00:00:00 ◼ ► The breaking news, if we want to get right into it, yesterday, iOS 18.1 and MacOS 15.1 Sequoia betas shipped with some Apple intelligence features.
00:00:21 ◼ ► I got the night before. Yeah, Sunday night, I got invited to a WebEx briefing from Apple PR. And
00:00:29 ◼ ► they never did. I don't think this is breaking the omerta, the NDA of, do you agree that this is on
00:00:37 ◼ ► background? But their usual technique is not to tell you what the briefing is about, even.
00:00:43 ◼ ► I don't care. And oftentimes, based on who from Apple PR is reaching out to me, I have a very good
00:00:51 ◼ ► guess sometimes, but sometimes not. And this is one where it's not because it is sort of general,
00:00:58 ◼ ► right? It's not like there are people at Apple PR who are in charge of developer betas, you know,
00:01:03 ◼ ► just sort of like iOS people or Mac people or something. But I am so, I'm so mad once I found
00:01:11 ◼ ► out what it was, I was, I'm still fuming that I didn't guess weeks ago that they might do that
00:01:18 ◼ ► this summer with the Apple intelligence. Because I realize this is very strange to have two forks
00:01:26 ◼ ► of the next year's. But if ever there was a reason to do that, I think Apple intelligence would be it.
00:01:37 ◼ ► just to really be able to hone in on testing and getting feedback on those specific features,
00:01:42 ◼ ► right? So that's one part of it. And then the secondary part is, as Apple's product catalog
00:01:47 ◼ ► becomes more varied, it does become difficult and has more architectures, right? You do start to have
00:01:53 ◼ ► this increasing kind of dichotomy between like what features are supported on what platforms.
00:01:58 ◼ ► And that's hard to ship even in a normal OS update. But I think in a beta, that could be a
00:02:02 ◼ ► really difficult thing to like, okay, how can we zone in on what are show-stopping bugs and what
00:02:08 ◼ ► are specific things maybe that are specific to this architecture that whatever version of the
00:02:14 ◼ ► binary we wind up shipping to these devices is going to be different. So having different,
00:02:23 ◼ ► Yeah, and I feel and it's funny, because I just from the previous episode of this show,
00:02:31 ◼ ► where just a couple days ago, Hunter Hillegas was on, he's the developer of an app called Vegas
00:02:36 ◼ ► Mate, and I had him on, we talked about a couple of things. But at one point, we got talking about,
00:02:41 ◼ ► I forget what led us there now. But we were talking about the legendary purple button in the
00:02:48 ◼ ► pre Mac OS 10.0 betas that would put the Mac into single window mode. I mean, I know that this is,
00:03:01 ◼ ► yes, for Mac OS 10 came out there. In addition to the red, yellow, green buttons, there was going
00:03:06 ◼ ► to be a purple one in the other corner. And then your Mac would only have one window at a time.
00:03:11 ◼ ► And when you switched to another window, they would automatically, whichever one was open,
00:03:18 ◼ ► would genie into the dock, and whichever one you were switching to would genie out of the dock.
00:03:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that that's one of the things that Stage Manager put it back, put this idea back
00:03:33 ◼ ► into the air, right? You know, like what comes around goes around, right? And when Stage Manager
00:03:38 ◼ ► was new, those of us old timers who were there for the early days of Mac OS 10, were like,
00:03:44 ◼ ► we've seen ideas like this before. But yes, very sort of similar, except Stage Manager is more than
00:03:56 ◼ ► Yes, yes, exactly. But I always say, and I've stuck with it. And it's generally good advice is
00:04:04 ◼ ► a lot of the times, as a user, or even as a colleague, when you're working, I bet you have
00:04:10 ◼ ► this experience to even as a colleague, working with engineers, software engineers, a lot of the
00:04:18 ◼ ► times, the best way to make a feature request isn't to describe what you think you want.
00:04:26 ◼ ► But just describe your problem. And then, if you have an idea, maybe tack it on. But start by
00:04:33 ◼ ► describing the problem. And oftentimes, that's just a better way to frame it for the engineers. And
00:04:39 ◼ ► Stage Manager today, and the purple button single window mode, 24 years ago, did try to solve the
00:04:48 ◼ ► same problem, which was, hey, if you've got a lot of windows open, because you're using either a lot
00:04:54 ◼ ► of documents in the same app, or many apps, each with a window, it can get visually cluttered on
00:05:01 ◼ ► screen, which might just annoy you aesthetically, but also make it hard to switch between the few
00:05:07 ◼ ► that you want to switch between, right? It solves the same problem, managing the visual complexity
00:05:13 ◼ ► of multitasking. But what struck me was in the show notes, I put, I think Hunter actually sent
00:05:19 ◼ ► me the link, but it was a great link. It's like a seven or eight, nine minute link. I guess now I'm
00:05:24 ◼ ► stuck putting it in the show notes again for this episode, but I will. But it's Steve Jobs at, I
00:05:31 ◼ ► think probably Macworld. I didn't even look. 2000, maybe it was WWDC 2000. But he's demoing to the
00:05:39 ◼ ► audience, this beta version of Mac OS X. It might have been the first public demonstration of the
00:05:46 ◼ ► Aqua user interface. And what made it seem relevant in addition to the whole Stage Manager
00:05:53 ◼ ► thing and whatever Hunter and I were talking about was just that one of the things that's come around
00:06:00 ◼ ► and Apple seems to have come back around to is not being afraid to show software well in advance of
00:06:09 ◼ ► when it ships, right? They're still totally as secretive as they can possibly be about hardware,
00:06:16 ◼ ► right? You could not get Jaws right now. If it was me and you and Jaws on this podcast,
00:06:22 ◼ ► instead of just me and you, we could not get him to tell us that there will be new iPhones
00:06:38 ◼ ► Not even getting him to tell us whether there's an extra button this year for the camera,
00:06:47 ◼ ► what the colors will be, what the materials will be. No, no, no. He wouldn't even acknowledge that
00:06:51 ◼ ► he could exist. He's like, I don't know. We always have a lot of things going on. I think you'll be
00:06:54 ◼ ► excited, but like, don't know. But with software, there, you know, to me, it's just one of the
00:07:02 ◼ ► differences between hardware and software. There's just not, and here's Steve Jobs in the year 2000,
00:07:09 ◼ ► over a year before Mac OS X actually shipped, a couple of years before Mac OS X certainly became
00:07:21 ◼ ► being, just being candid here, it was immediate. It was obviously the best desktop operating system
00:07:27 ◼ ► ever, but it was, what do you think? I think it was, I think it was 10.2 before it got good.
00:07:34 ◼ ► Yeah. That's, yeah, that's probably where, 10.2, yeah, there was like a blurring of some,
00:07:47 ◼ ► I think was the one that was sort of universal. Or almost everybody could agree that the combination
00:07:56 ◼ ► of Mac OS X getting faster and supporting more old stuff that people were waiting for, combined with
00:08:11 ◼ ► So you had finally, you had like that. Yeah. So you had like good hardware, right? So you had like,
00:08:18 ◼ ► Yeah. They needed the hardware to get faster just to be fast enough to run the software.
00:08:24 ◼ ► But I mean, genuinely, I mean, unless you were running in like one of the towers, in which case
00:08:28 ◼ ► you're like, great. Okay. As long as you need to like heat your house, it's great. But yeah.
00:08:33 ◼ ► I just thought that was really cool. Serendipity of it's on my mind now this week, because Apple
00:08:39 ◼ ► is already, you know, as two versions now of these operating systems in beta this summer,
00:08:44 ◼ ► they've told us all the features, they do this now every year. And it's not just three months
00:08:50 ◼ ► in advance from June to September. It's really sort of the roadmap for the next year, or at least
00:09:02 ◼ ► there was a time when you would basically have everything that was going to launch would launch
00:09:06 ◼ ► in September, and then you would maybe have some point releases and whatnot. With macOS, that
00:09:10 ◼ ► sometimes maybe that was a little bit different, but it was kind of finalized. But with iOS,
00:09:14 ◼ ► especially, and we've seen it with macOS too, it has been interesting in the last probably,
00:09:18 ◼ ► I'd say probably five, six years, where they've started to push out features throughout the course
00:09:24 ◼ ► of the year. So you might see a preview of something in June, right? And then you might
00:09:29 ◼ ► not have it until March, which to your point, and I hadn't even thought of this, is more similar to
00:09:34 ◼ ► what it was like in before now, now, now times, right? When 25 years ago, it made sense to kind of,
00:09:43 ◼ ► I think, pre-announce, especially for Apple, who was in a different position of, I guess,
00:09:49 ◼ ► a different power position than they are now. They really needed to let developers know as quickly as
00:09:54 ◼ ► possible what was happening, especially in the macOS 10 era, right? Because there had already
00:09:59 ◼ ► been so many aborted attempts at getting the next generation OS. They'd already burned a lot of
00:10:04 ◼ ► devs, which I know probably firsthand from either experience or from places you worked, where people
00:10:10 ◼ ► are like, "Oh, we're going to be doing this Rhapsody thing." Oh no, nevermind, right? And then
00:10:13 ◼ ► it made sense to, I think, kind of let people know as early as possible, this is what we're working
00:10:19 ◼ ► on so that they could start planning accordingly. That hasn't really been the case in the iOS era.
00:10:24 ◼ ► But again, like in the last five or six years, it has been interesting that they'll kind of
00:10:29 ◼ ► announce and kind of show off a vision of a feature that might not be realized and finalized for
00:10:35 ◼ ► several months after the initial OS release comes out. Yeah. I thought it was interesting at the old
00:10:41 ◼ ► demo where Jobs was showing, and it was mostly about the dock, the whole nine-minute video is
00:10:47 ◼ ► like about the dock, and single window mode was considered a dock feature because, like I said,
00:11:00 ◼ ► he said there's a shortcut. He didn't say what it was, Jobs, while he's demoing it. But, you know,
00:11:05 ◼ ► in modern day, it's the shift key, it has been for 20 years where if you hit, you know, I'm sure
00:11:11 ◼ ► somebody out there listening to the podcast is about to have their mind blown. But if you hold
00:11:15 ◼ ► down the shift key, when you hit the yellow button on a Mac window, it goes into the dock in slow
00:11:24 ◼ ► motion, which is really cool. And it was there in 2000, just so he could show how cool it was.
00:11:32 ◼ ► And he even showed, it was, this is how old it was, it was a trailer for Mission Impossible 2.
00:11:54 ◼ ► well, what's funny, that reminds me, I don't know if you've ever read Gil Amelio's book, which,
00:11:59 ◼ ► if you haven't, it's so good because it's so bad, but it's genuinely one of my favorite,
00:12:04 ◼ ► completely tone deaf memoirs ever. It's called 500 Days on the Firing Line or something like that.
00:12:07 ◼ ► Which is a great title, you know, he didn't come up with, you know, that his publisher was like,
00:12:13 ◼ ► this is not going to sell many copies. And this is a self-own in every respect, but man,
00:12:19 ◼ ► we're going to give it the correct title. But, you know, the entire book is just kind of an
00:12:28 ◼ ► when you read it, you're like, it kind of was your fault, Gil, it kind of was. But one of my
00:12:33 ◼ ► favorite anecdotes in it is he talks about how he spent, he's bragging about himself, how he spent
00:12:38 ◼ ► all this time getting Whoopi Goldberg's Nephew, one of the power books that was in Mission
00:12:43 ◼ ► Impossible, because she wanted one and he was like, very proud of himself for this. Keep in
00:12:48 ◼ ► mind, this was like one of the famous power books that like overheated that they had to like recall
00:13:03 ◼ ► was in and he was very frustrated because they had this massive media moment with that MacBook
00:13:08 ◼ ► and that power book rather in that huge movie. And then it was it was a recall, they had to recall it
00:13:13 ◼ ► like it was it was one that they really couldn't ship and it was just not a good product.
00:13:18 ◼ ► And so I'm happy that they were able to at least I guess keep that Paramount relationship
00:13:27 ◼ ► But yeah, it is crazy that we're however many years later and Ethan Hunt is still is still
00:13:33 ◼ ► Ethan hunting. And we're like, yeah, you're gonna be 70 years old and hanging off the side of a
00:13:38 ◼ ► helicopter and we're, we're gonna be like, yeah, because you're Tom Cruise. Makes sense. That's
00:13:46 ◼ ► I am going to tell you I don't think I've told this story yet. I have such terrible podcast
00:13:51 ◼ ► amnesia, but I don't think I have. I think you're going to enjoy this. And I've, I've been thinking
00:13:56 ◼ ► about telling this story now for seven, eight weeks. So backstage at my live show this year
00:14:08 ◼ ► Dave Oh, yes, you were there. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for the good words.
00:14:12 ◼ ► I am drawing a blank on his name. And maybe it's best that I am. All I remember now, I have it
00:14:18 ◼ ► written down somewhere in a notebook, but it's, it was one of those names like Sean, but it wasn't
00:14:25 ◼ ► Sean, but where it could be spelled two different ways. I had to figure out how to spell it. But
00:14:29 ◼ ► anyway, he's sort of an old, I would say a gentleman in his late 60s, sort of a hippie,
00:14:35 ◼ ► long hair, kind of seemed to have enjoyed some, some marijuana before. He's the sound one of the
00:14:43 ◼ ► sound guys for the California theater. And he was probably kidding. He was putting my lapel mic on
00:14:51 ◼ ► and my battery pack. And we went out and did a sound check with me on stage. And you know,
00:14:59 ◼ ► this year was a little different because we had the 3d cameras for the sandwich vision broadcast.
00:15:05 ◼ ► The spot where I was going to stand had to be adjusted, you know, so that I'm in camera,
00:15:10 ◼ ► blah, blah, blah. And, you know, we're doing the sound check and he's, I've never met this guy,
00:15:15 ◼ ► been at that theater before, but I don't know how, you know, if it's like a day gig type thing. I
00:15:21 ◼ ► mean, he's, but anyway, he's been doing sound for shows in Silicon Valley for decades. And I,
00:15:45 ◼ ► I think three times, three or four times where he had miked him for events. And he said,
00:15:53 ◼ ► I'll tell you one story. And he didn't remember the year, but it was the year where Gil Amelio and
00:15:59 ◼ ► Steve Jobs, I think it was the infamous horrible Gil Amelio never ending keynote, which I think was
00:16:07 ◼ ► like Macworld. Oh yeah, where he had the terrible shirt, which he also wrote about in the book and
00:16:11 ◼ ► he complained about the shirt. Yes. The keynote where I think Muhammad Ali was there and also
00:16:24 ◼ ► It was just after, so it was probably like Macworld 1997 in January and the deal to reunify
00:16:32 ◼ ► and acquire next was in December of 1996. So it's January, they're going to announce this. They're
00:16:39 ◼ ► going to announce that Steve Jobs is going to be a special advisor while Gil Amelio remains the,
00:16:45 ◼ ► and he said that he'd miked them both and they went into the nicest green room, just the two of
00:16:51 ◼ ► them. But unbeknownst to them, they were still miked and he could hear everything they were
00:16:57 ◼ ► saying. Oh my God. And he said that Steve got going about something and I, it's something about,
00:17:06 ◼ ► and I think it was because of, I forget if Muhammad Ali was there too, he didn't say, but
00:17:11 ◼ ► you know, they had some special guests and Steve said, what we should do for these things is start
00:17:17 ◼ ► having great musical bands come in as the special guests and let them play. And he said, you know
00:17:24 ◼ ► who we should get? We should get the Grateful Dead. That's it. They're a great American band
00:17:29 ◼ ► with a great history and they really kind of stand for a lot of the stuff that Apple stands for. And
00:17:34 ◼ ► he said he went on and on and he said there was just silence from Gil Amelio. And then he said,
00:17:43 ◼ ► Steve said to him, you've never dropped acid and gone to a concert, have you? And Gil Amelio said,
00:17:54 ◼ ► afterwards. And I said to him, I said, you might've heard the moment when it clicked in
00:18:05 ◼ ► Yeah. No, I think you nailed it. That's fantastic. I think he was there for it. He like,
00:18:10 ◼ ► it probably been, you know, in Steve's mind, he's like, I don't know, I'm selling the company.
00:18:14 ◼ ► Maybe I'll just focus on Pixar, whatever. Who knows? Then he talks to this guy and goes,
00:18:18 ◼ ► oh no, oh no, no, no, no. We're getting rid of this guy. I'm coming back in. I'm saving this.
00:18:23 ◼ ► We're taking this back. We're not letting the guy who's never been high at a concert. We're
00:18:29 ◼ ► not letting him run Apple, right? No. He said from his perspective, he honestly wondered if
00:18:38 ◼ ► Gil Amelio had ever heard of the Grateful Dead. And you know what I mean? This isn't like,
00:18:47 ◼ ► They were, I mean, you know what? I would bet that Gil Amelio is probably like my parents
00:18:51 ◼ ► and that they knew of the dead. My parents have been dead heads, but because my parents are just
00:18:56 ◼ ► not the types of people. My mom is definitely into the Beatles. She liked the Stones too. My dad
00:19:01 ◼ ► is a little bit older than her. And so he doesn't even like that as much, but they have like
00:19:04 ◼ ► different types of things. My parents are too straight edge for that sort of thing. So I bet
00:19:08 ◼ ► that's Gil Amelio where he's like, no, because I think he came from a semiconductor company or
00:19:18 ◼ ► I mean, I don't want to go off on a Gil Amelio tangent more than we already have, but I do
00:19:26 ◼ ► remember thinking as an outsider, God, I wish I had been writing Daring Fireball just five, six,
00:19:32 ◼ ► seven years earlier. So there'd be an archive of it. But I remember having being mostly queasy
00:19:39 ◼ ► because even then I thought that an outsider could never properly run Apple. I still think that's
00:19:47 ◼ ► true, but Apple had been in such trouble that who knows? I mean, I don't know. It just seemed so,
00:19:58 ◼ ► the situation seemed so dire. And then some of the things he said seemed to make sense.
00:20:03 ◼ ► He often made the connection that he wanted Apple. He saw Apple to computers, what Maglite
00:20:09 ◼ ► is to flashlights and that anybody can go into any store and buy those plastic ever-ready flashlights
00:20:17 ◼ ► for $3 and they work. And probably 95% of the dashboards in cars in America have one of them
00:20:25 ◼ ► in there. But if you really care, you're willing to spend 10 times that or more than 10 times that
00:20:31 ◼ ► and get a Maglite flashlight that's made of actual steel and it's made in America and the buttons
00:20:38 ◼ ► are really nice and it's brighter. Everything about it is better. And it costs a lot more.
00:20:43 ◼ ► And he said, "That's what I think Apple is to computers." And I thought, "Oh, that's pretty
00:20:47 ◼ ► good." And then the guy shows up for keynotes wearing a suit and it's, "That's not Apple."
00:20:52 ◼ ► No. And then in addition to be like, "Oh, we want to be the definitive thing. You pay more for us.
00:20:57 ◼ ► Oh, but we're also going to license the... We're going to let people do clones." Right?
00:21:01 ◼ ► So I think that... I don't know. He's one of my favorite kind of exec stories because he's just
00:21:06 ◼ ► the wrong hire. A lot of his ideas for turnaround would have worked at a different company.
00:21:11 ◼ ► And they weren't even bad things. And you can credit him for Johnny Ive a little bit because
00:21:19 ◼ ► he was the one who really kind of elevated some of that and Johnny Ive's predecessor a little bit,
00:21:24 ◼ ► at least keeping them in the flow of things there. But he's just the wrong guy for the company. I
00:21:31 ◼ ► mean, look, Apple did not hit the problems that it hit because of him. He came in after Michael
00:21:36 ◼ ► Spindler, right? There was already so much turmoil, but he was just... I think that his techniques
00:21:43 ◼ ► would have worked at a different type of company, just not Apple. And we are fortunate that he was
00:21:55 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. He made the one... The most important decision he made wound up being the one that was
00:22:03 ◼ ► ultimately the best decision in the history of the company for sure. And the industry probably.
00:22:10 ◼ ► Like when it came down to one single decision, you'd have to go back... The only things you could
00:22:16 ◼ ► compare it to would be like Gates talking IBM into licensing DOS from Microsoft. There's a couple of
00:22:23 ◼ ► singular moments where you can easily see how whoever made the decision could have decided
00:22:29 ◼ ► something else. Some other engineer at IBM could have said, "Come on, we can write our own DOS."
00:22:34 ◼ ► Yeah. The guy from... I can't remember what company it was, but the guy made a digital research,
00:22:39 ◼ ► I guess that's what it was. Like could have not been on the airplane and could have taken
00:22:43 ◼ ► the call from IBM or whatever. I think that's apocryphal. I don't think that's quite true.
00:22:48 ◼ ► People have disputed that, but I think there's enough truth in it to be like there was some of
00:22:53 ◼ ► it there. But yeah, you can see how, yeah, if that hadn't happened, things would be different. And
00:22:57 ◼ ► the same thing with Apple. And so, yeah, I mean, to all the shit that I like to talk about Gil
00:23:01 ◼ ► Emilio, admittedly, again, to your point, when it matters, he made probably one of the most important
00:23:06 ◼ ► business decisions in modern history. And that was a really good thing. Just put that on your
00:23:13 ◼ ► epithet, dude. That's what made, I think, the book so funny is that it's just this whole tome about
00:23:18 ◼ ► him basically rationalizing all this bad decision. It's like all you really had to do is be like,
00:23:23 ◼ ► "I brought back Steve Jobs." That's all you had to do. That's it. That's it. Don't focus on any of
00:23:29 ◼ ► the other stuff. That's it. And then just like sell yourself on the speaking circuit on that alone.
00:23:33 ◼ ► "Oh yeah, I had the foresight to see this and then get out of the way." Like just do that.
00:23:46 ◼ ► really. Right? I mean, everybody, you know, it's weird how young Jobs was at the time to say he was
00:23:52 ◼ ► sort of in the wilderness, but he was. Next was sort of languishing. It certainly wasn't super
00:23:57 ◼ ► relevant at any point in the Next's company history. People, pundits like me at the time,
00:24:10 ◼ ► And then he had this beautiful kind of one-two thing with the success finally of Pixar after
00:24:14 ◼ ► years of struggling the breakthrough with Toy Story and that becoming like a real thing.
00:24:25 ◼ ► Or, "We want to buy your company. We don't necessarily want you back." And he's like, "Okay,
00:24:39 ◼ ► from talking about iOS 18.1. You mentioned in the show notes, and I am the same way, there is
00:24:45 ◼ ► no way I've got a couple of trips for August coming up. There's no way I'm putting any beta,
00:24:53 ◼ ► let alone the next beta on my carry phone. So I will wait until after my vacation time. I'll wait
00:25:02 ◼ ► till the end of August to put it on my regular phone. And because my regular phone is my only
00:25:11 ◼ ► seemingly no point really to trying these new betas, the 0.1 betas on Mac or iOS if you don't
00:25:21 ◼ ► have an Apple intelligence compatible machine. Right. Yeah. I might put it on my personal M3
00:25:31 ◼ ► Macs MacBook, but I'm either on a separate partition or something, or container, whatever the
00:25:38 ◼ ► term is. But yeah, I'm not putting it on my phone. I would love to play around with it,
00:25:44 ◼ ► but I'm like, I don't have two iPhone 15 Pro Maxes. I just, I don't. So I will just have to
00:25:50 ◼ ► wait until yeah, probably end of August, like you, once it's basically about to kind of be released.
00:25:56 ◼ ► And then I'm like, all right, now I'll play around with some stuff. I do think Apple under Craig
00:26:02 ◼ ► Federighi, and it almost pains me to admit it because now that I see Federighi every year at
00:26:10 ◼ ► my show, it's like, I'd rather be able to kid him about it. But I feel like their engineering
00:26:18 ◼ ► discipline is just at an unprecedented level year over year that they, the way that they've,
00:26:26 ◼ ► without ever announcing it officially, but clearly by evidence have switched to a, from a,
00:26:35 ◼ ► let's try to get everything we announced at June out in the big release in September or October,
00:26:42 ◼ ► depending on whether it's iOS or Mac to let's figure out how we can slot these features into
00:26:49 ◼ ► dot updates a couple of weeks after September, we'll get one out in November, December, then
00:26:56 ◼ ► we'll have one in January, February, and then we'll have a last one in the early spring.
00:27:01 ◼ ► It's been a really good, I think the last, I forget the numbers, but I think it might've been
00:27:08 ◼ ► iOS 13, four or five years ago was a really, really rocky September version. It was the one where
00:27:22 ◼ ► I think it was 13, right? Yeah. They had to do the point release basically in the boxes before
00:27:26 ◼ ► they developed the technology to do it. But it was one of those where like, you had to run an update
00:27:34 ◼ ► Yeah. It was, it was pretty bad. And I feel like that might've been their, Hey, let's not let this
00:27:44 ◼ ► It's improved a lot. I fully agree. I will say though, like just as an end user who I do usually
00:27:50 ◼ ► have a separate phone that I can use for testing, although not in years like this for some of the
00:27:56 ◼ ► Apple intelligence features. But before I transitioned careers, like Apple would usually
00:28:02 ◼ ► kindly supply me with a, a, a loaner phone to, to use that I could run betas on. And, and I would
00:28:08 ◼ ► put it on my, my main phone too, but it was just kind of like part of the job now that that doesn't
00:28:12 ◼ ► have to be part of my job. I will say that. I think it was iOS 13. That whole beta process was
00:28:19 ◼ ► so Rocky and so bad that that kind of dispelled me of the notion of being like, yeah, I'm not,
00:28:24 ◼ ► I'm not putting this on my main carry until I get kind of a heads up from people I trust online,
00:28:31 ◼ ► that it's not going to be a disaster. And I know they've improved the processes since then.
00:28:34 ◼ ► But it, that was kind of one of those moments for me where I'm kind of like, I know they,
00:28:41 ◼ ► skittish. I'm like, nah, I'm out of weight. I remember that one. And it was public. I mean,
00:28:47 ◼ ► people, you know, we were talking about it on podcasts and blogging about it, but it was like,
00:28:57 ◼ ► but like last week of August. And it was an awful beta, just awful. I don't know what exactly the
00:29:03 ◼ ► problem is. There were some crashes. Maybe it was like, you'd start at 100% battery life and
00:29:08 ◼ ► two and a half hours later, it was like dead, dead, just right up and just be dead. Yeah,
00:29:12 ◼ ► that was, that's what I remember the battery life just being atrocious, crashing too. But I really
00:29:16 ◼ ► remember the battery life. Right. And if you hadn't been paying attention to it, you're like,
00:29:19 ◼ ► I didn't even get like an alert, like a low power alert. It's my phone's right dead. And it's warm
00:29:25 ◼ ► and it's plug it in, wait. And yeah. But what I remember was everybody doing the math. Well,
00:29:30 ◼ ► wait a minute. We were, they always hold these iPhone events in September, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
00:29:37 ◼ ► somewhere in those early days of September, the new iPhones have to have the new OS. That's the
00:29:43 ◼ ► only OS with the hardware support. And so like doing the math of like, when did these factories
00:29:55 ◼ ► It's gotta be around now. Right. I even, and we're all like, well, but then that would mean
00:30:00 ◼ ► they're going to ship all these phones with a really buggy OS. And we're like, I guess.
00:30:05 ◼ ► And then turned out they did. They did. They did. They had to like get out at the point update
00:30:11 ◼ ► literally like the day before, day after. Yeah. Which is, yeah. I think that I do, I do appreciate
00:30:17 ◼ ► kind of this approach. And I have to say, even though I'm like, I'm not a windows user,
00:30:20 ◼ ► this is something Microsoft does a little bit too with, with the, I guess their current kind of
00:30:24 ◼ ► like windows thing where they basically have either one or two big kind of releases each year.
00:30:29 ◼ ► And I think that splitting things up that way, like I like Apple's approach of announcing it all
00:30:33 ◼ ► at WWDC and then kind of slowly rolling things out over the year. I think that's a much,
00:30:38 ◼ ► I have to imagine that for the engineers, it's a better process for them. They don't feel as
00:30:42 ◼ ► constrained by crunch. And I think for end users too, there is something to be said about the fact
00:30:47 ◼ ► that because of the longer beta process and the fact that people can get used to things like
00:30:53 ◼ ► you're aware of features and you're, there's like more of a education aspect where people can kind
00:30:57 ◼ ► of, you know, through kind of the ethos of social media or friends or whatever, kind of become aware
00:31:02 ◼ ► and be like, Oh, okay, this is what's going to come. And this is, this is what this is. So it's,
00:31:06 ◼ ► it's not as, as much of a day one dump that it was before where sometimes people, a new feature will
00:31:13 ◼ ► come out and there were so many of them that people don't even know what something is, right? Like
00:31:16 ◼ ► they don't even know, might not even discover it for years until somebody points it out. And so
00:31:22 ◼ ► I think that's kind of one of the benefits too, is slow rolling it a little bit, give some of those
00:31:26 ◼ ► new things, a chance for people to really discover, especially when it comes to UI changes.
00:31:33 ◼ ► underappreciated, but I find myself even as an obsessive who professionally covers new features
00:31:39 ◼ ► and stuff like that, I actually do find that I, turning them out over a couple of releases over
00:31:46 ◼ ► the year does bring attention to features that if they all came out at once, maybe one of them would
00:31:51 ◼ ► have been, I didn't even know I've had that since October. I didn't even realize that it's less
00:31:56 ◼ ► likely to happen. I do think, so I think good for Apple that they've got these two forks of the OSs
00:32:04 ◼ ► right now. I suspect, and I'm hearing from a couple of friends, this is not great for third
00:32:10 ◼ ► party developers, really. And especially I think on the iOS side, which let's face it is A, the
00:32:17 ◼ ► highest priority one, and it's certainly the one with the most users. But the problem is now what
00:32:23 ◼ ► do you do if you're a developer and you've got a testing phone? Do you run 18.0 betas because that's
00:32:30 ◼ ► the one that's coming first? Or do you put 18.1 beta on because you would like to start integrating
00:32:39 ◼ ► Apple intelligence features or test the ones that are built into the system, right? Like the,
00:32:45 ◼ ► and we'll get to this in a second, the writing tools feature is one of the features that's
00:32:56 ◼ ► text, bring up the writing tools and say, make the sound more professional or make it funnier
00:33:03 ◼ ► or something like that. And if you want to make sure, 'cause you're thinking, well, our text field
00:33:08 ◼ ► we're subclassing UI text field or whatever, but we've done enough customizations for whatever
00:33:15 ◼ ► reason. I've been a little worried ever since WWDC that ours isn't going to work, but now what do you
00:33:21 ◼ ► do? Like how many iPhone 15 pros are you supposed to have for testing? Well, that's, I mean, this
00:33:28 ◼ ► is the frustrating thing, right? Is that these are, it was easier a decade ago when the median
00:33:34 ◼ ► price of the phone was like $700, but now it's more than that. And you already have the struggle
00:33:41 ◼ ► of having to test on a number of different screen sizes and device types and whatnot. But yeah,
00:33:45 ◼ ► to your point, like how many pros are you supposed to have? And it's okay, well, maybe I have a whole
00:33:49 ◼ ► collection of pros at that catalog. But only this one. Exactly. These are $1,100 phones. You're
00:33:55 ◼ ► like, okay. And it's also, it's one of those things, 'cause it's okay. And I know they would
00:34:00 ◼ ► never do this. I know they wouldn't, even for developers, I know they wouldn't, but it does make
00:34:04 ◼ ► you think you're like, man, why can't they just let you dual boot like two different OS versions
00:34:09 ◼ ► if you're one of the very special jail mode, right? That would be just for developers, like
00:34:13 ◼ ► not even like you can even disable certain telephony or other types. Well, I guess you'd
00:34:17 ◼ ► have to have telephony, but you could even disable certain like user focused features, but just be
00:34:22 ◼ ► able to do that just for testing would be really nice. It also kind of, again, kind of opens up,
00:34:26 ◼ ► I think what people have wanted for a long time and Apple's even sued some people over this. This
00:34:30 ◼ ► is why people try to create virtualized versions of iOS that they can run on their Mac so that they
00:34:36 ◼ ► can at least experiment with things. It might not be the same as the, although at this point it would
00:34:40 ◼ ► be the same as the normal hardware, but basically, but that would be a good way to be able to test to
00:34:44 ◼ ► see, okay, is this going to work or is it not without having to buy multiple $1,100 phones
00:34:49 ◼ ► that are going to be obsolete. This is a bad thing, right? They're literally going to be obsolete in
00:34:54 ◼ ► six weeks and you're going to have to buy multiple of the next iPhone 15. You're going to have to get
00:35:01 ◼ ► like a bunch of, or 16, you're going to have to get a bunch of those, the pro versions of those,
00:35:06 ◼ ► right? So there are very few, very few things that I would feel confident saying that every single
00:35:13 ◼ ► person listening to this podcast would agree upon. But I think here's one where I think we could ask
00:35:31 ◼ ► Always. Always. Well, it's so funny because I have friends who their phones will break and like,
00:35:34 ◼ ► if your phone breaks, your phone breaks, but I'm always like, okay, do we have a used one? Do I
00:35:38 ◼ ► have an old one I can send you? Can you get a good trade in thing? Like, what's the best deal
00:35:43 ◼ ► you can do? I have two. I have two. I've done that multiple times for friends because it is just one
00:35:47 ◼ ► of those. Yeah, it's the worst time. Like the only way I would ever suggest it would be like,
00:35:52 ◼ ► you don't have any other choice and they're giving you one hell of a trade in for your old broken
00:35:58 ◼ ► phone and without a shadow of a doubt that you have no interest or budget to be able to buy
00:36:08 ◼ ► yeah. If you were already going to buy like the iPhone 14 or whatever, or 13, which I think they
00:36:15 ◼ ► still sell. Sure. Why not? It doesn't matter. You could wait a month and get then for the same price
00:36:20 ◼ ► the iPhone 14 would drop down, but you don't care. So just buy the phone. But otherwise, yeah. And
00:36:25 ◼ ► the other thing too, I know this, I have enough friends, you know, who work, you know, I have
00:36:30 ◼ ► friends who are totally indie like me, like one person companies. I know people who work at mid-size
00:36:36 ◼ ► companies and I have friends who work at very large companies and even at like very large
00:36:42 ◼ ► companies, it is often hard to requisition hardware. You can't just because you work at,
00:36:49 ◼ ► I'll just say Netflix, right? A very successful company. You can't just raise your hand and say,
00:36:54 ◼ ► yeah, we need a bunch of iPhone 15 pros because now we've got to install this. That may not work.
00:37:00 ◼ ► No. Well, especially when they know they're like, okay, but we're going to be getting a requisition
00:37:03 ◼ ► in literally six weeks for a bunch of iPhone 16 pros, right? Because that's the ones we're really
00:37:09 ◼ ► going to want to focus on because we know that that'll have even more RAM and that's going to
00:37:12 ◼ ► have even more neural imp users and other other things that we know that no matter what Greg
00:37:18 ◼ ► Jazwiak would never tell us that they're going to be releasing, they're going to be really
00:37:22 ◼ ► optimized for this software, right? Which honestly, maybe, I don't know, which honestly kind of is one
00:37:30 ◼ ► of the reasons why I haven't been as focused, at least on the phone side about even testing
00:37:34 ◼ ► anything because I have such a strong feeling. I'm like, okay, if they're gatekeeping it so much,
00:37:39 ◼ ► just for the current pro devices and select Apple Silicon machines, if they're gatekeeping it to that
00:37:46 ◼ ► degree, that really says to me, okay, well then the 16 is going to be the one that's really going
00:37:51 ◼ ► to be able to show this stuff off. So in my mind, I'm kind of like, I'm not building apps, right?
00:37:55 ◼ ► Like I'm an enthusiast, but I'm not building apps. I'm not having to write about all these features.
00:37:58 ◼ ► So I'm in a little bit of a different position where I'm just like, yeah, I can wait until the
00:38:02 ◼ ► new phone comes out to really play with this stuff because that's going to be the better experience
00:38:12 ◼ ► Right. And again, this is pure speculation. I literally, nobody would tell me this anyway.
00:38:18 ◼ ► And nobody who knows would tell me, but I wouldn't be surprised too, if both for legitimate silicon
00:38:28 ◼ ► reasons, because the iPhone 16 chip is designed for this, that in addition to doing a better job
00:38:40 ◼ ► wouldn't be surprised if there's X, Y, and Z Apple intelligence features that only run on the iPhone
00:38:47 ◼ ► 16 Pro. Absolutely. No, I have the same and even fewer people would, no one would tell me,
00:38:53 ◼ ► people wouldn't tell you, they would certainly never tell me. So yeah, again, just pure
00:38:57 ◼ ► speculation, but that's been kind of my thought too, because they do that a lot, right? Where
00:39:00 ◼ ► there will be some things that we only learn about at the launch event. And this, it struck
00:39:05 ◼ ► me actually watching the keynote last month, actually, where I was like there now close to
00:39:11 ◼ ► two months ago, where I was thinking, I was like, okay, they're so light on so many of the details
00:39:16 ◼ ► on this. We don't know when this is hitting beta, the real extra wow features and some of the other
00:39:21 ◼ ► stuff is only going to be available probably again, like for hardware design, all kinds of
00:39:25 ◼ ► reasons on the next phone, right? Like we're getting a real preview of this now kind of at
00:39:31 ◼ ► a high level. That's how I viewed the keynote at WWDC was this is setting out our vision, no pun
00:39:38 ◼ ► intended, of how we see the AI landscape, not this is a well trotted out narrative of everything we
00:39:46 ◼ ► expect to accomplish, more like this is our high level goal. And we'll sprinkle in the details as
00:39:51 ◼ ► things become more available and as we learn more and as we get more feedback and as hardware is
00:39:55 ◼ ► better, but it was very much kind of much more aspirational, I think, rather than prescriptive,
00:40:01 ◼ ► which has not been the case for a lot of years and is not a typically very Apple thing to do.
00:40:06 ◼ ► But I think in this case makes a lot of sense, especially just given how much the tech,
00:40:17 ◼ ► the camera is so important and somebody did a poll is like, what do people who think they might buy
00:40:25 ◼ ► a phone? Anybody just general public, not nerds. What are the biggest priorities for the next phone
00:40:30 ◼ ► you buy? And it's I might get the order wrong price, battery life camera. I think that's the
00:40:38 ◼ ► order though. And of course, everything everybody buys in life price matters. So price is always
00:40:43 ◼ ► first. It's almost like you could take it off the list. Right. Battery life for features is above
00:40:49 ◼ ► everything else. And it's true. I mean, we all bitch about it, but it's true. And for all of
00:40:55 ◼ ► the fancy portrait mode and slow motion mode and cinematic mode in the camera and all the Apple
00:41:00 ◼ ► intelligence stuff coming out this year, and whatever new apps that come out, blah, blah, blah,
00:41:04 ◼ ► battery, battery, battery, battery, battery. But the camera is third. And there's a reason
00:41:09 ◼ ► that Apple has been running. I forget how many years now. As far as I know, it's the only
00:41:16 ◼ ► permanent ad campaign in tech history. Maybe the shot on my phone campaign. Is that what you're
00:41:22 ◼ ► talking about? Yeah. Shot on iPhone. Yeah. It goes back easily over 10 years. And with absolutely no
00:41:30 ◼ ► abatement, billboards all over the place. I live near a billboard here that Apple has had
00:41:37 ◼ ► continuously for years. There's a couple of them, I think in center city, Philadelphia, but I know
00:41:41 ◼ ► of one. And new iPhones come out. It's always for the new iPhones. And there's other things.
00:41:47 ◼ ► I think right now it's a Safari, the actually private browser right now. In the summertime
00:41:56 ◼ ► when there's no new actual products, that's when they'll do something like a privacy ad,
00:42:01 ◼ ► but at least a few months of the year shot on iPhone. It's super important. I could definitely
00:42:08 ◼ ► see how there would be. And they didn't really talk too much about Apple intelligence in the
00:42:12 ◼ ► camera. They talked about it with photos, the photos app. Apple intelligence will categorize.
00:42:18 ◼ ► Exactly. Because I think they want to be really careful there. Like A, they don't want to be like
00:42:24 ◼ ► Samsung and create the moon out of thin air. And I think even more to the point, because Apple has
00:42:31 ◼ ► been one of the pioneers of this, we've been using AI to make photography better for a decade now.
00:42:40 ◼ ► it's been a consistent thing. Google has done a great job with that too. A lot of upscaling
00:42:45 ◼ ► things. There's a lot of things that go into that. But when we talk about this new era of AI and
00:42:51 ◼ ► generative AI, I think Apple wants to be really careful not to conflate things because they still
00:42:56 ◼ ► want people to feel like the photos you take are your photos. And this isn't something that is
00:43:01 ◼ ► changing reality for you. And it's not using, it's not training on your photos, which is an
00:43:07 ◼ ► important thing, but it's also not retrospectively, again, to use the Samsung analogy, yeah, great,
00:43:11 ◼ ► that moon looks awesome. That's not the moon. You don't want it to change what actually happens. And
00:43:16 ◼ ► so I think you have to be careful how you thread that needle. But I do expect to see some things on
00:43:22 ◼ ► the hardware level, like improvements, right? I anticipate that how it will be with the narrative
00:43:28 ◼ ► around that will be, will again, to my point, it won't be about anything is changing, but just
00:43:32 ◼ ► look at how much better we're going to make this so that you can take the perfect shot.
00:43:40 ◼ ► They're not going to take the gray out of my hair and my beard, right? They're not going to make me
00:43:44 ◼ ► look 10 years younger as much as I wish they could. But I mean, I would love that if they could,
00:43:53 ◼ ► I don't know color balance and all sorts of stuff they could do along that spectrum. And then they
00:43:57 ◼ ► could say this is powered by Apple intelligence only because of the whatever chip the A exactly
00:44:03 ◼ ► will be the A 18 pro blah, blah, blah. Before we move on, you sent me a tweet. Somebody's already.
00:44:13 ◼ ► How do we, how do we put this on podcast terms though? It's not really an explicit podcast.
00:44:34 ◼ ► let me do this right now. But somebody on Twitter was like, no, Apple intelligence. No. And what
00:44:40 ◼ ► they did is they typed in. Let's F daddy selected it. And with the actual F word spelled out
00:45:10 ◼ ► It is, it is more special and then submissive. Okay. It's not wrong though. And then they added
00:45:15 ◼ ► in a comma. But I think I don't think no Apple no is I think that's the wrong take. I think that
00:45:24 ◼ ► Apple intelligence should do this because I agree. It's Oh no, no, no, no, no. I think no was was
00:45:31 ◼ ► saying this is not the correct interpretation of what I was writing. I don't think it was. I don't
00:45:38 ◼ ► think it was St. Apple should do this. Cause I agree with you. I was actually thrilled to see,
00:45:41 ◼ ► I see what you mean. I see. I see. I see. You're there. They're dinging Apple intelligence,
00:45:48 ◼ ► not for allowing them to say inappropriate things, but for not getting what the original slang intent
00:45:56 ◼ ► was. Exactly. Which, which is, which is, which is, which is why when they added in a comma,
00:46:01 ◼ ► which is great, the comma is better. It's it says, let's F comma daddy. It becomes when you
00:46:06 ◼ ► use professional, it becomes let us engage in sexual intercourse, comma father. Much better,
00:46:15 ◼ ► much better. I get it now. So I'm glad we talked about this. I get it. I misinterpreted what,
00:46:20 ◼ ► what their objection was, but now they're on team team us that you should be, it shouldn't,
00:46:31 ◼ ► that's your artwork and, or, or your communication. And, and we talked about it on at my show and they
00:46:38 ◼ ► were like, yeah, if you, you get to be you and Apple intelligence will help you, but Apple
00:46:43 ◼ ► intelligence shouldn't be bringing this topic up out of nowhere. No, it definitely shouldn't,
00:46:48 ◼ ► right? It shouldn't be suggesting that, especially in a professional context, probably any context,
00:46:52 ◼ ► it shouldn't be suggesting that. However, if you're trying to yeah, professionalize your,
00:46:57 ◼ ► your, your sex or whatever, that should be, yeah, your flirtation. Absolutely. I mean, look,
00:47:03 ◼ ► I'm hoping that I, I, I'm really into emoji pastas, which are like the ridiculous, like
00:47:08 ◼ ► chain texts that people send with that are very, very, very profane with those emoji things. And,
00:47:17 ◼ ► my friends and I, but I would love for Apple intelligence to help me create those. Right?
00:47:22 ◼ ► Like that would be in, in, in a peak world, something that could look at things, help me,
00:47:25 ◼ ► help me do this. And I don't know if that'll ever be a thing that they would embrace, but to me,
00:47:29 ◼ ► that is kind of the right balance, which is we're not going to suggest those things. But if people,
00:47:35 ◼ ► look, people are adults, these are our computers. If you want to use profane language with these
00:47:39 ◼ ► tools, if you're told no, that's just to me, that'd be like, okay, well, I'm never using this
00:47:43 ◼ ► feature, then what's the point in the same way that it just dumb? No, no AI at all. If you want
00:47:51 ◼ ► to write some sort of offensive manifesto in text edit, yeah, or send it to send a very rude or
00:48:00 ◼ ► threatening email in mail. You just, you're the one type, you're the one typing these things and
00:48:06 ◼ ► it's the computer's just a tool. Apple intelligence is a tool and I think Apple is very clear about
00:48:13 ◼ ► that. And I think that's one of the things that's very clarifying about their approach so far to,
00:48:19 ◼ ► to LLM AIs. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I think it's a good thing. And, and I don't know about
00:48:24 ◼ ► you. I remember one of the first things doing with the McAnnel entry school was you could make them
00:48:29 ◼ ► say things and yeah, typing, trying to see what profanities and what profane things we could get
00:48:34 ◼ ► the computer to say, but to just, to reel out, right? This is just the thing that kids are going
00:48:38 ◼ ► to do and the people are going to use these tools for and any attempts to prevent that from happening
00:48:45 ◼ ► is, is just going to make people even more committed to the bid. And, and it's, I don't
00:48:50 ◼ ► think it's the place of, if you're really wanting to be in the background, especially the way that
00:48:54 ◼ ► Apple is by making it so clear through their messaging that they want this to be on device
00:48:57 ◼ ► as much as possible and that it is private and whatnot. I'm like, okay, well then don't judge
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00:50:59 ◼ ► to deal with, all the stuff that it's just all wrapped around their stuff. You just get the money.
00:51:05 ◼ ► Fluid Engine is their new layout tool. Blueprint works with it. But Fluid Engine is the thing that
00:51:14 ◼ ► lets you, in addition to the old way where you can, of course, use a desktop computer to do
00:51:19 ◼ ► tweaks to your layout or adjustments or something like that. You can do it right from your phone now,
00:51:24 ◼ ► right down to your phone or your iPad or something like that. Everything works great. They've
00:51:28 ◼ ► optimized it with knowing just how many people their phone is their primary computer these days,
00:51:35 ◼ ► and their new Fluid Engine is built with that in mind. And the great thing about building phone
00:51:40 ◼ ► first is for anything really is if it works great on the phone, of course, it still works great on
00:51:46 ◼ ► the desktop computer. It's really vice versa often doesn't work. Build desktop first often doesn't
00:51:51 ◼ ► work, doesn't fit, something like that on the phone. But the other way around works great.
00:51:55 ◼ ► Email campaigns, they've got great, great automatic email marketing tools that engage with
00:52:01 ◼ ► your community, can help drive sales and simplify audience management. So if you want to run like a
00:52:07 ◼ ► newsletter or something like that, you could do all of that through Squarespace too. All of that's
00:52:11 ◼ ► available so much more. Just go to squarespace.com/talkshow. You get a free trial 30 days,
00:52:23 ◼ ► squarespace.com/talkshow. Well, the other the other reason I've been meaning to have you on
00:52:32 ◼ ► the show, Christina was you. I had my identity stolen. And I'm the one who told you. You're the
00:52:41 ◼ ► one who figured it out. I was gonna say because of you, I found this out. It's an incredible story.
00:52:45 ◼ ► Ridiculous. So what happened? I'll start is, yeah, you start because you're the one who figured this
00:52:52 ◼ ► out. So at this point, I guess it's about two or three weeks ago. I keep meaning to write about it,
00:52:58 ◼ ► but I'll just talk about it now. But I've been having a strange problem on my Mac with the auto
00:53:04 ◼ ► complete feature. And in certain apps, I'm not getting a full list of words. But this is the
00:53:09 ◼ ► feature where if you start typing H O S P, and then you hit F5, it should complete with words
00:53:18 ◼ ► like hospital. It's been there. I think it might even go back to speaking of next, might go back
00:53:23 ◼ ► to next step, certainly has been part of Mac OS X since for 24 years. And for me in certain apps,
00:53:29 ◼ ► in some apps, I get the full list of dictionary words. And then in a few apps, it must be some
00:53:35 ◼ ► kind of preferences. I don't know, I still haven't figured it out. But it's the main reason I want to
00:53:39 ◼ ► write about your story here. So I can get this off my chest. And maybe a reader will help me debug
00:53:43 ◼ ► this problem. But anyway, I started searching the web for this, about this feature. And it doesn't
00:53:50 ◼ ► really have a name. So it was kind of hard to Google for. And then I found a daring fireball
00:53:57 ◼ ► article, or just a brief link, like one of those links where I linked to something and I only wrote
00:54:03 ◼ ► one sentence and I didn't even block quote it. And it but it was a link. And I hovered over the link,
00:54:09 ◼ ► and it went to Tua, the unofficial Apple web blog for those of you who don't remember, but it was a
00:54:14 ◼ ► long standing, very popular group blog run by web blogs, Inc. Right? Yeah, that's right.
00:54:21 ◼ ► You know, the early years of daring fireball work coincident with Tua. And I happened to I forget
00:54:29 ◼ ► the number. But I because of this story, I've looked up how many times I've linked to Tua over
00:54:34 ◼ ► the years. And it's dozens and dozens of times really good site. Lots of great writers started
00:54:39 ◼ ► there, including I don't know if you started there, but it was it was my first tech writing. Yes.
00:54:44 ◼ ► It's the first time I remember your byline. Yeah, I mean, I was still in college. I did a thing for
00:54:51 ◼ ► USA Today about American Idol of all things. That was my first thing that I shocked shocker Christina's
00:54:57 ◼ ► shocking, absolutely shocking, Christina. Well, what's shocking is that I got that gig because I
00:55:02 ◼ ► was a commenter on the music editors blog. He had a music blog, and then he had an American Idol blog
00:55:12 ◼ ► we're looking for a contributor to the print an online edition about the show. So it was like me
00:55:17 ◼ ► and a couple people who actually knew what they were talking about giving the contestants advice
00:55:20 ◼ ► each week. So fake it till you make it works. But no, but yeah, Tua was my very first paid for tech
00:55:26 ◼ ► writing gig. Yeah. So you say Tua? I always say to most people say to most people say to I think
00:55:33 ◼ ► I've always been the aberration there. But yeah, although I guess that brings up the the hawk to a
00:55:38 ◼ ► girl it does which people made some really good puns about that actually, which was really,
00:55:43 ◼ ► really good. I think I think that 404 media when they wrote about this incident, which will be
00:55:55 ◼ ► So anyway, I found an old Daring Fireball link and I thought I don't remember what I linked to,
00:56:01 ◼ ► but it was clear from the little brief thing that I had written that it was a story at Tua
00:56:08 ◼ ► about this feature. And I thought, well, if I link to it, it must be good. And I don't mean that to
00:56:14 ◼ ► be self serving to me. I just mean that's probably why I linked to it. Oh, and I know that the
00:56:19 ◼ ► unofficial Apple web blog got shut down like a decade ago. And unfortunately, whoever still owned
00:56:25 ◼ ► it hadn't kept the archive up. And I thought, this isn't the links not going to work. But what
00:56:31 ◼ ► I thought was, well, I'll click it anyway, it probably won't resolve. But then I'll copy the
00:56:37 ◼ ► link and go to the Internet Archive, paste the link. But when I do I just thought, well, I'll
00:56:44 ◼ ► try it first. And before I do the copy and paste with no, I don't even know why I did it that way.
00:56:49 ◼ ► It occurred to me to just it actually seemed lazier to do it that way to just click rather
00:56:55 ◼ ► than control click, copy and go. It was like, I'll just click it and then I'll copy. But lo and
00:57:01 ◼ ► behold, it worked. It loaded. And then I thought to myself, my first thought was, oh, maybe I'm
00:57:08 ◼ ► wrong that they took down. Yeah, I don't know. And then I saw that the article's byline was
00:57:16 ◼ ► Christina Warren. And I do not have a really great memory of 2006 links at Daring Firewall.
00:57:34 ◼ ► right? Like I said, this is where I first became aware of you. And I remember you writing for TUOP,
00:57:41 ◼ ► but I don't remember you writing things like the Esoterica of a nerdy text autocomplete
00:57:49 ◼ ► in F5 feature. But I thought maybe. And then I start reading and I'm like, this doesn't sound
00:57:56 ◼ ► like what? It's just this, it didn't sound wrong. It just didn't sound like you. And I know your
00:58:04 ◼ ► voice, not just your literal voice here. I know. Jessica Vinas-Nelson No, you know my writing
00:58:07 ◼ ► voice. Absolutely. Yeah. Jared Absolutely. And I just, spidey sense started going off. And then I
00:58:12 ◼ ► got, this is where it gets funny. I get to the bottom and there's the author bio and it says,
00:58:19 ◼ ► "Christina Warren is a dedicated writer with a deep love of technology, Christine blah, blah,
00:58:24 ◼ ► blah." And there's a photo. And the photo is not you. Jessica Vinas-Nelson It is not me. It is not
00:58:31 ◼ ► me. It is not even a real human. Jared Nope. Well, it's got that generic, it is a young
00:58:38 ◼ ► white woman with long brown hair. But it's clearly in hindsight AI generated. It doesn't have
00:58:48 ◼ ► telltale signs of being AI generated, but you know. Jessica Vinas-Nelson No, but it's just,
00:58:52 ◼ ► if you've seen enough of these things, like I do anyway, like I look at them like, "Oh, okay,
00:58:55 ◼ ► yeah, this just has a slightly uncanny valley." It was not a bad AI generated photo. And
00:59:01 ◼ ► I made this photo in my profile picture for a few days. So I had to stare at it a lot. And I also
00:59:06 ◼ ► did it at work, which was very funny. But when you sent me the link, at first I was like, "So go on."
00:59:12 ◼ ► Jared Well, that's it. But literally, then I thought this is screwed up. Either something's
00:59:18 ◼ ► gone on with Too Odd that I missed, or something has just happened. And I stumbled across it. And
00:59:24 ◼ ► so I took a screenshot of it. I forget which I sent to you first, the screenshot of the bio with
00:59:30 ◼ ► the picture or just the link. Jessica Vinas-Nelson I think it was just the link. Yeah, it used to be
00:59:34 ◼ ► both. I think it was just the link. And I was like, "What in the hell?" And at first, my first
00:59:37 ◼ ► thing, because I think it was just the link that came in first, going back, I'm trying to scroll
00:59:41 ◼ ► through and find it. I was like, "Okay, what is this?" Because at first I was like, "Oh, yeah,
00:59:46 ◼ ► you found like an old link. Yeah, this doesn't resolve anymore. This hasn't resolved in years."
00:59:49 ◼ ► And then I clicked on it. And I realized it did resolve. And then I saw the photo and I went,
00:59:54 ◼ ► "What the f," but I didn't censor myself. And then I linked you to the author's page. And I said,
01:00:01 ◼ ► "LMAO, they stole all of us. This is insane." And they basically just, what we realized they did is
01:00:07 ◼ ► they bought the domain from Yahoo, Apollo Global, who were the, I guess, current owners of the
01:00:13 ◼ ► domain and whatnot. They sold the domain, but they did not sell the content. It turns out the content
01:00:18 ◼ ► actually, they couldn't have sold it. Even if they'd wanted to, it belonged to us. And it was
01:00:23 ◼ ► very clear, even in this company's about page, they only bought the content. And then what they
01:00:28 ◼ ► did is they scraped the internet archive, ran the archives that they could find through an AI
01:00:34 ◼ ► rewriting thing, and then just randomly assigned different authors to different stories. So
01:00:40 ◼ ► that link resolved and it was probably similar, but still uncanny valley compared to what an
01:00:47 ◼ ► original author wrote back in 2006. But they just randomly assigned author IDs to things.
01:00:53 ◼ ► But I had no idea. You were the one who just, you're, and I think you caught it. I think that
01:00:59 ◼ ► when people did some research, it looked like it had maybe launched a week earlier. So it was a
01:01:03 ◼ ► really, really recent thing. So it was like, I'm so grateful that you happened to be lazy and not
01:01:10 ◼ ► go immediately to the internet archive to click on that link, because I don't know when I would
01:01:15 ◼ ► have found out that my identity and name was being stolen and reused on stuff. At first,
01:01:22 ◼ ► I thought I was like, okay, well, they just, because this has happened before where a domain
01:01:26 ◼ ► expires, somebody buys it, and then they create kind of a splog, like a spam blog using archives
01:01:32 ◼ ► they can find. And I've seen that for years. That happened to the Hairpin a couple years ago,
01:01:36 ◼ ► which was a really great website. But what was, what incensed me where I kind of frankly, like,
01:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah. And still using the old author names on those new articles. And that's when I flipped
01:01:57 ◼ ► my stuff. Well, the whole thing is so scummy and scammy. I mean, I don't know, we need some kind of
01:02:05 ◼ ► combination word for scummy and scammy. But yes, there have been, and I know this firsthand from
01:02:12 ◼ ► all of the various domains that have gone defunct that I've linked to 10, 15, 20 years ago, that
01:02:21 ◼ ► like the best case scenario is when the domain is just, nothing is there. And it's like, okay,
01:02:26 ◼ ► all the URLs are 404s, but you can go to the Internet Archive or whatever. But a lot of them,
01:02:32 ◼ ► whatever the scam of the day is, it used to be like links to casino sites or something like that.
01:02:40 ◼ ► In recent years, it's more, a lot of times it'll be like a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency type thing.
01:02:47 ◼ ► Imagine if they did it with Tuod. Here's a site that used to be the unofficial Apple web blog,
01:02:51 ◼ ► and it was a bunch of Mac and iPhone nerd stories. And now it's trying to convince you to give your
01:03:04 ◼ ► and it could only happen with AI. That's this, I think. I mean, in theory, you could do it
01:03:11 ◼ ► another way. But it's so bizarre that this guy, and apparently his name, I have tried to reach
01:03:20 ◼ ► out to him, but his name is Haider Ali Khan, and he's bought a bunch of other domains. I forget
01:03:27 ◼ ► some of them. What's his name? Ernie? Yeah, Ernie Smith from TDM figured a lot of this out.
01:03:33 ◼ ► Ernie Smith from TDM, who anybody who's like, "Ah, where'd I hear of him recently?" He's the guy
01:03:55 ◼ ► which I am just jotted down, duly noted to put in the show notes. But he figured out that it's
01:04:30 ◼ ► But think about that. It is clever. I often think about this. Whenever new technology comes,
01:04:37 ◼ ► most people are good people and they are honest people and they don't think of novel ways to rip
01:04:47 ◼ ► off, screw and defraud people. They just don't. And the whole history of computing is like things
01:04:57 ◼ ► that had never occurred to anybody. And they're like, "Oh yeah, I guess that is insecure."
01:05:01 ◼ ► I mean, it used to be. I mean, as late as the '90s for sending email, you would just telnet
01:05:09 ◼ ► into email server, an SMTP server on, I forget, it was like port 20 or something like that.
01:05:16 ◼ ► And you didn't have to log in. You could just start typing email commands. And so you could
01:05:20 ◼ ► send email from any address on that domain to anybody you want to forge an email from somebody
01:05:28 ◼ ► because the SMTP protocol was written thinking like, "Well, what's the easiest protocol we could
01:05:35 ◼ ► have for sending email?" And it would be like, "Oh, you would just write a program to telnet in
01:05:41 ◼ ► on port 20 and start typing commands." Right? And the whole idea of spam, which is a forever problem
01:05:49 ◼ ► for email, but the idea that anybody can send email to anybody else, it sounded wonderful
01:05:55 ◼ ► originally. And then somebody figured out, "Well, hell, I could send a million of these to every
01:06:00 ◼ ► single email address on the internet." All sorts of problems like that. But people just don't think
01:06:07 ◼ ► of these things, right? And so I never would have thought of this scam. This never even occurred to
01:06:11 ◼ ► me. But what he did, I just, you described it, but I just want to reiterate. So he bought the domain
01:06:26 ◼ ► So he bought the domain but did not buy the content rights to everything Tua had written.
01:06:32 ◼ ► So all he had was a domain. But he knows somehow, I guess, through the Internet Archive,
01:06:40 ◼ ► he scraped the Internet Archive to get all the URLs from old Tua articles and then got the
01:06:48 ◼ ► content from them from the Internet Archive. Knew somehow he had the moral compass not to just
01:07:09 ◼ ► And so the articles are about the same subjects. If you go to the Internet Archive and look at the
01:07:16 ◼ ► original, it is about the F5 autocomplete feature. I think it was Dave Campo or somebody had actually
01:07:24 ◼ ► written the original article at Tua. And I could see once I read the original on the Internet
01:07:29 ◼ ► Archive, I was like, "Oh, yeah, I could see why I linked to this. It was a good article."
01:07:32 ◼ ► But what he did is he had every single one of those articles rewritten, put them at the same URL
01:07:37 ◼ ► they used to be, and yet for whatever reason decided or maybe by happenstance, just randomly
01:07:45 ◼ ► assigned bylines from the list of actual people who had previously written to Tua to each article.
01:07:52 ◼ ► So each article, whoever wrote the original one, like there were—here you got assigned to an
01:07:57 ◼ ► article you didn't write, and then there were other articles you did write that got us—
01:08:05 ◼ ► No, he did not write an article about American Idol or whatever it was that you wrote. They're
01:08:11 ◼ ► all mixed up and jumbled. Every single one of these authors, he decided, "I'll use their real
01:08:26 ◼ ► Yeah, this is fine. And then had the temerity to write in the about page that, you know,
01:08:35 ◼ ► they had meticulously rewritten the articles to match modern standards. And that was when,
01:08:43 ◼ ► when I talked to The Verge, they had a really nice poll quote for me that I can't repeat on this
01:08:47 ◼ ► show, but it was great. That's when I said that poll quote, because that was when I was like,
01:08:52 ◼ ► "Okay, genuinely, you can go believe yourself," because it's bad enough to do all this, but then
01:08:57 ◼ ► to write, "Oh, meticulously rewritten to adhere to modern standards." Are you actually out of your
01:09:04 ◼ ► mind? Right? And like you, this scam had never occurred to me. Of course, I've seen people rebuy
01:09:09 ◼ ► dead domains and revive the URLs and whatnot, but I never thought that somebody would try to
01:09:16 ◼ ► revive a brand using the names of the former writers with fake photos, and then do what they
01:09:25 ◼ ► did, which is like, "Okay, we want to keep the past links because we want to have good Google
01:09:29 ◼ ► juice, but we're not even going, we're going to rewrite them in a mishmash way because we think
01:09:34 ◼ ► that'll get us around the copyright infringement. It won't, but we think that'll do it. And we'll
01:09:38 ◼ ► just assign different author names because that'll be fine. The actual people who wrote that content,
01:10:07 ◼ ► once you went public with this on social media and it got picked up by The Verge, it got picked up by
01:10:25 ◼ ► Yeah, Jason Snell was really kind enough to link to it early on because he saw my post on Macedon.
01:10:30 ◼ ► Because what happened is you told me about this and I was incensed and I was actually sick that
01:10:35 ◼ ► day. I was incensed. That's why I saw it a couple hours late. You sent it to me earlier in the day.
01:10:40 ◼ ► I woke up because I hadn't been feeling well. I'm incensed. And so I immediately do the only
01:10:46 ◼ ► thing that I feel like I can do in that situation, which was like, "Okay, well, I'm going to throw a
01:10:50 ◼ ► temper tantrum and hope that people care enough online." And so I posted about it on Twitter and
01:10:59 ◼ ► "Are you kidding me?" Because just everyone else's response was the same response that you and I had,
01:11:03 ◼ ► which was I didn't even think that somebody could do something like this, right? I obviously,
01:11:09 ◼ ► this is a human problem, not a technology problem, but the way they were able to do this in such a
01:11:13 ◼ ► quick way obviously only happens because the AI would allow them to automate the way that they
01:11:18 ◼ ► did. But I was incensed and I was like, "Okay." I also sent an email almost immediately to the
01:11:25 ◼ ► one contact thing on the site and I was like, "Remove my name from your website immediately.
01:11:30 ◼ ► I don't want to be contacting my attorney." And I meant that. I was like, I didn't want to,
01:11:35 ◼ ► before I knew anything about the guy, I was like, "There probably isn't even any jurisdiction where
01:11:39 ◼ ► I could get these people and I don't really have the time. It's not even a money thing. I don't
01:11:43 ◼ ► have the time to fight this, but I just really wanted my name off the website." And so I sent
01:11:48 ◼ ► kind of a threatening email and then I had an inkling that it might get some attention because
01:11:54 ◼ ► some friends of mine who work at The Verge told me that they were posting about it in their Slack.
01:12:02 ◼ ► And then my friend Karissa at Engadget was kind enough to write a story. She was assigned,
01:12:06 ◼ ► she didn't even like the pitches and they just said, "Hey, can you do this?" She was like,
01:12:09 ◼ ► "Can I talk to you about this thing?" And I was like, "Yes, absolutely." And 404 Media was also
01:12:13 ◼ ► working on something at the same time. And so I was able to basically within the first day,
01:12:20 ◼ ► what they did was, and this was even funnier. So first, after my email came in and after the
01:12:26 ◼ ► story started going up, clearly the heat was on. And so first my byline was changed just from
01:12:33 ◼ ► Christina Warren to Christina. And I was like, "That's still not good enough." Because unfortunately,
01:12:39 ◼ ► and not unfortunately, for better or worse, even though the site's been gone for a really long time
01:12:42 ◼ ► and I haven't written for them since 2009, a lot of people will associate me with TUAW. And I was
01:12:48 ◼ ► like, "No, there's one Christina that's associated with that domain, with that brand and you can't
01:12:53 ◼ ► use my name in any way." Then it quickly shifted from that to Mary Brown. And they did change the
01:13:00 ◼ ► names of all the authors, which was my primary concern was not even for myself, because I'm
01:13:05 ◼ ► fortunate enough that I have a big platform other ways that even though I wouldn't want people to
01:13:10 ◼ ► mistake new AI generated slop with my byline and a different photo from me, I wasn't overly concerned.
01:13:17 ◼ ► But there are other people who have other careers and done other things who don't have the same
01:13:22 ◼ ► profile I do, who their names are being reused and are being again, like published actively on a site
01:13:28 ◼ ► that is in Google News, has been indexed, they know how to play this game that has a lot of backlinks
01:13:33 ◼ ► and Google doesn't care about that stuff, no matter what they say, they'll let these sorts of
01:13:37 ◼ ► scams go on. I there's, there's no way that a search engine would pick up that anything
01:13:43 ◼ ► suspicious. No, not at all. Not at all. It would just be like the search engine would be like,
01:13:47 ◼ ► "Oh, this URL is active again. Here's an article, let me index it." Exactly. Exactly. And so my main
01:13:54 ◼ ► concern was I was just like, I don't want some of my former colleagues to have their SEO and other
01:13:59 ◼ ► things caught up in this because that could hurt them professionally and whatnot. And then
01:14:03 ◼ ► selfishly too, I was like, I don't want my name on this stuff. I'm pretty protective over that.
01:14:07 ◼ ► So they changed the names and all the bylines. By the time the 404 media story was up, they started
01:14:14 ◼ ► to go through that process of changing it. But what was funny is that the backlash kept building
01:14:19 ◼ ► and it became bigger and bigger. It was a slow news week. So lucky for me, and also thank you
01:14:23 ◼ ► very much again for sending me the first heads up. I didn't expect it to have legs, but I'm
01:14:28 ◼ ► sort of person I've never met like a crisis that I won't turn into a publicity stunt. And so I was
01:14:33 ◼ ► like, I will milk this for everything that's worth, right? Because I think we need to talk about this.
01:14:37 ◼ ► And also this is insane that this happened and there'll be a great story for years to come. But
01:14:43 ◼ ► what was funny is that as this sort of be uncovered about this guy, he started removing
01:14:53 ◼ ► I was about to say, I don't know, because I don't know about you. Did you get an answer to any of
01:15:05 ◼ ► I got nothing. There was no correspondence with me at all. All I know is that within about a couple
01:15:11 ◼ ► hours of me sending that initial emissive and they started changing the bylines and stuff. And I know
01:15:16 ◼ ► that that wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been the media attention. And also if I hadn't
01:15:23 ◼ ► And there's still some fishy stuff. I'm looking at the homepage of tuah.com right now, and I don't
01:15:28 ◼ ► recommend anybody subscribe to the feed. But it's still up to date. There's July 30, July 30,
01:15:36 ◼ ► I don't know, three or four articles a day. But it's like the byline for the first four stories,
01:15:42 ◼ ► five stories, six stories, seven stories is Paul Terpstra, T-E-R-P-S-T-R-A. Now there's-
01:16:20 ◼ ► change the name. Because to me, that one, like everybody else's names were sufficiently
01:16:25 ◼ ► different enough. That one wasn't. And I don't know who just laziness, what the situation was,
01:16:31 ◼ ► but I don't know if they would listen or anything, but since they were responsive the first time,
01:16:41 ◼ ► I still don't love that hyperlinks, the two things that I wrote now go to something that is not what
01:16:48 ◼ ► I wrote and whatnot. I can't really do anything about that because again, the domain was sold and
01:16:53 ◼ ► I don't think you can copyright URLs, nor would I want people to. And yes, there is, I'm sure,
01:16:58 ◼ ► copyright infringement case brought up, but this guy, even finding out what country he's in would
01:17:07 ◼ ► I've just never, but it never occurred to me and it is devilish and it sucks that it's still up.
01:17:13 ◼ ► Because like you said, as somebody else who didn't have my unique position of having been
01:17:29 ◼ ► it wasn't just a random- No, it's amazing that we caught it the way that we did. And I hadn't been
01:17:35 ◼ ► aware of how you described it to me, but I hadn't quite understood until you explained it on the
01:17:41 ◼ ► podcast how you'd come across it that you'd actually click the link. I had thought that maybe
01:18:01 ◼ ► and if a Daring Fireball link comes up, I think, "Oh, maybe I already knew the answer and I've
01:18:10 ◼ ► I've definitely done that. I found my own articles or own documentation to solve a problem that
01:18:15 ◼ ► currently has. I'm like, "Oh, right. I did figure that out however many years ago. Got it." Yeah.
01:18:20 ◼ ► As I accelerate through middle age, it happens more and more and I'm like, "Oh, younger John
01:18:32 ◼ ► No, it is so—no, and I will say though, it only took a couple minutes to really sort of figure out
01:18:38 ◼ ► the scope of the basic gist of what this guy had done. But every click along the way, my first
01:18:51 ◼ ► defunct for a while and it had been—the best case scenario is somebody bought it and resuscitated it
01:18:56 ◼ ► and I was actually kind of happy for a moment. I was like, "Oh, this is fantastic." Some—whether
01:19:02 ◼ ► it was Verizon or whoever—somebody took the care of rejuvenating a site that I wish had never gone
01:19:10 ◼ ► away. I mean, I get closing it, but I wish that like the way that old copies of magazines that
01:19:17 ◼ ► don't exist anymore, you could still go to the library and read them on microfilm or if you have
01:19:22 ◼ ► a copy of the magazine in your box in your garage, it's still there for you to read. I wish Tua were
01:19:29 ◼ ► still there as it was on the day it shut down forever. I wish everything I've ever linked to
01:19:35 ◼ ► was still there. And I am so, so happy that the Internet Archive exists and I'm so worried because
01:19:44 ◼ ► it occupies a singular position on the entire Internet. There is—if something were to happen
01:19:53 ◼ ► to the Internet Archive, what's plan B for finding the original version? Unfortunately, not everything
01:20:01 ◼ ► that you wish you could find from 2006 on the web is in the Internet Archive, whether it was because
01:20:06 ◼ ► the site had a robots.txt file that said, "Don't even use the Internet Archive. We don't want to
01:20:12 ◼ ► be archived." Why in the world anybody would do that? It's bizarre and beyond me, but people have
01:20:17 ◼ ► done it or it was an obscure site that they didn't index. I've run into that problem where I can just
01:20:25 ◼ ► tell this is not a very popular—this was not a popular website and the Internet Archive, "Sorry,
01:20:32 ◼ ► no, we don't have any indexes of that. Darn." But here's one that did. But every step of the way,
01:20:38 ◼ ► I thought, "Oh, somebody resuscitated this and they mixed up the images. They made a—maybe it's
01:20:43 ◼ ► a coding error." And like I said, you were a 20-something white woman with long dark hair,
01:20:55 ◼ ► and this is a 20-something woman with long dark hair. So I could see how somebody might have
01:21:00 ◼ ► made the mistake. But the more I looked at it, the more I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no." And then I
01:21:07 ◼ ► started clicking around the site and I sort of got—I was like, "Oh, oh!" And it's like, "Oh!"
01:21:15 ◼ ► And the key, of course, was when I went to the authors page where they had all of the authors.
01:21:26 ◼ ► Stephanie: Yes, exactly. And you were like, you're just like, "Wow, okay, this is great. This is not
01:21:37 ◼ ► Stephanie; I do have to say, the nice part about this was that Jason at 404 Media reached out to
01:21:40 ◼ ► Mike Schramm, who had been an early and frequent contributor to the blog, and he'd sent an email
01:21:45 ◼ ► to a number of us. And so some of—I've kept in touch with a number of people from that era,
01:21:50 ◼ ► but a bunch of people I haven't talked to in years and years and years. And so it was kind of nice
01:21:54 ◼ ► that there was kind of a mini email reunion amongst some old writers that came out about this,
01:22:05 ◼ ► And I am—I'm angry at a lot of people about it, obviously, primarily the guy who did this.
01:22:10 ◼ ► I'm also a little bit annoyed, I'm not going to lie, with Yahoo, Apollo Global, whatever, for
01:22:15 ◼ ► selling the domain, making it clear that it's just that. And then I'm like, "Okay, you had the
01:22:20 ◼ ► perpetual license to this content too, but it's like, what are you doing? Do you do any due
01:22:24 ◼ ► diligence about this or not? Because the amount of money that you sold this for, which was probably
01:22:29 ◼ ► five or 10 grand, it couldn't have been a lot of money, especially for their bottom line. It's
01:22:45 ◼ ► ago, the news came out that Google is shutting out—or years ago, it said they're deprecating
01:22:50 ◼ ► their link shortener, which was like a Bitly type thing. There was a brief period of time—
01:22:59 ◼ ► Driven by Twitter's then 140 character length, which counted the entire URL as part of the
01:23:11 ◼ ► —Daring Fireball link shortener, which—but guess what? Mine still works. I don't use it anymore.
01:23:16 ◼ ► I don't need it anymore. But as long as my internet presence is active, those links will
01:23:24 ◼ ► keep redirecting. And Google announced that, I don't know, in a couple months, they're all
01:23:33 ◼ ► six years ago. And I get that there is a very real cost to maintaining an older service
01:23:49 ◼ ► and we were going to sunset it. And the initial plan was to just get rid of all the URLs.
01:23:54 ◼ ► And then we heard back from people who said, "Well, no, we've used these things in academic
01:24:03 ◼ ► well, we will scan." And in our situation, it was a little bit better because it wasn't
01:24:08 ◼ ► a general URL shortener like what Google's was, which could go to any number of resources.
01:24:13 ◼ ► It's just going to go to GitHub repositories. But we were able to say, "Okay, well, what
01:24:17 ◼ ► we'll do is we will scan these URLs that have been created. And any ones that go to something
01:24:22 ◼ ► that 404 is out, we're not going to maintain. And anything that goes to something that we
01:24:27 ◼ ► have viewed as spam or malicious or anything else, we're not going to maintain." But we
01:24:32 ◼ ► will go ahead and we kind of created a static service that somebody is maintaining to continue
01:24:37 ◼ ► to make the redirects work, which I think is the right thing to do. We got that feedback
01:24:41 ◼ ► from our users. And yeah, it's not as if it wasn't a ton of work that went into it, but
01:24:54 ◼ ► Well, GitHub, absolutely. No, it was the right thing to do, right? One of the tenets of the
01:24:58 ◼ ► web, this doesn't really hold true anymore, I guess, which is really sad. Again, to your
01:25:14 ◼ ► Exactly. Exactly. And again, I'm not saying that they should have to maintain this service
01:25:19 ◼ ► forever, because I'm sure that has a real cost and they're probably running older servers
01:25:49 ◼ ► This would be a fantastic project for interns. I mean, it's almost like the definition.
01:26:04 ◼ ► as simple as like my URL shortener, which only points to daring fireball articles. So I know
01:26:12 ◼ ► there are no DF4.us. That was my, but that still is my shortened URL or domain name. None of those
01:26:23 ◼ ► direct anywhere except to daring fireball. And then it's at daring fireball where there's an
01:26:29 ◼ ► article that links elsewhere. And so I get it that Google's could go anywhere. And so it's not,
01:26:34 ◼ ► but the basic mechanics of taking a short URL and redirecting to a long one is, I mean, like trivial.
01:26:43 ◼ ► Yeah. That would be like, not for an intern. That would be like day one of learn to code.
01:26:53 ◼ ► functions and things like that on how to create like a short, a URL shortener. I mean, it's an
01:26:57 ◼ ► incredibly simple thing. And again, it's not like they don't have a ton of redirects and they own
01:27:07 ◼ ► So, so again, you don't want to maintain a database. What I think we did for that reason
01:27:10 ◼ ► is that we have a static kind of, we figure out the kind of a static way to kind of, you know,
01:27:23 ◼ ► to your point, I think it'd be a great intern project. And then you would not be breaking the
01:27:27 ◼ ► web, which is a thing that you penalize people for all the time. If, if, if, cause like people
01:27:33 ◼ ► like your blog, like if you are sending, if you have a bunch of links that don't resolve,
01:27:36 ◼ ► like they will combat against you when they do their scanning and whatnot. So what are you doing
01:27:41 ◼ ► here? The funniest part about that to me too, is that Google's suggestion about six years ago,
01:27:47 ◼ ► they're like, okay, well, everybody should move, move to this Firebase service for, for short URLs.
01:27:52 ◼ ► Well, that Firebase service has now been deprecated as well. And, and, and, and so, and when people
01:27:57 ◼ ► are like, well, what should we do for this? The, the basic response is kind of like shrug.
01:28:10 ◼ ► Which again, if you, if they wanted, you know, and it is slightly different. I see the argument of,
01:28:15 ◼ ► well, we've decided to abandon this, so we're not going to keep it going. But what people wanted,
01:28:20 ◼ ► and I don't think it was unreasonable was okay, stop adding new features, but just let it go
01:28:24 ◼ ► for a couple of years. It's not broken, right? Just let it just, just keep it up. How much could it
01:28:29 ◼ ► cost? Can't cost anything that would matter to them. It just can't. And I do, I get it that
01:28:35 ◼ ► something, whoever bought old domains, like two hours or whoever shut down the hairpin or whatever
01:28:41 ◼ ► other site, it, it is more expensive to keep them running in perpetuity just to always have it up,
01:28:48 ◼ ► but it is not that expensive. And now one, everybody knows that once a site stops publishing
01:29:09 ◼ ► You know, so keeping sites, okay, we're all of the things that suck. Oh, I loved the hairpin,
01:29:17 ◼ ► or I love to, or I love my favorite site is shutting down. I can't believe it. And everybody
01:29:23 ◼ ► feels bad when staff gets laid off. And especially because it tends to come in waves as the economy
01:29:30 ◼ ► goes up and down. And so it really sucks when a site lays off their staff at a time when other
01:29:36 ◼ ► sites are laying off their staff. So the job market is tight. It sucks. Everybody who's ever
01:29:42 ◼ ► been in this business knows that it sucks and knows that it's, it's a hard business to want to
01:29:49 ◼ ► be in. But man, it is like insult to injury to say, Oh, and by the way, on your way out,
01:29:55 ◼ ► all the work that you've put into the site for the last years, many years, in some cases,
01:30:10 ◼ ► No, it totally is. And then, and it's, it's bad too, because I'm a big, strong proponent of kind
01:30:16 ◼ ► of preserving the web because this is the stuff matters. Like MTV news, this was one that,
01:30:19 ◼ ► that really hurt. Like they, that's how they existed for more than more than 20 years. And
01:30:24 ◼ ► they just completely nuked the whole thing. And again, I'm sure that it was expensive. They'd
01:30:29 ◼ ► been on WordPress and they moved to another CMS. I was trying to get in contact with people there
01:30:34 ◼ ► to see if there was a way that maybe we could crowdfund some money to save it. Matt Mullenweg
01:30:39 ◼ ► from Automattic has, like they offer a thing where WordPress, where basically you pay like,
01:30:43 ◼ ► I think it's 25 grand or something, and they'll host your content for life, which would be a
01:30:49 ◼ ► reasonable amount of money for Viacom to pay, but Viacom is undergoing ownership changes and, and
01:30:54 ◼ ► all that stuff. And so we were like, well, maybe we could crowdfund that. I wasn't able to get in
01:30:59 ◼ ► contact with anybody who had access to kind of IT stuff there to see if they even still had the
01:31:04 ◼ ► archives available. But I was trying to kind of help a week before all this stuff with the AI,
01:31:09 ◼ ► stealing my identity thing happened. The MTV news shutdown happened and writers lost decades worth
01:31:15 ◼ ► of work in some cases. The messenger, when that site, which lasted less than a year, like they
01:31:20 ◼ ► shut that down basically the day that I guess they filed bankruptcy or chapter seven or whatever.
01:31:25 ◼ ► And it was just like removed off of Amazon like instantly. So people's work is just gone and,
01:31:31 ◼ ► and it's a shame. What's, what's super interesting about the, the, the, the two-aw situation though,
01:31:36 ◼ ► is that they didn't redirect the URLs. However, to their credit, like when they got rid of the site in
01:31:43 ◼ ► 2015, they did archive all the contents on Engadget. And so, so the content has been archived
01:31:49 ◼ ► that the URLs don't resolve, but like the content has been archived. And I was very appreciative of
01:31:54 ◼ ► them at the time, even when they did that, I was like, okay, well, I'm glad that even though the,
01:32:01 ◼ ► preservation of this thing that, that I, that I did in college is still out there somewhere. And
01:32:05 ◼ ► I appreciated that, but that then made it almost that much more jarring. And it's okay. You did
01:32:10 ◼ ► the right thing. And, and to be clear, they didn't do that for all of their sites. Like when I worked
01:32:14 ◼ ► also for a site called download squad, which was great. And when that died, I think in 2010,
01:32:18 ◼ ► they, they didn't archive any of that. And and so those archives literally only exist in the
01:32:24 ◼ ► internet archive and it wasn't a popular enough site for it to probably have, you know, as many
01:32:28 ◼ ► iterations as two-aw did, but yeah. I don't know what the backstory on that is. I don't know,
01:32:35 ◼ ► maybe you do, but it is great. I am glad that Engadget.com is hosting all of the old original
01:32:43 ◼ ► two articles so that the only it's not the internet archive is not the only place to find them.
01:32:49 ◼ ► It's that's great, but I can't help but imagine that internally there was like one person who
01:32:55 ◼ ► wanted to do the right thing. And somehow somebody was like, all we have to do, it'll cost us like
01:33:08 ◼ ► Nope, Nope. And it's, what can I do? Well, that was the thing. They kept the registration. They,
01:33:14 ◼ ► I think they just didn't want to migrate the site over and whatnot. So, so, so I think they just,
01:33:19 ◼ ► they migrated the archives. Why they didn't do redirect, I couldn't tell you. I didn't work there
01:33:23 ◼ ► then, but at least they kept the archives, but then that was the thing, right? They kept paying
01:33:27 ◼ ► the $20 a year renewal. And then I guess they are approaching like the 10 year mark and they're like,
01:33:32 ◼ ► okay, well, we'll see if we can sell this. I saw it is the four character.com. It's a good one.
01:33:40 ◼ ► It's a good one. And a dot com, right? Like it's a four character one. Like it's, it's a good one.
01:33:44 ◼ ► And it's one of those things you could see in like a perfect world where like, if somebody wanted to
01:33:49 ◼ ► revive the brand, even if I didn't agree with it, I would be like, good luck to you. Even if,
01:33:53 ◼ ► even if they didn't in a kind of scammy way, fine. All power to you. Where I got angry was just,
01:34:00 ◼ ► okay, you can't take my words and you can't take, you can't bastardize my words and you certainly
01:34:06 ◼ ► can't take my name, right? That's the best word. I honestly think what he did is worse than just
01:34:13 ◼ ► stealing the original content from the internet archive and copy and pasting it onto his new
01:34:29 ◼ ► the articles are worse. They're all, they're all ever so slightly one generation of slop reduced
01:34:36 ◼ ► from the original pros of these writers who were all, it was a really good site with a bunch of
01:34:42 ◼ ► really good writers. And it was like that, like I said, the first, before I got to the picture,
01:34:49 ◼ ► that was not you, it was the pros. And again, it's not quite, it's, it's so hard to put your finger
01:34:55 ◼ ► on what makes AI slop pros tingle my spidey sets. Cause it's not as bad as the old game of, oh,
01:35:07 ◼ ► start with an English sentence, tell Google translate to translate it to Hungarian and then
01:35:15 ◼ ► translate it back to English or go like English to French, to German, to Mandarin, back to English.
01:35:33 ◼ ► Exactly. No, totally, totally. No, exactly. Like it's, it's better than that. Right? Like that,
01:35:37 ◼ ► that's the thing, but it's just uncanny enough, especially for blogs where there was this
01:35:44 ◼ ► Jason and I, when we were, we were on the phone together and when he was interviewing me about a
01:35:48 ◼ ► story, we were both at the same time clicking through links. Cause I still had a kind of an
01:35:52 ◼ ► archive of some links that I'd written for the site ironically backed up on my, on my tumbler.
01:35:56 ◼ ► And so I still had what the original URLs were. And so we were able to, we were, both of us were
01:36:00 ◼ ► kind of comparing what was originally there and what was there now. And it was very funny just to
01:36:06 ◼ ► see kind of the subtle differences and, and the verge even did like comparison between that too,
01:36:11 ◼ ► for some stories, because it was, it was just subtle enough, but yeah, there was an uncanny
01:36:15 ◼ ► quality and yeah, but, but again, I wouldn't expect somebody who didn't know me, right?
01:36:20 ◼ ► This is why we got so lucky, right? Somebody who didn't know me from anything, or maybe they knew
01:36:25 ◼ ► of me, but like certainly didn't know like my, my, my, my writing voice, my style wouldn't have
01:36:29 ◼ ► been able to look at that. They might've thought as you did initially, and I would have thought
01:36:32 ◼ ► this too, Oh, they just got the byline photo wrong or whatever, but they wouldn't have understood,
01:36:36 ◼ ► Oh, that's not how Christina writes, right? Like many people would just be like, no, that's,
01:36:40 ◼ ► that seems appropriate, especially if it were from this past date, right? That's, that's how you
01:36:45 ◼ ► wrote. And I will, I will defend or not defend, but I will, I will own up to the bad writing that
01:36:50 ◼ ► I wrote as a college student. That's fine. I'll take my lumps on things that I wrote that I'm
01:36:54 ◼ ► sure some of them were good. Some of them were not good, but I, I won't take responsibility for stuff
01:36:59 ◼ ► I didn't write, right? Or if you're going to make it worse like that, that's when I get insulted.
01:37:03 ◼ ► Okay. I will own my bad work, but I will be damned if you're going to make it something that I didn't
01:37:08 ◼ ► actually write. Yeah. And it's just, I was just the right, right person to stumble across it.
01:37:15 ◼ ► I knew it. But the other thing that also makes it a little insidious is, and now the link doesn't
01:37:22 ◼ ► go there anymore. I don't know my original one, but I'm pretty sure he either removed the dates
01:37:27 ◼ ► or changed the dates ostensibly because they'd been refreshed. Like you said, refreshed from
01:37:32 ◼ ► modern standards or whatever. That's bullshit was, but any, anything that would have alerted
01:37:44 ◼ ► No, they didn't do that. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All the dates were set up kind of on these
01:37:48 ◼ ► modern kind of things. It's like the slug. Yeah. Wouldn't be clear. Like you could go through the
01:37:53 ◼ ► archives and you could find things where like on, at least at the time when I looked at it,
01:38:02 ◼ ► and I could be like, okay, which, which now I think they've changed. But at the time when
01:38:06 ◼ ► it was live, like my, my author page was like hundreds of pages long and I could go back and
01:38:11 ◼ ► I could see things going back to 2004, which was before I ever wrote for the site. I think they've
01:38:16 ◼ ► kind of gotten rid of that now. And, and so, and I was like, I didn't write any of this. Um, now it
01:38:21 ◼ ► seems like they've, I don't know if they've culled some of the archives or if they've just hidden it
01:38:24 ◼ ► or what the process has been, but yeah, you're right. They, that, that was the insidious thing
01:38:29 ◼ ► is that like you might know from one view that the article was this age, but then you click on it and
01:38:33 ◼ ► all of a sudden the date is been modernized, which is a scam that a lot of companies have done for a
01:38:38 ◼ ► lot of time, for a long time news organizations, especially because it'll bring them higher in
01:38:42 ◼ ► Google results where they'll just make some small update and then all of a sudden it'll be like
01:38:47 ◼ ► originally published this, but if they even have that there, but it'll have a more current date up
01:38:53 ◼ ► top. So yeah, very insidious, as you said, I mean, very much trying to get people to think that this
01:38:58 ◼ ► was the site that they used to know. And if people hadn't been following those things and who would
01:39:03 ◼ ► right. Like it's just small again, like I just, the, the luck that, that, that it had in this,
01:39:09 ◼ ► and I'm, I'm so grateful for you for pointing this out to me because we were able to get it taken
01:39:13 ◼ ► care of. And also I think it's a good, I hope, look, these things will happen again. I hope that
01:39:19 ◼ ► people can maybe be more prepared for them. And that the, because it was a slow news day, which
01:39:25 ◼ ► thank God, because literally a couple of days later it was not. And so being able to, I think,
01:39:31 ◼ ► have kind of the outrage from a community perspective is good. I hope that obviously if
01:39:37 ◼ ► there's money, you meet people will do it, but I hope that it will make it harder for people to try
01:39:41 ◼ ► to pull off scams like this in the future. Yeah. And I don't want a lot of credit. It was just
01:39:47 ◼ ► serendipity that I found it early. And I think the baffling thing, and it wasn't genius that
01:39:51 ◼ ► uncovered the scheme. It was pretty obvious. Oh yeah. It was very obvious once you could see it.
01:39:55 ◼ ► It was just the awareness. We just didn't know the URL resolved. And the just pure dumb good luck
01:40:01 ◼ ► that I decided to go on this search into this problem like a week after the scam had started,
01:40:07 ◼ ► because the crazy part is it was inevitably going to come out. I mean, I think by now, right? I mean,
01:40:13 ◼ ► there's no way it would have gone a month before somebody stumbled across it and been like, "Hey,
01:40:20 ◼ ► that's not Scott McNulty. I mean, come on. It doesn't look anything like him. What the hell is
01:40:26 ◼ ► going on here?" Like how this guy thought he was going to get away with it is crazy. But that is
01:40:30 ◼ ► often the case with scams of all sorts when they're uncovered. You're like, "How did they
01:40:52 ◼ ► too much good stuff to talk about. I thank you, Christina. It's always good to talk to you. And
01:40:57 ◼ ► it's good to talk to the real you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for having the real me. Thanks again.
01:41:02 ◼ ► Like, I'm just such a weird, a couple of events, but thank you for helping bring that attention.
01:41:11 ◼ ► Though the funny part, the other—we have to mention this—the other part is when you were—after
01:41:16 ◼ ► this got taken care of to some extent, you started joking by using the AI-created avatar as your
01:41:23 ◼ ► avatar. But then you ran into the limit on certain—which social networks that don't let you
01:41:33 ◼ ► It was Twitter. It was Twitter because I have enough—they gave me a blue check. I can't do it.
01:41:44 ◼ ► Then I was stuck. I was like stuck with this photo. And I was like, "Can you change this?" I was like,
01:42:00 ◼ ► Fake Christina as real Christina and you ran into the "you can only change your avatar once a week"
01:42:06 ◼ ► Exactly. Yeah, right. I had to wait for like Twitter's AI or whatever to verify that my photo
01:42:14 ◼ ► was not breaking any guidelines so I could actually change it back to my real photo. It was a very
01:42:25 ◼ ► No, it really was. It was the perfect thing. I will say though, what made it—and now obviously
01:42:30 ◼ ► it doesn't work this way—but at the time what was funny was that when the Verge story came out,
01:42:35 ◼ ► their embeds all had the fake profile photo, which the commenters enjoyed. And I did too. I was like,
01:42:43 ◼ ► "This is even funnier now." Because you've got to find it funny. I initially only did it on
01:42:48 ◼ ► on Slack at work. And some of my colleagues who followed out what happened thought it was funny.
01:42:53 ◼ ► And then one of my colleagues kind of dared me. He was like, "You know, you've got to do this on
01:43:05 ◼ ► Well, especially since I had a whole situation with my Twitter account getting—I lost access to it for
01:43:10 ◼ ► a couple of months. And so I really was like attempting fate there. I will probably never
01:43:17 ◼ ► change my avatar or anything in my profile ever again on Twitter anyway. But yeah, that was a very
01:43:22 ◼ ► funny thing. I was like, "Well, I'm stuck with the fake me." And people were like, "You have to