My Fiber Situation Is Fine
Marco:
in general i'm very happy right now okay this is this this sounds like me what was it last week or the week before oh god all right lay it on me okay so so first of all i don't know if i've been on the show much if at all but for about 15 years maybe um i've had a weird uh stomach allergy to bananas and avocados oh yeah you've mentioned that for sure yeah it's the weirdest thing you know if i if i eat them i just get this like
Marco:
like massive stomach ache, like as if I ate a saw blade or one of those like spiky crusty O's from the Simpsons, you know, like it's like that kind of thing, like just, just hugely just, just pain.
Marco:
And, you know, nothing, you know, nothing, not too much detail, but like nothing can come out of your direction to fix this problem.
Marco:
It's just pain.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So anyway, in my life, I've known a couple of celiacs.
Marco:
One of them told the others, you should try taking colostrum because I was once a celiac and it fixed me.
Marco:
And so far, all three of them have been fixed by taking colostrum.
Marco:
So, hey, anyone out there who's celiac, you might want to look into that.
Marco:
With your doctor.
Casey:
Don't just blindly listen to us idiots.
Casey:
Let's talk to your doctor.
Marco:
Is this a medical thing or is this a non-medical thing?
Marco:
I don't know the details.
Marco:
So colostrum is like the first milk from a cow, like right when the calf is first born.
Marco:
I don't know the details.
Marco:
I'm probably butchering it.
Marco:
So, you know, you can get these pills on Amazon.
Marco:
It's like this weird New Zealand company that makes them.
John:
You can get these pills on Amazon is leaning me in the direction of non-med.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so the theory is that it like stimulates the, I think it stimulates the cilia in your small intestine to like regrow or fix itself somehow.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, I apologize to anybody medical out there who I'm butchering this.
Marco:
Yeah, don't forget the magnetic bracelet.
Marco:
I'm just saying I've known multiple celiacs who have tried this and it has actually like solved their issues like people who were celiacs for years and like you take it and then it just like fixes it and then you can stop taking it and you stay fixed anyway so I thought maybe this might help this issue because this seems like some kind of weird small intestine issue
Marco:
Um, so I, I've been taking colostrum pills for like a month and a half or so.
Marco:
And I decided, let me start testing this allergy again.
Casey:
Wait, did you do this today on a day that you're recording?
Marco:
I've been doing it gradually.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I'll allow it.
Marco:
So, so, you know, bananas, you know, they're not that hard to get or not that expensive.
Marco:
What could one cost?
Marco:
$10.
Marco:
So I took a couple of bananas and sliced them up into little discs and I froze them.
Marco:
And that, and so that way I had, I had like, you know, intervals, like fixed intervals that I had constant access to.
Marco:
i'm not sure what i guess the freezing is preservation like what function is the freezing serving here yeah because when when you only go shopping like every two weeks it's kind of hard to keep fresh okay all right so i would just like i would you know every day i would like i would like try one like one slice and just see like what happens
Marco:
And the first time I tried it, I kind of, I kind of had like a nervous stomach afterwards, but I'm like, I think that might just be psychological.
Marco:
Cause I'm, you know, so I just kept doing it.
Marco:
Like every day I would just take one and, and it got to the point where I would forget, like I would, you know, just throw it in my mouth and then I'd move on and I wouldn't think about it and I'd, and I feel fine and I would increase it to like, let's try two today.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Let's try three today.
Marco:
and slowly increased it and now i'm up to being able to eat a full banana by itself fresh and i don't feel anything it's fantastic so that's exciting i for the first time in 15 years i can eat bananas now i haven't tested it on avocados yet i'm gonna i'm gonna start that test next um again same thing you know controlling i didn't want to try them both at once controlling for the factors like let me try one first get that fixed which seems to be the case uh and now i can oh my god i can get a smoothie that doesn't suck now
Marco:
That's true.
John:
I was going to say, what is the banana item that you're most excited to eat?
Casey:
Smoothies, yeah.
Casey:
Smoothies are excellent.
Casey:
Not peanut butter and banana sandwich?
Casey:
Or banana bread, man.
Marco:
Yeah, banana bread too.
Marco:
That should be fine.
Marco:
I haven't had that in 10 years either or 15 years.
Marco:
That's no way to live.
Marco:
That's reason number one that I'm happy, that I had a banana earlier today and I had one yesterday and I had one the day before that and it's been fine.
Marco:
And now I have 15 years of bananas to make up for.
Marco:
Be careful.
Marco:
Too many bananas give you hard poops.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I've heard.
Marco:
But I eat a lot of vegetables.
Marco:
Believe me, my fiber situation is fine.
Marco:
Thanks, John.
Marco:
So anyway, the second reason I'm very happy is that
Marco:
I have been incredibly busy with doing some stuff in real life.
Marco:
It's good stuff.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But that has resulted in me not paying any attention whatsoever to the news or any flare-ups between people on Twitter or anything like that.
Marco:
I haven't even checked Instagram almost at all in about a week.
Marco:
I've just been so busy.
Marco:
Everyone always thinks like, oh my god, the world is so bad now.
Marco:
Now this is extra bad.
Marco:
Now I really got to pay attention.
Marco:
And the reality is...
Marco:
I salute everyone out there who pays attention for me.
Marco:
I'm in a much better mental state by keeping a lot of distance from a lot of that stuff.
Marco:
And so anyway, reason number three I'm happy is that the same reason why every muscle in my body hurts right now.
Marco:
It's more of a mixed happiness in the sense that I got...
Marco:
I got here on, I got my, uh, you're knocking the mic here.
Marco:
My, uh, Theracane right here, massaging my neck and shoulders here and there tonight.
Marco:
Um, because everything is sore.
Marco:
Um, because my task this week has been keeping me so busy is we've had this, this house for a while and we never really did major clean outs.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Like, you know, we would clean here and there, but, like, we just have, you know, 12 years worth of stuff accumulation.
Marco:
And we decided this week there was no school.
Marco:
Adam was visiting his grandparents upstate for a week, and we thought we are going to spend this week, we're going to rent a dumpster and actually, like, really clean out as much as we can.
Marco:
Like, massive, you know, early spring cleaning.
Marco:
This is what sex is for married people, by the way.
Yeah.
Marco:
Let's run the dumpster.
Marco:
Yes, the kid's away.
John:
Finally.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
John:
That's amazing.
Marco:
I've never run into a dumpster before.
Marco:
It turns out you just call, you know, like literally the company that is recommended here is called like, you know, A-A-A-A-A, you know, carding or whatever.
Marco:
It's one of those yellow pages names.
Marco:
And like you just call them up and some, you know, fairly curt person on the other end is like, how big you want it?
Marco:
You know, when do you want it?
Marco:
Okay, I'll drop it off today.
Marco:
Like, you know, it's that kind of thing.
John:
I mean, it helps if you're in New York, if you want to get that full experience.
John:
That's true.
John:
They sound different if you call in Alabama.
Marco:
I bet they don't sound that different.
Marco:
Anyway, so it wouldn't be funny if every carting company was all run by people from Brooklyn.
Marco:
They're all over the country just running carting companies.
Marco:
They're in construction, too.
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, yeah, so, you know, some guy in a truck shows up and dumps off this dumpster in the street in front of our house.
Marco:
Wait, they put the dumpster in the street?
Marco:
We didn't want them tearing up our pavers in our driveway.
Marco:
I know, but I believe you're allowed to do that.
Marco:
You can.
Marco:
It just takes a quick permit from the village, but it's a wide street.
Marco:
There's room to go around it and everything.
John:
I have never seen that in the Boston area.
John:
It's always got to go on your driveway or on your lawn.
John:
And yes, it does destroy it.
Casey:
You don't have streets made for the modern era.
Casey:
Your streets are preposterously tiny.
John:
Marco's street isn't that wide.
John:
My street's like 100 years old.
Casey:
It's pretty wide.
Casey:
And that's actually, that's a good point.
Casey:
Your street is, I don't know what your excuse is.
John:
It's not as wide as yours, Casey.
Marco:
Yours is like a football field.
Casey:
It's not.
Marco:
My street is wide enough that like a car can be parked on both sides of the street parallel parked and you can still drive through the middle.
Marco:
Yeah, with one car.
Marco:
One car could drive.
Marco:
So yeah, so it's like three cars wide basically.
Casey:
See, my street, I would say, is four cars wide.
John:
Yeah, Casey, you could have a bus on either side, and then you could drive two buses past each other between them.
Casey:
No, parallel parked on either side in two cars.
John:
Go get a tape measure and measure your street.
Marco:
It's huge.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
All right, fine, fine.
Marco:
Anyway, we digress.
Marco:
Yeah, so we knew we were hiring the dumpster.
Marco:
Over the weekend before it arrived on Monday, over the weekend before it arrived, we basically spent that time just staging a whole bunch of trash bags in the garage.
Marco:
By the way, this was a good time to have listened to...
Marco:
rectus was all about like you know space and and you know i've and i've heard merlin over the years talk about um it's all too much this wonderful book um and literally like so we we were driving up to drop adam off upstate we on the way up they were listening to rectus did the drop off had some lunch right before we got in the car i downloaded the audiobook for it's all too much and we listened to that on the way home and
Marco:
And then we listened to it as we were cleaning everything out, like for the first couple days.
Marco:
We're almost done with it.
John:
Just make sure you don't throw out your rock concert t-shirts.
Marco:
Yes, yes.
John:
One thing that you've learned is you got these books, you clean everything out, but don't make Marlon's mistake and get so enthusiastic that you throw out the one irreplaceable thing that you're going to regret losing for the rest of your life.
Marco:
yeah but i mean honestly i don't i don't think i have anything like that like i don't i don't know what the equivalent is maybe like save your well if you had a sega saturn you should save that but you don't no and i have all the video game systems i'm saving of course but i'm just you know i have like and and so fortunately you know it was a really nice day so first first we put everything like out on the curb for people to take and then anything that was still there like 24 hours later we'd toss in the dumpster and
Marco:
I put out like tech stuff, you know, like old networking gear and stuff like that.
Marco:
Um, I even, I, this might come up later.
Marco:
Um, I even got rid of my coffee roaster.
Marco:
I gave it away.
Marco:
Somebody took it.
Casey:
What?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm not roasting.
Casey:
Are you okay?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, we'll get to that later.
Marco:
But anyway, um,
Marco:
i'm still drinking coffee i'm just not roasting it anymore but um yeah so like a lot of stuff was taken stuff that was you know basically trash we threw away which i mean this included like literally every bit of food in the house uh like we because like we it's it's been we have a lot of a lot of expired food i found a jar of couscous from 2011 oh that expired in 2011 so it's actually probably from 2009 i think i could beat that stuff in my house
Marco:
I think we have a salad dressing in the refrigerator that beats that.
Marco:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
And we threw big black garbage bags, a lot of which was full of expired food or trash from the basement.
Marco:
We threw away so much stuff.
Marco:
And when the dumpster was first delivered and I started throwing these bags in, I thought, it's a 10 cubic yard dumpster.
Marco:
It's the smallest one they have.
Marco:
And I thought, oh, this is too big.
Marco:
We're never going to fill this up.
Marco:
Well, guess what?
Marco:
It's full.
It's full.
Marco:
It took us 48 hours.
Marco:
It's full.
Marco:
You could squish that down a lot.
Marco:
There's a lot of air in there.
Marco:
There's some, but not as much as you would think.
Marco:
A lot of the space was like, there were a couple of old broken pieces of furniture that we tried having people take and nobody wanted them, so we had to throw those out.
Marco:
A lot of stuff from the basement, like screens for windows that we don't even have those windows anymore.
Marco:
Like we changed the windows years ago.
Marco:
Like 10 years ago, we got new windows.
Marco:
And we have the screen for the old ones for some reason that we can't even use.
Marco:
Like stuff like that.
Marco:
Tons and tons of stuff that was just trash, just taking up space.
Marco:
And so my God, it feels good.
Marco:
And so the crazy thing is, so we have this dumpster full of trash in front of our house.
Marco:
The house, when you're inside of it, does not look that different.
Marco:
It doesn't look like we're moving out.
Marco:
It looks like we just tidied up a little bit.
John:
All that trash was hidden.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
My office closet, the basement, the attic.
Marco:
Where do we get 10 cubic yards of trash in our house and have it disappear and have nothing look different?
Marco:
anyway it feels very good this is something that i strongly recommend um if you have a house with too much stuff in it listen directives then listen then listen to it's all too much then rent a dumpster and it's it's it's a good it's a good time except that i am now extraordinarily sore from just huge amounts of hauling
Marco:
It's gone into this.
Marco:
Things like in the basement we had, again, from a renovation we did 12 years ago or 10 years ago, we had an old door.
Marco:
It was a custom-sized door, and the door frame that it goes in doesn't exist anymore.
Marco:
And so, why do we have this door in the basement?
Casey:
It's a custom-sized... Because it's bespoke.
Casey:
That's why...
Marco:
Yeah, so that's sitting outside now.
Marco:
I hope somebody takes it who wants like a, you know, reclaimed door and they can reclaim it from next to our dumpster.
Marco:
Hopefully I don't have to put it in the dumpster because my God doors are heavy.
Marco:
But yeah, oh man, everything on my body hurts.
John:
I'm sure people are listening to this and saying, oh Marco, you're being so wasteful throwing all these things in the garbage.
John:
You should have given them away.
John:
You should have free cycled them.
John:
You should have put them up for sale.
John:
You should have found someone who needed them or so on and so forth.
Marco:
There actually was like a free cycle type of group.
Marco:
Like our neighbor was a member of this like Facebook buy nothing.
Marco:
This is apparently a thing.
Marco:
I didn't know about it, but I'm not very good at that.
Marco:
But they posted it there and a lot of people came and took stuff.
Marco:
It was great.
John:
Yeah, so I was saying, part of the... I don't know if they talk about this, and it's all too much, but we talk about it... Merlin talks about it, and we talk about it in Rectifs when I talk to him on the topic.
John:
Sometimes, you know, you can use that as an excuse to never do this.
John:
You can say, oh, well, I don't want to throw all this stuff out.
John:
I really should give it away.
John:
And you should, but if you never actually do find someone to give it to, then it just stays in your house, right?
John:
And so you're, you know, like...
John:
getting the notion that we should get a dumpster and just chuck it all away and then stopping yourself and saying, no, I should find something to give it away.
John:
But then not doing that either doesn't help anybody.
John:
It keeps the junk in your house.
John:
And it also doesn't help the people that you were supposedly going to give it to.
John:
So though putting it all a dumpster and having to go to a landfill seems wasteful and, you know, it should be reused and so on and so forth.
John:
Yes, that's true.
John:
But when you have to choose the lesser of multiple evils, the one that gets the stuff out of your house will probably make your life better more than the one where you just keep it in your house and feel guilty about it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And like and there are, you know, certain things are easier to find better uses for than others.
Marco:
You know, things like clothing that's in decent shape.
Marco:
Usually you can find some place that will accept clothing donations or, you know, things that might have some value.
Marco:
You can often donate to thrift shops or something like that.
John:
And sometimes they have big just, you know, places where you can shove them.
John:
You don't even have to talk to a person.
John:
They'll just have like, hey, take your old clothes and put them in this thing that looks like a dumpster, but it isn't.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The problem, though, is that, you know, like a lot of things in our modern world, a lot more of this stuff ends up getting thrown away behind the scenes than we realize or that many people assume.
Marco:
Like, so, you know, if you're worried like, oh, no, like, what if I just throw this away?
Marco:
I can donate it to somebody.
Marco:
Well,
Marco:
depending on what it is and where you are, there's actually a good chance it's going to get thrown away by them.
Marco:
So, you know, it's kind of... This is not a good thing, but it is worth knowing in the sense that it's a good counter-argument against yourself that, you know, you don't have to necessarily not clean out your house because it might go to waste because, like, A, it's going to go to waste anyway.
Marco:
It's going to waste now if it's in your house not being used and not being useful.
Marco:
But B, like...
Marco:
Almost any way you could get rid of it, there's a high chance of a lot of it being wasted.
Marco:
And so in a way, it's crappy.
Marco:
It's kind of a negative way to look at it.
Marco:
But in a way, it's like, well, then I might as well get rid of it and improve my life and just try to not be so wasteful in the future when accumulating things in the first place.
Marco:
As opposed to like...
Marco:
I have to keep these 10 bags of junk forever because otherwise they'll go in a landfill.
Marco:
Then your house is just becoming a landfill at that point.
Marco:
That's not really helping anybody either.
Casey:
Well, so you've had a fun vacation then, huh?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
This is not a vacation.
Marco:
It's a break from school.
Marco:
This is not a vacation.
John:
How's the dog poop situation like?
John:
Well, he poops outside.
John:
I mean in the dumpster.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
There's one bag for me.
Marco:
I think I saw it so far.
John:
Really?
John:
Hmm.
John:
Interesting.
John:
If there's ever a dumpster in our neighborhood, it slowly fills with bags of dog poop.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, and I've been that guy.
Marco:
I mean, because look...
Marco:
I understand.
Marco:
I'm sure people have reasons.
Marco:
But it's stupid that if I'm walking my dog around these suburbs, there's no trash cans anywhere.
Marco:
You have to escort the poop back to your house.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There is not a town trash can anywhere.
Marco:
You can walk a mile and a half and see zero trash cans.
Marco:
And that, to me, like...
Marco:
I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.
Marco:
You know, we do see a lot of litter that happens as a result.
Marco:
Like, I think overall, it's probably more responsible city planning to put trash cans periodically somewhere.
Marco:
But also, who wants to have a trash can in front of their house?
Marco:
You know, I understand why they're not there.
Marco:
Like, it's definitely a bit of a NIMBY problem.
Marco:
But, you know, it is kind of annoying.
Marco:
So, yeah, I've totally been that guy.
Marco:
Like, I've like, you know, if there's nobody around and I'm walking past this dumpster, I'll just whoop, flick it in there.
Marco:
But, you know.
Marco:
But I figure, you know, now, like, you know, all the years I've been doing that, like, if somebody walked by my dumpster and throws their poop in there, that's fine.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
They owe it to me.
John:
It's a circle of poop.
John:
Now we'll get everyone writing in telling us how harmful it is to have animal waste in with garbage.
Marco:
Wait, where else are we supposed to put it?
Marco:
I don't know, but I'm sure it's wrong.
Marco:
Probably.
Marco:
I mean, look, believe me, there's going to be a lot of people who think half of what I just said was wrong.
John:
That's why I wanted to call it out to say like, it's not ideal.
John:
Ideally, you would carefully find good new homes for all this extra stuff.
John:
But in reality, it would mean that you just never do it and it would just fill your house until you died and then someone would have an estate sale.
Marco:
Or that person would hire a dumpster.
Marco:
That's what happens.
Marco:
That's how a lot of these stories end, unfortunately.
Marco:
You keep it until you die, and then someone else throws it away for you.
Marco:
That's no way to live.
Marco:
Keep in mind, a lot of this, this is the thing, so much stuff that you don't realize gets thrown away, like store returns.
Marco:
certainly there i know there was a couple of articles recently about like online shopping returns and everything yeah most returns to stores get thrown away there are very few items that stores will actually resell if they've been returned like there's so much you know recycling obviously the big one like so much plastic recycling gets thrown away we should be conscious about our waste for sure and our consumption for sure there's lots of reasons to be conscious about that and to
Marco:
to do that but you know there's a reason why you know the whole reduce recycle thing reduce is first you know there's because like once you have this stuff at that point like most of it at some point it's useful life is going to end and it's going to have to be sent somewhere and sometimes you can find a good use for it with somebody else or somebody wants to take it a lot of times you can't
Marco:
And so if you want to be environmentally conscious about this or you're more ecologically responsible, the better place to do that is the front part of this equation of like, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
Buy less stuff.
Marco:
Use less stuff.
Marco:
That's the better part of it.
Marco:
But don't get too high and mighty about what's going to happen after you're done with it because chances are it's going to end up in a landfill regardless.
Casey:
Fun.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad you're making progress, even though nobody can see it, except outside in the dumpster.
Marco:
I am recycling an absurd amount of cardboard.
Marco:
Oh, that's good.
Marco:
So one of the things we did was we upgraded to a larger bed, and so we had this tremendous Casper box.
Yeah.
Marco:
So that and I also pulled out of the basement two boxes for floor standing speakers that we use next to our TV.
Marco:
So pretty tall speaking of probably three and a half feet tall.
Marco:
So, you know, to a pair of speakers, each one had its own individual box that was almost the size of a coffin, like a coffin for a short person.
Marco:
And so I had two of those plus the Casper king-size box, which itself is probably about coffin-sized as well for a short person.
Marco:
And so I filled all three of those with other cardboard that had been flattened and packed and everything.
Marco:
Oh my, it's so heavy.
Marco:
Again, the hauling.
Marco:
But I would say I could probably fill half a dumpster just with paper and cardboard.
Yeah.
Casey:
My word.
Marco:
So yeah, that's sitting next to my dumpster.
Marco:
It's a fun night.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
So whatever's going on in the world of tech, I have no idea.
Marco:
I have missed all of it.
Marco:
Is anything going on?
Casey:
Did you hear?
Casey:
Apple bought Nintendo.
Marco:
Oh yeah, that finally happened.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
With regard to greedy Bluetooth from Ask ATP, we got some feedback from Paul Violanti, who wrote, regarding Marco's Apple Maps Bluetooth predicament, there's a setting to have Maps speak driving directions through the car as phone call audio.
Casey:
So if you go to settings, maps, spoken directions, and then toggle directions on radio on, then that will act as though a brief phone call has just came in, and that will make sure that your car radio treats that as an, oh my goodness, you need to listen to this sort of scenario.
Casey:
So Paul writes, this works on my 2017 Toyota 4Runner.
Casey:
Even if I'm playing no audio, the phone will connect as if it was on a phone call to speak the directions.
Marco:
Yeah, this is interesting.
Marco:
Yeah, because this is like about my FJ, like you have to be playing music or a podcast in order to hear any spoken map directions because it has to be logically thinking it's playing something.
Marco:
And so this is I never thought about this.
Marco:
This is a good idea.
Marco:
I'm going to try it.
Marco:
But it is kind of annoying that like I would have to like this would have to be how it works properly.
Marco:
over any Bluetooth, like not just that car radio.
Marco:
But it's interesting, like a lot of people forget or never knew these old Bluetooth modes where like, you know, phone calls were treated differently than audio.
Marco:
And this was for lots of legacy technology reasons.
Marco:
It's like a whole different Bluetooth profile and all these different codecs that were lower bandwidth.
Marco:
They could have...
Marco:
know bi-directional communication over the very very very crappy latency or very crappy bandwidth of early bluetooth versions um so there's all this stuff but um yeah it's interesting like bluetooth you know it's it's has a lot of crappy legacy stuff but in this case that actually will be helpful
John:
I feel for the person who had to come up with a copy for this option.
John:
It's called directions on radio.
John:
Like it's got to communicate this very, you know, the thing that Casey just said.
John:
So say you're in your car and you want to hear directions from the map, but you don't want to have audio playing.
John:
We'll turn this thing on and it'll do that for reasons that are even more complicated than this.
John:
But instead, it's just a toggle that says directions on radio.
John:
I wonder if people...
John:
I do wonder, like, how young do you have to be to not recognize radio as the thing in your car that makes noise, right?
John:
Because does anyone listen to it?
John:
I suppose tons of people do listen to radio, but at least in my household.
John:
I can't remember the last time we had AM or FM radio turned on in any of our cars.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and this is actually like, you know, I was first making Overcast back in 2013 or so.
Marco:
And I actually briefly considered doing this kind of feature that would route the podcast audio through the phone call profile instead of the audio profile.
Marco:
for this reason that like some people actually had bluetooth situations in their cars usually that supported the phone call mode but not the audio mode and so this and this was a thank god a very short-lived period in bluetooth evolution where you would have that you know only have the phone and not have the music but there are cars out there that that have that situation um so i briefly thought about like a feature that would just do this i even i even once looked into like what if i run one of those like you know
Marco:
phone ip apis like twilio or whatever back then like what if i actually have a premium feature where you can call a phone number and have it just play your podcasts like over the over an actual phone call for other types of integrations but fortunately fortunately like you know by the time i would have actually gotten to that on my to-do list the need for all this stuff had vanished
Casey:
Speaking of cars, it's a little bit of longer feedback, but I found it absolutely fascinating.
Casey:
So an anonymous person wrote in with regard to brake-by-wire systems.
Casey:
So this means there's no physical connection between the brake pedal and the brakes.
Casey:
It's all electronically controlled.
Casey:
That's brake-by-wire.
Casey:
So Anonymous writes, I've spent most of the last decade working on brakes and brake by wire brakes are actually stranger than how you portrayed them.
Casey:
When a car company calls brake by wire, they're primarily referring to a certain kind of electricity, electrically boosted brake system.
Casey:
Marcos Tesla has a Bosch, Bosch, Bosch.
Casey:
I-Booster, which is electrically boosted similarly to how electric power steering is boosted.
Casey:
It senses torque at a motor attached to the input rod and provides additional torque to the driver.
Casey:
These quote-unquote by-wire systems have the input rod connected to a master cylinder just as it would be in a car without power brakes.
Casey:
The master cylinder is sealed off from the rest of the system by a valve that is held closed during normal operation.
Casey:
The brake controller reads the master cylinder pressure and pedal stroke to determine the driver intent, and then uses a separate electrically actuated boost cylinder to generate the brake system pressure.
Casey:
So it is technically by wire as during normal operation, there's no fluid connection to the wheels.
Casey:
But there is fluid involved on the input side, and all of this actuation takes place in one piece of hardware.
Casey:
Some manufacturers, particularly Japanese automakers, use high-pressure accumulators in place of the boost cylinder, but the principle of operation is similar.
Casey:
This is done because only generating the pressure needed for a situation is more efficient, and subjective metrics are improved by isolating the driver from wheel behavior.
Casey:
Additionally, this provides a built-in failsafe where, if the brake unit fails, the isolation valve will open itself or be opened by the ECU and provide the driver with a direct connection to the wheels.
Casey:
And then, John, I guess you were having an email conversation with this person, is that right?
John:
Yeah, this is my response to that.
John:
So this is actually stuff that I had seen when the first break-by-wire system came out, and we didn't go into the past show, but how do they deal with a situation where, what if the electronics fail?
John:
When the very first break-by-wire things came out, lots of people were nervous about that.
John:
So they had all these fail-safes where it's like a regular braking system, but that part of it is shut off normally.
John:
But if anything goes wrong, this valve opens up, and it just sort of
John:
default fails into being normal-ish breaks, right?
John:
That was to make people feel more comfortable.
John:
So my response to this was to ask this person, you know, it was just basically amusing.
John:
I said, I wonder if the other go to the jet fighter route, so jet fighter planes for many, many years, decades,
John:
have also had fly-by-wire and the same deal the first plane that was fly-by-wire all of the pilots and the engineers were all scared it's like how you know i what if the electronics fail electronics fail all the time i want the pedals and the the stick in my plane to be connected to the control surfaces i don't want to rely on the electronics if the electronics go out i'm just i'm just going to fall out of the sky like a rock because i can't control anything anymore
John:
And the way they eventually dealt with that in jet fighters and other sort of fly-by-wire airplanes is not by doing the thing that you just read where it's like, well, it's like a regular hydraulic system, but we shut that off normally and do this by wire thing, but then it fails, it opens back up.
John:
instead the way they deal with it in not all planes but a lot of them i mean it's the same way they deal with a lot of things in aviation uh massive redundancy so there's not one electronic system there's not two electronic systems like three completely independent redundant fully functioning systems routed through different parts of the plane using different technologies and it's like if one of them fails you switch to the backup one of the backbone fails you switch to the backup backup one
John:
And that, in theory, makes people comfortable enough that they're okay flying the plane.
John:
Never mind the fact that a lot of fighter planes are so unstable under normal operation that without the computers constantly adjusting the control surfaces, it will tumble out of the sky like a rock thrown by a toddler.
John:
But we'll set that aside for now.
John:
um that was my question all right so you just described the way this works now do you think cars will ever go to full by wire with no physical backup and deal with it by saying okay we're really going to separate your pedals entirely from the hydraulic system but to make it so you all don't die we're going to double or triple or quadruple redundant make that make the system redundant
Casey:
And so the person wrote,
John:
This is kind of one of those, like the person here is working on break-by-wire systems, and I asked a question, I wonder if they're going to do X, and the person said, publicly available information would say yes.
John:
That's their way of saying, I'm not going to tell you we're doing that, but were you to look at publicly available information, you would see it leaning in that direction.
John:
So that's a confirmation without confirmation.
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Casey:
Aidan Traeger writes, I know you acknowledge the existence of third-party Apple Music apps on the show, but I wanted to pass along Mark Barrowcliffe's fourth annual iOS Music Player Showcase from just last month.
Casey:
So, you know, we were talking about, and God bless, does anyone at Apple actually use the Apple Music app?
Casey:
I feel like we say this about a lot of things.
Casey:
This is becoming like the new If Steve Were Alive.
Casey:
Does anyone at Apple actually?
Marco:
Well, I can tell you one thing.
Marco:
They definitely don't use the Mac version.
Marco:
And if they do, they definitely don't use the songs view.
Casey:
I feel like every corner of the music app on every platform is straight trash.
Casey:
And this is why I haven't divorced myself of Spotify, despite being cheap enough to want to, is because it's all garbage.
Casey:
I can't play something until I can.
Casey:
And then I'm in the midst of playing something.
Casey:
It's playing great.
Casey:
Actually, just earlier today, I had an instance where I was not authorized to play something.
Casey:
Earlier in the day, I had an instance where I was playing an album.
Casey:
I think I was playing Thriller by Michael Jackson.
Casey:
I was playing the album.
Casey:
Went through the first three or four songs, no problem.
Casey:
Just stopped.
Casey:
It knows it's ready to play the next song.
Casey:
I didn't stop it.
Casey:
I swear to you, I didn't stop it because this happens a lot.
Casey:
It's ready to play the next song, but it just...
Casey:
froze.
Casey:
The app is functional, but it just froze.
Casey:
It got sleepy, I guess.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I was asking too much.
Casey:
I guess I just don't have enough empathy for the machine.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
Anyway, so with regard to, hey, what could you do to fix this problem?
Casey:
Well, you could potentially just get a different music app entirely.
Casey:
And so Aiden reminded us of this list by Mark Barrowcliffe.
Casey:
It's actually more than a list.
Casey:
It's a comprehensive review.
Casey:
And I started paging through this this morning, and there is a lot here.
Casey:
So
Casey:
If you are interested, Mark does an amazing job of laying out the landscape and showing what each of these things looks like and how they behave and what they're good at, what they're bad at, etc.
Casey:
But it's a really, really interesting roundup, and I strongly encourage you, if you're like me and hate everything about your music situation, check it out.
Casey:
You might like it.
John:
These are just iOS apps, right?
Casey:
iOS and iPadOS, yes.
Casey:
I do not believe there was anything on macOS.
Casey:
That's correct.
John:
There's 16 apps.
John:
Three of them are new this year.
John:
I know there are similar clients available for the Mac, but I doubt there are 16 of them in total.
Marco:
This is so often the problem.
Marco:
I've looked at a lot of these possible alternative apps over the years and usually there is not an app that is Mac and iOS.
Marco:
There are some that are Mac only.
Marco:
There's a lot that are iOS only.
Marco:
And, but usually you, you have to give up one of those platforms to use one of these apps, or you can just, you know, have it use your Apple music library and which a lot of these apps do anyway.
Marco:
And then you can kind of, you know, just keep using the Apple version of music on the Mac, but that's the worst one.
Marco:
Like that's the one I don't want to keep using.
Marco:
That's the one I want to replace.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
I mean, I hate to rag on these apps because you don't know what constraints they're dealing with.
Casey:
You don't know what they're up against.
Marco:
Oh, I know.
Marco:
They're dealing with not caring.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Look, Apple has shown when they care about something...
Marco:
They put a lot of resources behind it.
Marco:
They put good talent on it.
Marco:
They incentivize the people in the company to work on it.
Marco:
And it's very, very clear that they do not value this because if they valued it, they would put the resources behind it to make it happen.
Marco:
And they just don't.
John:
And when you say they, to be clear, you're not talking about the developers who make the application because they don't set those type of priorities.
Marco:
Do any developers make the applications?
No.
Marco:
Honestly, look, a lot of times what happens in Apple, a lot of times is certain apps or features actually go for a long span having a full-time staff of zero people.
Marco:
The impression I've gotten over many, many people over many years is that people get moved around to different projects or they move themselves around to different projects.
Marco:
And for your career to progress...
Marco:
you typically have to be moved around to whatever the hot new thing is.
Marco:
And I've heard time and time again that it's hard for your career to advance and progress if you're doing the more boring stuff.
Marco:
What engineer or product manager wants to spend their time on the music app for the Mac?
Marco:
I understand why it is this way, but that is ultimately a failure of management and structure.
Marco:
That is something that the company has always had problems like multitasking and keeping their interest in working on the things they've already started rather than going and starting something new constantly.
Marco:
Ideally, as they grow, they should be able to balance more things over time.
Marco:
In practice, that hasn't really happened nearly as much as you would think based on their size.
John:
I mean, this is not a unique to Apple problem.
John:
Every company I've ever worked for experiences this.
John:
It is one of the most annoying to people like us who really appreciate good software to see resources not be put into something that is quote unquote done or isn't the new hotness or doesn't drive revenue or isn't driving growth or whatever.
John:
And that's just the natural inclination of any company, the people who are managing it.
John:
Why am I going to dump all my money into a thing that I know is not going to produce any growth, does not have any big potential upside, exists the way it is now, has a dwindling number of users?
John:
If I made it 1,000% better, I wouldn't make 0.01% more money, and it wouldn't make anybody choose the Mac or the iPhone.
John:
You can list off all these reasons why.
John:
Here's why we're not investing in that.
John:
And for the most part, that's right, except for where things just slowly start to decay, right?
John:
That people think, well, once it's done, it's done.
John:
And even though everyone knows intellectually, even at the highest levels of management, well, software is never done.
John:
You have to, at the very least, maintain it.
John:
And it's important to keep up with the times.
John:
And every few years, you really need to overhaul it.
John:
And Apple would say that they do that.
John:
It's just that they do that, like every company, way too slowly.
John:
They wait too long.
John:
They wait for something to become a festering sword to say, OK, well, we're never going to make any money off of this.
John:
but really it should be better because it's an embarrassment now or it's actually hurting us reputation-wise.
John:
And then someone seizes on that opportunity within the company to say, ah, I've wanted to fix this app forever and finally I get to bring a team up and we'll get a bunch of people who are enthusiastic and they'll fix it all.
John:
And that's not a cycle that we enjoy as users.
John:
We don't enjoy the app that we use every day slowly crumbling to dust until it becomes such a big crisis that Apple turns its gaze briefly to it and throws some people and money at it and resurrects it and then we begin the cycle again.
John:
It would be better...
John:
If everything was maintained evenly, you know, like, but that's not just, it's very difficult in my experience working for several different companies over my career.
John:
It's very difficult for companies to have that, to have that discipline to say we are going to keep a team of people.
John:
on let's say terminal for the mac right and we are never going to have zero people on it we're never going to have i mean i think i think terminal for example has had fractional people like it would have one person who's responsible for terminal and five other apps right so it's got you know 20 of a person on it for five years uh uh you know it's like but we're going to have what i always call it in my pitches inside companies because i'm always complaining about this is you need to have a standing army which is probably a bad analogy for militaristic reasons or whatever but a standing army for everything that you care about
John:
that you can never disband them.
John:
You can never say terminal's done, don't need any people on it.
John:
There always needs to be a terminal team.
John:
Doesn't need to be a big team, but it literally needs to be there forever.
John:
Like forever?
John:
What do you mean forever?
John:
Yeah, if you ship terminal on the Mac and you still sell Macs and terminal still comes with them, you always have to have at least some small team
John:
whose only job is to continue to maintain and improve terminal.
John:
And there are anti-patterns there as well because if you have that team, eventually that team gets bored and decide the terminal is going to become like a text-based MMO or something.
Marco:
Or they get like rewrite-itis.
Marco:
Like, oh, we're going to rewrite this all in SwiftUI.
John:
Right, right.
John:
So that's part of the discipline as well.
John:
But we're so far at the other end of the spectrum where it just gets abandoned that I feel like we could swing back in the other direction.
John:
And what you mentioned about career is also true.
John:
If you're going to do that and have a standing army who are on these applications, you need to not punish them for being on the boring project.
John:
If they're doing an awesome job and every year, you know, Terminal is the most beloved application on the Mac and it's so good that, you know, third-party Terminal apps have trouble competing and, you know, again, there's...
John:
with this particular thing where we're talking about apple it's a little bit weird because they're also the platform owner and you know that's that's another thing that this discipline will get you is you'll have the conversation should we be shipping insert application here with the mac or should we allow third parties to handle this entirely in fact there's a there's a topic about that that we'll get to in some future episode of atp and by being forced to have a standing army a team assigned to every single thing it makes you think
John:
do we really need to be shipping graphing calculator or do we care about graphing calculator anymore or should we let that be a third-party opportunity because we don't want to fund a team that for you know the next 20 years with even just one or two people all they do is make sure graphing calculator is improving every year right you know be honest with yourself do we care about graphing calculator or is it just there because someone wrote it once and it still works
John:
um so those are all things that should happen inside apple and should happen inside every company but it is not easy it's not easy from the outside it just seems like just make all the apps better right you have unlimited money but that's that's never really true and money doesn't translate directly into developer effort you know so it's tricky but i agree that apple particularly in the case of the music app and particularly particularly in the case of the music app on the mac uh is not doing well and
Marco:
I think in some ways, you know how over the last couple of decades, some of the more enlightened and some of the big tech companies have intentionally created career paths?
Marco:
Because the original problem was programmers would get elevated to management as they advanced in their careers, but not all programmers can or want to be managers.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
a lot of places have developed career tracks for programmers to advance their careers while still just being programmers, not, like, directing a whole team of people.
John:
They're called ICs, Marco.
Marco:
Yes, sorry.
Marco:
Yes, you can tell how much experience I have.
Marco:
Individual contributors.
Marco:
But, you know, you can see how, like...
Marco:
In a way, it was like the industry had to develop and stabilize and mature to some degree before it had the introspection and be like, actually, we need to kind of create a structure here that creates better results in this area.
Marco:
And I think this is one of those areas of the industry now is so big and so developed and mature.
Marco:
There's a lot of broadness.
Marco:
Boring technologies that we just kind of need to keep working.
Marco:
And they're never going to be exciting to work on anymore, probably, you know, or at least rarely going to be exciting to work on.
Marco:
But you can't have, you know, these big tech companies that have these big old developed platforms, all these different apps and parts to them, they have to incentivize and reward the maintenance of boring things over time.
Marco:
We have so much now that we've built as an industry over the last 20, 30 years that we still need.
Marco:
We need all of this to keep working.
Marco:
Ideally, it would slowly even get better and have a staff of more than zero working on it at some point.
Marco:
As you mentioned, this isn't exclusive to Apple, but Apple still does a pretty bad job of this.
Marco:
We need those things to have somebody looking out for them.
Marco:
And if the incentives in the company for things like career promotion and excitement and reward are not going to reward that, we need to start creating paths for that to be rewarded inside these companies.
Casey:
Well, they exist like in Apple.
Casey:
There is a title like there's distinguished engineer, scientist and technologist is a title at Apple.
Casey:
And my understanding, which is very limited, and I might have this wrong, but my limited understanding is that's basically a nerd's nerd that has just been a super nerd for their entire lives and is still writing code, even though they are.
Casey:
in the perhaps twilight of their career.
Casey:
And it's not because they're no good.
Casey:
It's the opposite, because they're extremely good.
Casey:
And I've seen in many companies these sorts of things, because what you said is right, that oftentimes, especially up until 10, 20 years ago, there would be a fork in the road, or really, there wasn't even a fork, I should say.
Casey:
There was just a really right-angled turn in
Casey:
where even if you really love coding, well, you're old enough and wise enough that, well, you're going to be a manager now and that's that.
Casey:
So, you know, kiss Xcode, Visual Studio, whatever, goodbye.
Casey:
You're just going to live in, you know, Excel and PowerPoint for the rest of your career.
Casey:
Have fun.
Casey:
And it's gotten better, but it's still not great.
Casey:
And I don't know, it's...
Casey:
Apple Music is just so frustrating because when I got exposed to Apple, which by John's metric was yesterday, but in reality it was the mid-aughts, they were the music company.
Casey:
More than almost anything else, they were the music company.
Casey:
They were the iPod company.
Casey:
They were the iTunes company.
Casey:
And it makes me sad, perhaps more than most, because that's kind of my...
Casey:
The intrinsic and default view of Apple is that they're so good at music, among other things.
Casey:
In the same way that, like, I guess in the 80s—and John, correct me when you're ready—but in the 80s, they were the publishing company, among other things.
Casey:
And they were so good at publishing, and in the aughts, they were so good at music—
Casey:
And, and to see Apple trying in some regard, you know, with Apple music trying to be modern and trying to be forward thinking and getting big into streaming.
Casey:
And yet the client applications, which is the thing that you would think would be their bread and butter.
Casey:
It's just such garbage.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
I hate poking fun at other people's work, but it's just so bad, you guys.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
It's nobody's work.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
Yeah, maybe that's it.
John:
I think Apple Music, especially on iOS, has a lot of people working on it.
John:
I mean, I think it is, we've talked about this before, probably hampered by the back end, which seems like it's old and creaky, not particularly responsive.
John:
And I bet the front end team has very limited control over what the back end does.
John:
And part of the reason it's so creaky and crumbling is because it is from one casey.
John:
started getting into apple it's old like in the grand scheme of things really does need to be tore down rebuilt the in particular on the mac splitting out the music app was not really the rebuild we were looking for on ios i think it's definitely doing better than the mac version but it's still weird and buggy i tend to blame a lot of the server side stuff for that but uh getting back to the like what uh having to have sort of a a team on every project a standing army and all your things forces you to do
John:
I think if you had that conversation about music, they would agree with Casey.
John:
They would say, well, no, music is a thing that Apple needs to do.
John:
Not just because we used to be the music company when we made the iPod, but just because it is a core activity that our customers do with our products.
John:
It is not graphing calculator.
John:
It is one of the big pillars of things people do with their phones and their Macs and their iPads and the things that we sell.
John:
So this is a quick conversation.
John:
Should music be better?
John:
Yes.
John:
Should we stop doing music?
John:
No.
John:
and you know it's a service behind it too so you got service like everything says please fix music i'm not sure what's taking them so long i think they have made some improvements in recent years but it is definitely in need of a freshening and an overhaul and maybe it's just so complicated now because they have the legacy of people like marco who are still using it like itunes so they've got to support all those features otherwise marco will be sad but then they're trying to also be spotify but spotify doesn't have that legacy that they have to deal with and
John:
you know, it's, it's a difficult situation, but this is definitely an area that needs improvement.
John:
But, uh, if, if they ask me, I'm going to say, do photos for families first.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I would agree with that.
Marco:
That's, that's probably in worse shape, but, but yeah, no, I mean, it's just, that's the thing.
Marco:
Like, I don't think this is one of the situations where like, it's not like any one person trying to do a bad job.
Marco:
It's that the, the structure of the incentives and the way things work, the way people move around, like it's that kind of stuff that has to be addressed financially.
Marco:
through structural changes and management.
Marco:
It's that kind of thing.
Marco:
It's not like there's some villain keeping music down.
Marco:
When you look at Spotify's crappy app,
Marco:
Spotify's app should not be a breath of fresh air in any way to any Apple customer.
Marco:
Because Spotify's app is terrible.
Marco:
And we are accustomed to Apple users, at least we used to be, to a higher standard of how good our first-party apps, or the apps that we're accustomed to seeing from our community, to how good those are.
Marco:
That's kind of where we came from.
Marco:
Now, yes, I know the iPhone is much bigger and everything else, but...
Marco:
We are accustomed to, culturally, a high bar.
Marco:
Our apps should be really good, and apps on the Mac and first-party apps from Apple should be really good, because historically, they usually were.
Marco:
And we're at a point now where, in a lot of areas, including this, they're not.
Marco:
And that's on them to create...
Marco:
you know, create the conditions to turn that around.
Marco:
Because again, like we should never, none of us should ever look at Spotify and say, Ooh, this part's nice because no part of Spotify is nice.
Marco:
It's garbage.
Marco:
Just insert in certain areas.
Marco:
It's just less garbage than Apple's current music app.
Casey:
See, but that's the thing.
Casey:
One of the areas where it's less garbage than Apple Music is it actually plays music reliably.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
That's an area where it's less garbage.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
And that's why, like, you know, because it is a terrible app.
Marco:
Otherwise, yes.
Marco:
It's a web view, and it's a bad web view at that.
Marco:
It's an even worse web view than the old Apple Music Store things were.
Marco:
And we shouldn't be looking at that and saying, ooh, this is better than ours in any way.
Marco:
Because Spotify's app is garbage, and Apple can very much do better.
Marco:
And so I wish they would in this area, because I don't want to use Spotify for lots of reasons, many of which are political.
Marco:
But certainly, I don't want to be tempted by any part of their app being better.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Caseta by Lutron, smart lighting control.
Marco:
This is brought to you by Lutron, pioneers in smart home technology.
Marco:
Now, a lot of people think, like I did, that you need smart bulbs to get smart lighting or you need special smart outlets or whatever.
Marco:
No, there's a much smarter way.
Marco:
Caseta uses smart dimmers and switches that replace the switch in your wall.
Marco:
And this has huge advantages.
Marco:
So number one, it's still a physical switch in the wall.
Marco:
So anybody who walks into the room doesn't have to know about your special app or special voice commands and how to turn your lights on and off.
Marco:
They can just use the switch on the wall.
Marco:
But then you also have...
Marco:
all of the smart functions that smart bulbs and stuff can, can offer in addition to having a real physical switch.
Marco:
So you can also do things like command it with apps or home kit or voice control, and you can automate it.
Marco:
You can have special sensors triggering certain actions.
Marco:
You can automate it based on things like sunrise and sunset times of day, different conditions.
Marco:
It's super smart,
Marco:
But it's still controlled by a switch in the wall.
Marco:
So that means anybody can use it at any time.
Marco:
And I personally like this because I can choose my own light bulbs.
Marco:
I'm a light bulb nerd.
Marco:
I like to pick, you know, whatever is the best brightness and CRI for what I'm looking for without having to limit myself to only, you know, the smart bulbs.
Marco:
But I can still have all the smart functionality with Lutron.
Marco:
Any light bulb controlled by the switch becomes smart with Lutron Caseta.
Marco:
It's just so great.
Marco:
And I have found this to be rock solid reliable.
Marco:
I cannot say that about any other smart home automation kind of system that I've tried.
Marco:
And I've tried a lot of them, believe me.
Marco:
Caseta is rock solid.
Marco:
It works every single time.
Marco:
It's incredible how much better it is than everything else.
Marco:
So see for yourself with the wonderful Caseta system.
Marco:
There are so much you can do with this, and it's so much better to replace the switch and make that smart than to try to make all the bulbs and stuff smart.
Marco:
So get smart lighting the smart way with Caseta by Lutron Smart Switches.
Marco:
Learn more at Lutron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's Lutron.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Lutron Caseta for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I would like to do the thing that I do every once in a while, which is I attempt to take a victory lap on something and then I'm shot down.
Casey:
So here we go, everyone.
Casey:
I would like to tell you that I was listening to the aforementioned Reconcilable Differences, episode 176, The Curse of Convenience.
Casey:
And first of all, I do love that show so darn much.
Casey:
It is so good.
Casey:
But beyond that...
Casey:
I was listening and John was describing how you are going through old photographs, like, you know, printed photographs and scanning them and so on and so forth, which as with everything John talks about is somehow riveting, even though it shouldn't be.
Casey:
But here's where the victory lap comes in.
Casey:
You were geotagging these photos.
Casey:
And I was lamenting to you just a couple of months ago that I think it's preposterous that Mr. Metadata himself didn't want to put geotags in any of his pictures.
Casey:
And I said, you should do that.
Casey:
You never know when you might want it.
Casey:
And listen to that.
Casey:
Apparently, John, you're geotagging your photos.
Casey:
And I am doing my victory lap as we speak.
John:
Well, I think you are aided there by the incredibly slow scanner I have.
John:
Because part of the problem, I mean, if you listen to the episode, unfortunately, this part is in the members only after shows.
John:
You'd have to go to relay.fm slash RD slash join, I think.
John:
I'm just going off the top of my head there.
John:
To hear the member thing.
John:
But yeah, the problem is,
John:
it doing something like this scanning photos there's a lot of downtime where you're waiting for the scanner and so you're looking for other things to do and part of what i'm doing with that time is taking the previous batch and retouching them and rotating them and fixing them and then while i'm in there like okay well i've done i've got them all looking nice and the scanner is only halfway through so what do i do now
John:
Well, might as well geotag them.
John:
Part of what I'm doing with geotagging is because how can you geotag photos from a long time ago?
John:
Well, if they're in my childhood home, I know the address.
John:
So I just do that.
John:
And as I said on the show, some of them are beach photos.
John:
I know the spot on the beach, so I just drop the pin on Google Maps with the satellite view and just get the latitude and longitude because I literally know down to 10 feet where it was taken from.
John:
And that's a fun thing to do while I wait for the scanner to finish.
John:
Yeah, so I don't do it with all of them.
John:
I can't do it with all of them, but it's something for me to do while I wait for the scanner to slowly grind.
John:
And here's the thing I don't understand about the scanner.
John:
I'm sure there's a good explanation for this, but I'm putting multiple photographs on a flatbed scanner at the same time, right?
John:
just because you know i figured that's more efficient but put a bunch down there and flatbed scanner it's got like a little bar i think that like kind of like shines light and moves across and scans right and the bar goes across the width of the thing goes you know and i imagine it just lighting up a row at a time of the the image and recording the pixel values and that little i'm assuming that's how it works i don't know the details right
John:
But what I expect to happen is I line up all the photos on the flatbed scanner and the little bar goes and just goes from one end of the flatbed to the other and scans all the pictures.
John:
Because if I had put a flat piece of paper there, like the scanning bed is, I don't know, it's like 11 inches by 14 inches, whatever it is.
John:
If I put a piece of paper filling the whole area, it would scan that.
John:
It would just go and scan the whole page, right?
John:
But when I put five photos there in the image capture app and I say, I want this to come out as multiple files,
John:
it does one pass for each photo.
John:
So it goes, it scans the first photo, and then it goes back to the beginning, scans the second one, it goes back to the beginning, scans, and that's why it takes for freaking ever.
John:
And I think that's incredibly inefficient, and I don't understand why it's doing that.
John:
So anyway, that's why I'm geotagging photos now.
Casey:
Hey, I don't care how you got there.
Casey:
I just care that you got there.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
And then since we're in apparently the John Power Hour, would you like to tell us about the feedback to your absolutely delightful streaming app spec?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I'm making up for the fact that I didn't post any blog posts last year.
John:
So now I've done two this year.
John:
So I'm maintaining my one per year average.
Yeah.
John:
um now wait like i said if one blog post is a follow-up to one that came shortly before does that count as a as like a whole separate one or is it like more like a 1.5 situation no it's a whole separate one okay it's got a different url it's got a title it's the whole it's the whole thing um so the last one where we talked about streaming apps and my you know spec for the bare bones features that they should all have and then i said i wanted to do a post about the feedback i was getting and i did um uh it's
John:
You know, we'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
The title is very similar to the other one.
John:
So some people might think, oh, I already read this one.
John:
But this is just about the feedback.
John:
I'm not going to, you know, go through it all here.
John:
Again, I talked about it more in Rectives.
John:
But I'm just going to tell you that the upshot is the overwhelming feedback, like 80% of all the feedback I got from people was people saying, I hate it when I launch a video streaming app and I can't continue watching the thing I was previously watching.
John:
not everybody complains but it's just like the number one complaint not even close um so much so that like it just i was in i was in the car with my daughter and i was saying i was going to talk about it on a podcast she doesn't care about technology or you know she watches streaming stuff all the time and we have all these streaming services but she doesn't care about apps or whatever so i said what do you think about streaming apps i'm going to be talking about on a podcast she's like i had to sort of explain what the streaming app is you know like netflix hulu amazon prime whatever
John:
Like not the shows that are on them, but like the actual thing you're using to watch the shows.
John:
What do you think about those?
John:
And you can tell she really hadn't given them much thought because, you know, kids just take things for granted.
John:
This is just how the world works.
John:
You can watch TV shows on your magic little device.
John:
I was like, yeah, but if you think about the apps, like do you have anything to say about them?
John:
Any kind of opinion?
John:
And she said, I can't find it kind of annoying when I go to the app and I can't find the show I was watching.
John:
It was literally the only thing she said.
John:
Totally unprompted.
John:
I didn't mention anything about it.
John:
I'm like, this is just like the original sin of streaming apps.
John:
And I go into this post, a further explanation of why that is.
John:
Someone from Hulu is saying that we actually did A-B testing and determined that it drove engagement.
John:
And so the theory that it drives more engagement is not just a theory.
John:
It's a real thing that happened and it caused them to change their apps to make them worse.
John:
For people who won't read it, I will just...
John:
throw in the money sentence that I almost bolded but didn't.
John:
The idea that you have some kind of engagement-based metric where like, well, if we make it harder for you to find the show you're watching, you'll try more new stuff and that's actually good for you because you'll discover new shows and all these other things you can convince yourself that this is better because it will make the company more money or even if you can convince yourself that it's better for the customer because it will help them discover new shows and they'll be happier in the end because they discovered that amazing show that they wouldn't have otherwise discovered.
John:
Even if you agree with all that, which I don't, but even if you stipulate that for the sake of argument, sure, that's all true.
John:
People hate it.
John:
They hate not being able to find the thing they were watching.
John:
And the adaptation of this old saying, which I could not find the source of, so I just linked the quote investigator, was people won't remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.
John:
And that applies to applications as well.
John:
People will not remember
John:
that your app helped them find their new favorite television show they'll remember that your app was frustrating and they will eventually associate that frustration with your brand and so even if it is better which i don't think it is to intentionally make it harder to find what people were watching everyone hates it please don't do it um yeah we'll see if anything changes but
John:
uh you know seeing the incentives so clearly outlined like this it seems like nothing will change because as far as these companies concern the applications are working as designed um and in the end uh as you know has been discovered really like the tv shows matter and we will suffer through almost any application to get to the play button to make it happen so probably not a lot of incentive for this to change but boy it's kind of a shame
Casey:
I've been loving your posts about this.
Casey:
And I'm sad that I'm not going to get another post about anything until 2023.
Casey:
So it's been a fun ride.
John:
Well, who knows?
John:
Stranger things have happened.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
So we have a few things to clear out in the main show.
Casey:
I don't know how much we'll...
Casey:
time we'll have for it but we wanted to start tonight with um the actually fairly old news at this point about nvidia intel and arm or more most especially nvidia and arm so we talked actually i guess it was like a year or two back when was that it was september of 2020 which i feel like it was yesterday but time is flat circle uh we talked about how nvidia was trying to acquire arm arm being how would you describe arm i don't know i feel like i'm gonna butcher this if i make an attempt at it
John:
The company that came up with the instruction set and CPU, many of the CPU designs that are used in cell phones and many other things.
John:
They're small, low power chips.
John:
And when people started making smartphones, ARM chips were ideally suited to it because they were small and low power.
John:
And eventually Apple decided to put ARM chips in the iPhone and then it started making its own chips based on the ARM instruction set and the rest is history.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
So early, I think it was late January, early February, there were some rumblings that, oh, this acquisition may not go through because a lot of regulators were really unhappy about it across the entire world.
Casey:
And then sure enough, it was, looks like February 8th.
Casey:
The deal collapsed.
Casey:
Quoting from Daring Fireball, SoftBank Media Group Corp has shelved its blockbuster sale of Arm Limited to U.S.
Casey:
chipmaker NVIDIA Corp, valued at up to $80 billion, citing regulatory hurdles that one-stead seek to list the company.
Casey:
uh britain's arm which named a new ceo on whatever tuesday that was said it would go public before march 2023 and softbank ceo which owns most if not all of it uh indicated that it would be in the united states most likely on the nasdaq so it is going to be its own thing sooner rather than later
John:
And for people who don't know, ARM is not unique, but part of what makes ARM different than other CPU makers is that they don't actually have to manufacture the chips themselves.
John:
They will license the instruction set and they will license CPU designs to people.
John:
And they will license to Apple the ability to make their own chips that are compatible.
John:
So, you know, if you want to make a chip, Arm will license you.
John:
Here's a design for a chip.
John:
Tell me how big you want it or whatever.
John:
But you can also get what is it called?
John:
Architecture license where Arm just says, OK, well, you just make your own chips.
John:
We'll tell you how the instructions are supposed to work, but you go ahead and you can make it any way you want.
John:
And so when NVIDIA wanted to buy them, I'm not entirely clear what people are scared about from antitrust other than just like, you know, two big giant companies that are really important to the world.
John:
Combining together doesn't seem like it would be good for competition.
John:
All right.
John:
So but anyway, the deal looks like it's not going to go through.
John:
And the reason I think this is relevant is a topic that has come up a lot in the show, especially before the ARM Base Max came out.
John:
we were talking about the possibilities like what will that be like uh they'll lose you know apple lose compatibility with windows uh all the people who are you who enjoy doing development on x86 because they're going to deploy on an x86 server somewhere will lose that uniformity between having the same instruction set in both places and really we're talking about x86 64 here not plain old x86 but anyway um
John:
The NVIDIA deal, if NVIDIA had purchased them, a lot of people thought that it would be the kick in the pants that ARM needs to finally sort of fulfill its destiny and strike down Intel and do what I was painting as the...
John:
optimistic scenario sort of sweep through the whole industry and apple's move to arm wouldn't end up being something that that hurts it in the long run because eventually everything would be arm pcs would be arm servers would be arm phones ipads and macs would be arm and then we'd be back to where we were when everything was x86 where you you know you get a mac this x86 and you deploy on your servers x86 you can run windows natively at x86 right then we would get back to that state
John:
so that we would just be kind of like a bump in the road where for a while apple moved to arm before the rest of the world did but eventually windows and the server also moved to arm and in fact the phones and ipads were already on arm and we have this beautiful future where everybody uses arm processors and they license the arm instruction set from this one company um and it's you know it's not great that one company controls it all but really since everyone can license it and apple makes its own chips and everyone can make their own chips if they want to it is actually a
John:
a more competitive landscape than when x86 dominated and the argument is the reason that hasn't been happening is because arm this relatively little company that doesn't even make its own chips and just licenses the instruction set and you know and chip designs that it makes to other people it's not in a position it doesn't have it doesn't have the people the skills or maybe even the desire to do what it would take to displace x86 and what it would take is uh
John:
all of the sort of tool chain stuff, compilers, you know, software support.
John:
Like, there's a big software component to sort of, that Intel has with x86 now that ARM doesn't yet have that has been slowing ARM's rod.
John:
Even on things like the server where it seems like such a clear win.
John:
Like, you know, Amazon's been rolling out ARM servers and they're like, they're faster, they're cheaper, they're lower power.
John:
It's like, what's the holdup?
John:
Like, why isn't everybody deploying on ARM and AWS?
John:
it's so much better than x86 what's the downside and the downside is well there's a whole ecosystem around x86 it's been there for decades that is very mature and it's been built up and it's taking a long time to go through that so the nvidia if nvidia bought them it'd be like well nvidia's got tons of money nvidia has the software expertise they know how to make an ecosystem it's the whole reason everyone's using nvidia stuff for like bitcoin mining and crap and you know before that cuda and
John:
all the nvidia performance with game drivers nvidia understands that there's a market they care about they have to give you like the full stack including all the software support and the tooling and everything and they can you know get that going now this deal has been you know shelved i think i think it's good that the deal didn't go through because i don't like these big companies combining but i i kind of was looking forward to a silver lining
John:
Of this deal being that maybe it would accelerate ARM, because I do want ARM to replace x86 everywhere, because I don't like, you know, Apple being the odd one out with the Mac on ARM and PC still on x86.
John:
I see no reason why the whole world can be one big happy family.
John:
all on ARM at the same time.
John:
There already is Windows for ARM, but is it more popular than x86 Windows?
John:
No.
John:
There already is ARM in the server, but is it more popular on the server side than x86?
John:
Not yet, right?
John:
So maybe we'll just get there more slowly now, but I thought this was worth noting that
John:
potentially a thing that could have accelerated this has been canceled.
John:
Again, I think this is the right decision.
John:
I don't like it when very big, very powerful companies combine into one company.
John:
I feel like that's bad for everybody involved, but I was kind of looking forward to that silver lining.
Yeah.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
You know what's funny?
Casey:
This is tangentially related.
Casey:
I don't recall having heard a lot of moaning or complaining about people who were previously virtualizing Windows and are now in the Apple Silicon world and can't do that anymore.
Casey:
That would have been me several years ago because I was living in VMware Fusion every day to do my work in Visual Studio and
Casey:
I think a lot of that is because the environment and landscape keeps changing.
Casey:
And my limited understanding of what's going on in C Sharp these days is that a lot of work is done on, was it Visual Studio Core?
Casey:
Excuse me, .NET Core or something like that, which is a cross-platform thing that apparently, I saw a tweet recently, I won't be able to find it, but apparently it came from Silverlight of all places, which is really weird and funky.
Casey:
But anyways, it's fascinating to me that
Casey:
You know, when I went to using a Mac in the late aughts, it was a relatively crazy thing to do at the time because, you know, especially living in a Windows world.
Casey:
It was not.
Casey:
No, no, for me, because I was living in this Windows world for like work and stuff.
John:
You're a Windows developer.
John:
You wouldn't be a Windows developer on a Mac.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so sorry that that was ambiguous, though.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
So anyways.
Casey:
So, yeah, so it was a little bit bananas at the time.
Casey:
But now it seems like there are very few people there.
Casey:
I mean, I personally haven't heard of anyone who is really burned or is like lingering on Intel.
Casey:
on account of these sorts of problems.
Casey:
Now, maybe you spent $15,000 to $20,000 on your computer setup, and that's why you're lingering on Intel, hi, John.
Casey:
But for people with normal computers, I haven't heard any real problems with it, which is really fascinating and really cool.
John:
Well, I mean, speaking of companies that have the skills and the experience building ecosystems, Microsoft, in theory, has all the tools.
John:
It's got plenty of money.
John:
They know how to build an ecosystem with software tooling all the way from the compilers and the IDEs to the libraries that go with it.
John:
There should, in theory, be no reason that Intel can't shift the entire Windows PC market over to ARM.
John:
But...
John:
it's been you know apple has gone through multiple processor transitions and has done all each one better than the last and microsoft has never done it and i don't know if microsoft is institutionally unwilling to do a processor transition or incapable arm windows on arm shows they're not unwilling because why would they have even tried to do windows on arm but they have not done a good job it's been this weird product it was kind of separate from the regular windows because you don't want to screw with the regular windows like their market is different than apple's market it is
John:
much bigger it involves more people who are resistant to change i understand their task is different than apple's apple is you know especially the mac in particular is small still small enough that apple can kind of do what they want to have all these users who are very dedicated to or whatever but i feel like on a long enough timeline microsoft should be able to pull this off so they've had a couple of false starts with windows on arms i'm hoping
John:
There's no reason that Microsoft can't do it eventually.
John:
And even if the server battle goes differently for whatever reason, Intel starts manufacturing on TSMC 3 nanometer and come roaring back and fight back against the ARM chips that are outperforming on the server, at the very least, Microsoft should be somewhat motivated by
John:
to not be tied to x86 i mean i you know microsoft has had it good because you know they've got intel and amd so they have two possible choices and they're always fighting each other whatever but uh microsoft's uh ambitions with surface really lend themselves in the same way that apples do to not only using arm chips but making their own arm chips for their own hardware and
John:
It seems like for a decade or more now, Microsoft has really wished that it could be Apple.
John:
The hardware that it makes is Apple-ish, not in the sense of what the hardware looks like, although sometimes it is that, but in the sense that Microsoft likes the idea that they can control the whole stack and give an experience that PC vendors were not giving.
John:
um and they can do that even better with arms so i really hope they pull it off because i don't like you know i the honeymoon period when i had my cheese grater or cheese grater is i guess well my one cheese yeah just one right wait now we're talking about the max again though right not the parmesan creators yeah the power back g5 was in the same case but that was power pc anyway
John:
That honeymoon decade where everyone was on x86 and was all one big happy family except we had the good OS and the nicer hardware.
John:
I hope we can get back to that again.
Marco:
Is anybody making PC ARM processors outside of the server space?
Marco:
Are there any consumer-facing PC ARM CPUs that Microsoft could even sell ARM Windows for?
John:
Yeah, they do.
John:
They sell ARM-based hardware with, you know, I think it's like the, I don't know what the names or numbers are of them, but actual ARM CPU designs that are PC or laptop caliber chips, and they put them in their Surface.
John:
Are they in the Surface products?
John:
Whatever they sell with the ARM chips in them, there are ones that are there.
John:
I don't think there's anything around that would rival like a Mac Pro.
John:
I mean, Apple doesn't even have one of those yet, but...
John:
there are options is there anything even rivaling a macbook air yeah yeah like the m1 is so good like is there anything i mean rivaling in terms of it's in the same power envelope and it runs windows okay but no they're not as good as the m1 because you know apple apple is on top of the game in terms of desktop caliber uh arm chips for sure but i mean there was another some other stories down in the topics thing about
John:
other companies getting in on this uh was it google at the very least a bunch of other companies are like we should do what apple did we shouldn't buy these cpu designs from arm or you know who else who else makes them qualcomm makes a lot of them i think yeah yeah like we shouldn't get those because then you just you just have a choice of what they offer to sell if we make our own chips we can make them exactly the way we want the same way that apple made their chips so they perform
John:
well with apple's applications they do what apple needs it to do right we should all do that shouldn't we uh but you know if you look at how long it took apple to execute that plan it is not something you turn around in a year that is a multiple many year five years six year ten year project um that some people are only embarked on maybe a few years ago so it's going to take a while for the fruits of that labor to appear but i hope apple has shown them the way to say if you want really good chips that are well suited to your products uh you got to do it yourself
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So this also happened a little while ago.
Casey:
What is the line from Godfather?
Casey:
We're handling all the family business or whatever.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
We're trying to clean everything out.
Casey:
So a while ago, a developer corrupted sort of an NPM library or two NPM libraries, Colors and Faker, which broke thousands of apps.
Casey:
So what the crap did I just say?
Casey:
So...
Casey:
NPM is Node Package Manager.
Casey:
It's a way to get other people's code into your apps in certain contexts.
Casey:
And there were two super popular ones, one called Colors, one called Faker, that the developer of these broke those deliberately.
Casey:
And that caused quite a kerfuffle.
Casey:
So let me read from bleepingcomputer.com.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
The developer behind popular open-source NPM libraries, Colors, aka Colors.js on GitHub, and Faker, aka Faker.js on GitHub, intentionally introduced mischievous commits in them that are impacting, or when this was written, impacting thousands of applications relying on these libraries.
Casey:
Yesterday, users of popular open-source projects such as Amazon's Cloud Development Kit, AWS CDK, were left stunned.
Casey:
Stunned, I tell you.
Casey:
on seeing their applications print gibberish messages in their console.
Casey:
GitHub has reportedly suspended the developer's account, and that too has caused mixed reactions.
Casey:
Quote, removing your own code from GitHub is a violation of their terms of service WTF.
Casey:
This is a kidnapping, quote, responded software engineer Sergio Gomez.
Casey:
Quote, the responses to the colors slash faker author sabotaging their own packages are really telling about how many corporate developers think they are morally entitled to other source developers unpaid labor without contributing anything back, wrote one Twitter user.
Casey:
So this is a really interesting case study in...
Casey:
how open source affects the world or the corporate world, if not the world, insofar as here's a library that was written by some person, presumably with little to no compensation by darn near anyone.
Casey:
It gets used darn near everywhere.
Casey:
And this person kind of justifiably is a little perturbed that they haven't gotten compensated for any of this.
Casey:
So they take matters into their own hands and kind of ruin it, which is perhaps not the most mature approach, but is, I suppose, within their rights.
Casey:
I think.
Marco:
Well, I mean, you can't say, okay, I'm going to do this work for free and anybody can use it.
Marco:
And then when a bunch of people use it, say, wait, now I want money.
Marco:
That's kind of on you at that point.
Marco:
So obviously, I think that's a huge jerk move to do something like this.
Marco:
And that's also a quick way to probably harm your chances of working in the industry again in the future for anybody else ever again.
Marco:
So that's also not – it's both a jerk move and also a stupid move.
Marco:
You shouldn't do it.
Marco:
But that being said, there are a lot of underlying issues here.
Marco:
I mean first of all, this is – admittedly, if you want – next to the entry of not invented here syndrome in the dictionary is a picture of me.
Marco:
So from that –
Marco:
That is excellent self-awareness, Marco.
Marco:
With that adequately disclaimed, I try to use as little third-party code in my apps as possible, which is often damn near zero.
Marco:
But the idea that
Marco:
I would have any kind of deployment of an app where not only am I using third-party code, but that it is auto-updating that third-party's code without my first downloading it manually and testing it?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
I mean, I know that you can use a package manager to pin to a certain version.
Marco:
I know that.
Marco:
But I bet a large part of this problem is that a lot of people aren't doing that.
Marco:
possibly even the majority of people aren't doing that.
Marco:
And that, to me, that is just incredibly irresponsible programming practices.
Marco:
And whatever you want to say about third-party code, I'm sure everybody likes it more than I do.
Marco:
But if you're going to use third-party code,
Marco:
You use one version of that code.
Marco:
And if you want to have some process where you can check for updates and test them, great.
Marco:
But to have it auto-update in any of your deployments, that's nuts to me.
Marco:
That isn't just living on the edge.
Marco:
That's negligence.
Marco:
And you should not do that.
Marco:
Look at Marco advocating testing.
John:
twice oh you're gonna get the new thing how can you tell whether the new version works well you'll test i know what you meant manually testing it i guess yes uh anyway yeah so yeah you can definitely pin versions i mean part of the reason that uh version pinning that it is a more complicated topic for npm in particular we've talked about this in the past that uh the way node has grown up
John:
the culture and the environment is that there are tons and tons of tiny little libraries thousands and thousands and thousands of dependencies for even a trivial like hello world website using a common web framework they're just they're very very small um did we give people too many hardware resources is that the problem like they don't know what to do with it so they want to burn it all up like no it's
John:
it's more more of a cultural issue because it's not like they're you know these it's still just two lines of code and two lines of code performs the same whether it's in one file or another one like it's not especially for a server to resident application it's not that big of a deal performance wise but you could argue the granularity is stupid but it is what it is um but what that means is if you pin things then you fall subject to another one of the things that ails the node js uh culture community which is security problems right and
John:
If you have so many dependencies, people are constantly finding security problems in them.
John:
And if you pin your versions, like wait two weeks, and now suddenly your application is vulnerable to 50 different things.
John:
And so you can say, well, then you should do that manual process where you test everything or whatever.
John:
It is a force pulling you back in the direction of saying, I'm going to...
John:
You know, honor the semantic versioning and I'm going to pin to, you know, I'll take any patch version or I'll take any minor version, right?
John:
As long as it's not a major version upgrade, I'll auto take that one because I will assume those are security patches or performance fixes or whatever.
John:
You know, I won't pin it all the way down.
John:
I'll pin it part of the way down.
John:
You know, and the reason this comes up in this particular story is like, that's fine.
John:
That probably works.
John:
That's probably a reasonable compromise between pinning it completely down and being vulnerable to a thousand security exploits within a month or, you know, letting it be a free for all.
John:
Find something in the middle.
John:
But this story is about a developer maliciously doing something.
John:
If you're doing something maliciously, you just make it a patch version, right?
Yeah.
John:
See, oh, yeah, no, this is just a minor change.
John:
I didn't totally replace all my code with a funny message, right?
John:
Because they're just individual developers, right?
John:
And Marco called this a jerk move, right?
John:
This gets at, like, this particular story and the person, I'm not too interested in why they were angry or, you know, whatever.
John:
I don't think there's any justification for them.
John:
I think they were just a jerk.
John:
They did a mean thing, right?
John:
But the thing that I'm much more interested in is how many...
John:
big important companies with lots of money are at the mercy of jerks right i mean not inside the company obviously obviously they're all at the mercy of jerks inside the company we've talked about this issue in the past right but externally right that is setting aside the jerks who are being jerks and they're doing mean things they're doing whatever why is it that you with all your money and all your people and all your smart big brains or whatever are essentially building your business on top of
John:
work that other people are contributing to you out of the goodness of their heart and you have no defense against any of them turning bad especially again in a node where it's not just you know one or two or three people that you could name but literally tens hundreds thousands of people are contributing to the software and you know like marco said if you make something for free and put it out in the world and put it in a license that anybody can use this for free
John:
You know, that's a choice that you've made.
John:
If you later come to regret that choice because suddenly it's used by everybody, you're like, man, if I had a nickel for everybody to use my library, I'd be rich now.
John:
Well, you know, you didn't make that choice, right?
John:
But also, if you want to take your ball and go home, you can also do that.
John:
right because it's your ball right you can just stop developing it or you can maliciously develop it or you could you know intentionally introduce bugs that makes you a jerk but it's a thing that you can do and there's always going to be weird stuff like that and the solution is not we should yell at those people because we'll you know by yelling we'll somehow stop jerks from being jerks someone is always going to get mad and do a thing and take their ball and go home or screw things up or whatever
John:
I feel like it's on the multi-billion dollar corporations or even the individual small companies to be thoughtful about the third-party code that they use and game this out and say, if something goes wrong with the third-party code, how do we handle that?
John:
Do we do it by pinning our versions all the way down?
John:
Then how do we handle security problems?
John:
Do we have an automated test suite?
John:
There are ways to deal with this and you should talk about them at your company.
John:
I don't think the solution is don't use third-party software.
John:
I don't think the solution is just don't worry about it.
John:
I forget if this story was before or after the Log4J thing came out.
John:
It was after.
John:
It was after?
John:
I'm pretty sure.
John:
But the Log4J thing is another example, right?
John:
This is a widely used piece of software that just had a bug.
John:
Like, you know, no one does do anything malicious.
John:
It's just like, oh, software has bugs, right?
John:
But so many people use this software.
John:
It was, and probably still is, a fire drill across the entire world of software saying, if you have anything that uses Java, chances are it uses Log4J, and now you are vulnerable to this exploit.
John:
Patch all your software.
John:
And who develops Log4J?
John:
Oh, a bunch of volunteers.
John:
Oh, and the whole world runs on it?
John:
Yeah, pretty much.
John:
So what is your, you know, this is a situation where you're not defending against someone malicious.
John:
You know, there just happened to be a bug.
John:
Human error, it happens, right?
John:
But suddenly, this is like the security problem that I mentioned with Node.
John:
Suddenly, without you knowing it, you and all your software are vulnerable to this exploit because it's already in there.
John:
So you need to do a thing to get it fixed.
John:
And a lot of people were like, when are you going to fix this bug?
John:
We need to fix ASAP.
John:
It's like...
John:
They're not your employee.
John:
The log4j team doesn't work for you.
John:
Do you pay them?
John:
Are they your employee?
John:
You can't make them fix things faster.
John:
They could just decide we're never going to fix this.
John:
They didn't do that.
John:
They're not a bunch of jerks.
John:
They're nice people, right?
John:
But I feel for them because the whole world is looking at them and say, hey, we've been using your software for free for a decade now, but it's really important that you not sleep for the next 48 to 96 hours and fix this bug for us because our big important company from which you profit zero amount
John:
Is in really in a bind here.
John:
So you really need to fix that.
John:
And that is the other part of this problem, which is like, if you're going to use open source software, you don't and you're not going to do anything to help support it, you're not going to have a standing army on staff who understands the source code for log4j and can fix their own bugs in it.
John:
and contribute them back to the source or not, whatever.
John:
Like it's open source, depending on the license, you can do whatever you have.
John:
But if you're not going to do that, if you're just going to assume all that third party open source software we have, it's someone else's problem to make sure it's good and fit for purpose.
John:
And if it ever isn't good, you know, even just something as simple as a bug, it's someone else's problem to fix it.
John:
And we're going to get really mad and pound the table and say, someone needs to fix this software that our company is built on.
John:
Well, why don't you fix it?
John:
But it's not our software.
John:
It's third party software.
John:
They should fix it.
John:
Well, I mean, they probably eventually will because they're not jerks, but in the meantime, do you have anyone who works for your company that can help fix it faster or fix it yourself?
John:
Well, no, that's how we save money, by not paying anyone to do that, and we just use a third-party code and...
John:
It gets to... This is the XKCD comic.
John:
It's 2347.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
It shows like a block structure being built, this big elaborate block structure.
John:
It looks all fancy, and there's one side of it that's held up by this tiny little skinny block, and it said, the big structure is all modern digital infrastructure, and the tiny little block, the caption says, a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.
John:
So much that we build on is...
John:
like at the mercy of a small number of nice people continuing to be not only nice but essentially infallible and the second they are not both nice and infallible these big corporations turn their soren like eye and say fix this bug it's going to destroy our multi-billion dollar business and you're like i'm just in my basement in nebraska and i've been maintaining this open source thing that you've been using and yeah we let you use it for free but
John:
it's not my problem that your company is going to burn down if you care that much about this maybe you should have let's say you know bought a support contract for this for some company that can do that or hired people who know enough about the source code to fix it or essentially not you know not take the software but then not be it's not like giving back it's like oh you took it you have to give back you don't have to give back license says you don't have to give back you don't have to give back but the second you get into a bind it's
John:
that's on you to say we never prepared for this scenario we are not prepared to support ourselves right so it's not a case of like i took and didn't give back which you know they did but you're allowed to and according to these licenses it's a case of we did not plan properly we we thought that we this nice person would always be nice and also that they would never make a mistake and that is a poor assumption and it's kind of hilarious to see like in the response to log4j thing like the u.s government
John:
made this panel and this committee or whatever to say this because it's a national security concern because you know the government and military uses software that uses log4j and suddenly we're vulnerable to these exploits how could it be like suddenly we're vulnerable to you know cyber espionage and the government can't fix it because we're relying on what is open source software what do you mean someone else wrote it and they don't work like having a committee where they have to sort of
John:
come to terms with the reality that we've all been living in because suddenly there is a flashpoint event that makes everybody realize just how precarious everything is, I think is actually a useful, I mean, I think the government committee, especially in the U.S., is going to be pointless and terrible because, you know, government stuff that has to do with computers is never good.
John:
But I think it's good for everyone to have like a moment of reckoning and saying, this is not new.
John:
This is the way it always has been and will continue to be.
John:
And I hope this helps people inside companies everywhere, perhaps seize this, you know, every crisis is an opportunity inside a company, seize this crisis slash opportunity to say, hey, do you like how this feels?
John:
If you don't, maybe we should put some small amount of money towards
John:
staffing somebody either in this company or a contractor or giving directly to the open source maintainers, or having more commercial companies spring up that will offer commercial support contracts, do something that involves money to make it so that we are not vulnerable to this type of thing.
John:
And it doesn't mean giving the money necessarily giving money to people that wrote software, there are tons and tons of other things you can do.
John:
That's why there's so many companies built on open source products where
John:
why would i pay this company for this product i can just get the source code for free well you're paying them for a support contract which they charge you through the nose for so you do have someone who you can yell out when it breaks because you're paying them right uh and if you're not going to pay anybody and again with node it gets complicated because like well we have 100 000 dependencies you're telling me there's some company that's going to support all 100 000 of these do we have to give 10 checks to 100 000 people
John:
No, but maybe if you hired a team of 10 Node.js experts and gave them a salary and kept them as full-time employees of your company, the next time something went wrong with some library, they could parachute in and fix it themselves in your own local copy.
John:
This story probably hits closer to home.
John:
I guess if you're an open source author, maybe you're rooting for the guy to be mad that he didn't get paid or whatever, but I'm not in that camp.
John:
I'm definitely in the camp of rooting for the people who run these big companies to get a clue
John:
that they actually need to do something to protect themselves their company and their customers from things like this and it's not the fault of the open source people and it's not the fault of you know like uh you know mean people doing mean things like this guy with colors like that's that's the you know not the common case but like you have to think about that because that's kind of the worst case scenario if the log4j people turned evil they could have done much worse
Casey:
Well, the funny thing is, you know, you talked about ways that corporate America can help.
Casey:
And Discourse did a victory lap about this after it happened.
Casey:
And when I first read this, I was like, yeah, go ahead, you guys.
Casey:
Great work.
Casey:
And now reading it again with a little distance between, you know, when it was posted and now.
Casey:
So the post is Discourse Gives Back 2021 edition.
Casey:
Discourse had a great year.
Casey:
We raised $20 million Series A investment, yada, yada, yada.
Casey:
So they talk about how they should give back, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And they enumerate, I don't know, maybe 10 different donations they made to different open source or community projects.
Casey:
And at first I was like, yeah, great work, folks.
Casey:
This is the way it should be.
Casey:
But it occurred to me the sum total of all, what, 10 of these donations was like less than $100,000.
Casey:
In the same post they just said, Discourse had a great year.
Casey:
We raised a $20 million investment.
Casey:
So of that $20 million, they were able to shave off less than $100 grand.
Casey:
Well done.
John:
I mean, you're not going to get, like, that kind of feel-good stuff where you chuck a couple bucks over the thing.
John:
It's better than nothing.
John:
It is.
John:
It is.
John:
What you have to think about is, like, what is the value, the future value of our company, right?
John:
Like, discourse is going to be this big product.
John:
Like, the future value of discourse in some degree depends on discourse not breaking and being terrible and having security problems, right?
John:
How much is it worth to you to make sure discourse continues to function correctly?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
What it calls into question is how much are we building our business on software that we didn't write that we have no way to support?
John:
That's a risk factor in your company.
John:
Sometimes it's a risk worth taking and you get lucky and everything works out and eventually you get so big that you're too big to fail or whatever that you can deal with these bumps in the road.
John:
But when you're just starting out, you get a huge boost from building on open source software.
John:
if you get unlucky you don't have the skills to fix it you can't pay people to help you fix it and it breaks and it takes down your company but discourse is probably big enough now where they should be thinking about how do we do this in-house again it's good to give money to the people who make the software hell if you you know if discourse was smart and they really care about some particular library that's really important to their product
John:
See if you can hire that person.
John:
Again, maybe they don't want to be hired, but then maybe you can hire someone and say, your only job is to be the in-house guru for these two libraries.
John:
So learn the source, start contributing to it, make a local fork of it if needed or whatever.
John:
But we need that library to always work.
John:
And if it ever breaks, we need it to be fixed ASAP.
John:
So now that's your job.
John:
And that's going to take a lot more than a one-time $100,000 donation.
John:
You can't get a single programmer to do anything for that amount of money once you factor in healthcare and all the other stuff.
John:
So...
John:
I think it is definitely better than just ignoring the problem and doing nothing.
John:
So I think discourse is, you know, it's good for them to be proud that they are essentially, we're giving away money, quote unquote, for free.
John:
We're just throwing at these people because they made some software we use.
John:
But they're not actually solving the problem because that money doesn't entitle them three years from now when something breaks in some obscure library to say, hey, remember we gave you $5,000 three years ago?
John:
Well, it's time for you to get up out of bed at 3 a.m.
John:
and fix this problem for us.
John:
And they would say, who is this?
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have a twofer from Omri Arbeev.
Casey:
First of all, what's Marco's current coffee setup?
Casey:
Has Marco tried James Hoffman's excellent AeroPress technique?
Casey:
And also, why aren't you roasting your own coffee, man?
Casey:
What's going on there?
John:
This is amazingly topical.
John:
I didn't know about the roasting stuff.
Marco:
So the current coffee setup is AeroPress still for if I'm making only one cup.
Marco:
And if I'm making more than one, which is the case most mornings, I'm using my Ratio 8.
Marco:
It's a fancy hipster coffee maker that's very nice.
Marco:
It is an automatic drip machine.
Marco:
It's just a good automatic drip machine.
Marco:
And it's not as good as AeroPress coffee, but it is less work in my morning routine when making two cups.
Marco:
Because now that I'm doing my big fake eggs with vegetables stirred into them and
Marco:
cooked up like you know it's my breakfast is is a lot of work these days um through my own choice and i appreciate that you know but the time spent on the coffee needed to go down um and with the ratio eight being a drip machine i could kind of like batch it and set it all up and then just hit go and then walk away and do my other stuff and then come back right before you know i'm serving breakfast everything's hot ready to go pour the coffee and it's done
John:
And for people who don't know, the Ratio 8 machine has wood on it.
John:
Of course it does.
John:
When he says hipster coffee maker, it's got wood on it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I was turned on to it years ago by Chase Reeves when I met him in Portland.
Marco:
He showed it to me and it looked really cool.
Marco:
And we picked it out for mostly aesthetic reasons, if I'm honest.
Marco:
It's got wood on it.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
But it's a really great coffee maker also.
Marco:
Anyway, so yeah, that's the coffee setup.
Marco:
And I stopped roasting because two things changed.
Marco:
First of all, my tastes shifted a little bit lighter than they were at first.
Marco:
That made it harder for me to do my own roast because making a light roast in a home roaster is actually pretty difficult to really nail it.
Marco:
Certainly, I didn't have the skill to really do that well.
Marco:
Secondly, the mail order things all got better over the last X years.
Marco:
I started roasting 10 years ago.
Marco:
It's been a long time.
Marco:
In the meantime, we've had a lot more really good mail order options.
Marco:
And I've been really happy with those.
Marco:
And so my tastes shifted towards a type of coffee that I'm not very good at roasting.
Marco:
And also the available options for me to just buy someone else's expertly roasted version of that increased and got better.
Marco:
So that's what happened.
Casey:
Good deal.
Casey:
So have you tried this AeroPress technique?
Casey:
I have not watched this video.
Marco:
I watched that entire series of videos and I still haven't done it because honestly, like I, my technique, which I do the inverted method.
Marco:
Um, and I just, I kinda, you know, I grind 15 grams into like a, a full AeroPress inverted.
Marco:
So I pulled out to the four line, but you know, upside down and boom,
Marco:
and i just pour in water and stir it and wait a few seconds and i slowly press it out and it's fine um i'm sure i could perfect that more you know if i if i actually tried this this better method but this better method is also more time consuming and my method is is fine for it works fine for me um this is an area where you know i i used to care a lot about all these details and now i care less about these details like i i've been
Marco:
focusing my energies more intensely in areas that I want to care a lot more about, and certain things had to fall by the wayside.
Marco:
This is why, for instance, I care less about cars than I used to.
Marco:
That had to kind of make room for other stuff.
Casey:
Well, no, you stopped caring about cars when you bought a Tesla.
Hey-oh!
Marco:
And similarly, I care a lot less about the fine details of the coffee process now because I get results that I consider very good with very little effort.
Marco:
And to answer some other questions, I am still using my Baratza Virtuoso grinder.
Marco:
Uh, I'm using the technique that I think I might've first saw in a James Hoppin video, um, where you spritz the beans with a little bit of water before you put them in the grinder and that eliminates all static clean.
Marco:
This is amazing.
Marco:
Look, if anybody out there, if you grind your own coffee and you're not doing this, I'm telling you, this is, this is like a life changer.
Marco:
If you grind your own coffee, but it makes a mess when you take out the little hopper because of static electricity, like making the grounds like cling to everything, uh,
Marco:
So you take a little spritzer, any little water spritzer.
Marco:
I got a little one on Amazon.
Marco:
It looks like it's made for perfume or something.
Marco:
I got like a four-pack for $10.
Marco:
And you just put plain water in it.
Marco:
Nothing special.
Marco:
And you just spritz the beans right before you put them in the coffee grinder.
Marco:
That gives it just enough moisture that static electricity doesn't really factor in.
Marco:
It doesn't have a chance to do anything.
Marco:
People with hair will be familiar with the phenomenon from hair and combing.
Marco:
there you go yeah see and so the beans come out and it's like it they come out perfectly and there and there's no like dust flying everywhere it's it's a game changer for like how messy your coffee counter gets when you're making coffee um anyway so yeah i'm still using my brats virtuoso from that's probably 10 or 12 years old now it's still working great because they build those things with pretty good quality
Marco:
And then AeroPress or the ratio weight.
Casey:
Do you have any particular beans that you can throw your weight behind?
Marco:
I go between a few.
Marco:
So former sponsor and possibly future sponsor, Yes Please.
Marco:
That is my standard... I always fall back to that one.
Marco:
So that's always in the rotation.
Marco:
Usually I get that one every...
Marco:
two bags that i get and then the one that i'm mixing in with it i will either do something from trade when i'll go between different roasters there or i'll or i'll go to intelligentsia all three of those options are great they all have different you know things going for them and everything um all three of them are great i strongly recommend all three of them honestly so yeah intelligentsia yes please and uh trade all of them trade trade former and future sponsor yes please former sponsor and intelligentsia have been none of the above
Marco:
Yeah, but yeah, they all do things great.
Marco:
Intelligentsia's roasts are a little bit darker, but they tend to have really nice single origins.
Marco:
So if I'm going for something like a really nice Costa Rica or when they do have Kenya, which is not that often, but you know, Kenya is still my favorite, but I can get it, but it's not super easy to get all year round.
Marco:
uh trade has i mean there's a million options of trade so i i don't really recommend any particular you know blend or roaster just go there if you if you want a million options because you know the whole thing to tailor it to you and everything that's that's a good thing and then what's great about yes please is that yes please is extremely consistent
Marco:
Everything I've gotten from when I've ordered coffee from other places, I get, you know, mostly stuff I like occasionally get something I don't like.
Marco:
Yes, please is like it's my rock of consistency.
Marco:
They produce something I've liked every single time.
Marco:
Like that's what's great about it.
Marco:
It doesn't always blow me away.
Marco:
Sometimes it's really nice.
Marco:
But usually it's not like, oh, my God, this is incredible.
Marco:
Usually it's like this is something I can depend on being great every single time.
Marco:
Like it's always, it's always good.
Marco:
It's, it's, it's definitely a crowd pleaser too.
Marco:
Like if you have anybody who like is very sensitive to any more bitter roasts, you'll never offend them with anything from yes, please.
Marco:
So that's why like, that's my default.
Marco:
If I have to recommend something to somebody who doesn't know what they like and want something that's like the same consistency every single time, that's, that's yes, please.
Casey:
And then also from Omri, is John still subscribed to cable?
Casey:
At what point is paying for cable no longer worth it for him?
John:
I mean, now I pay for cable and also tons of streaming services.
John:
It's the future we were promised.
John:
I can pay even more money for even more things.
John:
I think...
John:
Cable for me is tied to my TiVo, right?
John:
So if my TiVos break and I don't buy new ones, that will probably be the end of cable because cable without, well, I would say cable without TiVo is probably not gonna work for me.
John:
But of course, every cable company has their own, you know, server side DVR solution that they'll try to sell you as well.
John:
So maybe I would try that.
John:
But I mean, the main reason I still subscribe to it is it's part of some big package thing and I get all the fancy channels.
John:
And there are still some things that are on television either before or only on television, you know, before on the streaming service or they're not on the streaming service at all or they're on the streaming service much later.
John:
And I'm not even talking about things like sports with blackout or whatever.
John:
not every streaming service is a complete reflection.
John:
Like, no matter how much you pay them, it's a complete, accurate reflection of everything that's on all the channels that are on the large cable subscription.
John:
So it is, you know, good to have it.
John:
And it depends on what we're doing.
John:
Like, the Olympics is one example.
John:
You know, we're recording the Olympics on the TiVo, but then we also subscribe to the Peacock streaming service to get even more stuff.
John:
I do have to say, related to streaming video apps, given that I'm using an older TiVo,
John:
You know, it's the interface of using a TiVo to jump around video on your TV is still so much better than every one of the fancy streaming apps that's available on all these high power platforms like the phone and iPad and Mac and, you know, and websites or whatever.
John:
TiVo is still superior for that.
John:
just because it's responsive and works and is very reliable um so yeah i think you know i'm i'm pretty close to being able to get away without cable but i see no reason to make my to give up what i have now uh other than saving saving the money i suppose um so i'm just gonna stay with it until all my tivos die and replacing them like tivo still exists and we'll sell you a device but
John:
I always look, because they always have these come-ons like, save X number of hundred dollars on this TiVo, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I always look, but as far as I can tell, they do not sell a TiVo with as much storage as the one I currently have.
John:
The closest one they have, I think, they sell you is like half the storage.
John:
It's like, why would I ever buy a TiVo that's worse than the one I have now?
John:
I don't know if you can replace the hard drive and blah, blah, blah, but I'm not going to go down that road.
John:
Why would I buy one that has either fewer tuners or less hard drive space or both?
John:
That just seems pointless to me.
John:
So, when my thing breaks...
John:
Maybe I'll buy the smaller one or maybe I just won't buy one at all.
John:
Or maybe I'll try the cable companies.
John:
The cable companies want to try the Fios DVR.
John:
Or maybe I'll just cut the cord then.
John:
But it hasn't happened yet.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Paul Walker writes, do you have a good system for managing family contacts, especially kids, friends, and their parents across your multiple devices?
Casey:
Yeah, you tell each other, oh, so-and-so's number is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0.
Casey:
That's what we do.
Marco:
You airdrop them the contact card.
Casey:
Yeah, that's actually another good example.
Casey:
Yeah, but I certainly do not have a good answer for this question.
John:
All right.
John:
This is just like the photos thing.
John:
This is what I always bring up when we talk about photos.
John:
It's like, hey, Apple, if you think this is really hard, start with something small, like contacts, because it's a small amount of data.
John:
Like, photos are large and extremely numerous, but contacts are small and not that numerous.
John:
It's a small data set.
John:
This is a great place to try out your ideas about how it can work.
John:
And, you know, the thing that it is replacing for my youth,
John:
was an address book.
John:
And every member of the family in general did not have their own little address book with grandma's phone number in it.
John:
There was one address book by the phone, which was attached to the wall with a wire.
John:
And in the address book was grandma's phone number and address.
John:
And if grandma moved or changed their phone number, we changed it in that address book.
John:
Some people did have their own individual address books.
John:
Maybe, oh, you got your phone numbers of all your friends and your little address book, but you wouldn't also probably put, you know, all of your relatives' addresses in there because these can be in the family address book.
John:
This is a model that existed for a long time before computers existed.
John:
And when computers came along, it was more convenient implementation-wise for everyone to just have their own contacts.
John:
And, oh, we made a great way for you to just share contacts.
John:
Wow.
John:
Well, you just give someone else a copy.
John:
It's like, that's not sharing.
John:
Then now when grandma's phone number changed, everybody has to change it in all of their books.
John:
That's, you know, we have the technology.
John:
We can do better than this.
John:
So, Paul, I do not have a good system for managing family contacts.
John:
In fact, this just happened recently.
John:
My wife asked me, what's, you know, what's your brother's address?
John:
And I said, oh, I don't even think I have my brother's address in my thing.
John:
And if I do, it might be his previous house.
John:
Because in our family, we basically just decided that my wife has the canonical address book because she does the addressing of the Christmas cards.
John:
Yep, that's me.
John:
Where it has to count.
John:
And I do have lots of addresses and names of people in my personal contacts.
John:
That's Aaron.
John:
But I'm not confident they're up to date because if something changes, we change it in her address book, which is the quote unquote real address book.
John:
But I still want to have contacts in my thing.
John:
At the very least, I'd have like the iMessage ID of my brother so I can, you know, text with him or whatever.
John:
But I'm not confident that I have his current house address.
John:
And this is a terrible situation.
John:
It's like the photo situation, but at a smaller scale.
John:
So I really hope Apple does fix this.
John:
And there are probably third-party applications that do way better.
John:
I just don't know of them.
John:
So I don't personally have a good system for managing family contacts.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't either.
Marco:
I feel like maybe a decent way to do this would be
Marco:
Kind of similar to how, I don't know, for anybody who's used 1Password for families, the idea is that you have your own private 1Password items and anything you add by default is private.
Marco:
But you can then either, you have the option to move or copy any 1Password item into the shared family vault.
Marco:
And then that's accessible and editable by anybody in the family.
Marco:
And I think that might be a good way to do contacts of like, you know, maybe, maybe you, you still have by default, maybe everything is still private to you because, you know, you don't necessarily need the contacts of everybody else in your family, but you probably have, as John said, you know, like family members or, you know, close family friends, whatever, you probably have certain ones that you want everyone to have access to.
Marco:
But that again, you want a centralized, um, only one source of truth to edit when that changes.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And so maybe that could be a thing where there's like, you know, family contacts and then, you know, you can move a contact into the family and then everyone gets it and everyone can edit it.
John:
Yeah, I mean, again, because the data is so small, there's lots of, you know, it's easier to think about it here and easier to implement it.
John:
And Apple, in fact, Apple does something not similar, but they have...
John:
I believe they have some kind of solution to sharing for reminders, for example, because we have reminders that we share amongst the family.
John:
And I think those work on an individual basis.
John:
Like when I share a reminder, it doesn't just give a copy of it to someone else.
John:
It is both of us editing.
John:
Same thing with notes.
John:
Notes, you can do a shared note, which for sure is both of us seeing the same note.
John:
And reminders, we're both seeing the same reminder.
John:
And if I added the reminder, it updates on my wife's phone as well.
John:
That is not as convenient as what Marco was just saying, which is like, well, how about if there was like a, you know, you could collect reminders into the family reminder library.
John:
I think you might be able to deliver reminders too.
John:
But like the point is, this is not a completely foreign concept to Apple.
John:
They have just not extended it to contacts.
John:
And I certainly haven't extended it to photos.
John:
And it is a common problem that's going to come up in any family situation where there's going to be some data that is private to the individuals and some data that wants to be shared.
John:
And I hope Apple gets around to tackling it on all of their
John:
all the things they collect data for eventually.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, JumpCloud, and Lutron Caseta.
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:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
You skipped our bonus Ask ATP, man.
Marco:
Oh, there's a bonus Ask ATP, man?
John:
Yeah, the bonus can go in the after show.
John:
Although before that, someone pointed out that you do obviously calendar sharing as well.
John:
I use Google Calendar for that, but I think Apple does it the same way.
John:
Where they don't give you a copy of the calendar, it is actually a shared calendar, and you can make it.
John:
Yeah, there's a family calendar that you can make, yeah.
John:
Yeah, and apparently Apple will make one by default that is shared with all the people in your family.
John:
So they're traveling down this road just extremely slowly.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
The bonus to Ask ATP very quickly was from Nick Van Dupass, who writes, do you say you're in front of the computer or behind the computer?
Casey:
You absolutely say you're in front of the computer.
Marco:
Anyone ever said behind?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, you could have a colorful turn of phrase where you could say all the people lined up behind their computers or something like that.
John:
But no, I'm sitting in front of the computer.
John:
I mean, maybe it varies in different English-speaking countries or maybe it varies in non-English-speaking countries.
John:
But I have always said I'm in front of the computer.
John:
What are you doing in front of the computer all day?
John:
Sitting in front of the TV all day.
Marco:
We're always in front of it.
Casey:
There it is.
Marco:
Well, if you think about the computer as having a face, what is the front of a computer and the back of a computer?
Marco:
I think it's obvious that the front of the computer is the screen and possibly the keyboard.
Marco:
And the back of the computer is like, you know, the back of the screen lid if it's a laptop or, you know.
John:
Where the wires come out.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
And so I think any way that you would try to define the front or back of a computer, I think people would pretty much agree on that.
Marco:
And where you sit is facing its front.
Marco:
And your front is facing its front as well, unless you're doing something really weird.
Marco:
And so I would imagine like, that's why I have a hard time like thinking of any way somebody would perceive this as you being behind the computer.
Marco:
If your front is facing the computer's front, like anytime you're using it.
John:
I mean, but the thing is that phrases and language phrases don't logically follow from, you know, you can reverse reason it logically, but that's not how language works.
John:
I mean, as someone in the chat room pointed out, in English in particular, we say you get behind the wheel of a car.
John:
And you're not behind the wheel, you're in front of it.
John:
But like...
John:
Language does not language does not follow the logic that you have just outlined.
John:
It just is what it is.
John:
And it is, you know, it is an idiom, a saying.
John:
It is the language that developed around computers and televisions for that matter.
John:
And so, you know, in fact, the computer language probably just inherited from television because we're all sitting in front of the TV.
John:
And as soon as we got computers, I mean, the first computers, you were actually literally hooked up to your TV in your home.
John:
So that probably, you know, sort of explains the path that we traveled.
John:
But logic has nothing to do with it.
John:
It's just the way it is.
Marco:
Well, I can see two different ways to get there.
Marco:
Okay, so first of all, the behind the wheel of a car, if you think about behind in the form of motion, then when the car is in motion, unless you're going in reverse, but normally in forward motion of the car, you are behind the wheel.
Casey:
Another interesting point.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But where's the front of the wheel and where's the front of you?
John:
It's the same logic as before.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Where's the back of the steering wheel?
John:
The paddles are on the back of the steering wheel.
John:
The logo is on the front.
John:
The front of you is the part where your nose is.
John:
The fronts are tasting each other.
John:
It's the same situation.
Marco:
Well, but so there's the question of like, you know, for two stationary objects.
Marco:
i think if you're saying if you're saying what's special relativity you're really working hard to to back solve for this one if you're talking about objects that are stationary if you're saying you know are you in front of it or behind it then i think that then i think the question is like what direction are these objects facing so again so if you're on a train but you're facing you're facing backwards
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So if you're stationary, it's a matter of which direction the objects are facing.
Marco:
And if you are in motion, then it's a matter of like, what's the direction of motion and which object is more in front of it.
Marco:
So when you're on a train, are you behind the computer?
John:
But if you're sitting backwards on the thing and you're in front of it again, if you're on a train going close to the speed of lighting, you open a laptop screen, the screen is facing forward.
John:
How fast does the light come out of the laptop screen?
Casey:
This is going nowhere good.
Casey:
How do we end up in robot or not?
John:
This is amazing.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Language phrases.
John:
They seem normal to you because you're used to them, but a lot of them, if you try to explain them logically, they don't make any sense.
John:
It's just like, we all know what this means.
John:
It's the phrase we've all agreed upon.
John:
It is a cultural thing.
John:
And that's why it can vary from language.
John:
What did we talk about?
John:
Foreign language expressions.
John:
I wish I could remember one of them, but how widely they vary from country to country and language to language, all saying basically the same thing.
Marco:
all right one more theory all right so what if so from the perspective of from what we as broadcasters would describe the position of the audience like if you're a tv broadcaster you might think like you're looking through the camera through someone's tv screen and they are behind the tv screen from your perspective as a tv broadcaster right
Marco:
I can kind of understand that.
Marco:
When we talk about people's online communication, suppose we are talking about some jerk commenter on a website.
Marco:
We might think of that person as being behind their computer from our perspective of seeing them on the internet.
Marco:
So there is kind of – like I can kind of see – I've heard that phrasing before.
Marco:
Like, oh, this is a stranger behind a screen or behind a computer.
Marco:
Like I have heard that.
Marco:
They're hiding behind their computer.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so from certain perspectives – But they're sitting in front of their computer while they hide behind it.
Marco:
They are sitting in front of their computer, but from our perspective, maybe they are behind their computer.
Right.
John:
Yeah, from our inertial frame of reference.
John:
This is all totally irrelevant.
Marco:
I love that I started this podcast being a health doctor, and now we're ending it being physics professors.
Casey:
Our talents are broad.
Marco:
No, they're not.
Marco:
That's the problem.
John:
This is related to the thing.
John:
Remember this question ages ago, like what are the relative positions of us in your mind when you're listening to the podcast?
John:
Are we sitting in a row?
John:
Are we sitting in a circle?
John:
Are we stacked vertically?
John:
Because Marco doesn't, correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't like do any panning in the mix or anything, right?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And by the way, anybody who produces a podcast, don't do that.
Marco:
People hate it.
Marco:
A very common feature request that podcast app makers get is a down mix to mono feature, which I'm going to add soon.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Marco:
But it's all there on the code.
Marco:
I just have no interface for it yet.
Marco:
But because people who hear podcasts where people are not mixed in the absolute center, listeners hate it.
Marco:
In many ways, it makes it extremely difficult for certain people to listen to it at all.
Marco:
So yeah, don't do that.
Marco:
But yes, everyone's always dead center.
John:
But still, even with us dead center, the question remains.
John:
And that was the question we talked about.
John:
How do you picture the people?
John:
And you were doing the reverse.
John:
It was like, how do we picture ourselves?
John:
Like, we're not on television looking into a camera, seeing the audience behind the camera.
John:
We're just talking to a microphone.
John:
So where do we picture the audience?
John:
And to that, I would say, I'm a tiny little person inside your ear canal.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
yeah we should do remember uh i don't know a couple months ago upgrade did the like low bit rate uh release where they they had released like a couple of extra copies at like ridiculously hilariously bad bit rates you should do one where you're like you're in the center and john is on the left and i'm on the right or something like that just to mess with people and just i could hear we should change positions every sentence oh god
John:
hard pan left hard pan right i have to use like the crappy automation thing and logic oh it's such a pain it should be like a rotation where it's just a constantly spinning thing and whenever we speak we just hop onto that train and then it you know yeah
Casey:
You know, Marco, if you were a really good editor, you would really embrace spatial audio.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I am such a good editor that I know not to do this because us joking about it is funny right here.
Marco:
But if I actually did this, people would hate it so much.
Marco:
You don't understand how much they would hate it.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
It is very hated.
John:
I should make it sound like I'm a tiny person in the ear canal, but I'm so small that the ear canal is like a cathedral.
John:
And my voice echo.
John:
in spatial audio.
Marco:
That I can do.
Marco:
Reverb, yeah, reverb is fine because that doesn't mess people up too badly.
Marco:
Yeah, that's totally fine.
John:
But you can do spatial audio with that because Casey could be the other end of the ear canal and yell to each other and our voices could bounce.
Marco:
Hello!
Marco:
Beep, beep, beep.