PodSearch

ATP

11: A Particularly Exuberant Adolescence

 

00:00:00   Yeah retweet everything and then let's get going so nobody gets bored and leaves. I think we already lost that battle

00:00:05   So, what are we talking about this week, so what are we talking about? Well, this was a big week and

00:00:12   first and foremost

00:00:15   WWDC tickets happened they did that was

00:00:18   Interesting. It was nothing like we predicted at all. We were completely wrong

00:00:23   right because I I

00:00:26   know

00:00:28   But I don't remember what I said. What did I say last time? I think I said that I thought I would get a ticket

00:00:32   I did so I

00:00:33   Was right

00:00:35   Well, how about that?

00:00:37   You know, I don't know. I just I saw it going very differently in my head

00:00:42   I mean, I knew it would be quick

00:00:44   But I think I saw someone who kind of someone who had the source that cannot be named that said it was 71 seconds

00:00:52   yeah, they said like it was like somebody I guess had dinner with somebody who would know and

00:00:57   And they said it was something like that. Yeah, that seems reasonable to me

00:01:01   I mean based on what I saw that that seems right and that's just that's insane

00:01:05   So my question are two questions really to you guys our two-part question is one as

00:01:11   It has has been talked about in our little circle of life ad nauseum

00:01:15   Is this sustainable and two does Apple give a crap anyway?

00:01:19   So Marco, I'm sorry

00:01:23   I mean, that whole line of reasoning doesn't make any sense to me, where if people are

00:01:30   angry about how things went, they decide that it has to be some kind of neglect or malicious

00:01:36   neglect on the part of the personified entity that is this company that somehow they don't

00:01:40   care. They care.

00:01:44   I think it's… Almost everyone who has a blog and likes Apple stuff in the last week

00:01:50   has written something about WWDC and ideas on either how it could be fixed, whether it

00:01:56   needs to be fixed, or what this means in the universe.

00:02:00   My position is basically that, basically agreeing with Jon, and Jon you wrote this great thing

00:02:05   about the lottery, how it basically is, it has become a de facto lottery, even though

00:02:12   it technically isn't one, because even if you were there in the very first minute, it

00:02:18   was pretty random whether or not you got a ticket,

00:02:20   because there were so many server errors,

00:02:21   as everybody slammed the server even

00:02:23   from the very first few seconds.

00:02:25   So it is a lottery now.

00:02:28   And this is kind of-- isn't that the same way

00:02:31   that Google I/O goes generally?

00:02:34   There was something where--

00:02:35   I never tried to get a ticket, but it goes fast.

00:02:37   Yeah, I think it's similar in that it's basically random.

00:02:40   Like whoever gets-- like the first 5,000 database connections

00:02:43   get it, basically.

00:02:44   So there's something like that.

00:02:46   There's no point in that, because if there's

00:02:47   There's nothing you can do to increase your odds than it is a lottery.

00:02:52   I mean, you could say, "Well, there's something you can do to make sure that you have non-zero

00:02:57   odds," but you can't do anything to increase them because it's just the luck of the draw.

00:03:02   What hit on the database you happen to get when your CDN refreshes to have the new content,

00:03:08   there is really nothing you—the only thing you can do is decide to enter or not.

00:03:12   Entering means basically being paranoid for months and then being relieved when you find

00:03:16   out it's going to be preannounced, and then sitting there at your computer with hopefully

00:03:21   a synchronized clock and reloading the page a bazillion times.

00:03:24   All that annoying effort is essentially you putting your little ticket into the box.

00:03:28   Everything that happens after that is out of your control.

00:03:31   It's a lottery.

00:03:32   It's the world's most annoying lottery, because if it was a regular lottery and they just

00:03:36   said three months ahead of time, "Put your name in this box if you're interested in WWDC,"

00:03:40   then you'd be like, "All right, I did that."

00:03:42   Then there'd be no more.

00:03:43   You'd be wondering if you got it, but you wouldn't have to be sleeping with your phone

00:03:46   next to you on loud for months at a time and signing up for alerting services and sitting

00:03:51   there at your computer clicking, clicking reload.

00:03:53   None of that would be required.

00:03:54   That's all just pointless stress for the people involved.

00:03:59   At that point, why not just make it an honest to goodness regular lottery where you say,

00:04:04   "Hey, for this week, or for this day, we're going to sign you up, and then two days later,

00:04:08   we'll draw out of a hat."

00:04:09   I don't know.

00:04:11   It seems like what we've got isn't right.

00:04:15   And maybe that's just because all of the people who didn't

00:04:18   get a ticket have launched onto the internet, like Marco said,

00:04:21   and complained about it.

00:04:22   But I don't know.

00:04:24   It just doesn't feel right to me.

00:04:26   And one thing I read was Dan Provost, who is co-founder

00:04:30   of Studio Neat, who makes the Cosmonaut and the Glyph and

00:04:32   other cool things like that.

00:04:35   He had an interesting post, which I just put in the chat,

00:04:37   about how you could do kind of a half lottery,

00:04:39   half merit system.

00:04:40   this, I believe he based on your post, John, where he had said, and I'm going to

00:04:45   butcher the details because I read it a few days ago, but he said something like,

00:04:48   "Hey, for some marathon, I think it was a New York marathon, you get preference

00:04:53   based on seniority, sympathy, the elite, legwork, or charity."

00:04:58   And so he said, "Hey, what if we did that for WWDC?"

00:05:01   Where, you know, and his examples were seniority.

00:05:03   If you attended the past 10 WWDCs, then you'll more likely get a ticket or maybe

00:05:08   be guaranteed to get a ticket.

00:05:10   Or sympathy, if you lose the lottery for three consecutive years, well, wamp wamp, we'll

00:05:15   give you a ticket.

00:05:16   Or elite, or leg worth, or charity, you know, there's many ways in which you could say,

00:05:21   "Hey, if you apply, if you're one of the 100 or 1000 people that apply to these categories,

00:05:26   we'll give you a ticket, but everyone else you're going in a regular lottery, tough

00:05:31   nuggies."

00:05:32   And I don't know if that's right, but I thought it was a very interesting kind of

00:05:35   halfway to do it.

00:05:36   I think there's a lot of problems with that.

00:05:40   is it's not that it increases your odds if you fulfill those things. It was grouped

00:05:43   into guaranteed and non-guaranteed. And the guaranteed people got tickets and non-guaranteed

00:05:47   were all put into lottery, right? The problem with—

00:05:49   I think that's right.

00:05:50   Not the specifics of that, but the problem with having any type of things that human

00:05:54   beings can do to guarantee a ticket is that all you're doing is shoving the race into

00:06:01   another realm. And just 20,000 people would do what it takes to be guaranteed. And then

00:06:05   it would be like, "Okay, well, to be guaranteed, you have to climb Mount Everest and save a

00:06:08   a child from a burning building. I mean, you're just kidding. I have no doubt that all those

00:06:13   people who are sitting there hitting reload would do the things required to be guaranteed.

00:06:18   And if you oversubscribe the "guaranteed pool," well, then you're back to the same stupid

00:06:22   problem again.

00:06:23   That's the problem I see. The marathon, I guess the marathon helps a little bit because

00:06:28   inherently it's a difficult thing to do. So if some of the guarantees are like, "Run a

00:06:32   whole bunch of marathons," and that's perhaps—maybe if that was the actual requirement to be guaranteed

00:06:37   for a WWDC ticket, you have to run three marathons in a year, certified." Obviously, it's

00:06:44   not going to make any sense, but I'm saying, if the things—I tried to imagine what those

00:06:47   things could possibly be, and I think the post went into them as well. What could the

00:06:52   criteria be for getting a guaranteed ticket? If they're physically possible, people will

00:06:56   do them, because there's that much demand, I think.

00:06:59   Well, I think it's worth asking. A lot of these systems to try to prioritize people

00:07:06   or give certain people an easier time getting tickets.

00:07:09   A lot of them have assumed that loyalty is one of the big factors that matter.

00:07:13   Like if you've got the seniority, you've gone to X past ones

00:07:17   and you guarantee a ticket now or whatever.

00:07:19   But isn't that kind of counter to WVDC and what it's for in Apple's mind?

00:07:24   Apple loves having a very high percentage of first-timers there

00:07:28   because that really shows they're bringing new people into the ecosystem.

00:07:30   They're training new people.

00:07:32   you know, there is some repetition between...