00:00:07 ◼ ► Oh gee, yeah. C is kicking my butt right now, and audio math is kicking my butt right now.
00:00:14 ◼ ► So what are you trying to accomplish? And use very small words, because I am not familiar with audio
00:00:20 ◼ ► stuff at all. Okay, so in audio terms, I'm trying to implement a look-ahead limiter. You know,
00:00:26 ◼ ► you probably know as a podcaster and as a video person that clipping is real bad. I've heard this.
00:00:38 ◼ ► it sounds really bad. It sounds like a scratchy, loud kind of like kind of thing, like it sounds
00:00:44 ◼ ► awful. So it's very important when you're dealing with audio amplification, when you're trying to
00:00:49 ◼ ► make, you know, make volume levels louder or whatever else, it's very important to have a
00:00:53 ◼ ► limiter in front of it. And the point of the limiter is to catch those like very loud signals
00:00:59 ◼ ► that would clip before they clip and to apply gain downwards on them. So hold on, so hold on. So
00:01:06 ◼ ► to use kind of a really crummy analogy, so this is like I have my finger on the volume dial. I know
00:01:14 ◼ ► it's not quite volume, but for the sake of the analogy, I have my finger or my hand on the volume
00:01:18 ◼ ► dial and I see the person in front of the microphone take a real deep breath and like get
00:01:23 ◼ ► ready to shout and I go, oh crap. And I turn the volume down because I know they're about to shout.
00:01:27 ◼ ► Well, that's the look ahead part, but I haven't gotten to that yet. So the main part is they start
00:01:31 ◼ ► shouting and as they get really close to the top, you very quickly go, oh crap, this is going to
00:01:37 ◼ ► clip and you turn the volume down. Okay. Now you might think like the naive way to try to implement
00:01:41 ◼ ► this is basically you just look at every sample and the ones that are above one in the floating
00:01:49 ◼ ► point domain. So like the ones that are above 1.0, which is like the ceiling, you just like
00:01:53 ◼ ► compress those down by a certain multiplier or you just make them 1.0. You might think to do it that
00:01:59 ◼ ► way, but that ends up sounding awful because of the way signals work that basically introduces
00:02:03 ◼ ► a bunch of frequencies and distortion that weren't there before. And so the right way to do it is
00:02:16 ◼ ► advance that you can actually do almost like a gradual volume ramp downwards. And if you,
00:02:22 ◼ ► if you've seen, you know, if you're ever like using an audio editing program and you're,
00:02:25 ◼ ► and you're playing with the controls of either a compressor, which is basically a limiter with
00:02:30 ◼ ► some extra stuff or a limiter, then you will see something called attack time and release time.
00:02:35 ◼ ► And these are literally like the amount of time usually measured in like tens of milliseconds or
00:02:40 ◼ ► maybe hundreds of milliseconds at worst, the amount of time that it will take to turn the
00:02:46 ◼ ► volume down to prevent clipping. And then that's the, that's the attack time. And the release time
00:02:50 ◼ ► is the amount of time it takes to go back to normal. It's basically turn the volume back to
00:02:53 ◼ ► normal after it thinks it had that the, that the clipping sound is over. What you want to do is
00:03:05 ◼ ► which means you need to be able to look to see what's coming in the stream before you apply the
00:03:11 ◼ ► volume dip to, to limit it from clipping. So what I've been doing and, and, you know, so, you know,
00:03:18 ◼ ► programmers, you know, you can figure out like when you're dealing with some kind of like rolling
00:03:21 ◼ ► buffer with like look ahead functionality, but you can't modify this stuff and look ahead, but for
00:03:25 ◼ ► yet, like it's kind of, it's kind of awkward. And, and so I basically spent yesterday building the
00:03:31 ◼ ► framework to do look ahead processing. And then I spent today trying and largely failing to write
00:03:40 ◼ ► the, the gain processing that will gradually in response to what's coming up ahead, will gradually
00:03:48 ◼ ► raise and lower the volume in a way that doesn't sound horrible. And that actually works to prevent
00:03:51 ◼ ► clipping. And I just, I've just been having a terrible time. My brain is melted right now. Like I,
00:03:57 ◼ ► it takes, it takes me a long time to understand complex math, like, you know, anything involving
00:04:01 ◼ ► signal processing filters. Like I barely understand that stuff. Cause I'm really not good at that kind
00:04:06 ◼ ► of advanced math. I have very little knowledge of it and very little background in it, but the
00:04:10 ◼ ► limiter I thought would be easy cause I thought like, Oh, it's just like, you know, you basically
00:04:13 ◼ ► like ramp up and down the, the gain and response to what you see ahead of you. And yeah, it's
00:04:18 ◼ ► kicking my butt. It's not easy at all. And of course, because I'm working in C, I am frequently
00:04:24 ◼ ► like having these comical errors where like, you know, I love working in C. I like C was kind of
00:04:29 ◼ ► like my, my programming youth and, and I really enjoyed it. And I, my first job was all in C.
00:04:36 ◼ ► So I do love C on, on a very like intellectual level, but it is awfully funny when like,
00:04:46 ◼ ► worked like last build in this build, it's making random noise all over the place. Well,
00:04:51 ◼ ► I screwed up on memory somewhere and you just got to find like, where is the somewhere like
00:04:59 ◼ ► Oh boy. So I've had a number of those times and I've had a lot of terrible luck trying to
00:05:05 ◼ ► implement my limiter. Uh, but, uh, getting there slowly. Now why C speed? Because the API you're
00:05:13 ◼ ► using to see all the above some of the above the API. I'm actually not dealing directly with core
00:05:18 ◼ ► audio at this level. I'm dealing just with like float arrays, like just like giant, giant buffers
00:05:24 ◼ ► of floats that are sample data. So I could be writing this pretty much anything that can,
00:05:29 ◼ ► that can operate on raw buffers. When I write code at this level, I make extensive use of the, uh,
00:05:40 ◼ ► wrapper functions around highly vectorized optimizations for common math operations and
00:05:44 ◼ ► this kind of thing. So like if you want to like take an array of 500 numbers and multiply them
00:05:49 ◼ ► all by the same value or multiply two giant arrays of 500 numbers by each other and put the result
00:05:54 ◼ ► in a third array of 500 numbers using these functions in the accelerate framework are way,
00:05:59 ◼ ► way, way faster because they use vector operations on the processor. Uh, it's way faster than like
00:06:07 ◼ ► whole bunch of raw float arrays and a whole bunch of calls to these low level functions and everything.
00:06:13 ◼ ► And so you can do this in Swift, but Swift is such a Royal pain in the butt doing things like this.
00:06:21 ◼ ► Sure. And why not? Why not objective C then? Um, this library, I really just write and see for
00:06:28 ◼ ► speed like this is so in this audio pipeline is the only time I have ever had a measurable
00:06:34 ◼ ► improvement by removing an objective C message sent. Like I actually like back, back when I was
00:06:40 ◼ ► doing that battery testing, when I was like running at the batteries and all my devices
00:06:43 ◼ ► seeing like, Oh, does the speaker use all the battery? Does the Bluetooth use all the battery?
00:06:46 ◼ ► So that I discovered this optimization where like there was like there was this one call that
00:06:50 ◼ ► basically renders out a block of like 500 samples of audio in the audio pipeline. And so it's called,
00:06:57 ◼ ► you know, there's 44,100 samples per second. So the block that renders 500 at a time is called
00:07:03 ◼ ► many times per second. And by removing an obviously message send from that, I was able to
00:07:09 ◼ ► actually speed up the processing by some amount, like, you know, a couple percent, but it was like,
00:07:14 ◼ ► it was measurable and it was reliably measurable. Hmm. That's surprising. So what is the ultimate
00:07:20 ◼ ► driving motivation behind this? If you're willing to share. So I'm working on voice boost too.
00:07:26 ◼ ► I've been taught, I've talked about this a few times here and there, like just kind of mentioning
00:07:28 ◼ ► here and there. And basically I'm trying to do voice boost, but better. One of the reasons I'm
00:07:33 ◼ ► doing it now is because I really, if I want to support airplay too, in a way that isn't horrible,
00:07:39 ◼ ► I really need to write my own voice boost code instead of right now, voice boots is implemented
00:07:44 ◼ ► as a combination of a legacy, a you graph nodes like audio graph nodes from core audio.
00:07:49 ◼ ► And that API seems to like, it's very discouraged to use that now. And, uh, and it seems like Apple
00:07:57 ◼ ► is slowly showing at the door and using those to supply an airplay to stream is possible,
00:08:09 ◼ ► like off to the side that isn't connected to the hardware render with it into a voice or into a
00:08:16 ◼ ► airplay to style renderer. And like, so it's like, it's just a lot of overhead. It's a lot of extra
00:08:20 ◼ ► work and that would probably have a noticeable battery cost. So I don't want to do it that way
00:08:24 ◼ ► if I don't have to. So the way I want to do it is by not needing those old, a you graph processing
00:08:30 ◼ ► nodes anymore, which means that I have to write my own compressor. And the way you write a compressor
00:08:36 ◼ ► is you write a limiter first. And so I, uh, I need the, I need basically, I need the limiter for lots
00:08:42 ◼ ► of different things in audio processing things. Uh, but the very first thing I need it for is the
00:08:48 ◼ ► voice boost to compressor that I'm writing from scratch. And this is probably not wise, uh, but
00:08:53 ◼ ► I just spent like a month dealing with just like pain in the butt watch things, like not the fun
00:09:01 ◼ ► part of app development, but just like pain in the butt, like, Oh, this, this watch transfer just
00:09:06 ◼ ► failed for no reason. How do I fix that? How do I try to work around that? And, and going through
00:09:11 ◼ ► like, so overcast, um, five Oh three just came out a couple of days ago and, um, and this included
00:09:18 ◼ ► basically what I'm talking about, like the, the fix for watch transfers. This was a grueling process
00:09:23 ◼ ► where to figure out why standalone watch podcast transfers were so unreliable. I basically,
00:09:31 ◼ ► for the last few weeks, like shipping a beta build almost every day, uh, with different tweaks and
00:09:36 ◼ ► changes, I built a whole logging frameworks of people. So, so the watch would log what it's doing
00:09:41 ◼ ► and coordinate it with the phone app and log what it's doing. And then people in the beta could then
00:09:45 ◼ ► send me those logs so I could look at them and make tweaks and send that new builds the next day
00:09:49 ◼ ► or later that same day. And it was just a grueling long process of trying to finally figure out how
00:09:57 ◼ ► to make watch transfers even remotely reliable. And so I'm rewarding myself with that long slog
00:10:02 ◼ ► of doing something I really didn't want to do. That's very boring with a bunch of C. Well,
00:10:07 ◼ ► yeah, cause it's different, you know, it's like, I know it sounds crazy, but like, it does sound
00:10:11 ◼ ► crazy, but this is something I've been putting off for a year. Uh, and it, or, and parts of it have
00:10:17 ◼ ► taken me a year to figure out even how to do, uh, like, cause as I mentioned, like this involves a
00:10:22 ◼ ► lot of like DSP stuff that I do not have a background in that I, that I mostly don't know,
00:10:26 ◼ ► like whenever I see like whenever I like find a stumble upon like an academic paper online,
00:10:31 ◼ ► it tells me to do something and it's starts putting in like the big Greek, like Sigma symbol
00:10:35 ◼ ► and everything. I don't even, I don't know how to do even that stuff. Like I don't know how to even
00:10:38 ◼ ► read mathematic notation beyond like basic stuff. And when they start talking about things like,
00:10:44 ◼ ► like, you know, if I are filters and everything I had, I don't have any clue about that stuff. Like
00:10:48 ◼ ► I that's way above my head. And so it's taken me a very long time to figure out how to do this kind
00:10:53 ◼ ► of stuff. But I have figured out enough of it to get by on some low levels. And so I actually find
00:10:59 ◼ ► this really fascinating and interesting and it's a very good intellectual challenge and it's working
00:11:04 ◼ ► towards something I really, really want to get done. That will be very satisfying to me that most
00:11:09 ◼ ► people won't care about at all. All of this is going to go into a little check box that says
00:11:12 ◼ ► AirPlay 2. Like it's like a little bullet point feature on one release now supports AirPlay 2.
00:11:22 ◼ ► So I, that's what, that's my main goal here. I couldn't care less about your home pod. I want
00:11:26 ◼ ► to build more interesting stuff. So I want to do AirPlay 2 first to get me to, to build the
00:11:30 ◼ ► building blocks and then I can do interesting stuff with that. So that's, that's where I am now. And I
00:11:35 ◼ ► actually find this to be a wonderful change of pace from fighting watch connectivity and transfers.
00:11:43 ◼ ► This actually feels, even though this is way like harder math wise and way lower level,
00:11:49 ◼ ► this feels more satisfying to me because I feel like I'm not cleaning up some mess. I feel like
00:11:55 ◼ ► I'm actually building something and that's something you don't get very often in programming and you
00:11:59 ◼ ► gotta really enjoy it when you do. Not to spoil your fun, but did you check to see if there are
00:12:04 ◼ ► any libraries that already do this? Like open source libraries? There might be some that are
00:12:08 ◼ ► like really part of something bigger like, like the, what's that audio program? Not Audacity.
00:12:13 ◼ ► Yeah. Audacity. Like Audacity is an open source audio editor that has things like limiters and
00:12:17 ◼ ► compressors in it. I could look at their code and like, I don't know, steal it. I don't want to do
00:12:22 ◼ ► that though. And, and it's probably hard to like, you know, port some of that stuff over. What I'm
00:12:26 ◼ ► really looking for is like descriptions of like algorithms to do these kinds of things. And those
00:12:31 ◼ ► are actually few and far between. Most online code that you would find would do this either as like a
00:12:40 ◼ ► matlab function, which I don't know what to do with or they're doing it. They're just like, you know,
00:12:49 ◼ ► going to call the core audio units that at least I know how to use audio units already. I'm trying
00:12:53 ◼ ► to do this without using audio units. So here we are. To go back a half step. Do you have any
00:13:01 ◼ ► findings that you're willing to share with regard to watch related things? Like, was there
00:13:13 ◼ ► The main problem I had with the watch. So the, the watch app can wake up the phone app in the
00:13:20 ◼ ► background whenever it wants. Like whenever the watch app is running or is updating itself.
00:13:24 ◼ ► If the, if the watch app is running, it can send a message to the phone app and the phone app will
00:13:28 ◼ ► wake up if it's in the background, but it doesn't work the other way around. The phone app cannot
00:13:33 ◼ ► wake up the watch app on demand. So the phone app, like if, if you get a new download into your
00:13:39 ◼ ► phone, the phone can't send that immediately to the watch. It has to wait for the next time the
00:13:44 ◼ ► watch app checks in and the watch app can check in really, really pretty rarely. Um, you know, it's,
00:13:51 ◼ ► if you have it configured as a complication, it gets maybe every 15 minutes worth of check-ins.
00:13:57 ◼ ► If it's not a complication and you just have it on the watch, it gets a lot less time than that.
00:14:01 ◼ ► Each one of those check-ins, it can only be alive for like two seconds before the system, uh, you
00:14:06 ◼ ► know, puts it back in the background. And if at any point you, uh, violate any of these limits
00:14:12 ◼ ► from the watch app side, your app gets killed and then it doesn't come back for awhile.
00:14:16 ◼ ► So I had many problems. Part of my problems were I was exhausting some of these resource limits
00:14:22 ◼ ► because some things in the watch were just taking too much computation that I was doing.
00:14:25 ◼ ► And so it was getting killed in the background a lot. So it was not refreshing very often.
00:14:29 ◼ ► Uh, more problems. There were so many problems. Like there were a couple of race conditions with
00:14:33 ◼ ► like the watch app would start up and send a sync message to the phone app and then receive some
00:14:39 ◼ ► files the phone app had sent in the background. Uh, cause watching activity does not guarantee
00:14:44 ◼ ► the order of things you send, uh, whether some of them are background or not. It's very, very weird.
00:14:48 ◼ ► Uh, and so like there was some weird race conditions. There were some concurrency bugs.
00:14:53 ◼ ► There were some crashes that were sometimes my fault, sometimes being related to resource
00:14:58 ◼ ► terminations. And I had a system before where the phone app would try to communicate with the watch
00:15:06 ◼ ► app proactively. So even if the watch app wasn't running, and I said it earlier, the phone app can't
00:15:11 ◼ ► wake it up. The phone app was trying to say, you know what, this episode just came in. Let me just
00:15:15 ◼ ► create a watch file transfer and just tell it to start. And then next time the watch comes around
00:15:21 ◼ ► or next time the systems feel like it, it can maybe get that transfer. And hopefully sometime
00:15:25 ◼ ► the watch app will be woken up and it can receive that. So I was, I was basically proactively
00:15:30 ◼ ► creating transfers on the phone. This, this meant the phone had to keep track of what the watch had.
00:15:48 ◼ ► Problem number one was if you have more than one watch, this totally breaks because if you have
00:15:52 ◼ ► more than one watch, then every time the watch, every time a watch checks in with the phone,
00:15:56 ◼ ► first of all, if you have just changed watches, all background transfers get killed and invalidated
00:16:03 ◼ ► and you have to start them over. So if you, if you wear multiple watches, this is, this is,
00:16:08 ◼ ► this is one thing that suffers. And then also then like, you know, then you have two different sets
00:16:14 ◼ ► of what you might have. And so the phone can get confused about what the, what the watch has,
00:16:18 ◼ ► and it can send duplicate things. Some of those race conditions also resulted in duplicate sends
00:16:23 ◼ ► where like the phone would tell or the watch would tell the phone, all right, I have numbers one,
00:16:27 ◼ ► two, and three, and the phone would say, all right, I'll send you number four. And then
00:16:36 ◼ ► watch connectivity delivered in the background, number four, that was sitting there waiting for
00:16:40 ◼ ► it, but it just hadn't delivered it right on launch. So then it actually already had number four,
00:16:49 ◼ ► it thought it didn't have it. So it like, there's all sorts of weird little like race conditions and
00:16:53 ◼ ► various concurrency issues that just took me a very long time to figure out and fix. And my,
00:17:02 ◼ ► The phone no longer keeps track of what's on the watch, except for a very basic display function of
00:17:07 ◼ ► like displaying how much free space you have in the setting screen. That's it. Now, every time the
00:17:12 ◼ ► watch syncs with the phone, it tells it, I have, you know, episodes number one, two, and three,
00:17:16 ◼ ► or whatever. And the phone in response to that will create any necessary transfers to send new
00:17:22 ◼ ► stuff to the watch. That way you can have 10 watches paired and it'll basically work. Like,
00:17:29 ◼ ► it'll be, it'll still suck for other reasons, but it'll basically work because then like each
00:17:35 ◼ ► watch is only getting what is sent in response to it. This ends up working way more reliably
00:17:46 ◼ ► which dramatically improves things. The only downside to it is that the delay between when
00:17:54 ◼ ► your phone downloads a new episode and when that episode shows up on the watch, maybe longer in
00:18:01 ◼ ► many cases because it has to wait, like so the phone can download it and then it has to wait
00:18:12 ◼ ► But every other way I tried doing things was very, very buggy and very, you know, it would destroy
00:18:17 ◼ ► people's batteries and everything and it was, and it would make a lot of duplicates and it would,
00:18:22 ◼ ► transfers would get all bogged down and watch connectivity, which is a very buggy framework.
00:18:28 ◼ ► it would just take forever. Like it was just, it was so problematic to do it, to do the proactive
00:18:33 ◼ ► method. So this wave of basically doing everything in response to something is way more effective,
00:19:00 ◼ ► - Oh, geez. I almost got it. Like I have the look ahead part, I have that done. It's just a question
00:19:07 ◼ ► of like responding to the changes in like attenuation in a smooth and also accurate way.
00:19:16 ◼ ► 'Cause in theory, like if you have a look ahead of say, you know, 10 milliseconds and your attack
00:19:23 ◼ ► time is 10 milliseconds, in theory, it should be impossible to ever clip. Like the output should
00:19:40 ◼ ► - Honestly, much of it is. Yesterday was a lot of fun, like putting together all the look ahead stuff
00:19:45 ◼ ► and doing some more voice boost coding. Like that yesterday I had a lot of fun and I got a lot done.
00:19:49 ◼ ► It was very productive. Today has been one of those like bang in my head against the wall days.
00:19:53 ◼ ► - Do you have a separate little project where you're working on this part? Like are you,
00:20:05 ◼ ► - I have a Mac command line utility that I develop all this in. So that way, like I can,
00:20:10 ◼ ► I just hit build and it's, I don't have to wait for the simulator. I don't have to wait for any
00:20:13 ◼ ► devices. Like I just hit build and I run it from the command line with command line arguments of
00:20:17 ◼ ► files I have on my Mac to test with. And it's like, here's an input file, here's an output file.
00:20:21 ◼ ► You know, so it not only is it way faster of like a build and run and debug cycle, but also then I
00:20:27 ◼ ► can, I can supply it whatever input file I want. And then I can open the result up in Adobe Audition,
00:20:33 ◼ ► which is like, you know, this very sophisticated wave editor. And I can look and see exactly what
00:20:38 ◼ ► I output like at the wave level and just see like, is this working right? I can listen to it. I can
00:20:42 ◼ ► like on my big headphones and everything. So it's all to make it a lot easier. And then,
00:20:46 ◼ ► but I'm working on a framework that is shared with Overcast. And so that way, like once I figure it
00:20:52 ◼ ► out in this Mac utility, I can just bring it over. Just have a way out of the faster code debug cycle
00:20:58 ◼ ► is another reason a lot of people like unit tests when developing an isolated piece of functionality.
00:21:02 ◼ ► I love you, John. Oh my word, I love you. In this case, I don't know that at this moment.
00:21:09 ◼ ► You can still do it. Testing could still be a part of it if you knew what the, for example,
00:21:16 ◼ ► if you knew what you wanted the samples to look like in the stream, right? But you're doing it
00:21:19 ◼ ► sort of the more visual way of like make a file, chuck it into an editor and look at it, you know,
00:21:24 ◼ ► whatever. I also spend a lot of time in the debugger. Like that's like, basically the debugger is my test
00:21:29 ◼ ► suite. Like I just hit a break point right after, like, it's like, I know what this is supposed to
00:21:33 ◼ ► be. That's an under the radar title of under the radar titles. The debugger is my test suite.
00:21:38 ◼ ► Also, you can still run the debugger with unit tests. Like that's still a thing. Don't worry.
00:21:47 ◼ ► doing something like this where it's just a Mac binary is so refreshing in a few ways. Like,
00:21:52 ◼ ► it's so damn easy and fast and there's so much less to deal with. It's, it's really nice.
00:21:59 ◼ ► Uh, I hear you. No, I feel like, um, I don't want to pull on the unit testing thread anymore,
00:22:04 ◼ ► but, uh, I feel like unit testing is one of those things that you're going to come to in your own
00:22:10 ◼ ► time for some ridiculous reason. And then you're going to say to John and me, hopefully me, if not
00:22:16 ◼ ► both of us, you know, unit testing is actually really convenient. That's a pretty long, infinite
00:22:21 ◼ ► time. I'm arguing it given the current rate of change. Yeah. I would, I would not bet that I
00:22:29 ◼ ► would be arriving at that point. Anytime. Like I think I will be retired from programming before
00:22:34 ◼ ► I arrive at that point. You're going to work on it. Start working on Adam Casey. Yeah, there you
00:22:37 ◼ ► go. Maybe you have a chance with Adam will be heavily into test driven development. Oh,
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00:24:36 ◼ ► All right, let's start with some follow up. You're welcome, world. I think we can comfortably say
00:24:47 ◼ ► that it was only the three of us that got Apple to update its bagel emoji. And now it mostly looks
00:24:55 ◼ ► okay. There's still room, but it's better than it was. Oh, it's way better. Let's say this. Yeah,
00:25:02 ◼ ► definitely. The main thing you can say about it is it is an improvement. I mean, how could it be
00:25:06 ◼ ► worse really? But it is an improvement for sure. There are things to be said about it. But put it
00:25:13 ◼ ► this way. If I squint or move away from these big images or whatever, one is immediately
00:25:18 ◼ ► identifiable as that's supposed to be a bagel and the other one still looks vaguely donut-like. So
00:25:22 ◼ ► success on if you look at this and tell me what it is, you can say it's a bagel. If you look at
00:25:26 ◼ ► the details, you can nitpick them. But as other people have pointed out, you look at the details
00:25:31 ◼ ► of almost any emoji and there's some ridiculous stuff in there. But like the key thing tested,
00:25:39 ◼ ► it's a failure. So thumbs up. It now looks like it is now identifiable as a bagel, albeit a very
00:25:46 ◼ ► strange pale bagel that's semi toasted with plastic cream cheese on it, whatever, whatever.
00:25:55 ◼ ► is not to look photorealistic. Like it's an art style that on some level and this varies
00:26:02 ◼ ► depending on the vendor, but like, you know, it always looks a little bit cartoony because they're
00:26:07 ◼ ► being displayed in text in very, very small sizes most of the time. And so like to have something
00:26:13 ◼ ► look totally photorealistic will just kind of look weird. So the style they're in is honestly,
00:26:24 ◼ ► Yeah, for sure. I was going to say it's very close to, again, potentially uncanny valley.
00:26:29 ◼ ► They it's it's stylized for sure, but it is very much more photorealistic than most other emoji.
00:26:35 ◼ ► Ultimately, this is a much better bagel. It is more realistic than I expected it to be.
00:26:44 ◼ ► I do think that I do know like so, OK, so like they they made like the little, you know,
00:26:49 ◼ ► buttcracks seem more prominent. And so it's easier. It's more easily identified as a bagel that way.
00:27:13 ◼ ► this is a cartoon, right? And so like it is it is supposed to be that way. And also the cream cheese
00:27:19 ◼ ► hides the the texture of the of the horrible bread texture it had before, which appears to still be
00:27:24 ◼ ► under it. But but we don't really see it anymore. So ultimately. Oh, and the color of the dough has
00:27:31 ◼ ► has been tweaked to be, I think, a lot better, much closer to a real bagel. So ultimately,
00:27:37 ◼ ► my main complaint about it, which admittedly is a very minor complaint, is that a plain bagel with
00:27:43 ◼ ► plain cream cheese is such a waste. Like you have two opportunities there to have interesting
00:27:49 ◼ ► flavors in the bagel and in the cream cheese. And I understand if maybe you want to just take one of
00:27:55 ◼ ► those like an everything bagel with plain cream cheese is really good. Or a plain bagel with like
00:28:01 ◼ ► some kind of really outrageous cream cheese, like you know, like a really strong vegetable or
00:28:05 ◼ ► scallion or so like like that can be good too. But to have a plain bagel and plain cream cheese
00:28:11 ◼ ► is just it's a waste of carbs. It's not a waste. It's not it's like it's like plain cheese pizza.
00:28:17 ◼ ► Like, yep, it's not the thing you want all the time and other things can be more exciting.
00:28:31 ◼ ► A couple of you know, not that we're going to go through all this all again, but a couple of my
00:28:35 ◼ ► complaints about this bagel, the bottom half like they hid the texture of the you know,
00:28:49 ◼ ► the parts that are sticking out of the wrong color. But the main thing you already touched on is the
00:28:52 ◼ ► cream cheese. First of all, I think it looks like plastic or wall spackle or something doesn't read
00:28:56 ◼ ► as good as the way the way it's. And again, this is all ridiculous stuff that you could only see if
00:29:01 ◼ ► it's giant size, small sizes, it's fine. But but even maybe it's small sizes, you can notice it's
00:29:05 ◼ ► like the there is there is no bagel ever made in the history of the universe that had the cream
00:29:10 ◼ ► cheese put on it so that there is a tiny thin rim of bagel visible uniformly around the outside.
00:29:16 ◼ ► Or like it's it's basically impossible to do that unless you custom made a machine. If I saw a bagel
00:29:21 ◼ ► like that, I'd know I was in like dreamscape with Dennis Quaid. Like this is not this is this is not
00:29:26 ◼ ► reality. Look at this cream cheese and this bagel. This would never exist in the real world. This
00:29:29 ◼ ► must be a dream. It's bad. Anyway, it's vastly improved. If you scroll down in this article on
00:29:37 ◼ ► Emojipedia about the bagel update and you can see the list of everyone else's bagel emoji like
00:29:41 ◼ ► Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter. What the heck flavor is the Twitter bagel? It looks like a
00:29:48 ◼ ► hamburger. That's not even a bagel. Yeah, seriously. So the Twitter bagel, it has a sphere with a
00:29:54 ◼ ► hole down the center. Yeah, so like so shape wise, I can kind of forgive the shape if that's their
00:29:59 ◼ ► style. I mean, I can't. It looks like the Death Star. It does look like the Death Star. It actually
00:30:02 ◼ ► kind of does. But and so it's like it's it's clearly illustrating a bagel with cream cheese
00:30:07 ◼ ► and the bagel has five very large seeds on it and like they're like the size of like almonds.
00:30:15 ◼ ► And then the color of the bagel, it's almost red. It's like it's like a like a low saturation,
00:30:23 ◼ ► like dusty reddish brown. And I have never seen I used to work in a bagel shop and I've eaten a lot
00:30:30 ◼ ► of bagels since then. I have never seen a bagel that was anywhere near this color in any flavor
00:30:36 ◼ ► in any bagel shop anywhere. You don't have red velvet bagels mixed with blueberry all the time
00:30:45 ◼ ► cylindrical hole cut down the center of it. It looks more like a weird cream filled donut.
00:30:51 ◼ ► Yeah, it really does. It's by far the worst one. I don't think Microsoft's or Google's are
00:30:55 ◼ ► particularly good. In fact, I think outside of Apple's, I think Samsung's is actually my
00:30:59 ◼ ► favorite of this batch. Yeah, Samsung's is the clear second place. Well, I don't know. Google's
00:31:03 ◼ ► Google's isn't bad. I mean, I identify it was a bagel like you wouldn't that they put the sesame
00:31:07 ◼ ► seeds on it. What else? What else? It's not a donut. Well, Google's has a couple of critical
00:31:11 ◼ ► errors. So number one is like the perspective between the seam between the cream cheese and the
00:31:17 ◼ ► top bagel half on the far left and right is weird. It has like the wrong perspective. Like it's
00:31:23 ◼ ► overflowing. That's what they're trying to get at. But the bagels like weirdly behind it. It's
00:31:27 ◼ ► not the right angle. And then second of all, the way the seeds are distributed, it's as if the side
00:31:32 ◼ ► of the bagel that is not facing you has no seeds on it. Yeah, it's nonsensical. Yeah. Like I feel
00:31:39 ◼ ► like, yeah, like Apple's looks pretty good now. Twitter's is good for comedy value. I don't know
00:31:44 ◼ ► what's going on in Microsoft land with those black outlines. It's probably just their style
00:31:47 ◼ ► and Samsung's looks like a legitimate lender's freezer bagel like that. Samsung did a really
00:31:52 ◼ ► good job of showing what a lender's bagel looks like. It just looks a little donut like to Apple's
00:31:57 ◼ ► is clearly the best in this bunch now. So it's not even a contest. All I know is you're welcome world.
00:32:05 ◼ ► Yep. I complained about a screen time as a feature I was using and then it just stopped working. I
00:32:10 ◼ ► could no longer see my kids screen time reports on my phone and a million people wrote in to say,
00:32:17 ◼ ► yep, I'm having exactly the same problem. I tried disabling screen time for the people and
00:32:24 ◼ ► remove like the big reset, which was a terrible mistake because Apple and their infinite wisdom
00:32:29 ◼ ► has decided if you turn it off for somebody and then turn it back on, it has no recollection of
00:32:34 ◼ ► what your settings were. It's like, so you're starting from scratch again. And there are a lot
00:32:38 ◼ ► of settings. So once I did that once, I'm like, well, even if this fixed the problem, I wouldn't
00:32:43 ◼ ► go through it again because it's ridiculous. So as a warning to anyone who's thinking of trying
00:32:47 ◼ ► that, A, it didn't fix the problem and B, it makes you redo all of the settings. I hope you
00:32:51 ◼ ► remembered what they all were. But yeah, everyone's like, yeah, it was working for me now. It's not.
00:32:55 ◼ ► One person did say that supposedly in the 12.1 beta it's fixed. I'm not on the beta, so I'll just
00:33:00 ◼ ► wait patiently for 12.1 to come out and hope it fixes my problem. But if it's happening to you,
00:33:11 ◼ ► We talked about do not disturb. I was a big proponent of setting time do not disturb. And
00:33:15 ◼ ► I said, don't worry. You people can still get through if they need to because your VIPs and
00:33:19 ◼ ► repeated messages will get through. There's one other thing I forgot to mention. All that is true.
00:33:24 ◼ ► There are settings that allow people to get through when they need to, but you can also
00:33:34 ◼ ► is able to bypass do not disturb with either sounds, vibrations, or both. Just straight up,
00:33:39 ◼ ► like they will just go straight through it. So if you're worried that your spouse or children won't
00:33:45 ◼ ► be able to get in touch with you, go to their contacts and flip the switches for their ringtone
00:33:50 ◼ ► and their vibrate settings and say that they will pierce the wall of do not disturb. Of course,
00:33:55 ◼ ► maybe you want to either, I was going to say, maybe you want to tell the person that it's on
00:33:59 ◼ ► so they don't send you a message and expect do not disturb to protect you. Or maybe you don't want to
00:34:04 ◼ ► tell those people that it's on and they'll just assume that they shouldn't text you late at night.
00:34:07 ◼ ► Anyway, you figure that out yourself, but it's a good setting. You should know it exists.
00:34:16 ◼ ► emergency bypass was one humongous switch for an entire contact. So what that meant was if I wanted
00:34:23 ◼ ► to turn emergency bypass on for Erin, not only did it turn it on for the phone, but it turned it on
00:34:29 ◼ ► for text messages, which is not advisable in my personal opinion, because sometimes she would be
00:34:33 ◼ ► up late or get up early either because she just happened to wake up or couldn't fall asleep,
00:34:38 ◼ ► whatever. Or maybe it was a baby related thing at the time. And so she tried to send me a text
00:34:43 ◼ ► with the expectation that I wouldn't see it until I woke up. It would pass through and actually make
00:34:48 ◼ ► noise even if I'm on do not disturb. Because like I said, it was just one or not. It was all or
00:34:53 ◼ ► nothing for emergency bypass. But I'm looking at this now in iOS 12. And you're right, John,
00:34:58 ◼ ► what you just said is accurate that in the ringtone section of a specific contact, there's
00:35:02 ◼ ► a switch for emergency bypass. And in the text tone section for the same contact, there is a
00:35:08 ◼ ► different switch for emergency bypass. So in my case, I have Erin's ringtone switch on,
00:35:14 ◼ ► because if she's calling me at like midnight, something's deeply broken. And the text tone,
00:35:19 ◼ ► I have emergency bypass off because like I said, it is not unreasonable for her to send me a
00:35:24 ◼ ► message either after I go to sleep or before I wake up or actually more often than not, it's me
00:35:28 ◼ ► sending them to her, not the other way around. But either way, you get the idea. So that's good to
00:35:32 ◼ ► know. I did not know that that was the case that there are now two switches. So if you've looked
00:35:35 ◼ ► at this early on when it first came out in like iOS 10, then maybe look again because it's gotten
00:35:40 ◼ ► better now. All right. We have some feedback with regard to your contact syncing, John,
00:35:46 ◼ ► have you fixed it? I haven't actually even looked into it, but I did get this one piece of feedback
00:35:52 ◼ ► that looked promising from Jordan McDonald. He said, I heard about my contact syncing issues,
00:35:56 ◼ ► and he had a similar problem. He said, my syncing issue was due to one or more of the limits Apple
00:36:00 ◼ ► places on syncing and linked me to one of these Apple support articles to help keep your, here's
00:36:06 ◼ ► a quote from it, to help iCloud keep your contacts, calendar reminders and bookmarks up to date,
00:36:10 ◼ ► keep your information within these limits. Now that text, I'm sure someone thinks is helpful,
00:36:15 ◼ ► but I read that text and it's like, I'm helping iCloud keep my stuff in sync by doing this. It's
00:36:22 ◼ ► like, is this a requirement or is it not? Or am I just like lightening the load? Like iCloud is
00:36:27 ◼ ► really tired. My complaint about the language is it doesn't make it clear that like, look,
00:36:31 ◼ ► if you don't stay within these limits, your stuff won't work. It's like, you can help it,
00:36:36 ◼ ► but you know, if you don't do it, it'll just be harder, but it'll still, anyway, the limit,
00:36:40 ◼ ► the limits is a whole bunch of limits listed, which some of them are, you know, it's like,
00:36:43 ◼ ► oh, you can only have 50,000 contacts. Fine. Like I'm okay with that, right? These, you know,
00:36:47 ◼ ► there's going to be limits. It's nice to list them. It seems like that's what this support
00:36:56 ◼ ► and the maximum size of a contact photo is, you know, why is it this number? God knows.
00:37:16 ◼ ► they're big photos, even as JPEGs, they are not 200 kilobytes. I'm starting from that. And maybe
00:37:20 ◼ ► even if I crop them. So here's the thing. I'm going to look into this next time I go on a
00:37:26 ◼ ► contact photo, you know, mission. First thing is I'm going to make sure whatever photos I'm trying
00:37:32 ◼ ► to get to sync are below the size. And the second thing is I'm going to see if I can interrogate
00:37:36 ◼ ► some of my existing photos and like re-add them, but at smaller sizes to see if that helps,
00:37:43 ◼ ► you know, things go, you know, because a couple of people have had the feedback like, oh, I found
00:37:46 ◼ ► one bad contact. And once I modified or deleted that contact, it stopped coming up the works and
00:37:51 ◼ ► everything synced. But the meta complaint is if these are the limits and your stuff just silently
00:37:59 ◼ ► doesn't sync because it's above limits, that is terrible. Like fine. You have these limits, fine.
00:38:04 ◼ ► The limits are weird. You have to tell me, Apple, you have to say, I'm never going to sync your
00:38:08 ◼ ► contacts because the photo you put on there is too big. Like, and I think I actually have seen
00:38:13 ◼ ► an error message that says, you know, sorry, that image is too big. If I accidentally, you know,
00:38:17 ◼ ► drag like a giant ping image on there or something, it's like multi-megabyte. Right. So I think there
00:38:21 ◼ ► is an error like that. So I'm hoping that this article is just old or I'm hoping this can't
00:38:27 ◼ ► possibly be true because if all my contacts have stopped syncing because I put some images in there
00:38:31 ◼ ► that are too big and it just decided to never tell me that and just hope that I have a podcast that
00:38:36 ◼ ► someone named Jordan McDonald listens to and they'll send me an email pointing me to this
00:38:40 ◼ ► obscure support article. Boy, I'm going to be really depressed if that's true. But anyway,
00:38:43 ◼ ► if you are having problems, you know, maybe do that. By the way, the published date on this
00:38:48 ◼ ► article is September 7th, 2018. So it's not looking good for my hope that this is not true.
00:38:54 ◼ ► All righty. What's next? Let's talk about the printer compatibility list, which came up
00:39:01 ◼ ► several episodes ago when I got a new printer and was unreasonably excited about it. And you
00:39:07 ◼ ► had pointed me to, I believe it was you, John, pointed me to the printer compatibility list.
00:39:30 ◼ ► maintaining this list. For like, for, you know, because remember I said, oh, I'll just wait for
00:39:34 ◼ ► the, you know, the thing to be updated for. And the thing I did know about also is that they'd
00:39:39 ◼ ► start subdividing into printing versus scanning. You know, it's still just two checkmarks,
00:39:43 ◼ ► but it's better than it was, you know, back in the day. But yeah, so they're not going to maintain
00:39:49 ◼ ► it anymore. And it's mostly because of AirPrint. The text from the thing is many vendors of printer
00:39:53 ◼ ► scanners have adopted driverless technology such as AirPrint. Driverless is basically where they,
00:39:58 ◼ ► you know, they have an agreed upon interface and they push more logic onto the printer and they
00:40:01 ◼ ► just say, look, printers, you got to talk to us in this way. Otherwise we don't print. That's
00:40:04 ◼ ► part of the AirPrint thing. Anyway, and they are no longer providing drivers for new devices. If
00:40:08 ◼ ► your printer was made in the last several years, it probably doesn't require a driver. This list
00:40:12 ◼ ► is provided for reference purposes and it's no longer being updated. So basically they're saying
00:40:16 ◼ ► printer drivers, Apple would like them to no longer be a thing. It's like, look, if you want
00:40:21 ◼ ► to print on one of our things, do AirPrint. No drivers are required. And if you're not,
00:40:26 ◼ ► you're probably already on one of these lists. So in theory, it's reasonable to stop updating it
00:40:30 ◼ ► because people shouldn't be making printers that require drivers anymore. I'm not sure if that's
00:40:34 ◼ ► actually true enough and I kind of wish they would maintain that list, but I don't know. Like,
00:40:39 ◼ ► for example, the more recent version of one of the HP things, like the numbers were a little
00:40:44 ◼ ► bit bigger than the ones that are on the list. The last list that they have, this latest,
00:40:49 ◼ ► I couldn't find an HP printer with that number. I found one with like that number minus 10.
00:40:53 ◼ ► And maybe it's the same and maybe it would work fine, but then maybe it's totally different. Like
00:40:57 ◼ ► you don't really know. So if they never update that list again, I'm never going to see a list
00:41:02 ◼ ► like for Mojave to say, does this HP 12345 printer and scanner work with Mojave, with drivers or
00:41:11 ◼ ► without drivers? It's just like, I guess I have to check whether it does AirPrint. Does AirPrint
00:41:15 ◼ ► encompass scanning? Anyway, I'm still not doing anything with my printers, but Apple is out of the
00:41:21 ◼ ► business of keeping track of this big long list of printers that work and they just want everyone
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00:43:43 ◼ ► So somebody has licensed the Palm name to make a little itty bitty bitty phone that is kind of
00:43:50 ◼ ► the Apple watch to Android phones ish. So this is a little tiny phone that is a mostly full featured
00:43:59 ◼ ► Android phone that you can only buy on Verizon and only as an accessory to a regular phone.
00:44:07 ◼ ► And I guess the idea is much like the cellular Apple watch where you can walk away from your
00:44:12 ◼ ► phone and even drive away from your phone. And you can still get phone calls on your watch and
00:44:17 ◼ ► you can still get text messages on your watch. While on this little baby phone, you can get text
00:44:21 ◼ ► messages and make phone calls and whatnot. But so it's designed to be with you when you don't want
00:44:37 ◼ ► - When we were talking about night and day phone, that was the joke of like several years ago. Now
00:44:41 ◼ ► it's like your phone needs a phone. - Yeah. I don't get this. - Neither do I. - I think it's cool
00:44:46 ◼ ► that people are trying new ideas, but not every new idea is a good one. Who wants to get away
00:44:53 ◼ ► from their phone, but bring another phone with them? I just don't get it. - I'm not sure whether
00:44:59 ◼ ► this will succeed. Obviously this, you know, it's $350. Like it's only from Verizon. It's a little
00:45:03 ◼ ► Android thing. Like it's a very limited scope for this. And the fact that they bought the Palm name
00:45:08 ◼ ► and shoved it on the back means nothing because it's just an Android phone. But when I look at
00:45:12 ◼ ► this, I think about like, and there's a kernel of a decent idea in there somewhere, which is
00:45:19 ◼ ► as phones get bigger, physically speaking, it is sometimes inconvenient to have your, you know,
00:45:28 ◼ ► iPhone XS Max or like, you know, your big phone with you, particularly in places like in the summer,
00:45:33 ◼ ► you just got shorts and a t-shirt on. Like it's a big thing. But people also don't want to be
00:45:40 ◼ ► without their phones. We know like the phone insecurity problem, like, you know, it's like
00:45:43 ◼ ► taking a pacifier away from a toddler. They need to have their phone with them at all times. And
00:45:47 ◼ ► there is a tension there. I like to have my phone with me at all times, so I'm in touch, but these
00:45:51 ◼ ► phones are so freaking huge. But I love my big phone. I love it to death. I want my phone to be
00:45:55 ◼ ► even bigger. It's just humongous, right? But I'm going to go and just try to stick that in my
00:46:00 ◼ ► shorts pocket or do I have to always bring like a bag or a backpack? It's just, it's kind of too
00:46:06 ◼ ► much. And you're right that like the cellular Apple Watch is perhaps a thing there, but it's
00:46:09 ◼ ► not like you're going to text people when you say they're Apple Watch and you can't really watch a
00:46:12 ◼ ► quick YouTube video or do an Instagram or like, right? So what this product points out to me
00:46:27 ◼ ► being filled. Phones used to be much smaller than they are now. They've gotten so big that they sort
00:46:32 ◼ ► of have, you know, priced them out, priced themselves out, price is the wrong word. They've
00:46:42 ◼ ► little thing you just chuck in your pocket and go, right? You don't do that anymore because it's so,
00:46:50 ◼ ► less humongous phones. Does it argue for people to buy a big phone and a tiny phone? Probably not,
00:46:56 ◼ ► because that's kind of silly and you know, you got to, who wants to deal with two phones, but
00:47:00 ◼ ► that's what they're trying to do here to say, sometimes you wish you had your phone with you
00:47:04 ◼ ► and you wish you could do all the phone things, including texting people and doing a Snapchat or
00:47:08 ◼ ► making a little video or like, you know, do all the phone things, but it's not so darn big, but
00:47:14 ◼ ► you still love your big phone. So I wish that what actually happened instead of this silliness is that
00:47:20 ◼ ► more phone makers, Android and Apple, decided to sell, go back to selling some phones that are not
00:47:26 ◼ ► so big that they are, that they limit the context in which they can be comfortably used.
00:47:32 ◼ ► Good luck. This would have been a lot more interesting if the phone number sharing thing
00:47:38 ◼ ► was optional. Yeah, you got to have, don't you have to have a second number with it or something?
00:47:43 ◼ ► Well, no, no, no. So it does the same. Yeah, it does the same thing that the watch does, which is
00:47:53 ◼ ► this can't be a device that like you buy for your kids to take to school with them. Like,
00:48:02 ◼ ► hardware wise, they could sell it individually, but how they're positioning now is as a phone for
00:48:06 ◼ ► your phone or as a little thing where, you know, so I think again, I think there's a lot wrong with
00:48:09 ◼ ► this product, but the idea of market for a smaller phone, I think is there. Right. Like, it's like,
00:48:15 ◼ ► there's two, there's two separate things about this. Like there's the, there's the idea of a
00:48:20 ◼ ► small limited phone, and then the idea of a satellite phone that shares the same number
00:48:26 ◼ ► as your main phone. So you could take it with you when you don't want to take your main phone for
00:48:28 ◼ ► some reason. And like, I think that latter idea about having them both share the same number is
00:48:33 ◼ ► very limited in who actually would want that. It's limited to people who have a day phone or
00:48:39 ◼ ► a night phone or two Apple watches. Like, I bet there is a market for that. It's probably not very
00:48:42 ◼ ► big. And also about this being limited. It's not really, it's not a limited phone. It does all the
00:48:46 ◼ ► phone things is limited because it's smaller and probably gets worse battery life. And you know,
00:48:51 ◼ ► it's not, it doesn't have a fastest processor, but there's nothing that you would, you know,
00:48:55 ◼ ► there's no category of thing that you want to do on a phone. This can't do like, this is bigger than
00:48:59 ◼ ► the original iPhone probably. Right. Like you can do all the things on it as a camera. It has video
00:49:03 ◼ ► and it's like just the stuff isn't that good, but it's not even that limited. Right. So that's,
00:49:08 ◼ ► that's why I feel like someone might get one of these and come to the realization that most of the
00:49:14 ◼ ► time, all they need is this little dinky underpowered thing. And it feels so much better in
00:49:18 ◼ ► their pocket than the giant thing. But very few people will ever come to that realization because
00:49:22 ◼ ► who the heck is going to buy two phones and deal with all that? Like it's a, you know, a tech nerd
00:49:26 ◼ ► thing or people with money to burn or whatever. So, but anyway, I hope other, you know, phone
00:49:31 ◼ ► makers look at this and the lesson they take from it is not, well, we'll never do that because look
00:49:35 ◼ ► what a disaster that product was. That's the lesson they take is that there's enough interest
00:49:39 ◼ ► in this that they should consider making one of their models not be the size of a dinner tray.
00:49:44 ◼ ► I do think though, like this is one of those like aspirational products, like even for the people
00:49:50 ◼ ► who buy it that they might think is very similar to the cellular Apple watch. They might think,
00:49:55 ◼ ► Oh, I'm going to leave my, my big phone behind during occasions or roles X, Y, and Z. And I'll
00:50:01 ◼ ► bring this little satellite phone with me. But then, and by the way, if you're an iPhone user,
00:50:07 ◼ ► this doesn't have iMessage because it's Android. So that kind of sucks. So this is, I think this
00:50:12 ◼ ► is mostly for Android people. If you're an iPhone user for the same money, you could just buy an
00:50:16 ◼ ► iPhone SE. Anyway, but like, I think it's one of those things where you might think you would use
00:50:22 ◼ ► this in a, in a few contexts, but in real life, the first few times you did it, you would miss
00:50:27 ◼ ► things about your big phone. Number one, frequently cited by Apple watch people, you miss the camera.
00:50:32 ◼ ► And you know, this phone does have a camera, but it's not going to be nearly as good as the ones
00:50:37 ◼ ► that are in the flagship phones that you probably have access to otherwise, if you're spending this
00:50:41 ◼ ► kind of money for a phone. So like you're going to, there's going to be, and there's going to be
00:50:46 ◼ ► a number of those things for everybody. Like there's, there's going to be things that like,
00:50:49 ◼ ► yeah, you know what you think you want to leave your big phone at home, but once you're without
00:50:54 ◼ ► it, like you, there's a lot of things that you're going to miss and you're going to regret leaving
00:50:58 ◼ ► it behind. And so this little phone is going to go then go sit in a drawer somewhere for the rest
00:51:02 ◼ ► of its life. Like I just see this as a problem that doesn't really, the issue of having a satellite
00:51:09 ◼ ► phone that you sometimes take with you is not a thing. That is not a thing anybody really wants,
00:51:14 ◼ ► or at least anybody wants in great numbers. And even if they, even if you give it to them,
00:51:19 ◼ ► they will realize they won't actually use it shortly afterwards. So I don't see that at all.
00:51:25 ◼ ► The idea of there being smaller phones as choices to buy for your main slash only phone,
00:51:32 ◼ ► that idea has merit. I'm not sure how much the market supports that, but that idea has merit.
00:51:40 ◼ ► - Yeah, this might be a little bit too down market, because 350, like the quality of the
00:51:44 ◼ ► camera on the CPU has got a, it's probably too much of a downgrade. That's why everyone's saying,
00:51:51 ◼ ► just take an Apple Watch, right? But no one wants to text people on an Apple Watch. And who wants
00:51:55 ◼ ► to text people on a screen this small? Just ask all the people who use the original iPhone and
00:51:59 ◼ ► all the iPhones before they got tall with the five and before they got big with the six.
00:52:02 ◼ ► Like we did it. It was a thing that happened. So it's viable, but the quality of this camera
00:52:07 ◼ ► cannot be good. I mean, you can read the review to see what it looks like. It's probably below
00:52:11 ◼ ► the threshold where it's just going to annoy people. But most people don't have the newest,
00:52:14 ◼ ► latest, greatest phone with an awesome camera. So I feel like you could make a cheaper,
00:52:18 ◼ ► smaller phone as a standalone that would find a market. And the Palm stuff, I just feel like
00:52:24 ◼ ► is insulting, because it's like, they're, the heritage of Palm, like you just buy the name
00:52:29 ◼ ► and you just stick it on the back of the thing in this weird thing where it's like P-A-L-M in like
00:52:33 ◼ ► a square shape. I don't like it. It's upsetting. - By the way, user Mike Yu in the chat points out
00:52:39 ◼ ► that actually the Palm phone is way smaller than the original iPhone, which to me is like,
00:52:44 ◼ ► that's a cool thing to have something that's small, but you then pretty much won't be able to
00:52:50 ◼ ► like text on it. Like it has an onscreen keyboard, like modern smartphones, but like you're not going
00:52:55 ◼ ► to be able to see that much of that tiny little screen. Typing is going to be really hard. What
00:53:12 ◼ ► if this phone was like 50 bucks, that'd be a different story. Or if it was like really good
00:53:18 ◼ ► and a little bit bigger, so it'd be a little more useful, that'd be a different story. But
00:53:22 ◼ ► right now it's like, it's too small to have general use. And it's not a standalone product,
00:53:28 ◼ ► so you can't like bring it, you can't like buy it for your kids or whatever. And also it's too
00:53:33 ◼ ► expensive to be like a kind of like disposable, like you know, keep it just in case you need it
00:53:37 ◼ ► kind of thing. Like $350 is half the price of a really good phone. So I just, I don't see what
00:53:46 ◼ ► this is going for. - It does have more RAM than an iPhone 7. - Well that's good. You won't be able
00:53:52 ◼ ► to fit, I mean you can fit as many apps as you want in them as long as they're crappy Android
00:53:55 ◼ ► apps that you'll never want to use because they're so tiny. - Yeah, I'm just saying like it's a,
00:54:03 ◼ ► you're ridiculous because it's a $350 phone, but it's actually got a surprising amount of RAM.
00:54:07 ◼ ► - I mean, I don't think it's that terrible a device for the constraints it has. I just don't
00:54:14 ◼ ► really understand what would make somebody purchase one. You know, like I understand the pitch, but
00:54:21 ◼ ► realistically nobody's going to do that. - Exactly. - A bunch of people are going to do it because
00:54:25 ◼ ► they'll be intrigued by the idea, but it's too much of a downgrade from their actual phone that
00:54:29 ◼ ► I don't think that will be a viable substitute. - I don't know. All right, so you said that that
00:54:33 ◼ ► was a segue into our next topic. Tell me more. - Yeah, so this is about Adobe's announcements
00:54:39 ◼ ► at their Adobe Max conference. There's a bunch of them, maybe we'll talk about some of the other
00:54:44 ◼ ► ones later, but today the main one, the highlight is Photoshop CC is coming to the iPad in 2019.
00:54:51 ◼ ► And this may not sound like much because like, hasn't there already been Photoshop for the iPad?
00:54:56 ◼ ► Like who cares or whatever, but the important part is that this is in Adobe's words and in all the
00:55:02 ◼ ► PR things, this is real Photoshop on the iPad. It's not a new application that's kind of like
00:55:07 ◼ ► Photoshop. It's not a brand new application that can also read PSD files. Sometimes this is
00:55:12 ◼ ► full fledged Photoshop on the iPad, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And they emphasize, you know,
00:55:19 ◼ ► that it's the same code base and that it's fully compatible. And obviously, especially in the
00:55:24 ◼ ► beginning, there will be some features that are only on the desktop, but I'm sure they'll shore
00:55:27 ◼ ► up those gaps. But this is sort of Adobe finally, you know, I don't know, jumping in. Like Apple has
00:55:35 ◼ ► wanted pro applications on the iPad for a long time. And for the longest time, Adobe has been
00:55:40 ◼ ► like, "Oh, we'll make some apps for the iPad. We have some ideas of cool things we can do." But
00:55:44 ◼ ► Photoshop is a desktop app. Sorry, you can't have that on the iPad. And now you can. And, you know,
00:55:50 ◼ ► it's cross compatible. They have their, you know, cloud stuff where you can put the document in
00:55:55 ◼ ► their Creative Cloud Cloud. I don't know if they repeat cloud and work on it on your desktop and
00:56:00 ◼ ► work on the same thing. You know, and it also reads from iCloud drive and Dropbox, and it's just 100%
00:56:05 ◼ ► compatible. You make a document on desktop, you can open it up in your iPad. You make a document
00:56:09 ◼ ► on the iPad, you can open it on desktop. It's just, you know, real Photoshop. And that's obviously
00:56:14 ◼ ► the adapt with the interface. It's not the same as it is on the desktop. There's a bunch of things,
00:56:18 ◼ ► touch affordances and some interesting new tools in there. But I thought this was, you know, it's
00:56:24 ◼ ► about time. I'm sure all of Adobe's competitors are a little bit scared because Adobe, you know,
00:56:29 ◼ ► their application may or may not be as good as some of the existing stuff or may not be as,
00:56:34 ◼ ► you know, because most people who have had to do work on the iPad or like doing work on the iPad
00:56:37 ◼ ► have already chosen a non-Adobe application for the most part to do their stuff. And so they're
00:56:42 ◼ ► late to the game. But Adobe has an existing subscription system. Somehow they're going to
00:56:50 ◼ ► work out the financials with the Apple stuff of like, if you can subscribe through it, through
00:56:53 ◼ ► Apple thing or whatever, but the current work around is that if you buy Photoshop CC, you just
00:56:58 ◼ ► get the iPad app for free. I'm sure they've all worked all this out with Apple. Adobe has tons of
00:57:04 ◼ ► applications and lots of history and Photoshop is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of image
00:57:09 ◼ ► processing. So I bet the competitors aren't particularly happy about Adobe finally doing
00:57:14 ◼ ► this, but I think it's a good move for the iPad and hopefully it'll push Apple in the direction
00:57:19 ◼ ► of making the iPad even more pro. But the reason I said that the end of that weird palm phone thing
00:57:26 ◼ ► was a good transition to this is because there's a particular technical angle of this that I was
00:57:31 ◼ ► thinking about when the announcement was made and I have some musings based on it. And the
00:57:35 ◼ ► technical angle is how do you get Photoshop, a big fancy desktop application that historically has
00:57:41 ◼ ► been a thing that you use to show off the power of your computer, particularly your Mac, how do you
00:57:46 ◼ ► get that onto an iPad? And we've talked about how the iPad CPUs and GPUs are surprisingly powerful,
00:57:57 ◼ ► about the JavaScript benchmark being faster than the iMac Pro and just in general being,
00:58:04 ◼ ► that doesn't seem like a problem. CPU power seems like it's there. And, you know, storage for big
00:58:10 ◼ ► images, don't they make like a 512 gig iPad or something, a 512 gig phone, like whatever,
00:58:14 ◼ ► there's plenty of room to store giant files and especially if they're in the cloud, it's not a big
00:58:18 ◼ ► deal. But there is one aspect of iOS devices, even the big iPads, that doesn't seem like it's up to
00:58:25 ◼ ► snuff to deal with something like Photoshop and that's RAM. There hasn't been a Mac sold with four
00:58:32 ◼ ► gigs of RAM in it for many, many years. You sure? Doesn't the air still base itself at that? Oh,
00:58:38 ◼ ► please don't say that. I really hope that's not true. That can't possibly be true. That's
00:58:43 ◼ ► impossible. Anyway. I thought it was true, but we can look it up. Nope, it's eight. Four gigs of
00:58:48 ◼ ► RAM is not a lot for a Photoshop machine. Let's put it that way. Like, again, Photoshop always
00:58:55 ◼ ► wanted the most RAM you can put in it so you have really big images. And why does Photoshop use a lot
00:58:59 ◼ ► of RAM? I mean, the main answer is layers, right? So most of the time you could have one image,
00:59:04 ◼ ► it's probably not that high res, but you know, maybe it's like 600 DPI for like print publishing,
00:59:09 ◼ ► a magazine cover, whatever. But imagine that document has 50 layers in it. You know, that stuff
00:59:14 ◼ ► just eats memory. Also, like the way Photoshop deals with a lot of the images, it has to deal
00:59:19 ◼ ► with them in uncompressed format. Like you think of a JPEG as being like, you know, it's like, you
00:59:23 ◼ ► know, eight megs for this giant image. But like, no, actually, like if you deal with the raw pixels
00:59:28 ◼ ► in an uncompressed format, like multiply the width by the height by four and that's how many bytes it
00:59:35 ◼ ► needs, at least depending on what else. You could be doing more things. You could have more deep
00:59:39 ◼ ► color. Like, yeah, it's like, it's a lot of memory. Like a single, like, you know, one screen,
00:59:46 ◼ ► large image off the top of my head is like, you know, the 2030 megs. Like it's a lot, right? It's
00:59:52 ◼ ► way more data than like the JPEG version is. And to do a lot of operations efficiently, that has to
00:59:58 ◼ ► be in memory. Yeah. So you may be thinking, okay, well, that's the modern world where all the Macs
01:00:04 ◼ ► have tons of RAM, but Macs did ship with four gigs of RAM. We just talked about my Mac Pro that
01:00:08 ◼ ► shipped with two gigs of RAM and Photoshop ran on those machines. So it's obviously not a big deal.
01:00:12 ◼ ► Photoshop can run in much less memory than we run it in today. Maybe it's not great, but it can do
01:00:17 ◼ ► it. There's a second thing to think about though. Real time follow up. There is indeed one Mac that
01:00:22 ◼ ► is still sold new. The Mac mini updated 1,600 days ago. The Mac mini $500 configuration comes
01:00:37 ◼ ► anyway, so the other thing to be concerned about with iOS devices is, and you often hear this,
01:00:42 ◼ ► and this is not actually true. People will say that iOS devices don't have virtual memory. That's
01:00:47 ◼ ► not true. iOS devices have always had a virtual memory in that they have your programs address
01:00:53 ◼ ► memory using virtual addresses that are then translated to physical addresses. So virtual
01:00:58 ◼ ► memory has been an iOS from day one. What people mean when they say iOS doesn't have virtual memory
01:01:04 ◼ ► is they mean that iOS doesn't use swap, will not page things to disk. So in a virtual memory system,
01:01:12 ◼ ► when a program wants more memory and there's no more memory to give, the system will take
01:01:17 ◼ ► something that is in memory, hopefully that hasn't been used recently or isn't being actively used,
01:01:21 ◼ ► and it will swap it out to disk. It will say, "I'm going to take this big chunk of RAM. I'm
01:01:25 ◼ ► going to write it to a swap file." And I'll say, "You stay there." And that'll give you this RAM
01:01:29 ◼ ► that they were using before. And if they ever want that thing back, I'll go back to the disk and pull
01:01:33 ◼ ► it out of the swap file and bring it back in. Obviously going to disk and swap is way slower
01:01:38 ◼ ► than RAM, and you really don't want it to be in a situation where it's constantly shuffling things
01:01:42 ◼ ► "Oh, I got to take this out of RAM, put it on disk, or take this thing off the disk and put it back
01:01:45 ◼ ► into RAM." That's called swapping, and then it'll make everything slow. That's called the '90s.
01:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah, iOS has never had swap because as you can imagine, it was at the ragged edge of what was
01:01:57 ◼ ► possible in the original iPhone. And if there's a possibility that by loading a big game or
01:02:01 ◼ ► something, stuff can swap and then you try to switch and swap it back in, flash wasn't always
01:02:06 ◼ ► as fast as it is today, especially on iOS devices. And even if it's fast, it's way slower than having
01:02:12 ◼ ► things in RAM. So iOS from day one continuing today has said, "No swap." So it has virtual
01:02:19 ◼ ► memory, but it doesn't have swap. And what that means for RAM limits is like your 2G Mac Pro,
01:02:23 ◼ ► the 2G Mac Pro that I'm next to, we could run Photoshop or whatever. Maybe you have something
01:02:29 ◼ ► that has too many layers, doesn't fit in 2G. Doesn't matter. You can always swap out portions
01:02:34 ◼ ► of it. And it'll make it slower, but at least you can do it. But in iOS, when RAM is exhausted,
01:02:39 ◼ ► and when the system has ejected every other application from the system and you ask for
01:02:43 ◼ ► more RAM, the OS kills your program. There is no more to give. There's nothing like, "Oh, well,
01:02:50 ◼ ► the OS never says, 'Well, there's no more RAM. I've killed all the other programs. I'll just
01:02:54 ◼ ► start swapping some stuff out to disk.'" It doesn't do that. It says, "The RAM is all used up and you
01:02:59 ◼ ► are the only program running. I'm going to kill you now." I think it gives you low memory warnings,
01:03:03 ◼ ► but eventually the OS kills your program. And so what happens in Photoshop, it's just like
01:03:08 ◼ ► the desktop. If I make this awesome image in the desktop that's some 600 DPI magazine cover with
01:03:12 ◼ ► 50 layers, and then I try to open it on my iPad and I try to do some manipulation that requires
01:03:17 ◼ ► it to load a bunch of stuff into memory to run some filter across seven layers, and it keeps
01:03:21 ◼ ► asking for more and more memory to perform that operation, and then it runs out. The OS is going
01:03:26 ◼ ► to kill the program. How do they allow you to edit files that are too big to fit in RAM? And remember,
01:03:37 ◼ ► >> On the big iPad or on the iPhone XS Max and all that stuff. Anyway, it's not a lot of RAM.
01:03:42 ◼ ► There is very easy to find a real-world Photoshop image that will happily eat up 4 gigs of RAM while
01:03:48 ◼ ► you're working on it. And keep in mind that the OS has to take some portion of that, and so you
01:04:02 ◼ ► I don't know the details of how they actually did it, but there are a bunch of possibilities,
01:04:06 ◼ ► but one of them I find intriguing and delightful, which is rooted in the fact that Photoshop
01:04:12 ◼ ► has already run in the past on a platform that did not have swap. In fact, Photoshop has run on
01:04:19 ◼ ► a platform that did not have virtual memory. That platform is classic Mac OS. Classic Mac OS did not
01:04:33 ◼ ► >> The virtual memory part of it came into effect a little bit towards the end of classic Mac OS's
01:04:40 ◼ ► life. But the original Mac, no virtual memory, real addresses for everything, single shared
01:04:47 ◼ ► >> Yeah, the original one, yeah. But by the '90s, they had to have had at least some of that,
01:04:55 ◼ ► if you think about it, if you have programs that expect big shared memory space, I think they had
01:05:00 ◼ ► some, well, there were third-party programs that could give you some of this. And I think by Mac OS
01:05:05 ◼ ► 9 or whatever, they had some kind of virtual stuff. I don't think they ever had a real swap file.
01:05:10 ◼ ► But anyway, Photoshop ran before all of that. It ran, like, I don't know, it didn't run on,
01:05:21 ◼ ► I think Photoshop 1.0 ran on the Mac Plus. Certainly, the Mac SE, Photoshop could run on
01:05:31 ◼ ► Photoshop run on a machine with, like, a ridiculously small amount of RAM and no virtual
01:05:36 ◼ ► memory system and no swap? They did it the only way you could possibly do it, which is within
01:05:41 ◼ ► Photoshop, they wrote a system that said, when you're using memory to do something and the OS
01:05:48 ◼ ► says there's no more memory to give, you program, implement your own little virtual memory system,
01:05:54 ◼ ► where you'll make your own little swap files off to the side, and you will take portions of the
01:05:57 ◼ ► image data and write it out to your own little, you know, Photoshop swap files, like, a tiny
01:06:02 ◼ ► miniature virtual memory system just for that program within that program, so we can shuffle
01:06:06 ◼ ► things off of disk into memory, operate on them, put them back on disk, so on and so forth.
01:06:15 ◼ ► a platform that didn't have this. It would be extremely delightful if the code to do that from
01:06:21 ◼ ► original Photoshop suddenly came in super handy. It once again finds itself on a system that has
01:06:28 ◼ ► no swap, so it's like, well, we have our own swapping system written already. We can use that
01:06:34 ◼ ► to take things out of memory and put them onto disk and pull them off of disk or whatever.
01:06:38 ◼ ► I would love for that to be true. It's obviously potentially a competitive advantage over other
01:06:44 ◼ ► image editors like, you know, Affinity and the other competitors to Photoshop, which must have
01:06:47 ◼ ► to do something similar, because again, if you want to work with images that are too big to fit
01:06:51 ◼ ► in memory and your operating system does not have swap, you need to do something like that yourself.
01:06:56 ◼ ► And Photoshop, Adobe, in theory, has experience doing that very same thing. So that to me is the
01:07:01 ◼ ► most interesting and exciting part of Photoshop on the iPad, the idea that potentially code from
01:07:07 ◼ ► classic Mac OS has risen from the grave, or perhaps it never even left Photoshop and is now
01:07:14 ◼ ► potentially a competitive advantage over other programs that did not have their origin on a
01:07:20 ◼ ► system with no swap. I mean, modern versions of Photoshop still have like the swap disk options,
01:07:26 ◼ ► swap folders, scratch disk. Yeah, it's like it probably has the same system because, you know,
01:07:31 ◼ ► lots of like high-end or high-performance apps will do things like write their own memory allocator
01:07:37 ◼ ► because they can tailor it to exactly their use and they can, you know, get faster performance
01:07:40 ◼ ► and more control than the system stuff. I don't know of a lot of programs that write their own
01:07:45 ◼ ► swap file system, but I'm sure somebody does and, you know, beyond just Photoshop. And so it
01:07:52 ◼ ► wouldn't surprise me if Adobe still uses that, even like on Macs with, you know, 64 gigs of RAM,
01:07:57 ◼ ► they might still use that kind of system just because they already had it and they can tweak
01:08:01 ◼ ► it, they can tune it, and we know it still uses scratch disk for something, so that could be what
01:08:06 ◼ ► they're for. And also, like this is just one of those things that when you ask like, you know,
01:08:11 ◼ ► "Oh, what do you need Photoshop and iPad for?" and somebody says, "Oh, you can use alternative X, Y,
01:08:15 ◼ ► or Z." One of the things that really separates like pro apps from more, you know, basic or like
01:08:24 ◼ ► consumer or prosumer ones is this ability to deal with extremes. And this is true even on the Mac
01:08:30 ◼ ► too, like this is true everywhere, but like what really separates pro apps from the rest is you can
01:08:36 ◼ ► do operations on a, you know, 300 by 300 clip art thing you found on the web, or you can do operations
01:08:42 ◼ ► on like an entire like 600 DPI, 11 by 17 page layout of something, and it might, it'll be slower
01:08:50 ◼ ► if it needs to be, but it won't crash, it'll still work like, you know, it'll let you do what you
01:08:56 ◼ ► have to do. And I've never used any competitors for Photoshop really, so I don't know how they
01:09:00 ◼ ► handle these extremes. They might handle them just fine as far as I know, but like as like a
01:09:05 ◼ ► customer of these things and a user of these things, like if I were looking to, you know,
01:09:09 ◼ ► change my workflow to a competitor like everyone has had to do on the iPad up until this comes out,
01:09:15 ◼ ► one of the things I'd be worried about is like, can it really handle extremes or not? Because
01:09:20 ◼ ► occasionally I need it to. And so to have like, to have something that is known to have extreme
01:09:26 ◼ ► capability like Photoshop, that is known to handle crazy things and at least, you know,
01:09:32 ◼ ► even if it isn't fast, it will at least work. That's a really good selling point for them. And
01:09:38 ◼ ► that, and you know, there's lots of reasons why I think they're going to do well with this on the
01:09:42 ◼ ► iPad, but one of the big ones to me is like, you're going to know that you can throw anything at this
01:09:52 ◼ ► and if you're patient enough, it will probably work. So what I can't help but wonder is if
01:09:59 ◼ ► at one point in the past or perhaps in the present, they needed to create their own like
01:10:05 ◼ ► virtual memory system, what else do you think that they abstracted away about the underlying
01:10:11 ◼ ► platform in order to make things easier? Like, since Photoshop runs on Windows, it runs on
01:10:17 ◼ ► Mac OS, and soon will be running on iOS, how much do you think they're running against actual APIs
01:10:25 ◼ ► or some sort of like adapter layer that, or facade maybe, that Adobe wrote themselves? And at what
01:10:33 ◼ ► point are they like creating like an entire virtual machine within Photoshop just to kind of,
01:10:38 ◼ ► you know, smooth all these rough edges out? You know, it just, it's, I don't argue with what
01:10:43 ◼ ► you're saying, Jon, it's just, I can't help but wonder like, how far does this really go?
01:10:51 ◼ ► had separate UIs. Like the Mac version certainly just the first one to exist and it had native Mac
01:10:56 ◼ ► UI or as native as it could be. But at some point, due to someone's great idea about economies of
01:11:02 ◼ ► scale and not repeating yourself or whatever, they made a unified user interface that was
01:11:07 ◼ ► surely some underlying Adobe framework that rendered a Mac UI on the Mac and a Windows UI
01:11:12 ◼ ► on Windows. And the way you could tell that was that the Mac UI suddenly became a lot less Mac-like.
01:11:22 ◼ ► they weren't Mac interfaces, they weren't Windows interfaces, they were Adobe interfaces. And I think
01:11:27 ◼ ► a lot of Adobe apps are still like this, where it's like they're pulling from an Adobe suite
01:11:31 ◼ ► of controls and their idea of what a window and a button and the control should look like is the
01:11:34 ◼ ► Adobe idea. And it looks different on Windows and the Mac, but it's clear that there's been some
01:11:39 ◼ ► massive unification behind the scenes. That hasn't always been beneficial, but I'm sure that's the
01:11:44 ◼ ► case. And obviously their engines for dealing with images are mostly cross-platform for this part,
01:11:50 ◼ ► plus or minus the various use of the different acceleration frameworks on different platforms.
01:11:55 ◼ ► Right? So that's been a complaint about Adobe in the past from a Mac user perspective is that
01:12:01 ◼ ► they don't feel like Mac apps, they feel like Adobe apps. Obviously, if you like Adobe apps, or
01:12:05 ◼ ► if you move from platform to platform, that's an advantage. But sometimes I look at Adobe apps,
01:12:10 ◼ ► most Adobe apps, and I think this is like a weird, it's not an Electron app, but it's like a weird
01:12:15 ◼ ► kind of, I don't know, it doesn't feel like a Mac application. And sometimes it's kind of ugly,
01:12:22 ◼ ► and sometimes I kind of wish the controls were the regular controls. But at a certain point,
01:12:28 ◼ ► Adobe's probably like, "Look, Apple, you're lucky we still make motion." For a while, they were like,
01:12:32 ◼ ► "You're lucky you still make Photoshop for your platform at all, because Windows has taken over
01:12:35 ◼ ► the world." Obviously, that's less relevant today, and the iPad is certainly the more popular
01:12:46 ◼ ► yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of that sharing going on behind the scenes. I'm not sure that if they
01:12:52 ◼ ► ever had to implement a virtual memory system for Windows, because I think the first version
01:12:59 ◼ ► - I believe Windows got that in 3.1-ish, somewhere around that range, because my Gateway 2000
01:13:05 ◼ ► computer had the ability to either enable or disable 386 enhanced mode, which I'm pretty sure
01:13:13 ◼ ► was virtual memory. - My word. So do we think this is gonna be good? And I don't say that to
01:13:20 ◼ ► snark, and I'm not trying to be funny. It's hard for me to imagine that this is going to be without
01:13:32 ◼ ► hiccups. Just look at file management on the iPad, which is something that's relatively new.
01:13:40 ◼ ► File management is not easy on the iPad. What happens when you want to suck in something from
01:13:45 ◼ ► an SD card? Do you still have to go through the Apple Photos app to suck in these photos from the
01:13:54 ◼ ► SD card, and then bring them into Photoshop, and then back to your photo library or your camera roll
01:14:00 ◼ ► or whatever? It just seems like this is still going to have a lot of hurdles. Now, those hurdles
01:14:05 ◼ ► are the sorts of hurdles that really make Mike and Federico happy, but to somebody like me,
01:14:10 ◼ ► I find that to be infuriating. So is this going to be good, great? I guess the fact that Adobe has
01:14:17 ◼ ► cloud, hence CC, because that's Creative Cloud. Once you get a file, you can store it in Creative
01:14:23 ◼ ► Cloud, I would assume, and then it just kind of appears everywhere, I would assume, kind of iCloud-like.
01:14:31 ◼ ► - I mean, that's one of the potential upsides of Adobe running Photoshop on the iPad is hopefully
01:14:39 ◼ ► it will push Apple in the direction to make the iPad a better platform for pro applications.
01:14:45 ◼ ► The file stuff, I think actually we're probably mostly okay for the cloud options, because it
01:14:53 ◼ ► always got its thing, but it also works with iCloud Drive and Dropbox. And honestly, even if there was
01:14:58 ◼ ► full file system access from every application, there was SD card slot in the side of the iPad,
01:15:05 ◼ ► it's still probably more convenient to do the cloud stuff, you know what I mean? You're not
01:15:13 ◼ ► Macs have great file system access, but the way two Macs would look at the same file is they would
01:15:18 ◼ ► pull it up on a network share or something, right? So I think the cloud solution is probably mostly
01:15:24 ◼ ► okay. But the fact that some doors are closed to you, hopefully it will make Apple consider,
01:15:32 ◼ ► especially when it's not just one file, but it's a whole bunch of files, or you're working
01:15:35 ◼ ► on a project that's a folder full of files, and you can do all this with a cloud drive as well,
01:15:39 ◼ ► but there's some things that are a little bit easier locally, or there could be security
01:15:42 ◼ ► sensitive things where you don't want to go across the network, who knows? So I hope Apple pays
01:15:47 ◼ ► attention. There was an interesting video, we'll put a link in the show notes, this Verge review
01:15:50 ◼ ► of Photoshop on the iPad, and they had a bunch of their artists who worked for the Verge mess with
01:15:57 ◼ ► it and say what they think about using Photoshop on the iPad. They have some interesting things to
01:16:01 ◼ ► say that you might not think of if you don't draw on a computer all day. One of the ones was the
01:16:06 ◼ ► person talking about, I mean, this is true of any iPad app, not Photoshop, but if you're drawing
01:16:12 ◼ ► with the pencil on the iPad and you want to draw at a different angle, you can just rotate the iPad
01:16:17 ◼ ► like you would a piece of paper, which is not true of a computer screen, and is also not true,
01:16:22 ◼ ► interestingly, of something like the Surface Studio, where the screen is like a big iMac-like
01:16:28 ◼ ► screen and it kind of folds down. You can't take that and easily just twist it like you would twist
01:16:32 ◼ ► a piece of paper to scribble at a different angle, because it's just too big and it's not on a swivel
01:16:38 ◼ ► thing, you'd have to turn the whole computer and it would be awkward, it's more like a drafting table
01:16:42 ◼ ► than a piece of paper on the drafting table, which is an interesting angle for people considering
01:16:46 ◼ ► drawing on the iPad. But the other one that really stood out to me was the one artist who said she
01:16:51 ◼ ► was doing, they all tried to do some real non-trivial project on the thing, and she said
01:16:57 ◼ ► by the end of it, her hand was hurting a little bit from gripping the Apple Pencil, and she said her
01:17:02 ◼ ► Wacom tablet that she normally uses has a pencil with a big thick ergonomic grip with a smooshy
01:17:07 ◼ ► thing on the end, and if you look at the Apple Pencil, it's a beautiful, simple, elegant shape,
01:17:12 ◼ ► there's nothing as green as blah blah blah, but it's pretty darn skinny, right? It's pretty
01:17:16 ◼ ► skinny, it certainly doesn't have one of those ergonomic grip things, and you could add one or
01:17:19 ◼ ► whatever, but it goes to show how ill-suited, I don't want to get Marko on a ramp, but how ill-suited
01:17:28 ◼ ► so many aspects of modern Apple design are to demanding professional applications, because if
01:17:34 ◼ ► you are a professional using a stylus all day, just using the Apple Pencil the way it is, is
01:17:41 ◼ ► probably not great, like you don't see a lot of styluses or other things used by artists for a long
01:17:46 ◼ ► period of time, especially with a computer, that don't look and aren't actually more ergonomic than
01:17:52 ◼ ► a simple, unadorned, fairly slippery, skinny cylinder, and there's a reason for that, like there's
01:17:58 ◼ ► a reason, you know, things that look ergonomic tend to look ugly and be shaped so that they're easy to
01:18:04 ◼ ► comfortably grip and they reduce fatigue or whatever, and it's like, okay, well you don't have to use
01:18:10 ◼ ► the Apple Pencil, there is a wide variety of pressure sensitive styluses, oh wait, not really,
01:18:15 ◼ ► so again, I hope bringing more artists to seriously consider the iPad, because now quote unquote
01:18:22 ◼ ► "real Photoshop" is there, again, tons of artists have been using the iPad and Adobe has made
01:18:28 ◼ ► applications, and by the way, Adobe is also making non-Photoshop applications that are more of a
01:18:32 ◼ ► green field, let's reimagine what kind of illustration application we can make, I hope all of that, and
01:18:37 ◼ ► the influx of new creatives and all that stuff leads Apple down the same road that I got, I hope
01:18:43 ◼ ► that they're traveling for the Mac Pro, which is, what do professionals really need out of our
01:18:48 ◼ ► platforms, let's listen to them and make something for them, even if that thing is not well suited to
01:18:54 ◼ ► consumers, consumers don't want a weird Wacom tablet looking pencil thing, if they want a pencil
01:18:59 ◼ ► at all, the simple Apple one is probably the right thing, although they really wish they had a place
01:19:02 ◼ ► to stick it instead of it just being loose, so I hope, I hope all this is nudging Apple in the
01:19:10 ◼ ► right direction, and by the way, at Adobe Max, Phil Schiller came on stage and talked about
01:19:17 ◼ ► Photoshop and how happy it is it's coming to the iPad, and how great the iPad is, and so on and so
01:19:21 ◼ ► forth, so Apple is in on this and they're working together, so things are trending in the right
01:19:26 ◼ ► direction, and speaking of the Apple Pencil, I was thinking about this the other day, I don't know
01:19:31 ◼ ► how many people listen to this, I actually have an Apple Pencil, if you do have it, do you know where
01:19:34 ◼ ► it is, there's lots of ways that you travel with it, and little clip-on things, and places to stick
01:19:40 ◼ ► it and all sorts of stuff like that, it's so bad, and the cap, forget about the cap, right, I was
01:19:44 ◼ ► thinking about this and I was like, well, that's true, but in the idealized world of Apple, many
01:19:51 ◼ ► problems either don't exist in Apple's idealized world or they don't acknowledge them, but this is
01:19:56 ◼ ► a case where Apple itself definitely acknowledges this issue, and they acknowledge it with these
01:20:03 ◼ ► weird little white trays in all the Apple stores, why do they have these weird little white trays
01:20:10 ◼ ► where the pencils go, it's not like at the bank where it's connected with a cable, like there's
01:20:13 ◼ ► no anti-theft device attached to it, right, oh, the pencil's weighted, it will never roll off a table,
01:20:19 ◼ ► why are those little dugout canoes of plastic there, because if they weren't, the pencils will
01:20:25 ◼ ► be, no one would ever know where the freaking pencils are, where do I put this when I'm done
01:20:28 ◼ ► with it, how do I put it down, will it roll off the table, will someone step on it, you put it
01:20:32 ◼ ► back in the little plastic canoe, right, those little stupid little canoes are the greatest
01:20:38 ◼ ► Apple admission that there is something missing from the workflow, as they would say, of the Apple
01:20:44 ◼ ► pencil. - Yeah, like, it's very frustrating to me, like, I have an Apple pencil, I have an iPad Pro,
01:20:51 ◼ ► and I have a smart keyboard, there is no way to have all three of those things with me that
01:21:00 ◼ ► doesn't suck, like, why, it seems like these three products were never designed with the idea that
01:21:09 ◼ ► somebody would actually have any two of them, like, the smart keyboard and the iPad work together
01:21:16 ◼ ► okay, it isn't even great, it's just merely okay, the pencil and the iPad, it seems like they were
01:21:23 ◼ ► designed on different planets, and it's just a coincidence they happen to work together, but like,
01:21:28 ◼ ► no one ever thought you might want to carry an Apple pencil while you carry an iPad, like,
01:21:34 ◼ ► that seems to totally have been not considered at all, and the idea that here you can get a smart
01:21:41 ◼ ► keyboard, which is wonderful, I actually really enjoy having a smart keyboard, I mean, I've had
01:21:44 ◼ ► totally changed how frequently I use the iPad greatly for the better, but the smart keyboard
01:21:51 ◼ ► is a large cover that has lots of surface area and is willingly bulking it up, maybe they could
01:21:59 ◼ ► have put a spot there to store a pencil, but they didn't, they released a case that is like this big
01:22:05 ◼ ► leather flap that has a slot for the iPad and a slot for the pencil, but if you have a smart
01:22:10 ◼ ► keyboard it won't fit in the case, and it would be very awkward to get it out anyway, it's just like,
01:22:15 ◼ ► everything about, it's just like, one of the biggest things I want to see with the, you know,
01:22:22 ◼ ► anticipated iPad event that's probably happening sometime soon, I really want to see how and if
01:22:28 ◼ ► they have rethought how people actually use the Apple pencil, and if they can somehow make it
01:22:35 ◼ ► easy to have it with you more often, I would love that, because I literally have all these things,
01:22:42 ◼ ► and I never use the pencil because, as John alluded to, it's like, you know, off in a cup
01:22:47 ◼ ► or a drawer somewhere. - And the battery's dead in it now because you haven't charged it forever,
01:22:52 ◼ ► because that's awkward too. - Yeah, like the battery's definitely dead because I have not
01:22:55 ◼ ► charged it because I never have it with me, and so I never use it, and it's such a waste, like,
01:23:00 ◼ ► please, for the love of God, Apple, design these products together. - It charges in 30 seconds
01:23:06 ◼ ► though, and you can get two, anyway, there's all sorts of solutions to the charging thing
01:23:10 ◼ ► that are part of the pitch. - By the way, when it's totally dead, it doesn't charge in 30 seconds.
01:23:14 ◼ ► - Well, you get like a minute out of it, and you have five minutes out of it in 30 seconds,
01:23:18 ◼ ► so if we had some pitch of like a very short charge time gives you a surprising amount of
01:23:21 ◼ ► draw time, even if you're going from dead, I'm not sure how accurate this, but that was part of
01:23:25 ◼ ► the original pitch, which is not supposed to be an admission that you're probably going to lose it
01:23:29 ◼ ► and leave it uncharged, but anyway, there's one thing that Apple used to do better, probably not
01:23:34 ◼ ► for great reasons and maybe not as a conscious thing, but the 90s Apple, and Apple through the
01:23:41 ◼ ► 90s, maybe into the 2000s, was very into making a whole bunch of stuff that works together,
01:23:48 ◼ ► even into the 2000s in the Mac OS X era, like to give an example, to a fault, all right, so Apple,
01:24:03 ◼ ► display connector, remember that thing? Yeah, it was like a single cable that drove a display
01:24:14 ◼ ► it was like piggyback and DVI and a bunch of other stuff over a bunch of bins and a custom connector,
01:24:18 ◼ ► so that you could have a display that worked with the monitor and then worked with the keyboard
01:24:24 ◼ ► that connected to the display and the power button on the old Macs was on the keyboard,
01:24:32 ◼ ► systems that work together, the G4 Cube comes with little speakers that match the thing,
01:24:35 ◼ ► and then the thing connects with ADC to the display by a single cable, like match sets of stuff where
01:24:41 ◼ ► if you buy all the things, it's clear they work together, buy your laptop, the display has a little
01:24:50 ◼ ► like if you kept buying stuff, the next piece of the app, the very expensive Apple stuff that you
01:24:55 ◼ ► bought, you'd be like, oh, this fits in here, oh, that fits in there, and if I buy these things,
01:24:59 ◼ ► they fit in there, and they match this thing, like things aesthetically matched, there was a,
01:25:08 ◼ ► together, if you bought just one of them, it worked fine, but as you bought more of them,
01:25:16 ◼ ► and the keyboard works with the iPad, and the pencil works with the iPad, but the keyboard,
01:25:20 ◼ ► pencil, covers, and iPad do not get along, as Marco pointed out, like there's, once you get more
01:25:25 ◼ ► than, that's like the chicken and the wolf, once you get more than two things in this boat,
01:25:29 ◼ ► bad things happen, right, so that is a, I don't know, again, I don't think it was a particularly
01:25:34 ◼ ► conscious thing, but the idea that you can, that it is attractive, making it attractive to buy all
01:25:41 ◼ ► the things, because every new thing you buy just fits in neatly, and it feels like you're building
01:25:46 ◼ ► like the whole package, the ultimate setup, like you gotta have the G4 Cube with the cinema display,
01:25:51 ◼ ► with the speakers, with the Apple keyboard that turns the thing on, I think that wasn't on the
01:25:55 ◼ ► Cube, but anyway, like the whole setup was attractive, even back to like the LaserWriter,
01:25:59 ◼ ► get a Mac, get a LaserWriter, get the extended keyboard, get the Apple optical drive, get the
01:26:04 ◼ ► Apple external hardware, get the Apple printer, now we're getting into Wi-Fi routers again, right,
01:26:07 ◼ ► but that whole motivation to buy all the things, in the history of this show, my recollection is a
01:26:13 ◼ ► lot of our complaints have been, have had an angle where if you are Apple's best customer and you buy
01:26:19 ◼ ► all the Apple things, you are punished for it in some subtle way, like, you know, if you buy all,
01:26:29 ◼ ► and that's not, you know, that's not the right cycle, Apple should make it attractive for people
01:26:33 ◼ ► to spend all the money. And I remember that was the case, you know, for the first several years
01:26:39 ◼ ► that I came to Apple platforms, this was roughly 2008, the more Apple stuff I had, the better
01:26:45 ◼ ► everything worked together, and everything, you know what, it did guys, it just worked,
01:26:50 ◼ ► and I don't know, I shouldn't be encouraging this, because we've made this speech every episode for
01:26:56 ◼ ► the last hundred, and so we can hopefully let it go, but I echo what you're saying, John, that
01:27:00 ◼ ► I admire Apple trailblazing in so many ways, in so many categories, but I also wish I could have it
01:27:10 ◼ ► both ways and have them not screw up what already exists in order to trailblaze, but you can't have
01:27:16 ◼ ► it both ways. I just don't think it's that much to ask that when you buy an iPhone or an Apple watch,
01:27:25 ◼ ► Don't be ridiculous. Anything else about Photoshop? There's a lot more, maybe I'll watch that video,
01:27:32 ◼ ► and Gemini is their application that's like combines raster and vector stuff, and it's like,
01:27:36 ◼ ► you know, we talked about it at Domi XD a while back, like there's a bunch of interesting stuff
01:27:40 ◼ ► that Doby thinks, maybe I'll watch the video and bring in another time. There's that YouTube
01:27:50 ◼ ► which everyone was very excited about, because portrait video is definitely a thing, but editing
01:27:54 ◼ ► it in a "real video editing application" where no one conceived of the idea that people might want
01:27:59 ◼ ► portrait video is a little bit tricky. So yeah, there's a bunch of exciting things. They also had,
01:28:03 ◼ ► I think, a pretty good joke when Phil Schiller was there. I mean, maybe it's a Tech Dad joke or
01:28:08 ◼ ► whatever, but I give it a thumbs up. Phil Schiller came out and did his little spiel, and everyone
01:28:12 ◼ ► was happy to hear him say how great Adobe is and how great Apple is and so on and so forth,
01:28:15 ◼ ► and then when they whisked him off stage, they had a gift for him from the Adobe people to thank him
01:28:19 ◼ ► for coming there. They gave him a jacket from the team that was making Photoshop or whatever,
01:28:24 ◼ ► and it said "content-aware Phil" on the back of the jacket. That's pretty good. And they
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01:30:12 ◼ ► All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Jake wants to know, "In the age we currently live in,
01:30:20 ◼ ► how do the three of us stay informed about non-tech news? Is it just Twitter? And if not,
01:30:25 ◼ ► are there specific sites or voices that you would recommend?" I don't have a terribly good answer
01:30:30 ◼ ► for this. I do watch the... I watch national news in the morning as I eat breakfast. I watch
01:30:36 ◼ ► headline news, which I personally find to be relatively center. If you disagree with me,
01:30:43 ◼ ► that's fine. Just keep it to yourself. It's good enough for me. I do that most days of the week.
01:30:48 ◼ ► And then when I remember, although I forgot this morning, on Wednesdays I turn on Fox & Friends
01:30:52 ◼ ► because I'm an idiot. But I also like to see how other idiots... I mean, wait, what? I like to see
01:30:57 ◼ ► how the other side lives. And so that's mostly it. Anything else that's national typically bubbles
01:31:04 ◼ ► up via Twitter or there. Marco, what do you do? Very little, because everything that's in the news
01:31:13 ◼ ► for the last, I don't know, about two years has been so horrible that for my own mental health...
01:31:20 ◼ ► I know this is not the responsible thing to do as a citizen of the universe, but for my own mental
01:31:27 ◼ ► health, I try to block out as much of it as I possibly can. So I mostly don't follow news
01:31:34 ◼ ► sources regularly except for those that bubble up from links from friends and stuff. Yep. Yep.
01:31:40 ◼ ► That's mostly the same with me, with the exception of TV in the morning for about 15 minutes. Also,
01:31:45 ◼ ► for God's sakes, turn off Fox & Friends. It is... All kidding aside, it is truly and utterly heinous.
01:31:55 ◼ ► And you are contributing to it by watching it. Yeah, but... You are patronizing it. You are
01:32:02 ◼ ► a rating. You're increasing its numbers. You are hearing what they are saying. He's not a Nielsen
01:32:07 ◼ ► family. I don't know how the ratings work these days. Maybe the cable boxes all report back. I
01:32:10 ◼ ► don't know. I understand that perspective, but to me, it's important for me to at least...
01:32:16 ◼ ► Understand is too strong a word because I don't understand these maniacs, but to hear the other
01:32:24 ◼ ► side... And again, understand isn't the right word. Appreciate isn't the right word. But I guess just
01:32:30 ◼ ► get exposed to the other side because it helps me to understand the victims of Fox News. And I use
01:32:38 ◼ ► that word deliberately. I'm not trying to be funny. But even... Because I am more worldly, I think,
01:32:53 ◼ ► which is pretty much 99% of the time that they're talking. But it is interesting because I can
01:32:59 ◼ ► understand better how people that I care deeply for can get hoodwinked by these lies and this
01:33:06 ◼ ► propaganda. And so I personally think it's useful for me, but I am not trying to say that it's
01:33:13 ◼ ► useful for anyone else. And it is true utter filth. It is garbage and it is a danger to our
01:33:46 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. I find all TV news in all forms, in all venues, to just not... I find it...
01:34:11 ◼ ► My brain rejects it. I cannot stand it. It doesn't... It has to do with politics. It has to
01:34:17 ◼ ► do with just the form. Now, I grew up with the form. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with it. I
01:34:21 ◼ ► grew up with it, right? But from my modern sensibilities, I don't want what they're giving
01:34:27 ◼ ► me. And again, the TV is just a mechanism by which the news gets here. But there is a form that it has
01:34:33 ◼ ► evolved over time to be... Their selection of what they want to report does not match what I want to
01:34:41 ◼ ► hear ever. It's just too... Even local news, maybe especially local news. I don't need to know about...
01:34:50 ◼ ► I don't need the human interest story. I don't need to know about the kid who was hit by a car
01:34:55 ◼ ► a block down. I don't need to know about the surface level of some actors in a new movie.
01:35:07 ◼ ► and I encourage them heavily, stop watching television news. Because it might... Putting
01:35:12 ◼ ► aside Fox, right? Television news seems very much like the old SNL skit, where they're telling old
01:35:19 ◼ ► people that robots are gonna steal their medicine. It's all about what's gonna kill you, what terrible
01:35:23 ◼ ► thing is happening. It's like just so... It's clickbait before there was clickbait. It is so
01:35:28 ◼ ► incredibly hyped up and sensationalized, telling you about all the things that you should be
01:35:32 ◼ ► worried about. And it's not the things you should be worried about. It is a bunch of other crap.
01:35:38 ◼ ► And it's just like, don't subject yourself to that. You don't need to know that. Don't get all hyped
01:35:43 ◼ ► up about the killer bees that are coming into your neighborhood. I always wonder if there was
01:35:48 ◼ ► an actual story that people needed to know about. It would just be mixed in with all the other crap
01:35:51 ◼ ► on local news and given equal weight to the dog that was loose that the police shot that had
01:36:03 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** And a little bit on the Fox News things. I get where you're coming from, Casey.
01:36:08 ◼ ► But my advice would be that even if you're watching it with that in mind, constant exposure
01:36:15 ◼ ► to extreme propaganda can't help but shift your thinking merely through repetition. It's the
01:36:21 ◼ ► Overton window. Yeah, you think it's all lies and it's all BS and you're not falling forward
01:36:31 ◼ ► more weight than it deserves in your mind when you balance it against the truth, right? It's
01:36:37 ◼ ► not much you can do to stop. It's just human nature. It's not much you can do to stop that.
01:36:40 ◼ ► You will come to think that the positions staked out there are slightly more reasonable than they
01:36:48 ◼ ► are just by hearing it all the time. And it's the same stuff that all sorts of, you know,
01:36:53 ◼ ► the personalities and the jokes and you become familiar with the people and so on and so forth.
01:36:57 ◼ ► Even if in your rational mind you're like, "Well, this is all BS and I'm learning about the enemy,"
01:37:04 ◼ ► you could probably counteract a little bit, but it is a thing. So I feel like by now you should
01:37:09 ◼ ► know all you need to know about how Fox works and be able to understand the people who are into it.
01:37:14 ◼ ► And I would encourage you to stop watching it as well. But I would also encourage you to stop
01:37:18 ◼ ► watching all the other TV news. Anyway, to answer this simple question, Twitter is still the main
01:37:23 ◼ ► place where I get all my news. I have a very carefully selected group of people that I follow.
01:37:29 ◼ ► And I'm 20 degrees separated from the actual thing, but I trim that list to the point where
01:37:36 ◼ ► the things that come through on my feed are the things that I actually want to hear about
01:37:41 ◼ ► personally. And if I'm getting information that I don't want to hear about, I will trim that off.
01:37:48 ◼ ► I will add a follow by looking at a follow of a follow of a follow to see how something got to me.
01:37:52 ◼ ► Twitter is how I do it. Before Twitter, I used RSS. Before RSS, I typed in the names of websites
01:37:59 ◼ ► or used bookmarks. And before that, I guess I was back in the bad old days of TV news. But I never
01:38:05 ◼ ► watched TV news as like, "Now it's time for me to watch the news." It was just that sometimes it was
01:38:09 ◼ ► on in the house that I was in. That's as close as I got. Yeah, I saw a lot of TV news grow. I
01:38:14 ◼ ► spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house, and they would always have news on every night.
01:38:19 ◼ ► And you'd frequently see multiple news because you'd see the first local one, then the national
01:38:25 ◼ ► one, whatever. So you'd see three or four news programs in a row sometimes. So I saw a lot of
01:38:30 ◼ ► TV news growing up, and I totally stopped watching it after I stopped going over there as a kid all
01:38:37 ◼ ► the time. And so now I only ever see it if it's on a TV somewhere that I have to wait. Like an
01:38:45 ◼ ► office somewhere, like a doctor's office, something like that. It was the airport. When they have news
01:38:49 ◼ ► on at the airport, I can't stand it because you can't escape it. I just want to put on noise
01:38:58 ◼ ► every station, everything. Maybe it's not rational, but I really hate TV news. I really hate it.
01:39:04 ◼ ► Yeah, because now the few times I see it now, because I've been away from it for so long,
01:39:09 ◼ ► but I had such a strong history of it before that, now when I see it, it's like hitting a raw nerve.
01:39:16 ◼ ► It's the same garbage now that it was 20 years ago. I feel like it's worse. In the days when I
01:39:23 ◼ ► grew up at least, the network news had a certain boring stadeness that does not exist in any
01:39:30 ◼ ► television news anymore. They could get away with it because there were networks and there
01:39:34 ◼ ► were monopolies and news was isolated from entertainment and there was all sorts of factors
01:39:37 ◼ ► allowing them to essentially not give in to market forces that inevitably lead them down to
01:39:42 ◼ ► the television equivalent of clickbait. So that did exist. It is much worse now than it was.
01:39:46 ◼ ► Yeah, that's true. But it's still though, it was never good. It was just merely okay before,
01:40:04 ◼ ► And so yeah, I strongly suggest, Casey, regardless of what viewpoints you want to develop or
01:40:11 ◼ ► understand, TV news of any sort from any provider is horrible and is a bad way to get those viewpoints
01:40:17 ◼ ► or any information whatsoever. And just ultimately, I would recommend, and maybe you don't want to do
01:40:22 ◼ ► this, but I strongly encourage people who get a lot of anxiety or depression about everything
01:40:30 ◼ ► horrible that's going on in the world, step back from it. It feels like you're giving up or it
01:40:35 ◼ ► feels wrong in some way to take a break from it and ignore it or close yourself off from it.
01:40:41 ◼ ► But the reality is that there's always going to be, much of this applies to Twitter too.
01:40:49 ◼ ► There's always going to be more to read. There's always going to be more news. There's always going
01:40:53 ◼ ► to be various news publishers and various media trying to get your attention with new, breaking
01:41:01 ◼ ► developments of whatever, whatever, whatever. And most of it doesn't matter at all a day later.
01:41:13 ◼ ► and it feels like you're being useful or productive or a responsible citizen or informing yourself.
01:41:19 ◼ ► But a very low percentage of that is actually useful and necessary to know and has lasting value.
01:41:27 ◼ ► So number one thing is to cut out TV sources because they literally will just air constant
01:41:34 ◼ ► updates to nothing all day long because they don't want you to tune out. And there's always
01:41:38 ◼ ► something to watch. What you should do instead is more of like a, like get away from the push models,
01:41:44 ◼ ► go to a poll model where you don't just sit there receiving whatever one's sending you.
01:41:52 ◼ ► way that isn't a news show, go try to learn about it. If you hear about some new crisis or natural
01:41:57 ◼ ► disaster that's happening, go look it up and try to find information about it then. But get yourself
01:42:03 ◼ ► off the feed, off the constant cycle, whether that's a Twitter feed or constantly refreshing
01:42:10 ◼ ► news websites if anybody still does that, or Facebook feed if anybody, God forbid, still does
01:42:14 ◼ ► that, or if it's watching cable news or even just quote "having it on." That's still on. It's still
01:42:22 ◼ ► pouring garbage into your brain constantly. Cut it off. Actually step away from it. And you will find,
01:42:30 ◼ ► much like people find when they take breaks from Twitter for a while, you'll find that you don't
01:42:36 ◼ ► miss as much as you think you will miss. Like major events that happen, you still hear about.
01:42:41 ◼ ► Major things that you need to know, you still learn about. And you just remove this massive
01:42:48 ◼ ► source of distraction and just constant anxiety and constant like, because they're trying to
01:42:55 ◼ ► rile you up. That's how they make more money from you. They rile you up so you keep watching and you
01:42:59 ◼ ► stay engaged and you spread it around. If you just take yourself out of that system, it's way happier
01:43:07 ◼ ► on the outside. And the world doesn't become perfect, but you can at least have a better
01:43:12 ◼ ► mental state about it. - Plus they have the ads, 'cause news tends to be less valuable if it's not
01:43:16 ◼ ► live, so you actually have to allow the ads to play, which is a little bit in this ad for your
01:43:22 ◼ ► world. Like today, you have so many choices for news, so much more than you did in the days when
01:43:25 ◼ ► it was just newspapers and television and radio. Like the entire internet is there. There's lots of
01:43:29 ◼ ► places where you can get news stories in the form that you want them or whatever. If you like TV
01:43:33 ◼ ► news, some people, and I understand it's not for me, some people like that type of thing and don't
01:43:35 ◼ ► get anxiety from it. But very often, especially if you're the type of person who grew up watching
01:43:40 ◼ ► television news or grew up having television news on, you just continue to do it out of habit.
01:43:44 ◼ ► And like, that's the thing to question. And to defend Casey's Fox News stuff for a second,
01:43:49 ◼ ► I think it actually is important to know what Fox News is and how it works, not just take other
01:43:53 ◼ ► people's words for it. I just don't think you need to, for the rest of your life, watch one Fox News
01:43:58 ◼ ► show a day or a week. I think you can get it after a fairly short period of time. And check in every
01:44:03 ◼ ► once in a while. But it is important to know the enemy, to know what the hell's going on over there.
01:44:08 ◼ ► It's not important to watch it every day for years and years and years. You'll get it pretty quickly.
01:44:13 ◼ ► It's a hell of a thing. Are we satisfied now? As much as we will be. Probably won't be satisfied
01:44:25 ◼ ► All right. So Stephen Kim wants to say, or wants to know, "I'm in my final semester of college/university
01:44:30 ◼ ► and wanted to know if you guys had some sort of senior project. And if so, what was it?"
01:44:35 ◼ ► I did not. When I went to Virginia Tech, I did not have any sort of senior thesis project or
01:44:41 ◼ ► anything like that. I did do some fun things, but no, I did not have a senior project. John,
01:44:47 ◼ ► how about you? I did have a senior project. Everyone had to do one. It was in the engineering
01:44:53 ◼ ► school. I was majored in computer engineering, which is like a hybrid of electrical engineering
01:44:58 ◼ ► with a couple of CS courses thrown in, essentially. My particular project was—I don't even remember
01:45:04 ◼ ► how we came up with this—but it was a local area paging system. Yes, pagers were a thing. Yes,
01:45:08 ◼ ► I'm old. Local area paging system and software. There was a contest they had at the school where
01:45:14 ◼ ► you'd have to like—kind of one of those things where you get a bucket of parts and you have to
01:45:17 ◼ ► build a vehicle and the vehicles have to compete. You guys know about and talk about those engineering
01:45:23 ◼ ► contest stuff? Yes. It was a really cool NOVA episode about an MIT Hill Climb competition. It
01:45:28 ◼ ► was one of the favorite things I ever watched as a kid. I should find the link for next week.
01:45:32 ◼ ► Anyway, they have these contests, and the project—it's contrived, it's a senior project,
01:45:42 ◼ ► each team would have a pager, and when it was their turn to come and compete, you would page them.
01:45:46 ◼ ► You'd do this through a piece of software, and then the software also kept track of the matches,
01:45:51 ◼ ► and then they would compete and you would start the timer for the match. The software ran the
01:45:56 ◼ ► officiating for the match and recorded the results. So you'd basically run the competition
01:46:01 ◼ ► sitting in front of a PC, and the PC was connected through a parallel port to a radio transmitter,
01:46:06 ◼ ► and the radio transmitter would talk to the pagers. So the project was, "We made the pagers,
01:46:10 ◼ ► we made the radio transmitter, and we made the software." And we had to price out all the
01:46:15 ◼ ► components and source them, and it was actually a pretty good product that spanned hardware and
01:46:19 ◼ ► software. In the end, the part I did was the entire Windows program written in MFC and C++.
01:46:31 ◼ ► Here's the software, here's a floppy disk, and here is a beautifully commented printout of the
01:46:38 ◼ ► world's most heinous MFC code. How could you even tell it's the most heinous? All MFC code
01:46:43 ◼ ► was heinous. It was the first and last time I ever did Windows development. I'm so sorry. Marco?
01:46:50 ◼ ► Well, this ties right mostly to the beginning of the show. I did have a senior project. It was
01:46:54 ◼ ► required by my colleagues for everybody. And it was, so I was in computer science, and what I
01:47:01 ◼ ► chose to do was attempt to develop my own audio compression algorithm, not dynamics compression.
01:47:09 ◼ ► Yeah, but compressing the way MP3 compresses to make a file smaller. And the idea I had was,
01:47:15 ◼ ► you know, you have, you look at audio waveforms and you see basically a bunch of squiggly lines.
01:47:20 ◼ ► And my idea was, instead of storing every number on that line, maybe I can fit a least squares
01:47:32 ◼ ► best fit line to it and then simply store the coefficients of the least squares equation and
01:47:40 ◼ ► have that represent like, you know, 20 audio samples with like four coefficients. And I,
01:47:47 ◼ ► you know, I mentioned earlier, I don't really, I have a very limited understanding of things like
01:47:51 ◼ ► digital signal processing and signal theory. Well, I had way less of an understanding of it,
01:47:56 ◼ ► you know, 20 years ago or whatever that was. So, that's when I guess 15 years ago. And so I,
01:48:03 ◼ ► yeah, it was, I had very bad understanding of it then. And so my idea to make this, you know,
01:48:09 ◼ ► best curve fit algorithm as audio compression, not only was hilariously slow to run on my Pentium 3
01:48:19 ◼ ► of the day, but was, sorry, AMD Athlon of the day. So it was hilariously slow to run. And also,
01:48:27 ◼ ► made the files larger because it was so bad at compressing. And at first I tried lossy compression,
01:48:39 ◼ ► Then I tried lossless compression, figuring, well, if I can at least store the coefficients,
01:48:44 ◼ ► and then I can just store the difference values between, you know, what my crazy equations
01:48:48 ◼ ► predicted and the actual values, that's at least smaller numbers and they can take up less space.
01:48:53 ◼ ► So I tried lossless compression then. And that was also horribly slow and also made the files
01:49:00 ◼ ► larger than the input waves. And so what I ended up having to like pivot to, since I was already
01:49:06 ◼ ► deep into this project and couldn't really come up with a new thesis, was basically turn it into
01:49:11 ◼ ► like a survey of audio, of lossless audio compression algorithms. And it turned out all that
01:49:18 ◼ ► crazy work I had done to generate best fit curves and with least squares algorithms and everything.
01:49:24 ◼ ► It turns out if you just predict that one sample will be the same value as the one before it,
01:49:30 ◼ ► and then just store the difference as the smaller number, that is basically free to do on computers.
01:49:39 ◼ ► It takes no time and compresses almost as well as flack because flack is doing things like that.
01:49:54 ◼ ► compression for, you know, constant input types like music. And pretty much any predictor that
01:49:59 ◼ ► you use to generate sample to sample data works at about the same accuracy. Like it's pretty hard
01:50:05 ◼ ► to get it much worse than that. So that is what I did. I made a survey of audio compression
01:50:12 ◼ ► algorithms to show how efficient all these much simpler methods were than the one that I tried
01:50:18 ◼ ► first that took me months. You could have done your graduate thesis on run length encoding.
01:50:22 ◼ ► Yeah. It's too soon. He's still a little upset about his C code from earlier to this episode.
01:50:29 ◼ ► Tobogranit, I think, would like to know, "John, what Destiny videos and specific YouTubers perhaps
01:50:38 ◼ ► do you watch?" This is short. I'm always on the lookout for new things. But I have two favorite
01:50:46 ◼ ► YouTubers. My favorite YouTuber is named True Vanguard. I think his actual name is Ryan.
01:50:51 ◼ ► I like him because he talks a lot about PvP, which is a type of Destiny game that I like.
01:50:58 ◼ ► It's player versus player as opposed to player versus environment or player versus enemies,
01:51:03 ◼ ► PvE. He talks about PvP a lot. And he is... I don't know how to put this. He's a grownup. I mean,
01:51:11 ◼ ► they're all adults on YouTube for the most part. But he doesn't... I can maybe describe it by what
01:51:19 ◼ ► he's not. He doesn't yell all the time, which is the thing that kids like. They like it when people
01:51:23 ◼ ► react very dramatically to whatever is going on in the thing they're doing. So he's not a yeller.
01:51:30 ◼ ► I was gonna say that he doesn't curse, but that's like... I don't care about cursing. But
01:51:34 ◼ ► indicative of how sort of pleasant and mature and kind and not interested in sensationalism
01:51:45 ◼ ► or getting super angry about things. He just generally seems like a nice person. He's also a
01:51:53 ◼ ► dad. So I'm watching a dad video. He's really good at PvP. And he explains what he's thinking,
01:52:02 ◼ ► how he does things, stuff that he tried in a nice laid-back way that I find interesting. So
01:52:08 ◼ ► True Vanguard on YouTube, my number one YouTuber. My second favorite one is named Datto. I don't
01:52:17 ◼ ► prone to anger. He struggles with the fame that he has gotten by being a fairly popular Destiny
01:52:23 ◼ ► YouTuber. But he does PvE a lot. And so I want to learn about all the PvE things and the intimate
01:52:31 ◼ ► details and all sorts of stats about what's the best thing to bring into this. I tried out all
01:52:35 ◼ ► these different techniques and hear all the numbers and the math and all that stuff. And I occasionally
01:52:40 ◼ ► enjoy watching him struggle with himself and with the game and with all sorts of other things. To
01:52:46 ◼ ► give an example, when they released the new raid recently, there's a race between all the players
01:52:52 ◼ ► to see who can be the first one to finish it. And Datto is right in there because he's a pretty big
01:52:57 ◼ ► YouTuber in the Destiny world. And he's got a lot of friends. And he's good at that part of the game.
01:53:01 ◼ ► And so are his friends. So it's a six-person thing of players versus computer enemies trying to
01:53:07 ◼ ► finish the raid, see who can be the world's first. You get a big accolade from the game maker. And
01:53:13 ◼ ► they all stream on Twitch. Datto and his crew were not the world's first. They came in third or fourth.
01:53:21 ◼ ► They started playing when the raid was launched. There was a bunch of stuff for everyone who
01:53:29 ◼ ► finishes the raid on the first day. You'll get this free jacket and all sorts of swag or whatever.
01:53:34 ◼ ► Even if you're not the world's first, just everyone who finishes the raid on the first day,
01:53:36 ◼ ► you get all this stuff. Datto and his crew played the raid for slightly over 24 hours straight.
01:53:53 ◼ ► I watched them on and off. I went to sleep. I woke up. They were still playing. This was
01:53:59 ◼ ► like over the course of a weekend. I checked in an hour later. They were still playing.
01:54:03 ◼ ► After the world's first had already completed, many, many hours after, they were still going.
01:54:08 ◼ ► They knew they weren't going to be the world's first. They were still going. This is on Twitch,
01:54:18 ◼ ► doing something where you're like, just go to sleep. You're not going to get any better.
01:54:24 ◼ ► You're not going to get any sharper. I continue to think that if they had taken a six-hour break
01:54:29 ◼ ► in the middle, they would have finished the raid faster. Like if they had just gotten some sleep.
01:54:35 ◼ ► Because after 24 hours of intense concentration on a game, very difficult. It's not like they're
01:54:42 ◼ ► just casually doing this. This is like the most difficult top-level thing that you can do. They
01:54:47 ◼ ► were under-leveled for it. They're concentrating for 24 hours. You are fried. They were making
01:54:53 ◼ ► dumb mistakes and getting sloppy. They should have taken a six. Anyway, that drama, and just to see
01:54:58 ◼ ► that person that I've known since Destiny 1 days and struggle with that and be frustrated with
01:55:04 ◼ ► their failures but eventually to overcome was an amazing, dramatic moment in the world of Destiny
01:55:09 ◼ ► videos. And I was glad I was there intermittently to witness it. So those are my two ones.
01:55:14 ◼ ► True Vanguard, my number one. Datto, number two. There's a bunch of other ones. I look at
01:55:19 ◼ ► Planet Destiny sometimes. Erex, Kakus. They all have these crazy names. But those are my top two.
01:55:26 ◼ ► So I would highly recommend everyone check out True Vanguard and check out Datto if you're into
01:55:30 ◼ ► PvE and you can handle his occasional outbursts. So Casey, who are your favorite Destiny YouTubers?
01:55:41 ◼ ► Thanks to our sponsors this week, Away, Squarespace, and Fracture. And we'll see you next week.
01:56:04 ◼ ► 'Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
01:56:15 ◼ ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them. @caseyliss. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
01:56:28 ◼ ► N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:57:01 ◼ ► That's the context it usually comes up in. Marco, why don't you explain what a dark pattern is?
01:57:05 ◼ ► So if we're talking about the same thing, a dark pattern like in UI design is basically,
01:57:09 ◼ ► it's almost like designing something intentionally to trick or mislead the user into doing something
01:57:19 ◼ ► that's kind of bad for them, but that benefits you as the designer or as the owner. So a good
01:57:24 ◼ ► example of this would be like on a website, like really hiding the way to delete your account or
01:57:30 ◼ ► really hiding the way to call them on the phone if you need help with something. Like trying to
01:57:34 ◼ ► make it really hard to do something that kind of costs you, the owner, money that might benefit
01:57:43 ◼ ► people or making it easy to accidentally trick people into giving up their email address to your
01:57:51 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's called a dark pattern because patterns in general is like a construct that
01:57:55 ◼ ► you use in an interface, like sort of standard constructs, an arrangement of controls where
01:58:07 ◼ ► familiar ways to present interfaces to people. A dark pattern is a pattern, as Marco said,
01:58:12 ◼ ► that is of various purposes. A great example of this, setting aside computers entirely,
01:58:20 ◼ ► predating computers. If you have something that you have to put like on a box or in a contract
01:58:24 ◼ ► or whatever, and you can make the text really, really small because you really don't want the
01:58:29 ◼ ► person, like you have to put it there, but you really don't want the person reading that.
01:58:32 ◼ ► So you make it really, really small to try to discourage them from, maybe they can't see it
01:58:36 ◼ ► that well, maybe it's so small they're squinting and it's annoying to read. That's a dark pattern.
01:58:40 ◼ ► And then the computer is another one that comes to mind as sort of the canonical dark pattern is
01:58:46 ◼ ► the please send me your newsletter checkbox that is checked by default. That was like one of the
01:58:51 ◼ ► early dark patterns on the web, right? Where you're going through some signup process and
01:58:55 ◼ ► there's a checkbox that says, yes, please send me marketing material. And it's checked by default,
01:58:59 ◼ ► 100% a dark pattern. And by the way, if you make an error in the form and like, oh, your email,
01:59:05 ◼ ► you forgot to enter your phone number and you uncheck that checkbox, it's checked again when
01:59:10 ◼ ► the form comes back. That's also a dark pattern. So now that we've established what a dark pattern
01:59:14 ◼ ► is, this is about dark patterns in destiny. This was a very sad day for me and destiny.
01:59:20 ◼ ► actually it was intentional, but yeah. All right. Anyway, destiny has vendors where you can buy
01:59:25 ◼ ► things. And the way the system has worked since destiny one, destiny two is it's a bunch of squares
01:59:30 ◼ ► on the screen. You put your cursor over them and you press a button and you buy it. It's not like
01:59:34 ◼ ► a cart. You don't put things into a cart and there's no quantity. Like you can't say, give
01:59:39 ◼ ► me five of these, 10 of these. Like there's no place where you get to enter a number or hit an
01:59:42 ◼ ► up and down arrow to put numbers. If you want to buy something, you hover over it and you hit the
01:59:46 ◼ ► button. And not only do you hit the button, occasionally you have to hold down the button
01:59:49 ◼ ► for a certain period of time because some things, some actions have big consequences. Like maybe
01:59:54 ◼ ► something is very expensive or like there's a button you hold down to dismantle items that you
01:59:58 ◼ ► have. And if it's a very valuable item, you want to, they put in a delay so that, oh, you're just,
02:00:04 ◼ ► you're, you're going to disassemble this thing that took you a year to get. You have to hold
02:00:09 ◼ ► down the button for like 60 seconds, like in this big progress bar feels to make sure you don't
02:00:12 ◼ ► accidentally delete it. Right? Because lots of stuff you're deleting all the time. You get junk
02:00:16 ◼ ► in the game and you're just like, oh, delete, delete, delete, delete. Right? So those are short,
02:00:19 ◼ ► but the more consequential the action, the more you hold it down. But anyway, for vendors,
02:00:23 ◼ ► for buying things, for the most part, it's, you know, they're fairly fast. You hold down the
02:00:29 ◼ ► button a little bit. Sometimes you just tap it, but it's just a single press because there is no
02:00:33 ◼ ► quantities anywhere. And sometimes you want to buy 50 of something because there are consumable items
02:00:37 ◼ ► and you want to buy a bunch of these things that you're going to trade for those things. This whole
02:00:40 ◼ ► whole economy, you know, economy of materials and made up money and everything in the game. And you,
02:00:46 ◼ ► you buy them in large quantity. So the habit over the course of since destiny one, you know,
02:00:51 ◼ ► four years now or whatever, is you go to a vendor and you're like, I'm going to buy five of these
02:00:56 ◼ ► things and 10 of those and eight of those. And I'm going to go to this vendor and sell five of
02:00:59 ◼ ► these and disassemble that and put these into the, you know, and so you get used to hitting the
02:01:03 ◼ ► button in sequences. So you look at the price, you look at how much you have and you're like, oh,
02:01:07 ◼ ► those are, those are, you know, 10, it's not, they don't use dollars. Well, those are $10 each.
02:01:11 ◼ ► I've got 500 bucks. I'm going to buy five of those. You have one, two, three, four, five.
02:01:15 ◼ ► And they're like, all right, I got this much left. I'm going to buy two of those. They're
02:01:17 ◼ ► 20 each, one, two, three, you know, like that's what the game has trained us to do over the course
02:01:22 ◼ ► of four years. If you played from the beginning of destiny, that's how everything works.
02:01:26 ◼ ► In destiny two, in the latest expansion, there was a vendor who sold an item that is an incredibly
02:01:33 ◼ ► short supply in the new economy. And they're probably going to patch the game to fix this.
02:01:37 ◼ ► Particular item that, you know, a material, a resource that is very rare and there's no
02:01:44 ◼ ► reliable way to get more. You get a little bit more randomly, but not enough to feed what you
02:01:49 ◼ ► would want to use this item in. And a vendor would sell it and they sold it for 10 of a very,
02:01:54 ◼ ► fairly valuable other item. Like not currency, but like there's another resource that's pretty
02:02:00 ◼ ► rare and hard to get, but there is at least a reliable way to get it. They sold it for 10 of
02:02:04 ◼ ► those. And you're like, oh, you know, I'm not going to spend 10 of that very valuable resource
02:02:08 ◼ ► for one of these things. That's not a good deal. But eventually, as it became clear in the economy
02:02:13 ◼ ► that there was no other way to get them, you're like, well, I would love any opportunity to buy
02:02:18 ◼ ► these. So I'm just going to farm that other material, come back here and buy, you know,
02:02:23 ◼ ► I know they're 10 each, so fine, I'll get a hundred and then I can buy 10 of those things, right?
02:02:27 ◼ ► So you go out and you farm that material, or maybe like me, you have a massive surplus because that
02:02:36 ◼ ► Yeah. Like I've got this cash and stuff, I'm going to spend it. Even though it's like 10 to one,
02:02:41 ◼ ► it's not a good deal. It's the only way I have to get this stuff. So I need to buy some of this
02:02:45 ◼ ► stuff. And so I go to the vendor and I buy a couple of them and I'm like, oh, that really hurt. That
02:02:51 ◼ ► sucked. And I wait for the next week for the reset to see if the price changed. It didn't. It's still
02:02:54 ◼ ► 10 of those things. I'm like, let me just bite the bullet. Let me go farm a whole bunch of this stuff
02:02:59 ◼ ► and let me just go and just dump it all in. I'll just buy, I'll buy like, you know, 20 of those
02:03:04 ◼ ► things, right? I'm just going to do it. Like I've resigned myself to my fate. They're not going to
02:03:09 ◼ ► fix the economy for a while. So I go there and I buy like 20 of them and I go one, two, three,
02:03:14 ◼ ► four, five, six, seven, eight, and I'm hitting the button, right? And eventually the button stops
02:03:19 ◼ ► working and the icon grays out. I'm like, what the hell? I had like, I had literally a thousand of
02:03:24 ◼ ► this thing and they were 10 each, right? I could have, I could have bought a ton of them. Like they
02:03:27 ◼ ► were 10 each and I've got over a thousand. Why, why is the button disabled? Is there a limit that
02:03:31 ◼ ► a number I can buy per week or something? And I realized the reason the thing was disabled is
02:03:37 ◼ ► because every time I purchased one, the price doubled. And because the game had trained me,
02:03:46 ◼ ► when you want to buy 10 of something, go one, two, three, four, five, hit the button 10 times.
02:03:50 ◼ ► Like you're not looking down at the price to see if the price is changing. The price never changed
02:03:54 ◼ ► on any other item when you bought it until this thing. The reason I couldn't buy anymore is
02:03:58 ◼ ► because I no longer had enough to buy a single one. The next purchase was like 600 or something.
02:04:04 ◼ ► It was some huge amount, right? Like, I suppose it had to be a power of two, right? I didn't have
02:04:09 ◼ ► that much left anymore, but that's why it wasn't letting me purchase it. So essentially I bought
02:04:14 ◼ ► one of these consumables for like 512 of that other one before the thing stopped. So I burned
02:04:20 ◼ ► through like a year's worth of this very valuable consumable that I had built up in like 30 seconds.
02:04:25 ◼ ► No, there is no undo. There is no going back. There is no complaining to Bungie that you
02:04:31 ◼ ► accidentally did a bad thing. There was no delay. An example of a dark pattern would be a price
02:04:38 ◼ ► that doubles every time you buy one that is unprecedented in four years of the game and an
02:04:44 ◼ ► interface that does not let you buy things in quantities and let you preview the price.
02:04:47 ◼ ► The game had trained me, "Press the button a certain integer number of times and get your
02:04:53 ◼ ► thing." I was sad for like four days about this. I know it's all just pretend stuff, but I literally
02:05:00 ◼ ► spent a lot of my actual time building up the inventory of that other valuable item. Notice
02:05:05 ◼ ► how I'm not using all the crazy destiny words here to help you people? Yeah, I appreciate that.
02:05:14 ◼ ► this vendor in the game is supposed to be like a gangster and like every time you do any kind of
02:05:21 ◼ ► In the game world, it kind of makes sense, but it is. It was bad. It was brutal. I complained
02:05:26 ◼ ► about this on Twitter and I got a whole bunch of people commiserating saying, "Yep, I did the same
02:05:30 ◼ ► thing." So I wasn't the only one who got nailed by this. In some respects, it's like, "That's a
02:05:34 ◼ ► pretty good game. Like, you really felt like you were screwed by this criminal." It's like, "Yeah,
02:05:38 ◼ ► but I did spend like a year of Destiny 2 building up that." And it's nothing compared to the people
02:05:43 ◼ ► who play this game all day. Like, the YouTube people all have so much of every resource that
02:05:51 ◼ ► compared to the people who play like, you know, hours and hours a day. And this really hurt. And
02:05:56 ◼ ► I said it on Bungie on Twitter, like, "Bad show, Bungie. Like, don't make the people who play your
02:06:00 ◼ ► game feel bad. Like, I... And you see what you were going for? But I think you underestimated
02:06:04 ◼ ► exactly how dark this dark pattern was and exactly how trained people are to just hit the button five
02:06:09 ◼ ► times and not look at the price." To be fair, and just to show the listeners how annoyed you were
02:06:16 ◼ ► by this, this topic has been sitting in the after show section of our show notes for like, two months
02:06:22 ◼ ► or something like that. And typically, if something sits for that long, Jon will just say, "Oh, it
02:06:27 ◼ ► doesn't matter anymore," and move along. But not this, my friends. And I don't blame you, to be
02:06:31 ◼ ► honest. I would really chat my behind. So did the item or whatever that you bought not as many as
02:06:40 ◼ ► **Matt Stauffer** No, no, it was not worth it. Like, at 10 for one of these, it's not worth it.
02:06:46 ◼ ► For like, hundreds of that consumable item for one of them, it's a terrible deal. It's like someone
02:06:54 ◼ ► said you can buy a candy bar for $10. You're like, "Eh, maybe it's for charity." But if we said,
02:06:59 ◼ ► "Oh, and by the way, go ahead and buy 20 candy bars and the price will double every time." By the time
02:07:04 ◼ ► you're buying a candy bar for $1,000 and someone says, "Well, was it worth it?" It was, you know,
02:07:07 ◼ ► you got that candy bar for a thousand. No, it's not worth it at all. It was terrible. I'm still
02:07:15 ◼ ► **Jared Stauffer** All right. And just because people will ask, and this is the brief spoiler
02:07:21 ◼ ► moment of the episode, what did you have to spend in order to purchase what using the actual Destiny
02:07:33 ◼ ► for legendary shards. Legendary shards got it from disassembling legendary weapons and a bunch of
02:07:41 ◼ ► other things. Masterwork Cores used to randomly drop, used to be able to get them from disassembling
02:07:48 ◼ ► Masterwork weapons, which would randomly drop. Anyway, yeah, Masterwork Cores are incredibly rare
02:08:01 ◼ ► to require all sorts of materials to do infusion. So basically, I mean, they have the charts in this,
02:08:04 ◼ ► this is why they're going to adjust it. They changed the infusion economy such that people
02:08:08 ◼ ► used to do infusion all the time. And as soon as Forsaken came out, I bet the rate of infusion
02:08:14 ◼ ► dropped off a cliff because it basically became nobody ever infused anything. It used to be a
02:08:18 ◼ ► thing that you would do all day long and was like, nobody infused anything because it uses so many
02:08:22 ◼ ► resources, including Masterwork Cores, and there's no way to get more Masterwork Cores. So even if
02:08:27 ◼ ► you had a cache built up, eventually you depleted it. I bet like infusion has dropped practically
02:08:32 ◼ ► zero. So they're going to fix this. They're going to adjust it. They posted a bunch of stuff about
02:08:36 ◼ ► it a couple weeks ago about how they're going to provide some reliable way to get Masterwork Cores.
02:08:40 ◼ ► I still think it's kind of crappy. I still think making infusion this expensive makes people run
02:08:46 ◼ ► around with a bunch of hobo suits to use incredible parlance. And really, I just want to use my good
02:08:51 ◼ ► items, but I can't afford to infuse them. Anyway, all that made sense to Destiny people. Rest assured.
02:08:55 ◼ ► Is this how our show sounds to like non-programmers or non-nerds? Like when I was going through all my
02:09:00 ◼ ► audio stuff earlier, I'm sure a lot of our audience like zoned out or skipped the chapter. Like,
02:09:04 ◼ ► consider myself like appropriately gotten back at for that now. Legendary Shards and Masterwork Cores
02:09:11 ◼ ► are probably a little bit more ridiculous than ring buffers, but not much. I was asking in the
02:09:15 ◼ ► chat room, would it have squared if you had bought it one at a time or one AA time? You could only
02:09:21 ◼ ► buy one at a time. That's my point. You can only buy one at a time. So if you would like left the
02:09:26 ◼ ► store or something and come back. Yeah, no, I think it reset per day. So if you cranked up the price,
02:09:33 ◼ ► if you went to sleep and came back the next day, it would be back down to 10. So you can buy one a
02:09:36 ◼ ► day for 10, but like it's ridiculous. You need like three of them to do a single simple infusion
02:09:43 ◼ ► and it cranks up from there. Yeah, I got lost again. It's a complicated game folks. I can't
02:09:50 ◼ ► believe we made it through that though. This is a new record for us, I think, of how much destiny
02:09:55 ◼ ► we can make it through at once. Well, anyway, if that was your question, yeah, it resets on a daily
02:09:59 ◼ ► basis, which is way too slow. Like, and I did, I have been going back and buying one for 10,
02:10:04 ◼ ► but at a certain point, like once they said they were going to change the economy, I'm not even
02:10:07 ◼ ► buying one for 10 anymore because one a day is ridiculous anyway. I got to travel all the way to
02:10:11 ◼ ► the vendor and I hate that guy now. Yeah, on principle. Yeah, he screwed me. I'm surprised
02:10:16 ◼ ► you didn't do more pre-purchase research. You know, you research every other purchase in your
02:10:20 ◼ ► life to such a degree. Like if you're making a large destiny purchase. That's why I tweeted it.
02:10:26 ◼ ► I didn't like, don't make the same mistake that I did. Right. I mean, cause it's just, it was just
02:10:31 ◼ ► so unprecedented. Like I just, when would you ever need to look back at the price? The price is the
02:10:37 ◼ ► price. And then you go buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Like that's for four years. We've been doing that
02:10:41 ◼ ► never has something changed price when you bought one it's madness, let alone doubling. That's just
02:10:47 ◼ ► so cruel. I wonder if I could do a reverse ramp for the, so I know what you've been doing while
02:10:54 ◼ ► destiny chat was happening. I haven't been programming, but I've been thinking about it.
02:10:58 ◼ ► I've been like slowly like noodling on this throughout the entire show. Like whenever I
02:11:03 ◼ ► wasn't busy talking or anything, like I would like get an idea in my head. Like, Oh, what if I,
02:11:08 ◼ ► what if I do it this way? Take two showers tomorrow. Yeah. Shower is the ultimate idea place.
02:11:14 ◼ ► Nice. Yeah. I think I might do a reverse buffer for the multiplier. That might work better.
02:11:28 ◼ ► like doing like a very simple limiter without look ahead is like 10 lines of code. Like
02:11:33 ◼ ► this is not difficult stuff or it isn't, uh, it isn't complicated. It's just really tricky.
02:11:41 ◼ ► If that makes sense. Like there's a difference between like tricky and it's not complicated.
02:11:45 ◼ ► The solutions are very simple once you get them. But to figure out exactly what to do with these
02:11:50 ◼ ► crazy numbers and how to do it is very tricky. It's the kind of thing that like, like I start out
02:11:56 ◼ ► with a few lines of code doesn't work right. Then I like slowly blow it up with a whole bunch of
02:12:08 ◼ ► It's crazy. And none of it would be helped by test suites. Oh, a lot of it would be. Nope.
02:12:15 ◼ ► You really would. Don't even try to talk about stuff. You don't understand the problem that
02:12:21 ◼ ► you'd break the problem down to, into a easily testable functions and you'd get each of those
02:12:25 ◼ ► working. So you didn't have to worry about them anymore. And then you'd build up, you know, like
02:12:29 ◼ ► that may not be your way of working, but rest assured it is a way of working that does work
02:12:33 ◼ ► for this specific case. What I am doing is one of those functions. Like that's all it is. Like,
02:12:38 ◼ ► it's a very, very small function. Right. But if you know what the output's supposed to look like,
02:12:43 ◼ ► like making tests to show what the output is and like your, your aspirational state as your
02:12:57 ◼ ► Use the debugger in the test. Forget it. I can't do this. I need to, if we're going to have this
02:13:03 ◼ ► conversation, we're going to have this conversation. I'm going downstairs and pouring a drink. I cannot
02:13:07 ◼ ► have this conversation sober. We've covered these bases before. We're not, I'm not trying