My Favorite Slap in the Face
Marco:
Good cookies.
Marco:
Oh, what are you eating?
Marco:
Girl Scout s'mores.
Casey:
You know, I am not the world's biggest fan of all of the Girl Scout cookies that the world loves.
Casey:
Like, the peanut buttery ones are good.
Marco:
Which ones?
Marco:
The chocolate-covered ones or the sandwich ones?
Casey:
the former the chocolate covered ones yeah those are good um i mean they're not they're not amazing in my personal estimation but they're good um thin mints aren't really for me um but the the key for me and we've probably talked about this at some point is the uh the shortbread the trefoils trefoils however you pronounce it yeah those are good i could go through a box of those in a sitting wouldn't even blink an eye are you in uh samoa zone casey
Casey:
I honestly don't know.
Casey:
Is there any way to find out?
John:
I do not know.
John:
That is the best Girl Scout cookie, and it's the only one you should even bother getting.
John:
It's the coconut circle with caramel.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That is two things that I am convinced that I don't enjoy, but Aaron will regularly point out to me that any time I consume caramel or coconut, I always say, you know, I really don't like blank, but this is actually pretty good.
Marco:
Which suggests that you probably actually like it.
Casey:
Which suggests that I probably do.
John:
I was asking is that there's the two different bakers who do the Girl Scout cookies and one of them, the bad version of that is called Caramel Delights.
John:
And I am unfortunately in the Caramel Delight zone.
John:
So I have to get illicit imported Samoas.
Casey:
We have not one, but two new anniversaries to celebrate.
Casey:
I am not even kidding.
John:
What now?
John:
Oh, I saw that in the email.
John:
Now I've decoded the notes here.
John:
I think I replied to that and shamed him for having another anniversary.
John:
But go ahead, Casey.
John:
Of course you did.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, actually, so the first one is for a Mr. Let me check my notes.
Casey:
John Siracusa.
Casey:
who a year ago tomorrow as we record this, but by the time you hear this, a year ago today, in all likelihood, had announced that he was going independent.
Casey:
So, John, how's the last year been?
John:
I could swear I put that in my calendar to remind myself to talk about it.
John:
Are you off by the day or something?
Casey:
No, it's hypercritical.co slash 2022 slash 03 slash 30 slash independence hyphen day.
John:
Maybe I just missed it.
Casey:
We don't need to belabor this, but how's the last year been, bud?
John:
that's fine i mean i i did i did put like i said i did put a i thought i put something in my calendar to say hey it's been a year or whatever but really realistically setting aside that thing i probably put in my calendar like a year ago the main thing i'm thinking about is that 2023 will be the first full year and this is in front of my mind because we're doing like tax stuff now will be my first full year without jobby job income so like
John:
I feel like it just doesn't count because last year was like a jobby job and then I didn't.
John:
This year, you know, if everything works out, let me know jobby job income.
John:
And so this will be the first full year.
John:
So if you're an excuse to have another anniversary, which is basically next year around tax time, you can ask me, what was it like having an entire year
John:
without a jobby job and i'm gonna say well with the podcast ad market the way it is it was pretty rough but anyway i was gonna say you picked a hell of a year it's like the worst ads we've seen in years it's it's kind of like when i uh when my son was born my first child my oldest uh was born and then i got laid off like a week later so that's just did i know that i don't feel like i roll
John:
It was one of the e-book company got bought out, and they said, hey, everybody, you could either pick up your family and move to North Carolina or whatever, or you're all out of a job tomorrow.
John:
Let us know.
John:
You get 24 hours.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
And we all know you wouldn't set foot anywhere south of Long Island.
John:
Oh, I mean, yeah.
John:
You know, if it was a job that I love for people that I thought were, you know, the people who bought the company, if I didn't think they were a bunch of tools, I might have considered moving.
John:
But no, they were terrible people and none of us like them.
John:
And we all just left.
John:
But yeah, Alex, I remember bringing Alex to the office in his little infant carrier thingy or whatever.
John:
So anyway, here I am.
John:
I'm still hanging in there.
John:
ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
We're going to talk about that more in a minute.
Casey:
But I am glad that you're still hanging in.
Casey:
And congratulations, all Snarkicide.
Casey:
Congratulations on a year of independence.
Casey:
You've made it at least one.
Casey:
So that's a good start.
Casey:
And then we alluded to this moments ago, but it was brought to our attention via email that we have another anniversary to celebrate, which is the 10 year anniversary of friend of the show, Jonathan Mann's ATP theme, excuse me, ATP ending theme.
Casey:
I almost said theme song, but it was actually entitled on YouTube ATP ending theme.
Casey:
And so we, it was, it was released 10 years ago, a couple of days back was at the 26th of March, 2023.
Casey:
and we started using it every day i don't know marco what was it like the 27th basically it was like immediately yeah it's pretty soon afterwards yeah so i thank you to jonathan man um please check out all of his work that song like i remember i remember we were talking at the time we were talking to merlin mann just casually like hey do you are you interested in maybe writing us a theme song yeah i forgot about that
Marco:
And then Jonathan wrote this song, unbeknownst to us, he kind of came out of nowhere with this song.
Marco:
I forget exactly the timeline of it, but after some brief amount of time, this song was still in our heads.
Marco:
And it was so much in our heads, and I'm like, first of all, I like this song a lot, and it stuck in my head.
Marco:
Second of all, if I like it and it stuck in my head, other people would probably like it as well, and it would probably stick in their heads, and that's probably good for our podcast.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
so we basically went to merlin like you know what if since you haven't started yet never mind we got something else thanks sorry and we had we we put started putting this song in every show and it's fantastic i'm i love the song so much just so thankful to jonathan for writing it and letting us use it all this time yep and then merlin did do the theme song for reconcilable differences so he got to do a podcast theme
Casey:
yeah oh that's true there you go so uh yeah we'll have some links in show notes to uh jonathan's stuff to the actual youtube video to john's uh announcement post and the atp wherein we discussed all this and it was one of my favorite bar none one of my favorite moments of atp uh when john just dropped this on us and and i certainly had no idea and i think marco you also had no idea is that correct what were your guesses like i made you guess what were your guesses
Casey:
Oh, it was terrible.
Casey:
It was truly terrible.
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of, and I can't remember what we guessed.
Casey:
I think Marco was closer, but both of us were pretty far off.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so congratulations.
Casey:
More anniversaries to come.
Casey:
I just got to figure out what excuse I can come up with to figure some out.
Casey:
But maybe we'll let the occasion inflation rest for now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We also need to talk about, speaking of ATP members and ATP.fm slash join, we have recorded another ATP member special.
Casey:
John, would you like to tell us about it?
John:
We talked a lot about it on the actual episode, so I won't go too far into it, but it's another ATP Movie Club episode.
John:
This time I picked the movie, but I picked it kind of at the request of Marco and Casey because they expected me to make them watch a Studio Ghibli movie or something or The Godfather or something like that, and I didn't.
John:
I made them watch The Edge of Tomorrow.
John:
And so they said, well, you know, what if we do that?
John:
What if you pick out a Studio Ghibli movie for us to watch?
John:
And then I had a big debate about which one I was going to pick, which I talk about on the show.
John:
I ended up picking My Neighbor Totoro, which is kind of straight up the middle for a first Studio Ghibli movie.
John:
But it's not straight up the middle when the people watching it for the first time are Marco and Casey.
John:
So if you are an ATP member, please check out this episode.
John:
It may not be exactly what you expect, but I think we delve into the movie...
Casey:
uh in a way that you probably haven't heard before because the other two people on the show are first timers i think it was quite interesting it was it was something uh so yeah so please feel free to check that out uh atp.fm slash join you can join for a month you can join for a year you can join for a month just to get this one episode and then up forget to cancel whoopsies no problem there um so you know do what you do what you got to do but we encourage you
Casey:
especially in this genuinely trying time when it comes to podcast advertising.
Casey:
It would be lovely if you had a few bucks to send our way.
Casey:
You know, we would appreciate it.
Casey:
And we try to do good stuff for you.
Casey:
I don't want to make any promises about future HP member episodes.
Casey:
We do intend to do them, you know, maybe once every month or two is our goal.
Casey:
It doesn't mean we'll succeed, but that's the goal.
Casey:
We've been kicking around some other ideas that are not Movie Club.
Casey:
I'm sure we will return to the Movie Club well soon.
Casey:
But we are trying to be inventive and creative, even though that's not necessarily in our wheelhouse.
Casey:
So we will actually be talking a little bit more about this probably in the post-show.
Casey:
But anyways, hp.fm slash join.
Casey:
You can join us in watching or discussing at least my neighbor Totoro.
John:
And keep in mind that if you join up, even if you're just joining up to hear this one episode, like it's a monthly membership at minimum.
John:
You can listen to all of the member special episodes in that time.
John:
There's only like, what, four or five of them at this point.
John:
So you're not that far behind and you'd be getting your money's worth even if you just pay for one month.
Marco:
Yeah, you have access to everything that we've ever done as a member or anything.
Marco:
The full feed, like, you know, it isn't just from the time you sign up forward.
Marco:
You have access to everything that we've done in the past.
Marco:
So, yeah, feel free, help yourself, and then just, yeah, kind of forget to cancel.
Marco:
You'd be shocked how bad the podcast ad market has been so far this year.
Marco:
So, you know, we're fine.
Marco:
Don't worry about us.
Marco:
But if you've been on the fence about becoming a member, this is a great time to do it.
Casey:
Selfishly, it would be lovely.
Casey:
There are six episodes.
Casey:
There are five movie club episodes.
Casey:
The original trilogy, if you will.
Casey:
And then the oopsie-doopsie, we never watched Hunt for October.
Casey:
And oopsie-doopsie, we never watched a Ghibli movie.
Casey:
And then the frozen dinner fiasco, which we may never live down.
Casey:
So there's plenty of good stuff for you to check out if you're interested.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And John, there's...
John:
maybe good news maybe not about hdmi quick media switching in action on an apple tv 4k tell me about this please i think we talked about it when the new apple tv 4k came out and had support for this and the you know we discussed the technology involved a little bit uh and then the capper was unfortunately no televisions support this feature so you've got it on your apple tv box but it's pointless
John:
Well, now it's 2023.
John:
The 2023 crop of televisions have come out and several of them do support quick media switching.
John:
What this is supposed to do for you is make it so that when the television switches something about the picture it displays, it switches from 1080 to 4K.
John:
It switches from 1080.
John:
you know 60 frames per second to 24 it switches from sdr to hdr if does any of those things most modern televisions will black out the screen kind of like it's an old you know crt or something make it go all black and then waits a couple seconds maybe a couple three a couple four seconds and then it will come back on with whatever the new settings are
John:
This is relevant because if you use my recommended settings on the Apple TV that tell you to match frame rate and match, what is it called, match dynamic range or whatever, that means any time you switch between one mode and another, you will get that
John:
black screen and that happens surprisingly often because probably when you're using the apple tv initially you're just on the menu and you're going through the menus and you can pick what you want the menus to be displayed in you know like the little grid of all the icons all your different apps on your apple tv you can pick if you want that to be in 1080 and 4k and sdr and hdr right but it doesn't matter what you pick because chances are good that when you launch an app and start watching something in the app it's
John:
it will be different than what you picked.
John:
Because I think, actually, I think your only choice, well, I guess it's not your only choice, but the default choice that most people do, for example, is 60 frames per second for the thing where you see the apps and stuff.
John:
Like, why would you put that in 24 frames per second?
John:
That would be weird.
John:
But again, no matter what you pick, if you watch a TV show, that's probably not going to be 24 frames per second.
John:
If you watch a movie, it probably will be 24 frames per second.
John:
Is the show you're watching HDR?
John:
Is the show you're watching SDR?
John:
There's going to be a mode switch somewhere in your future.
John:
and that induces a black screen and a couple seconds of wait, and that is annoying.
John:
The reason I recommend having that feature on, even though that black screen is annoying, is because to do otherwise would be to pick a mode and dynamic range thing and just watch everything in that.
John:
60 frames per second HDR.
John:
Everything's going to be like that.
John:
Well, everything's not 60 frames per second HDR.
John:
And if you ask your television or your Apple TV to convert everything to 60 frames per second HDR, it'll do it and it will look awful.
John:
No matter what you pick, pick 24 SDR, it's going to be incorrect for some show.
John:
So you do want it to switch, but you don't want to wait.
John:
Quick media switching was, in theory, some part of the HDMI spec that was supposed to help with this.
John:
But as we said the last time we discussed it, the only thing it helps with is when you change frame rate.
John:
That's it.
John:
So if you change any other aspect of the thing, if you change from 1080 to 4K or back, if you change from SDR to HDR, you still get a black screen.
John:
So I was kind of disappointed in that standard, but it was like, well, let's wait to see when it comes out on TV what it's like.
John:
So now it's out on a TV.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video so you can see it in action with an Apple TV 4K.
John:
on a new 2023 lg television and when you switch only resolution no black screen thumbs up you know it still does like a crossfade or whatever but at least the screen doesn't go completely black and you have to wait right when you do anything else black screen but and i don't understand this but you can see the results in the video for yourself
John:
If you have quick media switching enabled on this particular LG television and it goes to the black screen to switch modes, the black screen is up for less time than if you don't have quick media switching on.
John:
That makes no sense to me because it's like if you change something other than, what do you call it, frame rate, quick media switching shouldn't be involved.
John:
And yet it is.
John:
So you can see the results.
John:
It also puts up a big, this LG television puts up a big gray banner that says quick media switching or something.
John:
It's like, man, it defeats the purpose.
John:
I don't need to see a banner.
John:
Just do it.
John:
Don't... Anyway.
John:
So the struggle continues for actual, timely, fast switching.
John:
And I guess we kind of just got that with the ARM-based Macs.
John:
Remember we were talking about when the M1 Macs first came out, how quickly they changed resolution?
Yeah.
John:
And how we were used to the idea that on the Intel Macs, of course, your screen is going to blank out for a second.
John:
And when they didn't do that, and it was like instant, like, wow, this is great.
John:
We're still waiting for the day that TVs do that.
John:
But in the meantime, it seems like quick media switching is a slight, very slight upgrade from not having it.
John:
So if you happen to have a fancy new Apple TV 4K, you happen to be in the market to buy a new television 2023.
Casey:
i guess look for one with quick media switching and then just wait with the rest of us for five to ten years when hdmi standards catch up with what we want them to do yeah we'll see what happens but i was like you said i was super disappointed that it was only for um what was it frame rate you said or whatever one it was and everything else it was the exact same thing that we but not the exact same it's faster black screen that's what's so weird it's like fair
John:
All right.
John:
And the other thing, the reason it's only frame right is because it's built on VRR, variable refresh rate, which is a feature of HDMI where it's mostly for gaming.
John:
Like when you're playing a game, instead of having the game, demanding that the game produce 60 frames every second and refreshing the screen at 60 frames per second.
John:
Instead, the television or the screen or whatever says to the game, just give me a frame when it's ready.
John:
right you know if you if you don't have a frame ready when you're supposed to don't worry i won't refresh the screen i'll just wait for you to give me the frame that's variable refresh rate so uh since they already had that feature implemented it's many many years old feature they already had that implemented you can think of changing from 24 frames per second to 60 as a weird kind of variable refresh rate where it's like 24 20 24 and then 60 and so the tech the sort of the the hardware and software to do that was already kind of built in so they could build this on top of it which basically makes quick media switching
John:
it's not like it's like they didn't really do any work they're like well we've already got vrr can we just do something with that sure we'll call it quick media switching it's basically vrr but for your television anyway disappointing but you know it's hdmi what do you expect and then john you have all sorts of new figurative and potentially literal tools in your tool chest with regard to destroying and recreating your own custom furniture
John:
Yeah, my little story about cutting some threaded rod to shrink some furniture that I bought resonated with a lot of people.
John:
The most common suggestion I got was a better place to buy threaded rod and other things.
John:
I bought mine from like Grainger.com or something.
John:
Everybody recommended a McMaster hyphen car.
John:
It's McMaster.com.
John:
M-C-M-A-S-T-E-R.com.
John:
They sell stuff like that.
John:
Threaded rod fasteners or whatever.
John:
Very popular company.
John:
Everybody who wrote in about them loves them, says this is where you should get this stuff.
John:
I did look and they did have threaded rod.
John:
The price was similar to what I paid.
John:
They didn't have stainless steel though, which is kind of what I preferred as opposed to like zinc coated whatever.
John:
But anyway, that's the website people recommended.
John:
Sean Cameron was one of many people to recommend.
John:
tool lending services uh you know everybody said this is a well expressed as a fellow technologist who is tool inclined and having a lot of the same predilections as john about how things should be around the house i also find myself holding back on buying all sorts of tools including vices as in things that squish things uh
John:
I wanted to mention that many communities have either workshop spaces or tool lending libraries through which you can get access to specific tools for a specific job.
John:
This is a much better approach than spending money on your own version of a tool that you only need once or twice.
John:
And then, what's this?
John:
Cece Hellberg?
John:
Tooted to say, I couldn't find one near you, but tool lending libraries are a thing for both woodworking and more, and also for things like specialized shaped baking dishes or even fly fishing kits.
John:
I've seen everything for apparel tools, drill bits, ladders, garden tools, and even a cement mixer in them.
John:
And the website, which we'll link in the show notes, is localtools.org slash find.
John:
Many people sent me this URL while also noting that they could not find any near me.
John:
So I guess it's not, you know, it's not everywhere, but check around you and maybe nearby.
John:
That would be a good idea if I cared a lot more about that.
John:
cutting some threaded rod you know again i got the job done it would have taken me more than a day to find this place drive to it and see if they had something for me and then return it and blah blah blah so probably not uh appropriate for what i was doing but very handy for other things and it does save you from having to buy a tool
John:
And finally, lots of people suggested something that I already knew about but did not employ, which is when cutting, you know, cutting a threaded rod and you don't want to script the threads with your hacksaw or whatever, one trick is to thread one or two nuts onto the threaded rod, either having two nuts, you know, tightened against each other or...
John:
Two nuts with a gap between them so that you're basically protecting the threaded rod with a metal thing that is fixed in place.
John:
And also after you finish cutting through it with your hacksaw pressed against one of the nuts, then you back the nut off of the threaded rod and that will smooth out any burrs that are on the threaded rod to get it so the thing goes on and off.
John:
All good ideas.
John:
I did not have any nuts to put on the threaded rod.
John:
I'm like, oh, you can just buy one of those at McMaster.
John:
Yeah, I could have, but now I'm ordering another thing, waiting for it to come, or I'm going to another home store and looking for an M6 1.0 nut and buying a bag of them for $5 that I'm never going to use again, and yada, yada, yada.
John:
Anyway...
John:
I cut it by hand and I survived.
John:
So thank you for suggestions.
John:
But if you had to cut more than one piece of threaded rod, get a vice.
John:
Get a vice.
John:
Get some nuts that fit on it.
John:
Get a new hacksaw blade.
John:
I guess don't do what I did.
John:
Only on this show do we have threaded rod follow-up.
John:
Indeed.
John:
And everybody wanted me to buy a hacksaw blade.
John:
Like, go buy a hacksaw blade.
John:
They're $2.
John:
They're $6, you know.
John:
They're not $2, but yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
It's a tough ad market.
Marco:
We can't be buying hacksaw blades every week.
John:
Right, right.
John:
Yeah, no, they're not.
John:
Yeah, you can buy a new one.
John:
I should probably get a new one.
John:
But, you know, again, I was just the home store for thread rod.
John:
I didn't think to look for hacksaw blades.
John:
And then you got to take the old one off and blah, blah, blah.
John:
next time i need to use my hacksaw i will definitely do it but uh i truthfully i thought the hacksaw blade was not as in rough shape as it was because like how often do i use it but i had forgotten that this i think this hacksaw was like from my father-in-law's tool collection so it had seen a lot of use before it even got to me uh and i was under the impression that it was actually a newish hacksaw with a newish blade and i was wrong
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad we have that resolved.
Casey:
Josh Calvetti writes with regard to camera apps, as in, you know, for physical cameras and geotagging and things.
Casey:
Josh writes, when I was shooting Sony about a year ago, I was using CamRote.
Casey:
I'm assuming that's like camera mode or something.
Casey:
Anyway, for geotagging and control of my A6600, much more user friendly and stable than the official Sony app.
Casey:
And it doesn't require you to sign up for anything.
Casey:
And that's C-A-M-R-O-T-E dot app on the web.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
yeah there's a lot of third-party apps as we were complaining about first-party apps like the apps from fuji or sony whatever how terrible they are there are actually a lot of third-party apps that will work with various brands of camera and as you would imagine they're all you know much much better than the first party ones i actually did try this cam wrote thing i don't have occasion to use my big camera in geotagging like i'm just using around the house i guess i could still geotag those but i can geotag those manually too because i'm literally in my house but next time i go you know on my next outing i'm definitely going to use that because i said before
John:
I can't actually sync both of my Sony cameras with my phone because the stupid Sony app only lets you sync one camera at a time.
John:
So I will try the third party one and we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
And then speaking of cameras, but this time ones within phones, apparently the Samsung fun hasn't ended yet.
Casey:
You can opt into.
Casey:
So this is different than the moon discussion we had a couple of weeks back.
Casey:
The moon thing was happening just kind of automagically.
Casey:
But you can also opt into quote-unquote remastering photos.
Casey:
And according to one person, and The Verge picked this up, and they said that they weren't able to recreate it themselves.
Casey:
But nevertheless, according to this one person, they took pictures of their baby and then tried this remaster thing.
Casey:
And this very gummy baby suddenly had teeth because the remaster thing kind of just thought, oh, that human should have teeth there.
Casey:
And it's a little creepy.
Casey:
I think it's not as a dramatic problem or difference, perhaps is a better word for it, as the whole moon thing.
Casey:
But it's definitely a little weird and kind of funny.
Casey:
So there's a link in the show notes to The Verge that covers all this.
Casey:
It has some GIFs that you can look at.
Casey:
It's something else.
John:
i think the moon feature is on by default i'm not sure if this one is but this is definitely the type of thing where if you didn't notice it and then went back years later especially if it like burns it into your picture you know like if you can't go back to the original as captured by the camera or whatever you're like how does this you know three week old baby have teeth it's like the magic of samsung
Marco:
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Collide, K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, and then we have some information.
Casey:
Did we cover the true Siri experience?
Casey:
I didn't think we covered this on the show, did we?
John:
Yeah, that was the title of the last episode, and we covered this exact thing.
John:
I couldn't remember the details, but then I revisited it or whatever.
John:
It was the person asking Siri for the weather.
John:
They just got a HomePod, and they said, I just tried to ask of the weather, and all it said was done.
Casey:
Okay, my mistake.
Casey:
So anyway, so with regard to that, Benjamin Mayo wrote and had a really good point.
Casey:
Benjamin wrote, Siri having just said done implies that it's running a shortcut.
Casey:
Do you happen to have a Siri shortcut in your library?
Casey:
Benjamin was talking to the person who originally posted this.
Casey:
Do you happen to have a shortcut in your library that has a name similar to weather?
Casey:
It might be getting confused and running the shortcut instead of actually looking up the weather.
Casey:
And the original poster Nairobi wrote back and said, I sure did.
Casey:
I had two that seemed to have no real purpose.
Casey:
I deleted them and Siri seems to be able to answer me now, consistently even, which is good news.
Casey:
So as much as I love crapping on Siri, turns out this one was a legitimate oops.
John:
But this is a situation where you're like, yeah, there is a problem, but how would anyone figure that out?
John:
You know, like you just, you ask, you know that you're able to ask the HomePod what the weather is.
John:
You do that and it does something different.
John:
Like what's your next debugging step?
John:
Are you going to know that you have some random shortcut that happens to have, you know, it's called check the weather or something because you clicked on some link that you forgot about a year ago.
John:
It's the debug ability of voice and systems, the discoverability we've talked about before of like,
John:
what can i actually say to you is not great and then when something goes wrong like what do you do to figure out what the problem is because there's you know the interface is talking and uh you know if it doesn't understand what's the weather the idea is that it's going to understand you conversing uh to it about uh what went wrong is you know probably not particularly likely although this next item has more on that topic
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So somebody put together basically chat GPT inside an iOS shortcut, which is kind of bananas.
Casey:
And there's a really interesting, unfortunately, it's on Medium, but there's a really interesting post about this.
Casey:
And there's a video included as well.
Casey:
It is fascinating.
Casey:
And from the way the video was edited, and I think there was a little...
Casey:
A little bit of complimentary or aggressive editing on this video, I think.
Casey:
But nevertheless, the way the video is edited, it is darn impressive.
Casey:
So the person whose name I don't have in front of me wrote, I explained everything in plain English.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
So this is with regard to how did they hang all this together?
Casey:
And so apparently what this person wanted to do was have ChatGPT basically interpret their verbal commands and turn it into a JSON payload that could be sent on to other things.
Casey:
And so how did they convince ChatGPT to do this?
Casey:
Well...
Casey:
They literally explained it to them.
Casey:
So now, quoting from this post, I explained everything in plain English.
Casey:
I described the types of requests, the exact structure of the response, and asked it to behave like a sentient AI, giving advice even for personal questions.
Casey:
I also provided a few details about time location in the devices in rooms in the house.
Casey:
From this, we will receive a perfectly structured message.
Casey:
And that's all there is to programming it.
Casey:
So there was no direct specification of here's an example JSON.
Casey:
It was just build a JSON object that has keys and values and so on and so forth.
Casey:
It's nuts.
Casey:
So there's an example here, an example command, quote, I sent my son to bed to read for another 20 minutes.
Casey:
Can you switch off the lights in his room when it's time to sleep?
Casey:
And sure enough, this works.
Casey:
And so in this case, GPT-3 understood that it is probably the bedroom that needs switching off.
Casey:
And it added the correct timestamp, which is 20 minutes after the time we passed the request.
Casey:
And you can see a little sample JSON there.
Casey:
All of this done without actually writing any code, at least on the ChatGPT side.
Casey:
And then I guess the other end of this was like some banana's
Casey:
just bananas complex shortcut, iOS shortcut, that processes this JSON and takes action on it.
John:
I think it's like sending it to Home Assistant or something.
John:
The reason I put this in here and the reason everyone was sending this to me is because it's exactly what I described in the last episode when I talked about how useful is ChatGPT to making Siri better, essentially.
John:
And I said, well, one thing you could do with it is...
John:
have it interpret what the person is saying and then translate it to the very very limited and rigid structured vocabulary of siri because that seems to be the stumbling point like you have to phrase things in a certain way for them to work with siri we talked about this was like you know adding new words taking six weeks to rebuild the database and everything siri can understand all sorts of things that you say but every single one of those had to be thought of and explicitly put into siri by a person you know the number of variations are not infinite you could never say something to siri like
John:
Hey, Dingus, I sent my son to bed to read for 20 minutes.
John:
Can you switch off the lights in his room when it's time to sleep?
John:
Siri will not make heads and tails to that.
John:
I'd be like, that's not one of the forms that I know how to parse.
John:
I have no idea what you're talking about.
John:
Or it'll make a bad guess or terrible things will go wrong, right?
John:
So the idea that you have one of these large language models sitting in front of Siri...
John:
listening to what you say, figuring it out.
John:
And in this case, once it figures out what you want, also formulating a JSON message that it then sends to like home assistant or some other thing, or, you know, translates into the form that Siri understands it.
John:
Like, because the chat GPT thing, like the, the, the large language model figured out you probably mean the kid's bedroom 20 minutes from now means that's when it should happen.
John:
And you want the lights to go off.
John:
Like it figured all that out.
John:
And then it can issue a command.
John:
Hey, dingus in 20 minutes, turn the lights off in the bedroom.
John:
And that Siri can understand that.
John:
I don't necessarily think layering things in that way is the best approach for Apple.
John:
But at the very least, it is a way to take two things that we have now.
John:
Siri, that can do a bunch of things as long as you phrase it in one of a very long list of ways.
John:
And large language models that can take a bunch of input text and figure out the most likely output text for it that fits the prompt and everything.
John:
And so those two things together, the video is a little bit janky because obviously having to run a shortcut is not the same as being able to say, hey, dingus and shortcuts take time to run.
John:
And you can see the edit points in the thing where it's not as seamless as you could imagine.
John:
But of course, if Apple implemented this, they wouldn't make you run a shortcut to do it.
John:
They would...
John:
fuse this into siri and they say oh siri 2 now powered by quote-unquote ai and and honestly it would be better right because we don't care what's happening we don't care that under the covers it's a language model translating it into a very text adventure style thing where all we know is that now we are able to say more things and actually get what we want from them
Casey:
It was certainly impressive.
Marco:
Honestly, I would even take just simpler things.
Marco:
Make Siri work every time.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Marco:
It fails in such weird, stupid ways so often.
Marco:
Honestly, this is... I go on a rollercoaster up and down with what I currently think about my HomePods as I have for the entire lifetime of these products now.
Marco:
I'm currently at a bit of a down phase in terms of
Marco:
the functionality of Siri and Apple Music.
Marco:
Like, it's... Oh, it's so buggy.
Marco:
It's so unreliable.
Marco:
These are brand new products.
Marco:
This, like... They're so buggy.
Marco:
Like, now they're faster in their bugs.
Marco:
Like, they behave buggy faster.
Marco:
But they're still... And it's...
Marco:
Can somebody somehow make sure that Tim Cook listens to music every single day using a stereo pair of HomePods and operating them via Siri?
Marco:
Someone make that happen.
Marco:
Somehow, in some non-creepy way, replace all the music playing equipment in Tim Cook's home and office, again, in a non-creepy way, with stereo pairs of HomePods.
Marco:
And just make sure that he has to operate them every single day.
Marco:
And let's see if maybe this product can't get a little bit better.
Casey:
That or use Apple Music in any platform for any reason.
Marco:
Well, because that's using Apple Music.
Marco:
I seriously doubt he's a Spotify user.
Marco:
So he's going to be using Apple Music via Siri.
Marco:
This will be good.
John:
I'm not sure if his main motivational driver is how frustrating he finds the products.
John:
Steve Jobs, sure.
John:
If something went wrong for him, make it his mission in life to make sure that that gets fixed because he is embarrassed to be shipping a bad product.
John:
He would burn the world down until it was fixed.
John:
Or at least he would try until he gets bored and moves on to something else.
Marco:
but anyway uh i feel like what tim cook's reaction would be to look at how the home pod is selling and if sales seem like in line with projections then i guess everything's fine yeah but but see and and again the home pod's one part of this like this is why you know i we keep harping on hey siri has to be better and not not only in these you know cleverness ways like as as we
Marco:
are seemingly in full swing now of the ai revolution here you know the the expectations people have are going to keep going up for how smart they expect it to be but also it still doesn't get the basics right it still is unreliable and slow and does stupid things with basic requests very frequently and inconsistent is another big problem that it has it's very inconsistent and
Marco:
You know, Apple is not only going to fall behind in competitive expectations of assistants as they all move more into AI stuff.
Marco:
But also, Apple is about to launch a brand new product that seems like it's going to be a pretty big bet the company is making.
Marco:
That also, by all accounts, seems like it might be pretty heavily relying on Siri for certain functionality.
Marco:
How are they going to do that if Siri continues to have the reputation of seeming to work a lot better in Apple executives' homes than in any other house in the world?
Marco:
I don't know anybody for whom Siri works as well as Apple seems to think it works.
Marco:
And this is going to hold them back.
Marco:
It's going to keep holding them back.
Marco:
Imagine...
Marco:
The products that they envision, I mean, look, obviously I'm talking about the VR headset thing, but also look at things like AirPods or the Apple Watch or the phone or the HomePod.
Marco:
All of their products now involve Siri in some way to varying extents, some more reliant on it than others.
Marco:
If they try to launch a product that depends heavily on Siri...
Marco:
They're going to present it one way, and that'll be nice, and it'll seem like everything is awesome and works.
Marco:
But then when we actually get the product, it's going to have all these weird inconsistencies and shortcomings, and that's going to make the product itself look and work badly.
Marco:
Siri is such a fundamental technology to Apple's modern product line, and they keep only leaning more into that over time.
Marco:
And for the amount that they are relying on Siri for the operation and success of their products, they seem to be allowing it to be a very poor performer in quality.
Marco:
They care so much about so many of the details and the fundamental technologies their products depend on.
Marco:
And then Siri is just miserable.
Marco:
And I don't understand why they don't seem to put a higher priority on making that fundamental technology as good as it can be.
Casey:
I almost wonder if it's because when you're on the inside, you see how the sausage is made or not, depending on how you want to look at it.
Casey:
And, you know, maybe they all know it's trash, but they can explain it away.
Casey:
Well, it's garbage because blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Well, it's garbage because politics.
Casey:
It's garbage because, you know, servers.
Casey:
It's garbage because any number of reasons.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I mean, I've been told from anyone I know that works or has worked at Apple that they are their own biggest critic, which I would believe, but golly, from an outsider's point of view, and we're going to be talking about this a lot later, from an outsider's point of view, we sure can't tell because Siri sure ain't getting better.
Casey:
My keyboard on my phone still wants to change W-E-L-L to W-E-apostrophe-L-L and vice versa.
Casey:
No matter what I do, it's always choosing the wrong one.
Casey:
Like, it...
Casey:
it sure doesn't look like anyone cares from the outside.
Casey:
And at some point, you know, everyone has a different line, but at some point people are going to stop being like, well, you know, it's okay.
Casey:
At some point it's just going to be so frustrating that people are going to stop using these products.
Casey:
I mean, I...
Casey:
I don't have HomePods or any other voice cylinder in the house because the Amazon one got way too chatty and all it wants to do is have me talk to it and advertise things to me and so on and so forth.
Casey:
By the way.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And then I never wanted a HomePod originally because they were too expensive.
Casey:
And then later, I just didn't feel like it was solving a need I have.
Casey:
And now I certainly don't want any because I'm such a Sonos fanboy.
Casey:
Nobody even wants to hear me talk about it anymore.
Casey:
So if the HomePod, to your point, Margo, if the HomePod and Siri were amazing,
Casey:
If they were really and truly great, I would probably have one in the house.
Casey:
I haven't tried the Google stuff, and again, I don't feel like this is a need I need to fill.
Casey:
And maybe the Google stuff is great, and I'm waiting for John to pipe in as soon as I stop talking.
Casey:
But if Siri was amazing...
Casey:
I would probably have a HomePod by now, but why would I spend a pile of money for a HomePod, even leaving aside the Sonos stuff?
Casey:
Why would I spend a pile of money on a HomePod when one of the marquee features never frigging works from everything I've ever heard?
Casey:
Like, why would I do that?
Casey:
It just seems bananas.
Casey:
I know, John, tell me I'm a dummy and that I should get some Google stuff.
John:
We talked about this last week, like, with the difficulty of Siri.
John:
It's one of the downsides of being early in the market.
John:
Like, Apple was pretty early with a voice assistant heavily integrated into its product family that does voice assistant-y things, right?
John:
Siri was 2011 or whatever, as we discussed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
people who come later with using entirely different approaches to solving this problem, like the large language models, which give you capabilities that Siri does not have, although there are, like we said, there are still gaps that a large language model can't do that Siri can do.
John:
But anyway, using more modern technology,
John:
Yeah, you're later to the market and you missed out on all those years of having products with these features, but you get to start with a newer, better technology that's on a faster, you know, trajectory.
John:
Like it could be that whatever, however Siri is made is like sort of an evolutionary dead end in terms of how it's structured and programmed.
John:
And there are a bunch of new branches going off in other directions.
John:
So like...
John:
And for Apple to say, OK, well, Apple was early and they had this other thing, but now they can just use the new thing.
John:
Well, the problem for Apple is they can't replace Siri with something built on new technology unless it can pretty much do everything that Siri does, because you don't have a regression where it's like, well, you used to be able to use Siri to do these hundred things, but.
John:
now we have a new quote-unquote AI-powered Siri, but it can do one-fifth of the stuff.
John:
So they've kind of, you know, again, it's the curse of being early.
John:
You build up all this functionality.
John:
Siri, for all we complain about it, is integrated into so many products and it can do so many different things.
John:
And even though we don't use all those things, someone out there is relying on the fact that you can, you know, ask Siri to predict the temperature in a different country, you know, a month from now or something.
John:
And then if you come out with a new one that's powered by AI and it can't do that, they've lost functionality.
John:
So...
John:
apple has a difficult kind of like it was with the operating system if you build an operating system before like memory protection and preemptive multitasking are common you build this huge customer base and all these apps built on it uh yeah you got all those years of good money but now when it comes time to have a modern operating system someone who starts from scratch right now uh can build an operating system with all those features from day one whereas you have to kind of retrofit it and it's a more difficult task so
John:
It's not that bad with Siri, but I think it is actually a challenge to use better, more modern technologies to make a better Siri while also sort of replacing all the functionalities.
John:
You have to kind of do a piecemeal where it's like, well, excuse me.
John:
Well, unbeknownst to you, when you ask this, we take this path in the code and we all go off into the new like large language model things.
John:
But when you ask anything else, it's the old Siri path and they slowly replace it from the inside.
John:
Like this is just basic, you know, software engineering, product management stuff, but it is difficult.
John:
And I hope something like that is happening inside Apple.
John:
Like there is lots of motion in the sort of AI section of the company.
John:
Granted, a lot of it has been related to ML, which was the other buzzword before AI, you know, machine learning.
John:
We've seen lots of ML powered features being built into Apple's
John:
applications and devices particularly around the camera and you know or any of the stuff even the the keyboard auto complete you're complaining about was quote unquote ml powered uh you know and it doesn't seem to be working out that well but anyway they've been doing things it just seems like the things they've been doing have not been siri siri's been sitting there being what it is taking six weeks to rebuild its database in 2014 hopefully that's better now um but not really getting better better so um
John:
I mean, maybe this is the new thing that will be, you know, we have all these like five to 10 year projects that we talk about in this program of like, when is Apple going to do X?
John:
And eventually they do do it.
John:
And every time that happens, someone says like, well, now what are you going to complain about?
John:
Now that you've got the Mac Pro, now what are you going to complain about when you got this, when you got that?
John:
It's like... There's always something.
John:
There's always something.
John:
And Siri is kind of bubbling up to the top as the, you know, long-term thing that Apple needs to deal with.
John:
They got a new file system.
John:
The Mac Pro, they build a new one, but then they forget about it for five years and we freak out again.
John:
So that'll be evergreen.
John:
But like...
John:
you know they they have a laptop cpus that don't overheat that are really fast low power like they did a lot of the things they fixed the keyboard right they're they knocked down a lot of these things they got a new operating system with memory detection and preemptive multitasking right but there's always something else and it seems like siri uh it might be the long pole at least until uh the headset arrives and we have a whole new thing to complain about
Casey:
which apparently is going to be in early june but we're going to talk about that uh yeah yeah i don't know where where are we i feel like we got oh the uh the chat gpt thing right so anything else on that before we move along i think we've covered it all right uh microsoft has threatened to restrict data from rival ai search tools according to bloomberg
Casey:
Bloomberg writes, Microsoft has threatened to cut off access to its internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products.
Casey:
The company has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract.
John:
So, yeah, we talked about this before in the context of like artists having their artwork used as training data, you know, and whether that is legal, whether it should be legal, whether it is ethical and, you know.
John:
How these things are going to work themselves out in court cases depends largely on who the litigants are.
John:
And in this case, it's a bunch of big companies, Microsoft and the other companies that it's licensing the stuff to.
John:
Not surprisingly, a big company thinks it's perfectly fine for them to trade their large language models on every single thing they can find on the Internet, but not fine for somebody else to use their search index stuff to train their models.
John:
So everyone wants...
John:
I, you know, I, big corporation, should be able to get any data I want and use it to train my thing.
John:
But once I've done that, nobody can use what I've generated to train their things because now I've created value.
John:
You see what I've done there?
John:
You can't use mine to train your thing.
John:
And it kind of gets into the whole thing of like, you know, the, you know, the, what do you call it?
John:
argument at insertum or whatever it is where you extend something to an absurd degree like well if there's no humans creating anything and it's just AIs creating things and they're not allowed to train off each other's data eventually they all just shrivel and die in place because no one wants to share their data and no one is producing any new data and you've already trained on everything else and they just sort of like I don't know it's like the you know AI inbreeding where they just shrivel up and become little shells for themselves so yeah this there was one other story here that I actually didn't put out like the US Copyright Office's
John:
forming a committee to discuss, forming a committee to discuss researching, whatever.
John:
They're doing something about, like, the legality of copyright and AI training or whatever.
John:
But unsurprisingly, big companies think that they should get everything and nobody should get what they do, and Microsoft is trying to enforce that in their contracts, and we'll see how this all plays out.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, it's great when this stuff is up and coming and it's like a free for all and like, oh, nobody minds.
John:
It's just an academic project.
John:
Oh, this is new and exciting.
John:
Nobody really cares.
John:
But then all of a sudden when there's real money being made and people are making products, they're like, wait a second.
John:
These, as I said before, these products have no value without good data to train them on.
John:
Where does that good data come from?
John:
And what relationship is there between the data that you're training on and the product that you make from it?
John:
And Microsoft is saying, if we train on a bunch of this data, you can't take the stuff that we've trained to train your training.
John:
Because people are putting AI-generated images on the web and in tweets and stuff like that.
John:
And then other...
John:
you know, image generation AIs, are being trained on images generated from other AI things.
John:
But they say, whoa, whoa, you can't train on those.
John:
They're the product of our machine learning.
John:
You can only train on things from actual human artists.
John:
You can steal that.
John:
No one cares about them.
John:
But once Microsoft uses our technology to generate some of that, you can't train on that.
John:
It's in our contract.
John:
You know, and there's a bunch of court cases surrounding this or whatever.
John:
So it is rapidly heading towards what will surely be a series of terrible court decisions that we will complain about on the show.
John:
No, I just I just love the idea of like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, all like legally barring each other from taking from looking at any.
John:
Don't let your large language models look at any of my data.
John:
If you do that, your data is tainted and we own your whole company.
John:
It's like, hey, no, that's not fair.
John:
And then they'll probably do what they do with patents and everything is to have these cross-license agreements.
John:
So they're like, look, this is annoying.
John:
We all hate it.
John:
Let's just, you know, have a giant patent cross-licensing agreement that says we all agree we can use each other's patents because the whole patent system is incredibly dumb and would destroy the entire industry if it was, you know, if it was allowed to play out.
John:
So instead we'll just say, we giant companies agree to ignore the patents.
John:
We'll only use them to crush small companies.
John:
America.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
You are so right.
Casey:
All right, we have semi-breaking news.
Casey:
WWDC has been announced.
Casey:
It is going to be a week long, asterisk.
Casey:
It is going to be, as we all foretold, June 5 through 9.
Casey:
It will be in Cupertino, well, sort of, but mostly online.
Casey:
But in the same vein as last year, and again, as we're told, there will be a special event the Monday, June 5th at Apple Park where you can sign up to get, I believe it's a free ticket if you leave aside the fact you have to travel there, that you can request to attend.
Casey:
They will accept requests until April 4th at 9 o'clock in the morning Pacific or noon Eastern time.
Casey:
And they're going to do something presumably similar to what they did last year.
Casey:
And I put my name in the hat.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
I genuinely don't know whether the three of us are going to be there or not.
Casey:
And we don't necessarily need to talk about that right today.
Casey:
But I'm hopeful that all three of us would be there because I haven't seen you two at all, literally not once since WWDC 2019.
Casey:
And that is too damn long.
Casey:
We'll figure that out amongst ourselves.
Casey:
But I am excited that there are dates.
Casey:
I'm excited that there's a pretty good chance that I think all three of us will be there.
Casey:
So I'm just excited.
Casey:
This is good news.
John:
You think there's a pretty good chance?
John:
Well, so we just got done complaining about Apple and Siri.
John:
And we are about to complain even more about Apple.
John:
But in between, this is like the reverse of a s*** sandwich.
John:
It's like...
John:
In this scenario, the shit is the bread instead of the meat.
John:
In the middle, what I'm going to say is, hey, Apple, send us press passes.
John:
Because otherwise it's a lottery.
John:
Like as Apple says, invitations will be allocated by a random selection process, right?
John:
And so we'll find out by April 5th whether we got the random.
John:
I put my name in the hat as well.
John:
But like the odds aren't great because it's not like WWC.
John:
It seems like it's a smaller number of people.
John:
It's not 5,000 people they're getting invitations to, I don't think.
Marco:
No, it seems like it's exactly like last year.
Marco:
The one day in person at Apple's campus with the in-person kind of keynote presentation and then everything else is online, basically.
Marco:
The in-person thing, you know, the old conference when everyone was like in the conference center held about 5,000 attendees.
Marco:
Last year at Apple's, it seemed to be about 1,000, maybe 1,500, like something in that ballpark.
Marco:
I would expect about that same number this year.
Marco:
Maybe a little bit more if they could fit.
Marco:
It seemed like they might be able to fit a few more people, maybe 2,000 at most.
Marco:
But that's probably about as high as you could expect.
Marco:
It's going to be the same deal as last year, basically.
Marco:
Some people will get there for that one-day thing.
Marco:
If you can't get there...
Marco:
you don't really need to worry about missing much of anything because all the content will be online, which I, and I'm very happy with that, honestly, because I, you know, I think this new format that, you know, COVID kind of forced them into this new format, but we were kind of heading in this direction for a while and COVID just forced them to make it like the premium, like primary experience.
Marco:
And it's so much better, honestly, than the old conference sessions like that were, that were performed in person.
Marco:
just by the nature of what they can do with this new format like it's it's so much better as a developer resource and so i am very very happy that they are continuing to do this uh also you know downtown san jose most of the stores you like are closed and there weren't that many to begin with
Marco:
there were only like three or four as it was and i guess most of them are not there or wildly changed like the sausage place isn't a sausage place anymore and they brought the sausage back i thought well there's like a sausage yeah it's more of like a burger place now at least the vegan indian place is still there and it's still amazing but at least it was last summer i don't know if it's still there now i hope so i might take a dinner dinner trip there this year if i if i can but
Marco:
But anyway, I'm very happy they're doing this format again because it worked really well last year.
Marco:
And even though it's not the same as the old conference in terms of like, there's way less reason for a lot of people to gather there in person.
Marco:
And because it's held at Apple's campus, which is not even itself downtown San Jose, like it's close, but it's not in downtown San Jose.
Marco:
And there is almost nothing around Apple's campus besides like houses and other office buildings.
Marco:
There's not really a downtown area to congregate.
Marco:
There's only a handful of small hotels.
Marco:
So there's not much of a community gathering really going on there.
Marco:
So it's a much smaller event for the in-person people.
Marco:
That being said, as I said on Under the Radar this week...
Marco:
if you have the opportunity to go and if you can swing the cost and logistics of going, I would suggest it just because it is kind of a cool pilgrimage for Apple fans.
Marco:
Like, it's cool to go there.
Marco:
It's amazing to actually walk into Apple Park and to see the actual, you know, the big circle building, to be in that, you know, tremendous cafeteria, you know, auditorium, atrium kind of thing.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
It's an amazing experience to see this place.
Marco:
It's a beautiful building.
Marco:
It's a beautiful environment they've built around it.
Marco:
And it's just a really cool feeling to be there with everybody, even though you're just watching a video in all likelihood, because that's what it was last year.
Marco:
Even if you're just watching a video and sitting there getting a slow sunburn because you forgot to put on the sunscreen that they literally gave you in the bag, please put on the sunscreen.
Marco:
It's in your bag.
Marco:
It's in your goodie bag.
Marco:
Just put it on.
Marco:
But anyway, like...
Marco:
It's cool to be there with everybody.
Marco:
It's cool to be in the crowd as everyone is seeing stuff for the first time and you get to feel the crowd reaction like being at a live event because it is one.
Marco:
I also find it very helpful as a developer.
Marco:
I feel like it actually motivates me a lot.
Marco:
When I'm there, in that environment, it's like a theme park or a pilgrimage, I said earlier, for Apple stuff.
Marco:
And so that actually really motivates me to come home and work really hard on all the stuff they just announced.
Marco:
And throughout the rest of the summer, the excitement fades.
Marco:
You actually get the beta.
Marco:
You realize, wow, the stuff they announced really doesn't work yet.
Marco:
Or it doesn't do what I hoped it would do.
Marco:
Or it's missing some functionality that I hope it will have later.
Marco:
Or wow, this is a real pain in the butt having to deal with all these deprecations that just happened.
Marco:
And wow, now I have to change this whole API I've been using back here for the last 10 years because they just changed it or killed it or whatever.
Marco:
And so there's all this kind of like grind or pain in the butt stuff that you have to deal with later in the summer.
Marco:
But at that point, at the very first day that everything's unveiled, when you're there that week or that day,
Marco:
it's all fun it's all like wow look at this it's so amazing and everyone's excited and everything's positive because no one's found all the crap yet and it's like it's just a really nice experience to be there and it is very motivating as a developer to go there so i i do strongly recommend i mean look if you don't live anywhere near california that's going to be a lot of expense and time and so it's probably not worth it to you for objective reasons
Marco:
But if you win the ticket lottery thing, and if you get the opportunity to go, and if you can handle the cost and time to get there, it's a fun pilgrimage and a fun event.
Marco:
It's not anything that you can put a monetary value on.
Marco:
It's just fun and motivating.
Marco:
And it's really great for that.
Marco:
And so it's recommended if you can swing it.
Marco:
And I'm going to do my best to be there.
John:
Yeah, the only reason I've been considering going this year is just to have the Apple Park experience that, you know, that everyone had the other year, because I still don't really want to be traveling.
John:
I don't relish being on a plane, breathing other people's air.
John:
I don't relish doing all that stuff.
John:
I don't relish getting COVID again.
John:
Many, many reasons that I would.
John:
very be very unlikely to go but considering i saw everybody go all last year and how much fun they had i think it's worth it for me to do as an experience because who knows how many more times they'll do it in this exact format and who knows how long apple park will be the way it is so i want to visit apple park of course i'll be i i fully expect that if i do end up going
John:
I will be very annoyed by the fact that apparently you're not allowed to bring real cameras into Apple Park, and I'll have to take pictures of my iPhone the whole time I'm there.
John:
But, you know, what can you do?
John:
I'm so sorry.
John:
Just think of how good those pictures will be.
John:
It's so many beautiful things, and I could take cool pictures of peoples and crowds, but nope, not allowed, just iPhone only.
Marco:
Does it actually say that, or is it one of those things where it's like no detachable lenses?
John:
Like there's a couple of... Yeah, it's basically no real cameras.
John:
You can use iPhones to take pictures within limited context, but I think the thing last year was no...
John:
Maybe they did say it is no interchangeable lens cameras, but I feel like they would just basically like no cameras except iPhones or no cameras except phones, I guess.
John:
Yeah, probably what they mean.
Casey:
I don't remember that.
Casey:
I mean, I believe you.
Casey:
I just I do not remember that being a thing.
John:
Maybe I'm misremembering.
John:
Someone from Apple can tell me.
Marco:
But anyway, this all I remember it being kind of vague, like because it what they're what they basically intend for the rule to be is no professional photography.
Marco:
But that's hard to codify.
Marco:
And so usually it ends up being like no professional cameras.
Marco:
And that's also hard to codify.
John:
I think they also don't want you to have zoom lenses because all the walls are glass.
John:
And if you have like a big zoom lens, you could like read things off whiteboards that are, you know.
John:
i wonder like you know if the rule ends up being like no detachable lenses like well could you bring in like the nikon p1000 and like it's basically a telescope yeah yeah i know you bring it bring in a super zoom with an 800 millimeter lens it's like hey it doesn't attach oh it's way it's a 3000 millimeter but it doesn't detach just bring the just bring a samsung phone it'll just make up things on apple's whiteboards that seem plausible yeah
Casey:
Or just bring a drone.
Casey:
Fly it right up to the edge.
Casey:
I'm sure they won't mind that or notice that at all.
John:
Oh, I'm sure they would love that.
John:
Did you go as press last year, Marco?
John:
Yes.
John:
So I think if you go as press, you get to do and see more stuff.
John:
Didn't they have like a day before thing where they showed you the developer center and stuff like that?
Marco:
Yeah, there was a developer center tour.
Marco:
They were doing like various groups for that.
Marco:
And there was like a hands-on area after the keynote where we got to see the new MacBook Air.
Marco:
And I got to be in the way of Johnny Ives' shot again.
Marco:
Or Tim Cook's shot, sorry.
John:
That's another reason that Apple should give us press passes.
Marco:
Yeah, because then all three of us could be in the way for Tim Cook trying to handle the new product for the camera shots.
John:
We'll be too busy talking about all the stuff we did in the hands-on room.
John:
We won't even have time to complain about Apple like we're about to do.
Casey:
Yes, that's it.
John:
I mean, it actually is true.
Marco:
That actually happens.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, WWDC, granted, I haven't been since 2019, and I miss the event.
Casey:
Golly, do I miss seeing you two and all of our other mutual friends.
Casey:
But WWDC, at least the way I remember it, and granted, it is different now, but it is exactly what Marco was describing.
Casey:
It's just a really great event to get you really excited about your work, or about Apple, even if it's not your work, or if you hope for it to one day become your work.
Casey:
It's super fun, and
Casey:
And I really hope that all three of us end up there and, you know, whether we get press passes or just get very lucky with the lottery or just choose to go because we haven't seen each other in a long friggin' time.
Casey:
One way or another, I hope that it works out.
Casey:
I don't, I don't know if there's that much more to say about this now, uh, but I am, I'm excited that they've announced it.
Casey:
I'm excited that I have a specific thing to look forward to.
Casey:
I'm excited that if I fly on Sunday, apparently Richmond has, uh, some airline, I feel like breeze or something that does direct from Richmond, Virginia to SFO, which is stunning.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Unfortunately, I think the return trip is like every, every other day or something like that.
Casey:
And it's not the day I would want to take back, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Anyway, I'm just excited, and I really hope it works out for the three of us.
Casey:
So anything else about WWDC?
Casey:
We'll do more about things we expect to see when we get closer to time.
Casey:
We don't have a merchandise story for ATP for WWDC yet.
Casey:
We are working on that.
Casey:
No promises.
Casey:
But anything else about DubDub?
Marco:
I would just say it's almost, I know this is rich coming from me.
Marco:
It's almost like seeing a live sports event versus watching it on TV.
Casey:
That is rich coming from you.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I can't even tell you which sport.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
The feeling of being there, of actually seeing the building and being right there with everyone else and everyone's cheering together when something good is announced.
Marco:
The feeling of being there is really cool and really energizing and it's a great experience.
Marco:
And again, what you're paying for with all the travel logistics and everything, what you're paying for is...
Marco:
that experience you're not paying for the developer content that's free but you're you're paying for the coolness of seeing it in person live that that i think is the main selling point and if you can so that's why like if you get in and if you can swing the travel logistics it's it's pretty cool and you should do it you don't have to do it every year but you should do it at least once
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
And actually, I should point out, as part of the meat in this poo-poo sandwich, every Apple employee that I've met is awesome.
Casey:
Like, individually, Apple people are super great.
Casey:
We may strongly disagree with the decisions and policies of the organization, but...
Casey:
Pretty much all the rank and, especially the rank and file people are pretty awesome.
Casey:
I mean, and I can't think of any examples that disprove the rule.
Casey:
Like pretty much everyone I've spoken to, both people that I kind of know, people that I do know, and even just strangers that I find out, oh, you work at Apple.
Casey:
They're all super chill and super cool.
Casey:
And that doesn't necessarily mean you'd meet any while you're there, but just being in the proximity gives you a chance.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
I mean, frankly, like, you know, I know we're not doing like a hiring ad for them, really, but like of all the kind of Bay Area tech company or any all the big tech company, I guess, candidates that one could possibly go to work for over on the West Coast somewhere.
Marco:
i would go to apple before going to any anyone else like it see it's such a cool place and it attracts really good people for a reason it's it's a really great place to work and and it's a really cool thing to see and it's a really great team that you that you work with there and so when you go there like you you see like at you know again you won't as cases you know you're not like walking through the offices or anything like you you
Marco:
you don't see a single desk from somebody, like, that somebody's working at.
Marco:
Like, you know, you're escorted in with, you know, event staff to the lunch area, and you sit in these chairs that are set up and everything.
Marco:
Like, you're not walking through the design lab or anything.
But...
Marco:
Any person you run into there, because you will see a lot of Apple employees there, and anybody you can talk to, talk to, because it's a company that attracts really good people for lots of good reasons.
Marco:
Again, it's a heck of an event.
Marco:
I strongly encourage you to go if you can.
Marco:
I understand if you can't, because it is a huge expense to get most people to California and stay in a hotel for a few days or whatever.
Marco:
I get that, but if you can do it, it's really cool.
Marco:
Consider becoming an ATP member.
Marco:
Members get all sorts of fun little goodies, number one of which is an ad-free version of the show.
Marco:
You get your own private feed that you can add to any podcast app you want, and it's an ad-free version of our show.
Marco:
You also get access to the bootleg feed if you'd like it.
Marco:
The bootleg is our unedited live broadcasts.
Marco:
It's released right after we finish the show recording, so it's usually the night before the main show comes out in the regular feed, so you get a faster release.
Marco:
And it contains all of our beginning and ending kind of small talk stuff, the title selection process, a few little bonus things here and there, as well as any kind of...
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
on john's beloved miyazaki movie my neighbor totoro it's so fun you got to listen to it member exclusive content is occasionally a fun thing we do there but all this comes to you for just eight bucks a month mainly you get the ad free feed and the bootleg feed those are the big things and then the occasional exclusive content is kind of a fun little bonus
Marco:
Join us today at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Again, eight bucks a month.
Marco:
We have different currencies, annual plan if you want it, but that's the gist of it.
Marco:
Eight bucks a month, you get our ad-free feed, our bootleg feed, and our occasional exclusive content.
Marco:
It is great.
Marco:
See for yourself, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for listening, and please consider becoming a member.
Marco:
Thanks.
Casey:
All right, so if you are an Apple person, I need you to tune out and come back to this episode after WWDC because it's that time again, fellas.
Casey:
Let's have a chat about Radar because it's time.
Casey:
Just to very, very briefly recap, Radar is Apple's internal tool.
Casey:
It used to be also to some degree externally visible.
Casey:
Now it's been replaced from an external perspective by feedback assistant.
Casey:
Radar is their internal tool.
Casey:
It's their bug tracker or issue tracker or what have you.
Casey:
It is basically the only way that we have as external people to communicate with Apple is to just throw a radar or really a feedback.
Casey:
We'll probably use the terms interchangeably.
Casey:
Throw feedback over the wall where I guess it gets internally turned into a radar and just hope that a human eventually looks at it and does something with it.
Casey:
And
Casey:
It is a deeply hostile and awful approach to developer relations.
Casey:
Because, you know, I can only speak for myself.
Casey:
I presume that, Marco, you probably have, and you don't have to say one way or the other, you probably have at least a couple of contacts in developer relations because you are on the bigger side, especially as an indie person, in terms of, you know, your reach and your company size and so on.
Casey:
You'd be surprised.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I can tell you, I certainly don't have any sort of contact in developer relations that if I have a question, I can ask them.
Casey:
I have a bunch of contacts that I've made completely personally that are outside developer relations, just rank and file engineers, that are friends of mine that I've made friends with, not because I'm trying to use them for any particular reason, just because they're good people, like we were talking about, and I enjoy them, and hopefully they enjoy me too.
Casey:
But I don't have any formal contacts within Apple for any sort of bugs or questions or anything like that.
Casey:
And, you know, if I have a problem, the easiest way, easiest and best way for me to get an answer is to tweet slash toot about it.
Casey:
And most times I'll get something that'll either push me in the right direction or maybe even solve my problem.
Casey:
But if I have a problem, if I have like a demonstrated problem with an Apple API...
Casey:
I can put together a feedback, which will almost certainly not get looked at.
Casey:
If it is, I will get asked for sample code.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
Which sometimes though takes hours to put together.
Casey:
This is uncompensated time, by the way.
Casey:
I don't know what an iOS developer contracts for, but years ago it was like $150 an hour.
Casey:
I'm sure it's like up around $175, $200 by now.
Casey:
So, you know, many hours of work to create a sample project for them, which I understand why they ask for it.
Casey:
But we're talking about an effective investment if, you know, if I was going to spend that time contracting myself out of like $1,000 of my time that could be used putting together a sample project for them to promptly ignore.
Casey:
Uh, you, you oftentimes get asked for a cyst diagnose, which is basically like, you know, a bunch of diagnostic information again, in and of itself, that's fair, but 90% of the time it's not even necessary or useful.
Casey:
Uh, it's just fricking broken.
Casey:
And you had an experience recently, and I think you were talking about it here on ATP.
Casey:
I don't think it was under the radar where you had said, um,
Casey:
Oh, you know, I filed a radar, and it's something that's really broken with audio stuff, if memory serves.
Casey:
And, you know, you sent that across the wire and threw it over the fence, and you didn't hear squat.
Casey:
And this is kind of a big deal, particularly for you, but arguably for Apple in general.
Casey:
In fact, why don't I let you interrupt me, and can you remind me what that bug was, if you recall?
Marco:
Yeah, I'll dig up the number and put it in the show notes.
Marco:
But effectively, it was the 16.4 betas were having the audio services were reset notification, which I think is a background demon crash.
Marco:
They were having that crash and reset audio services a lot whenever I would begin playback in Overcast.
Marco:
It was quite a common thing.
Marco:
uh way more than ever before it was causing problems like you'd hit play on 16.4 betas and just it wouldn't play and then if you go and check the overcast log you'd see oh this thing crashed like three times in a row um cool and yeah so it was it was a big problem with that and i and i attached cyst diagnosis and you know the the reproduction step to get it which was pretty easy like play something on overcast and you see this in the log and
Marco:
like and and i i did everything i was supposed to do and uh as far as i know that bug is still open i never heard anything i think it might be fixed in the uh in the last couple of betas and now uh 16 before is now out just like as of this week um and i think it is fixed in the release version of 16.4 but it was not fixed even as recently as like two weeks ago and
Marco:
So I was getting a little nervous it was going to get shipped to everybody.
Marco:
But I think it's fixed now.
Marco:
But the bug is still sitting there, open.
Marco:
I never heard a thing about it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So here's the thing is that I was talking with a friend at Apple and asked, just out of curiosity, hey, can you look at feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
We'll put it in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't need to know specifics, but just has a human being looked at this feedback, yes or no?
Casey:
And it turns out that, yes, a human had looked at it.
Casey:
And in fact, apparently there was internal activity on it within 24 hours of you filing it, which no bullshit.
Casey:
No one told me.
Casey:
That is incredible.
Casey:
That is exactly what we want to see.
Casey:
I am not lying.
Casey:
I'm not being facetious.
Casey:
Truly, that is exactly what you want to see.
Casey:
Yeah, that's amazing.
Casey:
But the problem is what you just said, Marco.
Casey:
Did you know this?
Casey:
Were you aware of this?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
What did you get back from Apple, Marco?
Casey:
Would you remind me real quick?
Marco:
Nothing.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
I just loaded up the bug now in feedback system.
Marco:
It says, recent similar reports, none.
Marco:
Resolution, open.
Marco:
No comments.
Casey:
It's not really tenable.
Casey:
It's not really fair, maybe.
Casey:
I know I say that a lot.
Casey:
I'm trying to get better about it.
Casey:
But it's just, it ain't right.
Casey:
And it's just, that's not a way for a company to
Casey:
who allegedly cares about developers, and what is the triad?
Casey:
It's Apple first, then users, and then somewhere below that is developers.
Marco:
It's not an equilateral triangle either.
Casey:
Well, that's also fair.
Casey:
If Apple cares about developers at all, can we have some sort of communication in the other direction?
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I'm not even getting into documentation and all the other problems with Apple's whole developer story, but this is not okay.
Casey:
This is something that could be a really friggin' big deal for Overcast.
Casey:
Like a colossally big deal.
Marco:
Yeah, I was really worried about this one.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And what are you supposed to do about this?
Casey:
And yes, okay, let's leave aside.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
The something incident.
Casey:
What's the formal name for it?
Casey:
I always forget.
Casey:
The DTS or something like that.
Casey:
What am I thinking of?
Marco:
Yeah, the DTS tickets.
Marco:
So yeah, so they have our DTS incident or whatever they call it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So with your developer membership, the $100 a year developer membership comes with two DTS developer tech support instances or tickets or whatever.
Marco:
You can raise one of these two tickets a year and they don't build up.
Marco:
Like if you don't use them within the year, they just expire.
Marco:
If you run out, you can buy one for 50 bucks each.
Marco:
I think you can buy extra ones.
Marco:
This actually gets you an actual DTS engineer to look at your problem, and they literally provide code-level support.
Marco:
You can include code, and they will look at it, and they will try it, and they will try to figure out what the problem is.
Marco:
And I think, I don't know, this has probably changed over the years, but I think there's some exception where if you have stumbled upon an actual bug that's their fault, then they don't charge you for the ticket or something like that.
Marco:
The problem with this system, first of all, is that most developers never use it because we don't even know about it.
Marco:
I've known about the system for years.
Marco:
I've been an Apple developer for, oh my God, how many developer members have I bought?
Marco:
12, at least 15, whatever it's been.
Marco:
Yeah, like 15 years, something like that.
Marco:
I've never used one, mostly because when I first heard about them and I heard that you only get two a year, I thought, well, I better save that up for when I really need one.
Marco:
exactly even after i learned that you can buy one for 50 bucks if you really need to like if you run out even after that i'm like i still consider it like this like you know only in an emergency of what i ever use this kind of thing and so i never even think to do it i forget about it all the time i i never consider it as an option and i probably shouldn't i really should just use it but because it's so limited i just like i completely forget that it's an option at all
Casey:
Yeah, same.
Casey:
And I mean, some of this is on us, to be fair.
Casey:
Like, we should be employing, and I'm looking at Marco, I'm looking in the mirror, we should be employing these and seeing if it's any better.
Casey:
But it's just so frustrating, especially in the cases where one puts together, and I don't know if this was the case with Marco's most recent one, but when one puts together a sample project, and I'm about to give John the floor, and you did this, John.
Casey:
When you put together a sample project and you explain exactly what's going on, here's a very simple sample project that demonstrates the problem, and you throw that over the wall, and then crickets.
Casey:
And crickets.
Casey:
And crickets.
Casey:
And it's just... And I understand, in the defense of Apple, I understand that they get just an inconceivable amount of issues.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
What I also get is that the current system does not work.
Casey:
It doesn't work for external people.
Casey:
And from everything I've heard from the internal people, it doesn't f***ing work for them either.
Casey:
So who is this in service of?
Casey:
Yes, I know that Apple's a big company.
Casey:
Yes, I know that radars go back to like literally the early 90s.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But at some point, what is this in service of?
Casey:
And don't even get me f***ing started about the fact that the way in which you say that you really care about something is duplicating a radar.
Casey:
It's just, oh, if Marco and I agree that this is a problem, well, then both of you file it and that's your de facto way of voting.
Casey:
are you kidding me with this just no that is not okay that is not a mechanism by which you vote is by throwing a radar across the wall then inevitably we'll come back with an f you give me a cyst diagnose anyway
Casey:
This is just, this is not okay.
Casey:
And the fact that this is still a thing blows my mind.
Casey:
And yes, Feedback Assistant, the app is a lot better than Radar, the web app was, but it doesn't matter.
Casey:
The whole frigging system is broken.
Casey:
It's awful.
Casey:
And I'm going to really lose my cool, believe it or not, I haven't yet.
Casey:
So instead, I'm going to say, John, tell me your recent story about your Radars and how swimmingly they went.
John:
So you two are going to make me be the big company representative again, because I have spent more time in big companies than both of you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You're the closest we got right now.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
I mean, I've spent some time, don't get me wrong, but you have certainly spent a lot more.
John:
So I do understand a lot of how things work here.
John:
A couple of reactions to things you two have said.
John:
When, you know, like the time we spend to file a feedback, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I would imagine that in a lot of cases, the vast majority of that time, at least I would hope the vast majority of that time, is the time figuring out whose bug it is.
John:
Because, you know, all our programs are filled with bugs, right?
John:
And we have to figure out why doesn't this work.
John:
And that takes a long time, depending on how thorny the bug is.
John:
but the only the only point where we're gonna hopefully file something with apple is we've done all the debugging and we have determined to the best of our ability that no i am using that api right it just doesn't work right and it's hard to determine that because applications are complicated apis are complicated we don't have the source code to the frameworks which also complicates things that's the thing that i'm used to as a web developer having the source code to all the third-party code really helps you determine
John:
is this my bug am i doing something wrong or is this a bug with you know the third party thing and it's kind of like the beginning programmer thing saying i think i found a bug in the compiler you've almost never found a bug yeah it's a it's a typical beginner programmer thing because you your program does something unexpected and you think you understand how it should work but you really don't right and that's how you learn and grow as a programmer so
John:
I think, in my experience, getting to the point where you're ready to file a feedback, that's on us, not on Apple.
John:
Yeah, I agree with that.
John:
You can't charge Apple for the time you spend debugging your program, right?
John:
Totally.
John:
And it's hard to get to that point, and that's why it feels frustrating because you spend hours, days, weeks, however long, trying to figure something out, and eventually you figure it out.
John:
I think this is not even my fault.
John:
And it feels like such an injustice because normally it's your fault.
John:
Like 99.99% of the time it's your fault, right?
John:
You did something dumb in your program.
John:
But you're like, no, I think this is a bug in one of these frameworks, which does happen, right?
John:
Then we go into the time if you are a conscientious bug reporter, which I try to be when I actually think I have a legit bug and I'm not just complaining about a feature suggestion or some crap like that, which also goes into feedback, which is why there's so many of them, right?
John:
um so i think i've got a legit issue i will go the extra mile to make a sample application this is after i've determined and probably probably part of the way i determine that it's actually a bug in a framework is by making that sample application so some of that time is attributable to me really because you get frustrated you're like wait a second i think
John:
you know forget about my app forget about all my code forget about stuff i'm doing fresh clean sheet of paper new project xcode let me see if i can reproduce this i got my real code here and i got my toy one and they kind of like meet in the middle until i can get the toy one to reproduce the problem with the minimum number of code and that's your sample project right so some of that time building that is you know is you figuring out where the bug is because very often this happens to me plenty i make the trivial sample project or more often these days i use playgrounds which
John:
has its own set of bugs but anyway use playgrounds to do something and if it works right in playgrounds or it works right in your toy example but it doesn't work right in your real app it's still probably your bug right that happens all the time but sometimes it goes the other way so when it goes the other way you're like all right i'm going to polish up this sample project i'm going to file the bug at this point in your head you understand the issue because you have boiled it down you have debugged it you have figured out
John:
When you do X and Y and Z, Q should happen, P happens instead.
John:
You've already figured that out.
John:
And you're like, I'm serving this up to you, Apple, on a silver platter.
John:
I've got a sample project.
John:
The source code to the sample project is on a public GitHub URL.
John:
A zip of it is included.
John:
There's a sysdiagnose that the feedback app already ran.
John:
I can describe in five sentences, here's the problem, expected result, actual results.
John:
It fits on a page.
John:
You could print this on an index card.
John:
Here it is.
Pshh.
John:
A bunch of things can happen at that point.
John:
One is that you may be perhaps one of the best, but one of a thousand people who sent that bug to Apple and they already know about it.
John:
And we would hope in a sane system that there would be some communication that says, yeah, no, we know about that one.
John:
It's been 50 people who have filed it, right?
Casey:
One would think.
John:
But anyway, that could happen.
John:
The other thing that could happen is that could just never get looked at because it's the bottom of a big pile and you would never know.
John:
But usually, especially if you have a tech podcast that Apple people listen to or you toot about it or whatever, someone will listen to the program and look at the bug or whatever and then get to us through back channels that X, Y, and Z is happening, right?
John:
But, you know, there's a lot of these bugs and it's difficult to, you know, get to all of them in a timely manner.
John:
You can't expect, and honestly, like, bugs that I file for my stupid apps, Apple should not look at.
John:
Like, for the purposes of my app.
John:
Because, like, who cares about my app?
John:
The only time they should look at them is because, oh, all right, we don't care about, you know, John's apps because whatever, who cares, right?
John:
But if this is actually a bug in our framework, this could affect, you know, Photoshop.
John:
or like a real app that people care about, right?
John:
If it's a legit bug in the framework, especially if it's a new bug, it didn't exist in the last version of the US and it does exist in this one.
John:
It's a regression, as they say.
John:
That's worth lurking at, not because of my apps, but because tons of apps use these frameworks.
John:
I'm not using super obscure frameworks.
John:
So if I have found a legit bug,
John:
or a legit change in behavior, someone should look at that.
John:
How do you determine that?
John:
It's a big pile of bugs.
John:
How many of them are people saying, I think the color of this button should be purple?
John:
And how many of them are a, you know, a carefully reproduced bug with a minimal sample project, right?
John:
That's a legit bug that affects Microsoft's office.
John:
You need people to sort through all those things, triage them and figure out which is which.
John:
And Apple doesn't seem to be particularly good at doing that either.
John:
Forget about the communication part of it.
John:
Right.
John:
So the most recent one I had and I do this, you know, I found a handful of bugs and I made little sample projects.
John:
The most recent one I found was interesting or the one I'm going to talk about here was interesting in that it was a straight regression.
John:
This is a thing that, you know, worked in my app in Monterey and didn't work in Ventura.
John:
Which right away makes me think this might be some kind of behavior change.
John:
And then I go look at the release notes, because when the new versions of the OS come out, they have like a framework level release notes.
John:
Hey, if you use this framework, here's what's changed in this thing, right?
John:
Because they they change things.
John:
So this this used to do that.
John:
This is deprecated.
John:
You know, we add these function.
John:
We remove those.
John:
We change this like nothing about this in any of the release notes.
John:
I look at the documentation and I'm sure documentation doesn't say anything about this.
John:
This was specifically this bug was like there's a thing in AppKit that you can put on a view that tracks when the cursor enters it and like tracks where the cursor is or whatever.
John:
called ns tracking area uh and i use it to track when the cursor enters like i'm using it for its intended purpose right um in monterey it worked as i expected in ventura it would track the cursor normally except if you were dragging something and then if you're dragging something and it's tracking area would be like i don't see any cursor i don't know what you're talking about it would not track at all and that broke a feature of my application because i needed to track it when things are being dragged right and i was debugging it for a while i'm like why is this not anyway
John:
Found the bug, isolated it, made a minimal reproduction sample application.
John:
You don't need to read anything.
John:
I always put all the text in the app.
John:
Like when you launch the app, it has text that says, here, do this, do that.
John:
I expect this to happen, and that happens, right?
John:
You don't even need to read the readme, right?
John:
Made the sample app, submitted it.
John:
Again, the fact that my app broke in Ventura, not a big deal.
John:
But if this is a legit change in behavior for NS tracking area, that is a commonly used thing in applications.
John:
It is a, you know, it's from AppKit.
John:
Lots of applications use AppKit.
John:
And, you know, that's a significant piece of functionality that just doesn't work anymore.
John:
And, you know, I didn't get any response or whatever.
John:
Eventually, I added a comment to the thing.
John:
Someone did respond to it because I probably complained about it on probably back then Twitter or whatever.
John:
And said, oh, you should, you know, what is, they asked me, what is your application or whatever?
John:
And they said, actually, you should be using the drag handling thing to handle drag, so on and so forth, you know.
John:
there was actually some feedback i'm like okay right well so i understand that i could use the drag thing but like it worked in monterey and doesn't work in mature is ns tracking area just not going to track drags anymore because if that's the case like like i was trying to get like was this an intentional change or are you just telling me hey there's a bug but you can work around it in this way are you telling me from now on ns tracking area will not do this so just get used to it and if that's true you should probably update the documentation and release notes oh by the way imagine
John:
that from now on ns tracking area won't do this or whatever so i added a comment to the task that said or to the feedback that said um you know my application is whatever um and i you know i've since added a workaround to you know using the drag handling to do this like i said if you're on venturi use the drag handling you know whatever
John:
And the next response I got in feedback was, great, we've closed your book.
John:
I'll read you the text, which is not great.
John:
Let's see.
John:
Thank you for letting us know that your issue has been resolved.
John:
You can close this feedback by selecting close feedback by the actions button found above.
John:
As you indicated, this issue is resolved.
John:
This feedback will no longer be monitored and incoming messages will not be reviewed.
John:
cool should you find the issue that the issue is still present please file a new feedback report so this is like double whammy because like one i wasn't saying it's resolved i was saying i found a workaround which programmers do all the time like oh there's a bug or a change in behavior you can code around it or whatever right and two saying oh and by the way don't even bother responding to this because even though we can't close this issue for you and we want you to close it yourself uh we're just never going to look at it again if you think this issue is still there file a new bug
John:
So I did file a new bug and said, I think it's still there because basically I don't know what you're telling me here.
John:
Again, my question was, is this like intentional new behavior or is it a bug that you're going to eventually fix?
John:
Not that I care that much, but it is basic functionality.
John:
And I complained about it on Mastodon and Apple people saw it.
John:
And so eventually I got someone to respond to the task and explain the situation.
John:
But John,
John:
Running to the press never helps.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Explain the situation in English, basically saying, this is an intentional change.
John:
We think this is the way it's supposed to work.
John:
It's not going to work the other way.
John:
Yes, we know we haven't updated the documentation or put anything in release notes, and we've already filed separate.
John:
you know internal radars to deal with that or whatever here's my what i'm going to say about this this particular experience i'm not going to say oh why didn't my bug get fixed and why did it take too long and all this other stuff because honestly who cares right what i am going to say is that from a policy perspective one of the things that apple should really work on setting aside all the things we already talked about like oh you know be better right when when you get to a point
John:
where a human being has somehow found their way to my feedback, whether it's because I have a podcast and post it on Mastodon or it's just random luck.
John:
At some point, hey, you come up on the rotation.
John:
Your feedback is being triaged.
John:
A human being has now got 37 seconds to look at your feedback and do something with it.
John:
I think one of the worst things that they do now that they can fix without really spending any more money or time or whatever is when a human does that, make sure you spend that time doing something useful because that's not going to come back again.
John:
I'm going to have to wait.
John:
The time gap between some of these things sometimes is like weeks or months between any response, right?
John:
So in that moment, when the human is looking at it for 37 seconds, please, human,
John:
Like, spend the extra five seconds to write a coherent sentence because we know no one is going to look at that again for three months.
John:
This is the one chance I get from my bug to have its time in the sunshine.
John:
And all I wanted as a human with reading comprehension skills to say to me, this is intended behavior.
John:
We're sorry that it's not documented, but just FYI, it's going to work this way from now on.
John:
That's it.
John:
And that wouldn't take any more time than the sentence that I just read you or the feedback that was in there.
John:
It's actually a shorter sentence.
John:
Spend the time that you have, which is small and not enough.
John:
Spend that time wisely because it wastes all of our time to get a...
John:
a response which we have all gotten, every developer has gotten this, a response that makes you think the person writing it either A, isn't a person and is a bot, or B, did not read anything in your feedback.
John:
If a response like that is put in, ostensibly, I'm told these are all done by humans, if a human spends their 37 seconds to give a response that makes the person who posted it think that they didn't read the feedback, either A, they didn't read the feedback, which is bad, or B, they wasted that time.
John:
So my one in this particular round of being mad about radar and feedback, my one plea for Apple is in the tiny slice of time, humans time that we get in the too small slice of human times we get, please let them do a reasonable job of feedback because it will save all of us so much time.
John:
It weighs so much more time to have three rounds of back and forth with a month between each round and
John:
than to just have the person write a coherent sentence on the first one that sounds like a human, not like a PR machine, and that reflects the fact that they saw the bug.
John:
that that i mean that's what really bothered me about this secondarily if anyone is listening or whatever i think it is insane that ns tracking area which has an option called enabled during mouse drag now is not does not work during mouse drag and i and i i await anxiously the updated documentation that how are they going to document the enabled during mouse drag option they're going to say this used to enable during mouse drag but it totally doesn't anymore sorry about that
John:
I think that's dumb.
John:
But that's the type of thing, like, if it was an open source project, I'd be in the issue arguing, like, I think this is a bad change in its tracking area, you're breaking apps for no reason, there's an option called enable during mouse drag, what the hell, right?
John:
You can't have that argument with Apple because it would be three months between replies.
John:
And by the way, they already said they're not monitoring this bug, so you'd have to be refiling it every single time.
John:
Like, that's pointless.
John:
That's the time-wasting open source arguing over bugs that Apple actually...
John:
you know, as a happy accident of their terrible feedback system avoids or whatever.
John:
But setting that aside, I'm willing to say, just tell me, Apple, just tell me this is the new way it is.
John:
Communicate that successfully.
John:
Communicate that you know that you haven't documented it, right?
John:
And by the way, on this particular issue, as far as I can tell, I mean, I don't know, because obviously we don't know what happens on Apple and we just talked about how there's no, you know, communication.
John:
But like, it seems like what happened...
John:
is whatever team is responsible for in this tracking area or that whole framework or whatever decided they were going to make this change probably for like some efficiency reason or it's like someone thought it would be a good idea like this happens all the time and you know we've decided that this the behavior of this needs to change even though it's going to be annoying for some people
John:
it'll have fewer bugs it'll have better performance like i get it right so they thought they were going to do this setting aside the fact that there's an enable during mouse drive auction whatever but they were going to do this uh but it seemed like they were going to do it and they knew it might break some applications but they didn't want to mention it and the release notes are documented because they were like fingers crossed maybe this won't break anyone's app and i hope no one notices don't tell anyone
John:
Yeah, don't like, yeah, which totally happens.
John:
You're like, Apple, the big company would never do that.
John:
Trust me, this absolutely happens because the incentives are structured for you not to go, oh, this has to be in the release notes.
John:
And then we have to make, you know, we have some policy that was made 10 years ago that says if you do any breaking change to AppKit, you have to clear it with Microsoft explicitly to make sure it doesn't break Office.
John:
Can we just make the change and put it in the betas?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe just no one will notice.
John:
And here I am with my dinky little app that five people run saying, excuse me, I noticed.
John:
And they must be like, damn it, somebody noticed.
John:
And it's an app that doesn't matter.
John:
So who cares?
John:
But it's a stupid guy with a podcast.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, I don't fault those engineers for trying to slip one under.
John:
I have 100 percent done this.
John:
So many times and I've been caught doing it and I've also snuck a bunch through and it feels like I'm just going to change the behavior and I bet nothing's going to break.
John:
And if I just don't say anything, it'll be be fine.
John:
But I'm going to say that's also probably not the best way to do things.
John:
So whatever incentives are structured to make engineers want to sneak this out without putting any release notes, change those incentives because.
John:
Engineers should be incentivized to do the right thing, which is, hey, we're changing the behavior of this.
John:
It's in the release notes.
John:
We updated the docs.
John:
Sorry if it breaks your app.
John:
And if it breaks too many apps, we'll roll it back.
John:
But just wanted to know this is a change because that would have saved me a little bit of my time on my app.
John:
And who knows?
John:
Maybe it did break, you know, Microsoft Office or something.
John:
And there's some other feedback about that.
John:
Um, but yeah, that's, that's, that's today, this year's this month's, whatever advice for Apple is spend the tiny slice of time you have wisely because it wastes most of our time if you don't.
John:
And I don't think it actually requires any more time.
John:
It just requires slightly differently spent time.
John:
above and beyond that not to go over all the things we've talked about a million times before but i do feel like there is a big difference between a bug report a concise bug report with a minimal sample project that's on github from a known good developer and a random feedback about the color of a button from someone you've never heard of before and it's the same thing with the app store that is frustrating when like a company like panic that should be like triple a white glove gold tier status in apple developer can't get their game through to the app store
John:
Their famous well-reviewed game that's on a million other platforms from the company panic while while scam apps sail through but You know the goal of these system these faceless bureaucracies is not to be a roulette wheel for outcomes
John:
There should be some... When you're triaging things, you should take into account the quality of the report, who it's coming from.
John:
They certainly do for Adobe, Microsoft, you know, the big companies like that.
Casey:
Oh, funny how that is.
John:
But they should also triage based on, like, you know, is there a sample project?
John:
Historically, like, give it... It's like Uber drivers and ratings, right?
John:
Like, give the developers a rating.
John:
This person...
John:
Daniel Jockett, five stars, gives amazing bug reports, always very concise, always technically accurate, hardly ever makes a mistake, hardly ever blames the compiler, comes with a sample project, is smart, is responsive.
John:
Like, look at those first.
John:
Like, you're triaging.
John:
You can't look at them all.
John:
There's too many.
John:
When you triage, bubble up the good ones.
John:
Have a system of, like, rating them.
John:
And then, getting to Casey's point...
John:
But, you know, I have to file a second one.
John:
Why can't I do?
John:
But public issue tracking systems have this solved.
John:
We all know that Apple's usual response is, well, we can't use public issue tracking because, you know, Adobe sends the source code to Photoshop or you can't have them up or whatever.
John:
And the answer to that from us has always been let people opt into it.
John:
Let developers say, I agree that anyone can see this bug report.
John:
You know what?
John:
It's on me.
John:
I'm saying market is public.
John:
I'm not going to put Photoshop source code in here.
John:
What I'm going to put is my little sample project that I made.
John:
And I'm going to say everybody can see this because then they can send the link to all their friends who will go to that URL and hit the me to vote up button on the thing instead of having to file something themselves.
John:
These are all imminently solvable problems without hiring more people except for to improve the system, which they already did once with the feedback thing.
John:
without staffing up someone and so forth uh and then i guess the final thing i'll say is uh app review used to be believe it or not way worse than it is in terms of how long things would go through oh so much worse and then at some point something happened inside apple and app review got faster did they do that by cutting corners and getting worse quality maybe but the point is you know it got faster no i think they actually did it by firing somebody but yes
John:
You know, whatever had to happen.
John:
I'm not saying, you know, there's easy solutions.
John:
Oh, we'll just we'll just spend less time and do a worse job and we can do more of them.
John:
And I don't even sure if that's the right term.
John:
But the point is, it is possible for big things to change inside Apple.
John:
It's happened before with AppReview.
John:
It can happen with feedback and radar.
John:
It is not a intractable problem.
John:
Yes, they'll probably have to spend more money and hire more staff or whatever, but whatever it is that they did to make app review way, way, way faster.
John:
And I think we would all agree that that's a net win.
John:
Like the quality still sucks and they still do terrible things like rejecting panics games, you know, and this is all the horror stories that all still there.
John:
But I feel like that's about been a constant, but the time has gone way down.
John:
So if the time between me getting useless, you know, incoherent feedback responses was three days instead of three weeks or three months, I would feel a lot better about it.
John:
So I feel like it is possible for Apple to change and improve feedback.
John:
I don't know what has to happen for that to happen, but I know it's possible.
John:
I know you can do it, Apple, right?
John:
There are basic suggestions that you ask any developer, you pull someone off, develop Apple developer off the street and say, what can we do to improve feedback?
John:
They have seven ideas for you.
John:
They're all good.
John:
Just take them.
John:
Like they're so obvious.
John:
Everybody knows what they are.
John:
It doesn't mean they're easy.
John:
It doesn't mean that you can do them overnight.
John:
It doesn't mean you don't have to hire new people.
John:
Like I understand, but this is an important part of the company, kind of like AppReview, an important part of the developer ecosystem that was really, really, really bad.
John:
making improvements and it pays dividends.
John:
Please do this.
Casey:
You know, we love the three of us in particular love to whine about, well, you know, why isn't such and such better?
Casey:
Why isn't it better?
Casey:
And I think one of the things that we, that we can do is talk about, you know, well, how would this, how could this become better?
Casey:
And I think what you're saying, John is excellent.
Casey:
You know, if a, if a reviewer is looking at it, like really properly look at it.
Casey:
If it's, if it's a, if it's more than just a, this is broken, broken,
Casey:
Do something about that.
Casey:
If there's a sample app, run the sample app.
Casey:
Acknowledge that this reviewer or this submitter has done good work.
Casey:
And like you said, have a rating system or something like that.
Casey:
Oh, Daniel Jalkin always writes amazing bug reports.
Casey:
We should pay attention to him.
Casey:
Maybe even, and this is going to be weird, Apple, but maybe even reply to him.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be amazing?
Casey:
I know, right?
Casey:
This is some real new thought technology.
Casey:
Casey, all he does is fuss and moan.
Casey:
He never includes a sample app.
Casey:
That's not true for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
He never includes a sample app.
Casey:
Oh, he doesn't deserve a reply.
Casey:
Well, you know what?
Casey:
Okay, that's kind of deserved.
Casey:
But another thing that I've been thinking about is...
Casey:
Apple will never, ever tell us what they're doing internally, which I don't think that has to be the case.
Casey:
But, you know, it's Apple.
Casey:
I understand it.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
But what if there was, like, some sort of indication on the public-facing feedback the last time that anyone within Apple has touched this?
Casey:
We don't know what they've done.
Casey:
We don't know if they just opened it and closed it immediately.
Casey:
But somebody touched this a week ago, a day ago.
Casey:
Two days ago.
Casey:
And then fast forward a week, and it says today.
Casey:
Then you don't have to tell me a damn thing.
Casey:
I at least know, assuming this isn't just, you know, fakery, I at least know that some friggin' human being has looked at this in the last six months.
Casey:
That would make me feel at least a little bit better, probably even so much better, because at least I know things are happening.
Casey:
I don't know what's happening.
Casey:
Maybe I won't see the results of it for a year, but at least I know somebody cares enough to have looked at it in the last week.
Casey:
And now, of course, I could argue on the flip side of that is, well, most of these are probably going to get looked at once and ever again.
Casey:
Well, we already know that.
Casey:
You're not telling us anything we don't already know.
Casey:
Like, who cares?
Casey:
Put in writing.
Casey:
Maybe somebody who actually gives a shit up high will be able to do something about it.
Casey:
Like, oh, there's so many, like John said, there's so many ways to fix this.
Casey:
And it's just, there's so many ways to fix this.
Casey:
And if any one of them, you know, I would like, I am in hell and I would love a cold glass of water.
Casey:
Please, anything.
Casey:
anything Apple please and my favorite by the way my favorite slap in the face and I think John you just had this happen recently is oh here's something you reported years ago which kudos to Apple for keeping it around and having looked at it years later but nevertheless here's something that happened years ago and we think we fixed it hey you want to do me a solid and go check well okay fair enough but John what happens if you don't check immediately
John:
Well, actually, it wasn't a years ago one.
John:
It was a thing where they said, and this is, we'll link in the show notes to, who's LapCat Software?
John:
Who's that guy?
Casey:
Jeff Johnson, is that right?
John:
Yes, Jeff Johnson.
John:
Had a similar complaint to mine, but yeah.
John:
File the thing, they fixed it, or they said it was fixed.
John:
And they do the thing, which I think is good, which is, hey, don't just close the bug when you fixed it.
John:
Actually get the person who opened the bug to agree with you.
John:
Yes, I agree.
John:
You have fixed it so we can close the report.
John:
And that would be a good system if we weren't sending messages to each other by carrier pigeon, right?
John:
Because it takes three months for anything to get back and forth.
John:
So that kind of makes it dumb.
John:
But anyway, I'd filed something.
John:
They said, we think this is fixed.
John:
And Apple's thing that they've been doing lately, as in the past few years, is...
John:
They'll send you the we think it's fixed message incoherently written in a way that you have to read seven times to figure out what the heck they're even talking about.
John:
You know, as you'll see, like we think this is fixed and they'll get like a build number.
John:
You're like, wait, what OS is that?
John:
What beta is that?
John:
How do I get that?
John:
How do I install that?
John:
They'll tell you basically we think it's fixed in a beta.
John:
And what they want you to do is, oh, just try your, you know, try your app or your sample program in this beta of the operating system and let us know whether it's fixed.
John:
Uh, and you know, one of mine was, uh, uh, they, they said, you know, they sent this bug and it wasn't one of my good bug reports.
John:
It was one of my bad ones.
John:
It was from a user's perspective.
John:
It was related to my program where like, um, there was like a thing is happening in system settings that I don't think should be happening based on what my program does.
John:
And they're like, uh, you know, it wasn't a great bug report.
John:
So they said, we think we've got it fixed.
John:
Can you confirm it in a beta?
John:
And my answer, I didn't say anything, but like my, my reading, it was like, uh,
John:
I don't have a good way to install a macOS beta.
John:
I'm not going to install it on my main machine.
John:
I don't have a drive available.
John:
All my laptops have been lent out to my kids.
John:
My son had to take two laptops to college for, so he had to run a VM on an Intel Mac, but he has an ARM Mac.
John:
And anyway, it wasn't convenient for me to install a beta anymore.
John:
So I just had the Casey style childlike satisfaction of them saying, please let us know if this is fixed in less beta.
John:
And then I just ignored it.
John:
I mean, because like, you know, I could have responded and said, oh, I don't have time to install it.
John:
But like bottom line is, OK, how about I let your thing sit there unresponded for six months?
John:
See how you like that.
John:
How about I leave your thing under?
John:
I know Apple, suddenly you want my feedback and you're sending me emails every week saying, hey, just so you know, your feedback, we asked for, you know, we need a response from you.
John:
We need some feedback.
John:
Engineering needs you to confirm this.
John:
They would send you emails every week or two saying, you know, letting you know that you're supposed to respond.
John:
And I would just ignore them and be like...
John:
i don't i don't have like not because i'm being mean and spiteful but i literally don't have time to install a beta to figure that out and what i figured was you know the new public version of mac os will come out and then i'll be able to see if it's fixed right that's what i figured would happen right instead what happened is uh after in my case 35 days apple said uh we're just going to close your bug
John:
We didn't hear from you.
Casey:
So later.
John:
Right.
John:
And basically, so the tolerance of Apple, I thought it was like on a fixed timer, but apparently not because Jeff Johnson had only waited like 16 days.
John:
Like when they ask you, hey, confirm that this is fixed.
John:
If you don't respond on their timetable,
John:
They'll just say, well, we waited a while and we didn't hear from you, so we'll just assume it's fixed.
John:
Done.
John:
Bye.
John:
Which is not the way it should work.
John:
If you're going to have this system where we don't close it until the developer confirms that it's fixed, you have to wait for them to confirm.
John:
And if basically no response, you will assume it's fixed.
John:
Why would you assume it's fixed?
John:
Maybe I'm dead.
John:
that's why i didn't respond you don't know what's going on over here i didn't respond to your confirmation thing you can't be that must mean it's fixed i'm closing it out right at least let the release version of the os come out because i'll update because i'll update to the latest version and then i'll be able to tell and by the way it's not fixed but i'll
John:
i'll pay it to the latest version because 13.3 is out it's totally not fixed it's it's a bad bug report i don't want to get into it like i don't blame apple this is a really complicated issue i don't even know how to fully report this but it's doing something that it shouldn't be doing or maybe it should be it's hard to tell without talking to a human but it's a minor issue i don't really care that much about it but like but and jeff johnson has a similar story his was closed after 16 days for the same reason he's like i don't have a good way to install a beta i'll just wait for the release oh never mind they closed it before the release came out
John:
uh apple like apple's internal system patience for lack of response from developers seems very low whereas we file things and months weeks years go by and we hear nothing we're expected to just tolerate that right so it is a very asymmetrical relationship uh and i think the apple's policy surrounding this is not great i would actually argue for inside apple
John:
If you think you fixed the issue to save us all time, close the bug.
John:
Say closed.
John:
We think it's fixed as whatever.
John:
And I know they have this weird thing where you can't reopen bugs, which just seems like a real problem with their system.
John:
But like if you wait for all developers to confirm, it's going to take you forever.
John:
And they don't actually wait for you to confirm.
John:
They'll auto close it after end days anyway.
John:
So it's like, just be honest and say, when you think you fix it, just close it as resolved.
John:
Say resolved, fixed in macOS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Because then there's a known resolution.
John:
And if I come back to it, I'm on vacation.
John:
I come back from vacation.
John:
I'm like, oh, looks like my bug was closed.
John:
And they said it was fixed in macOS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
I can confirm that at any time at my leisure.
John:
If I care about that bug, presumably macOS has rolled on since then, and I'll try to reproduce it.
John:
And if it's not fixed, in a sane world, I would reopen the bug.
John:
But in this world, I can refile it, right?
John:
You don't have to wait for me to confirm and send me nagging emails and then just close it anyway when I don't respond for two weeks.
John:
All right.
John:
That was just a little bonus content there.
John:
So I can link to the Jeff Johnson thing.
John:
But that policy also seems counterproductive, let's say, because it's just it's it's pretending that a relationship exists that doesn't actually exist, which is like we're talking back and forth.
John:
We're working together on this bug.
John:
No, we're not.
John:
We're throwing things over the wall and you are occasionally popping up every few months to ask us to do something which may be inconvenient for us.
Casey:
And as a final note on this, in the same vein as what I was saying about Siri, I think that there's a lot of people within Apple that would agree that Radar is perhaps not optimal.
Casey:
But I don't think that most people, even potentially the rank and file, really understand how aggressively awful it is for third-party developers.
Casey:
And here again, it's one of those things where I think it's easy for Apple to be like, eh, it's not great for us either, you know.
Casey:
Or...
Casey:
You know, you don't really understand how many we get or it's really, really a hard problem to solve, which all of those things are true.
Casey:
But ultimately, that doesn't matter.
Casey:
At some point, you need to fix the problem.
Casey:
At some point, Siri needs to be better than a pile of trash.
Casey:
At some point, radar and feedback assistant need to be better than just throwing thing into DevNull and hoping for the best.
Casey:
Like, it doesn't matter if you can excuse yourselves away from why this is bad.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
You all make a ridiculous amount of money to solve really hard problems.
Casey:
Here's a really hard problem to solve.
Casey:
Fix radar.
Casey:
It's actually not that hard.
Casey:
But still, fix radar.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
All right, can we do some Ask ATP to cheer me up, please?
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Steven Goza writes, John and others have mentioned a bunch about Mastodon being federated, and I can't wrap my head around it.
Casey:
I ignored it for a while until last week, which was probably two months ago, when John said an instance could become, quote, unfederated, quote.
Casey:
Now I can't ignore my confusion anymore and would love an explanation when you have a chance, which...
Casey:
Unfortunately, that time didn't come until now, but now we have the chance.
Casey:
So, John, what does federating or federation mean?
John:
Usually people use the email analogy, and I will use that briefly here before I try a different one as well.
John:
So the email analogy is you can pick an email provider, Gmail, Hotmail.
John:
You can host your own email in your own domain, you know, whatever, iCloud, Mail, all that stuff.
John:
Um, that is kind of your instance.
John:
Uh, you know, you can email me at my name at iCloud.com and my name at gmail.com or whatever.
John:
Um, you pick Gmail, you picked iCloud, you picked Yahoo, you picked Hotmail.
John:
Those are your instances, right?
John:
But you can send email to anybody when they say, oh, just send me your email address.
John:
You don't look and say, oh, I can't email you.
John:
I'm on Gmail and you're on Hotmail.
John:
No, you know that you can send an email to anyone on any other email instance because that's how email works.
John:
It is a federated system kind of.
John:
Right.
John:
So in Mastodon, we have little Mastodon addresses.
John:
It's your username at your instance.
John:
They look kind of like email addresses, but we put another out of the thing.
John:
So mine is at Syracuse at Mastodon dot social.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, it's like an email address, right?
John:
Um, but I can follow people on any other instance and they can follow me the same way we could email each other.
John:
If we are on different email instances or servers or whatever, that's what a federation means.
John:
The more precise or slightly more precise technical explanation, um, which still glosses over some details is, uh, the mastodon.social server that I'm on, uh,
John:
uh it talks to other servers to find out what's happening on them if uh and the way it does that is it looks all the people who have accounts i'm asking on not social uh what is the i'm gonna give you a sequel query now give me the unique list of uh instances that people follow on this server so you know
John:
500 people follow someone from this instance, one person follows from this instance.
John:
Just give me the unikified list of all the instances.
John:
Those are the instances that Mastodon.social needs to talk to.
John:
It doesn't need to talk to all the instances in the world because if nobody on Mastodon.social follows someone on foobar.social, it doesn't need to talk to that thing at all, right, and vice versa.
John:
So it can figure out who do I need to talk to.
John:
And then periodically, they communicate using the activity protocol to exchange information.
John:
Tell me what the people that my people follow are saying.
John:
And by the way, here's what my people are saying.
John:
And I will send that to all the other instances that for the people that follow them.
John:
Right.
John:
So you can sort of see how they work in the same way that an email server will receive an email from anybody who sends it and then will allow email to go out or whatever.
John:
Unfederation is something that kind of also happens in email as well, where an instance where one instance will decide, like, for example, Hotmail, if Hotmail decided, you know what?
John:
we're not going to allow any more email from gmail users not that they would ever do that but just you or me right that would mean that if you're on gmail and you send email to someone at hotmail it would bounce back and say nah sorry i couldn't deliver the email uh the hotmail server said they're not accepting email from gmail anymore right
John:
That happens with spammers.
John:
There's some thing that's emailing and it's spamming, right?
John:
The big email services like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, iCloud will unfederate.
John:
By the way, I'm pretty sure it's called defederate.
John:
The big email servers will have a denialist that will remove all of the spam servers that they don't want to receive email from.
John:
So you can imagine with a federated system like this, especially with something like Mastodon that's not quite the same as email,
John:
You could draw them out as little islands.
John:
You could have an island of instances that all talk to each other, but they don't talk to this other island of instances, or maybe there's one or two connections or whatever.
John:
So it's not like there's just one giant pool, and if you get defederated, you're off to the side.
John:
It could break up into a whole bunch of little islands with sparse connections between them and lots of internal connections.
John:
We'll see how this is going to shake out.
John:
But in the case of Mastodon, defederating is considered a feature of
John:
Not like a burden because email is supposed to be universal communication.
John:
Setting aside spammers, anyone should be able to email anyone else.
John:
But on a social network, the instance can set rules for behavior.
John:
You know, for instance, just off the top of my head, you could say this instance does not allow anyone to to use curse words.
John:
Right.
John:
And everybody who doesn't want to see curse words could be on that instance.
John:
And they might decide that instance might decide to defederate from any other instance that allows the use of curse words.
John:
If they did that, anyone who's on that instance, like, wait a second, I used to follow person over there.
John:
Now I can't see their stuff anymore.
John:
And they say, oh, well, we don't want curse words coming into our instance.
John:
So we defederated from them.
John:
And that person might say, oh, that sucks.
John:
I'm leaving this instance and going to an instance that is federated.
John:
And in that way, people would sort themselves into groups according to who they are willing to be federated with or whatever.
John:
In practice, what we mostly expect is there'll be a reasonable set of behavioral rules that
John:
That the vast majority of people will agree upon and defederation will only happen when like a Nazi or child porn server or some terrible thing comes and they'll be defederated and it'll kind of be like the civilized world of people who have basic standards for behavior.
John:
And, you know, because defederating is like the nuclear option, right?
John:
You can always just not follow people and you can block individual people and you can mute people and you can do all those types of defederation is like, look, this entire instance is filled with Nazis.
John:
It's so bad.
John:
It's unredeemable.
John:
If any good people are there, I'm sorry, but we're going to defederate from you or whatever.
John:
And so we don't know how this is gonna work out.
John:
This is kind of the first time this is being done at a large scale where defederation is a Feature of the system and not just something they use to deal with spam and abuse But just you know potentially ideological tool or a way for people to sort them into different bins As I said in past shows
John:
it may be the case that what happens here is kind of what happened with emails you get a bunch of really big instances that are kind of too big to fail and they could never defederate from each other because it would break the entire system and that would be kind of a shame because that kind of defeats the purpose of federation when you have these you know you know duopoly or whatever really big things but we'll see how it shakes out so that's how mastodon is structured that's how it's supposed to work we'll see how it's going to actually work in practice
Casey:
Yeah, really quick shout-out to the Decoder podcast, which I don't personally listen to every episode, but everyone I've heard has been very good.
Casey:
They just had on Eugene Rochko.
Casey:
I probably butchered that pronunciation.
Casey:
I'm sorry about that.
Casey:
But he is the benevolent dictator for life for Macedon.
Casey:
And it's like an hour, hour and a quarter.
Casey:
It was really, really, really good.
Casey:
I just listened to it a few hours ago.
Casey:
So that is worth listening to.
Casey:
And it's clear that he is someone...
Casey:
who, whether or not you agree with him, deeply cares about Mastodon and deeply cares about doing the right thing.
Casey:
And I think I generally agree with a lot of the things he said, except maybe quote tweets or quote toots, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But they talk a bit about Federation in this.
Casey:
And I really think it's a fascinating case study on, you know,
Casey:
Can communities really self-govern?
Casey:
What happens if they turn kind of evil?
Casey:
You know, what is this all going to mean?
Casey:
This is what you were talking about earlier, John.
Casey:
But the conversation with the guy who created Mastodon is really, really, really interesting.
Casey:
And so if you have the time, I definitely suggest it.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Eric Smith wants to know, is software getting worse?
Casey:
And this is a blog post on the Stack Overflow blog from late January.
Casey:
And it talks about, you know, is software legitimately getting worse?
Casey:
And so someone, I presume John, pulled some quotes for me to read.
Casey:
from from this blog post i suspect bugs per line of code is more or less staying constant but applications are much more complex than they were leading to more bugs in the absolute number sense also the threshold for a quote-unquote bug has changed over time for example tearing and frame latency were considered normal now they're a bug i don't think that expand the expanding the set of bug is terrible but a byproduct of that will be that it's hard to keep that set small
John:
There's the old adage in software, which is one of those old adages that no one really has the wherewithal to actually test, but people hear and it rings true to them.
John:
So we keep repeating it.
John:
So I'm doing that.
John:
It's that the number of bugs per line of code written by a programmer hasn't changed that much over the years.
John:
You know, there's a range.
John:
It's a bell curve or whatever.
John:
But in general, if you're going to write a thousand lines of codes, how many bugs on average do you expect to find a thousand lines of code?
John:
and that makes some sense obviously not all lines are created equal you know um it depends on what language you're writing it or whatever um but in general if you're going to write a thousand lines there's some average percentage amount of bugs you're going to have and then you debug and there's various software testing methodologies and qa and stuff to remove those bugs and make the software as bug free as time and money will allow right that is a
John:
a well-known thing.
John:
I don't think that's changing much.
John:
And the reason most people believe that is because although the software industry and technology advances by leaps and bounds, humans change way slower.
John:
And so in the blink of an eye between the invention of electricity and today, human evolution has done nothing.
John:
right except for maybe like uh work up some immunities to some viruses and stuff but like just generally nothing so it's not as if oh because humor is the faster we'll get so much better at programming that we'll make fewer mistakes no we're pretty much making the same amount of mistakes and incidentally this is this uh this particular argument very often comes up in the context of high level versus low level languages which we've talked about many times in the past and it's why proponents like me of high level languages say uh
John:
No matter how much you love C or C++ or assembly or whatever you may be arguing for or objective C or whatever, the bottom line is higher level languages let you write fewer lines of code.
John:
And even if you think it's all syntactic sugar or it's pointless or it's taking me too far away from the internals and I need a lower level or whatever, the unescapable fact is the more things you type, the more opportunity there is to make bugs.
John:
So if you have a higher level language that lets you do things with
John:
fewer lines of code with less boilerplate with less repeated things with less worrying about details that aren't important to your program you will produce fewer bugs for the functionality you're making you're still doing the same number of bugs per lines of code but because a thousand lines of swift does way more than a thousand lines of assembly your bug per line is the same but your bug per functionality is way better as for eric's question is software getting worse
John:
I think basically no.
John:
I think it's actually getting better, mostly because every part of the stack that we're using, it gets higher and higher and higher level.
John:
And of course, we're building on top of everything that has come before.
John:
We're getting so much more functionality for the amount of bugs that we're getting.
John:
Now, that might not feel important to you because you're like, I don't care that what Twitter client is doing would be science fiction to someone in the 60s in terms of, holy cow, what is it actually doing under the covers?
John:
Networking stacks and requests and...
John:
data encoding and decoding and the whole operating system stack on top of it and the layout engine it's like it is insane what and then for you it's like i scroll see a bunch of words and i scroll right it's easy for us to take that for granted but the amount of functionality as in what is it actually doing to let you use your thumb to scroll a bunch of words right is phenomenal and the number of bugs that it has compared to that amount of functionality versus the number of bugs like a recipe manager on an apple 2e had
John:
like the number of bugs is similar, but the functionality is vastly greater.
John:
So I would say software is getting better, just maybe not in a way that users notice because users are very quick to take for granted, like, you know, the magic of what these things are doing.
John:
And then all we can see is like, yeah, but there are still bugs.
John:
There are always going to be bugs unless you can spend huge amounts of time and money stamping them a lot, which you can't for an application that lets you scroll tweets or whatever, right?
John:
But we do get more and more functionality over time.
John:
So that's my take on this question.
Marco:
Yeah, I think there's also – you have to look at what software is asked to do over time and how that changes over time.
Marco:
Our expectations –
Marco:
are so vastly accelerating over time.
Marco:
And what we expect software to do today is so different from what it did back when we had Apple II running Print Shop Pro or whatever.
Marco:
It's so different compared to that.
Marco:
We expect our software to do way more.
Marco:
On one level, John is right, that the languages get better, the abstractions we're working on get better, the tools get better, and so that multiplies our productivity.
Marco:
How good can a program be
Marco:
per program we're working on it or per hour of time that's put into working on it we have made huge advances there but the reason it can feel like software is so buggy these days is that we are asking it to do a heck of a lot more than we ever have before and that's always increasing as soon as software achieves some new amount of functionality we immediately take it for granted and move on to asking about other things
Marco:
so for instance even if we don't have to go back to the apple too i'll just go back to the beginning of the iphone because this is like this is like where i've done you know a lot of my professional software development so i've been here a while i've seen a lot of things change over over time and and customer expectations changing over time and when the iphone i'll even say when the app store first launched so the iphone gets the first year for free when the app store first launched in 2008
Marco:
One person could make an app and the tools were pretty primitive.
Marco:
The hardware was pretty primitive.
Marco:
I mean, not compared to the Apple II, by any means.
Marco:
We were way past that.
Marco:
But, you know, compared to where we are today, things were simpler and more primitive and lower level.
Marco:
We didn't have luxuries.
Marco:
I mean, heck, the first version of the iPhone SDK didn't even have interface builder or core data or anything like that.
Marco:
We were super early.
Marco:
We'd have to see manual, retain, release, auto-release, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
Oh, gosh, that's right.
Marco:
All the UI was built in code for that first... There were no storyboards yet or anything like that.
Marco:
So it was early.
Marco:
It was basic.
Marco:
And UIKit was super early, super basic.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
All you had to focus on was whatever that app could do on the iPhone 2.0 screen.
Marco:
And it was a single device with a single screen resolution.
Marco:
And there was no background tasking.
Marco:
There were no extensions.
Marco:
There were no...
Marco:
There was no Apple Watch.
Marco:
There was no iPad.
Marco:
There was no Catalyst app.
Marco:
There was no widgets.
Marco:
All the stuff that we expect today wasn't there.
Marco:
And back then, you expected also that the app would kind of hold its own data.
Marco:
There was a lot less expectation of cloud-based storage, a lot less expectation of syncing and of cloud backup.
Marco:
Most things didn't use accounts and didn't have account mechanics in them.
Marco:
There was no in-app purchase.
Marco:
There were very few ads.
Marco:
It was such a different experience back then, not only because of the technological situation, but also because the customer expectations were simpler.
Marco:
Now, you are expected, if you're making an iPhone app, you're expected to have all of that stuff.
Marco:
You're expected definitely to have sync.
Marco:
To do sync well, you're probably going to need some kind of basic account system, and that adds a whole bunch of complexity.
Marco:
There's a lot there.
Marco:
You're probably going to have interactions with different web services to pull different stuff in.
Marco:
Your customers are going to expect you to have things like an iPhone and iPad app that somehow sync.
Marco:
Definitely those have to be the same purchase.
Marco:
You're going to have to have a watch app probably for certain types of things.
Marco:
You're going to have to have extensions.
Marco:
You're going to have to have share extensions.
Marco:
You're going to have to have a widget somewhere, lock screen widget, main screen widget, watch complication maybe.
Marco:
So the expectations of what people want you to do are so high that...
Marco:
the software necessarily has to be more complicated just to fit what people expect all apps to do these days.
Marco:
And so it can feel like things are worse quality because we're just asking them to do so much more.
Marco:
There are parts of what we do that are crappy quality.
Marco:
We mentioned Siri earlier and Siri is really inconsistent, but...
Marco:
Siri is so vastly more complex than anything we asked things to do, even 15 or 20 years ago.
Marco:
It's frankly amazing it works at all, let alone as, quote, well as it actually does.
Marco:
Because Siri actually does work well in certain things sometimes.
Marco:
And it's amazing to know that when you were here in earlier days of technology, when we didn't have anything close to that.
Marco:
And it's remarkable that it works the way it does, even.
Marco:
But the software that we wrote back in the day that might have felt more solid was a lot simpler and in some ways was more solid.
Marco:
But also now we wouldn't be happy with that.
Marco:
And customers demand so much more now.
Marco:
You can't make software like that anymore.
Marco:
And it's a shame because I would love if software was super reliable and super simple in some ways, or rather, I think I would love that.
Marco:
But then my actual customer demands would be like, well, I love this really simple software, but could you maybe make an iPad app or...
Marco:
Can you maybe add some shortcut support?
Marco:
There's always something that you want them to add.
Marco:
Man, I love paying once for apps and never having to pay again.
Marco:
But oh, can you add sync to a cloud service?
Marco:
There's so many of those things that modern customer expectations and modern technological environments in which everything has to work and interoperate and meet expectations just can't support that old, simpler way of looking at software.
John:
Oh, you know, so the, if the lines of, uh, the bugs per lines of code was still the same back then, part of the reason, and that, and I think it was, and that is, that is still, you know, a factor, but part of the reason some of those older programs felt, uh, more reliable, especially the good ones that we remember is because the, the, the market structure and the incentive structure were different back then.
John:
Um, and not back when the iPhone came out, but I'm talking like farther back than that.
John:
Um, so before the internet, you had to buy your software in a box on a floppy disk, um,
John:
And if there was something wrong with it, you couldn't just go download an update to that.
John:
Download it where?
John:
On CompuServe?
John:
Maybe.
John:
You know, they'd have a second version on a different floppy disk.
John:
So the incentives were for the software developer to spend way more time making sure the software they were going to pay to put on, you know,
John:
millions of floppy disks was as bug free as possible because they knew they can't just have people install a patch a day one patch when they launched the app because there was no internet right so those incentives are different but like that doesn't mean that the programmers weren't making the exact same number of bugs per lines of code all that means is they had to spend more time and more money
John:
getting that version 1.0 to a more bug-free state like any company could do that today it would just mean they have to ship later right that also means if there was a bug and there certainly was there was always bugs it would take way longer for you to get that fixed because you couldn't just download an update they'd have to print a version 1.1 put that on floppy disk and sometimes sell it to you or you'd send away for it and it's just like
John:
It was worse in all sorts of ways that people would not tolerate, right?
John:
Whereas now we just expect, oh, there's a bug.
John:
There better be an update tomorrow when I wake up.
John:
There was not going to be an update to your floppy disk when you woke up, right?
John:
It was what it was.
John:
So those incentives could exist today and do in different markets.
John:
For example, in theory, I don't know if this is true.
John:
Maybe Casey can tell me.
John:
But in theory, military software development has a much slower pace.
John:
and more thorough QA process and you know whatever I hope so yeah well you know also more more money being spent in various states to be basically a jobs program where we blow people up anyway yeah but it's also a lot higher stakes than like you know some weather app on your phone
John:
Yeah, or like self-driving.
John:
Don't think about it.
John:
That was originally the DARPA challenge.
John:
You guys don't remember that.
John:
It was a good Nova on it.
John:
Anyway.
John:
No, I remember it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think like different incentive structures can and do exist and those also influence perceived quality.
John:
But in general, the human beings produce X number of bugs per Y number of lines of code is not going to change until and unless human beings change.
John:
And that happens really slowly.
John:
So I think any perception that you have, think about the surrounding context.
John:
You know, what functionality am I getting?
John:
What incentives exist for this functionality?
John:
How fast can I get an update?
John:
Because you're trading things off.
John:
You're trading off the ability, you know, the ability to ship something with a bug in it is traded off against the ability for that bug to be fixed tomorrow through the magic of software updates, right?
John:
And so that creates an incentive structure for shipping software that is different from the one where you know you can't do an update until six months from now.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
And then finally for tonight, Thomas Alvarez writes, John mentioned how he wants a Mac Pro with GPUs on cards.
Casey:
And I'm curious what use he has for GPU power in an ARM-based Mac.
Casey:
If it's gaming, aren't we past that on the Mac now with Apple Silicon and moved on to running Windows on a dedicated gaming PC?
Casey:
We all know how you feel about a dedicated gaming PC, but would you just mind answering the question, please?
John:
I don't think I've actually talked about my specific needing GPUs on cards for an ARM-based Mac.
John:
Mostly we've been talking about if it doesn't have GPUs on cards, how is it not just a Mac studio with a bunch of empty space or something?
John:
So anyway, setting that thing aside, I am actually interested in significant GPU-powered and ARM-based Macs.
John:
back when we were still entertaining rumors of this sort of quad soc arrangement and i did the math on that that would have enough gpu power to be equivalent to a pretty okay you know external pc graphics card and i would be fine with that and why do i want that it's to play games and you'll be like well you can't play any games on an arm mac i still am personally holding out hope and
John:
that windows and gaming will get on the arm bandwagon eventually i don't have any reason to particularly believe that because it doesn't seem to be really happening but you know it seems plausible technically it's certainly possible we know that um but markets move slowly and i'm not sure if there's much motion there maybe the server stuff needs to go and destroy the economics of good x86 cpus for that to happen i don't i don't know how that's all
John:
I just, you know, for the same reason I have this big honking Mac that I don't need over here.
John:
I just like the idea of having more computing power than I actually need.
John:
Even if it's just so I can download like some demo of some 3D program that I'm never going to figure out how to use and just play with or whatever.
John:
Or, you know, like I locked myself out of a locked note bag, you know, the Apple notes, like back before you could use your Apple ID to lock a note.
John:
You could put individual passwords on notes and
John:
and i had a note that i had put an individual password on that i had forgotten and hadn't put it in keychain or anything like that and so i used my dual gpus to crack it like brute force to brute force crack yeah you can that's amazing force crack my own password and guess what the fans really spoiled my mac pro but i did crack because it was a short like throwaway password or whatever i just how long did it take
John:
I don't know, like five minutes.
John:
Like it wasn't, I did not use a 15 character or whatever password.
John:
Like this, this is an argument for you to, to do the thing where I don't remember when they did that.
John:
It was ages ago where they let you do the thing.
John:
Like, do you want to update your thing?
John:
So your Apple ID and your face can unlock all your notes or whatever.
John:
Um, I eventually did that.
John:
Right.
John:
But, uh,
John:
and that's that's just a silly example but like i could have also cracked it on you know on an iphone right like i'm not i'm not pretending that i need a big gpu to do this but the same reason people don't need a sports car because they're not race car drivers they just like to have one even though you you know you can't really use it without breaking the law at least i'm not you know breaking the law with my mac pro here or whatever
John:
Remember those ads when you couldn't export the G4 to communist countries because it was like a restricted export thing?
John:
I think Apple had an ad campaign about that.
Marco:
Classified as ammunition because it's too good of a computer.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, I just want it.
John:
Even if it's for that, you know, so I can play a five-year-old port, a port of a five-year-old game at high frame rates, the macOS version or whatever.
John:
That's it.
John:
It's, you know, and it's for games.
John:
Like, I really hope someday, you know, because ARM-based SoCs made by Apple with lots of GPU power,
John:
that's really good hardware for games too bad no one makes games for it too bad windows doesn't run it like i get it doesn't make perfect sense and as for the dedicated gaming pc honestly if i had a different house with another desk for things to put on i probably would have bought a gaming pc by this point but i don't know the desk is what's holding you back yeah right i'm gonna buy an entire mac pro instead of a desk
John:
well i mean no it's not the desk it's the house where the desk would go like there's no there's no play it's not like i'm getting a new house anytime soon and i do have my i've talked about this i do have my own irrational personal biases against microsoft and windows that will make me never want to buy a pc and honestly at this point it's been such a long streak i feel like i need to keep it going but in theory if you know i also haven't bought an xbox for that same stupid reason but in theory if i had a bigger house with another desk for me to put stuff on i might actually get a gaming pc to play pc games i
John:
That's why I'm enjoying my Mac Pro.
John:
I can play Microsoft Flight Simulator with my fancy new GPU and it looks really cool and I can't play it on any other platform.
John:
I play it in Windows and I get good frame rate and it looks really nice.
John:
And someday soon, well, someday, I don't want to say soon, but someday that will be over because I'll have an ARM-based Mac Pro.
John:
But hopefully by then, Microsoft will port Flight Simulator to Windows on ARM and I'll be able to somehow boot into Windows on ARM from an ARM-based Mac Pro and play Flight Simulator at even higher frame rates.
Marco:
that is the future i believe in that i'm dreaming of and that's why i want my arm-based computer to have a beefy gpu good luck you might have to keep dreaming on that one i know i know thanks to our sponsor this week collide and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join thank you so much we will talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
All right, so speaking of sponsorships and memberships and things of that nature, we are trying to come up with, like we were talking about the pre-show, more ideas for member specials.
Casey:
And it would be really awesome if we could get some ideas from listeners.
Casey:
And so it would be excellent if you used Mastodon, if possible, to toot at, and I'll take the fall on this.
Casey:
You can toot at me or the ATP Show account, but you can send it my way.
John:
What is the ATP Show account, Casey?
Casey:
Good question.
Marco:
I believe it's at ATPFM at Mastodon.social.
Marco:
Thank you.
Casey:
How does Mike do this on Upgrade?
Casey:
He has a really good way of handling it.
Casey:
It's on Mastodon.social at ATPFM.
John:
You don't need to overcomplicate it.
John:
Most Mastodon clients and the websites, the search is good enough that if you just type ATPFM into your search box on any Mastodon instance, it will probably find us.
John:
They should do a better job.
John:
I was thinking about this, that clients should do a better job
John:
of indicating the verified url oh that's a good point yeah like and put it like as like a little subtitle in the in the search results like name verified url yeah because what you want to know if there's like 15 atp fm accounts like impersonating which one is the real one only one of them can possibly be verified against atp.fm the website uh and and clients know that and show it they show it in search because it would help people find things but anyway that's a good idea that's the address we'll put a link in the show so you can also go to what atp.fm slash
Casey:
Yes, but that sends email.
Casey:
Nobody likes email.
John:
Oh, email's fine.
Casey:
Anyway, yeah, so if you have ideas for members' episodes, okay, so here's the criteria.
Casey:
We'll accept any ideas, but generally speaking, what we're trying to figure out is something that we are equipped to handle.
Casey:
So as an example, I would love to play Destiny one time
Casey:
With John and Marco, I don't have any PlayStation in the house.
Casey:
I don't have any video capture software in the house.
Casey:
I don't think any of the three of us, except maybe John, has the patience to put together a video or do any of that sort of thing.
John:
I totally have the patience for it.
John:
And like I said, PlayStation 5 is video capture built in.
John:
We're very close, people.
John:
Marco's got a PS5.
John:
I've got a PS5.
John:
Casey's the holdout.
John:
But anyway, that's already on the list.
John:
You don't have to suggest that one.
Casey:
Well, I'm just saying that like something along those lines that requires hundreds of dollars of investment.
John:
Or us going on a road trip across Australia.
John:
Probably not going to happen.
John:
Cool idea, but you know.
Casey:
Great idea, but not going to happen.
Casey:
So things that we can handle with just a microphone and we can spend some amount of money.
Casey:
In fact, if I can convince the boys, I think I have a pretty decent idea for one that involves spending an absurd amount of money for a little bit of food.
Casey:
And I mean those words.
Casey:
I choose those words very carefully.
Casey:
But anyway...
Casey:
Something that we can handle, and one thing in particular that we've been wrestling with, particularly John, is we think, how did you phrase this when we were talking privately?
Casey:
We think we can get a pretty good licensing agreement, I think John had said, for top four.
Casey:
And so what is a good top four?
Casey:
Well, top four Apple products, sure, that's kind of obvious, but there's got to be something more creative.
Casey:
Top four, we were talking about doing privately, we were talking about top four Apple announcements, but then we have to do like 35 hours of research remembering all these announcements.
Casey:
Or do we?
John:
Haven't you listened to Top 4?
Casey:
Yeah, fair.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, particularly in the vicinity of Top 4, but even in general, if you have a member idea, please, you know, send us a toot on Mastodon or feedback if you must.
Casey:
I guess our feedbacks are much better than Apple's, aren't they?
Casey:
But anyway, yeah, send it our way.
Casey:
We would love to hear it.
Casey:
And we hope to, again, this is not a guarantee, but our kind of
Casey:
Our goal, which we may not always achieve, is maybe one of these a month, if we can.
Casey:
It probably won't be every month, it may be every other, but our goal, our hope, is about one a month.
Casey:
And we can keep watching movies, and I'm sure we will, but let's try to figure out as a collective, let's figure out some other fun stuff to do.
Casey:
And if enough of you do join, then yes, I will buy a stupid PlayStation and I will play stupid Destiny with my stupid friends.
John:
And your kids will thank you for it.
John:
And by the way, for people who know, Top Four is a podcast that Marco does with his wife, Tiff.
John:
It is on Relay.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
I don't want to try to explain it.
John:
They ostensibly list the top four of something.
John:
It's an experience.
John:
It is an experience for sure.
John:
It will make you mad, guaranteed.
John:
can confirm and i and i have to say i have a newfound respect for what they do in that program having done just one very easy food-based challenge on a podcast and i cannot fathom what these that's also true these two champions have done to their bodies over the course of this show very very true it is like i have a visceral reaction now to to thinking about what they're going through and that's also why i'm not really gung-ho about new food-based challenges in atp but you know i may be forced to do some
John:
semi-related to membership which casey also skipped over because i wanted to put before this um i'm going to take take advantage of my podcast platform to say i'm trying to sell my old cameras and no one seems to want to buy them so uh i'm gonna put a link in the show notes to a web page i put up for me selling my old cameras i'm
John:
being silly and for now trying to sell them to people who are willing to meet up in the boston metro area to avoid shipping fees and stuff like that that's probably not going to work and it's probably going to fall through i'm gonna have to ship these two but for now if you live in the boston metro area and want to buy any of my stuff that's listed on this web page it's going to be in the show notes it's just my old sony a6300 and a couple lenses um for what i think are pretty reasonable prices and everything's in nice condition uh you know hit me up all the information is on the web page that will be in the show notes or you can just go to
John:
i'm gonna read a url now hypercritical.co slash four hyphen sale slash camera anyway go to the show notes um and uh i'm not gonna say this is directly related to uh the bad sponsorships but it's not not related