Digital Speedo
Casey:
Today is a very big day for me because I am, as of, what, six o'clock this evening, I am officially maxinated because two weeks ago at about 6, 630 was when I got my second shot of Moderna.
Casey:
And so I am ready to party, except not really.
Casey:
I haven't changed anything and don't really plan on changing much, but nevertheless, at least I can walk around without fear of catching something that will make me dead.
Casey:
So I'm very excited about that.
Marco:
Nick?
Marco:
Congratulations.
Marco:
It'll be interesting to see how we all slowly warm back up to things.
Marco:
I think some people never stop doing anything.
Marco:
Some people are going to jump right into it the second they're allowed to.
Marco:
I think a lot of people are going to have a much slower ramp back to, like, you know, quote, normal, or at least, like, you know, quote, unrestricted behavior.
Marco:
Like, it's weird, like, so today, literally just today, I was waiting outside my school to pick up my kid, and I heard from one of the residents that the town has officially dropped the outdoor mask mandate.
Marco:
And, I mean, first of all, I, you know, don't know if I should verify that.
Marco:
I probably should.
Marco:
But also, like,
Marco:
i thought okay well should i take my mask off like i in theory i'd want to but like how many people around town know that they've dropped the mask mandate like am i gonna appear like a jerk if i and and even though you know there's i mean the president and that's that's a phrase that we can now respect again um said you know basically as you know that we don't need to really really be wearing masks outside as much anymore
Marco:
you know, except in certain circumstances, but for the most part, like in most circumstances, we don't really need to be doing that.
Marco:
But like, it still seems like, I don't know if I, I don't know if I'm comfortable.
Marco:
I'm comfortable that I'm no longer at risk, you know, even though I'm not, I still have one more week before my, my two week notice after my vaccine is up.
Marco:
But I'm also confident that, you know, the risk of outdoor transmission that we, that we now know, especially in a place full of windy, fresh air like here is, is extremely low.
Marco:
But, like, when will I feel comfortable feeling okay being seen not wearing a mask by other people?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That's going to be – that's a tricky thing.
Marco:
And, like – and I wouldn't judge anyone else for their choice now because, you know, now that it's, like, pretty much truly optional for most conditions outside, I'm saying.
Marco:
I don't care if somebody wears it or not anymore.
Marco:
But I wouldn't want to appear like one of those, like, anti-masker –
Marco:
people in general.
Casey:
The problem you're having is your red computer's hat all over again.
Casey:
Because by not putting a mask on, depending on where you are and what you're doing and who you're around, that kind of implies a certain set of politics that I prick
Casey:
You don't want to imply a degree of redness.
Casey:
What do you say?
Casey:
A degree of redness.
Casey:
So, yeah, so I totally understand.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
For me, you know, as I think I might have said on the show and certainly I've said on analog, you know, the math is a little weird for me because, you know, what with the kids being so young,
Casey:
They're not going to be offered a vaccine anytime soon.
Casey:
There was actually rumblings that I saw in the last 24 hours that Pfizer may ask for two through 12 years old in September or something like that.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
Which would be great for my family.
Casey:
But because we have such small kids and because I haven't seen enough evidence that, you know, once you're vaccinated, you really don't like emit the virus directly.
Casey:
enough to worry about it.
Casey:
I think that is what people are guessing, but I haven't seen real good evidence from it.
Casey:
So anyway, because of that, I don't think my world is going to change that much.
Casey:
I perhaps won't be allergic to the indoors, as I like to joke anymore, but I certainly don't plan on loitering indoors.
Casey:
As a silly example, I used to love going to the library to do work.
Casey:
And I don't plan on picking that up again anytime soon.
Casey:
I might go outdoors somewhere to do work, but I don't plan on going indoors to just sit for hours and do work like I used to in the before times.
Casey:
But everyone has their own thresholds, right?
Casey:
And at least what gives me incredible joy, no sarcasm intended, is that
Casey:
At least for the three of us and our families, we are very, very close to being at the point that we get to make these decisions again rather than feeling like those decisions were made for us.
Casey:
So that's super great.
Casey:
And Marco, you said you got yours, what, a week ago Tuesday?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Your second shot?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
So by the time we record next, you will be vaccinated.
Casey:
And John, I know you got your first, but I don't recall you haven't gotten your second yet.
John:
I got my second this morning.
Casey:
Oh, excellent.
Casey:
Hooray!
John:
In the grand tradition of all ATP hosts apparently deciding to get vaccinated on the night we record, here I am.
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
All right, how are you feeling?
John:
I mean, my arm hurts.
John:
My muscles in the back of my neck are a little stiff.
John:
I have a mild headache, but, you know, like...
John:
I can't complain.
John:
It's like nothing, right?
John:
I mean, maybe you'll get worse tonight or something, but so far, it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel like I had it pretty easy.
Marco:
Like, you know, I mean, the hive issue predated the shot.
Marco:
By the way, I fixed the hives.
Marco:
Well, they fixed themselves.
Marco:
I'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
But yeah, my, you know, we had Pfizer here and I basically had, Tiff and I both had the day after we were just very tired.
Marco:
But after that, then it was fine.
Marco:
Yeah, and the hives turned out – so I'll never actually know because it could have been my illegal cold that I mentioned last time because the cold symptoms went away like at the same time that the hives stopped.
Marco:
I ended up having like four or five nights of them.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
Also, the onset and then offset of the hives.
Marco:
What's the corresponding word for when the symptoms go away?
Marco:
Anyway, it corresponded very strongly to when we had Adam's birthday balloons in the house.
Marco:
Now, normally, I don't have issues with latex or anything like that that might be related to balloons, but...
Marco:
These balloons, there were two things about them.
Marco:
Number one, I blew up like half of them.
Marco:
Like Tiff and I sat up one night, blew up the balloons ourselves, and there were probably 50 or 100 balloons in here.
Marco:
There were a lot.
Marco:
And they were really cheap Amazon balloons, and they kind of smelled a little funny.
Marco:
So I'm wondering if there might have been like some weird chemical in or on them that I was reacting to.
Marco:
And the hive started that night that we blew them all up, and then they went away after we popped them all and threw them away.
John:
Oh, that's wild.
John:
As I said when you discussed this earlier, I know you don't want to do this, but you can find the answer.
John:
Just get the balloons again, like for science.
John:
No.
John:
Because now you're just like, maybe it was the balloons, maybe it wasn't.
John:
Oh, they smelled funny.
John:
Okay, fine.
John:
This is knowable.
John:
You can't catch the cold again, but you can get the balloons again.
John:
And then we can know for sure.
John:
Just get one balloon.
John:
Just rub it on your arm.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know if one balloon would do it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Well, then you're just going to have to blow up 50 balloons again.
John:
But just think of how the frontiers of science, personal science that you would be probing.
John:
Because for now, this is going to be a mystery.
John:
It's like, maybe all balloons are a threat to me.
John:
But you can know this answer.
Marco:
But also, we are a balloon family.
Marco:
We have balloons in the house very frequently and often in large numbers.
Marco:
Any birthday, any occasion, there's balloons in our house.
Marco:
I've never had a problem.
Marco:
That's why I don't think it's all latex or something like that.
Marco:
It's probably something that was specific to these balloons that that was a problem.
Marco:
Or maybe just how much that I was blowing them up.
John:
You can get these balloons again.
Marco:
Can I?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
On Amazon stuff, you never know.
Marco:
Can you get the same thing twice?
Marco:
Sometimes.
John:
What about your bell?
John:
Yeah, that's the whole mystery of Amazon.
John:
When you order ostensibly the same product, maybe they're shelved all together and you have no idea which one you're getting.
John:
But if they look the same and they had that same funny smell, then you would know.
John:
And knowing is half the battle.
John:
The other half is getting to the emergency room fast enough if it turns out you're allergic.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
that's why they do those challenges like the doctor's office it's like you should know what you're allergic to but you so you go to the doctor and they give the little pinprick with like a you know three molecules of shrimp or something to find out if you're allergic you know yeah they don't do it when you live on an island with no hospitals on well i know you can bring the balloons to the doctor and say hey doc am i allergic to these
Casey:
So moving right along, we should make a few notes about the store.
Casey:
Wait, what store you ask?
Casey:
Well, guess what?
Casey:
It's the ATP store, which is back.
Casey:
It'll be here through the weekend after this episode comes out and up until the following weekend.
Casey:
So until May 14th, that is when the store closes.
Casey:
To recap, we have all sorts of fun stuff for you this year.
Casey:
We don't have a flamethrower yet.
Casey:
We're working on it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
We do have the new M1 shirt in both colorful and monochrome editions.
Casey:
To reiterate, the colorful one is darned expensive, but I assure you, believe it or not, we're making no money on it because it's just expensive to print on both sides in a million colors.
Casey:
The monochrome one is a little less expensive and also a little less colorful.
Casey:
We also have the ATP Performance shirt, which is a moisture-wicking exercise kind of shirt that
Casey:
The ATP pint glass, which we're going to talk about a little more in a second.
Casey:
And of course, the classic ATP logo shirt and pin.
Casey:
All of these are available at a store near your nearest web browser.
Casey:
Anyway, the ATP pint glass is dishwasher safe because it is engraved or etched.
Casey:
What's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
Is it etched?
Casey:
Etched.
Casey:
Okay, thank you.
Casey:
It is dishwasher safe.
Casey:
So unlike the mugs where it was, you know, paint on the outside of the mugs, this is etched.
Casey:
So it shouldn't be a problem.
Casey:
And also we need to talk a little bit about a little wonkiness that happened, especially in the first day or so of the store.
Casey:
And then some of that wonkiness is actually persisting.
Casey:
So here's the thing.
Casey:
Cotton Bureau does all of our, you know, fulfillment and all that.
Casey:
And they print the shirts for us and they do fulfillment for the glasses and the pins and everything.
Casey:
We love them.
Casey:
They're very reliable, very easy to work with.
Casey:
They're great over there.
Casey:
Uh, the shipping costs, however, might be a little wonky.
Casey:
So COVID has made international shipping in particular a mess.
Casey:
Now, those of you who have ordered from us in the past internationally, I say without hyperbole and without sarcasm, like I know it's been expensive, like really expensive.
Casey:
And I'm genuinely, honestly, sorry for that.
Casey:
Uh, unfortunately there's not a lot we can do about it.
Casey:
We've used other printers in the past that have had, um,
Casey:
like offices or manufacturing plants in europe and it's been a real mess like a real mess and it stinks that these are so expensive to ship i totally get that and if it's too if it's too much money for you or you just don't think it's worth it totally understand you can still throw us money by going to atp.fm join but you don't have to do that either
Casey:
um there's a new shipping program that cotton bureau is using for overseas stuff it is faster and more reliable but hey guess what that means it's more expensive so again i totally understand that it is expensive and it's tough and and and i am genuine we are genuinely sorry about that no just you additionally it's all of us yeah it's just i'm the only one sorry the other two don't care uh no
Marco:
It's all your fault, first of all.
Marco:
The entire world of global shipping and customs and VAT and everything else is all Casey's fault.
Marco:
And he exclusively is very sorry for it.
Casey:
Yep, you got it.
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Casey:
Additionally, there was some wonkiness early on, particularly with the performance tee.
Casey:
I guess some metadata was a little askew within Cotton Bureau's own systems, and so the shipping was way more expensive, particularly with the performance tee, than it was intended to be.
Casey:
If you ordered the performance tee already and you feel like, yeah, my shipping was too much money, well, either that's how much it costs or if you were afflicted by this particular wonkiness, when the sale actually goes through, because remember that that's Kickstarter style, when the sale actually goes through, you will get the correct pricing when your credit card is charged.
Casey:
And then if you are seeing ridiculous shipping even for domestic addresses.
Casey:
So there's a couple of things that could be going on here.
Casey:
First of all, the pint glasses ship priority mail.
Casey:
So you might want to think about putting the pint glasses in a separate order or at least trying and seeing if that makes a difference.
Casey:
And then if you're seeing something wherein the shipping is still bananas, go ahead and give Cotton Bureau a holler.
Casey:
They're really responsive on Twitter or even better.
Casey:
Support at CottonBureau.com.
Casey:
We'll have a link to that in the show notes.
Casey:
They're really, really great.
Casey:
We love Cotton Bureau.
Casey:
Despite what it may sound, we love Cotton Bureau.
Casey:
They've been great to us over the years.
Casey:
So much better than other people we've used.
Casey:
So again, on behalf of all three of us, I apologize for my role in blocking the Suez Canal.
Casey:
and for escalating the cost of international shipping everywhere, but we are all very sorry.
John:
The other thing I'll add is sometimes people try to order and the website tells them, oh, we can't ship it to you because it can't make sense of your address in some way.
John:
Sometimes that's because Cotton Bureau doesn't ship to your country, which is a bummer, but oh well.
John:
But sometimes it's because it does ship, like you live in Canada or something, and it's like, oh, we can't ship to you.
John:
And that's not right.
John:
So you contact Cotton Bureau and say, hey, here's what my actual address is.
John:
What do I have to do?
John:
to make to make it so that this is understood by your system and so most of the time you can get through that so keep drawing and then the other product a bit of follow-up i have is you uh casey ran through all the products and he mentioned the last one the pins which are basically i guess our our version of the home pod where we manufactured them well we manufactured them twice
John:
We manufactured the pins once, and we sold out of all of them.
John:
Because the pins are different.
John:
We have to buy them all up front.
John:
It's not like the print-on-demand shirts.
John:
Some things in Cotton Bureau are stock, and some of them are print-on-demand.
John:
But the pins were like, hey, tell us how much you want to order, pay for them all up front, and then we sell them.
John:
So we did that.
John:
We bought a bunch of pins, we sold them, and we're like, great, let's do that again.
John:
We bought a bunch of pins, and we've been selling that same batch of pins for, what, two and a half years?
Casey:
Three years?
John:
It might even be more than that, yeah.
John:
It's just, we cannot get rid of these pins.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's fine.
John:
Like, it's not a big deal.
John:
They're tiny.
John:
They don't take up a lot of room in the warehouse or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
But I think in this particular sale, we will probably run out of pins.
John:
So if for some reason for the past three years, you've been like, I'd like a pin, but not that much.
John:
If you want one, you should buy one now because the odds of us ordering more of these pins is very low.
John:
yes apparently nobody wants them anymore um and in fact i had to i uh emailed cotton beer and said how many pins do we have because i thought like when that when you know the numbers ticked over i'm like that's all the pins right but then it kept going up i'm like is this like a bottomless pit of pins how many pins are actually left and they told me and then there was like i think we were down to like 10 pins or something like that i forget how many it was but they're like here's because they reserve extras too for like you know if your pin gets damaged they want to replace it or whatever so there is
John:
a tiny amount of extras they reserve but i think it is conceivable that we could run out of pins if we don't run out of pins in the sale next sale the first three people to buy pins are gonna sell it out so if you want a pin buy a pin if not uh good riddance depends
Casey:
wow i like the pins i think it's a cool pin i don't understand but you know anyway this is probably the last you're going to be seeing a pins for a while so at least for a while that's right all right so again atp.fm store don't be that person tweeting me on the day after the sale ends sometimes literally minutes after the sale ends of course a lot of people queue it up now because i make such a big deal out of it but then there's you there's that person that you can tell
Casey:
They ain't messing around.
Casey:
They genuinely missed it.
Casey:
So if you're driving, pull over.
Casey:
If you're walking, pull to the side.
Casey:
Do what you need to do.
Casey:
ATP.FM slash store or alternatively ATP.FM slash join or just tell someone you love about how much you love the show.
Casey:
That works, too.
Casey:
Moving right along, my fans.
Casey:
I had talked.
Casey:
This is not, you know, the people.
Casey:
This is the spinning kind of fan.
Casey:
last week we talked about these RF controlled fans that I have and I didn't know how to make them work with HomeKit I don't recall where I was in the journey specifically with hacks for ways to fix this but
Casey:
A lot of people recommended Bond, and I'll find a link and put it in the show notes.
Casey:
James Bond?
Casey:
James Bond.
Casey:
James Bond.
Casey:
Shaken, not stirred.
Casey:
Bond Home or something like that, which is a box that basically will interface with either RF or IR.
Casey:
So you could, say, control a TV or something like that.
Casey:
And you can get a HomeBridge plug-in that works with that.
Casey:
I do plan to try that if...
Casey:
My new alternative plan doesn't work.
Casey:
And so we had to take the fans down that were in the screened in porch for reasons that are mostly uninteresting.
Casey:
But we had to take them down for a little bit.
Casey:
And I noticed that there is the RF controller that's in the wall, you know, where any standard light switch or fan switch would be.
Casey:
And then there's an RF like receiver controller.
Casey:
not literally in the fan, but like, you know, sitting where the fan is mounted.
Casey:
And basically the wires go from the wall unit to the receiver and then from the receiver to the fan.
Casey:
Well, as it turns out, I'm almost positive that the wires within the wall, which I haven't opened up yet, or, you know, behind the plate, I mean, those wires, I believe, match the wires going into the fan.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
My theory and my hope is that if I just take out this RF box, which is, you know, that's by design, like it's not permanently attached or anything like that.
Casey:
In fact, it comes detached.
Casey:
If I take away that RF box and then put in my Lutron Caseta fan switches, I think...
Casey:
I think that might work.
Casey:
So that's what I'm going to try.
Casey:
I probably won't be able to for another week, maybe two, for, again, uninteresting reasons.
Casey:
But that's the theory.
Casey:
And if that doesn't work, I'm going to try this Bond Home.
Casey:
I forget, James Bond, whatever it's called.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Speaking of spending money, ATP purchases.
Casey:
So we talked about AirTags and we're going to talk a little more about that later.
Casey:
I ordered my Apple TV and after all my kvetching, I actually got the big boy.
Casey:
I got the 64 gig and mostly because people said, well, what about those screensavers?
Casey:
And I'm a sucker for the screensaver.
Casey:
So I did get the big boy and it will be delivered at the end of the month.
Casey:
And oh man, am I excited for it?
Casey:
I am super stoked.
Casey:
Marco, I suspect you did not buy any TVs, but did you buy any remotes?
Marco:
I'm sad to say that I bought both.
Casey:
You bought a TV too?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, you sucker.
Casey:
You're as bad as I am.
Marco:
And I even bought the big one for the exact same damn reason.
John:
Wow.
John:
I infected both of you with this virus.
John:
When else can you double the storage of an Apple product for $20?
John:
You did.
John:
As I said, you can't afford not to buy the big one.
Ugh.
Marco:
yeah i did so so yeah so my plan was like you know but right now in in my house i have a 4k on the upstairs tv and i have the old hd model on the downstairs tv both tvs are actually 4k tvs so i got one new apple tv i will demo the previous apple tv 4k to the other tv that had the hd model previously and
Marco:
So I'm basically moving it down the line.
Marco:
And the new one, I did indeed get the stupid 64 gig for $20 or more because the stupid screensavers are actually one of my favorite things about the Apple TV.
Marco:
They really are.
Marco:
And if that increases the space to cash screensavers and therefore maybe includes more of them in my regular rotation than I otherwise would have,
John:
that alone is worth it to me but it doesn't i mean i mean we were joking about this yesterday but we did joke like we all have gigabit connections to our house like the extra storage space is not i'm gonna say right now is not going to let you access more screensavers it's not going to increase things in the rotation they just they can just stream you have a gigabit connection but you do have more space so there's that yeah so just in case it ever becomes useful yeah stupid 20 bucks all right fine
Marco:
so anyway and i also i i got a additional remote of the new remote type for the downstairs tv so even though i'm not i'm not giving it the new model i'm gonna have that good remote on both both tvs uh allegedly i hope it's actually good i mean that's that's one thing like none of us have actually tried it yet like no one's reviewed the remote yet we don't actually know if it actually is good can it can it be worse though really like it's hard really really hard to make it worse
John:
that's fair like there are certain aspects of it that we know immediately are better hey it's not symmetrical it's easier to know which way is up without looking at it or with looking at it for that matter and it is thicker and it has a curved bottom and the entire top of it is in a touch surface and these are the type of things that are certainly improvements uh now above and beyond that maybe it's also has its own problems or whatever you're right that we don't know but i think it's a pretty safe bet that if you really really hate the current remote this one is almost certainly going to be somewhat of an upgrade yeah
Marco:
Now, I did also buy AirTags.
Marco:
Excuse me.
Marco:
I bought a four-pack of AirTag.
Marco:
That is apparently how it is labeled.
Marco:
They are interesting.
Marco:
So I bought them, and I had this four-pack.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Let me open this up, activate the tag.
Marco:
and uh you know i thought okay i'll put one in my backpack maybe that sounds good but the main thing i wanted to put it on uh were our primary bikes in the family and the wagon that we bring to and from the boat for like freight hauling because these are things that we will often leave unattended in town for a while and unlocked to things and so i figured it could be you know a measure of kind of casual theft prevention or or whatever um
Marco:
and sometimes it's nice to know like you know did did my kid ride his bike you know from the playground to a nearby friend's house that way i can locate my kid if he doesn't if he doesn't have his apple watch on so i figured you know we should all have them on our bikes and that's three bikes and one wagon perfect okay so i get my air tag four pack and great these nice little round beautiful little objects and
Marco:
how do I attach these to anything?
John:
Have you considered a $450 piece of leather?
Marco:
The AirTags are yet another wonderful example of Apple's design failure, actually, of designing an object to be beautiful at the significant expense of actual usability.
Marco:
Because what you need with an AirTag
Marco:
and and this might be intentional you need to attach this to something in almost every case like i i could tuck one into a pocket in my backpack without modifying anything okay great but literally anything else i would use it for i need to attach it somehow now you know i could just use a roll of electrical tape that's that's one option and
Marco:
That doesn't work for certain things like, you know, we had friends ask like, you know, could I put one on my dog collar in case my dog gets lost or something like that?
Marco:
Well, no, you can't actually unless you go buy something else.
Marco:
And this is where they get you.
Marco:
So, if you'll notice, if you go to Apple's site, or, you know, we'll stick with Apple for now, we'll cover Amazon in a second, but, like, you go to Apple's site, great, you can buy the AirTag for $25 to $30, but...
Marco:
you're going to need something else with almost every single AirTag you buy.
Marco:
And the options that Apple sells to hold your AirTag are all, A, pretty bulky, and B, they're all like $15 and up.
Marco:
A lot of them are closer to $20, $30, $40.
Marco:
So it seems like Apple designed these in order to sell more accessories besides just them.
Marco:
Like, I think this is just like accessory revenue generation here.
Marco:
And if they would have designed it with a simple key ring hole in on one side, which is how like tile and everything else, those are all designed that way.
Marco:
Then many of us could just stick a cheap hardware store, you know, key ring thing through it and attach it to lots of different things.
Marco:
Or if we wanted to use some other kind of silicone holder, we still could.
Marco:
But because they designed them the way they did, prioritizing basically visual purity and possibly in an effort to increase accessory sales, both of which I think are likely contributors to this design, they end up being kind of useless if you just get the AirTags.
Marco:
Now, you can go to – lots of people have announced things like there's, of course, like a Belkin kit that Apple sells that's basically like a key ring attached to a big plastic case that goes around the AirTag.
Marco:
Okay, that's nice.
Marco:
You know, if you're putting it like on a big dog's collar, that's probably the way to go, something like that.
Marco:
Our friends over at – I think it was Elevation Lab announced a very similar kind of thing.
Marco:
None of these things are shipping until like June, but –
Marco:
So there's products like that.
Marco:
You can go on Amazon now and there's a million cheap no-name things that are $8 to $12, most of which appear that no one has actually gotten them and used them yet because they don't seem to have legitimate reviews because it just hasn't been enough time.
Marco:
AirTags just shipped a few days ago to the first buyers.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I'm kind of like, I'm kind of lukewarm on this.
Marco:
Like, okay, this is great.
Marco:
This will be fun if I, or this will be useful if I ever need it.
Marco:
But I can't imagine like a, a, a more like obtuse design than what they went with because you just can't attach to anything.
Marco:
Like it's,
Marco:
It's like a, you know, a UFO shaped disc with curved edges.
Marco:
You can't strap it down like with a cable tie, like with Velcro.
Marco:
You can't because it just slides out.
Marco:
You obviously can't put a ring around it.
Marco:
You can't like mount it into or onto anything very securely because it'll just slip out because of its shape.
Marco:
And so they literally did nothing to accommodate the idea to actually attach this to something.
Marco:
So it's like the very first iPad, the first generation iPad.
Marco:
And the only case that you could get for it was Apple's awful, that big black rubbery one that kind of just clamped around it on all sides because the original iPad made no accommodation for cases.
Marco:
And that's one of the things they changed with the iPad too.
Marco:
They added the magnetic mounts on the side so you could have the smart case.
Marco:
Well, this has like no affordances for attachment whatsoever.
Marco:
So you just you're going to end up having all these like big, expensive, you know, little custom mount things and and, you know, key ring straps and all these little things.
Marco:
And Apple sells a bunch of them.
Marco:
And I'm sure I'm sure they will.
Marco:
But like then the result is you put this thing if you want to put this on a key chain or on a dog collar or whatever it is.
Marco:
It's just going to be – not only is it going to be bulkier and more expensive, but it's just like it's less elegant.
Marco:
So you have this larger object than it could have been if it was just a key ring.
Marco:
The real price of it is going to be more like $50 each depending on how you mount it and what products are actually available and good.
Marco:
And it just – it kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth that this is kind of – it's one of those things like it looks good in pictures.
Marco:
But it's actually, I think, a bad design.
John:
I think people will yell at us if we don't bring this up because we haven't mentioned the umpteen other times that it'll come up.
John:
But people keep thinking that the AirPods are an example of my naked robotic core concept that we talked about with the iPhone.
John:
And to review the idea behind that with the iPhone is make the iPhone as small as possible so that you give the consumer the most options
John:
in terms of how they want to deal with it if they want the smallest phone possible then they've got it but if they want to put a case on it you've made the inside part as small as possible so that when you do put a case on it doesn't get that much bigger and so you might think that given what you just said about the air tags oh they're the same thing we don't even give you any case we give you the naked robotic core and you have to dress it up if
John:
these accessories like we don't do it you know it's not there's no holes in it it's not supposed to be attached it is literally the naked robotic core and you have to wrap it in something or you could just have it be the way it is and loosen your bag the problem with that and the reason i think the air tags are not a good example of naked robotic core is that as far as i can tell from seeing the teardowns i don't have these in person because i didn't buy any air tags but as far as i've seen from like the ifixit teardowns and stuff air tags are not
John:
as small as they can possibly be they're much more like sort of before the iphone went naked robotic or like the iphone 3g or iphone 3gs any they're both the same shape where there's a curve to the plastic so there's basically airspace inside it so that it can look like uh you know like i don't know what it's like what candy looks like it's like a lozenge kind of like it has a curve to it like a spree a very big spree
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I don't know that candy, but I'll take your word for it.
John:
But but like if this was going to be a naked robotic core, it would not that it would look more like tile, but tile.
John:
And my impression is they tend to pull in the edges as tight as they can.
John:
So there's no unnecessary curves or bulges for the sake of aesthetics or a particular design principle.
John:
you know, it's much more like the iPhone 4, let's say, where the outsides are sucked, or the last good-looking Mazda RX-7, where the outsides are sucked in as tightly as they can possibly be to the insides to give you maximum space to adorn it if that's what you want to do.
John:
If you want it to be as small as possible, hey, we've sucked it all in for you, here's your naked robotic core, but if you want to put something in it, we've really compacted the core as much as we can so that when you do put a case on it, it doesn't get too bulky.
John:
And I don't think that's what they've done with this, as far as I can tell.
John:
I may be wrong.
John:
Maybe there's not as much airspace in there as I think.
John:
But every time I see the curves and the things you were talking about that make it essentially hard to even, let's say, electrical tape something because there's no flat side, really.
John:
Although you can tell me, is there is one side of it kind of flat or no?
Marco:
No, the whole thing is bulbous.
Marco:
It's all rounded.
Marco:
It's all basically convex.
John:
Yeah, all right.
John:
So that's what I'm saying.
John:
I think this is not an ideal implementation of the naked robotic core.
John:
It has some aspects of it in that it's clear that they want you to put accessories on it or whatever, but yeah.
John:
And so people are drilling holes in them, which is a thing that you can do, but obviously there goes your waterproofing because you just drilled a hole for the water to get in, and I wouldn't trust that hole to stand up over stress because...
John:
you know it's not it's not a designed and molded and whole you've just basically you know ruptured the structural integrity of the airpod and now you're going to have like stress cracks and everything so i don't recommend that um it makes me think though of all the things that uh that apple made that don't actually have any kind of convenient attach point i was thinking of when they made a series of ipod touches that had the little pop out uh
John:
anchor point for a strap.
John:
Maybe you don't remember that because you weren't big into the iPod Touch, but I was getting iPod Touches, and they had... It was like a... It was flush, but if you pressed it in, it would go in a little bit and then pop out, and it was like a grommet.
John:
It was basically just like a...
John:
i don't know how to describe it like a cylinder with with a big disc on top of it and it would pop up and you would loop a strap around that right even something like that as sort of an anchor point not necessarily just oh tile has a hole in theirs therefore apple should have a hole in theirs apple could have done something more aptly to give an attachment point that is more minimal than what they have so i feel your pain in attaching things lots of people are posting twitter threads of like
John:
uh if you buy the expensive apple case here's where it falls down because the key ring it comes with is one of those flat key rings you know like the there's lots of different ways you can do key rings but one way you can do it is to have kind of like a a flattened snake that goes around in a ring and it makes it wide and wider in one dimension than it is in the other and lots of keys and other things don't fit around that or only fit around it one way but they can't rotate you know what i mean right and so it makes for absurd scenarios and also if you look at the apple cases
John:
If you're looking at the AirTag head-on, you'd be looking at the ring head-on as well.
John:
So you'd see the AirTag and Apple logo, and you'd see the key ring, so you could look straight through the hole.
John:
But a lot of keys go onto key rings the other way, where the key is rotated sideways, so you're looking at the side of the key and then looking through the key ring hole.
John:
I'm not describing this well, but like...
John:
look at your ring of keys if you just hold your finger with the ring and let the keys dangle usually the keys aren't facing you they are side sideways to you but the air tag is exactly the opposite so it doesn't even like sort of lay flat next to your other keys because it insists on being uh you know in the same plane as the key ring and it's the way it attaches with that big strap doesn't let it twist at all it's just really not particularly well thought out or particularly compact and it's also not a very good naked robotic core
John:
So maybe they'll revise it.
John:
Maybe the next one will be smaller.
John:
You know, they have some time to iterate on this.
John:
It definitely looks very much like the ideal use case is putting in a pocket of a backpack because then you don't need anything else.
John:
You don't care that it's a little bit bulky and it works fine.
John:
and you mentioned people putting it on their pets i would encourage people to consider a different option if they really want something they can find their pets because in my experience when pets run away they don't run away to an area where people have iphones they run into the woods and there's no one with iphones in there and it's way out of u1 range so if you're trying to oh my dog is lost hey i'll find it with the find my network no you won't unless it ran into a mall like it's like
John:
Where is your dog running?
John:
Does your dog just run into crowds full of people with phones?
John:
No, they always run off into the woods.
John:
They're chasing a bird.
John:
They're like, you have no idea where they are.
John:
It's not the ideal thing.
John:
Even Apple says AirTag is meant to track things, not people or pets.
John:
If you want to track your pet, because I have a pet that is a...
John:
a flight risk let's say because uh she really loves uh birds and squirrels and other things and has no idea that uh anything else exists when she sees them a strong prey drive they call it uh anyway uh there's the company i use is a whistle.com they're not a sponsor um but i've used their dog gps products for a long time um the first revision was a little bit uh the battery life wasn't that great but the second one the battery life is amazing
John:
It's kind of big and bulky.
John:
It's way bigger than an AirTag, but the battery lasts weeks, and it is literal GPS.
John:
So no matter where your dog goes, it sends a signal up to wherever.
John:
You can find your dog basically anywhere.
John:
It's not super-duper great real-time tracking, but you don't have to rely on your dog running near people with iPhones, which is a big plus.
Casey:
To come back around, John, I don't think you told us if you bought any Apple TVs or remotes.
John:
I got a new Apple TV.
John:
Yes, of course, the big one for to replace my my existing Apple TV 4K downstairs.
John:
And the existing Apple TV 4K will bump up to the bedroom, kicking out our old Apple TV HD.
John:
And then I got a spare remote so I don't have to use that stupid Siri remote ever again.
John:
So I got exactly the same stuff as Marco and I'm basically following the same plan.
Casey:
Good deal.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We need to talk about FileVault performance.
Casey:
And some people had pointed out that the SSD in computers that have the Apple T2 security chip is encrypted.
Casey:
So you can turn on FileVault so that your Mac requires a password to decrypt your data.
Casey:
But it's going to be encrypted no matter what.
John:
Yeah, we mentioned that in the last show, but it's just good.
John:
We'll link to the tech support article.
John:
Rather than just going by what you've heard in our reckons last time, oh, I think there's things with T2 or the M1 do this or whatever, here's an Apple support document that spells it out.
John:
iPhones and iOS devices have been encrypted
John:
Maybe since the beginning, but certainly for many many many years, right?
John:
And so the M1 Macs and the Macs based on the ARM chips and the you know iPhone-ish architecture of course do the same thing but even before that once the Macs got the T2 chip they would basically just encrypt everything by default now
John:
It being encrypted on the SSD is one thing.
John:
And you may be thinking, well, then what does turning FileVault on and off do?
John:
And as this article says, what it does is it means that to decrypt it, now you have to enter a password for one of your user accounts to decrypt it.
John:
Whereas before, the decryption keys presumably were in the secure enclave and it didn't demand anything of you, right?
John:
You could just...
John:
you know it was it was encrypted but you it didn't say hey before i can even boot please enter your password it would just pull its own password out of the secure enclave and and go to town so uh this was with respect to you know worrying about performance you have no choice if you have a t2 or an m1 mac whatever the performance hit is or isn't and i think there is basically none because it's all just done transparently and hardware at uh
John:
at full speed, you're paying that price no matter what.
John:
So your only choice is, hey, do I want it to require me to enter one of my passwords before it will decrypt?
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
Then related, Michael Bertel wrote that, I have two Mac minis in remote locations running headless.
Casey:
I access them via VNC over an SSH tunnel.
Casey:
In this setup, I need to have FileVault disabled.
Casey:
If I perform an OS update remotely, that requires a restart, and FileVault requires the input of a password before I'm able to connect via VNC.
Casey:
Just something to consider if you ever plan on servicing a Mac remotely without access to a physical keyboard.
John:
a bunch of people brought this in i have this vague notion that there is some way around this somehow but i don't actually know what it is but it seems like a lot of people have run into this problem that yeah if you do make it require your password and then you reboot and you're not there to enter your password at the point that it demands your password it's like it needs it to get to the disk so it can boot so if you're thinking i'm just going to vnc in and enter my password no you're not because the thing isn't even booted yet um like i said i think there might be some workarounds for this somehow but just keep it in mind if you
Casey:
uh if you don't know the workarounds like i don't and you enable file vault and you want to remotely control your computer through a reboot you may have a problem so now we turn into please apple please fix my particular bug corner and this time i'm not the winner john what's going on with your mac buddy
John:
I don't think that – I'm not really asking them to – I mean they should fix it if it's a thing.
John:
But this is – I just thought I'd bring this up because it's interesting.
John:
It's one of the aspects of owning a computer that lots of people don't own that people maybe don't think about.
John:
And I've always had these really weird computers that are –
John:
you know expensive and obscure that most people don't buy and probably shouldn't buy and so i have experience with this right so uh recently mac os 11.3 came out and as soon as i did the update i started experiencing a bug on my mac right and the bug was uh that the display would not wake from sleep
John:
Right.
John:
And it's not that the computer wouldn't wake from sleep.
John:
The display wouldn't.
John:
So, you know, I have my things.
John:
The energy saver set up is like screen saver goes on after five minutes.
John:
And then after 15 minutes, the display goes to sleep.
John:
And so when the display goes to sleep, you are seeing your screen saver.
John:
Then all of a sudden the display turns black.
John:
Right.
John:
The way it's supposed to work is you come up to your computer and you whack the space bar, click the mouse button or something.
John:
And the display springs back to life, right?
John:
During this time, the computer hasn't yet fallen asleep because the computer sleep timer is different and much longer.
John:
And you can confirm this, you know, by just going to another Mac and SSH-ing in and say, yep, here I am.
John:
I'm on this Mac.
John:
The Mac is totally awake.
John:
It's running.
John:
I'm SSH-ing to it.
John:
I can do stuff.
John:
But no matter what I do, the display won't wake.
John:
I can type as much as I want on the keyboard.
John:
I can click the mouse button.
John:
I can tap the power button on the computer.
John:
The display just stays asleep.
John:
And so when something like this happens, and it started happening immediately after 11.3, and it's happened multiple times since, so I'm pretty sure it's the 11.3 update.
John:
You think, oh, this is a bug.
John:
And you might be thinking, well, this happened so immediately, and so many people's Macs go to sleep.
John:
Surely this has been reported a thousand times already, and this will be fixed quickly.
John:
But then you remember...
John:
Nobody, to a first approximation, has my computer set up.
John:
Who has a Mac Pro with a Pro Display XDR?
John:
Probably nobody is reporting this.
John:
In fact, for all I know, the other eight people in the world who have a Mac Pro and a Pro Display XDR have their display set to never sleep because it's some sort of professional lab situation where it's just always being used or something.
John:
Or who knows, right?
John:
But I did my duty as a good, you know, Apple reporter and I file the feedback.
John:
And what I did was like one of the times that it happened, I SSH to the computer from elsewhere and I ran a cyst diagnosed and I ran a spin dump and I saved the files and then I made a feedback.
John:
Number will be in the show notes, FB 909 5615.
John:
And I said, here's what's happening.
John:
I have no idea how to reproduce it.
John:
It doesn't happen every single time, but it's happened a bunch of times.
John:
I'm pretty sure it's 11.3.
John:
Here's a spin dump.
John:
Here's a cyst diagnosed.
John:
Fingers crossed.
John:
uh you know all this is just to say if you dream of having let's say an exotic car or a fancy computer be aware that when you have problems a nobody cares and b you and only like five other people in the world have even a chance of having that problem so if you buy one of the new iMacs and something like this comes out uh thousands of other people are going to report it and it will probably get fixed but all i can do is just hope that it somehow magically goes away in a future update
John:
I have updated to 11.3.1 and haven't seen it happen since, but I updated like two hours ago.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Anyway, that's it.
Casey:
Fun times.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There's been an update with regard to the new 13-inch iPad and the old Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
uh jason snell had speculated on upgrade this uh this week or last that the new ipad pro would probably fit in the old magic keyboard case it might just be a bit too snug by apple standards and turns out that was that he was right and yes you can use the new 12.9 inch ipad pro in the old magic keyboard it's just that the tolerances are a little tight it's not going to be flawless and apple isn't keen on that but it will work
John:
It's like when you try to put on your skinny jeans after a long winter fattening up.
John:
You can pretty much get them on and snap them, but you can kind of tell it's not fitting the way it's supposed to.
Casey:
You know about this, John?
Casey:
Is this something you have experience with?
John:
I do.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
How skinny are your jeans?
John:
Yeah, just wait.
John:
What is it?
John:
After a certain age, you say you gain a pound a year for the rest of your life?
John:
Let me introduce you to the world of stretch jeans.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't have any of those yet.
Marco:
Oh, you're missing out.
John:
I mean, not that I wear jeans anymore anyway.
John:
I just wear sweatpants all the time, so it's not really an issue.
Marco:
I've been fully converted to stretch jeans.
Marco:
I'll tell you what, that's not a sponsor, but like the Banner Republic Traveler line.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So good.
John:
Oh, my word.
John:
The middle aged men podcast.
Marco:
Get some stretch jeans.
Marco:
I'm telling you, it's you feel like you're getting away with something because like they look normal.
Marco:
They look totally normal.
Marco:
And you're like, I can't believe how incredibly comfortable this is.
Marco:
And like because they feel almost like sweatpants, but with much more functional pockets because you don't have like the phone sliding out problem that you do with sweatpants.
Marco:
And you can go outside and like go out places and stuff and you look normal.
Casey:
Speaking of Jason Snell, and speaking of being a middle-aged man, if you're interested in the Tesla Model 3, then Snell borrowed one.
Casey:
And I thought it was worth, if you're willing and interested, listening to this review that Jason did on Upgrade Plus, which is there for pay-only after shows.
Casey:
So you will have to be a member to hear it.
Casey:
But on episode 351, Jason had recounted a trip from San Francisco to Arizona, I think.
Casey:
in a Model 3.
Casey:
And yeah, it was really, really interesting to hear someone who is not that into cars, but very into technology talk about it.
Casey:
One of the most striking things that he said was that he felt like he was more aware of his speed in terms of like miles per hour in the Tesla, the Model 3, with only the center-mounted display, no gauge cluster of any sort, than he is in his old traditional minivan.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I thought that was fascinating.
Casey:
He was saying that because on the minivan you have to look at where the needle is and find what the nearest number is and figure out exactly where in between the two nearest numbers are to get your exact miles per hour, that it was more effort for him to figure out his speed in the minivan than just looking at this screen that's a little bit out of your direct line of sight and looking in the corner to see the numeral.
Casey:
I've driven a Model 3, and I did not personally get this experience, but I also only have driven Model 3s for like 10, 15 miles at a time, not 2,000 or whatever it was that he did.
Casey:
So if you're a member of Upgrade Plus or whatever they call their membership, I definitely suggest you try out or take a listen to episode 351 and the after show from that.
John:
Sounds like it just wants a digital Speedo.
John:
I mean, I remember those coming out when I was a kid on like Cadillacs and stuff like, yeah, if you want to read a digital watch instead of an analog one, we can put that number in front of you and it'll be much bigger than it is on the corner of the Model 3 screen.
John:
But it took me a second to realize what a digital Speedo meant.
Marco:
I got it.
Casey:
I also thought it was fascinating.
Casey:
He was saying that his wife, Lauren, wears reading glasses, and apparently there is no, or as far as he knew, there was no affordance for increasing the size of the font in any of the display stuff on the Tesla, which was not that surprising, but also deeply disappointing.
Marco:
Yeah, they actually did a software update last fall, I think it was, where they made the font size way too small.
Marco:
And it was just like one day I went to my car and the PRND indicator, a bunch of other stuff was just really tiny.
Marco:
It seemed like they had designed the UI for the Model 3 and just kind of shoved it into the S screen, but it was really bad.
Marco:
And they had to revert that, I mean, a couple of weeks later maybe, but it kind of gave me a bad taste in my mouth.
Marco:
Like, wow, Tesla can at any time make my car significantly worse if they want to or if they accidentally do.
Marco:
And there's not really anything I can do about that.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Have you ever browsed in incognito mode?
Marco:
It's probably not as incognito as you think.
Marco:
And why would it be?
Marco:
Incognito mode, like the Chrome browser itself, is a Google product, and Google has made its fortune by tracking your movements online.
Marco:
There's even a $5 billion class action lawsuit against them in California where it's accused of secretly collecting user data.
Marco:
Google's defense was, quote, incognito does not mean invisible.
Marco:
So how do you actually make yourself as invisible as possible online?
Marco:
ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Because it turns out that even in incognito mode, your online activity still gets tracked, and data brokers still get to buy and sell your data just using your IP address.
Marco:
Data harvesters use your IP to uniquely identify you and your location.
Marco:
But with ExpressVPN, your connection gets rerouted through their encrypted server, and your IP address is masked.
Marco:
ExpressVPN's IP address is what they see, not yours.
Marco:
Every time you connect to ExpressVPN, you get a random IP address shared by many other ExpressVPN customers.
Marco:
That makes it harder for third parties to identify you or harvest your data.
Marco:
And ExpressVPN is super easy to use.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Okay, so I think it was right before we released or really recorded last episode, there was quite the brouhaha about Basecamp.
Casey:
And, oh man, there's so much here, and I'm going to try to figure out a way to summarize it very quickly, but to establish a little bit of, like...
Casey:
basic foundation.
Casey:
First of all, Basecamp has sponsored in the past.
Casey:
They haven't sponsored terribly recently, and they are not currently booked to sponsor in the future.
Casey:
And they definitely have sponsored in the past.
Casey:
But Basecamp is the company behind, well, Basecamp software, as well as Hey, the new-ish email service.
Casey:
And about a week ago, or maybe a little more, I think it was Jason Fried wrote a post on their kind of blogging platform that's powered off of Hay, saying that there's going to be a new company's policy, Jason Fried being their CEO, there's a new company's policy saying that there will be no more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account.
Casey:
It's probably worth noting here that that is not the original verbiage, but that's where it got changed to.
Casey:
And a lot of people got really up in arms about this, which is somewhat interesting because Basecamp is not a big company.
Casey:
It was, only about 60 people.
Casey:
But, you know, the internet needed a main character, and Basecamp and Jason Fried and David Hennemeyer Hansen, they became the main characters for last week.
Casey:
And
Casey:
A lot of people got really upset, and it seemed like there was more to this than meets the eye.
Casey:
And there is so much more to this than I think we can reasonably cover or even reasonably summarize during the course of the show.
Casey:
But it made all of us...
Casey:
kind of wonder what are the bigger implications about what went on and to build a little more on what about what went on you know a lot of people got really upset about this oh no more politics at work and and i think a lot of the employees at base camp said well hold on that's not really fair and then uh it came to light that a lot of the genesis from this of this was from a list that had been started many many years back about funny sounding names of clients of theirs
Casey:
And it's not terribly clear how much of that was something like Seymour Butts or how much of that was something that was kind of racially motivated.
Casey:
But a lot of people at Basecamp got really uncomfortable about it.
Casey:
This at the same time is while they're doing a, what is it, diversity, equality, what's DEI?
Casey:
I'm drawing a blank now.
John:
Diversity, equity, inclusion?
John:
There you go.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
A third of the company was in a DEI committee trying to make things better.
Casey:
As this is all going on, and I think that might have been the genesis of discovering this particular list,
Casey:
and the other list was brought to the attention of jason and david and you know it's hard to say what exactly happened but basically they kind of shrugged it off at first and that just escalated things even more and i don't know i really really strongly encourage you if you have the time and the willingness to read a little bit to read the two pieces by casey newton i believe both of them were at the verge we'll put them in the show notes and
Casey:
It's also worth reading the actual stuff that David and Jason said on their various, I guess, kind of sort of blogs.
Casey:
There's so much here, and I'm going to give you two a chance to add any other relevant summary if you'd like.
Casey:
But truly, you're hearing me, the chief summarizer in chief, doing at best a passable job of summarizing this.
Casey:
And I am deliberately leaving out a lot because we would be here for an hour if I don't.
Casey:
So that's kind of where things started.
Casey:
And again, please read the other Casey's articles and feel free to pause the show now to do so.
Casey:
But like I was saying earlier, it really makes people wonder, what is the role of politics in the workforce?
Casey:
What is the role of executives with regard to setting...
Casey:
uh rules and culture was this right was this wrong was it that their their edict of no politics in the workplace was right but the way they handled it was wrong who really knows and and we're certainly going to talk about it here in a second but what we do know is by the end of last week or perhaps the beginning of this week you know base camp had said in a very base campy way look
Casey:
If you want to leave Basecamp, if you're an employee and you would like to leave, we'll give you something to the order of six months severance and no questions asked.
Casey:
You can walk.
Casey:
We'll give you six months pay and we'll do what we can to help you land another job, which is cool.
Casey:
And supposedly about a third of the company did that.
Casey:
They walked away, including from what I understand, the entire iOS team, for example.
Casey:
So there's a lot here.
Marco:
uh i don't know who which of you would like to start maybe marco are there any other points that that i'm skipping that are salient with regard to the summary and then feel free to dig in if not honestly i i have not followed the story that closely i had you know i had a bunch of like stuff happening in real life nothing bad just a very busy couple of weeks and so i missed most of this i have read some kind of like the summary articles but
Marco:
And it's hard for me to speak about this because not only is it a little uncomfortable because I don't want to offend people or say the wrong thing or say something that I don't mean just like out of my clumsiness with using the language and speaking that I'm not particularly solid at.
Marco:
So there's all that factoring in here.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
On the basic question of whether a political speech at work should be allowed –
Marco:
And again, with the massive disclaimer that I've never managed people, I should never manage people, and I don't know what it's like to manage people.
Marco:
But with that all said, I think the idea that you shouldn't allow, quote, political speech in a workplace, however you define that, which is its own massive can of worms, but the idea that you shouldn't allow that...
Marco:
only makes sense in a perfect world that is not our world that we live in.
Marco:
The idea that you would not allow, quote, political speech presumes a lot about the equality of the world you're in, whether anybody is oppressed or
Marco:
There's so many presumptions of privilege and of equality in that kind of point of view.
Marco:
In reality, the world is messier than that.
Marco:
And in reality, you have to talk politics sometimes because the world is not right.
Marco:
Not talking about it really just enables the status quo to continue.
Marco:
And so the status quo has to be really damn good for everybody for that to make sense.
Marco:
And that's never really the case anywhere in the world ever.
Marco:
So I think it's one of those ideas that...
Marco:
A lot of tech people have really simplistic, systematic views of the world, of like, here's how things should work, because this is how they work logically in my head and in my computer programs.
Marco:
And the world is messier than that.
Marco:
The world is way messier than that.
Marco:
And I don't think we're ever going to be at a point where equality is so great and widespread and universal that...
Marco:
we will be able to have the privilege to say we don't need to talk about politics in the workplace.
Marco:
That's not reality.
Marco:
That will never happen.
Marco:
And as long as the world has any inequality whatsoever, the idea of trying to limit speech in a workplace to not include, quote, politics, again, whatever that means, I think it's a fantasy.
Marco:
And the real world is not like that.
Marco:
And by enabling
Marco:
or rather by forcing silence on certain topics as a policy, what you really do is enable the current ruling class, whatever that is, and you significantly disadvantage any kind of marginalized group or any kind of marginalized cause.
Marco:
And again, it's never going to work.
Marco:
That's never going to be a right and just and justified outcome.
Marco:
I don't think – I mean I don't know the people who run this company.
Marco:
I have no idea what their motivations are or aren't.
Marco:
But I don't believe that these are like fundamentally evil people.
Marco:
I don't – again, maybe I haven't read up on it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think they are.
Marco:
I think this was just a really badly made decision and a series of very badly handled problems from what I've read.
Marco:
But again, that's very little.
Marco:
So I'll let John talk about the details much better than I could and the issue much better than I could.
Marco:
But yeah, my point of view on this basically is, again, from my very limited reading of it, that the whole idea of politics at work, of trying to pretend like you can just not talk about that and everything will be fine, that's a fantasy.
John:
some of these things blow up on twitter like i mean we we're all kind of uh probably have some uh form of trauma from the past four years at least in the u.s anyway but uh in you know for these for the twitter dramas that are essentially lower stakes like this is one small tech company it looms large in our particular nerd world but i bet most people have never heard of it um
John:
When there's lower stakes like that and you're more distant from it, maybe your inclination is like, oh, then I don't have to pay attention to it.
John:
It's not a big deal, like whatever.
John:
But I think it's useful when something blows up like this that you do have distance from that is not really about you.
John:
It's not really about anyone, you know, and it's not really about anything of consequence.
John:
It's just, you know, one little company.
John:
there's always something in every one of these controversies there's always something to be learned and the more you're able to to look at it from a distance the more you're able to incorporate that new knowledge into yourself without any kind of like personal thread or identity thread or whatever right because i bet most people listen to this don't have any particular stake in base camp and it's you know like i said in the grand scheme of things it's not facebook or apple it's a 60 person company or was a 60 person company
John:
Right.
John:
And so that's the first thing I'll say about this is take the opportunity if you are a person who follows Twitter or follows any kind of tech news that when some of these things happen and when it seems like there's a lot of like strife and drama about some decision.
John:
take that opportunity to see, is there anything I, as a basically detached observer can learn from what has happened here?
John:
And there almost always is.
John:
Sometimes it's multiple things learn from different angles.
John:
Like, you know, it depends on the controversy, but sometimes in a controversy, especially when it's like super low stakes where people like arguing about superheroes or something, it's like, who cares?
John:
Um,
John:
You can put yourself in the position of all sides of the debate and say, okay, well, if I was in this position, here's what I would have learned from this thing.
John:
And if I was in this position, here's what I would have learned.
John:
If I was in this position, here's what, you know, what can be learned, right?
John:
And this is a great example of that in all measures.
John:
It's not as low stakes as superheroes, but in the grand scheme of things, most of us, you know, we're not Basecamp employees.
John:
um to just give a little bit of background if you haven't even heard of base camp the company in our you know sort of not mac nerd circles but sort of tech enthusiasts with tastes kind of circles um they're they're they're known for making products making sort of products that appeal to the nerds they have nice user interface they look nice and they're also known for um
John:
creating a company, Basecamp, it was originally called 37 Signals, that runs counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom about how companies should be run in a way that would be appealing to the founders.
John:
They made a company...
John:
It's the type of place that they would want to work.
John:
They wrote a lot of books about it.
John:
I think at least one was like a New York Times bestseller that says, look, you can run a company like this and it's better.
John:
Things like, hey, you don't have to grow at the maximum possible rate.
John:
It's okay to get a company that is merely...
John:
sustainably profitable you don't have to run your employees ragged you don't have to accept vc money and you know people would run at them and say like look what you have you you've left millions of dollars of value on the table by not pursuing growth at all costs and they would say that's just not what we want to do and this is a perfectly valid choice you can have a company that uh you know treats its employees with more respect than your typical company you can give them perks that most companies wouldn't give them even though you lose money on them and like
John:
You know, you don't have to require your employees to answer your emails on weekends and all sort of stuff that feels good to you.
John:
If again, if you look at the founders and where they're coming from, they say it seems to me that they tried to make a company that is a place that they would want to work.
John:
And that's one of the things that they're famous for in addition to their products, which are, you know, well, well made and appealing.
John:
And of course, David Hanemar Hanson created Ruby on Rails.
John:
So this is a whole other technical side of things where the technology stack they work on is itself famous and also famous for reasons that are related to the stuff that I just said.
John:
Ruby on Rails is convention over configuration and it's aesthetically nice and it's simple and it's user friendly and it has lots of affordances for getting set up and running and, you know,
John:
it all kind of fits together in that you know the like if you look at their their products their books the technology it makes sense together right and everything about it sounds good and you know a lot of people are having a lot of uh making fun of this like oh these are these are the people who are writing uh books about how to telling us how we're supposed to run a company for the past umpteen years and they just lost a third of their employees so haha i guess you all those ideas you had must have been terrible because you obviously have no idea what you're doing
John:
And I don't think that's necessarily the case, but I think this particular controversy goes to show that like what they've been able to do with their products, with their books, even with their technology stack, they've been able to do because of their decisions to not accept VC, to maintain control over the company, to not have a big hierarchy, to keep the company small.
John:
And that means that the two people, the co-founders,
John:
are able to essentially do whatever they want like it's their company they control it they don't have to answer to a board of directors they don't have to run their decisions by a committee if they think something is a good idea they can just do it that kind of individual control produces many great things lots of great works of art great video games small companies startups that are powered and driven by the decision of a small number of individuals and that allows them to do things that the big companies can't do or won't do or are against conventional wisdom
John:
What that also means is whatever foibles, flaws, or blind spots those two individual people who are in control of everything have, those also get a chance to be executed immediately, unequivocally, and if it turned out to be the wrong decision, that's the downside of having the control embodied in a very small number of people who answer to nobody.
John:
and it seems kind of amazing to me that 37 signal slash base camp has gone on this long without the blind spots of the founders manifesting in the way they just did so that that i think is an important lesson of like oh if only it was just me in charge of everything and i didn't have to run everything through this organization everything would be great and i would make all the right decisions like there is a buffering effect of
John:
of having more opinions and having not having absolute control.
John:
Uh, I wouldn't, you know, promote the idea of giving VCs control, but you know, like that, so that, that's one lesson that I take away from this.
John:
Um, the next thing is what, so what was, what was their problem?
John:
What's their blind spot?
John:
Um, like what did they do wrong?
John:
Like, you know, and part of the, one of the things you can learn from this controversy is, um,
John:
you know from the outside we didn't know anything initially we just we just said this policy land here's our new policy it had a bunch of other stuff in the policy which is other other new policies that are you look at and say oh i can kind of understand that or that seems weird like you know instead of giving you benefits they were just going to give you the cash for those benefits so you can decide what you want but it was like
John:
Well, but maybe what if they get a group discount?
John:
And will they always give us the cash?
John:
And is the cash really equivalent to what they're taking away?
John:
And what's the point of this?
John:
Getting rid of committees, which sounds like, oh, well, I mean, committees, like who likes committees?
John:
But on the other hand, does that mean just like it's just, you know, the committees, we were doing useful things.
John:
So why are the committees?
John:
And one of the committees they're getting rid of was the diversity, equity and inclusion committee.
John:
So that seems maybe not great.
John:
But the one that everyone focused on was the one we just read.
John:
No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account, which I think said no more societal or political discussions at work originally or something like that.
John:
And as soon as that, you know, that particular point is what when it landed on Twitter.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Another thing you can learn from this controversy is why did those two groups of people have such different reactions to this rule?
John:
One group thought it was like, well, you know, whatever.
John:
I can kind of understand where they're coming from.
John:
Seems kind of weird, but who cares?
John:
The other group was like, this is the wrongest thing you could possibly say.
John:
You have totally lost, you know, lost track of what you're doing.
John:
Do not do this.
John:
Understanding both of those positions is important to understanding what they did wrong.
John:
I was in the camp when I saw this and I said, oh, no, no, no.
John:
You've done something very bad here.
John:
And I and I what I'm a thing was like, they've done something so bad that they're going to have to walk this back.
John:
Right.
John:
Like they're they're just going to have to.
John:
It turns out that they stuck with it long enough for a third of their company to quit and then posted a thing which is like, it looks like we made a mistake.
John:
I was like, you think?
John:
Do you think you made a mistake?
John:
And they didn't spell out the mistake they made.
John:
So it's not entirely clear they understand it fully yet, but I think all observers would agree.
John:
Unless that third of the employees that left your company were employees that you wanted to leave your company, which it doesn't seem like it was because it was super senior people and a lot of them had been there for a long time.
John:
And I have a feeling that Basecamp did not hire a lot of people who were terrible employees and didn't retain people who were terrible employees.
John:
So probably you didn't want those people to leave.
John:
So you can't even say, oh, well, people left, but only the bad ones.
John:
And so you can kind of say, whatever you did, it didn't work the way you thought it was going to work, and it's bad.
John:
And then you've got to figure out what it was.
John:
And again, all the people who said this is a bad idea and this is terrible understood something that the founders didn't, right?
John:
And without digging into too much, Marco more or less landed on it –
John:
like as the details came out we could i don't want to dig more into the deals we'll put tons and tons of links you can read about what it is but like you know the founders who have complete control policy don't set a policy like this unless something has happened and they're like okay well i don't know how to deal with this so i'm just going to make a blanket rule so that we never have to deal with this again just let's just not bring it up again let's just not talk about it which
John:
Anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows is not the solution to any kind of serious problem that you're having.
John:
And these problems are hard, but it's essentially a failure of leadership of saying, we don't know what to do.
John:
It seems like whatever we do, nobody is happy.
John:
So we're just not going to talk about it anymore.
John:
And as Marco points out, you've essentially made a decision and picked a side at that point, whether you know it or not, because not talking about it is a, you know...
John:
tacit endorsement of the status quo and yada yada and then my people will be asking themselves well so what the hell is wrong with the status quo and why should people be arguing about stuff at work and i still don't understand and that brings me to another thing that you can learn by blocking a lot of these controversies is like inevitably someone will bring up the word woke which uh gets thrown around as kind of a uh you know an insult these days
John:
But it's, I think, one of the more recent sort of, you know, in the past, what, decade or so of vocabulary words that has come into use that is actually extremely appropriate.
John:
Because the reason people have such differing views of this rule has to do with how...
John:
awakened certain people are to things that other people are not yet awakened to and that sounds profound that's like oh we know the truth and you don't and blah blah it's not that at all right it's just that like i'm sure as as you live longer you will experience uh this eventually of like becoming aware of something that you hadn't really thought much about before right and this is something that i can personally i think all three of us can personally speak to as an experience uh of
John:
awakening to issues that previously were not on your radar at all if i think back to my teenage self and how aware i was of many many of the issues that fall under the umbrella of like current modern day wokeness i had no awareness of them whatsoever or the awareness i had was so surface level and i was on the complete opposite side of it that i might as well not have understood its existence right and
John:
Think of something simple like, does sexism exist?
John:
How are girls treated differently than boys in school?
John:
How are men treated differently than women in society?
John:
Maybe intellectually I could have given lip service or something or other, but I had no idea.
John:
I had not yet awakened to that profound reality, and it took years, embarrassingly long, and years and years and years of my age to eventually me to awaken the fact that, oh...
John:
life is actually different if you're a woman in america than if you're a man and not just different in like a way that we fixed in the 60s and we never have to worry about again but like profoundly different right i don't know what it's like to experience that but i do know what it's like to be awakened to the idea that there is something that you didn't understand before that you do now
John:
Multiply that by a million different issues that we all potentially are unaware of now, but could through experience or hearing other people talk about it or just, you know, the passage of time and through our thick skulls become awakened to things.
John:
And
John:
It's a difficult thing to express because if I could go back in time and talk to my teenage self and try to explain it, my teenage self would dismiss me and say, you're an idiot.
John:
Go away.
John:
I already understand this.
John:
You're stupid.
John:
Everything you're saying is dumb.
John:
And that doesn't make any sense.
John:
And that's not actually true.
John:
I mean, isn't that everyone's teenage selves?
John:
Right.
John:
But like...
John:
Like, that's the difficulty we face here, right?
John:
So anytime there's anything like this where the quote-unquote woke people see this and understand the underlying issues of sort of marginalization and oppression in the workplace in the sort of subtle modern incarnation where there is no one trying to do anything particularly evil and everyone is trying to do the right thing.
John:
But because, let's say, I mean, this is the hypothetical, I don't know, the founders, whatever, but let's say the founders of this company tried to make a company that they would want to work out.
John:
Maybe they did.
John:
Maybe they successfully made a company that they would want to work at.
John:
But they are two rich white dudes.
John:
And making a company that they want to work at isn't necessarily the same company that someone who doesn't share their life experiences would also want to work at, right?
John:
And, you know, I don't want to dig too far.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The details of the Basecamp thing are immaterial.
John:
But it's clear that the founders...
John:
I'm not going to say they didn't fully understand the perspective of the employees who were on the DEI committee and who were railing against the list of names and had specific grievances.
John:
Here's the thing about this.
John:
One more thing to learn.
John:
The founders all agreed that the list was bad.
John:
Everyone agreed the list was bad.
John:
We're going to get rid of it.
John:
It's bad that we have this list.
John:
It's not like they were saying the list is fine.
John:
I don't know what you're worried about.
John:
They weren't saying that at all.
John:
They were like, yes, we should never have done this.
John:
You know, the founders didn't make the list that, you know, they became aware of it.
John:
And they said, this is not how we do things here at Basecamp.
John:
We're not going to, you know, we're not going to have a list making fun of our customers names.
John:
It's bad for multiple reasons.
John:
We're getting rid of it.
John:
It's not like there was a debate about that, right?
John:
But they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by when, you know, when Preston's saying, okay, not only is this list bad, but also, hey, if you're, you know, I don't know the details here, but let's say they had an employee who was an Asian American and said, there's no Asian American probably alive today who's an adult who did not have their name made fun of or their imagined name made fun of when they were a kid, right?
John:
And maybe that's a thing you know intellectually.
John:
But if you haven't grown up having people make fun of your name in that way that they can make fun of Asian names or calling you things that aren't your actual name but it's fun to call you when you're in elementary school, having a list of names at work that people are making fun of
John:
has a different effect on you as making the workplace feel like a safe place where you belong and where you know you don't have to worry about things like that coming up and you might say well that's not a big deal who cares let's your name's not on the list what are you even worried about right not understanding the sort of continuum of like okay well making fun of my name that's not a big deal all the way up to like
John:
you know people attacking asian americans with cinder blocks and in san francisco latest story i read or whatever right those two things aren't connected at all which is something that some of the founders actually said it's like i can see where you come from this is bad we should get rid of the list but come on like it's not the same thing as like attacking asian americans on the street like this is not that's there's no connection between those two things and the thing is
John:
There is a connection.
John:
It is a long circuitous connection, but you can travel it and you can find it and they do eventually connect.
John:
And like the founders push back on trying to sort of draw the bigger picture.
John:
Someone who is aware of the bigger picture because they live it, trying to show that bigger picture to the founders, cause the founders to push back against that.
John:
Again, even though everyone agrees, list is bad.
John:
We're getting a little bit.
John:
There's not a thing that we do with this company.
John:
They disagreed about...
John:
particularly why we don't do it and what it means in the bigger picture and so the reaction was you know what we tried this and no one's happy we we told you we're getting rid of the list some people think that getting a list is bad and we said we're getting the list and the people who agree with us said well but you don't understand why you don't you're not getting rid of the list for the reasons that are the exact same reasons that we think you should and you don't understand the bigger picture so now we're angry at you so you know what no politics at work problem solved yeah
John:
And that was not the right decision to make.
John:
But it stems from the collective blind spot that the founders had.
John:
They didn't really know what they were dealing with.
John:
And I'm not saying these issues are easy to deal with.
John:
Few people are equipped to deal with this on their own, which is part of why you get a DEI committee, which is part of why you diversify your workforce.
John:
In fact, I feel like, again, I'm speculating here, but it feels like Basecamp has made an effort over the past few years to try to diversify its workforce.
John:
And that's kind of like, you know, the pipeline problem with like women in tech or whatever.
John:
Oh, the solution is let's just hire more women.
John:
That's not the solution.
John:
If you're hiring women into an environment that is hostile to women, all you're doing is like throwing them into a threshing machine and saying, we hired you, the problem is solved.
John:
And they're like, well, but here we are.
John:
And there's some things we should change about your company.
John:
Because now that we're here, we see it's not particularly great to be a woman here.
John:
So let's change some stuff, right?
John:
So it is plausible.
John:
I don't know if this to be true, but it is plausible that Basecamp made an effort to diversify its hiring because its founders are good people and want to do that.
John:
And they successfully diversify their hiring.
John:
And those diverse employees said, we think we should make some changes around here and let's form a committee to, you know, like once you get employees with different perspectives and different points of view, they necessarily will have things that they want to improve to make the working environment better for everybody, not just for the people who are already there.
John:
And when that happens, there is going to be, I'm not going to say a power struggle, but like
John:
the the phrase they use these days is renegotiating the social contract and that happens on levels very small and very large and even just at the level in an individual company if you hire a bunch of employees from diverse backgrounds they're the ones who are going to find that list and say you know what it's not great that this list exists making fun of people's names whereas it had existed for years and apparently it wasn't a big deal but now you hire some new employees and they say
John:
hey, we probably shouldn't do this.
John:
And to the founder's credit, they say, you know what?
John:
Now that you've shown us this list, we agree.
John:
This is crappy.
John:
We shouldn't do this.
John:
But then the debate that ensues about why it's crappy reveals that the founders don't really have the bigger picture that these other employees do because they don't have the life experiences.
John:
And they're also not experienced enough to know how to navigate this very difficult issue.
John:
And they don't have a bunch of committees or a board helping sort of buffer their decisions to try to figure out how we can navigate this.
John:
They just...
John:
Try to do the best they can as two individuals.
John:
They are not equipped to deal with this.
John:
They make the wrong decision.
John:
And a third of the company leaves.
John:
And you look at the third of the company leaving, you're like, oh, these people are all overreacting.
John:
What are they so mad about?
John:
What actually happened isn't that big of a deal?
John:
And the founders agreed the list was bad.
John:
And they're just, oh, because they're not woke enough, you have to leave the company?
John:
Maybe a final thing.
John:
One final thing you can learn here is,
John:
Well, ask the people.
John:
Ask someone who left, why did you leave?
John:
Why was it important enough for you to leave the company?
John:
Like, look at what they have to say on Twitter.
John:
Read their blog posts.
John:
See where they're coming from.
John:
Try to understand their perspective, right?
John:
And that can help you maybe...
John:
Sort of not file people away as these are the villains and these are the heroes and these are the overreactors and these are the people who are doing the, you know, the right thing or the smart thing or whatever.
John:
From all sides of this, there is something to learn about, you know.
John:
How people can make mistakes, how people can be blind to their mistakes, how something that's small to one person can be big to another, and how doing anything to upset the status quo, whether it is diversifying hiring practices or forming a DEI committee or...
John:
Or, you know, changing something about a workplace as simple as a list of customer names that we all agree is bad, that we shouldn't be laughing at at work, that we all agree we should get rid of.
John:
How that can turn into something that destroys a third of the company, right?
John:
Lots, lots and lots to learn here.
John:
And none of it has to, you know, none of it is about like...
John:
demonizing people or taking revenge against people or being thrilled that the people who wrote a bunch of management books about how to run a company have gotten their comeuppance because now it shows how they didn't know how to run a company after all.
John:
I think they know a lot about running a great company, but we found a blind spot and they made the wrong call and they are suffering the consequences from it.
John:
And I think and hope that they will learn something from this there.
John:
I think, you know, everyone involved is learning a hard lesson and I hope observers will learn something from this.
John:
That, you know, though this may be your first instinct and though it may be your instinct to stick to your guns, this is not actually the solution to the problems that were identified.
John:
And, you know, the details are going to be different in every single situation.
John:
But the idea that we are going to, you know...
John:
change the status quo in any way to make marginalized people ever so slightly less marginalized in ever so narrowly defined situations, that will necessarily have ramifications for everybody, not just for the marginalized people, right?
John:
If you want to make room for people at the table, it means you just can't continue to sit exactly where you are and do the same thing all the time.
John:
Making room means making room.
John:
And that's always difficult.
Casey:
Yeah, I think the thing that really bothered me about it is, or not the thing, but one of the things that bothered me about it was that, you know, this whole no politics in the workplace thing was obviously not a great idea.
Casey:
And people very quickly jumped on it and tried to say, hey, you know, this is not a great idea and it's not quite that cut and dry.
Casey:
And if you look at, and we have all these links in the show notes, that was announced in a post that Jason Fried wrote called Changes at Basecamp.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And everyone pretty quickly was like, whoa, whoa, that's not so great.
Casey:
Not loving that.
Casey:
There were one, two, three, four, five posts that followed.
Casey:
The fifth was a kind of mealy-mouthed half apology-ish.
John:
maybe it was more of it wasn't an apology it was it was an acknowledgement that they had made a mistake they didn't go into explaining here's the mistake that we made so it's not clear whether they fully understand it yet but you know they're part of their mo like people a lot of people ask why they do this publicly part of the way this company has always worked is they do things boldly and in public and whenever they come to mind so their last post of saying uh you know we made a mistake
John:
And we've got a lot of learning to do.
John:
Didn't go into more detail, but I'm sure this won't be the last post on this topic.
John:
Right.
John:
So I do hope that they are talking to people and soul searching and figuring out exactly what happened.
John:
But to expect them to to expect them to suddenly figure it all out immediately is asking a lot.
John:
And I think, you know, I think they have I think they have a road to continue to travel to truly, truly understand exactly what just happened.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And I think the thing that I find so gross, one of the things I find so gross about it is, you know, when from all the reporting, particularly the Casey Newton has done, when they were called out internally, like, hey, you know, this ain't this ain't right.
Casey:
The list ain't right.
Casey:
This ain't right.
Casey:
You know, there were times they agreed.
Casey:
But then when they were still challenged, they didn't seem to have any particular appetite to understand why.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it was like you said, John, they said, oh, well, you know, nobody seems to be happy.
Casey:
Well, screw it.
Casey:
No politics.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's move on.
John:
I mean, they understood what they understood some things that were wrong with it.
John:
Things that were within the realm of their understanding were, hey, it's not good to make fun of your customers because that's rude.
John:
And it's private customer information that we shouldn't be passing around anyway.
John:
So it's an invasion of privacy.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Those two reasons they got, which are both true, right?
John:
But I think it was particular Hennemeyer Hansen, like when pressed on like, oh, and by the way, there's also a racial and oppression aspect of this said, get out of here.
John:
That's not a big deal.
John:
That's not a big, you know, because that was outside their experience and understanding that they didn't, they hadn't yet awoken to what that reality is like for some people who are not them.
John:
And hadn't internalized it again, the same way that I had not internalized sexism when I was a teenager, even though intellectually I could say something about it.
John:
But but if pressed on a specific issue of all, that's not sexism.
John:
That's just that's something else.
John:
There's no connection.
John:
You know, right.
John:
I've been there.
John:
We've all been there before we have understood whatever the issue may be.
John:
And the fact that they couldn't make that connection, like, I don't, you know, who knows what else went on?
John:
I don't want to speculate.
John:
This could have been one of 17 different incidents, like whatever was going on internally.
John:
Again, I defer to ask the people who left why they left and they'll explain it to you in their own words.
John:
They're in a much better position than I do.
John:
But
John:
That's why this looks so weird from the outside, but it's like maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
John:
Maybe that was just revelatory to enough people to say, look, like when the rule came down, like we give up.
John:
We can't seem to make these founders understand what we're trying to tell them.
John:
And they disbanded the DEI committee and they say we can't talk about politics at work.
John:
So whatever hope we had for them figuring out is lost.
John:
And it's not so much about this one particular incident in an exchange, it's just the accumulation of offense.
John:
Because, you know, in the end, something more profound has to happen than this one incident for a third of your company to leave, right?
John:
Especially people who've been there for years and years, senior people, entire teams, like,
John:
this is obviously a bigger issue than the details that we have, you know, access to now, but it only takes, you know, everyone has their, their sort of breaking point or their giving up point of saying, well, I don't see this going any better.
John:
And as someone put it out in the chat in the update post, it doesn't say yet, as far as I can tell that they're changing the policy.
John:
They just are recognizing that they made a mistake.
John:
And it's not clear to me that they understand what that mistake was yet or how it connects to the rule they made or anything like that.
John:
But yeah,
John:
I'm hoping they will come around to it eventually.
Casey:
It's worth reading this first paragraph in an update, which, as we record, was posted yesterday.
Casey:
This is from Jason Freed.
Casey:
And again, I will read this verbatim, the first paragraph.
Casey:
Last week was terrible.
Casey:
We started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled, and it blew things up internally in ways we never anticipated.
Casey:
David and I completely own the consequences, and we're sorry.
Casey:
We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will.
Casey:
The new policies stand, but we have some refining and clarifying to do.
Casey:
That is the entirety of the first paragraph.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
So, like, they're saying the policies stand, but, like, they're refining and clarifying.
John:
Hopefully, their learning and reflecting will lead them to understand that refining and clarifying is not going to solve this problem.
John:
But, you know, it's...
John:
it's this let's put another way this is not the ideal learning environment for you as a company founder and ceo like this is not the way you want to learn these lessons in public in incredibly dramatic fashion in a way that is very bad for your established self-image as people who tell other people how to run a company right it's not the ideal scenario for you to learn and so it's probably harder for them to be receptive to these broader ideas and from my personal experience
John:
I've had to be exposed to, you know, information, experiences, the experiences of others, personal stories, reading on it for for years and years for it to finally sink through my thick skull about insert whatever issue you want to put here, whether it's sexism, racism, you know, any any kind of thing that I've felt like I've become awoken to in the latter part of my adult life, way embarrassingly late in my white male adult life.
John:
Right.
John:
And when I think about, okay, how would you cause that to happen in someone else?
John:
Like, oh, geez, I don't know.
John:
Do I, can I, can you give me 10 years?
John:
Like, it's not the type of thing that you can like argue on Twitter and like, oh, I'm convinced.
John:
Now I understand racism is real.
John:
Yay.
John:
It's not.
John:
doesn't work that way i don't know what the solution is um and to be clear the lesson here is not like oh company must be a battleground for changing each other's minds that's not what it is at all like i think one of the things that they will should be thinking about is what kind of environment were we trying to make it work and what kind of environment actually existed at work for all the different people who came to work for us what is the experience what has the experience of working at base camp been like for people who are not me
John:
and for not exactly like me and what is the ideal working environment that we want to create there's always going to be conflict at work there's always going to be multiple views it's not the job of the ceo to change the mind of all the employees it's not the employees to change the mind of the ceo people can leave and get a different job if they want like that's not what we're talking about here all we're talking about is if you are a leader and you're trying to make a place where people can work you have to decide as a leader what kind of place do i want to make and am i succeeding in making it be like that
John:
for everybody who works for me and that's a super hard job and it's much harder now than it was we can just say well everyone stays at home except for the white men and they're all going to be like me and we're all going to have the same thoughts and ideas and the same religion and come from the same place and speak the same language and we're going to make an environment that we like
John:
That's way easier if you're one of those people in charge than trying to make a good place to work for everyone.
John:
And to the credit of the founders, it seems to me that they were trying to make Basecamp more inclusive than it had been.
John:
It's just that they were not prepared.
John:
They were not prepared to understand what it takes to do that.
John:
It's not as simple as we'll just hire more different kinds of people and problem solved.
John:
And that's like, that's step zero, right?
John:
All you're going to do now is reveal all the problems you didn't know you had.
John:
One more thing I'll throw in here from the Creativity Inc.
John:
thing.
John:
Success hides problems.
John:
Basecamp has been very successful.
John:
The founders have been very successful.
John:
It's easy to think that everything is going awesome when everyone's raking in the money and people are buying your book about how to run companies.
John:
And every time you put an opening, tons of people apply and you get to pick really great employees.
John:
And it seems like you have an awesome little company and like being on that path for a long time can convince you that things really are going as well as you think they are, because how could you be so successful if they weren't?
John:
And having it slowly revealed to you that actually everything isn't as rosy as you think is counter to your notion that everything is, you know, like, what do you mean?
John:
We're doing great.
John:
Like, everything's awesome.
John:
I'm rich.
John:
We have a New York Times bestselling book.
John:
We have awesome products.
John:
Everybody loves us.
John:
What's the problem?
John:
And it's like that success exists.
John:
That success is helping hide problems from you.
John:
But it's not hiding them from us who are down here working with them, but it's hiding them from you.
John:
And that itself is a problem.
Marco:
Yeah, I think an overwhelming impression I got for, again, the little bit of the like actual direct quotes and stuff that I did read is that these people running this company don't seem like they're wrong a lot, or at least they don't think they're wrong a lot.
Marco:
and the the jump to defensiveness as a reaction is almost always a bad thing especially when dealing with issues like this and it seems like that's their like primary mode is like jump first to defensiveness because they can't i think they're they're not accustomed to being wrong in their in their own minds or the possibility that they might be wrong in their own minds and i think like that's why you see this like huge amount of defensiveness that is is quite quite bad
John:
I think they're used to being wrong in ways that they understand, because that's a big part of the how you run a company.
John:
You're going to do things.
John:
You're going to do bold things.
John:
You're going to make a mistake.
John:
You're going to learn from them.
John:
But they're used to being wrong in terms that make sense to them.
John:
Right.
John:
That we tried to make a decision.
John:
And now that I see that it didn't work, I now understand why it didn't work.
John:
Like it is all tractable.
John:
It is within their worldview.
John:
And here is a case where they're wrong in a way that they didn't even know what they were wrong about.
John:
right that it was just so and and instead of themselves figuring out that they were wrong based on i expected this to happen but that happened here's here's the explanation it seems like at this point they don't even yet have an explanation they don't know what just happened and it's much more uncomfortable to be wrong in that situation than in all the other situations where they were wrong because i bet half their business books are filled with like oh we did this we thought people would do this so we put this product out of this at this price point it turned out people didn't want to do that but they wanted to do this or this price was wrong we should have made this free
John:
Oh, we decided to charge people a lot, even though we weren't sure how it worked out.
John:
Like those are decisions they're comfortably wrong about.
John:
They'll tell you that's what business books are about.
John:
Here's what I learned from the things that I did.
John:
And this is the case where not only did they not realize they were wrong, they don't understand how or what they were wrong about and still don't.
John:
They saw the bad consequence.
John:
They know something went wrong here, but it seems like they just don't quite get it yet.
John:
I mean, I feel like they should really just sit through every single exit interview of every single employee is leaving the company and just let them talk to them for an hour each.
John:
And maybe that will sort of hammer home, like, when these people tell you why they're leaving, believe them, right?
John:
Because they're, like, and understand how that came about based on your policies and actions of the company, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, so I, I, I get what you're saying about them getting defensive and certainly they are.
John:
Uh, but I think part of it is like defense out of like fear of the unknown.
John:
Like what, what is, what even is going on?
John:
What even is going on here?
John:
This is something bad is happening and I don't quite understand it.
John:
And what people are telling me doesn't make sense to me.
John:
So they must be the ones who are wrong and we'll just stick to our guns and it'll be fine because it's always been fine.
Marco:
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Casey:
David Barber writes, I'm curious to know what, if any, note-taking apps are used by the ATP hosts.
Casey:
Obsidian, Rome, Evernote, OneNote, just folders.
Casey:
How do you track notes, plans, or ideas?
Casey:
I personally, I am not a productivity person, and I don't switch note-taking apps all the time.
Casey:
I use Apple Mail, which I know is extremely not trendy.
Casey:
I don't really care that much.
Casey:
I don't really have a to-do list manager other than the app DUE, which is basically just a glorified nagging machine.
Casey:
But I use Apple Notes for these sorts of things.
Casey:
I did use Evernote way long ago, and there are still some things in there, I suppose, but I haven't looked at it forever.
Casey:
I just use Apple Notes.
Casey:
It's fine for the sorts of things I want to capture, and it's good enough for me.
Casey:
John, what are you using?
John:
I'm using Apple notes ever since they revised it so that syncing works and everything.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Right.
John:
My needs are low.
John:
Uh, like the only things I really need are a note taking app that can do basic lists of things, supports links, um, synced everywhere.
John:
And I can share notes that's, and those features are all within notes and seems to be pretty reliable.
John:
I'm a little bit wary of like someday losing all of my data there.
John:
Um,
John:
So I tend to not like if there's anything like serious and important, I kind of feel more comfortable having it in a text file that lands in my backup vortex somehow because at any second all my notes could disappear.
John:
But most of the stuff that's in notes is just like notes, you know, shopping lists, a bunch of snippets of text that I want to deal with.
John:
Like if they all went away, it wouldn't be that bad.
John:
I think the only...
John:
really important thing i have notes is my squirrel list um i talk about that on rectives i think it's on rectives yeah it's a list of where i squirrel stuff away in the house so i don't forget where it is because i'm old now um i guess if i lost that it would be bad but in the end it's all in the house i'll find it eventually or if my kids will with the estate sale whatever wow what about you marco
Marco:
Yeah, pretty similar.
Marco:
I mean, I've never been that much of a note taker in any form, analog or digital.
Marco:
But certainly in the digital world, my needs are also pretty light.
Marco:
And yeah, I've just been using Apple Notes for a few years now.
Marco:
I used to use Clear for my shopping.
Marco:
Like when I'd be grocery shopping, I would use Clear because it was easy to swipe through in the grocery store.
Marco:
I don't even do that anymore.
Marco:
I just use Apple Notes.
Marco:
I have a grocery list that's just like a checklist.
Marco:
Ever since they had the checklist items and some more of the virtual formatting stuff.
Marco:
I love being able to just paste in images and stuff.
Marco:
I love how quick and easy it is to use it and
Marco:
It mostly syncs okay most of the time.
Marco:
Uh, although that, that being said, I've had actually recent sync issues where like I'll edit on one device and I'll go like to my phone and the title will be incomplete and the content might not sync until like the next edit I make on these, on the source device and then it'll pop over.
Marco:
So, but that's, that's been only a very recent thing.
Marco:
I assume and hope it's a temporary bug.
Marco:
Before that, everything was working fine for years.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Yeah, my Apple Notes app is where it's at.
Marco:
I share the same anxiety about it as John about the data format to it is completely opaque.
Marco:
And there are a few different ways to export data from Notes.
Marco:
A few different apps try to fill that role.
Marco:
But there's no way to then import it back in as far as I'm concerned.
Marco:
So that's not particularly useful as a backup method.
Marco:
I do wish that Apple would solve this.
Marco:
And I understand why they might not want to cram that into the iOS app, but they should at least cram it into the Mac app.
Marco:
But yeah, otherwise, I like Apple Notes.
Marco:
It is simple.
Marco:
It is deceptively powerful for how simple it is.
Marco:
And I don't like everything about it.
Marco:
It's not perfect.
Marco:
No app ever is.
Marco:
But it's close enough to what I need and provides enough advantages, enough integration, enough convenience everywhere, and frankly enough functionality that I'm not really looking elsewhere.
John:
And I would say people who don't know about the document scanning feature in Notes, which I forget about for months at a time but then remember exists, it's nice.
John:
It's this little camera icon in the app, and it will basically scan a document and, like, straighten it for you, you know, if you're scanning it at a slight angle or it's twisted or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's just, you know, there are plenty of apps that do a better job of this, I'm sure.
John:
But for a built-in app, don't forget that, hey, if you have a piece of paper that you want to save a picture of, instead of just bringing up the camera app and taking a picture of it and putting it in your camera roll, you can bring up a notes document and, you know, attach...
John:
you know use the document scanner and attach a nice straightened cropped in one button press uh view of a page and then just do that for multiple pages and they can be part of a note because notes can support and you can export them and you know as pdfs and put them into you know put them wherever you want but like i find it much more convenient than littering my camera roll with uh a bunch of slightly off-center skewed pictures that i then have to manually crop and fix you know and never do
Marco:
Also, if your desired output format is a PDF, like a scanned PDF of real-life paper, I don't think I mentioned this in the show, but I very recently learned that you can do that in the Files app on iOS.
Marco:
And it can scan directly to a PDF there.
Marco:
There is a way.
Marco:
You can do it from a Mac.
Marco:
You can do it with Preview, where it'll use the continuity camera thing to...
Marco:
use your phone's camera from your Mac's preview app to capture the document, but it's clunky and a little unreliable and just kind of, it's a lot of like manual weird back and forth.
Marco:
So if you are trying to use your phone as a document scanner to scan to a PDF,
Marco:
definitely do the um the built-in scanner thing and the files app for basic needs again as john said there are a million other apps that do like you know better you know more professional or more option filled versions of document scanning but if your needs are basic like me the built-in one in the files app is fine
Casey:
Why would you just do the scanning in the notes app and then go to print it and then you can make a PDF that way?
Casey:
Did you know that trick?
Casey:
I assume you knew that trick.
Casey:
I'm serious.
Casey:
I wouldn't even think to go to the files app.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So if you go to print anything in iOS and then it's some completely obtuse gesture, I think you need to like pinch out, you know, so I guess the opposite of pinch, you need to expand in order to get like a full screen preview.
Casey:
And then once you're in that...
Casey:
From the print dialogue?
Casey:
Yes, yes.
Casey:
I really, I'm not messing with you.
Casey:
I am not trolling you at all.
Casey:
So hold on.
Casey:
Now I got to try this live.
Casey:
It's going to be fun for you to edit.
Casey:
So I'm in Safari.
Marco:
I had no idea there was a PDF export in iOS.
Casey:
Yeah, so I'm in Safari and I go and I use the share sheet and I go to print.
Casey:
Okay, so then I'm looking.
Casey:
It just so happened I had ATP up.
Casey:
So I have to do the opposite pinch.
Casey:
So not bring in, but push out.
Marco:
I'm totally doing this.
Marco:
Hold on.
Casey:
and then and then you see a pdf version and then it has a share sheet or a share icon in the upper right wait i don't okay so go to print yeah the best programming ever all right so do you see you see there's like a print preview at the bottom yeah i just tried to print a web page and it totally didn't work so i'm gonna try like an email just i don't mean i don't know what else i'm gonna all right hold on so wait how do you do an action from mail
Casey:
uh you have to do the reply thing don't you all right well let me follow along in mail then just make sure we're seeing the same so i'm zooming out okay so you do uh where is it a print yep and then you see the print preview and you pinch to zoom into it i'm sorry so zoom in yeah it's it's how do you describe the opposite the anti-pinch you know like files
Casey:
And then you can do all number of things.
Marco:
But if you look, it says... So you have to go to the second action sheet nested inside the first action sheet that got you to the print dialogue.
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
This is ridiculous.
Casey:
Do an anti-pinch.
Casey:
Oh, it's totally ridiculous, but it does work.
Marco:
And zoom in with the page on the previewed pages that I guess make them open, logically open up a PDF.
Marco:
I mean, honestly, this kind of seems like an accidental feature.
Marco:
But wow, that's, this is like the epitome of the worst of touch design.
Marco:
Because this is completely undiscoverable.
Marco:
And even when you told me to do it, I still couldn't figure it out for a while.
Marco:
when you scan documents and notes they end up as pdfs too i think i mean certainly they do they're just inside a note so like yeah but you can get them out very easily by just holding down yeah but like if you're if you are scanning a document with your with your phone camera for the purpose of getting a pdf you're better off doing it directly in the files app and save you a couple steps rather than scanning it into a note for no other reason other than that you knew notes did this and then deleting the note or whatever like that's that's
John:
you normally it's like attached to a note where you want to sort of have annotations like i'm usually like say let's say i'm shopping for couches and we're seeing a bunch of different couches and i want to like basically save like the little tag that's on it to say oh we saw this couch and here's all the information about it the serial number the blah blah blah like in the notes document we're keeping track of the couches we're looking at scan document
Casey:
yep there's the little tag and we'll move on to the next one so it's a series of notes about couches pictures of the tag and then photos of the actual couches all you know it's it's a rich text document who knew uh just a couple of quick shout outs actually before we move on uh for grocery shopping i think reminders or excuse me notes is perfectly fine but i really really like any list i think i brought it up before we'll put a link in the show notes they do shared shopping lists really well including with photo annotations and quantities and things
Casey:
And, uh, I, this isn't exactly note-taking, but I should mention day one.
Casey:
I don't recall if they've ever sponsored the show before, but I really love day one.
Casey:
Actually, any list may have sponsored many, many years ago, but anyway, both of those, uh, whether or not they've ever sponsored really, really love both those apps.
Casey:
Uh, day one is a journaling app and that's where I keep memories from like the family because I have the world's worst memory and things that I want to remember.
Casey:
I keep in day one.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Zarf Scharf writes, what do you prefer developing against?
Casey:
An agent API or technology that's basically abandoned, but the bug workarounds are well-known, or modern API or technology that's constantly being updated and changed?
Casey:
This is a really good question, and I feel like I don't have one consistent answer.
Casey:
I mean, I look at what I'm working on right now, and I'm using SwiftUI exclusively in Combine, and that has its fair share of problems.
Casey:
So I'm enjoying it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
except when i'm not uh so i don't know i think i think i am too distractible by the by the new shiny that i probably would probably would would prefer something modern and new even though intellectually and the mature developer in me knows that that's the incorrect answer uh john what do you think
John:
I mean, the way this is phrased, I have to go with the modern one just because like the ancient one that's basically abandoned.
John:
Yeah, the bug workarounds are known, but working on any tech that is sort of basically no longer supported but abandoned gets real bad real fast, right?
John:
Like you don't want to be the last one using a particular technology for any purpose, right?
John:
Whereas working on the new thing that's constantly being updated and changed is
John:
that means it's constantly improving too.
John:
And that means that's where the action is.
John:
That means you probably don't have to be the one to fix every single bug that you ever find because so many other people are fixing and updating or whatever.
John:
So in practice, I think that's what everybody does.
John:
Yes, even Marco, like you don't want to be on something that nobody is supporting anymore.
John:
Now, PHP doesn't qualify for that because it's not like PHP is abandoned.
John:
People are working on it all the time.
John:
They're making new versions.
John:
They're fixing bugs.
John:
Like it's still used by tons of people, right?
John:
An actual...
John:
technology that is quote unquote basically abandoned means like you're out there using it and nobody else is like it won't even build on your machine eventually like it's just you know everyone moves to arm and it's still x86 and you have to figure out how to compile it for arm if you want to keep using it you got to go with the one that's constantly being updated and changed because that means people are working on it and that means it's improving what do you think marco
Marco:
Yeah, I'm kind of torn on this, actually, because, you know, John brings up a good point.
Marco:
Like if you are the last one using something that, you know, it might get abandoned or it might get discontinued or broken.
Marco:
That being said, you never want to be building on quicksand.
Marco:
So it's it's one of those things where the answer is it depends in an ideal world.
Marco:
You build something once and then you never need to revisit it unless you want to.
Marco:
That's not always what you get, though.
Marco:
In the real world, sometimes old technologies break because no one's minding them.
Marco:
No one's maintaining them.
Marco:
No one's minding the store.
Marco:
No one is testing against them.
Marco:
So that's not great to be relying on.
Marco:
On the other side of the coin, though...
Marco:
when I build against an API I'm trying to build something else I'm trying to build something on top of it I'm trying like the whole thing is I want to do this work and then never have the API cause problems for me or surprise me or require more time from me unnecessarily so obviously it's not great if it's still very much in flux and so like if abandoned means inactive
Marco:
Like if it's not being actively improved upon, but it's still like around and working and that doesn't seem to be changing.
Marco:
Like that's that's fine with me.
Marco:
And that's that's usually a safe bet for me.
Marco:
But if it seems like it's not even going to be supported in the near future, that that's when I bail.
Casey:
Abandoned is not the same as boring.
John:
Yeah, the way this question is phrased, it's like it's not PHP versus SwiftUI, it's ColdFusion versus SwiftUI.
John:
And to give it a choice between ColdFusion and SwiftUI, Marco chooses SwiftUI.
Marco:
Although, I'll tell you what, so the way I spent yesterday was there was this bug where Forecast, my MP3 encoder app, was...
Marco:
outputting weird things or crashing with certain types of wave file inputs.
Marco:
Like the, if the, if there was a wave file that was above two to the 31 bytes, it's like, you know, 2.2 gigs or whatever that is.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
2.1, whatever it is, if it was above that, but less than 4 gigs, so in the unsigned 32-bit integer size range, but not the signed range, so between 2 and 4 gigs, if it was a WAV file exported from Adobe Audition,
Marco:
then the system audio libraries, specifically the EXT audio file API, but I think pretty much any of Apple's platform audio libraries, would misread the end of the WAV file and would basically blow right past where the audio sample data ends and read whatever metadata happened to be after it
Marco:
as if it were audio data and so it would output like garbage audio and that would you know in forecast that would result in either garbage audio at the end of a file or in some cases forecast would crash because a function deep inside the mp3 encoder would try to read that as audio and some assumptions about the way audio flows would not be met and it would crash um so
Marco:
it was a terrible bug and i and i spent the whole day like looking at you know the specs of this ancient file format of the wave file which is the the riff wave file format from forever ago um and you know looking up like okay how is this being read how should this be being read is this is the size of the chunk supposed to be a signed integer or an unsigned integer and you know whose bug is this basically is it mine is it apple's is it adobe auditions bug who knows and it turns out yeah it turns out it's apple's
Marco:
So I had to file the bug report and everything.
Marco:
So I was dealing with all these old formats, which is one of the things I thought about those.
Marco:
But the reason I brought this up now is I actually went through and I did the stupid cyst diagnose and everything they wanted for me to file the bug report.
Marco:
And I made a sample project.
Marco:
So I kept adjusting things between my sample project and forecast to try to isolate the bug.
Marco:
And it turns out it's super easily isolatable.
Marco:
And I made the entire sample project in Objective-C.
Marco:
because it was easiest and fastest to do the thing I had to prove, and forecast is still all Objective-C.
Marco:
And as much as I'm enjoying using Swift for Overcast now... Oh, here we go.
Marco:
My god, Objective-C apps build so fast!
Marco:
it was shocking like you and your compile times oh my god it's like the difference of seconds who cares no it's not seconds it's it's like for your for your toy app though for your sample project right of course it's building fast it has like 10 lines of code for forecast too like because forecast is forecast is a medium sized app it's not a large app it's but it's you know medium and it builds instantly and
Marco:
And other simple stuff, like the code autocompletion was so fast.
Marco:
All that stuff, so much of it was fast.
Marco:
Debugging was amazing, because it not only worked, but was fast.
Marco:
And there were so many weird debugging type system error messages and fights that Swift would pick with me that I didn't have to deal with.
Marco:
Everything about working with Objective-C, besides writing it,
Marco:
Everything else was so fast.
John:
You get someone else to write it, and you'll just hit the compile button.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But the compilation, the debug and run loop, actual debugging, the build, the archive, everything.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
So much faster than Swift.
Marco:
It really spoiled me, and I realized, like, oh, man, Swift has a long, long way to go before it's anywhere near as responsive to edit and work with as Objective-C.
John:
It reminds me of rebooting back into macOS 9 on my blue and white Power Mac G3 after using the early versions of OS X for a while.
John:
You reboot into macOS 9, and you're like, wow, my computer's fast.
John:
Look how fast these menus pull down.
John:
This is amazing.
John:
uh yeah technology marches on uh speaking of your your uh sign 32-bit apple framework bug you when you i saw your tweet about that and then like not you know 50 tweets later uh there was another one on a similar i don't know if this has been proved you you figure out that that's actually the case with your thing but this was uh someone saying that uh
John:
Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's company, the shares of Berkshire Hathaway are so expensive now that they rolled over the apparent signed 32-bit integer.
John:
They're like $400,000 each or something, but they do like five decimal places of cents after it or something like that.
John:
Oh.
John:
What they said was that apparently it's some kind of signed 32-bit thing, and they got delisted due to a computer error, and they're going to fix it.
John:
I find that somewhat hard to believe, but it is coincidental that the number really got up to around, you know, the 32 bit value before it screwed up.
Marco:
That's pretty funny.
Marco:
I guess if they're treating it as an integer that just is like, you know, multiplied by 10,000 or whatever.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
I mean, maybe it wasn't signed.
John:
Maybe it was just it was 32 bit and then we need to go to 64.
John:
It seems like not supported by the facts because I can't imagine that's really true.
Marco:
But oh, yeah, look at that.
Marco:
424840, it's real close.
Marco:
If you would multiply it, because it's 429496, you know, that's the 32-bit.
Marco:
So if there are 424840, they're very close to that.
Marco:
So if, yeah, that makes total sense.
John:
I mean, it's like a reasonable assumption whenever this system was designed in the 80s or something, someone's saying, okay, and this is where we're going to store the share price.
John:
What's a big enough, how many digits is enough for the share price of a company?
John:
No one thinks any company is going to have a single share that's going to be worth $400,000 or something, or whatever it is.
John:
It just seems ridiculous in 1980, and here we are.
John:
That's amazing.
Casey:
WhoPhD writes, I've been waiting for an APFS deduping space saver script to move from alpha quality to beta quality or, quote, reliable enough for my less important data that suck up space.
Casey:
Have you heard of disk dedupe on the App Store?
Casey:
I have not, and I don't think you're asking me anyway.
Casey:
John, what do you think?
John:
So this is an interesting technology enabled by our wonderful modern new file system that we have here on the Mac.
John:
It's been around for a long time in the enterprise.
John:
The idea is that on every one of our disks, but especially on lots of enterprise disks, there's some data that's duplicated, right?
John:
You might think you don't have a lot of like literal duplicate documents.
John:
But it's sort of the enterprise level.
John:
A lot of devices do block level deduping, right?
John:
So if they can find any part of a file that's exactly the same as some part of another file, there's no reason to store that block of data twice.
John:
You can just store it once and point to it from both files.
John:
And this saves you space, right?
John:
So like, say you have a bunch of JPEG images, and they have a bunch of, you know, metadata inside them.
John:
And the metadata for a whole bunch of them is similar or the same, like a bunch of pictures taken, you know,
John:
at your home and the GPS coordinates are always the same.
John:
And, you know, I mean, obviously it's not down to the bite level that they're deduping or whatever, but the more granular you can get with your deduping, the higher chance you have to find redundancies and the more space you can save, right?
John:
Even just deduping at a file level, though, sometimes you do have...
John:
complete duplicates of files in multiple locations.
John:
Sometimes maybe the OS has them.
John:
Maybe some resources or assets are in multiple places.
John:
Maybe you have two of the same files somewhere, like one in your account and one elsewhere.
John:
If you have music libraries that are, you know, if you have multiple accounts on your computer and the music library is not shared among them with a single Apple ID,
John:
You could have the same songs in multiple places because you and your spouse both have the, you know, complete works of Taylor Swift separately in your own music libraries on your Mac that's shared between the two of you.
John:
Now you're storing all that data twice.
John:
Wouldn't it be great if you could store it once?
John:
What APFS has for you here is that APFS can do the, this was brought up a couple of WWDCs ago, can do the sort of like instantaneous clone of a file.
John:
you can see this in the finder if you make a copy of like a gigantic file and it looks like it completes instantly wait a second how did it just duplicate that four gig file instantly well it didn't use the you know i forget what it's called like smart cloning or whatever apfs just says okay i will just make a second pointer to that file now it's not the same thing as hard links in unix because hard links in unix you can make an quote-unquote instant copy of a file but they both point to the same data so if you make a four gig file and then you make a hard link to it and you edit either one the original file or the hard link
John:
you will change the other, right?
John:
But with APFS, smart cloning instant, whatever the hell it's called thing, when you make a copy, you don't have to worry that now when I edit one, the other one will edit.
John:
They are independent as soon as you make a change.
John:
So they're copy on write, right?
John:
So you instantly get a copy without actually taking up any more disk space.
John:
But if you change some part of the copy,
John:
they will start to diverge from each other, right?
John:
So it's a safe way to make an instant copy.
John:
So the way the deduping things work is they go through, in theory, they go through your entire hard drive or whatever, they find two files that are the same.
John:
This is sort of like the transporter in Star Trek, I guess, or cloning or whatever.
John:
They find two files that are the same, they delete one, and then they make a smart clone of the original to the second location, right?
John:
right so now i mean it's complicated by the fact that when they deleted that one it probably didn't actually go away because it probably exists in a snapshot right and so you didn't actually but pretend snapshots don't exist for a second so you've got two four gig files that are identical they're taking up eight gigs of space again ignoring snapshots right you delete one of the four gig files
John:
now you've saved four gigs of this space not really but in theory um and then you clone the original four gig file and that takes up no more space except for a tiny little bit for the metadata right so now you've you previously those two four gig files were taking eight gigs and you can make it so those two four gig files are only taking up four gigs and you don't have to worry about any weird side effects because you can edit one or the other and there they will be completely independent files they won't be linked to each other in any way
John:
except for the fact that they were originally cloned from each other.
John:
So, in theory, you could save a ton of disk space that way.
John:
In practice, apps like this, especially when they come from a third party and not Apple, scare me because what I just described, like, and the reason I'm comparing to the Star Trek transporter is the idea that it destroys all your molecules in the original location and then sends the information out elsewhere and then reconstitutes them so the transporter essentially kills you.
John:
There's a million YouTube videos on this if you want to watch it.
John:
It kills you and then reconstructs you elsewhere.
Uh...
John:
Aside, in this case, it has to delete one of the files and then it has to do the smart cloning thing to make and make reconstitute that file from a clone in exactly the way that it was before, including all the dates, all the permissions, all the metadata, the labels, all this other stuff.
John:
And that scares me a little bit because it is not a non-destructive operation.
John:
You must necessarily destroy one of the files and try to recreate it, quote unquote, exactly the way it was.
John:
So if Apple came out with a utility to do this, I might trust it.
John:
But 30-party ones, and I did actually buy this one here, I am very wary of.
John:
I'd be wary of trying to do it myself.
John:
Now, maybe you can make like a command line tool that does.
John:
It's not complicated.
John:
This API for the smart cloning, you can just look it up and run it, right?
John:
Maybe if there's files that are just, oh, these are just data files.
John:
There's no metadata.
John:
I don't care about them.
John:
Like, they're Taylor Swift songs, right?
John:
If I screw them up, worst case, I can just delete them all and redownload them from iTunes.
John:
Like, it's not a big deal.
John:
Maybe I would trust it in that scenario.
John:
But for now, I would say use caution when considering tools like this.
John:
The best thing you can say for tools like this is if you can run them in kind of a read-only mode and say, look, I'm not going to do any deduping, but just please tell me.
John:
How many duplicate files do I have?
John:
And if they could all be deduped, how much space would I save?
John:
Again, setting aside snapshots, which are a thing.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
Speaking of members, I'm glad to see, apparently, customers finally taking advantage of what I urged them to do last time, which is, hey, sign up to become a member, get the discount, buy crap from the store, and then cancel.
John:
To be fair, we don't encourage you to cancel.
John:
No, we don't encourage you to cancel.
John:
But last year, it seemed like people were buying from the store, but there was no increase in members.
John:
It's like, why are you not taking advantage of the free money that we're offering you here?
John:
Become a member, get the discount, buy stuff with it, and then cancel.
Marco:
Or stick around if you want to.
Marco:
Can we stop with the cancel?
John:
We know that some percentage of people will forget to cancel.
John:
That's part of the subscription thing.
John:
We make it super easy to cancel, but if you forget to cancel, that's on you.
John:
Because we make it so easy to cancel.