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