Three Wise Admins
Marco:
I guess we have to talk about him this week, huh?
Casey:
Okay, so here's the thing.
Casey:
Every year, I say over and over again, you gotta order, you gotta order, you gotta order.
Casey:
And every time all of you justifiably roll your eyes, oh sure, Casey, whatever, ho ho ho, we've heard this before.
Casey:
Really, this is your last warning.
Casey:
If you're driving, signal because you're an adult and you know what a damn turn signal is.
Casey:
Signal and then pull off the road.
Casey:
Park.
Casey:
Open up atp.fm slash store and take a look at our wares, our merchandise.
Casey:
That's W-A-R-E-S.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Mind you.
Casey:
Not our Juarez.
Casey:
Not our Juarez.
Casey:
So yeah, so here's the spread one last time real quick.
Casey:
We've got the M1 Ultra shirt, which is exactly as you would expect.
Casey:
The M1 Interposer shirt, which follow up is far and away in the lead of our new offerings.
Casey:
I'm very pleased by this.
Casey:
Uh, if you don't know what we're talking about, this is the M one logo that we've kind of created.
Casey:
And then underneath it, it says max.
Casey:
And then adjacent to that with a kind of interposer in between them is an upside down max.
Casey:
Uh, so I am the, I am in love with this shirt.
Casey:
I am so excited to get one.
Casey:
I have ordered mine.
Casey:
We additionally have M one ultra in monochrome, which is a little bit cheaper because we're not doing 34 passes to print them.
Casey:
And that comes in many, many different colors.
Casey:
We also, of course, have the traditional ATP shirt, and we have brought back the embroidered zip hoodie as well, which I quite like.
Casey:
I actually, to be honest with you, I prefer not to have the hood on my hoodie.
Casey:
I know this is very controversial, but it's still an excellent, excellent sweatshirt slash hoodie.
Casey:
And then finally, we have brought back the ATP pint glass, and you might ask, well, what do you mean, finally?
Casey:
You said they're mugs.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
You should have ordered.
Casey:
You should have listened to Casey, and you should have ordered, because guess what?
Casey:
Mugs are sold out.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Casey:
There is a slim chance we will have some extras after returns and things of that nature soon.
Casey:
maybe, and we might be able to put it up later, but no promises.
Casey:
You should have listened to me.
Casey:
You should have pulled the car over, stepped to the side of the sidewalk, done whatever you needed to do to go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Your time is running out.
Casey:
As we record this, which is presumably...
Casey:
hours before you hear it.
Casey:
There's only a couple of days left.
Casey:
It will end, the store sales will end on the 30th of April at eight in the evening ATP time.
Casey:
So that is Saturday at 8 p.m.
Casey:
ATP or New York time.
Casey:
That is your last chance.
Casey:
So now is your moment.
Casey:
Signal or say, excuse me, and pull the car or pull your butt over, do whatever you got to do.
Casey:
Go to ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
John:
Consider buying a pint glass because we've got plenty of them left.
John:
You'll be seeing them on the on-demand store for sure because it looks like we are not going to sell out of those.
Casey:
And the funny thing is, hand to deity of your choice.
Casey:
I love these pint glasses.
Casey:
Deity?
Casey:
Is that what I meant to say?
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Hand to God.
Casey:
Affluent.
Casey:
Affluent.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Bezel.
Casey:
But that was John's.
Casey:
Anyway, so yeah, hand to a thing that you consider holy.
Casey:
These pint glasses are excellent.
Casey:
They really, really are.
Casey:
The dishwasher's safe.
Casey:
They're engraved.
Casey:
They're excellent.
Casey:
I have four of them.
Casey:
I haven't broken any yet.
Casey:
And I actually have ordered two more because I love them so darn much.
Casey:
So all of my pronunciation mistakes aside, I apologize.
Casey:
The offending people have been sacked.
Casey:
But please, atp.fm/.store.
John:
One store-related thing.
John:
I did another blog post.
John:
I'm out of control.
John:
It's a whole new world.
John:
It's a whole new world.
Marco:
I would say not only did you write a blog post, you launched a new app, sort of.
John:
Kind of.
John:
Anyway, the thing I do on Twitter when we have the ATP store up, I do this thing I call frame game where I post little snippets of frames from movies or TV shows, and I ask you to guess what it's from, and the first person who guesses it gets a free T-shirt in the ATP store.
John:
And I've been doing that for several years now.
John:
It's a fun little game.
John:
I finally did a post about it to explain the game for people who don't know.
John:
And I also, this was really unrelated as I started doing this before the whole Elon Musk Twitter thing.
John:
But I was like, you know, I've been playing this game for years on Twitter and it's kind of hard to follow like on Twitter if you go back in time and try to look at it because of the way I've chose to thread the tweets together.
John:
It's just not easy to like, you know, go back in time and look at what
John:
for even for my own purposes did i ever do this movie before did somebody guess it how many you know like it's not easy to look at and i was afraid having all this stuff locked up in twitter isn't great i do the thing where you download your twitter archive periodically too but that that just gives you a local copy that's hard to follow so i wanted to have my own copy of
John:
the history of framegram which is stupid whatever but you know i saved all the images in a folder on my mac so i'm like i should put a web version of this up so i did um so there's the post explaining it uh and then there's a big shiny candy button on the post just because i always need something to distract myself with when i'm doing a blog post and this time it was can i make a shiny button
John:
um anyway uh you follow that button and it will take you to the frame game history viewer is that a place where you can go and play frame game kind of in your head if you want but really it's a history viewer if you want to see all the frames that we've ever done uh and there's a surprising number of things like more than 50 of them all the frames you've ever done the person who won them how long it took them to win because i put that in there just because it's so surprising like i think the best one is the
John:
I'm not going to ruin the movie in case you haven't seen it, but there's one where I think the smallest little piece of a frame I've ever posted, it was 64 by 64 pixels out of like a 1920 by 1200 frame.
John:
That's how much I posted with the frame and someone got it in like a minute.
John:
So...
Casey:
Looks like 48 seconds for one of them.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, sometimes they're kind of easy.
John:
And as I noted in the post, there's a good chance that people will figure out how to brute force this with computers.
John:
But I like to think that most people are trying to play legit.
John:
So anyway, read the post, play the game.
John:
It's lots of fun.
John:
One other aside I want to throw in here for a little dev corner thing.
John:
I ran when making this thing, which is, oh, it's a history viewer that shows a bunch of pictures.
John:
How hard could that be?
John:
Right.
John:
I ran into a classic of layout that I've certainly run into before on the web.
John:
And I imagine people with more experience doing iOS and Mac apps have also run into it.
John:
Tell me if this sounds familiar.
John:
So if you go to the frame game game, hypercritical.co slash frame hyphen game.
John:
you'll see that it's trying to show the frame and it shows like a small snippet of the frame and then it shows the full frame.
John:
And when it's showing the small snippet, it's in like a container that's the size of the full frame.
John:
And of course, every full frame is different aspect ratio, partly because movies and TV shows are different aspect ratios and partially because I'm taking like screenshots of video players and I'm not pixel accurate.
John:
So they're all over the place.
John:
So I have to change the aspect ratio.
John:
And it's like a single page web app or whatever.
John:
But something that you may not know if you're not a long-suffering web developer is that when you get what we call the viewport width, which is the width of the browser window from the left to the right edge,
John:
That returns the same value whether the scroll bar is visible or not.
John:
Now, most people who run their Macs in a default configuration don't even have scroll bars.
John:
They just have that thing where like, oh, when you're scrolling, like a little lozenge appears or whatever.
John:
But old people like me have it set in the general preferences and system preferences set to always show scroll bars, which is a confusing setting.
John:
It's kind of like the cache control no cache header, which tells it it's okay to cache.
John:
But anyway, always show scroll bars means...
John:
It doesn't mean that it always shows the scroll bar.
John:
It means if there's stuff that you need to scroll to, then it will always show the scroll bar, right?
John:
So if you're looking at a very long webpage and it's way taller than your monitor, you will see on the right side of your browser, a scroll bar, you know, a macOS 10 or whatever, macOS scroll bar, and it will always be there.
John:
When that scroll bar is there,
John:
The viewport width does not change, but part of the viewport is blocked by the scroll bar.
John:
So what if you want to have, like I did, want to have a frame for a movie that spans from edge to edge, okay?
John:
Well, you could get the viewport width and you could say, okay, I'm going to make this image the same width as the viewport.
John:
But of course, you know, frames have a width and a height and an aspect ratio.
John:
So if you make it the same width as the viewport, then you can calculate what the height would be based on the aspect ratio, right?
John:
And then you make it that height.
John:
But oops, what if making it that height pushed the crap on the bottom of the page down below the bottom of the browser window?
John:
Now you need a scroll bar and suddenly the scroll bar appears.
John:
And now the scroll bar is covering some of the content, which also means that a horizontal scroll bar now appears because there's some part of the content that you can't see that you need to horizontally scroll for.
John:
And so you're like, okay, well, if that happens, I'll figure out that the scroll bar is visible through an annoying hacky technique.
John:
And then I'll shrink the picture so that it moves out from under the scroll bar.
John:
And I'll say, make the picture, the viewport width minus the width of the scroll bar, which I can also calculate using some hacky ass way to do it.
John:
Right.
John:
And now you think you're all clever.
John:
So you shrink the thing.
John:
But when you shrink it, of course, the height shrinks too, right?
John:
Because you have to maintain the aspect ratio.
John:
What if the height shrinks so that now the content doesn't roll off the end of the screen and you don't need the vertical scroll bar anymore?
John:
Do you see what the problem is here?
John:
Right?
John:
So you made it too big and a vertical scroll bar appeared because it pushed the content down.
John:
Then you move it out from under the scroll bar and now in certain scenarios, the vertical content is no longer big enough to require a vertical scroll bar and now you're having a blank space on the right side of your picture.
John:
This is a classic layout problem of like changing my metrics to avoid things that pop in and out on the sides also changes the metrics because you have to maintain an aspect ratio.
John:
And so I had fun chasing my tail about this and sort of cursing and saying, like, I don't know why I didn't think of this because I've run into this exact same problem so many times, but you just you just forget about it's like like childbirth amnesia, right?
John:
You just forget about the pain.
John:
Yeah.
John:
right and so i had to do you know any programmer who's dealt with this probably knows what i did because this is not a really important application and that's just throw ugly hacks at it isn't that all of web development ever no it's all of all development ever yeah exactly because if you think about this is no actual solution like you you know it's too in this edge case which if you get a perfect you know a windows size just right and a content that says just right
John:
Both of those settings don't work, right?
John:
One of them, it's hidden underneath the scroll bar.
John:
The other one is an empty space.
John:
There's nothing in between that you can get.
John:
They're both wrong, right?
John:
So the only way to do it is to figure out how much did the content have to grow to cause the scroll bar to become visible and add a blank space that's that size.
John:
So that you make sure that when I resize this image and it gets a little bit shorter, I shove enough white space in there
John:
such that the vertical scroll bar, I'm sure the scroll bar is not going to go away.
John:
Then you can shrink the image and shove in the white space.
John:
And so don't look at the code for this.
John:
It's horrendous.
John:
But, you know, I just got sick of it and just wanted to get it done.
John:
So while you're playing the game, you can appreciate the edge case layout nuances that I had to suffer.
John:
Also, I could get the image to go exactly from one edge to the other.
John:
And please don't look on a retin display and look for half pixels because they're there.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
The Apple Studio display has a beta firmware that is available that fixes all of the camera problems.
Casey:
It is now perfect in every measurable way.
Casey:
There's nothing else to talk about.
John:
Oh, I wish.
John:
this is interesting that this this changed like we were saying like oh the screen runs ios right so i guess the next time the screen is going to get new quote-unquote firmware is the next ios update but of course this update is part of the next mac os beta now you know i'm sure there's an ios beta to go along with this and this maybe this beta is the same build number as the ios beta we don't know yet but anyway if you want to try out if you have a studio display you want to try this out which i don't recommend by the way but if you're really desperate to try it out it's in the mac os 12.4 beta
Casey:
So a friend of the show, Jason Snell, has possibly the best reasonable setup to show before and afters for this.
Casey:
A lot of people, like other friend of the show, James Thompson, had taken some photos before and after or compared them to like an iMac Pro or what have you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Jason still has a review unit, which he didn't update, and then updated his actual unit or perhaps vice versa.
Casey:
So he has two studio displays sitting right next to each other, one updated and one not.
Casey:
And so he put a video on YouTube where he filmed and linked up both of them and has them side by side.
Casey:
Um, so I am biased because I'm looking at a studio display and it's in my best interest not to think it's a piece of garbage because I've been waiting for it for like six years.
Casey:
So consider your source here.
Casey:
I have not installed the firmware update, but of course I've, I've looked at all these different, you know, examples and whatnot, and it's not great.
Casey:
I mean, it's not fixed by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
Um, I do think it's better from what I can tell, but it's not fixed, but I was talking with Jason briefly on Twitter and, um,
Casey:
Having had only one experience with... What's the front and center?
Casey:
That's your thing.
Casey:
Center Stage.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Center Stage.
Casey:
I couldn't think of the darn name.
Casey:
So I've had one experience with Center Stage, and I loved it.
Casey:
I thought it was amazing.
Casey:
I thought it made being on a call when people are flipping in and out of the call just that much better.
Casey:
And perhaps if I was just sitting on Zoom by myself all day, I would have a very different opinion about it.
Casey:
But for my needs...
Casey:
I think I would take an imperfect camera with center stage over a flawless camera without it.
Casey:
I am not saying that anyone has to agree with me.
Casey:
In fact, I bet most people don't.
Casey:
But for me, I'm willing to make that trade and I am happy to see that this is getting better.
Casey:
But I mean, I never expected this webcam to be particularly stupendous.
Casey:
I wish it was better.
Casey:
I think it should be better, especially for a company that seems to pride themselves on being so great at imaging and so on.
Casey:
But
Casey:
It doesn't look like this is fixed yet.
Casey:
And now people are starting to wonder, well, is this really hardware?
Casey:
Is this as good as it's going to get?
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
It's hard to say.
Marco:
I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the hardware here is very limited.
Marco:
When this first hit the news, whenever that was a few weeks back or a couple of months back...
Marco:
My guess then was like, I think the software might be able to tweak a little, but you have this relatively low resolution camera that's being cropped significantly to achieve center stage.
Marco:
And it's at quite a distance from people compared to the iPad that has similar hardware.
Marco:
And so it just seems like this was doomed to always be pretty mediocre to poor.
Marco:
And so far, this bears that out, that the tweaks that we're seeing now are seemingly fairly minor.
Marco:
And I think one of my favorite comparisons was, I mentioned a second ago, the James Thompson comparison.
Marco:
This is our friend who makes pCalc, great programmer and great member of our community.
Marco:
And James, he posted the before and after from the old software and the new software here.
Marco:
He also then posted the similar shot from his iMac Pro built in webcam, which may remind you is, I believe, a something like a two megapixel.
Marco:
It's a very low resolution camera.
Marco:
It's from 2017 and has no super fancy, you know, image processing.
Marco:
You know, it probably has whatever kind of basic stuff would come in any webcam, any commodity thing up to at least a couple of years ago.
Marco:
So no, you know, ML stuff.
Marco:
So in my opinion, and many others who saw this, the iMac Pro built-in webcam looks way better than the Studio webcam, before or after.
Marco:
And it's not that it looks super great, but it seems like it was working with more on the hardware side and didn't need to do so much software processing to get it to look right.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
There's only so much you can do in software when you have a little tiny sensor and a little tiny lens, and especially with these new center stage cameras, then you're further cropping it down to do the center stage effect.
Marco:
I think center stage in this context was a mistake.
Marco:
It makes a little more sense on the iPad in the sense that, again, you're holding it closer to you.
Marco:
It is more consumer-targeted.
Marco:
You might have those situations where the family's coming in and out, like they demo it in the background.
Marco:
But for a professional display like this that's mostly being bought for workplaces and power users and nerds like us...
Marco:
I don't think center stage is necessary, and it's definitely not necessary if it comes at the expense of whatever hardware resolution is necessary to have a decent picture.
Marco:
And in this case, it seems very clear putting this camera in here was a mistake.
Marco:
And if you look at the built-in webcams of all of Apple's recent hardware, I mean, look, they're never good.
Marco:
They're clearly relying very heavily on image processing in all of them, including the brand new MacBook Pros.
Marco:
People also say, why don't you put the iPhone camera, you know, the iPhone front camera even in the MacBook Pro cameras?
Marco:
And, you know, the answer there usually is depth of those screen lids being very, very limited.
Marco:
And, you know, we had to get the notch now and you don't want the notch to be bigger and stuff like that.
Marco:
But again, in a desktop display, you have significantly more depth.
Marco:
Now, they did have to keep the margins thin to make it look nice and look modern.
Marco:
So agreed, you know, there's not a lot of like depth or not a lot of like width and height in the in the screen bezel that are put up.
Marco:
But I have to imagine there was better hardware available that could have fit.
John:
and they just picked wrong here they just made the wrong choice this this webcam in this display was the wrong choice and if they have to give up center stage to have a better one i think that's the path they should have taken it's kind of weird that you know as you noted apple has always had crappy cameras crappy front facing cameras and all its products we used to complain about the two megapixel one of the iMac pro we were just saying was good it just seemed like they didn't care about them that much um we didn't think they would make it worse
John:
yeah same thing for like the macbook airs macbook pro they have like a 640 by something camera and like the original macbook air like it's just they were always just kind of not good behind the times and we complain about them and nothing would happen and i think the silver lining to this apple studio display thing is i think this is the first time that sort of the apple tech review community has latched on to the idea that the camera sucks in such a way that apple might notice because we all said it about the other ones like oh the new laptops are out oh does it still have a
John:
uh non uh hd camera we meant like it is it not up to 1080p yet or whatever like we'd make these snarky comments but it was never like a story a big story and the studio display the front-facing camera has suddenly become a story so i have to imagine especially with the mac hardware team that has produced the last few years of products that they have taken notice and
John:
that we all think their cameras suck.
John:
And the next version of anything that they put out that starting from now, right, so that's probably three years from now, like whatever the pipeline is where they are making decisions about future products now, I hope that they will say, oh, and we don't want a repeat of the Apple Studio display thing, so let's actually put a decent camera in this.
John:
That's my hope anyway.
John:
We'll circle back in three years and see how it is.
John:
And the second thing is about the software update,
John:
i still continue to think that the processing they're doing in software is not as good as it could be right because it's not as if we're looking at it and saying oh there's not enough light or it's too noisy or whatever like if you look at james thompson's thing some people are looking at the histograms of them and there someone said like did they not have the iphone camera image processing team look at this because the histogram is crap like you haven't processed it
John:
to you could you could do a better job of processing this that wouldn't look as gross it still wouldn't look great like it's not a good camera or whatever and by the way one of their solutions to like oh we have a uh a big fisheye camera that you're taking a small crop of they just took a bigger crop right so this so it makes it look less bad because you're not sort of throwing out more pixels of course you are smaller in the frame than you were before and you can decide if that's a feature or benefit but um
John:
that's that's one solution like okay we'll just zoom back out so now you can't see how ugly it is but the processing especially in james thompson's one looks off if you look at jason snell i agree he has the best example because he's literally like in front of both cameras at once so he gets to move and you can see how the camera moves around or whatever and the the one with the firmware updated the one without at various times look very similar to each other so i don't think it's a particularly big change um i still think i still think they could do better with
John:
better firmware of making i mean and i do wonder if it's like again like the like i was saying the camera thing a policy choice where they've decided that the most important thing is to have every pixel on a human being's face as bright as possible even if it makes them look like a wax death mask i think that's the wrong choice but that's
John:
That sure seems like what they're trying to do, like eliminate shadows on people's faces.
John:
And they don't need to because like in James Thompson, he had a ring light on him.
John:
He had plenty of light on his face.
John:
And the image processing was like, I've detected a human face.
John:
Brighten that sucker up.
John:
Because I guess most people like are, you know, in front of their webcams and they otherwise look like they're in a dark dungeon.
John:
So that the processing is really trying to brighten the face up.
John:
They need to detect that they don't need to make certain faces brighter because they're already bright enough.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, we'll see you in future firmware updates.
John:
But yeah, if you're buying this display for the camera, you're going to get what you're going to get, and you're probably going to be upset.
Marco:
Meanwhile, when I first got the XDR, which, as you know, does not have a built-in webcam...
Marco:
You know, I bought the little Logitech magnetically attaching thing that goes on top of it.
Marco:
As I've said before, that's a pretty good webcam.
Marco:
And when I first set that up, I was kind of disappointed that I had to look at this giant black blob on top of my monitor all the time.
Marco:
But I've gotten used to it now, and I'm really happy that I have a really good webcam for whenever I have to appear on a Zoom call.
Marco:
I kind of wish, like, maybe, you know, the webcam now is pretty important of a feature, and that seems to be only growing over time.
Marco:
You know, there's obviously a big bump during COVID of everyone all of a sudden working from home who wasn't before.
Marco:
But I think, obviously, a lot of that's going to stick around, even as COVID kind of, you know, goes into an endemic and waning state where a lot of people go back to work.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
To have designed this product, which chances are this studio display was probably designed almost entirely or entirely during the COVID era.
Marco:
And so to have designed this product with a really crappy webcam situation in this day and age...
Marco:
it was a it was a misstep and i i the more i look at the studio display the more i think you know they put in like you know the a13 it runs ios it's kind of buggy i'm kind of thinking like did they have to make this product do they have to design this with all this complexity did they have to give it a whole like phone os in there to control stuff did they have to do this fancy center stage thing with this crap hardware like
Marco:
When the iMac Pro with its five-year-old basic webcam looks better than it, the XDR works as a perfectly great display without having to boot an OS that occasionally crashes.
Marco:
I have to wonder, was all of this weird engineering they did in this the right choice when what they really just needed to do was make a smaller XDR?
John:
I think it was the right choice to have all the features that it has, good speakers, camera, whatever.
John:
I mean, obviously we just wish they were better, but that's what you want out of – it's more of a middle-of-the-road $1,600 monitor thing.
John:
The really expensive one doesn't have any extraneous crap because you just buy that stuff.
John:
You're going to have external speakers.
John:
You're going to have a fancy external camera.
John:
It makes more sense on the pro end than –
John:
This thing.
John:
And also for them doing the iOS thing, like that was probably the fastest, cheapest way to do it.
John:
Because I think about if they didn't do that.
John:
OK, so we're going to have a camera, we're going to have speakers and we need and we want to do center stage.
John:
I can imagine I'm going to do that.
John:
You know, pretend the camera was good.
John:
We would all be saying, great, center stage is cool.
John:
Right.
John:
how do you control center stage?
John:
You have to have some way to thread through, you know, your M-whatever chip in your Mac and all of its image processing and all of those smarts and all that code that you wrote for iOS now has to control a camera that is not in the same piece of hardware as the system on a chip, but is actually connected externally.
John:
And so you have to write drivers to do all that.
John:
And it's just like...
John:
The shortest distance to getting something working is that we already have an incomplete system that does this.
John:
Just put an A13 in there, and then the A13 acts like it would in an iPad.
John:
The camera's in the same case, and the speakers are there.
John:
It seems like it might even be less work.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Probably people who work on this project are laughing at me now, but it seems to me that it could conceivably be less work to do what they did because you don't have to do as much brand-new stuff.
John:
You already have the pieces that know how to do the things you wanted to do, and then it's a smaller amount of communication between the host Mac.
John:
and the things there if it wasn't less work if it was in fact more work and it's buggier then it's definitely the wrong choice but i'm i'm i look at this and i think you know it's parts been engineering and parts been engineering is you know a dirty word in the car industry but it shouldn't always be because if you have something that works if you know if you have door handles that work on your cars you don't need to reinvent the door handle with every car just put the good door handle on every car it's fine we're talking about him already yeah right yeah
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Sanity.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
There will be a mix of talks, panels, and conversations covering topics like foundations for building a content system, real-life applications for structured content from well-known brands like AT&T or The New York Times, proving collaboration methods to better connect everyone who works on content.
Marco:
And here's a few of the sessions, for example.
Marco:
Reflections on the Future of the Web, with digital leaders Guillermo Roche from Vercel and Michael Sippy from Outside.
Marco:
Overcoming the Challenges of Visual Transformation with Sanity CEO Magnus Hillestad and AT&T's Director of Technology Strategic Platforms, Scott Gens.
Marco:
Improv Consulting.
Marco:
A panel of content strategy consultants will improvise solutions to real-life problems.
Marco:
Actually, that's pretty cool.
Marco:
So there's more than one way to attend as well.
Marco:
You can join in person in San Francisco on May 24th to 25th, or you can attend virtually for free.
Marco:
Space is limited for the in-person location, so if you want to attend, be sure to reserve your spot soon.
Marco:
To learn more about Sanity and the Structured Content 2022 conference, go to sanity.io.
Marco:
That's sanity.io.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Sanity and the Structured Content 2022 conference for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about your Sonos Roam power button.
John:
I was complaining about my Sonos Roam that I didn't like the power button because to turn the stupid thing off, you needed to hold it down for a ridiculous amount of time and listen through a series of beeps.
John:
And it was hard to hold the button because the button was very skinny and it was on the edge of a triangle and you had to just keep holding it and holding it.
John:
And it was terrible.
John:
Anyway, brilliant thingy noted on Twitter that the Sonos Roam software was updated a few months ago.
John:
Now a quick press of the button on the back turns it off.
John:
So I updated my firmware and lo and behold, I can turn it off by pressing the button and it immediately turns off.
John:
So that's much nicer.
John:
The plus, minus, and play buttons on the end still suck, though.
Casey:
And then tangentially related, Patrick Niemeyer writes, Hearing John talk about the power button on a shower speaker reminded me of a topic that I can't believe I've never heard him discuss.
Casey:
The fact that a few generations ago, the lock button on the iPhone went from being instantaneous to more of a suggestion.
Casey:
It currently takes almost a second for the phone to lock after hitting the button, during which time the screen and touch input are fully active.
Casey:
I find myself constantly falling into the following trap.
Casey:
I prepare to pocket by making a quick volume adjustment, then lock the phone, and attempt to put it in my pocket.
Casey:
However, in the movement to put the phone down, I accidentally swipe down the on-screen volume gadget and mute the phone.
Casey:
Is this because the lock button became all things to all people?
Casey:
Because it used to be that the lock button was the lock button, but now, even with guided access turned off,
Casey:
Sorry, accessibility turned off, you still have like Apple Pay and Siri if you hold it down.
Casey:
And so I think that's what this is, is because when you hit the button once, there needs to be some amount of time for Apple to wait and say, are they hitting it a second time?
Casey:
You know, is this really a double tap?
Casey:
And we've only seen the first of the two taps.
Casey:
And so there's no way for them to divine...
Marco:
what it is you're going to do they just have to wait it out and wait whatever the amount of time is to time out if you will and know oh that was definitely a single tap we should lock now that's exactly right and so if you think about the different you know holding it down they don't have to wait really for that they as soon as you release the button they know you're not holding it down but they do have a delay to see are you double clicking it or triple clicking it or just single clicking it
Marco:
So the interesting thing is, if you disable the things that it might be waiting for double or triple clicks for, so that's Apple Pay, and if you have the accessibility shortcut as the triple click, if you turn those things off, which you can do in settings, and you hit the button, it sleeps instantly.
Marco:
So if you care that much about that being a thing and if you can live without double tap to Apple Pay.
Marco:
Now, I actually I tried this and I couldn't figure out how to go to that Apple Pay screen otherwise.
Marco:
Like I opened up the wallet app.
John:
That's what I was going to ask.
John:
If I turn this off, then how do I Apple Pay?
Marco:
Yeah, you go into wallet and then you tap on a card, right?
Marco:
No, it didn't bring up the... Well, I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe I did it wrong.
Marco:
But I tried that and it didn't bring up the payment confirmation.
Marco:
Oh, no, you're right.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Anyway, if you turn off those things, you can get instantaneous sleep again.
Marco:
But yeah, unfortunately, you'd have to never use Apple Pay.
Casey:
There's got to be a way.
Marco:
Oh, apparently the chat's saying that if you hover the phone over the active NFC terminal at the store, then it will prompt it to open up that screen.
Marco:
So you can't pre-approve it with your face, but you can at least open it up, move over the terminal first, then face ID approve it.
John:
I do wonder if for the double tap thing, if they could immediately sleep, but then if you hit the button again within the double tap interval, unsleep it and do Apple Pay.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's interesting, yeah.
Casey:
That is wild.
Casey:
I had no idea that that was the only obvious way to get into payments.
Casey:
That's very interesting.
Casey:
Anyway, Apple's self-service repair site is live.
Casey:
So if you recall, they announced, I don't know, it was a few months ago or something like that, that you will be able to buy parts and repair things yourself if you so desire.
Casey:
And apparently that has gone live, particularly for the iPhone.
Casey:
I don't believe there's anything for the Mac yet.
Casey:
And the website is weird.
Casey:
It is super weird.
Casey:
It's selfservicerepair.com, and it looks super janky.
Casey:
I don't know what's going on here, but it's weird.
Casey:
And apparently it's version, what is this?
Casey:
It says on the bottom, on the bottom left, it's spot.
Casey:
version 8145.5.
Casey:
I feel like I'm looking at the little pie symbol in the corner now.
Casey:
And there's a little doggy in the icon, which is very cute.
Casey:
But anyway, I guess they just outsourced this whole thing, this whole website, which is super weird.
Casey:
But you can go ahead and order parts.
Casey:
You can look at the repair manuals and get general info and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So that is something you can now do.
Casey:
Is it something that I would do?
Casey:
Heck no, because that scares the poop out of me.
Casey:
Trying to repair my phone, just the thought of it sounds terrible in my personal opinion, but I am genuinely glad that this exists for people who are not scaredy cats like me.
John:
Stephen Hackett did an investigation of this whole external website and looked at the company that did it.
John:
Apparently, they've done some other work for Apple as well.
John:
We'll link to his blog post where he explains it.
John:
The service manuals themselves are on Apple's website, and we'll put a link to that.
John:
It's just support.apple.com slash manual slash repair hyphen manual.
John:
And the website's fine.
John:
I think the complaint is it doesn't look like it was Apple designed, which is for sure.
John:
It just looks like someone used, you know,
John:
it's a simple it's perfectly fine it's a perfectly reasonable website it's got three boxes with icons and buttons and you know it's like a template from a bootstrap website i don't know it's it's not terrible but it certainly doesn't look like an apple site um and it's not uh to steven's point it's not an apple.com anywhere it's it's not self-service repaired at apple.com it's self-service repaired.com right so it's not even an apple's domain and you could be forgiven for thinking it's some kind of weird scam site or like
John:
not affiliated with Apple anyway, but it totally is.
John:
Like, this is Apple's official, like, we'll link to the press release.
John:
Apple's press release links to this site.
John:
This is not a scam, right?
John:
And that, I feel like, is a slight problem for Apple, but on the other hand, I bet there's probably all sorts of
John:
Not particularly nice looking websites that you have to go to if you're an Apple authorized dealer to deal with stuff.
John:
I mean, Stephen obviously knows about these things, having worked in an Apple store at least.
John:
But those ones still probably are under the Apple dot com umbrella.
John:
But yeah, if you want to dive in and start repairing your stuff, if your thing is one of the supported devices, check it out.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
There's been a lot of discussion, mostly led by John Gruber, about would Apple do this WWDC thing inside the ring of Apple Park?
Casey:
And I think it's very reasonable.
John:
How is that discussion led by John Gruber?
John:
We recorded an episode where we said the exact same thing before he released his.
Casey:
Yeah, but he like really deep dove, did a deep dive, whatever.
John:
We just said the same thing.
John:
We did just longer and later.
John:
I reject this notion.
John:
We have primacy about whether or not people are allowed in the ring.
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So having nothing to do with John Gruber at all, copyright 2022, John Syracuse.
John:
Copyright ATP.
John:
You were all there.
John:
We were talking about it.
John:
Remember?
John:
Hey, we're going to let people into the ring.
John:
Doesn't it seem weird?
John:
Have I ever had people in the ring?
John:
That was us.
John:
It was the show.
Marco:
Moving right along.
Marco:
One thing.
Marco:
I just want to remember it from one thing.
John:
I just want to be remembered for one thing.
John:
I just want to remember two episodes ago when we talked about people being led in Dabble Park ring and then talk show episode came out a week later and everyone's like led by John Gruber.
John:
No, no, Casey.
Casey:
Two episodes ago was like three months.
Casey:
We haven't recorded in forever.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So regardless of who it was, gosh darn it, people familiar with the matter have been wondering about whether or not Apple would bring civilians, regular schmoes, inside the ring of Apple Park.
Casey:
And Anonymous wrote us the following.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, apparently, it has happened.
John:
yeah and i think the cafe max thing answers another question of like how are they going to feed people and where will people go to the bathroom and stuff like that apparently they do have a subset of the the the ring and the space in the building you know the inside of the ring and also the space in the actual building where they allow the public at least allow the public to go once or twice that they can sort of cordon off with people and feel safe enough that you know there's places for people to be taken care of but that they're not going to just wander into the ring and
John:
You know, all the doors are locked in there anyway with key cards and stuff.
John:
So it's not I don't think it's a real problem, but I also don't think they want strange people just wandering around.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then Benedict Evans tweeted an idle observation.
Casey:
I have no idea what this kind of fencing costs, but it's very not cheap and it extends around the entire Apple Park site.
Casey:
And so I've not seen this in person, but judging on this picture, I'll paint you a word picture here.
Casey:
It seems like there are many, many, many vertical metal rods, each of which I would guesstimate is like four to six feet tall, but they're completely freestanding.
Casey:
Like if you think of an average fence, you would put some posts down and then have some stuff linking from one post to the other, but you wouldn't put a post every six inches, which is apparently what they've done here.
Casey:
Like there must be either like a river of concrete that went through the ground.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm guessing they're bound together underground somehow.
Marco:
There's something supporting them.
John:
This is like the most expensive kind of fence you can ever imagine making.
John:
Very Apple-like, right?
John:
So in case you're having trouble picturing it, I'll put a link to his tweet in the show notes with the photo.
John:
But it's like, you know, like the bars of a jail cell, just vertical bars like that, but they just come out of the ground.
John:
There are no horizontal members whatsoever.
John:
It's just vertical bars.
John:
Yeah, nothing bridges across the top.
John:
Or the bottom.
John:
Well, as far as we can see.
John:
It's just a vertical bar.
John:
Now, here's the thing about just vertical bars like this.
John:
Now, first of all, yes, obviously, there needs to be something underground to make it so these aren't just stuck into the earth.
John:
They're probably in cement or something.
John:
But the second thing is the precision required to make this fence not look terrible is extraordinary.
John:
extremely high like because these sticks are like probably they look like they're at least six or seven feet tall the tops of these things need to be even with each other so the fence makes a line and not like a wavy thing right every one of these sticks needs to be in concrete and lined up just so the correct distance from each other and they and it needs to be sturdy enough that you couldn't just go and like pull the tops of the bars apart but think of the leverage that you have at the top of those bars if these are stiff you know metal bars the
John:
Just do the math and the physics of how much leverage do you have down there?
John:
You have to not be able to bend them apart, and they have to not be able to be bent forward or backwards.
John:
And if this goes around all of Apple Park, how much does this cost per, like, linear foot?
John:
I don't even understand.
John:
And I don't think it's any more particularly secure than any other kind of fence because, you know, you throw a carpet over this thing and hop over like they do in every action movie.
John:
It's not like there's barbed wire on it, right?
John:
It's just as susceptible to hopping over by a bunch of kids or, like, climb a tree and hop over.
John:
Let's see the tree that's over there.
John:
If there's, you know, a tree near the fence, you climb up the tree and hop over.
John:
Kids know how to get over fences.
John:
It just boggles my mind.
John:
This is a Johnny Ives special.
John:
Like, I would like a fence that looks like this.
John:
And they say, Johnny, this is going to cost $250,000 per linear foot.
John:
It's like, I don't care.
John:
Just do it.
Marco:
Well, I mean, in all fairness, I've been fortunate, maybe, as a question mark at the end of that, enough in life to have once purchased custom windows.
Marco:
And, oh my god.
Marco:
And so, if you look at the amount of glass that is custom made in Apple Park,
Marco:
This fence is a drop in the bucket compared to what they must have spent on glass.
Marco:
Trust me.
John:
Well, I mean, so the big doors on the cafeteria, like the height of the whole building and they go out or whatever.
John:
I think those are only a few million each.
John:
And maybe this fence is more expensive than those two doors.
John:
maybe maybe i mean there's certainly you know if it's going through around the whole site like like how many miles of like it's probably like a couple of miles worth of fence right yeah as i'm saying goes all right so if you were in the fencing industry maybe this is just a standard kind of fence that we don't know and there's been an advance in fencing technology that makes us uh cheap to manufacture and it's actually not that hard to line these things up like maybe they're all made in a factory and they just come and you just bury them in units or whatever but it looks expensive it looks fancy and expensive and maybe not particularly functional so very apple like
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Very quick follow up.
Casey:
I had made offhanded comment, I think early on in the last episode, that I was not a fan of the Radiohead song Creep.
Casey:
And I think, John, you were giving me a little bit of flack about that.
Casey:
Dozens of people, dozens, I tell you, wrote in to say, I, too, love Radiohead and I dislike the song Creep.
Casey:
But most interestingly of all, my friend Spencer, a friend of the show, really, Spencer Wohlers wrote in.
Casey:
and said, hey, Tom York, the lead singer and songwriter of Radiohead, also hates Creep.
Casey:
And so I'll put a link into a short article that Spencer had sent that basically talks about how he always thought it was kind of garbage, too.
Casey:
So there, John.
John:
Bands always hate their big breakout hit because they just get sick of it.
John:
I can feel them.
John:
I think if you asked any band how much they like the song that made them famous, they're probably over it now, too.
Marco:
yeah imagine like being thom york and having to go to any party and like hey man play creep here's a guitar like it's just yeah and yes i know about the whole piano man comic or whatever the what was it on the onion or something i don't know i have no idea what you're talking about but that's fine all right why don't you tell me about your game streaming setup please
Marco:
Yes, so I mentioned, I believe it was last show or the one before that, I was looking at some new video capture hardware and trying to get some video capture recommendations for the Team Arment video game streaming setup that we have here, where there are three gaming PCs being captured over HDMI, three webcams, and they're all shown on screen at once in like, you know, three video screens or three webcams.
Marco:
So there's six little viewports being shown on screen at once for our game streaming for our family.
Casey:
And to jump in real quick, I got to say, we got a lot of feedback about this.
Casey:
And more than possibly any other time in ATP's history, the feedback was universal about Blackmagic stuff.
Casey:
And you can tell me whether or not it's good or not, but it seems like anyone who had touched Blackmagic stuff was like, oh, this stuff is great.
Marco:
Most.
Marco:
We did get a couple who said it had some issues, but for the most part.
Marco:
So quickly, before I go to the hardware route, I did mention briefly that I looked into NDI.
Marco:
This is basically sending video and audio over the network, running software on the PCs to do capture and stuff in software.
Marco:
And I tried that.
Marco:
We had a couple of people write in, actually more than a couple, who wrote in with experience with NDI.
Marco:
Basically, for me to use NDI to do all this over the network, it probably would require me to hardwire the gaming PCs with Ethernet.
Marco:
um and have possibly even like you know 2.5 g or 10 g ethernet um you know because the data rates for the amount of data i'd be capturing would be pretty high i might still do that at some point or maybe i'll do it for part of it like the webcams maybe because they're much lower uh bandwidth stuff but i i don't know that seems more finicky than i want to get into right now because the thing is what i want here out of the setup is when we want to stream to be able to basically turn it on and have it just work because
Marco:
However, because the setup is massive and lives on our kitchen counter, basically, I have to be able to, like, take it apart sometimes and put stuff away and then take it back out and have it work somehow without having to, like, reset up a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
So the more complex it is, the more finicky it is, the more things can change between invocations, the less appealing that is to me.
Marco:
And also, the more stuff is required to be out and to be used and to be bought and everything.
Marco:
Again, that also makes it less appealing to me.
Marco:
um so anyway so ndi i'm keeping on the back burner as an option but i right now i'm not using it um by far and away the top recommendation was the black magic um i don't know if it's atem or atem whoever you say that atem mini pro this was by far and away the most common recommendation and what this is is basically a little hardware video switcher and compositor thing and it has a bunch of great features you can basically have it
Marco:
do and the feature i need is called multi-view where you show like different viewports all at once on the screen so the atom mini pro could show the three it has four input multi-view so it could theoretically show like the three big game screens
Marco:
And then it can be a USB input to the computer running OBS.
Marco:
And so I could theoretically have that be the main input on the main background of the OBS composition and then put in the webcams myself manually.
Marco:
There's also a higher end
Marco:
uh attem mini like extreme that has eight ports i could theoretically use that and have it all in one box being done on hardware if i just replace the webcams with something that output hdmi instead of usb so that's an option i might go with in the future i don't really want to that's because this thing is this giant you know control panel covered in buttons with a thousand features i wouldn't use and don't need and
Marco:
And it's also super high-end in its capabilities.
Marco:
And so it's also like $1,000 for the big multi-input one or $500 for the only four-input one.
Marco:
So these are big chunks of money for a lot of features I wouldn't use.
Marco:
And I think it would actually make my setup physically more complicated, which is a little unappealing to me.
Marco:
So I'm also back-burnering that idea.
Marco:
I might go to that in the future.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
But what I decided to try first...
Marco:
was a PCI Express Thunderbolt enclosure and using the Blackmagic DeckLink Quad HDMI recorder, which is a four HDMI input PCI Express card.
Marco:
And I put it in the Sonnet Echo Express Thunderbolt enclosure that has three slots.
Marco:
Because once I started looking for this, I was thinking, well, hey, wait a minute.
Marco:
Uh, if I have the, if I could get a PCI express enclosure, if I just get one that has more than one slot, I can also get one or two USB cards and get rid of the whole hub entirely.
Marco:
Stop using a Thunderbolt hub and just use this one box with all these ports that I need all built into it.
Marco:
So that's what I did.
Marco:
I bought the one box.
Marco:
I got the three-slot enclosure.
Marco:
I got the HDMI quad input from Blackmagic.
Marco:
And I got two Sonnet USB cards.
Marco:
One that has four USB-Cs and one that has four USB-As.
Marco:
This is, so far...
Marco:
It looks like it has a lot of promise.
Marco:
I was very, very impressed that the enclosure and the USB cards don't need drivers.
Marco:
This is a huge appeal to me because every single time I'm looking at these things, I have to first figure out, you know, try to go to their site or go to their support page and see, all right, does it support Macs, number one?
Marco:
When you're buying PC-style hardware, you've got to really make sure, number one, does it support Macs?
Marco:
Number two, does it support Apple Silicon Macs?
Marco:
That's a huge question mark on a lot of these things.
Marco:
And the answer is not always yes, or the answer is sometimes like, well, it supports some features, or it supports some configuration, or it supports some of the hardware, but not all of it.
John:
You forgot number three.
John:
Number three, does it look gross in the back of my Mac Pro?
John:
Nobody makes color match cards.
John:
I was looking at USB cards and I was just like, oh, I have all these ports.
Marco:
Are the brackets the wrong?
Marco:
What color are your PCI brackets?
John:
Yeah, everything on the back of the Mac Pro is like matte black, like the part that has the ports in it, right?
John:
That kind of needs to be matte black to match, and all these are shiny silver, and you just can't have that.
John:
What is this, a PC?
John:
Come on.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Anyway, so the enclosure and the USB cards required no drivers.
Marco:
They just worked instantly.
Marco:
I was very, very happy.
Marco:
So the Sonnet enclosure and the two Sonnet Allegro USB cards worked.
Marco:
Fantastic.
Marco:
And I love the fact that I could just add this.
Marco:
I was also very pleased that the fan is not super loud relative to being in my kitchen.
Marco:
Now, I wouldn't really want this thing in my office.
Marco:
Oh, and also I was impressed when I took it apart.
Marco:
The fan they use is a Noctua 80 millimeter fan.
Marco:
That's a really good fan.
Marco:
Noctua is like an enthusiast fan brand that specializes in very quiet fans.
Marco:
So I was very impressed to see that in there.
Marco:
That's not something you usually see in someone else's hardware.
Marco:
So that was pretty cool.
Marco:
Anyway, so very impressed with the enclosure and the USB cards.
Marco:
The Blackmagic Decklink Quad HDMI card, I did have to install their software.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
comically difficult to figure out where exactly you go on their website to download the software.
Marco:
It ends up being called desktop video or something.
Marco:
It isn't called what you think it'll be called.
Marco:
You can't just go to the page from this card and click download.
Marco:
The manual doesn't... It's hilarious how opaque this process is.
Marco:
Eventually got it in there, got it working.
Marco:
The problem is...
Marco:
you know, this card said it works with Macs.
Marco:
It said it works with Apple Silicon Macs.
Marco:
It said you can capture things, and you know what?
Marco:
You open up any kind of capture app, including the one that comes with it, or OBS, or anything like that, and all four ports show up as four different capture devices.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Unfortunately, the card, while it says it will capture audio from the HDMI signals...
Marco:
And while it will attempt to capture said audio, it will also crappily do that by overlaying a whole bunch of noise and repeated blocks of audio.
Marco:
So like, if you click a button in Minecraft, it'll play the click, and then a half second later, play it again, and the whole time they're static playing.
Marco:
And no matter what I did, tried searching their support forums and all that crap, could not get past this issue.
Marco:
I cannot figure out why it's doing that.
Marco:
It's difficult with Blackmagic stuff if something doesn't work right because they have so many different products.
Marco:
that it's really hard to search for things that are relevant to what you are doing with them.
Marco:
But anyway, for whatever reason, the audio capture does not work on this card.
Marco:
So I'm going back to the drawing board on some of the stuff.
Marco:
I ordered a Magewell card, which is like, I guess, one of their rivals in this area.
Marco:
I already wanted those to try.
Marco:
Elgato does make a PCI Express card called the Cam Link Pro with four inputs, but it's Windows only.
Marco:
So I can't use that one without, again, doing a whole PC-based setup, which I really don't want to do.
Marco:
uh so we'll see if the magswell card is any better and then i guess i'll go from there the magswell card also claims to support max claims to support m1 max so we'll see if it actually does claims to support audio capture we'll see if that works but i i am i'm very very happy with most of the setup except for the video capture card
John:
which is unfortunately kind of important so we'll see i know uh far be it for me to recommend that you not bend over backwards to use a mac for something that it's not well suited for but i'm telling you if you just may use the pc as your capture machine uh i think you'd have a lot easier time but uh keep plowing bravely forward i guess
Casey:
You're spending some serious money on this.
Casey:
I'm aware.
John:
Well, he's going to return a lot of this stuff, I'm assuming.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I'm hoping to keep the enclosure.
Marco:
The only thing I might be returning is the Blackmagic card because the audio capture literally does not work the way they say it will.
John:
But eventually when you give up on this and get a PC to do it, like all this stuff will come back.
Casey:
Well, not necessarily.
Casey:
Presumably, the PC could use a lot of it, right?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
PC with Thunderbolt?
Casey:
Come on.
Marco:
But I will say, this is the first time I've ever used a Thunderbolt enclosure.
Marco:
And I'm very pleased with how nice and easy it was.
Marco:
Now, granted, I'm not using it for GPUs, which is, I think, what a lot of people use them for.
Marco:
But for this kind of thing, it was very nice to see.
Marco:
And this really solidified, if anything, this solidified my opinion that...
Marco:
if we don't need external gpu support or if we rather if we don't need additional gpu support then future mac pros are totally able to use thunderbolt enclosures for other types of pci card needs if they if they don't want to have internal slots because this is great this is all running off a 13 inch macbook pro like i don't even need a desktop to have full bandwidth pci cards in there that's that's fantastic and that that works great so
Marco:
Certainly, it at least has been educational in the sense that I now know what these enclosures are and how they work and the kinds of things they can do.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, I have some news.
Casey:
At long last, I am finally off of Gmail for my email.
Casey:
I switched my MX records like a week ago, maybe a week and a half ago, and I am receiving my email at Fastmail as the prophecy foretold.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
If you too are looking to move off of Gmail and would like a referral link where I believe both of us get some money off and I get some free time, it is going to be in the show notes.
Casey:
It's ref.fm slash the oh so memorable U28183245.
Casey:
It's like an ICQ number.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
1202572.
Casey:
I still don't think I can get a lot.
Marco:
25744294.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Why does that get drilled into every nerd's head?
John:
I don't understand.
John:
I mean, I had an ICQ account, but I did not memorize the number.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I wasn't young enough to want to memorize it.
John:
I never had a reason to memorize it because if anyone wanted it, I would just copy and paste it to them.
Casey:
I don't know what my deal is, or Marcos for that matter, but I don't know.
Casey:
I memorized mine.
John:
I'm kind of sad that I don't remember what my ICQ number was.
John:
I have to go dig out one of my classic Macs that probably still has the account information in there.
John:
Just launch ICQ and see what it tries to log in with.
Casey:
A couple of years ago, I think I tried logging into ICQ with 1202572, and it was not happening.
Casey:
And God knows what email address is associated with that account.
Marco:
You got so many new friends for Blista now.
Casey:
That wasn't Blista.
Casey:
That was AIM.
Casey:
That was AIM.
Casey:
That was AIM.
Casey:
So many new friends.
Casey:
Anyway, we're getting sidetracked as per usual.
Casey:
So yeah, so I did the migration to FastMail.
Casey:
So to fill you in in case you're not keeping up, I was on the Google Apps for Your Domain free plan, which had come out somewhere around like 2004, 2006, something like that.
Casey:
And if you wanted to, you could sign up for Gmail and then eventually Google Docs and all these other things were kind of stapled on the side.
Casey:
And you could get it for free, you thought, for life.
Casey:
And a couple of months ago, they've said, oh, no, not for life.
Casey:
We're going to end of life, this free thing, and you're going to have to start paying us.
Casey:
Which, I mean, okay, fair.
Casey:
I mean, I've freeloaded for like 10, 15 years at this point, so I can't entirely fault them.
Casey:
But I had already been trying to wean myself off of most things Google as it was, and so this seemed like a pretty good opportunity to wean myself off of Gmail.
Casey:
So I went to Fastmail, I signed up for an account, and I paid for a year, and I told it, okay, take all my things from Google and put them into Fastmail, expecting that this would be a 42-month endeavor that never ends and presumably will not work.
Casey:
So what they have you do is sign in via OAuth, and Gmail says I have about 20 gigabytes of email.
Casey:
And so I started it at something like 9.30 in the morning, like a week ago.
Casey:
And, uh, it took all of my calendar entries, uh, which was almost 5,000 calendar events.
Casey:
It took that in, I think it was literally two minutes or something like that.
Casey:
It was absurdly fast, which like, if you think about it, that's the way it should be, right?
Casey:
Like you would hope that it would be able to download, you know, from internet backbone to internet backbone, if you will, extremely quickly.
Casey:
But I didn't expect it to actually happen and even more so to work.
Casey:
And it seemed like it did, it did happen and it did work.
Casey:
But that was calendars.
Casey:
What about my email?
Casey:
So sure enough, I'm buckled up for like two weeks of transferring and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it took two hours.
Casey:
In two hours, I got an email that said, hey, all your past emails here now.
Casey:
We have downloaded 149,409 of 149,396 messages.
Casey:
And you might ask, well, why does that number not match?
Casey:
Well, I think because at the time it started, which was 149,396, I had gotten like 20 emails.
Casey:
So it ended up with 149,409.
Casey:
Well, that brings up a point.
John:
Is there a catch-up mode?
John:
Like how do you deal with the gap?
Casey:
So I think it does, or I think I could have it refresh, but once it was clear that it was actively working, I pretty much immediately flipped my MX records and was like, screw it, this is going to work, I'm just going for it.
Casey:
Which is a bit cavalier, I'll be the first to admit.
John:
I mean, you could have flipped the MX records first, right?
Casey:
I could have, theoretically, yeah.
John:
But I was a little... But you just wanted to make sure there was still a race condition.
Casey:
Yes, exactly right.
Yeah.
Casey:
No, I really just wanted to make sure that something was being transferred and that it was working in some way, shape, or form.
Casey:
And once I saw the transfer was starting to work, I was like, okay, this is going to be a mess.
Casey:
And so maybe I lost five minutes of email because I was too slow on the MX record change.
Casey:
But one way or another, yeah, so the chat is asking, did I give Fastmail my username and password?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Like I said, this is OAuth.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It has me log in via Google.
Casey:
Google gives them some sort of token back.
Casey:
It's been so long since I've done an OAuth implementation.
Casey:
So there's magic tokens that are exchanged, and then that's that.
Casey:
So I never actually gave Fastmail my username and password.
Casey:
So yeah, so in the span of two hours, I got literally 15 years of email or something like that.
Casey:
that went through lickety-split, no problem.
Casey:
All of my folders, which are really labels in Gmail world, that came through.
Casey:
I had the option of importing the rules that I set up in Gmail, of which I had a not insignificant amount of them, but I wanted to take this as an opportunity to clean slate and start anew.
Casey:
One thing that I did try was FastMail, by default, is IMAP, and so it uses folders,
Casey:
as folders rather than labels, which is what Gmail does.
Casey:
And I tried for like a few days, maybe a week to see if I could go back to the world of folders.
Casey:
And for me, I couldn't do it.
Casey:
And so what I did was very nicely, Fastmail has an option that says, hey, instead of organizing your messages with folders, you can organize them with labels.
Casey:
And then it's basically what I would call Gmail mode.
Casey:
And so now it behaves much like Gmail does, which is super great.
Casey:
And not for everyone, of course, but for someone who's been used to Gmail, that worked out excellently.
Casey:
And like I said, all the folders came through.
Casey:
Everything was great.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
So is the idea here that you can basically have a message in multiple folders, like it's kind of like a tag instead of a... Yes, exactly.
Casey:
It's like a tag, yeah.
Casey:
And when you...
Casey:
add a tag, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is no longer in the inbox.
Casey:
So part of the reason I went back to labels was I like to label, say, ATP feedback with an ATP label.
Casey:
And that was all well and good.
Casey:
But what was happening was, and maybe this was user error on my part, but I don't think so.
Casey:
But what was happening was when I set up my rule that said, okay, put this in the ATP folder, that's literally what it did is it moved it out of my inbox and into the ATP folder.
Casey:
And I personally prefer any new email, regardless of where it came from or why it's there, I want to see it in my inbox.
Casey:
It's the only place I want to check.
Casey:
Then I will file it away as necessary, but I only want to have to look at my email.
Casey:
And with the way folders were set up or perhaps the way I set up the rules –
Casey:
I would have to go into the ATP folder to look at the new ATP email.
Casey:
And so I said, no, the hell with this.
Casey:
I'm just going back to labels.
Casey:
And now it works exactly as I want.
Casey:
I have a rule that says, hey, when an ATP email comes in, mark it with the ATP label, but leave it in the inbox, which is exactly what I want to do.
Casey:
Again, not for everyone, but that's how I like it.
Casey:
So all good news on things that FastMail can control.
Casey:
The web app is surprisingly good.
Casey:
Now, I'm not like John.
Casey:
I never use a Gmail web app.
Casey:
And I know the Gmail web app.
Casey:
If you like it, you really like it.
Casey:
I really enjoyed it when it was new.
Casey:
Over time, I decided it was not for me.
Casey:
I'm not saying John's wrong.
Casey:
It's just not for me.
Casey:
And the Fastmail web app is really good.
Casey:
I don't have it open in front of me, but I believe there's even a way to make it use Gmail key shortcuts or keystrokes, if you will.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure about that.
Casey:
You'll have to check me on that, but I believe that to be true.
Casey:
So everything Fastmail related, the web app is great.
Casey:
The email comes in super fast.
Casey:
I've had a couple of pieces of spam breakthrough, but not a lot.
Casey:
There's also a neat feature where you can set up a folder or a label
Casey:
and say, hey, when I put something in here, tell your spam thing that this is something it should have caught as spam, and so you can help train it.
Casey:
Or, what's even more interesting is, you can set up a second label that you say, hey, if I put something in here, this is not spam.
Casey:
This is something that you thought was spam, but isn't.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That's not the only way to do that.
Casey:
If you're in the web interface, you can say, oh, not spam.
Casey:
But I just thought that was a very clever approach, especially if you're using a third-party client.
Casey:
The other interesting thing about Fastmail, which I feel like we said this on the show at some point, but Fastmail seems to have some sort of certification or entitlement or something such that it is one of the very, very few third-party email providers that actually can do push email on iOS.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't necessarily need that, but I turned it on because it's cool.
Casey:
And so, in fact, I can make an argument why it's not cool, but because it's new and shiny, I turned it on.
Casey:
And you can get push email via iOS, which is cool.
Casey:
And oh, and to log into your email in iOS, you...
Casey:
One of the ways you can do it, they do have their own bespoke iOS app, but the way I did it is I logged into Fastmail on the computer, and then they give you a convenient little QR code, and you scan the QR code with your phone, and that installs a profile, which sounds sketchy, but all the profile does is put in the account for you.
Casey:
which is super neat.
Casey:
And so again, like Fastmail is a prior sponsor.
Casey:
It wouldn't surprise me if they're going to be a future sponsor.
Casey:
I haven't looked.
Casey:
So I'm at least slightly biased, but they didn't pay me to say any of this stuff.
Casey:
Like this was all me on my own.
Casey:
And it's been really great.
Casey:
So if you're interested in moving away from Gmail for any reason or from whatever your current email provider is, I really do recommend Fastmail.
Casey:
It's really been really good so far.
Casey:
I mean, Marco, you've been there forever, right?
Marco:
Yeah, for, I mean, geez, probably over 10 years now.
Marco:
It's been fantastic.
Marco:
I have no complaints.
Casey:
Yeah, I cannot say enough good things about how this process has gone.
Casey:
So then, by comparison, I went back to Gmail and was like, okay, what do I need to do to tell them I want to get on the list of people that would like to maybe not do email anymore, but I don't want to lose what little YouTube stuff I have saved.
Casey:
I don't want to lose Google Docs.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't want to lose the shared ATP calendar, even though we should probably move it to Apple Calendar.
Casey:
I'm just going to leave that here.
Casey:
I don't want to lose any of that.
Casey:
Move it to Apple Calendar.
John:
That's madness.
John:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
Right now, what I have to do is do it via freaking CalDAV, which is absurd, just because you're on Google, John.
John:
I'm the one who moves the calendar rent anyway.
John:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is – so I think the way this works is if Google blesses me, which they're not guaranteeing with – I forget what they call it.
Casey:
But like if I'm allowed to have one of their freebie accounts, then I think I can keep all of the Google Docs, calendars, et cetera, and YouTube and whatnot.
Casey:
And I just lose my email, which is fine by me.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
When I went to go do that, you know, they sent all these scare grams about, oh, everything's going to be expensive and you got to pay, you got to pay, you got to pay.
Casey:
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
Casey:
Or you can sign up for this thing, but that's probably not what you want.
Casey:
And so I went to sign up for the thing and for the life of me, I couldn't find it.
Casey:
And of course...
Casey:
The Google website has gone, especially Google Apps website, is so full on enterprise, which means everything is confusing.
Casey:
It's all using verbiage that even I'm far enough removed from real jobs that I don't know what they're talking about.
Casey:
It was a mess.
Casey:
And eventually, I finally found my way into an online chat where someone was genuinely very helpful and was like, yeah, I'll take care of it.
Casey:
I'll put it on the list for you.
Casey:
But oh my word, it was just like the biggest F you on the way out the door.
Casey:
Like, oh, you want to leave?
Casey:
Oh, no, no.
Casey:
This is like canceling cable, baby.
Casey:
You got to work for it.
Casey:
And it was a mess.
Casey:
But FastMail, great.
Casey:
Google, I'm over you.
Casey:
And if you're interested in FastMail, please check out my referral code.
Casey:
It would make me very happy.
Casey:
John, tell me about your security camera.
John:
I forget what I said on the show about this.
John:
Did I just say I was getting one?
Casey:
I think you were talking about how you had intended it as a home project.
Casey:
And I don't think we went too much further than that.
Casey:
But I thought we talked about how you didn't want to put any holes in your house.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure a little birdie told me that involved in this process was putting a hole through the outside of your house.
John:
I mean, I knew it would.
John:
I just wish the hole had...
John:
uh worked out a little better but anyway that wasn't that bad so i i talked about this uh a bit more on a yet to be released episode of inconsolable differences which we would link in the show notes if we could but we can't but maybe we will later uh the camera that i got is this uh the the latest nest camera it's called nest cam outdoor indoor comma battery great product name um and i have a bunch of nest cams already
John:
And I, the reason I got this one is because I realized that I'm already paying for whatever the fancy plan is.
John:
It lets you add cameras without having to pay any more.
John:
So if I bought another camera, I didn't have to like, it doesn't increase my monthly fee.
John:
I used to have a ring camera and I got rid of that one so I could stop paying for that.
John:
And I could, you know, just buy this camera and, uh, you know, it's going to be an outdoor security camera.
John:
Um, and I had a place where I wanted to put it as basically where the old ring camera was.
John:
Um,
John:
uh but i didn't want to have to deal with batteries now this camera as the description uh indicates has a battery so you can run it on battery but from experience i don't like you know using cameras with batteries no matter how long the battery lasts first of all the batteries degrade especially if they're outdoors all year long in new england and the freezing in the winter and hot in the summer that really kills the battery and second i don't want to have to recharge it right so why not get one of the ones that you can plug in well this camera you can also plug in
John:
Uh, and if you plug it in, it just kind of has like a little, uh, it's like a USB C type cable or whatever, but you can also get one that has a, an AC plug wall wart thing.
John:
And then the little cable runs to the camera.
John:
And so even though the camera is battery powered, it's still plugged in.
John:
And if you lose power, then the battery takes over, right?
John:
And the battery lasts for like a month or whatever.
John:
So this is great.
John:
It's, it's essentially, uh, power powered by wire all the time, except when, uh, if the power goes out, you don't lose your camera.
John:
So I had to find a place to run the wire.
John:
This is near a light that I have that kind of shines where like my garbage cans are so I can scare away the raccoons when I go out there to deal with that at night in the winter or whatever.
John:
And so there was already like, you know, electrical wire running to the outdoor lights.
John:
They're just plain old regular lights, right?
John:
So I knew there was a way to get a cable from where I wanted to go, you know, from inside my house to outside my house.
John:
And I figured what I could do was make another small hole and then fish a wire in the same place where the wire that goes to the lights go.
John:
But instead of going out the hole where the lights are, I would go out a different hole.
John:
And I spent a long time trying to get that to work.
John:
uh without tearing everything apart uh in the end i had to tear apart a little bit more than i wanted to to get at the guts because this is like the eaves by my garage and you know the inside wall of the garage and the outside eaves and i drilled my here's my big mistake i i was trying to drill a hole that i was going to be able to fit this little wire through and so i was looking at my drill bits and i'm looking at the little adapter going is this is this drill bit big enough is this drill bit big enough whatever and you know comparing it and the little plug that i had to get through is not
John:
it's not symmetrical.
John:
It's like the plug goes and then the sort of socket that's on the end of the plug is on an angle.
John:
And I think I miscalculated, you know, it's kind of like if you have a square, if you measure the dimensions of the square, that's fine.
John:
But if you tilt the square and the angle suddenly gets bigger because the diagonal is much bigger than the legs of the square, right?
John:
That's kind of the situation I was in.
John:
So I drilled a nice neat hole that was about half of a millimeter too small.
John:
Like,
John:
You could fit the plug into there, but it was like the hole went in a ways, and so it would get bound up and jammed, and so I had to make the hole bigger.
John:
And making an existing hole bigger is difficult to do.
John:
Didn't do a great job of it.
John:
It got bigger.
John:
But anyway, you can't see it.
John:
I'll paper over it.
John:
Luckily, it's hidden behind a downspout, so you can't actually see the horrible job it did.
John:
But...
John:
I did get it plugged in, and it works, and it's doing its thing.
John:
Two bits that I want to talk about with this camera.
John:
The first one is, if you look at the webpage of a link on Google's website, you'll see that one of the things that they advertise about this camera, in fact, it's in the little animation, is that it is magnetically attached to the base.
John:
So the camera is just like a unit, like a little, you know, little semicircular thing or whatever.
John:
That's the camera.
John:
And it's got a really powerful magnet in it.
John:
And then the base also has a really powerful magnet in it.
John:
And you screw the base to whatever surface you want and you stick the camera over the battery.
John:
And if you look at their installation instructions, they say, if you're putting this camera outdoors, we recommend that you put it six to six and a half feet off the ground for best, you know, operation, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Well, if you've got a supposed security camera six to six and a half feet off the ground that's connected only with a magnet, someone can just walk right up to it and yank your security camera off the wall.
John:
And A, now you don't have a security camera.
John:
And B, now they have your camera.
John:
right now obviously you probably got a recording of them doing that because it's you know sending the data to the internet constantly but what good is that going to do you when they've got your camera it's like taking 200 you know 200 bills and thumbtacking them to the side of your house right it's like i don't want someone to be able to take that so there's this like sub market of products to try to take google's stupid design and make it slightly more secure so you can buy like a little kit
John:
that connects like one of those, you know, metal security wire things, you know, I mean, security wire, a little metal wire.
John:
Right.
John:
And so one end of it is kind of screwed behind the base.
John:
So you can't get to it.
John:
And the other end is screwed to the camera with like one of those security screwdriver tips.
John:
That's like a weird shape.
John:
It's not a Torx wrench.
John:
It's not a, you know, it's not, it's not a normal shape.
John:
Right.
John:
So you buy one of these little kits and it comes with a little two cent weird security screwdriver tip and the screwdriver.
John:
And anyway, anyway,
John:
at least now it's harder for someone to casually take the camera off my house if they tried to do it they would say oh it's stuck with something and then they'd have to have also brought with them a pair of nail clippers or something to cut through the metal security wire or just pull harder like this is not a thick wire or just exactly or just pull but if they pulled harder they might break the camera too so they should really just you know and now it's not pentalobe it's like it's got a little it's one of the it's a star with a dot in the middle
John:
Yeah, the dot in the middle is the security feature, right?
John:
Because a Torx wrench doesn't have a hole in the middle.
John:
I guess probably some of them do.
John:
But anyway, it's stupid.
John:
But that's what I did.
John:
I mean, I don't think – I'm not in a neighborhood where people are routinely steering security cameras off of the walls.
John:
So far, so good at that.
John:
But the real thing I want to complain about, and I went into more depth on this on Erectifs, but it's worth at least mentioning here.
John:
This camera, like the other Nest camera, has a feature where it can identify faces –
John:
And so you can teach it like it'll, you know, you can have a prompt you to look at this face.
John:
Who is this?
John:
Who is this?
John:
And you can just tell it who all the people are.
John:
So it attaches a name to a face.
John:
It calls that feature familiar faces, right?
John:
And so, you know, I already have this for like my cameras that are in my house that I know is all my family and stuff like that.
John:
And it's pretty good with the facial recognition, even at weird angles and with, you know, bad resolution and in the dark and all sorts of other things that can identify who it is and, you know, identify the face.
John:
And one of the features of that is if you have notifications turned on, it will, instead of saying person was spotted in the kitchen, it will say, you know, so-and-so was spotted in the kitchen by name, right?
John:
It'll tell you the name of the person, right?
John:
But what I wanted from this, and I just assumed I would be able to get silly me, is that, okay, if I have a camera that's facing outside my house and it knows all about all the familiar faces, right?
John:
then it also knows if it sees a face that's not a familiar face.
John:
Like, I saw a face, but it's not one of the five that's in my familiar face list.
John:
What I would like is for the outdoor camera to say, oh, hey, I saw somebody, and it's not on your familiar face list, so here's a push notification.
John:
And as far as I've been able to determine, even though they built this facial recognition system into their cameras, they have no way to tell it to notify you when it sees a face that is not familiar.
John:
Your choices are no notifications for people whatsoever or notifications of every single person.
John:
Those are the only two choices.
John:
Nice.
John:
And if you have a camera notify you of every single person and it's at your house, it's going to constantly notice value.
John:
Your son is by the camera.
John:
Your daughter is by the camera.
John:
Your wife is by the camera.
John:
You're by the camera.
John:
Like that's too many notifications.
John:
but I don't want zero notifications, the camera knows whether it's familiar face because it tells me who's in front of the camera by name or it says a person.
John:
It knows, but there is no mode that I could find that says just send a push notification to my phone if it's an
John:
unfamiliar face that seems like the feature that a security camera would have and this this thing doesn't seem to do it i and i googled for it i found one of those sad google help pages you ever see these ones like google doesn't actually have any humans helping you they just have like this community forum or where you just wail into the void are you familiar with these pages like if if you're looking for the answer to anything google related you'll find like i don't know what it is like a it's like a sick twisted version of a web bolton board where people are like
John:
help me i can't figure out this thing with google and other users commiserate yeah i can't figure out either i can't figure out either and the bottom of the thread is always some google employee saying uh yeah we don't support that you should like file a ticket maybe we'll look at it and then you look at the date it's like 2015 no right so i found a page where somebody said can i only get push notifications for for unfamiliar faces and they're like yeah you can't do that yeah you should file a future request
John:
oh my god i don't understand how they ship this product without the feature like what is the point of familiar faces if this feature doesn't exist for an outdoor security camera just so you can have so you can know exactly which person it saw but you still want notifications for everybody boggles my mind so anyway i don't have person notifications on because otherwise i'd be notified every single day every single time anyone in my family came and went from my house or walked in front of my house
John:
good job google that's amazing i i would this is the kind of thing i would assume google would be very good at they're good at identifying faces they're not good at understanding what to do with that information but just tell me when it's not familiar honestly i don't find this surprising at all but whatever
John:
And if this is a brand new product, like, oh, it's just version 1.0, fine, whatever, it'll come in the next version.
John:
This is years and years they've had Nest security cameras.
John:
I've owned them for years and years, right?
John:
And inside my house, it never occurred to me that this would be an issue because, like, my inside-the-house cameras aren't even on when we're home.
John:
Like, they're only on when nobody's home, and so I'm being notified when it sees any human is appropriate.
John:
If nobody's in the house and there's a human in the house, notify me, right?
John:
So I never went looking for the feature that I just assumed exists, which is just tell me if you see an unfamiliar face.
Casey:
I'm too lazy to look right now, but I wonder if the Synology Surveillance Station, which is there.
Casey:
I had no idea what that noise was.
Casey:
It startled me.
Casey:
Anyway, I wonder.
John:
You need to get closer to the mic.
John:
You need to figure out how to mic a vibraslap.
John:
I can get closer.
Yeah.
John:
How's that?
Marco:
Better?
Casey:
That was better.
Marco:
I can keep the bell really far away.
Marco:
It's nice and sharp.
Marco:
But I guess I've got to bring the Vibrasab closer.
John:
You need to mic it.
John:
You need to have it in an instrument setup where there's a separate little mic, a little wire going, you know?
Casey:
What black magic box will fix you?
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
I've got a PCI Express capture card to capture the sound of the Vibrasab.
Casey:
Anyway, I wonder if Surveillance Station does any of this.
Casey:
And I honestly don't know.
Casey:
It may be the dumbest thing in the world.
John:
It has to, because the facial recognition is like table stakes.
John:
And once any product other than this, I assume, has facial recognition, the first feature you implement is send me notifications of its unfamiliar face.
John:
Unless you're Google, in which case you just let it sit there for years without this feature.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I can say, for whatever it's worth, I continue to have only very good experiences with HomeKit Secure Video and with the Logitech Circle View.
Marco:
I know it's a really weird, specialized, niche thing that no one besides me appears to be using.
Marco:
However, this is a pretty good product.
Marco:
Actually, we recently took a trip, and so...
Marco:
We had found on our previous trips that there were a couple of areas of our house that we wanted eyes on.
Marco:
I bought a couple of additional Logitech Circle views right before this trip.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
I set them up in two seconds.
Marco:
John, they are outdoor rated, John.
Marco:
And also, if you wanted to drill one through your house, you only need to fit a USB-A plug, a regular little rectangular USB-A plug through the wall.
John:
My hull is smaller than a USB-A plug already.
John:
I was hoping it would be really tiny, and I had to make it a little bit bigger, but it still wouldn't fit USB-A.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Anyway, they have been fantastic.
Marco:
I have had perfectly fine luck with them.
Marco:
I think I now own something like four or five.
Marco:
HomeKit, if you have much of an iCloud plan, if you have the medium plan, you have, I think, five cameras worth of stuff.
Marco:
If you have the really big plan, you have unlimited cameras.
Marco:
Although, I question, like,
Marco:
what does unlimited mean exactly um the only the major downside and i mentioned this back you know months ago when i first talked about this the only downside is that nest actually gives you continuous recording and none of the home kit stuff does that home kit stuff is like if it detects motion or whatever conditions you set it will start recording a clip and it'll record a clip until that motion or whatever is gone for a few seconds so you don't have continuous recording but you do have a lot yeah
John:
That was kind of one of the features that I like about the Nest is that, you know, it's internet.
John:
So everything's going up to the internet.
John:
So again, if someone steals the camera, I'll have a video of that.
John:
And it is continuous because for things that are facing outside, even if there's no interesting events, like you can cordon off areas that you're not interested in.
John:
Sometimes you just want to see, did the UPS truck come?
John:
Did, you know, when did this Amazon thing?
John:
Does the neighbor walk on their dog?
John:
If the tree falls across the street, like just having it, just recording all the time and saving or whatever it saves, like,
John:
is it 60 hours or 60 days it saves a lot of video i think it's like 60 days i mean it depends on what plan you have i think yeah but anyway like it's it's just one less thing because i had the ring camera was the same type of like i'll only turn on when i detect something interesting happening or whatever and that's cheaper and it's nicer on battery but why i wanted this to be plugged in so it's just it's just recording all the time because it's facing out of the house and it's plugged in so i don't have to worry about it about it running out
Marco:
I will say also, for whatever it's worth, because it's only recording via clips, I haven't missed anything.
Marco:
It seems to be recording a rolling buffer.
Marco:
I've had certain ones, I think the Eufy ones, where if somebody walks into the frame, it wouldn't record the first couple of seconds of them being there.
Marco:
Because it would take a couple seconds for it to notice, wake up, and start the recording.
Marco:
Whereas the Logitech circle view...
Marco:
And I don't know if HomeKit always works this way or what, but the circle view, it seems to be recording a rolling buffer all the time.
Marco:
And if you detect motion, the clip you get includes a couple of seconds before the person enters the frame.
Marco:
So you have the complete entrance, activity, and exit, and then a few seconds after the exit all recorded, which is nice.
Marco:
So in practice, I haven't actually, it only recording clips has not been a problem for me.
Marco:
it also does have all the same all similar features of like you can you know draw out an activity zone to pay attention to in the frame all all this within the home app i mean it's by far the nicest part of the home app and it's like for as much crap as home kit gets for a lot of other stuff this has worked extremely reliably for me and this hardware has worked great i only wish there was more hardware available like you know with maybe a few different things like maybe maybe a less expensive indoor cam that was good there's not very many options but
Marco:
Overall, the CircleView and HomeKit SecureVideo has been great for me.
Marco:
It detects people, it detects animals, packages.
Marco:
It's just fantastic.
Marco:
I can strongly recommend HomeKit SecureVideo.
Marco:
I only have experiences with Nest with their older hardware, but my experiences with Nest have been very mediocre, whereas HomeKit SecureVideo with CircleView has been pretty good so far.
John:
Yeah, this hardware seems good, and the recognition, like, animal, person, vehicle, like, it all seems dead on.
John:
Like, I don't have notifications, but I can still go and look at the events for the last, you know, whatever many days and see that, yeah, that is a person, that is an animal, you did hear a dog bark, you know, and it has all the other stuff, like, if it hears a fire alarm, if it hears glass breaking, I'm assuming all that stuff works well, I just don't want to find out.
Casey:
Hey, so I'm looking at the CircleView camera website, and there's a bunch of general marketing material.
Casey:
And then like halfway down, unparalleled privacy, and there's three images side by side.
Casey:
Tilt to hide.
Casey:
Need instant privacy at a moment's notice?
Casey:
Simply tilt the camera down to instantly shield yourself from view.
Casey:
Simple turnoff.
Casey:
A rear-mounted button immediately cuts off both audio and video, so you're not left fumbling during private moments.
Casey:
That's what that button does?
Casey:
Do people put these in their bedrooms?
Casey:
Is that what's going on here?
John:
If they want to go have intimate moments underneath Marco's house, they need to be able to turn the camera off.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
That was a much better joke.
Casey:
I did not even see.
Casey:
Well done, John.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So since we last recorded a week and a half ago or whatever it was, Elon Musk has said, no, really, I would like to buy Twitter.
Casey:
And Twitter was like, no.
Casey:
And then they were like, okay, sure.
Casey:
Yeah, let's do it.
Casey:
Good summary.
John:
Well, actually, last week, remember, he had just bought like 9.2% of Twitter.
John:
And then we said, you know,
John:
we don't even know what could happen by next week so he hadn't even offered to buy the company he had just bought a percentage and they offered him a seat on the board and eventually turned that down because it seemed you know my guess was that it seemed too restrictive and then after we recorded he said you know what forget about being on the board i want the whole company
Casey:
So he has put together the financing, and this is all the financing stuff.
Casey:
I just plumb don't understand it.
Casey:
I will tell you the summary, but this particular is about who's paying what and what is giving.
Marco:
I can strongly recommend if you're a Stratechery subscriber, Ben Thompson did a really great job with the last two daily updates.
Marco:
I guess we'll link to them in the show notes.
Marco:
They do require a subscription to read, but the last two daily updates on Stratechery were fantastic at explaining all of this stuff.
Casey:
So, first of all, yes, I completely agree.
Casey:
But coming back to what we know, as of right now, it is 9.30-ish on the evening of Wednesday, the 27th of April.
Casey:
And so who knows what will happen tomorrow.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I got to edit the show really fast before it gets out of date.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
So as we know, Elon has said he was going to buy Twitter.
Casey:
So from Twitter's PR announcement, Twitter announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion.
Casey:
Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Casey:
Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction.
Casey:
The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter's closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.
Casey:
Note that's not when he got it.
Casey:
It's just when he talked about it.
Casey:
But moving on.
Casey:
Uh, quote, free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated, said Mr. Musk.
Casey:
Quote, I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots and authenticating all humans.
Casey:
Twitter's tremendous potential.
Casey:
I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.
Casey:
Okay, sure.
Casey:
Let's go with that.
Marco:
I actually, I am kind of okay with this.
Marco:
Twitter, as a company, has always been a disaster.
Marco:
Twitter's leadership has always been weird libertarian tech bro billionaires.
Marco:
They've always been that.
Marco:
And Elon Musk is another one of those.
Yeah.
Marco:
Twitter's leadership has always been really crappy and inconsistent with how they handle political problems, how they handle abuse problems.
Marco:
They've done a pretty crappy job of spam control, bot control.
Marco:
They do a really inconsistent job of dealing with abuse.
Marco:
They have really opaque and confusing and inconsistently applied policies regarding certain types of speech that are controversial or that are just outright illegal or hateful.
Marco:
They've always been really crappy at all that stuff.
Marco:
They've always been run by these tech dude bros.
Marco:
If you look at anything wrong with Elon Musk running this company...
John:
look at jack dorsey i mean like well why is he better like it so i can answer that question well okay like i get what you're getting at that you know that twitter has been poorly run and i agree with that but i think there's a difference in there's a difference in degree for sure like who is the bigger jerky tech bro jack dorsey or elon musk no contest right
John:
is it no contest oh no contest right because i mean i don't i don't think that high jack dorsey i guess jack dorsey still wants to think of himself as a good person i think he's trying to do the right thing jack dorsey spearheaded the blue sky project of like trying to you know do the right thing years later of trying to you know make a protocol as a replacement for twitter right so far that's very much still in the blue sky
John:
Yeah, no, but I'm just saying like Elon Musk would never even think about doing anything like that.
John:
Right.
John:
Elon Musk is definitely a difference in degree.
John:
I think he's also a difference in type just because Jack Dorsey like didn't buy Twitter because like on a whim sort of like like.
John:
Elon Musk is doing.
John:
He's a company that he... Was he a founder?
John:
He was there at the beginning at the very least and has a tie to the company and has high-minded ideals about what he wants the company for.
John:
So I think... And Elon Musk...
John:
does not as far as we can tell despite the incoherent statements that he throws out and then just goes and does whatever the hell he wants that isn't totally in conflict with the statements right but i i want to say that like i mean so first let me just get this out there i think it's obvious all the terrible things that could happen like we'll see but everyone knows the terrible things like how why why do people not like it well elon musk could make twitter worse for everybody right we use twitter and if he makes it worse for us that's sad um
John:
He can make it worse for the world by making Twitter do more evil and less good in the world.
John:
That's definitely a thing that he could do.
John:
And he would do that by allowing more bad behavior that is currently now not allowed.
John:
And despite what Mark said, like, you know, like that Twitter has done a bad job of controlling bad behavior, they've at least been trying.
John:
Elon Musk's stated goal is to do less of that, to essentially allow more bad behavior than they're currently allowing.
John:
So if you think it's crappy now, he's already said, I want to make it crappier.
John:
But setting all that aside...
John:
Because I think we could spend too long talking about how Elon Musk could make Twitter worse.
John:
There are parts of this deal that have the potential to make things better, right?
John:
First one is Twitter becoming privately held.
John:
which is, you know, Casey read before.
John:
That means there'll be no stock.
John:
No one is looking at the stock price.
John:
No one involved in the thing has to be worrying about what, you know, what this move is going to mean for the stock price tomorrow morning because there is no stock price.
John:
It's privately held.
John:
Now, it doesn't mean you just get to lose money forever then, but privately held gives you more leeway to do things that the quote-unquote stock market would frown upon.
John:
The second thing that's good about private ownership and Elon Musk in particular is when a single person controls your company,
John:
they can do things like get things done.
John:
It's not the sort of middle of the road, you know, now, now let's not be too hasty, big committee full of people who, none of whom can make a decision.
John:
That's why Twitter stagnated for so long.
John:
That's why Twitter has just sort of spent years and years, just not really getting any better and fumbling towards maybe making some things a little better.
John:
When you have a singular person in control, uh,
John:
they can get things done.
John:
And Elon Musk in particular, one of the things he has going for him along with Steve Jobs is when they get it into their head or any, you know, strong leader, when they get it into their head that they want to do a thing, they make that thing happen.
John:
If you're lucky, that thing is good.
John:
Like, I think it would be cool to have an electric car powered by lithium-ion batteries designed from the ground up to be electric.
John:
Luckily, that was a good idea.
John:
And he made sure that it happened, right?
Yeah.
John:
You can also have terrible ideas and then make them happen.
John:
And that's not as good, right?
John:
But at the very least, just the years that Twitter went, like, not really changing their product at all.
John:
I was reading some articles today talking about, like, how... People don't remember this if you haven't been on Twitter for ages like we all have.
John:
But, like, so many things that are part of Twitter now, Twitter didn't even think of themselves.
John:
They were things the community was doing and they adopted them, like...
John:
You know, it's going all the way back to like the fact that an individual thing on Twitter is called a tweet.
John:
Twitter didn't even come up with that.
John:
It was like, what was it?
John:
Craig Hockenberry and Twitter.
Marco:
Yeah, I believe so.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Retweets.
John:
That was the thing the community did.
John:
We would type capital R, capital T space and then paste the content of another tweet.
John:
And we did that for a while.
John:
And I was like, huh.
John:
I guess that's a good idea.
John:
We should probably do that.
John:
At mentions.
John:
Replying.
John:
So many features that people think are part of Twitter.
John:
Twitter didn't even think of and do themselves.
John:
They had to wait for people to sort of use in-band signaling to do them.
John:
You know, all the innovations that the clients came up with.
John:
Tweety, one of the original Twitter clients, invented pull to refresh.
John:
Have you ever pulled to refresh an iOS app?
John:
That came from a third party app that was used on Twitter, not from Twitter itself.
John:
And on and on for all the years of like people who use Twitter wanting them to add features and Twitter being like, I don't know.
John:
Maybe we'll do ads, I guess.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We should do a little bit more to fight spam.
John:
but i don't want to annoy people i don't know they just i just always see the twitter board is like and the ceo is just like hemming and hawing and not doing anything and having a single leader who is known for getting things done and who will be running a private company where he's unanswerable to shareholders or whatever means that at the very least things will happen it all depends on what things will happen
John:
If he has terrible ideas, then terrible ideas will come to fruition really quick.
John:
Or if he decides he doesn't want to do anything and just the fun of it is owning it so he can, you know, just sort of make the, you know, satisfy his whims, that could happen too.
John:
I'm not making any prediction about what will happen, but I will say that it is not a relief.
John:
It is like...
John:
it could potentially be terrifying for him to be able to do all sorts of things.
John:
But at the very least watching Twitter flail for the past decade and a half has always kind of been frustrating.
John:
And so now I kind of feel like this guy, I feel this way about government a lot too.
Yeah.
John:
one of the worst things that can happen is that the thing you're trying to make better is too hard to change.
John:
So it never, it can never get much worse, but also can't get much better.
John:
And it's just this war of like these tiny incremental ratcheting things.
John:
And it feels, you know, in some ways it's better to say, to give a democracy example, right?
John:
If you vote for somebody and they want to make, they want to do X and they just can't get X done because it's too hard to change the government.
John:
then they get voted out because you're going to say hey you said you're going to do x and you didn't so they get voted out and then people come in and they want to do y and then they can't make y happen because it's too hard to change anything and they get voted out and just nothing ever gets done right um that's kind of been the case with twitter where there's been
John:
lot of complaints about it and say you should do this you should do you know whatever things we think you should do and they would just never really do them that well i mean you could say over the past several years like the the sort of the trust and safety team trying to make it better for harassment or whatever has been making progress and making slow incremental changes but it's taken so long like gamer gate was a long time ago it's not like this is like fresh and oh this is a new problem we have to face they've had years and years to tackle it and they've gotten better than they were but not fast enough
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm hoping that whatever happens here, if Elon Musk decides to do literally anything with Twitter, that something will happen.
John:
And maybe that something will be disastrous and we'll all hate it, but at least the disaster will get it.
John:
We'll just get it over with, like get the disaster over with, burn it to the ground, destroy it, whatever's going to happen, make it happen.
John:
Or do something that makes it better or do something that turns out really bad and then make a hard right turn and then fix it.
John:
Right.
John:
As opposed to a sort of slow motion, sort of, you know, floating dumpster on fire, just floating down the river, which is like what Twitter has been for the past decade.
John:
So I'm not trying to give you the optimistic taste because I really think Elon Musk is it.
John:
total jerk and has terrible ideas about almost everything but at the very least his terrible ideas should come to fruition very quickly if he's doing anything at all the other possible take i just read recently i'll try to find a link for uh for notes is that there's a potential that he doesn't do anything
John:
And the whole point is that he just wants to control it so he can, you know, make decisions like a king.
John:
But if there's nothing for him to decide about, he'll just let it run the way it is and, you know, not do anything at all.
John:
In which case, that's probably the worst case scenario where that means things won't get better and they'll maybe slowly, slowly get worse.
John:
And that I think would be a total waste of private ownership and single person control.
John:
I really hope something happens to Twitter.
John:
I can't bring myself to hope that there's something that will happen will be good, but I kind of hope that there's something bad.
John:
Let's just get it over with.
John:
Like, just make it terrible now as fast as possible so we can all, you know, so we can all collectively push back against it, probably futilely.
John:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, maybe what will happen is we'll get round steering wheels back on Tesla cars, and something terrible will happen to Twitter, and we'll complain so much about it that he'll change it because he'll just be too annoyed.
Marco:
I agree with a lot of that, but I think... I don't know.
Marco:
When you look at how Twitter has run over the last 10 years...
Marco:
All those improvements that you mentioned to the product, they have really not improved the core product in a very long time.
Marco:
All of the things they've worked on over time, feature-wise or product-wise, have been basically trying to rip off the hot thing of the day.
Marco:
So, oh, look, Clubhouse exists?
Marco:
We're going to make our own Clubhouse.
Marco:
Oh, look, Substack exists?
Marco:
We're going to make our own Substack.
John:
Every social media company.
John:
Right.
John:
I mean, and Twitter has been even doing that more slowly and worse than their competitors.
John:
I mean, not that I'm saying that's a thing that they should be doing, but that's kind of par for the course.
John:
But I think about like, so they made tweets longer.
John:
They used to be 140, another 280.
John:
How long did that take to do?
Marco:
Like, it's just, it's too long.
Marco:
There's so much they could do to make the product better.
Marco:
And this is why, all right, if you'll permit me a bit of a thought experiment here.
Marco:
One of the reasons why, as I've thought about this, I am less down on it.
Marco:
I mean, look, I think the idea of Twitter going private, getting out of the issues that come with being on the public market, especially since their business is just not a very good business.
John:
They're not good at being a public company.
John:
The people who run the company never figured out how to make money.
John:
And so if you're going to be a public company and you can't figure out how to make money, what's the point?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I do, by the way, I do think this deal is going to go through.
Marco:
Now, it isn't definite yet.
Marco:
And everyone's like, oh, maybe he's going to get tired of it and just move on and just back out.
Marco:
I don't think he is.
Marco:
If you look at, first of all, how much of his personal wealth he has on the line here.
Marco:
It's pretty clear he's thought a lot about this.
Marco:
You know, say what you want about the guy, but when he does have a big idea, he tends to try to do it.
Marco:
His track record is that he does achieve many of those big ideas.
Marco:
Not all of them.
Marco:
I think his self-driving promises have been grossly overblown.
Marco:
um and you know there's a lot of problems there but generally you know electric cars big solar company rockets all that stuff he's done very very well on on most of his big promises and so i think he is going to go through with this there's a whole category of thing that he talks about and twitter buying twitter used to be in that category of just things that he says he just says things sometimes right and that you can find tweets from years ago where someone was like uh
John:
Hey, Elon, you should buy Twitter.
John:
And he said, how much is it?
John:
Right.
John:
That was like years ago.
John:
Right.
Casey:
52 minutes ago, he tweeted the following.
Casey:
Next, I'm buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in.
John:
I mean, all he does is shit.
Casey:
That's just a joke.
John:
But but like what he he'll say things like this, like he'll say, oh, Flint, Michigan has a problem with water.
John:
I'll just just tell me I'm going to pay to replace all the pipes.
John:
Oh, kids are trapped in a cave.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
I'm going to send this up in there.
John:
Oh, there's a there's a power problem in Australia.
John:
I'm just going to send you a bunch of batteries.
John:
you know, Oh, you can solve world hunger for $6 million.
John:
Just tell me your plan.
John:
I'll give you the 6 billion.
John:
Like, but he constantly says things that, that sound like, you know what the, the thing that we get from it is like, he'll say that he's going to replace all the pipes in Flint, Michigan.
John:
And,
John:
And his fans will latch onto that and say, see, Elon saves a day and never look at it again and just assume that that happened when it actually didn't happen.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, and he so fine, whatever.
John:
He's he's a bazillionaire who just says random crap on Twitter.
John:
Buying Twitter could have been one of those things.
John:
And in fact, he did make jokes about quote unquote jokes about buying Twitter before.
John:
This time, though, it's not a joke.
John:
And so I feel like.
John:
Of all those things that he says, some of them, you know, very often they sound like good things.
John:
Like, hey, I've got a lot of money.
John:
You've got a problem.
John:
Here's a solution.
John:
Let me just do it.
John:
But they usually don't happen.
John:
Usually don't happen for this category of things.
John:
The only things that he's made happen, SpaceX, Tesla, maybe solar roof, but if you look at stories and that, it's not doing too hot, right?
John:
He said so many other things, some of which were jokes, some of which were half jokes, some of which would have been like, yeah, do fix all the pipes in Flint.
John:
But nah, lost interest, right?
John:
And so I feel like buying Twitter falls into that category of like thing that could have been a joke, but turns out to be real.
John:
But I don't know whether once he owns Twitter, he's actually going to do anything with it other than
John:
You know, enjoy the control that he has because Twitter is important for, you know, has outsized importance compared to the people who are on it.
John:
Right.
John:
So one of the things he could do with it is, you know, continue the destruction of American democracy by allowing right wing nut jobs to have free reign over the thing and make sure that Trump gets elected in 2024.
John:
Like if that's what he wants to do, he can make that happen or at least make it much more likely.
John:
Uh, but maybe he doesn't care.
John:
Maybe he just wants to be able to find the one or two people who he likes and give them a thumbs up and ban the one or two people he doesn't like.
John:
And that's the extent of him owning Twitter.
John:
But I can't tell now, like it seems clear to me, despite his high-minded talking that Twitter is not Tesla and Twitter is not SpaceX.
John:
Twitter seems more like, uh,
John:
One, a cool toy and two, an undervalued asset.
John:
Because like as a businessman, he can see that Twitter has made him a lot of money and is a powerful tool to have control over.
John:
And why shouldn't he have control over that?
John:
He can probably use it to make a lot of money.
Marco:
we do have to think too, like he has so many things going on.
Marco:
He has so many projects.
Marco:
He runs so many companies.
Marco:
He's not going to be running Twitter day to day.
Marco:
He's going to have to hire somebody.
Marco:
It looks like Jack Dorsey is kind of sucking up to him.
Marco:
Maybe he's hoping to have the CEO job.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
He did so well the other two times.
Marco:
I know, right?
Marco:
But like, you know,
Marco:
we're assuming that you know if this goes through which i think it probably will again uh we're assuming that like changes will happen you know he's he's talking about changes honestly some of the changes he's talking about sound pretty good if he can pull them off which ones though and i can tell you the contradictory ones which ones sound good defeating spam bot sounds good open sourcing the algorithm is not compatible with defeating spam bots because if because if you tell them what the algorithm is the spam bots will game it
John:
He knows that, or at least I hope he knows that, but he just says random crap.
Marco:
Yes, and the thing is, when you look at the things he's been good at, things like building pretty great electric cars overall, and the SpaceX stuff, a lot of these things are...
Marco:
Problems that I think involve different types of engineering and different types of challenges than the kind of really messy crap you get into with running a social network.
Marco:
Running a social network, you don't understand the level that you have to deal with this stuff.
Marco:
Everyone out there who thinks they have a silver bullet to solve the problems of moderating content and controlling people and spam and abuse on a social network, you don't know.
Marco:
It's way more complicated than you think it is.
Marco:
And there are so many instances where you're between a rock and a hard place, where there is no good solution to a certain type of problem or a certain situation.
John:
The type of problem that it's most comparable with that Elon does have experience with, it's not comparable to, like I said, like the idea of like, you know, what his big innovation for Tesla is like, it's a good idea to use modern battery technology to make a purposeful electric car, right?
John:
That's a good idea.
John:
Make that happen.
John:
But the thing that's close to content moderation is, okay, so how do you build a whole bunch of cars reliably in a cost-effective manner?
John:
That is way more complicated than you think it is.
John:
It seems like, ah, just people build things all the time.
John:
How hard could it be, right?
John:
Turns out it's pretty hard.
John:
Like, there's a reason Apple and all its manufacturing partners, part of their power and their strength is their expertise in building millions and millions of things, you know, precisely, you know, without spending too much money, you know, making a good product, making it reliable consistently.
John:
There's a whole auto industry that has spent decades and decades figuring out how can we build cars.
John:
So they all come off the assembly line and they're all identical or whatever.
John:
And if you just think, ah, it's a detail, whatever, just the good, the big idea is we should make electric cars and everyone's cheering you on and I think it's great.
John:
And Elon is like, what if we use robots?
John:
That would be cool.
John:
And it's like, Elon, people have spent a long time figuring out how to build cars.
John:
It doesn't mean they're all right.
John:
Like, you don't have to do everything that they do, but they do have some knowledge that you don't have.
John:
So maybe consider that you coming into this field fresh and reading a few books or articles, and you're just going to say, I'm doing everything my way, and I think it would be cool to have robots.
John:
you know that's what i feel like the content moderation is like where it maybe has a good big idea about twitter but the detail of like i think we shouldn't allow bots well great you're the first one to think of that if you think that's your big idea like that is a good idea we all agree get rid of bots like no one wants bots right that's not you're not bringing any value here okay but how do you get rid of bots lots of people have looked at this before and you say i think we should use robots to get rid of bots i'm just making an example like
John:
He gets into his head and is like, I don't care about the details.
John:
Just do this thing that's cool.
John:
And I know everyone else does it differently.
John:
I know everyone else is using LiDAR on their cars.
John:
We don't need to just use cameras.
John:
But Elon, what makes you think we can do it all with cameras?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It seems like we can.
John:
Just go.
John:
Right?
John:
That's where his mindset falls down.
John:
Right?
John:
that there's nothing he can learn from anyone else.
John:
And the details aren't that important.
John:
Just make it happen.
John:
And I'll just drive you until you make it happen.
John:
And that's why a lot of people don't like working for Elon Musk.
John:
And it's difficult to deal with him.
John:
Again, much like Steve Jobs, it all depends on how good your idea is and how right you are.
John:
Is it true that you don't need LiDAR and just need cameras?
John:
If so, you're a genius, which turns out not to be true.
John:
You wasted many, many years and had many, many promises of a thing that's just literally never going to work because you can't do it with cameras with current technology and need LiDAR.
John:
We don't know how that one's going to turn out yet, but so far it's not looking great.
John:
But content moderation is much more like, how do you build cars reliably?
John:
And Tesla has not...
John:
figured that out they just haven't and other car companies are better than they were despite tesla saying we're doing everything our way and we don't look at you stodgy companies you are stuck in the old mindset the new mindset is better and it is better in lots of ways but he's not able to
John:
synthesize the best of the past with new ideas.
John:
He's more like, ah, just do it.
John:
And so I feel like content moderation, he's going to be like, I know lots of people look at this problem for years, including Twitter, but I have an idea.
John:
We should just do this.
John:
And he's going to like start from like, he's going to start relearning mistakes that people learned in like 1994, if he falls down that route.
John:
So,
John:
I'm not optimistic that he has anything to bring to the table when it comes to implementing his vision of, for example, a Twitter free from spam bots.
Marco:
I know this is very, very difficult for everybody.
Marco:
If we can step back for a second from the person himself and just think, like, do we think it is possible to have a different balance between Twitter
Marco:
I hate to use the term free speech, but let's use the term jerks, because that's the people who are yelling the loudest about demanding free speech, even though that doesn't even apply here.
Marco:
But the people who are demanding that the most are largely jerks, and what they're saying is, I want my jerkitude to have a publishing platform and an audience.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I wonder how much of this problem, because this is, again, this is a really hard problem.
Marco:
Really hard.
Marco:
Because everyone thinks that certain types of speak should be allowed and certain types of speak shouldn't be allowed on this platform, but they don't agree on what the types are.
Marco:
Any decision they make, even if they decide we're going to allow everything...
Marco:
is going to anger a large group of people or break laws or cause really horrible things in real life.
Marco:
And so maybe they're trying to tackle at a policy level which can only ever be reactive to problems.
Marco:
Anything that they're going to solve with a health and safety kind of team or whatever those are called –
Marco:
If you're relying on the community moderation team or structure to respond to people who are jerks, what has to happen is first someone has to be a jerk and post something horrible.
Marco:
And then you respond by trying to get them kicked off and maybe a day or two and maybe you get them kicked off.
Marco:
That's only ever going to be so good.
Marco:
And that's really inconsistent and hard to get right.
Marco:
So I wonder if it would be a better idea to tackle the problem more on the client side of basically.
Marco:
So I think a combination of two things here.
Marco:
Number one, we have to distinguish between what content is allowed to exist and
Marco:
on the platform versus what content the platform will promote.
Marco:
Those are very different things.
Marco:
Like, I face this issue in Overcast.
Marco:
You know, Overcast is a podcast platform and there's a lot, you know, I don't have any control over what people add to it because it's all the Apple directory.
Marco:
But I will occasionally have people write in who are very upset that something has reached a point in a top list where it shows up in my directory categories.
Marco:
And it's something usually, you know, some weird, like, ultra, you know, alt-right kind of thing.
Marco:
And I have to decide, like, you know, is this thing bad enough that...
Marco:
it should not be available in overcast or is it bad enough that i should not promote it in top lists and recommendations or is it neither and i should just leave it alone because people who are seeking this kind of stuff out you know they're seeking it out you know and so those are very hard decisions to make even on my level as one person looking at the world of podcasts which is way way way smaller than the kind of thing they're dealing with so like i i see these issues and so i think
Marco:
The way I usually fall on this is stuff has to be pretty bad for it to not be allowed to exist at all on a publishing platform like this.
Marco:
But you can exert much more editorial control and have much more of an opinion as the platform.
Marco:
First of all, if you're small like me, then it doesn't matter.
Marco:
But even somebody like Twitter, they have much more control over what they promote in things like ranking algorithms, recommendation algorithms, stuff like that.
Marco:
And so
Marco:
I actually think most people should be allowed to post most stuff that is not outwardly illegal or threatening harm to people.
Marco:
Most of that, I think, having that be allowed to be posted is usually okay, again, with those exceptions.
Marco:
And even, I mean, I know a lot of people don't even agree with those exceptions.
Marco:
Those people are ridiculous and naive.
Marco:
But if somebody's posting something that is not a threat and is not harassment and is not illegal in some other way,
Marco:
I don't see anything wrong with that, but I don't believe they deserve an audience.
Marco:
And I do think that the people who they're trying to be in communication with, if they're trying to like... Some guy's writing in, calling somebody an a**hole or whatever.
Marco:
I don't think it's necessarily the platform's job to actively prevent everyone from being a jerk.
Marco:
It is the platform's job to give people the tools...
Marco:
To not see most of that most of the time and to let people have way more control than we do now over how many jerks we allow access to us, how many jerks posts that we allow even to show up in our timelines.
Marco:
We have right now only extremely rudimentary controls over those things.
Marco:
We have blocking and muting, and in certain contexts you can disable replies, I think.
Marco:
But for the most part, we have very little control over that relative to the platform's age and alleged maturity.
Marco:
If Twitter really focuses on that end of things, I think it would be less controversial, first of all.
Marco:
It would still be controversial because the jerks still believe that everything oppresses them because their politics are factually wrong and factually dangerous and factually full of hate and abuse and horrible things.
Marco:
And they call it politics.
Marco:
They think it's OK.
Marco:
And a quick aside back to him.
Marco:
It disturbs me greatly all of his tweets about basically both sides-ism.
Marco:
That's a clear warning sign that he doesn't really think right about this stuff.
Marco:
But anyway, going back to the product itself.
Marco:
If we can get to a point where the jerks are...
Marco:
able to have their post on the platform within reason, but most people don't see them.
Marco:
And if you don't want to see jerks, you have very easy and obvious controls, probably hopefully that are on by default that filter a lot of that stuff out from even being shown to you or your followers.
Marco:
That can go a long way.
Marco:
And this is the kind of area that I think Twitter so desperately should have been investing in all these years instead of building freaking Clubhouse and Instagram stories and whatever else they were ripping off from other companies.
Marco:
Their core product is full of garbage because they haven't tackled problems like this.
Marco:
Whatever change in leadership has to happen to make them start looking at their product differently and maybe prioritizing different parts of it, I really hope they tackle that.
Marco:
Because that, I think, is so much more powerful than relying on letting a jerk post and become a jerk and then having to report them and then having to wait for the report to be seen and hoping the report is dealt with correctly.
Marco:
That whole thing...
Marco:
leaves a bunch of jerks on the platform and lets a lot more people see their jerkitude.
Marco:
Whereas if you have filters up front and smarter filters and more controls for people to not see abuse in the first place, you're doing way more good for way more people and the jerks can still have their jerk Twitter if they want it.
John:
So one of the dumbest things Twitter ever did was when they cracked down on third-party clients.
John:
So we already said earlier that, like, a lot of the new features, the new features, the features that we all take for granted on Twitter, like retweets and replies and, you know, all that good stuff, came from users and client applications.
John:
And there was a story recently explaining, like, one of the things that motivated Twitter cracking down on third-party clients.
John:
There was some...
John:
A person was buying up all the third-party clients to try to hijack Twitter's network by making those clients work with Twitter and also his own new network or whatever, and then Twitter caught wind of this, and they bought TweetDeck, and then they shut down the third-party clients.
John:
And anyway, turning off third-party clients killed all innovation on the client side.
John:
And I think a lot of what you're talking about, Marco, is like, and this was in Ben Thompson's, one of Ben Thompson's recent posts for Decker, the idea that
John:
I'm not going to say it's an abdication of responsibility, but it is an outsourcing of certain responsibilities.
John:
It's saying, look, we Twitter are never going to get it perfectly right.
John:
So why not let third party developers have a crack at this?
John:
We'll run the service.
John:
We'll have all the tweets and features and everything like that.
John:
But third party clients will reopen our API and we'll say, if you want to make a client.
John:
build on top of our API.
John:
We'll add more sophisticated features.
John:
We'll actually improve our API.
John:
We'll give you access to all the good stuff that only the first-party client has access to, and we'll add new features.
John:
And then you, third-party clients, can work on making clients that are better at, you know, hiding tweets that you don't want to see or quality filtering and stuff like that.
John:
I think that is a good idea, and that is potentially one of the good things that could come out of Elon Musk, because if somewhere in his weirdo head he has decided that having an API is cool and good, he'll make it happen.
John:
And he'll just say, and by the way, give the API all the features that the first-party client has, and that will be an improvement over the status quo.
John:
If he doesn't care about it, it won't happen.
John:
But it's possible that somewhere in his little brain he'll be like,
John:
oh yeah libertarian api good whatever just do it and that will be like an accidental good side effect of this right but setting that aside i feel like that is not the solution to the quality problem because a lot of the things that you were describing
John:
are sort of just redefining the problem and say, oh, we'll just we'll see less bad stuff and more good stuff.
John:
The problem is always what's the bad stuff?
John:
What's the good stuff and who decides?
John:
And having third party clients decide that is just asking each one of them to do something that Twitter, the company with 7,500 employees, hasn't been able to do over 15 years where you think some two people making a Twitter client are going to be able to figure it out.
John:
I mean, maybe there's larger third party companies, but there's no business model there.
John:
I don't understand how anyone would ever be able to staff up to the point where they can do any good here.
John:
Kind of like car manufacturing.
John:
It's not like no one has ever run a community on the Internet before.
John:
There is tons of prior art on what works and what doesn't.
John:
There's academic papers on it.
John:
There's real examples of real communities.
John:
There's real communities that we've been in.
John:
personally, each individual person has been on the internet for a couple of decades or whatever.
John:
We've been in communities that have gone well, that have burned themselves down.
John:
It's not like this is totally new territory.
John:
It's a hard problem to be sure, but it's not like this is the first time anyone's ever looking at this.
John:
Even Twitter before Elon,
John:
did a bad job of looking at other internet communities and learning from them what works and what doesn't work.
John:
The reactive thing where you were talking about is like, well, we have blocking and muting and you can report, right?
John:
That is such a rudimentary system and it doesn't scale well in any community that's reached this scale.
John:
that has done a better job has differed in ways that, you know, are not mysterious.
John:
Like there's been tons of people writing articles about this for years, right?
John:
What distinguishes these big communities that work better from this one?
John:
Usually what distinguishes them is, first of all, they are, they have much more restrictive rules, which I know people who are like, oh, I want to be able to say whatever I want, wherever I want.
John:
The fact is communities with more restrictive rules and norms do better.
John:
Maybe those rules are rules you don't like or do like or whatever, but at least it defines the community.
John:
If you don't like that community, you'll know you don't like it because you'll say, I don't like these rules.
John:
I'm going to go elsewhere, right?
John:
You'll know, is this the place for me or is this not the place for me?
John:
Fairly, strictly, harshly defined rules, right?
John:
If you're the type of person who wants to be somewhere where there aren't harshly defined rules, you will go elsewhere, but that leaves only the people who are willing to work within those rules.
John:
Second thing that works is context.
John:
Twitter always seems to me that if you report someone's tweet, it's like they look at that tweet, they look at their set of rules, whatever their set of rules is this week, and they try to make a decision.
John:
Even then it's hard because the rules are, you know, whatever, are fuzzy, right?
John:
Communities that work well at scale don't just say, okay, I've got an incident, I've got a set of rules, I'm going to smush them together and say thumbs up or thumbs down.
John:
You have to look at the context, and the context is, who is this person?
John:
Has this person been reported 100 times in this past week?
John:
Is this person a known bad actor?
John:
Is this a bot account?
John:
You know, what is the larger context of this conversation, right?
John:
That's really hard to do at scale.
John:
But the way...
John:
It's communities that have been more successful have done it.
John:
It's by having some kind of reputation type system that lets you build up and build down.
John:
Look at Stack Overflow, for example, or look at Red or any other kind of community where they have a sort of persistent, ongoing, gamified reputation system where the behavior that the system wants you to do gets rewarded and the behavior the system doesn't want you to do gets punished.
John:
And anytime any action is taken, they look at the context of your history and activity in the community to decide what should be done, not just here's a tweet.
John:
I don't know who posted it.
John:
I don't know anything about them.
John:
And then here's a set of rules.
John:
Except, of course, if it's the President of the United States and then all the rules go out the window because it's all noteworthy.
John:
Anyway, I'm not saying this is an easy problem.
John:
But whenever I see Elon Musk talk about it, it's like he's never been in an online community before.
John:
And for years and years, when I've read articles about things that Twitter is doing poorly and hears these communities do better...
John:
Like there are a bunch of obvious things that they could be doing that would make things better, but almost all of them would anger people who think the real problem is that there are too many restrictions.
John:
And that's just not the way online communities work.
John:
Online communities that are free for all burn down real quick.
John:
because when anyone can do anything the only people who are happy to stay there are the people who just you know just want to tear everything down and everyone else leaves it's like if you're if you're at a party and someone comes in they start screaming and shooting flames in the air everyone who does not enter screaming in flames leaves pretty quickly and you're just left with a room full of people screaming and shooting flames in the air right that's why all these right-wing networks can't get off the ground because you get a bunch of you know
John:
people together who just want to scream at things it's you know no one else wants to be there except for them and then they just look around and they all see each other and they get bored and leave um so also they have no ability to attract good talent to build them none well i don't know there's probably some people who will you know do something for the right price or whatever but but anyway not good people
John:
I know if people don't want to hear that, what they want to hear is, you know, I someone told me I couldn't post something once and now I'm angry.
John:
So I think everything should be allowed.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, if you feel that way, like start a blog.
John:
Right.
John:
You can write whatever you want and then no one can read it.
John:
Right.
John:
But if you want to be if Twitter wants to run a community, especially we haven't talked about this, like Elon, in theory.
John:
Twitter eventually has to do something to make Twitter make some kind of money.
John:
I mean, first thing I'd probably do is lay a bunch of people off or maybe they'll get laid off before the buyout goes through, like watch Twitter's earnings, you know, probably the next week's show.
John:
Maybe we'll see what happens here.
John:
But like one way you can make Twitter more profitable is to get rid of a lot of costs.
John:
And most of those costs are people.
John:
So...
John:
You could lay off a bunch of people and suddenly the balance looks a lot better.
John:
Right.
John:
But you probably do have to figure out some way to make money.
John:
Like Elon could probably run Twitter for the rest of his life, just burning cash.
John:
But I don't think he wants to do that.
John:
I think I think he wants it to make money.
John:
So how do you figure out how to make money?
John:
One way you can make money is to, you know, do something to make it grow.
John:
That's the whole problem that Twitter is going to be able to do.
John:
Like we need more people to be on Twitter.
John:
The way you grow a service, a social network service, you have to make it be a place where people want to be.
John:
And Twitter has not been as successful at that as, for example, Facebook.
John:
That has billions of users and Twitter has, you know, a small number of hundreds of millions or whatever.
John:
Like, what is it?
John:
Twitter has, like...
John:
Is it like 20% of the U.S.
John:
population or something?
John:
Anyway, they're not as big as Facebook, right?
John:
How do you make a place where people want to be?
John:
You have to make something that is pleasant for the majority of people.
John:
And the way you make a community that is a place where people want to be and is generally pleasant is not by removing rules.
John:
You have to add more rules.
John:
You have to make the rules well understood, and you have to make it restrictive, and you have to make it so that behavior you don't want that makes it an unpleasant place for people, that behavior is disincentivized.
John:
And good behavior, however you define that, that makes a nice place for people to be, is incentivized.
John:
There are lots of ways to go about doing it, but that's what you have to do.
John:
You have to add rules to make it a more pleasant place for people to be.
John:
If that's not your goal, if you don't want it to be a pleasant place for people to be, but instead you want it to adhere to some high-minded ideal about anything goes, you're not going to get new users that way.
John:
People are going to flee and you're going to be left with a room full of loud jerks.
John:
And that is not a money-making proposition, getting back to, like, do you want this to succeed?
John:
Are you just going to narrow it down to the 500,000 loudest jerks and charge each of them $10 a month?
John:
I don't think that's a good business plan.
John:
So far, I haven't seen anything, as Elon said, that made me think that any of these changes, were he to implement them, would suddenly make Twitter make more money.
John:
Every single one, he said, is going to make it a less pleasant place to be, which will translate for it making less money than it does now.
John:
But that's all assuming he's actually going to do any of these things.
John:
So if I had to give some advice either to the current owners of Twitter or the future owner of Twitter is you need to look at online communities that have been more successful and copy some of the things that they do.
John:
And then maybe imagine this, maybe add some innovations of your own with your millions of dollars and thousands of really super smart employees.
John:
Maybe you can do something better than a web forum did in 1997.
John:
I know that's hard to imagine, but you haven't even caught up to web forums with three wise admins from 1997.
John:
Like, Twitter is below that level.
John:
Obviously, scale is different.
John:
I understand that.
John:
But, like, the model of how to make a community that is a pleasant place for the people that you want to be there to be in the community, Twitter has utterly failed at.
John:
And so far, I don't see Elon doing any better.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Remote, Sanity, and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
Marco:
I think if there's any bit of consolation I can give people when dealing with this jerk is... So I was explaining to my kid the other day.
Marco:
there's this one kid that always will say or do something to provoke a response.
Marco:
Like, that's just the kind of kid he is.
Marco:
He's like the provocateur kind of personality.
Marco:
I was explaining to my son, like, look...
Marco:
He's going to keep pushing buttons until he gets a negative reaction.
Marco:
That's what he's doing.
Marco:
Once you see it that way, you see that's what he's doing every single time.
Marco:
He wants that negative reaction, and he's going to keep pushing buttons until he gets it.
Marco:
that's Elon Musk.
Marco:
Like, if you see all the crap he posts on Twitter all the time, that's what he does.
Marco:
He, for all of the, you know, good ideas and implementation he has with some of his companies and stuff, he also is just that same kind of provocateur, kind of just, you know, as people say, shit poster.
Marco:
Like, what he's doing is provoking a reaction.
Marco:
He's...
Marco:
All of the good things, he's also extremely juvenile and a jerk in a lot of ways.
Marco:
That's what he's doing here.
Marco:
And so for all of us to pick apart any particular tweet that he posts and basically let it set us all on fire...
Marco:
You're just giving him exactly what he wants.
Marco:
You're feeding the troll, as I said last week.
Marco:
I don't find that productive.
Marco:
And I think if I can advise all of you well-meaning people out there, you're giving the bully what they want.
Marco:
You're giving the provocateur the negative reaction that they were literally seeking.
Marco:
He doesn't post these tweets because he thinks they're good ideas.
Marco:
He posts them to get that reaction.
Marco:
That is the entire point.
Marco:
So don't engage.
Marco:
Don't let yourself get set on fire.
Marco:
Don't give him the reaction.
Marco:
Don't let him make you that mad because that's literally what he's going for.
Marco:
Ignore him like the troll that he is trying to be.
Marco:
My chapter title for the whole thing when we talked about last time was the roll eyes emoji.
Marco:
Give him that.
Marco:
Not even respond.
Marco:
Just roll your eyes in real life and move on.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Don't give him anything.
Marco:
Do not feed this negative energy that he wants because...
Marco:
It's not going to help anybody, and you are literally making him win by doing that.
Marco:
And I know it's the hardest thing in the world not to get mad when someone's being a jerk like that.
Marco:
It's super hard.
Marco:
I know all this.
Marco:
I just gave this speech three days ago.
Marco:
It's super hard.
Marco:
But trust me, don't engage.
Marco:
Don't feed the troll.
Marco:
Let him get the reaction from other people.
Marco:
Don't make it you.
John:
He's getting the other action with other people.
John:
I mostly ignore him, too.
John:
But the weird thing about him buying Twitter and like I mentioned this, I think when we were talking about him investing, it's not like he's on Twitter getting like banned and stuff.
John:
Yeah, he says stupid juvenile things, but they're all fine.
John:
Like he's just he's just like he posed that picture of like making fun of Bill Gates's gut.
John:
That's a jerk move, but there's nothing wrong with it.
John:
He's not going to get banned from Twitter for making fun of Bill Gates.
John:
He's just making a dumb joke.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Except for when he occasionally is leading harassment campaigns against people.
John:
But for the most part, Musk's problem is he tweets things on the SEC, maybe gets mad at them.
John:
whatever like he's he's done stuff on twitter that is run afoul of various laws but i don't think he has this long history of like wanting to tweet things and getting his account banned and having to delete tweets and stuff like that um so it's kind of like you know it's it's not like he's uh like buying twitter so that he can finally say what he wants to say
John:
He says we don't want to say all the time anyway.
John:
And most of it is just silly juvenile stuff.
John:
Some of it is harmful.
John:
Some of it is just, you know, stock market manipulation and, you know, hyping up Dogecoin.
John:
Like he uses the power of Twitter to whatever amuses him or whatever.
John:
But it's not like he's taking it over it.
John:
So he's like, finally, I can say what I want to say.
John:
The thing that I think a lot of people are afraid of is, like, he would like to make it easier for people who are getting banned to come back and say what they want to say, like, reinstate Trump's account, or this person was banned for saying something that I think, oh, you know, well, it doesn't bother me, so I think he should probably come back, right?
John:
You know, because I'm not a trans person, and so this anti-trans harassment doesn't bother me, so I feel like they should be allowed to come back.
John:
It's kind of funny, isn't it, right?
John:
No, it's not funny.
John:
And those kind of regressive attitudes that he has,
John:
It's not like he's doing that.
John:
He's spending most of his time doing, you know, random jerky things and occasionally either accidentally on a purpose initiating harassment campaigns just because he's got millions and millions of followers.
John:
But even that half the time is probably just by accident.
John:
Right.
John:
But to the degree that he has.
John:
regressive attitudes that he uh mostly has kept under wraps that slip out uh that's the degree to which his policy changes are just going to make it worse when the people who are not afraid to say the things out loud that he is wise enough not to say uh come on board and bring their army of bots or whatever but of course he's going to ban bots we don't have to worry about that
John:
It's just easy.
John:
Just ban bots.
John:
What's the problem?
John:
I know why no one thought of that before.
Marco:
I wonder.
Marco:
So I know this is a big throwback, but I mentioned before that when I was a teenager, I was on the Something Awful forums.
Marco:
One of the things that worked really well was that this was like 2000.
Marco:
This was a long time ago, 2002, like that kind of range.
Marco:
To have an account, you had to pay, I think it was $5 or $10.
Marco:
But if you violated any of the rules, your account would get banned, and you'd have to pay another $10 if you want to come back.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Metafilter did the same thing.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I wonder, like, I've always thought, you know, for a modern social network to do that, it's just too much of a hindrance to news signups.
John:
But Twitter is so small already.
John:
Like, I was totally thinking of this, too.
John:
Like, hey, you know, another way you make money, just charge everyone who uses Twitter.
John:
But, of course, that would destroy the market.
Marco:
Well, but he already said that he wants to, quote, authenticate humans.
Marco:
Well, a pretty good way to do that is like a $1 credit card charge for a new account or something.
Marco:
And I know there's a lot of challenges for doing that, that kind of thing.
Marco:
There's a lot of people you'd be artificially keeping out, and that's not good.
Marco:
But one of the reasons why...
Marco:
Those old forums that charged money back then, those were pretty well under control for the basic rules.
Marco:
Occasionally, you'd have somebody come in and violate them, and then the moderators would handle it.
Marco:
Now, granted, this is a very different problem today.
Marco:
Very, very different problem today.
Marco:
Hugely different scales, massively different situation.
Marco:
I recognize all of that.
Marco:
However, it worked really well.
Marco:
Now, Twitter is already not and never will be the biggest social network.
Marco:
It is not appealing for most people.
Marco:
Most people look at Twitter and they don't see why they should be there.
Marco:
And part of that's because of their crappy product direction over the last decade.
Marco:
Part of that's just inherent to the product that I don't think will be solved.
Marco:
It's kind of the social network for...
Marco:
I wouldn't necessarily say smart people, but it's the social network for, like, more engaged people, possibly, in certain ways, especially in things like media, you know, compared to other networks.
Marco:
So it is already kind of a specialized audience, and I wonder, like, might that model work on some kind of level here where many problems about spam and about abuse and about mass account creation and fraud, many of those problems get easier to deal with if the creation of accounts has a cost.
Marco:
And if the loss of an account has a cost, you know, one of the reasons why people are a little more civil in real life compared to the internet is because in real life, you have something to lose.
Marco:
You have your face in your community.
Marco:
You have a reputation.
Marco:
You have the safety of your physical body.
Marco:
You know, if you say something, you might have somebody like punch in the face.
Marco:
Like, so you have something to lose in real life.
Marco:
And so people tend to be
Marco:
a little more civil one of the reasons why people tend to be jerks in cars is because they have a little bit less to lose because you can't really see who it is behind the wheel and you're out of there in two seconds anyway so and you know you look online and people are infinitely jerk jerkier everywhere online
Marco:
in part because everything they created online is free.
Marco:
They have an account with no followers.
Marco:
They created it in two seconds.
Marco:
They have nothing to lose, whereas you have a lot fewer people on Twitter who have built-up followings, a valuable account, basically.
Marco:
You have a lot fewer of those people being extreme jerks to others.
Marco:
And so I wonder if there is some way in this future product direction slash revenue direction, maybe you involve something like paid account creation on some level.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think this is the kind of thing that not being a public company anymore does give them the freedom to experiment with something that's that dramatic.
Marco:
Because that kind of thing would absolutely crush, quote, growth.
Marco:
Like that would crush new member growth.
Marco:
But that actually might be good in a lot of other ways for the people who are already on the platform.
Marco:
And even if you crush much of the new member growth, you would probably still get like, quote, good people on a lot of levels, like people who are more valuable, who actually add to the conversation or who are actually intending to use it well instead of using it to crap all over people.
Marco:
I think that's the kind of thing that is worth considering.
Marco:
When you give people a cost to being jerks, when they are trying to protect something they have either paid for or built up over time, you tend to have better outcomes.
John:
Well, I mean, the problem with that problem, a lot of it is like authentic human things is that past experience with many online communities has shown that making people authenticate as themselves does not make them behave better.
John:
Right.
John:
So the removing anonymity does not increase the does not make people act more nicely.
John:
They're just as big a jerks as they always were.
John:
And of course, anonymity and pseudonymity or whatever you want to call it is super important online for a lot of people who don't want their identity to be shown because they're in an unsafe situation or they don't, you know, they don't want to be outed for something or whatever.
John:
So it's very difficult to do that and has a lot of downsides.
John:
But the other side of that of like making there be a cost for account creation has proven its utility, but only in communities that have never needed to be all that big.
John:
Uh, because the only way you get that done is not for like, Hey, new account creation costs money.
John:
I suppose you could do it that way, but you kind of have to say every account needs money.
John:
And it's very difficult to go to Twitter and say, okay, all, you know, whatever, a hundred million active users starting tomorrow, all your accounts are locked until you each pay a dollar.
Marco:
What if it only applied to new accounts?
John:
I know, but if you only do it for new accounts, you kind of have your existing problem and you've got to weed out these giant bot networks.
Marco:
Yeah, but that's way... I mean, that's so much easier for a problem to deal with than if they're still coming in the door, you know?
John:
There's giant armies of bot accounts that get traded around.
John:
The whole economy of having accounts that have existed for X number of years, Y accounts that have existed for X number of years and have Z followers, that's a thing that you can buy and sell on Twitter, right?
John:
That is a commodity, and
John:
The fact that Twitter hasn't been able to weed them out over like a decade and a half shows that it's probably not a super easy problem or maybe they just haven't been really into it because they don't want their daily active account numbers to go down.
John:
But either way, I feel like being authenticated as a specific human is a loser idea.
John:
It's not going to make people behave any better and it cuts off a lot of people who would need to have access to it.
John:
Anonymity is an important part of being online.
John:
Agreed.
John:
But making there a barrier to entry, like charging for accounts,
John:
It's a great idea as long as you don't really care about growing or being or staying big.
John:
And as long as you also don't care about people who can't afford that money being locked out of your network.
John:
And it's just like it works great for Metafilter.
John:
Works great for something awful.
John:
Twitter, I feel like, is probably on the other side of that.
John:
Probably a little bit too big, but hey, but like this gets into the idea of like just, again, setting aside Elon.
John:
Pretend you, you know, you have a conversation about Twitter or whatever.
John:
What kind of community do you want?
John:
If part of your definition of community is I would like a community where everybody in the community had at least $1 that they could spend on Twitter once.
John:
That suddenly becomes a definition of your community.
John:
So like, OK, so if that if some that doesn't if someone doesn't meet that criteria, I don't want them in my community.
John:
That's what you're saying.
John:
And you may be fine with that.
John:
Right.
John:
That's maybe a perfectly good idea for like, you know, I don't want anybody in my model train club who couldn't pay the annual union dues of five bucks.
John:
Fine.
John:
Then if there's someone who's super into model trains who you'd love to have in your thing, but they don't have five bucks a year to pay for it, they're not going to be in your community and you have to be okay with that, right?
John:
Coming up with that set of rules for something like Twitter is tricky, right?
John:
And this is assuming the answers that you come up with are going to be like, you know, satisfactory.
John:
Like what kind of...
John:
Again, Elon says nothing particularly coherent, but ask any of the current people in Twitter, what kind of community do you want Twitter to be?
John:
Right.
John:
If you could snap your fingers and make it happen, what would it be like?
John:
And thus far, anything that has created a barrier to creating an account like charging an amount of money or making it, you know, sort of slowing down the bot creation type stuff or making it so that people have something to lose.
John:
just hasn't been in their definition.
John:
Or if it wasn't the definition, they were doing nothing about it.
John:
It's so hard to tell with current Twitter management.
John:
Is this something that you want or is this just something that you haven't bothered to not do?
Marco:
Is this a choice or neglect?
John:
Yeah, it's really hard to tell.
John:
Like, what is your vision for Twitter?
John:
And some of you say, well, it's because we're a public company.
John:
We can't do anything like that because our daily active users would go down like a cliff and our stock price would fall.
John:
But they don't have to worry about that anymore, right?
Marco:
Yeah, well, beyond being a public company, I think a lot of this is like,
Marco:
Twitter's leadership has seemed to almost never understand their own product.
Marco:
They create all these weird little side features that nobody wants, basically, while not creating any of the features that people who have used Twitter for a while have been needing for years.
John:
Musk said he's going to bring an edit button, so we can just add that to the Flint water pipes, or maybe it'll be a thing that really happens.
Marco:
Maybe, but the point is, I think we've seen the current direction, because they haven't changed in a very long time, and they haven't done anything.
Marco:
They don't understand the product, and so we've seen what they have now,
Marco:
And if they change it in some significant way, I think we've seen how the current direction, how it grows or doesn't.
Marco:
We've seen what retains users and what doesn't.
Marco:
And we've seen what works.
Marco:
And we've seen if you have the way things are now, where everything's free and open to create accounts as much as you want, we see the problems with that.
Marco:
They have...
Marco:
These this huge number of employees, many of whom are having to deal with all this crap that results from all these bots and abusers and stuff being able to create 5000 accounts and then spam the crap out of people like that.
Marco:
I feel like that is that is not free to them.
Marco:
It's free to the world.
Marco:
It's not free to them by a long shot.
Marco:
And it creates all these problems that drive a lot of people off the platform or keep them off in the first place.
Marco:
And so if they do things that they might, in the short term, inhibit growth by doing things... And by the way, I fully agree.
Marco:
I'm not saying they should require real names.
Marco:
I'm not saying that at all.
Marco:
That causes way too many problems.
Marco:
I mean, look...
Marco:
Look at what I did at Tumblr.
Marco:
That was very intentionally set up so that people could create anonymous blogs, any number of them on their own account, and you could never tell.
Marco:
If you had an account with five Tumblr logs on it, the audience of those Tumblr logs could never tell which user had created that blog.
Marco:
that was always kept secret for, and that was a very intentional decision.
Marco:
So if you wanted to have five blogs and one of them was, you know, your like, you know, meme blog and one of them was your main blog where you post political quotes or whatever, and you wanted to have something totally different, something totally private that was like, you know, like a sex blog or something, you could have that.
Marco:
That was all separate and nobody could see that that was the same person running all those things.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
So anonymity by default, and you can choose whether you use your name or not, which is how Twitter is now, that is the right choice.
Marco:
However, that's separate from requiring possibly a small payment to create an account or things like that.
Marco:
Now, granted, yes, in whatever payment method you choose, there are certain people who won't have that payment method or who literally can't afford the dollar it would cost or whatever.
Marco:
I agree.
John:
Or there are certain people.
John:
people for whom the payment method is immaterial and then just billionaires will build keep buy unlimited number of accounts anyway it's actually a pretty tricky problem again works for metafilter doesn't doesn't work when some coke brother decides that they're going to put uh 17 million dollars to burn into 17 million accounts right around election season
Marco:
Maybe, but the point is that that does overall dramatically cut down on the crap you have to deal with.
Marco:
And if Twitter is no longer going to be chasing user growth at any cost, which is what they have to do as long as they're a public social network company, if they can pull back a little bit on that and try some things, and this is one of the things they end up trying...
Marco:
I actually think that could work really well.
Marco:
And that's the type of thing that, again, if they're public, they could never do that.
Marco:
But now that they have a random jerk possibly owning them soon who does crazy things on a whim all the time, even if they are in the short term not very profitable.
Marco:
I mean, look, we're going to have the jerk running it regardless.
Marco:
We might as well have some good ideas come out of it.
Marco:
And I think that kind of thing is a possibility of the kind of thing they might try.
Marco:
I think that could be really good.
Marco:
Twitter has so many problems the way it is now, and I don't see a lot of solutions that are going to massively make a change to things like abuse and spam and everything like that, unless you do something drastic like that.
Marco:
Hey, it's worth trying.
Marco:
It's certainly worth a try.
John:
Speaking of the edit button, just to foreclose on any people who are going to say this, Twitter is already working on the edit button.
John:
They already announced it on their official Twitter account.
John:
If it happens after Elon Musk buys it, it wasn't because of him, just FYI.
John:
They were already doing it.
John:
If it doesn't happen, I'm going to blame him because they're already doing it.
Casey:
Naturally.
Casey:
No, I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like leaving Elon aside, I really have come around to the Ben Thompson idea that Twitter being private is a good thing.
Casey:
And I think...
Casey:
While I wholly agree with what both of you were saying, that the company has just been chasing its own tail for as long as I've been a member, I do think that at least some of that was self-imposed because, like you said just a moment ago, Marco, growth, growth, growth.
Casey:
All we care about is growth.
Casey:
That's all that matters.
Casey:
Growth.
Casey:
We need growth.
Casey:
We need it now.
Casey:
We need it yesterday.
Casey:
We need it tomorrow.
Casey:
We need growth.
Casey:
Yes, all the growth.
John:
And they were bad at getting it.
Casey:
Oh, they absolutely were.
John:
They didn't pursue growth to the exclusion of everything else, and they grew really, really fast and got huge.
John:
No, they kind of topped out.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
stagnated.
John:
Yeah, their growth has sucked.
John:
They're a terrible business.
John:
And they kept pursuing the strategy of growth at any cost even when they had stopped growing really fast.
John:
So it's like, we're just going to keep doing this because we really need to grow.
John:
What else can we try to grow?
John:
It's like,
John:
maybe you know you could say maybe this is the natural size for the community you've created or maybe you should try like you know it's a it's a little apple thing oh we'll just make really good products and that will help us grow and the other strategy is let's figure out what needs to grow and who cares if it makes the product worse
Casey:
But either way, the idea of Twitter being able to focus on something other than growing, that sounds super appealing to me.
Casey:
And the optimistic take on this is we'll see that Twitter apps becoming a design playground all over again.
Casey:
We'll see TweetBot and Twitterific no longer being neutered by crummy APIs or limited APIs, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
In so many ways, there's so many things that could be better
Casey:
If Twitter doesn't have to focus on growth.
Casey:
And, I mean, I could argue that maybe being better at whatever sort of moderation or, I mean, I guess the extreme version of this is censorship, but one way or another, cleaning up Twitter.
Casey:
I mean, why does everyone refer to Twitter as the hell site?
Casey:
Like, doesn't that indicate that there's a problem somewhere?
Casey:
You know, if they don't have to focus on growth, if kicking thousands of bots off the network is...
Casey:
suddenly okay, maybe we'll see some of that now.
Casey:
Maybe it'll be better for everyone.
Casey:
And again, the optimist in me, I'm really hopeful that we're going to see a lot of positive changes for this social network that I love so much, even though I don't really know why anymore.
Casey:
So I'm hopeful.
Casey:
I'm really hopeful that
Casey:
If they go private through Elon or through someone else, I'm really hopeful they get to concentrate on the things that make the experience better for those of us who are here.
Casey:
And not necessarily here for 10 years, just here in general, rather than always chasing the next new person.
John:
Yeah, the downside of private ownership, of course, is like, let's say Twitter does something now.
John:
During Gamergate, people are harassing everybody and these giant brigades of things.
John:
People complained about it, and the complainers had some leverage because if Twitter becomes a hostile environment for certain classes of people and those classes of people leave, their numbers go down.
John:
Right.
John:
And they and we know the numbers go down because they have to report in their earning reports of here's how we're looking in terms of user growth or user stagnation or whatever.
John:
And that means that the mass movement of users on Twitter and how they're feeling about using Twitter can change what Twitter does.
John:
Private ownership
John:
That becomes much less powerful lever because, you know, the whole point of private is I don't have to tell you how our daily active users are doing.
John:
Uh, what do you care?
John:
It's not your problem.
John:
I'll figure out how to make money.
John:
Uh, and if things get really bad on Twitter because Elon does what some of the things he says he's going to do, which everyone agrees is going to make things worse for a lot of people.
John:
Um, and people leave.
John:
It's like, good.
John:
That's what I wanted.
John:
The kind of community I want is where people like you leave because you can't take being, uh, harassed because of who you are.
John:
Get off my network.
Um,
John:
uh and there's nothing you can do about that because it's a private company if you don't like it go somewhere else uh and you leaving causes my numbers to go down but i don't have to show those numbers to anybody and that's my problem to deal with so don't worry about it uh so and now we're trying to be optimistic like oh single ownership means they're free to do things they couldn't do before because twitter was sort of you know not going anywhere and they were treading water now they can make bold moves and they can but it also means that
John:
our ability as the collective users of twitter who you know enjoy it enough to keep using it today uh have much less power to influence the direction it goes because uh you know if if changes happen that make us like it less that could be by design and they could be showing us the door and saying we don't want people like you here so leave and i don't care if you leave because i don't need to meet any daily actor user numbers
Casey:
Yeah, I'm also interested to see what Elon really actually wants out of this, because obviously the terrible s*** poster that we see says, oh, I just want edit button, I just want an edit button, and I want, you know, all the bots off the network, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But what does he really want?
John:
And why does he care about the bots?
John:
Are bots bothering him?
John:
I haven't ever really seen him care much about anything that doesn't affect him personally.
Marco:
I mean, for whatever it's worth, like, there...
Marco:
A huge amount of the harassment on Twitter is and has been Russian bots.
Marco:
That's been a huge thing.
Marco:
And the whole thing with the Trump and all the original meaning of the word fake news and all this stuff, that's a big thing.
Marco:
A ton of what you see on Twitter that's crappy or negative is actually Russian bots.
Marco:
Now, there's also a lot of bad people that are legitimately posting those things, but I think it's more than you think that are actually bots.
Casey:
Well, either way, what is his goal?
Casey:
Is his goal pump and dump?
Casey:
Is his goal to remove all the bots?
Casey:
What is his actual goal?
Casey:
Because if his goal is to just make Twitter profitable and otherwise keep it mostly as is, then, you know, he...
Casey:
Then the difference to Twitter employees, I reckon, is that rather than having to convince thousands upon thousands upon thousands of shareholders that what they're doing is smart, they have to convince Elon and maybe a handful of other people, and I guess the board or whatever.
Casey:
But it can change the math dramatically, or maybe it doesn't change it that much.
Casey:
What if Elon says, I want a 2x monthly active users because that's what the king wants and that's what the king will get.
John:
Why would he want that?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Because he feels like it'll make Twitter more profitable?
Casey:
Maybe because he could bring it public again?
Casey:
This is pretty well outside my comfort zone, so it's probably obvious.
Casey:
But I can't help but wonder, what is his goal with Twitter?
Casey:
Is it simply to make more than zero dollars?
Casey:
Is it to make gazillions of dollars?
Casey:
Is it just to pay off all the loans and the debts and whatnot and then walk away?
Casey:
Is it to IPO again and make a whole shed load more money?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I just I wonder what he's really actually after.
Casey:
And I don't think anyone will ever know.
Casey:
But I wonder what he's after because, you know, our thinking, including very much my own thinking just a moment ago about, oh, you know, the API will get better because who cares?
Casey:
And they don't have to worry about growth because who cares?
John:
Have you ever heard Elon mention the API?
John:
I mean, we're just saying that because it's the thing that we want and it's the thing that could happen now.
Casey:
No, exactly.
Casey:
That's my point.
Casey:
But our theory is, oh, well, if they don't have the shareholders breathing down their necks, more, more, more, growth, growth, growth, then everything will be perfect now.
Casey:
And that may not actually be the case.
Casey:
It may be that Elon says, no, I still want growth because that's what I want.
Casey:
And I don't know why, but he could say that.
Marco:
I think he probably wants a lot of those things or all those things.
Marco:
I've read this great article on New York Magazine today basically interviewing Kara Swisher, who knows Elon Musk pretty well, interviewing Kara Swisher about him and basically asking what is he like?
Marco:
How does he think?
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
It's pretty short.
Marco:
It's worth reading because
Marco:
The thing is, he's not a one-sided caricature.
Marco:
He is, for all of his faults, a very smart person, and he does seem to have complex and multiple thoughts on this kind of stuff.
Marco:
What does he want from Twitter?
Marco:
Lots of things.
Marco:
I'm sure he wants to make money eventually on it, but if you look at the kinds of things that he creates, the ways he invests his money, the companies he starts, he's not trying solely to make money.
Marco:
If he wanted to just make money, he could probably find out much better ways to do it instead of doing really risky businesses or buying a very unprofitable social network.
John:
I don't think he needs to make money on Twitter.
John:
I think he just needs to make money by using Twitter, which is like if you say, what does he want out of Twitter?
John:
Look at what he's ever used Twitter for.
John:
Twitter is a powerful way for him to influence the world.
John:
It is a powerful megaphone.
John:
Like, you know, just think of something simple like hyping up Dogecoin, barely hyping up, right?
John:
When you have that many followers and people hang on everything that you say and you say something about Dogecoin and the price of Dogecoin goes up by X percent and you had a bunch of Dogecoin,
John:
twitter is suddenly a powerful tool for you to make money even if twitter itself loses money even if you are the owner of twitter and it loses money for you you can make that up just by hyping up other things and if you want to say like elon is very good at having things that he owns and controls be valued well beyond the supposed rational worth look at tesla look at how much tesla is i think isn't tesla worth more than like the entire rest of the audio industry combined or something like
John:
Tesla is not value based on its fundamentals in terms of how much profit do they make selling cars each year.
John:
It's valued based on its potential value.
John:
What could it be?
John:
That's all stocks are valued.
John:
Elon is good at making assets that he owns and controls.
John:
making you believe that they will be and are even more valuable than the hard numbers show.
John:
So he could do that to Twitter to say, now Twitter, this asset that we all basically believe is more valuable than the numbers show, right?
Yeah.
John:
But he could just use Twitter as he has in the past to continue to influence the world.
John:
And it's like a loss leader for him.
John:
It's like, I control it so I don't have to worry about anyone ever taking away this megaphone.
John:
I don't have to worry about this megaphone doing anything that screws me up.
John:
And I'm just going to use it as it slowly drains money as a private company as long as I stay above where I need to, you know, so they don't have to repay that giant loan that I took or whatever the hell the financing crap is.
John:
it's fine and i can use it to it's it's like it's one of the most powerful tools he's found to help him accomplish his other goals and he has a lot of them right so like i mean who knows it's so hard to tell like what he's going to do and he's got so many different things going on we're supposed to be going to mars now too by the way i don't know we don't think about that and he's got satellite internet and he's got a lot of things that he thinks are cool that he would like to see happen but how many of them
John:
Will actually get his attention?
John:
I don't know.
John:
And so far, what he's used Twitter for is whatever he's currently concentrating on, Twitter has been a component of that push.
John:
And it seems like controlling Twitter is a way to ensure that that continues to be the case.
John:
Setting completely aside, yeah, but what about Twitter itself?
John:
is that a business where you're going to somehow make money or make it grow or whatever maybe maybe merely by owning twitter everyone will suddenly believe it is way more valuable and he will be able to sell it for a profit but he's not the type of person who like buys something and quickly sells it when it's more valuable he didn't sell tesla when it was worth more than he bought it for he didn't sell spacex when it was worth more than he bought it for he held them for way longer than anyone thought he should and refused to sell and kept finding ways to keep them above water by financing them or whatever and
John:
You don't do that when you're trying to just buy a company, make it more profitable, and dump it like the private equity investors.
John:
So I can't imagine him doing that with Twitter.
John:
I think he's in it for the long haul until and the last it becomes super unfun for him.
Marco:
I think his motivations are much more complex than anything.
Marco:
In the same way, I always say when you have anything complex like a social network,
Marco:
Everyone has their hot take on what they have to do to fix their problem.
Marco:
And it always begins with, if they would just.
Marco:
If you would just X, if you would just do this, you'd fix, all you have to do is just this.
Marco:
And everyone has some simple thing.
Marco:
And the reality is much more complex than that, right?
Marco:
And I think that's, you know, he's a person.
Marco:
He's clearly a very smart person.
Marco:
Again, for all of his faults, he's clearly a very smart person.
Marco:
He has achieved a lot of very lofty things.
Marco:
And so I don't think if you say, what does he want Twitter for?
Marco:
It's not just anything.
Marco:
He wants Twitter for lots of reasons and,
Marco:
And I don't think it's as small as he wants a platform to pump up Dogecoin or whatever.
Marco:
Like, I don't think that's it at all.
Marco:
I think he's been doing that for free.
John:
I mean, he uses it for everything, not just for pumping up Dogecoin, talking about Tesla, for talking about SpaceX, for saying he wants a platform where people can hear him say that he's going to fix the pipes in Flint.
John:
Like, that is valuable to him as a person.
Marco:
Yeah, but he doesn't have to own it to do that.
Marco:
He's been doing it for free for years.
John:
But he has to own it to make sure no one stops him from ever using it that way.
Marco:
yeah but i mean was that ever a risk i mean i i think the the worst case outcome here that's that's likely to happen i mean there's lots of lots of worst cases that are unlikely to happen i think but i think the the most likely bad outcome here is that his acquisition goes through and he appoints freaking jack dorsey as the ceo and he doesn't really actively manage anything and that's it and then nothing else ever changes and so then we have the worst one
John:
The worst one is he immediately reinstates Trump.
John:
Trump wins in 2024.
John:
Our country is destroyed.
John:
I think like that's the easy.
Marco:
Frankly, no.
Marco:
First of all, I know I think this is the worst outcome that is likely that is like the worst and most likely outcome is he puts Jack back and then nothing else really ever gets better.
John:
Why would he put Jack back?
John:
Why would he?
John:
Does he think I know there are buds and everything, but like.
Marco:
man i just don't well that's why they're buds and everything but but ultimately i think because and again because elon can't run it himself like 100 of the time he's not he's not going to be like the you know an act a super active involved ceo um but worst case i think that is likely to happen is that that just it becomes another it becomes a jack vehicle again and everything gets you know continues to just be like finance tech bro bs and that's it um but
Marco:
Hopefully more changes in a positive way.
Marco:
And again, I think the reason why I am not super down on this is just because I have so little faith in Twitter's leadership up till now.
Marco:
They have just shown themselves to be totally inept and weirdly guided and misguided and...
Marco:
and to not understand their own product at all to not understand what it needs what it doesn't need like to not be able to properly moderate anything on their platform like they i have zero faith in their oh and also to have it be a bad business so i have zero faith in their current and past leadership so to have somebody else come in it's like i guess let's see what happens
John:
I'm still thinking it definitely has to be worse because the attitudes of the people who have run Twitter are better.
John:
Like what they are trying to do is better than what I've everything I've heard Ian say he's trying to do.
John:
There's still like I said, I'd much rather like fail fast.
John:
Like if you're going to try to do some bad things, I want them to be bad immediately.
John:
I don't want it to be slowly bad over the course of a decade of through neglect.
John:
Like neglect is worse.
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's that's my my optimistic scenario is that all the bad things happen super fast and hopefully maybe after the election.