My Immense Softness
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Uh, I added some brief to follow up that should only take a moment.
Casey:
Uh, the Apple dropping web kit.
Casey:
I think it's worth doing.
John:
Are you trying to do the pre-flight?
John:
Is that what's happening here?
John:
Yes.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
Oh, that's a, that's a power move.
John:
No, I'm putting a stop to that.
John:
Okay.
John:
Sorry, dad.
John:
I do the pre-flight.
John:
What's next?
John:
Marco writing the show notes.
Yeah.
Casey:
Lunacy, I tell you.
John:
Yes.
John:
Now, the official brief line will begin.
Casey:
Get the bad feeling all of our good content happened before we went live.
Marco:
Don't worry, I'm using some of that for the pre-show in the release version.
Marco:
All right, good deal.
Marco:
Yeah, bootleg people, go listen to the release version for like the first, you know, five minutes and you'll hear everything that just happened.
Marco:
Not even, 45 seconds.
Marco:
Yeah, listen to the modem sound.
John:
How many people, I guess in our audience it's fine, but we always refer to it as the modem sound.
John:
Just the number of people who know what that is or will recognize it when they hear it or know what we're talking about just shrinks every day.
John:
yeah but i think among our i think it's shrinking in the world but i think in our audience is staying about the same possibly even growing we need some more period like period piece movies that are that capture that little slice of time when the internet was a thing but most people were getting onto it with modems like that that was not a very long period of time but for the people who lived through it it was significant and no one has really done like a period piece i mean setting aside like war games and the acoustic coupler and all that i'm talking about the like you know
John:
2400 bought and on normal people are on the internet, but they're using modems to do it era.
Marco:
The problem is when you make a movie about some time, you know, three or four decades ago, whenever, like, first of all, like, you know, you got to figure out like, are the are the mid 90s or early 90s when this was really like becoming a big thing?
Marco:
is that time you've been cool enough to make a movie about yet and at some point it might be right oh for sure it's definitely because i feel like the the 80s are fading as we 80s kids get too old to care anymore and i feel like 90s is very in probably however the part of culture that is represented when you do like you know a look back movie by a few decades is like what the cool kids were doing at that time and i assure you no one hearing that sound was a cool kid because i was that person and there was no way i was a cool kid
John:
It doesn't have to be a cool kid's thing.
John:
And again, it will point to War Game.
John:
Sometimes you make a movie intentionally about the nerds or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, but they're never the nerds.
Marco:
They're never the... It's always like, oh, you take the kid's glasses off and all of a sudden he's hot.
Marco:
Like, it's, you know, it's never... It's never the nerds.
Marco:
What movies are you watching?
Casey:
She's all that.
Casey:
Actually, isn't there a he's all that now?
Casey:
But that's brand new.
Casey:
I just read, and I'm never going to be able to find it, but I just read in the last 48 hours, live streams, John, live streams, something about how, and I'm going to butcher it, but the premise was like the movie Superbad, which...
Casey:
Probably does not hold up at all, but my recollection of it is very fond.
Casey:
Superbad was in the brief window of time right before just everyone was carrying phones and text messaging and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And the thought was that this was the last movie.
John:
of of its ilk right the last time you can have a movie where not being able to communicate is the crux of the movie and oh no they do that all the time now they just have increasingly ridiculous contrivances to make that the case oh i've got no signal my phone is gone or there's an emp or whatever it's always some reason yeah now it's just all zombies yeah the zombies took out the cell towers first for some reason
John:
right exactly you know what i'm saying that you know that alleges this person on like twitter masked on or whatever i was watching some uh 80s anime with my son over uh his break and it's it's a movie set in i mean the future of of the 80s so like i think it starts i don't know in the 2000s or something but anyway everything's all futuristic right there's giant robots all you know the whole nine yards uh and they have really cool futuristic looking phones uh
John:
but they are in phone booths so whenever people need to communicate they go to a phone booth and use this amazing futuristic phone that like you know scans their retina or a response to voice commands but it's in a it's a booth and it's they're huge like and at their desk they have a really cool looking space futurey kind of phone and it's like the size of a shoebox on their desk with a cord connected to it right because they can imagine the future they can imagine the future with giant robots
John:
Right.
John:
And amazing technology and space travel and all sorts of things and aliens.
John:
But everyone having a phone?
John:
No.
John:
So there are plots that involve someone trying to call someone and they can't get them because they're not by a pay phone or at their desk.
Casey:
Those are the days.
Casey:
I just want to I want an entire documentary on the battle between X2 and K56 flex.
Casey:
That's what I want.
John:
there wasn't much of a battle like x2 kicked their butts like that's that was the battle like x2 won by a lot and and also the people had the the the k56 flex things it's not like they couldn't like isp supported that enough like you know if you bought it and you could use it it's not like it was a bad purchase it wasn't like you got uh what was it called like divx uh drive or something oh yeah
Marco:
Well, no, it was a bad purchase after a while.
Marco:
Initially, because the thing is, on the receiving end, until there was that V92 that unified them, on the receiving end, they had to choose certain phone lines would be X2, and the other phone lines would be K56 Flex, and you'd have to call the right one that matched the format of your modem.
Marco:
And since X2 was way more popular from the get-go...
Marco:
What ended up happening was the ISPs and BBSs would have way more X2 lines than K56 Flex lines.
Marco:
By then, your modem probably broke anyway, so get a new one.
Marco:
Don't worry about it.
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Nebula, a streaming service created and owned by some of the internet's most thoughtful creators, offering full-length and ad-free videos earlier than anywhere else, as well as Nebula exclusives.
Marco:
These are fully produced Nebula originals like Anita Sarkeesian's That Time When or Impact, Rene Ritchie's Retrospective on the Launch of the iPhone.
Marco:
They also have Nebula classes featuring all kinds of online courses led by creators, including an introduction to programming called What is Code from creator and NYU professor Daniel Schiffman.
Marco:
And tons of bonus and exclusive content.
Marco:
You know, I first heard about Nebula because I noticed that a large portion of the YouTubers that I would watch, at the end, they would say, hey, you know, go find me on Nebula.
Marco:
I make content there and all my, you know, my best stuff goes there.
Marco:
It's there first.
Marco:
It's there ad free.
Marco:
And this is people like Wendover Productions and Half is Interesting, of course, Georgia Dow, Real Engineering, Practical Engineering, like kind of all the stuff that I love to watch on YouTube, really.
Marco:
They all were on Nebula.
Marco:
And so I went there and it's great because you get all this bonus content.
Marco:
You get, of course, everything's ad free.
Marco:
It's exactly what you'd want as a nerd out of like a video site, a player experience.
Marco:
You know, they're on all your devices and everything.
Marco:
It was all these creators I was already into.
Marco:
And then I got to discover new creators that were similar quality and producing longer things.
Marco:
It's a great service.
Marco:
I strongly recommend.
Marco:
If you're nerdy enough to listen to our show, if you don't already know these producers, these content creators, you're going to love their stuff.
Marco:
And Nebula is a great way to get it.
Marco:
It's a great deal.
Marco:
So you can go there right now.
Marco:
It's normally...
Marco:
I mean, look, normally it's a good deal.
Marco:
Five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year.
Marco:
But we have a special.
Marco:
You can get a year of Nebula for just 40 bucks at nebula.tv slash ATP.
Marco:
So once again, normally five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, that's a great price.
Marco:
But it's even less now.
Marco:
40 bucks for a whole year of Nebula at nebula.tv slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Nebula for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I have a little bit of follow-up with regard to my Docker adventures.
Casey:
If you recall, last episode in the after show, I was talking about how I couldn't get Docker working properly on my Mac mini.
Casey:
A lot of people reached out to say, hey, it works on my desk.
Casey:
And I'm glad.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
But it doesn't work on my desk.
Casey:
And so a handful of people, and I don't have names in front of me, I'm sorry, but a handful of people recommended Colima.
Casey:
which is short for containers on Linux on Mac.
Casey:
And so the idea is it's what John was suggesting.
Casey:
It's like a Linux VM in which you run Docker.
John:
And so as far as Docker is concerned, I mean, that's what Docker desktop is too, right?
John:
I was suggesting you use VMware, like just run something that doesn't know anything about Docker, but just says, hey, I'm going to run Linux on your Mac.
John:
And then within that Linux VM, run Docker.
Casey:
And that's fair.
Casey:
But honestly, I don't care enough to understand the hyper specifics about it.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it's an alternate way of running Docker.
Casey:
And I had a bunch of problems with that with regard to network shares that are unimportant.
Casey:
But as of just a couple hours ago, I think I have that all squared away now.
Casey:
And that seems to be working.
Casey:
So now I have...
Casey:
temporarily powered off my Docker containers on my Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I have migrated everything to the Mac Mini and I'm going to see how that goes for the next few days.
Casey:
And I think and hope it's working and hopefully that'll go pretty well.
Casey:
Now, the motivation for doing this is even though the Raspberry Pi
Casey:
seems to be handling all four of the containers no problem.
Casey:
And I'm quite surprised by that because I think it's a two gig RAM Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And I was saying, you know, I really want an eight gig Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I don't think I need it.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
But nevertheless, there's not a lot of space in that Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I don't want to like thrash the SD card if one of these containers is downloading something.
Casey:
And so I wanted to move it to the...
Casey:
to the Mac mini.
Casey:
And in my initial tests on the Mac mini, if I have one of these containers download something on the Raspberry Pi, it goes at like 15, maybe 20 megabytes a second.
Casey:
On the Mac mini, I was kissing 90 megabytes a second.
Casey:
That's bytes, not bits, mind you.
Casey:
So I was basically maxing out my gigabit internet line.
Casey:
Which is pretty freaking cool.
Casey:
So that's part of the part of the reason I wanted to go to the Mac mini.
Casey:
And so far, knock on wood, everything seems to be working now.
Casey:
So if you're in a similar boat, I'm so sorry, but Kolyman will put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Tell me, John, Apple's considering not requiring all of us to use WebKit.
Casey:
What?
John:
Anytime Apple considers, quote unquote, considers anything like that, it's probably because the government is making them.
John:
So this is part of the German story about the Digital Markets Act.
John:
And he claims that that's one of the thing that's on the table to comply with the DMA is.
John:
stopping the requirement that every web browser that is on iOS must use Apple's WebKit engine.
John:
For people who don't know, you can get Chrome for your phone, but Chrome is running WebKit under the covers, not Google's fork of WebKit that is called Blink.
John:
It used to be that both Chrome and Safari were built on WebKit, but those days are gone now when Google went off and forked it.
John:
Anyway, this is something that I'm sure browser makers have wanted for a while.
John:
We've talked in the past about all the various security reasons why Apple wouldn't want this, but there are other reasons why Apple wouldn't want this.
John:
Setting aside anything having to do with security and just-in-time compilers and all sorts of exploits that can happen in web browsers, this is sort of the...
John:
The thing that a lot of developers were angry about, web developers were angry about when Apple was too slow, in their opinion, in supporting various web standards on iOS.
Marco:
Which, by the way, that was always like a really BSE classification of what was actually happening, which was basically it's like...
Marco:
The web people who didn't like the takeoff of apps would propose a quote standard saying, all right, now all web browsers have to have insert app capability X notifications, background execution workers, like all this stuff that Apple was like, we don't agree that's what everybody should have because that's going to make everything worse on our phones.
Marco:
And so it was way more complicated than Apple being quote slow.
Yeah.
John:
Well, in some things that were slow, like even just simple stuff like features they did support, but they weren't up to date with the latest changes in them.
John:
It wasn't always like a feature that Apple disagreed with, but that's changed a lot lately.
John:
I think Safari and the WebKit engine has really picked up in web standards.
John:
But the reason it's relevant is what you were getting at, that if you are dissatisfied with the one and only app store that exists on the phone,
John:
Apple has always had a way for you to sort of, oh, why don't you just ship it as a web app?
John:
Make it a web page.
John:
You can even put web apps on your home screen.
John:
That's a feature that Apple introduced.
John:
I think it was, was it part of the suite solution or did it come later?
John:
I forget.
Marco:
Yeah, it was really early on.
Marco:
I think that was iOS 2.0, wasn't it?
Marco:
Even before 2.0.
John:
it's one of those features that people don't even know exists and may even be using without knowing it so it's kind of uh you know it's almost like a different apple made this like oh you mean i can have an icon on my home screen that really just launches a web page but i don't know that because it just looks anyway that feature still exists apple could take that away at any time if they wanted but anyway if you're dissatisfied with the app store but there's some feature that you would like to have that you can't implement in webkit essentially and
John:
Like, man, if only I had Chrome, the actual Chrome, you know, Blink-based Chrome on iOS, I could do this other thing with my app.
John:
And setting aside things that integrate with the OS, like, oh, I want to have, you know, push notifications, stuff like that, just stuff that happens just in that web page, something having to do with service workers or, I mean, I guess this impacts the OS as well, but like, you know, IndexDB or just there's some feature, web feature that Apple doesn't have yet that you think, if I had this, I could make...
John:
uh a web-based app that would be really great if apple lifts this restriction and says uh browser engines out of the web kit are allowed it is plausible that a motivated group could decide okay we don't have to wait for apple to implement these new features these new web gl features or something that we really need for our cool web-based application because blink has already implemented it and so we'll use the blink-based google chrome on ios to run our cool application like it's a it's kind of a
John:
It's not a back door.
John:
It's not even a side door.
John:
It's just sort of like a side show.
John:
And being divorced from WebKit saying we're not dependent on Apple implementing these features.
John:
We're dependent on Google now instead, right?
John:
But say you are Google, for instance.
John:
It really would help them if they had a web-based application that they wanted to do cooler stuff with.
John:
um so i don't know if this will happen but i think uh it's probably a good thing and i think it's kind of long since past the time that apple can say nope it's just too unsafe we can't handle it's like find a way apple you found a way to do third-party keyboards for crying out loud talk about things that are potentially unsafe it's how many years into the iphone we're not asking on year two of the iphone to allow third-party browser engines but
John:
15 years in or wherever we are now i think it's uh the technical reasons that is difficult to remain but it's not there shouldn't be barriers i think it is time for third-party browsing engines to be available and i actually hope it does happen because that's a pretty clean thing to happen it's like a yes no it's a policy decision apple doesn't have to do anything they don't have to waste any time on this
John:
other than sort of making sure everything is secured.
John:
And, you know, frankly speaking, it's not like there are a million web browser engines out there waiting to burst through the door.
John:
There's a small number.
John:
There's Firefox, whatever their engine is called these days, and there's Blink, which is a WebKit fork.
John:
And then there's little hobby projects.
John:
So it would be nice to see those other engines on your iPads and iPhones.
Marco:
Well, but there is one complex part of it, though, that I think is a significantly complex part, is that this is not just a policy decision.
Marco:
There's a technical side of this, which is that WebKit has privileged execution abilities that other apps on iOS don't have, where it can do things like just-in-time compilation of JavaScript and then execute that at full speed.
Marco:
And I forget the details of exactly how all this works, but basically other apps can't do that.
Marco:
Safari does it.
Marco:
Like UI WebView and WK WebView, or UI WebView does not do it.
Marco:
WK WebView, I think, does because it can be out of process.
Marco:
Anyway, whole thing.
Marco:
But the Safari rendering engine on iOS has lower level access to how it can compile and execute JavaScript.
Marco:
So JavaScript will run faster on that than it would run on any third-party app that doesn't have that ability, which is all third-party apps.
Marco:
So even if they change the policy that says you can't have other web browser engines,
Marco:
if they actually allow, you know, Blink or whatever else in an app, but don't grant it this ability, and there's lots of reasons why they wouldn't, you know, because I can't imagine Apple wanting to open up that security can of worms with just, you know, letting Google's code do it on their devices.
Marco:
There's no way in heck they're going to allow that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The result we're going to get if they do this is browsers and other products that are based on those other browsing engines will have slower JavaScript speeds than Safari.
Marco:
And then people will say that's unfair.
Marco:
But there actually is this pretty significant security reason why not to do that.
Marco:
So I think it wouldn't surprise me if this doesn't go as well as people plan.
Marco:
And there's a good reason for that, that I think Apple is going to take a lot of hits for.
John:
because people won't fully understand the reason but there is a good reason why they wouldn't want to let any other browser engines perform as quickly as safari does you know on the back end i mean i understand the reason that's what i was getting at with the security concerns but i think at this point you can't just keep saying oh it's impossible to allow third parties to have fast javascript engines like fine it's impossible for the first decade and a half eventually you got to figure it out right it's like no it'll never be safe look if it's safe enough for apple to do it
John:
Apple can find a way to allow the two third parties I'm talking about that have engines figure out a way to do it safely, even if it is simply like, hey, it's safe for us to do it.
John:
And occasionally we have exploits.
John:
We're going to carefully vet when you submit and you're going to have exploits occasionally, too, and you'll patch them.
John:
And that'll be that.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Same thing with third-party keyboards.
John:
Incredibly dangerous to allow that.
John:
Apple found a way to do it safely.
John:
I think there is a way to do this safely, and it does involve not allowing anyone else to use a JIT, although I have seen some stuff recently, maybe it was in Gecko, saying they found a way to make the JavaScript engine fast without doing JIT.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I think they can find a way to make this work, because it's not like...
John:
they have to let a million different things, like they don't have to make a blanket policy.
John:
It's like now just in time compilation of anything is free for all.
John:
Anyone can do it.
John:
Put it in your, you know, casino games for children.
John:
We don't care.
John:
It's like, no, you know who you're dealing with.
John:
You're dealing with Firefox and you're dealing with Google and those submissions can get some extra attention and you can figure out a way to allow them to have alternate browser engines with this extra, you know, either they can decide to do it without just in time compilation.
John:
And, and again, I think there are ways to make that reasonably fast or if they really want to do a JIT,
John:
Find a way to make yourself okay with that in the same way that you're okay with Safari doing it.
John:
Because it's not like Apple's humans are magic and don't make bugs that cause security problems in WebKit.
John:
And Google's just can't do that.
John:
Like, make it work.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got some absolutely phenomenal feedback like a month ago.
Casey:
It was a while ago.
Casey:
And I loved it, but we didn't have a chance to talk about it for a few weeks because other things were going on.
Casey:
And I'd like to talk about it now.
Casey:
It's a little bit on the longer side, but I think it's worth it.
Casey:
So Chris writes...
Casey:
So I guess it's my turn to add credence to the theory that there is someone in the ATP audience with specialized knowledge about any niche topic that you stumble into.
Casey:
This example, inertial celestial navigation, or more generally, GPS-free navigation for military applications.
Casey:
Chris says, I was a U.S.
Casey:
Navy submarine warfare officer and have worked extensively with submarine-launched weapons, including the Trident II D-5 missile system.
Casey:
The SR-71, which is, I think, where this all came from.
Casey:
Yep, from Blackbird.
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
Your thing was the Blackbird.
Casey:
The SO-71 has an astro-inertial navigation system.
Casey:
In other words, it had a celestial navigation system, but it didn't work independently from the inertial navigation system of the INS.
Casey:
Many platforms, like planes, submarines, ships, land vehicles, et cetera, use INSs.
Casey:
These systems measure acceleration over time and integrate acceleration to calculate velocity.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
probably beyond the limits of this email but as an example total error includes not only the acceleration sensing error but errors caused by moving across the curvature of the earth either underwater or in near space which is the so-called schuyler oscillations and we'll put a link in the show notes over time inertial systems need to be told where they are because in position uncertainty tends to grow so the position navigation and timing pnt game
Casey:
is about reducing position error through better inertial measurement or limiting and correcting the error that grows from the INS you're using.
Casey:
Engineers have lots of clever schemes to do this, such as looking at the stars.
Casey:
The SR-71 used stars to estimate position to correct or limit the errors of the INS.
Casey:
Together, they were better than either component.
Casey:
According to the Aviation Geek Club, their position error had about a 300-foot radius.
Casey:
That's pretty good.
Casey:
And there's a link that Chris provided to the Aviation Geek Club, which explains a lot of this.
Casey:
And I thought an interesting segment of that link.
Casey:
The ANS works, this is the navigation system, works by tracking at least two stars at a time listed in an onboard catalog.
Casey:
And with the aid of a chronometer, it calculates a fix of the SR-71 over the ground.
Casey:
It was programmed before each flight in the aircraft's primary alignment, and the flight plan was recorded on a punch tape that told the aircraft where to go.
Casey:
when to turn, and when to turn the sensors on and off.
Casey:
The stars are sighted through a special quartz window located behind the cockpit, and there was a special star tracker that could see stars even in the daylight.
Casey:
How freaking cool.
John:
It was an interesting story about this, referencing the punch tape or whatever.
John:
I don't know if it's in one of the links we'll put in the show notes.
John:
Again, live streams, I don't know where I saw it.
John:
Maybe it was in a podcast.
John:
So they had two catalogs of star position information, one for the northern hemisphere and one for the southern, presumably due to memory limitations and whatever ancient computer from the 60s is in this thing, right?
John:
But they couldn't fit the whole world.
John:
And one of the SR-71 pilots, I think it was a podcast, was telling a story about a mission he had that flew from the northern hemisphere into the southern hemisphere.
John:
And he was just like landing just over the equator in the southern.
John:
But they hadn't loaded the southern hemisphere stars in the thing.
John:
He just had the northern one.
John:
So as soon as he crossed over the equator, the plane didn't know where it was anymore.
John:
And it was a little bit of a freak out.
John:
Some technology, man.
John:
Yeah.
John:
we can't we can't fit all those stars and you just get one hemisphere and if you fly over it oh well he said that uh he managed to land fine anyway because the plain old like uh radio radar type stuff that leads you to the airport he was landing in when you're flying at like 80 000 feet you get really good range on that radar you can see long distances so as soon as he crossed over the the the equator he could basically he basically had line of sight practically on to the uh the place where he was landing because he was flying so high that's awesome
Casey:
That is absolutely bananas.
Casey:
And then building on this, I don't remember where this link came from, but it turns out that turnabout is fair play.
Casey:
So this Twitter user, John McElhone, put a short thread up and it describes there's apparently a new U.S.
Casey:
Air Force stealth aircraft.
Casey:
And the U.S.
Casey:
government took a picture of it at night with stars in the background and posted it on, I don't know, like social media or official forums.
Casey:
I'm not sure exactly what the genesis of this image was or where it was posted.
Casey:
But John McElhone, via this Twitter thread, took us through...
Casey:
Figuring out exactly when and where that picture was taken based on the stars in the background of the picture, which I think is the coolest thing.
Casey:
So here the United States government rolls out this top secret.
Casey:
Well, I guess not top secret since they're posting a picture about it, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like they're announcing this new aircraft.
Casey:
They take a picture of it at night.
Casey:
They have the stars in the background.
Casey:
I wouldn't have thought anything of it.
Casey:
They didn't think anything of it.
Casey:
And John McElhone was able to pinpoint within, I think, a couple of hours and basically which Air Force base this thing had its picture taken on.
Casey:
This is like a 10-tweet thread, and it is well worth the two minutes of your time to read it.
Casey:
It is so cool.
John:
It reminds me of those stalker's threads where someone will post a photo and then the rest of the internet will figure out where on earth that phone was taken.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
There's a subreddit for that, but I forget what it's called.
John:
That's just called Reddit.
John:
Well, fair, fair, fair.
John:
Based on the background sidewalk or the house.
John:
It's not even those road signs.
John:
They can just tell where that is just because either someone is familiar with that area or has seen it before or they'll narrow it down based on Google Earth stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If we lived in the fantasy world of the movies where all large institutions are smarter than individual people, which we don't, the government would have put in that star field in the background with entirely fake stars to make people think it was on an Air Force base in Arizona or wherever when really it was in the secret Air Force base that we don't know about.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
Anyway, I just thought that was super cool.
Casey:
And then we also got, and Marco, I think you're best equipped to summarize it, but we got a lot of feedback about moisturizers, including several people who are like either doctors or residents that are in dermatology.
Casey:
So apparently there is nothing that our show cannot reach, and I'm very proud of this, probably unreasonably proud of this.
Marco:
yeah so last week's pre-show I was talking about my dry like hands and especially like around like the skin around my fingernails I always get all cracked and cut and I'd get to wear band-aids and it sucks and so we heard from so many people many of whom either were dermatologists themselves or they were married to a dermatologist or they knew a dermatologist or they went to a dermatologist or they saw a dermatologist once from across the room or something like they there were so many people
Marco:
So many connections to various parts of dermatology expertise.
Marco:
And everyone kind of agreed that, OK, to answer my question, are moisturizers real and do they work?
Marco:
Turns out, yes.
Marco:
In my defense, a lot of medicine, especially over the counter stuff, is not super real and doesn't super work.
Marco:
So, you know, I think that was a valid question to ask.
Marco:
Far and away, there were a few consistently recommended items.
Marco:
The first most recommended one, by far, is something called either O'Keefe's or O'Keefe's.
Marco:
I don't know how this is pronounced.
Marco:
Anyway, O'Keefe's Working Hands.
Marco:
Now, go search Amazon for O'Keefe's Working Hands.
Marco:
I have never in all of my life searching Amazon seen a product with such incredibly high reviews and so many reviews.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
80,000 reviews, 4.7.
Marco:
34,000 reviews, 4.7.
Marco:
5,000 reviews, 4.8.
Marco:
5,000 reviews, 4.7.
Marco:
Like, this is the most highly rated product I think I've ever seen on Amazon that I've ever searched for.
Marco:
So I thought, all right, I'll give this a shot.
Marco:
So I got some of that.
Marco:
I also dermatologists and various dermatology friends also frequently said Casey was right that Cetaphil is a really good all arounder for more kind of advanced needs like what I was having with my hands in the winter.
Marco:
It wasn't quite strong enough.
Marco:
And what they recommended was either the high-end creams from CeraVe and from Eucerin.
Marco:
And I got all three.
Marco:
So I have O'Keefe's Working Hands, Eucerin Advanced Repair Hand Cream, and CeraVe Moisturizing Cream.
Marco:
And I have to say, I have had significant progress in one, not even one week, like in five days since I've had these.
Marco:
So yeah, gotta say, y'all were right.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
And so far, the O'Keeffe's Working Hands seems to be the strongest in terms of forming a barrier because it's almost like wax.
Marco:
It dries.
Marco:
It's very waxy, and it works pretty well.
Marco:
I think the one that makes me the softest feeling afterwards, which I think is better for daytime use maybe because then I get to enjoy my immense softness, is the CeraVe Moisturizing Cream.
Marco:
A few people said there's a difference between cream and lotion.
Marco:
Nobody was clear on what that difference is or how much it matters.
Marco:
So I got cream for the CeraVe.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
I feel ridiculously soft and it's amazing.
Marco:
And finally, many people wrote in to suggest the technique because I was complaining about getting my hands all greasy and then being unable to operate doorknobs.
Marco:
Many people wrote in to suggest...
Marco:
What you're supposed to do really is apply the cream to the back of one of your hands and then rub the two backs of your hands together to get it all over the back and the top of your fingers.
Marco:
That way you never actually get it on your palms.
Marco:
That's very good advice.
Marco:
I've been doing that as well.
Marco:
I do want to get it kind of around the fingernails because the little cuticle areas always get all messed up too.
Marco:
So I'm trying to get it all around there too.
Marco:
So I get it a little bit on my hands, but certainly I'm not getting on the palms anymore.
Marco:
So anyway, that's good.
Marco:
Strongly recommend the O'Keeffe's Working Hands and the CeraVe Moisturizing Cream.
Marco:
And I'll put links in the show notes to those products on Amazon.
Marco:
But it's just, it's incredible.
Marco:
Like, I've never seen reviews this good for the O'Keeffe's.
John:
Seeing all those people suggesting with the rubbing the back of the hands together, it makes me think about like rubbing my two kneecaps together.
John:
Like the back of my hands are bony.
John:
How do you, rubbing two bony parts of my body together, I feel like I wouldn't get the moisturizer in all the spots.
John:
Don't form a fist.
John:
Like you just keep your hands flat.
John:
No, I understand.
John:
I guess I don't have enough back of hand fat or something.
John:
Well, you got to work on that.
John:
It's just, I got bony hands.
John:
Anyway, yeah.
John:
Give your hands some pizza and beer.
John:
I don't know what else.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the other suggestion I saw a lot of people had was not just wearing it at nighttime, but wearing gloves.
John:
In fact, when I did the search for the O'Keeffe's working hands on Amazon, there were also glove results as well.
John:
So basically said, put the moisturizer on and then put, lots of people had different suggestions for gloves, put gloves on top of your moisturized hands and then go to sleep to sort of lock in the moisture at nighttime so it doesn't evaporate out of your hands or whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
For someone who gets so bundled up when I go to sleep, it still seems weird to me to wear gloves into bed.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with that.
Marco:
If any of us would, it's you, though.
Marco:
That's also true.
Marco:
You're basically wearing an entire snowsuit when you go to bed every night.
John:
I know, but not gloves.
John:
That's weird.
John:
Anyway, yeah.
John:
And then, like, the thing is, like, underneath the gloves is your, like, slimy lotioned hands.
John:
Not, bleh.
John:
Give me a definite ick factor.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I might try that if I, like, because you can, like, on Amazon, there's, like, packs of basic cotton gloves that are made basically for this purpose where they're, you know, they're kind of semi-disposable.
John:
Or other people suggested socks, too, which is even funnier.
Marco:
You can do little sock puppets in bed.
Marco:
Oh, good night.
Marco:
Oh, good night.
Marco:
People also suggested wearing rubber gloves if you have to wash dishes and stuff.
Marco:
I haven't quite gone that far yet, but it's been crushing my soul.
Marco:
I've been delaying doing dishes throughout the day.
Marco:
Instead of washing dishes constantly as they're being used to keep a clean kitchen, now I like
Marco:
We'll let them accumulate for a couple hours and then do them, and it's killing me.
Marco:
I am not good at leaving dishes behind in the kitchen.
Marco:
I always have to have a clean kitchen, and that's very difficult for me.
Marco:
That's the hardest part.
Marco:
I'd rather have greasy hands all day than have dirty dishes in the kitchen, but it's been crushing me, but that also has been helping to reduce the frequency of that.
John:
Did you ever see the Palmolive ads that Merlin and I talk about?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
softens your hands while you do dishes that was the pitch oh yes it was an ad campaign where they show various people dipping their hands into it and it's like oh you know like they're at a spa remember we talked about this in reactives the commercials like they're they're getting their nails done or something and their hands are soaking in a bowl of stuff which is apparently a thing that you do when you get a manicure I don't know because I've never gotten one
John:
uh and they're talking about dish soap and and the big surprise is they talk about palm office as you're soaking in it you didn't even know it but your hands are in dish soap like because the dish soap is so therapeutic and softening to your hands that you could anyway uh their slogan was softens your hands while you do dishes um i bet it probably doesn't because it's probably soap but uh yeah wear gloves yeah that doesn't seem like it could possibly work at all i mean it was it was the 70s yeah
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you need me for this or should I just bugger off?
John:
You need to know about the Mac Pro and so does the rest of the world.
John:
Do I?
John:
You've had such a reprieve here because it was like the two-year transition and we did that item a couple of shows ago.
John:
Apple's entered year three of its two-year transition to ARM.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
In a way that no one cares about.
John:
They still sell the Intel Mac Mini and the Mac Pro that no one cares about is still Intel.
John:
As far as the world is concerned, Apple transitioned and it's fine.
John:
That's why nobody really cares because they transitioned the Macs that actually matter.
John:
There are these odd holes.
John:
So this is the latest news story, latest rumors from Bloomberg, I'm assuming German, about the new Mac Pro.
John:
And the story here is that he goes through a little bit of the history of like, oh, originally they planned to do basically like two M1 Ultra stuck together.
John:
We talked about this in the show many times in the past.
John:
can they get like four m1 maxes stuck together into this gigantic chip with like 40 cores yeah that was that was a jade 4c right yeah yeah yeah and it seems like that just didn't happen and isn't going to happen because they're onto the m2 ones and you know
John:
I mean, maybe it could have come out towards the end of this year, but it didn't.
John:
So it seems like that's all off the table, right?
John:
So now it's like Apple changed their mind, and now the Mac Pro is going to be M2-based.
John:
And so the obvious expectation was...
John:
It would be like, you know, four M2 Maxes stuck together in a big square thing.
John:
So it'd be even better, right?
John:
And the rumor is now that the big giant four M2 things stuck together, Mac Pro was scrapped.
John:
And the only thing you're going to get in the Mac Pro is going to be kind of like an M2 Ultra, right?
John:
So it's two M2 Max-ish things stuck together.
John:
They're not doing the big four one.
Marco:
Which, to be clear, is basically the same class of chip that's available in the Mac Studio.
John:
exactly and they were presumably they would put this in the mac studio right if they when they upgraded the mac studio to m2 it would get the m2 ultra and so would the mac pro and so this would be 24 cpu cores 76 graphic graphic cores and the rumor is up to 192 gigs of memory right so you know a good chip right but the m2 extreme like there would have been four of them is just double all that it would have 48 cpu cores 152 graphic scores and they didn't say anything about the ram and
John:
And so the story is, this is a quoting directly from the story, not a surprise.
John:
The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together.
John:
It will also help Apple and partner Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing company save chip production resources for higher volume machines.
John:
Basically, the idea is this thing costs too much money.
John:
It takes up valuable fab space and wafers, and we're not going to sell a lot of them anyway.
John:
The suggested rumored price is $10,000 without any other upgrades for that big giant ship, which...
John:
kind of makes some sense but not that much sense because it's kind of it seems weird that it would be more expensive than the 2019 mac pro uh you could say yeah that's because this is a system on a chip and it's got everything on one big chip and that chip is expensive but that hasn't been the case with the other computers they've made but you know combining
John:
The GPU and the CPU into a single SoC did not make the Mac Studio tremendously more expensive.
John:
Actually, there are economies there of not having separate components, not having to give a profit margin to AMD or whoever you're buying your GPUs from.
John:
But anyway, the idea that this is...
John:
Too expensive, too hard to make, and not a lot of people buy it.
John:
I see where they're coming from with that, but I have some issues with it.
John:
It's the issues I've always had with this discussion.
John:
The open question, which we won't know the answer to, and it seems increasingly likely the answer is going to be disappointing.
John:
If Apple does not allow...
John:
third-party gpus how many times have we just talked about this apple just freaking releases computers so we know what you're going to do if they don't allow third-party gpus the discussion has always been okay but given the rumors of this jade 4c thing or whatever they can put enough gpu on the soc to be equivalent to a current highest of high-end single gpu from a third party and that is that was true back when the jade 4c rumors were out and if you look at the current stuff it seems plausible right but
John:
But that was assuming they would do the 4X thing.
John:
But if they only do the 2X thing, it starts looking a little bit more grim.
John:
So I'd ran a bunch of numbers.
John:
This is using Geekbench's metal performance score, which, again, benchmarks are silly.
John:
And I didn't do a gaming benchmark because I was saying, let's treat this the way Apple treats it.
John:
Apple cares about metal.
John:
They use it in their stuff.
John:
And so the metal score is a reflection of how well could Apple use these GPU resources using its own API?
John:
Whatever.
John:
Again, how much credence you give to Geekbench.
John:
It gives a good back-of-the-envelope estimate.
John:
So let's take, for starters, the AMD Radeon W6900X, which is the best single GPU you can get in a 2019 Mac Pro from Apple.
John:
that score is 166 000 on the uh the metal uh geekbench score if you had two of them so if you bought a fancy new mac pro and 29 2019 mac pro and put two of those cards in it easy double you get about 335 000 on your metal score right
John:
AMD has just come out with their next line of cards, which just increased the first number.
John:
So instead of 6900, it's 7900.
John:
So the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, gotta love that because it's different than the XT, which is not the good one.
John:
XTX is the good one.
John:
Anyway, the XTX is more than double the speed of the 6900.
John:
So it gets around maybe 350,000.
John:
I couldn't get an actual metal score for this, but looking at...
John:
game benchmarks and stuff it very easily doubles the frame rate of the previous card which is very impressive it's very close to matching nvidia's best card so it's 350 000 for a single one of those and if you got two of those that would be 700 000 these are the numbers we're talking about for the metal scores right let's look at what the m1 ultra does with 64 gpu cores today
John:
So again, the best single card you could get on the market today is about $350,000.
John:
The best one you can get from Apple is $166,000.
John:
The M1 Ultra is $94,000.
John:
So not really in the ballpark of even of the previous generation high-end card.
John:
Certainly nowhere near the current generation high-end cards.
John:
Again, setting aside NVIDIA entirely, right?
John:
The rumored M2 Ultra, which is just a 2X M2 thing, has 76 GBU cores.
John:
And assuming they scaled linearly, which they probably want, that will be better than that.
John:
But assuming they scaled linearly, that's like 112,000.
John:
Still not in the ballpark of a 6900, let alone a 7900 from AMD.
John:
Let's look at the M2 Extreme, the one that would have been like four M2 Maxes stuck together.
John:
That is 225-ish thousand.
John:
That's in shooting distance, spitting distance, whatever they're saying is.
John:
That's close to 350,000, but still nothing to really write home about.
John:
And I ran these numbers on my own Mac Pro just for the heck of it.
John:
I have this hodgepodge of old video cards in here.
John:
I've got my W57X and I've got a Pro Vega 2.
John:
And those two combined give me 170,000 on MetalScore.
John:
So my two GPUs combined do about as much as one of the best GPUs you can get from Apple.
John:
And still considerably more than the rumored M2 Ultra.
John:
The rumored M2 Ultra would get 112, my Mac Pro gets 170.
John:
That leads to the question, I always say, how are you going to sell a Mac Pro to people who bought your previous Mac Pro when the previous one could just be filled with so much more GPU power?
John:
unless you also provide a way to add third-party gpus now you don't have this problem if this is true if these rumors are true and they're not sending the forex thing uh i think that's a reasonable thing to do as long as you are not constrained uh on gpu by what they decide to put in the socs that's always kind of been the worry about this it's like
John:
If I want a little GPU, I have to get all that CPU because it just comes with it because they come in these little units.
John:
You get the GPU cores, the CPU cores, the neural engine.
John:
It's a system on a chip.
John:
You get all of it.
John:
And they've been doing it with little building blocks.
John:
If you just want a machine with a reasonable CPU and then a huge amount of GPU, you can't get it.
John:
You've got every time you want more GPU, it comes with a whole bunch of other stuff that you may not be able to use.
Marco:
And vice versa, by the way, like, you know, I love having a whole bunch of CPU power.
Marco:
I barely need GPU power, but those things are tied together now.
John:
Yeah, and so for a modular Mac Pro system, that poses some of a problem if you're also not going to offer slots.
John:
And so that has been the question we've been working with.
John:
How are you going to offer an expandable machine when you're putting so much more on the SoC?
John:
And I really do think that in the, especially for the top-end Mac Pro, if they had gone with the quad arrangement, you could just say, look, I know it's not as flexible as you want it to be, but this machine is so expensive anyway,
John:
tough luck if you if you don't want all that gpu you're getting it whether you want or not if you don't want all the cpu you're getting it whether you want or not and by the way you're paying for it in both cases and if there's any market that is able to eat this and be like all right we'll just deal with it it's the mac pro because it costs so much money to begin with and money is less of an object to these people it is in quote unquote inefficient for them to be buying stuff they don't need
John:
But oh, well, it is.
John:
I think it hurts more in your case, Marco, where you're like, look, this is supposed to be your mainstream product.
John:
I don't want to have to buy a bunch of GPU cores.
John:
I don't need to make my compiles go faster.
John:
But, you know, the prices are low enough.
John:
You know, you're not talking tens of thousands of dollars that it seems reasonable.
John:
But it will be disappointing if they ship a Mac Pro and it's basically a Mac Studio that holds more RAM and bigger SSDs that can't have as much GPU power as my 2019 Mac Pro has.
Marco:
Yeah, this is why I still am really, really curious to see what the heck they do to the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Because it seems like, you know, if you look at what I think is most likely to happen, it's basically the Mac Studio.
Marco:
Like, that's like, you know, what I had been guessing for a while, like once we saw the direction of Apple Silicon, I'd been guessing for a long time, okay, well, they're going to be done with card slots, no more card slots, definitely no more third-party GPUs, and they're just going to multiply this chip until they have enough GPU power to be competitive.
Marco:
But that leaves so many open questions like, as you're saying, like they're just they're not in the ballpark of GPU performance once you are competing with multiple slots, each of which can hold the highest end NVIDIA or ATI or excuse me, AMD GPUs.
Marco:
That isn't because Apple's GPUs are bad.
Marco:
It's that you're dealing with massively different power envelopes.
Marco:
hugely different like that's the reason why apple's gpus are so good for mobile devices and laptops and small desktops is because they're so incredibly low power consumption for the amount of computational power they offer they're very efficient but when you're looking at you know these big beefy cards from nvidia and amd
Marco:
They're like themselves consuming hundreds of watts and have their own tremendous heat sinks and fans and power supply, you know, just to power these giant things because they are, for many people, that is the most important component of their computer.
Marco:
So they're willing to spend that power and heat and space and everything else.
Marco:
But the way Apple designs their GPUs, they just are not made for that kind of power consumption and performance class at that high end.
Marco:
And because they have this unified memory architecture where everything is together as one big thing...
Marco:
I don't see them ever making anything that is going to be in that class unless they go for something radically different than what they've made so far with the M line, which would be, for instance, like a slotted GPU that has its own memory and is not part of the unified memory architecture of the rest of the system and everything else.
Marco:
And they can do that if they want to.
Marco:
There's nothing saying they can't do that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I really decreasingly see the likelihood of them doing that for one product, the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And that's why my theory from the beginning here has been there isn't going to be an M-series Mac Pro that uses third-party GPUs or even has slots for other GPUs and possibly has slots for anything.
Marco:
But we'll see about that.
Marco:
But yeah, I just...
Marco:
I wonder too, maybe what they're seeing in the market is that maybe they actually finally don't have enough reason to address this market.
Marco:
Maybe they're okay saying, you know what, the performance level that we offer in the Mac Studio is enough for our highest end users and that's fine.
Marco:
I don't necessarily agree with that, but maybe that's what they're seeing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And certainly as Apple Silicon has gotten so, so good and these new Macs that use it are so good and so fast and so powerful, you know, many people, myself included, you know, maybe this is just me seeing my own needs and overestimating other people's, you know, resemblance to them.
Marco:
many people have been able to go down a level in product line in terms of what kind of power they, quote, need for their work.
Marco:
I used to get the most powerful desktops.
Marco:
Then I was okay with iMacs.
Marco:
Now I'm okay with a laptop that happens to have the M1 Max and all this crazy RAM and ridiculous SSD speeds and huge CPU power.
Marco:
It's all on a laptop, and that's enough for my needs right now.
Marco:
Maybe enough people have had their needs shift down the lineup in terms of like being able to get away with or even be very happy with something like a MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio that maybe this high end market is not enough for them anymore to justify this.
Marco:
And maybe at the same time.
Marco:
I think a lot of high-end video users have moved away from Apple in general over the last decade or so.
Marco:
So there's shifts in the marketplace there as well.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
It seems like most of the demand these days for all that massive GPU grunt...
Marco:
is in doing things like AI training, where you're not really doing that on a Mac full of Mac video cards, necessarily.
John:
They have dedicated hardware for that.
John:
If you needed the big power on that, you'd use one of those TPU things or whatever, like actual silicon made for that.
Marco:
Right, but there's never been a CUDA story on the Mac and stuff like that.
Marco:
So there's all these areas of high-end computing that the Mac either has kind of lost over time or was never really in to begin with.
Marco:
And so I wonder, look, they've been getting away just fine for the last couple of years not having a new high-end Mac Pro, not having a Mac Pro that used the modern processors.
Marco:
And it's been...
Marco:
pretty much fine i don't i don't know a lot of people who are who are clamoring for an apple silicon based mac pro that also has a bunch of gpu card slots uh there i'm sure there are those people but are there enough to justify this hugely different architecture from all the rest of their of their macs that use this the same chip probably not
John:
I mean, this story is saying that they can't even justify making a 4X cookie.
John:
You know, it's easy as cookie cutter.
John:
But like the whole idea of the double and quad is let's reuse our investment in the computers that actually sell like the notebooks.
John:
they were never making a custom custom thing i said we're we can't just you know clean sheet make a mac pro processor right we have to start with processors we use on our laptops can we do a bunch of work to weave them together to make a big one and they're saying we can't even justify that in the forex case and that's not the custom one right because they're like it's just too expensive too big or whatever and by the way what you said before about like the gpus high-end gpus using hundreds of watts by themselves
John:
If you put four of these things together like this, that whole arrangement will take hundreds of watts.
John:
Like, they can, they are within the same power envelope as a single top-end GPU plus CPU combination, right?
John:
So it's not like the architecture can't, like, scale up to that level.
John:
It can, and it would.
John:
If they put four of them together, it would take hundreds of watts.
John:
It would be, you know, you'd crank it up, and it would be a heck of a thing, right?
John:
And it would require very fancy custom cores.
John:
cooling and you know the interconnect would be very impressive or whatever um but they're saying no we can't even justify the investment in that because we don't think it's worthwhile and we don't have enough people who are going to buy it and it's going to take up because you can imagine how big that would be like the advantage of having like even like a xeon cpu plus a separate gpu is you don't have to put it all on one you
John:
You know, package, right?
John:
It's not one die, but one package, right?
John:
This would be, what, four dies, four M2 Maxes in one massive package arrangement?
John:
That is a complicated beast to make, right?
John:
Much more complicated than getting an Intel CPU and then, you know, an NVIDIA GPU and a PCI bus between them.
John:
And so they can't justify the investment in that.
John:
I think like an M2 Ultra that, you know, put the same thing in the studio and basically make the Mac Pro be a Mac studio, but with more expandability that will cover most of their needs.
John:
But, you know, even for something as simple as the three games that are optimized per year for Metal, like whatever it was recently, they did like a Resident Evil port, the latest Resident Evil, two years after it comes out on every other platform, they had a Mac port of it.
John:
And by all reports, the Mac port is amazing.
John:
It takes amazing advantage of Apple's, you know, Metal architecture, and it runs at really good frame rates at very low temperatures and without a huge amount of fan noises.
John:
It is an impressive game, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's not like those use cases don't exist, but it seems like the balance that Apple has struck, like when they make the system on a chip, they say, how many CPU cores, how many neural engines, how many, you know, H.264 and H.265 decoder encoders, how many ProRes encoders, like sort of the recipe for the SoC, their recipes have been very sort of valuable.
John:
Not too much CPU, not too much GPU, just kind of a nice arrangement of stuff that really hits the sweet spot for, let's say, high-end notebook, right?
John:
It has most, your use case is side marker where you're like, I don't need all this GPU cores.
John:
It's a pretty good balance for most things that most people want to do.
John:
if they can never move out of that sweet spot, they're never going to get like the low end thing that changes the balance heavily in favor of CPU or runs headless or something, right?
John:
With not a lot of GPU grant or the high end one where you take a small number of CPU cores and much, much more GPU, right?
John:
They don't seem so far willing to go in those directions.
John:
So if they don't go in those directions and they're not willing to even take for their sort of well-balanced little things and put them together, uh,
John:
they're kind of boxing themselves out of sort of top-end GPU performance, not even top-end, but sort of just high-end, right?
John:
And it's not like, it's very often in their demonstrations, they will show a piece of software or even just simple 3D stuff where, especially with like 6K screens and stuff, you can get some fairly trivial, like, you know, scene kit demo application and,
John:
that can pull down you know pull the frame rates down on a powerful mac because you don't have enough gpu grunt to do all those pixel shaders on a 6k screen and that seems like it kind of seems like you know i'm just gonna try to use a car analogy but i can't think of more recent one but it's like i'll use an even more obscure analogy when the power mac g4 had a front side bus that was hilariously slower than
John:
The CPU, I forget what it was, but the CPU was like at four or 500 megahertz and the front side bus is like at 100 megahertz.
John:
And it was just so RAM starved and so unbalanced.
John:
If you're shipping a screen with 6K pixels, but you can't drive a fancy looking 3D scene that uses all those pixels, even on your most expensive Mac, because you just don't have enough GPU cores.
John:
And by the way, you no longer have slots.
John:
That's not a good look.
John:
So it's like I feel like if you're going to like if you're going to extend the Mac line up to a high end and you should, you can have something.
John:
Even if it's really expensive and nobody buys it, there has to be some kind of offering there because right now there still are some customers and some applications that use it.
John:
I forget what the the app that was being demoed when the Mac Pro was introduced.
John:
But you remember there was like a Pixar thing showing like a big 3D scene.
Casey:
Yeah, it showed.
Casey:
When we were at WWDC and we were able to go to that, like, not really hands-on, but kind of hands-on area, there was somebody from Pixar showing the Mac Pro, and they showed the entirety of the town that most of Toy Story 4 took place in, like the fair and everything.
Casey:
And you could zoom in and out and pan around.
Casey:
And it was the entire fair, like that entire fair in the town and everything associated with it was being rendered in real time.
Casey:
And it wasn't, you know, perfect cinematic quality, but it was stunningly good.
Casey:
And you could zip around that thing like it was nothing.
Casey:
It was amazing.
John:
I mean, my recollection of that is you could still make the thing chug if you looked at the right thing.
John:
Like the frame rates weren't, you know, they weren't even up to 60 frames per second all the time, let alone higher refresh rates that presumably future Macs will have, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
so i don't think it's the end of the world if they just make an m2 ultra and in fact if they if they made that extreme quad one it's not like i would buy it because i think it would just be too expensive but it's a shame that if they don't have any other gpu answer
John:
that the 2019 mac pro will still be the gpu king simply because you can shove more gpu in it right and it'll be super sad if like i said the the m2 extreme they they they rumored uh has a similar amount of or not the m2 extreme the m2 ultra like the the 2x one has less has a lower metal score than my current mac pro my current one
John:
And granted, MetalScore is like when you're combining both the GPUs, so it's not like I'd be able to run a game at higher frame rates, but I could buy a Radeon Pro 6900 from Apple for a hugely ridiculous price that would also be faster than the rumored M2 Ultra, right?
John:
that's not great that's like last generation card and i can put it in my mac just one of them and be faster than the m2 ultra so i don't know what their pitch would be uh it would be like oh we've got the m2 mac studio which is great and it's small and blah blah blah and we've got the the the mac pro which is just like the mac studio but it holds more ram
John:
Like, I don't know what the pitch is.
John:
If it just holds more RAM and more CPU.
John:
Like, those are the two.
John:
And those are good, and people might need those.
John:
But, I don't know.
John:
The mystery deepens here.
John:
I really feel like Apple could solve their problems by supporting third-party GPUs in card slots, which is what everybody else does.
John:
And, yeah, you could still ship a really good one on the SoC.
John:
But for the people who want the third-party ones, it would be nice if they're there.
John:
But we've talked to this to death in the past...
John:
Shows it just doesn't make sense from the memory architecture thing.
John:
That's why we keep going around in this circle because it doesn't make any sense.
John:
It doesn't make any sense to offer card slots.
John:
And now with this rumor, it almost doesn't make sense not to offer card slots.
Casey:
So I want to pull on that a little bit.
Casey:
I am talking well outside my depth, and I don't particularly care about the Mac Pro in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
But my recollection, when we were initially pitched on the M1, which was what?
Casey:
WWDC 2020, I think?
Casey:
Something like that?
Casey:
We were told that, hey...
Casey:
The thing that makes this amazing is the unified memory architecture and the fact that the standard vanilla RAM is shared with the video card.
Casey:
So a lot of the time that you would be waiting for things to be copied about and moved around and whatnot, there is no waiting because it's all the same batch.
Casey:
It's all the same batch of RAM.
Casey:
It's a unified memory architecture.
John:
And also that memory happens to be really fast because it's also really, really close to the CPU.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So if a lot, probably not all, because I know like the SSDs are also extremely fast in these things.
Casey:
There's a lot of other stuff around this.
Casey:
But I thought that one of the big things about the M1 architecture and M2 now and so on and so forth is that the unified memory architecture is a very kind of...
Casey:
wild way of making a CPU-GPU combination that not a lot of people are doing.
Casey:
And Apple did it so well, and it is so damn fast.
Casey:
That's where so much of the speed comes from, and efficiency, but particularly speed.
Casey:
And you've kind of alluded to this, John, but I wanted to ask you directly, doesn't having a card with a GPU, doesn't that take away all of the benefit of a unified memory architecture?
Casey:
Because it ain't unified anymore.
Casey:
So would it even be...
Casey:
worthwhile?
Casey:
Is that what we really want?
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Well, I think it depends on the workload to some degree.
Marco:
If you think about how this kind of system would be built, if there is a theoretical new Mac Pro that has card slots that can support GPUs,
Marco:
i think all three of those are questionable like whether there even will be a mac pro and whether it will have card slots and whether those cards will support gpus yeah but assume we have all three of those you know apple said we have mac pro they just remember they said but we'll talk about that another day like they publicly announced it so i really feel like they there's there it's still coming yeah something probably i have i have one i have a two maybe one word for air power yeah air power yeah i know we'll see
Marco:
but anyway so you know if you look at like already we we can make some assumptions like there would be presumably you know some kind of m2 or m3 ultra max extreme whatever it would be a whole bunch of m you know cpus glued together as like the main processors of the whole thing if they're going to have socketed memory
Marco:
then maybe the chip would have some kind of massive L2 or L3 cache.
Marco:
But for the most part, I think main memory would just be its own bank of stuff.
Marco:
Because otherwise, they're never going to hit the 1.5 terabytes that the current 2019 Mac Pro offers.
John:
They're just...
John:
they're just not going to hit that on the soc and i don't i feel like they're that it's easier for them to give up on the 1.5 terabytes of ram which was mostly just like a silly bragging point than it is for them to give up on the gpus because you know they offer their top end gpu you can just buy it and it gives you a metal score that's higher than than the the rumored m2 ultra thing so
John:
But how many people ever buy with 1.5 terabytes of RAM?
John:
So the tiered RAM, and there were rumors of that, seems less likely to me than slotted GPUs.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And also, you know, you look at the way that PCs are structured now, like the architecture already supports GPUs having not only access to system RAM through various like fast methods and dedicated buses and things like that, but also they have access to their own giant pool of RAM each.
Marco:
And workloads and schedulers and everything are already designed to distribute work to multiple GPUs, each of which has its own pool of RAM.
Marco:
And, you know, that's what John's Mac Pro is doing.
Marco:
That's how it can achieve these high scores.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
It is possible to do all of that with the, you know, Apple Silicon architecture, I'm sure.
Marco:
Like, it would take work, and there would be different trade-offs.
Marco:
Like, having it unified, you probably have lower latencies in certain ways.
Marco:
You might have higher bandwidths in certain areas, almost certainly.
Marco:
And, you know, so...
Marco:
Chances are, if you, you know, if there was such a Mac Pro that had like only slotted GPUs and only socketed RAM, maybe they would actually be slower in certain like micro benchmarks, you know, because they wouldn't, the RAM would be a little bit higher latency or a little bit lower bandwidth or whatever it would be.
Marco:
but that when doing these massive jobs that people would buy these machines for, overall, they would be able to outperform the Mac Studio and the MacBook Pro and things like that because they would be able to dispatch all this work around and the increased latency would be made up for by just the massive amount of parallel power and total resources you'd have at your disposal.
Marco:
So it doesn't necessarily just say that it would be guaranteed slower or worse.
Marco:
It would just be a different trade-off.
John:
Yeah, like mostly what you're getting with the unified memory architecture, like it's an efficiency choice.
John:
And I don't mean efficiency in terms of power usage.
John:
Oh, that is definitely there as well.
John:
I mean in terms of how much stuff do you have to spend money on to put into your computer.
John:
So with separate GPU slots, like these GPUs come with like 32 gigs of RAM.
John:
That used to be the maximum you could even put in an entire machine with an M1 SoC before the Mac Studio or whatever broke through that barrier was.
John:
Yeah.
John:
so you have to get so much more stuff so you get you get this video top end video card which has huge numbers of of gpu goes on it just just a massive chip just filled with gpu and then it has its own you know 32 gigs of ram that is special extremely high bandwidth ram really really close to that gpu that's just like a complete duplication of effort of the stuff that's in the main soc because the soc has already got the gpu cores and ram real close to it that's really high speed and special
John:
Now you've got a second copy of that only without as many CPU cores, although they do have CPU cores there, of course, on an entire card.
John:
And they communicate over the PCI bus, right?
John:
And then you could have multiples of those cards.
John:
You could have multiple GPUs on a single card.
John:
It is inefficient in terms of money.
John:
You have to pay for all that stuff.
John:
And then power, you know, just to power the card and everything.
John:
It's a duplication of effort.
John:
And yes, there is a runtime cost to that sometimes in terms of transferring data back and forth.
John:
But you can solve that problem by just adding more resources most of the time.
John:
If you have enough VRAM on your dedicated GPU, most things that you do with GPUs don't require constant shuttling of data back and forth to the point where you're saturating the bandwidth, and that is your limiting factor.
John:
uh that's why they have so much ram in both of these places there are some situations that are like that where apple's socs excel because they don't have to copy the data that's what of course they're going to brag about and definitely on situations where you actually have a power budget or a battery you do not want to have a complete duplication of resources elsewhere but again in looking at the lineup you can say what machine should spend money resources space heat power uh dollars you know everything i
John:
On a duplication of resources just to get that top-end maximum power, it would be the Mac Pro, right?
John:
It's the reason they sold it with that dual whatever.
John:
Apple itself sold dual GPU cards, and you could get two dual GPU cards, and so you would have four high-end GPUs shoved into your Mac Pro.
John:
And it only seems less ridiculous because we don't think of the Xeon CPU as having any kind of integrated graphics.
John:
I think it has none.
John:
I asked that question last time.
John:
I don't remember what the answer was.
John:
Right.
John:
But having something with a huge amount of GPU, a huge amount of really fast GPU on the SoC, and then also third party GPUs, you'd only do that if you feel like, well, I got to pay for this GPU on the SoC, but I actually need more than that.
John:
I need more GPU cores.
John:
I can, you know, I can do my work twice as fast if I have twice as many GPU cores and I'm willing to pay for them.
John:
Apple should, I think, be willing to sell you that and say, well, you're kind of wasting the GPU cores on here unless the software is written well enough to be able to use them all at once.
John:
And it could be because Apple's frameworks let you sort of use the computing resources wherever they are.
John:
But lots of workloads are written with the expectation that you're not going to have a unified memory architecture.
John:
You will have to transfer stuff from regular RAM to VRAM.
John:
And that's OK.
John:
And the programs account for it.
John:
And what some customers really need is I just need as many of those GPU cores as possible.
John:
I'm willing to spend 800 watts on it.
John:
Just give them to me, right?
John:
Apple should, I think, offer that.
John:
And that's why I'm still holding out hope for GPU card slots.
John:
But I think I would actually be...
John:
happier if they found some way to put enough gpus to be competitive not the best but competitive because if they're competitive in their overall metal score on an soc they're going to crush it in anything that that is bottlenecked on on bandwidth back and forth to the vram because they don't have to do that right
John:
And so I think that solution, Apple can brag about it and say, oh, they'll put up one of those graphs and say, look how much faster we are than even the top end NVIDIA card.
John:
And they'd pick some particular benchmark that really benefits from, you know, the SOC and unified memory architecture.
John:
And they would show them crushing NVIDIA and just ignore all the ones where NVIDIA crushes them or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
That's fine.
John:
That's the Apple way to do it.
John:
Like have something that's a unique selling proposition.
John:
We make a different performance trade-offs than Nvidia.
John:
That's why you might consider us instead of Nvidia.
John:
We're not just, you know, our own CPU plus an Nvidia card because we don't like them or whatever.
John:
But this situation where you're like, we're not competitive at all and we don't offer card slots.
John:
But if you need a little bit more than a Mac Studio, the Mac Pro is for you.
John:
That's not as exciting.
John:
And so I really hope, I mean, you know, I hope they keep making Mac Pros forever.
John:
And so they get another shot at this with the M3.
John:
They can make different choices.
John:
They have lots of great building blocks.
John:
Their GPU cores look like they're really good, like in terms of what they do for the power they're given and the space and everything.
John:
Their CPU cores are phenomenal, right?
John:
It's just a question of how do we divide up these components?
John:
What kind of ratios do we choose?
John:
Maybe they'll make some interesting choices in terms of arrangement of stuff for the headset.
John:
Or who knows, maybe they'll just use watch CPUs.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But I think the headset might end up needing a little more GPU grunt and a little bit less CPU grunt.
John:
So maybe they'll make a different arrangement in that.
John:
I continue to have confidence in their overall architecture because I think they have all the building blocks.
John:
It's just a question of how do they dole them out to their individual machines.
John:
And this rumor is essentially a story of them changing their mind and making different trade-offs.
John:
And when they ship a product, we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
Are you sad?
Casey:
I mean this genuinely, like I'm not trying to poke the bear here, but are you sad reading this?
John:
Not really, because like I said, I don't think I would ever buy the 4X one because it would just be so expensive.
John:
I mean, I selfishly hope they do have GPU card slots because that's my most efficient money-wise path to get good GPU power.
John:
mostly at this point what i care about is uh a case design with a better cooling solution than the mac studio you know what i mean because i like the cooling solution on my mac pro it's a really big case and with really big slow moving fans the mac studio is not that it's not as good so if you know if if if they introduce a new mac pro obviously whatever mac pro they introduce is going to be so much faster than this except maybe in gpu but assuming it is within the ballpark and i eventually replace this machine
John:
I would like it to be with something that I don't have to bolt to the bottom of my desk because it's too noisy.
Marco:
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There's so much on there.
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You know, I was looking through the other night, and there are just so many topics that I am super interested in.
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Arthur Dickerson writes, do any of you journal handwritten or in an app?
Casey:
I will start and I will tell you that I am a devout Day One user.
Casey:
I don't think they've sponsored the show.
Casey:
They may have a long time ago, but I don't think they have.
Casey:
Day One is a journaling app.
Casey:
Actually, come to think of it, I think I stumbled upon Day One when Marco and Tiff and Aaron and I went to Germany because I wanted to have a way to take note of the things that the four of us did
Casey:
But do that not on Foursquare and not on Twitter, not on Instagram, but somewhere that was private for just me.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure it was the Germany trip that started me down this path.
Casey:
And day one does let you say, you know, I've been I'm here and it lets you geotag things and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
I had been using it on and off ever since then in 2013, but I got really, really serious about it around the time of the pandemic because I thought, oh, what a fun chronicle this will be of the two weeks of the pandemic, right?
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I began the pandemic on March 13th of 2020, not that I remember, trying to make sure that at least once a day I take note of something that happened that day, typically with a picture if I can.
Casey:
But if I don't, I'll write something down.
Casey:
And I've been going, I think, every single day since the 13th of March 2020.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I really like Day One.
Casey:
Again, I don't think they've sponsored in the past.
Casey:
They're certainly not sponsoring now.
Casey:
But I really like Day One because it's private.
Casey:
It's very reliable in my use.
Casey:
And it does basically everything I want it to do.
Casey:
And not too much more.
Casey:
And I mean that in a complimentary way.
Casey:
Uh, it, it lets you make, you know, audio recordings.
Casey:
If that's your thing, you can put videos on there.
Casey:
It all syncs with their own proprietary system.
Casey:
Um, and it's pretty darn reliable in it.
Casey:
And it's very quick, you know, it's easy to get in and out.
Casey:
It has a really great feature that shows you, you know, what happened on this day in years past.
Casey:
I really, really, really like it a lot.
Casey:
And I use it mostly for just, you know, taking note of things that we did during the day that are even mildly noteworthy.
Casey:
I try to be very, very religious with it when I'm traveling because that's so easy to forget the ins and outs of a WWDC trip, as an example.
Casey:
And my family's actually going on our first plane vacation since 2019 in just a couple of weeks, and I'll be using it a lot then later.
Casey:
as well and it's such a great way to say oh i we ate at such and such a restaurant and you know while you're there you can just you'll create an entry and it'll geotag where you are and you could go back at the end of the day and you know add in you know notes about what you did or thoughts or what have you um i really really like day one if you have any interest in this whatsoever i can't suggest it enough you should uh definitely try it out marco do you do any sort of journaling in any way shape or form
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
It's one of those things, it's like playing guitar.
Marco:
I would love to be an expert in playing guitar, but I am never willing to put in the effort to go from nothing to expert.
Casey:
You and me both, brother.
Casey:
Seriously.
Casey:
I really agree with you.
Casey:
I really do.
Marco:
In this case, there are some times in which I look back and say, boy, I would love to have journaled for that time, but I never actually do it.
Marco:
And I love the idea of it, but I never want to do it so badly that I actually do it.
John:
John, a question about your journaling first.
John:
Like this, the whole idea of this question of calling it journaling makes me think that it's like a different framing of, of writing because, you know, writing something every day or writing about your day or what happened in your life can take lots of different forms.
John:
And I feel like journaling comes with like a, an expectation of a sort of
John:
A context, a frame of reference.
John:
What I'm occurring to do is like having a diary, right?
John:
Which is a different way of saying the same thing.
John:
I write something down every day.
John:
All right, but if it's a diary, it's like, dear diary, here are my deepest thoughts, right?
John:
You know, my deepest feelings that I would never want anyone to know and like I'm writing them down, right?
John:
Whereas journaling is more like,
John:
I mean, you mentioned you're doing it someplace private.
John:
When I see journaling, I feel like it's I always think of it as like, how would you feel if this got into the wrong hands and was published?
John:
Right.
John:
And I feel like a journal is written with with the notion that it is slightly less bad than having your diary go public because your diary, it's like this is it.
John:
This is the base level.
John:
There is nothing that I won't write here, no matter how embarrassing, no matter like I'm just going to write all my thoughts and feelings.
John:
It is just for me.
John:
and it's my deepest inner thoughts with no filter.
John:
And journal is not that.
John:
Journal is, I'm going to put my feelings and thoughts about the day here, but it's kind of like something I think we're all familiar with.
John:
It's like writing not for an external audience, but also thinking about if someone did see this, how dire would it be for me?
John:
And that may seem like a weird thing to think about, but I have to tell you that a lot of the things I do in my life, like in the internet age, I have that mindset of like,
John:
This, I never intend this to go elsewhere or be seen outside of the context where, you know, where it was supposed to be, but it could.
John:
So let me make sure if that happens, it's not entirely awful.
John:
Like always sort of holding something back.
John:
So my question for Casey is, are your journal entries like diary entries or like a historian cataloging what your family did in a day or somewhere in between?
John:
Like how, how do you move along that spectrum?
Casey:
It's a good question.
Casey:
I would say mine is more of a captain's log than it is a diary.
Casey:
Like, there are occasions that I will put... I mean, I can't even think of an example off the top of my head.
Casey:
Like, it's not that I'm trying to filter myself.
Casey:
I can't even think of an example of something that is really and truly private.
Casey:
Like, I'll talk about, you know, oh, we had such and such a medical issue that we needed to take care of.
Casey:
Like, that'll get noted.
Casey:
But that's not...
Casey:
the end of the earth, if that sort of thing escaped, you know, it's one of those things where I wouldn't want my day one journal to be public, but I don't think it would be ruinous if it was, you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, I don't know that I would be canceled on account of my day one journal.
Casey:
I'm much more likely to get canceled because my dumb hot takes on this show or masked on or Twitter or something like that.
John:
It's not about canceling.
John:
It's not like we're saying you're planning a murder and you're writing.
John:
But just like writing about your feelings.
John:
Like, I mean, the journal as you describe it could be useful in this context.
John:
But I'm saying like something you would bring to your therapist.
John:
Like you could bring your therapist and say, oh, on this day I did this.
John:
And so it helps me understand, you know, what my feelings might have been versus literally writing down your feelings, bringing that to your therapist and said, here's how I felt on this day.
John:
And here's what I wrote about it.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's more – that's what I feel like is the word journaling implies like a one-step remove where you're sort of like – like you said, a captain's log, which has a particular context.
John:
And, you know, Picard writes stuff in his captain's log about his feelings, but there's still – it's written –
John:
a captain's log in particular is written with the expectation that it will have an audience of people who want to look at the captain's log to see what happened on the events of the journey.
John:
And it's not like the captain doesn't write about their feelings.
John:
Like I fear we'll never find land or whatever, but he's not writing about his, you know, secret love of the first mate or whatever.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, no, my thoughts about how much I love the two of you, I keep just for me.
Casey:
No, I mean, all kidding aside, it really is more along the lines of a captain's log.
Casey:
And I think to back up a step...
Casey:
What day one does for me is fix a problem that I have.
Casey:
And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way or to be flippant.
Casey:
Like, I genuinely have a terrible memory.
Casey:
And I'm not proud of that.
Casey:
I wish I had a much better memory.
Casey:
But my memory is garbage.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I can remember certain things and I can remember broad strokes of like Declan's fifth birthday trip to Disney world in late 2019.
Casey:
But I really enjoy, if I have the time and the presence of mind to do it, I really enjoy taking note of this is where we had lunch on the, you know, the first day that we were at Disney.
Casey:
This is where we eat dinner.
Casey:
And even to the degree of this is what I ate.
Casey:
Maybe I liked it, maybe I didn't.
Casey:
But I'm not going to go into like the how it made me emotionally feel that dinner or anything like that.
Casey:
It's really solving the problem of I have no memory.
Casey:
This is my external outboard memory that helps me to relive events in my life.
Casey:
usually good ones, sometimes mundane, but just events in my life.
Casey:
And day one is really good for me for capturing that.
Casey:
Now, you can write long-form stuff in it for sure.
Casey:
That's not a need that I typically have, and it's not something that I do particularly often at all.
Casey:
But you could do that there if you so desire.
Casey:
But yeah, if I were to summarize, I would say more Captain's Log than anything else.
Casey:
My typical day one entry is a title,
Casey:
often but not always a picture, and typically one paragraph or less, if any.
Casey:
You know, sometimes it's just the title and the picture, nothing else.
John:
yeah and to answer my question i don't do any journaling although my wife has day one installed and i hate it because it takes command shift d i'm in the finder i hit command shift d to open the desktop folder so i can like sort by stuff or whatever so i don't have to look through her incredibly messy desktop full of icons everywhere and i can just get a list view and find things you know sorted by date or whatever and command shift d does not open a stupid finder window the desktop instead it opens day one
Casey:
i have day one installed and the command shift d definitely does the desktop i think i think i'm thinking of day one it's like a teal icon it's a teal thing like it's a very it's like a light blue yeah maybe it's like a book um but also today i learned the command shift d brings you to the desktop so that's extremely useful thanks john go menu it's not a secret command i just never paid attention you know command d in a save dialogue also does that oh i'm fine fine
Casey:
Matt Tui writes, what folders do you add to the top level of your home directory?
Casey:
For example, I have one for my code, another for things that might be falling off the back of a truck.
Casey:
Does this feel like a sacred place in your computer saved only for special cases?
Casey:
P.S.
Casey:
I just installed Postman and it created, you know, tilde slash Postman.
Casey:
Yuck.
Casey:
I went first last time, so I'll save myself for last.
Casey:
I think Marco, let's start with you, please.
Marco:
I generally don't add stuff to my home folder directly, and it has a similar problem as the Dropbox folder in the sense that many apps will add their own top-level folders there that I don't necessarily want there and don't need to deal with myself and don't want to deal with myself, but they need to put their data there because they're hard-coded to do it or whatever.
Marco:
And so it ends up making the home folder not particularly useful to me as a place that I want to look very often because it's cluttered up with items that I don't need to be there that some app or the system decide need to be there.
Marco:
So I don't look that often.
Marco:
What I do have there, of course, I'll use the subfolders like documents and photos and things like that.
Marco:
But I do have in that top-level folder...
Marco:
all of my git checkouts so it's basically a list of projects you know it's like overcast in your home folder yeah yeah yeah wow home slash overcast you know home slash mad you know neutral i find that to be madness as well but you do you
Marco:
Well, hey, it makes all my paths really easy to type, you know, tilde slash whatever.
Marco:
So that's what I do.
Marco:
So it's full of checkouts of all my projects and, you know, a handful of folders that I never need to look at.
Marco:
And then, of course, my fake Dropbox folder, which is actually the Maestro Dropbox folder.
Marco:
But, you know, for path compatibility, it's still called Dropbox.
Casey:
John?
John:
I don't put things in the top level of my home folder.
John:
Other apps do, and I find it incredibly rude.
John:
Yes.
John:
So creative cloud files.
John:
I don't like you.
John:
I don't want you to be there.
John:
Why are you in the top level of my home directory?
John:
Dropbox does, and I have to say, Dropbox is one of the only ones that if I had a choice, and you do have a choice, I think, I'm okay with that being top level because of what it is, but I always want to have a choice.
John:
There are other apps that try to put things in there.
John:
Sometimes if they insist on being there, I make them invisible just so I don't have to see them in the finder.
John:
I tend not to go to that folder.
John:
But if you think about that folder, there's a good history to be had here going all the way back to the next days of like someone somewhere back in the day decided they were going to pick a reasonable top level arrangement for people's home directories.
John:
And so they decided you're going to, you know, the folders that you see there when you get a Mac, documents, movies, pictures, not photos, pictures, because some of them might not be photos, right?
John:
Then there's the dreaded library folder, which people don't understand.
John:
And it's got the little pillars on the icon or whatever.
John:
We as developers know what's in there, but it's, you know, it's, you know, computer stuff, right?
John:
Downloads kind of makes sense as a top level thing.
John:
Public downloads.
John:
Nobody freaking knows what that is because the web browser that used to ship with Macs, like it used to have a GUI and then it didn't have a GUI.
John:
It's still, you know, Apache, I think, still comes with Mac OS.
John:
But anyway, if you run a web server on your Mac out of people's home directory stuff, it comes out of public.
John:
But it's also, I think, the file sharing public directory or whatever.
Marco:
And inside, don't forget, inside of public is a folder called DropspaceBox, which is different from Dropbox.
John:
yeah that's right now sites is the web browser one public is like the public file sharing one and then a top level folder for music not audio but music so you've got movies not video pictures not photos music not audio uh it's such it's such a model and of course applications i do have a applications folder in my home directory and that is
John:
a supported thing and the OS will give it an icon.
John:
And I do have applications in there.
John:
There are applications that only I want to use that I know no one else in the system wants to use.
John:
It's sort of like a, like you don't graduate to slash applications until you reach a certain level of usefulness.
John:
So I've got a lot of crap in tilde slash applications.
John:
There are other folders that you can put in there that the OS understands, but this sort of arrangement of stuff,
John:
Chosen a really long time ago.
John:
It makes some sense.
John:
It's not a ridiculous arrangement of things, but Apple in typical fashion on Mac OS has not really revisited that structure to revise it much.
John:
And it's kind of strange.
John:
Like when they make features in the future, for example, iCloud drive where they say, what is it?
John:
A desktops and documents, right?
John:
The desktop folder, which is invisible, but is in the top level of your home directory.
John:
Uh,
John:
and documents those are the ones that sync is desktop documents is that it is it downloads as well i forget no it's just it's just it's called documents and desktop and that's that's literally those two folders yeah so those those two folders sync and icloud and it's like hmm all right so i kind of understand why library doesn't sync you know because we understand like you might have one per machine preferences or whatever but like
John:
And not syncing downloads makes a little bit of sense, but pictures?
John:
Well, you've got iCloud photos, but what if you have other pictures there?
John:
And should I put pictures in the pictures folder, not in documents folder?
John:
Well, then they're not going to sync.
John:
And it's just, it's clear that current day Apple doesn't consider all of these top level folders.
John:
It's not on board with the top level arrangement.
John:
Otherwise it would sync more of them, right?
John:
And like documents is so generic.
John:
Isn't a movie a document?
John:
Isn't a picture a document, right?
John:
Aren't downloads documents?
John:
What the hell is a document?
John:
documents is the thing that they sync but they're like okay we don't want to sync people's libraries because we have iCloud photo library for that and if they actually legitimately have pictures that are not photos they should put them in documents because that will sync same thing with movies it's just it's a it suffers from a little bit of sort of someone had a had a grand plan many many years ago probably back in the next days and that grand plan has uh the people who care about or know about their grand plan are long since gone and then people just don't want to change things but they are happy to ignore stuff
John:
There was also, by the way, back in the next days and the early Mac OS 10 days, the idea of slash network.
John:
So there was slash system slash network.
John:
There was slash local and then your home directory.
John:
And all those things had a library directory and applications directory under them.
John:
Right.
John:
right?
John:
That they were sort of the same arrangement of top level stuff repeated many times, depending on the, the scope, justice user stuff, justice machine stuff, the quote unquote network stuff.
John:
And that has also fallen by the wayside as the internet has taken over as the dominant network metaphor, as opposed to file sharing across local computers and a land and all that other stuff.
John:
So lots of historical baggage here, but that's part of the reason why I just try to stay the heck out of my top level home directory because
John:
And do everything.
John:
I don't do documents and whatever syncing or whatever, but I try to do everything under the thing they have.
John:
So my movies are in movies.
John:
My pictures are in pictures.
John:
Everything else is in documents.
John:
My downloads are in downloads.
John:
I don't touch sites.
John:
I don't touch public.
John:
My music used to be in music, but I had this notion back in the iTunes days.
John:
that I wanted to share my music library between multiple users on the system because it was the biggest thing on my computer.
John:
I've talked about this before.
John:
And so my music was in user shared, which still exists, by the way.
John:
User shares music.
John:
My music is still in music.
Marco:
Wait, you didn't just have the built-in iTunes share feature enabled?
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
No, no.
John:
Back in the day, if you put your music in user shared music,
John:
it would literally use the same iTunes library for multiple users.
John:
I don't think it was ever robust enough to have both users using it at the same time, but it might have been.
John:
But anyway, it worked well for years.
John:
Now, my music is still in user-shared music, even though I'm the only one using it there.
John:
So I really should move it back, but...
John:
anyway my music is so small compared to my photos library now it doesn't even matter it's like i'm not like marco with his uh fish stuff but um yeah thanks to the question no no top level stuff and uh github check out the top level of your home directory i say this is madness but i have to tell you that i am in my unix days my the top level of my home directory had way too much stuff in it i tried to arrange things nicely in the top level of my home directory and i failed miserably like
John:
Over the course of years in college, my grand plans of arranging the top level of my Unix home directory just were shattered.
John:
And then at my jobby jobs, if you looked at my home directory of my last jobby job on my last day of work, you would be horrified more than Ed Barker's thing.
John:
I had so much crap at the top level of my home directory, like my network shared home directory that was mounted every time I SSH to any machine anywhere inside the company.
John:
So much stuff.
John:
I should have saved an LS output just to like...
John:
mind-boggling amount of crap in my home directory.
John:
That's what happens if you give people discorders that are too big.
Casey:
uh for me uh i generally don't have much in there and i consider it semi-sacred um so i i do have applications there although there's nothing in it uh you know desktop of course downloads of course documents um movies music pictures public all that jazz uh the only other stuff that i also have in there is i do have i don't maybe 10 or 15 shell scripts that i use a whole lot i should probably find a different place for them but they're all living put them in your bin directory dude what are you doing
Casey:
My bad.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
But they're all they're all living there.
John:
I didn't mention that, by the way, but I do have top level Unix directories that I made invisible.
John:
So I have tilde slash bin where all my executables and scripts go.
John:
That's in my path in my shell path.
John:
Like the Unix stuff is there, but I don't see it in the finder.
Casey:
No, that's fair.
Casey:
I should probably do that.
Casey:
But leaving aside those like 10 shell scripts, I also have a folder.
Casey:
This is thought technology that I came up with.
Casey:
I think it was an original invention like a year ago, maybe two years ago.
Casey:
I have a folder called Detritus, and that's in my top level folder.
Casey:
And in there is like all the crap that I don't care if it disappears.
Casey:
So Audio Hijack dumps all of its files there.
Casey:
Obviously, I care if those disappear, but I handle all of these files immediately when I'm done recording.
Casey:
So Audio Hijack dumps its stuff there.
Casey:
Caliber has folders in there.
Casey:
Final Cut Pro, because I'm not anymore doing things.
John:
What you've got there is a temp directory.
Casey:
Yeah, kind of.
Casey:
You're right.
John:
But you wanted to be snooty and say detritus instead of TMP.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But Geotag, which is a thing I use to geotag photos from my big camera, and Zoom insists on having a download directory for reasons unknown.
Casey:
All of that is in detritus, and detritus is in my home folder.
Casey:
But other than that, and some shell scripts that apparently I need to move, oh, and my equivalent of Dropbox, which is Synology Drive, that's the only real custom additions to my home folder.
Casey:
Finally, Kai asks, hey, Casey, you have sometimes said that you use Spaces a lot as a part of your window management workflow on Mac OS.
Casey:
I use Spaces a lot in the days of the 2D grid, but lately with self-rearranging list of variable length with intermixed full screen apps, I find myself getting lost and feel I'm not using multiple desktops with their potential.
Casey:
Could you elaborate on how you use Spaces?
Casey:
Yeah, there's not a lot to say, to be honest with you.
Casey:
Typically what I'll do is I'll dedicate a space to development work so that typically if I'm on a larger screen and not just the laptop, typically that means I'm running Xcode as big as I can while still having a full-size simulator on the right-hand side.
Casey:
So I've got a full-size iPhone 14 Pro simulator on the right-hand side of the screen, and then Xcode takes up the entire rest of the screen.
Casey:
Um, I'll have a space dedicated to that.
Casey:
I'll have a space dedicated to, uh, like real-time communication.
Casey:
And so that is like two thirds Slack and one third messages.
Casey:
So this is a, you know, a full, they're both full screen tiled, uh, using the semi new Mac OS affordances to do so.
Casey:
And then I typically have a space for like web browsing, email, Twitter, you know, just my junk drawer space, if you will.
Casey:
The only reason that this works in my brain is because I have no idea where it is in system settings, but in system preferences, there was a way to say to Mac OS, do not.
Casey:
rearrange my spaces.
Casey:
It tried to get all smart about, you know, oh, the two things that you use the most, let's shimmy them next to each other, which I get.
Casey:
But because of, I think of this as like this whole, like, like space, you know, I think of it as a, an array of spaces, you know, an array that it's a lateral list of screens and,
Casey:
When they get rearranged, it breaks my brain.
Casey:
And somewhere in system preferences, and I got to assume in system settings, there's a place to say, don't rearrange them, leave them be.
Casey:
I don't recall there ever being a two-by-two grid.
Casey:
I'm not saying there wasn't, but I don't remember that being a thing, except on Linux, like X. No, we talked about this on the show before.
John:
The spaces used to be two-dimensional, not just left and right, but also up and down.
Casey:
Man, I believe you, I do not remember that at all.
Casey:
But one way or another, so as they're all a list, a lateral list, once I turned off rearranging, it got much better.
Casey:
And like I said, it's basically like junk drawer, development work, communication.
Casey:
And that's about it.
Casey:
There's not a lot of science to it.
Casey:
do you guys both of you swear that spaces are pretty much evil is that correct yeah i don't think they're evil i'm just super not into them i wasn't into the other spaces with the 2d either marco same story yeah i've never really gotten into like virtual desktop kind of like you know sets like that i just just never it's never been my thing i mean that's totally fair i i feel like i couldn't live without it but i know that makes me a bit of a weirdo
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think that's it.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Masterclass, and Nebula.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at 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.
John:
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 K-C-L-I-S-S-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-
Casey:
Hey, so we have potentially a problem.
Casey:
What are we going to do about our theme song?
John:
Many weeks.
John:
Many, many weeks of people have been making the same joke and asking the same question, which I don't blame them for.
John:
It makes perfect sense.
John:
In our theme song that you just heard, there is a section where our Twitter handles are read out.
John:
without the at signs, just with the letters so people can figure it out.
John:
And everyone's going, oh, you know, Twitter's going downhill and you're all on Mastodon and Marco recently is off of Twitter and he took the overcast account off Twitter.
John:
So you're going to have to change the theme song, aren't you?
John:
Here's my was and is still my opinion on this.
John:
And I'm sure it's not going to be a particular popular one, but it is what it is.
John:
The song lyrics are, luckily, if you're into Twitter,
John:
you can follow them.
John:
Now, the qualifier is important because, say, Twitter goes away, or Twitter gets evil.
John:
You can say, well, I'm just not into Twitter, so I'm not going to follow them, right?
John:
The other possibility is, if you're on Twitter, you can follow them.
John:
What if Marco deletes his account?
John:
that would mean that even if you are into twitter you can't follow him because he's not there but so far we're still in the good his account still exists and you could attempt to follow him there i think his account is private now it is your request to follow may not be approved i don't even know where to look to approve those requests i'm not approving anymore like i i lock the accounts in part to you know just see like you know i'm just gonna put a cap on this preserve the name right
Marco:
yeah yeah i'm preserving the name but but yeah i'm just kind of putting a cap on my usage of this like all right no more you know and look i'm not saying i'm gonna be gone forever definitely yeah twitter twitter could rise again many things could happen to twitter yeah but but yeah i frankly i'm not super optimistic
John:
But anyway, the theme song has always had that out.
John:
If you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
John:
Now, and the other angle is, again, say Twitter goes away.
John:
It goes bankrupt.
John:
It goes out of business.
John:
No one buys the assets.
John:
It gets sold for parts.
John:
Twitter no longer exists.
John:
Do we still have this theme song that has Twitter in it?
John:
I, being a nostalgic person, would say, yes, this theme song was written back when Twitter existed.
John:
Remember those days?
John:
Wasn't that fun?
John:
And we had Twitter handles or whatever.
John:
So I would be perfectly fine not ever changing the song.
John:
I'm just saying the song is a historical artifact.
John:
It always had a qualifier on it.
John:
Even if Twitter becomes entirely evil, the song is not endorsing Twitter.
John:
It has always been noncommittal.
John:
It's like, hey, if you're into Twitter...
John:
you can follow them and then it reads our handles.
John:
But the rest of the world does not agree with me.
John:
The rest of the world thinks Twitter should not be mentioned in the theme song if we are not actively on Twitter.
John:
I'm still on Twitter, by the way.
John:
But if we're not into Twitter anymore, we shouldn't tell people to try to follow us there.
John:
Luckily, our handles are all the same on Mastodon.
John:
Not the other part after the ad.
John:
But if you type in C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, that's Casey Liss.
John:
Don't type, that's Casey Liss.
John:
you will find him if you type my last name you'll find me type mark armand you'll probably find him like we are find a bull so my second level of bargaining is okay you demand that we change the song i still kind of like the reading of the handles i don't think you need to put the whole big thing in mastodon.social because then what about when we move mastodon servers because the whole point is you can move servers really easily and it's a fediverse and blah blah blah blah so i'm like let's not let's not go overboard here and just totally change everything and
John:
plus the rhythm of that part of the song works well reading the handles it teaches people how to spell my name which i appreciate and it doesn't you know it does mention twitter but it doesn't say anything on a particular service let's just leave that let's just change the if you're into twitter line to something else maybe you will do that so if i if if the world says we must change the song i would hope that we will change it in a minimal way uh
John:
Right now, we have done nothing, which you will be aware of when you hear this song that hasn't changed, most likely on this thing.
John:
But we are considering things.
Marco:
Yeah, I too would... I see the... Because look, here's the thing.
Marco:
People love our song.
Marco:
I love our song.
Marco:
We love our song.
Marco:
And so I don't want to rewrite the whole theme song without that line in it or whatever else, or have to spell out...
Marco:
At Marco Orman at Mastodon.social.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
Marco:
So I'd be inclined to take advantage of the situation we're in, as John mentioned, where our usernames are the same and just change it to something like if you're into social or on your social network or something that has the same number of syllables that is network agnostic.
Yeah.
John:
yeah we would know we wouldn't want to put mastodon because they'll be making the same mistake again like twitter we had a good run here like twitter's been around for a long time it will mastodon but what if we put app.net into the song like not mentioning a company that could go out of business or become evil is probably a good plan right and and it seems like whenever a new social a social service takes off we usually have these exact same usernames on it
Marco:
Or at least, like, we can make it happen.
Marco:
We try to.
Marco:
But the other thing is, like, you know, and I talked to Jonathan Mann, the composer and performer of our theme song, to see, like, hey, you know, would you be willing to do something new here or modify this?
Marco:
And he said yes.
Marco:
So we just basically have to figure out, like, what to do.
Marco:
And, you know, the thing is, like, because this song is almost 10 years old,
John:
you know whatever we do now even if we have him record like one line and try to drop it in it's gonna sound different i believe in our ability to make that work computers audio processing uh jonathan man pitching up his voice and not sounding it'll be i think we can pull it off but anyway we'll try but like we have a similar situation with like because the theme song is so old the whole people were making the joke when i quit my job saying like oh
John:
uh john didn't do any research like people don't even know what that line is about it's so long ago that that was a thing on the show but the people who do know say oh now that john doesn't have a job you have to change the theme no we don't have to it's fine as a historical artifact like when this song was written that was a gag in the show right right so many things in the song are from like like when was it written like pretty early in the run of the show i mean it had to be like mid 2013 maybe
John:
Yeah, we can go back and find the first show with the theme song.
John:
But, like, they're all, like, references and gags that could only have happened in the very, very beginning of the show because that's when the song was written.
John:
And I enjoy the fact that it exists as a historical artifact.
John:
The same reason I have my wedding photo on the wall.
John:
Like, we don't look like that any wrong, but that's when we were married.
John:
So the photo is still hanging.
John:
We don't say, oh, you should update your wedding photo to have pictures of you being old and wrinkly.
John:
Like, no, thanks.
Yeah.
Casey:
26th of March, 2013.
Casey:
So that was real early in the run of the show.
Marco:
That was what, like a month in?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
What episode number was it?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm just looking at the YouTube video he posted.
Casey:
It was March 26th, 2013.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Casey:
That's episode seven.
John:
golly oh my god that's amazing so episode seven i would say is pretty early and so we had enough gags by episode seven for a theme song to be written that lasted us until episode whatever the heck we're on 400 and something 500 whatever i can keep track how old am i
John:
What's 100 episodes here and there?
John:
We're recording 514, and this theme song was written in episode seven.
John:
That's why I'm a proponent of, we'll just never change a theme song and it'll just be a historical artifact.
John:
But we are exploring possible changes.
John:
So if you see some changes, and we do have alternate versions of the theme song we do.
John:
There was the bleeps and boops version that I was a fan of that we never actually put into the show.
Casey:
Go back and see.
John:
It wasn't terrible.
John:
It was awesome.
John:
It just was incomplete.
Casey:
I mean, it wasn't terrible.
Casey:
It was just nowhere near as good as the regular version.
John:
It was good in a different way.
John:
wasn't it was good in a bad way no it was good in a more narrow it was good in a more narrow way marco should appreciate this just like like fish is good in a way that is of interest to a narrower slice of the population let's say yeah let's go with that
Marco:
Anyway, so we'll figure something out.
Marco:
And I think odds are that... I would say odds are even between changing nothing and changing that one line and trying to make it sound natural with the rest of the song staying the same.
John:
It relies on Jonathan having the individual tracks, which, given that he writes a song every single day, does he keep the individual tracks?
John:
I know Marco, being a pack rat, does keep the...
John:
He keeps the logic files from all the ATP episodes.
John:
Yeah, I keep everything.
John:
Right.
John:
But I'm not sure if Jonathan Mann has the hard drive space to be keeping individual track files for every song that he's ever written.
John:
So I'm just crossing my fingers that he somehow, you know, stashed away the individual tracks for this one song.
Marco:
I wonder if we could train an AI model, just feed them all of Jonathan Mann's songs.
John:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
And just have it.
John:
You can put it into Descript.
John:
I'm sure Merlin is doing this right now.
John:
Descript is an audio.
John:
I'm saying it like him now.
John:
He says Descript.
John:
The word is Descript.
John:
I don't know.
John:
anyway it's like description anyway it's an audio editor that's really cool it lets you edit text by looking at uh edit audio by looking at text so it does a transcription and then you just move the words around and when you move the words around in the text it moves the audio around and it has a feature where you can feed it samples of someone's speech and then you can just type something you want them to say and it will say it in the voice of that person and it's amazingly good creepy but i don't think it does singing
John:
yeah yeah i i doubt it but hey i mean look i mean with all the things the ai can do these days we're we're very close i'm sure this is within someone could do this it's just that uh d script as marlon would say does not have this capability yeah and to be clear that that's mostly a joke like we actually are gonna have jonathan do something for us but but i'm saying this could be what jonathan does for us we don't know we just want to see the finished product yeah i guess whatever tools he wants to get it done it's his own voice oh my word
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
Sitting here now, I think, John, you have convinced me that it doesn't need to be modified.
Casey:
I can't tell when people are commenting on it if they're snarking for the fun of it or if they're legitimately kind of whining about it.
Casey:
I don't think that's the case, generally speaking.
John:
No, they're just making the joke.
John:
But the thing is, what we have to understand is if we don't change it, how many years do we have to hear them telling us that we—
John:
I think it'll probably die down after about a year but I'm willing to look into changing it for the purpose of future proofing but I'm also super okay with it being the same and whenever anyone asks about it now I'll be able to give them a timestamp link to this after show to explain why we haven't changed the theme song if we haven't changed it or why we did change it if we did