Best Blender Is a Wasteland
Casey:
Is that is, I don't feel like that is should be capitalized.
John:
Uh, pretty sure it should be, but good thing you have a website to find out.
John:
Jesus Christ.
John:
I hate you, John.
Casey:
I was so, I was so happy that you saved my topic that I was so excited to talk about by doing a good summary of it.
Casey:
And I was so proud of you.
Casey:
And so, so in love with you in a fraternal way, but it was fine.
John:
Didn't need saving.
Casey:
Well, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And, and I was so in love with you in a fraternal way.
Casey:
Now I hate you again, just like that.
Casey:
It's supposed to be capitalized.
Casey:
Damn it, John.
Casey:
Are you ever wrong?
Casey:
If you'd believe the internet, you are never wrong.
Casey:
It's a burden, I'm sure.
Marco:
Yeah, it must be a hard life.
Casey:
September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and our friends at Relay, which is also us, we try to raise money as best we can for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
They do incredible work, predominantly in the United States, but their work also has been shared or the results of their research have been shared the world over.
Casey:
and have done a phenomenal job of decreasing the mortality rate from childhood cancer.
Casey:
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but a lot.
Casey:
They've done really, really incredible work.
Casey:
And every September, Relay, even though this particular show is not officially part of Relay, I think we are...
Casey:
kind of unofficially part of Relay, especially in September.
Casey:
And so we join Relay, and since we all have Relay shows, we join Relay in trying to raise money for childhood cancer awareness, for curing childhood cancer and doing everything we can.
Casey:
So this is the time of year that I will be belligerent and accost you even more than I do for t-shirts, which I know is a lot, and tell you, hey,
Casey:
If you have even a dollar to scrape together that you could send to St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital to help cure childhood cancer, what else would you do with that dollar?
Casey:
Well, you know, buy Diet Coke.
Casey:
It's delicious, but it doesn't help cure cancer.
Casey:
And some would argue it probably makes cancer.
Marco:
I would even argue whether it's delicious.
Marco:
I mean, let's be honest here.
Marco:
That alone is also arguable.
Casey:
Well, we'll leave that aside for now.
Casey:
But nevertheless, stjude.org slash relay.
Casey:
S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash relay.
Casey:
ATP will probably be making some sort of joint donation at some point.
Casey:
We actually haven't had a chance to talk about it yet.
Casey:
That's on the to-do list for after this very show.
Casey:
So if you have even a dollar to your name, please...
Casey:
stjude.org slash relay.
Casey:
Please send a little bit of money.
Casey:
I don't want to guarantee anything, but I've been talking with Stephen Hackett, who has a child who was a patient at St.
Casey:
Jude, and St.
Casey:
Jude, I think by any reasonable measure, literally saved his child's life.
Casey:
Anyway, Stephen and I have been talking, and I might be getting involved with a little special treat, reward, maybe.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
Don't want to guarantee anything, but, you know, maybe get a little excited if we raise a lot of money.
Casey:
So please, if you have anything that you can donate, no amount is too little.
Casey:
I mean that.
Casey:
Now, of course, no amount is too much either.
Casey:
But hey, no amount is too little.
Casey:
Stjude.org slash Relay, if you please.
John:
And I've looked up the stats that you couldn't get before.
John:
Treatments invented at St.
John:
Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20% to more than 80% since opening.
John:
And with one in five children not surviving, St.
John:
Jude won't stop until no child does from cancer.
John:
There you go.
John:
Thank you, John.
John:
Although I tried to put the URL in there for you as well.
John:
I had to do the same pitch on my show recently, and I was trying to like, what's the URL?
John:
I'm like, it's probably stjude.org slash relay FM.
John:
And so I tried it and it worked, but apparently slash relay also works.
John:
So stjude.org slash relay with or without the FM.
John:
It's just a redirect that goes to the place where you can donate.
John:
Please donate.
John:
Um,
John:
The more, the better.
John:
And honestly, the podcast is coming.
John:
They do a 24-hour thing or whatever where they raise money and it's a big deal.
John:
They do all sorts of cool activities, which may or may not involve Casey, which may or may not involve me because honestly, I wasn't supposed to be involved last year.
John:
I think somehow I got sucked into it.
John:
But I always feel like when we do the pitch on here,
John:
They're already raising money, right?
John:
So we're late to the game here, ATP listeners.
John:
We really need to represent for ATP to show... We want to see the ATP bump, you know what I mean?
John:
Last year we did it with making fun of Casey with a little asterisk in the name or whatever.
Marco:
That was amazing.
John:
And that indirectly helped us see how amazing ATP listeners are and how generous they are.
John:
And I really want to see the ATP bump, right?
John:
So it's not going to be the size of the podcast-a-thon bump, although I think we could achieve that if everyone gave tons and tons of money.
John:
But please...
John:
Give as much as you can.
John:
Represent for ATP.
John:
It's a great cause.
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
And right now as we record, $37,124.33.
Casey:
We can do a lot better than that.
Casey:
It is early in the month.
Casey:
I will concede it's early in the month.
Casey:
But we, all of us, can do a lot better than that.
Casey:
And I agree with John.
Casey:
Let's be jerks about it.
Casey:
Let's just claim as much money as possible for ATP.
Casey:
Let's do it.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Like, because, you know, as Casey mentioned, like we we are we are near relay.
Marco:
We are relay adjacent, but we are not part of relay.
Marco:
And so I kind of feel like this little wonderful little rivalry that could happen here in only this way of like, I don't care about any other kind of rivalry.
Marco:
But like if it's a rivalry where like we're just raising more and more money for a really good cause, like there's kind of no downside to that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
There's nothing negative about that.
Marco:
So it would be kind of amazing for us to continue to throw a massive amount of ATP-inspired fuel on this fire because this is a really good cause.
Marco:
And we will keep talking about it every week during September as the rest of the relay world does because this is a great time to do this.
Marco:
And as Apple releases all of their good stuff probably over the next month and we all dump a massive quantity of money on new little shiny gadgets that we don't probably necessarily need...
Marco:
maybe most of its want and a little bit of need, we can also think about how we can allocate some of our money in better ways.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So you'll hear about it some more.
Casey:
And I will repeat my offer from last year, which I believe was whoever has the highest donation will get a not-for-sale batch of ATP stickers, which really are not that impressive.
Casey:
But I mean, they're incredibly cool.
Casey:
The best stickers I've ever seen.
Marco:
What you mean is they're exclusive, sold out, limited edition, not available anywhere except this way.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So if you want to buy a multi-thousand dollar set of ATP stickers, I strongly encourage it.
Casey:
Please do.
Casey:
You will be deeply disappointed and yet also very proud.
Casey:
But nevertheless.
Marco:
I mean, when you compare it to like NFTs, I mean, you talk about, you know, spending a lot of money for not a significant object, right?
Marco:
Like, I feel like we're at least giving you an object.
Marco:
Like there is at least something here.
John:
Yeah, and we know the sort of the provenance of it.
John:
Like, this is a legit sticker from actual Casey, not just like, oh, someone printed something that looks like an ATP sticker and gave it to you.
John:
This will be the real thing.
John:
So it actually has collector's value, right?
Casey:
Yes, please.
Casey:
stjude.org slash relay, if you please.
Casey:
Moving along to follow-up.
Casey:
Philip Spedding has some follow-up also from 2011.
Casey:
Apparently, John, you said, and I am quoting from the show notes, and apparently this is from Hypercritical episode 31,
Casey:
And this was released on August 24th of 2011.
Casey:
Put it on your calendar from 10 years from now.
Casey:
Is Microsoft making PC hardware or tablets or anything like that?
Casey:
So what's your ruling, John?
John:
I mean, so this episode, I had to go back and listen to it to remind myself what this was about.
John:
First of all, this was an episode where Dan couldn't make it.
John:
So Ryan Ireland was the guest host.
John:
So it was weird for me to hear not Dan's voice in there.
John:
And then I remembered that we had a guest spot.
John:
And we were talking about HP leaving the PC business.
John:
Maybe kids don't remember that, but Hewlett Packard was a company.
John:
They used to make personal computers that ran Windows, and they were leaving the PC business.
John:
And the topic of the show was like, or not of this part of the show anyway, was where does that leave Microsoft?
John:
Because if the only PC makers that can survive are the ones that essentially cater to business by selling the cheapest possible PCs...
John:
it's going to be really hard for Microsoft to ever compete with Apple in terms of quality or cachet or innovation or anything like that because their entire business would be around, you know, being the lowest bidder to sell millions and millions of PCs to the business world, which is a great business to be in, but you're never going to be Apple, have those sort of shiny things that Apple has in that scenario.
John:
So, you know, the...
John:
possibility came up, but like, well, what if Microsoft starts making its own personal computers?
John:
Because it seems like, like, you know, in the free market of the Windows world, it seemed like no one was willing to make nice computers.
John:
I think it was also Lenovo.
John:
I don't know if they were leaving or they'd just been sold or something like that, or the ThinkPads had been sold to Lenovo.
John:
Anyway, Microsoft can just do it itself.
John:
And then at least one company will be making nice PCs.
John:
But of course, Microsoft making PCs
John:
It doesn't make other PC makers feel really good because now Microsoft is competing with the companies that it's supposed to be supporting as the platform vendor.
John:
So that was the topic.
John:
We'll put a timestamp link in the show and it sits back a little bit farther so you can hear a little bit more of the conversation or you can just rewind a few minutes and hear it.
John:
And yeah, that was the prediction.
John:
Let's look at this 10 years from now and to see if Microsoft's making PC hardware.
John:
They absolutely are.
John:
They make the Surface line.
John:
They make that weird, what the iMac should be, drafting table, Surface Studio Pro.
John:
They don't make phones anymore.
John:
They did for a while.
John:
But yeah, Microsoft makes PCs.
John:
And it's kind of exactly like we discussed 10 years ago in that they don't make PCs that compete with the Dells of the world to be the cheapest possible PC you can put on the desk of all your employees or laptop or whatever and give them.
John:
They try to make computers that are nice.
John:
And I think...
John:
They actually are pretty nice.
John:
A lot of them are.
John:
They have a design aesthetic that, yes, looks a lot like Apple, but it's also very elegant and nice, and I'm using their mouse right here on my Mac, and I think it fits in well.
John:
And it seems to me that the main reason they're doing it is because they want to make really nice PCs and show off what Windows can do, and
John:
The rest of the PC world just wasn't doing it, right?
John:
It's like you can motivate them.
John:
You can say, we really want our PC vendors to make great hardware.
John:
But what really happened is they just ate each other and ate each other and ate each other.
John:
And so there was just one or two big companies left that sell to businesses.
John:
And no one was really, except for in the gaming world, perhaps where you have those really ugly gaming PCs.
John:
Nobody was making an Apple-like computer.
John:
So now Microsoft does.
Casey:
Yeah, turns out.
John:
Yeah, and this email came in on the exact day of the DAX 10-year anniversary.
John:
That's just why I tried to shove it into the show.
John:
It doesn't have anything to do with what we're going to discuss, but August 24th was yesterday.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
I owe a formal apology to Colin Donnell.
Casey:
I had attributed and credited Gruber for the, quote, Mac-asked Mac app, which was how Gruber, I thought, described Mac apps that really are good platform citizens and really care about being something that feels at home on the Mac.
Casey:
And Colin Donnell pointed out to me, oh, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
That was me.
Casey:
It's as though nobody remembered where follow-up came from.
Casey:
Like, how freaking frustrating would that be if nobody knew the genesis of follow-up?
John:
That was from Dubai Friday, right?
Casey:
I think so.
John:
I think that's right.
John:
You were two people off, though, because it was a Brent Simmons blog post.
John:
And Brent Simmons says, I stole this phrase from my friend Colin Donald.
John:
And then Gruber then took it from seeing on Brent's posts and probably talked about it in the various slacks that we're in.
John:
Yeah, so...
John:
We were two degrees off there.
John:
Sorry, Colin.
John:
This is your phrase.
John:
Duly credited.
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
A very funny name on Twitter, KingOleg1, made an actually what appears to me to be a reasonable observation.
Casey:
I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say about this.
Casey:
So KingOleg1 says, one important thing to add, oh, I'm sorry, this is with regard to 1Password and it going to Electron, which again is based on web technology.
Casey:
One important thing to add is the risk of dependency injection via the JavaScript package ecosystem, which is a total mess.
Casey:
I, for one, would never trust an Electron app with sensitive information, no matter the company behind it.
Casey:
You know, for example, crypto wallets that did the same and whose users were hacked this way?
Casey:
So how can we effectively describe this?
Casey:
So a lot of times, particularly in JavaScript, and a lot of code, but particularly in JavaScript, you will pull in code from other places because it will do things that you don't want to have to write yourself.
Casey:
And oftentimes, it will do them more efficiently, and it will be better tested and battle proven, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
So you might pull in a library that lets you store data in a certain way just for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
Well, if you're not inspecting that code that you're pulling in, it could do nefarious things.
Casey:
Like you have no way of knowing unless you actually go through the code and look.
Casey:
And so it is certainly possible that if one password is written using Electron and if some of the code that they pull in, which I'm assuming they pull in at least some, if some of that code wants to do a nefarious thing, unless they are extremely diligent about their third-party dependencies, that could happen, right?
Casey:
So that would be very, very bad.
John:
And yeah, we've talked about this before, where people who don't know Node and they're just like, oh, you're just saying it uses libraries.
John:
Every language uses libraries.
John:
What's the big deal with Node?
John:
Well, the way the JavaScript slash Node.js ecosystem has evolved, it's a very widespread use of packages.
John:
And the packages are often not trivial, but very small.
John:
And there are a lot of them.
John:
So whereas you might make, I don't know, an iPhone app, and you'll include like one third-party library to do a thing for you.
John:
A typical Node app includes literally hundreds or thousands of third-party libraries.
John:
And that's not an exaggeration.
John:
That's not like, oh, this is an extreme case.
John:
It's very easy.
John:
If you just do create React app and make a React application in Node and count the dependencies, you're already underwater.
John:
There's a huge number of them.
John:
And the way it's usually done with sort of continuous integration and cloud deployment for server-side stuff anyway is that a lot of them get pulled from the third-party repositories that are on the web.
John:
And so you're pulling library A, which uses library B, which uses library C, which uses library D, and so on.
John:
It's like all the way down the chain.
John:
It's like hundreds or thousands of dependencies.
John:
And if any one of those dependencies gets updated, they often require new versions of other dependencies.
John:
In many ways, it's a lively ecosystem, rich with new and updated apps and bug fixes.
John:
And yes, it's very active, right?
John:
But it also means that
John:
Sort of nailing down your dependencies and saying, look, this is it.
John:
We're just going to use these libraries and we're never going to change them again.
John:
It's difficult to do because people find security problems and there are bug fixes and you want those.
John:
And so you say, well, I'm not just going to be stay frozen at these thousand versions of my dependencies.
John:
Every single day, one of those dependencies gets a bug fix or security fix.
John:
And sometimes those are important.
John:
You don't want to ship with a security problem.
John:
And in fact, the main package manager for Node has built into it an audit feature that lets you know all the security problems that your current dependency stack has and how to fix them and all that other stuff.
John:
So the common practice is if a module is updated, if a library is updated, pull the new version because it probably has important fixes.
John:
And that's how the sneaky, you know, security stuff gets in.
John:
Someone will use a library that returns a Boolean value indicating whether or not a number is odd.
Hmm.
John:
It's a real thing.
John:
Look it up.
John:
And and someone will sneak a bit of code into there that likes, you know, does Bitcoin mining in your application or tries to steal keystrokes and send them to a website or something like that.
John:
And no one will notice because who no human is going to manually audit, you know, hundreds or thousands of dependencies every time one changes.
John:
It's just human nature.
John:
It's too much stuff.
John:
um so that's that explains why it's people aren't as concerned about security flaws of including a library or two in your mac or ios app although there is concern like this third party even if you're using one library and it's a third party like analytics tracker those are kind of creepy too but anyway that's why people are concerned about nodes specifically
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then Rustam Karamov, who is one of the co-founders of 1Password and also a developer, had a tweet in which he had some commentary on that.
Casey:
He writes, the 1Password code repository has more Swift than TypeScript, TypeScript being not a front-end, but a different way of writing JavaScript.
Casey:
It is not your off-the-shelf Electron, Node.js, or web app.
Casey:
It is more integration with macOS than any Catalyst app you can show me.
Casey:
And I'm actually curious if that's true.
Casey:
We should actually talk about that in a second.
Casey:
Launch services, Touch ID, keyboard shortcuts, system, sleep, wake, et cetera.
Casey:
I think the numbers show how we built 1Password 8.
Casey:
Do as much as possible in the Common Core, which they're very excited to tell you is built on Rust.
Casey:
And then use Swift for macOS specifics and TypeScript for the front end.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, I mean, it does show that, like, you know, if the majority of the code is in JavaScript, it's not as bad as it could be.
John:
But, of course, the front end is JavaScript.
John:
And they didn't really answer the question of how they handle dependencies because it's a difficult problem.
John:
Like, there's no easy solution to, like, oh, everyone just knows you should just pin all your dependencies and just never change them.
John:
It's like, well, that's not good either because, like, wait a week and you'll find out one of your dependencies has an incredible security flaw that you need to fix.
John:
And now you have to update it.
John:
And then it's just so easy to just...
John:
do what NPM tells you to do and update all your things.
John:
And then you can do a git diff to see what's changed and just your eyes will glaze over and eventually you'll get sick of looking at it and you won't find a Bitcoin miner.
Marco:
You know, people make fun of me for never wanting to use third-party libraries in my apps.
Marco:
Like, I almost never...
Marco:
bring in third-party code.
Marco:
Almost never.
Marco:
Like, unless it's something that I really can't do myself, and it's very complicated, and that I can easily look at and audit.
Marco:
Like, you know, two files.
Marco:
Like, you know, something really simple.
Marco:
And yes, I know it's possible to sneak weird stuff in, but like, you know, nobody's doing that until like my audio buffer...
Marco:
or things like that.
Marco:
But, you know, for the most part, I do everything myself.
Marco:
And this is a blessing and a curse.
Marco:
You know, the curse is that I do everything myself, and so I have to do everything myself.
Marco:
And I basically reinvent the wheel all the time.
Marco:
And that has pluses and minuses.
Marco:
You know, the pluses are that I...
Marco:
know everything about my code.
Marco:
I know everything it's doing and everything it's not doing.
Marco:
I know how it works.
Marco:
If I have to get in there and change or add to it to add functionality or change the way something behaves or figure out why something isn't behaving, I know it all because it's all code I wrote and I have right there.
Marco:
Whereas that's not true when you bring in other people's libraries.
Marco:
That being said, I definitely therefore move more slowly.
Marco:
I think once I get to where I was going, it's a better place to be that it's all my code, but it's a much slower road to get there.
Marco:
And I certainly avoid a whole host of these problems that you guys have been talking about.
Marco:
But, you know, obviously I bring on my own problems with things like having to, you know, fix bugs that other people have already fixed, you know, handle edge cases that other people have already handled and stuff like that.
Marco:
So, you know, it's a mixed bag, but I still like the way I do it better.
John:
i mean you're you're still especially on the apple platforms you're building on top of the os which is not third party it's first party but that's the the majority of the code in your application is apple's code right that's true of everybody who builds on a platform that's you know you're not setting even aside the operating system just whatever ui framework and everything that's where all the code is that's where all the lines of code are in all of our applications the whole point of coco and all the other things is like oh you get to write at this level where we've already written all the libraries for you to do stuff and you just tell us button goes here window goes there when they click this happens and then
John:
the whole machinery of the UI runs under there.
John:
And then underneath there is the foundation services and then the core OS services and the kernel and all the way down.
John:
So we're all standing on the shoulders of giants.
John:
It's just that you don't want to be standing on the shoulders of random internet script kiddies who wrote the, uh, is odd and library, which by the way has a dependency.
John:
Of course it does.
John:
It really, it depends on the is number library.
Yeah.
John:
But it only has one dependency.
John:
It's very slim.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So very quickly, with regard to Catalyst apps, I had asked or put out a call for submissions, if you will, of what people thought of and held up as really good Catalyst apps.
Casey:
Most of them I've not heard of and most of them were not really popular as far as I knew.
Casey:
The one, I should have kept better notes on the things that I was told, but the one that I do remember hearing a lot is Kraft, which is, I guess, one of those new cool kid note-taking apps, if I'm not mistaken, or like personal knowledge management, whatever things.
Casey:
This is so not in my wheelhouse, but I think it's called Kraft.
Casey:
I hope I have that right.
Casey:
But I will find a link and put it in the show notes.
Casey:
But yeah, apparently that's Electron, or excuse me, not Electron, is Catalyst and is very, very good from what I've been told.
John:
I think I used Kraft when they were first advertising it.
John:
Maybe they were advertising it was under development or whatever.
John:
Anyway, and I could swear I thought it was a web app when I first used it.
John:
But that was a while ago.
John:
Things have probably changed.
Marco:
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Marco:
Monetize your passion with membership.
Casey:
Moving right along, we have some CSAM news information that we need to talk about.
Casey:
I actually have not been following this very closely, but my very limited understanding, and perhaps, John, you can fill in a little bit here, is that somehow somebody or a team of somebodies have, like, extracted the neural hash algorithm from, I guess, a pre-release build of iOS and have been throwing things against it to try to see if they can create a collision that is wrong.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
just to back up a half step, remember that the way this works is every one of your pictures will be analyzed and a hash will be generated.
Casey:
And if that hash matches something that is known as child sexual assault material, something like that.
Casey:
Abuse.
Casey:
Abuse.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Child sexual abuse material.
Casey:
Anyways, if it matches one of these images or one of these hashes, I should say, then that'll cause problems, right?
Casey:
Well,
Casey:
People have extracted the algorithm, allegedly, and have been looking to see if they could make collisions that are not actually collisions, which is to say, take two unlike pictures and have the algorithm say, oh, these are the same thing.
Casey:
And I guess that's happening and people are figuring out a way to do it.
Casey:
And that's lightly alarming to say the least.
Marco:
Well, I don't think it's as bad as people say, because the idea of any hash, any hashing algorithm is taking a lot of information and reducing it down to a little bit of information.
Marco:
There's always going to be the possibility of collisions, where two different inputs produce the same output.
Marco:
So collisions are inevitable.
Marco:
If you are specifically looking to craft collisions with a certain algorithm, it usually can be done without too much trouble.
Marco:
So I have no doubt that people will be able to create images that...
Marco:
look kind of like random noise.
Marco:
So far, I think all the collisions that they've published so far, I think they all kind of look like random noise.
Marco:
So it's not like it's a picture of a puppy and the algorithm says, oh, we better report this to Apple.
John:
That's not entirely true, but continue, I'll clarify in a bit.
Marco:
Okay, so anyway, the idea of being able to create or find collisions is not great.
Marco:
When you're designing a hash algorithm, you try to minimize the chances of that, but it's inevitable.
Marco:
So the question is, what happens when a collision is found?
Marco:
What happens to an image that matches the hash?
Marco:
And we know that already.
Marco:
What happens is it gets that security voucher thing that's sent to Apple, and if they collect enough security vouchers from the same account, they're able to decrypt the images and look at them.
Marco:
Well, that would instantly then be obvious to the human who's reviewing this, deciding whether to forge law enforcement or not.
Marco:
They would see, oh, this is not CSAM.
Marco:
Therefore, we don't need to file this report.
Marco:
So it's an interesting academic exercise.
Marco:
It's interesting to prove the limits of this hashing algorithm.
Marco:
But I don't think this is a big deal that it's possible to create collisions here.
Marco:
I just don't think it's a big deal.
Marco:
Now, there is...
Marco:
There is certainly the angle of could you somehow attack someone else by inserting these images into their library and therefore getting them in trouble or getting them possibly in trouble or getting law enforcement possibly to go give them a visit.
Marco:
That's certainly an avenue worth considering, but –
Marco:
There aren't even a lot of ways to get images into other people's photo libraries without their interaction.
Marco:
And again, if it's actually not CSAM that you're ingesting into the library as well, that's not really going to do anything in the long run.
Marco:
Now, it is certainly worth questioning whether there are ways to get CSAM, actual CSAM, into other people's photo libraries and get them in trouble.
Marco:
That's certainly worth making sure there's not a good way to do that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The existence of hash collisions and the ability to generate them I don't think does much in this context because there is that level of human review.
John:
So to start with, the reason this item has a question mark after it in the little follow-up notes here is...
John:
They extracted an algorithm from a function that looked like it was probably the CSAM hashing function from like a released version of iOS.
John:
It's not even like a beta one because apparently Apple has been testing this for a while.
John:
Presumably running it against people's libraries in limited fashion or whatever.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Maybe it just wasn't used and it was dead code.
John:
We actually don't know what it's doing there.
John:
But we don't actually know for a fact that this is the exact algorithm, right?
John:
So there's that.
John:
And so people were using this algorithm.
John:
Remember, the job of this algorithm is to try to tell,
John:
if an image matches one of a fixed set of images that's in this database, you know, the NCMEC database, right?
John:
And instead of, the reason we need an algorithm, why don't we just compare it byte for byte, is because it wants to find the image even if it's been modified in some minor way.
John:
Like, oh, it's
John:
tinted a different color or there's like some words over it or you know it's been rotated a little bit or it's black and white instead of color like that's why the algorithm exists to try to say you know here's the fixed set of images we're looking for looking for this exact image not an image of a dog but this exact image of this exact dog right that's what they're looking for but we want to allow for minor variations because we don't want to miss an image just because you know
John:
Someone recompressed it as JPEG again, right?
John:
That's why these acronyms exist and as we said it a couple shows ago the threshold exists Because this algorithm is not exact it uses like whatever, you know What is it a neural hash or whatever?
John:
It's it's guessing it's trying to make a best guess because although humans find it easy to say yeah These are the same picture even though that one's been recompressed as a JPEG at lower quality
John:
It's really easy for humans to figure that out.
John:
Not so easy for computers to do.
John:
So it's making a best guess.
John:
And that's why the threshold exists.
John:
Because if the algorithm was 100% accurate, you'd flag on the first one.
John:
You're not letting people have 28 pictures.
John:
It's because it's not exact.
John:
So let's say, for example, that this neural hash had a 50 percent success rate at identifying images matching a database.
John:
You give it an image and it's like a coin flip.
John:
It's like, well, this image of my dog 50 50.
John:
It could.
John:
This algorithm could think it matches an image in the in the NCMEC CSAM database or it could not.
John:
if you did that, and, you know, remember Apple's, like, document said there's a one in a trillion chance of an account being flagged.
John:
So they're basically saying there's a one in a trillion chance that you, that an account will be falsely flagged, that you will reach the 30 photo limit.
John:
And by the way, I think since last show,
John:
I think Craig Federighi's basically said it was like 30 photos, but that's the number everyone is using, right?
John:
So, you know, it's one in a trillion that you're going to reach the 30 image limit, right?
John:
If the algorithm had a 50-50 chance, is that one in a trillion?
John:
And I did a little math to figure out, like, let's say you have the worst algorithm in the world and it's a 50-50 chance of identifying an image incorrectly.
John:
How many, what would the threshold have to be to get one in a trillion?
John:
And the answer is 40.
John:
right so if you had if this algorithm was awful like 50 50 people would say that's awful like why are you even using this hashing algorithm half the time it gets the answer wrong if you have a threshold of 40 the odds of it getting the answer wrong 40 times in a row exactly 40 times in a row in sequence right and just one after the other is one in a trillion
John:
Now, obviously, Apple algorithm is better than that.
John:
And people have more than 40 images in their collections and they're not sequential.
John:
So that probability calculation is not particularly relevant.
John:
The only reason I bring it up is to show that no matter how bad the neural hash algorithm is, Apple can adjust the threshold
John:
to make sure that even though it might get one or two pictures wrong, the odds of it getting 30 pictures wrong, no, not in a row, but 30 pictures wrong out of an entire collection are what they say it's supposed to be, you know, one in a trillion.
John:
And obviously they did that based on like test data or whatever, and they mentioned that they will adjust it.
John:
As long as the threshold isn't like a thousand or a million pictures, you know, probabilities go, you know, go up pretty quickly as you start requiring more and more coincidences, right?
John:
No matter how bad your algorithm is, right?
John:
So that's the first thing to understand about this is that, you know, anyone who knows anything about hashing or any of these algorithms should know that this is going to have false positives.
John:
That's the reason there's a threshold.
John:
And that's also the reason, as Marco mentioned, that there's human review.
John:
Second thing to know is in terms of trying to make collisions.
John:
People have made collisions with like, Marco said like noise images, like, oh, this, you know, this is a picture of a dog and here's just a gray bunch of noise.
John:
And the algorithm thinks they're the same.
John:
Ha ha, aren't computers dumb?
John:
But it's so easy for a human to see the gray field of noise is not the picture of a dog.
John:
Right.
John:
But people have made other collisions where like here's a picture of a pen and here's a picture of a nail.
John:
And it thinks those are the same picture.
John:
And you can go, OK, I can kind of see that because they're both kind of long, skinny things.
John:
Right.
John:
On a white background.
John:
Right.
John:
Lots of collisions between similar looking pictures, which is kind of this algorithm's job.
John:
It's supposed to find the exact picture.
John:
But if you get them close enough, it can be confused.
John:
So that makes sense, too.
John:
You know, collisions happen, right?
John:
But to sort of weaponize this, what you need to do is not just get two images that collide that have the same neural hash.
John:
What you need to do is get a, you know, a harmless image that neural hash thinks matches one of the CSAM pictures in the NCMEC database.
John:
And to do that, you have to know all of the hashes of the NCMEC images in that database.
John:
And as far as I'm aware, there is no way for you to get those specific hashes.
John:
The things that ship on your phone are derived from those hashes, but are not in fact those hashes.
John:
And here's what Apple had to say in this article from The Verge where they responded to this whole controversy.
John:
This is the Verge writing here.
John:
Apple said its CSAM scanning system is built with collisions in mind, given the known limitations of perceptual hashing algorithms.
John:
In particular, the company emphasized a secondary server-side hashing algorithm separate from neural hash, the specifics of which are not public.
John:
If an image that produces a neural hash collision was flagged by the system, it would be checked against the secondary system and identified as an arrow before reaching the human moderator.
John:
So what I interpret this as to say is that...
John:
All right, so neural hash algorithm is going to ship with your phone and we can run it and we can do all these experimentations with it.
John:
But Apple also has its own different hashing algorithm that they run on the server side.
John:
And so not only would you have to get the hash from the NCMEC database, which I don't think you have access to,
John:
And find an image that matches it.
John:
Because if you had the hash, you could find an image that matches it.
John:
And then get it on someone's phone.
John:
And then that image also needs to fool the other hashing algorithm that they're running, which you don't have access to.
John:
So you have no way to sort of reverse engineer that algorithm or figure out how to fool it or grab it.
John:
So you need to fool two different hashing algorithms.
John:
And then finally, go through human review.
John:
So I think if you wanted to get someone in trouble for having CSAM on their phone, as Marco points out, you could send them CSAM and that would do it, right?
John:
Like there's no trying to fool the system with like a noise image or a picture of a dog or something is way more work.
John:
than just finding actual CSAM on the internet, which is probably the NCMEC database, and shoving it on their phone.
John:
In all cases, you're performing a criminal activity, essentially trying to frame someone for a crime they didn't commit, you know, or whatever.
John:
You're going to try to blackmail them.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Well, I think that in the latter case, it's like you have two felonies instead of one.
John:
Right.
John:
There's all these schemes that are coming up.
John:
Like, you could have someone in a lawless state find an image on the internet that's probably in the NCMEC database and give you the neural hash of it because otherwise you can't get that one.
John:
And then now you have the hash to target and all they send to you is the hash.
John:
Now you're not in the possession of CSAM, so you can find an image that matches that hash and put it on the phone.
John:
But then when it gets to Apple's system, they're going to run a different algorithm on it that you don't have access to and it's not going to match in that case.
John:
So...
John:
This is a fun and interesting thing, and it can freak people out who don't understand, as Marco explained, that the job of a hashing algorithm is to take a large number of inputs and produce a much smaller number of outputs, which necessarily means there have to be collisions, otherwise it's not a hashing algorithm.
John:
And that's why the threshold exists, because there's going to be false positives, and we just have to tune it so that
John:
we need when we have enough or preponderance of evidence the odds of that many false positives happening is very very low and then finally you have human review so i think this story mostly faded because it's too again technical and weird and you know involves security stuff that most people don't care about uh but it is an opportunity to learn about hashing algorithms i suppose and i feel like this part where apple told us about the second server-side hashing algorithm is kind of an example of as far as i'm aware
John:
maybe security through obscurity because did they not tell us about that before and only revealed it now right in other words that they have backstops against abuses yeah the second level i don't think we knew about the second level of the hash right which is i mean it's fine but like i i don't know in one one respect you think why wouldn't you brag about that apple but another respect maybe it makes them more vulnerable to attacks to try to find the second out with them and all sorts of stuff like that i mean they did tell us about the threshold and they could have not told us about that but
John:
Anyway, I feel like transparency with security-related things is probably better than, you know, keeping the secret secondary server-side hashing algorithm from the public.
Casey:
There have been some Safari 15 updates, and actually there is a new developer beta that I believe was released the day we are recording, which I don't think any of us have really looked at yet.
Marco:
I have it installed.
Marco:
I installed it 10 minutes ago.
Casey:
I actually... During the show.
Casey:
Oh, well done.
Casey:
I put the public beta, not the developer beta, but the public beta on my phone about a week ago, maybe a little less.
Casey:
And it seems mostly okay.
Casey:
And there's a couple of minor quirks here and there, but for the most part, it seems fine.
Casey:
And I like the Safari now.
Casey:
I think I would have hated Safari a couple of builds ago, but I like it just fine now.
Casey:
But yeah, so there have been some changes as of beta 6, which is presumably roughly the same public beta that I'm on.
Casey:
Things basically look a bit more normal.
Casey:
The tab bar at the bottom, or it's not a tab bar, I suppose, but the bar at the bottom isn't quite so, the toolbar, thank you, the toolbar at the bottom isn't quite so floaty for the most part.
Casey:
I don't know, it behaves more logically.
Casey:
Perhaps, Marco, you have more to say about this than I. But these are definitely strong improvements that have gotten, so when I installed the public beta, I didn't rage quit my phone, which is a good thing.
Marco:
Yeah, so this shipped last week as part of developer beta 6, this new interface.
Marco:
The one that came out today, I think today's beta 7 or 8?
Casey:
I think it's 7, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, so the one that came out today, it looks like it's pretty similar in most ways.
Marco:
I don't see any major changes yet.
Marco:
But certainly, I've been using the one that came out last week, Beta 6, that finally gave it the big double-height toolbar on the bottom, the option to move the address bar back to the top so you can actually configure it to just be like old Safari was.
Marco:
So finally, I think on the iPhone, they have come up with a decent, good design.
Marco:
Not all parts of it are good.
Marco:
Not all configurations of it, I think, are good.
Marco:
But you can finally choose which one you want.
Marco:
in some ways is a design failure in the sense that they tried something radically new it didn't work and instead of rolling it back completely they're now just offering a bunch of check boxes that you can configure it it's like fine you don't like it make it however you want like you know it's kind of that which is not i mean ideally there would just be one design and it would be good enough that everyone would use it and everyone would understand it but in the absence of that option which for some reason they don't appear to be doing
Marco:
You can actually now configure it in a number of good ways depending on what your preferences are.
Marco:
So now I'm happy with it.
Marco:
I know that's – yeah, it sounds very entitled.
Marco:
But yeah, now I'm happy with it.
Marco:
Like they can ship this.
Marco:
And I think what happened is they tried something radical.
Marco:
It didn't work, and they're running out of time.
Marco:
The way they are, they're rushing to nail things down in these last two betas.
Marco:
The news came out earlier today that iCloud Private Relay is going to actually launch as a beta feature that I believe is going to be off by default at first, and then it'll, I guess, become out of beta sometime later.
Marco:
They're clearly nailing stuff down, getting ready for imminent release.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
you know this beta that came out today might end up being the last beta before the gm probably not i bet there's going to be one more but we are getting very very close to release and so i think they looked at the safari design and were like look this is still on fire we need to make people we need to make something that we can ship to the whole world and not have a massive problem on our hands so now they they fixed it and it's good i have not yet
Marco:
used the terrible Mac and iPad tab redesign, so I don't have anything to say about those.
Marco:
But on the iPhone, the iPhone Safari is now able to be set up in such a way that it's pretty good.
Casey:
I will say with regard to the iPad that I do for the most part have, I enjoy Safari.
Casey:
I don't have any major problems with it except the tabs.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
Like I don't mind the colors bleeding up.
Casey:
Well, you're right.
Casey:
I don't mind the colors bleeding up.
Casey:
Like I don't see it as necessary, but I don't mind it.
Casey:
But the thing I mind is I can never frigging tell which is the active tab.
Casey:
Never, ever, ever, ever can I tell what the active tab is.
Casey:
And that is absolutely infuriating.
John:
Stephen Hackett had a good post on 512pixels.net.
John:
The Safari 15 fight isn't over yet is the title.
John:
And it's talking about Mac Safari.
John:
And so rather than us talking again about all of our complaints about Mac Safari, just read this blog post.
John:
It reiterates all exactly the same things, mostly having to do with the tabs, which no longer make any sense now that they have allowed you to revert the design to be more like the old Safari while still keeping the tabs.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to trying the Safari and the phone one because it's kind of surprising to me that they didn't just stick with the bottom toolbar one because really, like as we've said in many past shows, it was the floating part that was a problem.
John:
And it just doesn't float anymore.
John:
Now it's just a big...
John:
big bar at the bottom right and so that's their design stuff at the bottom and they they found a straightforward way to do it without the weird floating thing that had all sorts of problems i don't think it's particularly attractive but you can swipe from side to side to go through tabs it's closer to the bottom of the phone which is easier to reach for people with big phones you know like we said it has all the benefits of their old design it just gets rid of the terrible parts of it and the giant drop shadow and all the other stuff but then they gave you the option to basically make it like safari 14
John:
which I have no complaints about because I like Safari 14 and I don't find it hard to reach the top of my phone, but it's, it's just so weird that they, that this is the new Apple of like, not only do we iterate on a design and make changes in response to, you know, internal testing feedback, whatever they're making changes in response to, but also we hedge our bets by letting you also change it back to the old way, which is so weird.
John:
Like Safari on the Mac is,
John:
does a worse job of that because safari on the mac lets you change it back to the old way but not really not really the old way you get the the tabs that the tabs that don't make any sense because they look like the new style tabs but they're not they don't change into the address bar so why do they look at the address bar and that's why casey can't tell what the heck they are so yeah the mac there's still work to be done but the mac is on kind of on a different beta cycle than the phone and it's going to be released the mac west is going to be released later anyway so
John:
The Mac still has time, but just FYI, if you thought this was the end of Safari 15, the Safari 15 watch, it probably isn't, at least on the Mac.
Casey:
I'd say that's fair.
Casey:
Possibly the iPad, too.
Marco:
Do you think the reason they keep doing these radical design and then either step it back or make an option to undo it, basically, is that a sign of problems in the flow?
Marco:
Or do you think that's just the maturity of a large company doing large things?
Marco:
In some ways, is this a sign of something being wrong?
Marco:
Or is this a sign of how big these things now are and that they're trying really ambitious things?
John:
I mean, I think it's a sign that... What would stop this from happening is another way of looking at it.
John:
If you think this is... Let's surmise that this is a bad thing.
John:
What does it take to stop this sequence of events from happening?
John:
What you need to stop it from happening is...
John:
somebody with you know better instincts to say no to it and as mentioned we talked about this in the past you really don't want the whole rest of the company to have veto power of what your group is doing like some group is responsible for the ui and safari and that's their job and other people can have opinions but in the end you hire these people to make safari for ios and
John:
And they should be able to do what you hired them to do rather than like, oh, well, we did it.
John:
But someone who's on like the, you know, the mail team thinks it's bad.
John:
So we can't ship it.
John:
Like a big, big wig manager on the mail team says this is a bad interface.
John:
And now we can't.
John:
It's like, no, they're in charge of mail.
John:
They're not in charge of mobile Safari.
John:
Like you have to allow the people you hire to do their jobs.
John:
So the only way to stop something like this from happening is not to have some sort of weird organization where everyone has veto power over everyone else.
John:
Like that's incredibly dysfunctional.
John:
But as you go up the org chart, not laterally, but upwards from the org chart, and it's very difficult to do that in Apple's very flat organization, probably the biggest bigwig who's in charge of like iOS software, like they probably report right up to the CEO.
John:
They did it back in the Steve Jobs days anyway, or like one step away from that.
John:
So there's a very small number of people who properly should have veto power.
John:
And in Apple, there's nobody in those one or two positions above this, whoever has final say in this type of thing, who had good enough instincts or tastes to stop this from shipping and having WWDC sessions about it, I guess, right?
John:
And in the old days, that was Steve Jobs.
John:
And his taste wasn't always good.
John:
He had terrible ideas sometimes.
John:
He shipped things with leather stitching on them.
John:
Like, let's not deify Steve Jobs' taste.
John:
But the fact is, a lot of stuff that didn't make it out the door because the one big wig guy, the CEO, was
John:
Didn't like it.
John:
Would Steve Jobs have stopped this?
John:
I think he would have stopped the floating blob because it's too fidgety.
John:
But lots of other things that we don't like, he wouldn't have stopped because his taste was super weird.
John:
But that's it.
John:
That's the only way you can really stop this from happening.
John:
So I feel like it's not a strategy to say, you know, step one, hire Steve Jobs.
John:
Like, that's not a viable strategy.
John:
And again, it's not even foolproof.
John:
So I would say that this is not the sign of an organization that has any sort of
John:
organizational problems like i think it's structured the right way i think what happened had to happen in this way to be a healthy organization but it is a sign that perhaps some of the people who actually do define and decide what the ui should be for mobile safari have some not great ideas
John:
Not ideas.
John:
Have some not great... It's not the ideas because everyone's like, all ideas are great.
John:
Let's hear it.
John:
Let's try it or whatever.
John:
But their value system, the values that they use to judge whether a thing that they've tried is successful or not, their values don't match well with the values of Apple as a company, I feel like.
John:
Because in the end, that's what it comes down to.
John:
It's not like Apple's customers made them change this, right?
John:
Apple as a company...
John:
the way they decide what feedback they will listen to and what feedback they will ignore, it's Apple's values that determines that.
John:
Because everybody somewhere hates something that Apple does.
John:
No matter what Apple does, you can find a bunch of people who don't like it, right?
John:
But Apple only takes that to heart and acts on it if Apple says, you know what?
John:
This subset of people who don't like this thing, we agree with them.
John:
They're right.
John:
This could be better.
John:
It is worse in ways X, Y, and Z, right?
John:
So I feel like the reason this got out is...
John:
Somewhere there is a mismatch between the value system used to judge the success of the work within the mobile Safari group and the values of Apple as a whole.
Casey:
I don't begrudge Apple trying something.
Casey:
It's so tough because on the one side, we'll tell you like, oh, Apple should try things more and get feedback more and let the outsiders be involved more.
Casey:
Uh, and then in the next breath, we'll tell you, well, what the hell were they thinking?
Casey:
Why did they release this ever?
Casey:
And I think it's possible for both those things to be true, but it's, it's, it's tough, especially with Apple, you know, you, they, they proclaim that their, their stuff is so well designed.
Casey:
It's so well thought out.
Casey:
Remember when they used to say it just works too.
Casey:
That was fun.
Casey:
Um, but nevertheless, it, it, it's,
Casey:
it's a tough thing to figure out internally, much less externally.
Casey:
Like, what do we allow to leak out and when do we allow it to happen?
Casey:
Do we present this perfectly wrapped package and only when it's perfectly wrapped that we will let it out of Apple Park?
Casey:
Or do we show kind of the build process and let people get involved and see what happens?
Casey:
And in this case...
Casey:
I admire them for letting the kind of the world get involved with with, you know, kind of voting on on what they think.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It seems to me like anyone with any amount of taste would have seen that this was a flawed design from the get go.
Casey:
That being said, where it's landed now, I'm pretty happy with like the left, particularly on the phone, the left, right swipey on the bottom is super convenient.
Casey:
I think, Marco, you brought that up a minute ago.
Casey:
uh in in having the address bar at the bottom is great for those of us who don't have miniature phones like marco so no matter how you slice it is it is good hey my miniature phone has a heart too it has feelings it doesn't have battery life but it has feelings you know what else doesn't have battery life my watch my 40 millimeter series 6 whatever it is it's i typically charge it a little bit in the middle of the day but if i don't i know it because holy cow
Marco:
By the way, for the record, I'm down to 89% battery health after about a year on the Mini, which I think is the biggest loss I've ever gotten in a year.
Casey:
I wonder what mine is.
Casey:
Now we're on a tangent of a tangent.
Casey:
Let's all look.
Casey:
Battery, battery health, 90% on my 12 Pro.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
So yeah, you're doing not too much better, 1% better.
Casey:
Not too stellar.
Casey:
Although I will say for better or worse, potentially worse, I do charge using Qi almost exclusively.
Casey:
It's very rare that I charge with anything but Qi.
Casey:
And my gut tells me, although it may be completely wrong, my gut tells me that that is not helping my battery health at all.
Marco:
Keep in mind also, the new phones with modern OSes do that weird thing where they don't even charge all the way until you're going to wake up soon.
Marco:
There's stuff like that that actually is helping.
Marco:
But overall, Qi charging is not great because for preserving the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries, charging them in a hot environment is not great.
Marco:
And Qi adds heat that wouldn't otherwise be there from the inefficiency.
Marco:
It's not great from that point of view, but
Marco:
I don't know how much – like I don't know if we have good information on like how much does Qi versus lightning charging matter in terms of battery lifespan.
Marco:
Like, yes, charging a battery in constant heat is not great, but is that enough to make a difference with that amount of heat over the typical lifespan of a phone versus just its natural degradation or the –
Marco:
the degradation introduced by things like constantly cycling it down a lot every day or fast charging it, which is also probably worse for it because charging it faster and introducing more heat is probably not good either.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of other factors with the way we use our phones these days that I don't know how much Qi actually matters.
Marco:
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Casey:
Something I've been needling on for about a month now is I feel like Apple is fighting a PR war with themselves.
Casey:
Like I'm going to blow through a handful of selections over the last month, month and a half of Apple just doing things that most of the public thinks are gross or wrong or certainly not desirable or what's the Merlinism.
Casey:
They're not wholesome.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And it's been going on kind of a lot recently.
Casey:
And it's really kind of weirding me out that this is consistently happening.
Casey:
I feel like every week there's some new brouhaha about Apple.
Casey:
And yes, of course, most of you will say, well, it's been happening forever.
Casey:
Yeah, I get that.
Casey:
But I feel like a lot of times it'll be somebody saying, oh, you know, Apple's doing this thing that's wrong.
Casey:
Somebody from the outside.
Casey:
Whereas I would argue a lot of this stuff, and I'm going to go through it in a minute,
Casey:
is happening internally and just leaking out into the real world.
Casey:
Or it's Apple making proclamations about how great they are only to have them backfire.
Casey:
And so I'm not terribly interested, unless the two of you are, in going through the particulars about any one of these things.
Casey:
But I'd like to take you through a timeline and start with Thursday, July 15th, when...
Casey:
This is shortly after Apple had announced that they were going to start bringing people back, which they've since backpedaled on.
Casey:
But they said, oh, we're going to bring people back.
Casey:
We're going to do a hybrid model.
Casey:
And off the top of my head, I think it was like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the office, Monday and Friday, you can work from home.
Casey:
And apparently they've been real jerks about it, which is of no great surprise.
Casey:
I've talked to many birdies who are saying that a lot of people are leaving because of it.
Casey:
uh maybe that's hearsay maybe or that is hearsay maybe that's not true but that's what i'm hearing but you know there's a verge article apple employees say the company's cracking down on remote work one employee said in slack that apple even denied their ada american disability act association something like that uh work from home accommodation so even though this person according to the government deserved to work from home apparently apple said tough nuggies if you were to believe them that's thursday july 15th
Casey:
Moving right along, Wednesday, the 4th of August, Apple places a program manager on administrative leave for her request after accusations of a toxic workplace.
Casey:
Again, I'm not really looking to litigate these particular points, but apparently a woman at Apple had, and I don't have her name in front of me, I'm sorry, had some seemingly legitimate complaints about a really toxic workforce.
Casey:
And Apple basically said, eh, no, you're fine.
Casey:
And she said, well, that's kind of bogus.
Casey:
Can we work this out?
Casey:
And apparently they're working it out.
Casey:
That was Wednesday, the 4th of August.
Casey:
Thursday, the 5th of August, CSAM stuff.
Casey:
So literally the next day, the completely bungled rollout of all the CSAM protections and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So that's Thursday, the 5th.
Casey:
Monday, the 9th, Apple shuts down employee run surveys on pay.
Casey:
So Cher Scarlett is an Apple employee and has been trying very, very diligently to get an understanding of whether or not pay is equitable amongst gender, amongst roles, amongst locations, and several other facets.
Casey:
And so Cher was trying to get Apple employees to voluntarily fill out information about what they're making, what their role is, etc.
Casey:
And apparently Apple's been shutting this down more and more and more violently.
Casey:
That was Monday, the 9th of August.
Casey:
The next Monday, the 16th of August.
Casey:
apple forces flick type watch out of the app store so this was a an app that i guess would let you do kind of like a swipey keyboard thing on your watch which unbeknownst to me as so many things are i'm really i need to get better about this but unbeknownst to me apparently this was really important for people that had accessibility needs and so a lot of people would use this keyboard in order to respond to text messages and things like that and
Casey:
uh miguel de casa who is a friend of the show had pointed out that this is one of the things that uh apple had previously touted as being one of their favorite apps in the app store for accessibility well done guys and then uh just a couple of days ago monday the 23rd of august apple employees are now organizing under the banner hashtag apple 2 which is in the spirit of me too
Casey:
So this is what, like six or seven items over the course of a month where something Apple has done, is doing, or didn't do, or whatever is causing like quite the blow up.
Casey:
And I feel like they are just fighting a PR war on themselves.
Casey:
And this is...
Casey:
very, very unlike Apple.
Casey:
And typically they're so quiet.
Casey:
They're so reserved.
Casey:
They only speak when they are sure they have everything right.
Casey:
It's just very, very, very surprising to me.
Casey:
And if you guys don't have thoughts about it, we can just let that one, we can let that marinate and move on.
Casey:
But if either of you guys have anything to add, I'd be very curious to hear what your take is.
John:
I was going to, like, dive into the title that you gave this for the topic, Apple's Fighting a PR War Against Itself, and say, like, what does that actually mean?
John:
What are you trying to say with that title, like, more precisely?
John:
You didn't dig into it in the description, but I think, like, the spirit of it, like, the way I... At first I read it and it made perfect sense, but then I read it again.
John:
I'm like, no, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
But I feel like the spirit of it... Let me try to expand on what I think the spirit of it is, right?
John:
So lots of people, as you noted, but people probably didn't hear, so I'm going to say it again.
John:
They're going to say, people always...
John:
they're criticizing apple it's like they're the biggest company in the world super popular to like of course there's going to be negative stories about apple like that's not new it's been happening the whole life of the company and just as they've gotten more powerful and more popular it just happens even more and more so this is not a trend you're not noticing anything new uh why are you even talking about this there's always negative stories about apple how half the things we do on the show some people will say oh you're always saying negative things about apple what are you talking about on the show like we're you're part of the whole same problem right
John:
But I think what is different about this set of items, or most of the set of items that you've gathered up here, and it connects to the fighting a PR war in itself, is these are stories that
John:
conflict with Apple's image of itself and the image they project to the world.
John:
Very often the negative stories about Apple are something that is negative, perceived to be negative by the world and certainly by whoever is writing the story, but that Apple would consider an asset.
John:
Like...
John:
I don't know, like, I mean, this is kind of fraught because of the antitrust stuff, but like, oh, the App Store.
John:
Why can't I put their, you know, why can't we have third party App Store?
John:
Why does everything have to go through the App Store?
John:
Apple would say, I know you don't like that decision, but we think it's perfectly in keeping with Apple's philosophy of having things be proprietary and having us control them and stuff like that.
John:
why can't i build a pc clone and run mac os on it right people hate that it's a negative story for the you know for literally decades they're like why doesn't apple license the operating system that microsoft is eating their lunch because they insist on making the hardware on the software and they crack down on clone makers negative story after negative story about that but apple would say yeah that's we see that's a negative story but
John:
Our conception of ourself is not threatened by that.
John:
We know that we're not letting you make Mac clones, except for that one time we did, which was a mistake.
John:
We know we're not letting you run Mac OS on cheap generic PC hardware.
John:
That's a strategy.
John:
We're doing that on purpose.
John:
That fits with our image of ourself.
John:
That fits with how we present ourselves to the world.
John:
We build the whole widget.
John:
It's an integrated experience.
John:
It all works together.
John:
We control everything about it, which is why it's nicer than your PC, right?
John:
But these stories, all this stuff, are negative stories that fly pretty much exactly counter to how Apple thinks of itself and to how Apple presents itself to the world.
John:
Apple wants to think of itself and wants to present itself to the world as a company that is fair and equitable to its employees, that it's a good place for anyone to work, that...
John:
It is a place where they are fighting against workplace harassment, discrimination, and so on and so forth.
John:
Apple doesn't say that it's perfect, but Apple tries to hold itself accountable and says, here are the values we believe in, and if we find out something is wrong, we will try to remedy it, and this is what we're shooting for.
John:
But these are stories about Apple doing the opposite and saying, no, we don't want you to do a survey of employees to find out how everybody makes.
John:
Despite the fact that it's against the law for Apple to literally stop that, Apple finds technicality and says, well...
John:
we can't stop you from doing it, but if you do it and involve Apple systems in any way, like if you posted an internal Apple bulletin board, if you use your company, you know, supplied computer to do it, like there's all sorts of these technicalities where Apple can strongly discourage slash squash this, especially if it happens inside the company where Apple can say, we're not breaking the law, but the spirit is you don't want employees to know what all their coworkers are making, right?
John:
because what you're hiding something like it doesn't like that is not in keeping with hey we want to have an equitable workplace where everyone feels welcome and where the pay is fair and so on and so forth right they do all these readouts about how well they're doing and hiring and diversity and all that other stuff but their direct actions counter that right the app store one is you know they're always doing bad app store rejections that is probably in keeping with with apple's image of itself and that yes and not to reject things and it's stupid but uh
John:
um yeah and apple 2 the the harassment stuff the the c sam stuff apple's in we talked about this in many past shows apple's whole thing is we're the privacy company we want to do things for maximum privacy and in this case it's a little bit more nuanced because apple thinks it is doing something that's in keeping with privacy but the world disagrees so that's maybe a slightly different category but still the pr rollout is against apple's normal practice of having a very controlled careful pr message and in this case
John:
setting aside the actual features, the rollout of them, the sort of, you know, how were they presented to the world backfired in a big way.
John:
Like, you know, even if you think the features themselves are fine, the way Apple presented it was not in keeping with Apple's usual image of itself as we know how to communicate.
John:
Like what we, like Apple's, one of Apple's biggest strengths is they choose very carefully what they want to communicate and they make sure that that is the message that gets out.
John:
That, you know, that someone doesn't take what they say and run with it and have a different kind of story.
John:
Like the story that Apple wants to see written is the story that fits with the message they're putting out.
John:
And Apple is so good at that, except for in the case of this stuff, which totally messed it up.
John:
Yeah, so I feel like this is...
John:
I don't know about, or in the same thing with the remote, the work from home thing.
John:
Like again, our could be argued that that's in keeping with Apple's tradition of having everybody work there, but it's, it is against the tradition of trying to be accommodating and welcoming and so on and so forth.
John:
You know, especially like, Oh, all the stories about how Apple is very accommodating during the COVID crisis and everything that's in keeping with Apple's corporate philosophy is extenuating circumstances.
John:
It, you know, we will accommodate for that.
John:
And you could even say, Hey, well,
John:
We have a new policy, even post-COVID, we're going to have a new policy, but it's just, it didn't go far enough.
John:
But yeah, Apple being at war with its employees is not in keeping with the image that presents to the world.
John:
So that, you know, that is just, you know, a bad PR situation.
John:
Like you don't want
John:
the story to be that, you know, all that stuff you say is BS because look at how you act.
John:
You don't want to look hypocritical, right?
John:
You want the image that you present to the world to be supported by everything you do.
John:
And in this case, you know, Apple might feel like that it's losing control of what is coming out of the company, like their culture of secrecy and everything has in the past probably helped with this.
John:
But people feel emboldened to say, look, this is going on in the workplace and we don't think it's right.
John:
And Apple, I dare you to punish slash fire me for telling the world that this is going on.
John:
And Apple's like, okay, we'll take that bet.
John:
We will punish you.
John:
And it just makes them look worse, right?
John:
Yep.
John:
So...
John:
you know obviously the solution here is apple uh either this you know stop doing things that are in conflict with the image you present to the world or change the image you present to the world and i would suggest doing the first one because most of the things apple is doing again smell i think we've come up when we've talked about app store or other things like it smells like there's someone somewhere in the organization who has as their goal to like you know
John:
Like someone thinks it's really bad, for example, for employees to know how much they, all their, their coworkers make.
John:
Right.
John:
And so they're just doing anything they possibly can to stop that from happening without thinking about, is this is, you know, is my goal in keeping with Apple's values?
John:
They just say like, no, like this, this is what I want.
John:
Maybe I work in the HR department and it will hurt my ability to hire and it will, I'll have to rebalance everyone's salary or I don't want the world to know how unfairly the women are being paid in the company.
John:
Like there's reasons why they're doing it.
John:
But something else in the organization should be overriding that they're, you know, sort of localized self-interest in the HR department to say, that's not how we do things at Apple, right?
John:
If they want to organize a survey, A, it's illegal for us to actually stop them.
John:
So why are you even bothering to, like, find all these technicalities, right?
John:
Because they're just going to eventually do it anyway.
John:
They'll put up a Google Sheet and they'll talk about it after work off of Apple scale.
John:
Like, you know, and B...
John:
if someone knows that you've been spending all this time trying to squash this, it just makes us look worse.
John:
Like the bottom line is, do we care about equitable pay or do we not?
John:
And if we do care about it, we should have the guts to say, here's what it's like at Apple right now.
John:
And if it's bad, say, we know it's bad and we're working to improve it in eight ways, X, Y, and Z, which they mostly do with a lot of other stuff.
John:
But then this is, you know, counter to that entire narrative.
John:
So what you don't want is a month like this, where the accumulation of stories slowly convince people that Apple is not the company
John:
that it thinks it is and Apple is not the company that maybe you thought it was.
Casey:
Are we the baddies now?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it is, I will go back to like, yeah, if you're the biggest company in the world, people are always going to be trying to tear you down.
John:
Like I still think in the grand scheme of things, Apple is way better than average on all of these things.
John:
Right.
John:
And a part of the reason these stories gets traction is because we expect so much of Apple and because they're such a pinnacle, you know, they're up on a pedestal.
John:
People want to tear them down and any little thing they do, you're going to yell them out.
John:
But anyone who is,
John:
worked literally any job ever uh you can think of much worse things that have happened to them at their job or they've seen happen in their job or that are systemic across their other giant company that they've worked for that you know make these things look like nothing but you know that's that's the you know it's like marco and his dependencies the beauty and the curse of apple that uh we we hold them to a higher standard because in general they are better
John:
And we're big fans of them, and they want them to do well.
John:
And Apple itself holds itself to a high standard.
John:
That's part of the reason its presentation to the world is to talk about their values and how they're working to improve.
John:
And, you know, like, again, there's room for criticism in all of them, whether it's labor in China or how they deal with China at all or cozying up to Trump at the Mac Pro factory.
John:
Like, there's always things to criticize.
John:
But through it all, I feel like what Apple has tried very hard to hold on to is...
John:
their values of like, this is what Apple stands for.
John:
And though we may fall short, we will acknowledge when we fell short and we will try to do better and make changes.
John:
And seeing Apple actively work against forces within its own company that are trying to improve it, right?
John:
Like say, I'm reporting harassment, take care of the harassment, don't yell at me.
John:
I'm trying to help make the pay more equitable.
John:
Don't stop the survey.
John:
You should be asking for, well, they don't need the results, sorry.
John:
They know what everyone's being paid, but anyway, you should be taking this feedback and acting on it and not trying to, you know, stop me or whatever.
John:
And again, I'm going to set aside the App Store rejections.
John:
We've spoken enough about that.
John:
From our perspective, it's a terrible thing to do to have these arbitrary and bad rejections.
John:
But there's so many of those, and it's so difficult to tell which are the good or which are the bad.
John:
And, you know, that's a...
John:
That's a long running thing that maybe Congress will sort out eventually.
John:
But yeah, I just hope Apple takes all the, kind of like the Safari 15 stuff.
John:
Like sometimes things go badly and you have a bad result, but you can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by saying, we're going to learn from this.
John:
We'll correct our mistakes.
John:
We'll take remedial action.
John:
And the next time we'll do better.
John:
And that's what Apple should do in all of these circumstances.
John:
But the first step is acknowledging that you're making a mistake.
John:
Like, you know, stop doing the things that are bad and then, you know, go through the rest of the process.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
John, I thank you because...
Casey:
I think my thesis was too brief and you did an excellent job of capturing what I was trying to say, which is exactly that, that this is incongruent with my perception of Apple and certainly the perception of Apple I think Apple wants me to have.
Casey:
And that is, in short, what I'm seeing over the last month, which is really too bad.
Casey:
And I agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
So thank you for being the chief summarizer in chief for me.
John:
Actually, one more thing on this, like the we keep talking about Apple, like as if it's this disembodied entity.
John:
But Apple is made up of all of these people.
John:
And the nature of companies is the people are is not made up all those people evenly.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, so there's thousands of employees and you don't average them all together and get Apple.
John:
The CEO counts as a much higher weighting factor.
John:
And then as you go down the org chart, you know, the weighting factors get smaller and smaller and they rank and file people have a much lower weighting factor in the average that is Apple.
John:
But when we talk about Apple's values and living up to its own values or whatever, these employees who are internally agitating to make things better.
John:
are Apple in the same sense that the CEO is Apple.
John:
There's way more of them, but their weighting factor is way, way, way, way, way lower.
John:
And in the end, they have a boss who has a boss who has a boss who tells them what to do and has the power to fire them, right?
John:
So that's the nature of companies.
John:
And so I think when we talk about Apple, like...
John:
These employees pushing back are, in fact, embodying the values of Apple because they make up the values of Apple, like the actual, you know, boots on the ground values of Apple is embodied by its employees.
John:
And in that way, all these stories do reflect...
John:
the mass of Apple living up to its ideals, but these people don't run Apple.
John:
And that's the disappointing.
John:
So when we're talking about Apple, we're talking about the people who are in charge of Apple, not the majority of the employees at Apple, who mostly are like every, you know, Apple employees that I've met are always just great, enthusiastic people with great values who want all the best for everybody else who works at Apple.
John:
And there's just, it doesn't, you know, you put a few people with bad ideas in the wrong place with the wrong motivations, and it can really make the whole company take a wrong turn.
Marco:
I think there also might be deep-rooted structural or cultural issues that are much, much harder to try to fix from anywhere, from the top or from the bottom or from anywhere.
Marco:
Because I think somebody, I think it was on Dubai Friday, famously said that success hides problems.
Marco:
That was also them, right?
Marco:
That follow-up on that?
John:
What?
John:
Are you trying to attribute that to me?
John:
It's Catmull.
Casey:
Wasn't that Catmull?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, Apple's been so successful that it's easy for everyone at the company, you know, at all levels, to get into the mindset of...
Marco:
We know what's best, obviously, because look at how well we're doing.
Marco:
Look at this great stuff we're making.
Marco:
We're really changing the world.
Marco:
We're doing great work.
Marco:
We're making great things.
Marco:
So therefore, we are great, and the way we do things is great.
Marco:
And we've heard over the years many common themes that go something like...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
we we've heard this over and over again over many years this is not new it does seem like apple is like any other big company you have people problems you have incentive problems you have cultural problems and as the company has gotten bigger that hasn't uh you know obviously gotten better it's if anything it's gotten worse um and
Marco:
And I do hear more about like the depth of that chain of command under Tim Cook as opposed to what it was under Steve Jobs.
Marco:
But that also could be attributed to the company's growth during that time.
Marco:
So it's hard to know if it's like, you know, is this the Tim Cook way or is this just as the company got bigger, this happened.
Marco:
But we know that they have problems.
Marco:
We know that there are problematic bosses.
Marco:
There are problematic managers.
Marco:
And we also know that Apple's not super great all the time at recognizing when it isn't the best, recognizing when they've done something that isn't good, that isn't changing the world for the better, that isn't the best it could be.
Marco:
Sometimes it takes them a long time to recognize that.
Marco:
Sometimes their own internal culture seems to prevent them from considering that as even an option.
Marco:
See also America.
Marco:
So it's very hard for them to seemingly to recognize when they have an internal problem or hell, an external problem, like when they have a product problem.
Marco:
It's very hard for them to recognize that sometimes.
Marco:
I hope some of these massive PR blunders they've created for themselves over the last year or so, but especially recently, as Casey has outlined here.
Marco:
I hope maybe this is shining a light on their own cultural problems to the people who matter, the people up top who can maybe start to change some of these incentives or implement better processes for dealing with problems when they arise or change policies in certain ways, change attitudes in certain ways.
Marco:
Because they are a big company like any other.
Marco:
They have problems like any other.
Marco:
They're going to have jerky bosses here and there like any other.
Marco:
And they have to recognize that's going to be a thing that they have to deal with and put systems in place to deal with it better than the way they're dealing with it right now.
Marco:
Because it does seem like that's not as good as it could be.
Marco:
So I hope this has been kind of a wake-up call.
Marco:
Because one other thing regarding the PR tone from Apple recently –
Marco:
It does – we've commented a lot in recent years about how it seems like they misread the room.
Marco:
They put something out there that goes over like a lead balloon, and they seem shocked at this.
Marco:
Like they seem totally caught off guard that the world didn't love something they put out there or something they said as much as they did.
Marco:
And –
Marco:
I think this all is related that, you know, it's, it's all like this company has been so successful for so long and they think everything they do is gold and they, they can't tell when their stuff stinks.
Marco:
And, and that, I hope we see movement in that area.
Marco:
I think we might be slowly seeing them get better at that.
Marco:
Um, but, but I, I do think they, I hope they keep going on that.
Marco:
I hope they keep pushing on that because this has been a problematic area for some time now.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
if Apple keeps telling themselves and if all the managers and chain of command inside of Apple, if they keep telling themselves that they're great, they're going to keep missing problems and they're going to keep putting their foot in their mouths and losing their best people and other problems that are avoidable if they...
Marco:
go in with a little bit more humble attitude and say, you know what, we're not great in all ways here.
Marco:
Let's put better processes in place.
Marco:
Let's start changing some of our attitudes, some of our culture, some of our workplace environment rules and things like that to actually better address this stuff.
John:
Speaking of things changing in recent years,
John:
months and years um one change that i have definitely noticed uh is that employees who are current employees of apple have felt i don't know if they felt more free more of them are speaking publicly while employed at apple which is a thing that almost never happened even about the most trivial things let alone like let me air my internal hr related grievances about apple while i'm still employed at apple and
John:
It was unheard of.
John:
And part of that was, I mean, you just mentioned Steve Jobs as someone at the top with slightly better taste vetoing things.
John:
He was also a massive authoritarian and he would probably fire these people on the spot if he was still alive.
John:
Because, you know, the environment of fear that caused everyone to be silent was not a good thing.
John:
It was, you know, the external effect of that was Apple had very controlled messaging and no one ever said anything.
John:
But internally, like success hides problems.
John:
So does silence.
John:
Silence hides problems too.
John:
So who knows what terrible things could have been going on back in the era where if you said anything on Twitter, if you acknowledge that you were an employee of Apple and said something that got picked up by some news org, it was like, you know, if Steve catches, if that L8 to the point where it comes up to Steve's desk, it would say, can we just fire that person?
John:
And maybe your boss will argue for another really important that the only person who knows how this thing in the kernel works.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe he would grumble.
John:
But obviously, you know, if you're a low level or a new employee, like the idea of being fired for doing something like that is a thing that happens in small startups with tyrants who run them.
John:
And also at various times at one of the biggest tech companies in the world when Steve Jobs was there, because, you know, one of his less less desirable attributes, let's say, was his authoritarian bent about command and control of the company that was his that he was running.
John:
All right.
John:
So the change that has taken place recently is employees are like poking their little heads out of their holes and being like, I'm going to make a tweet about work.
John:
I'm not going to tell you like Apple secret product, not even going to tell you what team I'm on because they still are too afraid to do that.
John:
They won't even like I work at Apple on software.
John:
Right.
John:
But a few of them are coming up and saying, here's.
John:
Something about the workplace at Apple, even just saying a good thing like, oh, I really like at Apple because we have this group and we talk and my manager says this or whatever.
John:
It's like, oh, I can't believe I'm hearing about things that are going on inside Apple from someone who still works there.
John:
Even hearing people, I've been outside Apple for five years and I'm finally ready to tweet about it.
John:
Right.
John:
Even hearing that used to be a big thing.
John:
And then setting aside the people who are like, look, I'm pissed at Apple.
John:
I brought this to HR.
John:
I brought them all this evidence about all this terrible things happening to me.
John:
Here's a screenshot of a message conversation I have with my boss that I sent them.
John:
And Apple said it was fine.
John:
What do you think?
John:
Like, we're all just holding our breath and going, is that person going to be fired tomorrow?
John:
The answer is no, they weren't fired, right?
John:
So how does the culture change at a company?
John:
Obviously, leadership can change it.
John:
But in the absence of that, when leadership is sort of not doing the right thing,
John:
Culture can start to change when people in the rank and file start to air their grievances in public and let these stories get picked up by the press and put pressure on the company.
John:
And yeah, a lot of them are probably going to get fired or sidelined or put on an administrative leave or like the company will find excuses to fire them, do all those terrible things that companies do.
John:
And that will also be a story.
John:
And that's not how Apple should be reacting to this, but I feel like that, you know, essentially brave Apple employees are attempting to change the culture.
John:
And I think they are having some tiny bit of success, uh,
John:
You know, even if it's just in the form of the pressure applied by the press and podcasts to talk about Apple or whatever.
John:
Because when this stuff was going on and we didn't know about it, we could just say, oh, Apple, they're so disciplined.
John:
They have great messaging and look at their products.
John:
It's all wonderful.
John:
Steve Jobs is great.
John:
I'm sure all these same things were going on, you know, years and years ago.
John:
We just didn't hear about them.
John:
And so I would rather hear about them.
John:
And if this is the only way, like, you know...
John:
Like the app store running to the press never helps, except it totally helps.
John:
So now that I'm telling all employees, like risk your job and your livelihood and your future career by, you know, publicly airing all of your grievances about the Apple workplace.
John:
Like, no, you can never ask that of people.
John:
They shouldn't have to do this.
John:
This is what leadership should do.
John:
And to be fair, I think there's lots of great leadership in Apple that is also working in this direction.
John:
But there's enough bad spots in that org chart that Apple is doing some things that are very counter to the values that the vast, vast, vast majority of people at Apple hold.
John:
And that's not a tenable situation.
John:
So kudos to all the Apple employees being brave.
John:
I hope it works out for you.
John:
And, you know, again, I want to acknowledge that like 99% of Apple is amazing and great.
John:
And it only takes just, you know, 1% or less doing the wrong thing in the right positions in the company to really mess things up for everybody else.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Colin writes, are there any tips for organizing an Apple Photos library of about 30,000 photos?
Casey:
The conditions you can put on smart albums don't seem robust enough.
Casey:
Mostly I'm just going through them by hand, deleting and sorting the last 20 years.
Casey:
How can I better zero in on significance?
Casey:
I feel like my completely esoteric bananas approach to this is probably not helpful.
Casey:
So, John, you seem to be the most invested in Apple Photos of the three of us.
Casey:
Tell me, what's the right answer?
John:
my main tip is uh use the favoriting feature the little heart thing right and this is it sounds it's trickier than that because if you just use that feature and you fave every photo you haven't organized anything right so there's a ratio in other words or if you if you fave one out of every 10 000 photos then you have three faves and that doesn't help you either right so you have to sort of find calibrate your fate your sense of faveness
John:
And what you want to do is basically I should look at the math to see what ratio, you know, what is my favorite ratio?
John:
Is it one out of every 10, one of every 100, every 50?
John:
But like you want to you want to be honest and say, is this a picture that I would consider printing, putting in a frame that I'd want to see in a screensaver?
John:
Like, is it a good photo?
John:
Right.
John:
And if you're honest with yourself, you don't have that many of those.
John:
You got a thousand pictures of your kids, but what are your favorite ones, right?
John:
And so I would say, I mean, if you really want to do this, and this is the question from Colin, I want to organize my 30,000 photos, you're going to have to go through all 30,000 and save the good ones.
John:
And when you're done with that incredible laborious process, because you're starting behind 30,000, right?
John:
Then you click on the little favorites thing in the sidebar.
John:
Suddenly your 30,000 photo collection becomes a thousand photos, let's say.
John:
right and a thousand photos all of which are really good now you're getting somewhere you can put those in random play in your screensaver right you can when you want to find a good picture of your kid when they were five click on favorites first scroll backwards to the year they were five you're looking at 30 pictures right you're looking at a screen full of pictures
John:
that's the way to do it and you know the number one tool like that's not the only tool but that is the easiest and the most important one and that also means every time you import pictures from now on you fave the good ones it's just an ongoing process and i'm going through 30 000 is going to seem like a lot it's not that bad you consider it like picking right you obviously you can delete the ones that are blurry or terrible or out of focus you know or like badly framed or whatever but
John:
Fave the really good ones.
John:
I'm not saying you have to edit the really good ones.
John:
You have to do any of them.
John:
Just fave them.
John:
That is the most important.
John:
And then beyond that, you can organize them into albums, put tags on them, use the face recognition.
John:
There's lots and lots of stuff you can do before that.
John:
But that's my number one tip.
Casey:
Marco, any thoughts?
Marco:
Nope, I don't organize my photo library at all.
Casey:
Yeah, for me, it's just by date.
Casey:
And I am trying to be somewhat diligent about the people feature in Apple Photos and making sure that the photos that are claimed to be Declan, for example, are actually Declan.
Casey:
But yeah, I view everything, almost everything I view on the file system by date and in Apple Photos by either date or by location.
Casey:
So I'm pretty useless in this capacity.
Casey:
Sorry, Colin.
Casey:
Sam writes, how does one Google for specific tech problems without receiving incredibly vague and unrelated answers?
Casey:
I'm sure you've all faced this at some point.
Casey:
Search engines will always push the most generic catch-all articles because that's what gets the most clicks.
Casey:
I don't have any good recipes for this either, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I'm assuming that John does.
Casey:
Oftentimes, I'll just blast through the first few results knowing full well that they're going to be shovelware.
Casey:
And then after page two or three, I'll finally find the thing that's useful.
Casey:
But John, you probably have some science that you can perform here.
John:
The sort of failure modes are familiar for anyone who's ever tried to Google for like best refrigerator.
John:
You know it's just spam links where people just make web pages by copying and pasting data from other things so they come up as the number 1 through 100 results on best insert name of product.
John:
That's the one noise problem.
John:
The other one is I'm having a technical problem.
John:
No one's doing SEO to get this but I don't know what to type to describe it.
John:
Computer won't work.
John:
Screen frozen.
John:
Those are not going to get you anywhere because it's too generic and people have been having those problems forever.
John:
And it's a sign that you don't know enough about what's going on to formulate a good question.
John:
So there's two strategies that I want to recommend.
John:
The first is the sort of if you're a tech nerd, you probably this probably won't occur to you because it seems like it shouldn't work.
John:
And it's like the wrong way to do things.
John:
But I'm here to tell you that you need to go against your instincts and try this, which is.
John:
type out like you know it's kind of like rubber ducking pretend someone came into the room and said hey what's the problem and you had to explain it to them whatever you would say to them type that into the google search box you're like but i'm gonna say seven sentences then you want me to type that whole big thing into the search box yeah type you know i was running adobe photoshop and every time i click on the bucket tool uh you know it makes a beeping noise and then the screen turns blue and i can't get it to stop
John:
every single word I just said, put that into the Google search box.
John:
And you're like, there's no way that's going to work.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
It's all that, like, that's just the way I phrased it in a sentence.
John:
And it's not, you know, I'm not looking for those words.
John:
And what if someone described the problem where they use different words?
John:
Just try it.
John:
The way this works best, obviously, is for non-computer stuff where you say, that person with the brown hair who's been in the movie with, you know, with Tom Cruise, but wasn't his co-star, but it was a different romantic interest.
John:
Type all that into the Google search box.
John:
Google does amazing things for that.
John:
Like, you can, again, when you're at, like...
John:
someone's at a table like, who's in that movie?
John:
And people are trying to do these three-word Google queries.
John:
Just record what they said and put it into the Google.
John:
It works great for celebrities, but for computer stuff, it can sometimes work.
John:
That's strategy number one.
John:
Strategy number two, try to fix it yourself until you get an error message.
John:
Copy and paste the error message into Google.
John:
because that's the secret of tech support and tech nerds the secret of all programming really in the modern era is try it just try something eventually something won't work and hopefully you'll get an error message and you hope against hope that that error message has enough uniqueness in it not too much uniqueness because you don't want like process ids or dates or other stuff right but just enough uniqueness and put the yes put the error message in double quotes maybe you'll get zero results then sort of narrow the double quotes down
John:
to just sort of the meat of the thing until you start getting results.
John:
Those are the main strategies I would employ.
John:
This is never going to work rubber ducking technique, and try it yourself, find an error message, put it in double quotes, and narrow the double quotes.
Marco:
Yeah, it's useful to know that for most, at least on the Mac, most error messages have selectable text these days.
Marco:
So you can actually select the text and paste it right into Google if you want.
Marco:
But yeah, this is a problem trying to find...
Marco:
any information on the web can be pretty difficult these days because there's just so much spam and algorithmically generated garbage and affiliate marketing sites and stuff.
Marco:
It's really hard.
Marco:
But I think this is the skill we've been training our entire lives building up.
Marco:
As the web has gotten more and more filled with crap, I think the answer is...
Marco:
You know that you're going to wade through a bunch of crap.
Marco:
You mentally prepare yourself.
Marco:
Like, all right, fine.
Marco:
I'm going to type in this terrible query into Google.
Marco:
I know I'm going to go through many pages of garbage trying to refine what I'm looking for.
Marco:
You will eventually find it.
Marco:
And it can feel like a long time when you have to do three or four searches to finally narrow in on what you're looking for.
Marco:
But in the reality, you're probably going to have your answer in 45 seconds.
Marco:
you know or something like that um certainly certain areas are are worse than others i agree with you know what john said about like if you're looking for like product recommendations uh that's just garbage like the reason why wire cutter is so popular is not because they necessarily always have great picks i you know i disagree with many of their picks it's because there's pretty much nowhere else trustworthy to go
Marco:
It's really hard to look anywhere else for anything.
John:
That's why when I Google for things now, I type Wirecutter Best Blender.
John:
I don't type Best Blender.
John:
Best Blender is a wasteland.
John:
Wirecutter Best Blender is just a convenient way for me to get to Wirecutter's latest Blender ratings, which I could just go to Wirecutter.com and click around, but Google makes it faster to type Wirecutter Best Blender.
John:
It's the same reason I type, you know, Tom Cruise movies Wikipedia, because I don't want results from anywhere else.
John:
So I just put the word Wikipedia in the title.
John:
And yes, I know I could just do W space with my little shortcut that goes right to the Wikipedia search or whatever.
John:
But like,
John:
that's that's i guess a third strategy if you know more or less somebody has probably has the answer to this you can just put the word in the query like wikipedia or wire cutter if you really want to get techie out you know a site colon and the url but like i don't even think you need to go that far right
John:
sometimes you you kind of know where you'd like to find this answer and you could look there first like you don't have to go as far as the right like stack overflow can't use undefined value as hash reference right you don't have to type stack overflow because they're usually number one in the search results without the word in there but wire cutter isn't you type best blender forget it
Marco:
And with tech stuff like Stack Overflow, it's useful, I'm sure many of you out there have noticed that whenever you search for anything that is vaguely coding related or anything that would be represented on a Stack Exchange site, some of them aren't coding related, some of them are like system admin stuff or just to help with your Mac or whatever.
Marco:
And you've probably noticed that when you search for anything that has those results, you might find the Stack Exchange site in the top few results.
Marco:
but you will also find seven or eight sites that might even rank above it that are all just ripping off Stack Overflow content and republishing it.
Marco:
Or you find some... You search for like, hey, how do I do this thing on my Linux server?
Marco:
Or what does this weird error message from MySQL mean?
Marco:
And you'll find...
Marco:
17 different reproductions of the same forum thread with different ads injected into each one for all these different sites that all are claiming to be independent and original.
Marco:
But of course, you can tell they're all just scraping whatever the heck the same original source was, whether it was Stack Overflow or something else.
Marco:
And you just kind of, you know, as modern internet searchers, you just kind of learn to spot this kind of stuff, and you start realizing things like, which I was saying, like, if this is the kind of answer that I already know a pretty trustworthy source will probably have, I will just search for their answer, which, again...
Marco:
This is not a great place for the world to be, but it's the place we have.
Marco:
So you start realizing, okay, well, for these kind of things, I'll add Stack Overflow to the query.
Marco:
So I just go right there.
Marco:
For these kind of things, I'll add Wirecutter or whatever.
Marco:
That's the world we're in.
John:
This, incidentally, is a good way to judge the health of your website.
John:
Someone mentioned IMDb in the chat.
John:
IMDb is ostensibly the internet movie database.
John:
But every time I want to know something about a movie, I type, you know, a list of Steven Spielberg movies Wikipedia.
John:
Or I type the title of the movie Wikipedia.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because IMDb is impossible for me to find.
John:
I want to find out what year was this release and who was the director.
John:
Wikipedia has that info.
John:
Boom.
John:
One second.
John:
It's right there in my face.
John:
IMDb can't find it for the life of me.
John:
And then it wants me to log in and get pro.
John:
And it's like, forget it.
John:
So IMDb is failing.
John:
You can tell it's failing.
John:
And even if it was number one search results, like type in the title of the movie, like I just, you know, that's not that I keep promoting Wikipedia because I own problems with it or whatever.
John:
But like, you know, the information architecture of your website is bad if people are actively avoiding it, even though it should be, quote unquote, should be the number one Google hit.
Casey:
Finally, Mark Slutsky writes, do I ever need to update Java?
Casey:
Every time this window comes up, I dismiss it.
Casey:
I've been doing so for years now.
Casey:
Nothing bad ever seems to happen.
Casey:
But am I wrong to do so?
Casey:
Man, I forgot Java was a thing, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I cannot remember the last time I've had a full-bore Java installation on any of my computers.
Casey:
It's been, I think, longer since I've had a full-bore Windows VM on one of my computers.
John:
So this is a screenshot of I think the Apple software update dialogue Apple used to ship Java with his computers and eventually it was available as a separate download But once you installed it from Apple like you'd get updates to it and eventually just you know Apple stopped supplying it I don't think they support it all anymore.
John:
I don't even know what stated up But this looks like the Apple update dialogue and one of the reasons I put this question in here is
John:
In recent years, because I have the non-Apple version of Java at work because I actually needed it for work many, many years ago, right?
John:
In recent years, the current owners of Java, I think it's Oracle, right?
John:
Have changed their, like, always running updater thing in a way that, in an unprecedented way.
John:
I've never seen this before.
John:
So on my work computer, when the dialog comes up, like the Oracle Java updater thing...
John:
It doesn't say to me, you know, you're running this version and this is a visualization version.
John:
Do you want to update or whatever?
John:
Like the Apple one has like skip this version, remind me later, install update.
John:
So this is, you know, the regular Apple dialogue.
John:
The Oracle, whatever dialogue comes up and it's some weird janky non-native UI, of course, right?
John:
And what it says to me is your computer is running something like this, not exact word, but your computer is running Java, but you haven't used Java in over two years.
John:
Do you want to uninstall Java?
John:
We don't recommend you keep it installed if you're not using it.
John:
That's what the dialog box says.
John:
That's the first party one?
John:
Yes, the first thing it does is says, hey, it looks like you haven't used Java in a while.
John:
We recommend that you uninstall it.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
Which is unprecedented.
John:
Like even Adobe Flash didn't offer to uninstall itself until it was literally no longer supported at all, right?
John:
like java is still supported it's still a thing it's not like java is dead right it's a very popular language used all the time now i haven't used java on my mac for many years and the the updater knows that and it's not just like the default action it's the first thing it wants me to do it says you should and like it recommends it it says you should uninstall it if you're not using it and it's fascinating so anyway my answer for mark is
John:
if you're not using java even though this thing doesn't say that like uninstall it right like you know go go to skip this version or whatever its problem is right if you are using java update it those are your two choices because if let's say you're not it was like what if i need java later you can always get java again it's not going anywhere right
John:
But if you're not using it, this dialog box doesn't say whether or not you're using it, right?
John:
But if you're not using Java, get rid of it.
John:
Like find the Java uninstaller.
John:
I know this is difficult with Apple stuff because they don't provide uninstallers and there's no option to uninstall on this thing.
John:
But you can, again, using your new Google skills that you learned, how to uninstall Java for Mac OS, right?
John:
And you will find, and again, look at the dates and the results.
John:
You will eventually find a way to do it or a link to an installer, Mac OS Java uninstaller, Mac Java uninstaller.
John:
You'll narrow it down pretty quickly.
John:
get rid of it don't worry if you ever need it again like you can always reinstall it um so that's my advice yeah i would say don't even decide whether you actually use it or not just uninstall it and see if anything breaks and if anything does break reinstall it yeah it's not dangerous or anything like official as long as it's not actual malware it's real java job is fine like you know it's a thing sometimes you might need to run a java application it's perfectly fine it's not you know like i said the
John:
which is generally considered to be an evil company their installers the ones offering to uninstall it so i think they're trying to do the right thing like they don't want you to have an old version of java that you never use on your computer because if it suddenly becomes an avenue for an exploit that reflects badly on oracle i suppose so they're they're saying we the default choice should be a recommendation that you uninstall this offer because it's clearly you're not using it
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Linode, and MadeIn.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So I went to a Phish concert.
Casey:
This is extremely exciting to me.
Marco:
And only you.
Casey:
Well, I tell you what, I am excited about this.
Casey:
I remember talking to you.
Casey:
I thought on the show about how... I'm talking years ago.
Casey:
You went to one years and years and years ago, and you hated it, and we were talking about it years ago.
Casey:
You hated it, you thought it was bad, you didn't enjoy it, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And then you told us, I think...
Casey:
I don't even think it was in the bootleg.
Casey:
I think it was privately you had said, hey, I'm going to this Phish concert.
Casey:
Did you say it publicly?
Marco:
I said it on, I think it was the bootleg.
Marco:
I don't think it was in the final show.
Casey:
Anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But one way or another, you said, hey, I'm going to this Phish concert.
Casey:
And I was stupefied because the last time we had spoken about it, it sounded like it was a never again sort of scenario.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I really miss live music, whether or not anyone listening agrees with my taste in music.
Casey:
And I would assume most of you do not.
Casey:
I really, really love live music.
Casey:
And even in the before times, it had been a while since I'd been to a concert.
Casey:
But I am very excited, even though I'm not a particularly large Phish fan.
Casey:
In fact, I don't particularly like Phish very much.
Casey:
I am super excited to hear your report on how it was going to a concert at all.
Casey:
and especially in these oh so unprecedented times.
Casey:
So where did you go?
Casey:
What did you see?
Casey:
Well, you obviously saw fish, but like, what happened, man?
Marco:
So I mentioned a few months back that, like when we were talking about COVID, you know, a few months back, and I mentioned how like,
Marco:
I thought it would be really cool to go to one of the first Phish concerts, even possibly the first one after COVID, to just kind of feel that energy to kind of celebrate the end of COVID and to feel... I figured it would be a very culturally significant moment, at least for my culture as a Phish fan, but just to kind of feel that after COVID.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
In practice, COVID isn't over, and it kind of will probably never be over.
Marco:
I think most of the evidence suggests an endemic future, not the end of a pandemic, but now it's going to be one of these viruses that just is like the flu and cold, that it just kind of goes around, and we try to...
Marco:
Get shots for here and there and whatever.
Marco:
But anyway, that's for another night.
Marco:
But, you know, COVID isn't over.
Marco:
It didn't didn't end.
Marco:
But live music is starting back up, you know, in responsible ways.
Marco:
And when I first said that, I was kind of like on the fence of whether I should go because the first scheduled concerts were just going to be like whatever was supposed to happen in 2020.
Marco:
They just changed the year 2021.
Marco:
And so it was going to it was going to start like in June or July.
Marco:
And a lot of the venues they had booked were on the other side of the country.
Marco:
And a lot of them are like indoor, like, you know, basketball stadiums and stuff.
Marco:
And so the last time I went to a concert was at Madison Square Garden in New York, which is an indoor basketball stadium.
Marco:
And I just – I really – I didn't like a lot of the environment of it.
Marco:
I didn't like the massive amount of smoke that collects at the top of stadiums when you have concerts there.
Marco:
I didn't have a very good view of the stage or any of the screens because I kind of got like a last-minute ticket from a friend.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I didn't know what to do.
Marco:
And that was 2009, so that was a long time ago.
Marco:
But I had decided after that, like, you know, I don't know if this is actually for me.
Marco:
And so I didn't go to any more shows after that.
Marco:
But because I wanted to have this kind of like, you know, quote, end of COVID celebration or to feel that cultural moment, I started looking, all right, what about doing one of these shows this summer?
Marco:
And they actually changed the tour before it started.
Marco:
They revamped the dates and the venues to be all outside venues.
Marco:
And much more of it was happening on the East Coast.
Marco:
So this changed.
Marco:
This went from a, oh, I don't know if I want to fly across the country to go to a basketball stadium into, oh, they're playing in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which is only a couple hours drive from here.
Marco:
on a beach.
Marco:
So I'm like, okay, now you have my attention.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
And so sure enough, I found a friend who would tolerate the band and we went...
Casey:
Clearly it was not me.
Marco:
No, it was not you.
Casey:
Although, actually, all kidding aside, I would have, like, in very different circumstances, I absolutely would have gone just to experience it.
Casey:
As much as I joke and as much as I give you a hard time, I would, in a different set of circumstances, I would have gone.
Casey:
I bet you I would have liked it, but that's neither here nor there.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, you might have had to inhale a lot of the smoke that was there in order to like it.
Marco:
I wouldn't have gone and it wouldn't have been because of the music.
Marco:
So on that note, keep in mind, this is on a beach with a breeze.
Marco:
So you would expect you wouldn't really notice much smoke happening on a beach with a breeze.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It was so smoky.
Marco:
Like the whole audience was just it was it was like a smoke emitter in a game.
Marco:
Like he's just the constant upward draft of smoke.
Marco:
And I never saw or smelled a single cigarette.
Marco:
none of it was cigarette smoke as far as i can tell literally none of it was cigarettes so that that was kind of a funny detail like it was so it there was so much smoke that like i was so i i took a friend's um advice and uh and bought like a a nice ticket they had like this vip area you could spend a little bit more on the ticket and you had like
Marco:
A little tent that you could watch it from, like kind of off to the side, but still pretty close.
Marco:
Had like, you know, much easier access to the bathrooms, had little snacks and drinks available and stuff like that.
Marco:
So other good thing about this was that it was less densely packed.
Marco:
You know, like in the general admission, you know, giant beach area, everyone's standing pretty close together.
Marco:
And, you know, in part to minimize COVID risk and in part just because I'm a boring old adult, I wanted that.
Marco:
I wanted the more like, you know, spread out, you know, boring adult version.
Marco:
So I did get the VIP ticket, and that was totally worth it.
Marco:
I'm so happy I did that because the VIP area was much more like my scene as the boring old person.
Marco:
And I was not the oldest person in the VIP section by a mile.
Marco:
I kind of felt like, oh, these are my people.
Marco:
Okay, good.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
it was really an incredible experience, you know, on a number of fronts, you know, obviously, you know, all the, all the massive clouds of smoke were funny and it was, it was interesting noting how like the, you know, the, the fish crowd being very much, this is very much a weed band.
Marco:
This is like, this is different bands have different crowd energies and attitudes and, you know, problems or, or, or benefits and,
Marco:
Certain bands, they're known for having really rowdy crowds that might have a lot of violence problems.
Marco:
You need more security to keep everything safe.
Marco:
Phish is not one of those bands.
Marco:
Everyone is so high and so chill.
Marco:
I noticed when people would walk by you and bump into you,
Marco:
they'd be like, oh, I'm so sorry.
Marco:
Like they're, hey man, I'm so sorry.
Marco:
Like they were so chill.
Marco:
Like nobody was like getting all aggro or upset at anybody else.
Marco:
Like it was just really nice.
Marco:
And so it was great.
Marco:
You know, the music was, it was a pretty good show.
Marco:
I got a couple of really of my favorite songs in there.
Marco:
But ultimately what I, what was really the big, the biggest value to me in this show was
Marco:
And if you'll permit me, you know, you guys each have feelings podcasts.
Marco:
I don't, so I'm going to, you know, this is going to have to go here.
Marco:
That's top four.
Marco:
That's not a feelings podcast.
Marco:
Your feelings about Pop-Tarts.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
All kidding aside, I know we make fun of my liking of Phish on the show because it's funny and I get that.
Marco:
But it is certainly not good for someone's psyche overall if nowhere in your life does anybody think that the thing you like is normal?
Marco:
And I'm sure many of us out there being computer nerds, especially growing up in earlier decades as computer nerds, I'm sure you understand.
Marco:
when the thing that you're into or that you identify with or that resonates with you, when everyone else thinks that's weird, when you're like the only person in the room, whoever likes the band you like that, that weighs on someone, you know, it's, it's a significant thing when your own wife can't tolerate the music.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
She can't, she tries bless her.
Marco:
She, she tries, but she can't and it's fine.
Marco:
So yeah,
Marco:
it was especially soul-mending to be in this place where my music, that normally I have to confine to headphones because it's too embarrassing and everyone else thinks it's too weird, my music was being blasted in the greatest possible way in this giant public area in this pretty big city full of tons of people, many of which were at the concert.
Marco:
So that's A, my music is being blasted aloud.
Marco:
B,
Marco:
I am looking at thousands of people in front of me, real people who, by nature of being there, most of whom don't think my music is weird.
Marco:
And that really meant something.
Marco:
I really felt that.
Marco:
And so that was very helpful.
Marco:
And then finally, I had this moment where, again, I think many of our audience can probably relate to maybe not being super comfortable with dancing, but
Marco:
i'm guessing there's a lot of overlap between programmers that's a texas size 10-4 yeah between you know programmers and computer nerds and people who don't feel comfortable dancing very much um so that's that's certainly me uh
Marco:
And I, one of the reasons why I'm, I hesitate to go to concerts is that I don't really know what to do when I'm at a concert.
Marco:
Cause I can't dance.
Marco:
I don't want to dance.
Marco:
I like, I just can't, I don't want to have, have that awkwardness, you know, of like trying to like being pressured to like do something and being the weird guy, just standing there or like, you know, weirdly moving my foot or something, you know?
Marco:
So that was, I was concerned a little bit about that going into this.
Marco:
So yeah,
Marco:
About halfway through the concert, I looked around and I realized two things.
Marco:
Number one, I had been moving slightly in my incredibly awkward, nerdy way to this music that is very hard to dance to.
Marco:
But I looked around the crowd and I saw every single other person was as bad at whatever the heck we were doing called dancing as I was.
Marco:
There were thousands, thousands of people who were...
Marco:
Exactly as weird and awkward and bad at this as I was.
Marco:
And it just is an incredible feeling to feel normal.
Marco:
Like in this way that you always thought you were weird, to have a place where you can feel normal and to feel fit in in a way that you never fit in, that was worth everything.
Marco:
So that, I'm incredibly happy I went to this for many reasons, but I got a surprising amount of, like, sole repair out of it.
Marco:
And that was worth everything.
Marco:
And you didn't get COVID.
Marco:
And I didn't get COVID.
John:
Yay!
Marco:
I got tested before and after.
Marco:
Yes, did not get COVID.
Marco:
So that helped a lot.
Marco:
But yeah, it was worth driving through New Jersey.
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
did you take any good pictures uh yeah i have a couple like video clips it was mostly like you know just kind of like me like you know panning across the crowd from my from my vantage point just like i just want to see like what the stage setup was now you've kind of described it and throw a couple on the slack so i can see
Marco:
yeah let me see i will but yeah it's like the vip tent was kind of like it was like it was near the front but off to the side which and it was good because i was actually standing up on the top of a platform like i was basically standing at the top of a staircase that that brings you like from the vip platform which was like a few feet up down and so i was looking over the crowd by a few feet instead of being down you know so i had a fantastic view of
John:
I was going to use the analogy that what you're describing is kind of like going to Macworld Expo back when Apple was doomed, right?
John:
Because you'd finally find people who like the weird computer you did.
John:
But someone in the chat had an even better example.
John:
Even better example because it's even more narrow interest.
John:
They described it as being kind of like going to an ATP live show.
John:
You listen to this weird podcast where they talk about technology and complain about Apple for two hours every week.
John:
And you're like the only person in your entire group of friends who even knows that this podcast exists, let alone listens to it.
John:
And then finally, you go to WWDC and suddenly you're a bunch of nerds who are into the same thing as you.
John:
And then you go to the ATP live show at WWDC and now you're with the tiny subset of a subset of a subset of people who actually like this weird podcast.
Casey:
That is extremely kind of a Who PhD to say.
Casey:
And, you know, Marco, as much as I genuinely love just beating you up mercilessly about fish, I am extremely, extremely pleased and really happy that you had this experience because I don't have...
Casey:
Exactly one to one feelings when I go to see a live show, but I get the same net joy.
Casey:
Like my joy comes from different places is a better way of phrasing it.
Casey:
My joy comes from different places, but I have that unbelievable joy when I go to a concert.
Casey:
Almost anything, even shows where I'm only mildly interested in the artist that's performing.
Casey:
I get such immense joy out of seeing music performed live.
Casey:
I think partly because I am so incredibly inept at performing anything that even vaguely resembles music.
Casey:
And so I just find it to be fascinating and incredibly impressive that any human being can make sounds that actually sound decent.
Casey:
But just to experience that and to have that feeling of we're all in this together in the best possible way and we're all having fun together.
Casey:
And yeah, you know, like the only time you'll find me dancing is at a concert or if I've had way too much to drink, which hasn't happened in a long time.
Casey:
So, yeah, I agree with you there.
Casey:
In so many ways, this you're feeling and the joy that's exuding from you is so much the way I feel.
Casey:
And I'm so very genuinely glad that you had the opportunity to do that.
Casey:
So do you think you're going to try to make this again like covid issues notwithstanding?
Casey:
Are you going to try to make this something that you do more often?
Marco:
I think I'm going to keep a much closer look on where they are performing.
Marco:
What kind of venue are they performing at?
Marco:
With this, I realize quite how awesome a beach venue is.
Marco:
I've never seen a concert on a beach before this, so it really is quite something to see.
Marco:
I would like to go maybe once a year or once every couple of years if they are playing at a really nice venue.
Marco:
And especially if they do one of those VIP areas again because that greatly added to the practicality and ease of me going to this concert.
Marco:
It's pretty good when you're a nearly 40-year-old boring guy to buy the seat where when you have to go to the bathroom, you can just walk 30 feet over and you get the air-conditioned port-a-potty.
Marco:
it's really it's a very different experience than than what concerts usually are for most people so yeah certainly if they offer this kind of thing again this is actually one of the first times they've had one of those vip areas um but if they offer this kind of thing again i would jump on it and especially in a venue like this where it's it's easy for me to get in and out of it and you know like travel time isn't too bad and it's a beautiful place you know with an a nice outdoor you know scenario i i would i would definitely jump on that in the future
Bye.
John:
Last big concert I went to, I held my pee the whole time.
John:
It's a young person's game.
Marco:
I was looking at some... There was some forum post back when... When the tickets first went for sale, I was trying to research what the different ticket types meant.
Marco:
And of course, it's all these fish fan forums and stuff that you get all these results from.
Marco:
Speaking of Googling for answers.
Marco:
And one guy was complaining... He was asking, hey, how do you guys go to the bathroom at the shows?
Marco:
What do you do for that?
And...
Marco:
And this one response was just smoke a blunt and eat a block of cheese.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So nothing has to come out.
Marco:
I don't think that works for P.
Marco:
Well, as opposed to drinking, though.
Marco:
If you're drinking a lot, then... Goodness.
Casey:
Well, like I said, I'm very glad that you had the opportunity, that you did it, that it seems to have gone well.
Casey:
If COVID ever gets to the point that we're okay with it, and if there's ever a time that fish is somewhere in between us, I would genuinely entertain making a trip and meeting up with you and going just to experience it.
Casey:
Because...
Casey:
I know when I see a Dave Matthews concert, which I haven't done in a couple of years, the smoke smell is strong, but I've got to imagine it is not even an iota compared to what it's like at a Phish concert.
Casey:
I cannot fathom what that was like.
Marco:
Well, and especially because like the...
Marco:
The email that you get with what's allowed in, what kind of bag you can bring in and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's a whole section of it that's like no outside alcohol being able to brought in, no illicit substances.
Marco:
And it's like, okay, fish is a lot of drug culture among the audience especially.
Marco:
Obviously, there's going to be a lot of stuff going on in there, and I think that's kind of like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge thing.
Marco:
But then I realized afterwards, like, wait a minute.
Marco:
weed's legal in new jersey so that's not an illicit substance in this venue actually marco everything is legal in new jersey well yeah except like you know good road design um but i realized afterwards like oh that's why like normally at a fish concert nobody would really care but here they especially didn't care and i think that's why it was so incredibly like everyone just massive cloud of smoke above the whole audience the whole time
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
So for what it's worth, I thought we were going to talk about this last week.
Casey:
We didn't end up having the chance.
Casey:
But I took a look at the set list from your concert and the set list from the most recent Dave Matthews concert for which I could find the time that each song took.
Casey:
And I made a list in Solver of here's how long each of the Phish songs was, and then here's how long each of the Dave Matthews songs were.
Casey:
And I computed the average length of a song at your Phish concert versus a mostly arbitrary but also recent Dave Matthews concert.
Casey:
Would you like to wager a guess, either of those numbers or perhaps the difference between them?
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, I don't know how much the length of songs matters because it's like, well, you know, it's a jam band.
Marco:
It's kind of like one continuous thing in certain ways.
Marco:
Like there are breaks, but sometimes songs bleed into each other or they kind of like call back to earlier songs.
Marco:
So I think what matters most is like how long is the concert in total?
Marco:
In this case, it's three hours and there was a break in the middle.
Marco:
So I think that's...
Marco:
it's less about song boundaries however to actually play along with your game i'm going to i'm going to guess that the average between the two bands actually is not that different uh even though there were some pretty long ones in this in this show um but i'm gonna guess the average for this show for fish was probably something along the lines of like seven or eight minutes and i'm guessing the average for dave matthews is probably about five minutes
Casey:
The longest, again, I'm picking these two concerts mostly arbitrarily.
Casey:
I'm looking at the 7th of August for Dave Matthews.
Casey:
The longest performance or the longest song was 17 minutes, 55 seconds.
Casey:
Total time for the entire Dave Matthews show, 2 hours, 49 minutes, 46 seconds.
Casey:
To come back to my actual question, in your guesses, you said what, 7 or 8 for Phish was your guess?
Marco:
Yeah, for average song length, yeah.
Casey:
8.97 minutes.
Casey:
So I will give you full credit for that.
Casey:
Even though you were a minute off, I still count it.
Casey:
However, your guess of five minutes for Dave Matthews is pretty wrong.
Casey:
Eight minutes for Dave Matthews.
Casey:
So a difference of only about a minute.
Casey:
It was 8.97 versus 8.09.
Casey:
So only a minute difference between the two.
Casey:
I would have figured...
Casey:
Especially given all the fun I've made of fish over the years.
Casey:
I would have figured it would have been like 15, 20 minutes per fish and like 10-ish, less than 10 for Dave.
Casey:
And it turns out, no, it was about the same.
Casey:
And CMF in the chat is asking what was the long song with Dave Matthews.
Casey:
It was Seek Up, which is one of my favorites.
Marco:
So I think what we're learning here is that you don't have any right to make long song jokes anymore.
Yeah.
Casey:
Possibly.
Casey:
I mean, I'm looking at this.
Casey:
Dave Matthews set list is 18 minutes, 10 minutes.
Casey:
I'm skipping a lot.
Casey:
But of the long ones, there's 18 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 12 minutes.
Casey:
And those were all the double-digit songs.
Casey:
Looking at the fish set, 14 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 11 minutes, 15 minutes.
Casey:
So there were more that were double-digit minutes.
Casey:
But still, it wasn't night and day like I would have expected.
John:
Fish should have They Might Be Giants open for them and just do their super short songs to pull down the average.
John:
Was there an opening band?
Marco:
There's never an opening band for Fish anymore.
Marco:
There hasn't been for a very long time.
Marco:
I didn't know that.
Marco:
One of the reasons why it's good to be a fan of this band is...
Marco:
They just want to give you as much music as possible.
Marco:
And so they start their shows pretty much on time.
Marco:
Growing up in the 90s, you see a lot of these 90s, like, everything sucks, caring about things sucks, you suck, a lot of that culture in the 90s.
Marco:
And so there was this arrogant rock star culture of...
Marco:
You'd have the opening band, they would start late, and then you'd be this long wait, and then the quote, real or whatever, the headlining band would start even later, and you're just waiting, and they're just making you wait, and you feel like they're being jerks to you.
Marco:
I'm making you wait all this time, and they're trying to be cool, and it's like, no, you're just being a jerk.
Marco:
This is not how his origins in the 90s, by the way.
Marco:
Just FYI.
Marco:
Well, yeah, I know.
Marco:
I'm just saying, like, we saw it a lot in the 90s, you know, because that's when we, that's when Casey and I grew up.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so, you know, Fish has none of that attitude.
Marco:
There's none of that, like, you know, we're cool, like, you know, F you.
Marco:
Like, there's none of that attitude.
Marco:
It's a very much like a positive, just, you know, they're happy to be there and play.
Marco:
And that's,
Marco:
That's what they want to do.
Marco:
They don't have opening bands because they want to cram in as much music as possible.
Marco:
They're limited by how late the venue and city will let them perform.
Marco:
They just want to cram stuff in, so they show up on time and they give you three hours of music.
Marco:
There's a 15-minute set break in the middle.
Marco:
Everyone takes a break, goes to the bathroom, whatever.
Marco:
Otherwise, it's a ton of music.
Marco:
I love that they just show up on time every time.
Marco:
It's good being a Phish fan, even though you get...
Marco:
no support from any room you're in but somehow they're selling out stadiums and beaches for three days in a row in the same city all the time all those thousands of people have to go something like where do they go where are all these people in the rest of life like when i'm you know in all these rooms i apparently find myself in where are all these people there's not one of them in the room like really there's thousands of them right here there's not one in all these other rooms i'm in