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471: My Fiber Situation Is Fine

 

00:00:00   - In general, I'm very happy right now.

00:00:02   - Okay, this sounds like me.

00:00:04   What was it, last week or the week before?

00:00:06   Oh, God, all right, lay it on me.

00:00:08   - Okay, so first of all, I don't know

00:00:10   if I've been mentioned on the show much, if at all,

00:00:13   but for about 15 years, maybe,

00:00:18   I've had a weird stomach allergy to bananas and avocados.

00:00:23   - Oh yeah, you've mentioned that, for sure.

00:00:24   - Yeah, it's the weirdest thing.

00:00:25   If I eat them, I just get this massive stomach ache,

00:00:29   like as if I ate a saw blade or one of those

00:00:31   like spiky crusty O's from the Simpsons,

00:00:33   you know like it's like that kind of thing,

00:00:34   like just huge, like just pain.

00:00:37   And you know, nothing, not too much detail,

00:00:40   but like nothing can come out of your direction

00:00:42   to fix this problem, it's just pain.

00:00:44   All right, so anyway, in my life I've known

00:00:46   a couple of celiacs.

00:00:48   One of them told the others,

00:00:51   you should try taking colostrum,

00:00:53   because I was once a celiac and it fixed me.

00:00:58   And so far, all three of them have been fixed

00:01:02   by taking colostrum.

00:01:04   So, hey, anyone out there who's celiac,

00:01:06   you might wanna look into that.

00:01:07   - What's your doctor?

00:01:08   Don't just blindly listen to us idiots.

00:01:10   Talk to your doctor.

00:01:11   - Is this a medical thing or is this a non-medical thing?

00:01:15   - I don't know the details.

00:01:16   So colostrum is like the first milk from a cow,

00:01:19   like right when the calf is first born.

00:01:20   I don't know the details, I'm probably butchering it.

00:01:21   But the idea, so you can get these pills on Amazon.

00:01:24   It's like this weird New Zealand company

00:01:25   that makes them everywhere.

00:01:26   - You can get these pills on Amazon

00:01:27   is leading me in the direction of non-med.

00:01:29   - Yeah, well anyway, so the theory is that it like,

00:01:33   stimulates the, I think it stimulates the celia

00:01:35   in your small intestine to like regrow

00:01:37   or fix itself somehow, I don't know, anyway.

00:01:39   I apologize to anybody medical out there

00:01:42   who, I'm butchering this, but--

00:01:43   - Yeah, don't forget the magnetic bracelet.

00:01:46   - I'm just saying, so I'm just saying,

00:01:47   I've known multiple celiacs who have tried this

00:01:50   and it has actually like, solved their issues.

00:01:54   Like people who were celiacs for years,

00:01:56   Like you take it and then it just like fixes it

00:01:58   and then you can stop taking it and you stay fixed.

00:02:00   Anyway, so I thought maybe this might help this issue

00:02:03   'cause this seems like some kind of weird

00:02:05   small intestine issue.

00:02:06   So I've been taking colostrum pills

00:02:09   for like a month and a half or so

00:02:12   and I decided let me start testing this allergy again.

00:02:15   - Wait, did you do this today

00:02:16   on a day that you're recording?

00:02:18   - I've been doing it gradually.

00:02:19   - Okay, okay, I'll allow it.

00:02:21   - So, you know, bananas, you know,

00:02:23   they're not that hard to get or not that expensive.

00:02:26   what could one cost, $10?

00:02:28   So I took a couple of bananas and sliced them up

00:02:30   into little disks and I froze them.

00:02:32   And so I had intervals, fixed intervals

00:02:35   that I had constant access to.

00:02:37   - I'm not sure what, I guess the freezing is preservation?

00:02:40   Like what function is the freezing serving here?

00:02:42   - Yeah, 'cause when you only go shopping every two weeks,

00:02:44   it's kinda hard to keep fresh bananas in stock.

00:02:46   So I would just, every day I would try one,

00:02:50   like one slice, and just see what happens.

00:02:53   And the first time I tried it,

00:02:54   I kinda had like a nervous stomach afterwards,

00:02:56   but I'm like, I think that might just be psychological,

00:02:58   'cause I'm, you know. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:00   - So I just kept doing it,

00:03:01   like every day I would just take one.

00:03:02   And it got to the point where I would forget.

00:03:04   Like I would just throw it in my mouth

00:03:06   and then I'd move on, and I wouldn't think about it,

00:03:08   and I'd feel fine.

00:03:09   And I would increase it to,

00:03:11   look, let's try two today.

00:03:12   Let's try three today.

00:03:13   And slowly increased it,

00:03:14   and now I'm up to being able to eat a full banana

00:03:16   by itself, fresh, and I don't feel anything.

00:03:18   It's fantastic.

00:03:19   - Oh, that's exciting.

00:03:20   - For the first time in 15 years, I can eat bananas.

00:03:22   Now I haven't tested it on avocados yet.

00:03:23   I'm gonna start that test next.

00:03:26   Again, same thing, controlling.

00:03:27   I didn't wanna try them both at once.

00:03:28   Controlling for the factors, like,

00:03:30   let me try one first, get that fixed,

00:03:33   which seems to be the case.

00:03:35   And now I can, oh my god, I can get a smoothie

00:03:37   that doesn't suck now.

00:03:39   - That's true.

00:03:39   - Yeah, I was gonna say, what is the banana item

00:03:42   that you're most excited to eat?

00:03:44   - Smoothies, yeah.

00:03:44   - Oh, smoothies are excellent.

00:03:46   - Not peanut butter and banana sandwich?

00:03:47   - Or banana bread, man.

00:03:49   - Yeah, banana bread too, like that should be fine.

00:03:50   I haven't had that in 10 years either,

00:03:51   15 years, but anyway. - That's no way to live.

00:03:54   - That's reason number one that I'm happy,

00:03:55   that I had a banana earlier today,

00:03:56   and I had one yesterday, and I had one the day before that,

00:03:58   and it's been fine, and now I have 15 years

00:03:59   of bananas to make up for.

00:04:01   - Be careful, too many bananas give you hard poops.

00:04:03   - I know, I've heard, but I eat a lot of vegetables,

00:04:05   so believe me, my fiber situation is fine.

00:04:09   (laughing)

00:04:10   Thanks, John.

00:04:11   So anyway, the second reason I'm very happy

00:04:16   is that I have been incredibly busy

00:04:21   with doing some stuff in real life,

00:04:23   that is, it's good stuff, it's fine,

00:04:25   but that has resulted in me not paying

00:04:27   any attention whatsoever to the news

00:04:30   or any flare-ups between people on Twitter

00:04:33   or anything like that.

00:04:34   I haven't even checked Instagram almost at all

00:04:36   in about a week.

00:04:37   I've just been so busy.

00:04:39   Everyone always thinks like, oh my God,

00:04:41   the world is so bad now.

00:04:42   Like now this is extra bad.

00:04:43   Now I really gotta pay attention.

00:04:45   And the reality is I salute everyone out there

00:04:48   who pays attention for me.

00:04:50   I'm in a much better mental state by keeping a lot of

00:04:53   distance from a lot of that stuff.

00:04:54   And so anyway, reason number three I'm happy is that

00:04:58   the same reason why every muscle in my body hurts right now.

00:05:02   It's more of a mixed happiness in the sense that

00:05:06   I got, I got here, I got my, here I'm knocking the mic here,

00:05:11   my Theracane right here, massaging my neck and shoulders

00:05:15   here and there tonight because everything is sore

00:05:20   because my task this week that has been keeping me so busy

00:05:22   is we've had this house for a while

00:05:26   and we never really did major clean outs.

00:05:31   Like you know, we would clean here and there

00:05:32   but we just have 12 years worth of stuff accumulation.

00:05:37   And we decided this week there was no school,

00:05:41   Adam was visiting his grandparents upstate for a week

00:05:43   and we thought we are gonna spend this week,

00:05:47   we're gonna rent a dumpster

00:05:48   and actually really clean out as much as we can.

00:05:52   Massive early spring cleaning.

00:05:55   - This is what sucks us for married people, by the way.

00:05:57   (laughing)

00:05:59   Let's rent a dumpster.

00:06:01   Yes, the kid's away, finally.

00:06:03   - Oh my god, so-- - That's amazing.

00:06:06   - I've never rented a dumpster before.

00:06:07   It turns out you just call, literally,

00:06:09   the company that is recommended here

00:06:11   is called AAAA, you know, Carding or whatever.

00:06:15   It's one of those yellow pages' names.

00:06:17   (laughing)

00:06:18   And you just call them up and some fairly curt person

00:06:22   on the other end is like, "How big you want it?

00:06:24   "When do you want it?

00:06:25   "Okay, I'll drop it off today."

00:06:26   It's that kind of thing.

00:06:28   - I mean, it helps if you're in New York

00:06:29   if you want to get that full experience.

00:06:31   - That's true.

00:06:32   - They sound different if you call in Alabama.

00:06:34   - I bet they don't sound that different.

00:06:36   Anyway, so it wouldn't be funny if every carting company

00:06:40   was all run by people from Brooklyn,

00:06:41   just they were all over the country

00:06:43   just running carting companies.

00:06:44   - They were in construction, too.

00:06:45   - Yeah.

00:06:47   So anyway, yeah, so some guy in a truck shows up

00:06:50   and dumps off his dumpster in the street,

00:06:51   front of our house, and--

00:06:53   - Wait, they put the dumpster in the street?

00:06:55   - We didn't want them tearing up our papers in our driveway.

00:06:57   - I know, but anyway, I believe you're allowed to do that.

00:07:00   - You can, it just takes a quick permit from the village,

00:07:03   but it's a wide street, there's room to go around it

00:07:05   and everything. - Jeez, I have never seen

00:07:07   that in the Boston area.

00:07:09   It's always gotta go on your driveway or on your lawn.

00:07:12   And yes, it does destroy it.

00:07:13   - You don't have streets made for the modern era.

00:07:16   Your streets are preposterously tiny.

00:07:18   - And Marco's street isn't that wide.

00:07:20   - My street's like 100 years old.

00:07:22   - It's pretty wide.

00:07:23   And that's actually, that's a good point.

00:07:24   Your street is, I don't know what your excuse is.

00:07:26   - It's not as wide as yours, Casey.

00:07:27   Yours is like a football field.

00:07:28   - It is not.

00:07:30   - My street is wide enough that like,

00:07:32   a car can be parked on both sides of the street,

00:07:34   parallel parking, you can still drive through the middle.

00:07:36   - Yeah, with one car.

00:07:37   - One car could drive, so yeah,

00:07:38   so it's like three cars wide, basically.

00:07:39   - See, my street I would say is four cars wide.

00:07:43   - Yeah, Casey, you could have a bus on either side.

00:07:45   and you can drive two buses past each other between them.

00:07:47   - No, parallel parked on either side in two cars.

00:07:50   - Go get a tape measure and measure your street.

00:07:51   It's huge. - Oh my gosh.

00:07:52   All right, fine, fine.

00:07:53   Anyway, we digress.

00:07:54   - Yeah, so we knew we were hiring the dumpster.

00:07:57   Like over the weekend before it arrived on Monday,

00:08:00   over the weekend before it arrived,

00:08:01   we basically spent that time like just staging

00:08:04   a whole bunch of trash bags in the garage.

00:08:06   By the way, this was a good time to have listened to rectus.

00:08:11   It was all about like space.

00:08:12   And I've heard Merlin over the years talk about

00:08:15   It's All Too Much, this wonderful book.

00:08:17   And literally, so we were driving up to drop Adam

00:08:20   off upstate, on the way up they were listening to Rectifs,

00:08:23   did the drop off, had some lunch.

00:08:25   Right before we got in the car,

00:08:26   I downloaded the audiobook for It's All Too Much,

00:08:28   and we listened to that on the way home.

00:08:30   And then we listened to it as we were cleaning

00:08:32   everything out for the first couple days.

00:08:34   We're almost done with it.

00:08:35   - Just make sure you don't throw out

00:08:36   your rock concert T-shirts.

00:08:37   - Yes, yes, I heard that.

00:08:38   - So one thing that you've learned is you got these books,

00:08:40   you clean everything out, but this,

00:08:41   don't make Maron's mistake and get so enthusiastic

00:08:44   that you throw out the one irreplaceable thing

00:08:46   that you're gonna regret losing for the rest of your life.

00:08:49   - Yeah, but I mean, honestly,

00:08:50   I don't think I have anything like that.

00:08:53   - I don't know what the equivalent is.

00:08:54   Maybe like save your, well, if you had a Sega Saturn,

00:08:56   you should save that, but you don't.

00:08:58   - No, and I have all the video game systems

00:09:00   I'm saving, of course, but I'm just, you know, I have,

00:09:02   like, and so fortunately, you know,

00:09:04   it was a really nice day, so first we put everything

00:09:08   like out on the curb for people to take,

00:09:09   and then anything that was still there,

00:09:11   like 24 hours later, we'd toss in the dumpster.

00:09:13   And I had put out like tech stuff,

00:09:15   you know, like old networking gear and stuff like that.

00:09:18   I even, this might come up later,

00:09:20   I even got rid of my coffee roaster.

00:09:22   I gave it away, somebody took it.

00:09:24   - What?

00:09:25   - Yeah, I'm not roasting anymore.

00:09:26   - Are you okay?

00:09:27   - Yeah, so anyway, we'll get to that later,

00:09:29   but anyway, I'm still drinking coffee,

00:09:31   I'm just not roasting anymore.

00:09:32   But yeah, so like a lot of stuff was taken,

00:09:35   stuff that was, you know, basically trash, we threw away,

00:09:38   Which I mean this included like literally every bit

00:09:40   of food in the house.

00:09:42   Like we, 'cause like, it's been, we have a lot of,

00:09:46   a lot of expired food.

00:09:47   I found a jar of couscous from 2011.

00:09:50   - Oh, neat. - Excuse me,

00:09:51   that expired in 2011.

00:09:52   So it's actually probably from 2009.

00:09:54   - I think I could beat that stuff in my house.

00:09:57   I think we have a salad dressing in the refrigerator

00:09:59   that beats that.

00:10:00   - Oh my gosh. - Yeah, so we just,

00:10:01   and we threw, you know, big black garbage bags,

00:10:05   a lot of which was full of expired food

00:10:06   or trash from the basement.

00:10:08   We threw away so much stuff.

00:10:11   And when the dumpster was first delivered

00:10:12   and I started throwing all these bags in,

00:10:14   I thought, it's a 10 cubic yard dumpster,

00:10:16   it's the smallest one they have.

00:10:18   And I thought, oh this is too big,

00:10:20   we're never gonna fill this up.

00:10:22   Well, guess what, it's full.

00:10:24   It took us 48 hours, it's full.

00:10:28   - You could squish that down a lot,

00:10:30   there's a lot of air in there.

00:10:31   - There's some, but not as much as you would think.

00:10:34   So a lot of the space was like,

00:10:37   there were a couple of old broken pieces of furniture

00:10:40   that we tried having people take and nobody wanted them,

00:10:43   so we had to throw those out.

00:10:44   A lot of stuff from the basement,

00:10:46   like screens for windows that we don't even have

00:10:50   those windows anymore.

00:10:51   Like we changed the windows years ago,

00:10:54   like 10 years ago we got new windows

00:10:55   and we have the screens for the old ones for some reason

00:10:58   that we can't even use.

00:10:59   Stuff like that, tons and tons of stuff

00:11:02   that was just trash, just taking up space.

00:11:04   And so, my God, it feels good.

00:11:07   And so the crazy thing is,

00:11:09   so we have this dumpster full of trash

00:11:11   in front of our house.

00:11:13   The house, when you're inside of it,

00:11:15   does not look that different.

00:11:16   It doesn't look like we're moving out,

00:11:18   it looks like we just tidied up a little bit.

00:11:20   - All that trash was hidden.

00:11:22   - Yes, my office closet, the basement, the attic.

00:11:26   It just, where do we get 10 cubic yards of trash

00:11:28   in our house and have it disappear

00:11:30   and have nothing look different?

00:11:31   Anyway, it feels very good.

00:11:33   This is something that I strongly recommend

00:11:37   if you have a house with too much stuff in it.

00:11:39   Listen to rectus, then listen to it's all too much,

00:11:42   then rent a dumpster.

00:11:43   And it's a good time, except that I am now

00:11:48   extraordinarily sore from just huge amounts of hauling

00:11:52   that's gone into this.

00:11:54   Things like in the basement we had,

00:11:56   again from a renovation we did 12 years ago or 10 years ago,

00:11:59   we had an old door that, it was a custom-sized door,

00:12:04   and the door frame that it goes in doesn't exist anymore.

00:12:08   And so, why do we have this door in the basement?

00:12:11   It's a custom-sized-- - Because it's bespoke.

00:12:13   That's why.

00:12:14   - Yeah, so that's sitting outside now.

00:12:15   I hope somebody takes it who wants a reclaimed door,

00:12:18   and they can reclaim it from next to our dumpster.

00:12:20   Hopefully I don't have to put it in the dumpster,

00:12:22   'cause my God, doors are heavy.

00:12:24   But yeah, oh man, everything on my body hurts.

00:12:27   - I'm sure people are listening to this and saying,

00:12:29   oh, Marco, you're being so wasteful

00:12:30   throwing all these things in the garbage.

00:12:32   You should've given them away.

00:12:33   You should've recycled them.

00:12:34   You should've put them up for sale.

00:12:35   You should've found someone who needed them

00:12:37   or so on and so forth.

00:12:38   - There actually was a free cycle type of group.

00:12:41   Our neighbor was a member of this Facebook Buy Nothing.

00:12:46   This is apparently a thing.

00:12:47   I didn't know about it, but I'm not very good at that.

00:12:50   But they posted it there,

00:12:52   and a lot of people came and took stuff.

00:12:53   It was great.

00:12:54   Yeah, so I was like, part of the--

00:12:57   I don't know if they talk about this,

00:12:58   and it's all too much, but we talk about it--

00:13:00   Merlin talks about it, and we talk about it in rec diffs

00:13:02   when I talk to him on the topic.

00:13:04   Sometimes you can use that as an excuse to never do this.

00:13:09   You can say, oh, well, I don't want to throw all this stuff

00:13:11   out.

00:13:11   I really should give it away.

00:13:12   And you should.

00:13:13   But if you never actually do find someone to give it to,

00:13:17   then it just stays in your house.

00:13:19   And so getting the notion that we should get a dumpster

00:13:23   and just chuck it all away, and then stopping yourself

00:13:25   and saying, no, I should find something to give it away,

00:13:26   but then not doing that either doesn't help anybody.

00:13:29   It keeps the junk in your house, and it also

00:13:32   doesn't help the people that you were supposedly

00:13:33   going to give it to.

00:13:34   So though putting it all in a dumpster

00:13:36   and having it go to a landfill seems wasteful

00:13:38   and it should be reused and so on and so forth,

00:13:40   yes, that's true, but when you have to choose

00:13:43   the lesser of multiple evils, the one that gets the stuff

00:13:46   out of your house will probably make your life better

00:13:48   more than the one where you just keep it in your house

00:13:49   and feel guilty about it.

00:13:51   - Right, and there are, certain things are easier

00:13:54   to find better uses for than others.

00:13:57   Things like clothing that's in decent shape.

00:13:59   Usually you can find some place

00:14:00   that will accept clothing donations,

00:14:02   or things that might have some value.

00:14:04   You can often donate to thrift shops or something like that.

00:14:07   - And sometimes they have big just,

00:14:08   places where you can shove them.

00:14:09   You don't even have to talk to a person.

00:14:10   They'll just have like, hey, take your old clothes

00:14:12   and put 'em in this thing that looks like a dumpster,

00:14:14   but it isn't.

00:14:14   - Yeah, the problem though is that,

00:14:16   like a lot of things in our modern world,

00:14:19   A lot more of this stuff ends up getting thrown away

00:14:21   behind the scenes than we realize,

00:14:24   or that many people assume.

00:14:25   So if you're worried like, oh no,

00:14:28   what if I just throw this away?

00:14:30   I can donate it to somebody.

00:14:31   Well, depending on what it is and where you are,

00:14:34   there's actually a good chance

00:14:35   it's gonna get thrown away by them.

00:14:36   So it's not, this is not a good thing,

00:14:41   but it is worth knowing in the sense

00:14:42   that it's a good counterargument against yourself

00:14:44   that you don't have to necessarily not clean out your house

00:14:48   because it might go to waste because like,

00:14:50   A, it's gonna go to waste anyway,

00:14:52   it's going to waste now if it's in your house

00:14:54   not being used and not being useful.

00:14:56   But B, like, almost any way you could get rid of it,

00:15:00   there's a high chance of a lot of it being wasted.

00:15:03   And so in a way that kind of, it's crappy,

00:15:06   it's kind of a negative way to look at it,

00:15:09   but in a way it's like, well then I might as well at least,

00:15:11   I might as well get rid of it and improve my life

00:15:15   and just try to not be so wasteful in the future

00:15:17   when accumulating things in the first place,

00:15:20   as opposed to like, I have to keep this,

00:15:23   you know, these 10 bags of junk forever

00:15:25   because otherwise they'll go in a landfill.

00:15:27   Like, well that's, then your house

00:15:28   would just become in a landfill at that point.

00:15:30   Like, that's not really helping anybody either.

00:15:32   - Well, so you've had a fun vacation then, huh?

00:15:36   - Oh my God, this is not a vacation.

00:15:39   It's a break from school.

00:15:40   This is not a vacation.

00:15:42   - How's the dog poop situation like?

00:15:44   - Well, he poops outside.

00:15:45   - I mean in the dumpster.

00:15:46   - Oh, there's one bag for me.

00:15:49   I think that's all so far.

00:15:50   - Really, hmm, interesting.

00:15:52   If there's ever a dumpster in our neighborhood,

00:15:53   it slowly fills with bags of dog poop.

00:15:56   - Yeah, and I've been that guy.

00:15:57   'Cause look, I understand, I'm sure people have reasons,

00:16:02   but it's stupid that if I'm walking my dog

00:16:07   around these suburbs, there's no trash cans anywhere.

00:16:11   - You have to escort the poop back to your house.

00:16:13   Yeah, there is not a town trash can anywhere.

00:16:17   You can walk a mile and a half and see zero trash cans.

00:16:22   And that to me, I don't think that's necessarily

00:16:25   a good thing, we do see a lot of litter that happens

00:16:28   as a result, I think overall it's probably more responsible

00:16:31   city planning to put trash cans periodically somewhere,

00:16:34   but also who wants to have a trash can

00:16:37   in front of their house?

00:16:38   I understand why they're not there,

00:16:40   like it's definitely a bit of a NIMBY problem,

00:16:42   but it is kind of annoying.

00:16:45   So yeah, I've totally been that guy.

00:16:47   I've like, if there's nobody around

00:16:49   and I'm walking past a dumpster,

00:16:50   I'll just whoop, flick it in there.

00:16:51   But I figure now, all the years I've been doing that,

00:16:55   if somebody walked by my dumpster

00:16:55   and throws their poop in there, that's fine.

00:16:57   I know, they owe it to me.

00:16:58   - It's a circle of poop.

00:17:00   We'll get everyone writing and telling us

00:17:03   how harmful it is to have animal waste in with garbage.

00:17:07   - Wait, where else are we supposed to put it?

00:17:09   - I don't know, but I'm sure it's wrong.

00:17:11   - Probably, I mean look, believe me,

00:17:14   there's gonna be a lot of people who think

00:17:15   half of what I just said was wrong.

00:17:17   You know, that's--

00:17:18   - Well, that's why I wanted to call it out,

00:17:19   to say like, it's not ideal.

00:17:20   Ideally, you would carefully find good new homes

00:17:23   for all this extra stuff, but in reality,

00:17:25   it would mean that you would just never do it,

00:17:27   and it would just fill your house until you died,

00:17:28   and then someone would have an estate sale.

00:17:30   - Or that person would hire a dumpster,

00:17:32   and just dump, like, that's what happens.

00:17:34   That's how a lot of these stories end, unfortunately.

00:17:37   You keep it until you die,

00:17:39   and then someone else throws it away for you.

00:17:41   And that's no way to live.

00:17:42   So, I mean, keep in mind, like, you know,

00:17:45   like a lot of this, this is the thing,

00:17:47   like so much stuff that you don't realize

00:17:49   gets thrown away, like store returns.

00:17:51   So, I know there was a couple of articles recently

00:17:53   about like online shopping returns and everything.

00:17:55   Yeah, most returns to stores get thrown away.

00:17:59   There are very few items that stores will actually resell

00:18:02   if they've been returned.

00:18:04   Like, there's so much, you know, recycling obviously

00:18:06   is a big one, like so much plastic recycling

00:18:08   gets thrown away.

00:18:09   We should be conscious about our waste for sure

00:18:12   and our consumption for sure.

00:18:14   There's lots of reasons to be conscious about that

00:18:15   and to do that, but there's a reason why

00:18:18   the whole reduce recycle thing, reduce is first.

00:18:21   Because once you have this stuff,

00:18:26   at that point, most of it, at some point,

00:18:30   its useful life is going to end

00:18:31   and it's going to have to be sent somewhere.

00:18:34   And sometimes you can find a good use for it

00:18:36   with somebody else or somebody wants to take it.

00:18:38   a lot of times you can't.

00:18:40   And so if you want to be environmentally conscious

00:18:43   about this or more ecologically responsible,

00:18:46   the better place to do that is the front part

00:18:48   of this equation of like, yeah, you know what,

00:18:50   buy less stuff, use less stuff.

00:18:51   That's the better part of it.

00:18:54   But don't get too high and mighty about what's gonna happen

00:18:57   after you're done with it because chances are

00:18:59   it's gonna end up in a landfill regardless.

00:19:01   - Fun. - Yeah.

00:19:02   - All right, well I'm glad you're making progress

00:19:05   even though nobody can see it,

00:19:07   except outside in the dumpster.

00:19:08   - I am recycling an absurd amount of cardboard.

00:19:11   Like I-- - Oh, that's good.

00:19:12   - So one of the things we did was we upgraded

00:19:16   to a larger bed and so we had this tremendous Casper box.

00:19:21   (laughing)

00:19:23   That, and I also pulled out of the basement

00:19:26   two boxes for floor-standing speakers

00:19:29   that we use next to our TV.

00:19:31   So pretty tall, probably three and a half feet tall.

00:19:34   So you know, two, a pair of speakers,

00:19:36   each one had its own individual box

00:19:38   that was almost the size of a coffin,

00:19:40   like a coffin for a short person.

00:19:42   And so I had two of those,

00:19:44   plus the Casper King size box,

00:19:46   which itself is probably about coffin sized as well

00:19:50   for a short person.

00:19:51   And so I filled all three of those with other cardboard

00:19:55   that had been flattened and packed and everything.

00:19:57   - Goodness.

00:19:58   - Oh my, it's so heavy.

00:19:59   (laughs)

00:20:00   Again, the hauling.

00:20:02   But I would say I could probably fill half a dumpster

00:20:05   just with paper and cardboard.

00:20:07   - My word.

00:20:09   - So yeah, that's sitting next to my dumpster.

00:20:12   It's a fun night.

00:20:13   - Oh, wow.

00:20:14   - So whatever's going on in the world of tech,

00:20:15   I have no idea.

00:20:16   I have missed all of it.

00:20:18   Is anything going on?

00:20:19   - Did you hear?

00:20:20   Apple bought Nintendo.

00:20:21   - Oh yeah, that finally happened.

00:20:22   (laughs)

00:20:23   (electronic beeping)

00:20:25   - All right, let's do some follow up.

00:20:26   With regard to greedy Bluetooth from Ask ATP,

00:20:30   we got some feedback from Paul Violante,

00:20:33   who wrote, regarding Marco's Apple Maps,

00:20:35   Bluetooth predicament, there's a setting to have maps speak

00:20:38   driving directions through the car as phone call audio.

00:20:42   So if you go to settings, maps, spoken directions,

00:20:44   and then toggle directions on radio on,

00:20:47   then that will act as though a brief phone call

00:20:50   has just came in and that will make sure

00:20:52   that your car radio treats that as an,

00:20:55   oh my goodness, you need to listen to this sort of scenario.

00:20:58   So Paul writes, this works on my 2017 Toyota 4Runner.

00:21:00   Even if I am playing, even if I'm playing no audio,

00:21:04   the phone will connect as if it was on a phone call

00:21:06   to speak the directions.

00:21:07   - Yeah, this is interesting, yeah,

00:21:08   'cause this is about my FJ,

00:21:11   you have to be playing music or a podcast

00:21:13   in order to hear any spoken map directions,

00:21:16   'cause it has to be logically thinking

00:21:17   it's playing something.

00:21:19   And so, I never thought about this, this is a good idea.

00:21:22   I'm gonna try it, but it is kind of annoying

00:21:24   that I would have to, this would have to be how it works

00:21:28   over any Bluetooth, not just that car radio.

00:21:33   But it is interesting, a lot of people forget or never knew

00:21:36   these old Bluetooth modes where phone calls

00:21:39   were treated differently than audio.

00:21:42   And this was for lots of legacy technology reasons,

00:21:44   it's a whole different Bluetooth profile,

00:21:47   all these different codecs that were lower bandwidth,

00:21:49   they could have bi-directional communication

00:21:52   over the very, very, very crappy latency,

00:21:54   or very crappy bandwidth of early Bluetooth versions.

00:21:57   So there's all this stuff.

00:21:57   But yeah, it's interesting, Bluetooth,

00:22:00   has a lot of crappy legacy stuff,

00:22:02   but in this case, that actually will be helpful.

00:22:05   - I feel for the person who had to come up with a copy

00:22:08   for this option, 'cause it's called directions on radio.

00:22:12   It's gotta communicate this very,

00:22:15   the thing that Casey just said.

00:22:16   So say you're in your car and you wanna hear directions

00:22:18   from the map, but you don't wanna have audio playing,

00:22:20   well turn this thing on and it'll do that

00:22:21   for reasons that are even more complicated than this.

00:22:23   But instead, it's just a toggle that says

00:22:25   directions on radio.

00:22:27   I wonder if people, I do wonder,

00:22:29   - How young do you have to be to not recognize radio

00:22:32   as the thing in your car that makes noise?

00:22:35   'Cause does anyone listen to,

00:22:36   I suppose tons of people do listen to radio,

00:22:38   but at least in my household,

00:22:41   I can't remember the last time we had AM or FM radio

00:22:43   turned on in any of our cars.

00:22:45   - Yeah, I mean, and this is actually like,

00:22:48   I was first making Overcast back in 2013 or so,

00:22:53   and I actually briefly considered doing this kind of feature

00:22:57   that would route the podcast audio

00:22:59   through the phone call profile instead of the audio profile

00:23:03   for this reason that like some people actually had

00:23:07   Bluetooth situations in their cars usually

00:23:10   that supported the phone call mode but not the audio mode.

00:23:13   - Oh my. - And so this was a,

00:23:16   thank God, a very short-lived period in Bluetooth evolution

00:23:18   where you would have that, you know,

00:23:20   only have the phone and not have the music.

00:23:22   But there are cars out there that have that situation.

00:23:25   So I briefly thought about like a feature

00:23:27   that would just do this.

00:23:28   I even once looked into like,

00:23:29   what if I run one of those like, you know,

00:23:31   phone IP APIs, like Twilio or whatever back then?

00:23:35   Like what if I actually have a premium feature

00:23:37   where you can call a phone number

00:23:40   and have it just play your podcasts

00:23:42   like over an actual phone call

00:23:45   for other types of integrations?

00:23:47   But fortunately, like, you know,

00:23:49   by the time I would have actually gotten to that

00:23:51   in my to-do list, the need for all of this stuff

00:23:52   had vanished.

00:23:53   - Speaking of cars, we have,

00:23:55   it's a little bit of longer feedback,

00:23:57   but I found it absolutely fascinating.

00:23:58   So an anonymous person wrote in

00:24:00   with regard to break-by-wire systems.

00:24:01   So this means there's no physical connection

00:24:05   between the brake pedal and the brakes.

00:24:07   It's all electronically controlled.

00:24:08   That's break-by-wire.

00:24:09   So anonymous writes, "I've spent most of the last decade

00:24:12   "working on brakes and break-by-wire brakes

00:24:14   "are actually stranger than how you portrayed them.

00:24:17   "When a car company calls 'break-by-wire,'

00:24:19   "they're primarily referring to a certain kind

00:24:21   "of electrically boosted brake system.

00:24:23   "Marcus Tesla has a Bosch, Bosch, Bosch.

00:24:26   iBooster, which is electrically boosted similarly to how electric power steering is boosted.

00:24:31   It senses torque at a motor attached to the input rod and provides additional torque to

00:24:34   aid the driver.

00:24:35   These "by-wire" systems have the input rod connected to a master cylinder just as it

00:24:39   would be in a car without power brakes.

00:24:41   The master cylinder is sealed off from the rest of the system by a valve that is held

00:24:44   closed during normal operation.

00:24:45   The brake controller reads the master cylinder pressure and pedal stroke to determine the

00:24:49   driver intent, and then uses a separate electrically actuated boost cylinder to generate the brake

00:24:54   system pressure.

00:24:55   So it is technically by wire as during normal operation there is no fluid connection to

00:24:59   the wheels, but there is fluid involved on the input side and all of this actuation takes

00:25:03   place in one piece of hardware.

00:25:05   Some manufacturers, particularly Japanese automakers, use high pressure accumulators

00:25:08   in place of the boost cylinder, but the principle of operation is similar.

00:25:12   This is done because only generating the pressure needed for a situation is more efficient,

00:25:18   and subjective metrics are improved by isolating the driver from wheel behavior.

00:25:21   Additionally, this provides a built-in failsafe,

00:25:23   where if the brake unit fails,

00:25:25   the isolation valve will open itself

00:25:26   or be opened by the ECU and provide the driver

00:25:28   with a direct connection to the wheels.

00:25:30   And then, Jon, I guess you were having

00:25:32   an email conversation with this person, is that right?

00:25:34   - Mm-hmm, yeah, this was my response to that.

00:25:35   So this is actually stuff that I had seen

00:25:38   when the first Brake-by-Wire system came out,

00:25:41   and we didn't go into it in the past show,

00:25:43   but how do they deal with the situation

00:25:45   where what if the electronics fail?

00:25:47   Like, when the very first Brake-by-Wire things came out,

00:25:50   Lots of people were nervous about that.

00:25:51   So they had all these fail safes where it's like,

00:25:52   it's like a regular braking system,

00:25:55   but that part of it is shut off normally.

00:25:57   But if anything goes wrong, this valve opens up,

00:25:59   and it just like, it sort of default fails

00:26:02   into being normal-ish brakes, right?

00:26:05   That was to make people feel more comfortable.

00:26:07   So my response to this was to ask this person,

00:26:10   you know, it was just basically amusing.

00:26:12   I said, I wonder if the other go to the jet fighter route.

00:26:15   So jet fighter planes for many, many years, decades,

00:26:18   have also had fly-by-wire,

00:26:20   and the same deal, the first plane that was fly by wire,

00:26:23   all of the pilots and the engineers were all scared.

00:26:25   It's like, what if the electronics fail?

00:26:28   Electronics fail all the time.

00:26:29   I want the pedals and the stick in my plane

00:26:32   to be connected to the control surfaces.

00:26:34   I don't wanna rely on the electronics.

00:26:36   If the electronics go out,

00:26:37   I'm just gonna fall out of the sky like a rock

00:26:39   'cause I can't control anything anymore.

00:26:41   And the way they eventually dealt with that in jet fighters

00:26:45   and other sort of fly by wire airplanes

00:26:47   is not by doing the thing that you just read,

00:26:50   where it's like, well, it's like a regular hydraulic system,

00:26:52   but we shut that off normally and do this by wire thing,

00:26:55   but then it fails, it opens back up.

00:26:57   Instead, the way they deal with it in,

00:26:59   not all planes, but a lot of them,

00:27:02   I mean, it's the same way they deal

00:27:03   with a lot of things in aviation,

00:27:04   massive redundancy.

00:27:06   So there's not one electronic system,

00:27:08   there's not two electronic systems,

00:27:09   like three completely independent, redundant,

00:27:12   fully functioning systems

00:27:14   routed through different parts of the plane

00:27:15   using different technologies,

00:27:17   And it's like, if one of them fails,

00:27:18   you switch to the backup one.

00:27:19   If the backbone fails,

00:27:20   you switch to the backup, backup one.

00:27:22   And that, in theory, it makes people comfortable enough

00:27:26   that they're okay flying the plane.

00:27:27   Nevermind the fact that a lot of fighter planes

00:27:29   are so unstable, under normal operation,

00:27:32   that without the computers constantly adjusting

00:27:33   the control surfaces, it will tumble out of the sky

00:27:35   like a rock thrown by a toddler.

00:27:38   But we'll set that aside for now.

00:27:40   So that was my question.

00:27:42   All right, so you just described the way this works.

00:27:44   do you think cars will ever go to full by wire with no physical backup and deal with it by saying,

00:27:50   "Okay, we're really going to separate your pedals entirely from the hydraulic system,

00:27:55   but to make it so you all don't die, we're going to double or triple or quadruple redundant,

00:28:00   make the system redundant." And so the person wrote, "Publicly available information would say,

00:28:06   yes, all the suppliers are preparing for that, especially as cars gain more and more advanced

00:28:10   ADAS, which is Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, some redundancy becomes necessary.

00:28:15   And there are lots of benefits that can come from separating the driver controls from the

00:28:18   actuator that you just might be able to imagine.

00:28:20   This is kind of one of those, like the person here is working on brake biowire systems and

00:28:25   you know, I asked a question, I wonder if they're going to do X and the person said,

00:28:29   "publicly available information" would say yes.

00:28:31   That's their way of saying, "I'm not going to tell you we're doing that, but were you

00:28:34   to look at publicly available information, you would see it leaning in that direction."

00:28:37   So that's a confirmation without confirmation.

00:28:42   We are brought to you this week by Collide.

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00:28:54   without considering their needs or even attempting

00:28:56   to educate them about the security of their laptop.

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00:29:02   who in the past saw just how much MDM was disrupting

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00:29:40   recommendations when their device is in an insecure state.

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00:30:27   Once again, that's collide.com/ATP.

00:30:30   That's spelled K-O-L-I-D-E, collide with a K.

00:30:32   k-o-l-i-d-e dot com slash ATP today. Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.

00:30:38   Aidan Traeger writes, "I know you acknowledge the existence of third-party Apple Music apps on the show,

00:30:47   but I wanted to pass along Mark Barrowcliff's fourth annual iOS music player showcase from just last month."

00:30:52   So, you know, we were talking about in God bless if yeah, does anyone at Apple actually use the Apple Music app?

00:30:59   I feel like we say this about a lot of things.

00:31:02   This is becoming like the new "If Steve Were Alive."

00:31:04   Does anyone at Apple actually--

00:31:07   - Well, I can tell you one thing.

00:31:08   They definitely don't use the Mac version,

00:31:11   and if they do, they definitely don't use the songs view.

00:31:14   - It's what, I feel like every corner of the music app

00:31:17   on every platform is straight trash.

00:31:19   And this is why I haven't divorced myself of Spotify,

00:31:23   despite being cheap enough to want to,

00:31:25   is because it's all garbage.

00:31:27   I can't play something until I can,

00:31:29   And then I'm in the midst of playing something,

00:31:31   it's playing great.

00:31:32   Actually, just earlier today,

00:31:33   I had an instance where I was not authorized

00:31:35   to play something.

00:31:37   Earlier in the day,

00:31:38   I had an instance where I was playing an album,

00:31:39   I think I was playing Thriller by Michael Jackson.

00:31:41   I was playing the album,

00:31:42   went through the first three or four songs, no problem.

00:31:44   Just stopped.

00:31:46   It knows it's ready to play the next song.

00:31:48   I didn't stop it, I swear to you, I didn't stop it,

00:31:50   'cause this happens a lot.

00:31:51   It's ready to play the next song, but it just froze.

00:31:54   Like, the app is functional, but it just froze.

00:31:56   It got sleepy, I guess, I don't know.

00:31:58   I was asking too much.

00:31:59   I guess I just don't have enough empathy for the machine.

00:32:01   Am I right?

00:32:02   Anyway, so with regard to,

00:32:03   hey, what could you do to fix this problem?

00:32:06   Well, you could potentially

00:32:07   just get a different music app entirely.

00:32:09   And so Eden reminded us of this list by Mark Barrowcliff.

00:32:13   It's actually more than the list.

00:32:14   It's a comprehensive review.

00:32:16   And I started paging through this this morning

00:32:18   and there is a lot here.

00:32:20   So if you are interested,

00:32:23   Mark does an amazing job of like laying out the landscape

00:32:26   and showing what each of these things looks like

00:32:29   and how they behave and what they're good at,

00:32:30   what they're bad at, et cetera.

00:32:31   But it's a really, really interesting roundup

00:32:33   and I strongly encourage you, if you're like me

00:32:36   and hate everything about your music situation,

00:32:39   check it out, you might like it.

00:32:40   - These are just iOS apps, right?

00:32:42   - iOS and iPadOS, yes.

00:32:44   I do not believe there was anything on macOS, that's correct.

00:32:48   - Yeah, there was 16 apps, three of them are new this year.

00:32:51   I know there are similar clients available for the Mac,

00:32:54   but I doubt there are 16 of them in total.

00:32:56   (laughing)

00:32:58   - Yeah, this is so often the problem.

00:33:00   Like, I've looked at a lot of these

00:33:02   possible alternative apps over the years,

00:33:04   and usually there is not an app that is Mac and iOS.

00:33:09   There are some that are Mac only,

00:33:11   there's a lot that are iOS only,

00:33:13   but usually you have to give up one of those platforms

00:33:17   to use one of these apps.

00:33:18   Or you can just have it use your Apple Music Library,

00:33:21   which a lot of these apps do anyway,

00:33:23   and then you can kind of just keep using

00:33:25   the Apple version of music on the Mac,

00:33:28   but that's the worst one.

00:33:30   Like, that's the one I don't wanna keep using,

00:33:32   that's the one I wanna replace.

00:33:33   - Mm-hmm.

00:33:34   It's so bad.

00:33:36   I mean, I hate to rag on these apps

00:33:40   because you don't know what constraints they're dealing with

00:33:44   you don't know what they're up against.

00:33:45   - Oh, I know what, they're dealing with not caring.

00:33:47   That's it, if they can't, look, Apple has shown

00:33:50   when they care about something,

00:33:52   they put a lot of resources behind it,

00:33:54   they put good talent on it,

00:33:56   they incentivize the people in the company to work on it.

00:33:59   And it's very, very clear that they do not value this,

00:34:04   because if they valued it,

00:34:06   they would put the resources behind it to make it happen,

00:34:08   and they just don't.

00:34:09   - And when you say they, to be clear,

00:34:11   you're not talking about the developers

00:34:12   who make the application,

00:34:13   because they don't set those top priorities,

00:34:15   you're talking about-- - Do any developers

00:34:16   make the applications?

00:34:17   (laughing)

00:34:18   Honestly, look, in a lot of times,

00:34:21   What happens in Apple a lot of times is certain apps

00:34:25   or features actually go for a long span

00:34:28   having a full-time staff of zero people.

00:34:30   The impression I've gotten over many, many people

00:34:33   over many years is that people get moved around

00:34:35   to different projects or they move themselves around

00:34:37   to different projects and for your career to progress,

00:34:42   you typically have to be moved around

00:34:44   to whatever the hot new thing is.

00:34:46   I've heard time and time again that it's hard

00:34:50   for your career to advance and progress

00:34:53   if you're doing the more boring stuff.

00:34:55   Like, what engineer or product manager

00:34:58   wants to spend their time on the music app for the Mac?

00:35:01   Like, I understand why it is this way,

00:35:03   but that is ultimately a failure of management and structure.

00:35:05   Like, that is something that, like,

00:35:07   the company has always had problems,

00:35:10   like multitasking and keeping their interest

00:35:13   in working on the things they've already started

00:35:15   rather than going and starting something new constantly.

00:35:18   And ideally, as they grow, they should be able

00:35:22   to balance more things over time.

00:35:25   In practice, that hasn't really happened nearly as much

00:35:27   as you would think based on their size.

00:35:31   - I mean, this is not a unique to Apple problem.

00:35:33   Every company I've ever worked for experiences this.

00:35:35   It is one of the most annoying to people like us

00:35:38   who really appreciate good software

00:35:40   to see resources not be put into something

00:35:44   that is quote unquote done or isn't the new hotness

00:35:47   or doesn't drive revenue or isn't driving growth

00:35:50   or whatever and that's just the natural inclination

00:35:52   of any company, the people who are managing it.

00:35:54   Why am I gonna dump all my money into a thing

00:35:56   that I know is not going to produce any growth,

00:35:58   does not have any big potential upside,

00:36:01   exists the way it is now, has a dwindling number of users.

00:36:05   If I made it 1000% better, I wouldn't make .01% more money

00:36:08   and it wouldn't make anybody choose the Mac or the iPhone.

00:36:13   You can list off all these reasons why.

00:36:15   Here's why we're not investing in that.

00:36:17   And for the most part, that's right,

00:36:21   except for where things just slowly start to decay, right?

00:36:24   That people think, well, once it's done, it's done.

00:36:27   And even though everyone knows intellectually,

00:36:28   even at the highest levels of management,

00:36:30   well, software is never done.

00:36:31   You have to, at the very least, maintain it.

00:36:33   And it's important to keep up with the times

00:36:35   that every few years you really need to overhaul it.

00:36:37   And Apple would say that they do that.

00:36:38   It's just that they do that, like every company,

00:36:40   way too slowly.

00:36:41   They wait too long.

00:36:43   They wait for something to become a festering sore

00:36:45   to say, okay, well, we're never gonna make any money

00:36:47   off of this, but really it should be better

00:36:50   because it's an embarrassment now,

00:36:51   or it's actually hurting us reputation-wise,

00:36:53   or like, you know, and then someone seizes

00:36:55   on that opportunity within the company to say,

00:36:57   ah, I've wanted to fix this app forever,

00:36:58   and finally I get to bring a team up,

00:37:00   and we'll get a bunch of people who are enthusiastic,

00:37:02   and they'll fix it all.

00:37:03   And that's not a cycle that we enjoy as users.

00:37:05   We don't enjoy the app that we use every day

00:37:07   slowly crumbling to dust,

00:37:09   'til it becomes such a big crisis

00:37:11   that Apple turns its gaze briefly to it,

00:37:13   and throws some people and money at it,

00:37:14   and resurrects it and then we begin the cycle again.

00:37:17   It would be better if everything was maintained evenly.

00:37:20   But that's not just, it's very difficult in my experience

00:37:23   working for several different companies over my career,

00:37:26   it's very difficult for companies to have that,

00:37:29   to have that discipline to say we are going to

00:37:32   keep a team of people on let's say terminal for the mag.

00:37:36   And we are never gonna have zero people on it.

00:37:39   We're never gonna have, I mean I think terminal for example

00:37:41   has had fractional people.

00:37:42   Like it would have one person who's responsible for terminal

00:37:44   and five other apps, right?

00:37:45   So it's got 20% of a person on it for five years.

00:37:48   But we're gonna have, what I always call it

00:37:52   in my pitches inside companies,

00:37:53   'cause I'm always complaining about this,

00:37:54   is you need to have a standing army,

00:37:56   which is probably a bad analogy

00:37:57   for militaristic reasons or whatever,

00:37:58   but a standing army for everything that you care about,

00:38:01   that you can never disband them.

00:38:02   You can never say, "Terminal's done.

00:38:04   "Don't need any people on it."

00:38:05   There always needs to be a terminal team.

00:38:07   Doesn't need to be a big team,

00:38:08   but it literally needs to be there forever.

00:38:09   Like forever?

00:38:10   What do you mean forever?

00:38:11   Yeah, if you ship terminal on the Mac

00:38:13   and you still sell Macs and terminal still comes with them,

00:38:16   you always have to have some, at least some small team

00:38:19   whose only job is to continue to maintain

00:38:22   and improve terminal.

00:38:24   And there are anti-patterns there as well

00:38:26   because if you have that team,

00:38:27   eventually that team gets bored

00:38:28   and decide the terminal is gonna become like a,

00:38:30   you know, an text-based MMO or something, right?

00:38:33   'Cause they just-- - Or they get

00:38:34   like rewrite-itis, you know?

00:38:35   Like, oh, we're gonna rewrite this all in Swift UI.

00:38:38   - Right, right, so that's part of the discipline as well,

00:38:41   but we're so far at the other end of the spectrum

00:38:43   where it just gets abandoned, right,

00:38:44   that I feel like we could swing back in the other direction.

00:38:46   And what you mentioned about career is also true.

00:38:49   If you're going to do that and have a standing army

00:38:50   who are on these applications,

00:38:52   you need to not punish them for being on the boring project.

00:38:57   If they're doing an awesome job,

00:38:58   and every year, you know, terminal,

00:39:01   terminal is the most beloved application on the Mac,

00:39:03   and it's so good that, you know,

00:39:05   third-party terminal apps have trouble competing,

00:39:07   and you know, and again, there's,

00:39:09   with this particular thing where we're talking about Apple,

00:39:11   it's a little bit weird

00:39:12   because they're also the platform owner.

00:39:15   That's another thing that this discipline will get you,

00:39:17   is you'll have the conversation.

00:39:18   Should we be shipping Insert Application here with the Mac,

00:39:22   or should we allow third parties to handle this entirely?

00:39:24   In fact, there's a topic about that

00:39:25   that we'll get to in some future episode of ATP.

00:39:28   And by being forced to have a standing army,

00:39:31   a team assigned to every single thing, it makes you think,

00:39:35   do we really need to be shipping Graphing Calculator?

00:39:38   Do we care about Graphing Calculator anymore?

00:39:40   Or should we let that be a third party opportunity

00:39:43   because we don't want to fund a team

00:39:45   that for the next 20 years with even just one or two people,

00:39:49   all they do is make sure Graph and Calculator

00:39:50   is improving every year.

00:39:52   Right, you know, be honest with yourself.

00:39:54   Do we care about Graph and Calculator

00:39:55   or is it just there because someone wrote it once

00:39:56   and it still works?

00:39:57   So those are all things that should happen inside Apple

00:40:01   and should happen inside every company,

00:40:03   but it is not easy, it's not easy.

00:40:05   From the outside, it just seems like

00:40:06   just make all the apps better, right?

00:40:08   have unlimited money, but that's never really true,

00:40:10   and money doesn't translate directly into developer effort.

00:40:13   So it's tricky, but I agree that Apple,

00:40:16   particularly in the case of the music app,

00:40:17   and particularly in the case of the music app on the Mac,

00:40:21   is not doing well.

00:40:23   - I think in some ways, like, you know how

00:40:25   over the last couple of decades,

00:40:28   some of the more enlightened and some of the big tech

00:40:30   companies have intentionally created career paths

00:40:35   because the original problem was like programmers

00:40:38   would get elevated to management

00:40:40   as they advance in their careers,

00:40:41   but not all programmers can or want to be managers.

00:40:45   And so a lot of places have developed career tracks

00:40:49   for programmers to advance their careers

00:40:51   while still just being programmers,

00:40:53   not like directing a whole team of people.

00:40:55   - They're called ICs, Marco.

00:40:57   - Yeah, sorry, yes.

00:40:58   You can tell how much experience I have.

00:41:00   - Individual contributors.

00:41:02   But you can see how in a way,

00:41:06   it was like the industry had to develop

00:41:09   and stabilize and mature to some degree

00:41:12   before it had the introspection.

00:41:13   Be like, you know, actually we need to kind of create

00:41:16   a structure here that creates better results

00:41:17   in this area, right?

00:41:18   And I think this is one of those areas of like,

00:41:21   the industry now is so big and so developed and mature,

00:41:26   there's a lot of boring technologies

00:41:29   that we just kinda need to keep working.

00:41:32   and they're never gonna be exciting to work on anymore,

00:41:35   or probably, or at least rarely gonna be exciting

00:41:37   to work on, but you can't have,

00:41:41   these big tech companies that have these big,

00:41:43   old developed platforms, all these different apps

00:41:45   and parts to them, they have to incentivize and reward

00:41:50   the maintenance of boring things over time.

00:41:54   We have so much now that we've built as an industry

00:41:56   over the last 20, 30 years that we still need.

00:42:00   We need all of this to keep working.

00:42:02   Ideally, it would slowly even get better

00:42:04   and have a staff of more than zero

00:42:06   working on it at some point.

00:42:08   But this isn't, as you mentioned,

00:42:11   this isn't exclusive to Apple,

00:42:11   but Apple still does a pretty bad job of this.

00:42:14   We need those things to have somebody looking out for them.

00:42:18   And if the incentives in the company

00:42:21   for things like career promotion and excitement and reward

00:42:26   are not gonna reward that,

00:42:29   we need to start creating paths for that to be rewarded,

00:42:31   like inside these companies.

00:42:33   - Well, and they exist.

00:42:34   Like in Apple, there is a title,

00:42:37   like there's Distinguished Engineer,

00:42:39   Scientist and Technologist is a title at Apple.

00:42:41   And my understanding, which is very limited,

00:42:44   and I might have this wrong,

00:42:45   but my limited understanding is

00:42:47   that's basically a nerd's nerd

00:42:48   that has just been a super nerd for their entire lives

00:42:52   and is still writing code even though they are

00:42:56   in the perhaps twilight of their career.

00:42:59   And it's not because they're no good,

00:43:00   it's the opposite because they're extremely good.

00:43:02   And I've seen in many companies these sorts of things

00:43:05   'cause what you said is right,

00:43:07   that oftentimes, especially up until 10, 20 years ago,

00:43:10   there would be a fork in the road,

00:43:12   or really there wasn't even a fork, I should say,

00:43:15   there was just a really right-angled turn

00:43:19   where even if you really love coding,

00:43:21   well, you're old enough and wise enough

00:43:23   that well, you're gonna be a manager now and that's that.

00:43:24   So, you know, KISS, Xcode, Visual Studio, whatever, goodbye.

00:43:28   You're just gonna live in Excel and PowerPoint

00:43:31   for the rest of your career, have fun.

00:43:33   And it's gotten better, but it's still not great.

00:43:36   And I don't know, Apple Music is just so frustrating

00:43:39   because when I got exposed to Apple,

00:43:43   which by John's metric was yesterday,

00:43:45   but in reality was the mid-aughts,

00:43:47   they were the music company.

00:43:50   Like more than almost anything else,

00:43:51   they were the music company, they were the iPod company,

00:43:54   They were the iTunes company.

00:43:56   And it makes me sad, perhaps more than most,

00:44:00   because that's kind of my intrinsic and default view

00:44:05   of Apple is that they're so good at music,

00:44:08   among other things.

00:44:09   In the same way that like, I guess in the '80s,

00:44:11   and John, correct me when you're ready,

00:44:13   but in the '80s, they were the publishing company,

00:44:15   among other things.

00:44:16   And they were so good at publishing,

00:44:18   and in the aughts, they were so good at music.

00:44:21   and to see Apple trying in some regard,

00:44:26   with Apple Music trying to be modern

00:44:29   and trying to be forward thinking

00:44:32   and getting big into streaming,

00:44:34   and yet the client applications,

00:44:36   which is the thing that you would think

00:44:37   would be their bread and butter,

00:44:39   it's just such garbage, it really is.

00:44:42   I hate making, poking fun at other people's work,

00:44:47   but it's just so bad, you guys, it's so frustrating.

00:44:49   It's nobody's work.

00:44:50   That's the problem.

00:44:51   Yeah, maybe that's it.

00:44:52   I think Apple Music, especially on iOS, has a lot of people working on it.

00:44:56   I think it is, we've talked about this before, probably hampered by the backend, which seems

00:44:59   like it's old and creaky and not particularly responsive.

00:45:01   And I bet the frontend team has very limited control over what the backend does.

00:45:04   And part of the reason it's so creaky and crumbling is because it is from when KC started

00:45:09   getting into Apple.

00:45:10   It's old, like in the grand scheme of things.

00:45:12   Really does need to be torn down and rebuilt.

00:45:15   In particular on the Mac, splitting out the music app was not really the rebuild we were

00:45:18   looking for.

00:45:19   I think it's definitely doing better than the Mac version, but it's still weird and

00:45:23   buggy.

00:45:24   I tend to blame a lot of the server-side stuff for that.

00:45:26   But getting back to having to have a team on every project, a standing army on all your

00:45:32   things forces you to do, I think if you had that conversation about music, they would

00:45:36   agree with Casey.

00:45:37   They would say, "Well, no.

00:45:38   Music is a thing that Apple needs to do, not just because we used to be the music company

00:45:42   when we made the iPod, but just because it is a core activity that our customers do with

00:45:46   our products.

00:45:48   It is not graphing calculator, right?

00:45:50   It is one of the big pillars of things people do with their phones and their Macs and their

00:45:57   iPads and the things that we sell.

00:45:59   So this is a quick conversation.

00:46:02   Should music be better?

00:46:03   Yes.

00:46:04   Should we stop doing music?

00:46:05   No.

00:46:06   And you know, it's a service behind it too.

00:46:07   So you've got servers around, like everything says, please fix music.

00:46:11   I'm not sure what's taking them so long.

00:46:12   I think they have made some improvements in recent years, but it is definitely in need

00:46:17   of a freshening and an overhaul.

00:46:19   And maybe it's just so complicated now

00:46:21   because they have the legacy of people like Marco

00:46:23   who are still using it like iTunes,

00:46:24   so they've gotta support all those features,

00:46:25   otherwise Marco will be sad,

00:46:27   but then they're trying to also be Spotify,

00:46:28   but Spotify doesn't have that legacy

00:46:30   that they have to deal with.

00:46:31   And you know, it's a difficult situation,

00:46:33   but this is definitely an area that needs improvement,

00:46:35   but if they ask me, I'm gonna say,

00:46:38   do photos for families first.

00:46:40   - Yeah, I mean-- - I would agree with that.

00:46:41   I would agree with that. - That's probably

00:46:42   in worse shape, but yeah, no, I mean, it's just,

00:46:44   that's the thing, like, I don't think,

00:46:46   It's one of the situations where it's not like

00:46:48   any one person trying to do a bad job.

00:46:52   It's that the structure of the incentives

00:46:55   and the way things work, the way people move around,

00:46:58   it's that kind of stuff that has to be addressed

00:47:00   through structural changes and management.

00:47:05   It's that kind of thing.

00:47:05   It's not like there's some villain keeping music down.

00:47:10   But it's like, when you look at Spotify's crappy app,

00:47:16   Spotify's app should not be a breath of fresh air

00:47:20   in any way to any Apple customer.

00:47:23   Because Spotify's app is terrible.

00:47:25   And we are a custom as Apple users,

00:47:28   at least we used to be, to a higher standard

00:47:31   of how good our first party apps,

00:47:34   or the apps that we're accustomed to seeing

00:47:36   from our community, to how good those are.

00:47:38   Like that's kind of where we came from.

00:47:40   Now yes, I know the iPhone is much bigger

00:47:42   than everything else, but we are accustomed

00:47:45   to culturally a high bar.

00:47:47   Like our apps should be really good,

00:47:49   and apps on the Mac and first party apps from Apple

00:47:52   should be really good because historically

00:47:54   they usually were.

00:47:56   And we're at a point now where in a lot of areas,

00:48:00   including this, they're not.

00:48:01   And that's on them to create the conditions

00:48:06   to turn that around.

00:48:09   Because again, we should never, none of us,

00:48:12   should ever look at Spotify and say,

00:48:14   "Ooh, this part's nice,"

00:48:16   because no part of Spotify is nice.

00:48:17   It's garbage.

00:48:18   - No, that's not true. - In certain areas,

00:48:20   it's just less garbage-y than Apple's current music app.

00:48:23   - See, but that's the thing.

00:48:24   One of the areas where it's less garbage than Apple Music

00:48:27   is it actually plays music reliably.

00:48:30   - I know. - That's an area

00:48:32   where it's less garbage.

00:48:33   - Agreed, and that's why,

00:48:35   'cause it is a terrible app.

00:48:37   - Otherwise, yes, you're right.

00:48:39   - It's a web view, and it's a bad web view at that.

00:48:42   It's an even worse web view

00:48:43   than the old Apple Music Store things were.

00:48:45   And we shouldn't be looking at that and saying,

00:48:48   ooh, this is better than ours in any way.

00:48:50   'Cause Spotify's app is garbage

00:48:51   and Apple can very much do better.

00:48:54   And so I wish they would in this area

00:48:56   because I don't wanna use Spotify for lots of reasons.

00:49:01   You know, many of which are political.

00:49:03   But certainly, you know, I don't wanna be tempted

00:49:06   by any part of their app being better.

00:49:08   (upbeat music)

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00:51:13   (upbeat music)

00:51:16   - I would like to do the thing that I do

00:51:18   every once in a while, which is I attempt

00:51:20   to take a victory lap on something and then I'm shot down.

00:51:22   So here we go, everyone.

00:51:24   I would like to tell you that I was listening

00:51:26   to the aforementioned "Reconsider differences"

00:51:28   episode 176, "The Curse of Convenience."

00:51:31   And first of all, I do love that show so darn much. It is so good.

00:51:34   But beyond that, um,

00:51:35   I was listening and John was describing how you are going through old

00:51:40   photographs, like, you know,

00:51:41   printed photographs and scanning them and so on and so forth,

00:51:43   which as with everything John talks about is somehow riveting,

00:51:46   even though it shouldn't be. But here's where the victory lap comes in.

00:51:49   You were geotagging these photos.

00:51:51   And I was lamenting to you just a couple of months ago that I think it's

00:51:54   preposterous that Mr. Metadata himself didn't want to put geotags in any of his

00:51:58   pictures. And I said, you should do that.

00:51:59   You never know when you might want it and listen to that

00:52:02   Apparently John you're met your geotagging your photos and I am doing my victory lap as we speak

00:52:07   Well, I think you are aided there by the incredibly slow scanner I have

00:52:11   The episode unfortunately this part is in the members only after shows you'd have to go to really not FM slash rd slash

00:52:20   join

00:52:22   I think I'm just going off top of my head there

00:52:24   To hear the member thing. But yeah, the problem is

00:52:28   It doing something like this scanning photos. There's a lot of downtime or you're waiting for the scanner

00:52:34   and so you're looking for other things to do and

00:52:37   Part of what I'm doing with that time is taking the previous batch and retouching them and rotating them and fixing them

00:52:43   And then while I'm in there, I like okay

00:52:44   Well, I've done I've got them all looking nice and the scanners only halfway through. So what do I do now?

00:52:49   Well my as well geotag them

00:52:54   Like part of what I'm doing the geotagging is because how can you geotag photos from a long time ago?

00:52:59   Well if they're like in my childhood home

00:53:01   I know the address like yeah, so I just do that and I said on the show some of them are there are beach photos

00:53:06   I know the spot on the beach

00:53:07   So I just dropped the pin

00:53:09   Right on any Google Maps like with the satellite view and just get the latitude and longitude because I literally know like down to you

00:53:15   Know 10 feet where it was taken from and that's a fun thing to do while I for the scanner to finish

00:53:20   Yeah, so I don't do with all of them

00:53:21   I can't do it with all of them, but it's something for me to do while I wait for the scanner

00:53:26   to slowly grind.

00:53:27   And here's the thing I don't understand about the scanner.

00:53:28   I'm sure there's a good explanation for this, but I'm putting multiple photographs on a

00:53:33   flatbed scanner at the same time, right?

00:53:36   Just because, you know, I figured that's more efficient, but I put a bunch down there.

00:53:39   And the flatbed scanner has got like a little bar, I think, that like kind of like shines

00:53:43   light and moves across and scans, right?

00:53:45   And the bar goes across the width of the thing, goes, you know, and I imagine it just lighting

00:53:48   up a row at a time of the image and recording the pixel values and that little thing.

00:53:54   I'm assuming that's how it works.

00:53:55   I don't know the details, right?

00:53:57   But what I expect to happen is I line up all the photos on the flatbed scanner and the

00:54:01   little bar goes and just goes from one end of the flatbed to the other and scans all

00:54:06   the pictures.

00:54:07   Because if I had put a flat piece of paper there, like the scanning bed is, I don't know,

00:54:10   it's like 11 inches by 14 inches, whatever it is.

00:54:12   If I put a piece of paper filling like the whole area, it would scan that.

00:54:15   It would just go and scan the whole page.

00:54:18   But when I put five photos there in the image capture app and I like show and I say I want

00:54:23   this to come out as multiple files, it does one pass for each photo.

00:54:28   So it goes, oh, scans the first photo and then it goes back to the beginning, scans

00:54:34   the second one, it goes back to the beginning, scans it.

00:54:36   That's why it takes for freaking ever.

00:54:38   And I think that's incredibly inefficient and I don't understand why it's doing that.

00:54:42   So anyway, that's why I'm geotagging photos now.

00:54:44   Hey, I don't care how you got there.

00:54:46   I just care that you got there.

00:54:47   I'm excited.

00:54:48   And then since we're in apparently the John Power Hour,

00:54:51   would you like to tell us about the feedback

00:54:53   to your absolutely delightful streaming app spec?

00:54:58   - Yeah, so I'm making up for the fact

00:54:59   that I didn't post any blog posts last year,

00:55:03   so now I've done two this year,

00:55:04   so I'm maintaining my one per year average.

00:55:06   (laughing)

00:55:07   - No wait, if one blog post is a follow-up

00:55:09   to one that came shortly before,

00:55:11   does that count as a whole separate one?

00:55:14   Or is it more like a 1.5 situation?

00:55:16   - No, it's a whole separate one.

00:55:18   OK, it's got a different URL.

00:55:19   It's got a title.

00:55:20   It's the whole thing.

00:55:22   So the last one where we talked about streaming apps

00:55:25   and my spec for the bare bones features

00:55:28   that they should all have.

00:55:29   And then I said I wanted to do a post about the feedback

00:55:31   I was getting, and I did.

00:55:34   We'll put a link in the show notes.

00:55:35   The title is very similar to the other one,

00:55:37   so some people might think, oh, I already read this one,

00:55:39   but this is just about the feedback.

00:55:41   I'm not going to go through it all here.

00:55:42   Again, I talked about it more in rectives.

00:55:44   But I'm just going to tell you that the upshot is

00:55:48   The overwhelming feedback, like 80% of all the feedback

00:55:52   I got from people was people saying,

00:55:53   "I hate it when I launch a video streaming app

00:55:55   "and I can't continue watching the thing

00:55:57   "I was previously watching."

00:55:58   Everybody complains about it.

00:56:00   It's just like the number one complaint, not even close.

00:56:04   So much so that like, it just,

00:56:08   I was in the car with my daughter and I was saying

00:56:09   where I was gonna talk about it on a podcast.

00:56:11   She doesn't care about technology or, you know,

00:56:13   she watches streaming stuff all the time

00:56:15   and we have all these streaming services,

00:56:16   but she doesn't care about apps or whatever.

00:56:18   So I said, "What do you think about streaming apps?

00:56:19   I'm gonna be talking about it on a podcast."

00:56:21   She's like, "I had to sort of explain

00:56:22   what the heck a streaming app is.

00:56:23   You know, like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, whatever.

00:56:27   Like, not the shows that are on them,

00:56:28   but like the actual thing you're using to watch the shows,

00:56:31   what do you think about those?"

00:56:32   And you could tell she really hadn't given them much thought

00:56:35   'cause, you know, kids just take things for granted.

00:56:37   This is just how the world works.

00:56:38   You can watch TV shows on your magic little device.

00:56:40   I was like, "Yeah, but if you think about the apps,

00:56:42   like, do you have anything to say about them?

00:56:44   Any kind of opinion?"

00:56:45   And she said, "I find it kind of annoying

00:56:47   "when I go to the app and I can't find the show

00:56:49   "I was watching."

00:56:50   It was literally the only thing she said.

00:56:52   Totally unprompted, I didn't mention anything about it.

00:56:54   I'm like, this is just like the original sin

00:56:58   of streaming apps.

00:56:59   And I go into this post, a further explanation

00:57:03   of why that is.

00:57:04   Someone from Hulu saying that we actually did A/B testing

00:57:06   and determined that it drove engagement.

00:57:08   And so the theory that it drives more engagement

00:57:10   is not just a theory, it's a real thing that happened

00:57:12   and it caused them to change their apps to make them worse.

00:57:14   For people who won't read it, I will just throw in the money sentence that I almost

00:57:19   bolded but didn't.

00:57:22   The idea that you have some kind of engagement-based metric where if we make it harder for you

00:57:26   to find the show you're watching, you'll try more new stuff and that's actually good for

00:57:30   you because you'll discover new shows and all these other things you can convince yourself

00:57:34   that this is better because it will make the company more money or even if you can convince

00:57:38   yourself that it's better for the customer because it will help them discover new shows

00:57:42   and they'll be happier in the end because they discovered that amazing show that they

00:57:45   wouldn't have otherwise discovered.

00:57:47   Even if you agree with all that, which I don't, but even if you stipulate that for the sake

00:57:52   of argument, sure, that's all true.

00:57:55   People hate it.

00:57:57   They hate not being able to find the thing they were watching.

00:58:00   And the adaptation of this old saying, which I could not find the source of so I just linked

00:58:05   the quote investigator, was "People won't remember what you said, but they will remember

00:58:10   how you made them feel. And that applies to applications as well. People will not remember

00:58:17   that your app helped them find their new favorite television show. They'll remember that your

00:58:22   app was frustrating. And they will eventually associate that frustration with your brand.

00:58:27   And so even if it is better, which I don't think it is, to intentionally make it harder

00:58:31   to find what people were watching, everyone hates it. Please don't do it. Yeah, we'll

00:58:37   We'll see if anything changes.

00:58:39   But seeing the incentives so clearly outlined like this,

00:58:42   it seems like nothing will change

00:58:43   because as far as these companies concern,

00:58:45   the applications are working as designed.

00:58:47   And in the end, as has been a skill to have,

00:58:51   really like the TV shows matter

00:58:52   and we will suffer through almost any application

00:58:54   to get to the play button to make it happen.

00:58:56   So probably not a lot of incentive for this to change,

00:58:58   but boy, it's kind of a shame.

00:59:00   - I've been loving your posts about this

00:59:04   and I'm sad that I'm not gonna get another post

00:59:07   about anything until 2023.

00:59:09   So it's been a fun ride.

00:59:10   - Well, who knows?

00:59:11   Stranger things have happened.

00:59:13   - Indeed.

00:59:14   So we have a few things to clear out in the main show.

00:59:18   I don't know how much time we'll have for it,

00:59:20   but we wanted to start tonight with the,

00:59:23   actually fairly old news at this point,

00:59:24   about Nvidia, Intel, and ARM,

00:59:26   or most especially Nvidia and ARM.

00:59:28   So we talked, actually,

00:59:30   I guess it was like a year or two back, when was that?

00:59:32   It was September of 2020,

00:59:34   which I feel like it was yesterday,

00:59:36   but time is a flat circle.

00:59:37   We talked about how NVIDIA was trying to acquire ARM,

00:59:40   ARM being, how would you describe ARM?

00:59:42   I don't know, I feel like I'm gonna butcher this

00:59:44   if I make an attempt at it.

00:59:45   - The company that came up with the instruction set

00:59:47   and CPU, many of the CPU designs that are used in cellphones

00:59:52   and many other things, there are small, low-power chips,

00:59:54   and when people started making smartphones,

00:59:56   ARM chips were ideally suited to it

00:59:59   because they were small and low-power.

01:00:01   And eventually Apple decided to put ARM chips in the iPhone,

01:00:05   and then it started making its own chips

01:00:07   based on the ARM instruction set, and the rest is history.

01:00:11   - Indeed, thank you.

01:00:12   So, early, I think it was late January or early February,

01:00:16   there were some rumblings that, oh, this acquisition

01:00:19   may not go through because a lot of regulators

01:00:21   were really unhappy about it across the entire world.

01:00:24   And then sure enough, it was, looks like February 8th,

01:00:28   the deal collapsed, quoting from Daring Fireball,

01:00:31   "Softbank Media Group Corp has shelved its blockbuster sale

01:00:34   of ARM, limited to US chip maker Nvidia Corp,

01:00:38   valued at up to $80 billion, citing regulatory hurdles

01:00:41   that will instead seek to list the company.

01:00:43   Britain's ARM, which named a new CEO

01:00:45   on whatever Tuesday that was, said it would go public

01:00:48   before March 2023, and SoftBank's CEO,

01:00:50   which owns most if not all of it,

01:00:52   indicated that it would be in the United States

01:00:54   and most likely on the NASDAQ.

01:00:56   So it is going to be its own thing sooner rather than later.

01:01:01   And for people who don't know, ARM is not unique, but part of what makes ARM different

01:01:08   than other CPU makers is that they don't actually have to manufacture the chips themselves.

01:01:15   They will license the instruction set and they will license CPU designs to people.

01:01:20   And they will license to Apple the ability to make their own chips that are compatible.

01:01:23   So if you want to make a chip, ARM will license you, "Here's a design for a chip.

01:01:28   Tell me how big you want it," or whatever.

01:01:29   You can also get what is it called architecture license where some arm arm just says, okay

01:01:34   Well, you just make your own chips

01:01:35   We'll tell you how the instructions are supposed to work, but you go ahead and you can make it any way you want

01:01:38   And so when anybody wanted to buy them

01:01:41   I'm not entirely clear what people are scared about from antitrust other than just like, you know

01:01:46   Two big giant companies that are really important to the world combining together doesn't seem like it would be good for competition

01:01:52   All right

01:01:53   So but anyway the deal

01:01:54   Looks like it's not going to go through and the reason I think this is relevant is a topic that has come up a lot

01:01:59   In the show especially before the arm based max came out

01:02:04   We were talking about the possibilities like what will that be like?

01:02:07   They'll lose, you know Apple lose compatibility with Windows

01:02:10   All the people who are you who enjoy doing development on x86 because they're going to deploy

01:02:16   On an x86 server somewhere will lose that uniformity between having the same instruction set in both places

01:02:21   And really we're talking about x86-64 here, not plain old x86.

01:02:25   But anyway, the Nvidia deal, if Nvidia had purchased them,

01:02:30   a lot of people thought that it would be the kick

01:02:36   in the pants that ARM needs to finally sort of

01:02:39   fulfill its destiny and strike down Intel

01:02:44   and do what I was painting as the optimistic scenario,

01:02:50   sort of sweep through the whole industry,

01:02:52   and Apple's move to ARM wouldn't end up being something

01:02:55   that hurts it in the long run,

01:02:56   because eventually everything would be ARM.

01:02:59   PCs would be ARM, servers would be ARM,

01:03:01   phones, iPads, and Macs would be ARM,

01:03:03   and then we'd be back to where we were

01:03:05   when everything was x86, where you get a Mac that's x86,

01:03:08   and you deploy on your servers x86,

01:03:10   you can run Windows natively at x86, right?

01:03:12   Then we would get back to that state.

01:03:14   So we would just be kind of like a bump in the road,

01:03:16   where for a while Apple moved to ARM

01:03:18   before the rest of the world did,

01:03:19   but eventually Windows and the server also moved to ARM.

01:03:23   And in fact, the phones and iPads were already on ARM,

01:03:26   and we have this beautiful future

01:03:27   where everybody uses ARM processors,

01:03:30   and they license the ARM instruction set

01:03:32   from this one company, and it's not great

01:03:35   that one company controls it all,

01:03:37   but really, since everyone can license it

01:03:38   and Apple makes its own chips,

01:03:39   and everyone can make their own chips if they want to,

01:03:41   it is actually a more competitive landscape

01:03:43   than when x86 dominated.

01:03:45   And the argument is the reason that hasn't been happening

01:03:48   is because Arm, this relatively little company

01:03:51   that doesn't even make its own chips

01:03:54   and just licenses the instruction set

01:03:56   and chip designs that it makes to other people,

01:03:59   it's not in a position, it doesn't have the people,

01:04:02   the skills, or maybe even the desire

01:04:04   to do what it would take to displace x86.

01:04:07   And what it would take is all of the sort of

01:04:10   tool chain stuff, compilers, software support,

01:04:14   like there's a big software component to sort of,

01:04:18   that Intel has with x86 now that ARM doesn't yet have

01:04:22   that has been slowing ARM's rod.

01:04:25   Even things like the server

01:04:26   where it seems like such a clear win.

01:04:28   Like Amazon's been rolling out ARM servers

01:04:30   and they're like, they're faster, they're cheaper,

01:04:31   they're lower power.

01:04:32   It's like, what's the holdup?

01:04:33   Like, why isn't everybody deploying on ARM and AWS?

01:04:36   It's so much better than x86.

01:04:38   What's the downside?

01:04:39   And the downside is, well,

01:04:40   there's a whole ecosystem around x86

01:04:42   that's been there for decades that is very mature

01:04:44   and it's been built up

01:04:45   and it's taking a long time to go through that.

01:04:47   So if Nvidia bought them, it'd be like,

01:04:50   well, Nvidia's got tons of money,

01:04:51   and Nvidia has the software expertise.

01:04:54   They know how to make an ecosystem.

01:04:55   It's the whole reason everyone's using Nvidia stuff

01:04:58   for like Bitcoin mining and crap, and before that,

01:05:00   CUDA and all the Nvidia performance with game drivers.

01:05:03   Nvidia understands that there's a market they care about.

01:05:05   They have to give you the full stack,

01:05:08   including all the software support

01:05:09   and the tooling and everything,

01:05:11   and they can get that going.

01:05:13   Now that this deal has been shelved,

01:05:16   I think it's good that the deal didn't go through because I don't like these big companies

01:05:20   combining but I kind of was looking forward to a silver lining of this deal being that

01:05:27   maybe it would accelerate ARM because I do want ARM to replace x86 everywhere because

01:05:31   I don't like Apple being the odd one out with the Mac on ARM and PC still on x86.

01:05:36   I see no reason why the whole world couldn't be one big happy family all on ARM at the

01:05:41   same time.

01:05:42   Windows for ARM, but is it more popular than x86 Windows? No. There already is ARM in the

01:05:47   server, but is it more popular on the server side than x86? Not yet, right? So maybe we'll

01:05:52   just get there more slowly now, but I thought this was worth noting that potentially a thing

01:05:58   that could have accelerated this has been cancelled. Again, I think this is the right

01:06:02   decision. I don't like it when very big, very powerful companies combine into one company.

01:06:06   I feel like that's bad for everybody involved, but I was kind of looking forward to that

01:06:10   that's overlining.

01:06:10   - I hear you.

01:06:13   You know what's funny?

01:06:14   This is tangentially related.

01:06:15   I don't recall having heard a lot of moaning or complaining

01:06:20   about people who were previously virtualizing Windows

01:06:25   and are now in the Apple Silicon world

01:06:28   and can't do that anymore.

01:06:30   And that would have been me several years ago

01:06:33   'cause I was living in VMware Fusion every day

01:06:36   to do my work in Visual Studio.

01:06:38   And I think a lot of that is because the environment

01:06:42   and landscape keeps changing.

01:06:44   And my limited understanding of what's going on in C#

01:06:48   these days is that a lot of work is done on,

01:06:51   was it Visual Studio Core, excuse me, .NET Core

01:06:55   or something like that, which is a cross-platform thing

01:06:57   that apparently, I saw it tweet recently,

01:06:58   I won't be able to find it, but apparently

01:07:00   it came from Silverlight of all places,

01:07:02   which is really weird and funky.

01:07:04   But anyways, it's fascinating to me

01:07:07   that when I went to using a Mac in the late aughts,

01:07:12   it was a relatively crazy thing to do at the time

01:07:17   because, especially living in a Windows world--

01:07:19   - It was not.

01:07:20   - No, no, for me, because I was living

01:07:24   in this Windows world for work and stuff.

01:07:25   - If you were a Windows developer,

01:07:26   you wouldn't be a Windows developer in a Mac.

01:07:28   - Right, right. - Right, exactly, exactly.

01:07:29   And so, sorry, that was ambiguous, so I apologize.

01:07:32   So anyways, so yeah, so it was a little bit bananas

01:07:35   at the time, but now it seems like there are very few people,

01:07:40   I mean, I personally haven't heard of anyone

01:07:42   who has really burned or is like lingering on Intel

01:07:46   on account of these sorts of problems.

01:07:47   Now, maybe you spent 15 to $20,000 on your computer setup

01:07:51   and that's why you're lingering on Intel, hi John,

01:07:53   but for people with normal computers,

01:07:55   I haven't heard any real problems with it,

01:07:57   which is really fascinating and really cool.

01:07:59   - Well, I mean, speaking of companies that have the skills

01:08:01   and the experience building ecosystems,

01:08:04   Microsoft in theory has all the tools.

01:08:06   It's got plenty of money.

01:08:08   They know how to build an ecosystem with software tooling,

01:08:10   you know, from all the way from the compilers and the IDEs

01:08:14   to the libraries that go with it.

01:08:15   Like there should in theory be no reason that Intel

01:08:19   can't shift the entire Windows PC market over to ARM.

01:08:24   But it's been, you know,

01:08:26   Apple has gone through multiple processor transitions

01:08:29   and has done all the, each one better than the last.

01:08:32   and Microsoft has never done it.

01:08:34   I don't know if Microsoft is institutionally unwilling

01:08:37   to do a processor transition or incapable.

01:08:40   Windows on Arm shows they're not unwilling,

01:08:43   'cause why would they have even tried to do Windows on Arm,

01:08:45   but they have not done a good job.

01:08:47   It's been this weird product that was kind of separate

01:08:49   from the regular Windows,

01:08:50   'cause you don't wanna screw with the regular Windows.

01:08:52   Their market is different than Apple's market.

01:08:54   It is much bigger,

01:08:55   it involves more people who are resistant to change.

01:08:58   I understand their task is different than Apple's.

01:09:00   Apple is, you know, especially the Mac in particular is small, still small enough that

01:09:04   Apple can kind of do what they want and have all these users who are very dedicated to

01:09:07   it or whatever.

01:09:08   But I feel like, on a long enough timeline, Microsoft should be able to pull this off.

01:09:14   So they've had a couple of false starts with Windows on Arms.

01:09:16   I'm hoping, you know, there's no reason that Microsoft can't do it eventually.

01:09:20   And even if the server battle goes differently for whatever reason, you know, Intel starts

01:09:24   manufacturing on TSMC 3nm and come roaring back and fight back against the ARM chips

01:09:31   that are outperforming on the server.

01:09:33   At the very least, Microsoft should be somewhat motivated to not be tied to x86.

01:09:41   I mean, Microsoft has had it good because they've got Intel and AMD, so they have two

01:09:45   possible choices and they're always fighting each other, but Microsoft's ambitions with

01:09:50   surface really lend themselves in the same way that Apple's do to not only using ARM

01:09:55   chips but making their own ARM chips for their own hardware and you know it seems like for

01:09:59   a decade or more now Microsoft has really wished that it could be Apple like the hardware

01:10:05   that it makes is Apple-ish in the not in the sense of like what the hardware looks like

01:10:10   although sometimes it is that but in the sense that Microsoft likes the idea that they can

01:10:14   control the whole stack and give an experience that PC vendors were not giving and they can

01:10:19   do that even better with ARM.

01:10:20   So I really hope they pull it off,

01:10:22   'cause I don't like, you know,

01:10:24   the honeymoon period when I had my cheese grater,

01:10:27   or cheese grater is I guess, well, my one cheese,

01:10:29   yeah, just one, right?

01:10:31   - Wait, now we're talking about the Macs again though, right?

01:10:33   Not the Parmesan creators?

01:10:35   - Yeah, the PowerPC 5 was in the same case,

01:10:37   but that was PowerPC, anyway.

01:10:38   That honeymoon decade, where everyone was on x86

01:10:42   and was all one big happy family,

01:10:43   except we had the good OS and the nicer hardware,

01:10:46   I hope we can get back to that again.

01:10:49   Is anybody making PC ARM processors

01:10:54   outside of the server space?

01:10:55   Are there any consumer-facing PC ARM CPUs

01:10:59   that Microsoft could even sell ARM Windows for?

01:11:02   - Yeah, they do.

01:11:02   They sell ARM-based hardware with,

01:11:05   I think it's like the, I don't know what the names

01:11:08   or numbers are of them, but actual ARM CPU designs

01:11:11   that are PC or laptop-caliber chips,

01:11:14   and they put them in their Surface,

01:11:16   are they in the Surface products?

01:11:17   Whatever they sell with the ARM chips in them.

01:11:18   There are ones that are there.

01:11:19   I don't think there's anything around

01:11:21   that would rival like a Mac Pro.

01:11:23   I mean, Apple doesn't even have one of those yet,

01:11:24   but there are options.

01:11:26   - Is there anything even rivaling a MacBook Air?

01:11:28   - Yeah, yeah, definitely.

01:11:29   - The M1 is so good.

01:11:31   Is there anything that--

01:11:32   - Rivaling in terms of it's in the same power envelope

01:11:34   and it runs Windows okay,

01:11:35   but no, they're not as good as the M1

01:11:37   because Apple is on top of the game

01:11:40   in terms of desktop caliber ARM chips, for sure.

01:11:44   But there was some other stories down in the topics thing

01:11:46   about other companies getting in on this.

01:11:50   Was it Google, at the very least?

01:11:51   A bunch of other companies are like,

01:11:53   we should do what Apple did.

01:11:54   We shouldn't buy these CPU designs from ARM.

01:11:57   Or who else makes them?

01:12:00   Qualcomm?

01:12:00   Qualcomm makes a lot of them, I think.

01:12:01   Yeah, yeah.

01:12:02   Like, we shouldn't get those because then you just

01:12:04   have a choice of what they offer to sell.

01:12:06   If we make our own chips, we can make them

01:12:07   exactly the way we want, the same way

01:12:08   that Apple made their chips so they perform well

01:12:11   with Apple's applications.

01:12:12   They do what Apple needs it to do.

01:12:14   We should all do that, shouldn't we?

01:12:15   But if you look at how long it took Apple to execute that plan,

01:12:18   it is not something you turn around in a year.

01:12:20   That is a multiple, many year, five year, six year,

01:12:23   10 year project that some people only embarked on maybe a few years ago.

01:12:28   So it's going to take a while for the fruits of that labor to appear.

01:12:31   But I hope Apple has shown them the way to say,

01:12:33   if you want really good chips that are well-suited to your products,

01:12:37   you got to do it yourself.

01:12:38   All right. So this also happened a little while ago. We are, we are,

01:12:42   what is the line from Godfather?

01:12:44   or we're handling all the family business or whatever.

01:12:46   - That's it. - We are,

01:12:47   we're trying to clean everything out.

01:12:48   So a while ago, a developer corrupted, sort of,

01:12:53   an NPM library, or two NPM libraries,

01:12:55   Colors and Faker, which broke thousands of apps.

01:12:58   So what the crap did I just say?

01:12:59   So NPM is Node Package Manager.

01:13:02   It's a way to get other people's code into your apps

01:13:04   in certain contexts.

01:13:06   And there were two super popular ones,

01:13:08   one called Colors, one called Faker,

01:13:10   that the developer of these broke those deliberately.

01:13:14   And that caused quite a kerfuffle.

01:13:18   So let me read from bleepingcomputer.com,

01:13:20   we'll put a link in the show notes.

01:13:21   The developer behind popular open source

01:13:23   NPM libraries colors, aka colors.js on GitHub,

01:13:26   and Faker, aka faker.js on GitHub,

01:13:28   intentionally introduced mischievous commits in them

01:13:31   that are impacting, or when this was written,

01:13:34   impacting thousands of applications

01:13:35   relying on these libraries.

01:13:36   Yesterday, users of popular open source projects,

01:13:39   such as Amazon's cloud development kit, AWS CDK,

01:13:42   were left stunned, stunned I tell you,

01:13:45   on seeing their application print gibberish messages

01:13:48   in their console.

01:13:49   GitHub has reportedly suspended the developer's account

01:13:51   and that too has caused mixed reactions.

01:13:53   Quote, "Removing your own code from GitHub

01:13:55   "is a violation of their terms of service, WTF.

01:13:58   "This is a kidnapping," quote,

01:14:00   responded software engineer Sergio Gomez.

01:14:02   Quote, "The responses to the colors/faker author

01:14:05   "sabotaging their own packages are really telling

01:14:08   about how many corporate developers think they are morally entitled to other source

01:14:12   developers' unpaid labor without contributing anything back," wrote one Twitter user.

01:14:17   So this is a really interesting case study in how open source affects the world, or the

01:14:25   corporate world if not the world, insofar as here's a library that was written by some

01:14:30   person, presumably with little to no compensation by darn near anyone.

01:14:35   It gets used darn near everywhere,

01:14:37   and this person, kinda justifiably,

01:14:40   is a little perturbed that they haven't gotten compensated

01:14:43   for any of this.

01:14:44   So they take matters into their own hands

01:14:46   and kinda ruin it,

01:14:47   which is perhaps not the most mature approach,

01:14:48   but is, I suppose, within their rights, I think?

01:14:52   - Well, I mean, you can't say,

01:14:54   "Okay, I'm gonna do this work for free

01:14:56   "and anybody can use it."

01:14:58   And then when a bunch of people use it

01:14:59   and say, "Wait, now I want money?"

01:15:00   Like, you know, that's kind of on you at that point.

01:15:03   So obviously I think that's a huge jerk move

01:15:07   to do something like this.

01:15:08   And that's also a quick way to probably harm your chances

01:15:12   of working in the industry again in the future

01:15:14   for anybody else ever again.

01:15:16   So that's also not, it's both a jerk move

01:15:20   and also a stupid move, you shouldn't do it.

01:15:22   But that being said, there are a lot

01:15:26   of underlying issues here.

01:15:28   I mean, first of all, this is admittedly,

01:15:32   Like if you want, next to the entry of

01:15:34   not invented here syndrome in the dictionary

01:15:36   is a picture of me.

01:15:37   So from that point of view--

01:15:41   - That is excellent self-awareness, Marco.

01:15:42   - Yeah, with that adequately disclaimed,

01:15:45   I try to use as little third party code

01:15:48   in my apps as possible, which is often like damn near zero.

01:15:53   But the idea that I would have any kind of deployment

01:15:59   of an app where not only am I using third party code,

01:16:03   but that it is auto updating that third party's code

01:16:07   without my first downloading it manually and testing it.

01:16:12   What?

01:16:13   I mean, I know that you can use a package manager

01:16:16   to pin to a certain version, I know that.

01:16:19   But I bet a large part of this problem

01:16:22   is that a lot of people aren't doing that.

01:16:24   Possibly even the majority of people aren't doing that.

01:16:27   And that to me, that is just incredibly irresponsible

01:16:32   programming practices.

01:16:33   And whatever you want to say about third party code,

01:16:35   I'm sure everybody likes it more than I do.

01:16:37   But if you're gonna use third party code,

01:16:42   you download early, you use one version of that code.

01:16:45   And if you want to have some process where you came

01:16:48   to check for updates and test them, great.

01:16:50   But to have it auto update in any of your deployments,

01:16:53   that is, that's nuts to me.

01:16:54   That isn't just living on the edge, that's negligence.

01:16:59   And you should not do that.

01:17:01   - Like a Margot advocating testing.

01:17:03   (laughing)

01:17:05   You did it twice, oh you're gonna get the new thing,

01:17:06   how can you tell whether the new version works?

01:17:09   Well you'll test.

01:17:10   I know you meant manually testing it I guess.

01:17:12   - Yes.

01:17:13   - Anyway, yeah, so you can definitely pin versions.

01:17:16   I mean part of the reason that version pinning,

01:17:19   that it is a more complicated topic for NPM in particular,

01:17:23   We've talked about this in the past, that the way Node has grown up, the culture and

01:17:27   the environment is that there are tons and tons of tiny little libraries.

01:17:31   Thousands and thousands and thousands of dependencies for even a trivial, like, hello world website

01:17:36   using a common web framework.

01:17:37   They're just very, very small.

01:17:40   Did we give people too many hardware resources?

01:17:42   Is that the problem?

01:17:43   Like, they don't know what to do with it, so they want to burn it all up?

01:17:45   No, it's more of a cultural issue, because it's not like they're, you know, it's still

01:17:49   just two lines of code, and two lines of code performs the same, whether it's in one file

01:17:53   or another one, like it's not, especially for a server to resident application, it's not that big of a deal, performance wise, but you could argue the granularity is stupid, but it is what it is.

01:18:00   But what that means is if you pin things, then you fall subject to another one of the things that ails the Node.js culture community, which is security problems, right?

01:18:13   if you have so many dependencies,

01:18:15   people are constantly finding security problems in them.

01:18:18   And if you pin your versions, like wait two weeks,

01:18:23   and now suddenly your application is vulnerable

01:18:24   to 50 different things, right?

01:18:26   And so you can say, well, then you should do

01:18:28   that manual process where you test everything or whatever.

01:18:30   It is a force pulling you back in the direction of saying,

01:18:34   I'm going to honor the semantic versioning,

01:18:37   and I'm going to pin to, you know,

01:18:40   I'll take any patch version,

01:18:41   or I'll take any minor version, right?

01:18:42   as long as it's not a major version upgrade,

01:18:44   I'll auto-take that one, because I will assume

01:18:47   those are security patches or performance fixes or whatever.

01:18:51   I won't pin it all the way down,

01:18:53   I'll pin it part of the way down.

01:18:54   And the reason this comes up in this particular story

01:18:57   is like, that's fine, that probably works,

01:18:59   that's probably a reasonable compromise

01:19:01   between pinning it completely down

01:19:03   and being vulnerable to a thousand security exploits

01:19:05   within a month, or letting it be a free-for-all,

01:19:09   find something in the middle,

01:19:11   but this story is about a developer

01:19:13   maliciously doing something.

01:19:14   If you're doing something maliciously,

01:19:15   you just make it a patch version, right?

01:19:17   See, oh yeah, no, this is just a minor change.

01:19:19   I didn't totally replace all my code

01:19:21   with the funny message, right?

01:19:22   Because they're just individual developers, right?

01:19:26   And Arco called this a jerk move, right?

01:19:29   This gets at, like, this particular story and the person,

01:19:32   I'm not too interested in why they were angry

01:19:35   or, you know, whatever, right?

01:19:36   I don't think there's any justification for them.

01:19:38   I think they were just a jerk.

01:19:39   They did a mean thing, right?

01:19:40   But the thing that I'm much more interested in is

01:19:43   how many big important companies with lots of money

01:19:47   are at the mercy of jerks.

01:19:49   Right, I mean not inside the company.

01:19:51   Obviously they're all at the mercy of jerks

01:19:53   inside the company.

01:19:54   We've talked about this issue in the past, right?

01:19:56   But externally, right?

01:19:58   That is setting aside the jerks who are being jerks

01:20:01   and they're doing mean things, they're doing whatever.

01:20:03   Why is it that you with all your money and all your people

01:20:05   and all your smart big brains or whatever

01:20:07   are essentially building your business

01:20:09   on top of work that other people are contributing to you

01:20:13   out of the goodness of their heart,

01:20:15   and you have no defense against any of them turning bad,

01:20:18   especially again in a node where it's not just

01:20:20   one or two or three people that you could name,

01:20:22   but literally tens, hundreds, thousands of people

01:20:25   are contributing to the software.

01:20:27   And like Marco said, if you make something for free

01:20:29   and put it out in the world and put it in a license

01:20:31   that anybody can use this for free,

01:20:33   that's a choice that you've made.

01:20:36   If you later come to regret that choice

01:20:38   because suddenly it's used by everybody,

01:20:39   like man if I had a nickel for everybody to use my library I'd be rich now. well

01:20:43   you know you didn't make that choice right but also if you want to take your

01:20:47   ball and go home you can also do that right because it's your ball right you

01:20:51   can just stop developing it or you can maliciously develop it or you could you

01:20:54   know intentionally introduce bugs that makes you a jerk but it's a thing that

01:20:58   you can do and there's always going to be weird stuff like that and the

01:21:02   solution is not we should yell at those people because well you know by yelling

01:21:06   will somehow stop jerks from being jerks.

01:21:08   Someone is always gonna get mad and do a thing

01:21:10   and take their ball and go home or screw things up

01:21:12   or whatever.

01:21:13   I feel like it's on the multi-billion dollar corporations

01:21:16   or even the individual small companies

01:21:18   to be thoughtful about the third-party code that they use

01:21:22   and game this out and say,

01:21:25   "If something goes wrong with the third-party code,

01:21:28   how do we handle that?

01:21:29   Do we do it by pinning our versions all the way down?

01:21:31   Then how do we handle security problems?

01:21:33   Do we have an automated test suite?"

01:21:35   There are ways to deal with this and you should talk about them at your company.

01:21:39   I don't think the solution is don't use third-party software.

01:21:41   I don't think the solution is just don't worry about it.

01:21:44   I forget if this story was before or after the Log4j thing came out.

01:21:47   It was after.

01:21:48   It was after?

01:21:49   I'm pretty sure.

01:21:51   But the Log4j thing is another example.

01:21:53   This is a widely used piece of software that just had a bug.

01:21:57   No one does anything malicious if software has bugs.

01:22:00   so many people use this software, it was, and probably still is, a fire drill across

01:22:05   the entire world of software, saying, "If you have anything that uses Java, chances

01:22:10   are it uses Log4j, and now you are vulnerable to this exploit. Patch all your software."

01:22:15   And who develops Log4j? "Oh, a bunch of volunteers." "Oh, and the whole world runs on it?" "Yeah,

01:22:20   pretty much." So, what is your, you know, this is a situation where you're not defending

01:22:26   against someone malicious, you know,

01:22:28   they just happen to be a bug, human error, it happens, right?

01:22:31   But suddenly, this is like the security problem

01:22:34   that I mentioned with Node,

01:22:35   suddenly without you knowing it,

01:22:37   you and all your software are vulnerable to this exploit

01:22:39   because it's already in there.

01:22:41   So you need to do a thing to get it fixed.

01:22:43   And a lot of people were like,

01:22:45   when are you gonna fix this bug?

01:22:46   We need to fix ASAP.

01:22:48   It's like, they're not your employee.

01:22:50   The log4j team doesn't work for you.

01:22:51   Do you pay them?

01:22:53   Are they your employee?

01:22:54   You can't make them fix things faster.

01:22:56   they could just decide we're never gonna fix this.

01:22:58   They didn't do that, they're not a bunch of jerks,

01:23:00   they're nice people, right?

01:23:01   But I feel for them because the whole world

01:23:03   is looking at them and say, hey,

01:23:05   we've been using your software for free for a decade now,

01:23:07   but it's really important that you not sleep

01:23:09   the next 48 to 96 hours and fix this bug for us

01:23:12   because our big important company,

01:23:14   from which you profit zero amount,

01:23:17   is really in a bind here, so you really need to fix that.

01:23:20   And then the other part of this problem,

01:23:21   which is like, if you're going to use open source software,

01:23:25   You don't, and you're not going to do anything

01:23:28   to help support it, you're not gonna have a standing army

01:23:31   on staff who understands the source code for Log4j

01:23:35   and can fix their own bugs in it

01:23:36   and contribute them back to the source or not, whatever.

01:23:38   Like it's open source depending on the license,

01:23:40   you can do whatever you have.

01:23:41   But if you're not gonna do that,

01:23:42   if you're just gonna assume all that third party

01:23:44   open source software we have, it's someone else's problem

01:23:47   to make sure it's good and fit for purpose.

01:23:49   And if it ever isn't good, you know,

01:23:51   even just something as simple as a bug,

01:23:53   it's someone else's problem to fix it

01:23:55   and we're gonna get really mad and pound the table

01:23:56   and say, someone needs to fix this software

01:23:58   that our company is built on.

01:23:59   Well, why don't you fix it?

01:24:00   But it's not our software, it's third party software,

01:24:03   they should fix it.

01:24:04   Well, I mean, they probably eventually will

01:24:06   'cause they're not jerks, but in the meantime,

01:24:09   do you have anyone who works for your company

01:24:10   that can help fix it faster or fix it yourself?

01:24:13   Well, no, that's how we save money

01:24:15   by not paying anyone to do that

01:24:17   and we just use third party code.

01:24:18   And it gets to, this is the XKCD comic,

01:24:21   it's two, three, four, seven,

01:24:23   we'll put a link in the show notes.

01:24:25   It shows like a block structure being built,

01:24:27   this big elaborate block structure that looks all fancy

01:24:30   and there's one side of it that's held up

01:24:31   by this tiny little skinny block and it said,

01:24:34   the big structure is all modern digital infrastructure

01:24:37   and the tiny little block, the caption says,

01:24:40   a project some random person in Nebraska

01:24:41   has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.

01:24:44   So much that we build on is like at the mercy

01:24:49   of a small number of nice people continuing to be

01:24:53   not only nice, but essentially infallible.

01:24:55   And the second they are not both nice and infallible,

01:24:58   these big corporations turn their sore unlike eye

01:25:01   and say, "Fix this bug, it's going to destroy

01:25:04   "our multi-billion dollar business."

01:25:05   And you're like, "I'm just in my basement in Nebraska

01:25:07   "and I've been maintaining this open source thing

01:25:09   "that you've been using."

01:25:10   And yeah, we let you use it for free,

01:25:11   but it's not my problem that your company

01:25:13   is gonna burn down.

01:25:14   If you care that much about this,

01:25:15   maybe you should have, let's say,

01:25:18   bought a support contract for this,

01:25:20   for some company that can do that,

01:25:21   hired people who know enough about the source code to fix it or essentially not take the

01:25:27   software but then not be, it's not like giving back, it's like oh you took it, you have to

01:25:30   give back, you don't have to give back, the license says you don't have to give back,

01:25:33   you don't have to give back, but the second you get into a bind, that's on you to say

01:25:36   we never prepared for this scenario, we are not prepared to support ourselves, right?

01:25:42   So it's not a case of like I took and didn't give back, which they did but you're allowed

01:25:47   to and according to these licenses.

01:25:49   It's a case of we did not plan properly.

01:25:51   We thought that this nice person would always be nice and also that they would never make

01:25:56   a mistake.

01:25:57   And that is a poor assumption.

01:25:58   And it's kind of hilarious to see in the response to the Log4j thing, the US government made

01:26:03   this panel and this committee or whatever to say, "This is because it's a national security

01:26:08   concern because the government and military uses software that uses Log4j and suddenly

01:26:12   we're vulnerable to these exploits.

01:26:14   How could it be?

01:26:15   we're vulnerable to cyber espionage and the government can't fix it because we're relying

01:26:21   on what is open source software, what do you mean someone else wrote it and they don't

01:26:24   work for it.

01:26:25   Having a committee where they have to sort of come to terms with the reality that we've

01:26:28   all been living in because suddenly there is a flashpoint event that makes everybody

01:26:31   realize just how precarious everything is, I think is actually useful.

01:26:38   I think the government committee, especially in the US, is going to be pointless and terrible

01:26:41   because government stuff that has to do with computers is never good.

01:26:44   But I think it's good for everyone to have a moment of reckoning and saying, "This

01:26:49   is not new.

01:26:50   This is the way it always has been and will continue to be, and I hope this helps people

01:26:55   inside companies everywhere, perhaps seize this."

01:26:59   Every crisis is an opportunity inside a company.

01:27:01   Seize this crisis/opportunity to say, "Hey, do you like how this feels?

01:27:07   If you don't, maybe we should put some small amount of money towards staffing somebody

01:27:13   either in this company or a contractor or giving directly to the open source maintainers

01:27:18   or having more commercial companies spring up that will offer commercial support contracts,

01:27:24   do something that involves money to make it so that we are not vulnerable to this type

01:27:29   of thing.

01:27:30   And it doesn't mean necessarily giving money to people that wrote software.

01:27:33   There are tons and tons of other things you can do.

01:27:34   That's why there's so many companies built on open source products.

01:27:37   Why would I pay this company for this product?

01:27:39   I can just get the source code for free.

01:27:40   Well, you're paying them for a support contract, which they charge you through the nodes for.

01:27:45   So you do have someone who you can yell out when it breaks because you're paying them,

01:27:49   right?

01:27:50   And if you're not going to pay anybody—and again, with Node it gets complicated because

01:27:54   like, well, we have 100,000 dependencies, you're telling me there's some company

01:27:57   that's going to support all 100,000 of these?

01:27:59   Do we have to give $10 checks to 100,000 people?

01:28:02   No.

01:28:03   But maybe if you hired like a team of 10 Node.js experts and gave them a salary and kept them

01:28:08   as full-time employees of your company, and the next time something went wrong with some

01:28:10   library they could parachute in and fix it themselves in your own local copy.

01:28:14   So I mean this story probably hits closer to home I guess if you're an open source author

01:28:21   maybe you're rooting for the guy to you know be mad that he didn't get paid or whatever

01:28:24   but I'm not in that camp I'm definitely in the camp of rooting for the people who run

01:28:29   these big companies to get a clue that they actually need to do something to protect themselves,

01:28:35   their company and their customers from things like this and it's not the fault of the open

01:28:40   source people and it's not the fault of you know like you know mean people doing

01:28:45   mean things like this guy with colors like that's that's the you know not the

01:28:48   common case but like you have to think about that because that's kind of the

01:28:51   worst case scenario if the log4j people turned evil they could have done much

01:28:54   worse well the funny thing is you know you talked about ways that corporate

01:28:59   America can help and discourse did a victory lap about this after it happened

01:29:04   and and when I first read this I was like yeah go ahead you guys great work

01:29:08   And now reading it again with a little distance between when it was posted now.

01:29:13   So the post is "Discourse Gives Back 2021 Edition.

01:29:17   Discourse had a great year. We raised 20 million, a $20 million Series A investment, yada yada."

01:29:22   So they talk about how they should give back, blah blah blah.

01:29:26   And they enumerate, I don't know, maybe 10 different donations they made to different open source or community projects.

01:29:31   And at first I was like, "Yeah, great work, folks. This is the way it should be."

01:29:35   But it occurred to me the sum total of all,

01:29:39   what, 10 of these donations was like less than 100 grand.

01:29:42   In the same post they just said,

01:29:44   Discourse had a great year,

01:29:45   we raised a $20 million investment.

01:29:49   So of that $20 million,

01:29:51   they were able to shave off less than 100 grand.

01:29:53   Well done.

01:29:55   - I mean, you're not gonna get,

01:29:56   like that kind of feel good stuff

01:29:57   where you chuck a couple bucks over the thing.

01:29:59   It's better than nothing.

01:30:00   - It is, it is.

01:30:01   - But what you have to think about is like,

01:30:02   What is the value, the future value of our company?

01:30:06   Discourse is going to be this big product.

01:30:09   The future value of discourse in some degree

01:30:11   depends on discourse not breaking and being terrible

01:30:13   and having security problems.

01:30:15   How much is it worth to you to make sure discourse continues

01:30:18   to function correctly?

01:30:19   And it should be worth a lot more than a one time,

01:30:21   feel good, random investment to develop.

01:30:23   Because honestly, those developers,

01:30:25   they don't want to work for discourse.

01:30:27   They can't get $10 from every company

01:30:29   and be like a $10 employee of every company in the world,

01:30:33   and maybe they don't want to start a company

01:30:34   that sells commercial support for their open source library.

01:30:37   And again, with the Node.js case,

01:30:38   there's thousands of those people,

01:30:40   so how are you gonna work that?

01:30:41   What it calls into question is,

01:30:44   how much are we building our business on software

01:30:47   that we didn't write that we have no way to support?

01:30:50   That's a risk factor in your company.

01:30:52   Sometimes it's a risk worth taking,

01:30:53   and you get lucky, and everything works out,

01:30:55   and eventually you get so big that you're too big to fail,

01:30:58   or whatever that you can deal with these bumps in the road.

01:31:01   But when you're just starting out,

01:31:03   you get a huge boost from building on open source software.

01:31:07   If you get unlucky, you don't have the skills to fix it.

01:31:09   You can't pay people to help you fix it,

01:31:13   and it breaks and it takes down your company.

01:31:14   But Discourse is probably big enough now

01:31:16   where they should be thinking about

01:31:17   how do we do this in-house?

01:31:18   Again, it's good to give money

01:31:20   to the people who make the software.

01:31:21   Hell, if Discourse was smart and they really care

01:31:24   about some particular library

01:31:25   that's really important to their product,

01:31:27   See if you can hire that person.

01:31:29   Again, maybe they don't want to be hired,

01:31:30   but then maybe you can hire someone

01:31:31   and say your only job is to be the in-house guru

01:31:35   for these two libraries.

01:31:36   So learn the source, start contributing to it,

01:31:39   make a local fork of it if needed or whatever,

01:31:41   but we need that library to always work

01:31:43   and if it ever breaks, we need it to be fixed ASAP,

01:31:45   so now that's your job.

01:31:46   And that's gonna take a lot more

01:31:48   than a one-time $100,000 donation.

01:31:50   You can't get a single programmer to do anything

01:31:52   for that amount of money once you factor in healthcare

01:31:54   and all the other stuff.

01:31:55   You know, I think it is definitely better than just ignoring the problem and doing nothing.

01:32:01   So I think Discourse is, you know, it's good for them to be proud that they are essentially,

01:32:05   "We're giving away money" for free!

01:32:07   We're just throwing at these people because they made some software we use.

01:32:10   But they're not actually solving the problem.

01:32:12   Because that money doesn't entitle them three years from now when something breaks in some

01:32:15   obscure library to say, "Hey, remember we gave you $5,000 three years ago?

01:32:19   Well, it's time for you to get up out of bed at 3am and fix this problem for us."

01:32:23   and they would say, "Who is this?"

01:32:24   We are sponsored this week by JumpCloud.

01:32:28   Try JumpCloud for free at jumpcloud.com.

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01:33:10   (upbeat music)

01:33:14   - All right, so we have a twofer from Amri Arbeev.

01:33:18   First of all, what's Marco's current coffee setup?

01:33:20   has Marco tried James Hoffman's

01:33:21   excellent AeroPress technique.

01:33:23   And also, why aren't you roasting your own coffee, man?

01:33:25   What's going on there?

01:33:26   - This is amazingly topical.

01:33:27   I didn't know about the roasting stuff.

01:33:30   - So the current coffee setup is AeroPress still for,

01:33:35   if I'm making only one cup, and if I'm making more than one,

01:33:39   which is the case most mornings, I'm using my Ratio 8.

01:33:44   It's a fancy hipster coffee maker that's very nice.

01:33:47   It is an automatic drip machine.

01:33:48   It's just a good automatic drip machine.

01:33:50   And it's not as good as AeroPress Coffee,

01:33:52   but it is less work in my morning routine

01:33:56   when making two cups.

01:33:58   Because now that I'm doing my big fake eggs

01:34:00   with vegetables, stirred into them, and cooked up,

01:34:04   my breakfast is a lot of work these days.

01:34:07   Through my own choice, and I appreciate that,

01:34:09   but the time spent on the coffee needed to go down,

01:34:12   and with the Ratio 8 being a drip machine,

01:34:15   I could kind of batch it and set it all up

01:34:17   and then just hit go and then walk away

01:34:19   and do my other stuff and then come back

01:34:21   right before I'm serving breakfast,

01:34:23   everything's hot, ready to go,

01:34:25   pour the coffee and it's done.

01:34:26   - And for people who don't know,

01:34:27   the ratio eight machine has wood on it.

01:34:30   - Of course it does.

01:34:31   - Yeah, when he says the hipster coffee maker,

01:34:33   it's got wood on it.

01:34:35   - Yeah, I was turned on to it years ago by Chase Reeves

01:34:39   when I met him in Portland and he showed it to me

01:34:42   and it looked really cool and we picked it out

01:34:46   for mostly aesthetic reasons, if I'm honest.

01:34:49   - It's got wood on it.

01:34:50   - Right, it's really nice.

01:34:52   But it's a really great coffee maker also.

01:34:55   Anyway, so yeah, that's the coffee setup.

01:34:57   And I stopped roasting because two things changed.

01:35:01   First of all, my tastes shifted a little bit

01:35:06   lighter than they were at first.

01:35:08   That made it harder for me to do my own roast

01:35:10   because making a light roast in a home roaster

01:35:12   is actually pretty difficult to really nail it.

01:35:15   and certainly I didn't have the skill

01:35:18   to really do that well.

01:35:20   And secondly, the mail order things all got better

01:35:24   over the last X years.

01:35:25   I mean, I started roasting maybe what, 10 years ago?

01:35:28   It's been a long time.

01:35:29   Well, in the meantime, we've had a lot more

01:35:31   really good mail order options.

01:35:34   And I've been really happy with those.

01:35:36   And so my tastes shifted towards a type of coffee

01:35:39   that I'm not very good at roasting.

01:35:41   And also, the available options for me

01:35:44   to just buy someone else's expertly roasted version

01:35:47   of that increased and got better.

01:35:49   So that's what happened.

01:35:51   - Good deal.

01:35:52   So have you tried this AeroPress technique?

01:35:54   I have not watched this video.

01:35:55   - I watched that entire series of videos

01:35:58   and I still haven't done it.

01:36:00   Because honestly, my technique,

01:36:02   which I do the inverted method,

01:36:04   and I just kinda, you know,

01:36:06   I grind 15 grams into a full AeroPress inverted.

01:36:11   So I pull it out to the four line,

01:36:13   but upside down and I just pour in water and stir it

01:36:18   and wait a few seconds and I slowly press it out

01:36:19   and it's fine.

01:36:21   I'm sure I could perfect that more

01:36:23   if I actually tried this better method

01:36:26   but this better method is also more time consuming

01:36:28   and my method is fine, it works fine for me.

01:36:32   This is an area where I used to care a lot

01:36:35   about all these details and now I care less

01:36:38   about these details.

01:36:40   I've been focusing my energies more intensely

01:36:43   in areas that I wanna care a lot more about,

01:36:46   and certain things had to fall by the wayside.

01:36:47   This is why, for instance, I care less about cars

01:36:50   than I used to, that I had to kind of make room

01:36:53   for other stuff.

01:36:54   - Well, no, you stopped caring about cars

01:36:56   when you bought a Tesla.

01:36:57   Hey-o!

01:36:58   - And similarly, I care a lot less about the fine details

01:37:03   of the coffee process now, because I get results

01:37:06   that I consider very good with very little effort.

01:37:11   And to answer some other questions,

01:37:12   I am still using my Baratza Virtuoso grinder.

01:37:15   I'm using the technique that I think I might have first

01:37:18   saw in a James Hoppin video

01:37:21   where you spritz the beans with a little bit of water

01:37:24   before you put them in the grinder

01:37:25   and that eliminates all static cleaning.

01:37:27   This is amazing.

01:37:28   Look, if anybody out there,

01:37:29   if you grind your own coffee and you're not doing this,

01:37:31   I'm telling you, this is like a life changer.

01:37:33   If you grind your own coffee,

01:37:34   but it makes a mess when you take out the little hopper

01:37:37   because of static electricity,

01:37:38   like making the grounds cling to everything.

01:37:41   So you take a little spritzer, any little water spritzer,

01:37:44   I got a little one on Amazon,

01:37:45   it looks like it's made for perfume or something.

01:37:47   I got a four pack for 10 bucks.

01:37:49   And you just put plain water in it, nothing special,

01:37:52   and you just spritz the beans

01:37:54   right before you put 'em in the coffee grinder.

01:37:56   That gives it just enough moisture

01:37:58   that static electricity doesn't really factor in.

01:38:01   It doesn't have a chance to do anything.

01:38:03   - People with hair will be familiar with this phenomenon

01:38:05   from hair and combing.

01:38:07   - There you go, yeah.

01:38:08   And so the beans come out and it's like,

01:38:10   they come out perfectly and there's no dust flying

01:38:14   everywhere, it's a game changer for like how messy

01:38:17   your coffee counter gets when you're making coffee.

01:38:19   Anyway, so yeah, I'm still using my Braco Virtuoso

01:38:22   from that's probably 10 or 12 years old now.

01:38:25   It's still working great 'cause they build those things

01:38:27   with pretty good quality.

01:38:28   And yeah, and then Aeropress or the Ratio 8.

01:38:33   Do you have any particular beans

01:38:35   that you can throw your weight behind?

01:38:37   - I go between a few.

01:38:40   So former sponsor and possibly future sponsor, Yes Please,

01:38:44   that is my standard, I always fall back to that one.

01:38:48   So that's always in the rotation.

01:38:50   Usually I get that one every two bags that I get.

01:38:54   And then the one that I'm mixing in with it,

01:38:56   I will either do something from trade

01:38:58   when I'll go between different roasters there,

01:38:59   or I'll go to Intelligentsia.

01:39:02   All three of those options are great.

01:39:04   They all have different things going for them and everything.

01:39:07   All three of them are great.

01:39:08   I strongly recommend all three of them, honestly.

01:39:10   So yeah, Intelligentsia, yes please,

01:39:12   and Trade, all of them.

01:39:14   - Trade, Trade former and future sponsor,

01:39:17   yes please, former sponsor,

01:39:18   and Intelligentsia have been none of the above.

01:39:21   - Yeah, but yeah, they all do things great.

01:39:24   Intelligentsia's roasts are a little bit darker,

01:39:27   but they tend to have really nice single origins.

01:39:30   So if I'm going for something like a really nice Costa Rica

01:39:33   or when they do have Kenya, which is not that often,

01:39:35   but Kenya's still my favorite, but I can get it,

01:39:38   but it's not super easy to get all year round.

01:39:41   Trade has, I mean, there's a million options of trade,

01:39:43   so I don't really recommend any particular blend or roaster.

01:39:47   Just go there if you want a million options

01:39:50   'cause the whole thing would tailor it to you

01:39:51   and everything, that's a good thing.

01:39:53   And then what's great about Yes, Please!

01:39:55   is that Yes, Please! is extremely consistent.

01:39:58   Everything I've gotten from,

01:39:59   And when I've ordered coffee from other places,

01:40:01   I get, you know, mostly stuff I like,

01:40:03   occasionally I get something I don't like.

01:40:04   Yes, please is like, it's my rock of consistency.

01:40:08   They produce something I've liked every single time.

01:40:11   Like that's what's great about it.

01:40:12   It doesn't always blow me away,

01:40:14   but sometimes it's really nice,

01:40:15   but usually it's not like, oh my god, this is incredible.

01:40:17   Usually it's like, this is something I can depend on

01:40:19   being great every single time.

01:40:21   Like it's always, it's always good.

01:40:23   It's definitely a crowd pleaser too.

01:40:25   Like if you have anybody who like,

01:40:27   is very sensitive to any more bitter roasts,

01:40:30   you'll never offend them with anything from Yes Please.

01:40:32   So that's why, that's my default.

01:40:34   If I have to recommend something

01:40:35   to somebody who doesn't know what they like

01:40:37   and wants something that's the same consistency

01:40:41   every single time, that's Yes Please.

01:40:44   - And then also from Amri,

01:40:45   is Jon still subscribed to cable?

01:40:47   At what point is paying for cable

01:40:48   no longer worth it for him?

01:40:50   - I mean, now I pay for cable

01:40:51   and also tons of streaming services.

01:40:53   It's the future we were promised.

01:40:55   I can pay even more money for even more things.

01:40:58   I think cable for me is tied to my TiVo.

01:41:04   So if my TiVos break and I don't buy new ones,

01:41:09   that will probably be the end of cable because cable without--

01:41:12   well, I would say cable without TiVo

01:41:15   is probably not going to work for me.

01:41:16   But of course, every cable company

01:41:18   has their own server-side DVR solution

01:41:20   that they'll try to sell you as well.

01:41:22   So maybe I would try that.

01:41:23   But the main reason I still subscribe to it is it's part of some big package thing and

01:41:27   I get all the fancy channels and there are still some things that are on television either

01:41:34   before or only on television, you know, before on the streaming service or they're not on

01:41:40   the streaming service at all or they're on the streaming service much later.

01:41:43   And I'm not even talking about things like sports with Blackout or whatever.

01:41:47   Not every streaming service is a complete reflection.

01:41:50   no matter how much you pay them, is a complete accurate reflection of everything that's on

01:41:53   all the channels that are on the large cable subscription.

01:41:56   So it is good to have it in.

01:41:58   It depends on what we're doing.

01:42:00   The Olympics is one example.

01:42:04   Recording the Olympics on a TiVo, but then we also subscribe to the Peacock streaming

01:42:07   service to get even more stuff.

01:42:10   I do have to say, related to streaming video apps, given that I'm using an older TiVo,

01:42:17   It's the interface of using a TiVo to jump around video on your TV is still so much better

01:42:22   than every one of the fancy streaming apps that's available on all these high powered

01:42:25   platforms like the phone and iPad and Mac and websites or whatever.

01:42:30   TiVo is still superior for that just because it's responsive and works and is very reliable.

01:42:37   So yeah, I think I'm pretty close to being able to get away without cable, but I see

01:42:43   no reason to give up what I have now other than saving the money I suppose.

01:42:52   So I'm just going to stay with it until all my TiVos die.

01:42:55   And replacing them, TiVos still exist and will sell you a device but I always look because

01:42:59   they always have these come ons like "save X number of hundred dollars on this TiVo blah

01:43:03   blah blah" I always look but as far as I can tell they do not sell a TiVo with as much

01:43:07   storage as the one I currently have.

01:43:09   The closest one they have I think they sell you is like half the storage.

01:43:12   Why would I ever buy a TiVo that's worse than the one I have now?

01:43:15   Why would I buy, I don't know, you can replace the hard drive and blah blah blah, but I'm

01:43:17   not going to go down that road.

01:43:19   Why would I buy one that has either fewer tuners or less hard drive space or both?

01:43:24   That just seems pointless to me.

01:43:26   So when my thing breaks, maybe I'll buy the smaller one or maybe I just won't buy one

01:43:30   at all or maybe I'll try the cable companies, the cable companies, the FiOS DVR, or maybe

01:43:36   I'll just cut the cord then.

01:43:37   But it hasn't happened yet.

01:43:39   Alright, Paul Walker writes, "Do you have a good system for managing family contacts,

01:43:43   especially kids' friends and their parents across your multiple devices?"

01:43:46   Yeah, you tell each other, "Oh, so-and-so's numbers 1234567890.

01:43:52   That's what we do."

01:43:53   I have no good—

01:43:54   You airdrop them the contact card.

01:43:56   Or they are, yeah, that's actually another good example, yeah.

01:43:58   But I certainly do not have a good answer for this question.

01:44:01   This is just like the photos thing.

01:44:02   This is what I always bring up when we talk about photos.

01:44:04   It's like, "Hey, Apple, if you think this is really hard, start with something small,

01:44:07   contacts because it's a small amount of data.

01:44:09   Like photos are large and extremely numerous, but contacts are small and not that numerous.

01:44:13   It's a small dataset.

01:44:15   This is a great place to try out your ideas about how it can work.

01:44:20   The thing that it is replacing from my youth was an address book.

01:44:25   And every member of the family in general did not have their own little address book

01:44:28   with grandma's phone number in it.

01:44:30   There was one address book by the phone, which was attached to the wall with a wire.

01:44:35   And in the address book was grandma's phone number and address.

01:44:38   And if grandma moved or changed their phone number, we changed it in that address book.

01:44:43   Some people did have their own individual address books, maybe, "Oh, you got your phone

01:44:46   numbers of all your friends in your little address book."

01:44:48   But you wouldn't also probably put all of your relatives' addresses in there, because

01:44:52   those can be in the family address book.

01:44:54   This is a model that existed for a long time before computers existed.

01:44:59   And when computers came along, it was more convenient implementation-wise for everyone

01:45:02   to just have their own contacts, and oh, we made a great way for you to just share contacts.

01:45:06   Wow.

01:45:07   Well, you just give someone else a copy.

01:45:08   It's like, that's not sharing.

01:45:10   Then now when grandma's phone number changed, everybody has to change it in all of their

01:45:13   books.

01:45:14   That's, you know, we have the technology.

01:45:15   We can do better than this.

01:45:17   So Paul, I do not have a good system for managing family contacts.

01:45:23   In fact, this just happened recently.

01:45:25   My wife asked me, "What's your brother's address?"

01:45:29   And I said, "Oh, I don't even think I have my brother's address in my thing, and if I

01:45:32   do it might be his previous house."

01:45:35   Because in our family we've basically just decided that my wife has the canonical address

01:45:39   book, because she does the addressing of the Christmas cards.

01:45:41   That's me.

01:45:42   And that's where it has to count.

01:45:44   And I do have lots of addresses and names of people in my personal contacts.

01:45:48   But I'm not confident they're up to date, because if something changes, we change it

01:45:53   in her address book, which is the "real address book."

01:45:56   But I still want to have contacts in my thing.

01:45:58   At the very least, I'd have the iMessage ID of my brother

01:46:01   so I can text with him or whatever.

01:46:03   But I'm not confident that I have his current house address.

01:46:07   And this is a terrible situation.

01:46:08   It's like the photo situation, but at a smaller scale.

01:46:11   So I really hope Apple does fix this.

01:46:12   And there are probably third-party applications

01:46:14   that do way better.

01:46:15   I just don't know of them.

01:46:16   So I don't personally have a good system

01:46:18   for managing family contacts.

01:46:20   - Yeah, I don't either.

01:46:21   I feel like maybe a decent way to do this

01:46:24   would be kind of similar to how,

01:46:27   I don't know, for anybody who's used

01:46:28   one password for families, the idea is that,

01:46:31   you know, you have your own private one password items,

01:46:34   and anything you add by default is private.

01:46:37   But you can then either, you have the option

01:46:39   to move or copy any one password item

01:46:42   into the shared family fault.

01:46:45   And then that's accessible and editable

01:46:46   by anybody in the family.

01:46:48   And I think that might be a good way to do contacts

01:46:50   of like, you know, maybe you still have,

01:46:53   by default, maybe everything is still private to you

01:46:56   because you don't necessarily need the contacts

01:46:59   of everybody else in your family,

01:47:00   but you probably have, as John said,

01:47:02   like family members or close family friends, whatever,

01:47:05   you probably have certain ones

01:47:06   that you want everyone to have access to,

01:47:08   but that, again, you want a centralized,

01:47:11   only one source of truth to edit when that changes.

01:47:14   And so maybe that could be a thing

01:47:15   where there's like family contacts,

01:47:17   and then you can move a contact into the family,

01:47:20   and then everyone gets it, and everyone can edit it.

01:47:23   Yeah, I mean, again, because the data is so small,

01:47:25   there's lots of-- it's easier to think about it here

01:47:27   and easier to implement.

01:47:28   And in fact, Apple does something not similar,

01:47:30   but I believe they have some kind of solution

01:47:34   to sharing for reminders, for example,

01:47:36   because we have reminders that we share amongst the family.

01:47:39   And I think those work on an individual basis.

01:47:41   Like when I share a reminder, it doesn't just give a copy

01:47:44   of it to someone else.

01:47:44   It is both of us editing.

01:47:45   Same thing with notes.

01:47:46   Notes, you can do a shared note, which for sure is both of us

01:47:48   seeing the same note.

01:47:49   And reminders, we're both seeing the same reminder.

01:47:52   and if I added the reminder, it updates on my wife's own as well.

01:47:55   That is not as convenient as what Marco was just saying, which is like, well, how about

01:47:59   if there was like, you know, you could collect reminders into the family reminder library.

01:48:03   I think you might be able to do other reminders too.

01:48:05   But like the point is, this is not a completely foreign concept to Apple.

01:48:09   They have just not extended it to contacts and I certainly haven't extended it to photos.

01:48:12   And it is a common problem that's going to come up in any family situation where there's

01:48:16   going to be some data that is private to the individuals and some data that wants to be

01:48:19   shared and I hope Apple gets around to tackling it on all of their, all the things they collect

01:48:24   data for eventually.

01:48:27   Thanks to our sponsors this week, Collide, JumpCloud, and Lutron Quesada. And thanks

01:48:32   to our members who support us directly. You can join at ATP.fm/join and we will talk to

01:48:37   you next week.

01:48:39   [Music]

01:48:40   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:48:48   Oh it was accidental.

01:48:52   John didn't do any research.

01:48:54   Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.

01:48:57   Cause it was accidental.

01:49:00   It was accidental.

01:49:03   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:49:08   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

01:49:16   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:49:21   Anti-Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C

01:49:26   USA, Syracuse, it's accidental

01:49:32   They didn't mean to, accidental

01:49:36   Tech podcast, so long

01:49:41   - You skipped our bonus Ask ATP, man.

01:49:44   - Oh, it was a bonus Ask ATP, man?

01:49:45   - Yeah, well, it's basically on the after show.

01:49:47   Although before that, someone pointed out

01:49:48   that you do obviously calendar sharing as well.

01:49:51   I use Google Calendar for that,

01:49:52   but I think Apple does it the same way.

01:49:54   Where they don't give you a copy of the calendar,

01:49:55   it is actually a shared calendar, and you can make it.

01:49:57   - Yeah, there's a family calendar that you can make, yeah.

01:49:59   - Yeah, and apparently Apple will make one by default

01:50:02   that is shared with all the people in your family,

01:50:04   so they're traveling down this road just extremely slowly.

01:50:07   - All right, the bonus to Ask ATP very quickly

01:50:10   was from Nick Van DuPas, who writes,

01:50:13   "Do you say you're in front of the computer

01:50:14   or behind the computer?

01:50:16   You absolutely say you're in front of the computer.

01:50:18   - Who here, did anyone ever say behind?

01:50:20   - I don't know.

01:50:21   - I mean, you could have a colorful turn of phrase

01:50:23   where you could say all the people lined up

01:50:26   behind their computers or something like that,

01:50:27   but no, you know, I'm sitting in front of the computer.

01:50:29   Yeah, I mean, maybe it varies

01:50:32   in different English-speaking countries,

01:50:33   or maybe it varies in non-English-speaking countries,

01:50:35   but I have always said I am in front of the computer.

01:50:38   What are you doing in front of the computer all day?

01:50:39   Sitting in front of the TV all day,

01:50:40   or always in front of it? - Yep, there it is.

01:50:42   - Well, if you think about the computer

01:50:44   as having a face.

01:50:46   What is the front of a computer and the back of a computer?

01:50:49   I think it's obvious that the front of the computer

01:50:50   is the screen and possibly the keyboard.

01:50:54   And the back of the computer is the back of the screen

01:50:57   lit up, it's a laptop or whatever.

01:50:58   - Where the wires come out.

01:50:59   - Right, yeah.

01:51:00   And so I think any way that you would try to define

01:51:03   the front or back of a computer,

01:51:05   I think people would pretty much agree on that.

01:51:07   And where you sit is facing its front

01:51:12   and your front is facing its front as well,

01:51:15   unless you're doing something really weird.

01:51:17   So I would imagine, that's why I have a hard time

01:51:21   thinking of any way somebody would perceive this

01:51:23   as you being behind the computer

01:51:26   if your front is facing the computer's front

01:51:29   any time you're using it.

01:51:30   - I mean, but the thing is that phrases and language phrases

01:51:34   don't logically follow from, you know,

01:51:36   you can reverse reason it logically,

01:51:39   but that's not how language works.

01:51:40   as someone in the chat room pointed out, in English in particular we say you get behind

01:51:44   the wheel of a car.

01:51:45   And you're not behind the wheel, you're in front of it.

01:51:47   But language does not follow the logic that you have just outlined.

01:51:52   It just is what it is, and it is an idiom, a saying, it is the language that developed

01:51:57   around computers, and televisions for that matter.

01:52:00   So in fact the computer language probably just inherited from television because we're

01:52:04   all sitting in front of the TV, and as soon as we got computers, I mean the first computers

01:52:07   You were actually literally hooked up to your TV

01:52:09   in your home, so that probably sort of explains

01:52:12   the path that we traveled,

01:52:13   but logic has nothing to do with it.

01:52:15   It's just the way it is.

01:52:16   - Well, I could see two different ways to get to,

01:52:18   okay, so first of all, the behind the wheel of a car,

01:52:21   if you think about behind in the form of motion,

01:52:24   then when the car is in motion,

01:52:26   unless you're going to reverse,

01:52:26   but normally in forward motion of the car,

01:52:29   you are behind the wheel.

01:52:32   - Interesting point, yeah.

01:52:33   - But where's the front of the wheel

01:52:34   and where's the front of you?

01:52:35   It's the same logic as before, you know what I mean?

01:52:37   Where's the back of the steering wheel,

01:52:38   the paddles are on the back of the steering wheel,

01:52:40   the logo is on the front,

01:52:41   the front of you is the part where your nose is,

01:52:43   the fronts are tasting each other, it's the same situation.

01:52:45   - Well, but so there's the question of like,

01:52:47   for two stationary objects,

01:52:49   I think if you're saying what's behind--

01:52:51   - Special relativity, you're really working hard

01:52:53   to back-solve for this one.

01:52:55   - If you're talking about objects that are stationary,

01:52:57   if you're saying, are you in front of it or behind it,

01:53:00   then I think that, then I think the question is like,

01:53:03   what direction are these objects facing?

01:53:05   So again, so if you're on a train,

01:53:06   but you're facing backwards.

01:53:08   - Right, yes.

01:53:09   - Oh my goodness.

01:53:10   - So, yeah, so if you're stationary,

01:53:12   it's a matter of which direction the objects are facing.

01:53:16   And if you are in motion, then it's a matter of like,

01:53:19   what's the direction of motion

01:53:20   and which object is more in front of it.

01:53:22   - So when you're on a train, are you behind the computer?

01:53:25   (laughing)

01:53:27   But if you're sitting backwards on the thing

01:53:28   that you're in front of it again?

01:53:30   If you're on a train going close to the speed of light

01:53:33   and you open a laptop screen,

01:53:34   The screen is facing forward.

01:53:35   How fast does the light come out of the laptop screen?

01:53:39   - This is going nowhere good.

01:53:40   How do we end up in robot or not?

01:53:41   - This is amazing.

01:53:42   This is kind of, yeah.

01:53:43   What I'm saying, like it's just language phrases,

01:53:46   they seem normal to you because you're used to them,

01:53:48   but a lot of them, if you try to, you know,

01:53:50   explain them logically, they don't make any sense.

01:53:52   It's just like, well, we all know what this means.

01:53:54   It's the phrase we've all agreed upon.

01:53:56   It is a cultural thing.

01:53:57   And that's why it can vary from language.

01:53:58   What are we talking about?

01:53:59   You know, foreign language expressions.

01:54:02   I can't, I wish I could remember one of them,

01:54:04   but how widely they vary from country to country

01:54:08   and language to language,

01:54:09   all saying basically the same thing.

01:54:11   - All right, one more theory.

01:54:12   All right, so what if, so from the perspective of,

01:54:16   from what we as broadcasters would describe

01:54:21   the position of the audience,

01:54:23   like if you're a TV broadcaster,

01:54:25   you might think you're looking through the camera

01:54:28   through someone's TV screen

01:54:30   and they are behind the TV screen.

01:54:32   from your perspective as a TV broadcaster, right?

01:54:35   I can kind of understand that.

01:54:37   When we talk about people's online communication,

01:54:41   suppose we are talking about some jerk commenter

01:54:44   on a website, we might think of that person

01:54:48   as being behind their computer from our perspective

01:54:53   of seeing them on the internet.

01:54:55   So there is kind, like I can kind of see,

01:54:57   I've heard that phrasing before, like oh,

01:54:59   this is a stranger behind a screen

01:55:02   are behind a computer.

01:55:03   I have heard that.

01:55:04   They're hiding behind their computer.

01:55:05   Right, exactly.

01:55:06   And so from certain perspectives--

01:55:09   But they're sitting in front of their computer

01:55:11   while they hide behind it.

01:55:12   They are sitting in front of their computer,

01:55:13   but from our perspective, maybe they are behind their computer.

01:55:17   Yeah, from our inertial frame of reference.

01:55:20   This is all totally a relativity thing.

01:55:22   Yeah, I love that I started this podcast being a health doctor,

01:55:27   and now we're ending up being physics professors.

01:55:32   - Our talents are broad, but perhaps they're not deep.

01:55:35   - They're not, that's the problem.

01:55:37   - This is related to the thing,

01:55:39   remember this question ages ago,

01:55:40   like what are the relative positions of us in your mind

01:55:43   when you're listening to the podcast?

01:55:44   Are we sitting in a row? - Oh, golly, yeah, yeah.

01:55:46   - Are we stacked vertically?

01:55:47   (laughing)

01:55:49   'Cause Marco doesn't, correct me if I'm wrong,

01:55:50   but you don't do any panning in the mix or anything, right?

01:55:53   - No, and by the way, anybody who produces a podcast,

01:55:56   don't do that, people hate it.

01:55:58   A very common feature request that podcast app makers get

01:56:01   is a down-mixed to mono feature,

01:56:03   which I'm going to add soon, don't worry.

01:56:05   But it's all there on the code,

01:56:06   I just have no interface for it yet.

01:56:08   But because people who hear podcasts

01:56:11   where people are not mixed in the absolute center,

01:56:14   listeners hate it.

01:56:16   In many ways, it makes it extremely difficult

01:56:17   for certain people to listen to it at all.

01:56:20   So yeah, don't do that.

01:56:21   But yes, everyone's always dead center.

01:56:22   - But still, even with us dead center,

01:56:24   the question remains, and that was the question

01:56:26   we talked about, how do you picture the people?

01:56:27   And you were doing the reverse,

01:56:29   it was like, how do we picture ourselves?

01:56:30   Like we're not on television looking into our camera,

01:56:32   seeing the audience behind the camera,

01:56:34   we're just talking to a microphone.

01:56:35   So where do we picture the audience?

01:56:36   And to that I would say,

01:56:38   I'm a tiny little person inside your ear canal.

01:56:41   - Wow.

01:56:41   - It's a valid color digit.

01:56:44   - Yeah, we should do, remember,

01:56:45   a couple months ago, Upgrade did the low bit rate release

01:56:49   where they had released a couple of extra copies

01:56:52   at ridiculously hilariously bad bit rates.

01:56:55   You should do one where you're in the center

01:56:59   and John is on the left and I'm on the right

01:57:01   or something like that just to mess with people

01:57:02   and just make it--

01:57:03   - No, we should change positions every sentence.

01:57:06   - Oh, God.

01:57:06   (laughing)

01:57:09   - Hard pan left, hard pan right.

01:57:11   - Oh, I have to use like the crappy automation thing

01:57:13   and logic, oh, it's such a pain.

01:57:15   - It should be like a rotation

01:57:17   where it's just a constantly spinning thing

01:57:19   and whenever we speak, we just hop onto that train

01:57:22   and then it, you know, yeah.

01:57:24   - You know, Marco, if you were a really good editor,

01:57:25   you would really embrace spatial audio.

01:57:28   - Exactly.

01:57:29   - I am such a good editor that I know not to do this

01:57:32   because us joking about it is funny right here,

01:57:34   but if I actually did this, people would hate it so much.

01:57:39   You don't understand how much they would hate it.

01:57:42   Trust me, it is very hated.

01:57:44   - It should make it sound like I'm a tiny person

01:57:46   in the ear canal, but I'm so small

01:57:48   that the ear canal is like a cathedral

01:57:50   and my voice echoes in spatial audio.

01:57:53   - Reverb, yeah, reverb is fine

01:57:54   'cause that doesn't mess people up too badly.

01:57:57   - Yeah, that's totally fine.

01:57:58   - Well, but you can do spatial audio with that

01:58:00   because like Casey can be at the other end of the ear canal

01:58:02   and they yell to each other and our voices can bounce.

01:58:06   - Hello.

01:58:06   (beeping)