0:00:00Take two showers tomorrow. Shower is the ultimate idea place.
0:00:03Yeah, Marco's a little grumbly tonight, but I can understand.
0:00:07Oh gee, yeah. C is kicking my butt right now, and audio math is kicking my butt right now.
0:00:14So what are you trying to accomplish? And use very small words, because I am not familiar with audio
0:00:20stuff at all. Okay, so in audio terms, I'm trying to implement a look-ahead limiter. You know,
0:00:26you probably know as a podcaster and as a video person that clipping is real bad. I've heard this.
0:00:32When your audio level goes above the maximum input level of a digital input device,
0:00:38it sounds really bad. It sounds like a scratchy, loud kind of like kind of thing, like it sounds
0:00:44awful. So it's very important when you're dealing with audio amplification, when you're trying to
0:00:49make, you know, make volume levels louder or whatever else, it's very important to have a
0:00:53limiter in front of it. And the point of the limiter is to catch those like very loud signals
0:00:59that would clip before they clip and to apply gain downwards on them. So hold on, so hold on. So
0:01:06to use kind of a really crummy analogy, so this is like I have my finger on the volume dial. I know
0:01:14it's not quite volume, but for the sake of the analogy, I have my finger or my hand on the volume
0:01:18dial and I see the person in front of the microphone take a real deep breath and like get
0:01:23ready to shout and I go, oh crap. And I turn the volume down because I know they're about to shout.
0:01:27Well, that's the look ahead part, but I haven't gotten to that yet. So the main part is they start
0:01:31shouting and as they get really close to the top, you very quickly go, oh crap, this is going to
0:01:37clip and you turn the volume down. Okay. Now you might think like the naive way to try to implement
0:01:41this is basically you just look at every sample and the ones that are above one in the floating
0:01:49point domain. So like the ones that are above 1.0, which is like the ceiling, you just like
0:01:53compress those down by a certain multiplier or you just make them 1.0. You might think to do it that
0:01:59way, but that ends up sounding awful because of the way signals work that basically introduces
0:02:03a bunch of frequencies and distortion that weren't there before. And so the right way to do it is
0:02:10to catch it well in advance of it actually clipping like, you know, enough samples in
0:02:16advance that you can actually do almost like a gradual volume ramp downwards. And if you,
0:02:22if you've seen, you know, if you're ever like using an audio editing program and you're,
0:02:25and you're playing with the controls of either a compressor, which is basically a limiter with
0:02:30some extra stuff or a limiter, then you will see something called attack time and release time.
0:02:35And these are literally like the amount of time usually measured in like tens of milliseconds or
0:02:40maybe hundreds of milliseconds at worst, the amount of time that it will take to turn the
0:02:46volume down to prevent clipping. And then that's the, that's the attack time. And the release time
0:02:50is the amount of time it takes to go back to normal. It's basically turn the volume back to
0:02:53normal after it thinks it had that the, that the clipping sound is over. What you want to do is
0:03:01ideally to, to really prevent something from clipping, you need to have look ahead,
0:03:05which means you need to be able to look to see what's coming in the stream before you apply the
0:03:11volume dip to, to limit it from clipping. So what I've been doing and, and, you know, so, you know,
0:03:18programmers, you know, you can figure out like when you're dealing with some kind of like rolling
0:03:21buffer with like look ahead functionality, but you can't modify this stuff and look ahead, but for
0:03:25yet, like it's kind of, it's kind of awkward. And, and so I basically spent yesterday building the
0:03:31framework to do look ahead processing. And then I spent today trying and largely failing to write
0:03:40the, the gain processing that will gradually in response to what's coming up ahead, will gradually
0:03:48raise and lower the volume in a way that doesn't sound horrible. And that actually works to prevent
0:03:51clipping. And I just, I've just been having a terrible time. My brain is melted right now. Like I,
0:03:57it takes, it takes me a long time to understand complex math, like, you know, anything involving
0:04:01signal processing filters. Like I barely understand that stuff. Cause I'm really not good at that kind
0:04:06of advanced math. I have very little knowledge of it and very little background in it, but the
0:04:10limiter I thought would be easy cause I thought like, Oh, it's just like, you know, you basically
0:04:13like ramp up and down the, the gain and response to what you see ahead of you. And yeah, it's
0:04:18kicking my butt. It's not easy at all. And of course, because I'm working in C, I am frequently
0:04:24like having these comical errors where like, you know, I love working in C. I like C was kind of
0:04:29like my, my programming youth and, and I really enjoyed it. And I, my first job was all in C.
0:04:36So I do love C on, on a very like intellectual level, but it is awfully funny when like,
0:04:41you know, you, you get a, you get an error where like, Oh, the thing I, the thing that
0:04:46worked like last build in this build, it's making random noise all over the place. Well,
0:04:51I screwed up on memory somewhere and you just got to find like, where is the somewhere like
0:04:56somewhere I made a mistake and I'm writing all over garbage somewhere and yeah, it's,
0:04:59Oh boy. So I've had a number of those times and I've had a lot of terrible luck trying to
0:05:05implement my limiter. Uh, but, uh, getting there slowly. Now why C speed? Because the API you're
0:05:13using to see all the above some of the above the API. I'm actually not dealing directly with core
0:05:18audio at this level. I'm dealing just with like float arrays, like just like giant, giant buffers
0:05:24of floats that are sample data. So I could be writing this pretty much anything that can,
0:05:29that can operate on raw buffers. When I write code at this level, I make extensive use of the, uh,
0:05:35the accelerate framework with all the VDSP functions. This is basically Apple's like
0:05:40wrapper functions around highly vectorized optimizations for common math operations and
0:05:44this kind of thing. So like if you want to like take an array of 500 numbers and multiply them
0:05:49all by the same value or multiply two giant arrays of 500 numbers by each other and put the result
0:05:54in a third array of 500 numbers using these functions in the accelerate framework are way,
0:05:59way, way faster because they use vector operations on the processor. Uh, it's way faster than like
0:06:03going through one by one and doing these operations. So basically I'm dealing with a
0:06:07whole bunch of raw float arrays and a whole bunch of calls to these low level functions and everything.
0:06:13And so you can do this in Swift, but Swift is such a Royal pain in the butt doing things like this.
0:06:21Sure. And why not? Why not objective C then? Um, this library, I really just write and see for
0:06:28speed like this is so in this audio pipeline is the only time I have ever had a measurable
0:06:34improvement by removing an objective C message sent. Like I actually like back, back when I was
0:06:40doing that battery testing, when I was like running at the batteries and all my devices
0:06:43seeing like, Oh, does the speaker use all the battery? Does the Bluetooth use all the battery?
0:06:46So that I discovered this optimization where like there was like there was this one call that
0:06:50basically renders out a block of like 500 samples of audio in the audio pipeline. And so it's called,
0:06:57you know, there's 44,100 samples per second. So the block that renders 500 at a time is called
0:07:03many times per second. And by removing an obviously message send from that, I was able to
0:07:09actually speed up the processing by some amount, like, you know, a couple percent, but it was like,
0:07:14it was measurable and it was reliably measurable. Hmm. That's surprising. So what is the ultimate
0:07:20driving motivation behind this? If you're willing to share. So I'm working on voice boost too.
0:07:26I've been taught, I've talked about this a few times here and there, like just kind of mentioning
0:07:28here and there. And basically I'm trying to do voice boost, but better. One of the reasons I'm
0:07:33doing it now is because I really, if I want to support airplay too, in a way that isn't horrible,
0:07:39I really need to write my own voice boost code instead of right now, voice boots is implemented
0:07:44as a combination of a legacy, a you graph nodes like audio graph nodes from core audio.
0:07:49And that API seems to like, it's very discouraged to use that now. And, uh, and it seems like Apple
0:07:57is slowly showing at the door and using those to supply an airplay to stream is possible,
0:08:06but it would be very clumsy. I basically have to like create a whole audio graph,
0:08:09like off to the side that isn't connected to the hardware render with it into a voice or into a
0:08:16airplay to style renderer. And like, so it's like, it's just a lot of overhead. It's a lot of extra
0:08:20work and that would probably have a noticeable battery cost. So I don't want to do it that way
0:08:24if I don't have to. So the way I want to do it is by not needing those old, a you graph processing
0:08:30nodes anymore, which means that I have to write my own compressor. And the way you write a compressor
0:08:36is you write a limiter first. And so I, uh, I need the, I need basically, I need the limiter for lots
0:08:42of different things in audio processing things. Uh, but the very first thing I need it for is the
0:08:48voice boost to compressor that I'm writing from scratch. And this is probably not wise, uh, but
0:08:53I just spent like a month dealing with just like pain in the butt watch things, like not the fun
0:09:01part of app development, but just like pain in the butt, like, Oh, this, this watch transfer just
0:09:06failed for no reason. How do I fix that? How do I try to work around that? And, and going through
0:09:11like, so overcast, um, five Oh three just came out a couple of days ago and, um, and this included
0:09:18basically what I'm talking about, like the, the fix for watch transfers. This was a grueling process
0:09:23where to figure out why standalone watch podcast transfers were so unreliable. I basically,
0:09:31for the last few weeks, like shipping a beta build almost every day, uh, with different tweaks and
0:09:36changes, I built a whole logging frameworks of people. So, so the watch would log what it's doing
0:09:41and coordinate it with the phone app and log what it's doing. And then people in the beta could then
0:09:45send me those logs so I could look at them and make tweaks and send that new builds the next day
0:09:49or later that same day. And it was just a grueling long process of trying to finally figure out how
0:09:57to make watch transfers even remotely reliable. And so I'm rewarding myself with that long slog
0:10:02of doing something I really didn't want to do. That's very boring with a bunch of C. Well,
0:10:07yeah, cause it's different, you know, it's like, I know it sounds crazy, but like, it does sound
0:10:11crazy, but this is something I've been putting off for a year. Uh, and it, or, and parts of it have
0:10:17taken me a year to figure out even how to do, uh, like, cause as I mentioned, like this involves a
0:10:22lot of like DSP stuff that I do not have a background in that I, that I mostly don't know,
0:10:26like whenever I see like whenever I like find a stumble upon like an academic paper online,
0:10:31it tells me to do something and it's starts putting in like the big Greek, like Sigma symbol
0:10:35and everything. I don't even, I don't know how to do even that stuff. Like I don't know how to even
0:10:38read mathematic notation beyond like basic stuff. And when they start talking about things like,
0:10:44like, you know, if I are filters and everything I had, I don't have any clue about that stuff. Like
0:10:48I that's way above my head. And so it's taken me a very long time to figure out how to do this kind
0:10:53of stuff. But I have figured out enough of it to get by on some low levels. And so I actually find
0:10:59this really fascinating and interesting and it's a very good intellectual challenge and it's working
0:11:04towards something I really, really want to get done. That will be very satisfying to me that most
0:11:09people won't care about at all. All of this is going to go into a little check box that says
0:11:12AirPlay 2. Like it's like a little bullet point feature on one release now supports AirPlay 2.
0:11:17But if I can get this down, I can then also use this to build more interesting stuff.
0:11:22So I, that's what, that's my main goal here. I couldn't care less about your home pod. I want
0:11:26to build more interesting stuff. So I want to do AirPlay 2 first to get me to, to build the
0:11:30building blocks and then I can do interesting stuff with that. So that's, that's where I am now. And I
0:11:35actually find this to be a wonderful change of pace from fighting watch connectivity and transfers.
0:11:43This actually feels, even though this is way like harder math wise and way lower level,
0:11:49this feels more satisfying to me because I feel like I'm not cleaning up some mess. I feel like
0:11:55I'm actually building something and that's something you don't get very often in programming and you
0:11:59gotta really enjoy it when you do. Not to spoil your fun, but did you check to see if there are
0:12:04any libraries that already do this? Like open source libraries? There might be some that are
0:12:08like really part of something bigger like, like the, what's that audio program? Not Audacity.
0:12:13Yeah. Audacity. Like Audacity is an open source audio editor that has things like limiters and
0:12:17compressors in it. I could look at their code and like, I don't know, steal it. I don't want to do
0:12:22that though. And, and it's probably hard to like, you know, port some of that stuff over. What I'm
0:12:26really looking for is like descriptions of like algorithms to do these kinds of things. And those
0:12:31are actually few and far between. Most online code that you would find would do this either as like a
0:12:40matlab function, which I don't know what to do with or they're doing it. They're just like, you know,
0:12:49going to call the core audio units that at least I know how to use audio units already. I'm trying
0:12:53to do this without using audio units. So here we are. To go back a half step. Do you have any
0:13:01findings that you're willing to share with regard to watch related things? Like, was there
0:13:06some head slapping moment where you were doing something silly and that,
0:13:09that's what caused the problems or is this considered a trade information?
0:13:13The main problem I had with the watch. So the, the watch app can wake up the phone app in the
0:13:20background whenever it wants. Like whenever the watch app is running or is updating itself.
0:13:24If the, if the watch app is running, it can send a message to the phone app and the phone app will
0:13:28wake up if it's in the background, but it doesn't work the other way around. The phone app cannot
0:13:33wake up the watch app on demand. So the phone app, like if, if you get a new download into your
0:13:39phone, the phone can't send that immediately to the watch. It has to wait for the next time the
0:13:44watch app checks in and the watch app can check in really, really pretty rarely. Um, you know, it's,
0:13:51if you have it configured as a complication, it gets maybe every 15 minutes worth of check-ins.
0:13:57If it's not a complication and you just have it on the watch, it gets a lot less time than that.
0:14:01Each one of those check-ins, it can only be alive for like two seconds before the system, uh, you
0:14:06know, puts it back in the background. And if at any point you, uh, violate any of these limits
0:14:12from the watch app side, your app gets killed and then it doesn't come back for awhile.
0:14:16So I had many problems. Part of my problems were I was exhausting some of these resource limits
0:14:22because some things in the watch were just taking too much computation that I was doing.
0:14:25And so it was getting killed in the background a lot. So it was not refreshing very often.
0:14:29Uh, more problems. There were so many problems. Like there were a couple of race conditions with
0:14:33like the watch app would start up and send a sync message to the phone app and then receive some
0:14:39files the phone app had sent in the background. Uh, cause watching activity does not guarantee
0:14:44the order of things you send, uh, whether some of them are background or not. It's very, very weird.
0:14:48Uh, and so like there was some weird race conditions. There were some concurrency bugs.
0:14:53There were some crashes that were sometimes my fault, sometimes being related to resource
0:14:58terminations. And I had a system before where the phone app would try to communicate with the watch
0:15:06app proactively. So even if the watch app wasn't running, and I said it earlier, the phone app can't
0:15:11wake it up. The phone app was trying to say, you know what, this episode just came in. Let me just
0:15:15create a watch file transfer and just tell it to start. And then next time the watch comes around
0:15:21or next time the systems feel like it, it can maybe get that transfer. And hopefully sometime
0:15:25the watch app will be woken up and it can receive that. So I was, I was basically proactively
0:15:30creating transfers on the phone. This, this meant the phone had to keep track of what the watch had.
0:15:37So the phone would know what was new and what needed to be sent to the watch.
0:15:41This worked somewhat, but created a bunch of weird edge case problems.
0:15:48Problem number one was if you have more than one watch, this totally breaks because if you have
0:15:52more than one watch, then every time the watch, every time a watch checks in with the phone,
0:15:56first of all, if you have just changed watches, all background transfers get killed and invalidated
0:16:03and you have to start them over. So if you, if you wear multiple watches, this is, this is,
0:16:08this is one thing that suffers. And then also then like, you know, then you have two different sets
0:16:14of what you might have. And so the phone can get confused about what the, what the watch has,
0:16:18and it can send duplicate things. Some of those race conditions also resulted in duplicate sends
0:16:23where like the phone would tell or the watch would tell the phone, all right, I have numbers one,
0:16:27two, and three, and the phone would say, all right, I'll send you number four. And then
0:16:32right after the watch said, I have numbers one, two, and three,
0:16:36watch connectivity delivered in the background, number four, that was sitting there waiting for
0:16:40it, but it just hadn't delivered it right on launch. So then it actually already had number four,
0:16:46and then the phone is resending it because at the time the phone got the sync message,
0:16:49it thought it didn't have it. So it like, there's all sorts of weird little like race conditions and
0:16:53various concurrency issues that just took me a very long time to figure out and fix. And my,
0:16:58my solution at the end was basically stop doing anything proactively on the phone.
0:17:02The phone no longer keeps track of what's on the watch, except for a very basic display function of
0:17:07like displaying how much free space you have in the setting screen. That's it. Now, every time the
0:17:12watch syncs with the phone, it tells it, I have, you know, episodes number one, two, and three,
0:17:16or whatever. And the phone in response to that will create any necessary transfers to send new
0:17:22stuff to the watch. That way you can have 10 watches paired and it'll basically work. Like,
0:17:29it'll be, it'll still suck for other reasons, but it'll basically work because then like each
0:17:35watch is only getting what is sent in response to it. This ends up working way more reliably
0:17:43and it eliminates duplicate transfers almost a hundred percent of the time,
0:17:46which dramatically improves things. The only downside to it is that the delay between when
0:17:54your phone downloads a new episode and when that episode shows up on the watch, maybe longer in
0:18:01many cases because it has to wait, like so the phone can download it and then it has to wait
0:18:06until next time the watch checks in before it even starts the transfer to the watch.
0:18:12But every other way I tried doing things was very, very buggy and very, you know, it would destroy
0:18:17people's batteries and everything and it was, and it would make a lot of duplicates and it would,
0:18:22transfers would get all bogged down and watch connectivity, which is a very buggy framework.
0:18:25And because I was just sending too many messages proactively in the background,
0:18:28it would just take forever. Like it was just, it was so problematic to do it, to do the proactive
0:18:33method. So this wave of basically doing everything in response to something is way more effective,
0:18:40way faster at like at the actual transfers and then just has the downside of like,
0:18:44there's that latency between when new stuff arrives and when the watch can get it.
0:18:48- Sounds fun.
0:18:49- Yeah, so that in response to all that, I needed to do something productive
0:18:53and that's why I'm writing my own look ahead limiter, damn it.
0:18:56- Whatever makes you happy.
0:18:57- By the way, if anybody knows how to write a look ahead limiter, let me know.
0:18:59- Yeah, that is intense.
0:19:00- Oh, geez. I almost got it. Like I have the look ahead part, I have that done. It's just a question
0:19:07of like responding to the changes in like attenuation in a smooth and also accurate way.
0:19:16'Cause in theory, like if you have a look ahead of say, you know, 10 milliseconds and your attack
0:19:23time is 10 milliseconds, in theory, it should be impossible to ever clip. Like the output should
0:19:29never be clipped then, but I'm not having that kind of outcome yet. So here we are.
0:19:34- Well, good luck. I'm sure that's just a boatload of fun.
0:19:40- Honestly, much of it is. Yesterday was a lot of fun, like putting together all the look ahead stuff
0:19:45and doing some more voice boost coding. Like that yesterday I had a lot of fun and I got a lot done.
0:19:49It was very productive. Today has been one of those like bang in my head against the wall days.
0:19:53- Do you have a separate little project where you're working on this part? Like are you,
0:19:58you know, doing the audio processing, not in overcast, but in like a just a, you know,
0:20:02a separate framework project or like just off to the side?
0:20:05- I have a Mac command line utility that I develop all this in. So that way, like I can,
0:20:10I just hit build and it's, I don't have to wait for the simulator. I don't have to wait for any
0:20:13devices. Like I just hit build and I run it from the command line with command line arguments of
0:20:17files I have on my Mac to test with. And it's like, here's an input file, here's an output file.
0:20:21You know, so it not only is it way faster of like a build and run and debug cycle, but also then I
0:20:27can, I can supply it whatever input file I want. And then I can open the result up in Adobe Audition,
0:20:33which is like, you know, this very sophisticated wave editor. And I can look and see exactly what
0:20:38I output like at the wave level and just see like, is this working right? I can listen to it. I can
0:20:42like on my big headphones and everything. So it's all to make it a lot easier. And then,
0:20:46but I'm working on a framework that is shared with Overcast. And so that way, like once I figure it
0:20:52out in this Mac utility, I can just bring it over. Just have a way out of the faster code debug cycle
0:20:58is another reason a lot of people like unit tests when developing an isolated piece of functionality.
0:21:02I love you, John. Oh my word, I love you. In this case, I don't know that at this moment.
0:21:09You can still do it. Testing could still be a part of it if you knew what the, for example,
0:21:13if you knew what the numbers were supposed to look like, if you knew what the samples,
0:21:16if you knew what you wanted the samples to look like in the stream, right? But you're doing it
0:21:19sort of the more visual way of like make a file, chuck it into an editor and look at it, you know,
0:21:24whatever. I also spend a lot of time in the debugger. Like that's like, basically the debugger is my test
0:21:29suite. Like I just hit a break point right after, like, it's like, I know what this is supposed to
0:21:33be. That's an under the radar title of under the radar titles. The debugger is my test suite.
0:21:38Also, you can still run the debugger with unit tests. Like that's still a thing. Don't worry.
0:21:44Tell you what though, like, like as an iOS developer, the vast majority of the time,
0:21:47doing something like this where it's just a Mac binary is so refreshing in a few ways. Like,
0:21:52it's so damn easy and fast and there's so much less to deal with. It's, it's really nice.
0:21:59Uh, I hear you. No, I feel like, um, I don't want to pull on the unit testing thread anymore,
0:22:04but, uh, I feel like unit testing is one of those things that you're going to come to in your own
0:22:10time for some ridiculous reason. And then you're going to say to John and me, hopefully me, if not
0:22:16both of us, you know, unit testing is actually really convenient. That's a pretty long, infinite
0:22:21time. I'm arguing it given the current rate of change. Yeah. I would, I would not bet that I
0:22:29would be arriving at that point. Anytime. Like I think I will be retired from programming before
0:22:34I arrive at that point. You're going to work on it. Start working on Adam Casey. Yeah, there you
0:22:37go. Maybe you have a chance with Adam will be heavily into test driven development. Oh,
0:22:41I didn't say test driven development. I'm not a monster. I mean, come on.
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0:24:36All right, let's start with some follow up. You're welcome, world. I think we can comfortably say
0:24:47that it was only the three of us that got Apple to update its bagel emoji. And now it mostly looks
0:24:55okay. There's still room, but it's better than it was. Oh, it's way better. Let's say this. Yeah,
0:25:02definitely. The main thing you can say about it is it is an improvement. I mean, how could it be
0:25:06worse really? But it is an improvement for sure. There are things to be said about it. But put it
0:25:13this way. If I squint or move away from these big images or whatever, one is immediately
0:25:18identifiable as that's supposed to be a bagel and the other one still looks vaguely donut-like. So
0:25:22success on if you look at this and tell me what it is, you can say it's a bagel. If you look at
0:25:26the details, you can nitpick them. But as other people have pointed out, you look at the details
0:25:31of almost any emoji and there's some ridiculous stuff in there. But like the key thing tested,
0:25:35it has to pass is what is this? And if you if someone percentage of people say donut,
0:25:39it's a failure. So thumbs up. It now looks like it is now identifiable as a bagel, albeit a very
0:25:46strange pale bagel that's semi toasted with plastic cream cheese on it, whatever, whatever.
0:25:51It's going to be small. It'll be fine. Well, and like, you know, the point of emoji
0:25:55is not to look photorealistic. Like it's an art style that on some level and this varies
0:26:02depending on the vendor, but like, you know, it always looks a little bit cartoony because they're
0:26:07being displayed in text in very, very small sizes most of the time. And so like to have something
0:26:13look totally photorealistic will just kind of look weird. So the style they're in is honestly,
0:26:20I think Apple's current style is actually more photorealistic than it needs to be.
0:26:24Yeah, for sure. I was going to say it's very close to, again, potentially uncanny valley.
0:26:29They it's it's stylized for sure, but it is very much more photorealistic than most other emoji.
0:26:35Ultimately, this is a much better bagel. It is more realistic than I expected it to be.
0:26:40And it's like I don't I don't have any more complaints about it. Basically, like I,
0:26:44I do think that I do know like so, OK, so like they they made like the little, you know,
0:26:49buttcracks seem more prominent. And so it's easier. It's more easily identified as a bagel that way.
0:26:55The the whole to circle ratio and shape are better. They're more they better reflect
0:27:02actual like, you know, New York style bagels and the cream cheese. While I don't
0:27:08love the like, you know, perfect way it was applied there, I do recognize this is like
0:27:13this is a cartoon, right? And so like it is it is supposed to be that way. And also the cream cheese
0:27:19hides the the texture of the of the horrible bread texture it had before, which appears to still be
0:27:24under it. But but we don't really see it anymore. So ultimately. Oh, and the color of the dough has
0:27:31has been tweaked to be, I think, a lot better, much closer to a real bagel. So ultimately,
0:27:37my main complaint about it, which admittedly is a very minor complaint, is that a plain bagel with
0:27:43plain cream cheese is such a waste. Like you have two opportunities there to have interesting
0:27:49flavors in the bagel and in the cream cheese. And I understand if maybe you want to just take one of
0:27:55those like an everything bagel with plain cream cheese is really good. Or a plain bagel with like
0:28:01some kind of really outrageous cream cheese, like you know, like a really strong vegetable or
0:28:05scallion or so like like that can be good too. But to have a plain bagel and plain cream cheese
0:28:11is just it's a waste of carbs. It's not a waste. It's not it's like it's like plain cheese pizza.
0:28:17Like, yep, it's not the thing you want all the time and other things can be more exciting.
0:28:22Plain cheese pizza is way better than a plain bagel with plain cream cheese.
0:28:26Oh, no, sir. Like none of it's done well. Like simple. It can be it can be done well.
0:28:31A couple of you know, not that we're going to go through all this all again, but a couple of my
0:28:35complaints about this bagel, the bottom half like they hid the texture of the you know,
0:28:41the cut inside so they don't have to worry about that for the most part anymore.
0:28:44But it looks it looks kind of like it's like toasted or stale, like it's the wrong
0:28:49the parts that are sticking out of the wrong color. But the main thing you already touched on is the
0:28:52cream cheese. First of all, I think it looks like plastic or wall spackle or something doesn't read
0:28:56as good as the way the way it's. And again, this is all ridiculous stuff that you could only see if
0:29:01it's giant size, small sizes, it's fine. But but even maybe it's small sizes, you can notice it's
0:29:05like the there is there is no bagel ever made in the history of the universe that had the cream
0:29:10cheese put on it so that there is a tiny thin rim of bagel visible uniformly around the outside.
0:29:16Or like it's it's basically impossible to do that unless you custom made a machine. If I saw a bagel
0:29:21like that, I'd know I was in like dreamscape with Dennis Quaid. Like this is not this is this is not
0:29:26reality. Look at this cream cheese and this bagel. This would never exist in the real world. This
0:29:29must be a dream. It's bad. Anyway, it's vastly improved. If you scroll down in this article on
0:29:37Emojipedia about the bagel update and you can see the list of everyone else's bagel emoji like
0:29:41Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Twitter. What the heck flavor is the Twitter bagel? It looks like a
0:29:48hamburger. That's not even a bagel. Yeah, seriously. So the Twitter bagel, it has a sphere with a
0:29:54hole down the center. Yeah, so like so shape wise, I can kind of forgive the shape if that's their
0:29:59style. I mean, I can't. It looks like the Death Star. It does look like the Death Star. It actually
0:30:02kind of does. But and so it's like it's it's clearly illustrating a bagel with cream cheese
0:30:07and the bagel has five very large seeds on it and like they're like the size of like almonds.
0:30:15And then the color of the bagel, it's almost red. It's like it's like a like a low saturation,
0:30:23like dusty reddish brown. And I have never seen I used to work in a bagel shop and I've eaten a lot
0:30:30of bagels since then. I have never seen a bagel that was anywhere near this color in any flavor
0:30:36in any bagel shop anywhere. You don't have red velvet bagels mixed with blueberry all the time
0:30:40or shape like it's not even bagel shaped. It is literally sphere shaped with with a
0:30:45cylindrical hole cut down the center of it. It looks more like a weird cream filled donut.
0:30:51Yeah, it really does. It's by far the worst one. I don't think Microsoft's or Google's are
0:30:55particularly good. In fact, I think outside of Apple's, I think Samsung's is actually my
0:30:59favorite of this batch. Yeah, Samsung's is the clear second place. Well, I don't know. Google's
0:31:03Google's isn't bad. I mean, I identify it was a bagel like you wouldn't that they put the sesame
0:31:07seeds on it. What else? What else? It's not a donut. Well, Google's has a couple of critical
0:31:11errors. So number one is like the perspective between the seam between the cream cheese and the
0:31:17top bagel half on the far left and right is weird. It has like the wrong perspective. Like it's
0:31:23overflowing. That's what they're trying to get at. But the bagels like weirdly behind it. It's
0:31:27not the right angle. And then second of all, the way the seeds are distributed, it's as if the side
0:31:32of the bagel that is not facing you has no seeds on it. Yeah, it's nonsensical. Yeah. Like I feel
0:31:39like, yeah, like Apple's looks pretty good now. Twitter's is good for comedy value. I don't know
0:31:44what's going on in Microsoft land with those black outlines. It's probably just their style
0:31:47and Samsung's looks like a legitimate lender's freezer bagel like that. Samsung did a really
0:31:52good job of showing what a lender's bagel looks like. It just looks a little donut like to Apple's
0:31:57is clearly the best in this bunch now. So it's not even a contest. All I know is you're welcome world.
0:32:01John, tell me about screen time and how everyone's having problems with it.
0:32:05Yep. I complained about a screen time as a feature I was using and then it just stopped working. I
0:32:10could no longer see my kids screen time reports on my phone and a million people wrote in to say,
0:32:17yep, I'm having exactly the same problem. I tried disabling screen time for the people and
0:32:24remove like the big reset, which was a terrible mistake because Apple and their infinite wisdom
0:32:29has decided if you turn it off for somebody and then turn it back on, it has no recollection of
0:32:34what your settings were. It's like, so you're starting from scratch again. And there are a lot
0:32:38of settings. So once I did that once, I'm like, well, even if this fixed the problem, I wouldn't
0:32:43go through it again because it's ridiculous. So as a warning to anyone who's thinking of trying
0:32:47that, A, it didn't fix the problem and B, it makes you redo all of the settings. I hope you
0:32:51remembered what they all were. But yeah, everyone's like, yeah, it was working for me now. It's not.
0:32:55One person did say that supposedly in the 12.1 beta it's fixed. I'm not on the beta, so I'll just
0:33:00wait patiently for 12.1 to come out and hope it fixes my problem. But if it's happening to you,
0:33:05you are not alone. All righty. Let's see what's next. Tell me about emergency bypass.
0:33:11We talked about do not disturb. I was a big proponent of setting time do not disturb. And
0:33:15I said, don't worry. You people can still get through if they need to because your VIPs and
0:33:19repeated messages will get through. There's one other thing I forgot to mention. All that is true.
0:33:24There are settings that allow people to get through when they need to, but you can also
0:33:28within specific contacts, designate that that contact, that person, whoever it is,
0:33:34is able to bypass do not disturb with either sounds, vibrations, or both. Just straight up,
0:33:39like they will just go straight through it. So if you're worried that your spouse or children won't
0:33:45be able to get in touch with you, go to their contacts and flip the switches for their ringtone
0:33:50and their vibrate settings and say that they will pierce the wall of do not disturb. Of course,
0:33:55maybe you want to either, I was going to say, maybe you want to tell the person that it's on
0:33:59so they don't send you a message and expect do not disturb to protect you. Or maybe you don't want to
0:34:04tell those people that it's on and they'll just assume that they shouldn't text you late at night.
0:34:07Anyway, you figure that out yourself, but it's a good setting. You should know it exists.
0:34:10So I actually wrote a blog post about this in 2016 when it was new. And at the time,
0:34:16emergency bypass was one humongous switch for an entire contact. So what that meant was if I wanted
0:34:23to turn emergency bypass on for Erin, not only did it turn it on for the phone, but it turned it on
0:34:29for text messages, which is not advisable in my personal opinion, because sometimes she would be
0:34:33up late or get up early either because she just happened to wake up or couldn't fall asleep,
0:34:38whatever. Or maybe it was a baby related thing at the time. And so she tried to send me a text
0:34:43with the expectation that I wouldn't see it until I woke up. It would pass through and actually make
0:34:48noise even if I'm on do not disturb. Because like I said, it was just one or not. It was all or
0:34:53nothing for emergency bypass. But I'm looking at this now in iOS 12. And you're right, John,
0:34:58what you just said is accurate that in the ringtone section of a specific contact, there's
0:35:02a switch for emergency bypass. And in the text tone section for the same contact, there is a
0:35:08different switch for emergency bypass. So in my case, I have Erin's ringtone switch on,
0:35:14because if she's calling me at like midnight, something's deeply broken. And the text tone,
0:35:19I have emergency bypass off because like I said, it is not unreasonable for her to send me a
0:35:24message either after I go to sleep or before I wake up or actually more often than not, it's me
0:35:28sending them to her, not the other way around. But either way, you get the idea. So that's good to
0:35:32know. I did not know that that was the case that there are now two switches. So if you've looked
0:35:35at this early on when it first came out in like iOS 10, then maybe look again because it's gotten
0:35:40better now. All right. We have some feedback with regard to your contact syncing, John,
0:35:46have you fixed it? I haven't actually even looked into it, but I did get this one piece of feedback
0:35:52that looked promising from Jordan McDonald. He said, I heard about my contact syncing issues,
0:35:56and he had a similar problem. He said, my syncing issue was due to one or more of the limits Apple
0:36:00places on syncing and linked me to one of these Apple support articles to help keep your, here's
0:36:06a quote from it, to help iCloud keep your contacts, calendar reminders and bookmarks up to date,
0:36:10keep your information within these limits. Now that text, I'm sure someone thinks is helpful,
0:36:15but I read that text and it's like, I'm helping iCloud keep my stuff in sync by doing this. It's
0:36:22like, is this a requirement or is it not? Or am I just like lightening the load? Like iCloud is
0:36:27really tired. My complaint about the language is it doesn't make it clear that like, look,
0:36:31if you don't stay within these limits, your stuff won't work. It's like, you can help it,
0:36:36but you know, if you don't do it, it'll just be harder, but it'll still, anyway, the limit,
0:36:40the limits is a whole bunch of limits listed, which some of them are, you know, it's like,
0:36:43oh, you can only have 50,000 contacts. Fine. Like I'm okay with that, right? These, you know,
0:36:47there's going to be limits. It's nice to list them. It seems like that's what this support
0:36:50article is about. But then you get to the part about maximum size of a contact photo
0:36:56and the maximum size of a contact photo is, you know, why is it this number? God knows.
0:37:01224 kilobytes, which is really, really small. That's, I mean, even in JPEG, like,
0:37:08cause I'm starting from, as I am starting from like photos, like, you know, whatever,
0:37:1212 or 21 megapixels, 21 megapixels. I don't know what the hell my camera is. Anyway,
0:37:16they're big photos, even as JPEGs, they are not 200 kilobytes. I'm starting from that. And maybe
0:37:20even if I crop them. So here's the thing. I'm going to look into this next time I go on a
0:37:26contact photo, you know, mission. First thing is I'm going to make sure whatever photos I'm trying
0:37:32to get to sync are below the size. And the second thing is I'm going to see if I can interrogate
0:37:36some of my existing photos and like re-add them, but at smaller sizes to see if that helps,
0:37:43you know, things go, you know, because a couple of people have had the feedback like, oh, I found
0:37:46one bad contact. And once I modified or deleted that contact, it stopped coming up the works and
0:37:51everything synced. But the meta complaint is if these are the limits and your stuff just silently
0:37:59doesn't sync because it's above limits, that is terrible. Like fine. You have these limits, fine.
0:38:04The limits are weird. You have to tell me, Apple, you have to say, I'm never going to sync your
0:38:08contacts because the photo you put on there is too big. Like, and I think I actually have seen
0:38:13an error message that says, you know, sorry, that image is too big. If I accidentally, you know,
0:38:17drag like a giant ping image on there or something, it's like multi-megabyte. Right. So I think there
0:38:21is an error like that. So I'm hoping that this article is just old or I'm hoping this can't
0:38:27possibly be true because if all my contacts have stopped syncing because I put some images in there
0:38:31that are too big and it just decided to never tell me that and just hope that I have a podcast that
0:38:36someone named Jordan McDonald listens to and they'll send me an email pointing me to this
0:38:40obscure support article. Boy, I'm going to be really depressed if that's true. But anyway,
0:38:43if you are having problems, you know, maybe do that. By the way, the published date on this
0:38:48article is September 7th, 2018. So it's not looking good for my hope that this is not true.
0:38:54All righty. What's next? Let's talk about the printer compatibility list, which came up
0:39:01several episodes ago when I got a new printer and was unreasonably excited about it. And you
0:39:07had pointed me to, I believe it was you, John, pointed me to the printer compatibility list.
0:39:11It was me, actually. Oh, I'm sorry. My apologies, Mark.
0:39:14I don't think John even knew about it. Oh, I know about it. Oh, of course he did.
0:39:18I thought I had that one. But I hadn't checked it in years. Like I hadn't, like,
0:39:22I didn't even know it was still maintained, which leads us to today's follow up.
0:39:25So why don't you continue in that vein? So unfortunately, Apple is no longer
0:39:30maintaining this list. For like, for, you know, because remember I said, oh, I'll just wait for
0:39:34the, you know, the thing to be updated for. And the thing I did know about also is that they'd
0:39:39start subdividing into printing versus scanning. You know, it's still just two checkmarks,
0:39:43but it's better than it was, you know, back in the day. But yeah, so they're not going to maintain
0:39:49it anymore. And it's mostly because of AirPrint. The text from the thing is many vendors of printer
0:39:53scanners have adopted driverless technology such as AirPrint. Driverless is basically where they,
0:39:58you know, they have an agreed upon interface and they push more logic onto the printer and they
0:40:01just say, look, printers, you got to talk to us in this way. Otherwise we don't print. That's
0:40:04part of the AirPrint thing. Anyway, and they are no longer providing drivers for new devices. If
0:40:08your printer was made in the last several years, it probably doesn't require a driver. This list
0:40:12is provided for reference purposes and it's no longer being updated. So basically they're saying
0:40:16printer drivers, Apple would like them to no longer be a thing. It's like, look, if you want
0:40:21to print on one of our things, do AirPrint. No drivers are required. And if you're not,
0:40:26you're probably already on one of these lists. So in theory, it's reasonable to stop updating it
0:40:30because people shouldn't be making printers that require drivers anymore. I'm not sure if that's
0:40:34actually true enough and I kind of wish they would maintain that list, but I don't know. Like,
0:40:39for example, the more recent version of one of the HP things, like the numbers were a little
0:40:44bit bigger than the ones that are on the list. The last list that they have, this latest,
0:40:49I couldn't find an HP printer with that number. I found one with like that number minus 10.
0:40:53And maybe it's the same and maybe it would work fine, but then maybe it's totally different. Like
0:40:57you don't really know. So if they never update that list again, I'm never going to see a list
0:41:02like for Mojave to say, does this HP 12345 printer and scanner work with Mojave, with drivers or
0:41:11without drivers? It's just like, I guess I have to check whether it does AirPrint. Does AirPrint
0:41:15encompass scanning? Anyway, I'm still not doing anything with my printers, but Apple is out of the
0:41:21business of keeping track of this big long list of printers that work and they just want everyone
0:41:24to use AirPrint. So welcome to the future of printing. We are sponsored this week by
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0:43:28mention ATP in the question afterwards about where you hear about them. Thank you so much to fracture
0:43:32for sponsoring our show. - There's a new Palm Pilot sort of, except not at all.
0:43:41(laughing)
0:43:43So somebody has licensed the Palm name to make a little itty bitty bitty phone that is kind of
0:43:50the Apple watch to Android phones ish. So this is a little tiny phone that is a mostly full featured
0:43:59Android phone that you can only buy on Verizon and only as an accessory to a regular phone.
0:44:07And I guess the idea is much like the cellular Apple watch where you can walk away from your
0:44:12phone and even drive away from your phone. And you can still get phone calls on your watch and
0:44:17you can still get text messages on your watch. While on this little baby phone, you can get text
0:44:21messages and make phone calls and whatnot. But so it's designed to be with you when you don't want
0:44:26to have your big, huge phone with you. What? Like I, what? - Yo dog. - Why?
0:44:33(laughing)
0:44:37- When we were talking about night and day phone, that was the joke of like several years ago. Now
0:44:41it's like your phone needs a phone. - Yeah. I don't get this. - Neither do I. - I think it's cool
0:44:46that people are trying new ideas, but not every new idea is a good one. Who wants to get away
0:44:53from their phone, but bring another phone with them? I just don't get it. - I'm not sure whether
0:44:59this will succeed. Obviously this, you know, it's $350. Like it's only from Verizon. It's a little
0:45:03Android thing. Like it's a very limited scope for this. And the fact that they bought the Palm name
0:45:08and shoved it on the back means nothing because it's just an Android phone. But when I look at
0:45:12this, I think about like, and there's a kernel of a decent idea in there somewhere, which is
0:45:19as phones get bigger, physically speaking, it is sometimes inconvenient to have your, you know,
0:45:28iPhone XS Max or like, you know, your big phone with you, particularly in places like in the summer,
0:45:33you just got shorts and a t-shirt on. Like it's a big thing. But people also don't want to be
0:45:40without their phones. We know like the phone insecurity problem, like, you know, it's like
0:45:43taking a pacifier away from a toddler. They need to have their phone with them at all times. And
0:45:47there is a tension there. I like to have my phone with me at all times, so I'm in touch, but these
0:45:51phones are so freaking huge. But I love my big phone. I love it to death. I want my phone to be
0:45:55even bigger. It's just humongous, right? But I'm going to go and just try to stick that in my
0:46:00shorts pocket or do I have to always bring like a bag or a backpack? It's just, it's kind of too
0:46:06much. And you're right that like the cellular Apple Watch is perhaps a thing there, but it's
0:46:09not like you're going to text people when you say they're Apple Watch and you can't really watch a
0:46:12quick YouTube video or do an Instagram or like, right? So what this product points out to me
0:46:20is the potential, and I think it's a real potential, for some, like a role that's not
0:46:27being filled. Phones used to be much smaller than they are now. They've gotten so big that they sort
0:46:32of have, you know, priced them out, priced themselves out, price is the wrong word. They've
0:46:36removed themselves from a category of uses that they used to be able to fit into. Oh,
0:46:42little thing you just chuck in your pocket and go, right? You don't do that anymore because it's so,
0:46:46they're so freaking big, right? So to me, this argues for a potential market for
0:46:50less humongous phones. Does it argue for people to buy a big phone and a tiny phone? Probably not,
0:46:56because that's kind of silly and you know, you got to, who wants to deal with two phones, but
0:47:00that's what they're trying to do here to say, sometimes you wish you had your phone with you
0:47:04and you wish you could do all the phone things, including texting people and doing a Snapchat or
0:47:08making a little video or like, you know, do all the phone things, but it's not so darn big, but
0:47:14you still love your big phone. So I wish that what actually happened instead of this silliness is that
0:47:20more phone makers, Android and Apple, decided to sell, go back to selling some phones that are not
0:47:26so big that they are, that they limit the context in which they can be comfortably used.
0:47:32Good luck. This would have been a lot more interesting if the phone number sharing thing
0:47:38was optional. Yeah, you got to have, don't you have to have a second number with it or something?
0:47:43Well, no, no, no. So it does the same. Yeah, it does the same thing that the watch does, which is
0:47:48that it shares your number with your main phone, which also means though that like,
0:47:53this can't be a device that like you buy for your kids to take to school with them. Like,
0:47:57because it is your number, like they, you can't call from it to you. Yeah. I mean,
0:48:02hardware wise, they could sell it individually, but how they're positioning now is as a phone for
0:48:06your phone or as a little thing where, you know, so I think again, I think there's a lot wrong with
0:48:09this product, but the idea of market for a smaller phone, I think is there. Right. Like, it's like,
0:48:15there's two, there's two separate things about this. Like there's the, there's the idea of a
0:48:20small limited phone, and then the idea of a satellite phone that shares the same number
0:48:26as your main phone. So you could take it with you when you don't want to take your main phone for
0:48:28some reason. And like, I think that latter idea about having them both share the same number is
0:48:33very limited in who actually would want that. It's limited to people who have a day phone or
0:48:39a night phone or two Apple watches. Like, I bet there is a market for that. It's probably not very
0:48:42big. And also about this being limited. It's not really, it's not a limited phone. It does all the
0:48:46phone things is limited because it's smaller and probably gets worse battery life. And you know,
0:48:51it's not, it doesn't have a fastest processor, but there's nothing that you would, you know,
0:48:55there's no category of thing that you want to do on a phone. This can't do like, this is bigger than
0:48:59the original iPhone probably. Right. Like you can do all the things on it as a camera. It has video
0:49:03and it's like just the stuff isn't that good, but it's not even that limited. Right. So that's,
0:49:08that's why I feel like someone might get one of these and come to the realization that most of the
0:49:14time, all they need is this little dinky underpowered thing. And it feels so much better in
0:49:18their pocket than the giant thing. But very few people will ever come to that realization because
0:49:22who the heck is going to buy two phones and deal with all that? Like it's a, you know, a tech nerd
0:49:26thing or people with money to burn or whatever. So, but anyway, I hope other, you know, phone
0:49:31makers look at this and the lesson they take from it is not, well, we'll never do that because look
0:49:35what a disaster that product was. That's the lesson they take is that there's enough interest
0:49:39in this that they should consider making one of their models not be the size of a dinner tray.
0:49:44I do think though, like this is one of those like aspirational products, like even for the people
0:49:50who buy it that they might think is very similar to the cellular Apple watch. They might think,
0:49:55Oh, I'm going to leave my, my big phone behind during occasions or roles X, Y, and Z. And I'll
0:50:01bring this little satellite phone with me. But then, and by the way, if you're an iPhone user,
0:50:07this doesn't have iMessage because it's Android. So that kind of sucks. So this is, I think this
0:50:12is mostly for Android people. If you're an iPhone user for the same money, you could just buy an
0:50:16iPhone SE. Anyway, but like, I think it's one of those things where you might think you would use
0:50:22this in a, in a few contexts, but in real life, the first few times you did it, you would miss
0:50:27things about your big phone. Number one, frequently cited by Apple watch people, you miss the camera.
0:50:32And you know, this phone does have a camera, but it's not going to be nearly as good as the ones
0:50:37that are in the flagship phones that you probably have access to otherwise, if you're spending this
0:50:41kind of money for a phone. So like you're going to, there's going to be, and there's going to be
0:50:46a number of those things for everybody. Like there's, there's going to be things that like,
0:50:49yeah, you know what you think you want to leave your big phone at home, but once you're without
0:50:54it, like you, there's a lot of things that you're going to miss and you're going to regret leaving
0:50:58it behind. And so this little phone is going to go then go sit in a drawer somewhere for the rest
0:51:02of its life. Like I just see this as a problem that doesn't really, the issue of having a satellite
0:51:09phone that you sometimes take with you is not a thing. That is not a thing anybody really wants,
0:51:14or at least anybody wants in great numbers. And even if they, even if you give it to them,
0:51:19they will realize they won't actually use it shortly afterwards. So I don't see that at all.
0:51:25The idea of there being smaller phones as choices to buy for your main slash only phone,
0:51:32that idea has merit. I'm not sure how much the market supports that, but that idea has merit.
0:51:37But that's a very different thing than what they've shipped here.
0:51:40- Yeah, this might be a little bit too down market, because 350, like the quality of the
0:51:44camera on the CPU has got a, it's probably too much of a downgrade. That's why everyone's saying,
0:51:51just take an Apple Watch, right? But no one wants to text people on an Apple Watch. And who wants
0:51:55to text people on a screen this small? Just ask all the people who use the original iPhone and
0:51:59all the iPhones before they got tall with the five and before they got big with the six.
0:52:02Like we did it. It was a thing that happened. So it's viable, but the quality of this camera
0:52:07cannot be good. I mean, you can read the review to see what it looks like. It's probably below
0:52:11the threshold where it's just going to annoy people. But most people don't have the newest,
0:52:14latest, greatest phone with an awesome camera. So I feel like you could make a cheaper,
0:52:18smaller phone as a standalone that would find a market. And the Palm stuff, I just feel like
0:52:24is insulting, because it's like, they're, the heritage of Palm, like you just buy the name
0:52:29and you just stick it on the back of the thing in this weird thing where it's like P-A-L-M in like
0:52:33a square shape. I don't like it. It's upsetting. - By the way, user Mike Yu in the chat points out
0:52:39that actually the Palm phone is way smaller than the original iPhone, which to me is like,
0:52:44that's a cool thing to have something that's small, but you then pretty much won't be able to
0:52:50like text on it. Like it has an onscreen keyboard, like modern smartphones, but like you're not going
0:52:55to be able to see that much of that tiny little screen. Typing is going to be really hard. What
0:53:00we do on phones today barely even fits on the iPhone SE. To make something that's even
0:53:07significantly smaller than that and to try to make it a useful thing. It's like,
0:53:12if this phone was like 50 bucks, that'd be a different story. Or if it was like really good
0:53:18and a little bit bigger, so it'd be a little more useful, that'd be a different story. But
0:53:22right now it's like, it's too small to have general use. And it's not a standalone product,
0:53:28so you can't like bring it, you can't like buy it for your kids or whatever. And also it's too
0:53:33expensive to be like a kind of like disposable, like you know, keep it just in case you need it
0:53:37kind of thing. Like $350 is half the price of a really good phone. So I just, I don't see what
0:53:46this is going for. - It does have more RAM than an iPhone 7. - Well that's good. You won't be able
0:53:52to fit, I mean you can fit as many apps as you want in them as long as they're crappy Android
0:53:55apps that you'll never want to use because they're so tiny. - Yeah, I'm just saying like it's a,
0:53:59well that leads us into our next topic. But the most of the specs of this thing,
0:54:03you're ridiculous because it's a $350 phone, but it's actually got a surprising amount of RAM.
0:54:07- I mean, I don't think it's that terrible a device for the constraints it has. I just don't
0:54:14really understand what would make somebody purchase one. You know, like I understand the pitch, but
0:54:21realistically nobody's going to do that. - Exactly. - A bunch of people are going to do it because
0:54:25they'll be intrigued by the idea, but it's too much of a downgrade from their actual phone that
0:54:29I don't think that will be a viable substitute. - I don't know. All right, so you said that that
0:54:33was a segue into our next topic. Tell me more. - Yeah, so this is about Adobe's announcements
0:54:39at their Adobe Max conference. There's a bunch of them, maybe we'll talk about some of the other
0:54:44ones later, but today the main one, the highlight is Photoshop CC is coming to the iPad in 2019.
0:54:51And this may not sound like much because like, hasn't there already been Photoshop for the iPad?
0:54:56Like who cares or whatever, but the important part is that this is in Adobe's words and in all the
0:55:02PR things, this is real Photoshop on the iPad. It's not a new application that's kind of like
0:55:07Photoshop. It's not a brand new application that can also read PSD files. Sometimes this is
0:55:12full fledged Photoshop on the iPad, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And they emphasize, you know,
0:55:19that it's the same code base and that it's fully compatible. And obviously, especially in the
0:55:24beginning, there will be some features that are only on the desktop, but I'm sure they'll shore
0:55:27up those gaps. But this is sort of Adobe finally, you know, I don't know, jumping in. Like Apple has
0:55:35wanted pro applications on the iPad for a long time. And for the longest time, Adobe has been
0:55:40like, "Oh, we'll make some apps for the iPad. We have some ideas of cool things we can do." But
0:55:44Photoshop is a desktop app. Sorry, you can't have that on the iPad. And now you can. And, you know,
0:55:50it's cross compatible. They have their, you know, cloud stuff where you can put the document in
0:55:55their Creative Cloud Cloud. I don't know if they repeat cloud and work on it on your desktop and
0:56:00work on the same thing. You know, and it also reads from iCloud drive and Dropbox, and it's just 100%
0:56:05compatible. You make a document on desktop, you can open it up in your iPad. You make a document
0:56:09on the iPad, you can open it on desktop. It's just, you know, real Photoshop. And that's obviously
0:56:14the adapt with the interface. It's not the same as it is on the desktop. There's a bunch of things,
0:56:18touch affordances and some interesting new tools in there. But I thought this was, you know, it's
0:56:24about time. I'm sure all of Adobe's competitors are a little bit scared because Adobe, you know,
0:56:29their application may or may not be as good as some of the existing stuff or may not be as,
0:56:34you know, because most people who have had to do work on the iPad or like doing work on the iPad
0:56:37have already chosen a non-Adobe application for the most part to do their stuff. And so they're
0:56:42late to the game. But Adobe has an existing subscription system. Somehow they're going to
0:56:50work out the financials with the Apple stuff of like, if you can subscribe through it, through
0:56:53Apple thing or whatever, but the current work around is that if you buy Photoshop CC, you just
0:56:58get the iPad app for free. I'm sure they've all worked all this out with Apple. Adobe has tons of
0:57:04applications and lots of history and Photoshop is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of image
0:57:09processing. So I bet the competitors aren't particularly happy about Adobe finally doing
0:57:14this, but I think it's a good move for the iPad and hopefully it'll push Apple in the direction
0:57:19of making the iPad even more pro. But the reason I said that the end of that weird palm phone thing
0:57:26was a good transition to this is because there's a particular technical angle of this that I was
0:57:31thinking about when the announcement was made and I have some musings based on it. And the
0:57:35technical angle is how do you get Photoshop, a big fancy desktop application that historically has
0:57:41been a thing that you use to show off the power of your computer, particularly your Mac, how do you
0:57:46get that onto an iPad? And we've talked about how the iPad CPUs and GPUs are surprisingly powerful,
0:57:57about the JavaScript benchmark being faster than the iMac Pro and just in general being,
0:58:01you know, sometimes just being straight up faster than a lot of Apple's laptops. Like
0:58:04that doesn't seem like a problem. CPU power seems like it's there. And, you know, storage for big
0:58:10images, don't they make like a 512 gig iPad or something, a 512 gig phone, like whatever,
0:58:14there's plenty of room to store giant files and especially if they're in the cloud, it's not a big
0:58:18deal. But there is one aspect of iOS devices, even the big iPads, that doesn't seem like it's up to
0:58:25snuff to deal with something like Photoshop and that's RAM. There hasn't been a Mac sold with four
0:58:32gigs of RAM in it for many, many years. You sure? Doesn't the air still base itself at that? Oh,
0:58:38please don't say that. I really hope that's not true. That can't possibly be true. That's
0:58:43impossible. Anyway. I thought it was true, but we can look it up. Nope, it's eight. Four gigs of
0:58:48RAM is not a lot for a Photoshop machine. Let's put it that way. Like, again, Photoshop always
0:58:55wanted the most RAM you can put in it so you have really big images. And why does Photoshop use a lot
0:58:59of RAM? I mean, the main answer is layers, right? So most of the time you could have one image,
0:59:04it's probably not that high res, but you know, maybe it's like 600 DPI for like print publishing,
0:59:09a magazine cover, whatever. But imagine that document has 50 layers in it. You know, that stuff
0:59:14just eats memory. Also, like the way Photoshop deals with a lot of the images, it has to deal
0:59:19with them in uncompressed format. Like you think of a JPEG as being like, you know, it's like, you
0:59:23know, eight megs for this giant image. But like, no, actually, like if you deal with the raw pixels
0:59:28in an uncompressed format, like multiply the width by the height by four and that's how many bytes it
0:59:35needs, at least depending on what else. You could be doing more things. You could have more deep
0:59:39color. Like, yeah, it's like, it's a lot of memory. Like a single, like, you know, one screen,
0:59:46large image off the top of my head is like, you know, the 2030 megs. Like it's a lot, right? It's
0:59:52way more data than like the JPEG version is. And to do a lot of operations efficiently, that has to
0:59:58be in memory. Yeah. So you may be thinking, okay, well, that's the modern world where all the Macs
1:00:04have tons of RAM, but Macs did ship with four gigs of RAM. We just talked about my Mac Pro that
1:00:08shipped with two gigs of RAM and Photoshop ran on those machines. So it's obviously not a big deal.
1:00:12Photoshop can run in much less memory than we run it in today. Maybe it's not great, but it can do
1:00:17it. There's a second thing to think about though. Real time follow up. There is indeed one Mac that
1:00:22is still sold new. The Mac mini updated 1,600 days ago. The Mac mini $500 configuration comes
1:00:31stock with four gigs of RAM. For Mac mini, probably not a Photoshop power house, but
1:00:37anyway, so the other thing to be concerned about with iOS devices is, and you often hear this,
1:00:42and this is not actually true. People will say that iOS devices don't have virtual memory. That's
1:00:47not true. iOS devices have always had a virtual memory in that they have your programs address
1:00:53memory using virtual addresses that are then translated to physical addresses. So virtual
1:00:58memory has been an iOS from day one. What people mean when they say iOS doesn't have virtual memory
1:01:04is they mean that iOS doesn't use swap, will not page things to disk. So in a virtual memory system,
1:01:12when a program wants more memory and there's no more memory to give, the system will take
1:01:17something that is in memory, hopefully that hasn't been used recently or isn't being actively used,
1:01:21and it will swap it out to disk. It will say, "I'm going to take this big chunk of RAM. I'm
1:01:25going to write it to a swap file." And I'll say, "You stay there." And that'll give you this RAM
1:01:29that they were using before. And if they ever want that thing back, I'll go back to the disk and pull
1:01:33it out of the swap file and bring it back in. Obviously going to disk and swap is way slower
1:01:38than RAM, and you really don't want it to be in a situation where it's constantly shuffling things
1:01:42"Oh, I got to take this out of RAM, put it on disk, or take this thing off the disk and put it back
1:01:45into RAM." That's called swapping, and then it'll make everything slow. That's called the '90s.
1:01:49Yeah, iOS has never had swap because as you can imagine, it was at the ragged edge of what was
1:01:57possible in the original iPhone. And if there's a possibility that by loading a big game or
1:02:01something, stuff can swap and then you try to switch and swap it back in, flash wasn't always
1:02:06as fast as it is today, especially on iOS devices. And even if it's fast, it's way slower than having
1:02:12things in RAM. So iOS from day one continuing today has said, "No swap." So it has virtual
1:02:19memory, but it doesn't have swap. And what that means for RAM limits is like your 2G Mac Pro,
1:02:23the 2G Mac Pro that I'm next to, we could run Photoshop or whatever. Maybe you have something
1:02:29that has too many layers, doesn't fit in 2G. Doesn't matter. You can always swap out portions
1:02:34of it. And it'll make it slower, but at least you can do it. But in iOS, when RAM is exhausted,
1:02:39and when the system has ejected every other application from the system and you ask for
1:02:43more RAM, the OS kills your program. There is no more to give. There's nothing like, "Oh, well,
1:02:50the OS never says, 'Well, there's no more RAM. I've killed all the other programs. I'll just
1:02:54start swapping some stuff out to disk.'" It doesn't do that. It says, "The RAM is all used up and you
1:02:59are the only program running. I'm going to kill you now." I think it gives you low memory warnings,
1:03:03but eventually the OS kills your program. And so what happens in Photoshop, it's just like
1:03:08the desktop. If I make this awesome image in the desktop that's some 600 DPI magazine cover with
1:03:1250 layers, and then I try to open it on my iPad and I try to do some manipulation that requires
1:03:17it to load a bunch of stuff into memory to run some filter across seven layers, and it keeps
1:03:21asking for more and more memory to perform that operation, and then it runs out. The OS is going
1:03:26to kill the program. How do they allow you to edit files that are too big to fit in RAM? And remember,
1:03:32the biggest iOS devices I think have 4 gigs of RAM. Is that the max now?
1:03:36>> I think so.
1:03:37>> On the big iPad or on the iPhone XS Max and all that stuff. Anyway, it's not a lot of RAM.
1:03:42There is very easy to find a real-world Photoshop image that will happily eat up 4 gigs of RAM while
1:03:48you're working on it. And keep in mind that the OS has to take some portion of that, and so you
1:03:53don't even get all the 4 gigs to yourself. So that's a little bit of a head-scratcher,
1:03:58but obviously they did it. They demoed it, right? So how did they do it?
1:04:02I don't know the details of how they actually did it, but there are a bunch of possibilities,
1:04:06but one of them I find intriguing and delightful, which is rooted in the fact that Photoshop
1:04:12has already run in the past on a platform that did not have swap. In fact, Photoshop has run on
1:04:19a platform that did not have virtual memory. That platform is classic Mac OS. Classic Mac OS did not
1:04:25have virtual memory and did not have swap. >> Wait, what?
1:04:28>> And by the way, yeah. >> Like, wait.
1:04:31>> In the early days. >> As in, like, not until Mac OS X?
1:04:33>> The virtual memory part of it came into effect a little bit towards the end of classic Mac OS's
1:04:40life. But the original Mac, no virtual memory, real addresses for everything, single shared
1:04:43address space, no swap, no virtual memory, no nothing, right?
1:04:47>> Yeah, the original one, yeah. But by the '90s, they had to have had at least some of that,
1:04:51please, for the love of God. >> I think they might, well,
1:04:55if you think about it, if you have programs that expect big shared memory space, I think they had
1:05:00some, well, there were third-party programs that could give you some of this. And I think by Mac OS
1:05:059 or whatever, they had some kind of virtual stuff. I don't think they ever had a real swap file.
1:05:10But anyway, Photoshop ran before all of that. It ran, like, I don't know, it didn't run on,
1:05:16like, the Mac 128, but on the Mac Plus, I believe, which had one megabyte of RAM,
1:05:21I think Photoshop 1.0 ran on the Mac Plus. Certainly, the Mac SE, Photoshop could run on
1:05:26a machine with a monochrome display, which is always fun. So how did it do it? How did
1:05:31Photoshop run on a machine with, like, a ridiculously small amount of RAM and no virtual
1:05:36memory system and no swap? They did it the only way you could possibly do it, which is within
1:05:41Photoshop, they wrote a system that said, when you're using memory to do something and the OS
1:05:48says there's no more memory to give, you program, implement your own little virtual memory system,
1:05:54where you'll make your own little swap files off to the side, and you will take portions of the
1:05:57image data and write it out to your own little, you know, Photoshop swap files, like, a tiny
1:06:02miniature virtual memory system just for that program within that program, so we can shuffle
1:06:06things off of disk into memory, operate on them, put them back on disk, so on and so forth.
1:06:10And so that's Photoshop's origins. It was originally a Mac program, and it was born on
1:06:15a platform that didn't have this. It would be extremely delightful if the code to do that from
1:06:21original Photoshop suddenly came in super handy. It once again finds itself on a system that has
1:06:28no swap, so it's like, well, we have our own swapping system written already. We can use that
1:06:34to take things out of memory and put them onto disk and pull them off of disk or whatever.
1:06:38I would love for that to be true. It's obviously potentially a competitive advantage over other
1:06:44image editors like, you know, Affinity and the other competitors to Photoshop, which must have
1:06:47to do something similar, because again, if you want to work with images that are too big to fit
1:06:51in memory and your operating system does not have swap, you need to do something like that yourself.
1:06:56And Photoshop, Adobe, in theory, has experience doing that very same thing. So that to me is the
1:07:01most interesting and exciting part of Photoshop on the iPad, the idea that potentially code from
1:07:07classic Mac OS has risen from the grave, or perhaps it never even left Photoshop and is now
1:07:14potentially a competitive advantage over other programs that did not have their origin on a
1:07:20system with no swap. I mean, modern versions of Photoshop still have like the swap disk options,
1:07:26swap folders, scratch disk. Yeah, it's like it probably has the same system because, you know,
1:07:31lots of like high-end or high-performance apps will do things like write their own memory allocator
1:07:37because they can tailor it to exactly their use and they can, you know, get faster performance
1:07:40and more control than the system stuff. I don't know of a lot of programs that write their own
1:07:45swap file system, but I'm sure somebody does and, you know, beyond just Photoshop. And so it
1:07:52wouldn't surprise me if Adobe still uses that, even like on Macs with, you know, 64 gigs of RAM,
1:07:57they might still use that kind of system just because they already had it and they can tweak
1:08:01it, they can tune it, and we know it still uses scratch disk for something, so that could be what
1:08:06they're for. And also, like this is just one of those things that when you ask like, you know,
1:08:11"Oh, what do you need Photoshop and iPad for?" and somebody says, "Oh, you can use alternative X, Y,
1:08:15or Z." One of the things that really separates like pro apps from more, you know, basic or like
1:08:24consumer or prosumer ones is this ability to deal with extremes. And this is true even on the Mac
1:08:30too, like this is true everywhere, but like what really separates pro apps from the rest is you can
1:08:36do operations on a, you know, 300 by 300 clip art thing you found on the web, or you can do operations
1:08:42on like an entire like 600 DPI, 11 by 17 page layout of something, and it might, it'll be slower
1:08:50if it needs to be, but it won't crash, it'll still work like, you know, it'll let you do what you
1:08:56have to do. And I've never used any competitors for Photoshop really, so I don't know how they
1:09:00handle these extremes. They might handle them just fine as far as I know, but like as like a
1:09:05customer of these things and a user of these things, like if I were looking to, you know,
1:09:09change my workflow to a competitor like everyone has had to do on the iPad up until this comes out,
1:09:15one of the things I'd be worried about is like, can it really handle extremes or not? Because
1:09:20occasionally I need it to. And so to have like, to have something that is known to have extreme
1:09:26capability like Photoshop, that is known to handle crazy things and at least, you know,
1:09:32even if it isn't fast, it will at least work. That's a really good selling point for them. And
1:09:38that, and you know, there's lots of reasons why I think they're going to do well with this on the
1:09:42iPad, but one of the big ones to me is like, you're going to know that you can throw anything at this
1:09:52and if you're patient enough, it will probably work. So what I can't help but wonder is if
1:09:59at one point in the past or perhaps in the present, they needed to create their own like
1:10:05virtual memory system, what else do you think that they abstracted away about the underlying
1:10:11platform in order to make things easier? Like, since Photoshop runs on Windows, it runs on
1:10:17Mac OS, and soon will be running on iOS, how much do you think they're running against actual APIs
1:10:25or some sort of like adapter layer that, or facade maybe, that Adobe wrote themselves? And at what
1:10:33point are they like creating like an entire virtual machine within Photoshop just to kind of,
1:10:38you know, smooth all these rough edges out? You know, it just, it's, I don't argue with what
1:10:43you're saying, Jon, it's just, I can't help but wonder like, how far does this really go?
1:10:46It used to be that the Mac version of Photoshop and the Windows version of Photoshop
1:10:51had separate UIs. Like the Mac version certainly just the first one to exist and it had native Mac
1:10:56UI or as native as it could be. But at some point, due to someone's great idea about economies of
1:11:02scale and not repeating yourself or whatever, they made a unified user interface that was
1:11:07surely some underlying Adobe framework that rendered a Mac UI on the Mac and a Windows UI
1:11:12on Windows. And the way you could tell that was that the Mac UI suddenly became a lot less Mac-like.
1:11:17And like, you entered the era where Adobe apps had essentially Adobe interfaces. Like,
1:11:22they weren't Mac interfaces, they weren't Windows interfaces, they were Adobe interfaces. And I think
1:11:27a lot of Adobe apps are still like this, where it's like they're pulling from an Adobe suite
1:11:31of controls and their idea of what a window and a button and the control should look like is the
1:11:34Adobe idea. And it looks different on Windows and the Mac, but it's clear that there's been some
1:11:39massive unification behind the scenes. That hasn't always been beneficial, but I'm sure that's the
1:11:44case. And obviously their engines for dealing with images are mostly cross-platform for this part,
1:11:50plus or minus the various use of the different acceleration frameworks on different platforms.
1:11:55Right? So that's been a complaint about Adobe in the past from a Mac user perspective is that
1:12:01they don't feel like Mac apps, they feel like Adobe apps. Obviously, if you like Adobe apps, or
1:12:05if you move from platform to platform, that's an advantage. But sometimes I look at Adobe apps,
1:12:10most Adobe apps, and I think this is like a weird, it's not an Electron app, but it's like a weird
1:12:15kind of, I don't know, it doesn't feel like a Mac application. And sometimes it's kind of ugly,
1:12:22and sometimes I kind of wish the controls were the regular controls. But at a certain point,
1:12:28Adobe's probably like, "Look, Apple, you're lucky we still make motion." For a while, they were like,
1:12:32"You're lucky you still make Photoshop for your platform at all, because Windows has taken over
1:12:35the world." Obviously, that's less relevant today, and the iPad is certainly the more popular
1:12:41tablet platform than Android, because they don't have that many great tablet apps. But
1:12:46yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of that sharing going on behind the scenes. I'm not sure that if they
1:12:52ever had to implement a virtual memory system for Windows, because I think the first version
1:12:56of Windows they wrote it for had both virtual memory and swap, but I'm not sure.
1:12:59- I believe Windows got that in 3.1-ish, somewhere around that range, because my Gateway 2000
1:13:05computer had the ability to either enable or disable 386 enhanced mode, which I'm pretty sure
1:13:13was virtual memory. - My word. So do we think this is gonna be good? And I don't say that to
1:13:20snark, and I'm not trying to be funny. It's hard for me to imagine that this is going to be without
1:13:32hiccups. Just look at file management on the iPad, which is something that's relatively new.
1:13:40File management is not easy on the iPad. What happens when you want to suck in something from
1:13:45an SD card? Do you still have to go through the Apple Photos app to suck in these photos from the
1:13:54SD card, and then bring them into Photoshop, and then back to your photo library or your camera roll
1:14:00or whatever? It just seems like this is still going to have a lot of hurdles. Now, those hurdles
1:14:05are the sorts of hurdles that really make Mike and Federico happy, but to somebody like me,
1:14:10I find that to be infuriating. So is this going to be good, great? I guess the fact that Adobe has
1:14:17cloud, hence CC, because that's Creative Cloud. Once you get a file, you can store it in Creative
1:14:23Cloud, I would assume, and then it just kind of appears everywhere, I would assume, kind of iCloud-like.
1:14:27But I don't know, don't you think that this is still going to be fairly clunky?
1:14:31- I mean, that's one of the potential upsides of Adobe running Photoshop on the iPad is hopefully
1:14:39it will push Apple in the direction to make the iPad a better platform for pro applications.
1:14:45The file stuff, I think actually we're probably mostly okay for the cloud options, because it
1:14:53always got its thing, but it also works with iCloud Drive and Dropbox. And honestly, even if there was
1:14:58full file system access from every application, there was SD card slot in the side of the iPad,
1:15:05it's still probably more convenient to do the cloud stuff, you know what I mean? You're not
1:15:09using SneakerNet to ship files around, even to another Mac. It's not like, yeah,
1:15:13Macs have great file system access, but the way two Macs would look at the same file is they would
1:15:18pull it up on a network share or something, right? So I think the cloud solution is probably mostly
1:15:24okay. But the fact that some doors are closed to you, hopefully it will make Apple consider,
1:15:32especially when it's not just one file, but it's a whole bunch of files, or you're working
1:15:35on a project that's a folder full of files, and you can do all this with a cloud drive as well,
1:15:39but there's some things that are a little bit easier locally, or there could be security
1:15:42sensitive things where you don't want to go across the network, who knows? So I hope Apple pays
1:15:47attention. There was an interesting video, we'll put a link in the show notes, this Verge review
1:15:50of Photoshop on the iPad, and they had a bunch of their artists who worked for the Verge mess with
1:15:57it and say what they think about using Photoshop on the iPad. They have some interesting things to
1:16:01say that you might not think of if you don't draw on a computer all day. One of the ones was the
1:16:06person talking about, I mean, this is true of any iPad app, not Photoshop, but if you're drawing
1:16:12with the pencil on the iPad and you want to draw at a different angle, you can just rotate the iPad
1:16:17like you would a piece of paper, which is not true of a computer screen, and is also not true,
1:16:22interestingly, of something like the Surface Studio, where the screen is like a big iMac-like
1:16:28screen and it kind of folds down. You can't take that and easily just twist it like you would twist
1:16:32a piece of paper to scribble at a different angle, because it's just too big and it's not on a swivel
1:16:38thing, you'd have to turn the whole computer and it would be awkward, it's more like a drafting table
1:16:42than a piece of paper on the drafting table, which is an interesting angle for people considering
1:16:46drawing on the iPad. But the other one that really stood out to me was the one artist who said she
1:16:51was doing, they all tried to do some real non-trivial project on the thing, and she said
1:16:57by the end of it, her hand was hurting a little bit from gripping the Apple Pencil, and she said her
1:17:02Wacom tablet that she normally uses has a pencil with a big thick ergonomic grip with a smooshy
1:17:07thing on the end, and if you look at the Apple Pencil, it's a beautiful, simple, elegant shape,
1:17:12there's nothing as green as blah blah blah, but it's pretty darn skinny, right? It's pretty
1:17:16skinny, it certainly doesn't have one of those ergonomic grip things, and you could add one or
1:17:19whatever, but it goes to show how ill-suited, I don't want to get Marko on a ramp, but how ill-suited
1:17:28so many aspects of modern Apple design are to demanding professional applications, because if
1:17:34you are a professional using a stylus all day, just using the Apple Pencil the way it is, is
1:17:41probably not great, like you don't see a lot of styluses or other things used by artists for a long
1:17:46period of time, especially with a computer, that don't look and aren't actually more ergonomic than
1:17:52a simple, unadorned, fairly slippery, skinny cylinder, and there's a reason for that, like there's
1:17:58a reason, you know, things that look ergonomic tend to look ugly and be shaped so that they're easy to
1:18:04comfortably grip and they reduce fatigue or whatever, and it's like, okay, well you don't have to use
1:18:10the Apple Pencil, there is a wide variety of pressure sensitive styluses, oh wait, not really,
1:18:15so again, I hope bringing more artists to seriously consider the iPad, because now quote unquote
1:18:22"real Photoshop" is there, again, tons of artists have been using the iPad and Adobe has made
1:18:28applications, and by the way, Adobe is also making non-Photoshop applications that are more of a
1:18:32green field, let's reimagine what kind of illustration application we can make, I hope all of that, and
1:18:37the influx of new creatives and all that stuff leads Apple down the same road that I got, I hope
1:18:43that they're traveling for the Mac Pro, which is, what do professionals really need out of our
1:18:48platforms, let's listen to them and make something for them, even if that thing is not well suited to
1:18:54consumers, consumers don't want a weird Wacom tablet looking pencil thing, if they want a pencil
1:18:59at all, the simple Apple one is probably the right thing, although they really wish they had a place
1:19:02to stick it instead of it just being loose, so I hope, I hope all this is nudging Apple in the
1:19:10right direction, and by the way, at Adobe Max, Phil Schiller came on stage and talked about
1:19:17Photoshop and how happy it is it's coming to the iPad, and how great the iPad is, and so on and so
1:19:21forth, so Apple is in on this and they're working together, so things are trending in the right
1:19:26direction, and speaking of the Apple Pencil, I was thinking about this the other day, I don't know
1:19:31how many people listen to this, I actually have an Apple Pencil, if you do have it, do you know where
1:19:34it is, there's lots of ways that you travel with it, and little clip-on things, and places to stick
1:19:40it and all sorts of stuff like that, it's so bad, and the cap, forget about the cap, right, I was
1:19:44thinking about this and I was like, well, that's true, but in the idealized world of Apple, many
1:19:51problems either don't exist in Apple's idealized world or they don't acknowledge them, but this is
1:19:56a case where Apple itself definitely acknowledges this issue, and they acknowledge it with these
1:20:03weird little white trays in all the Apple stores, why do they have these weird little white trays
1:20:10where the pencils go, it's not like at the bank where it's connected with a cable, like there's
1:20:13no anti-theft device attached to it, right, oh, the pencil's weighted, it will never roll off a table,
1:20:19why are those little dugout canoes of plastic there, because if they weren't, the pencils will
1:20:25be, no one would ever know where the freaking pencils are, where do I put this when I'm done
1:20:28with it, how do I put it down, will it roll off the table, will someone step on it, you put it
1:20:32back in the little plastic canoe, right, those little stupid little canoes are the greatest
1:20:38Apple admission that there is something missing from the workflow, as they would say, of the Apple
1:20:44pencil. - Yeah, like, it's very frustrating to me, like, I have an Apple pencil, I have an iPad Pro,
1:20:51and I have a smart keyboard, there is no way to have all three of those things with me that
1:21:00doesn't suck, like, why, it seems like these three products were never designed with the idea that
1:21:09somebody would actually have any two of them, like, the smart keyboard and the iPad work together
1:21:16okay, it isn't even great, it's just merely okay, the pencil and the iPad, it seems like they were
1:21:23designed on different planets, and it's just a coincidence they happen to work together, but like,
1:21:28no one ever thought you might want to carry an Apple pencil while you carry an iPad, like,
1:21:34that seems to totally have been not considered at all, and the idea that here you can get a smart
1:21:41keyboard, which is wonderful, I actually really enjoy having a smart keyboard, I mean, I've had
1:21:44totally changed how frequently I use the iPad greatly for the better, but the smart keyboard
1:21:51is a large cover that has lots of surface area and is willingly bulking it up, maybe they could
1:21:59have put a spot there to store a pencil, but they didn't, they released a case that is like this big
1:22:05leather flap that has a slot for the iPad and a slot for the pencil, but if you have a smart
1:22:10keyboard it won't fit in the case, and it would be very awkward to get it out anyway, it's just like,
1:22:15everything about, it's just like, one of the biggest things I want to see with the, you know,
1:22:22anticipated iPad event that's probably happening sometime soon, I really want to see how and if
1:22:28they have rethought how people actually use the Apple pencil, and if they can somehow make it
1:22:35easy to have it with you more often, I would love that, because I literally have all these things,
1:22:42and I never use the pencil because, as John alluded to, it's like, you know, off in a cup
1:22:47or a drawer somewhere. - And the battery's dead in it now because you haven't charged it forever,
1:22:52because that's awkward too. - Yeah, like the battery's definitely dead because I have not
1:22:55charged it because I never have it with me, and so I never use it, and it's such a waste, like,
1:23:00please, for the love of God, Apple, design these products together. - It charges in 30 seconds
1:23:06though, and you can get two, anyway, there's all sorts of solutions to the charging thing
1:23:10that are part of the pitch. - By the way, when it's totally dead, it doesn't charge in 30 seconds.
1:23:14- Well, you get like a minute out of it, and you have five minutes out of it in 30 seconds,
1:23:18so if we had some pitch of like a very short charge time gives you a surprising amount of
1:23:21draw time, even if you're going from dead, I'm not sure how accurate this, but that was part of
1:23:25the original pitch, which is not supposed to be an admission that you're probably going to lose it
1:23:29and leave it uncharged, but anyway, there's one thing that Apple used to do better, probably not
1:23:34for great reasons and maybe not as a conscious thing, but the 90s Apple, and Apple through the
1:23:4190s, maybe into the 2000s, was very into making a whole bunch of stuff that works together,
1:23:48even into the 2000s in the Mac OS X era, like to give an example, to a fault, all right, so Apple,
1:23:54on my original, I don't know, my Power Mac G3 maybe, whatever, they had the ADC Apple
1:24:03display connector, remember that thing? Yeah, it was like a single cable that drove a display
1:24:09with power and USB and video, only worked with Mac stuff, it was a proprietary thing,
1:24:14it was like piggyback and DVI and a bunch of other stuff over a bunch of bins and a custom connector,
1:24:18so that you could have a display that worked with the monitor and then worked with the keyboard
1:24:24that connected to the display and the power button on the old Macs was on the keyboard,
1:24:28and that power button could turn on the Mac that was connected with it, like
1:24:32systems that work together, the G4 Cube comes with little speakers that match the thing,
1:24:35and then the thing connects with ADC to the display by a single cable, like match sets of stuff where
1:24:41if you buy all the things, it's clear they work together, buy your laptop, the display has a little
1:24:46pigtail on it, the pigtail has a magsafe connector and that goes into there, and like,
1:24:50like if you kept buying stuff, the next piece of the app, the very expensive Apple stuff that you
1:24:55bought, you'd be like, oh, this fits in here, oh, that fits in there, and if I buy these things,
1:24:59they fit in there, and they match this thing, like things aesthetically matched, there was a,
1:25:03there was a styling theme with them, the connectors on them all matched, they all work
1:25:08together, if you bought just one of them, it worked fine, but as you bought more of them,
1:25:11you saw where they plugged in, whereas with the iPad, the covers work with the iPad,
1:25:16and the keyboard works with the iPad, and the pencil works with the iPad, but the keyboard,
1:25:20pencil, covers, and iPad do not get along, as Marco pointed out, like there's, once you get more
1:25:25than, that's like the chicken and the wolf, once you get more than two things in this boat,
1:25:29bad things happen, right, so that is a, I don't know, again, I don't think it was a particularly
1:25:34conscious thing, but the idea that you can, that it is attractive, making it attractive to buy all
1:25:41the things, because every new thing you buy just fits in neatly, and it feels like you're building
1:25:46like the whole package, the ultimate setup, like you gotta have the G4 Cube with the cinema display,
1:25:51with the speakers, with the Apple keyboard that turns the thing on, I think that wasn't on the
1:25:55Cube, but anyway, like the whole setup was attractive, even back to like the LaserWriter,
1:25:59get a Mac, get a LaserWriter, get the extended keyboard, get the Apple optical drive, get the
1:26:04Apple external hardware, get the Apple printer, now we're getting into Wi-Fi routers again, right,
1:26:07but that whole motivation to buy all the things, in the history of this show, my recollection is a
1:26:13lot of our complaints have been, have had an angle where if you are Apple's best customer and you buy
1:26:19all the Apple things, you are punished for it in some subtle way, like, you know, if you buy all,
1:26:24you know, lots of Apple stuff, things work not as well as if you just had one of them,
1:26:29and that's not, you know, that's not the right cycle, Apple should make it attractive for people
1:26:33to spend all the money. And I remember that was the case, you know, for the first several years
1:26:39that I came to Apple platforms, this was roughly 2008, the more Apple stuff I had, the better
1:26:45everything worked together, and everything, you know what, it did guys, it just worked,
1:26:50and I don't know, I shouldn't be encouraging this, because we've made this speech every episode for
1:26:56the last hundred, and so we can hopefully let it go, but I echo what you're saying, John, that
1:27:00I admire Apple trailblazing in so many ways, in so many categories, but I also wish I could have it
1:27:10both ways and have them not screw up what already exists in order to trailblaze, but you can't have
1:27:16it both ways. I just don't think it's that much to ask that when you buy an iPhone or an Apple watch,
1:27:22and you also have a MacBook, that you can plug one into the other to charge it.
1:27:25Don't be ridiculous. Anything else about Photoshop? There's a lot more, maybe I'll watch that video,
1:27:32and Gemini is their application that's like combines raster and vector stuff, and it's like,
1:27:36you know, we talked about it at Domi XD a while back, like there's a bunch of interesting stuff
1:27:40that Doby thinks, maybe I'll watch the video and bring in another time. There's that YouTube
1:27:44Premiere edition, the Premiere Rush thing? Yeah, the Rush CC for doing portrait video,
1:27:50which everyone was very excited about, because portrait video is definitely a thing, but editing
1:27:54it in a "real video editing application" where no one conceived of the idea that people might want
1:27:59portrait video is a little bit tricky. So yeah, there's a bunch of exciting things. They also had,
1:28:03I think, a pretty good joke when Phil Schiller was there. I mean, maybe it's a Tech Dad joke or
1:28:08whatever, but I give it a thumbs up. Phil Schiller came out and did his little spiel, and everyone
1:28:12was happy to hear him say how great Adobe is and how great Apple is and so on and so forth,
1:28:15and then when they whisked him off stage, they had a gift for him from the Adobe people to thank him
1:28:19for coming there. They gave him a jacket from the team that was making Photoshop or whatever,
1:28:24and it said "content-aware Phil" on the back of the jacket. That's pretty good. And they
1:28:30used the hyphen correctly. Oh, even better. I thought that was a good joke, Adobe.
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1:30:12All right, let's do some Ask ATP. Jake wants to know, "In the age we currently live in,
1:30:20how do the three of us stay informed about non-tech news? Is it just Twitter? And if not,
1:30:25are there specific sites or voices that you would recommend?" I don't have a terribly good answer
1:30:30for this. I do watch the... I watch national news in the morning as I eat breakfast. I watch
1:30:36headline news, which I personally find to be relatively center. If you disagree with me,
1:30:43that's fine. Just keep it to yourself. It's good enough for me. I do that most days of the week.
1:30:48And then when I remember, although I forgot this morning, on Wednesdays I turn on Fox & Friends
1:30:52because I'm an idiot. But I also like to see how other idiots... I mean, wait, what? I like to see
1:30:57how the other side lives. And so that's mostly it. Anything else that's national typically bubbles
1:31:04up via Twitter or there. Marco, what do you do? Very little, because everything that's in the news
1:31:13for the last, I don't know, about two years has been so horrible that for my own mental health...
1:31:20I know this is not the responsible thing to do as a citizen of the universe, but for my own mental
1:31:27health, I try to block out as much of it as I possibly can. So I mostly don't follow news
1:31:34sources regularly except for those that bubble up from links from friends and stuff. Yep. Yep.
1:31:40That's mostly the same with me, with the exception of TV in the morning for about 15 minutes. Also,
1:31:45for God's sakes, turn off Fox & Friends. It is... All kidding aside, it is truly and utterly heinous.
1:31:55And you are contributing to it by watching it. Yeah, but... You are patronizing it. You are
1:32:02a rating. You're increasing its numbers. You are hearing what they are saying. He's not a Nielsen
1:32:07family. I don't know how the ratings work these days. Maybe the cable boxes all report back. I
1:32:10don't know. I understand that perspective, but to me, it's important for me to at least...
1:32:16Understand is too strong a word because I don't understand these maniacs, but to hear the other
1:32:24side... And again, understand isn't the right word. Appreciate isn't the right word. But I guess just
1:32:30get exposed to the other side because it helps me to understand the victims of Fox News. And I use
1:32:38that word deliberately. I'm not trying to be funny. But even... Because I am more worldly, I think,
1:32:45than your average Fox & Friends viewer, I understand when they're just lying to me,
1:32:53which is pretty much 99% of the time that they're talking. But it is interesting because I can
1:32:59understand better how people that I care deeply for can get hoodwinked by these lies and this
1:33:06propaganda. And so I personally think it's useful for me, but I am not trying to say that it's
1:33:13useful for anyone else. And it is true utter filth. It is garbage and it is a danger to our
1:33:20democracy. But it helps me to understand some of the people I care about to watch it.
1:33:26**Matt Stauffer** I find that reason
1:33:27unconvincing for the cost that is incurring.
1:33:30**
1:33:46**Matt Stauffer** Yeah. I find all TV news in all forms, in all venues, to just not... I find it...
1:34:11My brain rejects it. I cannot stand it. It doesn't... It has to do with politics. It has to
1:34:17do with just the form. Now, I grew up with the form. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with it. I
1:34:21grew up with it, right? But from my modern sensibilities, I don't want what they're giving
1:34:27me. And again, the TV is just a mechanism by which the news gets here. But there is a form that it has
1:34:33evolved over time to be... Their selection of what they want to report does not match what I want to
1:34:41hear ever. It's just too... Even local news, maybe especially local news. I don't need to know about...
1:34:50I don't need the human interest story. I don't need to know about the kid who was hit by a car
1:34:55a block down. I don't need to know about the surface level of some actors in a new movie.
1:35:02I don't want TV news. And I'm surprised Casey's watching it, but my parents watch it,
1:35:07and I encourage them heavily, stop watching television news. Because it might... Putting
1:35:12aside Fox, right? Television news seems very much like the old SNL skit, where they're telling old
1:35:19people that robots are gonna steal their medicine. It's all about what's gonna kill you, what terrible
1:35:23thing is happening. It's like just so... It's clickbait before there was clickbait. It is so
1:35:28incredibly hyped up and sensationalized, telling you about all the things that you should be
1:35:32worried about. And it's not the things you should be worried about. It is a bunch of other crap.
1:35:38And it's just like, don't subject yourself to that. You don't need to know that. Don't get all hyped
1:35:43up about the killer bees that are coming into your neighborhood. I always wonder if there was
1:35:48an actual story that people needed to know about. It would just be mixed in with all the other crap
1:35:51on local news and given equal weight to the dog that was loose that the police shot that had
1:35:56rabies. It's exactly the same. So anyway, I don't watch TV news.
1:36:01**Ezra Klein laughs**
1:36:03In conclusion.
1:36:03**Matt Stauffer** And a little bit on the Fox News things. I get where you're coming from, Casey.
1:36:08But my advice would be that even if you're watching it with that in mind, constant exposure
1:36:15to extreme propaganda can't help but shift your thinking merely through repetition. It's the
1:36:21Overton window. Yeah, you think it's all lies and it's all BS and you're not falling forward
1:36:25and so on and so forth. But the constant repetition eventually gives the propaganda
1:36:31more weight than it deserves in your mind when you balance it against the truth, right? It's
1:36:37not much you can do to stop. It's just human nature. It's not much you can do to stop that.
1:36:40You will come to think that the positions staked out there are slightly more reasonable than they
1:36:48are just by hearing it all the time. And it's the same stuff that all sorts of, you know,
1:36:53the personalities and the jokes and you become familiar with the people and so on and so forth.
1:36:57Even if in your rational mind you're like, "Well, this is all BS and I'm learning about the enemy,"
1:37:01it does have an effect on you in that manner. If you're aware of the effect,
1:37:04you could probably counteract a little bit, but it is a thing. So I feel like by now you should
1:37:09know all you need to know about how Fox works and be able to understand the people who are into it.
1:37:14And I would encourage you to stop watching it as well. But I would also encourage you to stop
1:37:18watching all the other TV news. Anyway, to answer this simple question, Twitter is still the main
1:37:23place where I get all my news. I have a very carefully selected group of people that I follow.
1:37:29And I'm 20 degrees separated from the actual thing, but I trim that list to the point where
1:37:36the things that come through on my feed are the things that I actually want to hear about
1:37:41personally. And if I'm getting information that I don't want to hear about, I will trim that off.
1:37:45If I'm not getting information that I think is important or I'm getting it too late,
1:37:48I will add a follow by looking at a follow of a follow of a follow to see how something got to me.
1:37:52Twitter is how I do it. Before Twitter, I used RSS. Before RSS, I typed in the names of websites
1:37:59or used bookmarks. And before that, I guess I was back in the bad old days of TV news. But I never
1:38:05watched TV news as like, "Now it's time for me to watch the news." It was just that sometimes it was
1:38:09on in the house that I was in. That's as close as I got. Yeah, I saw a lot of TV news grow. I
1:38:14spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house, and they would always have news on every night.
1:38:19And you'd frequently see multiple news because you'd see the first local one, then the national
1:38:25one, whatever. So you'd see three or four news programs in a row sometimes. So I saw a lot of
1:38:30TV news growing up, and I totally stopped watching it after I stopped going over there as a kid all
1:38:37the time. And so now I only ever see it if it's on a TV somewhere that I have to wait. Like an
1:38:45office somewhere, like a doctor's office, something like that. It was the airport. When they have news
1:38:49on at the airport, I can't stand it because you can't escape it. I just want to put on noise
1:38:53canceling headphones to not hear the news. My hatred for television news in all forms,
1:38:58every station, everything. Maybe it's not rational, but I really hate TV news. I really hate it.
1:39:04Yeah, because now the few times I see it now, because I've been away from it for so long,
1:39:09but I had such a strong history of it before that, now when I see it, it's like hitting a raw nerve.
1:39:16It's the same garbage now that it was 20 years ago. I feel like it's worse. In the days when I
1:39:23grew up at least, the network news had a certain boring stadeness that does not exist in any
1:39:30television news anymore. They could get away with it because there were networks and there
1:39:34were monopolies and news was isolated from entertainment and there was all sorts of factors
1:39:37allowing them to essentially not give in to market forces that inevitably lead them down to
1:39:42the television equivalent of clickbait. So that did exist. It is much worse now than it was.
1:39:46Yeah, that's true. But it's still though, it was never good. It was just merely okay before,
1:39:54and now it's truly awful. And when you see it, when you're away from it for a while,
1:39:59and then you see it, you realize quite how horrendously bad it really is.
1:40:04And so yeah, I strongly suggest, Casey, regardless of what viewpoints you want to develop or
1:40:11understand, TV news of any sort from any provider is horrible and is a bad way to get those viewpoints
1:40:17or any information whatsoever. And just ultimately, I would recommend, and maybe you don't want to do
1:40:22this, but I strongly encourage people who get a lot of anxiety or depression about everything
1:40:30horrible that's going on in the world, step back from it. It feels like you're giving up or it
1:40:35feels wrong in some way to take a break from it and ignore it or close yourself off from it.
1:40:41But the reality is that there's always going to be, much of this applies to Twitter too.
1:40:49There's always going to be more to read. There's always going to be more news. There's always going
1:40:53to be various news publishers and various media trying to get your attention with new, breaking
1:41:01developments of whatever, whatever, whatever. And most of it doesn't matter at all a day later.
1:41:07It's like junk food for information. You're just throwing junk food into your brain,
1:41:13and it feels like you're being useful or productive or a responsible citizen or informing yourself.
1:41:19But a very low percentage of that is actually useful and necessary to know and has lasting value.
1:41:27So number one thing is to cut out TV sources because they literally will just air constant
1:41:34updates to nothing all day long because they don't want you to tune out. And there's always
1:41:38something to watch. What you should do instead is more of like a, like get away from the push models,
1:41:44go to a poll model where you don't just sit there receiving whatever one's sending you.
1:41:48When you want to learn about something that you hear about through some other
1:41:52way that isn't a news show, go try to learn about it. If you hear about some new crisis or natural
1:41:57disaster that's happening, go look it up and try to find information about it then. But get yourself
1:42:03off the feed, off the constant cycle, whether that's a Twitter feed or constantly refreshing
1:42:10news websites if anybody still does that, or Facebook feed if anybody, God forbid, still does
1:42:14that, or if it's watching cable news or even just quote "having it on." That's still on. It's still
1:42:22pouring garbage into your brain constantly. Cut it off. Actually step away from it. And you will find,
1:42:30much like people find when they take breaks from Twitter for a while, you'll find that you don't
1:42:36miss as much as you think you will miss. Like major events that happen, you still hear about.
1:42:41Major things that you need to know, you still learn about. And you just remove this massive
1:42:48source of distraction and just constant anxiety and constant like, because they're trying to
1:42:55rile you up. That's how they make more money from you. They rile you up so you keep watching and you
1:42:59stay engaged and you spread it around. If you just take yourself out of that system, it's way happier
1:43:07on the outside. And the world doesn't become perfect, but you can at least have a better
1:43:12mental state about it. - Plus they have the ads, 'cause news tends to be less valuable if it's not
1:43:16live, so you actually have to allow the ads to play, which is a little bit in this ad for your
1:43:22world. Like today, you have so many choices for news, so much more than you did in the days when
1:43:25it was just newspapers and television and radio. Like the entire internet is there. There's lots of
1:43:29places where you can get news stories in the form that you want them or whatever. If you like TV
1:43:33news, some people, and I understand it's not for me, some people like that type of thing and don't
1:43:35get anxiety from it. But very often, especially if you're the type of person who grew up watching
1:43:40television news or grew up having television news on, you just continue to do it out of habit.
1:43:44And like, that's the thing to question. And to defend Casey's Fox News stuff for a second,
1:43:49I think it actually is important to know what Fox News is and how it works, not just take other
1:43:53people's words for it. I just don't think you need to, for the rest of your life, watch one Fox News
1:43:58show a day or a week. I think you can get it after a fairly short period of time. And check in every
1:44:03once in a while. But it is important to know the enemy, to know what the hell's going on over there.
1:44:08It's not important to watch it every day for years and years and years. You'll get it pretty quickly.
1:44:13It's a hell of a thing. Are we satisfied now? As much as we will be. Probably won't be satisfied
1:44:20until television news is destroyed in all forms. Just wait. It's aging out.
1:44:25All right. So Stephen Kim wants to say, or wants to know, "I'm in my final semester of college/university
1:44:30and wanted to know if you guys had some sort of senior project. And if so, what was it?"
1:44:35I did not. When I went to Virginia Tech, I did not have any sort of senior thesis project or
1:44:41anything like that. I did do some fun things, but no, I did not have a senior project. John,
1:44:47how about you? I did have a senior project. Everyone had to do one. It was in the engineering
1:44:53school. I was majored in computer engineering, which is like a hybrid of electrical engineering
1:44:58with a couple of CS courses thrown in, essentially. My particular project was—I don't even remember
1:45:04how we came up with this—but it was a local area paging system. Yes, pagers were a thing. Yes,
1:45:08I'm old. Local area paging system and software. There was a contest they had at the school where
1:45:14you'd have to like—kind of one of those things where you get a bucket of parts and you have to
1:45:17build a vehicle and the vehicles have to compete. You guys know about and talk about those engineering
1:45:23contest stuff? Yes. It was a really cool NOVA episode about an MIT Hill Climb competition. It
1:45:28was one of the favorite things I ever watched as a kid. I should find the link for next week.
1:45:32Anyway, they have these contests, and the project—it's contrived, it's a senior project,
1:45:38whatever—was to make a system of pagers, sort of like the restaurant pagers, where
1:45:42each team would have a pager, and when it was their turn to come and compete, you would page them.
1:45:46You'd do this through a piece of software, and then the software also kept track of the matches,
1:45:51and then they would compete and you would start the timer for the match. The software ran the
1:45:56officiating for the match and recorded the results. So you'd basically run the competition
1:46:01sitting in front of a PC, and the PC was connected through a parallel port to a radio transmitter,
1:46:06and the radio transmitter would talk to the pagers. So the project was, "We made the pagers,
1:46:10we made the radio transmitter, and we made the software." And we had to price out all the
1:46:15components and source them, and it was actually a pretty good product that spanned hardware and
1:46:19software. In the end, the part I did was the entire Windows program written in MFC and C++.
1:46:25Oh, God, I'm so sorry. It's no wonder you hate Windows so much.
1:46:29And then I printed it at the end and handed it in.
1:46:31Here's the software, here's a floppy disk, and here is a beautifully commented printout of the
1:46:38world's most heinous MFC code. How could you even tell it's the most heinous? All MFC code
1:46:43was heinous. It was the first and last time I ever did Windows development. I'm so sorry. Marco?
1:46:50Well, this ties right mostly to the beginning of the show. I did have a senior project. It was
1:46:54required by my colleagues for everybody. And it was, so I was in computer science, and what I
1:47:01chose to do was attempt to develop my own audio compression algorithm, not dynamics compression.
1:47:08You've spoken about this, that's right.
1:47:09Yeah, but compressing the way MP3 compresses to make a file smaller. And the idea I had was,
1:47:15you know, you have, you look at audio waveforms and you see basically a bunch of squiggly lines.
1:47:20And my idea was, instead of storing every number on that line, maybe I can fit a least squares
1:47:32best fit line to it and then simply store the coefficients of the least squares equation and
1:47:40have that represent like, you know, 20 audio samples with like four coefficients. And I,
1:47:47you know, I mentioned earlier, I don't really, I have a very limited understanding of things like
1:47:51digital signal processing and signal theory. Well, I had way less of an understanding of it,
1:47:56you know, 20 years ago or whatever that was. So, that's when I guess 15 years ago. And so I,
1:48:03yeah, it was, I had very bad understanding of it then. And so my idea to make this, you know,
1:48:09best curve fit algorithm as audio compression, not only was hilariously slow to run on my Pentium 3
1:48:19of the day, but was, sorry, AMD Athlon of the day. So it was hilariously slow to run. And also,
1:48:27made the files larger because it was so bad at compressing. And at first I tried lossy compression,
1:48:34that sounded so horrible compared to MP3 and made bigger files much more slowly.
1:48:39Then I tried lossless compression, figuring, well, if I can at least store the coefficients,
1:48:44and then I can just store the difference values between, you know, what my crazy equations
1:48:48predicted and the actual values, that's at least smaller numbers and they can take up less space.
1:48:53So I tried lossless compression then. And that was also horribly slow and also made the files
1:49:00larger than the input waves. And so what I ended up having to like pivot to, since I was already
1:49:06deep into this project and couldn't really come up with a new thesis, was basically turn it into
1:49:11like a survey of audio, of lossless audio compression algorithms. And it turned out all that
1:49:18crazy work I had done to generate best fit curves and with least squares algorithms and everything.
1:49:24It turns out if you just predict that one sample will be the same value as the one before it,
1:49:30and then just store the difference as the smaller number, that is basically free to do on computers.
1:49:39It takes no time and compresses almost as well as flack because flack is doing things like that.
1:49:47And it turns out, lossless audio compression basically always maxes out at around 50%
1:49:54compression for, you know, constant input types like music. And pretty much any predictor that
1:49:59you use to generate sample to sample data works at about the same accuracy. Like it's pretty hard
1:50:05to get it much worse than that. So that is what I did. I made a survey of audio compression
1:50:12algorithms to show how efficient all these much simpler methods were than the one that I tried
1:50:18first that took me months. You could have done your graduate thesis on run length encoding.
1:50:22Yeah. It's too soon. He's still a little upset about his C code from earlier to this episode.
1:50:29Tobogranit, I think, would like to know, "John, what Destiny videos and specific YouTubers perhaps
1:50:38do you watch?" This is short. I'm always on the lookout for new things. But I have two favorite
1:50:46YouTubers. My favorite YouTuber is named True Vanguard. I think his actual name is Ryan.
1:50:51I like him because he talks a lot about PvP, which is a type of Destiny game that I like.
1:50:58It's player versus player as opposed to player versus environment or player versus enemies,
1:51:03PvE. He talks about PvP a lot. And he is... I don't know how to put this. He's a grownup. I mean,
1:51:11they're all adults on YouTube for the most part. But he doesn't... I can maybe describe it by what
1:51:19he's not. He doesn't yell all the time, which is the thing that kids like. They like it when people
1:51:23react very dramatically to whatever is going on in the thing they're doing. So he's not a yeller.
1:51:30I was gonna say that he doesn't curse, but that's like... I don't care about cursing. But
1:51:34indicative of how sort of pleasant and mature and kind and not interested in sensationalism
1:51:45or getting super angry about things. He just generally seems like a nice person. He's also a
1:51:53dad. So I'm watching a dad video. He's really good at PvP. And he explains what he's thinking,
1:52:02how he does things, stuff that he tried in a nice laid-back way that I find interesting. So
1:52:08True Vanguard on YouTube, my number one YouTuber. My second favorite one is named Datto. I don't
1:52:14actually know what his real name is. He is younger. He's a little bit more potentially
1:52:17prone to anger. He struggles with the fame that he has gotten by being a fairly popular Destiny
1:52:23YouTuber. But he does PvE a lot. And so I want to learn about all the PvE things and the intimate
1:52:31details and all sorts of stats about what's the best thing to bring into this. I tried out all
1:52:35these different techniques and hear all the numbers and the math and all that stuff. And I occasionally
1:52:40enjoy watching him struggle with himself and with the game and with all sorts of other things. To
1:52:46give an example, when they released the new raid recently, there's a race between all the players
1:52:52to see who can be the first one to finish it. And Datto is right in there because he's a pretty big
1:52:57YouTuber in the Destiny world. And he's got a lot of friends. And he's good at that part of the game.
1:53:01And so are his friends. So it's a six-person thing of players versus computer enemies trying to
1:53:07finish the raid, see who can be the world's first. You get a big accolade from the game maker. And
1:53:13they all stream on Twitch. Datto and his crew were not the world's first. They came in third or fourth.
1:53:21They started playing when the raid was launched. There was a bunch of stuff for everyone who
1:53:29finishes the raid on the first day. You'll get this free jacket and all sorts of swag or whatever.
1:53:34Even if you're not the world's first, just everyone who finishes the raid on the first day,
1:53:36you get all this stuff. Datto and his crew played the raid for slightly over 24 hours straight.
1:53:44Oh my word.
1:53:45I go, it was like two minutes and 30 seconds over the 24-hour mark. So basically,
1:53:49they sat down there. They started playing the raid. And they played it for 24 hours.
1:53:53I watched them on and off. I went to sleep. I woke up. They were still playing. This was
1:53:59like over the course of a weekend. I checked in an hour later. They were still playing.
1:54:03After the world's first had already completed, many, many hours after, they were still going.
1:54:08They knew they weren't going to be the world's first. They were still going. This is on Twitch,
1:54:12not on YouTube. And you're watching them. And it's kind of like when you watch someone
1:54:18doing something where you're like, just go to sleep. You're not going to get any better.
1:54:24You're not going to get any sharper. I continue to think that if they had taken a six-hour break
1:54:29in the middle, they would have finished the raid faster. Like if they had just gotten some sleep.
1:54:35Because after 24 hours of intense concentration on a game, very difficult. It's not like they're
1:54:42just casually doing this. This is like the most difficult top-level thing that you can do. They
1:54:47were under-leveled for it. They're concentrating for 24 hours. You are fried. They were making
1:54:53dumb mistakes and getting sloppy. They should have taken a six. Anyway, that drama, and just to see
1:54:58that person that I've known since Destiny 1 days and struggle with that and be frustrated with
1:55:04their failures but eventually to overcome was an amazing, dramatic moment in the world of Destiny
1:55:09videos. And I was glad I was there intermittently to witness it. So those are my two ones.
1:55:14True Vanguard, my number one. Datto, number two. There's a bunch of other ones. I look at
1:55:19Planet Destiny sometimes. Erex, Kakus. They all have these crazy names. But those are my top two.
1:55:26So I would highly recommend everyone check out True Vanguard and check out Datto if you're into
1:55:30PvE and you can handle his occasional outbursts. So Casey, who are your favorite Destiny YouTubers?
1:55:36Oh, I love all of them, Marco. I can't choose just one. All the great YouTubers.
1:55:41Thanks to our sponsors this week, Away, Squarespace, and Fracture. And we'll see you next week.
1:55:45[music]
1:55:46Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. 'Cause it was accidental.
1:55:55Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
1:56:04'Cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
1:56:15And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them. @caseyliss. So that's Casey Liss. M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
1:56:28N-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.
1:56:47Did we ever do the Dark Patterns in Destiny? We haven't, right?
1:56:53Can you handle more Destiny?
1:56:55Well, do I have a choice?
1:56:56Do you guys know what a dark pattern is?
1:56:58No.
1:56:59Like in UI design?
1:57:01That's the context it usually comes up in. Marco, why don't you explain what a dark pattern is?
1:57:05So if we're talking about the same thing, a dark pattern like in UI design is basically,
1:57:09it's almost like designing something intentionally to trick or mislead the user into doing something
1:57:19that's kind of bad for them, but that benefits you as the designer or as the owner. So a good
1:57:24example of this would be like on a website, like really hiding the way to delete your account or
1:57:30really hiding the way to call them on the phone if you need help with something. Like trying to
1:57:34make it really hard to do something that kind of costs you, the owner, money that might benefit
1:57:43people or making it easy to accidentally trick people into giving up their email address to your
1:57:49mailing list or stuff like that.
1:57:51Yeah, and it's called a dark pattern because patterns in general is like a construct that
1:57:55you use in an interface, like sort of standard constructs, an arrangement of controls where
1:58:01you tend to see a text box with a checkbox underneath it. Those are patterns of just
1:58:07familiar ways to present interfaces to people. A dark pattern is a pattern, as Marco said,
1:58:12that is of various purposes. A great example of this, setting aside computers entirely,
1:58:16the concept of fine print. Fine print is a dark pattern,
1:58:20predating computers. If you have something that you have to put like on a box or in a contract
1:58:24or whatever, and you can make the text really, really small because you really don't want the
1:58:29person, like you have to put it there, but you really don't want the person reading that.
1:58:32So you make it really, really small to try to discourage them from, maybe they can't see it
1:58:36that well, maybe it's so small they're squinting and it's annoying to read. That's a dark pattern.
1:58:40And then the computer is another one that comes to mind as sort of the canonical dark pattern is
1:58:46the please send me your newsletter checkbox that is checked by default. That was like one of the
1:58:51early dark patterns on the web, right? Where you're going through some signup process and
1:58:55there's a checkbox that says, yes, please send me marketing material. And it's checked by default,
1:58:59100% a dark pattern. And by the way, if you make an error in the form and like, oh, your email,
1:59:05you forgot to enter your phone number and you uncheck that checkbox, it's checked again when
1:59:10the form comes back. That's also a dark pattern. So now that we've established what a dark pattern
1:59:14is, this is about dark patterns in destiny. This was a very sad day for me and destiny.
1:59:18This, I don't think it was intentional. So maybe I can't list it as dark. Well,
1:59:20actually it was intentional, but yeah. All right. Anyway, destiny has vendors where you can buy
1:59:25things. And the way the system has worked since destiny one, destiny two is it's a bunch of squares
1:59:30on the screen. You put your cursor over them and you press a button and you buy it. It's not like
1:59:34a cart. You don't put things into a cart and there's no quantity. Like you can't say, give
1:59:39me five of these, 10 of these. Like there's no place where you get to enter a number or hit an
1:59:42up and down arrow to put numbers. If you want to buy something, you hover over it and you hit the
1:59:46button. And not only do you hit the button, occasionally you have to hold down the button
1:59:49for a certain period of time because some things, some actions have big consequences. Like maybe
1:59:54something is very expensive or like there's a button you hold down to dismantle items that you
1:59:58have. And if it's a very valuable item, you want to, they put in a delay so that, oh, you're just,
2:00:04you're, you're going to disassemble this thing that took you a year to get. You have to hold
2:00:09down the button for like 60 seconds, like in this big progress bar feels to make sure you don't
2:00:12accidentally delete it. Right? Because lots of stuff you're deleting all the time. You get junk
2:00:16in the game and you're just like, oh, delete, delete, delete, delete. Right? So those are short,
2:00:19but the more consequential the action, the more you hold it down. But anyway, for vendors,
2:00:23for buying things, for the most part, it's, you know, they're fairly fast. You hold down the
2:00:29button a little bit. Sometimes you just tap it, but it's just a single press because there is no
2:00:33quantities anywhere. And sometimes you want to buy 50 of something because there are consumable items
2:00:37and you want to buy a bunch of these things that you're going to trade for those things. This whole
2:00:40whole economy, you know, economy of materials and made up money and everything in the game. And you,
2:00:46you buy them in large quantity. So the habit over the course of since destiny one, you know,
2:00:51four years now or whatever, is you go to a vendor and you're like, I'm going to buy five of these
2:00:56things and 10 of those and eight of those. And I'm going to go to this vendor and sell five of
2:00:59these and disassemble that and put these into the, you know, and so you get used to hitting the
2:01:03button in sequences. So you look at the price, you look at how much you have and you're like, oh,
2:01:07those are, those are, you know, 10, it's not, they don't use dollars. Well, those are $10 each.
2:01:11I've got 500 bucks. I'm going to buy five of those. You have one, two, three, four, five.
2:01:15And they're like, all right, I got this much left. I'm going to buy two of those. They're
2:01:1720 each, one, two, three, you know, like that's what the game has trained us to do over the course
2:01:22of four years. If you played from the beginning of destiny, that's how everything works.
2:01:26In destiny two, in the latest expansion, there was a vendor who sold an item that is an incredibly
2:01:33short supply in the new economy. And they're probably going to patch the game to fix this.
2:01:37Particular item that, you know, a material, a resource that is very rare and there's no
2:01:44reliable way to get more. You get a little bit more randomly, but not enough to feed what you
2:01:49would want to use this item in. And a vendor would sell it and they sold it for 10 of a very,
2:01:54fairly valuable other item. Like not currency, but like there's another resource that's pretty
2:02:00rare and hard to get, but there is at least a reliable way to get it. They sold it for 10 of
2:02:04those. And you're like, oh, you know, I'm not going to spend 10 of that very valuable resource
2:02:08for one of these things. That's not a good deal. But eventually, as it became clear in the economy
2:02:13that there was no other way to get them, you're like, well, I would love any opportunity to buy
2:02:18these. So I'm just going to farm that other material, come back here and buy, you know,
2:02:23I know they're 10 each, so fine, I'll get a hundred and then I can buy 10 of those things, right?
2:02:27So you go out and you farm that material, or maybe like me, you have a massive surplus because that
2:02:31material was in abundance before the expansion. I had a pretty big surplus.
2:02:34Found it in the attic.
2:02:36Yeah. Like I've got this cash and stuff, I'm going to spend it. Even though it's like 10 to one,
2:02:41it's not a good deal. It's the only way I have to get this stuff. So I need to buy some of this
2:02:45stuff. And so I go to the vendor and I buy a couple of them and I'm like, oh, that really hurt. That
2:02:51sucked. And I wait for the next week for the reset to see if the price changed. It didn't. It's still
2:02:5410 of those things. I'm like, let me just bite the bullet. Let me go farm a whole bunch of this stuff
2:02:59and let me just go and just dump it all in. I'll just buy, I'll buy like, you know, 20 of those
2:03:04things, right? I'm just going to do it. Like I've resigned myself to my fate. They're not going to
2:03:09fix the economy for a while. So I go there and I buy like 20 of them and I go one, two, three,
2:03:14four, five, six, seven, eight, and I'm hitting the button, right? And eventually the button stops
2:03:19working and the icon grays out. I'm like, what the hell? I had like, I had literally a thousand of
2:03:24this thing and they were 10 each, right? I could have, I could have bought a ton of them. Like they
2:03:27were 10 each and I've got over a thousand. Why, why is the button disabled? Is there a limit that
2:03:31a number I can buy per week or something? And I realized the reason the thing was disabled is
2:03:37because every time I purchased one, the price doubled. And because the game had trained me,
2:03:46when you want to buy 10 of something, go one, two, three, four, five, hit the button 10 times.
2:03:50Like you're not looking down at the price to see if the price is changing. The price never changed
2:03:54on any other item when you bought it until this thing. The reason I couldn't buy anymore is
2:03:58because I no longer had enough to buy a single one. The next purchase was like 600 or something.
2:04:04It was some huge amount, right? Like, I suppose it had to be a power of two, right? I didn't have
2:04:09that much left anymore, but that's why it wasn't letting me purchase it. So essentially I bought
2:04:14one of these consumables for like 512 of that other one before the thing stopped. So I burned
2:04:20through like a year's worth of this very valuable consumable that I had built up in like 30 seconds.
2:04:25No, there is no undo. There is no going back. There is no complaining to Bungie that you
2:04:31accidentally did a bad thing. There was no delay. An example of a dark pattern would be a price
2:04:38that doubles every time you buy one that is unprecedented in four years of the game and an
2:04:44interface that does not let you buy things in quantities and let you preview the price.
2:04:47The game had trained me, "Press the button a certain integer number of times and get your
2:04:53thing." I was sad for like four days about this. I know it's all just pretend stuff, but I literally
2:05:00spent a lot of my actual time building up the inventory of that other valuable item. Notice
2:05:05how I'm not using all the crazy destiny words here to help you people? Yeah, I appreciate that.
2:05:09It doesn't really help. It was killer. And the thing is, it is a dark pattern because
2:05:14this vendor in the game is supposed to be like a gangster and like every time you do any kind of
2:05:18deal with him, he always like, "Welches on his deal," or he doesn't, you know, like...
2:05:21In the game world, it kind of makes sense, but it is. It was bad. It was brutal. I complained
2:05:26about this on Twitter and I got a whole bunch of people commiserating saying, "Yep, I did the same
2:05:30thing." So I wasn't the only one who got nailed by this. In some respects, it's like, "That's a
2:05:34pretty good game. Like, you really felt like you were screwed by this criminal." It's like, "Yeah,
2:05:38but I did spend like a year of Destiny 2 building up that." And it's nothing compared to the people
2:05:43who play this game all day. Like, the YouTube people all have so much of every resource that
2:05:46it's ridiculous. But I don't. I'm a casual player. I play every once in a while, like,
2:05:51compared to the people who play like, you know, hours and hours a day. And this really hurt. And
2:05:56I said it on Bungie on Twitter, like, "Bad show, Bungie. Like, don't make the people who play your
2:06:00game feel bad. Like, I... And you see what you were going for? But I think you underestimated
2:06:04exactly how dark this dark pattern was and exactly how trained people are to just hit the button five
2:06:09times and not look at the price." To be fair, and just to show the listeners how annoyed you were
2:06:16by this, this topic has been sitting in the after show section of our show notes for like, two months
2:06:22or something like that. And typically, if something sits for that long, Jon will just say, "Oh, it
2:06:27doesn't matter anymore," and move along. But not this, my friends. And I don't blame you, to be
2:06:31honest. I would really chat my behind. So did the item or whatever that you bought not as many as
2:06:37you expected of, was it worth it? Like, what is the...
2:06:40**Matt Stauffer** No, no, it was not worth it. Like, at 10 for one of these, it's not worth it.
2:06:46For like, hundreds of that consumable item for one of them, it's a terrible deal. It's like someone
2:06:54said you can buy a candy bar for $10. You're like, "Eh, maybe it's for charity." But if we said,
2:06:59"Oh, and by the way, go ahead and buy 20 candy bars and the price will double every time." By the time
2:07:04you're buying a candy bar for $1,000 and someone says, "Well, was it worth it?" It was, you know,
2:07:07you got that candy bar for a thousand. No, it's not worth it at all. It was terrible. I'm still
2:07:12sad about it. I shouldn't have put this topic here and I'm sad all over again.
2:07:15**Jared Stauffer** All right. And just because people will ask, and this is the brief spoiler
2:07:21moment of the episode, what did you have to spend in order to purchase what using the actual Destiny
2:07:27terminology? **Matt Stauffer**
2:07:29They were selling, this is kind of sounds overdue, they were selling Masterwork Cores
2:07:33for legendary shards. Legendary shards got it from disassembling legendary weapons and a bunch of
2:07:41other things. Masterwork Cores used to randomly drop, used to be able to get them from disassembling
2:07:48Masterwork weapons, which would randomly drop. Anyway, yeah, Masterwork Cores are incredibly rare
2:07:54in Destiny 2 and the new, in the Forsaken expansion, they changed the infusion economy
2:08:01to require all sorts of materials to do infusion. So basically, I mean, they have the charts in this,
2:08:04this is why they're going to adjust it. They changed the infusion economy such that people
2:08:08used to do infusion all the time. And as soon as Forsaken came out, I bet the rate of infusion
2:08:14dropped off a cliff because it basically became nobody ever infused anything. It used to be a
2:08:18thing that you would do all day long and was like, nobody infused anything because it uses so many
2:08:22resources, including Masterwork Cores, and there's no way to get more Masterwork Cores. So even if
2:08:27you had a cache built up, eventually you depleted it. I bet like infusion has dropped practically
2:08:32zero. So they're going to fix this. They're going to adjust it. They posted a bunch of stuff about
2:08:36it a couple weeks ago about how they're going to provide some reliable way to get Masterwork Cores.
2:08:40I still think it's kind of crappy. I still think making infusion this expensive makes people run
2:08:46around with a bunch of hobo suits to use incredible parlance. And really, I just want to use my good
2:08:51items, but I can't afford to infuse them. Anyway, all that made sense to Destiny people. Rest assured.
2:08:55Is this how our show sounds to like non-programmers or non-nerds? Like when I was going through all my
2:09:00audio stuff earlier, I'm sure a lot of our audience like zoned out or skipped the chapter. Like,
2:09:04consider myself like appropriately gotten back at for that now. Legendary Shards and Masterwork Cores
2:09:11are probably a little bit more ridiculous than ring buffers, but not much. I was asking in the
2:09:15chat room, would it have squared if you had bought it one at a time or one AA time? You could only
2:09:21buy one at a time. That's my point. You can only buy one at a time. So if you would like left the
2:09:26store or something and come back. Yeah, no, I think it reset per day. So if you cranked up the price,
2:09:33if you went to sleep and came back the next day, it would be back down to 10. So you can buy one a
2:09:36day for 10, but like it's ridiculous. You need like three of them to do a single simple infusion
2:09:43and it cranks up from there. Yeah, I got lost again. It's a complicated game folks. I can't
2:09:50believe we made it through that though. This is a new record for us, I think, of how much destiny
2:09:55we can make it through at once. Well, anyway, if that was your question, yeah, it resets on a daily
2:09:59basis, which is way too slow. Like, and I did, I have been going back and buying one for 10,
2:10:04but at a certain point, like once they said they were going to change the economy, I'm not even
2:10:07buying one for 10 anymore because one a day is ridiculous anyway. I got to travel all the way to
2:10:11the vendor and I hate that guy now. Yeah, on principle. Yeah, he screwed me. I'm surprised
2:10:16you didn't do more pre-purchase research. You know, you research every other purchase in your
2:10:20life to such a degree. Like if you're making a large destiny purchase. That's why I tweeted it.
2:10:26I didn't like, don't make the same mistake that I did. Right. I mean, cause it's just, it was just
2:10:31so unprecedented. Like I just, when would you ever need to look back at the price? The price is the
2:10:37price. And then you go buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Like that's for four years. We've been doing that
2:10:41never has something changed price when you bought one it's madness, let alone doubling. That's just
2:10:47so cruel. I wonder if I could do a reverse ramp for the, so I know what you've been doing while
2:10:54destiny chat was happening. I haven't been programming, but I've been thinking about it.
2:10:58I've been like slowly like noodling on this throughout the entire show. Like whenever I
2:11:03wasn't busy talking or anything, like I would like get an idea in my head. Like, Oh, what if I,
2:11:08what if I do it this way? Take two showers tomorrow. Yeah. Shower is the ultimate idea place.
2:11:14Nice. Yeah. I think I might do a reverse buffer for the multiplier. That might work better.
2:11:20I continue to think that there are probably libraries in straight C that do this.
2:11:23The thing is like to do it right. It's probably only like 50 lines of code. Like,
2:11:28like doing like a very simple limiter without look ahead is like 10 lines of code. Like
2:11:33this is not difficult stuff or it isn't, uh, it isn't complicated. It's just really tricky.
2:11:41If that makes sense. Like there's a difference between like tricky and it's not complicated.
2:11:45The solutions are very simple once you get them. But to figure out exactly what to do with these
2:11:50crazy numbers and how to do it is very tricky. It's the kind of thing that like, like I start out
2:11:56with a few lines of code doesn't work right. Then I like slowly blow it up with a whole bunch of
2:12:01crazy crap. And then eventually I figure out something that works. And then I ended up
2:12:05then pruning that back down, deleting all the stuff I didn't actually need.
2:12:08It's crazy. And none of it would be helped by test suites. Oh, a lot of it would be. Nope.
2:12:15You really would. Don't even try to talk about stuff. You don't understand the problem that
2:12:21you'd break the problem down to, into a easily testable functions and you'd get each of those
2:12:25working. So you didn't have to worry about them anymore. And then you'd build up, you know, like
2:12:29that may not be your way of working, but rest assured it is a way of working that does work
2:12:33for this specific case. What I am doing is one of those functions. Like that's all it is. Like,
2:12:38it's a very, very small function. Right. But if you know what the output's supposed to look like,
2:12:43like making tests to show what the output is and like your, your aspirational state as your
2:12:49failing test, I'm not going to pitch you a new test. It would work okay for this.
2:12:54It's just not how you're working. It's fine. The debugger works too.
2:12:57Use the debugger in the test. Forget it. I can't do this. I need to, if we're going to have this
2:13:03conversation, we're going to have this conversation. I'm going downstairs and pouring a drink. I cannot
2:13:07have this conversation sober. We've covered these bases before. We're not, I'm not trying
2:13:14to convert you. You set up break point and you can see what all the values are. Oh my God.
2:13:18God.
2:13:19(beeping)