0:00:00- Does anyone have Taylor Swift tickets
0:00:01they wanna sell me?
0:00:02Massachusetts shows?
0:00:03Not for $12,000, which is the current going rate.
0:00:07- So back up, so I was watching this,
0:00:08and it happened through Christina Warren,
0:00:11former and one of the only guests ever on the show,
0:00:14former guest Christina Warren,
0:00:15and dear friend of the show.
0:00:16Anyways, I was watching her try to do her whole rigmarole
0:00:20in order to get herself Taylor Swift tickets.
0:00:22So my limited understanding is,
0:00:24you got in some sort of queue,
0:00:27and it said there's 2,000 or more people in front of you.
0:00:30And then she had retweeted,
0:00:32I doubt I'll be able to find it,
0:00:33but she had retweeted somebody saying,
0:00:34in the time I've spent in the queue,
0:00:36I wrote a Chrome extension to figure out
0:00:38exactly where you are in the queue, which is amazing.
0:00:42- The queue that she was in,
0:00:43I didn't even get a chance to enter that queue
0:00:45'cause I lost that lottery.
0:00:47But today there was another queue that I could get in.
0:00:49And rather than download that Chrome extension,
0:00:52I just opened the Chrome dev tools
0:00:53and looked at the JSON flying by.
0:00:55I was telling Mark of this before.
0:00:56And yeah, you can see where you actually are in the queue.
0:00:58Not that that helps you.
0:00:59It's like, oh great, now I know, you know,
0:01:01I started at 15,000 and I'm around 10,000,
0:01:03even though the UI says 2000 plus.
0:01:05But that doesn't tell you anything.
0:01:06Like the rate at which that number went down varied wildly.
0:01:10Like it went down like thousands in like, you know,
0:01:1215 minutes and then didn't budge for like an hour
0:01:15and then went down three and in the next 15,
0:01:18it's just, I don't know what it's based on.
0:01:21You know, we had multiple windows going here
0:01:24with the same thing, different accounts.
0:01:26Anyway, the queue closed and they said,
0:01:29sorry, all the things that we had reserved
0:01:32for the people who are supposed to buy tickets today
0:01:35was like Capital One credit card holders.
0:01:37Sorry, we sold all those out.
0:01:39So even though you're still in line, tough luck.
0:01:41See you later.
0:01:42So Friday is my next chance, my next and final chance.
0:01:45And Friday is the day that everybody gets a chance
0:01:48to be in the queue.
0:01:49So if I couldn't get in the queue
0:01:49when just competing against Capital One credit card holders,
0:01:52I don't know what I'm gonna do on Friday.
0:01:54So you would say that John is a Swifty.
0:01:57I think that's what we're learning today.
0:01:58- Tickets are not for me,
0:01:59although I do like Taylor Swift's music.
0:02:02- I mean, I think the answer here is like,
0:02:04the price of seeing Taylor Swift
0:02:06is just whatever it takes to buy these on StubHub
0:02:08or whatever, that's the reality here.
0:02:10It's like, it's not, whatever the list price is,
0:02:12I mean, it doesn't really matter.
0:02:13Like, it's like, a handful of lucky people
0:02:16will get the list price.
0:02:17For the most part, you're competing with a whole bunch
0:02:18of bots and scammers probably, and resellers and scalpers,
0:02:21And so you're gonna have to be either very lucky
0:02:24or play that game.
0:02:25- Well yeah, but the actual going rate for tickets
0:02:28for these shows is, I'm not kidding,
0:02:29like 11 or $12,000 right now.
0:02:31- Oh my word.
0:02:32- I'm not paying that.
0:02:33- Well, but that's right now.
0:02:35Wait until the shows are two weeks away
0:02:37and it'll be different.
0:02:38- Yeah, we'll see.
0:02:40- 'Cause right now, no one has the tickets yet.
0:02:41So everyone's like, oh my god, I need to buy one of that.
0:02:44But give time for all of the actual tickets
0:02:47to be acquired by people.
0:02:49And then a week or two before the show,
0:02:51you can probably pick them up for maybe a few hundred bucks,
0:02:53I don't know.
0:02:54- This is what I get for not being,
0:02:55well a few hundred bucks is lower than the actual price,
0:02:57by the way, Mark.
0:02:58I like the actual word.
0:02:59- Oh my God, what's the actual price?
0:03:02- So I believe it's, if you want floor seats,
0:03:05I had this info before, let me look it up for you
0:03:08so you can be suitably shocked.
0:03:10This is not the scalper price, this is the price if you,
0:03:14for the price if you buy it from Ticketmaster.
0:03:17- Is floor more desirable or less?
0:03:19- Yes, the floor seats start at $350 and go up to $900.
0:03:23That's not the scalper price.
0:03:24That's the just straight up price, right?
0:03:27And then the other sections are in the other ranges
0:03:29as you would imagine.
0:03:30They have a $200 to $300 range.
0:03:31And if you're in the bleachers
0:03:33at the top of the football stadium, it's $50 to $100.
0:03:36So it varies from basically $1,000 for your best seat
0:03:39to $50 for your worst.
0:03:40And they cover every price range in between.
0:03:42And that is, again, not the scalper price.
0:03:44That is the price that you pay if you're lucky enough
0:03:46to get a ticket at the actual retail price.
0:03:48- I am so happy to be a Fish fan right now.
0:03:50- That is utterly bananas.
0:03:52- Yeah, Fish has a few more shows
0:03:53and is slightly less popular than Teleswap.
0:03:57- A little, maybe.
0:03:58- All right, let's do some follow up.
0:04:01Tell me about what you,
0:04:04you made many mistakes with your phone transition.
0:04:08We got some feedback about it.
0:04:10I am a little annoyed at myself
0:04:12that I didn't yell one password repeatedly
0:04:14while you were telling the story because we had your--
0:04:16- Don't worry, plenty of other people did.
0:04:17- Okay, good, good, good.
0:04:18But there are other approaches you could have taken
0:04:20with regard to moving your 2FA stuff
0:04:23from one phone to the other.
0:04:24Can you tell me about this?
0:04:25- Well, speaking of one password, though,
0:04:26I did mention on the show, I thought,
0:04:27every time I get a list of people,
0:04:28I'm like, did Marco edit this out?
0:04:29This is the thought I always have
0:04:30when the feedback starts coming in.
0:04:32I'm like, did Marco edit this out?
0:04:33And the answer's almost always, no, he didn't edit out.
0:04:35People just haven't gotten to that part in the show yet.
0:04:37- But that almost is how I keep you on your toes.
0:04:40- Yeah. (laughing)
0:04:41Or they just didn't hear me when I said it.
0:04:42But I do have the two-factor stuff
0:04:46on more than one device.
0:04:47The reason I didn't want to just like,
0:04:48why didn't you just take the phone, bring it home,
0:04:50and you know, blah, blah, blah.
0:04:51Well, then there's two things to that.
0:04:52One is I did want to do the device-to-device transfer
0:04:55because based on my last experience,
0:04:56I have learned that that is the best way to do it
0:04:58and I don't want to have to sign into everything.
0:05:00So restoring from an iCloud backup is not as good,
0:05:03it seems like, as device-to-device transfer.
0:05:05So I still have to do the device-to-device transfer.
0:05:06But secondly, yeah, I've got it on another device,
0:05:08but like the whole point of redundancy is not to,
0:05:11you know, two is one, one is none.
0:05:13If I only have it on one other device,
0:05:15I don't want to also have that device be screwed up.
0:05:19I don't want to risk it.
0:05:20Like say I hit the wrong button when
0:05:21I'm trying to do the export or whatever
0:05:22and I delete it instead of exporting it.
0:05:24Now I've just destroyed my one and only backup of that stuff.
0:05:27That's why-- and yes, lots of things sync.
0:05:30iCloud keychain syncs, one passport syncs,
0:05:32all these things.
0:05:33There's tons and tons of two-factor apps.
0:05:34I probably will eventually get everything
0:05:37into iCloud keychain because that's kind of where
0:05:39I'm going with this.
0:05:41Now that it syncs and now that it supports two-factor stuff,
0:05:43I just haven't gotten around to it.
0:05:44So anyway, setting that aside, what if you just don't want to do this whole thing like
0:05:48sitting in the Apple Store for hours?
0:05:50There are other options, and I could have pursued these, which involve not going to
0:05:53an Apple Store and just doing it on the telephone, right?
0:05:56I mostly went to the Apple Store because I wanted to talk to a human, and I needed to
0:06:00see another iPhone 14 Pro to say, to convince myself, is there something wrong with my camera
0:06:05or is it just me being weird and picky?
0:06:07And that's why I needed to get hands-on an ostensibly working 14 Pro to compare, and
0:06:12And also to talk to the person in the Apple store who sees these phones all day and say,
0:06:15"Does this look like it's broken to you or does it just look like that's what they're
0:06:18all like?"
0:06:19And that's not the type of thing I can do over the phone with somebody.
0:06:22I could have convinced the person over the phone to say, "Look, I just think the camera's
0:06:25bad.
0:06:26You need to send me a replacement."
0:06:27But anyway, the reason the phone comes up is if you do it over the phone, you can get
0:06:31them to overnight you a device and then you can do the data transfer at your leisure in
0:06:36your house and then send it back.
0:06:37And I believe they just charge your credit card or authorize your credit card for the
0:06:40purchase so if you don't send it back you're out the money.
0:06:43Particles on Twitter said that if you get AppleCare Plus with theft and loss protection
0:06:47you get the Express replacement.
0:06:49I think they probably still authorize your credit card.
0:06:52I'm not sure if Express replacement is only if you have theft and loss.
0:06:56I'm pretty sure you can get them to cross ship you something if you are convincing enough
0:06:59over the telephone.
0:07:00What I am kind of disappointed in is when I was complaining about that I had to spend
0:07:03three hours in the Apple store, the Apple store employee never said, "Oh well if you
0:07:08don't want to do that now that we've gone through all the rigamarole and I've tested
0:07:11your phone and brought it into the back and we tried.
0:07:12Now that we did all that, you don't have to get it replaced here.
0:07:15You can just go home and call them on the phone and that's probably what I should have
0:07:18done.
0:07:19They didn't say that to me.
0:07:20I don't have theft and loss protection so maybe that's why they didn't say that to me.
0:07:24But either way, next time I do it I have many other options.
0:07:27I can by that point have moved all my two factors off to something that syncs.
0:07:34It depends on what the problem is.
0:07:35If I don't have a camera issue that I need to see in person,
0:07:37I could just do it all over the phone
0:07:38and have them cross-ship me something.
0:07:40Anyway, so just FYI,
0:07:42if you don't want to spend three hours in the Apple Store
0:07:44listening to people tell Apple Store employees
0:07:47about their computer problems,
0:07:49consider doing it over the phone.
0:07:51- And then we could even set up a special Apple Watch face
0:07:56when you're in the Apple Store.
0:07:57Do you want to tell me about that?
0:07:58- I don't have an Apple, I do have an Apple Watch.
0:08:00I wonder if it's so dead that it won't boot anymore.
0:08:02I should take it out and try it.
0:08:03And my Series 0, my awesome looking Series 0,
0:08:05still lurking in my drawer.
0:08:07Anyway, Alex, Siri, you wrote in to tell us,
0:08:10I enjoyed the episode with the PSA
0:08:11about customizing complications on Apple Watch faces,
0:08:13and I wanted to share one more cool thing with watch faces.
0:08:15You can change them with personal automations
0:08:17in the Shortcuts app.
0:08:18Every Friday at 5 PM, my watch automatically
0:08:20switches to the weekend face.
0:08:22And every Sunday at 9 PM, it switches to the weekday face.
0:08:24These both run without intervention
0:08:26and without any extraneous notifications.
0:08:28And what's especially cool is that any automation
0:08:30can trigger-- that you can trigger in Shortcuts
0:08:31can be used.
0:08:32So an event like arriving at a location
0:08:34or connecting to a specific Bluetooth device
0:08:36can cause a change to your watch face.
0:08:39Might be something Marco used to switch over
0:08:40to sand driving watch face when he gets in the car
0:08:42or just when he arrives at the beach.
0:08:44That is cool, like shortcuts,
0:08:46one of the great powerful features of it
0:08:48is that shortcuts can do things,
0:08:50you don't have to trigger them.
0:08:51Like they can do things based on environmental factors
0:08:54that they are aware of.
0:08:55And having your watch face kind of automatically change
0:08:57based on your location or time of day or day of the week
0:09:00is kind of a cool thing if you do have multiple watch faces
0:09:03and you don't wanna bother like swiping
0:09:05between them manually.
0:09:06- Excellent, Matt Friedman writes,
0:09:08with regard to why bother with new Apple TV,
0:09:11if anybody still has a first gen Apple TV 4K,
0:09:14a second or third gen model will allow them
0:09:16to watch HDR on YouTube without having to swap back
0:09:18to the TV's native YouTube app,
0:09:20which may or may not support it
0:09:21depending on the age of your TV, which is pretty cool.
0:09:23- I didn't even realize that I had totally forgotten
0:09:26that there was a second or third gen Apple TV 4K
0:09:28as we were talking on Twitter about this
0:09:30And I was like, I'm pretty sure I get HDR in YouTube app.
0:09:33That's what I was using to demo when I got my new TV
0:09:36or whatever.
0:09:37I didn't need the brand new Apple TV 4K,
0:09:39like the smaller one that we were just talking about last
0:09:41show.
0:09:41I didn't need that to watch HDR.
0:09:43So I was like, but you didn't have the second gen model,
0:09:46did you?
0:09:47You have the second gen, the first gen.
0:09:48I'm like, I don't know.
0:09:49Yeah, there was apparently a first gen Apple TV 4K.
0:09:51And for whatever reason, it didn't get HDR in YouTube.
0:09:55That's the problem with these product lines.
0:09:57I mean, not that I endorse the idea of having something
0:10:00parentheses to differentiate them, but the generation names are kind of worse than the
0:10:04year number because I had totally forgotten about that one. So if you're wondering, "Hey,
0:10:08I already have an Apple TV 4K, why the heck would I want this new one that's slightly
0:10:11smaller?" If you have a first gen Apple TV 4K and you care at all about HDR on the YouTube
0:10:15app, get one of the new ones.
0:10:17Good talk. Jacob writes, "With regard to using multiple smart albums to work around the lack
0:10:23of nested Boolean logic in Mac OS's photo smart albums, unfortunately photos doesn't
0:10:28allow you to reference another smart album into smart album's conditions.
0:10:31Whoopsie doopsies.
0:10:32I couldn't believe that.
0:10:33I would have to go double check it and see if it was true.
0:10:35It's like, how?
0:10:36Why?
0:10:37Like, things are so weird and limited.
0:10:38Like that has to be possible.
0:10:39Like, that's the awkward work around we talked about, but no, he's right.
0:10:42It's not possible.
0:10:43It'll let you reference, I think it'll let you reference an album, but not a smart album.
0:10:47Smart albums are so weird.
0:10:48Like iOS has no idea that they exist and they're just so powerful and cool.
0:10:51I wish they would like get first class treatment across all of Apple's platforms.
0:10:55If only.
0:10:56This is a YouTube topic,
0:10:59would you like to cover this actually?
0:11:01- Sure, Aaron wrote in to say,
0:11:02maybe the YouTube album removal page fell away
0:11:05because Apple added the ability to hide purchases.
0:11:07We'll put a link in the show notes to a support article
0:11:09that lets you just basically pick anything
0:11:11in your library, your iTunes library, and just hide it.
0:11:15Removing from an account requires contact to support,
0:11:17but this is a non-destructive solution
0:11:19that is enough for almost everybody.
0:11:20So if you listened to the last show and you're like,
0:11:21"Oh no, I've got the YouTube album
0:11:22"and the delete page is gone.
0:11:24"What do I do?
0:11:24"I don't wanna call support."
0:11:25you can just hide it and then forget that it exists.
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0:13:27Elon Musk has decided to fire basically any Twitter employee that
0:13:36Criticizes him because he is the thinnest skinned human that has ever lived. It was kind of another day
0:13:41I forget what day was another day on Twitter watching, you know, the the Elon Musk drama and he was saying stupid things
0:13:48You know spouting like every day
0:13:50Yeah spouting off the way you would expect like a teenager who has just learned a program would spout off about something company, right?
0:13:57Oh, he's he's he owns the company, but he's like these dummies
0:14:01They're doing this the thing reason this is closed
0:14:03Slow is because of XYZ and then one of the engineers who works on the thing that he was talking about said actually that's not
0:14:08True. Here's the actual situation and laid out in a series of I thought very polite and concise technically accurate tweets from a developer
0:14:14who knows, here's the actual situation.
0:14:16And then Elon Musk said later that he fired that guy,
0:14:19and he did.
0:14:20'Cause he didn't like being,
0:14:21and then all of the Elon fanboys were like,
0:14:24that's what happens if you publicly contradict the boss,
0:14:27you should say that stuff in private.
0:14:29You know, like don't contradict the CEO of your company
0:14:32on Twitter and just publicly embarrass him.
0:14:34Well, A, if he's doing an embarrassing thing,
0:14:36he's really just embarrassing himself.
0:14:37And B, I would hope that publicly correcting the CEO
0:14:41of your company is not an immediately fireable offense,
0:14:43but apparently in Twitter it is, right?
0:14:44And so then the obvious followup to that is
0:14:48people who were saying mean things about Elon Musk
0:14:51on Twitter's internal Slack also fired.
0:14:54Because Elon asked a bunch of people
0:14:57to go through all the messages on the internal Slack
0:14:59and find all the people who said mean things about them
0:15:01and fire them.
0:15:02And so they got an email at 1.30 a.m.
0:15:04telling them that they were no longer employed by Twitter.
0:15:07So yeah, he's a big jerk and a dummy head
0:15:10and he does hilariously, like sort of comic book,
0:15:15comic book villain, comic book petulant villain,
0:15:17like Dr. Evil, like I don't even know.
0:15:20I just, it really, you know, it really boggles my mind
0:15:24that people can still find something to not admire
0:15:28in just like a, you know,
0:15:29a petulant thin-skinned billionaire bully,
0:15:32but here he is doing what he does.
0:15:34- I'm starting to try to figure out like,
0:15:36what has made his other companies successful?
0:15:41- Delegation, baby, that's what.
0:15:43- Does he, though?
0:15:44It seems like he has made a lot of good bets
0:15:49in what to invest in and what direction to go in.
0:15:54He wasn't the original founder of Tesla,
0:15:56but he got in super early, took it over,
0:16:00probably kicked out the actual founders.
0:16:02- Yeah, I don't know the details,
0:16:03but basically, he got in there early,
0:16:06And I think Tesla, I think he really benefited that company.
0:16:11His direction and his boldness in a lot of ways
0:16:17I think really helped Tesla product-wise.
0:16:20- And his ability to get them enough money
0:16:22so they didn't go out of business.
0:16:23I think that is the key thing that he brought to the table
0:16:25because without him scrambling for money,
0:16:28or again, another person who was equally good
0:16:30at scrambling for money because that is a skill
0:16:32that a lot of people have,
0:16:33finding a way to keep the company afloat
0:16:35by any means necessary, including lying,
0:16:38which he's in trouble for with the SEC.
0:16:40But whatever, he did what it took
0:16:42to make sure Tesla did not go out of business.
0:16:44- Yeah, but it seems, it just seems like
0:16:47the things that succeed are in spite of him,
0:16:51not because of him.
0:16:52And that for people in these companies
0:16:54to produce good work, they're almost just kinda using him
0:16:58as like the bank and like the guy who gets the money
0:17:02from investors/lying to the stock market.
0:17:04- And they also have to learn how to navigate him.
0:17:07They also have to, like the people,
0:17:08the companies that are able to succeed
0:17:10with him running them have, are filled with people
0:17:13who have learned how to get the job done
0:17:16within the parameters laid out by him.
0:17:19What those parameters might be,
0:17:21and I'm sure they change from company to company.
0:17:23Right now the parameters are,
0:17:24if you say anything mean about me, I fire you.
0:17:25So if you are inside Twitter and you're like,
0:17:28I really want Twitter to succeed,
0:17:29how do I make that happen?
0:17:30You would have to learn to navigate the environment
0:17:32which if you ever say anything mean or contradictory
0:17:35to your boss, even when your boss is totally wrong,
0:17:37you're gonna get fired.
0:17:37So figure out how to navigate that,
0:17:39and then figure out how to succeed despite that.
0:17:43I don't think he's necessarily always been like that,
0:17:46but right now at Twitter, that's what he's like.
0:17:48So those are the parameters, and those parameters suck.
0:17:52- What gave me hope initially is,
0:17:54when you look at the list of his other companies,
0:17:56as I said a few episodes ago,
0:17:58he tries to solve hard problems.
0:18:01and running a giant social network,
0:18:04especially one that doesn't print money
0:18:06and needs a lot of help in that department,
0:18:08but just running a giant social network
0:18:10is a hugely hard problem.
0:18:12And I think the difference here is that
0:18:17the really hard problems in his other companies
0:18:20were mostly engineering problems or--
0:18:23- Or financial problems.
0:18:24- Yeah, like problems getting difficult things to market,
0:18:28things that are difficult to make,
0:18:30getting them to market and keeping the lights on
0:18:33and keeping the money coming in.
0:18:34Those are hard problems.
0:18:36Running a social network that's already established
0:18:40is not mostly an engineering problem,
0:18:42it's mostly a people problem.
0:18:45And he is just the worst with people.
0:18:48He is horrendously bad and every week, every day,
0:18:51every hour he finds new ways to be horrendously bad
0:18:54with dealing with people,
0:18:55both his own people and the public.
0:18:57And I just, I don't, I'm having a really hard time
0:19:00seeing how this ends well.
0:19:02Because there is no engineering product to make here
0:19:07that is the final product.
0:19:08There is no like, all right, we succeeded in building
0:19:11the rocket hover car or whatever.
0:19:12There is no end here like that,
0:19:15the way there is with these other companies.
0:19:16This is just something very difficult.
0:19:19This is like running a messy political human set
0:19:23of human problems of humans.
0:19:25and he's even worse than Google
0:19:28at dealing with human problems.
0:19:30He is so disgustingly bad at dealing with people.
0:19:35And this latest thing with the email of,
0:19:39better be prepared to work 24/7 or get fired,
0:19:42like, God, I'm so mad about that.
0:19:44- Yep, so we'll put links in the show notes of both these.
0:19:46First is a New York Times article
0:19:48about the firing people who criticize them.
0:19:49The next is a Washington Post article.
0:19:52The headline is, "Musk issues ultimatum to staff.
0:19:53"commit to quote unquote hardcore Twitter
0:19:56"or take severance."
0:19:57Here's the summary.
0:19:58Employees were told that they had to sign a pledge
0:20:00to stay on with the company.
0:20:01Quote, this is from the email,
0:20:02"If you're sure that you wanna be part of the new Twitter,
0:20:05"please click yes on the link below."
0:20:08Anyone who did not sign the pledge
0:20:09by five p.m. Eastern time Thursday
0:20:11will receive three months severance pay.
0:20:12The message said, "In the midnight email,"
0:20:14which is obtained by Washington Post,
0:20:15Musk said, "We will need to be extremely hardcore.
0:20:17"Going forward, this will mean working,"
0:20:19this is a quote, "This will mean working long hours
0:20:21"at high intensity," he said,
0:20:22"Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.
0:20:25The pledge email paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office is expected
0:20:29to lead to even more attrition at the company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half."
0:20:33So he's basically saying, he's sort of getting the company ready to say, "Look, it's going
0:20:37to be hard, you're going to have to work long hours and sign this pledge saying if you're
0:20:42up for that and if you're not up for that, that's great, you get three months severance,
0:20:45see you later."
0:20:46Because to your point earlier, Margo, this not being a technical problem, he wants it
0:20:51to be a technical problem.
0:20:52And he has created, not created, but like he has identified a technical challenge.
0:20:57In his mind, I think the technical challenge is like this company, it's, you know, is inefficient.
0:21:01Like their infrastructure, though it may work fine and there's no more failwales, it's,
0:21:05you know, it could be done better.
0:21:06Smarter people could make this better.
0:21:07We can cut our infrastructure costs, save a lot of money.
0:21:10Like it's, it's bloated and overrun.
0:21:11There's a lot of stuff we probably don't need.
0:21:13And the stuff we do need could be more efficient, right?
0:21:16He's decided, because I think that's what appeals to him, that that is the technical
0:21:20challenge in front of them.
0:21:21And what he wants is a crack team of people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives,
0:21:27family, mental and physical health, who will never contradict him or say anything mean
0:21:33to him or about him, even when he's entirely wrong, to destroy themselves to help him achieve
0:21:38that goal.
0:21:39And as you pointed out, it's alright.
0:21:41So you snap your fingers and you achieve that goal.
0:21:43Have you solved any problem for Twitter?
0:21:46Like yeah, you probably saved a little bit of money in infrastructure.
0:21:49hey, let's say you can cut their infrastructure costs
0:21:51in half, have you found a way to make enough money
0:21:54to service your debt now that all the advertisers are gone
0:21:56because of the other stupid things that you did?
0:21:58Probably not, right?
0:21:59So I don't know why he's identified that as a problem
0:22:01that is super important to tackle,
0:22:03and I think if you are going to tackle that,
0:22:05trying to tell the entire company that you have, you know,
0:22:08you have until tomorrow at 5 p.m. to sign this pledge
0:22:12saying you will destroy yourself from me,
0:22:14otherwise you're fired.
0:22:15I mean, it seems like that's not the best way
0:22:18to staff up for attacking this problem.
0:22:21And the only thing I can say is like,
0:22:22maybe if you had a startup and you're like,
0:22:24look, I'm gonna be the worst startup CEO ever,
0:22:27I'm gonna destroy everybody who works for me,
0:22:29they're all gonna burn out,
0:22:30but the few that don't will get a big payday from an IPO.
0:22:33And by the way, we don't have a product yet,
0:22:35but this crack team is gonna build it.
0:22:36But that's not the situation at Trigger.
0:22:37They already got the product.
0:22:39They already got a big company with the product,
0:22:40they don't have to build it.
0:22:41And it's almost like he wants to destroy it
0:22:43so it becomes nothing, and then build it back up from zero
0:22:46with his crack team of burned out
0:22:48sycophants. And I mean, that's one way to go about it. But it's
0:22:52just totally like, you know, destructive to value destructive
0:22:57to people's lives. And this is the point that Twitter already
0:23:00exists. Like you don't have to build it, it's already there.
0:23:03You just need to learn how to run it in such a way that it
0:23:06makes money and is better in whatever way you decide is
0:23:09better.
0:23:09You're right. Like he's so over focused on the technical side,
0:23:14and the overhead side.
0:23:15Even if he's correct, they were overstaffed before.
0:23:20Maybe not as much as he thinks they were,
0:23:22but they were overstaffed before.
0:23:24And we have heard stories that their technical stack
0:23:27was kind of a mess.
0:23:28However, that's not the hard part about running Twitter.
0:23:32The hard part about running Twitter
0:23:34is all the people issues, all the politics issues,
0:23:36all the abuse issues.
0:23:39- Policies, incentives, and business models.
0:23:41Those are the actual hard parts,
0:23:42but he's not interested in those.
0:23:43he's interested and I wanna write code,
0:23:45because that, I don't know, that seems more fun.
0:23:47- Or at least it's, he's going in there,
0:23:50look, every 20 year old, every like smart 20 year old
0:23:54programmer has left college where they were the smart
0:23:5820 year old hotshot and they go get a job
0:24:01and they look at everything around them
0:24:02and they're like, that's stupid, why is it done that way?
0:24:05We should just X, right?
0:24:08And it's the dumb 20 year old thing to do.
0:24:10We've all been there, most of us,
0:24:11myself included, have been that guy.
0:24:14I, like, you look at something from an ignorant,
0:24:18inexperienced point of view and you think,
0:24:21this is a much simpler problem than these other idiots
0:24:24seem to make it out to be, I'm gonna waltz in there
0:24:26and make a simple fix.
0:24:27And then you waltz in there and you realize,
0:24:29oh God, this is way more complicated than I thought it was,
0:24:32or it was done this way for a reason,
0:24:34and you get your butt kicked effectively.
0:24:36- But what if you didn't have to ever realize that,
0:24:39because what you could do is simply fire everyone
0:24:40who contradicted you.
0:24:41(laughing)
0:24:43Like imagine if the 20 year old comes into the company,
0:24:45says that, and instead of learning a hard lesson
0:24:47by trying to rewrite something and messing up production
0:24:51and getting a stern talking to and blah, blah, blah,
0:24:53if instead they came in and said that,
0:24:55the people who knew better corrected him
0:24:57and then the 20 year old fired them.
0:24:59Right, that's the situation we're in.
0:25:01It's like, that's not a path to success.
0:25:06Again, I want Twitter to succeed.
0:25:10I decreaseingly want him to succeed.
0:25:13I think he's such a horrible person right now.
0:25:17Like the way he--
0:25:18- He did say he's gonna get someone else to be CEO,
0:25:20which is, I think maybe he's getting tired
0:25:21of people yelling at him,
0:25:22so like someone else can run the company
0:25:24and he can go back to whatever he normally does.
0:25:26- You know, all I can say is like,
0:25:28keep the heat up, everyone.
0:25:29Like keep telling him how much of a piece of crap he is.
0:25:32- Unless you're a Twitter employee,
0:25:34in which case you're gonna get fired.
0:25:35(laughing)
0:25:36And the downside, I mean, God, oh God,
0:25:38my opinion of him is dropping so quickly.
0:25:42I've decided I'm selling my Tesla,
0:25:44I don't want it anymore, I don't want him anymore.
0:25:46I'm still gonna be on Twitter
0:25:47because I want Twitter to succeed,
0:25:49but God, I wish it wasn't his.
0:25:51And I outlined last week why I want Twitter to succeed.
0:25:55And we'll get to a little bit more of that later,
0:25:57but I want everything bad to happen to him.
0:26:01I want him to be constantly trolled,
0:26:04I want him to not have any peace in his life
0:26:08so that, 'cause people are constantly telling him
0:26:10how much of an a** and an idiot he is.
0:26:12That's what I want for him, because he,
0:26:14what he does to people.
0:26:15'Cause here's the thing, like, this email he sent,
0:26:17I mean, this angered me on so many levels,
0:26:19this thing, this ultimatum that you have to become,
0:26:21you know, work your butt off extra hours forever or leave.
0:26:26That is such like Silicon Valley toxic workaholism culture.
0:26:33and I take such deep offense to that in our industry.
0:26:37It's a huge problem in our industry
0:26:38and I've talked about it before,
0:26:40I am so strongly against that workaholism culture
0:26:44because it has so many negative effects.
0:26:46Because the thing is, not everyone is
0:26:48some 20 year old hotshot who wants to sleep at the office
0:26:51and eat pizza in Silicon Valley, like the TV show.
0:26:54Not everyone is like that and not everyone can do that.
0:26:57And when you create a workplace
0:27:00where that's the only acceptable culture,
0:27:02Not only does it burn out those people
0:27:06who are willing to do that,
0:27:07but it excludes tons of people
0:27:09who can't or won't work that way.
0:27:12And then it creates other things, like for instance,
0:27:14one of the problems we now have is that
0:27:17as the tech industry is laying off tons of people,
0:27:19we have to deal with H1B visa holders,
0:27:22where this is the type of visa,
0:27:23for anyone who doesn't know, in the US,
0:27:26we offer visas for people who are not US citizens
0:27:29to come here and work using this work visa.
0:27:33And I don't know the details, forgive me,
0:27:35but the company who you're working for
0:27:37kind of sponsors it in some way.
0:27:39So a lot of people who are gonna stay,
0:27:41who are gonna keep working for this jerk,
0:27:44are H-1B visa holders who,
0:27:47if they decide not to accept his terms,
0:27:49they have to leave the country.
0:27:51And that's a serious thing.
0:27:53And so there's all these little knock-on effects
0:27:56that when you first think about what he's doing,
0:27:59You might think, oh, well, he just wants really good workers
0:28:03and only the most dedicated people will stay.
0:28:06Well, it's not that simple.
0:28:08You're gonna have all these people who really can't
0:28:11and don't want to work that way,
0:28:13but are kind of forced to for reasons like this,
0:28:15and it excludes tons of people who can't work that way.
0:28:18What if you have a kid?
0:28:20You shouldn't be at the office
0:28:21working long nights every night if you have a kid.
0:28:24What if you have to take care of somebody at home?
0:28:26Like there's just, there's so many groups of people
0:28:30or situations that you either exclude or abuse
0:28:34with these simplistic views of the world that,
0:28:36oh, you better work here 'cause you wanna be hardcore.
0:28:38Like, things are not that simple.
0:28:40Things have never been that simple.
0:28:41And if he would just take his head out of his ass
0:28:44for two seconds and look around,
0:28:45he might have a small chance of seeing that.
0:28:47But unfortunately, that's never gonna happen.
0:28:49- And that's the thing that bothers me.
0:28:50I'm glad you brought that up.
0:28:53all the Elon fans that I have heard, you know,
0:28:57shouting into the ether, seem to say things like,
0:28:59"Oh, it's a meritocracy, and oh,
0:29:01the best people will be there,
0:29:02and they won't mind," and blah, blah, blah.
0:29:04What if the best person is the person
0:29:07who can only give eight hours a day to their job?
0:29:12Why is that bad?
0:29:14Or what if the best person doesn't live
0:29:16in fucking San Francisco?
0:29:18Like, why is that bad?
0:29:20It's so backwards and, I don't know,
0:29:25when he makes these proclamations,
0:29:27okay, boomer, sure.
0:29:28He's only like five or 10, he's like 10 years older than me
0:29:30and like five years older than Jon, I think.
0:29:32But it's such a boomer mentality of--
0:29:35- No, the boomers only work nine to five.
0:29:37- Ah, true, actually, no, that's fair, that's fair.
0:29:39- The premise that people accept,
0:29:41you can even see it in the chat room,
0:29:43somebody said that this workaholism culture
0:29:45is the reason why Silicon Valley became successful, right?
0:29:47- No, it's not.
0:29:48- And why the employees make so much money.
0:29:50also not.
0:29:51- Yeah, so the premise is that if you do live in the office
0:29:56and spend all your life there or whatever,
0:29:59that you will somehow do better work
0:30:00than if you didn't do that,
0:30:01and that's absolutely not true.
0:30:03Every time they've ever studied this,
0:30:05I mean, you should know this just as a programmer,
0:30:06should I pull an all-nighter or should I go to sleep
0:30:08and work on this problem again in the morning?
0:30:10Oh, if I sleep, I'm losing eight hours of working time,
0:30:12therefore I should pull an all-nighter.
0:30:14Your efficiency and quality of programming at 3 a.m.
0:30:19are detrimental to your productivity.
0:30:21You should go to sleep.
0:30:23Making people burn themselves out
0:30:26does not produce better work than letting them be rested.
0:30:29That's what the smart companies know.
0:30:31And the companies that have been successful,
0:30:32like the 8088 was not made by people
0:30:35who are pulling all-nighters for years at a time, right?
0:30:37Crunch in the game industry.
0:30:40Does that make better games?
0:30:41No, it makes everything worse and it destroys lives.
0:30:43And even gaming companies are learning,
0:30:45if we wanna do better, we should try to avoid that, right?
0:30:49It feels like you're doing, like I'm doing the hard work
0:30:54and you have to do this,
0:30:56especially if you're gonna be in a startup.
0:30:57Nevermind that Twitter is not a startup.
0:30:58Anyway, this is what you just have to do
0:31:01for that big payday, you just gotta give your all.
0:31:02And it's like your fundamental assumption
0:31:06that working harder in longer hours
0:31:07produces better work is what you need to reexamine.
0:31:10And once you've reexamined that, it's much easier.
0:31:11Setting aside the humanity of don't be cruel to people,
0:31:14especially dumb 20-year-olds who have no life experience,
0:31:18oh, they can do it because they don't have a family.
0:31:20They have health and they should have lives.
0:31:22It's cruel to essentially, not trick them,
0:31:26but coerce them into working harder than they should
0:31:29in a way that they'll regret.
0:31:30They'll say, I spent my 20s burning myself out
0:31:34at this company and I saw no benefit from it, right?
0:31:37And I just wasted my life, right?
0:31:38And they don't know that now,
0:31:39but because they don't have kids and can do it,
0:31:41and they think they will convince themselves
0:31:43that they're doing better work by working longer hours, no.
0:31:45And really the bad thing about it,
0:31:47I don't know a lot about Twitter culture,
0:31:48but it seems like from all the people bailing on Twitter,
0:31:51that their culture was, let's say,
0:31:54I mean, certainly better than this,
0:31:55and possibly better than average
0:31:57in terms of work-life balance
0:31:59and the culture of being able to say things
0:32:01on internal slacks that are critical of leadership.
0:32:03I mean, people were bragging about that,
0:32:05like it's a big deal, but can you,
0:32:07I can't even imagine working at a company
0:32:09where if you say something against leadership
0:32:12in an internal channel or in even an internal meeting,
0:32:15or to the face of a VP in a meeting.
0:32:18That shouldn't be a fireable offense.
0:32:20You can offend people and be rude
0:32:21and politically get in trouble inside a company,
0:32:25but a company that will not allow dissent
0:32:27from within the company and the privacy of that company
0:32:30is not a healthy company.
0:32:32And so these Twitter employees were accustomed
0:32:34to the environment where they weren't told
0:32:36that you need to work 20 hours a day,
0:32:38where there was an acknowledgement that you have a life,
0:32:40where there was an acknowledgement
0:32:41that you will do better work for the company
0:32:44if you are well rested and have stability
0:32:47in the rest of your life.
0:32:48And there was an acknowledgement within the company
0:32:51that it's okay to criticize the company
0:32:52because that's a healthy thing and that's how we get better.
0:32:54And then overnight, overnight all that changes
0:32:57and people quit on their own, people get fired,
0:33:00people get laid off.
0:33:01I'm wondering how many people will be left
0:33:03and it's the people who are left are going to be
0:33:05the people who are foolishly willing enough
0:33:07to destroy their lives for the amusement essentially,
0:33:10not benefit 'cause they don't need anything
0:33:11for the amusement of this billionaire
0:33:13and the people who are trapped, who have H-1B visas,
0:33:16or can't get another job quickly,
0:33:18or really need this job right now
0:33:19because they're in financial straits
0:33:20or they need the healthcare.
0:33:22There are so many reasons in our stupid system,
0:33:24healthcare being tied to your job, one of the big ones,
0:33:26something that people who are saying
0:33:27another country might not think about.
0:33:29When you leave your job, you lose your healthcare
0:33:32unless you're willing to pay a lot of money
0:33:33to continue getting it for some amount of time.
0:33:36It's messed up, anyway.
0:33:38So I feel like the only people left will be
0:33:40the true believers who are going to
0:33:41destroy themselves for him,
0:33:43and the people who are trapped.
0:33:44And those are not the best people.
0:33:45And then if you drive all those people
0:33:47to work ridiculous hours, you're gonna get poor work
0:33:50out of those remaining people.
0:33:51And it's just not a good situation.
0:33:54Like I said last week, if you got enough money,
0:33:56you can just play that game out,
0:33:58burn the thing to the ground,
0:33:59and start building up from the bottom purely with,
0:34:02you know, Elon fans who are willing
0:34:03to destroy themselves for him.
0:34:05I don't think that's a healthy company culture either,
0:34:07but it is a path that he can take
0:34:09as long as he's willing to continue to put billions
0:34:10and billions of dollars into this to pay off the debt
0:34:12and continue to hopefully keep the service running,
0:34:15he's got enough runway to continue this farce
0:34:19for as long as he wants.
0:34:20- And it isn't just about he's gonna ruin these people.
0:34:26In these kind of working conditions,
0:34:28the best people won't even work for you.
0:34:31The best people usually are not the 20-year-olds.
0:34:35It's good to have those 20-year-olds in the company
0:34:38because they do provide a lot of energy,
0:34:40a lot of grunt work.
0:34:42They do have good ideas that the older people
0:34:43might not think of, and a little bit of gumption
0:34:46in certain ways that older people tend to fade off on.
0:34:49But the older people in the company,
0:34:50and I mean, this is still Silicon Valley,
0:34:53the term older means people much younger than me.
0:34:57(laughs)
0:34:58I'm talking people who are like 30.
0:35:00(laughs)
0:35:01It's really terrible.
0:35:02We have an awful ageism problem in our industry.
0:35:04But people who are older who might have a family,
0:35:08and they are refusing to work 16 hour days for this jerk,
0:35:13they are better usually.
0:35:15The experience they have usually makes them
0:35:19more efficient workers and they know their value
0:35:22and they know that they can do great work
0:35:26benefiting the company massively
0:35:28even if they're only there eight hours a day.
0:35:30And if your company culture or explicit rules
0:35:34makes it so that those kind of people
0:35:36either can't or won't work for you,
0:35:40then you're only ever going to get those,
0:35:43either the 20 year old hotshots
0:35:45or the people who are too stuck and aren't able to leave,
0:35:49and you're gonna be missing out
0:35:50on so much of the best talent.
0:35:52So it isn't just that you're gonna be
0:35:57being mean to the people you have,
0:35:59it's that you literally won't even be able
0:36:01to get the best people,
0:36:03and even if he's on everything right up to this point,
0:36:05which of course he so much hasn't,
0:36:08but the best people won't even work for you.
0:36:10And so you have to then hire more
0:36:13of those hotshot 20 year olds,
0:36:15and you still won't get the quality and efficiency
0:36:17of work that you get from more experienced people
0:36:20being present in the ranks.
0:36:22And so it ends up being even less efficient,
0:36:24and you have to work people even harder
0:36:26because you're working less efficiently
0:36:28or doing things that are less wise.
0:36:30And it's just such a huge mess,
0:36:31and it just all, it all comes down to,
0:36:35wow, for a guy who's run so many companies,
0:36:37he really seems terrible at running companies.
0:36:39- Right, that's the thing.
0:36:40Oh, we gotta move on.
0:36:42Some of my real-time follow-up from Hayew DVD in the chat,
0:36:45with regard to the Apple TV 4K,
0:36:46first-gen, A10X, old Siri remote that everyone hated.
0:36:50Second-gen, A12, new remote.
0:36:53Third-gen, A15, USB-C remote.
0:36:57That's your three generations.
0:36:58- However, if you bought a new remote
0:37:00for an older Apple TV. - Yeah, which I did.
0:37:03- Which every, yeah, I did too.
0:37:04Then it's all out the window.
0:37:06We are brought to you this week by Trade Coffee.
0:37:10You know, the holidays are approaching,
0:37:11it's kind of shopping season,
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0:39:01- All right, with regard to the utility of HomeKit,
0:39:08this is from Todd.
0:39:09Todd writes, "I'm a high-level quadriplegic,
0:39:13"which means I have no use in my arms or legs.
0:39:15"I have been doing home automation for 30 years.
0:39:17"HomeKit has been a blessing.
0:39:18"It's fairly simple to set up and it is very reliable."
0:39:22I'm not so sure if that's true,
0:39:23but hey, if Todd thinks it's reliable,
0:39:24I'm good with that not so much for consumer level home automation that came before it
0:39:28I have I device switches all over the place
0:39:30It's so enabling to be able to tell Siri to turn lights on and off
0:39:32I have outside lights automated to come on and turn off. It's great for me. There's a lot of return on investment homekit automation
0:39:38I think that's a really good call and you know, it's not just people without use of their arms and legs
0:39:42You know
0:39:43I can think of many many many many different kinds of people that that
0:39:47Being able to shout into the ether and have a response could be really powerful
0:39:51So I thought that was a good point from Todd another advantage of one big consumer electronic companies enter an area
0:39:57It was previously like specialized like we described as consumer level
0:40:00Automation that came before it like when it was a smaller industry and the only people it's like well most people just have light switches
0:40:06But if you really need something there's these three companies that try to make things for people who can't reach right switches or whatever, right?
0:40:11But having a big company like Apple come in has got to be just you know
0:40:15So much more money and effort put into making it better
0:40:18So we may all complain about a home kit, but it's probably because that's only the only home automation thing
0:40:23We've ever dealt with if we had to deal with like cruddy home automation
0:40:25You know from the 80s or 90s or something that came before this. I'm sure that was much worse
0:40:29Indeed. I remember when when I was growing up. My dad had what was it x10 something like that?
0:40:36I forget what it was now the banner ads in the web
0:40:38Yep, that he had x10 all over the place
0:40:41Then I put in a very very small extent installation my dorm room because I was that kind of a dork
0:40:44I think I told this story at one point in the show. But but anyways, I
0:40:48His X10 setup was really robust
0:40:52and worked reasonably well, much to my surprise.
0:40:56I think it was X10, I might have that wrong.
0:40:58- Didn't they invent the pop under or the pop up?
0:41:00Was it them?
0:41:01- I have no idea.
0:41:02- Yeah, great legacy guys.
0:41:04- Yeah, there's that.
0:41:05I don't know, it was cool stuff.
0:41:07And that, he had to have a dedicated Windows machine
0:41:10to be the server for it.
0:41:11It was a mess, but it was cool
0:41:12that he was doing this in the mid 90s.
0:41:14Hey, the Mac is entering its third year
0:41:17of the quote two year transition quote to Apple Silicon.
0:41:21This was pointed out by Colt of Mac
0:41:24where we are in the beginning of the third year
0:41:26and we were supposed to have it all done in two years.
0:41:28- And that's counting generously
0:41:30because like they announced in June,
0:41:31like the first ARM Macs and they basically said,
0:41:34you know, like we'll begin our two year transition
0:41:36when like the first one comes out at the end of the year.
0:41:38So here we are at the end of 2022,
0:41:41which is generously two years after
0:41:43not the announcement of ARM Macs,
0:41:45but when the first one came out.
0:41:46So yeah, entering year three of the two-year transition,
0:41:49still waiting for that Mac Pro.
0:41:50- Yeah, so with regard to that, I got, wait, well, we got,
0:41:54but I got one of the best feedback emails
0:41:56that I've received in a while.
0:41:59And this is from Jonathan Clayton, who writes,
0:42:01"Because the quote unquote new Mac Pro
0:42:03was a topic of discussion yet again,
0:42:05and to validate Casey's anger about discussing the topic,
0:42:08I did some back of the envelope math.
0:42:09HP went live," as Jonathan wrote this,
0:42:12"3,564 days ago as of November 11th, 2022.
0:42:16For 2,641 days or 74% of its existence,
0:42:19there's been anticipation about whatever has come
0:42:21to define the new Mac Pro.
0:42:23For 257 days was the ATP launch
0:42:26until the 2013 Mac Pro shipped.
0:42:28For 1,512 days was the two years
0:42:30after the 2013 Mac Pro was released,
0:42:33about the time when people started asking questions
0:42:36until the Mac Pro 2019 shipped,
0:42:37and then 872 days and counting
0:42:40since Apple announced Apple Silicon Transition
0:42:43at WWDC 2020 and the 2019 Mac Pro was doomed.
0:42:47Sorry, John.
0:42:47So there have only been, according to Jonathan,
0:42:50923 days in ATP's existence of 3,564 days
0:42:55where everyone was okay with the current state of the Mac Pro.
0:42:57So 25% of ATP's nearly 10 years
0:43:02that the two of you have been, well, really me too,
0:43:05but all three of us have been satisfied.
0:43:06And I just thought that was wonderful, delightful,
0:43:08back-of-the-envelope math to share with everyone.
0:43:10- So it's interesting math,
0:43:11but I don't agree with the part where it says,
0:43:13where these numbers indicate times when we were
0:43:16or weren't satisfied with the existence of the Mac Pro.
0:43:19Right now, I'm perfectly satisfied with my Mac Pro.
0:43:22I don't think like, oh, Apple needs to do something
0:43:23about the Mac Pro. - You shouldn't be.
0:43:24- The current Mac Pro is great, it's just what I wanted.
0:43:28So you can't like basically start counting
0:43:30as soon as they release one and say,
0:43:32well, now you're immediately dissatisfied
0:43:33and waiting for the next one.
0:43:34Sometimes we were waiting for the next one,
0:43:36like almost the entire reign of the trash can,
0:43:38it was kinda like, yeah, yeah,
0:43:39we're kind of dissatisfied, right?
0:43:41But for the entire reign of the 2019 Mac Pro,
0:43:43I certainly haven't been dissatisfied.
0:43:45I'm not here saying, oh, I'm interested in the new Mac Pro,
0:43:48but I'm not dissatisfied with the state of it.
0:43:50I'm not saying, when is Apple gonna make a real Mac Pro?
0:43:52They made one, I bought it, I've got it, I'm happy.
0:43:54Thanks for all the math, but I think if you're going
0:44:00to do sentiment analysis of when we're upset
0:44:02about the Mac Pro, I think you would find much longer spans
0:44:05when we're upset, for instance, about the laptops.
0:44:08- That is fair, that is fair.
0:44:10- Yeah, that's true.
0:44:10But the difference is that was completely justified,
0:44:13whereas I don't know if all that Mac Pro whining was.
0:44:15But that's okay.
0:44:16- Oh, it was. - Just wait.
0:44:17When they come out with the new Mac Pro,
0:44:18and if it's like another trash can type thing
0:44:20where it's not satisfactory,
0:44:21then we'll enter another dark period.
0:44:22But we'll see. (laughs)
0:44:24- I'm so very excited.
0:44:26All right, so something that I'm actually
0:44:28genuinely excited about is the iPhone's 14
0:44:31satellite emergency SOS is live if you live in the US,
0:44:35and I think only the US.
0:44:37This debuted, I think, Monday, or maybe yesterday.
0:44:40It was sometime in the last 48 hours.
0:44:42And we'll put a link to the Apple Newsroom article
0:44:45where they mentioned that France, Germany, Ireland,
0:44:47and the UK are coming next month in December.
0:44:50And I also thought it was interesting.
0:44:52They kind of made passing mention of this,
0:44:54but I don't think they ever really discussed how
0:44:56or the mechanism for it.
0:44:57But in the Newsroom article, they said,
0:44:59"Additionally, if users want to reassure friends or family
0:45:02"of their whereabouts while traveling off the grid,
0:45:04"they can now open the Find My app
0:45:05"and share their location via satellite."
0:45:07And we're gonna talk a little bit more
0:45:08about that in a moment.
0:45:09Another thing that I thought was super cool,
0:45:11and no sarcasm, is that you can actually do a demo
0:45:14on your iPhone 14.
0:45:16So if you have an iPhone 14, you can go to settings,
0:45:18and then emergency SOS is one of the top level settings,
0:45:21and then go down to try demo,
0:45:23and you can actually try out a faked,
0:45:27oh my gosh, I'm having an emergency situation,
0:45:29and it's completely faked.
0:45:30- Is it completely faked?
0:45:31So here's two things.
0:45:32One, I found out about this thing,
0:45:35and my very first thought was,
0:45:37oh, it's kind of a shame I don't have an emergency,
0:45:39because it would be cool to try that.
0:45:40- Yeah, exactly.
0:45:41- And then two seconds later, I found out,
0:45:42hey, Apple thought of that, and they made a way,
0:45:45because they know people want to try it,
0:45:46so they made a way for you to try it
0:45:48without actually having emergency, which I think is great.
0:45:50Second, how much of it is faked?
0:45:52'Cause I tried it. - Well, that's true.
0:45:54- And it makes you do like, oh, you know,
0:45:56point towards the satellite and line up the thing
0:45:57or whatever, and then obviously it doesn't send the message,
0:46:00right, 'cause that part is surely fake,
0:46:01but is the part where you're trying
0:46:03to find the satellite also fake?
0:46:04'Cause you could fool me, like,
0:46:06just pick an arbitrary point direction
0:46:08and then make me move my phone?
0:46:10Because it's not sending anything,
0:46:11there's no way for me to tell,
0:46:13is it actually, is the part where you're turning around
0:46:16to find the satellite real?
0:46:17'Cause it does tell you to go outside,
0:46:18and I went outside, I should have tried it
0:46:20from like inside underneath a piece of tinfoil
0:46:21to see if like, if it still says,
0:46:23"Oh, you found the satellite," you know?
0:46:25But either way, it's fun to do the demo,
0:46:27you should try it, it brings you through a bunch of things.
0:46:29But like, so, you know, almost all of it is fake,
0:46:31but what I really hope is the part
0:46:33where you point it at the satellite
0:46:36and at the very least receives whatever the satellite
0:46:38is spraying down, I hope that part's real.
0:46:40I wanna believe it's real.
0:46:41- Oh, same, and I assumed that part was real,
0:46:44although then as I was talking about it during the show,
0:46:46I was thinking, well, maybe that wasn't real at all.
0:46:48But I assumed the satellite connectivity part was real,
0:46:51it's just the emergency part,
0:46:53just like you said a moment ago,
0:46:54the emergency part was not.
0:46:55But you make a good point, and it occurred to me,
0:46:58like I said while I was talking about it,
0:46:59that maybe everything was fake, I don't know.
0:47:01We'll have to maybe follow up.
0:47:02- Yeah, and also, when you're doing this demo,
0:47:04Like they put, this is, all right,
0:47:06so the fact this feature exists I think is great.
0:47:08This is like Apple at its best
0:47:09anticipating what people want to do.
0:47:11And then they just, like, they did a good job
0:47:14of making this fake UI, because it's not an easy task
0:47:17to make it clear that you're doing something that's fake,
0:47:20to make sure you can't accidentally do the non-fake thing,
0:47:24and on every single screen, making it so that like,
0:47:28there's no confusion about the fact,
0:47:30don't worry, you're not actually telling ambulances
0:47:33to come to your house.
0:47:34difficult problem they did not have to tackle
0:47:36just for this purely like, hey, people wanna try this
0:47:39because it's fun.
0:47:40And it's not just fun, it's also rehearsal
0:47:42for if you ever have an emergency.
0:47:43Because the last thing you wanna be doing in an emergency
0:47:45is like, I know my phone's supposed to do this thing,
0:47:48but I've literally never done it
0:47:49and I have no idea where it is,
0:47:50which is why one of the cool features of this
0:47:52is like you don't have to remember where it is.
0:47:53Just in America.
0:47:55Dial 911 and if it can't dial 911,
0:47:57that's all you have to remember.
0:47:58That's what people know anyway.
0:47:59Oh, you know, something terrible's happened, dial 911.
0:48:02If you're in the mountains and have no signal,
0:48:05right on the screen where you don 911,
0:48:06it will throw up a button that says,
0:48:09you know, satellite, do this, SOS, whatever,
0:48:11because it will try 911, but there's no phone available,
0:48:13so you don't have to learn, like,
0:48:14oh, I have to go into settings,
0:48:15or what app is this under, or whatever.
0:48:17If you just do the first thing that comes to your mind,
0:48:19which is dial the emergency number,
0:48:21you will be presented with an option
0:48:22to do this if necessary.
0:48:24- Yeah, that's really cool, 'cause like, that's,
0:48:26when I first saw that there was a demo,
0:48:28I was like, what?
0:48:29Like that's so unlike Apple to offer that kind of thing,
0:48:33so it's noteworthy, first of all, that it's there.
0:48:36And then I started thinking, why is it there?
0:48:37And at first I thought, well, it's probably there
0:48:39just for the PR of this new software release,
0:48:42so now everyone can try it out and see.
0:48:43But then I thought really, oh, that kind of rehearsal angle,
0:48:46like, oh, they want people to know where this is
0:48:49for when you need it.
0:48:51That's really cool.
0:48:52And again, all this is very un-Apple-like,
0:48:55but I think in a very good way.
0:48:57- I think it is Apple-like.
0:48:58like, and maybe it's because I'm old,
0:48:59but this is exactly what I think of when I think of Apple,
0:49:02is someone being really thoughtful about a feature
0:49:04and then spending way too much time and effort
0:49:07to make a really good UI for the fake satellite interface.
0:49:10So because, again, the challenge is there,
0:49:13is to teach people how it's gonna work.
0:49:15If you were an emergency,
0:49:16here's what we would be asking you to do.
0:49:17We'd be asking you to find satellites.
0:49:19We'd be like, this is what you're gonna do,
0:49:20so it's rehearsal, but also the whole time,
0:49:22make sure that you know you're not doing anything destructive
0:49:25and it's clear to you that it's a demo.
0:49:26And that's a lot of work, and that's the best of the Apple
0:49:29that I think of.
0:49:30Maybe it's the '80s or '90s Apple,
0:49:32with the Apple that was all about user experience and user
0:49:35interface, and surprise and delight, and not ads.
0:49:38Yeah.
0:49:39If only.
0:49:41You have to click through this ad
0:49:43before you can send the satellite message.
0:49:45Hey, it looks like you're trying to dial 911.
0:49:47Can I interest you in a casino app?
0:49:49Right.
0:49:49You might want to sign up for Apple Arcade
0:49:50before you send that message.
0:49:51Are you sure?
0:49:52It's going to take you a really long time
0:49:53before the helicopter gets there.
0:49:54You might want to kill some time with this new gambling slots app.
0:49:57All right. Focus gentlemen. So I did this, you know,
0:50:01demo just like the two of you did and I did a screen recording while I was doing
0:50:05it and I tweeted it, you know, because as we sit here now,
0:50:07Twitter is still here miraculously.
0:50:09And so we'll put a link to that video in the show notes.
0:50:12I'm sure the quality is garbage, but nevertheless,
0:50:13it will give you the gist of it if you don't have an iPhone 14. But yeah,
0:50:17I thought it was really, really cool. I love that,
0:50:19that this is something you can try and just like the two of you said,
0:50:23it is a great rehearsal for when the time comes. So all good things. Then the same day,
0:50:28iJustine on YouTube was given a special privilege to discuss all this with Kyan Drance and Arun
0:50:35and Tim something or other. I'm sorry, I forgot to write the rest of the names down. But anyways,
0:50:40they talked about a bunch of things. They mentioned on this and perhaps in the newsroom
0:50:43as well that it is free for two years, quote, "Starting with the activation of your iPhone
0:50:49They made some other interesting kind of one-off comments.
0:50:53They said that the satellites are traveling at 15,000 miles an hour, 800 miles above the
0:50:59Earth.
0:51:00Leaving aside the 15,000 miles an hour thing, I still think to this day that it is pretty
0:51:06freaking cool that this little brick in my hand can talk to a cell tower that's, you
0:51:12know, maybe a mile, two miles, five miles away.
0:51:15We're talking about a satellite 800 miles above the Earth.
0:51:21That is extremely cool.
0:51:23I hope to never need this feature, but I just think that's super duper cool that this is
0:51:27something that we have in a run-of-the-mill everyday phone.
0:51:31I think that's awesome.
0:51:33It was also interesting that Arun said that if you're in a car accident, the phone will
0:51:38try to dial 911, but if it can't, it will—and these are direct quotes now—if it's unable
0:51:44to call 911, it will then use this capability to try to get the message out via satellite.
0:51:49In that situation, the phone probably does not have a clear view of the sky and might
0:51:53be between the seats or in the trunk. So we keep the data extremely small in that situation,
0:51:59and we have a really good confidence that we'll still be able to get that message out
0:52:02and get you home. How freaking cool is that? That it knows, if you're in a car accident,
0:52:07like God forbid, that, "Oh, we've got to keep this, whatever the transmission is, crazy
0:52:13small because we may not have a long time to transmit it.
0:52:16So I thought that was super neat.
0:52:17If you're in a car accident or you're on a roller coaster.
0:52:19Remember that's the we didn't cover that.
0:52:20We didn't cover that story of people are getting activations on like, uh, you know, amusement
0:52:23park rides.
0:52:25And I feel for Apple there because I don't think that's malfunctioning.
0:52:28I think a lot of the motions that happen to you when you're in amusement park ride are
0:52:31exactly the same as happened when you're in a car accident, especially when you're considering
0:52:36its emotion happening to the phone, not necessarily to you.
0:52:39So I'm not saying amusement park rides injure you, but it could be that in an actual car
0:52:43accident that injures you, your phone may experience exactly the same accelerations
0:52:48of exactly the same kind as it would in an amusement park ride if it was in your pocket.
0:52:52So I don't know how you solve that problem, really.
0:52:55And then, you know, the worst case scenario, you're in an accident in an amusement park
0:52:59ride.
0:53:00So it's not like they're, you know, maybe they could help with their ML model or whatever,
0:53:04but I feel like it's not doing anything wrong.
0:53:07Like there is, in many cases there is no difference and so I'm not quite sure how they solve that
0:53:11problem but it seems like it might be an actual problem.
0:53:15Maybe they'll have signs at amusement parks that say, you know, put your phone into airplane
0:53:18mode or don't bring your phone on this ride with you or something like that.
0:53:21And in general I would say don't bring your phone on the roller coaster.
0:53:25You don't need to text anybody while you're on it.
0:53:27And you know, I remember last time I was at, was it Great American?
0:53:31I think it was universal maybe in Florida,
0:53:35waiting for my family to get off a ride.
0:53:38And it was like some looping roller coaster
0:53:40that went over the water and I'm standing by the railing
0:53:41looking at the water and down at the bottom of the water,
0:53:43you could just see the lit up screens of a bunch of phones.
0:53:46'Cause it's like we're going over the loops
0:53:48and they're like falling out of their purse,
0:53:49falling out of their pocket.
0:53:51Yeah, don't bring your phone on the ride.
0:53:53- Well, what else are you supposed to do with it?
0:53:55It's in your pocket. - They have lockers.
0:53:56They have lockers that you can put your stuff.
0:53:58- They cost like $1,000 a minute.
0:54:00It's an amusement park. I know but like would you rather your phone be lit up at the bottom?
0:54:05It must have been since they were unlocked
0:54:06It must have been people like trying to take a video while they're on the roller coaster or something like that
0:54:10And there they are in the water
0:54:12Good job. Anyway real-time follow-up. I have no idea if this is you know, 100% true or not
0:54:17But according to 100 ghosts in the chat
0:54:19I had a message that said the satellite had passed and I would need to wait two minutes for the next one to be available
0:54:24This is in the context of doing the demo
0:54:27So that makes me think it's what you and I expected John that the satellite portion was real
0:54:30- I've never played a video game. Oh, well, but why would they do that?
0:54:35It makes the service look they want to give you an authentic experience of what it's really gonna be like
0:54:39I just don't actually know if you know any actual communication with the satellite is involved
0:54:43Nothing really matters like the whole point of the rehearsal is this is what you're gonna be asked to do
0:54:46Maybe it'll say it passed you're gonna have to point in the direction
0:54:49You're gonna have to hold it there like they can make the rehearsal be authentic. Mm-hmm
0:54:54Well anyway moving along it is worth noting that in order to do this
0:55:01Via or to in order to send your location you can do that
0:55:05Manually it doesn't happen automatically, but you can manually go into the find my app you can do this right now
0:55:11but I won't let you send it find my me and then my location via satellite and
0:55:16Presumably I didn't try this but presumably this is where you would say okay?
0:55:19Who do you want to send it to but it says?
0:55:21Generally speaking not available and then there's learn more in a chevron and in the learn more
0:55:25It says something along the lines of hey, you're connected to sell and or Wi-Fi
0:55:30So we're not gonna bother with the satellite right now
0:55:32But which I thought was reasonable a couple other things from the I justine interview
0:55:36The medical ID is sent along with the SOS message
0:55:38So, you know what you're allergic to how big how tall you are how much you weigh etc, etc
0:55:43Which I thought was interesting again going back to a rune
0:55:47This is a quote.
0:55:48"It was really important to use the satellite constellation that was fully mature and built out.
0:55:51The challenge became, how do we make the iPhone be able to interact with this thing that's already launched and been up there for a long time and has been mature?
0:55:58So we had to make the necessary hardware modifications to allow us to optimize that communication back and forth,
0:56:02and then build an entirely new communication stack that included a whole new waveform and all the layers above,
0:56:08a custom link layer, a custom networking layer, etc."
0:56:11And they eventually came out and stated that Globalstar is the partner company,
0:56:15And they said that that was in no small part because apparently it is unusual for satellite radio operators to have a single
0:56:23global frequency, but Globalstar does. So whatever it is, you know, 1, 2, 3.5 megahertz or whatever, that is the case across the planet. And
0:56:31Mike had said that they have Apple proprietary radio systems in each of Globalstar's ground stations to support this.
0:56:41He also said in summary we have a general idea of the dead zones from cellular networks and he said I'm sorry
0:56:48I'm paraphrasing what he said that he he had a they have a general idea of where the dead zones are from cellular networks and
0:56:53They when they were building this all out and figuring out how to make work
0:56:56They were prioritizing, you know, how do we make these areas work?
0:56:59So like I don't know the Shenandoah National Park here in the East Coast or one of the eight gazillion parks in, California
0:57:04They know these are the places that people are going to use this sort of thing. How do we make it work the best there?
0:57:09So I found all of this extremely fascinating. I think the Justine video, which is about 20 minutes long, is worth your time.
0:57:15I just think it's super cool.
0:57:17All right, move right along.
0:57:20Mastodon.
0:57:22Is that a thing? Are we doing this?
0:57:24It seems to maybe possibly be becoming a thing?
0:57:28I had to look this up because, all right, so we'll talk about Mastodon in a second,
0:57:32but it'll explain why I have lots of accounts in them.
0:57:35But my accounts, I signed up for them five years ago,
0:57:39probably during the last Twitter is doomed cycle, right?
0:57:43I mean, we all went to app.net at one point,
0:57:45and not went to, but got signed up for app.net.
0:57:48And at some point, apparently in 2017,
0:57:51I signed up for tons of Mastodon stuff.
0:57:53So when the Mastodon stuff came around, I'm like,
0:57:55oh, I'm pretty sure I have a Mastodon account.
0:57:56Turns out I have like six Mastodon accounts,
0:57:58which is part of the problem.
0:57:59Anyway, continue.
0:58:00What is Mastodon?
0:58:01- Right, so I don't know if I'm the best person
0:58:04to give a great summary of Mastodon.
0:58:05But the idea of Mastodon is, you know,
0:58:07what if you had Twitter, but it wasn't as centralized?
0:58:11It was kind of quasi-centralized.
0:58:14And so you could join an instance,
0:58:17what is there, is an instance the term they use for it?
0:58:19What do they call it?
0:58:20- Yeah, instance. - Okay.
0:58:21You can join an instance, which is basically a server,
0:58:23where there are like-minded individuals.
0:58:26And that, well, in theory--
0:58:29- You can join an instance.
0:58:31- Well, okay, what-- - It's federated.
0:58:32You can join an instance.
0:58:34- No, hear me out for a second.
0:58:35I think the theory, in my understanding anyway,
0:58:38of the theory is that you join a server,
0:58:40an instance that has like-minded individuals,
0:58:42and then the administrators of that instance
0:58:46can block other instances from talking to you.
0:58:49They can do all sorts of content moderation
0:58:52and so on and so forth.
0:58:53So if you want to be in a instance where free speech
0:58:58is a thing, you can do that.
0:59:00If you want to be in an instance where you mostly chat
0:59:02about programming stuff, you can do that.
0:59:04But what's fascinating and interesting about Mastodon
0:59:06is that, like you said, it's federated.
0:59:08So what that basically means is you can link up
0:59:11and follow other accounts from other instances.
0:59:15So even though I might be on mastodon.social,
0:59:18which I have an account there,
0:59:19but I haven't posted anything,
0:59:21I might be on mastodon.social,
0:59:22but Jon might be in ItalianAmericans.family
0:59:26or something like that.
0:59:27- Jon might be in seven other.
0:59:29- And seven other ones too.
0:59:31So in theory, I think that's a kind of neat idea,
0:59:35but in practice, I think it's kind of aesthetically icky
0:59:40and I just don't know how well it really works out,
0:59:43especially since you can, as the instance owner/runner/
0:59:48whatever, you can just up and decide,
0:59:51eh, I don't wanna deal with this anymore.
0:59:52And that has happened.
0:59:54And I think the code of conduct or whatever
0:59:56amongst Mastodon administrators is you have to give
1:00:00six months notice or something like that, but really you don't, I don't think.
1:00:05What are they going to do?
1:00:06Well, let me describe some more of the cool features about this and get to the kicker,
1:00:09which is like last week or maybe the week before Marco was like, "We're not going to
1:00:12go to Mastodon, and even if we did, it doesn't matter because they're going to have all the
1:00:15same problems as Twitter."
1:00:16A lot of people said, "Wait, but have you heard about Mastodon's features?
1:00:19They're not going to have all the same problems as Twitter because it has all these features."
1:00:21You already talked about one, Casey.
1:00:22"Oh, if you're on a server, that server can decide which ones it wants to federate with.
1:00:26It can just block an entire server filled with trolls, right?
1:00:28And so you don't have to deal with them and blah, blah, blah.
1:00:31And there's even more to it than that.
1:00:33If an instance shuts down, you can transfer, basically,
1:00:37your followers or your identity, like redirect
1:00:39to a different thing.
1:00:41So it's not like, oh, I'm beholden
1:00:43to the owner of this thing.
1:00:44So if they shut it down, then I'm screwed
1:00:46and I lose everything.
1:00:47No, there's actually a feature where
1:00:48you can transfer your followers and your account
1:00:51and your identity to another instance.
1:00:53And so it's made to be resilient and decentralized,
1:00:56giving each instance owner the ability to form a community
1:01:00that works the way they want it to work.
1:01:03But I think having said all of that,
1:01:05and I'm sure there's other features
1:01:06that I'm even missing about this,
1:01:07having said all of that, like what is it,
1:01:09ActivityPub, the public API for this type of thing
1:01:12and everything, you do still have all the same problems
1:01:17as Twitter, you just have them in miniature form,
1:01:21repeated many different times.
1:01:23What are the problems of Twitter?
1:01:24The problems with Twitter are,
1:01:25how do we set the rules for this community?
1:01:28How do we decide what behavior is and isn't allowed?
1:01:30How do we decide which other federated instances
1:01:33to block and to not block?
1:01:34How do we decide when to kick somebody off?
1:01:36How do we make money to keep this service running?
1:01:39Does making that money make it an unpleasant place
1:01:41for people to be, right?
1:01:42It's all exactly the same problems as Twitter.
1:01:45The good thing about it is that you get many,
1:01:47many chances to solve those.
1:01:48So instead of just having one chance
1:01:50with one stupid Elon Musk running the thing or whatever,
1:01:52you get 50 chances.
1:01:53But that's also the bad thing,
1:01:54and it's why I have so many accounts.
1:01:56I wanna sign up for Mastodon.
1:01:58Hmm, which instance should I choose?
1:02:00The instance where other people I know are?
1:02:05- Oh, but that doesn't matter.
1:02:07- But yeah, well, it kinda matters
1:02:09'cause you can have a local feed,
1:02:10but if an instance is like,
1:02:13oh, it's the place, there's a community
1:02:15with a set of rules, I wanna go where my friends are
1:02:17because I bet that set of rules is good.
1:02:18Well, but it also could just be that all your friends
1:02:21went to the most popular instance,
1:02:23and it turns out the most popular instance
1:02:24is run by a megalomaniac who reads all your DMs,
1:02:27because by the way, the owner of the instance
1:02:29can read all your stuff, right?
1:02:31It's like, you don't know that, right?
1:02:33So maybe that's the wrong instance.
1:02:34Maybe I should go to this instance.
1:02:35Oh, that instance was run by somebody as a hobby
1:02:37and they shut it down two years ago, right?
1:02:40When I went into re-sign into my Mastodon things,
1:02:44one of them was totally gone,
1:02:45because the thing was shut down.
1:02:47One of them had a big red banner at the top
1:02:49said, "Warning, this thing is shutting down imminently."
1:02:51One of them I forgot my password to forever,
1:02:54so that one's gone, right?
1:02:56I don't know why it wasn't in any of my keychains
1:02:57or something, or maybe I just never knew the password
1:02:59and didn't save it.
1:03:01And the quote-unquote popular one, mastodon.social,
1:03:04I couldn't get my username on,
1:03:06which frustrates me in the end, right?
1:03:08And then I have like three other ones, right?
1:03:10And so I'm shuffling the people, but anyway.
1:03:13It is better than Twitter because it is less centralized,
1:03:17but all that means is that all these instances
1:03:21now have this trial by fire of,
1:03:22"Hey, you think it's so easy to run Twitter?
1:03:24"You figure out how to do it,
1:03:25"and figure out how to keep the lights on,
1:03:28"figure out how to make enough money to run the instance.
1:03:30"If your thing becomes popular
1:03:31"and you're not making any money,
1:03:32"how much you think it's gonna cost you
1:03:33"to run Mastodon for all these people
1:03:35"and do all the federated activity?"
1:03:37And then, by the way,
1:03:38if a bunch of Nazis come into your server,
1:03:40you're gonna spend your whole day fighting them off,
1:03:41and then spam bots come, and then blah, blah, blah.
1:03:43It's like, if you become the most successful big instance,
1:03:46"Oh, Mastodon.social, it's super popular.
1:03:48"It's got millions of people."
1:03:49Well, that's like days or weeks away
1:03:51from facing the same problems that Twitter faced
1:03:54when it got a million or so people.
1:03:57So I'm not poo-pooing these things.
1:03:58I think it is better than having one publicly
1:04:01or privately held company that is the centralized version
1:04:03of all of this.
1:04:04But I think, I'm not gonna say,
1:04:08oh, it's not gonna help and it's not gonna save us
1:04:11'cause if Twitter goes away,
1:04:12Mastodon is better than nothing, I feel like,
1:04:14and it is very much Twitter-like.
1:04:16But boy, they have an uphill climb.
1:04:18They're gonna have to go through all the same thing.
1:04:19Their instances are gonna come and go.
1:04:22They're gonna have to work through
1:04:23all sorts of different rules.
1:04:24Hopefully there'll be enough of them
1:04:25trying these experiments,
1:04:26but there'll be a lot of wreckage from that
1:04:28of like, oh, this server screwed up
1:04:30and this was invaded by Nazis and they set these rules here
1:04:33and this one doesn't allow cursing.
1:04:35There's just gonna be a lot of that churn going on
1:04:38and it's just exhausting to keep up with that.
1:04:40So that's probably going to keep it
1:04:41from ever being popular with anybody
1:04:42except for real nerdy people.
1:04:44And then all the years of stuff that's happened on Twitter.
1:04:47The API, all the clients that are built around,
1:04:50I know everyone just uses the official client,
1:04:51but like, you can make third party Mastodon clients
1:04:55probably, but right now, there's the official client
1:04:57in the web UI, and they're better than Twitter was
1:05:00in the beginning, but they're not as good as the best
1:05:02of the best Twitter interfaces that exist today.
1:05:04How could they be?
1:05:05They just haven't had time and money to mature.
1:05:07So, you know, it's not that I'm pessimistic about Mastodon,
1:05:12but I just don't, the only problem Mastodon solves
1:05:14is Elon Musk, and it's, granted, that's a big problem,
1:05:17Or if, you know, previously the only problem it solves
1:05:19is Twitter is fairly inept management, right?
1:05:23But all the other problems are there,
1:05:25they're just now spread into little miniature instances
1:05:28of those problems, and then people are sprinkled over
1:05:31those instances like, fend for yourselves, figure it out,
1:05:34hope you land on something with a good moderator,
1:05:35don't say anything in DMs that you don't want anybody to see.
1:05:38I don't know, I don't relish it.
1:05:42Anyway, I'm on all sorts of Macedon things,
1:05:44I still do want to get my last name and I asked it
1:05:46on it on social, but I'm working on it.
1:05:48So on mastodon.social, they have an about page,
1:05:51which I don't know if you can see it if you're not logged in,
1:05:53but it's mastodon.social/about.
1:05:55There's a section, moderated servers,
1:05:57and there's a list of just eyeballing it,
1:05:59maybe a couple hundred, maybe 10 or 20 of which are limited.
1:06:04And then there's a bunch that are considered suspended.
1:06:07As I'm scrolling this list, one of the instances that
1:06:12is limited is, I kid you not, sh*tposter.club, and FYI, it's limited because of harassment,
1:06:19you don't say. Also, is Elon the president of the sh*tposter club? Because he certainly
1:06:25thinks he is.
1:06:28Having instances, that is the one good thing about Mastana, is these tiny tyrants who run
1:06:31the instances, they are able to do what big companies thus far have not been doing, which
1:06:38is like, "Hey, if someone's being a jerk in your instance, just boot them out. You don't
1:06:41have to have this complicated policy.
1:06:43There's not going to be any New York Times story
1:06:44about how you booted out the jerks.
1:06:45It's like having an IRC server back in the day,
1:06:48or whatever, like BBS.
1:06:50If you run the BBS and someone's a jerk, you boot them off.
1:06:53And there's no big story about it, right?
1:06:55Because it's your thing and you get to run it
1:06:56and you get to set the rules, right?
1:06:58But what that means is that every instance is at the whim
1:07:01of the people who own that instance.
1:07:03And how well do you know the people who own instances?
1:07:06Right now, there isn't enough knowledge
1:07:08for the general public of like,
1:07:11is this a good instance to be on or a bad one?
1:07:13It's like, well, you'll find out.
1:07:14Again, just like BBS is our IRC service,
1:07:16you'll find out if the admin is a jerk or not eventually.
1:07:19If this ball keeps rolling,
1:07:23there should eventually be public knowledge
1:07:25about which ones are reasonably safe, nice places to be.
1:07:30But like I said, all that does is fast forward you to
1:07:34like Twitter circa 2007 or eight or nine, I guess,
1:07:39where it's like, okay,
1:07:40now we found a nice pleasant place to be.
1:07:42And now here come all the problems that Twitter encountered.
1:07:44How are you going to deal with them,
1:07:46person who runs this thing in your spare time?
1:07:47Good luck.
1:07:48- Yeah, I don't know.
1:07:50I like, I really feel like I'm turning into old man
1:07:54who shouts at clouds 'cause I'm,
1:07:56I don't wanna be pessimistic about everything,
1:07:59but I just don't love what I've seen so far on Mastodon.
1:08:03Like, I think it just, it seems like the,
1:08:08it seems like Linux, right?
1:08:10I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
1:08:11But it's like the--
1:08:12- Linux is way better.
1:08:14- Well, fair.
1:08:15It's like the crummy open source version
1:08:17of something that everyone likes, right?
1:08:19Which is impressive.
1:08:21- It's not that crummy.
1:08:22It's actually, I mean, again,
1:08:23considering I signed up for it five years ago,
1:08:25it's pretty feature rich.
1:08:26And the web UI does not look like it was just
1:08:29thrown together in a weekend, right?
1:08:31It's not great, and it's overly confusing and overly
1:08:34complicated and could be improved or whatever.
1:08:36But I'm impressed with how many features
1:08:39it's gotten in the five years that I've been ignoring it.
1:08:41And I get what you're getting at in that it's like--
1:08:44open source software.
1:08:47I mean, the worst thing you say about it
1:08:49is that they're all kind of running the same software.
1:08:51So whoever modifies that software
1:08:53and updates it has the ability to make our lives better
1:08:56or worse.
1:08:56And how does that work?
1:08:57But for people thinking it's going
1:08:59to be like an IRC type thing.
1:09:02It is more pleasant than that.
1:09:04- It is, it is for sure.
1:09:05- Yes, I mean, to me, the problem with Mastodon
1:09:08is not anything about its features.
1:09:12Suppose you get over all the hurdles.
1:09:15Suppose you choose a server instance or whatever
1:09:18to host yourself, which will host you for some reason,
1:09:23indefinitely into the future without problems, lol.
1:09:26Okay, so suppose you get past that,
1:09:28And suppose that some of your friends get past it too
1:09:32and they somehow find you or create accounts or whatever.
1:09:36It's just really hard to juggle two very similar
1:09:40social networks where you don't have the same friends
1:09:43on both, you don't have any good way to get all
1:09:46of the friends on one onto the other,
1:09:49and it's kind of hard to know like,
1:09:50well what do I post where?
1:09:52Now, if you have say topic specific Mastodon instances,
1:09:57Like I was on one for Overcast,
1:09:59there was like a podcast kind of standardized discussion
1:10:02kind of thing, but that was like topic specific.
1:10:05For just like general use,
1:10:08what do I do with two Twitter like services?
1:10:11Like my entire usage pattern of Twitter
1:10:15is through these apps.
1:10:17I have Tweetbot on the Mac, I have Tweetbot on the phone,
1:10:20there's other apps like Twitturific that are great.
1:10:22Mastodon has an app and I used it briefly
1:10:26on my phone last night.
1:10:27I'm not aware of a Mac app besides the web app
1:10:29and the web app, and you know,
1:10:30web apps for this kind of stuff just suck
1:10:32compared to native apps.
1:10:33The native apps are way better.
1:10:34And so on my phone, I tried the Mastodon app
1:10:37and because it kind of looks like Twitter
1:10:40and kind of works like Twitter,
1:10:42you expect it to work like Twitter
1:10:43and it's a bit uncanny valley-ish
1:10:44and then you go to do something
1:10:46that works in your Twitter app of choice
1:10:48and it doesn't work at all or the same way.
1:10:51it just kind of feels broken.
1:10:53And I can post stuff there, but do I post the same thing?
1:10:57Do I cross post?
1:10:58Do I have to look at responses from both?
1:11:01In the ideal case, what would get this off the ground
1:11:05is one app, say Tweetbot or Twitterific,
1:11:10where you could attach your Twitter account
1:11:13and a Mastodon account or two
1:11:16and view all the replies in one app
1:11:18and have everything work the same way.
1:11:21- Can you imagine if it had this, I don't know,
1:11:23what if your timeline was all together,
1:11:25if it was like, I don't know, you, you, you,
1:11:27whoa, whoa, what if it was unified?
1:11:29I bet that would be cool. - You're making a joke,
1:11:31but the inability to browse Mastodon
1:11:35with a unified timeline is actually a barrier
1:11:38for adoption for me personally,
1:11:39because that's what Mark was saying.
1:11:41If you're used to doing it a certain way in Twitter,
1:11:43since this is so similar, there are habits that you're formed
1:11:45and you're like, well, I don't wanna use Mastodon,
1:11:47doesn't let me view it the way I'm used to viewing it.
1:11:51And obviously the solution is that,
1:11:52well, if Twitter implodes, Mastodon's
1:11:54starting looking a lot better, and you don't have
1:11:55to have this question anymore, because it is so Twitter-like,
1:11:58and it is the most Twitter-like of the competing things,
1:12:00that if Twitter literally does implode,
1:12:02or actually goes down and they can't bring it back up,
1:12:04or whatever, turns into something terrible
1:12:07that everybody leaves, Mastodon is there waiting for it.
1:12:10But I feel like the centralization of Twitter,
1:12:13people can sign up for it, they know where to go,
1:12:16they go to twitter.com, right?
1:12:18The single unified namespace, and you can say,
1:12:20well, you know, Mastodon has a unified namespace too.
1:12:22It just has an extra ad and an address in it,
1:12:24just like an email address, not a big deal.
1:12:26I think it is a big deal,
1:12:27especially since when instances go down,
1:12:29you might not necessarily be able
1:12:30to get the same username elsewhere.
1:12:31Stable URLs, tweets for all these years
1:12:34have had stable URLs.
1:12:36Not so with Mastodon things,
1:12:37'cause if that instance goes down and disappears from the web
1:12:40that URL that points to that instance
1:12:41is not gonna work anymore, right?
1:12:43That's kind of why I like this Jack Dorsey,
1:12:46you know, wankery project, whatever,
1:12:49the Project Blue Sky thing,
1:12:51which is like, let's build Twitter,
1:12:52but let's do it with open standards and decentralized
1:12:54and blah, blah, blah.
1:12:56If you look at the technology and ideas
1:12:58behind Project Blue Sky, we'll put a link in the show,
1:13:00it's blueskyweb.xyz,
1:13:03the technology and the ideas I think are really good.
1:13:06I don't think it will ever actually come to anything,
1:13:08which is the problem,
1:13:09but like what you want is the best of both worlds.
1:13:11You want the clarity and single unified namespace
1:13:16and stable URLs of Twitter,
1:13:18but without it being owned and controlled
1:13:19by a single private company.
1:13:20And that is a tall order.
1:13:22We kind of already have that with blogs and RSS.
1:13:25It was straightforward.
1:13:27URLs were stable as they wanted to be.
1:13:29You presumably owned and controlled your own blog.
1:13:32And if your hosting company went down,
1:13:33you can move your blog elsewhere or whatever.
1:13:35But that was like a ideal world for computer nerds
1:13:39who know how to make and run
1:13:41want to make and run their own blog.
1:13:44And what that rapidly turned into is, "Oh, my blog is on Blogger."
1:13:48And then eventually Blogger falls out of favor.
1:13:50"I'm on LiveJournal.
1:13:51I'm on Tumblr."
1:13:52And it's just like these big companies that are helping other people do this thing that
1:13:55only nerds could do before.
1:13:58And Twitter just solved that problem for everybody.
1:14:00We're one company, go to one place, we're all talked together in one big giant thing.
1:14:04And that's why Marco said it two shows ago, it would be ideal if that could just continue
1:14:07in terms of the simplicity of the user experience, but not ideal in terms of the consequences.
1:14:13Because as we've seen, a person who controls Twitter can really screw things up for a lot
1:14:17of people.
1:14:18And both pre-Elon and post-Elon we saw that, amply demonstrated, right?
1:14:22So I'm not sure what the solution is, but the blue sky stuff looks really appealing
1:14:26to me if something like that could ever actually be created and gotten off the ground.
1:14:31And if they worked out all the problems of like, how do I make it simple for regular
1:14:34to people to sign up while still not having it eventually
1:14:37be owned and controlled by a single company.
1:14:38Because kind of like blogging, you're like,
1:14:40"Oh, blogging, it's free.
1:14:40"It's not owned and controlled by a single company."
1:14:42But once you get the regular people in there
1:14:43who don't want to write their own servers
1:14:45or run their own servers or own CMSs,
1:14:48you get necessarily these companies that,
1:14:50you know, I don't know if Ben Thompson
1:14:53will call them aggregators, but like,
1:14:54"Hey, we're a big company.
1:14:56"You don't wanna have to worry about running a blog.
1:14:58"We'll run it for you."
1:15:00That's why I feel like, you know,
1:15:01I mean, arguably frequent sponsor Squarespace,
1:15:04encouraging you to get your own domain name
1:15:07kind of helps us hedge against that
1:15:09because in theory, if Squarespace goes away
1:15:12or becomes evil or starts charging you too much money,
1:15:14you can just pick up your website
1:15:16'cause it's at your own domain name
1:15:17and put it someplace else.
1:15:17But now we're back to techie stuff again, right?
1:15:20And what you'd be looking for is another company
1:15:22like Squarespace that solves this problem for you.
1:15:24And that's why you get these big consolidations
1:15:26of a giant company where most people have their
1:15:29Twitter replacement blue sky thing,
1:15:31and then the nerds have their own individual
1:15:33Twitter replacement blue sky.
1:15:34Same thing with Mastodon.
1:15:35You can run your Mastodon since you can get
1:15:36a Mastodon address that is a domain that you control.
1:15:40But that is definitely a tech nerdy thing
1:15:41and most people won't do that.
1:15:42So, hard problems to solve.
1:15:45Arguably, running Twitter not like an idiot
1:15:48is an easier problem to solve
1:15:50than everything we've discussed here
1:15:51because Twitter had improved over the years,
1:15:55learned some hard lessons,
1:15:57and was on a path that was ever so slowly
1:16:00getting slightly better over time.
1:16:03If someone could have just taken over Twitter
1:16:05and bent that line up to get better faster,
1:16:08boy that would have been much better than where we are now,
1:16:11which is bending that line way, way downward real fast.
1:16:15- Yeah, I don't see Mastodon itself,
1:16:19and maybe it's possible for something else
1:16:20to have a better story here.
1:16:21I don't see Mastodon having the user experience
1:16:26to really ever get mass traction.
1:16:28And part of it is because of the weird federation stuff
1:16:32and the weird double at usernames and everything.
1:16:36There's a whole bunch there that's just very
1:16:38normal person hostile.
1:16:40- The instability of addresses and URLs,
1:16:42it's a real problem.
1:16:44- But I think ultimately,
1:16:45what's gonna take off, if anything,
1:16:50to replace Twitter is gonna be another centralized company
1:16:53that's gonna have a really nice app
1:16:54and be accessible everywhere and be really easy
1:16:58for everyone to get into and that's what's gonna work.
1:17:01And Mastodon, while I respect what they're trying to do
1:17:04and I like a lot of the ideals behind it,
1:17:06the implementation and the user experience so far
1:17:10is just so regular person hostile.
1:17:13And I don't see that meaningfully changing.
1:17:17What might happen is one Mastodon host
1:17:21might get really popular and then you just have
1:17:24a different centralized company, that might happen.
1:17:27But the whole thing with like,
1:17:29oh, well you can follow me over here,
1:17:31it's like, yeah, you can make your moonshine
1:17:34in your bathtub, but no one's gonna really do that.
1:17:37It's this whole nerd dream where everyone's gonna have
1:17:39their own domains and their own URLs,
1:17:42and over and over again, the industry just proves
1:17:46that's not what people ever wanna do,
1:17:48and at least a lot of people.
1:17:51We can get nerds like us and business owners
1:17:53and stuff to do it, but to get most of the public
1:17:55into something like this, it has to be way simpler
1:17:58and way easier.
1:17:59There can't be 16 different answers.
1:18:01There can't be a question that poses 16 different options
1:18:03of like, all right, well first, before you even use
1:18:05this thing, where do you wanna make your account?
1:18:07That, you can't even ask people that.
1:18:10It shouldn't be a question.
1:18:11You should instantly start up with like,
1:18:14we have an amazing app that works really well
1:18:16and that does everything you want it to do.
1:18:17Like, that's like table stakes.
1:18:19For a social network, you have to have apps
1:18:21on every major platform that have to be great
1:18:24and they have to be usable and they have to have features
1:18:27people want and here's the thing,
1:18:29if you're gonna mimic Twitter in what your product is,
1:18:33you have to support a lot of things that Twitter supports
1:18:36and they have to work the same way.
1:18:39If you're gonna make something that looks like Twitter
1:18:41and kinda acts like Twitter but then doesn't work
1:18:44like Twitter, you're gonna anger everybody.
1:18:47Like I was trying to read a thread,
1:18:48like somebody, I was poking around Mastodon in the app
1:18:51and somebody posted a thread with a little thread emoji
1:18:54to indicate this is a thread.
1:18:56And for the life of me, I could not figure out
1:18:58how to see the replies of that thread.
1:19:00I tried like, you know, tapping into that one message
1:19:02or swiping right or whatever,
1:19:04and I got it to show me other replies,
1:19:07but nowhere in the list was like
1:19:09the next post in that thread. (laughs)
1:19:11And so, and again, it was just some like,
1:19:13some little difference that like,
1:19:15this is a small behavioral paper cut
1:19:18that if I'm going to move from Twitter,
1:19:21I can't be hitting paper cuts like that
1:19:23because I am going to expect this thing to work like Twitter.
1:19:26Now, if it's not gonna work like Twitter,
1:19:28it should be even more different.
1:19:30Like, I don't get that feeling on Tumblr
1:19:33because Tumblr is way more different from Twitter
1:19:36than Mastodon is.
1:19:37And so Tumblr is its own thing.
1:19:39And so I can go to Tumblr and while it is
1:19:42very different from Twitter,
1:19:44it doesn't frustrate me in the same way
1:19:46because it's its own thing.
1:19:48It's not trying to be Twitter.
1:19:49Whereas Mastodon is basically trying to be Twitter,
1:19:53and so it has to copy it really well
1:19:56and have all those features nailed down,
1:19:57all those little details nailed down.
1:19:59And Twitter looks like a simple product, but it's not.
1:20:03And that's a hard thing to totally match.
1:20:07And I think at this point,
1:20:08anything that's different from Twitter,
1:20:10Mastodon's been around long enough
1:20:11that it's probably a choice,
1:20:13not a just we haven't gotten to it yet kind of thing.
1:20:15And so that's gonna hurt them,
1:20:18and that's gonna hurt them with adoption
1:20:19for new people who are in there now kicking the tires
1:20:21'cause we're all super mad at Elon.
1:20:23Like, they have a big rush of people
1:20:25checking it out right now,
1:20:27but I don't see how that sticks for so many reasons.
1:20:30So, I don't know, I hope I'm wrong.
1:20:32- They had a big rush of people five years ago
1:20:33when I signed up too.
1:20:34I mean, I think there's been multiple rushes on Mastodon
1:20:36over the course of time.
1:20:37Like, one way around that is you could be better, right?
1:20:40You know, you could be different, but if you're different,
1:20:42you have to be better enough so that people
1:20:44are willing to learn your new thing
1:20:45and accept the betterness of it
1:20:47because there is advantage to learning the new thing.
1:20:49And also, like if Twitter goes away,
1:20:50people will eventually learn how ever Mastodon works.
1:20:52And then you get into, okay, but how does Mastodon work?
1:20:54Does it work in a good way?
1:20:55One example that I saw, I don't even know if this is true,
1:20:57because it seems so ridiculous that I have a hard time
1:20:59believing it and I haven't tested it myself,
1:21:00but I saw somebody say, and people can correct me
1:21:04and follow up, that if you are doing the equivalent
1:21:06of DMing, direct messaging, between you and another person
1:21:08on Mastodon, and you @ mention another person,
1:21:12they are added to the DM conversation.
1:21:14Like they get sucked into the DM conversation.
1:21:16So you say something nasty about somebody--
1:21:18- The whole conversation.
1:21:19- Yeah, and they get to see everything you said before
1:21:22you @ mentioned them as well, right?
1:21:23That is a terrible misfeature,
1:21:26like that's just bad product design, right?
1:21:28And there's always gonna be misfeatures in products,
1:21:30but that's why the maturity of Twitter platform is valuable
1:21:33because they've, I'm not gonna say
1:21:35they learned hard lessons, they did,
1:21:37but also a lot of the features that are in Twitter
1:21:39were sort of pioneered by its users,
1:21:41the use of @ mentions, retweets,
1:21:44pioneered by its users and the third-party developers, right?
1:21:47And that process hasn't run long enough on Mastodon
1:21:50for it to work these things out.
1:21:52It also helps that Twitter was a single company,
1:21:54that they could hire product designers and work on it,
1:21:56whereas Mastodon is more distributed,
1:21:58and an open source project or whatever.
1:22:00And I feel like Mastodon is close.
1:22:02To solve the, if you wanted to solve the problems
1:22:05that I was citing before of unstable URLs
1:22:08and not a single namespace or whatever,
1:22:11I know people are gonna say Web3 and crypto,
1:22:13but please try to keep those words out of your mind
1:22:15when you listen to me say this.
1:22:16What you basically need is a distributed database
1:22:20that keeps track of-- so imagine downloading a client,
1:22:25and you downloaded your whatever,
1:22:27Mastodon 2 client or whatever.
1:22:29And in the client, it comes with this set
1:22:31of configurable servers that are like--
1:22:33I don't know what the equivalent is--
1:22:36basically index servers that run on the internet
1:22:38and keep track of where all the Mastodon instances
1:22:41and runs essentially the central namespace.
1:22:45And those will change over time,
1:22:47kind of like the root DNS things change.
1:22:48People don't know that their web browsers
1:22:49and their operating systems come with an idea
1:22:51of what the root DNS servers are,
1:22:52or come with the idea of the things that are trustable,
1:22:55the SSL root stuff.
1:22:57That's built into all of our software.
1:22:59No users ever need to configure it,
1:23:01but it is also resilient and decentralized.
1:23:03Like how does DNS work?
1:23:04How does the SSL signing certificates work?
1:23:06That stuff changes over time and is maintained
1:23:09not by just Apple or just Microsoft or just Amazon,
1:23:14but users also don't have to deal with it.
1:23:16You know, it's like, how do I configure the DNS routes?
1:23:20How do I configure the trusted route certificates?
1:23:22Like, pretty much users don't have to deal with that.
1:23:25Their phone just connects through SSL or TLS or whatever.
1:23:27But that is a decentralized system.
1:23:30And I would point out, none of that uses crypto.
1:23:33You can have a shared database among people and be like,
1:23:36but what if someone poisons it?
1:23:38Like, yeah, you get a bunch of people who trust each other
1:23:40through like human relationships and legal contracts,
1:23:43and you can get people to work on a distributed database
1:23:46without burning the planet down.
1:23:48Anyway, I'm gonna go for a crypto rant.
1:23:50The whole point is a distributed database
1:23:53is not a foreign thing to the internet.
1:23:55The whole internet works based on that,
1:23:57just based on DNS and TLS certificates alone, right?
1:24:00If that didn't work, nothing would work on the internet
1:24:02and none of that uses crypto.
1:24:04And that's what something like a Blue Sky type thing
1:24:08or a Mastodon type thing should work,
1:24:10that when you download the client,
1:24:11You don't have to know any of that's going on
1:24:13behind the scenes, but it is resilient
1:24:15against any one company failing.
1:24:17And it can implement a global namespace.
1:24:19Hey, DNS, global namespace.
1:24:21You can implement a global namespace
1:24:22to give you unstable URLs.
1:24:24Because like, oh, stable URL, how does this URL work?
1:24:26Well, when you look up that, when you click on that URL,
1:24:29you know, we distribute the IP address,
1:24:33the response to that URL such that some server
1:24:35will answer on it in your locality
1:24:37and get you the answer to the, you know,
1:24:39like, it's complicated.
1:24:41I'm not saying it's easy, there's no reason no one has done it.
1:24:43And like, how do you incentivize people to do that?
1:24:46Like, they're not going to do it unless there's money to be made, right?
1:24:49And that's why the blue sky thing is kind of like, I think it was Jack Dorsey, like
1:24:52just feeling bad about making Twitter a private company and starting this project to fix it
1:24:56or whatever.
1:24:57And it's probably going to go nowhere, but that's sort of my hope for like the distant
1:25:00future again, assuming we're not all dead from the water wars, where we come up with
1:25:06a real better solution to this that gives us the value that we got out of Twitter without
1:25:10any of the baggage long after Twitter 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 have burned to the ground.
1:25:15See, I feel like even that distributed ID thing, that is a pipe dream of ever becoming
1:25:22like a significant thing because here's what would happen.
1:25:25We've seen this pattern over and over again.
1:25:26Here's what always happens.
1:25:27I could go in there and get Marco.org as my ID and it's like, "All right, this is me.
1:25:31This has verified me and I have some crypto signature that says that—"
1:25:35No, no crypto.
1:25:36No crypto.
1:25:37And you just get @marco or @marcoarmint.
1:25:39Armin, like it doesn't have to be any more complicated than Twitter.
1:25:41Okay, but then like, what's gonna happen?
1:25:44That's gonna be too hard for most people to do, and so someone's gonna come up with, you
1:25:48know, ids.lol/marco, and then they're gonna say, "Hey, you can come sign up at ids.lol
1:25:54and get whatever you want."
1:25:55What's the too hard part?
1:25:57The, like, you know, setting up your own DNS entry or whatever.
1:26:01You would just download the app and sign up, like the user experience would be exactly
1:26:04like Twitter, you download an app and you sign up and you enter a username and see if
1:26:07it's taken and you make a password like that's it that's the user experience.
1:26:10I don't know with see like but without something central there are so many
1:26:14potential pitfalls of like abuse spam fraud. Yeah just like there is in DNS and
1:26:20TLS root certificates this is not I'm not saying this is easy to do but it has
1:26:23been done without crypto a shared database among parties that ostensibly
1:26:28don't trust each other building trust in ways that do not involve solving Sudokus.
1:26:32I don't know that to me like that's a very different problem space like having having you know
1:26:38How many root certificates are there and I don't know I've I don't know maybe like a hundred
1:26:43No, I'm not saying it's easy
1:26:44But I'm saying we have proof like DNS is the best example DNS is a single unified namespace with a lot of entries not
1:26:50Just like the number of root certificates
1:26:52There are a lot of DNS names and DNS poisoning is a problem and so on and so forth and parties don't trust each other
1:26:58and you know authoritarian countries have their own weird DNS things where they're screwing
1:27:03stuff up, but if DNS didn't work, nothing would work on the internet.
1:27:08What you're doing mass on that is you're trying to piggyback on DNS to some degree, but that's
1:27:11like what I'm saying is a system that is like DNS but is not DNS for identity for a service
1:27:16like Twitter.
1:27:18And all the crypto people are screaming their bloody heads off right now, it's like this
1:27:21is exactly what crypto should be used for, again.
1:27:23Now they're all still crying because all their money got stolen/burned to the ground or whatever.
1:27:27- I know, it's like, I feel like DNS is--
1:27:29- It really couldn't have happened to better people.
1:27:31- Yeah, exactly, there's just so many ridiculous downsides
1:27:35to that and like, you know, we did this in,
1:27:38whenever DNS was made in the 60s, 70s,
1:27:41we have a proof of concept that is super important
1:27:44to the underpinnings of the internet.
1:27:45Anything you can say that you're gonna say,
1:27:47that's why we need crypto, I would just keep pointing
1:27:49at DNS and say, they didn't need crypto,
1:27:51but how do they, well, why don't you ask them?
1:27:53Why don't you ask them how it works?
1:27:54But what about bad actors?
1:27:55But what about DNS poisoning?
1:27:56what about China? It's like, yeah, those are all problems solvable without destroying the
1:28:01world. Oh, God, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, crypto people.
1:28:04I'm not. Yeah, I'm not. Before we move on, I think
1:28:09it's worth, and I don't mean to start a whole other tangent, but I think it's worth calling
1:28:13out our friend, Matt and Reece, at micro.blog, which has different trade-offs than Mastodon
1:28:19and is different in a lot of ways. But one of the things that I think is very interesting
1:28:22about microblog is that it is really intended to be clear that it's your content and it's
1:28:31your stuff.
1:28:32Now granted it's stored on the microblog servers and so on, but like my microblog, I have a
1:28:39microblog account and it's @list, but if you go to list.micro.blog, you can find me there
1:28:47and you can also, if I remember right, micro.kclist.com?
1:28:50I think yes, so that is all my stuff.
1:28:54And when you go to micro.case list.com, it doesn't redirect.
1:28:57It presents as micro.case list.com.
1:29:00And I think it's really important to maintain that it's
1:29:03clear that this is your stuff, and it
1:29:05lives in kind of your world.
1:29:07And you can tweak it very Tumblr-esque.
1:29:09You can tweak it to your heart's content.
1:29:10And actually, in a lot of ways, it's very similar to Tumblr,
1:29:13but oriented specifically around microblogging.
1:29:16And again, a different set of trade-offs.
1:29:18We need to go into the ins and outs of it right now.
1:29:19and I'm still trying to figure out exactly
1:29:22how I would verbalize the trade-offs between the two,
1:29:23but it is worth pointing out.
1:29:26And Microblog is, from what I can tell,
1:29:29a really, really chill place right now,
1:29:31I think in part because it costs money to join it,
1:29:33and there's something to be said for that.
1:29:35So it might be worth taking a look there as well.
1:29:37And they also, and my understanding of this is very fuzzy,
1:29:42but you can, I guess, present as a Mastodon-friendly account
1:29:47using ActivityPub.
1:29:48you can set up a Mastodon username or something like that,
1:29:51and then that would allow Mastodon users to follow you,
1:29:54and I think you can follow Mastodon users in Microblog.
1:29:57Again, I'm very fuzzy on all this,
1:29:58but there's some amount of interoperability between the two,
1:30:02and it's worth checking out.
1:30:04Again, Manton's a friend of ours.
1:30:06Jean McDonald, who I think is their community manager,
1:30:08I think is her title, a dear friend of ours.
1:30:10So I'm biased, but it's worth looking at.
1:30:14- Yeah, and this is like,
1:30:16The idea of the activity pub being like the glue
1:30:19that can actually glue together all these services,
1:30:23that's very promising.
1:30:25I just, I hope that kind of thing really takes off.
1:30:28Like I hope that I'm totally wrong,
1:30:31that this kind of stuff will be too hard for people.
1:30:33And I hope that in a few years,
1:30:35we're all talking on different services
1:30:37in a federated world using activity pub
1:30:39to communicate between them.
1:30:40And most of them are Mastodon, some of them are Microblog.
1:30:42Like I hope that world comes to be.
1:30:45That would be way better than being all centralized
1:30:47under Twitter in most ways,
1:30:48but I just don't think it's going to turn out that way.
1:30:53The world has shown time and time again
1:30:55that people really value the conveniences
1:30:57and features of centralized, you know, massive services.
1:31:01And I hope I'm wrong.
1:31:03You know, the world proved me wrong here,
1:31:04but I wouldn't bet on it.
1:31:07- Yeah, that's what I was saying.
1:31:08Like, you have to provide the same user experience
1:31:10as Twitter, I'm just saying there's a technical way
1:31:11to do that so that the experience is the same
1:31:13but the underpinnings are not controlled
1:31:15by a single company, that's the trick.
1:31:16Because if you do anything that is actually federated,
1:31:20like just even email, you inevitably end up
1:31:23with big companies controlling most people on the service.
1:31:26Most people's email addresses are like
1:31:28Popmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Reddit, right?
1:31:30And that's despite the fact that email is totally federated.
1:31:33You could run your own email server or whatever,
1:31:34but like the world changed in such a way
1:31:35that it's basically, A, it's basically impossible
1:31:37to successfully run your own email server,
1:31:39which we talked about in the past, right?
1:31:41And B, most people who aren't tech nerds
1:31:43end up at one of these big companies, right?
1:31:46That's inevitable with any kind of thing
1:31:48that is technically complicated.
1:31:49So the only way to solve that problem
1:31:51to actually be decentralized,
1:31:53but also have the user experience of centralized
1:31:55is with something like I was describing,
1:31:57which is very difficult to pull off.
1:31:58Like, you know, we know it can be done,
1:32:01but can it be done in today's environment?
1:32:03Can it be done in the face of, you know,
1:32:05where actual money gets spent?
1:32:06VC companies are not gonna fund that
1:32:08because how do you make money from it?
1:32:09They want the control.
1:32:11They want the information, right?
1:32:12And even if you do that, there are more problems past that.
1:32:16Twitter search, centralized search,
1:32:19is much more difficult to do in the federated world.
1:32:21You end up having to fall all the way back to Google,
1:32:22but you say, "That's fine, I'll just use Google."
1:32:24But centralization of Google as a power on the web
1:32:27is itself a problem, right?
1:32:29But trying to do real-time,
1:32:32the type of real-time live searches
1:32:35and looking at even just hashtags or anything else,
1:32:39stuff that Twitter is able to pull off
1:32:40because they are a centralized private company
1:32:42is so much harder to do in a federated world
1:32:46and is equally hard to do in a world
1:32:48that's trying to look centralized but isn't
1:32:50because looking centralized is half the battle,
1:32:52then you have to, you know, the fact that you aren't
1:32:55means you have to now implement these features.
1:32:56Try implementing real-time search
1:32:58such that when somebody tweets that anyone in the world
1:33:00can see that tweet in their search moments later
1:33:03in a world where things under the covers
1:33:04are distributed as DNS.
1:33:05If you've played anything with DNS, you know,
1:33:07its strength is not making changes visible
1:33:10to everybody very quickly, right?
1:33:12That TTL is very often a lie and TTL exists for a reason.
1:33:16Like, you know, DNS is not the solution to this.
1:33:18It is just an example of that type of thing.
1:33:20And that's, you know, and the fact that DNS is there,
1:33:23it's why people piggyback on DNS so much.
1:33:25I mean, obviously email does,
1:33:27but even things like Java with the, you know,
1:33:29and that everyone else copied
1:33:30with the reverse DNS naming scheme or whatever,
1:33:33it's like, I have a big problem.
1:33:35I need namespaces for classes in my programming languages.
1:33:38I need namespaces for bundle identifiers for my apps.
1:33:41That problem is too big for me to solve.
1:33:42Can I piggyback on DNS?
1:33:44Done.
1:33:45(laughs)
1:33:46And we just make it the convention,
1:33:47again, not enforced by crypto,
1:33:49that it has to be com.mycompany.myappname,
1:33:52com.mycompany.mycooljavaclass, right?
1:33:55And then we've just pushed off that problem onto DNS.
1:33:58You cannot push off the Twitter problem onto DNS,
1:34:01but it shows how much value there is
1:34:02that we're able to take this janky, mostly unencrypted,
1:34:06completely insecure, scary, designed in the 70s thing that underpins the entire internet
1:34:12because it is so essential to have something like that.
1:34:14And I just hope someday in my life there is another thing that is like DNS but better
1:34:20modernized but equally decentralized that can underpin the pipe dream of every company
1:34:27in our lifetimes, especially Microsoft, of centralized identity on the internet that
1:34:32is not tied to a single company.
1:34:33I forget what it was called when Microsoft first started running that and everybody freaked
1:34:36out but now everybody takes a little run at it and then runs away screaming.
1:34:40But someday it might happen.
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1:36:44Let's do some Ask ATP.
1:36:50SuMarneedy writes, "What's the best way of downloading Xcode?
1:36:53I've heard a lot of mixed opinions / statements about how the Mac App Store 1 sucks and some downloaded via an app called X codes
1:37:00I think it'd be interesting to hear about what you all do and what the differences are
1:37:03I've done Mac App Store. I've done downloading it directly from the web and
1:37:09Currently my preferred method is the X codes app
1:37:12X codes basically does magic to look at what the available versions of X code are and makes it basically one-click install or
1:37:21uninstall and I really dig that and that's what I've been using for the last few months.
1:37:25I actually just use the developer website like developer.apple.com like where you download the betas. I just download it from there.
1:37:32Usually the latest versions available at least for a little while after it comes out
1:37:36and so I just download it there. I have previously had the Mac App Store version.
1:37:42I have found that to be much slower to update and so if you really want to get oh
1:37:48oh, I need the latest one right now.
1:37:49It ends up that usually takes a longer time,
1:37:52both to see the update and then also then
1:37:54to actually install the update.
1:37:57Xcode is a giant app with tons and tons of files
1:38:01and whatever the process is through the App Store
1:38:04to update apps, it seems to be significantly slower
1:38:07than just downloading the .zip thing from Apple
1:38:10and installing it directly.
1:38:12So I guess download the zip files now
1:38:14from the developer site.
1:38:15- Yeah, I will second that.
1:38:16do not do the Mac App Store.
1:38:18I think the Mac App Store is mostly doing the same thing that has to be done by any
1:38:23of the techniques, but the Mac App Store is so bad at giving you any progress indication
1:38:27and so bad about letting you pause and resume the thing.
1:38:32I haven't actually used X codes.
1:38:33I just go to developer.apple.com, go to the download section, you will get a file that
1:38:38ends in .xip, that's the zip file.
1:38:40We're saying an X instead of a Z, it's a .xip.
1:38:45that file takes a long time depending on your internet connection because it's very large,
1:38:48right? Decompressing/verifying the signatures of that file, un-XIPing it, unzipping it takes
1:38:56so long and I love that to be a step that I can take, you know, because downloading
1:39:00it just downloads into your download folder and it sits there. You can let it sit there
1:39:02for an hour or a day and come back tomorrow. Unzipping it, un-XIPing it also takes a long
1:39:07time. While you're doing that, I can be in Xcode doing stuff while that is just running
1:39:12and then it unzips and then maybe the next day I come
1:39:15and finally quit Xcode.
1:39:17I was gonna say drag the old one out of my applications
1:39:20folder and put it in the garbage, but don't do that.
1:39:22Listen to me for a second.
1:39:23Recursively remove the existing Xcode
1:39:27with the rm command from the command line
1:39:28because it is so much faster to do that
1:39:30than to empty the trash in your finder.
1:39:32See, press it, that's what we talked about this.
1:39:35And then drag the new one from downloads.
1:39:37And so that process I may do in a leisurely pace
1:39:39that I'm not in a big hurry over the course
1:39:41of one or two days, and at no point during that process
1:39:45am I stuck that I can't do development work.
1:39:48So that's why I always go and download the thing myself,
1:39:51uncompress the thing myself,
1:39:53and swap it in for the other one myself.
1:39:56Because the tools to do those individual tasks are easy.
1:39:58It's easy to download something,
1:39:59use the browser of your choice,
1:40:01use whatever download thing, use Wget,
1:40:02like whatever, you know, well,
1:40:04Wget might be hard with the authentication,
1:40:05but anyway, download it, unzip it,
1:40:08there's one application on your Mac that's gonna do that,
1:40:10It's gonna have a progress bar.
1:40:11You can watch it, let it sit there,
1:40:13and then swap it for the old one.
1:40:14Tons of ways to do that.
1:40:15You can do it in the finder if you wanted.
1:40:16You can do it like me and recrystallably remove
1:40:18very carefully the previous one,
1:40:20and then put the new one in its place.
1:40:21That's my preferred technique, but whatever you do,
1:40:23don't do the Mac App Store because it takes
1:40:25a really long time and you have no control over it,
1:40:26and it's not fun.
1:40:28- I would encourage you and the listeners to try Xcodes
1:40:31because it doesn't-- - Yeah, I should.
1:40:32I hadn't actually heard of it.
1:40:33I gotta get that now.
1:40:34- It's very, very good, and is that safe?
1:40:39I don't like the idea of having anybody get between
1:40:42me and Apple with Xcode.
1:40:44Like that's a pretty high risk thing.
1:40:46- Yeah. - I understand that.
1:40:48- What about the, that's the, what is it,
1:40:50the Richie paper, thoughts on trusting trust?
1:40:53Someone in the chat room get me that
1:40:54and we'll put it in the show notes.
1:40:55- Yeah, no, I know what you're thinking of.
1:40:57But no, I think it's safe.
1:40:58I mean, it's all open source.
1:41:00- I mean, like, it probably is safe,
1:41:01but like, it's just like, how much am I willing to
1:41:04outsource the the acquisition of Xcode to some third party, you know, I don't know it to me that that trade-off is not worth it
1:41:12That's fair. I
1:41:14Personally don't see it as a particular problem because this is such a popular tool and I presume somebody has gone through
1:41:22Maybe not but I presume somebody hasn't certainly I mean the populated tool means that if someone has
1:41:26Exploited it you're hoping that someone else is gonna be the sucker that finds out and you'll read about it and before that
1:41:32And where would you read about it?
1:41:33Probably on Twitter, because you see the updates in real time
1:41:35and it's not federated.
1:41:37Oh, man.
1:41:38One of these days we're not going to talk about Twitter,
1:41:40right?
1:41:41Maybe one day?
1:41:42Anyway, I would seriously recommend checking it out.
1:41:45And I guess I'm going spelunking through the source code
1:41:47if you really fancy it.
1:41:48Claude Zines writes, what do you think
1:41:49is the best designed Mac app that Apple currently makes?
1:41:52And for probably Syracuse, what do you
1:41:54think is the best designed Mac app that Apple has ever made?
1:41:57For me, I honestly don't know.
1:42:00I really don't.
1:42:02I've been thinking about this on and off,
1:42:04and I'm not actively bothered by many of Apple's apps,
1:42:09except music, and home to some degree.
1:42:12But I don't think that I can think of any shining example
1:42:16of something really, really good.
1:42:17I think Notes is close.
1:42:19I mean, it's not crazy powerful,
1:42:21and it has some things I wish I could change,
1:42:23but it's pretty darn good.
1:42:25So maybe I would say Notes,
1:42:27but I'm hoping one of you is gonna come up with something,
1:42:29and I'm gonna say, oh no no no, that's my answer.
1:42:31So I think we started with Marco first last time,
1:42:33so John, what's a good one?
1:42:34- No, start with me, 'cause I'm gonna,
1:42:35John's gonna have the right answer,
1:42:36I'm only gonna have wrong answers.
1:42:37- Ah, that's fair, okay, no, that's fair.
1:42:39- I think we're both gonna have, well, go ahead.
1:42:41I think we're gonna have at least,
1:42:42there's at least one mediocre answer that Casey will like.
1:42:45- Yeah, so my, I mean, really,
1:42:47I think Home is the best designed app.
1:42:49(laughing)
1:42:51- I hope you're kidding, I hope you're kidding so badly.
1:42:53- Yeah, of course.
1:42:54No, I don't know, I also, I thought of Notes,
1:42:58I feel like if you're looking at,
1:43:00Apple has many styles they've used over time.
1:43:03Notes, I think, is the best example of Apple's current style
1:43:07where they're very iOS-y, Notes is very iOS-styled,
1:43:12but it's still very functional as a Mac app.
1:43:15But I would say, I think I like better than Notes.
1:43:18I think I like Mail.
1:43:20For being a kind of more Mac-like experience,
1:43:25I think Mail is that.
1:43:26That being said, I'm not in Ventura yet,
1:43:28so I don't know if Ventura Mail is maybe worse in some way.
1:43:31- It's better and worse, I'd say.
1:43:33- Oh, great, okay, well, anyway.
1:43:35And I even, I thought, I almost thought
1:43:37of maybe saying Safari, but I don't know.
1:43:39It's really hard because what Apple design means
1:43:44changes over time, and I think on the Mac especially,
1:43:48they're not currently in a very good place, so I don't know.
1:43:52John, what's the right answer?
1:43:53- I'm surprised that there was so much waffling about this.
1:43:56I think there's probably a better answer than the one I'm going to give, but the one that
1:43:59immediately sprung to my mind is Safari.
1:44:02Like Safari is a Mac-y Mac app.
1:44:05I don't think it makes any unforced errors.
1:44:08Like there's no like super obvious annoyance that's been there for years that we all hate.
1:44:12And most of the things it does, it does really well and in a Mac-like way.
1:44:17Just think about things like, oh, can I drag an image off of the thing?
1:44:20What can I do with the address bar?
1:44:22How do the preferences work?
1:44:23How do the tabs work?
1:44:24It's just it's a really good Mac. It always has kind of always has been a really good Mac app
1:44:28Even as the times have changed
1:44:30And yeah, it's just a web browser and we kind of take it for granted
1:44:34But I think that's part of its strength. Like you don't spend a lot of your time just grinding it
1:44:38Maybe the people who wanted the the color favicon tabs were grinding their teeth, but that's solved now too. Like it's
1:44:44That's the easy answer. I think there's probably a better one. I'm scrolling through my applications folder to try to like jog my memory
1:44:50There's probably something that it is better, but I wouldn't pick notes because I feel like notes
1:44:54For all its great features and everything. It's like, you know what I would consider like an okay third-party
1:45:00Application like but Safari there is like when I think of well if there was a third-party browser that use WebKit or whatever
1:45:07You know setting aside the engine
1:45:09They could make a much better thing that's much more full-featured more interesting more whimsical more surprising to light more
1:45:15You know, well more better done and I don't think that's possible. I think Safari
1:45:20Really just does not make any doesn't doesn't put a foot wrong for the most part
1:45:24It does what it does and it does what it does really well. So that's my easy answer
1:45:27I think that's mostly a good answer
1:45:29I'd mostly and mail like the reason I think that's not true is mail is
1:45:33Kind of like notes and that it's a good bundled application to have a basic mail client
1:45:37But geez any good third-party mail client from from the past you would say is better than it even how mainstream today is probably better
1:45:44Than it and certainly something like the entourage or like in those days like I don't know
1:45:48it's not comparable because it's an ancient era or whatever,
1:45:51but like, you know, Entourage or, you know,
1:45:55Claris email, it stops all over current Apple mail
1:45:57in a million different ways in terms of kind of like
1:46:00comparing like, you know, athletes from their eras, right?
1:46:04Claris email and Entourage in their era were,
1:46:07so stood so much taller above their contemporary apps
1:46:12than does Apple mail today.
1:46:14Not that Apple mail is a bad application,
1:46:15but geez, it is not the best one Apple makes.
1:46:18And then in terms of what's the best Mac app that Apple has ever made, that's tough.
1:46:26I mean my easy answer for that is the classic macOS Finder probably peeking around about
1:46:31the time that pop-up tab folders came into being and most of the annoying problems were
1:46:37out because I think that was again an example of an app that had just been polished within
1:46:41an inch of its life and had just recently gotten some really new features and most of
1:46:46The bad things about it, like not being able to copy more than one thing to a floppy disk
1:46:49at a time had been solved, right?
1:46:51Obviously different error, no memory protection, blah blah blah, but that's my sentimental
1:46:56favorite.
1:46:57There's probably again some other things that I'm not thinking of in the past, but you know,
1:47:01classic Mac finder, circa Mac OS 8 or 9-ish is probably my answer for best-assigned Mac
1:47:08I've ever made.
1:47:09And kind of like Safari, you take it for granted.
1:47:10People don't even think of it in an app.
1:47:12It's like the reason you take it for granted is it just did what it needed to do in a way
1:47:15that everybody understood, and as long as it didn't crash, you're like, "Oh, fine,
1:47:19dude, that's not even an app, that's just the way my computer works." And that, I
1:47:22feel like, is an achievement in itself.
1:47:25Finally, Andrew Larson writes, "I was listening to the episode of Rectifs where John was explaining
1:47:29to Merlin the reasons for leaving his job, and I picked up on a line about how a good
1:47:33boss will work with you on family issues you might be having. Ahem, Elon, it was my understanding
1:47:38that you have all once had the privilege of leading people, or at a minimum, you've
1:47:42been on teams of people lead led by someone personally I'm new to leading
1:47:45people what advice would you give to someone who is new to leadership from
1:47:48the perspective of some pretty talented people who have led or been led by
1:47:51someone tech or non tech related I've never led anyone I never had any sort of
1:47:58like subordinate when I was working and I think Marco leads himself and his
1:48:03employees a jerk the worst employee you have to deal with I you know I know
1:48:09I know that's not the question, but being your own boss
1:48:11is actually kind of a form of leadership.
1:48:13And you have to lead yourself, which is actually
1:48:16a fairly difficult thing to do.
1:48:17Not to sidetrack this, but even if you think you,
1:48:20Casey, or you, Marco, have never led a team of other developers
1:48:24to do a thing, the leadership experience
1:48:28is relevant for being self-employed as well.
1:48:30Yeah, I think it's a very different skill, though.
1:48:32They're both hard problems, but these are both very different
1:48:35problems.
1:48:36Also, I think there's two different versions of lead,
1:48:38right?
1:48:39I read this as like being a HR leader,
1:48:42like a boss, basically.
1:48:44- A people manager.
1:48:45- Right, thank you.
1:48:46- Having reports.
1:48:48- Exactly, I've never been in that position,
1:48:50but I was what the companies I was in
1:48:53typically called a tech lead
1:48:54for many, many, many different times.
1:48:56And I certainly have thoughts on that,
1:48:58if that's where Andrew was going with this,
1:49:00but again, I read that more as people manager,
1:49:02not technical leader.
1:49:04- Yeah, so I've been both of those things.
1:49:07I've done tech leads, I've been a people manager,
1:49:09and I've been both at the same time for the same people.
1:49:12Sometimes I've been those same things at the same time
1:49:14for different people, which I think is the most difficult,
1:49:17where you have a team of people reporting to you,
1:49:19and also you're a tech lead for a larger,
1:49:21only slightly overlapping thing.
1:49:24But yeah, I think this is mostly a people management thing.
1:49:27There's a reason I have not been a people manager
1:49:30most of the time, it's because I don't think
1:49:31that's where my skills lie.
1:49:33At various times, based on the promotional ladder
1:49:36various companies sometimes you can't avoid being a people manager if you want to get promoted or
1:49:40you get you know not forced into the situation but you know offered a quote-unquote promotion
1:49:44that makes you a people manager as part of your responsibilities and you feel like you have to
1:49:48take it to advance your career and that will show you whether you think you have any kind of
1:49:52aptitude for it but you know the it's a very difficult job and the skills required for it are
1:49:58different than the skills required for being a developer but there is a lot of overlap because
1:50:04as a developer, as we've talked about in past shows, you have to learn how to communicate
1:50:08and work with people. No, they're not your reports, but you have to communicate and work
1:50:13with your peers. You have to communicate upward in the org chart, downwards and sideways.
1:50:17That's part of your job as a developer, and it's an increasing part of your job as a developer,
1:50:21as you become more experienced and sort of climb the corporate ladder in game or responsibility.
1:50:26And at no point are you a people manager in there, but you still have to have those people
1:50:30skills. Being a people manager requires those same people skills and then much more on top
1:50:35of that because now you're responsible for people. You're responsible for their well-being.
1:50:40You're responsible for their performance. You're responsible for getting them promoted
1:50:43when they do a good job and dealing with it when they don't do a bad job. And it is a
1:50:47huge amount of responsibility and a very difficult job and some people thrive in that environment
1:50:52and love it and become better at it and other people run screaming from it. So the first
1:50:56thing I would say is figure out whether this is a thing you want to do because I know it
1:51:02might seem like you have no choice because to get promoted you have to become a People
1:51:05Manager, but I can tell you that you can find companies where there is an individual contributor
1:51:11track that you can still get promoted on and not have to have people report to you.
1:51:15But if you do find that you like it, even if you're very bad at it in the beginning
1:51:18and you absolutely will be, just like everyone is a crappy programmer in the beginning, everybody
1:51:22is a crappy manager in the beginning, what you want to do is learn how to not be a crappy
1:51:26manager and that is a long road and it is very much learning, you know, it's kind of
1:51:30like being a parent.
1:51:31You're not a good parent in the beginning, nobody is, you have no idea what you're doing,
1:51:35but hopefully you learn over time and hopefully you don't screw up your kids too much along
1:51:38the way.
1:51:39It's exactly the same way with reports.
1:51:42Your first reports you're probably going to make tons and tons of mistakes.
1:51:46Learn from them, be empathetic, be a human being, don't be, you know, don't be as cold
1:51:51and calluses Elon Musk don't buy into the toxic things you may think about productivity
1:51:56and you know workaholism and avoid any authoritarian impulse you have.
1:52:01These are also this is also advice for parenting.
1:52:04Avoid any authoritarian impulse you may have.
1:52:07Avoid trying to take lessons from your own upbringing and your own bad bosses in the
1:52:10past and you know replaying those things out and replaying those traumas out to your current
1:52:15reports and that's that's a lot of work that is a lot of as they say emotional labor where
1:52:20where you have to moderate yourself and your feelings
1:52:24to achieve a goal within the company
1:52:27because you can't, your job is not to throw a tantrum
1:52:30or start screaming at people,
1:52:31even though you might feel very frustrated
1:52:33because that's why you're the manager.
1:52:34And if your employee starts screaming and everything,
1:52:37you as a manager have to learn how to deal with that.
1:52:39So if I was better at being a people manager,
1:52:42I would have more actionable advice,
1:52:44but all I can tell you is here's the shape of the territory
1:52:47and it is a very difficult skill
1:52:49you're going to be bad at it. But if you think it's something that you might enjoy, it is
1:52:52possible to get good at it, probably by asking somebody other than me how to do so.
1:52:57Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Trade Coffee, and Linode. Thanks to our members
1:53:03who support us directly. You can join atb.fm/join. We will talk to you next week.
1:53:09[Music]
1:53:10Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.
1:53:18John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him
1:53:27Cause it was accidental, it was accidental
1:53:33And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm
1:53:37And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them
1:53:42C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
1:53:51Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse
1:53:58It's accidental (it's accidental) They didn't mean to accidental (accidental)
1:54:06♪ Tech podcast so long ♪
1:54:10- What do we got for an after show?
1:54:14Who did something exciting this week?
1:54:15- I don't know, I got nothing.
1:54:17- I don't know either.
1:54:19I'm working on a database, like it's just not--
1:54:24- Working on a database, what are you doing?
1:54:25- Well, I'm working on two databases actually.
1:54:27So I'm working on the overcast, on the server side.
1:54:30I've actually reached a fairly stable point
1:54:33in the overcast server story.
1:54:35So since we last talked about this,
1:54:38I've been doing a lot of optimization on the server side.
1:54:40Like I mentioned, I had that one giant table
1:54:43that matched users to episodes.
1:54:46And it was by far my biggest table.
1:54:49And it was hundreds of gigs, including
1:54:50hundreds of gigs of indexes.
1:54:52Over the last month or so, I've gotten database loads way down,
1:54:57mostly from index consolidation on that table.
1:55:01So it used to have, I think, three or four different indexes
1:55:04that different things would query.
1:55:06Now it has one index.
1:55:08I rewrote all the server-side code to just use one index.
1:55:11And to always query for these three columns,
1:55:13like user ID, podcast ID, episode ID.
1:55:16Every query can use that index now,
1:55:19so I don't have to have a separate one for like,
1:55:21all right, if I only have a podcast ID, use this index.
1:55:25There's nothing like that anymore.
1:55:27I took recommendation indexing out of that,
1:55:29so I don't have to have a recommended index on that.
1:55:32Anyway, all that has dramatically reduced
1:55:34the load on that server.
1:55:36And so I've bought myself some time.
1:55:39I've also gotten away from the situation where I had,
1:55:43I discussed months ago, I was using S3
1:55:48and S3 compatible things like linear object storage
1:55:50and Cloudflare in front of all that,
1:55:52trying to shift like the list of episodes in a podcast,
1:55:57trying to shift that onto a CDN in some way,
1:55:59or S3 fronted by a CDN.
1:56:01And that's largely what I was doing all summer
1:56:05as like my various efforts to try to lighten the server load
1:56:09and that plan just hasn't gone very well.
1:56:13I ran into a number of problems.
1:56:15So using actual S3, having Cloudflare in front of it
1:56:20helps a lot, but even just like the write traffic to it,
1:56:25it was so excessive.
1:56:28I ended up paying a lot just for writes to S3.
1:56:32So I switched over to Linode Object Storage
1:56:34about halfway through the summer,
1:56:35and it was much better there because it was way cheaper.
1:56:40Still having Cloudflare in front of it and everything.
1:56:42But then I was hitting bugs of like,
1:56:45when you have a level of caching
1:56:48in front of your database in some way,
1:56:50it's all right, so in my code I would like,
1:56:51all right, every time some episode data
1:56:54about a podcast changed,
1:56:56I would rewrite that record to the CDN.
1:57:01Or at first I'd rewrite it to like linear object storage
1:57:04and I would increment a version number
1:57:05so that way the next time the app fetched it,
1:57:08it would get a different URL
1:57:09'cause it had like the version number at the end,
1:57:11which would invalidate the CDN so it would bypass it.
1:57:14Anyway, but then what happens if the write fails
1:57:17to the object storage?
1:57:18Now I have out of date data
1:57:19and I can either like blow up the crawl process
1:57:21and throw an exception so it doesn't write anything,
1:57:24Or what if there's like a small race
1:57:28where like right after the object storage is updated,
1:57:32what if the CDN goes to read it and gets stale data?
1:57:35Then it has cached stale data.
1:57:38And so I had all these like weird edge case bugs
1:57:41that were causing occasional problems
1:57:43and dealing with this system ended up being
1:57:45so much more complex and so much more involved
1:57:48than not having it in the first place.
1:57:52So what I did now is I eliminated the object storage
1:57:56layer of this stack.
1:57:58Now I just have a server process,
1:58:01like a server method that reads data out of the database
1:58:04and serves it, and I have Cloudflare in front of that
1:58:07providing a short-lived cache.
1:58:09Again, server load is not meaningfully higher with that,
1:58:13but I've gotten rid of a whole bunch of bugs.
1:58:15So I'm at a point now where I think I'm stable,
1:58:19much more stable than before,
1:58:21And I bought myself some time so I can finally stop
1:58:26working on my servers every single day
1:58:29and focus on something else.
1:58:31- I have some bad news for you about that.
1:58:33I mean, you already know the news
1:58:34'cause you've done this before,
1:58:35but this reminds me of one of my past jobs
1:58:37where basically the entire history of the company
1:58:39was doing what you just described every year or two.
1:58:43- Just forever, like literally forever.
1:58:45Because you would think now I've done this thing
1:58:49where I've rearranged stuff in the database
1:58:51and did all the type of things you described,
1:58:53like move this from over there
1:58:54and we thought this would help,
1:58:55but it didn't put this back here
1:58:56and now I feel like I'm in a stable place
1:58:57and it just start a timer.
1:58:58Because it's like,
1:58:59I mean, only if your growth continues, obviously.
1:59:01This company was growing constantly,
1:59:02like 30% year over year.
1:59:04It's like, you're gonna be doing all that again.
1:59:05And every time you think now there's no more,
1:59:08I can't get any more blood from this stone,
1:59:09I've rung out all the efficiency.
1:59:11It's like, guess what?
1:59:12In a year and a half,
1:59:14you're gonna be back at the same place
1:59:15and you're gonna surprise yourself
1:59:16by finding even more stuff you can wring out
1:59:18and then keep going and keep going.
1:59:19It's like it literally never ends.
1:59:21It's like, just the growth continues,
1:59:23and you find new ways to make your relational database
1:59:26survive the load that you thought
1:59:28it could never survive by doing increasingly clever things.
1:59:30And just, yeah, that's the treadmill.
1:59:35Although I suppose you want to get off that treadmill by going
1:59:37to Cloud Kit eventually, but we'll see.
1:59:39Yeah.
1:59:39Well, and one thing that I think is worth context here
1:59:42is that Overcast is not growing very much.
1:59:45Like, I'm not losing people, but I'm also not
1:59:48growing very aggressively.
1:59:49It's a very, very slow growth.
1:59:51- Well, you're not growing in customers,
1:59:52but as you noted when you were messing with this,
1:59:54and maybe one of the private things,
1:59:57the activity pattern of the existing users can change
2:00:00in response to things you don't control,
2:00:01like Patreon and podcasts.
2:00:03- Yes, so one thing I learned is that
2:00:06as I was instrumenting various things
2:00:08and collecting stats in various ways,
2:00:10I noticed, and I kind of knew this already,
2:00:12but I didn't know quite to what degree,
2:00:14that Patreon feed updates are,
2:00:20I think like three quarters of my feed updates or half.
2:00:23Like it's some absurd amount of my feed updates
2:00:26are just Patreon feeds.
2:00:26And so that's something that has changed
2:00:29over the last few years that between Patreon
2:00:31and Substack and Ben Thompson stuff.
2:00:34- And why we're Patreon?
2:00:36Is it because you have tons of people
2:00:37subscribing to Patreon things?
2:00:38It's because the URLs are all unique per person, right?
2:00:41- Not only are they all unique per person,
2:00:43but Patreon has time bombed URLs
2:00:45as their enclosure URLs,
2:00:47so that every time you fetch the feed,
2:00:51every item has changes in it.
2:00:53- That's miserable.
2:00:54- Yes, it sure is.
2:00:57So one of the observations, a while ago I did a thing
2:00:59where I have, I used to, for a brief period,
2:01:04to try to solve that problem, I sent all download URLs
2:01:08for the enclosure through a redirect
2:01:11that was fixed on Overcast.
2:01:12We'd be like, overcast.fm/download/bighash,
2:01:15and that would never change.
2:01:17And so all the sync updates that would happen that, hey,
2:01:20something about this feed has changed,
2:01:22and so your copy of the app has to download
2:01:24a whole new copy of the feed.
2:01:26All those updates were saved if all that changed
2:01:29was the enclosure URL on all these Patreon feeds.
2:01:31Well, that ended up causing some problems occasionally
2:01:34with certain things.
2:01:35And so I turned it off a few months ago,
2:01:38but I turned it back on now only for feeds
2:01:41where I think it's necessary.
2:01:43So there's heuristics that run where
2:01:45it's like, you know, under certain conditions,
2:01:47it will now redirect downloads through that kind of URL,
2:01:51and Patreon is one of those things where it's like,
2:01:52you know, if you have like a private feed,
2:01:54or it has under a certain number of subscribers,
2:01:57I will redirect it through these URLs.
2:01:59That way, again, they stay fixed,
2:02:00and we stop having to send all these duplicate updates.
2:02:03And so, I basically spent, you know,
2:02:05a few weeks doing stuff like that,
2:02:06of like simplifying, getting rid of some of the tricks
2:02:09that didn't work with the object storage,
2:02:12reintroducing an old trick that worked
2:02:14with this download URL thing,
2:02:16tweaking some of the Patreon refresh times
2:02:18and things like that,
2:02:19and optimizing various parts of my crawling process.
2:02:24Like it used to hit the database
2:02:25for getting all the list of items,
2:02:27it used to hit it twice.
2:02:28Now it hits it once.
2:02:29That made crawling faster,
2:02:30and lightened the load on a major database.
2:02:32Like there's stuff like that,
2:02:33I was doing stuff like that,
2:02:34optimizing the different things,
2:02:36index consolidation on that one big database table.
2:02:39So now, that's I think stable.
2:02:43And so I've been actually spending the last few days
2:02:48working on a replacement for FC model.
2:02:51FC model is my old Objective-C SQLite kind of model layer
2:02:58that Overcast uses and a couple other things.
2:03:03I think including Castor,
2:03:04I think they ended up using it too.
2:03:05But anyway, it's just this little open source library.
2:03:08Nobody should use it now, it's outdated now.
2:03:10And it's very Objective-C-E.
2:03:15And so I've wanted for a while to remake it
2:03:19using modern Swift stuff, modern Swift concurrency.
2:03:22And the reason I hadn't remade it yet
2:03:24is frankly I just didn't think I knew Swift well enough
2:03:27to really do a good job of it.
2:03:28Now I think I finally do.
2:03:30And so I've been remaking a new model layer
2:03:34using Swift and Swift concurrency
2:03:36that will be the foundation for hopefully
2:03:38the next version of Overcast.
2:03:40- Is it too much to hope that you're writing unit tests
2:03:42for this thing?
2:03:43(laughing)
2:03:45'Cause it's a library, come on,
2:03:46it's a super important library,
2:03:47now is the time to whip out those tests.
2:03:50- In all fairness, FC model is the only other time
2:03:53I've written tests.
2:03:53- That's what I'm saying, this is the time,
2:03:55it's time for testing to shine.
2:03:57- Yeah, so, this, I will--
2:04:01- That's not an answer.
2:04:03- I plan to maybe someday write tests for this.
2:04:05- That's a no.
2:04:06- I want tests to exist,
2:04:07I just don't wanna be the one to write them.
2:04:08- Exactly. - There you go.
2:04:10But yeah, so, and this one, so I'm going,
2:04:12I'm writing directly against SQLite this time.
2:04:15Like before I used Gus Mueller's excellent FMDB library,
2:04:18which was a great, it's a great SQLite bridge to FFC,
2:04:22and FC model is based on that.
2:04:24Now I'm eliminating the middle layer
2:04:26and just writing Swift directly to SQLite API.
2:04:30- Isn't there one, I was just thinking
2:04:32of something you were talking about.
2:04:33Isn't there like a existing popular shim layer
2:04:36that basically puts a Swift front end
2:04:37on the SQLite C API?
2:04:39- Yeah, there's a couple of them,
2:04:40and I'm using one of them because that's me.
2:04:41- But I thought there was like one popular one
2:04:43that's actually really thin,
2:04:44so you wouldn't have to rewrite that, but oh well.
2:04:46Have you met Marco?
2:04:48- I know.
2:04:48- The API is not, the SQLite API is not that,
2:04:52and especially 'cause like,
2:04:54I'm not using all of the features of SQLite.
2:04:56I'm using a very small subset of them,
2:05:00so it really is not that bad.
2:05:02Like it's not, I'm not,
2:05:03I don't really need a whole big library
2:05:06that shims the entire API SQLite for what I'm doing.
2:05:10I really need something very, very basic and limited.
2:05:13And so anyway, so just writing directly into the API
2:05:16I thought was better for my needs
2:05:18and my preferences and my style,
2:05:19and it allows me to only have what I actually need
2:05:22and to know how every bit of it works.
2:05:24And I can make decisions like my concurrency story here
2:05:27is using the new Swift actor concept,
2:05:31which is a bit of a pain in the butt in certain ways,
2:05:33but I'm really happy with some of the ways it performs
2:05:36and some of the guarantees that it makes and everything.
2:05:38And I'm using all modern conventions everywhere
2:05:41of like using async stuff to fetch everything,
2:05:44using exception throwing instead of random assertions
2:05:48that could fail in weird ways,
2:05:50like doing everything kind of the newest, most modern way.
2:05:53- How are you finding calling
2:05:55into the SQLite C APIs from Swift?
2:05:58Do you have a lot of unsafe this and unsafe that
2:06:00everywhere in your code?
2:06:02- Shockingly, no.
2:06:04I have almost none.
2:06:05It's really weird like how little of that I needed.
2:06:09Swift is really good now at kind of marshaling stuff
2:06:13in and out of C libraries.
2:06:15And I don't know if this is, you know,
2:06:17if the SQLite API just has a bunch of good annotations
2:06:20or whatever, I think it's just,
2:06:21I think it's just Swift has matured to the point
2:06:24where it does a lot of this stuff automatically for you,
2:06:26or at least with very little drama.
2:06:28and there's very little of that ugly,
2:06:30unsafe pointer stuff necessary.
2:06:32- Oh, I'll be interested.
2:06:33Is this gonna be open sourced like FC model was?
2:06:35- I don't know yet.
2:06:36Open sourcing FC model,
2:06:39I'm not sure that was really worth it.
2:06:43In the sense that I did occasionally,
2:06:46I got one or two bug fixes from people over time from that
2:06:49and that was worth it to make it better,
2:06:51but I'm not sure I want the liability of my stuff
2:06:55being used as such a foundational layer
2:06:58on other people's apps, and if I don't open source it,
2:07:01not only does that reduce my feel bad burden
2:07:05about what if I break your app,
2:07:06but it also gives me more flexibility
2:07:07to change it more dramatically over time.
2:07:09If I decide, hey, you know what,
2:07:11this API is actually kind of clunky,
2:07:13I wanna rework the way this thing is called
2:07:15or deprecate this other thing,
2:07:17I can just make sure my one app is okay with that
2:07:20or modify my one app to use the new calling convention,
2:07:25and then that's it, I don't have to worry about that.
2:07:26So I might open source it eventually,
2:07:29but I want to, I'm not gonna open source it yet
2:07:33and possibly never, but I don't know yet.
2:07:36- Yeah, I mean, for something of this obscure
2:07:38within the smallish community of developers
2:07:41who might be interested in this,
2:07:42you can just throw it out there
2:07:43and just like never, like basically have a read me
2:07:46that says I don't support this, I don't maintain it.
2:07:49If you wanna do something with it, feel free,
2:07:51but don't send me bugs, don't, you know,
2:07:53I'm gonna break it and it's gonna break your crap.
2:07:55Tough, like, you know, just like a big disclaimer.
2:07:57And we've talked in past shows about how you can't actually
2:07:59do that because people expect you to maintain it
2:08:01no matter what.
2:08:01But I think the audience for this is small enough
2:08:03that you might be able to get away with basically
2:08:05the chuck it over the wall and then just continue
2:08:09to do exactly what you said.
2:08:10Oh, guess what?
2:08:11I've decided this API needs to change.
2:08:12And I don't care how many other people's apps it breaks
2:08:14'cause they should know that I'm not supporting this.
2:08:16And if that leads people to take your code and fork it,
2:08:18then it's also not your problem.
2:08:19Like you can make it not your problem
2:08:21while still having it, you know, out there for the internet
2:08:24as sort of a public good.
2:08:25- I mean, the other thing though is like,
2:08:27you know, if someone's out there looking for
2:08:29a Swift SQLite or database library,
2:08:32they should probably use one of the bigger ones.
2:08:34- That's what I was gonna say is what you should do
2:08:37while you're writing your library
2:08:38is look at the other ones at least.
2:08:39Look at the one function that you're going to write
2:08:41your version of and see if there's any edge case
2:08:43that they know about that you don't know about.
2:08:45That's the benefit to the world of the having it open source
2:08:49is just like hey, if someone cares, they can go look at it
2:08:51and learn something about the ins and outs
2:08:55of interfacing SQLite from Swift, right?
2:08:59And that's the benefit you'd be providing.
2:09:00And what you're basically saying is,
2:09:01I take no responsibility.
2:09:03If you use this in your app and I break it,
2:09:05don't come crying to me.
2:09:06I don't even need your bug reports,
2:09:07but I do want it to just be out there
2:09:09as yet another Google hit for someone looking
2:09:11for how might one do a Swift front end to SQLite.
2:09:15- That's interesting.
2:09:16Yeah, maybe, I don't know.
2:09:17- Plus, do you or do you not want unit tests?
2:09:20because if you open source it, there's at least a prayer.
2:09:22- Make other people write your tests for you.
2:09:24- Yeah, there's at least a chance that you'll get a unit test.
2:09:26- Casey will write them for you.
2:09:29- Will he?
2:09:30If that's a deal, then maybe I'll open source it.
2:09:33- Writing unit tests for a database interface layer
2:09:35is like how I spent half my career.
2:09:36I do not want to do that again voluntarily.
2:09:39- It sounds fun, doesn't it?
2:09:41- Oh, so fun.
2:09:42So much fun.
2:09:44- Well, that's the thing,
2:09:45is that then you start getting into the fine line
2:09:46of like is it a unit test or an integration test?
2:09:49What is this?
2:09:49- Yeah, exactly.
2:09:50Well, at least with SQLite,
2:09:51you don't have to start a database server.
2:09:53- Yeah, that's true.
2:09:54- The difference between mocking a database
2:09:56and having an actual SQLite,
2:09:57especially if it's an in-memory database
2:09:58with no file on disk, it's real blurry.
2:10:01- Yeah, no, I agree.
2:10:02I mean, it's interesting nonetheless.
2:10:05And honestly, as I was sitting here listening to you,
2:10:07like I've never had the occasion,
2:10:08not once in my career of using SQLite,
2:10:12and I don't know a whole lot about it,
2:10:15But I am very, very interested in Swift concurrency and async/await and stuff like that.
2:10:22And I don't think, like, I understand it and I'm okay at it, but I wouldn't say I'm particularly
2:10:27strong at it. So I would be interested in looking at this, not necessarily for the database stuff,
2:10:32not necessarily to use it, but more to kind of crib and understand, well, how does Marco approach
2:10:37async/await and concurrency and actors and things like that, and to help my understanding of these
2:10:41these things, which I think is passable, but not super strong.
2:10:46And if you are in the position that you feel like you are at least reasonably strong at
2:10:51those things, then that's something that people like me or anyone else could learn from.
2:10:56You really kind of also have to see the use of it because with async and with actors and
2:11:02things like sendable and all that, there is the possibility that it starts to, I'm not
2:11:07I'm not going to say infect, but you know, well, okay, fine.
2:11:10That it starts to affect, affect with the letter A,
2:11:14the code that uses it.
2:11:16- No, you're right, you're absolutely right.
2:11:17- Right, and like making an API such that that,
2:11:22the tendrils of that are confined
2:11:26to where you want them to be.
2:11:27Like it is appropriate for this to make the calling code
2:11:31be shaped like this, but it is not appropriate
2:11:33for it to just like thread through your entire application
2:11:35because something has to be sendable
2:11:37all the way up to the top, you know what I mean?
2:11:38That's, adjusting the library doesn't let you know that.
2:11:41Like, Mark will find that out when he tries
2:11:42to go use his library in his app and finds out
2:11:44that he has to like go up 17 levels in the call stack
2:11:47to thread something through and make everything all async.
2:11:49But you know, that's the thing you only learn
2:11:52from using the library in an application.
2:11:54- Yeah, and that's one thing, by the way,
2:11:55like, you know, it was a pretty,
2:11:58it's a pretty strong choice to make
2:12:00all of your database calls go on an actor
2:12:02because, on a custom actor, because that means
2:12:06that anything that calls into it to make a database query
2:12:09has to be from an async context.
2:12:11So that, there's no good way to block
2:12:16and just wait 'til you get this.
2:12:18Like, there's a few crappy ways,
2:12:20but basically all of the calling code to use this
2:12:23is gonna have to be async.
2:12:25And that is going to be a big pain in the butt
2:12:27at certain times, but where I arrive at the end of all that
2:12:32is gonna be really great.
2:12:34And so that's why this is,
2:12:36like I'm kinda starting this out small.
2:12:38I'm gonna try to start writing
2:12:39like a couple of subsystems of the app using this
2:12:41before I really replace all of my old model code with it.
2:12:45And that's gonna be a months long project
2:12:48that's gonna involve probably lots of rewriting of the app.
2:12:50And that's no small job. (laughs)
2:12:54So that's why this is kinda like a side project right now.
2:12:58It's kind of in like the Skunk Works area
2:13:00of Overcast right now.
2:13:02And I'll probably ship some little thing behind the scenes
2:13:05using it soon, but it's gonna be a while before
2:13:08it's like the main database of the app.
2:13:10But gotta start sometime.
2:13:12- Yeah, that's where you need those unit tests
2:13:14that stress test the, stress test the concurrency
2:13:18in ridiculous ways because you don't wanna find that out
2:13:21when you're in your application.
2:13:22Like finally I've got everything all async
2:13:23but now it's a weird bug and I don't understand it.
2:13:25It's like put the torture test into your unit test
2:13:27that have people adding and removing things simultaneously
2:13:31as fast as they can while something else tries to do a regular operation and make sure that
2:13:35it ends up in a sensible state afterwards.
2:13:37Find those bugs in your unit test because trying to find them in your actual application
2:13:40is going to be bad.
2:13:42Obviously, Actors and all that is much better than Threads and is probably even better than
2:13:48Grand Central Dispatch.
2:13:51The technology for Async on Apple platforms has gotten better and better over time.
2:13:55So hopefully you'll be mostly protected by that by doing best practices, but Actors are
2:14:00still relatively new to Apple's platform, so it's a good idea to actually have some
2:14:04kind of stress test that is not "I'll just run my application and see if it works."
2:14:08[beeping]
2:14:10(beep)