0:00:00Daniel, it's always good to talk to you. How's your summer going?
0:00:03Fast! It's one of these things, I guess it's like accelerating as you get older. I think everything
0:00:08goes by, it seems like it's going by faster. And this summer, it seems to exemplify that,
0:00:13because in part, probably because we've been busy flying around here and there, not flying,
0:00:19literally, but zipping around. So it's just been one of those summers where it's kind of like a
0:00:23loosely connected series of days at home. And so it's like, "Oh, well, it's almost the end now."
0:00:30I kind of always look forward at the end of the summer to the "boring" September where kids are
0:00:37back in school. It's like I'm guaranteed to be at home. I kind of look forward to just like having
0:00:42some long, boring days at home. Yeah, I always felt that way too. September and October might
0:00:48be my favorite months of the year. I don't know why. It's like a combination of some of the best
0:00:54weather we consistently get in the Northeast. I like that sort of back-to-school, sort of return
0:01:01to normalcy, or the pattern, right? The sort of me. I mean, I'm the most creatureist of habits.
0:01:08Is that right? I'm the creatureist of habits. Sounds like a D&D role or something.
0:01:15I am one of the biggest creatures of habit. I'd say it that way. Maybe not pathologically so,
0:01:20but when I'm knocked off my habits, I get grumpy. Like my inner Larry David
0:01:26come out and needs to be suppressed. And it's sort of enjoyable, right?
0:01:31Yeah. Pretty good.
0:01:34Right. It is. And it is the privilege, right? The true privilege. I know people toss that
0:01:39around a lot in the last decade, but truly it is. You can appreciate it. It's a
0:01:45lucky that I love what I do and that me being lost in my work for a couple of days in a row
0:01:52makes me feel good. It's like, man, what a privilege. I still think back to the manual
0:01:57labor days, like when I was a stock boy at a big sort of combination, a Walmart type store called
0:02:05Far More. And I was the stock boy and, oh my God, I just hated it because it was so monotonous and
0:02:11it would be the same fricking stuff. Like every day at the, I used to work the second shift. So
0:02:17like three to 11 and it's like the store closed at 10, I think something like that, maybe nine.
0:02:24But anyway, my last hour or two, we called it blocking the shelves and all it meant was like,
0:02:30you go to the big shampoo and hair product dial and go through from top to bottom, front to back,
0:02:38every single item, move all the product that was left to the front so that it looked in the
0:02:43morning when the store reopened, it looked like the whole aisle was freshly stocked.
0:02:47What a boring thing. I think about that too. It must be better. I don't know if they let
0:02:54teenagers do it, but maybe like if you're working after the store's closed, they'd let you use like
0:02:58AirPods or something, listen to podcasts or music or something. But we certainly didn't have anything
0:03:04like that. Just you left your own devices with the crap playing over the store speakers. And then some
0:03:12days it would be like, "Hey, John, we need someone to go out in a parking lot and round up the
0:03:16shopping carts." And it was like, "Oh, this is awesome." Right? Because it's something different.
0:03:23Right? It was like, if I had now, if I was the shopping cart wrangler five days a week,
0:03:30then it would have been like, "We need you to block the shelves," then that would have been my
0:03:34relief. Right? But it was like, just what a true privilege that I love what I do.
0:03:38Yeah. Well, let me ask you something. Because I only started, first of all, I never knew what
0:03:43it was called when you pull the stuff forward. But I've noticed over the past few years, I have
0:03:48some kind of like empathy for the store. And now when I buy something, I self-block the—
0:03:55I kind of do that too. And I don't know if I'm a nicely conscientious person who would have done
0:04:01that anyway, or if it's because I had the job for two summers.
0:04:04That's what I was wondering, if you have like the empathy for the schmuck who's going to go around
0:04:08having to do it. But yeah, I kind of feel like, I don't know, I feel like I'm a little bit like
0:04:13overly conscientious about those kinds of things. Like, my wife gives me kind of a hard time because
0:04:19like I, when I'm checking out at the supermarket, I like to put all the stuff on the half of the
0:04:26conveyor belt that's closest to the worker. And she's like, "Why the heck are you doing that?"
0:04:32I was like, "Well, it just makes it easier for them." But yeah.
0:04:34It's sort of like my thing I mentioned recently, I think on the show, or also on the website,
0:04:41I always forget where I said it, but that I say thank you to like the—
0:04:44Oh, yeah, I heard that somewhere.
0:04:45To our home assistants. Not every time, but I try to. But the other thing I definitely do,
0:04:51and I know it's because I had the job for two summers, is I always return my shopping cart.
0:04:56And I don't know that until I had the job once or twice a week for two summers that I ever realized
0:05:03just how many people just leave their carts randomly. And surely it didn't make me bitter
0:05:08about them. But I think before I had the job, even as a teenager, I might have done that too.
0:05:13Like, "Ah, the return thing looks like it's all the way down there. I'll just leave my cart here.
0:05:16It's an empty spot. It doesn't look like the lot's full. It's not taking up a necessary spot for
0:05:21cars." But then once you're the person who has to go through the whole parking lot and
0:05:24gather up every cart. Yeah, I never did that again.
0:05:28But then do you worry that by returning the cart, you're depriving somebody of the job of
0:05:32returning the carts?
0:05:34Oh, I never thought about it that way. But I think no. I don't think anybody ever resents it.
0:05:38Because I think anybody who has that job has other stuff to do anyway.
0:05:42And it's the more carts... It certainly was my... When I had the job, the more carts that were
0:05:48actually stacked in with each other in the official return troughs, I don't know what
0:05:54you call those things. It always seemed better and nicer. Because it always seemed like the ones that
0:05:59were left randomly were like at the four corners of the lot.
0:06:03Yeah, I kind of think about it because I hate... Well, I sort of hate like all social interaction,
0:06:09which is ironic in a way because here I am chatting with you. I love chatting with people.
0:06:13I love being social. I don't actually like engaging with the checkout person at the supermarket. So
0:06:19I will almost always go to the automated self-checkout thing. And then I wonder,
0:06:26am I part of the problem here? Am I getting rid of... Somebody got fired because of me,
0:06:31because they didn't need as many people to check people out.
0:06:34But I think you're like me too. Because if you do talk to the checkout, if you do go to the human,
0:06:39you are going to be friendly and make some point of sort of just being just a little bit like,
0:06:45"Hey, I appreciate that you're here doing a hard job." So I do, but that's what I'm seeking to
0:06:51avoid. It's not that I'm antisocial with them. I'm not really introverted. And like you say,
0:06:55here we are on a podcast talking, right? And it's like anybody who's ever met me, hopefully I'm very
0:07:00friendly. I'm not shy. I just always had thought introverted meant shy. And I'm not shy, but I do
0:07:07find social interactions exhausting to some degree, not as much as other people do. But even this
0:07:13podcast, like when I'm done recording the talk show, I feel to some degree emotionally spent.
0:07:18I couldn't believe that the eye-opening thing for me is that there are extroverts who actually draw
0:07:25energy from social interactions, right? Like I kind of thought extrovert meant...
0:07:30Yeah, I don't know. You're a little obnoxious.
0:07:33Yeah, it doesn't have a great reputation. The word doesn't really...
0:07:37Yeah, I mean, it has a reputation of kind of a go-getter, I guess.
0:07:42Yeah. But it's that explanation that introvert, all social interactions draw from your emotional
0:07:49energy and extroverts suck it up and get more energy and therefore can keep going,
0:07:55right? That once an extrovert never wants the party to end. I was like, "Whoa, that's not me."
0:08:02I mean, it's really interesting because I always thought also that I was just 110% extrovert,
0:08:07and my wife identifies as the same amount of introvert. But it definitely... When you start
0:08:14thinking about those definitions and you compare yourself to the experiences of people who maybe
0:08:20legitimately are introverts, I think we all have a little bit of both. So I definitely have that
0:08:25experience. And I think it's also what I was saying about being overly conscientious,
0:08:31that takes energy just to have the concern of how you're going to come off to somebody or what
0:08:39they're going to think of you, etc. Right. And I don't know, helping to bag my own stuff and...
0:08:45Yeah, of course. Got to do that. Yeah. Somebody the other day, I was checking out at our local
0:08:50grocery store and they check out... It's a place with no self-check. Otherwise, I might use that
0:08:56more frequently for the same reason as you. But he said, "I'm his favorite type of customer." And
0:09:00I had no idea where he was going with it. And he said, "Well, because you bring your own bags."
0:09:03And I don't know, Philly... I don't know, has Boston done this? Or...
0:09:07Yeah. Well, in my suburb of Boston, Arlington, we have... It got rid of the plastic bags.
0:09:13That's where Philly is. And Philly was supposed to do it right at the outset of 2020. And I don't
0:09:20know why. God knows what the explanation was, but something COVID, okay, we'll delay it. And it's
0:09:27like... I don't know. I guess because they sort of wanted... I guess the thinking was that when we were
0:09:35so fearful that COVID was spreading through fomites, that they wouldn't even let you bring
0:09:40your own bag, right? It was like they went the opposite way where, "Screw the environmental
0:09:45impact. Right now, we're in a pandemic." And I get it because we didn't know, right? Nobody knew.
0:09:50It really took surprisingly long to figure out how the hell COVID spread so that when we thought it
0:09:54could be fomites, so let's be careful. I remember our local Trader Joe's, which you think of as a
0:10:00forward-thinking lefty, hippie-dippie sort of chain, right? The type of place that was
0:10:06the earliest to have customers bringing their own bags to pack up all their groceries. The rule was
0:10:14you can bring your own bag, but you have to leave them in the bottom of your cart. And we'll put all
0:10:19your items back in your cart, and then you go out in the parking lot and bag them yourself.
0:10:26Again, I don't think that's unreasonable. I laugh now because it seems ridiculous, but I guess that's
0:10:31why the city of Philadelphia paused the no plastic bags thing because they were sort of, "Hey, these
0:10:37plastic bags are sealed up, so we'll let you use them." But anyway, he said, "It's because you
0:10:42brought your own bags." And I was like, "Huh. Well, I'm glad he appreciates that because..."
0:10:47- You're the friend of the worker. - All right. Let's thank our first
0:10:52special friend, our good friend at Linode. This is actually where I have hosted Daring Fireball now
0:10:57for more years than I can count. Although if I really wanted to, I'm sure I could go back and
0:11:03count them. One of the new things they want me to tell you about is their new managed database
0:11:09system, fully managed database service for, and here's where I start mispronouncing the names of
0:11:14these database systems. MySQL, which in my head for years and years I thought was pronounced MySQL,
0:11:20PostgreSQL, or is it pronounced Post-gress-sequel? MongoDB, I'm pretty sure is pronounced MongoDB,
0:11:30and more. And you can easily deploy high performance database clusters. And these
0:11:37managed databases allow you to quickly deploy a new database and defer management tasks like
0:11:42configurations, managing high availability, disaster recovery, backups, data replication.
0:11:50With managed databases, you get all of that. Fast, simple deployment, secure access,
0:11:55daily backups included, and flexible plans for really big instances and really smaller ones.
0:12:05Like everything else Linode does, they really do scale from the smallest of customers to
0:12:10truly big enterprise ones. Go to linode.com/the-talk-show and learn more. And you can also
0:12:16see why Linode has been voted the top infrastructure as a service provider by both G2 and TrustRadius.
0:12:23Other things I'll just throw in. Award-winning support that they offer 24 hours, seven days a
0:12:28year, 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year to every level of customer. You get the same top
0:12:36knot support as a big enterprise company, even if you're just a single person on a single plan.
0:12:40Ease of use and setup. Developers have been trusting Linode for projects big and small since
0:12:442003. They make cloud computing fast, simple, and affordable, and allow you to focus on your
0:12:50projects, not your infrastructure. So once again, visit linode.com/the-talk-show. You can create a
0:12:59free account using your Google or GitHub account to log in or just use your email address and you
0:13:06will get 100 bucks in credit just by using that URL linode.com/the-talk-show. All right, real
0:13:16topics. This one's a bit heavy, but I'm really interested by it. Did you see, I linked to it
0:13:21yesterday as we record this New York Times story about a father who had uploaded a naked photo of
0:13:28his son at a doctor's advice because he had a rash on his genital area. Do you see this story?
0:13:34Jared: I heard you talking with Ben on dithering about it just today.
0:13:38Michael; Yeah. So we talked about it. I wanted to talk about it here, but for anybody who didn't
0:13:42read the story, it was reported by Kashmir Hill, who's done fantastic work. She used to be at
0:13:47Gizmodo years ago. It's no surprise that she's worked her way up to the New York Times. And just,
0:13:54if you really think about the mechanics of being the reporter, like, it's such a hard story to get
0:13:59and that sort of meta level really fascinates me. And the father in question, he only used his first
0:14:05name in the story, but basically the infant son had seemingly a genital rash of some sort. Talked
0:14:12to the doctor a couple years ago. I think it was probably, I forget the exact date, but I'm almost
0:14:17certain if it was like 2020, COVID stuff is in place. So, so much medicine was going to telemedicine.
0:14:24And the pediatrician said, "That sounds worrisome. Can you take some pictures of it and send me some
0:14:29pictures?" And he used his Android phone to take pictures of it as best he could. And then he
0:14:35sent it to his wife. So, I guess his wife maybe was the one sending the pictures to the doctor,
0:14:42sent it to his wife through Google Hangouts. And then a couple of days later, his Google account
0:14:46has been flagged and is like deactivated or paused and more or less comes down to their AI system
0:14:53had, you know, the phone went, the picture went from his, or pictures went from his Android phone
0:14:58to Google Photos. From Google Photos, he sent it to his wife by Hangout and that's it. But their
0:15:06AI systems had flagged the photo or photos of his son's genitals as CSAM, suspected child sexual
0:15:15abuse material. Trying to make this long, well-reported story short. It was human reviewed,
0:15:20but the human reviewer thought it looked suspicious too and then that's it. But this guy
0:15:24had everything in Google. It was like a Gmail address that he'd been using since the very,
0:15:29he was apparently a very technically minded, I think he was a software developer even,
0:15:33got on Gmail early, had been using it as his primary email address. His Android phone was using
0:15:39Google Fi, their cellular service as a cell provider. So, that got shut down too. So,
0:15:44he lost his phone number. So, just, and you know, all of his two-factor stuff was in Google
0:15:50Authenticator. So, if you lose your primary email address and you lose your phone number
0:15:55for SMS backups and you lose your Google Authenticator, think of how many things you'd be
0:16:02locked out of. And I know, I guess a lot of things with two-factor have those things you can print.
0:16:08They're like authenticator codes, but you get like a list of 10 of them and they say print these out
0:16:13and put them in a safe place. So, maybe he wasn't permanently locked out of everything else in his
0:16:16life, but that's a lot, right? And of course, then this thing goes to law. It's not just, oh,
0:16:22a tale of a father who got lost his Gmail account. But you know, then it went to the,
0:16:26it was reported to the police, the police investigated. The police investigated,
0:16:31this is where the story at least has somewhat of an upbeat tint, where the police looked into it
0:16:36and clearly saw that this, yeah, what this was incorrect. This was a father taking pictures of
0:16:43his son and it happened to be the genitals, but at the doctor's advice, this is no question about it.
0:16:49This is not sexual abuse. This was trying to get dermatological care for an infant.
0:16:55You know, anybody who's had a baby, I think knows that you're wearing diapers all day and, you know,
0:17:01what are they doing in the diapers? They're making them wet one way or the other. The rashes and
0:17:06stuff happened down there. I mean, it's literally the phrase for diaper rash and there's all sorts
0:17:10of things. Nobody wants a rash. And if you do get a rash, where's the last place you would like a
0:17:15rash? So the police looked into it and that all went well, right? Because you can imagine how
0:17:20that can go south. There've been stories along these lines where child protective services gets
0:17:26involved. And if the first interaction doesn't go quite right, they can take your child away,
0:17:32which is, I don't know, I can't imagine it, right? That didn't happen at least,
0:17:40but he'd get locked out of Google.
0:17:42Jared: Yeah, well, it sort of makes you wonder how often this happens and
0:17:47are there worse consequences that haven't been reported in the New York Times?
0:17:52Pete: Right. Right. And one of the things that Cashmere Hill emphasized in our story is that
0:17:58we collectively outside Google and Facebook and whoever else does this sort of AI-based scanning
0:18:05have no idea how many people there are because they don't report the numbers of,
0:18:10and they certainly don't want to report the number of false positives, right? The people
0:18:15wrongly accused or people who say they are. Google's internal system to human review it
0:18:21clearly failed in this case. I mean, I guess we're presuming that what Cashmere, and Cashmere Hill
0:18:28says that she saw the photos and questioned herself as the reporter, found the whole story credible.
0:18:32The police did investigate and, you know, issued a report that exonerated him. So, I think it's
0:18:38safe as we can be to say that he was wrongly flagged and Google's human review clearly failed.
0:18:44How many times that happened so we have no idea because it for obvious reasons, most people,
0:18:49if that happened to them, were wrongly accused of this. How do you go public with that, right? The
0:18:54last thing you want to do is go public and have your name associated with being suspected of this,
0:18:59even if you're innocent, right? Yeah. Yeah, I find it also just kind of,
0:19:04the last thing I, the whole human review thing makes sense on many levels, but the last thing
0:19:12I'd expect sending a photo of my kid to a doctor is that somebody at Google was going to eventually
0:19:18be looking at the photo. Right. Like, it just, whatever the circumstances are. So, an AI system
0:19:24I'm sure it's like one of those things that you agree to when you say,
0:19:27"Okay," after not reading the long legal agreement on Google Photos or whatever, but I don't know,
0:19:33in a way it's like, it's just such a weird consequence to not only have your child's picture
0:19:44reviewed by somebody at Google, but the child's genitals. It's like, what? That's,
0:19:51everything that's creepy about this to me is like the parts of it that aren't actually what the
0:19:58alleged or feared behavior was. Yeah. It's one of those things where I can't really
0:20:03imagine being the sort of mentally ill person who wants to look at child sexual
0:20:13abuse material. And so, it's, I think it's good for humanity that the 99 point whatever percent
0:20:22of people have repulsed by it as opposed to attracted to it. But just trying to imagine
0:20:29a little, you can kind of see, you know, how like kid playing in a bathtub, which is what I posted
0:20:35on during Fireball. But we took pictures of our son in the bath at bath time. You know, we didn't
0:20:40think twice about it 18 years ago. I don't know. And I think there's pictures of me from the 70s,
0:20:46like John's first bath or whatever. I think any human reviewer can look at that and say, yeah,
0:20:51that's a naked baby, but it's typical family photo stuff. Whereas like my son has a skin condition
0:20:59and swelling on his genitals and trying to show it as best you can to the doctor. I can't imagine how
0:21:05like a reviewer would say, oh yeah, this one's a problem. This goes into a different pile than
0:21:10an 11 month old who's in the swimming pool in the backyard on a sunny day or something like that.
0:21:14But it raises some technical questions too. Really can't stop thinking about it, how it's such a,
0:21:20it's so nuanced. The only thing I can say for sure is it seems to me that Google should have
0:21:26a better way of appealing this and that a proper human appeal, even after the first human reviewer
0:21:32said this is still suspicious, that somehow there should be some second level where somebody could
0:21:39look at this and look at all this guy's other photos and say that this, and maybe even take
0:21:45the time to call the guy's doctor, right? And if you're this mark, the subject of the story,
0:21:50and say my child's pediatrician is Dr. So-and-so's office, here's the phone number, which I think is
0:21:57the stuff the police went through, right? That at some level, if Google had somebody who could spend,
0:22:02I don't know, half an hour looking into it, they'd say, oh yeah, this was a mistake,
0:22:07we're very sorry, everything's back to normal. But maybe they can't effectively because the scale
0:22:15of how many photos they're looking at is too much. I mean, hopefully the scale of
0:22:23people where the AI system says this is suspicious, the first human reviewer says,
0:22:28yes, this seems bad. Hopefully that number isn't so low and that when that happens, and it is legit
0:22:38CSAM, right? It is the system working to identify abuse material. The person who's responsible for
0:22:46it feels bad that they got caught, or scared knowing that, oh my God, this is going to be
0:22:51investigated, I'm in trouble. That the last thing they would do is behave like an innocent person
0:22:56and be like, I want to keep talking to you about this, I would like to speak to a supervisor. I
0:23:00don't know. But these services are so huge and have so many users, billions, right, for Google
0:23:09photos. I mean, got to be close to a billion. And if the accuracy rate is 99.999 or add another nine,
0:23:18make it six nines, that sliver that's less than 100% with a billion users could be frighteningly
0:23:26high, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just the whole thing also just draws my thinking to what
0:23:34innocent thing are you doing that technology and the way our society is set up could, it's like the
0:23:41plot for a movie almost, right? It's like, well, what innocent thing you would never think is going
0:23:47to cause you to like go down this terror hole of like police and, I mean, just hearing about this
0:23:55guy, the experience at all. I mean, in the fact that it was like, you and I know this, many people
0:24:03listening know this is when you're caring for your kid and dealing with doctors that like,
0:24:07all of the intentions here were just about like taking care of his kid. And this is what happens.
0:24:14Right. And it really was at the advice of the doctors that take, try to take some pictures
0:24:18of this and let me take a closer look. I don't know. Having read this story, and I even wrote
0:24:23this on Daring Fireball that they spoke to somebody who was an expert and said, I wouldn't
0:24:29take naked pictures of my children, but if I did, I wouldn't upload them to the cloud or something
0:24:34like that was her advice. And like I pointed out, like, that's not feasible advice for most people
0:24:40because most people have their camera is going to be their phone and their phone is almost certainly
0:24:45in the last decade set to automatically upload the pictures they take to the cloud, right? Which is
0:24:51what you want overall, like for almost everybody listening, every single photo you take is something
0:24:58that you want uploaded to the cloud so that if you lose your phone, you don't lose it. Even you
0:25:03don't even lose the photos you took today. The more I think about this, I still completely
0:25:08empathize with this guy and I think it was wrong. What happened? It seems like surprising and
0:25:12shocking if Google is still entrenched in like not restoring his account, et cetera. But I'm thinking
0:25:21about it personally. I think there is something that I'm not to say like I couldn't fall into
0:25:27another trap of like being wrongly accused of something, but I probably would stop short of
0:25:35taking such a picture. Maybe just because I'm a little more, I don't know, like wouldn't want to
0:25:39do that with my own body. So something about it that just so happens, I don't think I would
0:25:50fall into this trap. I would probably make an appointment, go into in-person visit.
0:25:55That's a good point. I hadn't thought about that, but if it were me and I had a rash down there and
0:26:01my doctor said, "Can you take a picture of it?" Again, it comes back to our personal empathy with
0:26:08professionals. I think that I could have a somewhat comfortable conversation with my doctor and say,
0:26:14"You know what? I'm actually not comfortable with that. Is there something else, some other thing
0:26:19that we can do?" Yeah. There's something about it that just, it does sort of like trigger a
0:26:24"don't do that" kind of feeling. I might, see, now my mind's racing. I might be willing, as weird as
0:26:32it would be, but it would be weird, let's face it, it would be weird to go into your doctor and have
0:26:37your doctor look at them. Yeah. But if it's COVID or you're far away or whatever, I might be willing
0:26:46to do it through a telehealth web. Something ephemeral, right? The idea that you're not
0:26:55creating an artifact even if you are, but there's something about creating the artifact that feels
0:27:00a little weird. Right. I think probably most people listening have had telehealth consultations
0:27:07during the last two years. I had my annual wellness check, as they call it now, back in 2020
0:27:14over this webcam type thing that wasn't, you know, one of the name brand things like Zoom. It was
0:27:20some kind of web-based portal my doctor has, which there's always, you know, possibilities of bugs,
0:27:26right? But I sort of more or less implicitly trust that while there might be bugs, just like any
0:27:32system has bugs, it's designed to be ephemeral. And that if I show my doctor my genitals on the
0:27:39webcam, that there's not going to be local copies, you know, and me knowing more about technology,
0:27:44knowing that it's going through a web browser, I feel pretty good that when you have a video
0:27:49web conference, there's no local cache of the files, I think. I don't know that it's all
0:27:54streamed. It doesn't seem like it. I never hear anybody talking about clean my Mac, adding a
0:28:00feature to clean up web chat, video files. So I guess I would do it that way. But then you run
0:28:07in, this is where my mind goes, you run into the technical problem that your webcam probably is
0:28:11the worst camera you have, right? And it's, if you're trying to show your son's rash,
0:28:16I don't know, maybe it doesn't show up, right? And some of the most common problems critics
0:28:20looking at webcam footage have is getting skin color right and stuff like that, which is exactly
0:28:25what the doctor's looking for. And it might even auto-correct to that's red, but you know,
0:28:30that's auto-correct to sort of make it more natural skin color or something like that. I
0:28:34don't know. It's all complicated, but it made me think back to the whole thing. And I wrote about
0:28:40this briefly on Daring Fireball, but it made me think back to the whole controversy last year with
0:28:46Apple's plans for CSAM fingerprinting, which is different than this AI model where the fingerprinting
0:28:53plan, Google does that too, but it's two entirely different systems. The fingerprinting idea
0:28:59is that there's an organization, the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children,
0:29:05and NCMEC, I think is the way that the people in the know pronounce it. NCMEC, and it's called
0:29:13NCMEC. And the US government has authorized them through law that I guess they do, I think that
0:29:20might even be where they get all their funding, like the CDC. And their entire mission is to help
0:29:26missing and endangered children of all forms. And part of their legal responsibility is that
0:29:31they are legally authorized to hold a database of known CSAM material. And that nobody else,
0:29:41material that is illegal for anybody else to hold. It is just, they can't share this database of
0:29:48images with Apple and Google and Facebook because it's illegal. It's illegal for them to share it.
0:29:54They're a super well-respected organization, but what they've done with a system that was
0:29:58originally, I think, designed by Microsoft and everybody credits as being very successful
0:30:03is creating hashes of all these images. And a hash is just like a 40-character string.
0:30:10I don't know how big theirs are, but let's just say it's 40 characters. It's
0:30:13like a couple of trillion to one odds of two of them being the same. And what they can distribute
0:30:21to companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and anybody else they trust is the database of the
0:30:26fingerprints. And it's pretty much just, if you think about it, even if you're not comfortable
0:30:31with the math or the algorithms behind hashing functions, it really is sort of the equivalent of
0:30:40an actual fingerprint. Like if you got my left index finger's fingerprint and you had the
0:30:46fingerprint, that fingerprint doesn't give you any information about me, right? You don't know how
0:30:53old I am. You don't know if I'm a man or a woman. You certainly can't deconstruct what I look like
0:31:00from a fingerprint. It's like that's what the hashes are. But if there's an image on a user's
0:31:05cloud photos and you take the fingerprint of that image and that fingerprint is in the database,
0:31:12there's a very, very high chance that it's a match just by looking at the fingerprints in the
0:31:17same way that my fingerprint left at a crime scene matching the fingerprint that police just taken me.
0:31:22It's very high chance that I committed the bank robbery. Certainly a contributing evidence.
0:31:27That's looking for known CSAM. What affected this guy in the New York Times story is a system Google
0:31:33has and other companies seemingly have like Facebook and others to try to identify new
0:31:40CSAM, unknown CSAM. And the only way I think this has got to be true. I mean, there's absolutely,
0:31:47it's common sense. There's no way that could be done through any other way than machine learning.
0:31:53There's no way that every single new photo uploaded to Google Photos or Facebook or whatever
0:32:00could be human reviewed first. And number two, you wouldn't want that, right? You don't want,
0:32:03you wouldn't want every photo everybody takes to be looked at by employees of Google or contractors
0:32:09or whatever, right? But it's an entirely different thing. What really strikes me is Apple's proposed
0:32:16system last year was only about fingerprinting and not using any machine learning in the way
0:32:22that machine learning can, you can now search iCloud photos and your photos app on your,
0:32:27your Apple device and search for dogs and all sorts of pictures you've taken of dogs show up
0:32:33because of machine learning. And it can identify your children and you can, this feature has been
0:32:40an Apple thing for a while. Google has the same thing where it's like, oh, that's a face. And I
0:32:44don't know who this is. Do you want to assign a name to this? And yeah, I can type in that's Jonas
0:32:49and the machine. Now I can type for Jonas in my photos. And I don't know if it has every photo
0:32:56of him, correct? It probably has some errors, but also thousands of photos of my son show up.
0:33:03That's not what Apple was trying, was proposing or even saying or hinting. They were no hint that
0:33:08they were going to try to do that to identify CSAM. They were saying, we're only going to do
0:33:14fingerprinting and against this known database of, of material from the NC Mac and that they
0:33:20signed, we've worked with them to design the system. But what was so controversial about it
0:33:25was that Apple was proposing to do the fingerprinting on your device before the photo
0:33:31gets sent to iCloud. And it really freaked people out. I think rightly so, right? I said this on
0:33:39dithering too. It sounds weird that my own device would be checking my photos for fingerprinting
0:33:44against this database. But while Apple being Apple didn't say why, my looking at their proposed plan,
0:33:53my thinking still is to this day, a year later that they designed that proposal with the idea
0:34:01in mind that eventually iCloud photos will be end to end encrypted so that they could, at some point
0:34:08they couldn't do it on the server. And what Google did would be impossible to do on the server if
0:34:15Google photos were end to end encrypted, right? Because the end to end encrypted means that the
0:34:20company in the middle has no way, no secret key to unlock the stuff. It is cryptographically secure.
0:34:27And even all the computing might of Google, maybe the institution on the planet with the most
0:34:33aggregate computing power, can't feasibly decrypt even one photo if it was end to end encrypted.
0:34:41That proved super, super, super controversial. Google's system, the one that flagged this fellow
0:34:47and who knows, at least two people in this report, who knows how many other people that we don't know
0:34:52about, has been in place for years and it was really with no controversy whatsoever. And here's
0:34:59somebody, here's a guy who's at least his digital life was ruined and his personal life got extremely
0:35:06scary and worrisome with a police investigation for this for a while. And I'm just curious what
0:35:12your thoughts are on that. Should something like Google photos and iCloud photos be end to end
0:35:17encrypted and therefore keep these companies from doing what Google's doing? Yeah, I mean,
0:35:23my gut reaction to all of that is probably not surprising as I'm all in on the Apple like privacy
0:35:30stance and all that stuff. And I guess I kind of fall on the side that just because technology
0:35:36could buy essentially invading our privacy just because it could prevent terrible things from
0:35:44happening doesn't mean that it's necessarily worth the trade off. So I guess I tend to lean towards,
0:35:51yeah, encrypt everything. I think that what you said about there not being any blowback about
0:35:55the Google thing, there's something proprietary, something about the proprietary ness of like your
0:36:01phone being yours. And like Google servers being Google's. It's like the difference between like
0:36:06it's like the difference between like a guests like a restaurant or a club you go to like,
0:36:14padding you down, not a restaurant, but like a club, let's say you go to a club and they
0:36:17pat you down like make sure you don't have a, I don't know, a weapon or something. Yeah,
0:36:21yeah. No, I think we've all been to places like that. I mean, they have it now. I think it's a
0:36:26rule. I don't know if other sports do it, but I'm more familiar with baseball where you have to,
0:36:29you have to go through an airport style magnetometer to get into Yankee Stadium now.
0:36:34I mean, right. Whereas like if there was some technology that allowed major league baseball to,
0:36:43I don't know, scan your house for weapons while you're watching a game at home,
0:36:47people would be like, that's a much different thing. It's obviously not a great comparison
0:36:51because it's not, it's just the idea though that you kind of have like control over your own stuff
0:36:57in your own space. I think people are naturally inclined to think it's a violation to have a
0:37:04company exert its sort of authority over you in your own space. Right. And I don't know,
0:37:13all this stuff, even with just what's described, what Google is described as doing,
0:37:17it makes me feel more comfortable not being an avid Google customer. And, but at the same time,
0:37:25I feel like I could get, just because it's never happened to me with Apple. I don't know
0:37:29that means I'm necessarily any better off being all in on Apple stuff. I don't know for sure if
0:37:34there hasn't been any follow up from Google after the New York Times article, but how could this guy
0:37:39still not have his account restored? And it just feels so dense. You know what, it feels like the
0:37:46denseness of Apple's App Store review sometimes, right? Luckily the App Store review denseness when
0:37:52it happens isn't about whether you have access to all of your contacts and calendar dates and emails
0:37:59and all that. But it could be an app you've spent a year of your life or your company's time working.
0:38:07I mean, the stakes are really high. It seems like Apple has done better on that, but we've had
0:38:12stories over the years of the App Store where developers have had bad interactions, rejections
0:38:17from the App Store that the review system did not work. It seemed everybody reading the story,
0:38:22once it gets publicized, seems to agree Apple screwed this up. But if it hadn't been publicized,
0:38:28it literally could flush an entire year or more of the developer's time down the drain. I mean,
0:38:34it's high stakes. And some of those instances had a very comparable sort of like black box,
0:38:43can't tell why they won't reinstate it. So that rings similar to this. And it's like,
0:38:49at least what I saw in the article is just, well, they just said no and no explanation why.
0:38:55But it seems like there's definitely seems like there's something wrong with when the police say
0:39:00like there's no crime committed. Like there's something wrong if your system at that point
0:39:04doesn't allow you to backtrack. Yeah, it seems clear that Google failed in some regard there.
0:39:09It seems like the exoneration from the police should be enough. And the fact that there's no
0:39:14mechanism and again, I understand that the scale of Google and their photos that are being uploaded
0:39:22every day is so enormous. And there's a scaling issue with customer service, where the business
0:39:30model of these massive, what do we call them? Again, FAANG.
0:39:36Jared: G, FAANG. Kind of arbitrary. I mean, Netflix doesn't really belong in that.
0:39:41Pete: I kind of feel like they just make it sound better because it's FAANG. Facebook, Apple, Amazon,
0:39:50Netflix, and Google.
0:39:52Jared Where's Microsoft? Microsoft should be in there.
0:39:55Pete Right. But FAAM.
0:39:57Microsoft should definitely be in there and Netflix as much as I love them should not.
0:40:03Jared No, they shouldn't.
0:40:03Pete But the scale of those companies,
0:40:05and I guess now that Facebook's meta in some people's style books, I don't know,
0:40:10ruins the whole thing, but I've gotten emails since I've written a story and it seems like
0:40:15readers out there still say FAANG. I get it that the scale of these companies with a model of
0:40:21getting free users and scaling to literally the scope of the planet, right? Like one of the
0:40:28problems facing Facebook growth-wise is that they're at a point where they have so many
0:40:34billion users that they've run out of people, right? It's not that everybody on the planet uses
0:40:39Facebook, but everybody who feasibly could and wants to is. And Google's at that scale too.
0:40:46That it's, how do you provide customer support where you can get a reasonable person who will
0:40:52actually listen to the story and will say, "Okay, I'll contact the police and have the police get
0:40:57me this report," because you obviously can't just trust a report that's sent by the user.
0:41:00I get it that scaling might be incompatible with the scope of these services, right? And that
0:41:06before computers and the internet, there was just no way to have that level of users, right? And
0:41:15what are the organizations that came closest in the pre-computing era? I guess the IRS,
0:41:20in the United States, the IRS and the phone company, right? Like AT&T before the breakup.
0:41:26Every house in America that had a phone had AT&T long distance. AT&T pre-breakup was not
0:41:34well known for their customer service. The IRS is not well known for their customer service.
0:41:39Although I will say personally, over the years when I've done things like filing extensions,
0:41:43I know because you and I have commiserated on it, being like a self-proprietor who likes to
0:41:49do their own stuff. I've had interactions with the IRS and it's actually worked out pretty well.
0:41:55I actually think IRS, and I know that that's part of this new bill that the Democrats and Biden just
0:42:00passed to actually fund the IRS better. But even as underfunded as they've been, when I've needed
0:42:05customer service, it's been pretty good, but their reputation certainly isn't the best, right?
0:42:09I don't know. I guess part of the difference, Ben brought this up on dithering, but that these
0:42:14companies are sort of like quasi-governmental groups. And as bad as the reputation of like
0:42:21the post office or the IRS, I don't know about other countries. Do other countries have better
0:42:26and more favorable views of their countrywide tax collection agency? My view, even as someone who's
0:42:35pretty left-leaning in the US and happily pays my taxes and feels like it's a privilege as a citizen,
0:42:41the US culturally, our creation myth was all about not wanting to pay taxes that we didn't authorize,
0:42:48right? I mean, being anti-tax is pretty central to the American culture. But at the very least,
0:42:56you can, if it truly is a government agency in a democracy, you can demand some level of
0:43:01accountability, right? And you can say like, there's your congressional representative
0:43:06can get together and a majority of them can say, we're going to require the IRS to issue a report
0:43:12every year with how many people got audited, which they do, right? They issue reports like that,
0:43:17and they issue estimates of how much people who underpay on their taxes collectively,
0:43:23how much money is underreported, and what would that be by our best estimate?
0:43:27We don't get those numbers out of Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft on these issues
0:43:32of how many people are flagged and how many people complain when they get flagged that it was wrong.
0:43:38And it seems like somehow we should. I mean, and obviously the government can pass laws to make
0:43:42these companies do it. And I kind of feel like that's, I'm generally anti-regulation, but I
0:43:47actually feel like in this case, it's it, this is a case where carefully crafted regulation could be
0:43:54good for everybody involved, including the companies. Cause then rather than worrying that
0:43:59if nobody else is saying how many people, 150 Google photos users, I'm making this number up,
0:44:04were reported for this wire system and our human review said, yeah, they should have their account
0:44:10closed and be reported. And 150 of them last year came back and objected and said, no, this is
0:44:17wrong. You've got it wrong. You should look again. Nobody wants to be the first to say that, right?
0:44:21Because who wants it out there? Then all of a sudden that's the tech news story of the day that
0:44:25last year, one of these companies flagged close to 200 people, or maybe it's a thousand people.
0:44:30We don't know. Right. But whatever it is, it, whatever the number is 48 people, 2000 people more,
0:44:36I mean, obviously the more publicity it's going to get, nobody wants to be the first to do it,
0:44:40but if the law said everybody had to do it, I guess the only way you'd look bad is if your
0:44:45system was flagging, if it's a 48 from one of the companies and 75 from another company and 2,500
0:44:53from another company. Well then yeah, but then that company has a problem, right?
0:44:57The other thing that stuck out to me, I wanted to say this before we move on to other less,
0:45:01well, I don't know if you think talking about system settings and Ventura is a cheerful subject,
0:45:06but it's cheerful in comparison. The other thing that I thought of today, thinking of before you
0:45:11and I recorded, I was out running errands and I should do it more often because boy, I get a lot
0:45:17of good ideas when I go for a walk, but it just popped into my head that one of the things I
0:45:21forgot about Apple system, I was only thinking about the finger fingerprinting and comparison
0:45:27against the known database of fingerprints and the, that the objections were all about it being
0:45:33on the device side and adhere when it's all on the server, everybody just is sort of, it's like
0:45:40the slow boiling frog. Everybody's just accepted that whatever these companies do with machine
0:45:44learning on the servers, well, that's their business. It's not my device. And I only thought
0:45:48about that part, but the other part that popped into my head was that part of Apple's proposal
0:45:53was, I think the number was 30 that even if there's a fingerprint match of a photo, you were going to,
0:46:00if they put the system into place and a photo going from your iPhone to your iCloud photos
0:46:07account was fingerprint matched and matched a fingerprint in the Nic Mac database.
0:46:13You had to get to like, I think the number was 30 before the account would be flagged and then
0:46:20have those 30 images human reviewed, take a look that nothing funny is going on. This person hasn't
0:46:27been somehow attacked by somebody who's figured out how to create hash collisions with the Nic
0:46:33Mac database fingerprints. Whereas seemingly from this New York Times report, I don't think it
0:46:37quite said how many photos, but it certainly wasn't 30. It was like a handful of photos that he took.
0:46:43Maybe they only sent the doctor like two photos, but he took 10 photos, but they all would have
0:46:48been the same, right? Or close enough that this guy's story of, here's my explanation for what
0:46:54happened, would jibe with the fact that the dozen photos he took were all from the same angle and
0:47:00the same lighting of the same age kid. And on the same, in the same like 10 minute
0:47:07time period, because they have the timestamps on there too. There is something too, I think what
0:47:13you're getting at is whatever Apple was proposing had built into it a kind of defense against false
0:47:21alerts. And even the most modest default to like, I think it's pretty safe to assume that if you've
0:47:34got a real problem on your hands, it's not going to be like one set of photos in a 10 minute span
0:47:39one day out of a person's life. Yeah, because what came back to me was I wrote about this pretty
0:47:45extensively last year when Apple had the plan. And part of that was, I think I was on at least two
0:47:50press briefings over WebEx about it. It was the Apple had one that they initially planned.
0:47:57And it was like a presentation explaining what they were doing. It was the presentation was
0:48:03more or less a rehash of the PDF they published. But then the nice part about a press briefing like
0:48:08that is then it was open to questions. And we in the media who were invited could ask questions
0:48:13of Apple's head of security, Ivan, I always forget how to pronounce his last name.
0:48:17Kirstich maybe?
0:48:18Yeah, Kirstich, Ivan Kirstich, who's been their head of security for a long time and truly has,
0:48:23really, if you think about the weight of the world on his shoulders among all the unsung executives
0:48:29at Apple, boy, there's somebody whose job is heavy.
0:48:31Just a real just I think it's Yvonne just to get the people who are screaming at their
0:48:36podcast right now to settle down. But I might be wrong, but I think it's Yvonne. Yeah.
0:48:42I think you're right, too, now that I think about it. But of course,
0:48:45I mispronounce everybody's name. Yeah, no offense, Yvonne. But no, but a very cogent explanation.
0:48:51It wasn't sugarcoating it. And it really but one of the things that was brought up about that
0:48:5630 limit, and I forget, maybe it's 20. And maybe they adjusted it. But they even said,
0:49:01they emphasize that if that number proves to be too high or too low, we can always change that
0:49:08number. If it ends up that there's proof and evidence that criminal CSAM distributors are
0:49:16getting away with it because they're doing it in batches of 20 or whatever, and then creating new
0:49:21accounts that they could lower the number. And if it turns out, and they emphasized it,
0:49:26their math was like, I don't know, like a trillion to one that somebody could just wrongly be flagged
0:49:33for 30 fingerprints, just a truly astronomically high number. But maybe not super astronomically
0:49:40high. It was something where it was like, if there's a billion iCloud users, I remember doing
0:49:45the math, there's like a one in 1000 chance. So I think it was a trillion was the number,
0:49:51but there's like a one in 1000 chance that someone's going to be flagged, which seems wrong.
0:49:56But the thing that I believe it was Yvonne, but Apple definitely emphasized was that by having a
0:50:01threshold that's this high, that the system is not intended, and no system could reasonably be
0:50:06designed to catch every single thing you can't, there is no feasible way to design a system where
0:50:15somebody who distributes one CSAM image is going to be caught without risking too many false matches,
0:50:26right? That the balance between doing it right and catching people who should be caught,
0:50:31but acknowledging you're not going to catch everybody, that they felt very comfortable
0:50:35with that number. And they emphasize, this is the part I wanted that popped into my head,
0:50:38that Nick Mac completely signed off on that. And Nick Mac had representatives singing Apple's
0:50:45proposals praises that this is great. And part of the reason was that the people who have a problem
0:50:52with child pornography, it's a compulsion. It is a truly, it's profoundly compulsive behavior. And
0:51:01that the number of images that such people collect is astonishing. Just appalling. And therefore,
0:51:10some of the people on the media might be thinking, or out there just thinking, "Why wait for 30?
0:51:15Geez, why not get them after 10 or something like that?" The people who are out there who tend to get
0:51:21caught have more of this than it's not even close to 30. It's sick how many numbers they have.
0:51:26So it does make me wonder how this guy at Google got flagged after what couldn't have been more
0:51:31than like a dozen photos. That seems like a second failing. Yeah, and not only that,
0:51:37but it would be a more clear cause for flagging if it was the fingerprints thing, because
0:51:46there wouldn't be any doubt about whether it was an AI issue or not. So it feels to me anyway like
0:51:53the AI thing, while it would find novel material, that it wouldn't be as reliably vetted.
0:52:01Right. Yeah. And that sort of is what I'm thinking. And everybody can find this.
0:52:07The AI stuff is getting so good, but it's always going to have holes, right? At some point,
0:52:12it's going to flag a dog as a cat and a cat as a dog in a way that a human would laugh and say,
0:52:19"That's crazy. That's so obviously a dog, not a cat." I can't even see why this AI system would
0:52:24think that dog is a cat. I don't know. I don't know. The other thing, I'm with you, I think,
0:52:29that I'm on the side of more end-to-end encryption. To take the tradeoff of with end-to-end encryption,
0:52:38perhaps some stuff that would have been caught without it by a system like Google's
0:52:44will no longer be caught, but for the benefit of that with value and privacy,
0:52:49some things are going to happen within the realm of one's individual privacy.
0:52:57Yeah. I basically take the stance that the technology existing to make law enforcement
0:53:03easier in some ways doesn't mean that's the right way to do it. And when people put up
0:53:10these arguments like, "Well, shouldn't the police have access to everybody's phone?" I say, "No,
0:53:17make the police work harder. Make the police find another way to get the bad guys in a way that
0:53:25doesn't involve having access to my phone." Right. And it's a recurring theme of human
0:53:32psychology that I often come back to. I've talked about it with Facebook and the app
0:53:37tracking transparency and ad privacy in general, that these companies like Facebook in particular,
0:53:46who clearly is the big public objector to app tracking transparency and is the one whose stock
0:53:51has taken the biggest hit. And so I think it's very fair to hold Facebook up as the primary actor
0:53:57here. But even the secondary argument of that so many small businesses have grown and flourished
0:54:05by targeting ads through Facebook and Instagram that wouldn't be possible to be targeted so
0:54:12accurately without widespread tracking. Yeah.
0:54:17That once somebody has something like that, they truly feel entitled to have it forever. That by
0:54:26closing this loophole, you're taking something away from them. Even if that thing is something
0:54:32that was never really theirs to own, right? The privacy of people who say, who click
0:54:38or tap the "Ask App Not to Track" instead of the "Allow Tracking" button, they're the ones who own
0:54:46their personal privacy and should be able to declare whether they're being tracked or not.
0:54:50And the fact that these companies had that tracking without anybody's tacit agreement,
0:54:56even if it was something like you said earlier, like seven pages down in a terms of service
0:55:02agreement that you just sort of scroll. I mean, everybody, that's like the biggest,
0:55:06one of the biggest jokes in all of computing. I mean, it's gone, but it goes back to the shrink
0:55:09wrap days where there was like a license on the box software you bought that says, as soon as you
0:55:15cut open this box, you've agreed to these terms. Right? I mean, in the early days of the web,
0:55:21people used to publish like funny things from terms of service agreements on box software,
0:55:25like how ridiculous it was. And you've legally bound yourself to these terms that nobody reads
0:55:30just by opening the box. But that entitlement, like once you've got it, you feel entitled.
0:55:35Like with law enforcement and coming back to phones, like go back to the early days of the
0:55:42telephone, right? When the telephone went from something that was in the news that
0:55:47Alexander Graham Bell had invented. And now in addition to the telegraph, there was only capable
0:55:52of sending Morse code. You could actually hear the voice of your loved ones from across town,
0:55:57across the state, across the country, even for obvious reasons was rapidly adopted by anybody
0:56:02who could afford it. And now everybody's got phones and everybody loved using them for
0:56:06generations, right? Like actual landline phones. But imagine if your law enforcement, how awesome
0:56:12it was that then all you had to do is get like a warrant for, you suspect Daniel Jalkitz and
0:56:18John Gruber are committing a crime and you get this warrant and then you just connect a pair
0:56:23of headphones with a piece of copper to the phone line outside my house. And you can listen. You can
0:56:28just listen to our phone calls, right? Like everybody's seen it. It's a trope, right? In
0:56:34movies, whether they're set in the forties or fifties or until very recently, when it's no
0:56:41longer credible to think that people are using landline phones, but until just the last 10,
0:56:4615 years, everybody knows it. But what a benefit to law enforcement. I don't think it was a mistake
0:56:51that it was legally permitted for the police with a search warrant to be able to tap somebody's phones
0:56:58if they had a warrant that provided sufficient evidence that a crime might be committed.
0:57:05But then once they had it and they had it for so long, right? Like you and I were born in an era
0:57:11where that was already assumed to be something the police could have. It was just part of the
0:57:15world around us that the police, if you're suspected of committing a crime, your phone
0:57:19might be tapped and they can hear you as clear as the person you're calling. Once that was taken
0:57:25away, that whole argument about the people who like Apple, who are making these phones should
0:57:30provide a backdoor for the good guys, was sort of predicated on like, "Hey, you're taking away
0:57:36something that's been an important part of our criminal process for decades."
0:57:40Jared: Yeah. And it's funny you saying like, you don't think it was wrong for them to do that. I
0:57:47basically agree, but then I wonder like, in an alternative history where audio encryption
0:57:54was invented before the telephone and like, every telephone call in history was encrypted end to end,
0:58:03no, I wouldn't argue to give the police a decryptor. You know what I mean?
0:58:10Pete: Right, right.
0:58:11Jared; So, it's sort of, I think we're, you and I are both like, very privacy oriented,
0:58:17but even us, we are sort of having our views on this a little colored by the circumstances of
0:58:23history. Like we think, yeah, it was fine when they did wiretaps, because they always did. But
0:58:29I think maybe it wasn't fine. I mean, maybe it's not really fine. It's just circumstantially what
0:58:35they were able to do. And like, I think that might be the test. If the technology existed to prioritize
0:58:44telephone users' privacy over the needs and wants of law enforcement, would we have allowed that?
0:58:52And we wouldn't, I mean, a lot of people wouldn't. And I think I'd like to think that I would,
0:58:58back in whatever, the 50s, when the telephones happened, 40s, 30s.
0:59:03Pete; I don't know when it got widespread, but…
0:59:05Jared; Yeah, I don't really know, but I have to believe, like in the same way, I don't think
0:59:09people really expect anybody to open their mail. There's certain expectations about,
0:59:18again, it's like, well, you don't expect it, but you also accept that the police might have a
0:59:23warrant and permission to do something like that. But I don't know, it's definitely, I empathize
0:59:29with the whole profession of law enforcement is definitely challenged by the empowerment of
0:59:36personal privacy that we have. But if you value privacy at all, and you value the ability to
0:59:42ensure your own privacy, it's like even back with wiretaps, nobody was saying, "Criminals, you have
0:59:49to make a phone call if you're going to conspire with somebody. You're not allowed to go down to
0:59:52the river and meet with somebody behind a bush because police need to have the access to your
0:59:58conversation." It's always been kind of like a question of, try to catch the bad guys making
1:00:04mistakes with technology that we can control, that law enforcement can control. But there's always
1:00:09been a way for people to ensure or almost 99.999% ensure their privacy if they wanted to. And it's
1:00:18just gotten a lot easier now. Yeah, let's take another break here. And before we move on, I want
1:00:23to tell you about Memberful. You can monetize your passion with memberships. Memberful allows creators
1:00:32on the internet to build a sustainable recurring revenue. It is the easiest way to sell memberships
1:00:39to your audience. And it is used by some of the biggest creators on the whole web. And they have
1:00:44everything you need to run a membership program, including custom branding, gift subscriptions,
1:00:49Apple Pay, free trials, private podcasts, just for your paying members, and tons more. And they
1:00:56seamlessly integrate with the tools you already use, things like WordPress, all sorts of stuff
1:01:00like that. You have full control and ownership of your audience, your brand, and your membership.
1:01:06Your members may not even know that they're going through Memberful. They're very much in the
1:01:09background. Your brand is yours. If you ever do decide to leave, you can take your entire
1:01:14membership base with you. You're not locked in to Memberful. You don't have to ask all of your
1:01:20members to unsubscribe and resubscribe to a new system. You can take them all with you. And they
1:01:25do it that way because it's the right way to do it. And it makes people think, "Well, that makes
1:01:29it more likely I'd sign up." And that's how confident they are that you're going to stay
1:01:32with Memberful once you sign up. They have a world-class support team that is ready to help
1:01:36you simplify your memberships and grow your revenue. They know what works. They know what
1:01:41helps grow a membership. And they're willing to help you because they only make money when you
1:01:47make money. And they're only happy when you're happy. And you're only happy when your audience
1:01:52and your members are happy with what they're getting and what they're paying. And they really
1:01:56will. They'll help you every step of the way. You can get started for free with no credit card
1:02:02required upfront. Go to memberful.com/talkshow today. Once again, no credit card required
1:02:11upfront. Go to memberful.com/talkshow today. I've lost track of how many Memberfuls I'm subscribed
1:02:18to. I know I subscribed to Jason Snell's Six Colors. I subscribed to Relay FM, like the system-wide
1:02:25thing at Relay where they make a bunch of great podcasts. I don't know, dozens of others. I almost
1:02:30don't even want to look it up because I might rethink my monthly budget of my subscriptions.
1:02:36But that's how many people, individual creators on the web, I support personally through Memberful.
1:02:41It's really, it's a great experience as a customer. Moving on, one of the reasons I wanted
1:02:45to have you on the show, Daniel. I talked about it on my last episode with my esteemed friend,
1:02:50Mr. John Moltz. And then I wrote about it on Daring Fireball fairly briefly, at least by my
1:02:56standards last week, of the current state of the all-new rewritten system settings in macOS 13
1:03:06Ventura. I always say macOS the number and then the name because the names, I cannot keep the
1:03:13name straight in hindsight. I think our old friend Wolf Wrench pointed this out back in the big cat
1:03:19days. So we're going back 15 years, but like back when it would be like macOS 10.4 Lion.
1:03:27- Puma, no, Tiger, 10.4 Tiger. - Oh yeah, because that was the first really good one. That was the
1:03:32one where I thought, you know what, this macOS 10 thing is getting good. Yeah, 10.4 was Tiger,
1:03:3610.5 was Lion, and then Mountain Lion was famous. - 10.5 was, I think, Panther. I'm kind of
1:03:44embarrassed. - No, because 10.6 was Mountain Lion, which was the one, the new features.
1:03:48- We're both wrong. We're both wrong. macOS 10.5 Leopard. - Ah, all right.
1:03:53- And then Snow Leopard. You're getting ahead of yourself. The Lion and Mountain Lion was quite a
1:03:57bit later. It was like 10.10 or 10. something. - All right, but it was true that 10.5 was
1:04:03some cat name and 10.6 was a slight of... - Snow Leopard, yeah, Leopard and Snow Leopard.
1:04:09- Well, anyway, I just proved myself correct that I couldn't keep the cat names.
1:04:13- I can't either, really. Some of them jump out at me.
1:04:16- But at least the cat names let me associate... You know how there's people who do memory tricks
1:04:28will teach you that there's mnemonic tricks where if you imagine your house and that if you're
1:04:34supposed to remember the words green apple and typewriter, that if you imagine a place in your
1:04:42house where you've set down the typewriter with a green apple next to it, you can remember. And then
1:04:47a day later, someone say, "What were you supposed to remember?" And it's like that visual thing for
1:04:52many people would help them remember. I remember I put a typewriter on my dining room table with
1:04:58a green apple next to it because you've painted this picture. Whereas if you just tried to
1:05:01remember the words green apple and typewriter, maybe you'd forget them in a day. The cats gave
1:05:07me like a picture, right? Like, because I know what a tiger looks like. These California place
1:05:11names, number one, I didn't grow up in California. But number two, they all look the same to me.
1:05:18I guess Yosemite doesn't look like Monterey because it's not on the ocean, but it's all
1:05:24sort of places where you can take absolutely stunning, beautiful desktop wallpaper photos.
1:05:31It's all a blur to me. - Yeah. Well, they're only picking
1:05:35the names of places where they can associate with beautiful photos. So they do kind of all blur
1:05:40together because despite of people always joke, like where's the Mac OS like Folsom?
1:05:45Folsom has its place, but it's mostly associated with a prison.
1:05:50- Mac OS 17, the Castro. - Right. Yeah.
1:05:53- So anyway, Mac OS 13, aka Ventura, has a rewritten system settings app.
1:06:03Most of the time I talk to, I have so much more to say about it, but what I wrote,
1:06:08and I think pretty fairly, I think got out what I wanted to say with this, with few words,
1:06:13but I think not because I was holding back, but because I just wanted to make a 16th point that
1:06:18this seems to me like something has gone very wrong at Apple because these errors that have
1:06:24been pointed out, like all these little visual glitches in the fit and finish for lack of a,
1:06:29I mean, I can't think of a better way to put it. The fit and finish is clearly not there.
1:06:33The argument that, well, it's still in beta doesn't work for me because we've had betas of Mac OS
1:06:42versions all the way back to the late nineties before Mac OS 10, 10.0 shipped. What was that?
1:06:49What was that cat? The first cat was Cheetah? No.
1:06:51- Did they have a cat name? - I don't know. Maybe 10.1.
1:06:54- I should know, I guess. I mean, I was there, but.
1:06:56- Yeah. Well, but we've had betas and there have been-
1:07:00- Cheetah. Yeah, you're right. Cheetah. Look at that.
1:07:02- Yeah. 'Cause it was, I remember it was a lie because the biggest problem with it was that it
1:07:06was also slow. - Right, right, right, right.
1:07:09- And they picked, they should have picked like Garfield, you know?
1:07:12- Well, don't trust me on anything 'cause I famously quit Apple after 10.2. I think it was
1:07:18maybe even right before 10.2 because I thought Mac OS 10 was basically done. So I was like,
1:07:24"I'm out of here." - It's finished.
1:07:28- Yeah, we got it. Yep. We nailed it.
1:07:30- There have been betas. In the old days, they weren't public betas, but there have certainly
1:07:37been developer betas for the obvious reason that developers are the people who need betas of new
1:07:41operating systems where old APIs have been deprecated and new APIs have been introduced.
1:07:46And it's in developers' interest to support new APIs and changes to the system and new features
1:07:52that Apple wants third-party developers to use before it actually ships. And it's in Apple's
1:07:58interest to be able to say, "Okay, this operating system we announced at WWDC, it's now, here we
1:08:04are five months later, it's ready to ship. And let's show you some of the great things developers
1:08:09have built that are only possible in this new operating system." It remains to this day. I mean,
1:08:16I guess they do less third-party demos and keynotes, but they still do sometimes,
1:08:20and they like talking about it. They did a bunch of them with the, remember with the Catalyst
1:08:24a couple years ago, they had a bunch of developers who'd wanted to show how they'd turned their iOS
1:08:30apps into Mac apps. And in all those betas in the old days, there were bugs and there'd be,
1:08:37"Yeah, well, that's obviously a bug." But there wasn't widespread fit and finish problems.
1:08:44And I think it's fair to say, I mean, and you said you were at Apple then. You've been using
1:08:52Cocoa for longer than most people. I'm not going to say as long as anybody, but longer than most
1:08:57people. And one of the big advantages of Cocoa that Apple, I can remember Steve Jobs saying it
1:09:04over and over again. Honestly, I've seen videos of Steve Jobs talking about the next days when
1:09:10these frameworks were before they were at Apple, that it makes it easy to make a great looking UI.
1:09:20And conversely, almost makes it, you have to do extra work to make a bad looking UI or a sloppy
1:09:28looking UI. There's a great art, and I think I've done it. You do it all the time developing your
1:09:35software, but there's an art to properly laying out a preferences tab. And it sounds like boring
1:09:43work, but if you like making apps, it can be very fun. It's like, I'll go back to the IRS.
1:09:49Like every year they make a new version of the 1040 form and it doesn't seem like fun,
1:09:54but if you're the right type of graphic designer, that sort of, hey, you have eight and a half by
1:09:5911 inches. You have to have, here's a checklist of everything that needs to be on here. And here's
1:10:04the most important stuff. How do you lay this out? And so that the typical taxpayer looking at it
1:10:10will have the easiest time filling out this form. That's like what a preferences window is, right?
1:10:15And laying it out is an art and it's not like Interface Builder. You just said, I have seven
1:10:20check boxes and Interface Builder would just automatically stick them on the screen and do it.
1:10:25But if you knew what you wanted to look at, you could do it visually and you drag these things
1:10:29around, and they would snap into place. And the things like I'm talking about that Coco made easy,
1:10:34that from the pre-Coco days of Mac development that I'm most familiar with, you didn't get,
1:10:41or you didn't get it as well as they did it where it's like, okay, if you have three check boxes
1:10:46on top of each other, how far away do they go? Does check box two, how does it go 20 pixels below the
1:10:55first one? Or is it 22? And it's like, I think the older way, and maybe I'm throwing Code Warrior and
1:11:02some older things under the bus here. Maybe you'll correct me, but one way you could do it is you'd
1:11:07look up in the HIG and the HIG would have a thing that if you have multiple check boxes in a dialog
1:11:11box, they should be 20 pixels apart. If you have an okay and a cancel button at the bottom of an
1:11:18alert, the okay button should be on the right. The cancel button should be right next to it on
1:11:23the left. They should be this far from the corner in pixels, this far from the bottom in pixels,
1:11:32and the two buttons should be exactly 24 pixels apart. And there'd be those, you could look them
1:11:38up in the HIG and then you could do all your work knowing those numbers. Koko made it so that those
1:11:43things snapped into place and there'd be like a little visual indication like right here is the
1:11:49indicator. This is how far away it should be. If you want to nudge it up another couple pixels
1:11:54with the arrow key, you could do it, right? But you know that you're doing it wrong. You're doing
1:12:01it against the HIG. So you... Jared: Yeah, and to be precise, not Koko so much,
1:12:06but interface builder, the app. Right, right. But the whole system, right?
1:12:10Jared Yeah. But it's funny you ask about that with all like MetroWorks, CodeWarrior,
1:12:16PowerPlants. I'm thinking also Resorcerer, ResEdit, all the ways we used to design interfaces.
1:12:23I honestly cannot remember if they did anything to help you place the buttons and the controls.
1:12:32Pete: I don't think they did. As I recall, and ResEdit's the one I'm the most familiar with,
1:12:37because while I wasn't, I made little things, you know, it's same thing, same type of things
1:12:42I do now where I was never a professional Mac developer, but I make little hobbyist-type things
1:12:46on the side. But you know, I was deeply into, invested in opening up the apps I had from actual
1:12:52developers and hacking them with ResEdit. Yeah, I don't think that ResEdit had anything like that
1:12:58to help with alignment. The according to the HIG alignment, you were sort of on your own. There were
1:13:03ways to show an alert instead of drawing it visually as a, what was it, a DITL resource, DITL?
1:13:11Jared Yeah.
1:13:11Pete I mean, of all the stupid freaking things I'm wasting my brain.
1:13:16Jared I think that's right, yeah.
1:13:16Pete There was like a DITL resource, dialogue.
1:13:20Jared Dialogue something list.
1:13:22Pete Yeah.
1:13:23Jared Yeah, well, everything that ended with a
1:13:25TL I think was a something list.
1:13:28Pete But you know, there was a way to just call a toolbox function and say, just show an alert
1:13:34with this text with these two buttons, and then that thing would make the alert look like a
1:13:40standard alert with all the right layout. But if you had like a layout, a visually laid out dialogue
1:13:45in ResEdit, I don't think there were any kind of layout tools like that.
1:13:49Jared Yeah.
1:13:49Pete Well, it was, you know, I do remember
1:13:52Interface Builder in particular, and it used to be a separate app. It was a big, like, I would show
1:13:58it off to other people. I remember I worked for like a week as a contractor, did a short job at
1:14:05Fog Creek in New York. And this was like, maybe 2005. And I remember showing like, Joel Spolsky,
1:14:13the Interface Builder. And I'm just like, look at this. Now hold on to your hat.
1:14:18I'm gonna place a button here and it's gonna tell me where to put it. I think you're right
1:14:22that the old stuff, the Mac classic stuff didn't do that. Because I wouldn't have been so excited
1:14:28about showing off Interface Builder if it was something that had already been there in the past.
1:14:34Pete Right. It was groundbreaking. And it allowed,
1:14:37again, I played around with Interface Builder far more than I did Project Builder, which was that
1:14:45that was where you actually wrote the code. And they got sort of wrapped into one with the
1:14:50renaming of Xcode. But Xcode is, I think it's fair to say, I mean, and this is why I'm so glad to
1:14:55have you here, because I think you correct me if maybe it's not fair to say, is Xcode is really
1:15:00more like an evolution of Project Builder. It's extended deeply into the future. And it is truly
1:15:07a real crown jewel in Apple's intellectual property. It's hard to imagine where Apple
1:15:15would be if Xcode weren't as good and capable as it is, even though every developer I know has a
1:15:20whole pet list of things they wish Xcode did better. But it's really Project Builder brought
1:15:25forward. There really is no Interface Builder anymore.
1:15:28Jared Well, yeah, I mean, they really just
1:15:33basically componentized Interface Builder so that there's a mode in Xcode when you're editing
1:15:39zip file, which is the Interface Builder format these days. It basically transforms the app. It's
1:15:46pretty clever. I mean, the complexity that Xcode tackles is pretty impressive. But I would say
1:15:53there is as much of an Interface Builder interface as there ever was, but it just doesn't live
1:16:00independently of Xcode. Yeah.
1:16:02Pete Turner So here, I'll just imagine, as you might,
1:16:05if you were making a blog editor app, and that you have an idea, you know, like you sketch it out on
1:16:12paper, and you think it's going to be a standard document window, there'll be a toolbar at the top,
1:16:18like a standard Cocoa app, Mac, a Mac OS X app with a toolbar at the top. For now, I'll just
1:16:23worry about what those toolbar buttons will be later. But there'll be a standard toolbar at the
1:16:28top. And there'll be at the top of the window, something that looks like mail, where instead of
1:16:34two CC subject, there'll be these blog fields like title, keywords, tags. And then underneath that,
1:16:46like a mail app, there'll just be a big text area where you type the text of your post.
1:16:51Jared Ranerel You're really making me stretch my imagination here. I don't know if I can keep this
1:16:58all in my mind here. I'm going to slow down a little bit.
1:17:00Pete Turner But whether you're a one-person developer shop,
1:17:03or if you have colleagues, and maybe one of the colleagues is purely their role is just as a
1:17:09designer, the UI designer, and they don't know Objective C from JavaScript. They don't write
1:17:16code. They're not programmers at all. But they are designers and they do good UI design. You wouldn't
1:17:23mock it up and show exactly what it looks like in Photoshop, and then render out a ping and give it
1:17:32to the developer to make. A designer could use Interface Builder to just make it directly. It
1:17:38used to be called nib files. And now there's zib. Is that how we pronounce it?
1:17:41Jared Ranerel I think so. Yeah, XIB. It's basically XML-based version of the same thing.
1:17:47Pete Turner Right. Because the old nib format was like a binary
1:17:50blob that you, yeah, it was like a "don't look inside or come out."
1:17:53Jared Ranerel No, and they're still like famously difficult to deal with, like, source control,
1:17:59collisions and merges and all that. But you stand a chance since it's text-based at the core.
1:18:04Pete Turner Right. But a designer could just do this all visually and drag out the label for the
1:18:10title. That's a text label. That's a standard control and select it. And just like, I'll bet
1:18:16everybody listening to this podcast, whether you've ever done UI design work or used Interface
1:18:22Builder, you've used apps that work like this, right? Drawing apps of any kind, things that you'd
1:18:28use to make any kind of drawing, like Photoshop or Illustrator or…
1:18:35Jared Ranerel Or like presentation software like Keynote or…
1:18:38Pete Turner Yep, Keynote's a fantastic example,
1:18:41or what's Microsoft's version of Keynote called?
1:18:43Jared Ranerel It's funny, we are the funniest Mac-centric people in the world right now.
1:18:48Pete Turner PowerPoint.
1:18:48Jared Ranerel PowerPoint. There you go.
1:18:49Pete Turner I really did draw a blank.
1:18:53Jared Ranerel I did draw a blank too. I'm like,
1:18:54"Yeah, I think Microsoft has something that's kind of like an imitation of Keynote."
1:18:59Pete Turner I've used, like anybody, especially with my
1:19:03writing, I've used Microsoft Word. And I definitely used and used to really like Excel was always,
1:19:09to me, the proof that Microsoft could do good Mac software. And really sort of the old versions,
1:19:15like in the 90s of Microsoft Excel on the Mac were extraordinarily good software. I don't think I've
1:19:22ever used PowerPoint. I think I've, maybe I've had to open it at some point because I was using
1:19:26a work machine or something that had it installed and somebody gave me a deck, but I don't think I
1:19:29ever actually made anything. But yeah, like Keynote's probably the, maybe the most used example
1:19:34in the audience, but you know, it's the same type of thing. You have standard elements where in
1:19:38Keynote, if you want to put a title at the top, you draw a text box and you want to insert video
1:19:45in the middle, and then you select that video after you've dragged it in. And then you can set
1:19:50properties on it. Like there'll be like a little info palette where you can set a property like,
1:19:55should this video start playing as soon as this slide is shown? Should it start three seconds
1:20:02later? Should we wait till you manually advance instead of going to the next slide, the next time
1:20:07you hit the clicker, it'll, then it'll play the video. And then you have a visual way of specifying
1:20:12all that. Interface Builder was like that for layout and doing something like, I think you'll
1:20:17agree, doing something like the Mars Edit standard editing window for a blog post is right down the
1:20:24middle. Could have been an example of the sort of thing you would, that Interface Builder would make
1:20:29right. And again, it's not just that you can drag out those text labels and then the editing field
1:20:35for where the user types the title and types the keywords, but the fact that they could be
1:20:40positioned the exact right distance from each other, according to the human interface guidelines,
1:20:46so that they were both worried for the good of the platform adhering to the platform's standard
1:20:53idioms for how things should be laid out. And then that you as an individual developer could
1:20:59count on Apple's expertise of trust us. This is the right amount of distance from like a
1:21:04accessibility and usability perspective. Right? Yeah. It makes it a lot faster. I mean,
1:21:10I kind of, like you were saying earlier, like there's a certain kind of like satisfaction and
1:21:14just laying out a UI like that. And for whatever reason, I didn't really become a UI based developer
1:21:21until after I left Apple, because I used to always work on OS levels stuff in my early career. But
1:21:29once I started working on apps, I kind of got into that the idea of like, just figuring out how to
1:21:34make it work. And but the tools helping you with the alignment and you kind of learn some basics
1:21:39from Apple about like balancing there, there's a standard, since we're talking about preferences,
1:21:44there's a standard in the cocoa design guidelines. I think it's called like a center weight balance.
1:21:50You know, if you look at any traditional preferences, like I like to look at Safari,
1:21:55and you open up Safari's preferences, because they have a lot of different panels in there that
1:21:59in their own way exemplify. The idea is, if you look at the different panes in Safari,
1:22:06the labels where the labels line up every pane, more or less, the labels are on the left and the
1:22:13values are on the right. And where that split happens is different in every panel. And it's
1:22:21because of this kind of philosophy of center weight. So we want the overall layout of the
1:22:29preferences is to have the weight of content on the left and right be approximately the same. So
1:22:35it's not centered, but the stuff that extends out from the left side from the labels is sort of like
1:22:44counterweighted by the stuff that extends out on the right side. And that is, I mean, it's
1:22:49interesting to point that out. It's kind of one of the things, it's one of the tools, knowing that's
1:22:53a guideline is one of the tools that helps you then use tool like the interface builder aspect
1:22:59of Xcode. But it's also pretty pertinent, I think, to what we're sort of, we're sort of dancing
1:23:03around. We haven't dived into it. The system settings on Ventura, Ventura, 13 Mac OS, Mac OS,
1:23:1010, 13 Ventura. No, it's not 10, 13. Jesus. It's just 13, 14. Oh, 13. Yeah. Okay. Well,
1:23:16we don't trust either of us for anything version-based, but it's funny. I'm looking at
1:23:21ever since you brought it up. I've I opened it up immediately when you mentioned it. I opened up
1:23:26system settings cause I'm recording this on Mac OS Ventura. And the first thing, the very first
1:23:33thing I almost just tried to do it again. I want to resize the window. I want to make it wider.
1:23:38And it's the very first thing I try to do. And it's infuriating to me that I can't do it because
1:23:44it's just seems too narrow. And that it's an interesting, it's interesting in light of what
1:23:49I just said about the whole like center weight thing, because everything about the design of
1:23:56the new system settings, this whole like iOS style of like, I, in the blog post I wrote
1:24:03recently about this, I called it the table view style of an interface because that whole
1:24:10interface of like a round wrecked with rows that you can tap in and it like brings you to a new
1:24:17view that whole iOS, basically like the best like exemplifies the iOS interface. And that is based
1:24:25on a class in UI kit called UI table view. And this looking at it right now, I'm looking at the
1:24:32general tab of system settings. It's very much that it looks like it could have been transplanted
1:24:40from an iOS device right into my Mac. And it's like the inversion of the center weight thing
1:24:48I'm talking about, because as opposed to on the Mac or traditionally everything sort of like
1:24:55the gravity, so to speak, is at the center of the panel, the gravity in an iOS layout like this
1:25:03is like double gravity at both edges of the screen. Right. And everything about this design is
1:25:12antagonistic to the idea of how you would design it as a traditional Mac interface.
1:25:19And I'm not even saying that you might think people listening might think I'm just slamming
1:25:26on system settings. I'm not even really doing that. I think it actually kind of works in some ways.
1:25:33But it's a big transition from having this like standard for how almost all settings based
1:25:44interfaces on the Mac should behave. Like it really begs the question like, how are all of
1:25:49Apple's own apps going to change how they do their settings? And that, like I said, I want to make a
1:25:55window wider, which is weird, because one of the main criticisms of this system settings changes,
1:26:02you know, unlike on the traditional Mac interface, the label being close to the value is useful
1:26:09because you can associate it with the value more easily. And the wider if Apple let me make this
1:26:15window wider, it would exacerbate the problem of the iOS style table layout, putting the label
1:26:23really far at the left and the value really far at the right. I don't know. It's I want to get I want
1:26:28to say one thing about the system settings before I forget and before in case I don't get a chance
1:26:33to say it. And you mentioned this like in the historically like Apple doesn't have like glaring
1:26:37UI issues in betas. And so you argued that they shouldn't be able to use that as a defense for
1:26:44this. And I'm reminded of that debacle two years ago, maybe with Safari. Remember the Safari tabs?
1:26:51Oh, I remember it well. And it was only one year ago.
1:26:54Oh, it's only one year ago.
1:26:56But we're living in an era.
1:26:58Right time is an illusion. Yeah.
1:27:00Where time is an illusion. It has been a very long year.
1:27:04It has been a long year. Remember that time sunny back when we had Safari tabs? Anyway,
1:27:11that was an example where the elephant in the room sort of became apparent to everybody
1:27:17to the extent that they actually pulled back and they decided not to ship that.
1:27:22Right.
1:27:23And I have been thinking about the system settings thinking,
1:27:26I'm conflicted because I think it's horrible. And you mentioned on your blog post, you mentioned
1:27:34how it was kind of a short blog post you made. You leaned heavily on this tweet thread by Nicky
1:27:42Tonski. Yeah. And that, I mean, that I think that's part of the reason you were able to make
1:27:50your post so short was that you could lean on that. It just says so much, all the things that
1:27:56are wrong with this. All of that said, I don't, I'm conflicted. I think there are some things about
1:28:03the new system settings that are better. But like I said in the blog post, I wrote that I feel like
1:28:09they're just, they're trying to change too much at once. And, but here's the problem. The system
1:28:15settings fixes some real issues in a way that the Safari tabs didn't fix real issues. So I don't
1:28:23think I would be comfortable with them backing out. Like I think this is the kind of, it's kind
1:28:28of like a scenario right now where you might imagine Apple saying, Oh, well we were a little,
1:28:32we jumped the gun a little too quick on the trigger with this. Let's just go back to the
1:28:36old system preferences, let it cook for another year, but they fixed some things in here that
1:28:44I don't want to lose now. And so it's like, they've invested in like, there's this whole
1:28:48thing with login items. Have you noticed this? Like for years we've had like login items only
1:28:56included the items that the user has specifically chosen to launch at login time. So the problem was
1:29:03over time, Apple's discouraged developers from using that mechanism and started encouraging
1:29:09developers to use another mechanism where their stuff runs in the background as like a launch
1:29:14agent or a launch D man or something. And, but there was no user control over that.
1:29:20So now I'm looking at my login items and it has well fast scripts. My own app is up at the top.
1:29:27It's still using the old fashioned mechanism in part because I protest against this,
1:29:34the fact that they didn't expose the new system via system preferences. But now,
1:29:40and right below that there's this allow in the background section that gives users access to
1:29:46enable or disable all of these different apps that are using the newer mechanism.
1:29:50I think it still shows your old fashioned login items too.
1:29:53It does. Yeah, they're both there. So now it's great. If this was,
1:29:56if this was the only thing they changed in system preferences for Ventura, I would be
1:30:03singing its praises. But here's the problem is I don't think, I don't think I want them to back out
1:30:10of this and I don't think they have time to fix all the issues. So I think it's just going to be a
1:30:15slow, I hope it's just going to be a slow fix. Like they'll have to fix this over time, but it's
1:30:22not great. It's not the fact that things are as they stand. This Nicky Tonski tweet thread really
1:30:30exemplifies like how bad so many things are. You know, I think what you were getting at though,
1:30:36with your post that I latched onto was just the idea in general that it seems to be harder for
1:30:42people to make Swift UI stuff look good or to not have like little defects. And that's, there's a
1:30:49little irony in that assessment because one of the big selling points of Swift UI, especially I think
1:30:54for iOS is it empowers you to make things look beautiful, like with very little work and the
1:31:00whole tutorial and the introduction to Swift UI, which I guess is now like two years old. I think
1:31:06we saw it introduced right before the WWDC in person before the pandemic 2019. Yeah,
1:31:14like everything it's aging and it's, but from the beginning it was impressive because it allowed you
1:31:22to make these beautiful iOS interfaces that in contrast to what you and I are saying about the
1:31:28problems on the Mac, it actually kind of cinched up and like prevented certain UI defects. So
1:31:34there's something to, I think some people out there will rightly listen to us saying like
1:31:40Swift UI has all these rough edges and it makes it hard to make a refined Mac app. And they will
1:31:48rightly object to the assessment that Swift UI has that problem. There's something to be said for the
1:31:55idea that if you just declare what your interface should contain, the system can make it look good.
1:32:00And I think it does do that only at a very limited level and far more impressively on iOS than on the
1:32:09Mac. All right. You brought up so much there that it was so wonderful. Let's see if I can come back
1:32:15to everything. All right. Number one, your point about the login items. I love that point. And it
1:32:21is absolutely one of my favorite new things in Ventura and the new system settings is where it
1:32:28lives. Now, the old way for people who don't know the old way that's been in Mac OS 10 and probably
1:32:35was bad thing in next back before then, but you went to the users and groups system preferences
1:32:42panel, which is by name users and groups. And we've had it for so long. And I know I don't want to go
1:32:51on a sidetrack about why the iPad doesn't have multiple users yet, but going back to the early
1:32:56days of Mac OS 10, the ability to have multiple users on one Mac was groundbreaking. And I know
1:33:04that for people who are younger and have just grown up knowing that's possible on the Mac,
1:33:09but that a family could have an account for mom, dad, brother, sister, and all have the
1:33:15four different accounts with all their preferences and their own email. And everybody could use the
1:33:20same app for email, but only your email was in your account was huge for Mac users. Classic Mac
1:33:29didn't have anything like that. I mean, there was some kind of ham-fisted attempt at it in a very
1:33:33late era, but yeah, maybe Mac OS 8 had something, but it doesn't matter what. But anyway,
1:33:38that's what you think users and groups is. That's where you go to make these user accounts. And most
1:33:44Macs in use have one user, the owner of the device, right? But you can create more than one.
1:33:51Even for me with devices that only I use, I always create like a test account with standard
1:33:58preferences. And I delete it once in a while just so I can get like, "Hey, what does a brand new
1:34:03user account on Mac OS look like now?" And it's an account with none of my real data in it,
1:34:08but I can throw it away. That's where you go to manage it, right? And you can create it in users
1:34:12and groups. And groups, I guess people don't use as much anymore. That used to be more of a thing
1:34:18that was in the Unix days. But then there's other things in there and they've always been there,
1:34:21like the login options. Do you have a little thing up at the top in the menu bar that lets you switch
1:34:26users quickly? But then the other thing is when you select a user, there's two tabs. I'm looking
1:34:33at an older version of Mac OS, but there's the password tab, which is the one most people use.
1:34:39But then there's a second tab there, login items. And that's what you were talking about was the
1:34:43only place that was a list of these. This is the label. These items will open automatically when
1:34:50you log in. And you can, if you don't know this, maybe it's the tip of the day, you can put any app
1:34:56you want in there. I don't need to do that because I also have the system-wide setting on where
1:35:01whenever I restart, I just want everything that I left open the last time to reopen again.
1:35:07But that's a new, relatively new feature of the Mac OS. And 20 years ago when it was new,
1:35:13if you always use Mars Edit and you always use BB Edit, every time you log on BB Edit, Mars Edit,
1:35:20Mail, maybe, and Safari, have those four apps open automatically as soon as I log in. You can just
1:35:27drag. How do you add an item? Well, there's a plus button where you can choose one or you could just
1:35:31drag it in. And then if you feel like there was too much stuff happening automatically when you log
1:35:36in, you'd go there and take them out. But it sort of goes back. The other thing that it sort of goes
1:35:41back and you brought up working on very early versions of Mac OS X. One way that the system
1:35:46has evolved tremendously over two decades is that in the early days, everything was sort of an app,
1:35:54right? Even .prefpane files, like the things that like if a third party developer, like I don't
1:36:00think Hazel, which is a great app, is a prefpane anymore because they sort of discourage it.
1:36:06But like when if you were a developer making a third party utility that instead of you'd run from
1:36:12the applications folder, you wanted to be in system preferences. It was really just a different,
1:36:17you have different APIs to call to integrate with system preferences and to answer things that as a
1:36:22pref panel you're expected to answer from system preferences. But it was really just a different
1:36:27project type in Xcode and a different file extension on the bundle instead of a .app,
1:36:31you'd compile and build and compile and you'd get a .prefpane. Everything was sort of an app.
1:36:37And so anything that you might run like circa 2002, 2003, everything that might be in login items was
1:36:46just an app, even if it was just a faceless thing that didn't have a doc icon that ran in the menu
1:36:51bar, right? So, but then Apple evolved the system over the years and made things that could run in
1:36:57the background be very different from an app. And that's where we've run into this problem
1:37:04in recent years where now you can have software that does things automatically and that if the
1:37:09user really wants to use it, should be running in the background. But it's exactly the sort of
1:37:16thing that makes me so passionate. Always going back to the early days of classic Mac, that the
1:37:24Mac let an enthusiast user who wanted to understand how their computer worked, but without
1:37:31being technical, that you could learn how it works and you wouldn't be worried that because your
1:37:36computer was 18 months old that you had all sorts of shit running in the background automatically
1:37:42and that you don't even know what it is. You don't know how to tell what it is. And even if you know
1:37:47what it is, cause it's popping up a dialogue box once in a while and you're like, I didn't launch
1:37:51that. It's clearly launching automatically every time I restart, how do I turn this off? Right?
1:37:57How do I stop this thing from whatever company installed it from running automatically and being
1:38:04able to have that list was great. And now that they've modernized it to account for all the
1:38:09modern ways things can come in the background, it truly exemplifies to me the best of the Mac
1:38:14spirit. Right? And it's very Mac-like specifically, not Apple specifically,
1:38:20because iOS and iPadOS and certainly watchOS and tvOS, to go further down the list of where
1:38:28this would be so bizarre, they don't have the concept of shit running in the background. And
1:38:32that's the whole sandboxing thing in the app store. Like you can be the most enthusiastic
1:38:38user of I'm going to try a new app from the app store every day. I'm just going to pick a random
1:38:42app and install it on my iPhone and do that for three years. You're not going to have any shit
1:38:49running in the background when you restart your phone fresh, because it just isn't part of the
1:38:53OS or the concept. And that's too, it's a whole different podcast episode to talk about whether
1:38:58Apple of all companies should be the one to make a mode for the iPhone or a Mac phone, where there's
1:39:05an enthusiast version of the iPhone where this unbelievably powerful software could let you run
1:39:10things in the background. Right? Because I've run all sorts of stuff in the background on my Mac.
1:39:14And if I could do it on the phone, I would. Right? Like be fantastic if Rogue Amoeba could make
1:39:18sound source for iOS. But the fact that the Mac does allow you to do that, and yes, they've made
1:39:26it harder for security reasons and privacy reasons. You know, that it's more of a hassle
1:39:31than the old days when everything was just an app and anything could be in your login items. But
1:39:35to bring that back where you can inspect what happens automatically from all third-party
1:39:39software, fantastic. Huge win. Can't say enough about it.
1:39:44Jared: It's so good that we can't allow the return to the old system preferences if we lose this.
1:39:52Pete: Where is the new list in Ventura?
1:39:56Jared It's under general. So this is also confusing to me. The whole like stack-based iOS
1:40:02thing. And I totally accept it and agree that the old system preferences were a nightmare as well.
1:40:11Like this, organizationally, there were lots of like, nested like things you'd have to go
1:40:17into like advanced and then...
1:40:18Pete Well, even the login items being in users as groups was sort of counterintuitive. I see
1:40:25what once you understand it, oh, it's per user, so you can see which login items another user has too.
1:40:30It makes some sense. And yeah, I'm searching right now in Mac OS 10.15. I'm running an old version
1:40:37of Mac OS here on this podcast machine. If I search for login, yes, login items shows up,
1:40:42and I hit return and it takes me there. So search at least works now, or as for years. But yeah.
1:40:47Jared You know what, this is another little bug though that really bugged me for years. I can't
1:40:51believe Apple never fixed it. Years and years. If you type too fast in the system preferences,
1:40:56search. Have you ever?
1:40:58Pete Yes.
1:40:58Jared It's so infuriating. It'll like lose a keystroke or something.
1:41:03Pete Yeah, because it's like doing something like running some sort of query after every keystroke,
1:41:08but the query can take longer than...
1:41:10Jared Yeah. So anyway, to give Apple full credit, I'm also very excited that as far as I can tell,
1:41:16in the system settings in Ventura, that is fixed. Finally!
1:41:20Pete That bothered me so much. I thought in my more bored times, I thought of like,
1:41:26figuring out a way to like inject code into system preferences to fix that. But yeah, so in the
1:41:34Ventura system settings, it's under general. And then there's all this good stuff. It looks a lot
1:41:39like iOS, I can see like Craig Federighi's argument about it being an improvement to the organization
1:41:46and being familiar to iOS developers. That all makes sense. General login items, and then it
1:41:52lists open at login, and then below that allow in background, and it's all fairly well laid out. It's
1:41:59just totally different from Mac, typical Mac UI. And I don't know some something about this. I
1:42:07don't think I'm okay with it. But I'll get used to it. It's like, it doesn't seem good. It doesn't
1:42:14seem right. Some of the things about this change seem great. The fact that they have fixed the
1:42:21search field and they have login items, and there's something about the overall cohesiveness of the
1:42:28new system settings that does feel good. And I want to give full credit to Apple for the good
1:42:35work that has gone into this. But the imposition of a very iOS style UI, I don't know if that's
1:42:45where we're going. And in general, in the broader sense, if that's where we're going with Swift UI,
1:42:49I just feel like this is not the right UI for a mouse and desktop monitor computer.
1:42:59Right. I tried to make that point with Molt's last episode that it's a mouse pointer
1:43:09and keyboard computer. We used to call them WIMP interface, Windows icons, mouse pointer.
1:43:16Was that what the P was? I think it was Netflix.
1:43:18But the Mac with the precise pointer can work with a UI seemingly designed for touch in a way
1:43:28that the iPhone inherently designed only for touch with nothing more precise than your
1:43:35fat finger point would not have been good. I don't think it would have been a success,
1:43:39or it certainly wouldn't be the success that it was if they had made some sort of Mac style
1:43:44interface for the original iPhone. That the way they rethought everything really was necessary for
1:43:50the lack of precision in pointing and was also meant for this scrollable interface that responds
1:43:57to your touch right away. Because one of the things, and I'll emphasize this to anybody out
1:44:01there listening, you're bringing up Safari, Mac Safari, as an exemplar of a somewhat complex
1:44:08preferences window that is well laid out because I've been tapping around these tabs in Safari
1:44:16ever since you brought it up. And I'm noticing this and that, and I'm like, "Boy, that is a nice
1:44:22touch." Safari's preferences also though, the current ones right now exemplify the fact though
1:44:27that each of those tabs at the top, general, literally the next one is tabs, autofill,
1:44:33passwords. The contents of each of those tabs easily and naturally fit in a window without
1:44:40any scrolling. Although the window does nicely, it is one of those things that seemed like magic
1:44:45in the early days of Mac OS X. The window automatically resizes because like the autofill
1:44:51preferences are only four check boxes high, right? It's a very short list of preferences. And so the
1:44:57whole window contracts to just fit what's necessary. But then when you go to privacy,
1:45:04it grows a little bit. And then you go to websites and it grows a lot because there's a lot of lists.
1:45:09But it's really thoughtful. I've always said this. I'd say this again, and it's lost and it's a whole
1:45:14nother discussion about Safari versus other web browsers on the Mac and WebKit versus these
1:45:20browsers and what features are in there or whatever. But putting aside the web developers
1:45:25perspective about differences in WebKit versus Chromium and the problems they might encounter
1:45:30where Chromium is much faster to adopt new web standards than WebKit and whether that's political
1:45:37because Apple wants to have people make apps instead of websites, blah, blah, blah.
1:45:41Just put that aside. If you just look at Safari as a whole corner to corner menu bar down,
1:45:48it is a wonderful Mac app. You could teach a whole course, not just like a single lecture, but base a
1:45:54whole course on Mac UI design around Safari and all these details. And the preferences window is
1:45:59one of them. But the preferences window also is really where the difference between Safari and all
1:46:05other browsers today on the Mac, at least the ones from the big companies is exemplified because Chrome
1:46:10and everybody else follows Chrome's lead just makes the preferences content within a web browser.
1:46:17It's completely un-Mac-like. It's just Chrome in its own universe of interface.
1:46:23Jared Ranerelle It's a very junk drawer style of, yeah.
1:46:27Pete L
1:46:27I think it's an interesting contrast with system preferences as a whole for the whole system,
1:46:32where in the early days of Mac OS X, when it really was Mac OS X, I think it's fair to say
1:46:39that every one of those preference panels fit in the model of this one window. And the window,
1:46:46again, in system preferences grows and shrinks as needed, depending on the panel. But the biggest
1:46:50one that was necessary was fit within a window that didn't need to scroll, which was important
1:46:56because the window didn't scroll, right? But then you could put sub views in. And again,
1:47:01it said this last week, Federighi argued it extremely well on stage with me at my talk show
1:47:07back at WWDC, that those things have grown significantly over the years. And there's so much
1:47:14stuff now that is undoubtedly, I would argue, as somebody who loves the old system preferences and
1:47:21sort of feels like maybe they've rushed this change to system settings one year too soon,
1:47:27that the team should have been full steep ahead on exactly what we see. But maybe this was a thing
1:47:32that would have been best announced next year. But I totally, and again, I could sing the praises and
1:47:38lecture and try to make a lecture or a talk at a conference about the things that are little
1:47:43details of UI design that have done so well in the classic system preferences. A lot of it is
1:47:48just horrible at this point because it's trying to do too much, right? You go to security and
1:47:55privacy alone, just security and privacy alone. It could be an app or several apps unto itself,
1:48:03and you're down there within privacy. Now there's four tabs at the part general file vault is simple,
1:48:09right? That's a nice easy tab, but it's already a sub tab in security and privacy. You get to
1:48:15privacy and here's where you're off in crazy land where you've got location services, contacts,
1:48:22calendars, reminders, photos, camera, microphone, speed trick. It goes on and on. Full disk access.
1:48:28And every one of those things, I could name all of them. Every one of those themes seems like a
1:48:34reasonable thing that Apple should have in the privacy settings for the Mac OS. But boy, that's
1:48:40a lot to cram into a list inside a tab, inside a prep pane. And then some of those or many of them
1:48:49themselves, once you select them, have their own view over to the side of the apps that have those
1:48:54privileges like location services access, right? It is a lot to cram in there. And as a diehard
1:49:02Mac user who prides myself on paying attention to this stuff, even I forget where the hell the
1:49:08preference for something something is. So I think it's a win. I haven't forgotten your other very
1:49:12keen point, your ambivalence about what Apple should do. Specifically, this tabs controversy
1:49:18with Safari last year, which is, I can't talk about it without naming myself as an actor.
1:49:30I am. I wrote about it extensively. And honestly, I did not try to trash it. I didn't take any,
1:49:38but I felt like I had much to say. I felt like I was right. And I said it. And as close as I can
1:49:46come to say, I'm not saying that I will not say that I, John Gruber, deserve credit for Safari's
1:49:53tabs being scrapped. But I can say that my public arguments against it were highly influential
1:50:03within Apple at taking the unusual step of just scrapping what was a featured big change from the
1:50:13OS that year. And there, especially in the last two weeks since this has come out, I've had people,
1:50:19reader and listener feedback along the lines of, I've been waiting for you to say more
1:50:24about system settings. And I hope you do to system settings what you did for Safari tabs last year.
1:50:30And I, because I feel so much more like you. I don't feel, it's similar in that there are
1:50:38things that are clearly wrong, that they're clearly intending to ship. But I don't feel as strong,
1:50:44like I was certain, I was dead certain last year. I didn't know if what I could write would change
1:50:49things, but it felt like I was right that I should at least publicly put it out when I had time to
1:50:54give Apple time to consider it and change their mind. I don't feel that way about system settings.
1:51:00Again, I think you said it very well, that there are so many good things about it, right?
1:51:05But exactly as it is, it is.
1:51:09It's sort of, I think that's where it gets at. It's not about system settings. It's about this
1:51:15underlying, how much do you force the familiarity and conventions of iOS UI design on the Mac in
1:51:24general? Like who cares system settings, even though I said like, I considered hacking the
1:51:31app to fix the search field. I don't use system settings as much as Safari. So like the tabs issue
1:51:39in Safari could have been much more impactful on my day-to-day enjoyment of my Mac, right?
1:51:46And so system settings, I mean, like also, like we've said, we both agree the old system
1:51:54preferences is not, it's not like this wonderful, perfect thing.
1:52:00Or it's not the wonderful, nearly perfect thing at once was. It really was wonderful. And perfect is
1:52:06a hard word to bite, especially for perfection. And someone like you loves hunting bugs. But it
1:52:12was pretty close to the best imaginable system settings thing. It was a lot of stuff that was
1:52:18organized at the time pretty well. It's not that it's aged poorly. It's just that the complexity
1:52:23of the system and the things that are now considered important. I mean, full disk access,
1:52:27that's, that's, that would, everything that ran on your system had full disk access, or at least
1:52:33there were full disk access to your user account. There's so much stuff that just wasn't an issue
1:52:39then. And it's outgrown it. I don't want to leave the topic, but I do want to take a break here and
1:52:42thank our third and final sponsor today. And it fits right in with the idea of tools that
1:52:46make development of software easier. It's our friends at Revenue Cat. In-app subscriptions are
1:52:53a pain. The code can be hard to write, time consuming to maintain, and full of edge cases.
1:52:59I have never made an app with in-app subscriptions, but I have many friends who have.
1:53:06And I can say for a fact that I don't know a single one of them that thinks that right out
1:53:10of the box in-app subscriptions are easy in any way possible. Revenue Cat makes it simple so that
1:53:18you as the developer can focus on building features, not in-app purchase infrastructure.
1:53:25With Revenue Cat, you also get out of the box subscription metrics and charts that you can't
1:53:29get from App Store Connect. Plus pre-built integrations and web hooks make it easy to
1:53:35sync customer events and revenue data to every tool in your stack. Here's where you go to find
1:53:43out more. RevenueCat.com. No special URL. Just learn more at RevenueCat.com and see why thousands
1:53:51of the world's best apps trust Revenue Cat to power subscriptions on iOS, Android, and the web.
1:53:58RevenueCat.com. My thanks to them for sponsoring the show. They're also sponsoring Daring Fireball
1:54:04this week. It's a nice rare twofer that generally I think only happens by coincidence, but it's nice
1:54:11when it happens. Three sponsors and I am a customer slash patron whatever of all three.
1:54:20So I guess I'm on the right show. Linode, Revenue Cat, what was the second one?
1:54:25Memberful. Memberful, right. I use all these products. So hey, good sponsors.
1:54:32I often tell sponsors it's the ground troops who encourage their company if they work at a larger
1:54:38company. Maybe you should sponsor Daring Fireball or the talk show. And at a company where there's
1:54:45a dedicated marketing team, they may not be familiar with me or my work, but it can sometimes
1:54:50be hard to explain, especially like my sponsorships because they don't work like most web ads at all.
1:54:56And in fact, as time has gone on, they're less and less like most web ads. And then I haven't
1:55:01been running any analytics on Daring Fireball for I think a year and a half, something like that.
1:55:07And that sometimes doesn't seem like not only have they never heard that, but that it doesn't
1:55:15seem to make any sense to them. But when they ask questions about the audience, I say, "I don't have
1:55:20analytics and I don't do polls." I never say never, maybe I'll do a reader poll someday.
1:55:26But my best description of who's a successful sponsor of my site is to look at my archived list
1:55:32of sponsors and especially the list of repeat sponsors who clearly were happy with the results
1:55:37that they got. But that in terms of my audience, it's not, is it designers? Is it programmers? Is
1:55:42it tech people? And I say it's all of the above. And really the best way I can encapsulate it is
1:55:48people with good taste. Yeah. Yeah. We have a similar problem on core intuition. It's just like,
1:55:54we don't do any work to try to make ourselves marketable. It's just if you want to reach our
1:56:00people, whoever they are, then let us know. We'll throw out another shout out to core
1:56:05intuition at the end. Let me say this before we sign off. I want to talk about, because I
1:56:10sort of threw Swift UI under the bus in my, more so than I threw the new system settings itself
1:56:18under the bus. One thing that I think is fair to say is you could pretty much do any interface you
1:56:24want in AppKit. I think that's part of the appeal and the basic idea. You may have to start
1:56:29customizing at a certain level, right? And at some level, every good app has something in it that's
1:56:33custom because if it was really just all built into AppKit, you just got text editor preview,
1:56:39which they actually preview is more than just standard AppKit, I guess. But you could. So you
1:56:43could have used AppKit to make an iOS style, iPadOS style redesign of settings. I guess you
1:56:52could have also definitely, it might've even been easier if the one of the stated goals is to make
1:56:56it iOS like in its layout and appearance for reasons scrollability being a big one. That's
1:57:04one of the key points really is that makes this idea better than every thing fitting into views
1:57:10within sub views in a fixed size window that you could have used UI kit to now with catalysts.
1:57:17They certainly did a fantastic job. I always bring it up with messages, right? I'm sure
1:57:22everybody who isn't a nerd has no idea that two years ago or three years ago, I don't know how
1:57:28many years ago that one was, but that Apple didn't throw out, but more or less redid the Mac messages
1:57:36app as a catalyst port from the messages app on iPad and iPhone. And it has everything you could
1:57:43have wanted, including Apple script support, which I really thought like, oh, I don't use Apple
1:57:47script and messages very often, but when I do, it's really nice to have, and there's no way that's
1:57:52going to make it because that's not part of UI kit and it's there. They really knocked it out.
1:57:55I think if they had done a settings redesign that the way that this new Ventura settings
1:58:00is supposed to look like, if we ignore all of the glitches and layout things,
1:58:04you can sort of see what it's supposed to look like. If they were using UI kit or app kit,
1:58:09these glitches would not be there. I really believe that's true. And because they've never
1:58:14been there before, right? Like when they totally redesigned iOS seven, when it went from the old
1:58:20likable 3d textured interface to the Scott forestalls gone, Johnny I've in charge of UI now
1:58:28more consistent across apps, throw out the textures. We don't need buttons that look 3d.
1:58:33They can just be text labels. Look of iOS seven. There were lots of problems in the iOS seven beta
1:58:40because it was all new and it was all surprisingly fast. You can look back at the date when they
1:58:45announced that forestall was being forced out of the company and that the UI design team would now
1:58:51report to Johnny I've, but that's effectively when the iOS seven look and feel project started.
1:58:56And here it was in June, like seven months later or eight months, something like that. Not a lot
1:59:02of time for a project like that. There were lots of things that were glitches, lots of things they
1:59:06sort of, okay, now that it's in public, remember the male in particular used a very thin weight
1:59:11of Helvetica for lots of stuff that maybe looked elegant in screenshots, but was actually hard to
1:59:18read. It was such a thin weight and they just bumped it back up to a regular weight of Helvetica,
1:59:23but there all the things that were wrong in the beta because so much had happened in a short
1:59:27period of time. None of them were these egregious, just bizarro things like buttons that are half cut
1:59:34off. Yeah, it took me a while, even living full time on Ventura. It took me a while to notice
1:59:40that another like really problematic change in the system is the print panel. I don't know if
1:59:47you noticed this, I made a tweet about it. Basically the print panel is also completely
1:59:55transformed into this iOS scrollable table view style. And again, it's a good example where
2:00:03the print panel has so many problems. It's easy to imagine why somebody was excited to
2:00:09tackle this and try to make it better. And it is better in some ways, but it's just specifically
2:00:16when you talk about the cutoff thing, like I don't know why they are affecting, I guess this is Swift
2:00:22UI, I'm assuming, I don't know for sure. I don't know, but the system settings, I think you maybe
2:00:29confirmed it or close to confirm that it is Swift UI. Or at least parts of it, right? Yeah. And it's,
2:00:35I know a lot of this stuff, you can make it mostly Swift UI and call out to app or UI kit when you
2:00:40need to, or app kit or whatever, you know, that it's not, there is no such thing. And there's no
2:00:46need to be a religious dogmatic purist that it's all Swift UI no matter what. But Swift UI is
2:00:54definitely involved. Yeah. So I don't know. It's weird. Cause like I said earlier, in many ways,
2:00:59at least on iOS, I think Swift UI has sealed up the rough edges so that it's harder to make things
2:01:06look inadvertently wrong. I don't have enough experience myself using Swift UI to know
2:01:13what the people who are developing this stuff in Swift UI are running up against the, what makes it
2:01:19unpredictable in this way. Looking now I'm looking at my Mac at the print panel and there's just a
2:01:25lot of, well, a computer decided how to lay this out and not a person. And there's something
2:01:32wonderful about that. Like the web, the basic fact that like multiple paragraphs on a webpage can flow
2:01:41across a page without any human designing that. It works really well. So there's something to be said
2:01:49for declarative design where like standards can be applied to make it look right all the time.
2:01:56And I guess there's just this rough edge between what can be made to look right all the time
2:02:04and what needs a human eye to finesse it. And some of this Swift UI stuff on the Mac, at least
2:02:11either it needs better programmatic rules at the Apple end, or it needs to allow more developer
2:02:20interaction with making it look perfect. I thought you made such a keen point. I really liked it. And
2:02:25it was really, it was like, I read your post on bitsplitting.org and I just, I thought I got to
2:02:34have Jalkyd on to talk about this. And you were riffing off my post about this and you have a
2:02:38screenshot in there, but you brought up the story that I've told a few times. I can, I've talked to
2:02:42people firsthand. I don't think it's public knowledge, but we do know that the M1 original
2:02:48Macs, the MacBook Air and the 13 inch MacBook Pro and the Mac mini that were announced when the
2:02:55first Apple Silicon Macs in November of 2020, that they were form factor identical to the
2:03:02last generation Intel versions of all three. And that you'd have to look at like the actual serial
2:03:07numbers to be able or product numbers underneath the little small print to tell whether a MacBook
2:03:13was a MacBook Air was an Intel one from earlier in 2020 or the late 2020 that was shifted to Apple
2:03:21Silicon. And that this was a deliberate strategy. This is what I can say from multiple sources at
2:03:28Apple, but they planned that out years in advance to get the last generation Intel ones to a point
2:03:33that they'd be good enough to use as the first generation of Apple Silicon for multiple strategic
2:03:40reasons. They wanted it to be secret from the supply chain so that if anything did go wrong,
2:03:45that they didn't want Intel to know until as late as possible because it's strategy, right? That's
2:03:51the way you work with a company that's part partner, part adversary with negotiating.
2:03:56But then also, and engineering wise, let's get them to a point where we change as little as
2:04:03possible because transplanting the entire architecture is a big deal. It might sound
2:04:11like a big deal to the lay person out there listening and trust me, as expert as I am,
2:04:16I can say it's a big deal. And I think you would agree. And somebody who's even more expert,
2:04:20like people who actually work on Johnny Suruji's team at Apple at a high level would say, "Oh yeah,
2:04:25you have no idea. It was incredibly complex." So change as little as possible, right? So that
2:04:31nothing would go wrong. And I think this, I don't know for a fact, but I think it's part of the
2:04:36reason that they fixed the keyboards to the new no longer using butterfly switches things, I think
2:04:43in 2019, that was, maybe it was 2018 at the latest, but you know, it was in the last year or so of
2:04:50Apple's Intel MacBooks. But let's fix this freaking keyboard now so that we can have it in the wild.
2:04:57And then when we go to Apple Silicon, the keyboard is off our list of things that we know we have to
2:05:02look at. And part of it too is that the whole keyboard situation had gone on for years at
2:05:06that time anyway. But you brought up that they could have done something similar, right? If
2:05:11you're going to make a big change, try to change as few things as possible. Only change one thing.
2:05:16Don't even change the display or the webcam or the speakers or the keyboard or the size of the case.
2:05:21Let's just change from Intel to Apple Silicon. And that's enough change for an entire product generation.
2:05:27And if we pull it off, that'll be great. And then we'll make new MacBook Airs a year later that have
2:05:32an all new design from the ground up meant for Apple Silicon, which we just saw a couple months
2:05:37ago. Couldn't they have done that with Swift UI? And if they're going to switch to Swift UI as a
2:05:42truly foundational change to how system preferences is made, couldn't they have tried to make it look
2:05:48exactly like system preferences we know and change just that one thing. And then once you know Swift
2:05:55UI is capable of building something like that, then you know it's ready to make a new UI with it.
2:06:02Jared: That's really interesting that you connected that strongly to the system
2:06:07settings because I, in my own mind, I didn't even think about it in that specific way. I thought
2:06:13about it in the broader, more general sense of like, Swift UI as a technology, make it
2:06:22replicate the cocoa, the app kit and the UI kit controls and the behavior of all of them. Exactly.
2:06:31So, it's a little bit of a different angle what you're extrapolating. But I, yeah, I think
2:06:37it's, I think I said in the piece, it's like it would have been less exciting, but it would have
2:06:41been better ultimately if, you know, I do this all the time in my own work. I'm currently working on
2:06:49Mars Edit, the next major version of Mars Edit, and I'm working on the syntax highlighting and
2:06:54I am dramatically changing the infrastructure of the syntax highlighting. And the temptation
2:07:01is there to add new features and to dramatically enhance the way syntax highlighting works.
2:07:08And my boring ambition is first and foremost to get it to work exactly the same
2:07:14as the previous version. And I'm not going to hold myself up as somebody who always makes the
2:07:20right choice technologically or business wise or anything. But as soon as I saw your piece
2:07:26about Swift UI, it sort of unlocked this feeling I've had about Swift UI over the past few years.
2:07:33I mean, I started off like everybody else. I think I was just so excited about it. I was like,
2:07:37this is neat. This looks fun. It looks exciting. It's fun to program. And to your point, you made
2:07:43a point a few minutes ago about like with AppKit, you could customize any aspect of the UI. I think
2:07:49you can do the same with Swift UI. I'm not experienced with it myself, but I think if you
2:07:54want to like rebuild the earth from the ground up with Swift UI, I think you can do that as a
2:08:00developer. The things people complain about and are rightfully annoyed by are the ways in which
2:08:07Swift UI offers you the promise of a certain system standard behavior and then doesn't follow
2:08:14through on it. So you say like, I want a table, I want a list, or I want a text view, or I want to
2:08:20control with a label and a value, and you get 90% of it maybe, but you don't get 100%.
2:08:28And I think it is such a major transition that if they had said similarly with the M1, if they had
2:08:38said, hey, developers, here's the deal, Swift UI is here. The bad news is you're not going to get any
2:08:44new functionality. The good news is it's going to be like easier to write bulletproof UI code that
2:08:52works exactly as you expect. An alternate basically one of the one of the like vectors of the change
2:08:57of Swift UI is that it is essentially a replacement for Interface Builder. Like if you're developing a
2:09:04Swift UI app, you don't use Interface Builder. So just coming from that point of view and saying,
2:09:10hey, developers, we're going to give you an all new way to develop UI that is like Interface Builder,
2:09:18except for you write it all out in code. And I think people would have been excited by that.
2:09:23I mean, I'm sure there would be debates about which is better, but it would have been like,
2:09:27oh, okay, well, I can either lay all my radio buttons and checkboxes and labels out in Interface
2:09:34Builder, or I can specify them with Swift UI in this data driven mechanism, but they still look
2:09:40the same in the end. But what's the story then for somebody who like the prototypical designer
2:09:46who doesn't code producing something for production using Swift UI? I don't think it's good. It's a
2:09:54good question. I don't think it's good. I don't think there is a story for them. I mean, it's…
2:10:00You can imagine an interface style visual tool that looks visual and allows a visually oriented
2:10:06designer to do something. And then when you hit save, it's saving Swift UI. I mean, in theory,
2:10:15but that tool doesn't exist. I think that, again, I have to concede, I don't have a lot of experience
2:10:22with Swift UI. I played with it around the introduction and every once in a while I get
2:10:27back into trying it. But I think the interface for working the Swift UI previews in Xcode,
2:10:35I know they allow a certain amount of editing in the preview that then maps back into the Swift UI
2:10:42source code. But it's very integrated with the source code in a way that I don't know. I don't
2:10:49know how much you could like hand Xcode to a designer and say, just mess around with this
2:10:54in the UI in the preview and we'll take care of it from there. I hope that's something that's high on
2:11:02Apple's list for the future and we just haven't heard about it yet. And if not, I find that very
2:11:07sad and disappointing. Like you even said, like when you left Apple and started making apps on
2:11:12your own that using Interface Builder was something that you found fun, right? It's a way of thinking
2:11:17about UI that even if you could do it all in code, doing it visually appeals to a part of your brain
2:11:23and in some ways is faster and easier and easier to know exactly that it's going to be right.
2:11:28This has been such a great episode and I've actually changed my mind a bit just by talking
2:11:34to you that I think I've come around to, no, I'm just going to say fully on board, but mostly on
2:11:39board with Apple forging ahead and shipping this and hopefully fixing as much as they can as
2:11:44frequently as they can to make it better. And that I guess it was if the bigger impetus was that
2:11:50they're going to do a big rewrite and they want to use Swift UI for it, it would have been a waste of
2:11:54time to recreate the old interface if they wanted to do a new interface too. Yeah. You know, like,
2:12:02I guess the way to do it would have been to do an app kit/UI kit rewrite that implements the new
2:12:10interface and then start re-implementing it in Swift UI with going forward. But again, I can see
2:12:18that I don't have to have Craig Federighi back on the show to hear how, well, isn't that a waste of
2:12:24time too? If the goal, the twofold goal was we want a visual redesign where it's laid out and
2:12:29looks more like iPadOS and iOS. And internally, developer-wise, we're so committed and think Swift
2:12:35UI, we're so convinced ourselves that Swift UI is the future that the sooner we switch to it,
2:12:40the better. The long future that still remains unbelievably ahead of the Mac, right? That wasn't
2:12:46finished in 2002. So I get it, but it is ambitious. And I know that's one of the things that I keep
2:12:54coming back to that I wonder how many people listening and reading. This is very ambitious.
2:13:00And I know it must seem maybe to a layperson that the system settings app is kind of boring,
2:13:05and it's just a bunch of checkboxes and radio buttons and pop-ups. But doing that well is
2:13:11intricate work. So it's no surprise to me that since early June, when they first showed this to
2:13:19us to now nearing the end of August, that there hasn't been that much progress. And there's
2:13:26definitely been some, right? There's a lot of things that look better than the first developer
2:13:30build from June. I mean, it's definitely moving in the right direction.
2:13:34Jared Ranerelle>> Yeah, but at the end of the day, we're going to have this
2:13:37iOS-style UI. Even if it's perfect, it's going to be a completely different style of UI than
2:13:45everything else on the Mac. And getting back to what I was saying and what you agreed with, that
2:13:49Safari's, for instance, Safari's preferences is exemplary in just kind of showing how to make a
2:13:57Mac preference panel. Pete Lienberg
2:13:59But that would be a good thing to say, "Let's rewrite the Safari preferences in SwiftUI
2:14:03and make it exactly the same." Jared Ranerelle>> Exactly. Well, but
2:14:07that's where I get back to this idea that they're changing too many things at once,
2:14:11because they're changing not only how things are laid out, but you said system preferences is
2:14:17boring. It's a bunch of check boxes and radio buttons, but there actually aren't any check
2:14:23boxes or radio buttons in the new iOS style. I mean, there's some. There's some radio buttons.
2:14:28But I'm looking right now on my Mac, again, I'm running the Ventura Beta, and I'm looking at Apple
2:14:36system preferences and then side by side with the Safari preferences. And then in the Finder,
2:14:43like if there's a second settings on the Mac that is as widespread, is globally known and should be
2:14:53like a standard look and feel, it would be the Finder settings. And you open up the Finder
2:14:58settings and they're all classic toolbar based with check boxes. And it's the old AppKit style.
2:15:09And so I'm just frustrated. It's been a lot of years now that there's been a lot of split
2:15:16personality in Apple's software. There's been a lot of, "How do you make Mac software? How do
2:15:22you make?" I mean, it's a little more obvious how to make iOS software, I think, but I'm tired of
2:15:29years and years go by. And it got especially bad when it was like, to make a Mac app, you can
2:15:37either make a Mac app or you can make a Swift UI app or you can make a Catalyst app. And they all
2:15:42look different and they all behave differently. And now even at the system level, we're seeing
2:15:48the same thing. It's just not cohesive. And for a company that's so design centered as Apple is,
2:15:56to be looking right now as I am at the system settings app next to Safari settings,
2:16:03next to Finder settings, and they don't look like they belong on the same system. And I don't know
2:16:10if that means like Finder and Safari just need to catch up to where Apple's going with system
2:16:17settings, or if this is all going to work itself out and there'll be some compromised UI that
2:16:25everything adopts. But right now it's not great. You know, and I'll go back to the iOS 7 comparison
2:16:31where they redesigned the whole look of the operating system and obviously third party apps
2:16:35aside, but if you just had a fresh iPhone and a fresh installation of iOS 7, everything was
2:16:41redesigned for the new look. It wasn't like, "Okay, we've done this new thing. We've got a new look for
2:16:47iOS 7." And you can see it in Mail, Safari, and Settings. But the calendar and the Notes app still
2:16:55look like the skeuomorphic leather at the top and ripped paper. And that would have been bizarre.
2:17:02And I think this is bizarre, but the Mac being the Mac and then being so much broader, it makes
2:17:09it seem less bizarre. And again, it would be worse. It's clearly with all the problems that still
2:17:14remain in system settings. The last thing I'm going to do is say they should have done this for
2:17:18the settings and preferences window in every single app that Apple ships in the system.
2:17:22But I guess to close out, to just go back to the term "dogfooding," right? And I know that
2:17:27sounds gross, but there's no better term for it, but that the company making a thing should
2:17:31use their own shit to do it. Steve Jobs emphasized that all the time about cocoa,
2:17:38even when the App Store and the software developer kit launched a year after the original iPhone. The
2:17:43third-party developers get to use the same frameworks and tools and Xcode as Apple itself.
2:17:48The same things Apple used to make iOS 1.0, anybody else can use to make their software.
2:17:54And that was the big problem in hindsight with the original watch kit for the Apple Watch,
2:18:00where third-party developers had an entirely different set of APIs than what Apple used to
2:18:05make the original watchOS system. And the reason why was simply because the watch hardware was
2:18:13so underpowered and limiting third-party apps so that they couldn't run in the background and
2:18:17couldn't even use the CPU. It was necessary for battery life, but I think in hindsight,
2:18:22what they should have done is just not have third-party apps for the first year like they
2:18:26did with the iPhone. But the fact that the thing for third-party developers wasn't the thing that
2:18:31Apple itself internally used to make the things that were great about even the original Apple
2:18:36Watch, it just sort of proved that dogfooding is an important concept. It really is important for
2:18:41Apple to be using the things that they're saying that third-party developers should use.
2:18:47If the idea is that system settings is the first really big project for the Mac,
2:18:53or we're going to make an important app, I mean, literally that everybody has to use at some point,
2:18:57and when you do need to use it, it's often for something very important that you don't want to
2:19:02futz around with. If they can make a great system settings app with SwiftUI, then that's a great
2:19:10testing ground, and it is a great proof of concept that if as much as possible was written in SwiftUI
2:19:17and the fit and finish is to Apple's highest standards, even if you disagree, you know,
2:19:23you don't like the actual style of the iOS style on the Mac, that's a subjective argument.
2:19:29At least you can say, "Well, if you're going to go that way, this looks perfect. It looks perfect
2:19:35from the top corner to the bottom corner. Everything does look deliberate, and whether
2:19:40I like this style or not or think this style is appropriate for the Mac, at least if somebody
2:19:46does think this is the right way to do it, this is an extremely well-done fit and finish version
2:19:52of that idea." SwiftUI should be able to do that. If SwiftUI is going to be used in the future to
2:19:58make everything, as they're saying, that's the future, then at least being able to do system
2:20:03settings is a fantastic stepping stone along the way. And I guess that's sort of the thinking?
2:20:10Yeah. Well, I guess there's so much in system settings that it was such a monumental undertaking.
2:20:16Everything in system settings had to be redesigned to work with this. And I guess it sort of makes me
2:20:21wonder, if it's so comprehensive, and like you said, it is ambitious, maybe they should have
2:20:28included all of the other Apple apps in that, and had the Finder settings and the Safari settings
2:20:34and everything make the same transition at the same time. But it's sort of telling that they
2:20:39didn't. I don't know. At the same time, it's like really ambitious and an amazing amount of work
2:20:45just to get system settings going with this. And I can understand how maybe it would have been too
2:20:51much to try to do everything else at the same time. The standard shouldn't be... There should
2:20:56be no internal, "Well, but this is a new thing, so if our standards are a little lower on fit
2:21:02and finish, that's fine." That should never happen, right? And it's like, I say this all the time,
2:21:08but the fact that I say it all the time means that I do actually say it all the time, which is that
2:21:12I'm reluctant to play the "If Steve Jobs were still around" card. But I do try to be very
2:21:17reluctant about playing that card. But if you had to demo this new system settings, as it stands
2:21:24today in the current beta of Ventura, to Steve Jobs, and he doesn't personally give a shit about
2:21:29the comp sci reasons that Swift UI and declarative UI is actually a great idea and is the foundation
2:21:38of this going, all he wants is a great-looking system settings app that he can understand
2:21:43and that he thinks looks up to his quality. If you demoed this to him today and you had all those
2:21:48bugs that Nicky Tonski picks out in that Twitter thing, it's impossible to imagine that he wouldn't
2:21:53erupt. And so there is that sort of my concern behind the scenes is who's that person in Apple
2:22:02whose standard is so high that you don't have to erupt, I guess. There's all sorts of ways to
2:22:08enforce a good standard. But that one way or the other, if this is what you're demoing and you see
2:22:15that this meeting is going to go with the person looking through every single panel and poking at
2:22:21everything in there, and they're going to see all the bugs you know about in the layout issues,
2:22:26that you know they're going to say this is completely unacceptable.
2:22:30Why are you showing this to me? That's how high the standard should be.
2:22:33Well, Jon, I've been looking passively here at my Mac. I want to leave people on a little upbeat.
2:22:43All right. That's music to my ears.
2:22:46So if you want to feel good about system settings, just go into mail.app and look at the mail
2:22:54preferences. As much as we hailed Safari for having beautiful, exemplary Mac preferences,
2:23:04something has been wrong with mail preferences forever. For instance, the print settings
2:23:11are now changed to this new format, but Finder, Safari, etc., are not changed.
2:23:18I kind of wondered, is mail—I haven't looked at mail in a while—has mail changed? And no,
2:23:24mail is the same. And it's not good. It's really not good.
2:23:30I like and use Apple Mail, but I've thought ever since I've been using it that its preferences are—
2:23:38Its preferences are weirdly bad. And that whole center gravity thing I was talking about earlier,
2:23:44if you just click through the tabs on mail, there's no consideration of that strategy.
2:23:53Again, there's a whole tab. There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven tabs. One of them
2:24:02is called Fonts and Colors, but a lot of the font settings are over in composing and viewing.
2:24:11It's a very weird, it's a very strange thing. It's slightly better. At one point, I remember,
2:24:16at one point they introduced some new feature. I think when they changed to the three-pane layout,
2:24:25right now, at one point, in distant memory, they had the list of mail messages up top and then the
2:24:33content below. And they switched to this new layout. And I remember at one point, they just
2:24:38select all and then write on the preferences and then put a checkbox above it. I don't know.
2:24:46It's just a mess. I don't understand it. Sorry, mail team. I know you're doing your best work, but
2:24:53perhaps the biggest contribution you're making right now is to make system settings on
2:24:59Ventura look inspired. Maybe mail should have been ground zero for the SwiftUI iOS style.
2:25:08Well, speaking of good work, let me thank you for your good work. I use your software every day,
2:25:14FastScripts and Mars Edit. You've also got Black Ink, your crossword app. What else do we want to
2:25:20promote? Oh, that's probably good for my apps. Those are the main things.
2:25:25People can get those at redsweater.com.
2:25:27It's commerce, baby. It's now commerce.
2:25:34Well, it used to be red-sweater for about 20 years. It was red-sweater. And then I finally
2:25:42managed to acquire red-sweater without the hyphen. And one of my favorite things now is just saying
2:25:48redsweater.com without having to either say red-sweater when I mean hyphen, or you just
2:25:55don't want to clarify. You don't want to have to clarify it at all. And so redsweater.com,
2:26:00the same way you would spell the color and the thing that in America, at least,
2:26:04we wear to warm up on a brisk fall evening.
2:26:10Maybe in the same way that Jason Snow has registered six colors with the U,
2:26:16perhaps you should register redjumper.com.
2:26:19I should. And I'm going to look at that and it's going to be, yeah, oh, this domain is for sale.
2:26:23$3,295.
2:26:25And then when you contact them, you're like, screw it, I'm spending $3,000 on this domain.
2:26:31And the guy is like, I've been waiting for you.
2:26:33Well, ultimately, I ended up, it was years and years and years of trying to get redsweater.com.
2:26:41And ultimately, I will say I paid a good amount of money for it, but it was less than $3,295.
2:26:48I think I paid $2,000 for it, which is not too bad for a custom domain. But the investment wasn't the
2:26:56money. It was the years and years of trying to get one person who owned it that whole time to give me
2:27:02the time of day. And they finally did. And they finally sold it to me. So it's a happy time.
2:27:37[Laughter]
2:27:44Although I suppose Gruber Motor Company doesn't work as GMC either.
2:27:48[Laughter]
2:27:49Oh, right. No, it certainly does not.
2:27:51Sort of. Sort of take it. So I'll have to come out with something. It's probably the
2:27:56Daring Fireball Motor Company.
2:27:58The Daring Fireball. Everyone wants to drive a car called the Daring Fireball.
2:28:02Yeah. Now that one's out too. Son of a bitch.
2:28:05Don't worry about it. We got safety under control.
2:28:09I will post a link, I promise. I know I always promise this to your post on titled Disciplined
2:28:16Innovation about this that we've referenced throughout the show at bitsplitting.org,
2:28:22which is your blog. And we also mentioned Core Intuition, the show that we do with our mutual
2:28:26good friend, Manton Rees, which is at…
2:28:29Yes. Coreint.org. C-O-R-E-I-N-T.org.
2:28:35Right. And if you guys mostly, largely talk about developers stuff.
2:28:39Yeah. Well, it's funny. We try to frame it like we talk about indie business challenges. We don't
2:28:46really talk about developing. And that's why I try to emphasize to people because we never talk
2:28:51about programming really. We just talk about what it's like to be in the Apple ecosystem as an indie
2:28:58developer. So it can be fun. Just to say, when you're talking about, "Oh, what is your audience?
2:29:06Are they designers? Are they developers?" We have product managers. Everybody wants to listen to this
2:29:14show because it's not about development per se. It's about getting by in an Apple world, I guess,
2:29:19is a good way to summarize it. That is, as a listener, I can say that is an excellent
2:29:23way to summarize it. Your self-awareness remains astute. I thank you so much, Daniel, for your time.
2:29:30You are my friend and I appreciate that very much. I will also throw out a thanks to our three
2:29:36sponsors of this show again. Linode, where you can host your website. Memberful, where you can
2:29:41monetize your passion with membership. And Revenue Cat, you can make in-app purchases and subscriptions
2:29:49easy. All of these products are endorsed by your guest again. You gotta love it when that works
2:29:57out. No cheating. There's no fudging on the schedule, I swear. I didn't even know. No, no.
2:30:02Well, thank you Daniel. Thank you so much for having me.