00:00:08 ◼ ► So, you know, this is my old LG C7 OLED that we've had for, you know, since 2017 when it came out.
00:00:22 ◼ ► And so it has, for five years, had the Minecraft Hearts HUD burned into the bottom corner of it or so.
00:00:30 ◼ ► And so, you know, every time there's like a gray scene, you see like this outline of this row of hearts and a few other things.
00:00:37 ◼ ► Well, anyway, so, you know, that burn-in area has shifted into greater intensity, I would say, over time.
00:00:45 ◼ ► And then what ultimately has driven my family crazy recently is that in the middle of the screen now, it started to develop what appears to be a large green splotch.
00:01:08 ◼ ► It's like the hue is shifting green for the content being displayed in the middle of the TV.
00:01:15 ◼ ► It's like the green, the green subpixels tend to wear out and become apparent that they're wearing out faster.
00:01:22 ◼ ► Yeah, like, and so it had grown into about the middle 30% of the TV where like everything that is being, that was being watched on it was like, you know, just slowly turning green and yellow.
00:01:40 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's like, all right, so my family was finally like, just please, can we please get our new TV?
00:02:12 ◼ ► Occasionally, they have had an option where you can get a stand during some years, but I think this is not a stand year.
00:02:26 ◼ ► At some point, we had a sound bar that was too tall, and when using the TV's regular feet, the sound bar would intrude into the TV.
00:02:38 ◼ ► And so, at some point, a couple years back, I had bought VESA feet to lift it up a little bit higher.
00:02:55 ◼ ► No, so, the VESA-compatible screws on the LG are, like, only, like, in, like, the high-up section, like, the high-up in the middle section.
00:03:27 ◼ ► Now I have a new TV, and now I have all sorts of settings to investigate and tweak over the next few weeks.
00:03:35 ◼ ► And I am loving that suddenly I am not the only person putting Vision Pro-related things into the show notes.
00:03:58 ◼ ► Yeah, because, like I said, in my briefing with Apple, I was talking about light seal fitting things or whatever,
00:04:03 ◼ ► and they mentioned that the sizing, like the letter number codes for the various light shields are intentionally obscured to not make people feel self-conscious about the shape of their face or head.
00:04:17 ◼ ► And I thought that was interesting, and then apparently someone on Reddit has, of course, decoded what those letters and numbers mean.
00:04:24 ◼ ► Again, it's basically just a look-up table, but someone has basically brute-forced it and figured out what it means.
00:04:31 ◼ ► after a lot of reading and experimenting, especially with Apple's Vision Pro size help tool,
00:04:37 ◼ ► And then John has taken the liberty of summarizing what Avalanche said, which I will read thusly.
00:04:41 ◼ ► The first digit refers to how far forward your forehead and cheeks protrude relative to one another.
00:04:46 ◼ ► The second digit refers to how deep the light seal is, likely relative to your cheek position, not your forehead.
00:05:01 ◼ ► W plus and N plus light seal cushions don't actually add any extra cushioning, only extra depth.
00:05:11 ◼ ► The other number, it looks like a single number, like 23, but it's actually a two and a three.
00:05:44 ◼ ► Colin Allen writes us, because of the PDF standard is adopting JPEG XL to support HDR images.
00:05:50 ◼ ► The Chromium maintainers have changed course and now are going to implement JPEG XL in the browser.
00:06:01 ◼ ► But then kind of cold water got poured on it by Google saying, yeah, we looked at it and we kind of liked the format that we're using.
00:06:13 ◼ ► And that's basically, you know, the kiss of death for a new image format if Chrome decides not to support it.
00:06:19 ◼ ► Thankfully, the PDF standard is dragging Google kicking and screaming to support JPEG XL.
00:06:25 ◼ ► And I look forward to the day when we can use this format, because as we discussed on a past episode, it has lots of advantages over today's JPEG or today's ping or other formats that we use for images these days.
00:06:36 ◼ ► And then digging back a little deeper with regard to chapter links within Apple Podcasts app.
00:06:48 ◼ ► And Steven mentioned that Apple Podcasts shows links for chapters that link to some external URL only if those links are to Apple services, such as Apple Books, Apple Music, Classical, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple Podcasts, Apple Sports, Stocks, Apple TV, and Shazam.
00:07:02 ◼ ► Steven says that this is true of chapters embedded in the MP3 or using the podcast colon chapters tag in the RSS feed.
00:07:18 ◼ ► When you add a chapter marker to a podcast, you know, obviously it exists at a timestamp and you give the chapter a text name, but you can also make that text name be a link to somewhere.
00:07:32 ◼ ► If you look in Overcast at the chapters in ATP, you'll see like, you know, sponsored by blah, blah, blah.
00:07:36 ◼ ► And that will be a link that you can tap that will take you to, you know, the sponsor web page or whatever.
00:07:53 ◼ ► Although I had a hell of a time finding where the chapters are hidden in the Apple podcast app because, again, I don't use it normally.
00:08:10 ◼ ► Anyway, I loaded up one of our episodes that I know has links in some of the chapter names because I can see them in Overcast.
00:08:18 ◼ ► And sure enough, those links were entirely invisible, not shown at all in Apple podcast.
00:08:22 ◼ ► Now, I haven't confirmed the other side of this, although I trust Stephen Robles to get this right.
00:08:39 ◼ ► Like, if you're going to support chapters, support all the features that chapters support.
00:08:53 ◼ ► But only if they link to some Apple stuff, and that is some terrible, like, Microsoft or modern-day Apple App Store BS.
00:09:00 ◼ ► And you may be thinking, well, they're just looking out for our security, which is a thing that Apple always says when they don't want to provide third parties the ability to do something they can do.
00:09:09 ◼ ► Because, you know, you could put malicious links in podcast chapter links, and we don't want people tapping on those and going somewhere.
00:09:16 ◼ ► And it's just a fun coincidence that there was a story in the news recently about the Apple podcast app.
00:09:30 ◼ ► I didn't actually confirm this one manually for what I hope are obvious reasons, but it's really weird.
00:09:34 ◼ ► So, reading from MacRumors, which I think most of their information is based on 404 Media, security researchers have identified suspicious activity in Apple's podcast app that could be used to deliver malicious content to users based on a report by 404 Media's Joseph Cox.
00:09:47 ◼ ► Cox's report describes some odd experiences with the podcast app that certainly suggests something untoward is going on across both iOS and macOS versions.
00:09:56 ◼ ► He says that over recent months, the app has automatically launched and displayed unusual podcasts without his input.
00:10:01 ◼ ► On Mac and iPhone, the app has opened religion, spirituality, and education podcasts for no apparent reason, in some cases even launching themselves the moment Cox unlocked his device.
00:10:10 ◼ ► The podcast in question often features strange titles containing code fragments, URLs, and in some cases, attempts at cross-site scripting attacks.
00:10:16 ◼ ► So, the idea that it's like, okay, we don't want to show arbitrary links, we only want to show links to Apple properties because there would never be any problems with Apple podcasts and links, and lo and behold, a story specifically about weird links.
00:10:28 ◼ ► Now, maybe you could say this is confirming, say, this is what Apple's trying to protect you from.
00:10:31 ◼ ► Well, it's clear that Apple is not doing a good job of protecting us from this already.
00:10:52 ◼ ► Don't do, like, URL detection and say, we would show this link, but it's not a link to Apple Books or Apple Music Classical or Maps or Music or News or Apple Podcasts or Shazam or Apple TV or stuff.
00:11:01 ◼ ► Like, the amount of work it requires to implement that is just, what a terrible policy.
00:11:07 ◼ ► I mean, again, we're all mostly isolated from the Apple Podcasts, as in the app world here because we're Overcast users and most of our listeners are as well.
00:11:15 ◼ ► Apple Podcasts has improved tremendously in recent years due to what we presume to be competition from Spotify and other companies, but this chapter's implementation is not great.
00:11:24 ◼ ► You know, I mean, Overcast has supported links since day one and chapter links since day one that it supported chapters,
00:11:33 ◼ ► And I've never heard of this being used in a way that would suggest that there is that, like, these are somehow any more dangerous than the web, which, you know, we know how to deal with that.
00:11:50 ◼ ► So, like, I'm not entirely sure why there would be any kind of, like, meaningful security angle to restricting the links in the podcast app.
00:11:59 ◼ ► I do see, though, like, I think what they're trying to do with the, like, you know, linking to Apple properties thing, that seems like they're working on, you know, they mentioned this in the automatic chapterization thing from about a month ago.
00:12:15 ◼ ► They mentioned that, like, they will start detecting when people are talking about another podcast and they will automatically put in, like, a chapter link to Apple podcasts to that podcast.
00:12:28 ◼ ► So, it sounds like maybe something that's made for, like, you know, cross-promotion, which, again, actually, I had this idea for Overcast at the very beginning.
00:12:36 ◼ ► And ever since the very beginning, Overcast has maintained a database index on certain, like, variations and normalizations of podcast page and episode URLs, figuring that, like, at some point maybe I would add this feature.
00:12:52 ◼ ► But it just, honestly, it never came up, like, no one ever has asked for this, and there's been a million things that have been more important than that, so I've never really gotten to it.
00:12:58 ◼ ► But it seems like it's part of the same effort by Apple of, like, they're trying to add cross-promotion, you know, abilities to both transcripts and to, you know, chapter links.
00:13:11 ◼ ► I assume that there is some kind of big publishers, like, pushing them to do this, but I haven't heard of anybody actually, like, trying to support this on the publishing side.
00:13:26 ◼ ► It also seems like if Apple is hoping for people to put in, like, manually put in links to Apple properties only as their only chapter link, that seems optimistic in the current environment.
00:13:40 ◼ ► Not just tech podcasts that are, you know, heavily into other apps like mine, but, like, if you're a mass market podcast and you want to do a chapter link to some other podcast, you've got to consider all your people on Spotify and maybe on YouTube and, like, all these different platforms.
00:13:53 ◼ ► Like, if you're going to only publish one link, it's probably going to be to, like, your own site where you would redirect people to whatever client they want to use, not linking directly to, like, the Apple podcast page for your show.
00:14:17 ◼ ► And I'm kind of hoping that small apps like mine don't get, you know, stomped out in the process of Apple fighting with everybody else, you know, all the big players.
00:14:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I was talking to Stephen about this on Amaston to trying to confirm it because I was like, do you have documentation on this?
00:14:39 ◼ ► It's like, here's where you can put, you know, links to timed links, they called them or whatever.
00:14:53 ◼ ► And they do say when you provide links in your episodes to Apple services, we'll link them, right?
00:14:59 ◼ ► But it doesn't say if you provide links that are not to Apple services, we won't link them.
00:15:06 ◼ ► And it just seems bizarre to me that they would do this sort of self-serving only links to Apple properties thing and sort of weasely hide from it by not straight out saying that's what they're doing.
00:15:19 ◼ ► And I would imagine that most of the links that people want to put on chapter things are links to the thing they're talking about in that chapter, whatever that is.
00:15:28 ◼ ► Presumably, it's like some web, you know, you're talking about a story in the New York Times, you're talking about a website, you're talking like whatever the thing, you know.
00:15:34 ◼ ► And then also on any chapter that is a sponsor for people who do chapters for sponsors, surely you want your like link to that sponsor that lets the people know you heard about it on whatever.
00:15:54 ◼ ► Like, you know, you mentioned, you know, linking to Apple things when they're, you know, another podcast.
00:16:01 ◼ ► I actually think that's maybe something you would do because the Apple Podcasts app is actually pretty popular.
00:16:09 ◼ ► But like Apple Music, I don't think people's first instinct would be I'm going to link to a song and a streaming service.
00:16:17 ◼ ► Unless you're an Apple Focus podcast, you're probably going to go with Spotify or at least something that's cross.
00:16:32 ◼ ► But companies have shown that if you are successful in other ways, you can afford to do this.
00:16:36 ◼ ► For example, Instagram not allowing you to link anywhere ever and just people becoming accustomed to, you know, that's surprising.
00:16:46 ◼ ► The topic that lends the title to the episode of the talk show that Stephen Robles was on is Lincoln bio.
00:16:52 ◼ ► That that phrase that young children know, but that old people think is like the worst thing ever.
00:16:57 ◼ ► The idea that someone would, you know, have an online service that essentially forbids links anywhere and all these insane workarounds of having like a landing page and these companies that will bank your landing page for you.
00:17:08 ◼ ► So if they want to see the thing you're talking about on Instagram, Lincoln bio, which means go to the bio for the account that put this thing in.
00:17:20 ◼ ► It's just insanity, like, you know, and if they're worried about security, if they're worried about like this bug seems like maybe people are putting like a weird URL schemes in there that launch apps and stuff like that.
00:17:35 ◼ ► I'm surprisingly upset by this thing that doesn't affect me at all because I don't use Apple podcast, but it's like one of these cases where Apple is being sort of cartoonishly stupid or evil in such an obscure little corner.
00:17:47 ◼ ► It's like, why why are you bothering like this how many pockets even have chapters and yet they're doing this?
00:17:54 ◼ ► But the fact that it's sort of kind of documented makes me think it's intended behavior and it's a bad idea.
00:17:58 ◼ ► I don't think it's them trying to like being evil or I think it's them being a little naive or maybe optimistic.
00:18:05 ◼ ► I just I don't see like, you know, I just like publishers are like don't use chapters at all.
00:18:12 ◼ ► And they never have like in large quantities and in the world right now of DAI with injecting podcasts with ads at download time by all these ad providers that everyone's using.
00:18:24 ◼ ► And, you know, like in this world, the idea of of adding more metadata into the podcast that is timestamp specific just doesn't happen because, again, like whenever publishers insert ads of different lanes, the timestamps all shift around.
00:18:38 ◼ ► And so the software that they're doing that with has to be made to support chapters and to shift the timestamps accordingly when they insert and remove ads.
00:18:46 ◼ ► And none of the software does that because none of them care at all about that kind of experience.
00:18:51 ◼ ► I mean, these publishers like they don't even really they hardly even use meaningful show notes like to give you some idea like they don't the metadata side of big podcasts has always been pretty, pretty weak and pretty neglected.
00:19:21 ◼ ► The lever of messing with chapters that are on point zero zero one percent of all podcasts.
00:19:28 ◼ ► You're angering a small, tiny, tiny group of people who are super into podcasts and everyone else doesn't care and will never notice this.
00:19:36 ◼ ► Well, and if they wanted to do it as more of like a like an Apple enhancement kind of lock in, like, you know, I guess keep it all in our ecosystem.
00:19:43 ◼ ► The time to do that would have been like six years ago, like, you know, back before Spotify really got big into podcasts.
00:19:58 ◼ ► I recently ran into I was messing with stuff on threads and someone pointed out to me, hey, threads allows you to if you are have a threads account for a podcast and we have a threads ATP account, you can link to your podcast.
00:20:22 ◼ ► And if you put any of those things in, it gave like an obscure error message or just did nothing and said invalid.
00:20:39 ◼ ► And I figure what the domain name is, but it's like the URL that Apple hosts for a podcast, which I guess brings up a web page and will launch the Apple podcast app.
00:20:49 ◼ ► But it is not the URL of the RSS feed and it is not the URL of the website for the podcast.
00:20:54 ◼ ► It is a link to Apple's representation of its info that it has on that podcast in its podcast index.
00:21:32 ◼ ► And I'm always looking for something good to get my family that actually is special, actually personal and matters.
00:21:38 ◼ ► This is always hard for me because, you know, the reality is after a number of Christmases with the same family, you kind of run out of stuff to get people.
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00:22:11 ◼ ► So when the recipient opens it up, they can see a nice personal gift message from you, of course.
00:22:31 ◼ ► Whenever you have a new picture, you go right into the wrap, you share, and it shows up on the frame.
00:22:46 ◼ ► It's really, it's such a nice picture frame and it's such a nice way to connect with family when you can't be there.
00:22:53 ◼ ► So for a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames.
00:23:25 ◼ ► So there's been some news over the last week, as there tends to be, and there's a departure from Apple that we need to talk about.
00:23:52 ◼ ► John Gianandrea, Apple Senior Vice President for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026.
00:24:01 ◼ ► Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramania has joined Apple as Vice President of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi.
00:24:10 ◼ ► Subramania will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML Research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.
00:24:16 ◼ ► The balance of Gianandrea's organization will shift to Sabir Khan and Edi Q in order to align closer with similar organizations.
00:24:32 ◼ ► And apparently this Amar person was at, excuse me, he was at Google and then spent like a minute at Microsoft and is now going to Apple.
00:24:49 ◼ ► It's from the Times of India, being excited about this new person who just joined Microsoft in July of 2025.
00:25:04 ◼ ► So it's difficult to get a read on what's going on here, but it's important to note that JG's like portfolio of stuff, first of all, was already cut down after the reorg, after the whole, you know, Siri, Apple intelligence disaster.
00:25:22 ◼ ► And I don't know, this is when we talked about, you know, the reorg and or even just after WWC and things going badly, it's like, well, when you are the person in charge of this long suffering project that essentially fails to launch, that's not good for your career.
00:25:39 ◼ ► And sure enough, he got reorg out of that responsibility and the responsibility was given to other people, but he was still at the company doing stuff.
00:25:48 ◼ ► And it's the, in the world we live in, if you are high enough up in a company, an important enough person, maybe you appear on stage, maybe you're on like a leadership page, maybe you're a vice president or a senior vice president.
00:26:03 ◼ ► If you're an important person at a company and you get all sorts of fancy stock options and a huge salary and a signing bonus, and they poach you from Google and you're like, you're a big, important person.
00:26:31 ◼ ► If you're lucky enough to be a CEO, maybe you get a golden parachute on your way out the door.
00:26:38 ◼ ► And it's like, well, wait a second, if you succeeded, okay, maybe the higher ups get, you know, their success, they get the spoils.
00:26:45 ◼ ► But if you don't do well, not that I'm saying he failed entirely, but if like, if, if you have a high profile failure to do essentially the thing you were hired to do, if you were a lower level employee, you would not expect the CEO to be telling, to put out a press release.
00:27:07 ◼ ► And I feel like that's an unhealthy part of the corporate world is that when you reach a certain level, you're too big to fail.
00:27:15 ◼ ► No matter what happens, they always say nice things about you and you always get money and you get a cushy landing and it should be the opposite.
00:27:23 ◼ ► Like when you have all that money and all those stock options and you're a bazillionaire and you get all this money to come to Apple and you fail at your job, you're the consequences should be more severe.
00:27:35 ◼ ► Not less because you were given, you were given much and much was expected of you and you still have all the stuff that was given.
00:27:42 ◼ ► I don't think you also need, uh, uh, you know, a glowing kissy kissy review from the CEO on your way out the door, but that's the way they do it.
00:27:50 ◼ ► It was just like, well, of course we here in the upper echelon, uh, we'll always preserve each other's dignity.
00:27:57 ◼ ► And well, now I'm saying that we need to trash him or anything like that, but it's like, if you're a medium to low level employee and you get bad performance reviews, you're gone with no ceremony.
00:28:12 ◼ ► And as your peers in the org charter of like, well, of course we want to make sure that no one ever thinks that he did a bad job at anything and everybody loves him.
00:28:26 ◼ ► If you're, if you're training AI models to try to figure out what, what's a picture of a hot dog and one model, uh, keeps getting it wrong, but, uh, the model had rich parents and you're like, well, but we're going to add a modifier to that model and we're going to multiply its success by like, you know, uh, 50% higher.
00:28:43 ◼ ► And so then when we figure out here are the top five models in all of our different training, the one that has rich parents is up there and it's like, well, it didn't do well, but it's, you know, it's, it's one of us, right?
00:28:57 ◼ ► It would be, it would be cruel, you know, to, if, if we said anything mean about that, like, that's not how you find the best model for identifying hot dogs.
00:29:13 ◼ ► I'm, you know, his retirement I'm sure is well-deserved and he was just not able to be successful in Apple.
00:29:21 ◼ ► What I'm complaining about is the culture of gentle landings and, uh, gentle talk and babying of people who have every advantage in the entire world.
00:29:31 ◼ ► They don't need the, uh, you know, the, the, the, the boosting from the CEO, uh, to go along with it.
00:29:42 ◼ ► Like, you know, first of all, a lot of times some kind of, uh, golden parachute or contract is negotiated as part of the person's hiring in the first place.
00:29:51 ◼ ► I'm not sure the press release where they say you're wonderful as part of that contract, but yeah, I know that's another part of it could be.
00:30:00 ◼ ► Like you don't like you as the company, you don't want the world to think you screwed up and made the wrong hire.
00:30:05 ◼ ► So, and you don't want the world to think that you cause this person to fail or this person couldn't succeed in your, in your company.
00:30:11 ◼ ► So it is in everyone's best interest that when you have somebody who's high up enough that it's like press worthy when they leave or get fired, uh, it's, it's in all of their best interests for the company to be like, we're going to make this, we're going to smooth out this PR.
00:30:39 ◼ ► Cause you know, cause you, you wouldn't want the story to be Apple fires this bit, this AI guy.
00:30:45 ◼ ► And we don't know if he was fired, but you know, you wouldn't want the story to be like Apple fires an executive that they hired away from Google for a while because his division wasn't doing what they wanted or whatever.
00:30:55 ◼ ► Like that's a bad story, not only on him, but on Apple also maybe like at this level, maybe the, the person could even like sue the company for disparagement or something.
00:31:05 ◼ ► Like there's all these, like when you get to that level, I'm not saying you have to trash them.
00:31:11 ◼ ► And the idea that like, it's a, it's a PR, like everybody knew as soon as the reorg was done, like even when they, the way they phrased the reorg it, no one's fooled by this, especially people in the business world.
00:31:23 ◼ ► And so he got reorg out of that responsibility and then we all just started our stopwatches, right?
00:31:27 ◼ ► Cause one, when an important person is reorg out of their responsibility, it's like, I guess they're going to be looking for a new job because the, because the, the indignity, the indignity of like, they're so proud and they have so much dignity.
00:31:37 ◼ ► It's like, well, you hired me to do this thing and now you've decided I'm not going to do it.
00:31:47 ◼ ► Or I'm going to retire or whatever, because they can't, but during that time when their dignity is injured and they're either looking for a new job or organizing their retirement, they're still getting their big salary.
00:32:06 ◼ ► And especially in this case is like one of the highest profile failures because it was public.
00:32:16 ◼ ► But like at WWC 2024, they announced this thing that was, we hired this guy from Google many years later, Apple intelligence, here it comes.
00:32:41 ◼ ► If you go back to a few times when Apple hasn't done this, I think Paper Master got booted out unceremoniously.
00:32:48 ◼ ► I think a couple of Apple retail chiefs under Tim Cook's error also kind of got the boot without too much wonderful, you know, messages from Tim Cook.
00:33:04 ◼ ► I mean, there was some, you know, anyway, I just, I just don't think it's like, it's not fooling anybody.
00:33:12 ◼ ► And that whole, like, you know, I'm not saying it should have kicked him out sooner because I also agree that like, if you hire someone to do something, give them a chance.
00:33:21 ◼ ► They didn't just like say, oh, you haven't done it within two years and you're out of there.
00:33:26 ◼ ► And I'd still would love to hear the story of like how they decided to announce what they did at WWC 2024.
00:33:32 ◼ ► But whatever that, whatever, whoever was involved in that decision made some terrible mistakes.
00:33:40 ◼ ► And they, and they did it anyway to essentially force the, you know, force the, the, force the issue and say, well, you know, you sink or swim.
00:33:59 ◼ ► Like I said, you know, when, when the dignity of an important executive is injured, start your timers because that executive is probably going elsewhere or retiring.
00:34:08 ◼ ► And again, and, and, you know, as we discussed when he was, you know, relieved of all these duties months ago, uh, we don't know what the story there was.
00:34:16 ◼ ► Like, we don't know if, you know, was he, was he not, you know, good enough for this or is the story something else?
00:34:34 ◼ ► And, you know, and, you know, ultimately what you have to do is look at results and the results were like his division when he was leading it didn't produce good output.
00:34:43 ◼ ► Even, even when they announced, like that is the, that is, that makes me think that he had like enemies within the company said, we're going to announce this anyway.
00:34:56 ◼ ► I, I'm not saying that's what happened, but like, that is one plausible theory from the outside.
00:35:18 ◼ ► I mean, when you're, when you're like, you know, a successful person in your career, like that, yeah, you might have enough money, but like you want to do the work.
00:35:25 ◼ ► Like, you know, somebody like, like, like John Gianandrea, like he's a, he's a very accomplished, you know, expert in his field.
00:35:33 ◼ ► It's, you know, it's, it isn't about, you know, it isn't about like, oh, I want to keep working just to make another couple million bucks.
00:35:41 ◼ ► Like the vague things that I've heard about his rep was that he's very into like research and that type of environment.
00:35:48 ◼ ► So I can see him at a university or he could just retire, you know, like enjoy your work.
00:35:52 ◼ ► Like, you know, you could see a lot of the, a lot of the new AI companies would, would, you know, if he has all of this, like, you know, academic and theoretical talent, that's, there's still a huge market for that out there in the job world.
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00:38:29 ◼ ► Meta has poached Apple's most prominent design executive, Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple's user interface design team since 2015.
00:38:44 ◼ ► Quote, Steve LeMay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999.
00:38:51 ◼ ► he has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple's culture of collaboration and creativity.
00:39:11 ◼ ► Meta is creating a new design studio and putting Dye in charge of design for hardware, software, and AI integration for its interfaces.
00:39:18 ◼ ► Joining Dye at Meta is Billy Sorrentino, a prominent deputy who has served as a senior director in Apple's design team since 2016.
00:39:30 ◼ ► That group is tasked with developing wearable devices such as smart glasses and virtual reality headsets.
00:39:35 ◼ ► Dye's major focus will be revamping Meta's customer devices with artificial intelligence features.
00:39:39 ◼ ► At Apple, Dye most recently oversaw the interface of the Vision Pro headset in a sweeping redesign of Apple's operating systems.
00:39:45 ◼ ► He was also central to designing the company's apps, the Apple Watch, and the iPhone X.
00:39:50 ◼ ► His team has been helping develop a slate of new smart home devices as well, Bloomberg News has reported.
00:39:55 ◼ ► The turnover is expected to continue with many of the remaining top leaders, including Cook, nearing typical retirement ages.
00:40:02 ◼ ► Johnny Surugi, Apple's Silicon Chief, and Lisa Jackson's Apple's Head of Government Environmental Initiatives have both been evaluating their features of the company, Bloomberg has reported.
00:40:15 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I see you've got a quote from Jason and Six Scholars here, and I did read what he wrote earlier, and he's saying exactly what I've been thinking and have said on past episodes when talking about stuff like this.
00:40:26 ◼ ► Perhaps more so than Marco, I've always been pretent to assign blame to particular individuals for Apple decisions that I don't agree with, because who knows what goes on inside the company.
00:40:38 ◼ ► There are two angles in this, both of which Jason mentioned in his article that we'll link.
00:40:42 ◼ ► One is, well, okay, so you don't know what's happening inside the company, but you do know who's responsible for it, according to Apple's org chart.
00:40:49 ◼ ► And so even if it's not Johnny Ive or Alan Dyer or whatever personally doing the thing you disagree with, if they're in charge of all user interface design and you see a bunch of user interface design from Apple that you don't like, it's fair to say, even though you didn't do this personally, like the coach doesn't play on the team, but they're in the end responsible for the performance of the team.
00:41:10 ◼ ► And the second thing is, when Apple brings out Alan Dyer and has him stand in front of a table of little clear pieces of plastic and try to explain why his terrible interface is good, yeah, I'm going to blame Alan Dyer.
00:41:20 ◼ ► Because I, like, did they force him out there to explain or try to explain or fail to explain?
00:41:31 ◼ ► And so, although Marco has been anti-Alan Dyer for a long, long time, I gave Apple and Alan the benefit of the doubt until there was no way to, there was no way to deny the fact that he's in charge.
00:41:46 ◼ ► He's, he, in the end, it's all his responsibility and he is literally in the video describing the thing.
00:41:54 ◼ ► And again, it doesn't mean he did any or all of it himself, but he is clearly the face of this.
00:41:59 ◼ ► And because he's in charge of it, whether he did it or not, he obviously approves of it.
00:42:14 ◼ ► Let me, let me just read this from Jason real quick and then I promise I will get out of Marco's way.
00:42:17 ◼ ► And I know everyone's going to be mad at me, but let me just clear the decks and then we'll let, we'll set Marco loose.
00:42:21 ◼ ► Uh, Jason Snell over at Six Colors wrote, so this is, is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta as Mark Ehrman editorializes?
00:42:28 ◼ ► Just to pause there, like you didn't read the headline, but like I believe the, the Bloomberg headline is, what is it?
00:42:51 ◼ ► And obviously we're very inside baseball and developers are more mad about Apple's interface than most people are.
00:42:57 ◼ ► So like maybe to the outside world and an average Bloomberg reader, like, oh, they'd hired a big designer from Apple and everyone knows Apple is good at design.
00:43:05 ◼ ► But like, the more you know about Alan Dye and Apple and the more you care about interface design, the less you think that headline makes any sense.
00:43:13 ◼ ► Right. So with that in mind, and again, let me just clear the decks before I let Marco go.
00:43:17 ◼ ► So is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta as Mark Ehrman editorializes?
00:43:25 ◼ ► Though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Alan Dye to stay at Apple, they would have kept him.
00:43:30 ◼ ► I think it's more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other changes are afoot at Apple.
00:43:37 ◼ ► Certainly being offered what must have been a truckload of money by Mark Zuckerberg couldn't hurt things.
00:43:41 ◼ ► What I'm saying is sometimes when you're bracing for a departure of a senior employee, you're doing it because they think they're more valuable than you think they are.
00:43:52 ◼ ► Change is hard and it's natural for people, including Apple executives, to want to keep the band together as long as possible.
00:44:06 ◼ ► But I was looking at Instagram shortly before we started recording, and let me tell you, this man sniffs his own farts and loves it.
00:44:16 ◼ ► Quote, I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should do something else wonderful.
00:44:30 ◼ ► It was an interview with him that I didn't want to pull out after the liquid glass thing where he was, I forget who he was interviewed.
00:44:37 ◼ ► But he was basically saying that he feels like he has imposter syndrome, and he's afraid everyone's just going to find out that he has no idea what he's doing, which seemed just so on the nose.
00:44:53 ◼ ► Maybe he feels that way, but maybe he's also trying to put a brave face on him leaving Apple, and we don't know all the details or whatever.
00:45:04 ◼ ► In the end, I don't like the user interface things that Apple did when he was in charge of those things.
00:45:19 ◼ ► All right, so we just said, for John G. and Andrea's departure, we were just saying how, like, you know, we don't know all of the effects that go into somebody not succeeding in a company.
00:45:46 ◼ ► Like, there's so many ways that the work of a, you know, a division under a person can be bad or non-ideal that aren't necessarily the person's fault.
00:45:59 ◼ ► He, you know, in the very little bit I've read from him or seen from him, I don't think we would necessarily get along.
00:46:08 ◼ ► But I'm sure he's a fine person, and I'm not going to, like, you know, dance on the grave of his career at Apple, you know, because, like, in a way that would feel too deeply personal.
00:46:34 ◼ ► Well, that was back when, you know, in the early Tim Cook era after Steve Jobs had passed away, Tim kind of didn't know how to assign talent to things like software and, you know, design, you know, design beyond, you know, industrial design.
00:46:52 ◼ ► And so Tim had put Johnny in charge of all design, and Johnny brought in Alan Dye, who I believe was in, like, the print marketing team or something at the time, and put him in charge of software design.
00:47:04 ◼ ► And that was, you know, look, you put someone in charge of software design that was not really a software designer then or now.
00:47:20 ◼ ► You know, just because somebody mentions imposter syndrome in an interview a couple years ago doesn't necessarily mean that they are modest or have an honest view of their work.
00:47:30 ◼ ► And the designs that we've seen from Dye, especially in recent years, have not shown modesty or maybe, you know, humility or even necessarily, you know, interest in making the best work at it, you know, even if it's not, like, your ideal.
00:47:50 ◼ ► You know, the work we've seen coming out of Apple software design in recent years, especially this past year, has been, we know what's best.
00:47:57 ◼ ► By the way, it's actually not especially good in certain ways, especially ways that are traditional, you know, software usability, you know, hallmarks.
00:48:11 ◼ ► Like there's so many issues, you know, with the new designs that are like directly against decades of well-established, you know, human interface and computer design.
00:48:22 ◼ ► So I look at the Dye era and whether it was Dye's fault or not, this is a pretty significant sign that that era has just ended.
00:48:31 ◼ ► Because if you look at, like, the bigger picture here, he just shipped all of the 26 series OS redesigns.
00:48:57 ◼ ► One of the reasons so much talent goes to Meta is not because everyone loves Zuckerberg and Facebook and Instagram.
00:49:12 ◼ ► And when Zuck wants to hire, you know, somebody, some talent, he pays whatever it takes.
00:49:24 ◼ ► Apple is historically not thought of as a place that you get paid particularly well compared to other Silicon Valley competitors.
00:49:37 ◼ ► Like, that's the, that's the impression I've gotten from a lot of, a lot of reports about, about Apple's salary negotiation.
00:49:46 ◼ ► From what I understand, people who work at Apple still make a hilarious amount of money.
00:50:00 ◼ ► And this is before we even start talking about the like athlete salaries that we discussed on a past episode.
00:50:05 ◼ ► Apple is always trying to kind of be like average or in the middle and Meta is a little bit higher.
00:50:13 ◼ ► Then I feel like we're getting into the whole, you know, athlete salary, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, ridiculous stuff like that.
00:50:20 ◼ ► And so, you know, for, for the die era to end seemingly at an, at an odd time and maybe suddenly.
00:50:32 ◼ ► This doesn't sound like executives were bracing, just about to hear that he's going to leave us.
00:50:42 ◼ ► Like not, not, not that they fired him, but they literally like let, they let Meta kind of take him without putting up a huge fight.
00:50:51 ◼ ► This, this smells to me like, you know, if, if he went into Tim's or whoever's office and said, Hey, guess what?
00:51:09 ◼ ► I didn't see the whole, I don't know what the whole statement was from Tim Cook to Bloomberg, but the part that was quoted talks about Steve LeMay, not Alan Dye.
00:51:21 ◼ ► It's not, you don't, I don't see, maybe there'll be in the press, but I don't see the like, thank you, Alan, for all your years of work and blah, blah, blah.
00:51:28 ◼ ► Like, because it's a difference between like retiring or like bowing out versus being disloyal and going to Facebook, which I think Tim Cook likes a lot less than the way JG left.
00:51:41 ◼ ► Maybe there is that in the statement, but the, the quoted part is not about Alan Dye at all.
00:51:52 ◼ ► Like, I don't know if the titles are exactly the same, but it sounds like direct, direct Dye replacement.
00:51:56 ◼ ► And Tim Cook gave a statement in Bloomberg that says, Steve LeMay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999.
00:52:04 ◼ ► And, you know, just some, there's not much about him on the internet, but, you know, you do some quick, like, you know, LinkedIn searches and stuff.
00:52:26 ◼ ► I, you know, we don't know, we don't know really from the public's perspective, we don't know anything about Steve LeMay.
00:52:33 ◼ ► You're taking somebody who seems like he has worked on the Mac, on UI, you know, for a very long time and has been there for a very long time.
00:52:47 ◼ ► The, one of the things that, that kind of rubs me the wrong way is that I love two things that historically a lot of people have not loved.
00:53:07 ◼ ► We saw that there were, and still, you know, to this day, this kind of thing remains, but, you know, there were a lot more in the past of like startups or products, general comments from the industry of like, well, you don't want to listen to podcasts, right?
00:53:23 ◼ ► And there was kind of this, like this kind of assumption baked into a lot of discourse out there from like the general public for a long time.
00:53:43 ◼ ► And that same common, like, you know, attitude has been levied at computers for all of computing.
00:53:50 ◼ ► And some, some of that, you know, for a lot of people that is deserved, you know, for a lot of people, computers are kind of their enemy.
00:53:56 ◼ ► They're, they're, they've been, you know, hard to use or they fight them or they represent like their work or, you know, whatever it is.
00:54:03 ◼ ► But what started being really scary and, and, you know, discomforting and discouraging to me over the years has been that it seems like Apple was taken over by people who didn't like computers either.
00:54:22 ◼ ► He freaking loved computers and understood how to make great computers, didn't succeed 100% of the time, but loved computers nonetheless and had a really good track record.
00:54:43 ◼ ► And Johnny Ive always seemed like he was kind of in that, in that ballpark too, of like he was, he loves design, like industrial physical design.
00:54:53 ◼ ► Johnny Ive is very good at physical design, but it seems like a lot of Johnny's products, especially the unedited late Johnny era, seem like computers designed by people who hate computers and who assume everyone else hates computers too.
00:55:11 ◼ ► You want, you want to just have this computer that's like nothing because you hate computers.
00:55:14 ◼ ► And Alan Dye, his era of software design leadership has seemed like that bringing that same attitude to software.
00:55:24 ◼ ► Like, especially on the Mac, where he really seemed like he never even bothered to try to understand the Mac.
00:55:31 ◼ ► The design of computer interfaces under Alan Dye was, don't you hate all the things your computer can do?
00:55:48 ◼ ► All the things that you can use your computer for besides just idly looking at content.
00:55:57 ◼ ► All this dirt, all these dirty features and functions and things you can do to produce or edit or enjoy something.
00:56:06 ◼ ► Instead, look at me with my shiny glass over top of your content, fading and blurring and warping and blurring.
00:56:29 ◼ ► So instead, we're going to show off with a really flashy interface how little of an interface we can make.
00:56:36 ◼ ► And so it was all principles of – again, I read it as that same attitude of like, don't you hate computers?
00:56:55 ◼ ► But to love computers and to watch the company that makes the best computers be taken over by people who didn't seem like they loved computers as much as you is a really hard thing to go to like to get through without getting cynical and discouraged and kind of thinking like, God, I guess we're not going to like – at some point, this is going to stop being the best computer company.
00:57:25 ◼ ► But I find this encouraging that in a relatively short span, it seems like we are surprisingly close maybe to the end of the Tim Cook era at Apple, which is a big deal.
00:57:40 ◼ ► Johnny Ive left a few years back, and the products got a lot better after he left, I think, because they got a lot more balanced in terms of functionality versus nice design.
00:57:53 ◼ ► And now Alan Dye is leaving and being replaced by somebody who's been there back when Apple was a computer company that made really great computers led by people who loved really great computers.
00:58:05 ◼ ► So, again, we don't know anything about Steve LeMay from the public yet, but I think this is a promising sign.
00:58:13 ◼ ► And maybe in a year or two, we'll have interfaces heading more towards usability and functionality.
00:58:28 ◼ ► You know, and if it's John Ternus, you know, that's, you know, he comes from products, like the product part of the company, which is promising.
00:58:35 ◼ ► If Ternus is indeed also being considered as a CEO to happen imminently, maybe he was part of the choice of who to replace Dye with.
00:58:49 ◼ ► But this all sounds like really promising turns for a company that, you know, I've made no secret that I've been pretty stale on the leadership recently.
00:59:14 ◼ ► So I'm super glad for Zuckerberg and that wonderful group of people to lose some more money.
00:59:39 ◼ ► It's kind of a shame that he did release all the, that Apple did release all the 26 OSs right before he leaves.
00:59:46 ◼ ► Like, if we could just push that back and have him leave and then not release it, that was never going to happen, though, because they needed something to announce to WNBC.
00:59:51 ◼ ► Anyway, like, as I said, when the 26 OSs were out and we were talking about them, we're on a multi-year slope with these 26 OSs.
01:00:12 ◼ ► But fundamentally, you know, again, there are fundamental problems with liquid glass that are not going away anytime soon.
01:00:22 ◼ ► You're just like it took a little while after Johnny Ive left to get, like, you know, I was going to say power books.
01:00:29 ◼ ► But I don't think you're being too optimistic because he was at the top of an organization that was doing things we didn't like.
01:00:43 ◼ ► But it's the time to be optimistic is finally there is a hope of change here because things were not going in a direction we liked for a long time.
01:00:52 ◼ ► And that was obviously not going to change by someone just presenting Alan Dye with a strong argument because he was not convincible if anyone ever was presenting that argument.
01:01:04 ◼ ► Now we're stuck with them for the next several years, even as they may be, like, repaired and touched up before the next redesign.
01:01:19 ◼ ► We talked about, like, obviously things we didn't like about them and things UI nerds don't like about them or whatever.
01:01:32 ◼ ► One, underscore David Smith's little chart of, like, maybe not representative, but he has very popular apps, of, like, adoption of the new iOS version.
01:01:42 ◼ ► He said for the past few years they've been doing a thing where it sort of trickles out and then they pushed everybody real hard around the .1 or .2 update.
01:01:58 ◼ ► And by push it, I mean, like, really strongly suggest to people that you update it or update it automatically overnight if they have the setting that way or whatever.
01:02:06 ◼ ► Or Apple tends to be cautious with new iOS releases in particular where the early adopters get updated to it immediately, manually, but they just let people sort of grow organically until they say, okay, now it's really ready with the .1 or .2 and they push it out hard.
01:02:22 ◼ ► Maybe that means Apple is still being a little cautious with this or maybe it's just a policy change.
01:02:41 ◼ ► In the public consciousness, I don't think the feeling about the 26 OS is, this is amazing.
01:03:04 ◼ ► Sometimes that happens because they put new emoji in or they change one thing or whatever.
01:03:24 ◼ ► What they want to see happen is I want there to be stories and publications or whatever.
01:03:31 ◼ ► I want to hear word on the street is that everybody loves the comprehensive new OS design.
01:03:35 ◼ ► And that has not been the story about the 26th story is also not that it's a disaster, even though some people think it is.
01:03:46 ◼ ► And that's not, you know, if that's that doesn't sort of make Alan Dye's reputation become bigger within Apple.
01:04:07 ◼ ► And then the final factor, which I'm just speculating about, is surely somewhere within Apple, there are lots of people who are computer nerds, who care about user interface design, who hate everything that we hate about it.
01:04:42 ◼ ► Anything you hear someone complain about Apple in the outside world, there are people inside Apple also having that complaint.
01:04:49 ◼ ► And I feel like the people inside Apple who are cranky about things that Apple are doing, they can just be cranky for years.
01:05:13 ◼ ► That is not a formula for great job, Alan, from, you know, looking forward to what you do next.
01:05:31 ◼ ► And why do I hear whispers in the hallways about these cranky old people who don't like what I'm doing?
01:05:41 ◼ ► Again, the money and Facebook going to get, I don't, I don't doubt that Facebook went to get him.
01:05:45 ◼ ► Because Facebook is, has many wrongheaded notions about things, including let me, let me grab the designer that everybody loves from Apple, right?
01:05:58 ◼ ► Anyway, it seems like a situation where maybe his dignity is not hurt, but like, I don't think things are going as well as he hoped.
01:06:17 ◼ ► every single piece of media you ever saw about the iPod or the iPhone or the AirPods or anything that it's just, let me just have these long barker.
01:06:56 ◼ ► So reading from the Cloudflare blog, on 18 November 2025 at 1120 UTC, Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic.
01:07:06 ◼ ► This showed up to internet users trying to access our customer sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network.
01:07:12 ◼ ► The issue was not caused directly or indirectly by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind.
01:07:16 ◼ ► Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database system's permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a feature file used by our bot management system.
01:07:27 ◼ ► The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
01:07:33 ◼ ► The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our bot management system up to date with ever-changing threats.
01:07:41 ◼ ► The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size.
01:07:48 ◼ ► First, as someone who's worked in, you know, online server-side stuff for 25 years, this failure is so textbook.
01:07:56 ◼ ► Like, if you read the details of it, you're like, if you've been in this industry, you're like, oh, I've had that happen.
01:08:03 ◼ ► It was like an assumption, a missing filter on a query resulting in double, the limits, you know, the limits on the size seems like a good idea at the time.
01:08:11 ◼ ► But, like, and then the other thing that I feel like is depressing, because I complain about this at every company I was ever at, and you always hope, like, but surely, like, the big, competent companies don't do this, which is the lack of a staging environment that reflects production, where you can test changes in production.
01:08:31 ◼ ► What you want is, and by staging, I mean, production is the thing the customers use, and development is the thing the developers use.
01:08:37 ◼ ► And there are levels between there, and, like, the final one before production, we always used to call it staging in the companies I worked at, which is, it's supposed to be like production, but it's not actually production.
01:08:48 ◼ ► So, however production is set up, whatever hardware it's got, whatever software it's got, it's like a miniature version of production.
01:08:56 ◼ ► It doesn't have millions of servers or whatever, and it's not accessed by millions of people, but it has to work the same.
01:09:02 ◼ ► So, if they had a representative staging environment, and they had deployed this change into that staging environment, all the machines would have, you know, the query would have gone afoul, run out a double-sized thing.
01:09:15 ◼ ► And it would be like, oh, that change you just put out, we just pushed it to staging, and it broke everything.
01:09:19 ◼ ► And so it wouldn't get to production, because you'd say, like, if we push it to production, it would break everything in production.
01:09:24 ◼ ► It's clear that there is not a staging environment that is sufficiently similar to production.
01:09:33 ◼ ► There are some minor differences, but surely those minor differences won't make a difference.
01:09:38 ◼ ► Like, oh, there's a different kernel version here, or, you know, we have hardware versions of this load balancer in production, but we have a software simulated version in staging.
01:09:47 ◼ ► You have to make it actually the same, because you never know where the problem is going to come up.
01:09:51 ◼ ► Maybe the problem will be, oh, this specific kernel version has this specific bug that triggers this thing, and that specific kernel version is only in production, and staging is, like, one patched revision different, and that was the part that you trip across.
01:10:04 ◼ ► So, you know, part of growing up is learning that no company has a competent staging environment, even someone as big and powerful as Clover.
01:10:16 ◼ ► What I'm talking about here was this outage going by, and my strange reaction to it, which was, I should get on Cloudflare.
01:10:24 ◼ ► I swear to you, like, this, my first thought was, like, you know, reminiscing about all the problems I've had in production, how this is so typical, and down to those particular details, and the staging environment.
01:10:41 ◼ ► And you would think this is not, like, why would you, a big company has an outage that attracts you to it as a customer?
01:10:47 ◼ ► It's like, that's where I want to be, the big company that had an outage due to incompetence that I'm familiar with from my working world.
01:10:56 ◼ ► Part of it is, I had the meaning to look into Cloudflare for stuff, and this is, like, a reminder, like, them just being in the news, like, oh, yeah, I meant to do that.
01:11:04 ◼ ► Part of it is the entirely wrongheaded notion that it's like, well, they just had a failure, so surely they're not going to have another one right after it, which is not logical or true in any way.
01:11:22 ◼ ► I think also because, like, Marco mentioned it recently in the context of ATP stuff or when you're talking about the episode artwork.
01:11:32 ◼ ► And the reason I wanted to use it is I have, you know, my personal website on an incredibly inexpensive, crappy shared hosting service that's ancient that I really should move off of.
01:11:56 ◼ ► First, occasionally, my shared hosting and my virtual servers and whatever, like, I don't know, they get, like, swapped out or whatever.
01:12:07 ◼ ► I also have, like, an uptime monitoring service that I can see that my uptime has, like, three nines.
01:12:23 ◼ ► So I'm like, well, I could solve that by either moving everything to a different, you know, platform or putting something in front of it.
01:12:30 ◼ ► And the second thing is all my websites have, like, SSL certificates, especially, like, I have .app websites, like, switchclass.app and frontandcenter.app that just redirect somewhere.
01:13:03 ◼ ► And I don't know how long, but for many years, there's been a free service called Let's Encrypt at letscrypt.org that will give you free SSL certificates, including a script to manage it for you.
01:13:21 ◼ ► My crappy shared hosting service probably intentionally does not support Let's Encrypt.
01:13:25 ◼ ► And trying to do it manually would be difficult because of the way share hosting works.
01:13:33 ◼ ► So whenever I have to reissue my certificates, which now is, like, six certificates that I have to do every single year,
01:13:52 ◼ ► But it was still annoying because you had to, like, copy and paste it into their little cPanel interface.
01:14:24 ◼ ► Which I'm like, well, when, if my site is down or slow, if I could just serve it from the Cloudflare's edge cache for the thing, that'll be great.
01:15:07 ◼ ► But also because, like, when they say contradictory things such that only one of them can be right, it clues you in.
01:15:24 ◼ ► But the good thing is, in my third window or fourth window, I have actual Cloudflare open.
01:15:51 ◼ ► Or like, if you wanted to talk SSL to what they call your origin server, don't you still need a certificate on your origin server?
01:16:06 ◼ ► I still don't know if they're actually right, because they're describing what Cloudflare is doing internally, and I'm not privy to that.
01:16:16 ◼ ► They were trying to claim that it communicates over IP address to the thing, and they'll generate a self-signed certificate for you or whatever.
01:16:35 ◼ ► There's like a window in the middle there where I can screw things up, and then I tweaked the caching for a little bit, and it worked.
01:16:42 ◼ ► And I moved every one of my sites that had an SSL certificate to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare has now managed all of them for me, and I enabled caching and tweaked all those rules.
01:16:51 ◼ ► So the vast, vast majority of my traffic is now being cached at their CDN that's closer to the edge.
01:17:03 ◼ ► And for the first time this year, I guess starting now, for the 12 months starting now, I will not have to manually renew or reissue any SSL certificates.
01:17:12 ◼ ► And by the way, everything that I've done in Cloudflare, 100% free, because their free plan offers all of this, which I think is a mistake.
01:17:23 ◼ ► The next thing up is like $20 a month, and I'm tempted to do that just to see what the features are, but this is all for free.
01:17:28 ◼ ► And I know this is ridiculous for people like, dude, Let's Encrypt has existed for like 15 years.
01:17:34 ◼ ► But I had, this is what happens when you have a website that's been around for a long time, or it's on a service that's been around for a long time.
01:17:44 ◼ ► Don't you know that you can get a free, dedicated server that you can control yourself for the same or less money with better?
01:18:03 ◼ ► And just the relief I feel from having, I don't know, six or seven websites all now being managed on Cloudflare with its SSL and not having to worry about any of that stuff on my shared hosting.
01:18:13 ◼ ► So, and I know Cloudflare, the company, has some questionable practices and some questionable things, and we've talked about them in the past or whatever.
01:18:20 ◼ ► But right now, I'm just feeling relief about finally doing something to my website that I wanted to do for a long time and eliminating one source of things that I have to worry about.
01:18:42 ◼ ► It's also where if you share a link from Callsheet, it will share to a path within callsheetapp.com.
01:18:54 ◼ ► I don't think it's using Let's Encrypt from what I can tell from the certs on my website.
01:19:07 ◼ ► I've never really used AWS, but the way people describe AWS is that it's this, but much worse.
01:19:15 ◼ ► And also, by the way, Cloudflare is much nicer than cPanel, if you're familiar with that.
01:19:30 ◼ ► Like, for some reason, like, you know, Overcast uses it for all the uploads hosting for premium.
01:19:48 ◼ ► So I log in and, like, because I hardly ever log in to AWS, trying to figure out how to pay them.
01:20:13 ◼ ► And then you finally get in and it's like, okay, well, you know, here, here's your credit card form.
01:20:45 ◼ ► But, like, not, like, they're still a pretty, you know, mature product and they still have a lot of features.
01:20:51 ◼ ► And so, like, I think they just manage a substantially better, you know, usability design.
01:21:01 ◼ ► And so every single thing there is cluttered up with a billion enterprise features that, like, yeah, two customers wanted that, so they added it.
01:21:10 ◼ ► And it's just, there's so much complexity there to do what should be very simple things.
01:21:29 ◼ ► But, again, serious people, I don't know how, pay with purchase orders for millions of dollars.
01:21:33 ◼ ► But, like, AWS and the web interface is, like, that's not, that's not how it's meant to be used, kind of.
01:21:39 ◼ ► Like, there's this whole third-party companies, like, CloudFormation and all this stuff, like, that exist to be a middleware layer between your programs and the AWS API.
01:21:50 ◼ ► And nowhere in there should humans be clicking around at a web interface because that's not repeatable.
01:22:09 ◼ ► CloudFlare is, like, a more modern version of cPanel, like, with knowledge of the web past 1996.
01:22:28 ◼ ► And they do a good job of, like, having lots of help links and explaining to you what they mean.
01:22:32 ◼ ► Like, when they use jargon to explain their features, it's like, well, this is what we mean when we say this.
01:22:40 ◼ ► And on the ChatGPT and Gemini front, Mark, you mentioned before, like, asking it for screw sizes or whatever and saying, like, I didn't even check.
01:22:50 ◼ ► Well, you did, because that's the thing, that's the reason I think this is a perfect application for LMs.
01:23:00 ◼ ► Because I'm literally clicking on a web interface and then loading my web, you know, like, it either works or it doesn't.
01:23:09 ◼ ► The way you verified it is if you got those screws home and tried to put them in the back of the TV and they didn't fit, you would know immediately.
01:23:16 ◼ ► There's no, like, condition where you would, like, have no idea that it was the wrong screw and put it in and two days later your TV would explode.
01:23:37 ◼ ► But it's like, with encryption, like, I'm sure there's a word for this or a term of R, but, like, you want something that, when you get the right answer, it's trivial to confirm that the answer is right.
01:24:05 ◼ ► And the ideal for LMs is anything that you will immediately be able to check whether it's right.
01:24:13 ◼ ► And so that kind of excludes things like health information where it's like, well, maybe, you know, if it's telling me to, you know, eat donuts every day, I won't find out until I have a heart attack 20 years from now or whatever.
01:24:21 ◼ ► But, like, if it tells you a screw size and the screw size is wrong, you're going to find out real quick.
01:24:26 ◼ ► If it tells me to do this on the website and then this will happen and I do it and it doesn't happen, guess what?
01:24:32 ◼ ► So, and the only reason I'm doing the competition with the two of them is just, you know, because it's kind of fun to see the different approaches and so I can compare them and maybe give me a slightly better chance of not doing something dumb where I see there's differences between them.
01:24:45 ◼ ► But in the end, like, as I started to progress through the thing, I'm like, I'd no longer looked at the LLM's instructions and just started doing it myself because you sort of figure out the interface.
01:24:55 ◼ ► Use LLM's for what they're good for and they're good for basically anything that you can immediately check and that the consequences of it are not a big deal.
01:25:17 ◼ ► Again, my experience with Cloudflare has been extremely positive and I'm very impressed with what I was able to get away with for free, like you had said.
01:25:26 ◼ ► And at some point, I will probably follow in your footsteps and look at, you know, what would it take to move my website over there?
01:25:37 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I bet you I could find a way to put it in there without too much work.
01:25:52 ◼ ► But anyway, the point is, network, when you make a request to hypercritical.co or switchglass.app or front and center.app or front hyphen and hyphen center hyphen.app.
01:25:59 ◼ ► Anyway, if you make a request to any of these things, you are hitting an IP address controlled by Cloudflare, which goes through their network and then it makes it proxies a back-end request to my quote-unquote origin server in Cloudflare parlance, which is called a million other things and a million other services.
01:26:18 ◼ ► The actual server is still exactly where it has always been on my crappy shared hosting.
01:26:22 ◼ ► But there is now a CDN in front of it and the Cloudflare network and they manage all this SSL's termination between the client and you.
01:26:31 ◼ ► It's still SSL between Cloudflare and my server, but it's using a self-signed 15-year certificate that only Cloudflare trusts.
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01:27:19 ◼ ► They all have opt-outs or takedown mechanisms, but you'll never, as an individual, be able to keep up with the hundreds of them that are cropping up all over the place and constantly making new ones.
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01:29:07 ◼ ► and he was complaining, justifiably, that for some reason, Siri always autocorrects C-H-R-I-S to K-R-I-S.
01:29:15 ◼ ► And I theorized, oh, well, I bet you have a contact, you know, that's named Chris, K-R-I-S, in your phone.
01:29:28 ◼ ► Well, I mean, I saw this fly by, and I thought this was a fun thing, because I've dealt with this before.
01:29:36 ◼ ► The wonderful voice assistant in your phone, if you have an Apple phone, has had a feature for many years,
01:30:04 ◼ ► Well, it has been used in my household, to great comic effect, because back in the day,
01:30:10 ◼ ► Tiff would say, call me Tiff, and it would say, okay, from now on, I will call you Tiff.
01:30:22 ◼ ► Now, I actually have a different problem, which is, at some point in the last maybe two years or so,
01:30:34 ◼ ► But at some point in the last two years, my phone has started frequently auto-correcting Tiff to
01:30:48 ◼ ► So I assume there is a database in the phone of known terms and proper nouns and things like that,
01:31:01 ◼ ► And so now, even though she is, like, the contact I, like, you know, have the most frequent contact
01:31:17 ◼ ► But nope, nevertheless, in many contexts in the phone when typing Tiff, it comes out as all capitals.
01:31:23 ◼ ► Yeah, so when I saw this, I figured, let me just do it on my phone just to fresh my memory
01:31:29 ◼ ► Um, and like so many things involving Apple's voice assistant, just because a thing used to
01:32:25 ◼ ► It will, not only will it not say my name and give me snarky replies of like, you're John.
01:32:58 ◼ ► Eventually, I hear my HomePod in the other room say something audibly to me that says, you
01:33:28 ◼ ► I can't, I can't get the opportunity to do what I had done in the past, which was, that's
01:33:36 ◼ ► When it would say my last name and I would say, that's not how you say my name, we would
01:33:43 ◼ ► Instead, I was just getting text bubbles and eventually audio that was telling me, you can
01:33:49 ◼ ► Like it did like their product knowledge thing, like go to the contacts app and find, you know,
01:33:54 ◼ ► And it's telling you to add a custom field to your contact where you can fit, oh, what is
01:34:20 ◼ ► But once there's something in the field, like it says on the edit screen, the first line
01:34:27 ◼ ► And the third line says my pronunciation, but I only know that because what looks like a
01:34:46 ◼ ► And I'm like, okay, like, but when I put something there, I don't know how you're going to pronounce
01:34:53 ◼ ► Do I put like, do I use the whatever, like the phonetic alphabet that you see in a dictionary?
01:35:12 ◼ ► I'm like, no normal person would ever tolerate what I tolerated trying to get this to happen
01:35:32 ◼ ► And I got it into a loop where I could change the contents of that text field and then say
01:35:44 ◼ ► S-E-R-R-A space, the word Q, like Q-U-E-U-E, not like C-U-E, but like a line, Q, Q-U-E-U-E space
01:35:56 ◼ ► I was afraid it was going to space that out as three words, but it turns out that if you
01:36:16 ◼ ► There's a lot of experimentation led to this because I typed all sorts of other things and
01:36:21 ◼ ► But this, for whatever reason, this madness, you know, only the middle thing is a word.
01:36:29 ◼ ► I don't think S-A-H is a word, but some Scrabble person probably telling me they're both words.
01:36:32 ◼ ► But anyway, Q-U-E-U-E is a word because I was trying to get, how do I get it to say the
01:37:05 ◼ ► I mean, all I gotta say is that Siri has not gotten better and there seems to be a technology
01:37:11 ◼ ► that exists in the world that could, at the very least, allow me to say, hey, dingus, here's
01:37:20 ◼ ► And I would pronounce it and then I would say, please say my name back and it would do it.
01:37:23 ◼ ► I feel like that is attainable with today's technology, not attainable with Siri without
01:38:39 ◼ ► One of the perks of membership, one of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic.
01:38:45 ◼ ► This week on Overtime, we are going to be talking about a rumor of an Apple and Intel chip partnership to possibly make Mac chips again, which is very interesting.
01:40:59 ◼ ► And there's a bunch of people or a bunch of different bagel shops from around the country,
01:41:19 ◼ ► And I am extremely happy to tell you that the local shop Baltic's Bagels here in Richmond
01:41:26 ◼ ► earned the People's Choice Award in New York City for People's Choice Best Bagel in the 2025
01:42:12 ◼ ► And I have to imagine this Bagel Fest contest thing, including bagels from all over the
01:42:29 ◼ ► It kind of gets back to, I thought, it's not actually something I'm going to discuss in
01:42:32 ◼ ► I think it's an upcoming episode of Robot or Not, where I talked about the idea of like,
01:42:44 ◼ ► But when you go somewhere else in the country or when you present other people with like
01:42:51 ◼ ► your hometown food or whatever, and you expect, surely they'll love this because this is the
01:43:02 ◼ ► Those people have no affection for or knowledge of the regional food product you're presenting
01:43:16 ◼ ► But here I am in California and you give it to Californians and they're like, they don't
01:43:24 ◼ ► They have no nostalgia for it, nor can they judge whether you've successfully reproduced the
01:43:34 ◼ ► And they go next door and get, you know, something with avocado on it or whatever, right?
01:44:01 ◼ ► How is, how is it so fucking inconceivable to you that there exists a good bagel outside
01:44:23 ◼ ► Like, I, I, there's, you could have a good food product that people enjoy, but it doesn't
01:44:29 ◼ ► Like that, that person who's in Colorado, who's making authentic New York bagels in Colorado,
01:44:54 ◼ ► I'm, I'm supporting your idea here because what I'm saying is that there's nothing inherently
01:45:05 ◼ ► And to the degree that you can simulate that elsewhere, fine, but that doesn't make you
01:45:11 ◼ ► And I'll also add that the bagel seed of my use, as we've discussed, has changed significantly.
01:45:20 ◼ ► So people putting caraway seeds on everything bagels, it's really just, you know, things have
01:45:24 ◼ ► But for the record, the third runner-up for People's Choice is Town Bagel, which is listed
01:46:30 ◼ ► It's kind of like the people in TV shops picking out the TV that's the brightest and has the
01:46:45 ◼ ► I kind of agree with Marco that like if you want to judge a bagel place, I know what you're
01:46:52 ◼ ► But one of the essential skills or attributes of a bagel place is how they deal with stuff
01:47:00 ◼ ► So I feel like my go to for like the equivalent of just try the plain cheese pizza would be
01:47:05 ◼ ► like sesame or poppy because then you get to see what is their philosophy on putting stuff
01:47:11 ◼ ► on the bagel because some places cover every square inch of the bagel with sesame seeds and
01:47:15 ◼ ► sometimes they're double layered and some places put three sesame seeds in the bagel and that
01:47:30 ◼ ► Well, I mean, everything teaches you like whether they use caraway seeds, whether they put salt
01:47:41 ◼ ► It does teach you how they deal with toppings, but I feel like some places, even if they put
01:47:56 ◼ ► Why would you ever order anything else besides an everything bagel if the everything bagel
01:48:03 ◼ ► But, you know, when I just got bagels that are not a new bagel place, but a bagel place
01:48:09 ◼ ► She wanted it from a particular place that I don't particularly enjoy, but it's not terrible.
01:48:19 ◼ ► I've been there before, but I didn't remember it was years ago because I decided they weren't
01:48:31 ◼ ► down and I was like, I mean, I sounded dumb when I said this, but I knew what I, I hope
01:49:13 ◼ ► I'm offended as a New Yorker, as a Long Islander, that you would have the audacity to sell 12 bagels.
01:49:22 ◼ ► German listeners who are just like, they're like, what are, what is he complaining about?
01:49:33 ◼ ► But anyway, I had to ask them to put the everything bagels in a separate bag, which I should never
01:49:39 ◼ ► If you have to, I am of the belief that if you have to ask them to separate the everything
01:49:47 ◼ ► Because again, like, because what that, what that tells you is like, maybe they don't serve
01:49:52 ◼ ► a lot of those bagels or maybe the people here, you know, don't feel that strongly about their
01:50:00 ◼ ► I mean, it should, the default is everything in a separate, if they say don't bother with
01:50:06 ◼ ► No, there is, in my personal opinion, and we've talked about this many times, there is a pretty
01:50:12 ◼ ► I'm not saying it's equivalent to New York, but given how far we are from New York, it's
01:50:19 ◼ ► Number one, I, there's something about the everything bagel that just isn't quite right.
01:50:23 ◼ ► I personally am not offended by salt on an everything bagel, but there's something about it that
01:50:29 ◼ ► So if I wasn't going to do a plain bagel as my, like, litmus test, everything is absolutely
01:50:34 ◼ ► But the other problem this local shop has is that it doesn't separate everything into its
01:50:45 ◼ ► But the correct behavior for a bagelologist in this situation is to ask, do you want those
01:50:59 ◼ ► But I thought it was funny that the Richmond, the Podunk Richmond, Virginia bagel shop won
01:51:15 ◼ ► This errand I was running does happen a couple of times a year, so I'll probably go and try
01:51:35 ◼ ► And after this absolute badgering you're giving me, I don't know if I want to talk to you about
01:51:42 ◼ ► this anymore, but because we need a little bit more for an after show, I'm going to say
01:51:52 ◼ ► A few days ago, maybe a week or two ago, Bullstrap reached out and said, hey, we heard you really
01:52:09 ◼ ► And I chose, forgive me, I don't have the model number or name in front of me or whatever,
01:52:36 ◼ ► Well, I mean, no more than I did within the first 48 hours, as we already discussed when
01:52:44 ◼ ► Anyways, I personally do not believe that it is absolutely compulsory to have a bottomless
01:53:00 ◼ ► But the place where this gets unfortunate for your boy, Casey, is that I think the bottomless
01:53:13 ◼ ► Once you get used to not banging your finger against the lip of the case, it just, to go
01:53:18 ◼ ► I mean, but with you, I'd be worried about you like dropping it and somehow hitting that
01:53:30 ◼ ► But no, it is the, now that I've had a chance to look, it is the Ballstrap Minimalist case.
01:53:35 ◼ ► I don't think they've ever sponsored, and they certainly didn't ask for me to say anything,
01:53:40 ◼ ► but I thought it was funny to concede publicly that even though I maintain, like I just said