John:
Let's try this thing.
John:
But just think about what it would be like if you recorded your entire life all day, like with your with your AR glasses, it just recorded everywhere you went.
John:
that is a tremendous, like you said, a tremendous liability.
John:
Nobody wants every moment of their life recorded and able to be recalled by somebody who's not them.
John:
I don't even want it to be recalled by someone who is me.
John:
I don't want to be able to go back and see every moment of my past.
John:
But I certainly don't want any arbitrary person who gets access to my AR goggle recording to be able to jump back in time and look at it.
John:
That is fodder for dystopian sci-fi entirely.
John:
We're just talking about what happens on a computer.
John:
But that's plenty scary enough.
Marco:
Yeah, because your whole life is on your computer.
Marco:
And the things you do, I mean, there's so much information there that could be used against you in some way, whether it's if you happen to flash a view of your bank account on a browser somewhere or just sensitive emails you get, just sensitive documents you have to deal with, what you're browsing for legitimate reasons.
Marco:
There's just so...
Marco:
There is so much there.
Marco:
You are creating a massive honeypot reward for one bad actor in any part of it to be able to access and do horrendous things with.
Marco:
Again, I wouldn't even trust Apple to do this.
Marco:
And I trust Apple with a lot.
Marco:
I trust that even though we will complain about them when it's warranted...
Marco:
I do trust them a lot with a lot of data and integrity.
Marco:
That being said, as they push more into trying to be an ad company with, I think, somewhat spotty morals in that department, I don't know that we could even trust them with that.
Marco:
I think what Apple's argument would be is, well, we will keep it secure and we won't sell your data to other companies, which is what they call tracking.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Apple itself would probably at some point use that for advertising targeting purposes.
Marco:
Again, we're in a different world now.
Marco:
Now that Apple is not only an ad company and a rapidly expanding ad company, but also now that Apple is having some tough quarters with services growth...
Marco:
they're going to tighten the screws they're going to keep going you know this this past month or quarter whatever we had all of a sudden price hikes for all the services that's not a coincidence look at look at their growth rates look at their revenue rates it's slowing down all of a sudden we have lots of ads launching around the app store again not a coincidence they're they're going to keep tightening the screws because what they call quote services are all things where
Marco:
they can fairly easily just increase the spigot a little bit.
Marco:
They can do things here and there that will degrade things for users or developers or both or whatever, but will give them a little bit more money in the short term.
Marco:
This is what companies do.
Marco:
Apple's not immune to it.
Marco:
They're going to keep doing this.
Marco:
And so I can clearly imagine a future, and I hope this never happens, but I think it's extremely plausible that
Marco:
Where if Apple had this feature of their platforms, this total recording everything feature, which, frankly, I don't think they would ever do because I think it's too problematic and they would know that.
Marco:
But if they were to ever launch such a thing, there is no question in my mind that they would find a way once a bad quarter came around, they would find a way to twist some logic to say...
Marco:
Okay, we're going to now start using that data to target ads to you.
Marco:
And only in our apps, though, we're going to be super privacy sensitive.
Marco:
And only we can do this creepy thing to your data.
Marco:
But that's what they would do.
Marco:
And so again, like, you look at, you know, even Apple, who we trust so much, who has a pretty good track record in most of these areas.
Marco:
I think even they would be a very small step away from taking advantage of that kind of thing in a creepy way.
Marco:
And that's Apple.
Marco:
Imagine any other company with access to that kind of data.
Marco:
I think a VC-funded company is especially scary about that because...
Marco:
It is really hard to to look at that and not be tempted when times get tough.
Marco:
So when when you're not meeting your numbers, when you need a little bit more revenue for it to hit some goal or to avoid some problem, it's really, really hard to not tap that resource.
Marco:
And it's a massive resource that could be used.
Marco:
in immensely creepy and terrible ways not to mention you know even going going beyond stuff like legal problems with it which again there there are many legal problems with like you know if you are recording things in your computer without people's consent that are on the other side of those things that's a bit of a problem in a lot of a lot of places i'm not sure the law has caught up with that but certainly nda law has caught up with that
John:
If you're under NDA, you're not supposed to record anything that happens in the meetings that you have at work or whatever.
John:
If people use enterprise software to do their tele-meetings or whatever, they explicitly disable recording if they don't want you to be able to record it.
John:
That's their corporate policy.
John:
And of course, if you install a third-party app that also records on your computer using for corporate stuff, you are certainly violating your employee agreement or some NDA or whatever.
John:
which is a more well-trodden area of the law than, you know, like the phone system, the law is kind of caught up with that.
John:
So we have all the recording statutes that probably apply to recording someone saying audio, but recording like an image that goes across your screen because someone sent it to you in like a WhatsApp thing, it's so technically esoteric that I do wonder if the law in various states would be able to grapple with that or if it's just, you know, something that hasn't ever been tried because this technology is so new.
Casey:
It's funny, also, one of the things that's on the Rewind website is, you know, you can record your meetings.
Casey:
And at the bottom of this page, it says, oh, shoot, where did it go?
Casey:
I lost it.
Casey:
It says something like, oh, how does this work?
Casey:
And then there's like a help page about it.
Casey:
At the bottom of that, it says, make sure to read this article as well, colon, The Importance of Consent.
Casey:
and they talk a little bit about it, and they say at the bottom of this article, in bold, we believe all users of our product should proactively seek consent from everyone they record, even if they are not legally obligated to do so.
Casey:
And apparently, news to me, because I was looking at this earlier, there are only 11 American states that are two-party.
Casey:
Shoot, I lost the list, but somewhere around here.
Marco:
I believe Massachusetts— California is a big one.
Casey:
Oh, here it is.
Casey:
California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Casey:
Not New York, apparently.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And again, this is not the first thing that records your screen.
John:
Screen recorders exist and have existed forever.
John:
And like all the legal things are also caught by that.
John:
And in my time in corporate America in the latter years, we routinely recorded every meeting.
John:
It's basically like, oh, for people who couldn't show up to the meeting, make sure we record it and it would get shoved into the cloud.
John:
somewhere and some microsoft thing and then other people will be able to view the meeting so recording meetings is not you know a thing that rarely happens what didn't happen as often is someone locally recording using a third-party piece of software they install like it gets recorded and pushed to you know push to the microsoft one drive through the microsoft teams thing or whatever that that is a feature that most people who work in corporations want but they want to be able to control it but so it's not like this is letting the recording your screen gene out of the bottle but the idea of it being pervasive because to get the value of it kind of has to be pervasive
John:
And maybe you could just say, I would just run that on my home computer, not my work computer.
John:
But that also kind of cuts into things.
John:
If the thing that was sent to you was like a message, a non-work related message sent to you and messages, you're not going to see it if you go through your your life stream later at home.
John:
So here's what the the CEO had to say about it in a little Twitter thread to sort of explain why his product is OK.
John:
local and private by design we record anything you've seen said or heard and make it searchable for your privacy we store all of the recordings locally on your mac only you have access to them so as you would imagine if they're trying to not be immediately ridiculously evil they do not take these recordings of your local computer and throw it into the cloud it's all just on your mac it's you know it's all local right
John:
mind-boggling compression.
John:
This gets to the technical feasibility.
John:
How can I record everything that's happening on my screen all day without filling my disk, right?
John:
Storing all the recordings locally means compression is very important.
John:
We compress raw data up to 3,750 times.
John:
What an odd number.
John:
Without major loss of quality, for example, 10.5 gigabytes of raw recording data becomes 2.8 megabytes.
John:
And then finally, no cloud integration or IT required.
John:
In order to enable you to search anything you've seen, we use native macOS APIs with its optical character recognition to recognize and index all the words that appear on your screen.
John:
So it's all happening locally.
John:
It's all on your device.
John:
And they're able to compress things.
John:
So that they, you know, get down to size.
John:
And in terms of the – they also touted their VC funding, which is why everybody knows about it.
John:
In terms of the business bottle, here's something they have to say.
John:
I think this is on their website on the how much does Rewind cost.
John:
Rewind is completely free for now.
John:
Not reassuring, company.
John:
No.
John:
Don't put an exclamation on that.
John:
Not reassuring.
John:
Anyway, we plan to offer a free product indefinitely, I'll bet.
John:
And for users who get a ton of value, we will charge them a monthly subscription, a.k.a.
John:
freemium.
John:
And then this is not getting better here.
John:
We aren't yet sure what the price will be or what the features will be in the free product versus the paid product.
John:
We'll make that decision based on feedback we get.
John:
One thing's for sure.
John:
We will never sell your data or do advertising.
John:
Are you sure about that?
Marco:
See, I would like to know what was their pitch to the VCs?
Marco:
Because I bet it contains much more detail than that.
John:
I mean, they didn't get a huge amount of VC money.
John:
And the person who the CEO also had previously, I think he was from Optimizely, which got just the ridiculousness of like $10 million not being a huge.
Marco:
And you're right, like in terms of.
Marco:
But it's just it's ridiculous.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
John:
But like in the grand scheme of this is Andreessen Horowitz.
John:
It's a big VC company and he's had a successful company that presumably he did well for the VCs.
John:
And when they invested in that company, that's why he invested in his new company.
John:
So here's the thing about this feature.
John:
if you if you had gone back to my childhood and found some technically minded adults and said that a company is gonna make a product that keeps track of our location all day every day and makes that information accessible to other people potentially they would say what someone's gonna spy me and know where i am all the time my device is gonna track my location on the earth 24 hours a day this is a dystopian nightmare and we all have phones and we don't care about that it's
John:
like well it's just location data and we trust apple not to share with anybody and yeah there was that thing where google accidentally we let people get at every location and see that you're you know where you go during the day or like there is kind of a an acclimation to technology tracking things that were previously seemed like the surveillance state
John:
So, I mean, how many people use their phones and turn location off so it's never tracked?
John:
None of us do that because there's just so much utility for a device that knows where we are.
John:
Whether it's find my friends to find out where people in your family are or just being able to set a reminder so it knows when you get back home or, you know, maps features or keeping track of your runs or how many steps you've taken and where you walked.
John:
We have pretty much all accepted and found a vendor that we can trust well enough.
John:
that we're okay essentially carrying a tracker around.
John:
We're carrying a tracker around with us all day.
John:
It's always keeping track of where we are, and it's recording it.
John:
And we're like, yeah, we've worked out the kinks in that.
John:
People are mostly okay with it.
John:
But if you had dumped in somebody from the 70s and described it, they'd be like, no, I don't want this tracker.
John:
Yes, it's an amazing peak of technology, but I don't want it to be tracked.
John:
Oh, you say it's only on the device or it's shared in this cloud you described, but you say it's safe and it can't...
John:
You have to do so much reassurance and explaining of the cultural context for that to be OK.
John:
Part of the reason that happened is because we passed a technical threshold where doing that is not prohibitive.
John:
I'm not entirely sure that we have passed the threshold where doing full screen recording or per window recording in OCR is not oppressive, because especially if you're on a laptop.
John:
It's going to hurt your battery.
John:
Like there's a page on this site that says, look, we're using the imaging powers of the M1 SoC to do all this compression.
John:
And I bet they are.
John:
But every one of those little things takes power.
John:
And that, you know, especially on battery powered devices like laptops, but even on like a desktop, you're burning CPU cycles.
John:
doing this thing that presumably will have value later but you're burning it all the time like i mean again to get value out of it you can't just like run it for one hour a day you have to run it all the time so i do feel like the utility of this if this could exist immediately and magically work and like be seamless and not impact your life and not impact battery life
John:
i think the utility of it actually is tremendous but like getting over the hump of of from where we are now where it's not and people are scared of it to the other side where it's just as scary in the wrong hands but people are now used to the utility of it it's kind of inevitable as everything i don't know if this is going to happen but i've always talked about this before of like uh
John:
technology catching up with our perceptions right so audio we've got the technology to make audio good enough for our human ears like we can do it like even if you're a crazy audiophile person who wants 192 kilohertz whatever 48 bit like we can do that it's no problem audio does not need to get better for humans until and unless we evolve better hearing and that's gonna take a long time right
John:
We haven't caught up with video because video still is pixelated and it's not 3D like our eyes see and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But if Moore's law continues long enough and eventually Moore's law does stop because you can't make things smaller forever, see quantum physics, right?
John:
If Moore's law continues long enough that we max out on audio, vision, smell, touch, like all our senses, basically, and we still have some more like doublings of transistor density to go.
John:
We're going to get live streams whether we like it or not, because it'll basically be free.
John:
And to not do it would seem like wasteful.
John:
Right.
John:
And hopefully we will have the security things worked out then.
John:
Hopefully we all didn't die in the water wars.
John:
Like there are many caveats to what I'm describing here in this particular time scale argument.
John:
But the utility of this is tremendous.
John:
Because if I said, look, we're not going to do any privacy things, but now a genie has granted you a wish and you can go back to any moment and find anything.
John:
And where was that thing?
John:
Like you have that magical ability.
John:
It's not technology.
John:
It's literally magic.
John:
People would take that in a second.
John:
It's a superpower.
John:
It's this kind of superpowers that computers give us.
John:
Things that we can't do easily as human, like remembering things or erasing things perfectly or whatever, like computers can do.
John:
They give us the power to do that.
John:
This would be a superpower that computers could give us if it could be harnessed in a way that we find acceptable and doesn't totally destroy our lives.
John:
Is 2022 the time and the place for that to happen on macOS from a VC-funded company?
John:
Probably not, but I remain...
John:
fascinated by the idea and i think the utility of the idea is unavoidable eventually if we have excess computing capacity somebody's going to do it and some generation of people are going to grow up and they're going to think of it the way we think about our phone's gps tracking or the way we think about google searches just as part of life that it would be barbaric to live without because what the heck is the point of computers if not to do this thing
Casey:
It was interesting watching the intro video as well, which is literally a minute, I think, to the second.
Casey:
And the CEO, Dan Siracher, I probably pronounced that wrong.
Casey:
But anyways, he said that he went deaf or lost a lot of hearing in his 30s and then was able to get it back by way of a hearing aid.
Casey:
And then he thought to himself, allegedly.
Casey:
Well, what else could we apply this principle to?
Casey:
How else can we supercharge a human being?
Casey:
And he eventually landed on, well, what if you had perfect memory?
Casey:
And that's kind of what this rewind thing is trying to do.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have very mixed feelings about it.
Casey:
I like the fact that somebody is doing something innovative on Mac OS because that seems to be happening so rarely these days.
Casey:
It is funny.
Casey:
Like you had said, John, you know, unleashes Apple Silicon rewind utilizes virtually every part of Apple Silicon system on a chip running rewind doesn't tax system resources like CPU and memory while recording allegedly.
John:
uh it uses every part of the soc but doesn't tax cpu you know cpu is part of the soc and either way when you're using parts that don't count as a cpu i'm not using the cpu i'm using the h265 encoder that still uses electricity and it uses less than doing it on the cpu but like there is no avoiding the there is technical overhead for doing this technical or for the compression there's technical overhead for doing this the
John:
for the storage and there's overhead of actually doing the screen recording, right?
John:
It's not huge overhead and I think our machines can mostly handle it, but it is, it's going to impact your battery life some amount.
John:
And I don't think they throw out any figures of like 1% worse battery life or 4%, we don't know what it is, but it's not zero.
Casey:
Yeah, but I don't know.
Casey:
As someone who genuinely has a pretty crummy memory, I find this very fascinating.
Casey:
It is not often that I think to myself, oh, where did I see that thing?
Casey:
But it definitely happens.
Casey:
And in a situation where I felt like I could trust whatever vendor is providing this service,
Casey:
I would probably be interested in it, but I echo what both of you, particularly Marco, is saying about the privacy implications, about the consent implications.
Casey:
Like, yeah, I guess every time I speak to anyone on my computer, I can ask them if I have their consent to record them.
John:
Or you could turn it off like it was a big switch in the menu bar.
John:
Again, it cuts into the value if you turn it off, but it's a thing that you could do.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I think this is a very fascinating idea.
Casey:
And the fact that this group of people seems to claim that they can realize this idea, that's super cool.
Casey:
Now, I'm skeptical that that's reality, but I dig the demo, if nothing else.
Casey:
Now, maybe it's all smoke and mirrors, but it looks really slick.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I would definitely be interested in this.
Casey:
I put my name or my email in the list just because I'd like to toy with it for a minute and see what it does.
Casey:
But a lot of the incentives that I see, namely the fact that it's VC funded, and they don't really seem to know how they're going to make money, that does not align well with the incentives I want them to have, which is privacy beyond anything else.
Casey:
You know, efficiency is a second tier, you know, right behind privacy.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I'm very skeptical.
Casey:
Quick aside, by the way, I just realized a few minutes ago where A16Z came from.
Casey:
Did you know this?
Casey:
I think I figured it out.
John:
I think everybody knows but you.
John:
Everyone but you.
John:
Even I knew.
John:
Did you know the Beatles is a music pun?
Casey:
I did actually know that, but I had no idea it was 16 characters between the A and the Z. Anyways, I don't know.
Casey:
Let me start with Marco.
Casey:
Would you use this, both Rewind specifically and a fantasy, let's call it Apple, and yes, I agree with all you were saying about Apple and services, but would you use an Apple-provided version of Rewind?
Casey:
Would you use the Rewind-provided version of Rewind?
Casey:
Let me start with Marco, and then John, I'd like to hear your two cents.
Marco:
i just i don't see this ever being a thing that is worth the the risk you know it's almost like imagine if imagine if nuclear power was far less safe than it really is and so like you know imagine so we'd be like yeah like there's value in generating this power but you know every every couple of years it's gonna have a giant meltdown it's like well maybe that's not worth it and i know in reality this is a bad metaphor because it's way safer but anyway um
Marco:
You know, I think you look at this product and like, first of all, even if we ignore the VC part of it, you know, just conceptually a product like this, well, the very first thing it's going to have to do is add multi-device sync.
Marco:
Because that's the very first feature request people are going to have.
Marco:
Because they're going to go, oh, I was doing this thing, but I forget whether it was on my desktop or my laptop or my phone or my tablet.
Marco:
And I guess you can't really do any of this on iOS, but who knows how they would get around that.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So you can start to see, all right, the very first thing people are going to want is something that's going to require them to have this data synced somehow between devices and therefore probably stored on some kind of server, maybe encrypted.
Marco:
So there's already a lot of red flags even there.
Marco:
But again, even if you just stick with what they've announced and you assume they will never need money and so all that's off the table, all those concerns are off the table.
Marco:
And again, even heck, even assume...
Marco:
Not only Apple did it, but Apple of 15 years ago did it before they really got into the ad business.
Marco:
Even with all those assumptions, I think this is creating a massive liability that the liability is greater than the value that it creates.
Marco:
And I cannot see this going well long term for the people who use it.
John:
john i i also signed up for the thing i'll definitely try it out of technical curiosity um when i talked about the way apple might implement this because they're the platform owner they have more invasive access to apps running on the system and also they can do a thing that that third parties can't which is they can vend apis that third parties can then adopt to sort of opt into this so it can be both more efficient and more privacy preserving and with sort of like a an impartial referee in the middle being apple the platform owner kind of like how you know how does location services work like
John:
It's an Apple vended API that they control, and Apple is able to control the privacy of it to some degree through both the App Store and the way the APIs work.
John:
And same thing with sandboxing and a lot of things like that.
John:
That's why I envisioned Apple trying to being able to pull this off in a more secure way.
John:
I still think the technical overhead of it is probably not worth the tradeoff.
John:
But like I was saying before with the sort of long term thinking about this and how we think about GPS,
John:
I mean, there are tons of technologies that have terrible privacy implications that we don't like as tech nerds who are sensitive to this, but the world disagrees.
John:
Like Facebook, for example, right?
John:
Or, you know, so many things having to do with the web.
Marco:
Or even like, you know, workplace man-in-the-middle security products.
John:
yeah like just just you know there's i mean the workplace ones i think are more kind of more justifiable because it's like at least at least you know what you're getting into there and it's your employer and you can separate your personal or whatever things like facebook we're like oh just give them access to your whole life and they will sell ads against it and like you know people have different thresholds for how much they care about this and it seems like there are a lot of things that may be terrible for privacy but also clear pretty much everybody's threshold right and
John:
and a product like this is probably only one generation away setting aside the technical hurdles from clearing enough people's threshold that it doesn't matter who cares if everybody who listens to adp is horrified by it right uh that the masses writ large have different make different trade-offs they have different they have different weights and different values to these different things when they weigh x against y they're like oh facebook i see cool pictures of my friends and have fun total you know privacy destroying thing i don't
John:
care about that it's weird esoteric i'm not a tech nerd who cares right i'm not saying they're right obviously we disagree with that but uh if you think like i don't see this ever catching on because i find it distasteful i don't think that's you know my pessimistic view is that's not gonna save us in terms of like me trying this for real like oh will you run this on your computer all day right now i have to say no like i'm interested in seeing it run
John:
I want to see how it works.
John:
But my personal trade office is annoyed as I am when I can't find something.
John:
I'm not annoyed enough to to give this.
John:
But, you know, someday I'm going to get old and die.
John:
And then the next generation of people may not have the same foibles that I have.
John:
And the thing I was I mentioned dystopian sci fi raising this issue a lot.
John:
Someone in the chat room pointed out that there was an episode of Black Mirror that touches on this.
John:
Exactly.
John:
I've seen every episode of Black Mirror.
John:
And so I vaguely remembered it, but they looked it up for me.
John:
It's the entire history of you.
John:
It's more about, hey, if you have the ability to go back and look at any of your memories because your whole life is recorded, maybe you'll obsessively go back and look at a memory that's like, you know, that you'll sort of like.
John:
spiral on that one memory and keep obsessing over it and looking at every corner or whatever.
John:
It's kind of like a romance and someone's like, you know, I think it was like someone was cheating on someone else and someone's rewinding the memory and looking at it.
Marco:
This would be my personal hell.
Marco:
Like I'd be so tempted to like go back to like middle school and then I would just torture myself with like all the dumb crap I did and said and acted like, oh God.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
i mean like again black mirror is not a uh you know it's it's it's not a happy show although san junipero is the best episode of the entire series and it stands alone it is not a series of continuity so you like these these are independent for the most part independent episodes so just watch san junipero just find that one episode i forget which season and which episode it's for it's s-a-n space j-u-n-i-p-r-o put a link in the show notes
John:
that episode is worth watching and is one of the best episodes of television ever and it is totally standalone you need no continuity but every other episode of black mirror is so grim and the entire history of you is also grim and i'm sure there have been decades and decades of sci-fi novels that have
John:
examine what it would be like if every moment of our lives was recorded by us by a totalitarian state that's ruling over us by aliens like there are so many things in there that are scary to us which is why companies like this are trying to be careful with how the interest of technology but i pretty much do feel that something like this is unavoidable as long as technology you know again as long as more's law continues long enough to get us into a place where this can be implemented in such a way that it like
John:
that the technical trade-off and the battery life trade-off or whatever are rendered moot.
John:
And then it's just a matter of who's bothered by it.
John:
We'll all be gone.
John:
So we don't have to worry about it.
John:
And I think the generation of people who live there probably go, that's useful.
John:
I'll do that.
John:
And they'll care about privacy.
John:
They won't want it to be super bad.
John:
And, you know, if we've done well as a human race, we will have implemented laws that protect our privacy much more than we have today.
John:
But I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about that at this moment in 2022.
John:
So check again in a hundred years.
Casey:
I forgot to mention how does the recording of meetings work in the Rewind website.
Casey:
Where is the data sent?
Casey:
Video data is never sent off your Mac.
Casey:
The only data sent to a cloud service is the audio.
Casey:
We send it to a cloud transcription service in order to generate a transcript of what was said.
Casey:
This transcript is created so you can read it and search for specific words that were said.
John:
yikes nope nope i mean they can do that on device too but maybe that's the one that kills the battery you know like maybe that eats up the cpu maybe the the speech attacks is not as good on apple system it's not as jason h says in the chat room every episode of black mirror ends up on a tech company's roadmap
Marco:
oh no this because that's the thing like it's it's so easy to see like oh well we're gonna poke this hole in our security model that we previously established or that you thought you had in order to provide this great value this now there's one hole already oh we gotta send your audio off to a cloud thing
Marco:
Okay, well, what's next?
Marco:
It's so easy to make a couple little exceptions here.
Marco:
Well, we have to make this exception here to provide value to you and or us.
Marco:
But that becomes so easy to do.
Marco:
Once there's any holes, oh, we'll just add a little more here.
Marco:
Just a little more.
Marco:
Oh, one more little exception here.
Marco:
And again, the liability of this is so high, it is not worth even creating.
Casey:
I do think it's a very interesting technical challenge with what appears to be a very interesting solution.
Casey:
But yeah, the more I think about it, and I was already getting the heebie-jeebies to begin with, but the more I think about it, the heebie-er my jeebies get, if you will.
Casey:
It is creepy.
Casey:
You know what else is creepy?
Casey:
Elon Musk officially owns Twitter now.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
I don't even know what to say about this.
Marco:
People are acting like this is some kind of massive change and huge turn for the worse.
Marco:
Now, I think this is not good in absolute terms.
Marco:
However, in relative terms to the way Twitter has always been led, I don't know that it's that much worse.
Marco:
Twitter has always been terribly led by horrible people.
Marco:
Like, it's never been well moderated.
John:
It's been terribly led, but it hasn't been terribly led by people who have ideas that are as wrong as his are.
Marco:
Yes!
John:
Yes, it has!
John:
I don't think so.
John:
So here's...
John:
So the reason we all think Twitter has been mismanaged is because the crew that was running Twitter for all these years has just seemed unable to do anything.
John:
So it was like status quo was the safe move because like, hey, we've got this thing.
John:
It's kicking off where it's becoming super popular.
John:
It's becoming part of the culture.
John:
It's blah, blah, blah.
John:
uh let's just not rock the boat so they did nothing for twitter to twitter for so long they didn't really figure out how to make a lot of money they made money but they didn't make a lot of money they could have made potentially more money uh they didn't add features that's for sure uh they screwed third-party developers and then kind of like backed off a little bit on that like they didn't do a great job but it was mostly inaction
John:
It was people who didn't have any good ideas.
John:
The best idea they had was it seemed to me that they understood the limits of their competence.
John:
They were like, we don't know what to do.
John:
So let's just not do anything, which is not good leadership, to be clear.
John:
But it is different than I know what we should do.
John:
We should do bad things.
John:
Now, Elon Musk, to be fair, says lots of crap.
John:
You have no idea what he's going to do.
John:
It's just kind of like it's hard to talk about his owning Twitter until he actually does anything.
John:
You can't really pay attention to what he says.
John:
He says a lot of things, right?
John:
But a lot of the things he says make the world think, I don't like those ideas, and if you were to do them, I would be sad.
John:
And that's different than the people who were running Twitter before.
John:
The people who were running Twitter before weren't constantly saying, we want to let more Nazis back.
John:
They weren't saying that.
John:
What they were saying is, we're trying to get rid of them, but it's hard and we're incompetent.
John:
Like, you know, which is not, again, not good leadership, you know.
John:
And they, like, the way they handled moderation, it was not good.
John:
But in general, the noises they made was...
John:
We agree that this should be better than it is and we're trying to make it better and we're failing at making it better.
John:
Right.
John:
That's very different than saying, actually, I think we should make it worse.
John:
And that's what a lot of people hear when they hear Elon Musk speak because he has ideas that we say, no, that would make everything worse.
John:
And he's like, yeah, isn't that great?
John:
And that's why Elon Musk potentially is way, way worse than the incredibly incompetent people who are running Twitter before.
Marco:
See, I think people are forgetting some of the details of how how crappily Twitter has been run.
Marco:
And and I'm not I'm not just talking about product direction.
Marco:
You know, we can we can say things like, oh, they should have had to edit tweet or whatever.
Marco:
You know, that that's one area.
Marco:
And honestly, it's hard to imagine anybody doing worse than what Twitter has been doing to date in that area.
Marco:
But, you know, I think killing Vine and stuff like that.
Marco:
They just generally didn't know what to do.
Marco:
But I think it's important to remember Twitter's past leadership was extremely libertarian, extremely hands off with moderation and let a whole bunch of hate and Nazis and horrible stuff on the platform indefinitely with poor controls and poor enforcement.
Marco:
But which direction did they go in?
John:
They went in the direction of improving that incredibly slowly and not to the level that we find acceptable.
John:
But it didn't go in the other direction.
John:
There was no sort of there was no sort of consensus with the leadership that, in fact, you know how bad it is now?
John:
We should make it worse.
John:
Instead, they said, OK, we kind of gradually agreed that maybe we should make it better.
John:
And they acted too slowly and did a bad job.
John:
But directionally, they were not heading in the wrong direction.
John:
They were heading the right direction from a place of terribleness too slow.
Marco:
I think they were so far from right before – and I don't mean right as a conservative.
Marco:
I mean right as incorrect.
Marco:
They were so far from good before that I don't even know if we can judge their micro moves as being even in the right direction.
John:
They did move in the right direction and did make important moves, especially within the last few years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Here's the thing.
Marco:
Everyone points to like, oh, look, Twitter finally kicked off Donald Trump.
Marco:
You know when Twitter kicked off Donald Trump, the second his term was clearly done, the second he had no more use to them, they kicked him off.
Marco:
They kept him on the entire four years before that and didn't enforce a goddamn thing against him.
Marco:
When he broke all the rules, he was himself directly abusive and breaking laws constantly, and they did nothing against him because he was too convenient to have on the platform and it would have been too politically bad for, in their mind, to kick him off.
Marco:
So they kept him on.
Marco:
Those stupid weasels kept him on the entire term and let him do all the damage he did.
Marco:
And they only kicked him off...
Marco:
Like after January 6th, when it was when he was politically tanked and when his term was effectively over, that's when they kicked him off.
Marco:
They wrung every single bit of value out of having him on that platform.
Marco:
And then they look like heroes for kicking him off.
Marco:
So forgive me if you think like, you know, if Elon flirted the idea of maybe letting him back on, that doesn't make him any worse than the previous leadership.
Marco:
That makes them both turds, to be clear.
Marco:
But it makes that it's no it's no worse than them.
John:
they did kick him off and he would be reversing that so that's worse like obviously not kicking him off for so long is terrible and you could you know like they waited too long and they did a bad job or whatever but reversing it is worse like i mean it's comparing two bad things to be clear i don't disagree with anything you said about what they did like but twitter is more than just him twitter is how they handled all the moderation and stuff and there were people in twitter trying to move things in a good direction and
John:
uh and part of what enabled people to try to move things in a good direction twitter was the ineffectiveness of leadership that they were able to try to do good within the org despite the fact that the leadership may have disagreed with the good they were trying to do you know what i mean like that they weren't paying attention and while they weren't paying attention the head of the the trust and safety department was able to try to do good things and hire some good people briefly right and
John:
Again, you can't put this at the feet of the line because what has he done so far?
John:
Not much, right?
John:
He's fired a bunch of people that people think he hasn't fired.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's the thing.
Marco:
I think the reason why I am slightly optimistic about this is not necessarily because I hugely believe in him.
Marco:
It's more that I just had so little faith in the previous leadership.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I think he is he's showing signs in both directions.
Marco:
He's showing signs that seem like things are going to be terrible and signs that show that maybe he's going to make some refreshing changes.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
We don't know yet.
Marco:
He you know, as as John said a few minutes ago, like Elon floats a lot of ideas in public and he's a total troll and he does a lot of it for attention or for laughs.
Marco:
Sometimes he's actually legitimately floating an idea he thinks actually might work.
Marco:
He's not good socially.
Marco:
He's not a serious person.
Marco:
He's not a serious person.
Marco:
He has obviously pretty poor social skills, possibly for reasons that I can't diagnose because I'm not a professional, but there might be something there.
Marco:
I think he clearly...
Marco:
You can't take everything he says at face value, but you also can't rule him out as being totally incompetent because of all the crap he says, some of it he actually does and it turns out pretty good.
Marco:
Not all of it.
Marco:
But some of it.
Marco:
And so I think it's important when dealing with him, I think it's important to try to just not feed into his trolling with your attention and just focus on the results.
Marco:
Is he going to actually do good stuff?
Marco:
And the answer to that is we don't know yet.
Marco:
It's too soon.
Marco:
But Twitter's previous leadership was awful.
Marco:
And so I think the bar is low for him to be at least no worse than them.
John:
Well, the thing is, like, the thing that's attractive in any sort of, like, situation where you want a strong man to come in and, like, wipe the slate clean or whatever is, like, you want decisive action, right?
John:
I'm so sick of these people doing nothing or, you know, like, saying they're going to do something and never doing anything or, like,
John:
Saying they're moving in the right direction, but they move so slow it doesn't even matter.
John:
I want decisive action.
John:
And at a certain point, dissatisfaction with the status quo becomes so pervasive that decisive action is the most important thing.
John:
It doesn't even matter what that action is.
John:
I just want decisive action.
John:
And very often, the biggest problem...
John:
big corporations have is there's no one there who's empowered to do something decisive because once you have a company that's really really big especially if the people running it aren't the people who founded it and don't own it all you just kind of want to not screw things up and you have your options vest and get your golden parachute and like there's lots of motivations to not rock the boat right because everyone involved and so it becomes hard for big corporations to do anything it becomes hard for leadership to do something um
John:
What Elon Musk has going for him and the things people find attractive is he doesn't care.
John:
He doesn't care because he's already rich.
John:
He doesn't care because he doesn't care.
John:
Whatever it is, he has no problem with taking decisive action.
John:
And people find that attractive.
John:
But that is obviously the trap is if it's decisive action doing something terrible, that's not good.
John:
Right.
John:
And very often people will say, yeah, he did the terrible thing, but it was so decisive.
John:
And that is attractive to people.
John:
Like, people can hold that in their head and say, I don't agree with what he did, but at least he did it decisively, and that makes me admire him, right?
John:
And the other thing is, well, you can't argue with the results.
John:
The results were great.
John:
Very often, people are put in a situation where
John:
you know not being as incompetent as the last person is seen as a victory for example right or just sort of like like knowing it like the question is if you had picked a random person off the street and put them in that same situation and said consequences are meaningless to you no matter what happens don't worry you'll be fine do whatever you think is right tons of people would be able to do what Elon Musk did and
John:
his the thing that that say oh i will attribute to this he's a genius it's like he was just uninhibited was he uninhibited because that's the wise thing to do i don't know but he was he was uninhibited and he was able to do the thing that other people didn't have the guts to even try and it worked out a few times and it also helped that he was born rich and blah blah blah right you know so i don't like
John:
Saying like, oh, he was involved with things that were a success, therefore he knows what he's doing.
John:
I don't see that at all, because this is a totally different realm.
John:
And we kind of see how he how he uses Twitter.
John:
And if that's what he likes about it, it's potentially I potentially don't want to be on the Twitter that Elon Musk thinks he would enjoy.
John:
But I'm also not ready to celebrate his disciples until I see what he is decisive about, because I do want to see the decisions.
John:
And who knows what they will be?
John:
Because it's not as if he's immune to feedback and learning, but he'll try all sorts of things and he'll say all sorts of things.
John:
And hopefully he will try something.
John:
It'll be a disaster.
John:
He'll try something else.
John:
That's what, you know, then the clock is ticking on his debt and all the other financial things or whatever.
John:
But that's that's his MO.
John:
And that's what people who have nothing to lose do.
John:
People who have nothing to lose can be refreshing, but kind of like rewind.ai.
John:
Sorry, rewind.ai.
John:
Having nothing to lose can also be terrifying, right?
John:
It really depends.
John:
And that's why, in general, it's not a great idea to have single, unaccountable people with nothing to lose in control of things that are important.
John:
Just putting that out there.
Marco:
Yeah, and I totally agree with that.
Marco:
But I think that when people judge whatever he's going to do with Twitter, and look, he might completely ruin it for all we know, but I think it's very important to just always contextualize like, well, how good was it before?
Marco:
In the case of things like moderation decisions.
Marco:
I don't necessarily care if Twitter is filled with a bunch of people whose stuff I don't want to see if I'm not seeing it.
Marco:
And I don't really care if there's people who try to abuse me or people I care about if I and they don't see it.
Marco:
So I think it's important to recognize when you have a social network as big as Twitter –
Marco:
It's really hard to say people of type or belief XYZ should not even be allowed to use this because it is really blurring the line between public infrastructure and a private company.
Marco:
So that's a tough thing to manage.
John:
I think the line is very blurry when one person owns it.
John:
And it's a private company.
John:
Literally, it's a private company.
John:
Like, where's the blurred line?
Marco:
Well, but again, I mean, look, I make these arguments all the time about the App Store and about how, like, you know, the App Store has become such a required and massive part of so much of everyday life and commerce that...
Marco:
it does kind of cross the line and start to need public-style regulation.
Marco:
Large social networks, the handful that there are, are kind of like that in certain ways.
Marco:
It's tricky.
Marco:
You can't just say, somebody who's ultra-conservative, who's a huge dickwad, you can't just say, oh, they can't use this platform because of something stupid they said.
Marco:
But you can say, no one needs to see what they say.
Marco:
And so it's really, it's so hard.
John:
I think you can say they can't use the platform.
John:
That's the whole point of having a private company.
John:
I totally disagree that Twitter is the public square.
John:
It's like 200 million tech nerds and journalists.
John:
It's a private company.
John:
The public square is the public square.
John:
The internet, you could say, is the public square.
John:
But anybody can start a social network.
John:
You can make your own Mastodon server.
John:
I will never be on board with that.
John:
It is ridiculous.
Marco:
Yeah, but you know what?
Marco:
Look, look, everyone, look, this is not the first time that Twitter has made us all mad.
Marco:
And this is not the first time that lots of us have with great principled stands say we're leaving Twitter.
Marco:
Go join us somewhere.
Marco:
Here's on this new other thing.
Marco:
Come join us here because Twitter has made us mad.
Marco:
And all those other things have pretty much gone nowhere because that's not how social networks work.
Marco:
And so I think it's – to everyone out there who's like fleeing Twitter, look, do what you got to do.
Marco:
If you feel strongly enough to do that, go for it.
Marco:
But don't assume that you will never come back.
Marco:
Don't assume that Twitter is guaranteed to be bad under this new ridiculous leader.
Marco:
Keep an open mind that maybe this will be fine, or at least no worse than it has been, and maybe leave the door open to come back, because you're not going to get anyone else to go en masse to some new thing that's the same thing, but just not Twitter.
Marco:
That's not how anything works, and we've seen this time and time again, so...
Marco:
uh i would advise everyone you know before you go fleeing to your alternative and delete your twitter account like maybe don't delete the account maybe maybe leave it open and don't post saying i'm never coming back you know maybe just you know leave leave the door open and don't burn the bridge also i to go back a little bit is elon that decisive like he seems to be waffling about what to do with twitter blue and whether he came in and threw his weight around immediately making like
John:
add this feature in a week and do this and firing a bunch of firing a bunch of people and telling a bunch of people to do a thing within a week uh is probably stupid but definitely decisive he didn't have a year's worth of meetings with people before deciding what to do he's just doing stuff is he doing things with with forethought or things that are wise to do or things that will be useful we'll find out but he did a bunch of stuff that's for sure
Casey:
Well, but then he's getting in fights with Stephen King or not even getting in fights.
Casey:
He's asking Stephen King, well, what do you think I should do?
John:
He does stupid stuff all the time.
John:
Like that's all he does all day is stupid stuff, right?
John:
And the things he did, quote unquote, there's my whole point with the decisively is firing a bunch of people and trying to make sure they don't get severance.
John:
Like, oh, it's decisive, but it's bad.
John:
You're doing it's like you're firing the wrong people and you're doing it in a dickish way.
John:
And like, but because it's decisive, like something is happening, right?
John:
So if your thing was like, I hate...
John:
stagnation of twitter i want to see something happen the you know the monkey's paw finger on the monkey's paw curls and says okay something's happening now all right and we'll see we'll see how it turns out uh but things are happening i feel for the people who work there because i'm sure lots of people work there would like things to be better and they they don't have control over this um
John:
But, you know, I'm sure this is not the last time we'll talk about this.
John:
And it is hard because all the things he's doing so far are like rumors of what he's doing internally that are leaking out.
John:
And it's like, that's not relevant to us as users of the thing.
John:
We have to see what happens to the Twitter that we use.
John:
And right now, there's not much visible except for tons of things that he's talking about doing, but hasn't actually done yet.
John:
So we'll see.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand randos on Twitter, randos in the chat room, people that I am acquainted with, friends—
John:
Many of whom seem to worship the ground that Elon walks on because he's decisive and he's rich and might makes right.
John:
And he's a strong man.
John:
Like this is not a new phenomenon.
John:
Thousands of years of human history have shown people love the strong man.
John:
People love authoritarian fascism is popular for a reason.
John:
It is explicable.
John:
It is should not be shocking.
John:
We would hope that people would, you know, learn the lesson of history, but they don't.
John:
It is attractive.
John:
It will always be attractive, probably until and unless we evolve away from it or, you know, wipe ourselves out.
Marco:
He has a lot of the same appeal that Trump did to a lot of people.
Marco:
Despite being the richest person in the world most of the time, he's seen as the everyman to a lot of people who feel like society is against them.
Marco:
The everyman.
Marco:
He came from nothing.
John:
The son of a diamond emerald miner in South Africa.
Marco:
Yeah, just like Trump was self-made and a good businessman, right?
John:
Self-made multimillionaire.
John:
Started off with nothing but a few hundred million from his father.
Marco:
But what appeals to people about him, there's so much overlap with Trump.
Marco:
And it's many of the same people.
Marco:
And so I don't agree with pretty much any of that.
Marco:
But I understand why...
Marco:
a certain personality type would think he's basically God.
Marco:
And we have to deal with that.
Marco:
That's the reality.
Marco:
And we might as well try to understand it and deal with it.
John:
The project of society is to try to make it so that those notions do not find root.
John:
And we are doing a bad job of
John:
educating society.
John:
So far, we're not burning witches.
John:
We got away from that, but barely.
John:
Barely.
John:
And in any second, it threatens to come back.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
I've had lengthy conversations with some of these Elon superfans.
Casey:
It's so troubling because they seem to think a lot of them...
Casey:
Oh, well, just listen to this interview.
Casey:
Or, oh, did you just know this one tidbit?
Casey:
Or, oh, what if I told you this?
Casey:
Like, suddenly, oh, you're right.
Casey:
Elon is God.
Casey:
I am a mere peon in the world that he lives and owns.
Casey:
And I don't get, like...
Casey:
I don't understand.
Casey:
And I guess I should just let it go because it's probably not making for good programming.
Casey:
I don't understand how people are so enamored with him.
Casey:
I just don't.
Casey:
I don't think that his cars are very good.
Casey:
SpaceX, I don't know enough about to have an opinion.
Casey:
Starlink seems like it's clever, but not really going to amount to a whole lot.
John:
I mean, part of it was what you're explaining right now, that you associate all those things with a single person, which is a ridiculous thing, right?
John:
But it's a thing that we all do.
John:
It's a shortcut.
John:
It's like Steve Jobs is Apple.
John:
Elon Musk is Tesla.
John:
And obviously, like, those are companies filled with people doing things.
John:
And because he...
John:
owns them or funded them or make made important decisions that led them to their success we attribute it all to that one person and that type of thing is the same thing that leads you to you know to like like any you assign accomplishments accrual of wealth power good looks height like all these things all these attributes that people can have we connect them to virtue and say you know if you
John:
Yeah, if you have a limp that is less virtuous than the person who walks without a limp, right?
John:
If you get a disease that is like, and we connect everything with virtue, right?
John:
Your hair color, your skin color, your height, how much money you have, what family you belong to, things that are in your control, things that aren't in your control, we say, and therefore that is connected to virtue.
John:
What virtue?
John:
Uh, brains, wisdom, strength, uh, you know, leadership qualities.
John:
And that causes people, you know, why do they worship these people?
John:
Because all of those accomplishments are connected with merits that they believe in.
John:
And they say, of course I believe in him.
John:
He is a hero.
John:
He is amazing.
John:
He is brilliant.
John:
He is making the world a better place because they, you know, they, uh,
John:
These accomplishments, which can be accomplished by terrible people, say, but no, but because he did those things, because he has those things, because he is those things, therefore he has these other virtues.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is it's an unavoidable trap of human nature and a shortcut that we take.
John:
So anybody who accrues, acquires any of those things.
Right.
John:
People start to see all those other virtues in them.
John:
Right.
John:
And of course, there's, you know, the people who see virtue in the punishing of the people they don't like, which gets into an even bigger problem with fascism and racism and so on and so forth.
John:
But like, it's depressing, but it is well, well trod territory.
John:
And it is it is difficult to combat, especially when other things are going poorly as well.
Casey:
I just can't wrap my mind around how people who I know that strike me as intelligent human beings look at this professional internet troll.
Casey:
He seems like just a dirtbag human, and yet these people worship the ground he walks.
Casey:
I just don't get it, but we should move on.
Marco:
I think it's important, too, to separate the personality details of this person from his work.
Marco:
And I think, you know, there was a discussion on the talk show about this this week.
Marco:
It was actually a great episode with Federico Vitici and John Graber.
Marco:
Great episode.
Marco:
I recommend it.
Marco:
There was a great discussion there about kind of, you know, separating the artist from the work when somebody turns out to be like a turd in real life and that comes to light, but you still enjoy their work or what they've made before you found out they were a turd.
Marco:
You can look at the various companies that he's been involved with so far, and I think largely they've been pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They did great things in batteries.
Marco:
They're working on doing great things in solar.
Marco:
SpaceX is itself a pretty great thing, doing itself pretty great things.
Marco:
Starlink is a bunch of asterisks with the space debris problem, but that's a pretty amazing idea as well, that from the handful of people I know who have used it, it's pretty great.
Marco:
So I think owning Twitter, again, if we just don't even pay attention to the crap he says...
Marco:
Just look at the work.
Marco:
And I know that's hard because he says a lot and most of it's horrendously inflammatory or ridiculous or whatever.
Marco:
But just ignore everything he says and just look at the work.
Marco:
Owning Twitter kind of fits in the sense that...
Marco:
It's yet another massive challenge in yet another area that he has at least started out knowing nothing about.
Marco:
But, you know, do you think he knew how to make cars before Tesla?
Marco:
Do you think he knew how to make rockets before SpaceX?
Marco:
Do you think he knew how to launch satellites and run an ISP before Starlink?
Marco:
This is actually fitting a pattern that he does of tackling truly ridiculous, pretty large scale, pretty difficult problems that he thinks he can do.
Marco:
Regardless of why he thinks he can do them or the ridiculous ideas that he gets that he spouts off on Twitter.
Marco:
Again, if you ignore all of that because he's a massive troll and kind of a dick.
Marco:
So if you just ignore all of that and just look at the work.
Marco:
He does actually achieve some pretty remarkable things.
Marco:
And so that's why I think, hey, you know what?
Marco:
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
Marco:
I'll stick around on Twitter to see what the heck he does with the place.
Marco:
Because again, it wasn't well run before.
Marco:
And so he's tackling a massive problem again.
Marco:
And in the past, when he has tackled massive problems, it's actually worked out pretty well eventually.
Marco:
Again, if you ignore everything he says.
Marco:
So I'm willing to apply the same strategy here.
Marco:
Turns out his car company makes pretty great cars that a lot of people like.
Marco:
His rocket company makes pretty good rockets that are doing important work.
Marco:
You know, his satellite company is covering space with these disposable satellites that all those issues aside are providing a good service to people.
Marco:
So again, big problems.
Marco:
ignore all the crap that comes out of the guy's mouth and I hope no one has to work for him in the process because apparently that's not a super fun amount or that's not super fun either but you know when you look at the work when you look at what comes out of this you know jerk it actually is often pretty impressive
John:
Well, it's not a blank slate when it comes to Twitter, because we kind of like we may not know what he thinks he wants to do with Twitter, but we know how he uses Twitter.
John:
It's not like Twitter.
John:
He's not new to Twitter.
John:
He's been on Twitter for years.
John:
He is a very experienced Twitter user.
John:
And if you see the way he uses Twitter and you think, how would this person make Twitter more to their liking?
John:
It's not optimistic.
John:
That doesn't mean that's what he's going to do.
John:
It doesn't mean he's going to make Twitter more to his liking.
John:
But I have a feeling.
John:
Look at how Jack used Twitter.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, I know.
John:
But like, I mean, I think I think it kind of fit the way he used it was like, I kind of like it the way it is.
John:
And so it didn't change that much.
John:
But Elon wants to change Twitter.
John:
I mean, the reason he bought it practically is, you know, it's like I'm just this is a thing I use all the time.
John:
And I think it should I think it should be different than it is.
John:
So I'm just going to buy it because I'm super rich.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not as if we're like, I'm just going to learn about social networks now.
John:
I mean, he is going to learn about how it is to run them.
John:
But we're not starting from zero in terms of I have no idea what Elon thinks about Twitter or
John:
we at least know what he thinks about it as a user.
John:
We don't know necessarily that he's going to tailor the service to his own personal tastes, but I have a hard time believing he'll do much of anything.
John:
So I'm going in predisposed to think that the changes that he, he is going to make are not going to appeal to me and, uh, people who are a similar mindset, but we'll see.
John:
Like I, I, I'm, I totally agree.
John:
It's like, it's hard to talk about until he's actually done something.
John:
Cause it's point, like we're not even talking about all the things that he said because, uh,
John:
Whatever.
John:
He says lots of things.
John:
He's changed what he said 17 times.
John:
Let's just wait to see what he actually does.
John:
But I am not particularly optimistic because pretty much every idea that he's floated with a few minor exceptions does not seem like the way to go to me.
John:
But, you know, we'll see.
Marco:
Well, but see, even that, like, in all the stupid crap he has floated, there's usually been, like, a little kernel of something that was actually correct or good about it.
Marco:
Well, if you say everything, eventually, one of the things is going to be, you know, if he covers all the bases.
Marco:
But, you know, like, all the stupid crap he said that everyone jumps down his throat about, usually it's like, okay, that's 80% a bad idea, but 20% of it, you were actually on track for something good, you know?
Marco:
And I think that's how he does lots of things.
Marco:
That, like, if you look at the way he runs his companies and some of the ideas he tries...
Marco:
He tries lots of crazy stuff where he floats a lot of crazy ideas or he says lots of crazy things.
Marco:
Some of them never happen, thank God.
Marco:
Some of them do, like the Cybertruck.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
Well, that doesn't happen yet.
Marco:
It's not out yet.
Marco:
You can't buy it yet.
Casey:
It'll arrive just before Linux on the desktop really arrives.
Casey:
It'll be the same time.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, like, you know, he has a bunch of ridiculous ideas.
Marco:
He tries to like, you know, look at some of the things he's talked about on Twitter so far.
Marco:
So, you know, some of the immediate controversies are that he wanted to lay off a bunch of people.
Marco:
Well, yeah, Twitter is way too big for what it is.
Marco:
How he does it.
Marco:
Well, but slow down.
Casey:
But he laid off the wrong people.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It was the wrong people.
Marco:
So this is the 80% bad part, but the 20% of it, like he identified a real problem.
Marco:
So he, he might've solved it poorly.
John:
If you'd pick someone off the street and put them in charge of Twitter, they also would have laid off a lot of people because everyone knows it's overstaffed.
John:
It's like, that's what attributing.
John:
This is like, you know, the obvious thing that everybody knew, but no one had the guts to it.
John:
It's a condemnation of previous Twitter management, obviously.
Marco:
Yeah, the previous dropping door of leadership never touched it.
Marco:
So that's one thing, okay?
Marco:
They're the ones that hired all those people.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So that's one thing.
Marco:
So there's also – look at his dumb idea about tying verification to Twitter Blue.
Marco:
Well, some of that is terrible, but also Twitter Blue is a premium service that no one I know bought.
Marco:
I know so many people who are Twitter power users.
Marco:
I don't know a single person who buys Twitter Blue.
Marco:
And I have no use for it.
Marco:
And I've been using this platform for like a decade heavily.
Marco:
And yet, so obviously, they launched a premium product that most of their premium users don't want.
Marco:
Secondarily,
Marco:
You know who could pay for verification, who would love to pay for verification?
Marco:
Businesses.
Marco:
Every single business.
Marco:
I have a verification mark on Overcast.
Marco:
We have one on ATP.
Marco:
And in part, the reason why I sought those was because it makes us look more legitimate.
Marco:
And if I could have those in other platforms as easily, I would get them there, too, because, again, and businesses are, you know, yeah, you don't want to make like every journalist, you know, in the world have to pay for something that might be able to afford it or whatever.
Marco:
But businesses sure can.
Marco:
So, again, there's a kernel of like, OK, why?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
You know, you have businesses capturing all this value on Twitter and.
Marco:
Why not let businesses pay not $20, make businesses pay $100 a month for a verification checkmark?
Marco:
Like these aren't terrible ideas completely.
Marco:
The details that he has floated so far or that have been rumored that he said some of the details are awful.
Marco:
Many of the details are awful.
Marco:
But at the heart, like, you know, Twitter is a platform that most people have identified as totally failing as an advertising delivery service.
Marco:
And everything people want is away from ads.
Marco:
So what if they launched a premium thing that people wanted to pay six or eight or 10 or 20 bucks a month for?
Marco:
That's not that bad.
Marco:
Well, but did you do the math on that, though?
John:
You do the back of the envelope math.
John:
It's not great.
John:
Like that's the like that's that's what you get with just saying things and saying like, oh, well, you know, this way, like just do the back of the envelope math.
John:
Like how much of the money they make from ads now?
John:
And everyone agrees they're not doing a good job with ads.
John:
But how much do they make from ads now?
John:
How much would they make of every single person who's on Twitter pays what he's saying a month?
John:
And, you know, 100 percent of people aren't going to pay for it.
John:
And it's like, it's way less, right?
John:
So what's the plan?
John:
And obviously, he just said, that's why it's so hard to engage with this.
John:
Like, who cares?
John:
He hasn't actually done anything yet.
John:
We'll see.
John:
And what if it's only additive and blah, blah, blah?
John:
Like, there's all these theories about how it could go or whatever.
John:
But back of the envelope, like, being able to pay for verification and those type of things, you know, like, as most of the articles that talk about this say, I think there was a, was this in the Neil Patel one?
John:
That the product of Twitter is moderation.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
That that's what they're selling.
Marco:
That was a great article.
Marco:
Yeah, the Verge, welcome to hell.
John:
Right.
John:
Because that's that's true.
John:
That's true of anything that's advertising driven or whatever.
John:
Like you need the people to be there so you can advertise to them.
John:
So you have to make it a hospitable place.
John:
Twitter has arguably not been great about getting people to be there, but it's got a lot of the quote unquote valuable people there who are valuable to advertise to or whatever.
John:
Like that all makes sense.
John:
It just hasn't been leveraged very well.
John:
And verification is part of the the moderation product because you want to make it so that there is a way for people who use their service to determine if this is really McDonald's or not McDonald's.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like that's part of the product that they're selling.
John:
Right.
John:
You could sell other things on top of that, like let the people who are willing or able to pay get better features or whatever.
John:
But that is all in service of making it a place where it is safe and suitable to advertise.
John:
Because the money you're going to get from the people who pay for any of these services is nothing compared to like literally every single person on Twitter pays this.
John:
It's not going to match your advertising income.
John:
unless you charge every single person $3,000 a month.
John:
Like when you do them, and again, I use the everybody, but that's ridiculous.
John:
What percentage of people, no matter how good you make this product, what percentage of the people even can pay for it, let alone will pay for it, then add up all their money and weigh it against your potential advertising to these people who are valuable to advertise to and advertising keeps winning.
John:
And so in the end, if you look at this from a business person's perspective,
John:
If you want to make more money than they're making now, you can cut costs, which is what everybody does when they buy a company, lay off a bunch of people, lower your costs.
John:
And you can increase revenue.
John:
And where is that ever going to come from?
John:
You can get some revenue from your users, but there's not a lot of them.
John:
Twitter is not as big as Facebook.
John:
So they can't get a fraction of a cent from everybody and be bazillionaires.
John:
They have to get...
John:
Larger money from advertisers to give access to their relatively small mere hundreds of millions or whatever Twitter's user bases of people who are valuable to advertise to.
John:
And then there's the value of the conversation that happens on Twitter.
John:
You know, again, makes it a place where people want to be so you can advertise to them.
John:
Are there other ways to make money from Twitter?
John:
Fine.
John:
But any way you come up with to make money from Twitter, you have to say, OK, is this in lieu of advertising?
John:
Because if it is, it has to make at least as much money.
John:
If it's not in lieu of advertising, does this make it an environment where advertisers still want to advertise?
John:
And that's where I feel like he gets into trouble with a lot of his.
John:
schemes that he's throwing out there not that they're bad ideas because i've always been a proponent of have people pay for a service so they can support it with money but twitter is so long past the point like it's it's too big to be supported by its users because you know not enough people will pay to run twitter like you can't run twitter on you know you can't make it like app.net where like everyone who's on it pays something or whatever twitter is too big for that but it's also too small
John:
To say it's a free for all and I don't care because we have literally 5 billion people.
John:
So you will advertise with us.
John:
It's in that uncomfortable place in between where it's just barely too big to be supported by its users.
John:
You have to advertise to it, but it's filled with people who want to make it a place where advertisers don't want to advertise.
John:
Well, I'm tired of talking about this.
John:
You do wonder if Elon Musk watches Black Mirror and, again, like the joke in the chat room, sees every episode and says, that would be awesome.
John:
Don't give him any more ideas.
Casey:
Seriously, Jesus.
Casey:
Jesus, John.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Trade Coffee, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atv.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
can we have something to lighten the mood please and thank you i don't know maybe we just have to come i did i did enjoy the part where he thought stephen king was balking at paying 20 so he said how about eight he's so dumb he's so dumb he's not dumb that was that was trolling that was like i come on was it he is a troll oh he's unquestionably a troll unquestionably
John:
I mean, that's – part of that – part of saying that he's always a troll is attributing to him an intelligence, wisdom, and self-awareness that is not in evidence because it seems like – Well, thank you.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like it's easier to say that because like, well, obviously he must be smart because he's rich.
John:
And so when he says something stupid, it must be because he's trolling to get a rise out of you.
John:
But no, sometimes he's just stupid.
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, in the things like this, this strikes me as trolling, but I'm not, I'm not convinced it is.
Casey:
Yeah, for sure.
Casey:
He is definitely a troll.
John:
Like I'm not, he's a thousand percent, but it's hard, but sometimes it's hard to tell when he's trolling, when he's just dumb, because there's enough of both to go around.
Casey:
Well, and this is such an absurd tweet.
Casey:
He tweeted a couple hours ago.
Casey:
Advertisers should support this poll.
Casey:
Option one, freedom of speech.
Casey:
Option two, political, quote, correctness, quote.
Casey:
That's trolling.
Casey:
I know it is, but it's so, like, why do we worship this jacket?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
I don't get it.
John:
I don't think a lot of people worship him.
John:
I don't think it's an epidemic of positive regard, which is how we got Trump as president.
John:
That's what it is.
Casey:
Can we please talk about anything else, for the love of Christ?
Casey:
Please.
Casey:
I don't care what.
Casey:
Anything.
Casey:
Anything else.
Casey:
Why did I bring this?
Casey:
I brought this on myself.
Casey:
I'm an idiot.
Casey:
I shouldn't have brought it up.
John:
I mean, we avoided it for as long as we could.
John:
It's like, well, he was going to buy it, but then he's trying to get out of it.
John:
It's been going on for months.
John:
It went on and eventually it ended the way.
John:
Again, things that fly in the face of the idea of him being a mastermind.
John:
It seems like he wanted to buy Twitter and just sort of a fit of peak of like, yeah, I should control this because I'm on it all the time and it sucks and I can make it better and I should buy it for a ridiculous price.
John:
And then he kind of said, well, actually, maybe I don't want to do that.
John:
It seems like a dumb idea.
John:
Can I get out of it?
John:
Oh, no, I can't.
John:
Oh, I guess I'm buying it.
John:
Like, that is not the sign of a...
John:
of a stable genius as they would say like it's not the sign of somebody who has got their stuff together and is you know it's it's sure is decisive action he took a decisive action to do a stupid thing and then he decisively said i'm getting the hell out of this and he decisively couldn't do that
John:
It does not reflect well on him.
John:
If someone who was not a millionaire did that, you would pity them, right?
John:
You're not a billionaire.
John:
Sorry, Elon.
John:
Not the America's richest man.
John:
You would feel pity for them and how little hold they had over their life and what poor decisions they make.
John:
But when someone who's fabulously wealthy does it, people will bend over backwards to attribute genius to those moves.
John:
Those moves are not genius.
John:
Not at all.
John:
Just ask the bankers who lent him the money.