Later Is Getting Later and Later
Let me post that we're live to Twitter, if it still exists.
Is it still running?
Who even knows?
What a disaster.
Holy jamoles.
What a week.
So my goodness, I was slightly optimistic last week.
I think I'm less optimistic now.
Yeah, I don't need to do any navel gazing other than to say I regret not pushing back on you a little bit more last week.
It doesn't really matter.
I think all three of us can agree.
Oh, man.
Things are happening and it's not good.
It's not good.
It was today, I believe, that anyone could start signing up for Twitter Blue, the new version of Twitter Blue, where you get a checkmark, a verified checkmark for signing up.
And so any normal person who is reading all these tweets, who sees a Twitter user with the display name, let's say LeBron James, and a blue checkmark next to them, they don't look at the actual handle for this account.
They just see that LeBron James is saying, oh, I want to get traded or whatever the fake thing said earlier today.
and so news outlets are now picking this up because that thing is getting retweeted and you see oh lebron james with the blue check said he wants to get traded but it's just some dummy who paid eight dollars for a blue check mark yeah i mean that's the that's the silly version of it the the less silly one of the people who are doing like cryptocurrency promotions like somebody uh imitated the twitter official twitter account and said new you know twitter blue is now available and to get it you just need to get this cryptocurrency and go to this link or whatever and it had like
thousands of retweets that's real people like potentially losing real money on someone who's just scamming trying to you know trying to take advantage of the fact that it's pretty easy to make an invitation twitter account now and they basically were up for two hours before they got banned right because the the enforcement of like hey you're not allowed to do this is not lightning quick and so in that two hours how much money did they make and was it more than eight dollars because if it's more than eight dollars it's worth their time to just keep doing this forever
Right.
And then my other favorite thing, I don't I'm not going to be able to dig up show notes entries for this, but my other favorite thing was Twitter briefly had the blue checkmark, which used to mean that you have like and all three of us are verified.
And if it was forever ago for all of us that this happened and.
And if memory serves, I had to provide like a copy of like a scan of my driver's license to become verified or something along those lines.
So for the verification, hence verified, you know, all three of us had to provide some sort of actual government credential, you know, a scan at least of a government credential to Twitter, which, yeah, you could fake that, blah, blah, blah.
But it was still they were trying.
Now, apparently what they're doing is blue just means you're either one of the old farts like us that had already been verified, or you're paying the $8 to get yourself Twitter blue and thus verification.
And then certain government accounts and certain important people have briefly had, I think it's already been canned, a different checkmark that indicates that you're actually who you say you are.
So the way we fixed the checkmark problem was by making more checkmarks.
Like...
oh how why why but then i think they undid they undid the gray check mark or they took it away from i think they did i think it's in the process of being unwound now so yeah so this this uh this general chaos or whatever like it reminds me of uh the discussion we had about this back when elon made the offer for twitter i don't know however many months ago that was um and at that point i was uh you know i
not necessarily optimistic, but I could see a lot of the potential upsides of Twitter getting new ownership that is not as beholden to, you know, just not rocking the boat and keeping the share price up and growing and all those other things because you have many more options when you're a private company.
I still think that's true in terms of,
You know, pretty much no matter how much Elon screws this up, like, oh, I'm trying this, I'm trying that, I'll try this, oh, it doesn't work, I'll undo it, I'll do this.
You know, doing things haphazardly, not really having much forethought, doing a cruddy job on a lot of them, causing bugs.
That doesn't really, like, you can do that for a long time because there's no one telling you to stop as long as you continue to just pump money into the company.
And he has sold a bunch of his Tesla shares recently.
Yeah.
It's easier to have a years-long, you could say, gradual decline into chaos.
Or you could say a long runway to try to figure out something that works.
And in the process of doing that, maybe people flee.
Maybe they go away.
Maybe they come back.
But the network effects of social networks are such that it's actually – you actually have to do something to actively send people away.
Like something that is –
harmful for them to be there if you just slowly remove value people will stay for a really long time witness Instagram which I feel like it's less nice than it was in the past but the network effect is strong and the habit is strong so I do feel like despite all of the silly flailing
As a private company with one person just making random decisions from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, moment-to-moment, you can do that for a really long time because who's going to stop him?
He does it until he gets bored or until everybody leaves, and everyone's not going to leave.
People will trickle out.
Anyway, so I feel like this is the type of thing that it's –
It's going to be exhausting if you try to keep up with it from moment to moment.
And it's more just kind of like sit back and watch it go.
I mean, and the good thing about making lots of decisions and trying things that undoing them is that probably eventually you'll find something that's not bad.
Uh, we'll keep you posted.
It hasn't happened yet, but, uh, you know, it seems like it should happen eventually.
And having that runway of just like, look, I can do whatever I want and no one's going to stop me.
Uh, and I have a lot of money, uh, allows for a lot of these decisions to take place.
I just hope that, uh, it doesn't actually get so bad that Twitter becomes, uh, you know, less useful because I really do use it a ton.
Not that it has replaced RSS for me, but it has supplanted RSS as the primary place where I get, uh,
content for the show where I learned about the world where I follow the news like I've always been a big fan of Twitter and I will continue to use it as long as it provides that value to me yeah same you know a lot of people are really you know sitting back and enjoying the shot on Freud like oh look at this jerk who's making a fool of himself and that's true and he is and thank God for that because he could use it and I do think it's kind of amazing that I saw some tweet earlier that like basically he has turned Twitter into a platform that is mostly dedicated to dunking on him
he's uh become the permanent main character yeah which is i think you know he i think could use some of this uh well you're just assuming that he you know i i don't think any of it is penetrating i mean really when you're as famous and as rich as he is people are constantly saying terrible things to you and eventually you just learn to uh you know ignore it uh and then eventually i feel like you learn to ignore it all even the valid criticism and that's how you get you know yon musk
Well, but at this point, I think he is like the things he's trying are going over like lead balloons.
And I think he can't he can't help but but see the backlash on some level.
So so I think that's, you know, maybe maybe it'll introduce some, you know, very much needed humility to him.
But that's the thing about like him and people like him and Trump to some degree is like these are people who value who care about Trump.
What the the other like they admire and look up to some other people and they care about what those people think.
So Elon Musk cares about what MKBHD thinks about the new gray checkmark feature because he, you know, MKBHD is a big famous person and a tech person.
And it's like, you know, it's not like Elon cares about what people writ large think.
But he cares about what other famous people think, what other tech people think, what other rich entrepreneurs think.
Like there is a cohort of people that he cares about their opinions of.
And it's a big set of people, which is why he'll try something like the great checkmark and then get yelled at by the six people he cares about.
And he'll take what they say.
He'll ignore the million other people who told him the same things, you know, weeks and months.
It's not like he's listening to quote-unquote everybody, but there are people they care about.
And so if they do something silly and it doesn't work, they'll be like, whoops, that was bad.
Let me try something else.
And that feels like what the process is going on right now is he's trying things and listening to the...
small in the grand scheme of things, but still large, set of people that he respects and considers his peers as captains of industry or famous people or whatever.
I mean, it's what we all do.
We can't listen to everybody, but we do listen to our peers.
It just so happens that Elon's peers are other famous people or whatever.
So that acts as a feedback mechanism to let him know, hey, the gray checkmark, it seems kind of silly or whatever.
Unfortunately, a lot of his interactions online are not just with people
you know people with people that he understands and respects and wants to interact with but those people may not be the people that uh everyone else on twitter understands and wants to interact with and respect so when he gives lots of airtimes to uh you know q anon conspiracy theorists and uh alt-right people or whatever maybe that upsets other people but
There is a feedback loop happening here.
It just remains to be seen whether it will eventually produce better results.
Yeah.
And, you know, honestly, like a lot of people out there are like, well, this place is over, burn it to the ground.
And I don't have that attitude.
As much as I don't like him as a person, and I'm liking him less and less as the days go on here, but as much as I dislike him as a person, I want Twitter to work.
I want it to succeed because...
I still get a ton of value out of it.
And there is no direct replacement.
People think oftentimes, oh, we'll just all go to Mastodon or whatever, insert thing here, app.net back forever ago.
People think, oh, we'll all go over here and we'll make a better place there.
That's not really how this works.
First of all, as I mentioned last time, you're never going to get everyone to go over to any one particular place.
So that's problem number one, and that's the biggest problem.
Problem number two is if somehow you magically succeeded, you'd have all the same problems that Twitter has.
You would have all the same challenges of moderation and extremism and hate and harassment and misinformation.
You'd have all of the same problems, and you'd just have either no company, if it's a decentralized thing, to deal with it,
Or you would have a smaller and less effective company possibly to deal with it.
So ultimately, if we want this form of communication to persist and to be a thing that exists in the future, which I think enough people get a lot of value out of it that we probably should want that.
The easiest path to get there and the most likely path to get there and possibly the only path to get there is to make Twitter succeed.
None of us want this guy to succeed because he's a huge dickhead and we all know that and nobody wants him to, you know, whatever.
As I mentioned last episode, I didn't think that highly of the previous leadership.
But still, I use the platform because it's where all my friends are.
It's where I get a lot of my information.
It's where I conduct a lot of my business.
And it isn't just like, you know, trying to like sell stuff I make or anything.
It's stuff like posting programming questions and like, hey, I got this error.
What does this mean?
And like all of their iOS developers are there and they're all answering stuff.
Or I can see what other people do and what other people try.
I can see if something's going on in the world.
I can see stuff there.
Like,
it provides a lot of value.
You can't just pick up all of that and move it somewhere else and have all of our problems magically solved because A, you can't pick it up and move it and B, the problems would still be the same.
So as much as it pains me to say anything positive about this guy, I want this company to succeed because I want the product to continue to exist.
And my biggest concern is not that they'll do weird stuff with the product because I think the feedback mechanism there, as John was just saying,
It's not great, but it exists.
And if he really takes a big steaming turd and everyone reacts the way they've been reacting and he sees that and takes it back, okay, well, that's iteration.
We'll all dunk on him the whole day.
It'll be kind of funny.
We'll get some laughs out of it and then we'll move on.
My biggest concern is it won't stay up.
because all the people he fired all knew how to run it, and we keep hearing all these stories of, like, well, this one part of the infrastructure was basically held together by three people, and they're all fired.
And, like, there's all sorts of things like that that he basically, like...
you know slice and dice the company apart with this mass layoff he just did a lot of those people were like the only institutional knowledge of how certain things worked or they they had a process for keeping certain things running that now no one knows or no one is assigned to do um and that's and that's that applies for lots of things that applies for you know technical stuff all the way to things like policy decisions and and you know abuse prevention and stuff like that
There's basically just giant gaping holes and missing teams because he came in and slashed everything without fully understanding what anything did.
And that is where my main concern comes.
It's not the product.
The product, they'll figure out eventually because there's good feedback on that.
My concern is all the people who are now gone, who are holding the place together, now it will fall apart in certain ways.
And I think we have a rough year or two ahead of just...
infrastructure, policy, content abuse to deal with on Twitter.
And I think eventually they'll figure it out and they'll get people in there and people will come up to speed and problems will be fixed.
And I think eventually, I hope, I mean, I'm always an optimist of this kind of stuff.
I think eventually they will bring it together and it will...
kind of solidify and and move forward in some clear direction but i think it's going to be a really rough road between now and whenever that solidifies and that it could take a year it could take more than a year i don't know maybe somehow miraculously it'll only take a few months uh but it's going to be rough but but i think i i still maintain the attitude of i want this to work because
Twitter is a platform we all love to hate.
The reality is we all use it.
And I'm finally willing to admit, you know what?
I like it.
Fine.
I like Twitter.
I want it to stick around.
I don't have anything to replace it.
I don't want to replace it.
Nothing can replace it.
I hope it sticks around.
This is another example of how, you know, famous, much admired billionaires get graded on a curve, right?
Again, if you weren't a billionaire and you did any of the things he's doing, you would be so shamed and it would just be like, you know, what do you do when you take over a company?
Well, obviously I have to cut some staff.
Okay, how are you going to do that?
The clumsiest way possible with no forethought and then a day later regret it so much that you try to hire people back.
It's just like,
It's just the dumbest things.
Because he's a billionaire, I was like, no, he's a secret genius.
It's like, no, he's just doing a bad job.
And again, cutting people, laying off people from a company that people think had too many.
I don't disagree that maybe Twitter had too many employees and needed to be thinned down.
But there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it.
He's just doing it.
badly and there may be consequences that or he may get away with it but it's like when you are rich and famous almost anything you do people will bend over backwards to find a way to explain that actually it's great when really if you again took joe schmoe off the street and said gresset you're the ceo of twitter now and they did all these things they'd be like boy he took this guy off in the street and he's making a lot of really easy mistakes here like when you come into a company sure you got to lay people off but you know take a day or two to figure out which people you should lay off and then don't regret it a day later and try to beg them to come back and it's just
Just doing basic things badly is seen as like a badge of honor when you are a bazillionaire.
When you're not a bazillionaire, it's just seen as being bad at your job.
Well, look at it this way.
He is fitting in with the tradition of Twitter management.
He is bumbling about making crummy decisions.
Well, no, the old Twitter manager wouldn't make any decisions.
They would do nothing.
Yeah, they only bumbled about it.
Well, fair.
It actually is.
As much as I am so here for dunking on Elon Musk, I will say that for better and for worse, they are at least shipping things, kind of.
Are they shipping?
I don't think anything's actually gotten released to the point where it's extended to all users.
Like, I wonder if they start pulling their release back before it's even just, you know, been visible to everybody.
I can't even keep track of what they think they've deployed and what they haven't.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is going to be probably fairly disastrous in the short term.
And again, there's good ways to do that and bad ways, and there's no other bad way.
But that's the thing of being insulated from consequence.
You're insulated from consequence because, A, it's a private company.
You don't have shareholders' hands to do it.
And, B, he's got a bazillion dollars.
So when you're insulated from all consequence, it's like, well, all consequence for him, I mean.
Not all consequence from us.
And this is a point a lot of people made in the feedback.
Like...
It's all well and good to say, oh, well, Elon is insulated from the consequences of his actions, but we're not insulated from the consequences of actions.
It's possible for him to do things that affect everyone else really badly, right?
And we'll see how that happens.
But for him, it's like he always lives to fight another day.
And so it's like people looking at it as admirable.
It's admirable to have no consequences for yourself because you're all set and you're a bazillionaire, right?
And I guess people wish they were in that position to make as many mistakes as they wanted and never suffer for them because...
You know, it'll all be fine, but there may be consequences for the rest of us.
So hopefully he gets nudged in the right direction and the mistakes he's already made don't end up being, you know, even just a very simple consequence.
It's not a big deal.
But like, hey, Twitter goes down again because, you know, some infrastructure thing fell over and it takes an hour to come back up.
Right.
That's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and it might be a blessing for some people, depending on how well Twitter is going that day.
But it is a consequence.
And if you were the CEO of the company and you took over, and then in the first month you had a bunch of downtime, people would say, boy, that new CEO did a bad job.
But when it's a private company and you're Elon Musk and you don't care, so what?
yeah and that's oh that's the thing like again like i just i want this to work because twitter is again like as much as we love to to crap all over it it is very important to a lot of people and it provides a lot of very important functions to a lot of people and a lot of businesses and a lot of our friends and a lot like it just it's a very important site lots of important stuff happens on twitter and this is why i'm not rooting against it i really want to succeed like
people think, oh, we'll just go back to blogging and everything.
It's like, well, yeah, some people will, but the world you think you're going to go back to, it doesn't exist anymore.
It's like a ghost town of rotting wreckage of what was there that's been neglected for 15 years or whatever.
It
People think they're going to go somewhere else and have all the same functions or features.
And I'm telling you, it's not that way.
The best chance for most of us is for Twitter to succeed.
And that way we can choose to keep using it or not.
But that decision isn't forced upon us.
That's the easiest decision because we don't have to change anything, but like over the history of the internet, like things do go away.
I, you know, it used, there used to be extremely popular Usenet groups that eventually just became ghost towns, like you said, because everyone used a move to web bullet imports and web bullet imports.
boards had years in a heyday where it was a big, great place to be and everyone loved to hang out there and had great features and everyone understood them and they figured out the moderation.
But then those web bulletin boards, most of them, or many of them, became ghost towns because everybody moved to Facebook or to Twitter or to whatever.
And eventually, these places will become ghost towns.
And it's not like the thing that replaces them will be like Twitter, but better because web forums was not the same as Usenet.
Different technology, different atmosphere, different people, different like pros and cons.
It was fairly different, but it was like a place to hang out online, right?
Just like Facebook was, MySpace, Usenet.
Twitter today so if Twitter does go down in flames eventually and becomes a ghost town the thing that replaces it will not be it's just like Twitter but a different it'll be something entirely different because that's the way these things go we you know we all collectively find a place to hang out online that we enjoy and we'd all don't want it to end or change or be different but in my lifetime alone there's been like five or six different places that I've
hung out online with small groups of people, large groups of people, the entire internet, and most of them have gone away.
And what they've been replaced with has not been just like that, but with a different masthead on the top, but it's been entirely different.
You could argue that Slack is kind of like Hotline, if any old school Mac users know that.
And you could argue that web forums is kind of like Twitter, or of course there's discourse, the modern reinvention of web forums, so everything old is new again, but
Yeah, I don't I don't think Twitter is forever.
But if you wanted to say what's the what's the shortest distance to not causing tons of disruption, it would be like make Twitter good.
But failing that, if Twitter does fail, something will replace it eventually.
And what does probably won't look like Twitter does, because that tends to be not the way these things go.
Well, and I think what is most likely to replace Twitter is not having its value as a public square.
Like, you know, the Twitter founders use this phrase, and it's kind of, you know, douchey when they do a lot of times.
But there is some value to it in the sense that, like, on Twitter, you can just, like, at mention someone.
And first of all, like, every important person you can think of is probably there.
The owner of different companies is there, different executives, celebrities, sports figures, politicians.
They're all there.
Whoever writes the app that you want to have a question about or anything, they're probably there.
almost everyone who you might want to contact is there.
Now, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it's way smaller than something like Facebook, but it's different.
It's like the people who you would want to interact with in public in some way or have a public question, any company you might want to interact with, they're all there.
And you can just like at mention them or DM them if they're open.
and you can reach these people.
And maybe they'll respond, maybe not, but they'll probably at least see it, or somebody will see it who works for them or whatever.
And that's something that... It doesn't really exist in any other platforms in that way.
Facebook is a giant black hole of...
We're going to hide almost everything by default from everybody until – unless you pay us to boost your posts so the people who want to see it actually will see it.
It's all this mess at Facebook and all these algorithmic filters that they can extract money from people trying to reach their own audience.
And Elon made a couple of feints in that direction to say, oh, if you pay for the $8 thing, your replies will be more prominent in the algorithmic timeline.
It's a –
time-tested thing is just that facebook has billions of people and twitter has a few hundred million so right but like but if twitter if twitter goes away what's most likely to happen is everybody will flee partly to private things like slacks and discords and everything which people have already been doing and you know so now like now if we want to like just kind of say something to our friends we have other places to do that we have chat groups we have message groups we have you know whatsapp or i message or we have slack or we have discord or whatever like
There's all different ways that people have private chats between themselves that is not trying to be some kind of broadcast.
If you're going to have a broadcast, Twitter's the best place for that.
It's way better.
For most audience types, it's way better than the other platforms because it's much more reliable in a lot of ways.
It's simpler in a lot of ways.
And if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, which is not most of the world, as I was saying, but if you have the kind of audience that uses Twitter, and we do,
then that's where these people all are.
And it would be a shame if that went away because suppose you go over to Macedon or whatever, app.net, if you go to some smaller Twitter network clone, then you can try to broadcast stuff there, but you just have way fewer people, way fewer people.
And so the value of having it be public at all is diminished.
And
And then at that point, you have the liability of things being public without a lot of the benefit of things being public because it isn't a large enough group.
If you're going to talk to a small group, you're better off having the group be private.
That way you don't have the liabilities and problems of it being public.
If you're going to talk to somebody in public, you want it to be the biggest public area you can find.
Twitter is that for a lot of people and us included and most people who would listen to a show like this.
That is where most people who like information, that's usually where they are.
And so it would be a massive loss if that went away.
And nothing is out there to replace it right now.
On the infinite timescale, John's right.
Something will come along and replace it because that happens over time.
But that happens after something has become irrelevant and people have left voluntarily, not when a popular platform implodes while it's still popular.
Well, Google Reader and RSS.
I mean, that's not just that's not that that's what made RSS go away.
But RSS and blogs had a slow fade to sort of less prominence, partly because new things came along and were exciting and people, you know, would tweet instead of blog.
But anyway, you know, it's just if younger people listening have never been through this, all I just wanted to point out is like this stuff does happen.
Nothing is forever.
Even Facebook, even though it seems like it's forever, is probably not forever.
I feel like the timelines are getting longer as the Internet has matured.
In the early days of the Internet, things would last like a month or a week and come and go, and they'd seem like the biggest thing ever.
Now things are lasting way longer because these companies are so big.
But, you know, even IBM, which seemed unstoppable in my youth, eventually didn't go away.
IBM still exists.
But boy, is it different than it was.
I mean, the concept that I have in my head at IBM has no match to what they are today, mostly for the better for the world, I think, but not for the better for IBM.
Oh, stop it.
IBM wasn't bad for the world.
Big Blue.
Yep.
Hey, Big Blue, as I've said many, many times on the show, Big Blue paid for basically my life until I was an adult.
So I will always defend them, even if they made a lot of questionable choices.
Speaking of questionable choices, if you haven't already gone to atp.fm/.store,
Now is the time.
You are basically out of time.
We are going to close the store.
What is it?
Saturday, Sunday, sometime this weekend.
It doesn't matter.
Sometime this weekend.
The shirts are going back in the vault.
Walt Disney would be so proud of us.
So yeah, so the ATP store, it is up, but it is not up for much longer.
So now is the time.
If you are at all interested in an M2 shirt, either the colorful logo on black or
or the monochrome logo on very colorful shirts, or the classic ATP logo shirt, or the hoodie.
Now is the time.
You're running out of time because all of this stops on Sunday the 13th.
So go to atp.fm/.store.
Now, Marco, if you wanted to save a little bit of money, is there a way you could do that while still getting excellent, excellent merchandise?
Yeah.
Yes.
So first, if you live outside of the US, move to the US.
That's true.
You'll save a lot on shipping.
That's a tough sell lately, but okay.
Yeah.
Barring that, you could, or in addition, you could join us as a member at atp.fm slash join, and you will get a coupon code in your membership panel for 15% off your merchandise order.
Excellent.
So you can go to atp.fm slash store and atp.fm slash join.
Now, this is where John would say, well, here's what you can do.
You can join for just a month and then you can cancel because we're gentlemen and we let you cancel and we don't hassle you about it.
And you can just cancel and get your 15% off and then move on with your life.
But...
If you're already joined, why don't you check out the bootleg?
Why don't you check out the ad-free version of the show?
You might like either one of those or both even.
Hey, listen to all three versions.
Listen to the version with the ads and then listen to the bootleg and then listen to the one without the ads.
You get the full experience.
And don't forget our movie club episodes and maybe there'll be something we'll make in the future.
You never know.
So you don't have to cancel.
Don't listen to John.
John isn't always right.
Usually, yes, but not always.
Don't listen to John.
Just let that ride.
Just let that baby ride.
And again, the end date is Sunday, November 13th.
The time is clearly marked on the site.
They'll tell you like how many days, you know, hours, minutes that are left.
One thing to remind people if they're listening to this later, if you go to atp.fm slash store and the sale has already ended, you will see stuff for sale there.
We sell like our leftover merchandise, but also we sell the on-demand versions of certain shirts.
I'm not sure which ones they're going to be, but as I say every time we have these sales, the on-demand ones, they're less expensive, but they're also not as nice.
They're less expensive because they're not as nice.
The printing process is not the super fancy, extremely expensive printing process that we do use for the shirts that we're selling you now.
So if you want a shirt,
don't be fooled into getting the on-demand ones like again when the when the on-demand store is there it'll be clear it won't say this limited time blah blah blah like it'll be it's a different store it has different text at the top of the page but the shirts will look similar we're probably going to sell some similar designs to the ones you see up here now and it'll just be shirts it won't be hoodies or anything like that um
So don't accidentally buy an on-demand shirt if you come to the store like on November 20th or something.
Be aware that the store does change over and we drain old merchandise and put the on-demand shirts on.
So this is telling you if you have any desire to have this shirt, get it for yourself and give it to someone else to give to you as a Christmas present.
They'll be happy they don't have to shop for you and you'll be happy that you got the good version of the shirt.
We haven't mentioned the chicken hat, the pint glass, the mug because, hey, they're already sold out.
So if you snooze, you lose.
And that's why you need to go to ATP.fm slash store.
Now's the time because you're almost out of time.
And don't forget to click through on the hat, the pint glass and the mug and click the bring it back button to let us know if you want one of these the next time we sell them, which will probably be like, I don't know, the spring or whatever.
Whenever we do the next sale sometime next year, that bring it back thing will let us know how many people want more hats.
Have we sold every chicken hat we're ever going to sell and we don't need to make any more?
Or are there still people who missed out on it and want one?
The only way we know that for sure is if you enter your email address and then click the bring it back button.
Yes, I know it's annoying to enter email address.
We're not going to take that value at face value because we know some people won't click it or whatever, but just it'll give us a rough idea.
All right, let's do some follow-up.
We were talking about Rewind.ai last week.
This is the Lifestream thing.
And apparently the CEO caught wind of it and listened.
So hi, Dan.
And clarified for us that since we recorded, in fact, he had a tweet about it when we launched two days ago.
We shared that we would use a cloud transcription service.
That didn't go over so well with some folks.
You don't say, Dan.
So today we decided that we would entirely ditch the cloud transcription and only do transcription locally on your Mac.
And then there was another tweet where Dan pointed us to that tweet.
So thank you, Dan, for following up.
And yeah, not going to the cloud, which I am in full support of.
Isn't it weird that if you are running this company, you know that people are going to look at your product and be scared of it for security reasons?
Yeah.
And you're surprised when people don't like the fact that you're sending the audio that you're constantly recording to a cloud transfer service?
I mean, in that meeting, I guess you say, look, people aren't going to like it, but I guess people are used to this anyway.
I mean, they do it with their Amazon Echoes and stuff.
I think they'll just be okay with it.
It's like, why not...
Just not do that.
It's got to come up, right?
You've got to have to have the meeting, and someone's going to say, no, I think it will be okay.
I think people will choke this down.
It's like, just why not?
They're doing so well with everything else.
We're all privacy, security, trying to say all the right things whenever we take money.
It's like, don't use a cloud transcription service.
You know that's going to come up, and they reverse so quickly.
Maybe they just didn't have the local transcription ready in time, and that's why they had the cloud one in the first version.
It's hard to know, but it just definitely seems like a silly fumble for a launch.
So, John, speaking of screen recording, let's talk about some enterprise spyware, baby.
And we mentioned this on the last show, and I talked about the similar stuff on a recent episode of Reactifs.
And someone wrote in to say that there's a corporate security product called DTEX that watches what you do using the screen recording APIs and macOS to try to identify if you're leaking or stealing data to calculate how productive you are.
So this was from Alex.
And this is a whole...
genre of software that is basically corporate spyware corporate malware uh that is trying to watch the employees especially if they're remote employees who knows what they're doing there uh up to and including doing exactly what rewind is doing is like literally recording your screen all the time and i guess having somebody or some machine learning thing review it to make sure you're not playing minesweeper all day um yeah uh corporate spyware is not great it doesn't reflect well that you don't think you can trust your employees but it is definitely a thing so again rewind is the
kinder gentler version of that where you do it to yourself uh and hopefully the company that you you choose to buy the software from you trust in some way whereas enterprise software is someone else does it to you and like all enterprise software the person who buys it is not the person who has to be subjected to it yeah
We had some breaking news just before recording.
A friend of the show, Jason Snell, has done some research for us because we're not allowed to.
Yeah.
So last week I was complaining about the smart folders in the sidebar of photos and how they seem totally disconnected from the sort of machine learning powered search field in the upper right.
And I also think I said that people are excluded from that, but that's not true.
Person is one of the things that pop up menu.
But Jason figured out, as I requested, if someone knows how this works, please tell me.
Jason figured out that if you say in the smart album field, if you say text is...
like that's what you pick from left menu pick text if you type a word in the field text is whatever it's like you had searched put that term into the upper right search field it does also search the ocr text like that's what you might think it is like oh this this photo has text in it it does do that but it also understands the concept of like what is a dog or whatever
so jason wrote an article about it at six colors.com we'll put a link in the show notes he did an example of searching for a person is or he did person includes person is john syracuse because he's got pictures of me and text is microphone or i think he did text his camera in in the example thing and what it'll do is it'll find pictures with the machine learning thinks have a camera in them and also pictures where the person is labeled as me and so i'll find pictures of me with a camera and that's exactly what it did
it doesn't do the autocomplete thing like the search field does so you can't tell that what you're typing if it's a search if it's like a keyword or if it's like an ml keyword or if it's like ocr text if you type it in the upper right it shows you like a an icon next to each one to let you know what you're doing and also in my brief experimentation when you type in that text is field every time you type a character it wants to update the number of items matched and in my library there's like a two second pause each time i type a character so
the performance is not great either nice but at least it's possible and then for people who don't know the icing on this cake is that smart albums don't sync to ios so they're invisible to most of the world but i will enjoy using this feature on my local instance and it's the jury's still out as to whether there's a way to do nested boolean logic like instead of just saying and all these conditions together or all these conditions basically to be able to have parentheses with sub expressions with different logic not sure if that's possible but if it is there'll probably be a few next week indeed
All right, and then with regard to my confusion on the iPad volume buttons, Andre Aguilar shared that there is indeed a setting, which I think I had made brief mention of last week.
You go into Settings, then Sound, and the setting is called Fixed Position Volume Controls, which defaults to Off.
But what's interesting is an unnamed listener who has been listening since Neutral points out that this is not available on my iPad, the M2 iPad, nor on the iPad 10th generation.
And there's an Apple support document about this, which reads, on most iPad models with iPadOS 15.4 and later, you can allow the volume controls to change based on how you hold your iPad.
With iPad Pro 11-inch 4th Gen, iPad Pro 13-inch 6th Gen, and iPad 10th Gen, the dynamic volume buttons are always on.
And I also thought it was kind of interesting, and I think somebody else pointed this out to me, that it's reversed for right-to-left languages.
So in the same document...
With languages that have writing that goes from right to left, you increase the volume with the button on the left or top and decrease the volume with the button on the right or the bottom, which is a nice touch.
So yeah, it turns out I can't change this back even if I wanted to, even though a lot of people still have this ability and are apparently using it because they were all reporting to me that that's what they did.
Real-time follow-up from Jason reminding of the old ways from back in the iTunes days to get nested Boolean logic.
One of the ways you do it is you would make a playlist and then you would reference that playlist in your smart album.
So every sub-expression, you'd have to make a separate entity.
And you can do it with albums.
If you make a smart album and then reference that within your thing, the problem is you have to have a bunch of these...
sort of sub-expression albums or smart albums in your sidebar.
I guess you could bury them in a folder or something.
But yeah, that old technique from iTunes continues to work.
It's just super gross.
Apple should just add nested Boolean Logic.
We are brought to you this week by Memberful.
Monetize your passion and build sustainable recurring revenue by selling memberships to your audience with Memberful.
Memberful has everything you need to run a membership program, and this seamlessly integrates with all the tools and hosting and everything you already use.
And all the features you might want are there.
Gift subscription support, Apple Pay support, free trials, private podcasts, and so, so much more.
Memberful is used by some of the biggest creators on the web.
And it's not hard to see why.
They have great features, great support.
They integrate with your existing stacks.
You don't have to rebuild everything from scratch.
They have a world-class support team ready to help you simplify your memberships, grow your revenue.
And what's greatest about Memberful, I think, is that they align themselves with what's good for you.
So your branding is what shines.
Your members don't just see Memberful everywhere.
They aren't subscribing to Memberful.
They're subscribing to you and your brand.
It's all about you.
Payments even go directly to your own Stripe account.
So you retain full control and ownership of your audience and your membership program.
So it is just a wonderful tool to offer memberships.
I strongly advise if you want to diversify your revenue, membership is a great way to do it.
And Memberful is where to go because doing anything else is really a ton of work and it's not.
worth it so go to memberful see for yourself how great it is with a free trial there's no credit card required you can get started right now today no credit card at memberful.com slash atp once again memberful.com slash atp thank you so much to memberful for sponsoring our show
John, you got some excellent news about the, how do you pronounce it?
It's not XNU.
What is the verbalization of this?
I don't know.
I think I've only ever read it.
No, I must have heard it in a WWDC thing.
It's not XNU, that's for sure.
If you work on Darwin and you know how to pronounce the name of the kernel that's spelled XNU, write in and tell us.
I'm sure there's no controversy about how to express a computer term that most people read and never speak.
Yes, exactly.
Anyway, this is a tweet from Longhorn who is never underscore released on Twitter.
It's a good follow who knows lots of deep technical stuff.
And it was...
tweeted in response to the uh kernel sources being released for mac os 13 for people who don't know the core os of mac os ios ipad os tv os audio os uh reality os am i missing any os's maybe the car os maybe not um
is Darwin, which is like a BSD Unix-like derivative with the mock microkernel with the BSD layered on top of it.
That's all open source.
And every time Apple comes out with a new operating system, like when they come out with a new version of macOS, shortly after that, they post the open source version of like, here's the version of Darwin that is underneath macOS 13 Ventura.
So they just did that.
And then people come over it to see what they can find.
And what Longhorn found is something that...
They didn't point out directly, but they just said this, and I follow them enough that I trust them.
ECC support is coming to ARM64 macOS with page-deliver granularity retirement on faults.
That is what Longhorn says.
And you know what that means.
Mac Pro Day is getting closer.
Because why would they add ECC support to Darwin for ARM64 and macOS?
What kind of Mac might benefit from ECC?
Arguably, all of them would benefit from ECC.
There it is.
But...
uh the mac pro is the most likely to have one and apple itself has already pre-announced the mac pro a long time ago lest we forget they said there's one more machine that needs to move to apple silicon and that's the mac pro but we'll talk about that later and later is getting later and later but sometime in 2023 probably we'll get to see the new mac pro and it seems like it might have ecc memory and i'm excited
Now remind all of us why ECC memory is important and useful.
So RAM is not perfect.
Sometimes RAM has faults and you'll try to read some bits and the bits you get will not be the same bits as the bits that were written there.
And as you can imagine, that can really screw things up on your computer.
There are lots of parts of the computer that try to help, you know.
make that not happen one of the many ways to that you can help with that is called ecc for error correcting code and it's a very old way of essentially putting a bunch of redundant data in the data that you store so you can tell when the data you read is not the data that you wrote sometimes you can also correct the error if you have enough information to
fix the one bit that you know is flipped based on these the extra information you could put in there and when you have as the amount of ram you have increases uh if your percentage of error stays the same you're much more likely to hit an error because if you know if the percent is like one in a million bits well what if i told you you have 500 million bits that's much worse odds than if you had 500 bits right so big computers with big memory where you really care about there being any kind of fault
have historically employed ECC for error correction.
There are other techniques in hardware that also help with this.
ECC is a very specific one, but unless it's replaced by something better, it's one of the most important tools we have in the tool set for making sure that the RAM in your computer is reliable.
Didn't the iMac or, yeah, the iMac Pro had ECC RAM, didn't it?
Sure did.
Yeah, someone was pointing out in the chat room that the later DDR standards, I think I talked about this on an episode of ATP like a year or two ago, the later DDR standards incorporate ECC-like functionality within them just to function because that's just how they're made.
But again, I trust Longhorn to know this stuff.
And so if there is evidence of ECC stuff in ARM64 on macOS, I think that just take it at face value.
And I think there's just going to,
be some kind of ecc ram and whatever soc is coming in the mac pro i can't wait i can't wait even though i'm probably not gonna buy it i still can't wait
Ventura and third-party preference panes.
What's the deal with that?
So my first question when I was writing this line item is I've been calling them preference panes since, you know, 2001.
But now that it's called system settings, what the hell is it called?
What are they called?
What we mean is the little icons on the left that you click on to see stuff like mouse or users and groups or privacy.
And like, what are those?
What are those called?
Yeah.
Go to the... Sections?
Go to the privacy and security section?
No, there's settings gears, obviously.
If it's a preference pane, then it must be a settings gear.
Go to the network settings?
I guess it's just network.
Anyway, we used to call them preference panes.
It was nice alliteration there.
Now I don't know what the heck they're called.
So that's one thing.
Settings sections, it rolls right off the tongue.
Yeah.
We had some questions for people like, hey, you know, system settings is like overhaul.
What about my third-party preference panes?
You know, the third-party software can make little preference panes in there.
For example, Backblaze, a frequent sponsor of our show, used to put a little icon that was amongst all your other icons in system preferences.
What happens to it in Ventura?
For the most part, if you had a third party preference pane installed, it will continue to work in Venturi.
It's just at the bottom of the list alongside, you know, they're kind of grouped together, all the third party ones.
Backblaze in particular has basically decided they're out of the preference pane game.
so if you are running the latest version of backblaze it still shows up in your little sidebar in ventura but when you click on it all it loads is a basically an empty preference pane with a button that says backblaze preferences and when you click it it just launches a backblaze app so it's still there for you to find it so you didn't say hey where the heck did backblaze goes it's still installed but they basically move their functionality out into an app and a lot of the functionality was outside of the preference pane before anyway
Preference panes are weird, especially weird when you're running on an ARM Mac and you have an x86 preference pane and it has to run through Rosetta and it's being launched, trying to show the content inside an ARM process, which is the system settings app itself.
So third-party preference panes have been not out of favor, but just sort of marginalized over the past few years.
I still run some important ones, like my mouse acceleration software, SteerMouse, is still a preference pane.
it seems a little bit weird in ventura but it does work and it does you know i just clicked it and i and i guess the next part of this item here i just clicked it while i was talking and it crashed in exactly the same way as i have uh pasted into our show notes nice legacy loader x86 uh died uh when trying to look at the steer mouse preference pane sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't anyway isn't your entire computer a legacy loader x86
oh why is it doing why is it doing like legacy look because it's not like it's i'm not running the arm version of system settings i don't have an arm cpu so what is i don't know anyway it crashed it's a little bit janky like many things in ventura's uh system settings but for people wondering preference pains are still a thing barely and it seems like some of the companies that are more on top of their game like backblaze are kind of moving out
uh we got an excellent excellent excellent tweet from mark you um this is one of those things where incredible brevity is exactly what you need in order to make this great which is something that i'm not good at but mark writes uh here's maybe i'm filling in actually so so the context here is what what is a smart versus magic versus cover your cover versus folio on the keyboards how do we decode this we were talking about this like two or three weeks ago
mark writes smart screen turns on when opened magic has full travel keys not the nubs cover screen side only folio both sides combine those as needed boom nailed it as far as i can tell this is accurate i mean you're just back solving for the products they release when they release a new one you have to get a new map so it's not it's not as if there's this helps you parse anything but it is a nice retroactive uh taxonomy
this was uh extremely well done and i i am very impressed and speaking of nomenclature what's going on stage manager yeah we're asking a couple shows ago what do you call those piles of things on the side of the screen stage manager and mac os what are they what are they called well according to the menus apparently uh they are called sets because the menu item and the window menu in the finder is you can say remove window from set
um so i guess that makes some sense but it's still kind of weird like what set did you put the thing in i don't know it would be nicer if they had a branded name that made more i mean they can call the thing the dynamic island but they decided the things on the side of stage matter are just called sets anyway that's that appears to be what they are
Related news.
Earlier today, I wanted to do something on my iPad where I was flipping back and forth between two different windows.
And I wanted each of these, or two different apps, and I wanted each of these apps to take up most of the screen.
And it occurred to me, ah, I could use Stage Manager for this.
Sure enough, I turned on Stage Manager.
I was only using it for about five minutes.
But not only did it not crash, it was actually kind of nice.
I only used it for a few minutes, and I quickly turned it off as soon as I was done.
But for those five minutes, I actually kind of enjoyed it.
So that was a neat moment.
I feel like Stage Manager for the Mac, as I said many times, it's basically spaces for people who don't want more visibility.
you know they don't want stuff to be hidden you know off to the side that they can't see like mentally i have to know that there are these various spaces i have to bring a mission control to see them it's like why don't we just put it all on one screen and you can cycle through sets of windows and you sacrifice some screen space for those little sets and you can even hide those if you want and make them appear just when you need them uh but i think it's easier for people to manage because it's like it doesn't suddenly make a bunch of virtual screens all around them for people you know
If you like Spaces, you're probably already using it.
But if you don't like virtual screens, Stage Manager tries to be, it's like virtual screens, but a little bit more comfortable if you don't like having virtual screens.
As someone who really, really, really likes Spaces and uses them heavily, when I've tried Stage Manager on the Mac, it
Its mental model does not match my mental model for how things should work, and so I really didn't care for it on the Mac.
But in limited use on the iPad, when you have a very constrained problem, it actually was reasonably nice.
We are brought to you this week
Thank you.
Obviously, this is why Hover is such a popular choice for people like me starting all kinds of businesses.
I personally, I use Hover all the time.
Whenever I need a domain name, I love their search.
Once you buy the domain name, they're wonderful.
They help you manage it and everything.
Great UI, great management tools, great support if you need it.
But what I really love the most, I don't need to do much management after I buy it.
What I need to do is find the right name.
And Hover just excels in having a really nice search.
They offer all the different TLDs to search what's available.
They offer really good kind of like word matches and word suggestions, not just kind of like the generic, like, you know, whatever you wanted online.info.
Like it's way better than that.
It's really good.
So it's just a great place to buy managed domain names.
I love it.
So whatever you're doing next, grab that domain name and many more.
at hover.com slash ATP.
Using that link, you can get a 10% discount with that link on all new purchases.
Once again, hover.com slash ATP for 10% off all new purchases.
Thank you so much to Hover.
Make a name for yourself with Hover.
John, tell me, you've got scare quotes around the word new, but in the show notes it says you've got, quote, new, quote, phone and mouse.
What did you break?
Well, I talked about my mouse before, that it was being wonky again, and, you know, that I figured out sticking the Post-it note under the little shaky button, but I still had the one that was being wonky, right?
Because I fixed the noisy one with the Post-it note, but then it was the wonky one.
So I decided to just do another warranty repair on the wonky one, because why not?
This time, they did not ask me to send them a video of it not working.
Ah, nice.
I have no idea why, because they have no idea who I am.
Had no record of my previous returns.
They just, you know, everything is new, and it was all done through chat.
Took a long time, and it did require me to dig up the original receipt and send them, you know, a picture of that and a bunch of other stuff, but...
you know it got done um they sent my new mouse but also they sent me a shipping label right so i have to send the old mouse back which i did uh and they eventually sent me a new mouse and this is a microsoft computer mouse pictured in your mind it came to my house in a box that was 19 inches by 14 inches by six inches what i was like what is this it was huge i recently ordered a bike handlebar that came in a smaller package than that yeah
Inside the box was a smaller box, and inside the smaller box was a mouse wrapped in bubble wrap.
And I have to say, every time I've gotten one of the, you know, I've done it twice now, both of these mice that I've gotten replaced, when the replacement one has come, they all look just like...
dirty and scuffed up like they do not look new the whole thing with like apple refurb stuff is there's like every part of it that you can see or touch is brand new not the case when getting a mouse replaced by i don't know what they do like i again i didn't pay enough attention to look at the serial numbers but did they just replace the guts of my mouse no because this is scuffed up in a way that my mouse wasn't in different places like it just seems dirty and grimy and not like i'm getting a new mouse and again it just comes wrapped in bubble wrap like literally the bear mouse
with bubble wrap wrapped around not even any tape to hold the bubble wrap on just now wad into the bubble wrap shove it in a box shove it in a bigger box you know i'm glad i got it replaced for free under warranty but now i've had two of these and they've both been replaced under warranty so it's not going too well over here in microsoft mouse land but anyway that is my quote unquote new mouse which is absolutely not new and in fact i'm not sure if they even still sell this mouse because a bunch of people are like oh i have a microsoft discount do you want to get discounted version of this mouse
And they all look at their store like, oh, I guess you can't get this mouse discounted.
Well, maybe when it comes back to the store, you can still get the Surface Precision Mouse, which is, as far as I can tell, this mouse but gray.
But I want the black one, the Microsoft Precision Mouse.
It's black.
And maybe they're just not selling that anymore.
Maybe it's because they all die within a year.
I don't know.
Maybe they're just giving me rotating through this batch of, uh, you know, cruddy ones that they have in their factory.
Anyway, I'm using my quote unquote new mouse and the phone thing.
So I think last episode I complained about my, the camera on my iPhone 14 pro was,
like i think i said like it gets a lot of glare from the sun and i wish i had a lens hood to stop the glare from the sun that i was using my hand over the i would hold up the phone to take a picture like on you know walking around in the fall and the sun is low and it would get this glare and i'd put my hand over to try to make a lens hood and then my fingers would go in the picture and it was annoying me i'm like well it's just this new cameras with the big lenses and lots of lens elements they're just catching a lot of glare i guess that's why you know i use lens hoods on my real cameras
but then a couple people wrote in to me and said i had the same problem with my iphone 14 pro camera and i brought it into the apple store and it turns out my camera is messed up and they replaced it for me so i'm like huh so i took a bunch of test pictures i just put in our little slack channel and marco can use this in the show thing if he wants because it's no incriminating evidence it's a picture of some mushrooms growing on some random person's lawn in my neighborhood right so it's not even my house
And you can see at the top of the photo, like I'd have a gray haze coming down, like sun glare basically.
And that gray haze, like you can make something like that happen with any iPhone camera or any camera at all, especially without a lens hood on it.
But it is much more severe on my iPhone 14 Pro camera than on my wife's iPhone 13 Pro or any other iPhones in the house.
And I just thought it was part of this camera.
But then I've seen, you know, someone said they got the thing repaired.
They showed a close-up picture of like the main camera on the back of their phone.
They said the lens actually looked cloudy.
So I turn over my phone.
I look at the main camera lens, which is like the biggest one.
And you know what?
It did look a little bit cloudy, like almost like there was condensation on it or like oil covering it or whatever, something you wouldn't notice unless you had light hitting it at an angle.
And so I took a whole bunch of test pictures to say, you know, I was going to bring these with me to the Apple store and say, here, this is what my camera is doing.
And it seems like it shouldn't be like this.
And it doesn't take much to make this happen.
You just need the sun to be a little bit low.
And you just, you know, you don't even need the sun in the photo.
Like this mushroom picture, the sun is not in the photo.
The sun is above the frame of the camera, but it's producing so much glare and just, you know, gray haze coming down.
And I tried it with all the cameras.
The 3X camera didn't have it.
The 0.05 had it and the 1X had it.
But the 3X was, you know, that's part of the reason I could tell that it wasn't quite the same.
Now, obviously, focal length changes how much glare you're going to get and stuff like that.
So it's not like an Apple's-Apples comparison.
But I thought I had enough to make a Genius Bar appointment.
And I did.
And I brought the phone in.
And, you know, the good thing is I sat down at a table and I said, let's just grab a 14 Pro right here and let's do a comparison.
Let's, you know, find something glary here and take a picture of it with these two cameras side by side, the 14 Pro that's security chained to this table and mine and see if there's a difference.
One thing I learned is it's surprisingly hard to find a place to demonstrate this inside an Apple store because, yes, there are glary lights in the ceiling, but they're not that glary.
They're pretty gentle.
And if you aim the camera up at the ceiling lights, everything up there is gray.
So you're never going to see a gray haze, right?
So the technique we came up with was have one iPhone 14 Pro turn on the flashlight on the back and point it at the other one and then reverse it.
And you could see it was pretty clear that the one in the Apple store did not suffer from glare as much as mine did.
So the person did take the camera into the back and ran it through their camera tester thing and said the camera tester thing didn't find anything malfunctioning in terms of color reproduction or whatever.
But they could see that it was clear from the photos that they were taking that comparing my 14 Pro to the 14 Pro in the store, there was a difference.
They could not replace the camera because they just don't have camera parts.
I don't know if this is a, you know, Shanghai zero COVID shutdown thing or just like early on in the production run of any phone, they don't have parts.
So they said, but we can replace the whole phone.
I said, okay, do that then.
So, you know, and they said, okay, well, we'll replace the whole phone, but we don't have this phone.
So you have to come back when we have it in stock.
So eventually they got it in stock and I knew it was coming next and I was dreading it.
I even discussed it with the person when I was there.
Um,
i'm gonna go pick up a new you know basically a brand new version of my exact same phone a black iphone 14 pro with whatever you know 256 gigs or whatever but i can't just hand them my old phone i can't just like erase my old phone and hand it to them and take the new one because i have too much multi-factor authentication crap on here and some of it cloud syncs like apple's multi-factor cloud syncs but some of it doesn't
We went through this before, last time I got my phone two years ago, and I was complaining that the Google Authenticator app didn't have a way to transfer stuff.
Now Google Authenticator does have a way to transfer stuff, but it's a manual way.
So you see where this is going, don't you?
I'm going to go to the Apple Store to quote unquote pick up my phone.
And then what's going to happen?
I'm going to sit there and have to do device to device transfer for my old phone for the new phone, wait for that to complete, and then do a 30-second export import from Google Authenticator, right?
Oh, my God.
And I couldn't think of a way around this.
They're not going to let me leave the store with two phones.
Nope.
I should have just asked them and said, can I just take both of them and bring back the old one later?
Because I don't need to be here for this, right?
Not a chance.
It's not really happening.
And there's no way to make it go faster.
I can't do the Google Authenticator thing like...
i mean i guess i could have done taken like screenshots of the qr codes but like that's a terrible security don't do that do not don't write down your passwords and don't take screenshots of the qr codes for your multi-factor authentication like i could have done that but i just didn't realize anyway i went to the apple store and i did device device transfer
And, of course, the new iPhone, when it came out of the box, wasn't running 16.1.
And my new phone was.
So, first, I got to do an OS update.
Oh, God.
I started doing the OS update.
And the person... I mean, these people do this all day.
So, they know what they're doing.
They said, if that progress bar doesn't seem like it's moving, let me just bring out the computer.
And they had, like, a computer running Apple Configurator 2.
And they'll just... With the 16.1 already downloaded.
And so, we waited for, like, three minutes and said, don't that progress bar is not satisfactory.
They just...
You know, brought out a MacBook Air, plugged my phone into it and did, you know, blasted on 16.1.
Still took a while, but it was way faster than waiting for the update to run.
Then I had to do device-to-device transfer, which took forever.
And then after that was finally over, then I, at that point, I'd been there so long.
I was like, you know what?
I'm going to install my test flight apps, you know, and I'm going to do the multi-factor thing.
and you know after you do device device transfer i'm still shocked when i pick up my phone and it has a whole bunch of grayed out icons that say waiting underneath them like what you just did oh it doesn't do the apps it just always downloads the apps from the app store i needed to download google authenticator asap i don't care about all the other apps uh and there's a way to do that we may have even talked about it on this very program but it was so long ago that i forgot about it if you hold down your finger on one of those grayed out icons it says waiting and
pop-up menu appears and you can select prioritize download oh and your phone will bump that app to the front of the queue so i did prioritize download on google authenticator and a bunch of my other authenticator apps and downloaded them and i transfer all the stuff oh excellent so i spent a little bit over three and a half hours sitting in an apple store i i had the forethought to bring my ipad with me because both my phones would be out of commission during this whole time and i just sat there and
Dorked around on my iPad and listened to other people's tales of woe with their computers and iPads and stuff.
And I got to look at all of the current crop of Apple hardware.
And, yeah, that was how I spent an entire day.
It was great.
See, this is why Funemployed John is very helpful because what would you have done if you had an actual job?
I would have had to go on a weekend, but like, I thought of this, it's like, this is why I'm kind of all in on iCloud Keychain for multi-factor stuff.
I don't want to ever have to do this, but like, if you need to, if I need to get a new phone, if something happens and I get like a warranty repair, I'm going to have to do this again, right?
And I know there's other ways about it.
Like, I can and have transferred my multi-factor stuff to other secure devices in the house, so I could just trust that it's all going to be there and then bring the new phone home and do that.
Maybe I'll do that next time, but like, you know me in redundancy, I just feel like
I don't want to just have this stuff in one.
The whole point of me having backups, like having this on this device and also on another iPad or something, is that it's in more than one place.
And if my phone falls in a lake, I don't lose all my multi-factor stuff, right?
So having it in one place, even for a short period of time, makes me a little nervous.
But after three and a half hours in the Apple store, breathing through a mask the whole time, of course, maybe I'll think better of it.
Yeah, that's painful.
But don't worry.
It's not like you've wasted any time doing any sort of login or setup of Apple products because you didn't get a new Apple TV, right?
Well, device-to-device transfer on the phone is the – as we learned last time I made this terrible mistake – is the best chance you have of all your apps not requiring you to log in.
If you get one of the new Apple TVs, which I did –
you have no chance of protecting your login information.
There's nothing you can do, apparently.
You get a new Apple TV.
I got one.
It's smaller.
It's cute.
One of the funny things about the new Apple TV, because people do reviews of it online, and very often they would take a picture of it next to the old hockey puck, because what else are you going to take a picture of?
Look, it's smaller, right?
I think I saw at least two reviews that made me think, is the new Apple TV matte black instead of glossy black?
It's not matte black.
But there is a matte black protective piece of plastic around it.
And like every protective piece of plastic on every electronic device ever, sometimes people don't notice it and forget to take it off.
And people had actual product shots in their reviews on reputable tech sites where they forgot to, I would assume, forgot to peel off the matte black, the carefully, you know, precision cut, almost invisible matte black wrapper around the brand new Apple TV.
And it looked like the new Apple TV was matte.
It's not as glossy.
Take off.
take off the sticker doesn't it cover up the ports on the back yes it does but they were just taking you know they're just taking like the pictures of it like like any picture of merchandise you don't show the cords right no cords on the sony tvs on the sony site no cords on the apple tv yeah but like you would think like if they're reviewing it they would at some point try to plug a cord and realize oh crap i have to peel this whole thing off they did but by then the photography people had already taken all their pictures probably like i don't know oh my god
Speaking of the cords, though, that's one of the things.
So they changed the cord layout in the back.
Obviously, I got the one with Ethernet.
And I think – now I'm going to remember.
I think the layout used to be power HDMI Ethernet, and now it is power Ethernet HDMI.
So basically, previously, HDMI was dead center in the thing, and now HDMI is not dead center.
An HDMI cable is the thickest and stiffest cable that connects to this tiny little puck.
i kind of understand why they did it because most people don't have ethernet and so with the old arrangement it would be one cord in the middle and one cord on the left if you're looking at it from the front now it would be one cord on the left and one cord on the right with empty ethernet in the middle for most people but honestly if you buy the one with the ethernet maybe you i don't know maybe you just want the thread radio
But anyway, they changed the card arrangement.
But yeah, you plug that thing into your TV and it says like, oh, bring your phone nearby or something.
It's one of those like weird come-ons of some magical technical thing.
Like, we'll just do the magical thing.
So just come here and it says, oh, I found your phone.
I think I know who you are.
I'll set this up for you.
And I have the home screen syncing configured.
So it...
remembers all the apps i had installed and where i put them on the home screen and does it all and you're like wow this is awesome really easy apple setup experience and my apple tv is back exactly how i left it look at this it's like you can tell almost nothing changed except the box box got smaller and a completely an audible fan has been eliminated and if you have test flight because remember test flight is just not a thing to apple if you have test flight apps then they are not installed by default just like on the phone you have test flight apps on apple tv
Plex and channels.
Plex and channels, I think, are the only ones.
But yes.
Why am I not on the Plex test flight?
I don't know, because you didn't evangelize as well as I did, apparently.
Apparently not.
Anyway, but no, that's all, as Jason Snell said in another article, he's not really on top of his game lately, SixSellers.com, that's all an illusion.
Don't be fooled into thinking your Apple TV is back exactly the way you left it, because every single one of those icons, if you click on it, has no idea who you are, and you have to log back in.
Every one of these apps has a different way to log back in.
Sometimes it wants you to enter your username and password.
Why can't Apple TV, one of Apple's own platforms,
use icloud keychain for the apple id that you are logged into the apple tv with to get your username and password i don't know but it doesn't instead you have to use your phone as a remote and your phone is also logged into your apple id and can read your icloud keychain and so your phone will look up your username and password and icloud keychain and send it as text to the text field that it is being used to enter why can't you do the apple tv i have no freaking idea why it drives me nuts sometimes you'll have to go to service name.com slash activate
And type in a four-digit code and get in that way.
Sometimes it will say, hey, just launch the Disney Plus app.
And if it's on the same network as us, it will let you log in.
Allegedly.
I'm glad Jason said in the article, that has never worked for him.
It's never worked for me either.
Remember last time I said maybe it's because I'm not on Wi-Fi and it says you have to be on the same Wi-Fi network.
And there's like the technologist in me saying, do they mean Wi-Fi Wi-Fi?
Or is that just like the catch-all word for network because people don't know that there are other kinds of networking than Wi-Fi?
Because...
My TV isn't on Wi-Fi.
It's, you know, connected through Ethernet only and is not connected to Wi-Fi because Google TV OS doesn't let you do both of them at the same time.
And so it never worked for me, but it also never worked for Jason.
So then you got to do using your own password.
So laborious.
And, you know, poor me, just like Jason.
I have subscribed to way too many streaming services.
Yeah, I know.
It's such a terrible thing to do.
But anyway, I spent not three and a half hours, but at least probably 45 minutes, maybe an hour,
going through all my services and logging them all back in, reconnecting my Plex, refinding all my shares on Infuse, logging into all the different services, logging with TV provider, get redirected to the Verizon page, log in, bounce back, pick up your phone, enter this thing in, pull things out of the keychain.
So laborious.
I'm glad new Apple TV doesn't come out very often.
Yeah, it is a real, real pain.
And I went through it when I got my new Apple TV with Ethernet.
Disney Plus sign-in thing did not work for me for Beans.
So just like you said, I'm glad Jason had said something.
Like, in the grand scheme of things, it's fine.
All my stuff is in one password.
But the inconsistency across all these apps, not surprising, but frustrating, nevertheless.
Yeah.
Again, sometimes it's slash activate, slash pair.
Then it's, oh, I need a username and password.
And the Apple TV does remember an email address that any email addresses that you use to sign into stuff, which is nice.
But then you still got to be on your phone or your iPad and you got to go and grab the password from 1Password and be ready to paste it in the field.
None of this is a big deal, but it's just frustrating.
Yeah.
We're not going to have time to talk about the ads thing, but this is just another one of those paper cuts that seem to be appearing more and more often in Apple stuff.
Or maybe a more complimentary way of looking at it is so many other paper cuts have gone away that these ones that are left stand out more.
I'm not sure which one it is.
It doesn't really matter.
But in the same way that if they add ads everywhere in these OSes, it's going to be more and more frustrating.
Well, something like this is just frustrating.
It's not a big deal.
It's just frustrating.
It's weird, though, because like they write tvOS.
It's their own platform.
You sign in with your Apple ID.
One of the options you have is to not be prompted for further authentication when making purchases like that's an option in the settings.
You can say, hey, I just I'm signing to my Apple ID.
I just want to be able to buy stuff.
Don't prompt me for my password when I buy stuff so you can spend money.
real money without entering anything but somehow the platform has no ability to do what every other apple platform can do which is look up your passwords in icloud keychain and stick them into fields when you're logging into something and this is on you know you know maybe in version one they don't have that fine but eventually it will come now it's way past overdue like i don't call this a paper cut i would call this like a feature that should should have been there a long time ago and there must be some
reasonably sound technical reason for why they just don't want to do that but i cannot think of what it might be not knowing the details and it just and not that that's the greatest thing that's like the minimum of like hey just autofill my passwords for my keychain like i do on my phone on my mac on my ipad on anything else like just autofill for my keychain right but on top of that is every other effort apple has ever done to like sign in with your tv provider or universal sign in for everything and
All those different approaches that they've touted in various keynotes have not been adopted universally.
So now every time you launch an app, it's like, gee, I wonder how this app will want me to log in.
Will it try to use Apple thing?
Will it try to use sign in with provider?
Some of the apps I discovered, if you sign in with like one app, like one Fox affiliated app, other Fox affiliated apps already know that you're logged in because they probably do the application group sharing thing or whatever behind the scenes, right?
It's just super weird.
And, you know, and like...
Not that people buy new Apple TV very often, but this is one of the main and only friction points for regular people to use Apple TV because people do subscribe to streaming services and sometimes they subscribe and unsubscribe, but you're gonna have to do this.
There's no avoiding, you have to sign in to Netflix.
You can't use these streaming services without signing in.
If you pay for one, you have to authenticate.
So everyone's going to have to go through this.
And it's not a simple process if you haven't done it 50 times.
And even if you just described two or three streaming services, it's not a good sort of like first impression, right?
That's why the first impression of a device, device transfer on the phone is like, oh, I got a new phone.
It knows that I got a new phone.
It'll bring all my junk to the old phone.
Most people don't use test flight.
So it's not a big deal.
Most people don't have two factor outside of Apple stuff, right?
That's a good experience.
TV is like not a decade away from that, but at least five years behind the times.
Yeah.
I also was very confused.
I don't recall how much I talked about this last episode, but I wasn't sure the right way to accomplish what I wanted to do with my Apple TVs, because what I wanted to do was trickle down, right?
So take the 4K Apple TV that was in the living room, put that in the bedroom.
Take the 1080 Apple TV that was in the bedroom.
That becomes a travel Apple TV.
But I wasn't sure the rightest way to do this.
I can tell you the wrong way to do it, which is to have a plan to carefully rename them to what they're going to be when they get in their proper homes and then forget to do that.
See, I did only the first step.
I had the plan and then I executed the plan.
And that seemed to work just fine.
So what we're saying is basically go to the living room one.
And then go to general settings, whatever, and rename your living room one from whatever it's called now, which I mentioned living room, rename it to bedroom.
But, oh, you can't rename it to bedroom because if you try to rename it to bedroom, it'll put bedroom parentheses two at the end.
So first, go upstairs to the bedroom and either shut that one down.
No, there is no shutdown function for Apple TV.
I searched for it.
Just yank it from the plug.
It's just like a TiVo or whatever.
Or rename it away from being bedroom.
Then go back downstairs and rename the one downstairs into bedroom.
then bravely unplug everything because there's no way to shut down.
I guess you can put it to sleep if you want to unplug it, but honestly it doesn't make a difference, I don't think.
Then hook up your new one, and then you can name your new one living room, and it won't become living room parentheses two, if you're lucky.
If you're unlucky like me and forget to do that, you just got to go through this again.
But even if you remember to do it, I think you need some time for it to settle.
Otherwise, they forget what they were named, and you'll end up with the parentheses two anyway.
Cool.
Yeah, so I did do exactly what you described because I thought about it for probably longer than I should admit.
And I was like, I guess what I can do is I can start the bedroom TV and rename that and then go to the living room one and rename that and then add the new one and hopefully it'll all work out.
And it did.
But I don't know, I almost feel like I expected or it's certainly hoped that
that when I set up the new Apple TV, it could be like, oh, am I taking over for the old one?
And I guess the difficulty there is that I would have to have both of them online simultaneously and often in an entertainment center.
That's not something that's easy to do.
But these are Wi-Fi, so you just plug them both in.
Like the thing I'm thinking of as an example, I mean, I just mentioned the phone, but the great example of doing this right is, again, frequent sponsor Eero.
Replacing your router, the thing that provides Internet to your entire house,
Seems like it would be the most fraught example of, hey, I want to swap one device for another, you know, Indiana Jones, Raider of the Lost Ark style, you know, with the bag of sand and the like, because the thing needs to talk to the Internet to figure out who you are and what your info is.
Like Eero has like a cloud sync notion of your identity.
You have an Eero account, right?
It needs to talk to the internet to do that.
But it is the internet.
It is providing the internet.
It's providing IP addresses for doing other routing.
I got a new Eero and I plugged it in and I said, hey, you're the new Eero.
Here's the old one.
And it said, okay, I'll replace the old one.
And it's like, done.
No, I didn't have to do anything.
It swapped itself in as my router with no errors, no problem.
It understood what it was doing.
And it was like, and I get a new Apple TV and it's like an all day project.
What the hell?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's so true.
That's all right.
I am liking the new Apple TV.
I can't say I noticed anything that's particularly different, but I mean, I like it.
And, you know, now my 4K bedroom TV, which is not fancy at all, but now it has a 4K Apple TV attached to it.
So that's kind of cool for the, you know, once a month that I actually use it.
Speaking of settings, I was speaking of like noticing a difference.
it didn't remember how i had configured in terms of audio video so i had to go back through and do all those settings again that we talked about before like to match content on or off uh you know what do you want the menu screen to be hdr no dolby vision screen size audio format like every single one of those options it had no recollection of what they were previously so it just had to start you know reset everything again
fun uh you want to tell me about your boy bono and what he's been up to recently there's a funny bit from it so bono's got a new book out it's like an autobiography about i don't know about uh you know his life and his band he's the lead singer of the band you too uh and there was a going around a couple weeks ago was uh excerpts from it in the various reviews one of them was about the infamous uh album
that Apple distributed for free onto everyone's iPhone or into everyone's iTunes library, more precisely, whether you wanted it or not.
And Bono had an apology in the book about that.
It's quoting from the book.
As one social media wisecracker put it, I woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.
For the less kind, the free U2 album is overpriced.
Bono said he was sorry.
He said, if just getting our music to people who like our music was the idea, that was a good idea.
But the idea was getting our music to people who might not have had a remote interest in our music, and maybe there might be some pushback.
At first, I thought it was just an internet squall, but quickly realized we'd bumped into a serious discussion about big tech.
I take full responsibility, Bono says.
Not Gaio, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddie Q. I thought if we could put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it.
Not quite.
i think who cares about the u2 album or whatever but i think it's interesting why we still remember it and why why was it such a big deal giving stuff away for free is usually not frowned upon even if you don't want it people will take free stuff just because it's free i mean that's why you end up tasting all those weird free samples at costco yeah it's free whatever and that's something you're putting inside your body but like you know free anything here here's a free thing whatever um
Why did everyone hate the free album?
I'm not entirely sure that Bono really understands why people hated it so much because he, as a famous rock star who's not particularly tech savvy, probably doesn't know or care about these intimate details.
He knows it was a mistake and he takes responsibility for it because he argued for it or whatever.
But like, why?
Why did everyone get so angry about
uh the the u2 album being on their devices and i think it's instructive and not that we're again not that we're going to talk about this week but we probably will later about the ad stuff of how it feels to have a powerful entity that doesn't know or care that you exist uh do something to one of your personal technology devices uh
without your consent that you you know that you didn't ask for and can't undo and if the thing that they're doing is putting free music in your itunes library who cares not a big deal it is the probably the smallest deal you can think of it's like all that means is that there are some is an album in your itunes library that i didn't put there and maybe even i interested in
But even that tiny bit is like every time you go in there, you're like, stupid U2 album is there again.
I don't even like them.
Or maybe worst case scenario, it's the only thing in your library.
And every time you connect it up to your car, it starts playing a song and it starts playing one of those songs from the U2 album because that's all you've got in there because you use Spotify.
It's the tiniest thing, but that tiny thing put in literally every single person's iTunes library, whether you want it or not, and you couldn't get rid of it until they get that thing later where you get to delete it, right?
Before all the big blowback.
That just makes everybody go off the deep end.
And I think justifiably because it just, you know, it reveals the control that the large companies have over our lives that they mostly don't exercise or they exercise for good, like, you know, stopping malware or putting signatures for a malicious software or whatever.
But, like, just to do this – and, you know, we're trying to do the nice thing.
We're trying to be – you know, we're trying to give people free music or whatever.
It doesn't matter what the motivations are.
It's just like –
That album just sitting in there, even if you didn't care about it when it came out, a week later, two weeks later, a month later, especially if you're not into the tech news and you miss the story where it's like, hey, go to this page where you can delete it from your library.
That page, I'm assuming, is still up at Apple's website somewhere because there could still be people who have this in the library and don't know that you can delete it.
We should probably try to find it for the show notes.
But most people don't know or care about that.
They just know that every time they look in their iTunes library, there's this album that they didn't want there.
And they just get madder about it and madder about it.
Someday there's going to be some person who's had that in their iTunes library for 20 years.
not knowing how to get rid of it and they're gonna be so angry about it if they ever meet bono they're gonna that's the first thing they're gonna yell at him about so i understand why bono apologized but i do think it's an instructive lesson about like the smallest most well-intentioned thing can cause like a complete open revolt whereas other things that companies do that people don't notice that are way way worse
nobody cares like you know selling access to your demographic information to advertisers and tracking you across multiple sites that's invisible to people they don't even see it and they don't care about it and is in general way worse but that U2 album every time they see it I feel like people just get madder and madder
It wasn't even very good.
No, it wasn't.
thanks coronavirus slash social distancing, and I still have Songs of Innocence albums stuck on my phone.
I never really cared for YouTube, but the constant ambush of their music over the years has elevated them to nickelback levels of discomfort.
Web searches have revealed a web tool that I missed by about six years that Apple provided to remove the album, but it was engineered prior to the advent of two-factor authentication and does not properly work with modern Apple infrastructure.
How can I get rid of it?
to which Joseph underscore S writes, who is apparently a community specialist for Apple.
Hey there, thanks for using the Apple support communities, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You need to contact Apple support.
Here's how you can do it.
So that's the answer.
That's nice.
So I, you know,
at a company that cared more about the web that page would both still exist and still work i guess it hasn't worked for six years and i guess you can contact apple so they can get rid of it but man like and that's the other thing about this they realized the mistake they made from the blowback and they introduced the tool to remove it which most people don't know about because most people just are not following tech press and who cares right
And then like, that was it.
Like, you know, they said, well, this problem is we'll never have to worry about this again because people who want to remove it will use the tool and people who don't care, don't care.
It's like, no, most people care and have no idea you introduced that tool.
So you should have a solution for that long term, right?
Whatever hack they did to give this to everybody, there should be an accompanying hack, which is basically like a button on every single person's Apple ID page that never goes away.
And the only thing that button does is delete YouTube album.
like just that's got to be there forever now that's that's your price for this mistake is forever on every you know account dot apple id dot apple dot whatever like you have to have the delete you two album button and you can never get rid of it and you have to test it every time you do any kind of change talk about this is such classic apple so i found what is allegedly the link and you know how apple is really good about having really clean and pretty urls i mean that genuinely like they really honestly do um
The URL here is buy.itunes.apple.com slash webobjectsbaby slash mzfinance.woa slash wa slash offeroptout.
That is your URL.
Yeah, that's just the Steve Jobs equivalent.
You want a bumper case?
Fine.
Have a bumper case.
You want to be able to delete the thing?
Fine.
Go to a webobjectsurl.
Yep.
And for the record, it's a 404.
I always pronounce it woe in my head.
mzfinance.woe.
Web objects application?
Probably.
Who knows?
The woe extension.
Some web objects guru probably knows.
So apparently the iPhone 15 buttons, allegedly, are going to be quite a bit different.
Ming-Chi Kuo writes, My latest survey indicates that the volume button and the power button on two high-end iPhone 15, the new iPhone models, may adapt a solid-state button design similar to the home button design of the iPhone 7, 8, SE 2, and 3.
To replace the physical mechanical button design, there will be taptic engines located on the internal left and right sides to provide force feedback to make users feel like they are pressing physical buttons.
Due to this design change, the number of taptic engines used in each phone will increase from the current one to three.
As a result, the existing taptic engine suppliers, Luxshare ICT, which is the first one in AAC Technologies, the second one will be significant beneficiaries.
It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also follow Apple's design to create new selling points, which is a structural positive for the mobile phone vibrator industry.
I love the way people tweet when their beat is part suppliers for the iPhones.
It's such a different perspective.
What's important about this?
It means more phone vibrators.
It's really good for these companies that make them.
I find this fascinating.
Yeah.
Is there something wrong with the power and volume buttons on our current phones?
I guess because they move, it makes waterproofing harder.
What else is wrong with them?
Anything on an iPhone that moves or that is an entry point for dust and stuff is also a service liability in the sense that it's something that can break.
It's something that people will break on their phones or that will fail on the phone and that either the person or Apple will be responsible for repairing it.
So there's that angle too, but...
Is this plan, I mean, if this is real, you know, which I think it's plausible.
Yeah, we'll see.
Yeah, you got to think, like, are they really going to be saving that much?
Like, so they have the cost of two new taptic engines.
They have to put them somewhere.
Yeah, the space.
Yeah, I have to imagine that they're going to take up more space than the buttons do.
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I mean, that's what I would assume.
And then the battery power to every time you hit the button, your little burst of electricity to move a little mechanical thing.
I mean, that being said, like when they moved the home button to a haptic taptic engine, which I think it was the iPhone seven before then.
Yeah, I think it was a seven.
That was great.
I love the iPhone seven.
Yeah.
Like, like, you know, we had our doubts when when that when that information came out back then.
and it came out and it was fine i would even say possibly good yeah i think it was better than the physical one but that physical button was like i mean forget about tiny dust particles you could fit an entire cat inside there and people did shove their entire cat and like those home buttons would break all the time because you were pressing it constantly and it really moved you could put cereal in there cookie crumbs potato chips whole pets like just everything would go in there you know you think that you think the lightning port is bad for collecting stuff the home button was a nightmare but
But I do wonder how much of your pet you can shove into the crevices and the side of the power button on a modern iPhone.
I think from a product quality perspective, I would trust Apple to do this well because they already have done it well.
So I think it would feel fine and we wouldn't notice and we'd get used to it.
It'd be one of those weird things that everyone says like, oh, remember when it was a real button and now you can't even tell unless the phone's off or whatever.
Like, you know, it'd be one of those things.
Yeah, I don't object to it because I think it's going to be bad, but boy, in terms of cost of parts, complexity.
And space.
That's the thing.
Internal space.
That, to me, I can't imagine this is worth it.
Internal space.
I mean, we'll see.
Maybe these things have gotten way smaller and it just needs to be little for this, but it's so fascinating.
It makes sense because, look, if your job is to waterproof the iPhone and you're sick of your weak point was the headphone jack or your weak point is the home button, you're
You're knocking them down one by one.
Every year, it's like, what's the next thing that can make this phone more waterproof, right?
And maybe these just came up on the list, right?
Yeah, I hope.
Yeah, the fascinating thing is the last bit here, again, from the perspective of someone who's talking about parts manufacturers for iPhones.
It is expected that high-end Android smartphones will also follow Apple's design.
It's just expected that whatever Apple does, even if it doesn't make any sense, even if it seems to be dumb,
they'll copy it because apple does it like there's no other reason no other reason you need to do it like they could have they could have done it five years ago if it was a good idea they could have done it but it's like but as soon as apple does it well they'll do it too just because apple did it and they can say oh whatever apple has we have that too like don't just you know give apple a year to do this to see if it actually is a good idea and then you can copy it but it's just fascinating anyway maybe this is all just a rumor uh put out into the world by the manufacturers of tiny tactic engines for phones we'll see
We are sponsored this week by Collide.
Collide is an endpoint security solution that uses the most powerful untapped resource in IT, end users.
When you're trying to achieve security goals, whether for a third-party audit or your own compliance standards, the conventional wisdom is to treat every device like Fort Knox.
Old-school device management tools like MDMs force disruptive agents onto employee devices that slow performance and treat privacy as an afterthought.
That way of doing things turns IT admins and users into enemies, and it creates its own security problems because users turn to shadow IT just to do their jobs.
Collide does things differently.
Instead of forcing changes on users, Collide sends them security recommendations via Slack.
Kali will automatically notify your team when the devices are insecure and give them step-by-step instructions on how to solve the problem themselves.
By reaching out to employees via a friendly Slack DM and educating them about company policies, Kali can help you build a culture in which everyone contributes to security because everyone understands how and why to do it.
For IT admins, Collide provides a single dashboard, lets you monitor the security of your entire fleet, whether they're running on Mac, Windows, or Linux.
You can see at a glance which employees had their disks encrypted, their OS up-to-date, their password manager installed, etc., making it easy to provide compliance to your auditors, customers, and leadership.
So that's Collide, user-centered, cross-platform endpoint security for teams that slack.
You can meet your compliance goals by putting users first.
Visit collide.com slash ATP to find out how.
If you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag, including a t-shirt, just for activating a free trial.
That's collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Thanks to Collide for sponsoring our show.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP, which we haven't had time for lately, and I apologize.
But let's start with James Egg, who writes, I'm building a house to be completed within the next few months.
This is a great opportunity to upgrade my home tech.
And with matter in the news lately, I'm thinking a lot about smart home options.
There are plans for in-wall Ethernet wiring to any place there might be a stationary Internet-connected device, connections for external wired Ethernet cameras, and ceiling-mounted Wi-Fi access points.
But I'm dubious of some of the other smart home products and how useful they are.
My life does not feel burdened by turning on lights manually, for example.
How useful are things like smart switches, thermostats, door locks, garage door openers, and other options, really?
Is all of this smart home tech really that great?
I have no idea.
So for me, I've dabbled with a reasonable amount of this stuff.
I haven't done a lot of like smart locks.
I haven't really played with any of those or some of the really invasive stuff.
But with regard to like light switches and things of that nature, I've dabbled with a fair bit of it.
For my money, they are a past sponsor, but I swear I freaking love them.
Lutron Caseta stuff.
And they actually, the ones that were current at the time we sponsored are fine, but they actually have a new dimmer that's aesthetically much better looking than the ones that they had up until recently.
Oh, I envy the new one.
It's the Diva smart switch, which the guts, the insides are the same as all the other Lutron Caseta stuff that I've been singing their praises both when they paid me and when they haven't because it's so damn good.
But this one, the Diva stuff, I think it's just a dimmer so far, is so aesthetically so much better looking than the existing stuff.
And I didn't find the existing stuff bad, but this is way better.
But it doesn't pop out and become a remote though, does it?
No.
Well, no, none of the Caseta stuff.
Well, they have remotes, but the in wall switches don't pop out.
But you can like they give you a little plate because that's what I have.
They give you a little plate that you can take the remote and mount it to your wall.
It's not actually going into your wall.
It just looks like a switch, but you shove the little remote in there.
And so that is a dimmer switch.
It's just not connected to anything.
You can also get a dimmer switch that is actually on your wall, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyways, we're getting off into the ether here, but the Caseta stuff is really, really good.
Like, honest to goodness, it's really, really good.
Obviously, I can sing for hours my praises of Sonos equipment.
Not everyone on the program agrees, but that's okay.
But the Sonos stuff has worked out really well for me.
And as I spoke about a few episodes ago, integrates to some degree with some of the Caseta stuff, which is super delightful.
Yeah.
Some people have asked, sometimes snarky and sometimes in a not snarky way, what's going on with the Ethernet project or maybe the Fiber project.
That is still something I want to work on, but I've mostly put aside for now.
I've just been distracted by a bunch of other stuff.
And this is the busiest time of year for the List family because not only do we have...
Regular holiday stuff, but Declan and Michaela's birthdays are both like before and after the holidays.
So from basically mid-October to mid-January, life is crazy busy around my house.
So I'm probably not going to do anything more with the Ethernet stuff anytime soon.
But I will say that one consistent piece of advice, and I got a lot of advice.
a lot of which conflicted with other pieces of advice that I was given.
It was all in conflict with each other.
But the one thing that almost everyone agreed on was anywhere you want an Ethernet drop, you want at least two Ethernet drops.
Don't put in one.
Put in at least two because you never know what else you're going to want there.
So I will say, James, that if you are putting Ethernet in the walls, which you say that you are,
put at least two Ethernet drops.
They can be in the same panel.
I'm not saying one on one wall, one on the other.
But wherever there's Ethernet, put at least two.
That's what you got to do.
Yeah.
I would say on the front of like, I think the most interesting part of this question is, is smart home stuff really worth it?
Oh, yes, yes.
Like as James says, you know, to quote, my life does not feel burdened by turning on lights manually, for example.
How useful are all these things?
And first of all, it depends so much on your situation, how many smart things you're going to do, what smart things you're going to do.
To me, whether it's worth it or not comes down to how much effort and cost and set up fiddling does it take to actually get it to work?
And then how much time does that save me over time?
And how long does it last before it breaks?
Yeah.
Now, the reason why I've been such a fan of the Caseta stuff is that it does have a fairly strong uphill route to get there in the sense that most of the Lutron Caseta products are on the higher end price-wise compared to competitors.
And to really do it right, a lot of these have to be hardwired switches in the wall and stuff like that.
So there's a bit of a curve to get there.
However...
I've tried a bunch of other stuff before.
I've tried other smart home products.
I've tried stuff that can be controlled via HomeKit or via the Alexa ecosystem.
I've tried a bunch of other stuff from a bunch of different brands.
And all the other ones were just flaky.
And they would either have to be like...
unpaired and repaired and reset up every so often or they would only work like 90% of the time and everything whereas Caseta works every single time and once you set it up you don't need to touch it it just works all the time forever that's why I have stopped using all the other stuff and I go with it because whether it's worth it or not like
If you get some value out of something, but then after four months, you've got to reset the whole thing up and repair it with HomeKit and all that crap, that's going to really eat into the value that it created for you.
And you're going to question, like, should I just throw all this crap away and just go back to dumb switches, right?
But if you set it up once and it just always works and it works every single time reliably and quickly, which is what Caseta does and which, frankly, nothing else I've tried does, then the value burden it has to overcome is lower.
And so I like... For smart switches, I don't have everything in my house on a smart switch.
I have them in kind of like key areas.
So here's some situations where they're great.
So number one, automation.
You can have certain lights outdoors turn on 10 minutes after sunset every night and turn off right before sunrise or whatever.
And all this stuff, because of the way Caseta stuff works, they're just...
there are switches on the wall that or little remotes that you can put around and so you can you know just hit them manually you don't have to like tell the other people in your family like hey to turn this light off don't touch the switch because you'll ruin my smart light you have to instead speak this one command to our voice cylinder and hope it works no it's not like that because again that raises the annoyance level and that decreases the value you get
So if you do, like, smart switches, like, you know, Caseta stuff and everything, you're on a good path.
And then where it helps is, you know, first of all, the automation angle.
Whether it's, like, you know, occupancy sensing in a room, motion sensing, or, you know, time trigger things, temperature trigger things.
Like, there's all sorts of things you can do with, you know, both the built-in Caseta functionality and when you tie it to HomeKit or whatever else.
Like, you can do all sorts of fun stuff there.
Yeah, like a really good example of that very quickly is, you know, on weekdays, Erin is the first one downstairs.
And it used to be up until, you know, a few days ago, it used to be pitch black when she would get up.
And we recently put a Caseta dimmer switch on the like little pendant lamp or whatever it's called that's sitting above our kitchen sink.
And so what I'd figured was, well, wait, why is she going downstairs to a pitch black kitchen?
I'll just have that thing turn on around the same time that her alarm wakes her up every weekday.
So Monday through Friday, I forget exactly what time it is, call it six o'clock.
Monday through Friday at six o'clock, the little pedestal lamp comes on at like 50% brightness or pendant or whatever it's called, doesn't matter.
It comes on at like 50% brightness.
And this way she walks downstairs and she's not, A, she's not blinded by a full brightness LED light.
And B, there's a little bit of light already there for her.
So she's not bumping into things.
And that is very silly.
I'll be the first to tell you, it's silly, but it's actually a kind of nice quality of life improvement because it's just something that automatically happens that makes your life just a teensy bit better.
A big deal?
No, but convenient nevertheless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I'd also say like, you know, the the value in just having voice control or home kit control for a lot of the stuff is pretty significant.
So, for instance, like every night I walk around to like turn off these two lamps in our living room that, you know, we turn these lamps on when we're hanging out there at night.
And then every night when we go to bed.
I walk around and I turn these lamps off and I lock the door.
And, you know, you do these things like, you know, these routines are part of your life.
Well, if you can just trigger a scene or use an Alexa command or whatever to say goodnight or, you know, turn everything off, turn off living room, whatever it is,
you can save yourself from walking around the room and that saves you, you know, 15 seconds every day for, you know, indefinitely into the future.
So, you know, the very first time you set it up, you're going to feel like, well, is this really worth it?
But, you know, after a while, like that really adds up.
So again, if the barrier to entry is not too bad for you and if it doesn't require ongoing fiddling, that can be very valuable.
another thing like right now on my desk i have three lutron caseta pico switches which are the little wireless switches i'm just talking you know so we have these three little wireless switches they control the two banks of lights in the room and the heated rug there's just little wireless battery powered things on my desk that control other lutron caseta products like you know the switches that are by the door of the room which is not within reach as i'm sitting here podcasting and the rug which is down under my desk on on a smart switch down there that's also temperature controlled
So, you know, I was just sitting here and as we were podcasting, my feet were getting cold.
So I turned the rug on and I didn't have to get up out of the chair.
I didn't have to like take my headphones off and I didn't have to do a whole thing.
It's great.
I can also, you know, if I'm in the middle of a show and I'm too hot or too cold, I can open up the home app and I can change my thermostat from here, from my computer or from my phone or from anywhere.
So that's another thing.
Smart thermostats, which also James asked about, are amazing.
If you only smartify one thing in your house, make it smart thermostats.
And it's not because you can use their automatic learning behaviors.
No, those are crap.
It's just so you can control it remotely.
And that's incredibly nice.
So not only can you control it from within your house, like I was doing a workout, I do these FaceTime workouts, and I was doing a workout with my trainer, and
I was getting a little hot and I realized, oh, I forgot to turn the heat down.
And so I just raised my wrist and told my watch, turn off downstairs heat.
And it worked.
That kind of stuff is amazing.
As I mentioned, it's great when you're just at your desk.
You don't want to or can't easily get up.
You can adjust it there.
Or if you are out on a trip or something, suppose you went to visit your family for a holiday, you'd be gone for a few days, you'd turn the heat down.
Well, when you're coming back,
you can turn the heat back up a couple hours before you actually get home.
So your house is not freezing when you get home.
Or if you leave for a trip and forgot to turn the heat down, you can go do that when you're on the trip.
So stuff like that.
There are high value things like that.
And then also there is just kind of those little everyday conveniences of I don't have to walk around and turn off two or three lamps anymore.
I can just do it all from one button or one command and that's it.
Or you can automate things with sunset or motion or whatever else.
So there's that kind of value.
So you don't have to automate or smarten everything in your house, every light switch.
That's overkill.
But to do them in certain places where you have potential high value really can be worth it.
The thing that got me over the edge of getting this because I don't really want most of the smart stuff is that I have an older house and I don't have the luxury of having as many outlets and particularly not as many switch controlled outlets.
So basically in our main living room, the lights that are in there
two out of the three main sort of areas of lights aren't controlled by any wall switches.
You have to walk up to the lamp and turn it on with like a switch on the lamp itself.
And they're kind of in the corners of the room.
And every time we go into the room, we gotta walk all the way to one side of the room.
turn on the lamp walk to the other side of the room turn on the lamp and then there's a switch for the third one that's on another wall right and that doesn't seem like a lot but it's kind of annoying and i just it got it was got tiresome for me or even if you're just on the couch and you want to turn one or both the lights off when you're watching you got to get up off the couch you got to walk over the corner of the room turn the light off walk you know and yeah you could rewire the house and put those things on a switch or whatever but also you can just use one of the smart outlet things and so now
I don't have to do that.
I can yell into the air.
I can do it on my phone.
They are automated to turn off at night when we're in bed.
So if we go upstairs and people forgot to turn the lights off, they'll turn themselves off.
Like, that seems like a small thing.
Oh, you don't want to walk an extra 10 feet to turn off a light?
But that kind of little thing, like...
You know, multiply it over how many times per day that I turn those lights on and off.
I mean, it's at least once turning them on, at least once turning them off.
And usually more because you probably want to, you know, turn them off when you're not in the house.
It's pretty convenient.
And the cost of it was small, like one of these little smart outlet things.
There's some initials, you know, set up to buy the little thingy.
But I think the first one I got was like 50 bucks and had two outlets on it.
And it integrated with every single one of these services and it was fine.
as for lutron specifically i recently bought one of their things um and the smart hub like i think that's what you need to sort of start having a lutron thing yeah it is hub based they're they're not wi-fi and it's actually is a very good thing um they use their own rf protocol that uses the same frequencies as wireless microphones um and roughly and so it's like it's this this
Part of the frequency spectrum that is very reliable, goes through houses and walls very well and very easily, has great range, has pretty much no interference.
And their protocol is such that it's kind of like what Matter is trying to do now, but their protocol is such that their devices all talk to each other.
And there is a hub for them to interact with the rest of your Wi-Fi network and the Internet.
But the hub is not required for operation, like, you know, for the devices to talk to each other.
So, like, if you have, like, in my bike area downstairs where we pull our bikes in at night, I have a motion light set up where I have a Lutron motion sensor.
and maybe 10 feet away, I have a Caseta smart switch in the wall, and I have it set up so that that motion sensor triggers the lights to turn on when it detects motion.
So we pull our bikes in under the house, and bing, lights turn on so we can see what we're doing.
It's super fast, and it's super reliable.
And the reason is because when the motion sensor detects motion, it doesn't have to relay the signal through the hub to then have the hub tell the light turn on.
Instead, when you set it up, it programs it such that the motion sensor talks directly to the switch and doesn't relay through the hub.
So the devices can talk to themselves directly when necessary, and that dramatically improves performance and reliability.
I was kind of surprised when I was setting up the hub, although, you know, if you think about it, it makes sense.
The hub doesn't connect with Wi-Fi.
It's Ethernet.
Which I guess is another reliability thing because one of the things that tends to be flaky with home automation stuff is surprisingly they fall off your Wi-Fi network.
I don't know why they do, but it's a thing that happens.
I don't know.
They get confused if Wi-Fi inherently is not the type of protocol where you're going to have a device that's constantly connected to your Wi-Fi for years at a time.
But yeah, the Smart Hub plugs into Ethernet only, which is not a problem for me because I have Ethernet in lots of places.
But one complaint about the Smart Hub is...
it has like a strip of like led light up you know thing around it and you can't turn that light off so i had to put a piece of black tape around the entire smart hub just so i wouldn't see a stupid light glowing at me from like behind the t because i put it behind the tv i have ethernet to the tv area it's very small and you know plugs into ethernet and power uh and you know that's it and it's not it's not a complicated thing but it has a light that you can't turn off it's another thing that euro gets right by the way this is just a time where we talk about all our past sponsors
Eero has lights on all their hub things, but you can turn off the lights.
So the Eero that's upstairs doesn't have light on because I don't want a light shining that is visible from our bedroom, right?
So, yeah.
Lutron, you got to let people turn off that light.
Like, there's no point.
I'm hoping I'm not making the thing overheat.
Let's put tape around it, but I'm not blocking any vents or anything.
Anyway, yeah, I think I think the utility of smart home stuff is undeniable.
It's just a question of not overdoing it because you do have to have that balance.
How annoying is this versus how much benefit do I have?
And that's why we tend to like the things that don't require you to teach people who enter your home how to operate your home.
You don't have to know anything about smart home to press a switch on a wall, even if it's like I said earlier, like there's the Lutron switch that's on the wall.
It's not actually a switch.
It's just one of those little remotes that Marco was talking about.
Stuck to your wall.
It's literally all it is.
Behind it is just your wall.
It doesn't do anything, right?
But it fools people who don't know anything about home automation into thinking, oh, that's a switch because I see a switch plate and I see a thing that looks like a switch and it's got a light bulb on it and I press it and the lights turn on.
That's all anyone needs to know.
They don't have to know that you can talk into the air and make lights turn on, but you can.
Yep.
And I think that just to put a period on the end of this whole topic, the thing with Lutron that's so great, and this isn't unique to Lutron, but they do the best at it that I've seen, is that there are physical traditional switches first and smart switches second.
So you don't have to like have the hub on and active and whatnot in order to turn your lights on and off.
If you don't have an internet connection, your lights will still work because these are traditional light switches first and
that just so happen to be able to communicate via RF to smart stuff elsewhere in your house.
So I think that's very important.
Gentlemen, if you wouldn't mind, I've put a link in Slack.
Can we all go to this website?
Because apparently we're going to figure out, because Mark Richard wants to know, which of the three of us is the fastest typist?
Oh, no.
I already did this because I put this in the show.
Well, I didn't do it.
Oh, this website's stinky.
Yeah, I was trying to find like the classic one that like is better than this.
It's telling me I'm ready.
I don't want to race yet.
No, I don't want to race yet.
All these guys are doing this.
The chat room, do you remember the like the good type racing game that used to be on the internet?
It was a web page and you'd go in and it would say ready go and it would show you a bunch of text and you'd have to type it exactly as it appeared and it wouldn't let you keep typing if you made a mistake.
There's a million of those sites now and all of them are just scummed up with ads and scams and just like they're all ugly and not fun.
And I tried to find one that was tolerable that more or less did what I wanted to do.
But I don't, you know.
Yeah, we're playing Type Racer.
It's not.
This is this is a terrible site.
Yeah, it really is.
I think I got 85 words per minute.
It already cleared itself.
Oh, yeah.
Mine cleared, too.
Well, you beat me slightly.
I think it was 85 and 81.
I don't know.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
I'll tell you, the fastest typist is John, probably.
Why would you say that?
I'm a terrible typist.
So what was your speed then?
You guys just played something.
Tell us what you got.
I said 85 for me and 81 for Marco, I'm pretty sure, with like 96% accuracy for me, and I don't think Marco worked.
Yeah, because I hit one wrong letter at the beginning, and I kept typing ahead of it, thinking it would just not matter, and it totally mattered, and then I had to backspace all the way back.
You can take a second run if you feel like your first one was messed up.
Nah.
To me, who's the fastest typer?
I don't really care.
It's probably John.
I don't care.
So what did you get, John?
I don't know how you would think it would be.
You've seen me type.
I'm a terrible typist.
I don't type the right way.
I mean...
I'm a touch typist in that I don't have to look at my fingers most of the time, but I'm not a touch typist in that I do not type the way you're supposed to type if you're a touch typist.
I don't use all my fingers.
I don't do it right.
That's why I'm such a slow typist.
I'm a weird typist.
The one I can most relate to is Matt Panzarino of TechCrunch.
When I first met him, we were sitting next to each other at WWDC and I noticed that he typed the same way I did, which is the wrong way, using not enough fingers on all the wrong keys.
And I was like, hey, we're
we're typing buddies we both type in this totally messed up way if you watch me do it it's like the least efficient thing like there's for touch typing you're there there's fingers assigned to each key like if you look at the key in the keyboard you say what finger should i use hit that key maybe in some cases there's debate where you could maybe use one or two different fingers i use all the wrong fingers for all the wrong keys and lots of my fingers are doing nothing so
i'm a terrible typist but based on this brief run on type racer here we're kind of all in the same ballpark i got 84 words per minute at 97.6 accuracy and that was just on my first run i did not like do multiple runs to try to get better i'm sure i could go faster and i'm sure i could also do worse so we all seem to be in the mid 80s on this test and this test i think was pretty easy because it didn't give you lots of weird words so a lot of it is just us activating macros where we you know
Our brains have macros for the common English words, so you don't have to think about typing letters, whereas if it was a bunch of proper nouns of cities we'd never heard of, we'd be transcribing them a letter at a time, and that would really reveal how crappy we are.
But none of us are particularly fast typists in the grand scheme of things, because if any of us actually touch-typed,
we'd be going much faster.
I do.
Do you do it right with the right fingers and the right keys?
I think for the most part, the only thing is I will say that I only ever use my right thumb for space bar and I only ever use the left shift key, which is not correct.
Other than that though, I think I pretty much use the right fingers in the right spot.
You should take a recording with the center stage camera of like the look down at your desk.
What is that feature called?
Like the thing where it looks down at your desk?
Oh yeah.
Like desk view or something.
Yeah.
Why are you not so much faster?
Yeah.
I'm doing 84 words per minute using three fingers.
Let me try again then.
Good grief.
You know what I'll do?
Let's do it again.
While you race yourself, I will answer Mark Richard's second part of the question, which was, how much typing do you feel you do while writing code, particularly when using an IDE with autocomplete, etc.?
For me,
I do not that much typing when writing code because most of writing code is not limited by your typing speed.
It's limited by your thinking speed and your debugging speed later.
So that's not – where I do a lot of typing is server administration.
Because if I have to type in different repetitive commands or if I'm typing in SQL queries to try to figure out what's going on with my database or whatever else, that's where I do a large volume of repetitive typing.
But for actual code writing, it really isn't that much because I'm not actually writing that many lines of code per minute or whatever.
yeah part of the reason my weird typing doesn't isn't that much of a problem for programming is yes part of it is you're not really typing much but also uh i think typing speed is important to programming but in a weird way like like in your iteration speed because what you're typing in your programming is not prose it's lots of square brackets and curly braces and hyphens and greater than and less than signs and you know dollar signs and at signs if you're in pearl like it's
it's weird characters that are not in convenient places on the keyboard.
So my totally wrong typing doesn't impair me there, but I can type those programming concepts really fast.
And where it helps in terms of iteration is if you're trying to do a thing, especially if you're an experienced programmer and you're working in a language that you know, you're like, I should do it like this.
No, maybe I should do it like that.
Maybe I should do it like that.
And you're working in just like a little, like a little, you know, not a paragraph, but like a little, you know, five, 10, 15 lines of code.
And you're having different ideas about how you should do things.
uh even if just half the times you're hammering on the autocomplete you know like tab return whatever the autocomplete thing writing sort of writing the autocomplete in your in your id to quickly be able to say i'm going to do a loop like this oh i need a variable here i need a property here i need anything like that i need to navigate my id up here to put this property and i'm going to come back in
If you're an experienced programmer and you're doing something fairly trivial, you know what you want to type and your brain absolutely can outrun your fingers because you're like, okay, I need this property, I need this for loop, I need this thing over here, I need to call this method, I need to make this new method, I need to make this new class.
If you're good with your tools,
your brain can go faster than your fingers.
And that's where being a fast typist helps.
It's not like you're doing that sustained.
You do that in tiny little bursts over the course of an hour of you banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why something doesn't work, right?
Like that's programming, right?
But for those little bursts, it is nice to be able to close the gap
between your brain your fingers when you're a beginner there is no gap because you don't even know what you have to type yet but eventually as you gain experience as a programmer you do repetitive things you get familiar with the api you get familiar with your tools and it's nice to to to make that connection faster because then it lets you have the thought and have it have the code for it appear so you can get to your next thought so you don't waste any time sort of waiting for the curly braces to fall out of your fingertips
all right real-time follow-up i've raced the chat room a couple times i got 100 words per minute the first time 97 words per minute just now accuracy hovering at between 97 and 98 yeah so i think you're probably the fastest one unless marco makes some other runs but i honestly i don't think i could do much better than 80 90 i doubt i could crack 100 whereas like jason snell what is he like 120 130 like accurate you know he's an actual real typist he is bananas fast yeah
All right, and then finally, Brian Hamilton writes, home screen widgets are still just app launchers without any real interactivity.
Why hasn't Apple okayed buttons yet?
What makes the dynamic island in live activities use less power than a full PCAL calculator widget or more interactive overcast widget?
I think a lot of this is because of the tech they use to do it.
To the best of my knowledge, they serialize the SwiftUI view.
And so basically, it's not exactly a snapshot, but for the purposes of this discussion, they take a snapshot.
of a swift ui view right like oh here's what you need in order to reconstruct this to to kind of um deserialize it later here's what we'll need and then they just compute it once put it on screen it stays static if they have to recompute this constantly then that's incredible i shouldn't say it's incredible battery drain but when you're operating at apple's level every little teeny teeny tiny bit counts and i have a few engineers that work you know on on some of this stuff
And it's fascinating listening to them talk about perf.
Everything is about perf, which is performance.
And I forget what they call how battery efficient things are, but I think they have a funny term for that as well.
But anyway, the point is that having something that's interactive, suddenly you're
you're causing far more battery drain than you would otherwise.
Not to mention that this whole serialization dance of the SwiftUI views doesn't, I don't think it really lends itself well to interactivity because then you're talking about more than just a static view.
You're talking about logic and what do you do when it's interacted with and so on and so forth.
It is a bit of a bummer.
Like I wish that these things were interactive, but I do understand from a technical perspective why it isn't the case.
I don't know if you two have any other further thoughts on this.
Yeah, the actual thing I'll add, and it gets even more technically esoteric here, but to understand that to have interaction, and I think they eventually will, but like the reason they've been holding off so far is actually a more complicated problem than you think.
To have any kind of interaction on the phone or anywhere in a GUI, you need an event loop.
Right.
And that event loop needs to send events to code that's going to process those events.
And there is an event loop on all the screens.
That's how it catches your swipes and your taps and all your other things.
But remember, what you're asking is, hey, Apple, on this screen that you control, the lock screen or the control center or whatever, you know, wherever you want it to be, widgets.
That's not a third party app.
That's an Apple app.
Springboard is an Apple app, whatever the heck runs all that stuff like that's Apple apps.
And you're saying you want third party code to participate in processing events from the event loop on those things.
How do you get the third party code to process events coming from Apple's app?
Well, there's a million ways to do that.
You can do it with XPC.
You can do it with the plugin architecture.
You can do it all sorts of things.
But that is all of a sudden way, way more complicated than the data-driven approach of, hey, third-party app, give me a Swift view setup, which you can think of as data and not code, right?
And then the event loop that runs those screens...
does not need to send events to third-party code that can then do whatever the heck it wants forget about power usage forget about like oh i'm afraid i'm going to send a tap event to third-party code it's going to go into an infinite loop and drain the battery and freeze the screen which is a problem and difficult to defend against but setting that aside
Once you allow third-party code to run within the context of the home screen or the lock screen, even if it's an external service and using XPC, the cross-process communication to do it, you've now let third parties into your application in a way that they can impact...
reliability and functionality of your app and doing that has to have a big enough trade-off that you're willing to build the infrastructure required to protect springboard to protect control center from the third-party bugs right you got enough of your own bugs that are screwing things up right
And so I think that has mostly been the barrier is like to do this right.
We can't just sort of load you as a plugin or load you as an external process and funnel events to you because both of those things have, yes, you know, battery life concerns and stuff like that, but security concerns and reliability concerns.
And so it seems it's like, well, you've got this stuff.
Just let me tap on it.
The just let me tap on it is sort of six.
The success of the user mental model of a GUI is like, oh, it's just a button and I press it.
But under the covers, the actual machinery of accepting events, processing them and handing them off to code and who wrote that code and where it came from and how they all run the same process, how they can affect each other is thing.
Users don't have to worry about, but programmers and platform owners do.
And it is actually possible.
slightly more thorny than you think all that said i think it's going to come eventually it's a useful thing they're going to make it happen but it is it's definitely not a 1.0 type thing and i think it's going to be a while before they get around to tackling that task in a way that they feel comfortable with
So I think it's actually more fundamental than that.
I mean, you're right.
Those are complexities they'd have to deal with, but they have ways to deal with those, and I think it would be fine overall.
The bigger problem is that the way that widgets work on iOS, the apps that you're seeing the widgets for are not running.
That's very important to realize that what you're seeing, like, you know, what Casey was saying, like they wake up a part of your app, an extension of your app every so often.
And they allow it to run for a brief, you know, a few seconds of background time to give them a timeline of new views to say, all right, at this time, show this view.
And then at this time, change it to this.
And at this time, change it to this.
And they'll wake you up every so often in the background, they'll wake up your extension and
And you have a few more seconds to generate the next set of those timeline snapshots.
So what you're looking at with widgets is things that the app rendered at some point in the past.
It could be a few minutes ago.
It could be a few hours ago.
That way, like if you have a screen that has six widgets on it, you don't have to keep six apps running because that would be a much more significant drain on battery and performance and everything else.
So
what you're looking at with a widget is not anything that the app has live access to.
Now, that's a little bit different with live activities.
They have more access, but it's still... In general, the way the widget system works is, like, the app...
can't really do much live in that widget.
It can simply provide the system with a timeline of snapshots to show at certain times and the app gets woken up periodically to update those.
And overall, again, this is kind of, you know, the reason why iOS is generally more power and memory efficient than macOS or Windows or Linux is because it has these very aggressive app lifecycle management things happening in the background where
You think you're running a bunch of apps, but you're really not.
You're really running like one or two apps at a time on iOS, really.
And so anyway, so changing, you know, making widgets more interactive would basically require that those apps were running and ready to respond to your touches and respond, you know, dynamically and possibly run animations or whatever else.
And so it's a totally different lifecycle of the apps.
That that's a much, much greater thing.
Like right now, the little bit of activity or the little bit of interactivity you have with widgets is you can basically define like rectangles and say, all right, when this rectangle is tapped, open this URL in the main app.
And so it's much more of a kind of like of a launcher kind of response than a live interaction kind of response.
And it's data-driven.
You just give them data.
You give them the regions.
You give them the URL.
You can see how it just gets all the data.
And to do this the right way and the way that is efficient, you wouldn't actually run all six apps for situations.
You'd come up with some kind of approach where you make that more efficient, whether it's
single sort of firewalled uh off like place where all the third party ones run in a single process where they load all the stuff or it could even just be more data different driven approach where you still don't get to write arbitrary code but you don't you can provide more data than just this region in this url like you could you know provide a slightly richer uh format of like what you want to happen
um you know all the way up to and including like i said you know a single you know a single process that runs all the widgets and when that process crashes it takes out all the third-party widgets but it doesn't affect apple stuff right and then you get to load some small extremely constrained amount of code into there and there's memory limits and there's something watching it to make sure it doesn't spin in the cpu like it's a pain to do because you have to sort of cordon them off and confine them and separate them from the apple code and you can't run
like you can't have say you can have 24 widgets and then we'll run 24 extra processes and do xpc to them that's not good either right so it's not impossible you can do it but it's just doing it right it's kind of like doing stuff with the web like all the stuff that i'm talking about has happened within web browsers because web browsers have a whole bunch of code all running in one big stew and how do we protect
the user and the browser and the os from that big stew and the answer is safari and webkit have been broken off into these little islands of limited functionality that communicate with each other but there's only one of them there's not well it gets multiplied by the number of web pages but still it's not like they have you know a separate process running for every single you know uh gif animation on on a web page right there's some engine that runs all the image decoding and processing it's far walled off from everything else but you don't have to have one for every image
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Collide, and Memberful.
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
We'll be right back.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
I went to John's Pizza Place.
Was it everything you dreamed of and more?
So, you know, John being from but not currently residing in Long Island has, of course, his pizza place from when he was here that he thinks is the best pizza place.
Two of them.
He went to one of them.
They're basically the same, though.
It's fine.
okay and uh and we we've learned over the last couple of months that uh not only have i never been to it but that i i coincidentally constantly run errands very close to it which has frustrated john to no end that i have had the chance to go to this pizza place many times and never had
Well, we were talking after the show like a month ago, and I was following along on Google Maps as the two of them were discussing where things were and what was going on.
And we realized, or Marco and I at least realized live as we're talking to each other, although we were not broadcasting live at that point, that, oh my goodness, one of these pizza places, like you said, Marco, you're basically driving directly by it.
all the time and neither you nor I I mean obviously I wouldn't know but even you didn't have any idea you both had an idea because I pointed this out to you multiple times in the past well we ignored it the other time but once I once I realized it was like across the street from the Whole Foods that I go to it's like okay that's that's pretty close so John said over and over again
get the Sicilian, a corner piece preferred, and get garlic knots.
And we sure enough, we decided to get a whole bunch of stuff and kind of share it all, try it all.
And included in that whole bunch of stuff was a couple of corner pieces of Sicilian and a whole bunch of garlic knots and a whole bunch of, you know, maybe like three or four other slices.
You got the Crispino too, right?
Yeah, that little like thin square thing.
Yeah, with like the fresh tomatoes on top of it.
Yeah, yeah.
It was like fresh tomatoes and like, you know, a little red pepper and fresh mozzarella.
So anyway,
i'm really i'm really annoyed because it was really freaking good and i don't want john to be so right about it but damn it he was right about it like when we were like first taking bites we're like huh
All right, this is decent.
Okay, you know, maybe it's not the best pizza I've ever had, but it's pretty good.
Okay, and then, like, as we're going through, we're like, you know, this is actually, this is really good.
Like, this, I hate to admit it, but, like, this is actually really good pizza.
Like, and I was, like, trying to think, like, you know, what pizza have I had that was better in certain ways?
I'm like...
hmm, there's actually, there's certain elements of this that I actually like better than other pizza.
I'm like, hmm.
I would maybe give it a nine.
Like, it was very, very good.
Wow.
And it's not fancy pizza.
It is utilitarian pizza.
So it is not trying to be gourmet, despite the crispino being a little bit fancy or whatever.
It is very kind of...
I'm not going to say junk food pizza, but it is like staple pizza because the type of pizza you can get all the time and it's not good for you and it's greasy and it's way too much bread and you're probably going to eat too much and make yourself sick.
But it's like that's what it is.
And that's that's you know, it's not I never say this is the best pizza for a different example.
Casey's, you know, John's a Bleecker Street.
undoubtedly better pizza but this is the pizza that i grew up near and this is a really good example of neighborhood pizza and in particular the sicilian is junky and exactly the junky way that casey loves and that it is just unapologetically a giant wad of dough with too much sauce and cheese on it and it's all greasy and that's exactly what i want for it now now basically now that i have this pizza like once every year at most maybe i'm probably down to like once every 0.74 years or whatever um
Because I didn't go last time I was on Allen.
That's the perfect frequency for me.
And I'm just so glad that like this place and the other place that is like sort of its sister restaurant that have the same pizza managed to still be there so many years after so many things like you eat it when you're a kid and like the restaurant closes down and they bulldoze the whole thing and they, you know, build something else in its place.
And now everything is a Whole Foods or whatever.
This place looks very different, but it's still there.
And apparently, I mean, I know for a fact, because I've had it like, you know, two or three years ago, last time I was there pre-COVID, still good pizza.
And it still tastes like it did when I was a kid.
And I love that.
Yeah.
And the only thing I would suggest to you, John, is that I actually don't think the Sicilian was their best pizza.
I was extremely impressed with their white with spinach and with their kind of margarita style slice where it's like kind of regular pizza, but it's like the fresh mozzarella, you know.
Sicilian is not for everybody.
It is just my favorite, but all their pizzas are good.
The white pizza, by the way, was very popular with the high school students when I was growing up.
It was super popular.
So it is a good slice.
Yeah.
And but yeah, the margarita slice, I think, was my favorite one.
But but they were all unfortunately, they were all really good.
And I hate to tell you that I think you were right.
But yeah, I think in this case and garlic knots, it's hard to screw up.
It's just like dough.
And no, no, no.
It's very easy to screw up garlic knots.
They many places screw up because there's two I say three main ways you could screw up a garlic knot.
Number one, you could overcook it.
Number two, you could have way too much bread, you know, as like the ratio could be way, way off.
And number three, I forgot how to count.
I think there's just those two.
But anyway, so like you can really mess it up with just like sloppy ratios.
Number three is you could drench it too much in oil.
Like it's just, you know, it's just like soggy.
Yeah, maybe.
But usually when I've had bad ones, they've either been burnt or they've been like way too bready and like the ratios were off.
I wouldn't.
Yeah, I'm not saying that they're easy to get.
Like I'm saying in the New York metro area, garlic knots are to screw up.
Any place else in the country that I know garlic knots are, don't if you see them, don't buy them because they have no idea what they're doing.
Right.
But yeah, I got to say, man, that's I'm glad I don't live really close to this because that would be a very bad thing for me because I would go there a lot.
They do have like it's a pizza place, but they do have an attached sit down restaurant, which also had some pretty OK dishes.
But I have no idea what their menu is like anymore.
And it was honestly was always a little bit weird.
The weird thing about this is this place called Emilio's.
We'll put a link to it.
Emilio's in Comac.
And the sister restaurant was Branchinelli's, which is right across the street from my high school.
And that's obviously the one I went to way more often.
But they were both basically equal distance from the house that I grew up on.
So we go to both of them all the time.
And the restaurants could not be more different.
There's like no shared item on the menus for the restaurant, but the pizza is exactly the same.
And I don't know the history behind that.
I don't know.
I don't even know if like one family started the restaurants or two families did, or they're just totally unrelated and they copy each other's pizza, but...
i'm so glad that and that place still exists too i'm so glad both these places are still there and very jealous that you got to eat all that uh good pizza i will say it was kind of funny you know this this place is a it's a good like 45 minute drive for me uh and like going there to eat a whole bunch of bread like it's like a sicilian and garlic knots like just like this is just a wad of bread basically and oil
Yeah, to eat all that bread before having to drive for 45 minutes was, you know, a bit challenging of like a, you know, stay awake situation, but it was worth it.
Yeah, the other move, so when I go to it, I'm going from out east on the island, so it's like I'm driving for like two hours to get the toaster, and then you drive it back, and of course by the time you get it back, it's stone cold, right?
Like the heat has been gone from it, but this is the good thing about it, especially the Sicilian, it is great warmed up again in a toaster oven the next day or after two hours of driving.
Just so, so good because it's so big it can handle being warmed up for 15 minutes in like a 325 toaster oven on top of a piece of foil because then the little bits at the edges get all kind of like crispy or whatever by the time it's heated all the way through.
So good.
Awesome leftover pizza.
Totally a different thing than leftover just, you know, regular Neapolitan pizza, but...
I need to have some of that.
This next summer, I need to make a trip out there.
It is so onerous, though, because, you know, if you're driving, you know, two hours in each direction through Long Island traffic to get pizza really does make the experience less nice.
But you get to go at off hours and you're going to Whole Foods anyway.
So you should always just pick up, you know.
an entire Sicilian pie, throw it in the back of your car.
And then like, don't even bother eating that day.
Just put it directly into the fridge, wrap individual pieces in foil.
And then for that week, whenever you want to be super unhealthy, you take a piece out in the foil, you unfold the foil.
The foil is already, you know, put it right on top of your toaster oven tray.
Put it in there for 15 minutes, 325.
You're good to go.
So first of all, I love that you've managed to take this easy thing and turn it into a whole bunch of pork.
What's work?
What's work about that?
Just eat the pizza at the pizza place.
You said you eat it and then you can't move because you just have like 20 pounds of dough and sauce.
Well, anyway, and I will say also, though, I did I did a couple of times reheat pizza in my dumb steam toaster, and it's really very good at reheating pizza.
Like you would think a little bit of steam would make it soggy.
No, it just softens the crust a little bit so it doesn't get like that rock hard reheated crust texture.
If it's rock hard, you're overcooking it.
Sicilian would be harder, but I'm talking about a regular pizza slice.
If you put a regular pizza slice in an oven or a toaster oven to reheat, you run a pretty significant chance of the crust getting pretty hard.
If you have a dumb steam toaster and you can somehow cram a slice of pizza into it, which it really doesn't fit gracefully in, it's really good.
I strongly recommend it.
It's amazing.
For the proponents of the skillet technique,
overrated oh too fidgety you're dirty a pan and the difference between doing it in a good coast drawman is not worth like i don't i there are pros and cons of both approaches and i would never choose the the set of trade-offs for the skillet uh heating up a pizza i mean frankly the best way to eat pizza is to just eat it fresh the second best way to eat pizza is cold
You and your cold pizza.
My wife is into the cold pizza.
I don't completely object to it, but I do not prefer it.
And I love reheated pizza.
Not as much as reheated lasagna, which everyone knows is the best way, literally the best way to have lasagna.
Oh, facts.
You can't have that fresh.
Reheated pizza is, I love it.
It's amazing.
Part of the fun of getting pizza is to have the reheated pizza.
It's different than the fresh pizza, and I like the fresh pizza better, but I still like it.
It's like turkey leftovers.
It's like the second version of the meal.
I'm glad you went on your pilgrimage.
This is making me want to like figure out a way to have the three of us come together and do like Johnson bleaker and do Emilio's and somehow make like a video or a podcast out of it or something.
I don't know how, but no one wants to see a star Facebook on healthy food.
Oh, I bet they do.
I want to stop my Facebook, but I don't think people need to watch it.
It's a private, it's a private time between me and my pizza, my garlic nuts.